had been her first case as investigating officer. Initially there’d been a single murder, and Col. Sauls, branch commander at Murder and Robbery, had thought the time was right for her to lead an investigation – take on her first case and solve it. No one could have foreseen that Ella herself would become a victim of the serial killer, almost a statistic.
“You’re obsessed. An obsession can consume you,” observed Silas. “Let’s sort out the coffin thing first. Let’s take it step by step, think every step through and discuss it logically. Let the head rule, not the heart.”
“He spared my life. Why? It would have been easy, quick…”
“Are you discussing these questions with your trauma counsellor, Ella?”
When they were alone, she was “Ella”, not “Warrant Officer”. She liked it when he called her Ella in private, like a father talking to a daughter. She snuggled into the seat, her clothes still damp, and turned towards him so she could study his profile. In the dim evening light, shadows lay in the furrows and contours of his cheeks, chin and neck.
“Killing isn’t what drives him, Colonel. For him, killing is a by-product. His primary motive is the skin…he is only interested in harvesting skin.”
“And when he couldn’t get yours, he had no reason to take your life. Is that what you’re saying?”
“He wouldn’t have accomplished anything by killing me. He wanted a piece of skin from my stomach. Why? What’s the meaning of the skin?”
“It wasn’t as if he spared your life because he was overcome by sudden affection. He didn’t pity you. He was interrupted. If he hadn’t been interrupted…”
She knew what he wanted to say, and why he’d stopped mid-sentence, the words dangling in the air. She knew only too well the fate of Abel’s fourth victim, the one who’d come to rescue her from that house, the one who had interrupted the Nightstalker while he was harvesting the skin from her stomach…Zack’s death wasn’t a by-product, Zack was the recipient of Abel’s terrible fury.
Silas drove through the gates of the provincial hospital and round the back to the forensic path lab, which was set slightly apart. Dr Koster’s domain.
“I want to see her,” said Ella as they got out. “She’s a part of Abel. They’re inseparable, Abel and his mother. She’s the one who led me to him.”
“From her grave.”
“She can help me again.”
“Only once your sick leave is over, when the trauma counsellor has signed you off.”
An unmistakable smell hung in the long, silent corridor leading to Dr Koster’s office. Not the usual antiseptic odour of hospital corridors, but a whiff of decay, and of strong deodorant sprays and cleaning agents, with undertones of chlorine, formaldehyde and death.
It was not exactly an uplifting professional environment, but this was where Ella had become acquainted with Abel’s first two victims. Naked and defenceless on the stainless-steel autopsy table, here the bodies had talked to Dr Koster, told him what had happened to them, helped him fill in the details of their violent passing.
Ella had come here to look at Mia Vermooten, the ambitious high-flyer who had been the Nightstalker’s first victim. And his second victim: pretty, frisky Emma Adams.
“Where’s the coffin?” asked Dr Koster.
There were brownish smears and stains on his overcoat – dried blood, or coffee, Ella guessed. Harder to tell his age. The grey stubble on his wrinkled face and the brown pigmentation on his forehead and the back of his hands put him on the wrong side of sixty, perhaps even seventy, she speculated.
“I’d love some tea,” said Silas, “while we’re waiting for the Messrs Poppe.”
Dr Koster switched on the kettle. Ella watched as he scooped coffee into a mug. He’d remembered, she thought with some satisfaction, that she didn’t drink tea.
She’d come to Dr Koster’s domain to see the third victim as well: the reporter. She’d found it much harder to look at him, at someone she’d known as a living, breathing, laughing human being. She knew it was him, lying there on the autopsy table without a face, the skin completely stripped from his skull.
“What are you going to do with the old lady?” asked Dr Koster. “When we’re through with the coffin?”
Silas shrugged. “Put her back in her grave. What else?”
“She’ll need a new coffin. You can’t put her back in an old, rotten coffin.”
“I’ll put in a requisition for a new coffin. Pine, with rope handles. Poppe & Son can rebury her.”
Ella had not seen the Nightstalker’s fourth victim on Dr Koster’s table. She’d known him even better than she’d known the reporter. Much better. Intimately, in fact. She’d still been in ICU when Dr Koster had completed his autopsy report on Zack. Her condition had been critical. The doctors had feared the onset of sepsis where Abel had cut into her stomach with an unsterilised blade. She’d attended Zack’s funeral in West Park in a wheelchair, pumped full of antibiotics and strong pain medication. Afterwards, she’d been taken straight back to her hospital bed.
There was a sound at the service entrance and Dr Koster looked up. “They’re here.”
Poppe & Son’s coffin trolley came rolling up the slight incline. Under their grisly load, rubber wheels crunched over the clean tiled floor, the swing doors of the autopsy room were pushed open and then silently closed again, aided by hydraulic springs.
“Thank you – you can leave the coffin on the trolley,” said Dr Koster. “I’ll call you when I’m finished with her.”
“How long will it take?” asked Mr Poppe Senior.
“Not long.”
“We’re busy. We have a funeral tomorrow.”
“She’s not going anywhere. The day after tomorrow, the next day…”
After the Messrs Poppe had left, Dr Koster’s assistant appeared with a claw-hammer and a large screwdriver.
The screws were rusted, but as the wood was rotten, damp and covered with red mud, the coffin wasn’t going to be reused. It took the assistant only a few minutes to dislodge the lid and lift it away.
2. 1991-1993: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Mountains, forests, rivers. Rolling verdant hills dotted with villages. Cottages built of stone, corrugated iron and wood huddled around places of worship. Bells pealing in church towers, muezzins calling from minarets. Riverbanks with trees and fruit-laden orchards, juicy red pomegranates, vegetable patches, fields of oats and wheat, grassy pastures
