The Chemistry Of Death Quotes
"A human body starts to decompose four minutes after death. Once the encapsulation of life, it now undergoes its final metamorphoses. It begins to digest itself. Cells dissolve from the inside out. Tissue turns to liquid, then to gas."
"No longer animate, the body becomes an immovable feast for other organisms."
"It's about three miles away. You'll have to park up and cut across the marsh to the woods. From what they said the body should be somewhere round here."
"All was flatness and water, an emptiness that, depending on your mood, could be either restful or desolate."
"I wasn't superstitious, and unlike Linda Yates I didn't believe in premonitions. Except she hadn't said it had been a premonition, not exactly. Just a dream. And I knew all about how seductive dreams can be. Seductive and treacherous."
"It wasn't quite a picture postcard. It was too lived in, too sprawling to fit the image of a rural English village."
"I still wasn't thinking too clearly, back then. If I'd thought about it at all, with the arrogance of a city-dweller I'd assumed there would be taxis, a shop, something."
"The heat seemed eternal, leaching the colour from the trees and baking the ground to the hardness of bone."
"The road gave way to more houses. It was obvious that this was pretty much all there was to Manham. Lights were on in some of the windows, but there was no other sign of life."
"Putting off the moment when I would have to go to bed and face sleep, I stayed there until the sky had darkened to velvet indigo, pierced by the brilliant flickering of stars, a random semaphore of long-dead flecks of light."
"I'd had the dream again. It had been a bad one. As always, it had been so vivid that waking seemed like the illusion, my dream the reality."
"Monday morning or not, she couldn't think of a better start to a new week."
"Forty-eight more potential disappointments. Except that this month was different. This month the disappointment was three days late."
"It's just your imagination. Your period's three days late and you're letting it get to you."
"Not so much because of what the images showed — God knows that was shocking enough. But the fact of looking at them was like taking a step back in time."
"I didn't want this. But then, nobody did. Least of all the dead woman."
"My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I pulled into the side of the road. All at once I felt I couldn't breathe."
"I recognized her as one of Henry's patients, one of the loyal number who still preferred to wait until they could see him."
"Run it off. You'll feel better for it afterwards."
"It wasn't enough. And now even that was ebbing."
"It was a soap opera come to life, Manham's very own melodrama."
"Tragedies draw communities like this together."
"I'd walked with Jenny to the small cottage she rented with another young woman. We hadn't bothered with my car after all. It was a warm, clear night, and she only lived a few hundred yards away."
"But the dreams defied any neat rationalization."
"Because there was only one way I could ever be with my family again, and I knew taking it would be an act of despair, not love."
"I'd called Mackenzie first thing that morning to tell him I would examine Sally Palmer's remains if he still wanted me to. The knowledge had been with me from the moment I'd woken, as if the decision had been made while I was asleep. Which, in a way, I suppose it had."
"Realistically, I didn't know how much use I would be. At best I might be able to give a more precise idea of the time-since-death interval, assuming my rusty knowledge hadn't deserted me. But I was under no illusions that it would do much to help Lyn Metcalf. It was just that doing nothing was no longer an option."
"Grateful to be able to put that much off for a little longer, at least, I'd agreed."
"All of them with their own lives, untouched by mine. Or each other's."
"The relief I felt was fleeting, quickly replaced by a clinical detachment."
"As you are now, so I once was. As I am now, so will you be."
"Judgement can fall upon any of us, at any time. It is not for us to question it. It is not for us to cry that it isn't fair. God is merciful, but we have no right to expect His mercy."
"Evil doesn't cease to exist just because we choose to ignore it."
"At ourselves. We are the ones who have permitted this Serpent to move freely among us. No-one else."
"Standing behind Scarsdale as he continued his impromptu press conference, I noticed that the ranks of his hard-line parishioners had been swelled by new converts."
"Manham's a small place. And small places breed small minds."
"Something like this brings out the worst in everyone."
"She wobbled unsteadily on her feet as the discordant music slowed to a stop. Thankful it had ended, she leaned against the rough stone of the wall for support, becoming aware once again of the bite of the rope tied around her ankle."
"The smell of burning tobacco hung in the air. There was rustling, an indistinct sound of movement."
"Suspicion stole in like an airborne virus, not apparent at first, but already carried unknown by the first victims."
"Like any contagion, there were those who were more vulnerable than others."
"Unlike skin and flesh, bone retains the impression of anything that cuts into it."
