The Welshman made me sit down on the ground beside the skeleton and and then briskly handcuffed my hands behind my back.
‘I still don’t understand what you’re looking for,’ I said. ‘Is this what Hitler was talking about in the letter?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘The beetle.’
So Grublock had been telling the truth! ‘What beetle?’
‘
Anophthalmus hitleri
.’
I had no idea what that was. ‘What makes you think it’s here?’ I said.
‘Be quiet, please.’
‘Look, I know you’re probably going to kill me after this, whether you find it or not.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘I just want to know what all this has been about.’
The Welshman looked at me and sighed, then he said, ‘Two
weeks ago, the individual who is now my employer became aware that a private detective was making enquiries about
Anophthalmus hitleri
. For a long time the consensus has been that there is not a single specimen of the organism, alive or dead, anywhere in the world – but if a serious collector like Horace Grublock believed that somehow, somewhere, some examples might really have been preserved, then that in itself seemed a good enough reason to pursue the possibility. So the aforementioned individual contracted me to find the beetle before Grublock did. Unfortunately, Zroszak had already made excellent progress.’
‘So you killed him and searched his flat.’
‘Yes. It seemed simplest to pick up where he left off, rather than start from the beginning.’
‘But you didn’t find much. Then you saw me go inside. And you thought I might have found something you missed. But actually the letter from Hitler didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.’
‘No.’
‘And I wasn’t much help either.’
‘No. Except perhaps at Claramore, and with the spinster.’
‘So why were you looking for Seth Roach’s body?’
‘Zroszak seemed convinced that two of the beetles had been buried along with the boxer. That was in his notes. He didn’t really explain his reasoning. I believe he had access to some notebooks of Philip Erskine’s and some letters of Evelyn Erskine’s which I was not able to find.’
‘And you thought Seth Roach must have died at Claramore.’
‘It seemed likeliest. I was wrong.’
‘Do you really think the beetles will still be here? With him? After all this time?’
‘We shall see,’ said the Welshman. ‘The chemical and microbiological conditions in a place like this are unpredictable. The beetles were bred to be hardy. It’s just possible that they may never have decomposed. They may even have been
fossilised in some way.’ Finishing his explanation, he knelt down beside the skeleton. He brushed some filth away from the skull. And then Seth Roach vomited on him.
Black and flickering, the vomit raced up the Welshman’s arm, spread across his chest and swirled up to his chin. He tried to scream and straight away it filled his mouth. Falling on his back, he clawed clumsily at himself, but could barely tear open a gap in the flow, and soon every inch of him was tarred. I heard a sound like thousands of tongues clicking in quiet disapproval; I could see flashes of red and then, worse, flashes of white beneath the boiling slick of black. At first, his whole body thrashed back and forth, but then it was only his hands and feet that shook, and before long even those went limp. Within seconds there was almost nothing left of him but bones, hair, clothes and shoes. Then the beetles came for me.
They shot across the ground, jumped on to my feet and carried on up each of my legs. There was something not quite right about the way they moved, like a cheap animated film. I clamped my mouth shut so they couldn’t get down my throat. I wished the Welshman had already shot me so I didn’t have to die like this.
But then the beetles stopped.
Some had got as far as my groin, which was drenched, of course, in urine. Others had got as far as my armpits, which were almost as damp. There was something almost nervous in the way they milled around the fetid arches of my body, pricking my skin through my clothes with their tiny needle legs – this, I thought, must be what the angels feel like to the pin. One or two detached from the mass, spread their swastika wings, fluttered up in front of my face, gave me an eyeless glare and descended to rejoin their fellows. Then, all at once, in an instant, like a black tablecloth being whipped from a table, they withdrew. I watched the last few hop back into Sinner’s eye sockets. There was silence. Steam, just visible in
the dim light from the streetlamps on Back Church Lane, rose from the Welshman’s hollow carcass. I fainted.
At about five in the morning, I was awoken by something licking my face. I opened my eyes. A fox. I jerked my head away, and, startled, it trotted a few steps back. Mangy and thin, it had sinews like twisted telephone wires, a stink like a petrol station forecourt, and a coat the colour of a traffic cone left in a skip full of rainwater. It was – if I’m not making myself clear – impossibly beautiful. For perhaps a full minute, the animal stared at me with a strange scepticism and a boy’s eyes. Then it darted away and up over the fence. I breathed out, and so did the dawn.
A couple of hours later the first yawning Grublock Homes workmen arrived at the site. When they saw the skeletons they wanted to call the police, but I managed to talk them into calling Teymur first. With the mobile phone held to my ear, I explained everything. I don’t think Teymur believed me when I told him that Grublock was dead, but he still gave the order to the workmen to let me go. (One little-discussed advantage of building sites is the fantastic selection of ways to break a pair of handcuffs.) Before I left, I borrowed some gloves and searched through the clothes that still clung raggedly to the Welshman’s remains. In his left inside jacket pocket was the letter from Hitler.
