The Babylon Rite by Tom Knox Page B

footpaths making sad diagonals across the lawns.
    On a winter’s night, like last night – which was when the incident must have occurred – this was definitely a good place to choose: if you wanted somewhere very quiet, in central London, to slice off your own head with a chainsaw.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Constable.’
    The uniformed man quickly stooped and unzipped the entrance, allowing Ibsen inside.
    It was even colder within the tent than without. Letting his eyes adjust to the soft, suffused daylight inside, Ibsen leaned and gazed through the driver’s side window of the car.
    The cadaver was still here, though it was about to be moved: a headless corpse sitting in the front seat. The clothed body was in rigor mortis, and it was also twisted, tormented, locked in a shouting grimace from the sheer stunning pain induced by auto-decapitation.
    The head had tumbled off the body onto the passenger seat. It lay there on its side, gory with dried blood, looking unreal. It looked, momentarily to Ibsen, like a fake head from some execution scene in a TV series about the Tudors; a ludicrous wax head in a basket.
    Behold the head of a traitor.
    And yet: it all was too horribly real. The guy really had parked here, and got out his chainsaw, and sawn his own head off. The noise must have been tremendous, Ibsen surmised: the buzz of the saw, the grinding of steel on bone, the glottal scream of reflexive pain, the final rasp of blood-frothed air from the severed windpipe, and then … nothing. Did the chainsaw keep buzzing until it ran out of fuel? Presumably so. It had already been removed from the stiff cold grasping fingers – and taken away by Forensics.
    They now knew the chainsaw was an unusual, pricey model, a Unifire Rescue Saw, stocked by only one shop in London, and they consequently already knew it had been bought just yesterday, by the victim, the suicide: Patrick Klemmer.
    Leaning close to the driver’s side window – for some reason the only window not liberally splashed with blood – Ibsen stared in at the headless body.
    What did they already know of Patrick Klemmer?
    He was a rich kid. Another
very
rich kid. Twenty-seven years old, heir to a large fortune; his retail billionaire German father had gifted him a two-million-pound flat in London – just across the park, in Cumberland Terrace.
    In other words, it seemed that young Patrick was, like Nikolai Kerensky, a European playboy: Patrick Klemmer’s particular
thing
was sex parties. He organized them for a living, as much as he needed a living: themed orgies and swinging sex parties – erotic masques for bored, affluent young Londoners, people perhaps not unlike himself. The business, for all its scandalous nature, was a proper business: their initial investigations showed Patrick Klemmer was doing well, making a good profit.
    So why had he killed himself?
    Ibsen marvelled once more at the flamboyant spray of arterial blood across the windscreen. And the blood hadn’t just spattered the windscreen, it had sprayed the passenger window, the ceiling, the rear seats. There was one elegant Art Nouveau signature of blood even on the rear window.
    Enough. Ibsen checked his watch. Pathology would be here to take away the body in a few minutes. He had just wanted to see it one more time.
    Unzipping the tent, the DCI stepped out into the damp and chilly December air and breathed, deep and longing.
    The constable on duty gave him a sympathetic nod. ‘Doesn’t get any prettier, does it, sir?’
    ‘No,’ Ibsen agreed. ‘It certainly does not.’
    ‘Any idea why, sir? I mean, like, a
chainsaw
?’
    Ibsen gazed at a pair of grey Canada geese flapping laboriously across the blank white sky. ‘If you wanted to cut your head off, that’s virtually the only way to do it. A chainsaw, with one bold movement. Either that or fall onto the saw. Almost any other method and you lose consciousness, or blood, too quickly, before you can complete the task. Some people have managed to