The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) by Derek Raymond Read Free Book Online

get it out.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘I’m going to put him together as much as possible the way he was.’ I let the boiled dollops of flesh and bone tumble out of the limp plastic, and opened the other bags. I found Bowman’s, theone with the head in it. Grey flesh and a few skeins of colourless hair clung to it. I squatted on the floor with it and turned it round and over; the features wobbled unrecognizably on the bone structure. The skin of the face had boiled off: the eyes were cooked blank. The lower jaw was in another bag. There were no teeth in either jaw, so there was no point in looking for dental records. The teeth themselves were nowhere to be found. I turned the skull face-down and said to Cryer: ‘You see that hole in the occiput? That’s the wound that killed him. What do you think of it?’
    ‘There’s no exit wound.’
    ‘That’s right. If it had been a bullet at close range, it would have had to come out somewhere, and it would have been found.’
    ‘It looks exactly like a bullet wound all the same.’
    ‘I know it does,’ I said. ‘It isn’t, but you can bet that whatever it was there was plenty of power behind it. Something sharp went wham, straight into his brain; he can’t have known a thing.’
    ‘Why do you keep saying
him
? Couldn’t it have been a woman?’
    ‘No, you can see it was a man from the shape of the pelvis.’
    ‘I couldn’t have told.’
    ‘That’s practice,’ I said, ‘and reading. I do a lot of that when I have time – pathologists’ textbooks, biographies. I’m a man troubled by meanings, and look where it’s got me – being here, doing this. Still, I won’t settle for anything less than the exact truth. Some of my colleagues think I’m just awkward on purpose, but what it really is – I seldom agree with my colleagues because too often their reasoning is based on the results they expect, and as such is generally ill-found. Excuse me for talking aloud while I work. Too many detectives I know ought to get out of the force altogether, though of course you get the bright ones.’
    I finished emptying the bags and laid the contents out. We both bent over what there was. There wasn’t much, so it didn’t tell us much. The blind flesh on the fingers was no help, just as Bowman had said it wouldn’t be. The knuckles and finger ends had popped out through the skin.
    ‘How will you ever find out who he was?’ Cryer said. He doubled up suddenly; I saw he was going to vomit by the grey sweat on his face.
    ‘Do it anywhere in the corner there,’ I said.
    He was horribly sick. When it was over he said: ‘Sorry. Had a big lunch today, early.’
    ‘With the mob from the news-desk?’
    ‘No, with my girl. Today’s her twenty-second birthday.’
    I looked at what lay on the floor, the smashed legs that I had fitted to the severed knees, the elbows, wrists, shoulder-blades and hands. I said: ‘Well, mind you look after her.’
    ‘I do my best,’ he said, ‘but women are so confident.’
    ‘They are till something happens to them.’
    ‘I have to do my job,’ he said, ‘that’s the trouble. I can’t be everywhere. I won’t let her get on a tube train by herself now, not after six at night. I lecture her till she starts yelling at me, but it’s her I’m thinking of.’
    ‘You lecture her,’ I said. ‘She might end up being glad of it.’
    He got out a packet of Kleenex and wiped his face. Now that he had reacted, he was calmer over what was on the floor. He repeated: ‘Do you think you will find out who he was?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘It’s simpler than you might think,’ I said, ‘the murderer’s going to give me a hand. In fact, he’s started to already. The fact he’s left no trace, that’s a trace in itself. Second, he wasn’t alone; there were certainly at least two of them. Thirdly, the job was so well done that I’m certain it was done for money, and that probably means that the victim wasn’t just