by Jane Adams
Ray shook his head. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘But how does it fit with Lee?’
‘Lee was a would-be alchemist,’ Amy said. ‘He believed in transmutation. We all do, it’s part of our religion: that the soul, the essence of life, can be transmuted and purified through meditation and living a good life. Through experience. Lee thought you could push the process faster. Like base metals into gold. Humankind into something else.’
‘And this transmutation,’ Ray asked. ‘I mean, as part of your belief system, what are you hoping to achieve by it?’
Amy hesitated before saying, ‘All religions that have a creation myth talk about man being created in some kind of godly image. Or man aspiring to be closer to the gods. I suppose you could say that’s what we’re trying to do. Build a society that we believe is closer to what our makers wished us to be part of. I suppose, like the Mormons believe that they can bring their ancestors into the church by baptizing them in the present, we believe that when we die we cast our souls out into the world to be reborn. To touch the souls of the unborn and maybe make a difference to what they will become. When Lee died, he would have . . .’
‘Amy, this isn’t for general consumption,’ Bryn said. ‘It’s a sacred thing.’
‘Murder kind of changes circumstances, Bryn. I’m sure the Prophet would want us to explain . . .’ She sighed. ‘If Lee sent his soul, if he didn’t do as we teach . . . I’m not conveying this very well.’ She looked at Ray, obviously expecting him to make fun of her.
‘I just need to know,’ he said. ‘I’m not about to ridicule.’
‘OK. Look, we believe that when we die and we send out our soul, then we have a duty to touch as many new lives as we can. We try to bless the unborn, but we have no right to, well, interfere, if you like. Individuality is such a remarkable, miraculous thing that we see it as practically sacred. Lee believed that he could send his soul out to a particular individual and that his soul could . . . kind of bond.’
‘Like possession?’ Ray asked.
‘Possession implies unwillingness,’ Bryn said softly. ‘The one Lee chose, the one he sent his soul into, would have been waiting a long time to welcome him.’
* * *
When Ray left Sommers House he felt deeply depressed. Looking back through his rear-view, he saw Bryn closing the twin iron gates and locking them, hoping that the decorative twists of metal could keep the world at bay.
They had spoken for a little longer, but all in all Ray felt that it had been a wasted journey. He had learned a little more about Harrison Lee and they had told him about the splinter group that had broken away from the Eyes of God when Morgan had died in the explosion at the chapter house. Bryn and Irene claimed to have no dealings with this other group, though Ray wondered about that. It would surely have been natural to want to contact old friends even if they had gone their separate philosophical ways. The leader of this other group was a man called Edwin Farrant and Ray had made a note to himself to let Beckett know about them.
He drove back to Mallingham and went straight to the hotel. Katie and her parents were waiting for him.
‘Katie wants to tell you about something,’ her mother said. ‘We’ve spent a lot of time talking about it and trying to sort out what she actually remembers from what she thinks she remembers. It might be important.’
Ray sat down and reached out for Katie’s hand.
‘There was a boy,’ Katie told him. ‘I dreamed about him. But he’s real.’
‘A boy? At the house?’
Katie nodded. ‘He wasn’t one of the ones who died,’ she said. ‘This was after. The night it all happened.’
‘And you’ve never talked about him before?’
Katie shook her head. ‘This boy, he told me not to drink the juice they gave me. He took the cup away and when I felt sleepy he told me that I had to stay awake. He took me down the stairs. There was a cupboard.’
She looked at Ray for confirmation. He nodded. The house had been old and large enough to have had back stairs leading from the kitchen to what had been servants’ quarters.
‘He put me in the cupboard. He’d put cushions in there for me to sit on. He got the rug from the hall and folded it up so that it blocked the door. He said that I had to be really quiet and not go to sleep.’
Tears had started to form at the corners of her eyes and, Ray realized, she was looking scared now, not just tired or subdued.
‘He’s back,’ she said, ‘and he wants me. He wants the three boys and then me.’
‘Who wants you, Katie? And why? Do you know that?’
Katie nodded, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Like last time,’ she whispered. ‘He wants to do it again.’