It wasn’t until much later – after all the research and investigation and speculation that has gone into writing this story – that I understood what must have happened. Deep in Sinner’s throat, almost dead, those final two specimens of
Anophthalmus hitleri
, bred to be indomitable, had managed one last desperate, damaged, awkward fuck; and Millicent Bruiseland, luckily, wasn’t there to interrupt them. Buried ten feet beneath the surface of the rubbish dump, the resulting larvae thrived on the boxer’s flesh. And after those ferocious offspring had reduced Sinner to a skeleton and gnawed the marrow from his femurs, they made do with the toxic
borscht of cooking oil and mushy vegetables and bacon fat that pooled in every cranny. Occasionally, they might feast on a dead dog or cat or pigeon, and perhaps, when they were really lucky, one of Albert Kölmel’s younger, more reckless rivals might decide to bury another human body. Later, in Whitechapel’s rather more prosperous years, when a warehouse was built on top of the old site of the dump, they tunnelled up through the floorboards and punctured the tins of baked beans. Weeks or months might go by without food, but – thanks, again, to Erskine – they were resilient enough to survive. Often, they would simply cannibalise each other. Eighty years later, although these grandchildren of Fluek had spread throughout the dump and into the foundations of the adjacent buildings, a miniature London Underground, Seth Roach’s skull was still the epicentre of their colony, so when the Welshman exposed it to the light for the first time since its original interment they devoured him. And the same thing would have happened to me – if not for my trimethylaminuria. Even beetles have standards.
When I got home, the first thing I did was wake up my computer. Stuart was online, and immediately he popped up on my chat program.
STUART: omfg are you ok?
KEVIN: yeah
STUART: did the police come?
KEVIN: no
STUART: what? why not? what happened, then?
I told him, from the beginning. Once or twice I broke off, because there were certain details I wanted to check on the Nazi memorabilia collectors’ forums. When I was finished, he said:
STUART: that’s insane
KEVIN: i know
STUART: so did you ever find out who hired him?
KEVIN: no
at first i believed grublock that it was the japanese
then i sort of believed him when he said it was him, anonymously
then i thought maybe old man erskine
for a minute i even wondered if it might be tara southall
but none of those theories stood up
in a way, the biggest mystery is his thule society tattoo
i’d sort of forgotten about it until just now, but i think, by the end, it had actually begun to smudge
STUART: so it wasn’t a real tattoo?
KEVIN: no
but that’s not such a surprise – it was pretty obvious he wasn’t really from the thule society
STUART: why?
KEVIN: come on, stuart
it’s unrealistic
whatever all those websites might say, they disbanded in the 1920s
STUART: that’s what they want you to think
KEVIN: no, stuart, they did
what’s weird is, why would you even pretend to be from the thule society? what’s the point? who is it going to work on? because there must be only about a dozen people in london who might recognise that symbol
even grublock probably wouldn’t
of course, i would
but why would anyone make such a big effort to fool me, specifically, into thinking the ariosophists were involved?
STUART: yeah i see what you mean
KEVIN: but that’s a bit of a dead end
we can’t ask him
he got eaten by beetles
STUART: which is pretty awesome btw
you have to tell me more about that at some point
KEVIN: yeah i will
anyway, so i was thinking about the other thing i didn’t really understand
it was only two nights ago but it seems like ages
when i posted on the forum about philip erskine, and someone replied asking me about seth roach
‘nbeauman’
who was that?
they never replied again
in retrospect it was less like they wanted to help and more like they wanted to see how much i already knew
bit creepy
STUART: we should hack into the account
KEVIN: yeah, could do
but there’s not really any need
i had another look at his previous posts
i think he’s just a sockpuppet
STUART: whose?
Everyone on the forum, including me, had at least one ‘sock-puppet’ account – some probably had five or six. If you were losing an argument badly and needed reinforcements you would log out of your real account, log into your sockpuppet account, and post something like ‘yeah kevin’s right, any fuckwit knows that.’ It didn’t really help, but sometimes there was nothing else to be done.
KEVIN: stuart, why did the police never arrive?
STUART: what?
KEVIN: when i was in the service station, you said you’d
call them
then again when i was at the building site
but they never came
STUART: i think maybe they thought i was a prank call
KEVIN: you never called them
STUART: i did!
KEVIN: you already know whose sockpuppet nbeauman is
STUART: no
KEVIN: like i said, i looked at his posts
and the only time nbeauman ever posts on the forum is
when you are losing an argument, stuart
There was no response for a while, then, after a bit:
STUART: really?
KEVIN: yes
STUART: well, that’s weird
KEVIN: it’s not weird
you knew about seth roach before i did
you must have been looking for anophthalmus hitleri
yourself
you’d heard that grublock was convinced it was real
so you hired the welsh guy
and you guessed i’d get dragged into it, because i work for
grublock
so you told him to put on that thule society symbol because you knew that i would know what it meant, and i’d think he was an ariosophist, not just a gun-for-hire, and then i’d never suspect it was you
STUART: kevin, that’s ridiculous
you have too much imagination
come on, you’re my best friend
KEVIN: we’ve never actually met
STUART: what does that matter?
KEVIN: i know
but it’s the only anophthalmus hitleri in the world. the swastika wings, the name, the personal commendation from hitler, the sheer rarity – the fact that it eats human flesh! – it’s not just priceless, it’s practically mythical. even i hadn’t heard of it until all this started
are you saying you wouldn’t betray your best friend for that?
you would
i would
we all would
it’s our hobby and it’s our life
the only difference is, most of us can’t afford to hire a proper operative like that welsh guy
but you can
plus, you love all that stuff