Otto Skorzeny was a Nazi. One of Hitler’s favourites, and hand-picked for his personal bodyguard. He was an imposing figure, standing at six-feet-and-four-inches, with a vicious scar on one cheek from a fencing duel. During the war, he led a number of high-profile raids and saw action just about everywhere the Axis did.
Towards the end of the war, when Hitler’s paranoia had him seeing enemies everywhere, he made Skorzeny his chief Hexenjäger. He was responsible for hunting down any practitioners of magic in the Reich who were not loyal to the cause, which by that time was pretty much all of them.
After the war, he was interned, tried, acquitted and detained, before he escaped and fled to Franco’s Spain, but he never gave up his Witch Hunting mission. For the rest of his life, he moved between Europe, North Africa, the Middle-East and South America in pursuit of this cause, working for, at various and overlapping times, the Egyptian government, Juan Peron, the CIA and even Mossad.
And in 1959, he moved to Ireland and bought a 165-acre farm.
Woods was dead. Very dead. Whoever or whatever had killed him had done about as thorough a job as was possible without cremating the pieces afterwards. A large pool of blood lay just inside the door. It was dried, but had bright red spots where fresh drops had dripped more recently. I looked to the ceiling to see a streak where blood had sprayed in a wide arc.
I gingerly stepped around the pool on the floor and approached Woods where he lay in his patterned pyjamas. His head was tilted to one side at an angle that suggested his neck was broken. His right arm was missing and a wide gouge had been torn up - or down - his torso.
I examined the exposed bone at his shoulder. There was no sign of a cut edge. Judging by the ragged flesh and trailing ligaments, the ball-and-socket joint had been ripped out, like tearing a drumstick off a cooked chicken. I regretted the analogy as soon as I thought of it. It’d be a while before I would be able to eat chicken again.
Now closer, I could see that the gash in his torso started from the navel and ran all the way to his throat. The edges were ragged and showed signs of vicious tearing. Whatever had done it was not a cutting implement; Rather, it was something only moderately sharp but used with incredible force.
“I don’t suppose McGinnis is here?” I asked.
“He’s back in Dublin,” said Murtagh, who had still not stepped over the threshold. “Holding down the fort.”
“Well, fuck. Do we have anyone else? Yang has a medical degree, right?”
“I’ll go get her,” said Murtagh. He left quickly.
“I don’t suppose you brought your scrying gear with you?” I asked Cormac.
“I did,” he said, as he stepped inside the room for the first time. He found a relatively blood-free spot on the floor and turned a slow circle, looking at the walls and ceiling. He continued, “but I’m not sure if I’ll get much here. This much blood would cause problems for most spells.”
I stood and examined the room properly for the first time. It was small and lit only a single window. The old door that led to the main house had been plastered over during one refurbishment or another, it seemed. The furniture was old and heavy and far too big for the space, with a large wardrobe shoved into the corner beside the bed in a way that meant you had to sidle into the gap between them to open the doors of the wardrobe, and could not leave that gap until you closed the doors again. There was also a chest of drawers and a writing desk side-by-side along the wall under the window. Someone sitting at the desk could see out to the forest on the estate grounds. The ceiling, furniture, walls, and window were all spattered by blood to some degree.
By the time Doctor Yang arrived, Cormac and I had located Woods’s missing arm by following another arcing spray across the wall to the corner beside the chest of drawers. I left it in place and joined her at the door, while Cormac took photos of the body and the scene.
“You know I only did a year in med school?” she asked.
“Well, I never went to college at all so you’re a year ahead of me,” I said.
“And my degree is in theatre studies,” added Cormac as he joined us.
“Is it?” I asked. “I never knew that.”
“You hired me. You didn’t check my résumé?”
“I was more concerned with your criminal record.”
“Fair enough,” said Cormac. “The body is in here,” he told Yang, “we don’t need a full postmortem; just whatever your scientific eye can tell us.”
She stepped inside and shuddered briefly at the scene before her. Then she knelt by Woods and gingerly peeled back the scraps of his shredded pyjamas to examine his chest. She produced a pair of latex gloves from somewhere and probed the huge wound.
“His ribs are broken,” she said. “Badly.”
I joined her at the corpse and gestured at the slash-mark. “Whatever did this broke his ribs too?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, pressing lightly on his solar plexus, or what remained of it. “This is an upward-slash. Whatever broke the ribcage like this did so from the front. His sternum is shattered and the fragments driven all the way back. The slash came afterwards. This would kill almost anyone instantly.”