"The old church was cool and musty, even on a warm evening. Light fell through the stained-glass window in blues and mauves, the ancient glass warped and uneven in its leaded frames."
"Forget it. The bastards just needed reminding of a few things."
"Now you see why I don't talk about it. Or didn't."
"Once word got out what I'd been doing there would be no end to the morbid curiosity."
"You could live here for thirty, you're still from a city. Push comes to shove, people look at you and think 'foreigner'."
"Life's biggest mystery reduced to a banal mathematical formula."
"Regardless of what atrocities they've committed, the single most shocking thing about our real-life monsters is how normal they seem."
"The only dampening of the mood came after we'd eaten."
"The yellows, purples and reds of the flowers edging the village green hurt the eye with their vibrancy, filling the air with the heavy sweetness of pollen."
"All in the name of the greater good, of course."
"I wasn't happy with the idea of going behind Ben's back, especially when it would probably turn out to be nothing. But I couldn't take that chance."
"He moved through the village like a ghost, speaking to few people, asking only not to be noticed."
"In the way that small communities have of ascribing roles to its members, he became the village untouchable, the pervert whom children were warned not to go near."
"Ever since Sally Palmer's body had been found, he'd lived in fear, knowing that rationality didn't play any part in selecting scapegoats."
"Instead, when the callers changed tactics, threatening to break the door down unless he opened it, he did as he was told."
"Despite the disturbance, no-one was visible in them, and no-one had come out to see what was happening. But I knew people were looking."
"If the village was only now starting to give up its secrets, there was no telling what else might be unearthed before this was done."
"You get certain chances at certain times. Crossroads, or whatever. You make your decision, you end up going down one track; you make the other, you end up somewhere else entirely."
"It's been, what? Three years now?... It's long enough. You can't bring the dead back, so you might as well carry on with the business of living as best you can."
"All this time I'd let him believe my experience as an anthropologist had been entirely academic. Even though I hadn't actually lied, it was a poor repayment of trust."
"The body's location couldn't be dismissed as a coincidence. The village could no longer distance itself from this very literal skeleton from its past."
"From a detection point of view, that presented worrying problems. Either something had happened to force the killer to change his methods, or he was so erratic that there was no pattern to his actions."
"The flies' music was audible as I made my way across the marsh... a senseless, idiot drone which seemed to constantly waver in pitch without actually changing."
"Is he deliberately showing off or just being careless? It's like we're dealing with two conflicting mindsets."
"If suspicion had been a contagion before, now it threatened to become an epidemic."
"The pain of absence was still there, and always would be. But now there was also an acceptance."
"Catastrophe doesn't announce itself in advance."
"It's all right, she'd told me, smiling. This is how it should be."
"Sometimes you feel you've just got to do something, you know?"
"Feeling helpless. Sometimes you feel you've just got to do something, you know?"
"What if you'd fallen in? 'Then I'd have put everyone out of their misery, wouldn't I?'"
"Look, David… You won't tell anyone about this, will you? 'Of course not.'"
"I know we said we were going to take a couple of days, but… Well, I'd really like to see you. If you want to, I mean."
"The world is full of people who've insisted the person they know can't be a killer."
"I'd no idea that Ben used to have a relationship with Sally, far less that he'd a history of assault."
"It's about time people woke up to that bastard Anders."
"This isn't just about Ben Anders! For God's sake, can't you see that?"
"Good. They can hang the bastard for all I care."
"He keeps them alive for three days before he kills them."
"If anything happens to her, if she dies because you were lying, I swear I'll kill you myself."
"I used to be an expert in that sort of thing. Before I came here."
"We're only locals, after all. I expect our ignorance must have amused you."
"I can assure you I won't be taken for the fool again."
"We'll carry on pursuing other leads, obviously."
"You ever been taken in for questioning for murder?"
"Because I didn't have anything to do with it."
"I thought it was a case of no-one missing a slice off a cut loaf, you know?"
"Now I can think about what I'm going to do to that bastard Brenner."
"And from now on you can be sure I'll leave it in the hands of the 'experts'."
"There was only one place I could think of to go."
"It was one of the hardest things I'd ever had to do."
"Sometimes there just isn't anything you can do, no matter how much you might wish otherwise."
"What good are you going to do charging up there?"
"Don't think I don't know what's wrong with you."
"You want to get a nice girl. That'd brighten you up a bit."
"I tried to bring my knee into his groin but we were too close."
"He wore the same expression of gentle concentration as when he tended his plants."
"It's all right, we're at the surgery. Just hang on."