‘How do you know any of this, Katie?’ Lisa Fellows asked. ‘You can’t be certain the dead boys have anything to do with you. You’ve had no contact with any of those people, not since you were five years old.’
‘I just know,’ Katie protested. ‘Someone put it into my head.’
Her mother looked at her in complete bewilderment and Ray knew as he left a little later that he was the only one who believed her.
Chapter Sixteen
Ray arrived at the office to find that they had acquired a new secretary.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘Rowena. I’d forgotten all about her.’
‘Fortunately, she had the sense to call first and leave her number,’ George said. ‘Apparently you’d been a little vague about both the job and when she should come for an interview. I called her back and she starts tomorrow.’
Ray was hungry. They ordered a take-away from an Indian restaurant on the Welford road and ate it in the tiny kitchen while Ray filled him in on the day’s events.
‘This second group,’ George asked, ‘what do they call themselves?’
‘Farrant’s group calls itself New Vision apparently.’
‘Sounds like an optician’s. And how do they differ from Martyn Shaw’s lot?’
Ray shrugged. ‘Apart from the fact that they still see Morgan as the true Prophet, I’ve no idea. No one at Sommers was very forthcoming.’
‘And your little chat with Katie, what did you glean from that?’
‘That she remembers a hell of a lot more than she thinks she does. I want to talk to Beckett, and her parents, get them to agree to me taking her out to the site of the original chapter house. See if anything else springs to her mind once she’s there.’
He pushed his plate aside. The food was very good but he found it hard to take any pleasure in it without feeling guilt. Two families had lost children and, if Ray’s calculations were right, then a third would be taken tonight. He found it hard to think of anything else.
‘We know the third location,’ George said thoughtfully. ‘Have there been similar links with the abductions?’
Ray shook his head. ‘So far, no.’ He got up and pulled an A–Z map of Mallingham from the bookshelves. They cleared the table and he laid it out, then fetched coloured marker pens from the office. ‘Here, here and here,’ he said. ‘Warwick Street, Roger Joyce lived at 53. Barratt Road. That’s over here, right across town. Phillip Abrahams was just eleven and he lived above the corner shop with his mum and brother. And Nathan Brown, the last of the three. St Augustine Road, which back then was a main road between rows of terraced streets with a church on one corner and a pub on the other.’
He took a different pen and marked the locations of the new abductions. ‘And these’ — he took a third marker — ‘are where the bodies were found. St Leonard’s Vicarage, the Fosse Cinema and here, the third one was found in a pub yard, laid out on one of the tables. Sarah and I drove by where it used to be the other night. More bloody redevelopment. Why the hell they never finish one lot before they pull something else down beats me.’
George gave him a shrewd look. ‘Why is this last place so important?’ he asked.
Ray laughed harshly. ‘I grew up close to there. One of the little back streets off the King Richard’
s Road. Ryman Street. There was a shop on the corner, Mrs Snow’s. She was ancient even when I was a little kid, one of those old women who are born that way and go on for ever. My dad used to drink at the pub, Robin on the Green it was called, though the only green round there was the colour of the curtains. I suppose I felt like anyone else who has a violent act take place on their doorstep. I felt possessive about the place I grew up in and to have something like that happen, to have to go and interview my old neighbours, my dad’s old friends. It was a strange thing and yes, I guess it made Nathan’s death more personal even than the other two.’
They gazed at the map, trying to discern a pattern, something that the killer saw but they did not. George even tried measuring distance, both actual and by road — examined the geometry of it all — but there was nothing discernible.
When will it happen? Ray asked himself, aware of the knot of dread that tightened his stomach and turned his insides to water. He thought of Beckett. He’d be asking the self-same thing, trying to position his officers to cover the most ground. Knowing that even the best cover would be too thin and imprecise.
He knew he had to do something. To join Beckett’s force, even though one more pair of eyes would make little difference in a town the size of Mallingham.
As though he read Ray’s thoughts, George went and fetched their coats. ‘Keep your mobile on,’ he said, ‘and call in at least once an hour.’
Ray nodded.
‘We’ll meet back here at six tomorrow morning.’