“What about his arm?”
She lifted the collar of his pyjamas away from his broken neck to show a large ugly bruise on his shoulder. "I’m guessing the killer put one hand here and one on his arm and… pulled. You’ll probably find similar bruises on his arm, and likely broken bones where they gripped it. Did you find it?”
I pointed to the corner where the severed appendage lay, and she stood and walked to it. She glanced in once and then turned away. “Jesus,” she muttered under her breath.
“Stand here, and watch your feet,” I told Cormac, gesturing to a spot inside the door.
He carefully stepped to a clear spot by the largest pool of blood and I walked to the door.
“You’re Woods and I’m the assailant. Door kicked in and Woods comes to see who it is,” I said.
Cormac took an appropriately frightened pose, both arms held up protectively. I stepped towards him and grabbed his left arm with my right and mimed a punch to his chest. “One punch here to disable him,” I said, “then an eviscerating upward swipe? Yang, could the gash have been made with a hand?”
She considered the corpse. “Possibly; it’s about the right size. But it would require phenomenal strength.”
“That’s something I imagine the killer had,” I said, as I put my hand on Cormac’s shoulder and mimed the removal of his arm with a tearing twisting motion. As my arm completed its arc, I ended up pointing directly to the corner where Yang was standing. “This was a vicious act. One hurried and frenzied movement. They left him where he dropped. No sign they moved the body or did anything else.”
“Should we wake Sir Arthur?” Yang asked.
“Probably best,” said Murtagh, who was still waiting outside. I couldn’t help but notice that he was waiting with his back to the door. Standing sentry. “The others will all wake at the same time, and it’ll be best to get The Magistrate advance notice.”
“You don’t think one of the guests did this?” I asked, half in shock. “They treat the rules of hospitality like a religion. Murdering one of Sir Arthur’s people? And in his own home… That’s blasphemous to them.”
Murtagh turned to peer in the door. “I don’t know of anything else that has the strength to literally rip someone limb from limb.”
“Galligan,” I said. “Augustine’s bodyguard.”
Murtagh let out a quiet low whistle. “But even someone with your strength… Could you do this?”
“I’d like to think not,” I said, but the truth was I hadn’t gone pound-for-pound against a human with intent to kill since I was a teenager, and troll strength only increased with age. I knew I didn’t have the rage or bloodlust inside me to tear a person to pieces, but I was not sure about the physical strength needed.
At that moment, a cold sensation originating somewhere between my hindbrain and the lowest level of my gut gripped me. I quickly removed my glamour to inspect my hands. I was not sure what I was expecting, but seeing them clean of blood made the feeling disappear. I still shuddered as I replaced my glamour, then turned to the others.
“Don’t tell anyone who doesn’t already know. If someone did this to provoke a reaction, let’s not give them one. Sir Arthur will be awake a couple of hours before sunset. Until then, I want a headcount. Murtagh, have your men subtly - subtly - make a list. See if anyone else is missing. We’re looking for other victims or for suspects who might have fled. And see if anyone noticed anything strange last night.”
“If a guest did this, surely they fled? Can’t we check?” said Yang.
“Entirely possible. If anyone can get by Murtagh’s cordon without being detected, it’s a vampire who just fed,” I said. “But I don’t think popping the lids off coffins and shouting ‘you still in there?’ is the best way to proceed.”
“We’ll call that ‘plan B’, then,” she said.
“Stick a pin in it and we’ll circle back to it later. Right now, we need to find out how they got away from here. Whoever did this would be covered in blood and has to have left a trail.” I walked to the door and scanned the pathway and the small garden behind the house. It seemed clear all the way to the tree-line. “I don’t suppose we brought a K-9 unit?” I asked Murtagh.
“Around Sir Arthur and his guests? Not if you ever wanted to use them again for anything,” he said with a scowl. Then he added, “Did you know dogs can get PTSD?”
“I actually did, but let’s not discuss how I know. Grass seems clear. But there’s no way they made it into the woods without making contact with those trees. If they fled into the forest, we’ll find blood on those leaves somewhere.”
“I’ll call the men, and start a search,” Murtagh said.
“Let’s not draw too much attention to things. Have your guys start their canvas. Cormac and I will check out the trees. We’ll scream in abject blood-curdling terror if we need backup.”
Murtagh saluted and disappeared around the side of the house while I closed the door to Woods’s room. Then I had second thoughts and opened it again.
“Doctor Yang, could you stay here? Stay inside and keep the door closed? I know it’s grisly, but we need to make sure the scene isn’t disturbed. We’ll come back and relieve you as soon as we can.”
