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By Root 417 0

with whatever he had been about to say earlier, before Harries’s rats interrupted us, but it seemed that my wishes were in vain. At the top of the stairs he turned right into a panelled corridor lined with doors. A right-angled turn at the end led us into a similar passage with a door set prominently at the end. Typical of Harries to take the master bedroom, I thought, then frowned. I had never met the man, yet my objectivity seemed to be shading with the tints of other people’s opinions. The Doctor turned the handle and entered the room, crossing straight to the window and staring out across the gardens. Steeling myself against the smell that had begun to seep out, I walked across to the bed.

In my career as a police officer I have seen death in many ways: in mortuaries, on streets, dragged out of stinking rivers; knifed, beaten, mutilated or just quietly and inoffensively dead. In all my time nothing had prepared me for the sight as I pulled the stained and stinking sheet from the thing on the bed. Yet at the same time my feelings had been and have been echoed, both before and since the time I first set eyes upon the remains of Richard Harries. It is the disquieting feeling I get now when I walk down a street and see a half-demolished building in a derelict slum area. Harries’s face was like that. One side of it was still intact, although the skin was red and blistered and the eye had run and spread. The other side was ruined, stripped of all humanity. It had been burnt down to the skull and beyond. The bone was blackened and cracked like rock and the eye was just a curdled white lump in the socket. The line of teeth, roughened and blistered by the fire, stretched up to the end of his jaw in an insane grin. The worst thing about Richard Harries was not his appearance, or the smell, or even the frozen laugh. It was the knowledge that everything I could see in his exposed face lay under my own as well.

I pulled the sheet entirely off and bent to the gruesome task of searching Harries. I found nothing but everyday items: a few coins, a bunch of keys, a handkerchief. I could not examine the body closely for other injuries without removing his clothes, a process that I did not relish, so I confined myself to an examination of the exposed areas. There were no injuries apart from the obvious ones and if any were covered by his garments then the body would have had to be redressed after death. I could not imagine any circumstances, however unusual, that would have required that. Perhaps it had been an accident.

As I worked I became gradually aware of a scratching noise, like fingernails tapping irregularly on wood. At first it did not bother me, but it became increasingly irritating as I worked. Eventually I glanced up, ready to deliver a mild reproof to the Doctor, but before I could say anything I noticed that his hands were behind his back as he gazed out of the window. Whatever the noise was, it had nothing to do with him.

Whether or not my reaction had alerted whatever was producing the noise to my interest I could not say, but it died away slowly, as if the thing that was causing it were scuttling away into the distance. Harries’s remaining rat, the one that had stayed in the house? The thought made me uneasy – not only was the thing intelligent enough to dismantle a cage door hinge, but it also seemed to me that it might be spying on us.

Trying to distance the thought from my mind, I rolled up Harries’s sleeves and trouser legs to check his limbs. As I pulled the trouser legs back I noticed something strange. There seemed to be an unusual amount of play in the knee joints: as I moved the leg around it seemed to move sideways as well as forwards and back. I was about to comment on this to the Doctor when he answered my unspoken question.

‘The severe electric shock he received caused all his muscles to spasm,’ he said in a low voice. ‘The effect would have been most marked in the long extensor, long adductor and sartorius muscle tissue. His knees just couldn’t take the strain: shattered straightaway.’

I finished rolling