The Meating Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

the door to the en-suite bathroom.
    He knew he should go and check it out, but his feet were rooted to the spot as his eyes assessed the mess before him. If no one had told him it was Mrs McCulloch, he would have been hard pressed to tell if the skinned meat was male or female. He was conscious of movement at his side, of Jessie easing away from him, edging closer to the bed, as if to study what lay upon it.
    Although the bedclothes – the duvet cover, the folded blanket, the stacked pillows – were sodden with blackened blood, they seemed not to have been disturbed, other than the fact that a body lay on the bed, head missing, skin stripped to reveal bloodied musculature. And the body looked oddly slim around the waist, the stomach slack, which told Gilchrist she had been gutted. He also knew that the missing head was sure to be in the bathroom, along with the guts, the window open and the fan on full blast – he could hear it clearly now. The skin might be in there, too, laid out to dry in some kind of perverse, symbolic message.
    ‘You think it was him?’ Jessie asked.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Brian McCulloch.’
    Gilchrist let out another rush of air. His mind was spinning, firing away at a subconscious level, telling him that some piece or other did not fit, that it maybe even belonged in a different puzzle. He could not say what was niggling at him, only that something was not right.
    His mind continued to churn, desperate to figure out what he was missing.
    The children were at peace, while their mother had been decapitated, disembowelled and peeled back to the bone in the adjacent room. Surely they would have heard something? Unless they had been killed first?
    But then what mother could let that happen?
    Jessie walked around the end of the bed, heading towards the bathroom.
    ‘Don’t go in,’ he barked.
    She stopped and glared at him.
    ‘Don’t disturb the scene,’ he repeated. Jesus Christ.
Don’t disturb the scene
. What were they supposed to do? Dance around on tiptoes to keep any clue intact?
    Then a thought struck him. ‘Blood,’ he said.
    ‘There is that,’ Jessie agreed. ‘Lots of it.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    She looked at him, puzzled, as if his ears had sprouted feathers.
    ‘Did you see any blood on McCulloch?’ he said. ‘Or in his car?’
    She narrowed her eyes. ‘No.’
    He did not need to say that whoever had killed Mrs McCulloch, and ripped her stomach open, and pulled out her guts, and hacked off her head, and skinned her, must have been splattered in the stuff. The realisation dawned behind Jessie’s eyes.
    On automatic now, his mind crackling with possibilities, he walked around the end of the bed. Clotted blood formed black trails from the bed to the bathroom, marking the path of the head, the skin and the entrails. Together, he and Jessie stood at the door, facing a scene from a slaughterhouse in hell. Only then did Gilchrist understand that he had the trail of blood the wrong way round, that the skinned and headless and disembowelled corpse had been carried
from
the bathroom
to
the bed. Which was why the bedclothes were undisturbed.
    He edged closer to the bathroom threshold, taking care not to stand on any blood spots or bloodied footprints, although it did strike him as odd that the footprints were noticeable by their absence. By the door frame, he noted one of the switches on the wall was in the ON position. Which would be the fan. None of the downlighters was switched on, so he made a mental note to ask the SOCOs to dust the fan switch for fingerprints.
    He leaned forward and peered inside.
    The bathroom was as big as Fisherman’s Cottage kitchen and dining room combined. The floor and walls were fully tiled, the ceiling covered with pre-fabricated panels as glossy as marble, and riddled with downlighters. A wet room, large enough for a party of six, filled one corner. Even from where he stood, Gilchrist could see that was where the slaughter had taken place. Its glass panels were