Soul Seeker by Keith McCarthy Page A

himself that this was not the wrong thing to do, that he could love his memories just as strongly while finding new joy in new relationships, but he had known that it was a stupidity he had to defeat; failure would mean only entrapment in his own history.
    Of course, his attachment – could he yet call it love? – had come from a direction in which he was not looking. He had originally been attracted to a gynaecology cancer nurse specialist, finding her vivacious irreverence for the lunacies of the NHS refreshing, her genuine feelings for the women in her care, touching. Yet it had not developed beyond mutual liking and, whilst he was discovering this, Charlie had come into his ken when a relatively young woman had come into the hospital with torrential vaginal bleeding. It had been Eisenmenger who, examining the tissue biopsies under the microscope, had diagnosed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma of the endometrium, a very rare condition. She had developed severe psychological problems, including obsessive-compulsive symptomatology and some self-harming; Charlie had treated her, attending the multidisciplinary team meeting, at which Eisenmenger was the pathologist, to outline the progress she had made.
    She was eight years younger than him, but cheerful and optimistic, open-hearted and ebullient, something that he seemed to have been missing for a long, long time. She was single, having separated from a long-term partner eighteen months before, but the mother of a twenty-one-year-old son, Paul, who was reading computer sciences at Durham; she was not keen to enter into another long-term relationship, but he was not sure that he was either; they found the middle ground mutually reassuring and had just been taking it from there, at least until the last few weeks. Now, though, he suspected that things were changing; now, his life as a jobbing forensic pathologist was beginning to bite. The death in a fire of an elderly couple in Upton St Leonards followed in less than a week by the death of a seventeen-year-old girl from some heroin she had been given by her father; the headless corpse and unassociated head, and now another head and body, portending as they did the long haul that serial killings usually entailed, were an unwelcome addition to this litany. He could see in Charlie’s eyes that she was beginning to wonder.
    His muscles were twitching uncontrollably, beginning now to go into long painful cramps. He was intolerably hot, sweat soaking his clothes. He had almost lost his voice and could only now croak odd, tremulous words – ‘ Pleeassse . . . For fuck’s sssaake . . . Oh, G-g-god-d-d . . . ’ The tingling had long since changed from a tickling sensation through an uncomfortable pattern of pinpricks to sharp, incessant stabs of razor-thin agony, all over his body, within every cell. He had long ago lost control of his bowels, and his heart he could feel was bouncing around inside his chest, careering off his ribs and, he was certain, beginning to miss beats.
    The camera lenses continued to stare, blind to his pain.

FOURTEEN
    â€˜this is your case, no one else’s’
    T he summons to Braxton’s office was both expected and unwelcome, and was so in equal measures. They had tried to keep the finding of headless bodies and unrelated bodyless heads quiet, but inevitably, given the sensational nature of these discoveries, things had leaked and the press were sniffing; thus the police needed to coordinate a public relations strategy. Beverley hated this side of her newly refound promotion, because it meant telling lies by telling part of the truth, misinforming by informing, being as mendacious as the scum she had to swim through every day. She found the mutually parasitic relationship of the media and the police to be somehow less honest than that between the police and the lawbreakers, in which at least there were some truths exchanged from time to time, and in