She hesitated a moment before nodding, then she went inside and slowly closed the door behind her.
“You’re going to have to buy her something really nice for that,” said Cormac.
“Flowers? A tin of biscuits?”
“A new car. A holiday home, maybe.”
“I’d be happy with a holiday.”
“How about a long weekend in the Kildare countryside?”
“The problem with you,” I said as we walked towards the trees, “is that someone once told you that you’re funny and you didn’t realise they were joking.”
We walked the treeline twice before Cormac noticed a bloodstain on a slender tree high above us. A dark red streak began at the base of a branch and ran down the trunk before tapering off.
“What does that look like to you?” I asked.
“Like someone with a bloody hand leaped up there and grabbed the branch for support before sliding down.”
I scanned the grass at the base of the tree, all the way back to the house. “But no blood here, so whoever did it managed to clear twenty feet of lawn without shedding drops of blood on the way.”
“You saying they cleared twenty foot horizontal and fifteen feet vertical without touching the ground? They can do that?”
“I know Galligan can’t.” The tree in question would probably fold under the weight of a full-grown troll even if they didn’t hit it at whatever speed would be needed to make the leap.
We pushed on into the trees following a line that ran from the door past the bloodstained tree.
The house was immediately lost to sight and within a few minutes the world dropped to an eerie silence. Nothing blocks out the sounds of the outside world as efficiently as thick woodlands, but they usually fill that void with their own natural noises. As someone who’s spent most of his life in the city, I can only guess what those noises were - squirrel fights or whatever - but they were absent here. Aside from the occasional rustle of leaves as wind shook the topmost branches, Cormac and I walked through dead silence. Even our footfalls were muted by the thick loam beneath our feet.
“This isn’t creepy at all,” said Cormac.
“Not in the least,” I agreed. I stopped and looked around and then up. A solid canopy above us didn’t so much block the light as filter it. Everything was shades of green, like we were standing at the bottom of a shallow emerald ocean watching waves crash overhead.
“There,” said Cormac, pointing.
I followed his gaze and saw a broken branch hanging by a thin strip of bark. The leaves had been stripped of it, as if someone had grabbed it carelessly. “So they came this way. The perimeter is close. They may be long gone.”
“The mill is closer,” said Cormac.
He was right. An old fence marked the line of the estate and we were close to where it intersected with a disused track. The track cut through the woods, running almost parallel to a stream that once fed the wheel of a mill on the estate grounds back when it was a working farm. The track and the stream continued west, off the property, but the mill itself would have to be close to our current location.
I turned a few times, hoping to glimpse it through the trees, but it was Cormac who spotted it. The undergrowth was thicker here, probably due to the stream, but we pushed through to where the mill had once stood.
Only two walls remained. The other two had collapsed to rubble decades or a century ago, and the roof had gone with them. Numerous shrubs had worked their way through the rocks and the two standing walls were more ivy than brick, but it was still possible to see the size and scope of the building that had once stood here. A large hole in the wall alongside the stream betrayed its purpose.
The mill-pond still existed, even after all this time, but it had lost any semblance of being man-made. Thick bushes grew along its edges, so to even see it, I had to climb up the sloping edge of one of the mill’s walls. From this vantage, I could see it had been entirely reclaimed by nature. Lily-pads covered most of its surface, and weeds and algae choked what remained. But there was one spot that seemed clear of recent growth.
I jumped down and made my way around to that spot. The shrubs and bushes that clustered that side of the pond had been roughly flattened.
“What do you make of this?” I said, pointing to the gap in the foliage.
“Something badly wanted to get to the water,” said Cormac.
“Not quite,” I corrected. “These are all bent towards us. Something was in the water and flattened them getting out of the pond.”
Cormac knelt to examine the branches as I stepped over them to the water’s edge. The pond was deep here, but I could see that it was only free of plants because they had been similarly flattened. Something - quite recently - had disturbed this part of the pond and stirred up all the mud from its bed, judging by the cloudiness of the water.
“Maybe they landed in the water from the trees and washed off the blood before fleeing,” suggested Cormac. “If I’d just committed a crime against a bunch of vampires, I wouldn’t want to leave a blood-trail they could follow.”
“A fine theory,” I said. “But there’s a small problem with it.”
“What’s that?” he asked, standing.
“They climbed out of the pond here,” I said, “on this side of the stream. “Why would they do that if they were fleeing the scene? This side points right back to the house.”
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