Bond - 27 - Never send flowers by John Gardner Read Free Book Online Page B

and religious works, he had seen at least four books concerning worship and the ancient Egyptians.
    `It's an honour. A very great honour, but you know that, if she sent you." At this point, Seymour had written that David appeared to be in some trance-like state. `Isis, mother of all things, lady of the elements, the beginning of all time. Sister-wife of Osiris. Speak ...
    Speak through the oracles I have created for you.
    Written baldly on the page, Seymour admitted that the words seemed to be the rather dramatic ravings of someone mentally disturbed. In his report, he wrote, `David's voice seemed to change, echo, become distorted. It was the most frightening change I have ever witnessed in a human being. Even his face appeared to alter. I felt cold, while Sergeant Bowles later stated that he experienced the feeling of something terribly evil in the room with us.
    `She speaks through the oracles. She says there are enough. That you will take charge of them." David March was utterly wrapped in this bizarre belief. `It is just as she told me. They have started to speak in a chorus." The Superintendent added, `It seemed very important to him that we believed what he said. A matter of extreme significance, not in any legal or judiciary sense. This was a man proclaiming that he had done what was asked of him." `Everything,' March continued. `I did all that she asked. They were picked with great care.
    Fair-coloured white women. I showed them love, as Isis commanded, and each was sacrificed just as she told me, at the exact time and under the correct conditions. I promise you it was done according to her word, for she is the mother of life.
    She would speak only through the oracles.
    Through them she says you will take them from me.
    `Good, David." Seymour realized that he was trembling. `Where are they?" `They're safe. I've kept them safe.
    `Then it's time for us to see them.
    The heads were in large jars sealed carboys floating in formaldehyde, turned pink from the blood which had flowed from the terrible ragged necks. The serrated skin flapped, creating an eerie sense of life. The carboys had been placed in some obvious order in the large refrigerator in David March's kitchen: two were on a top shelf, one in the centre middle and two more on the lowest part.
    March even had a pair of great padlocks on the door of the thing, and the heads moved as he opened up, their hair lifting in the liquid, their dead eyes staring with half-surprise and half-terror, the pinkish stain below the horrible jagged necks rising and adding an almost supernatural glow in the confined light.
    `Talk to them,' March said in a whisper which had about it a sense of wonder. `Are they not marvelous, the way they speak so softly?" Sergeant Bowles vomited, and there was a side note from the Superintendent saying that he suffered from nightmares for some time after.
    David March's trial, while sensational, did not yield everything to the public. His plea of insanity was so strong, and supported by both the defence and prosecution, that only the bare facts came out.
    Certainly the Press reported hyped-up stories gleaned from the victims' friends, and from bits and pieces they scavenged from the gardener and live-in cook at the March seniors' house but only after the verdict of guilty but insane was returned, and David had been sentenced to be `Detained at Her Majesty's pleasure' which is the British way of saying life plus ninety-nine years in an institution for the criminally insane.
    The trial was almost an anti-climax. It was the brutality of the murders, and the discovery of David March that overshadowed everything else.
    The picture was so strong in Bond's mind that he shivered, looking up, surprised that he sat in this pleasing Swiss hotel, other guests' laughter and talk going on around him. The long report had taken him almost half an hour to read, and, even though it was written baldly, without emotion, the Superintendent had somehow conveyed all the