* * *
Mallingham at night was like any town, a place of shadows and yellow lights. Darkness smoothed the torn edges of a community that was having the heart ripped out of it, physically and now emotionally. Mallingham had come late to the redevelopment by destruction approach adopted by the town planners. Leicester had endured this in the 1970s. Row upon row of Victorian terraces ripped apart, giving way to concrete and high-rise, despite the lessons of the previous decade that communities originally established at ground level could not survive being turned on end and thrust into the sky. The planners in the nearby city had learned their lessons and by the 1990s had begun to make the most of what they had instead of giving way to the wholesale destruction of the past. The tendency to pull down real eighteenth-century in order to rebuild the mock type had been abandoned and now Victorian factories and ancient churches were seen as something to be treasured and reused rather than knocked down in the name of progress.
Mallingham had yet to learn that lesson and corporate vandalism was still the order of the day. At the turn of every road a new pile of rubble had appeared. The planners had preserved the odd building, like St Leonard’s Church, and here and there enterprising souls had even tried planting gardens on long-abandoned plots. Trees sprang up in the midst of brick-strewn lots and a children’s playground stood alone, complete with new slides and climbing frames, although the children it was meant to entertain had now been moved to new estates on the edge of town.
Ray drove to the police station to talk to Beckett. Outside, the media had gathered in force and television cameras all but blocked the street.
Ray did a U-turn, mounting the pavement at the end of the road and attracting unwanted attention from the crowd. He drove off at speed, far more speed than was wise in narrow streets where cars were parked on either side and speed bumps, new and red-brick-edged, seemed to have been breeding. He called Beckett on his mobile from two streets away.
‘Where are you?’ Beckett wanted to know.
Ray told him.
‘Stay put, I’ll get someone to bring me over.’ He was with Ray fifteen minutes later. ‘They’re picking me up again on their next sweep,’ he said as the patrol car drove slowly away. ‘What happened down among the crackpots?’
‘At Sommers House? Very little of any use, I suspect. Did you get my message about Farrant and his splinter group?’
‘The New Vision lot? As it happened, they contacted us. By fax if you please, from their solicitor.’
‘And what did it say, this brief from their brief?’
It was a poor attempt at humour, but Beckett understood. He smiled slightly. ‘That they deny any association with these deaths and emphasize the law-abiding nature of their membership. Nothing you wouldn’t expect.’
Ray nodded. ‘I told Bryn Jones to make a similar statement,’ he said. ‘Other than that, I advised them to sit tight and do nothing.’
‘Hope they take the advice. Something tells me Farrant’s lot won’t.’
Beckett sighed, and slumped down in the seat of Ray’s car, his unbelted raincoat pulled around him. Ray could see in the half-light that he had not shaved.
‘You had any sleep lately?’
‘Not much. The PM reports have come in. They’ve rushed them through, the preliminary findings at least, we’re still waiting on toxicology.’
‘Asphyxia following sedation,’ Ray guessed. ‘The kids don’t struggle. He puts them to sleep, takes samples of their blood, cuts off a few strands of hair and then smothers them with whatever’s handy. Last time it was a cushion. Blue, if I remember correctly.’
Beckett nodded. Ray wasn’t looking at him and he felt the movement rather than saw. He was staring out of the windscreen towards the end of the road. A warehouse had been demolished and the road end, which had once been blocked by a wall of red brick, now gave an unexpected view over the north of Mallingham.
‘How many streets?’ Ray said softly. ‘How many houses and families and kids?’
Beckett said nothing. ‘If you’re cruising round tonight, expect to be stopped,’ he said. ‘I’ve got roadblocks on all the main drags and police check-points everywhere I can spare the manpower. Extra men stationed around what was the Robin on the Green pub. You’d better warn your partner. I suppose he’s out here too?’
Ray nodded.
The patrol car prowled back along the deserted street and Beckett opened the door, ready to go. He seemed to be about to speak, but changed his mind. Ray watched as he got into the other car and it moved slowly away. What more was there to say? he thought.
* * *
As Ray left Mallingham he realized that he was not alone. At first he thought the bike following him must simply be someone setting off for the early shift at work, but something about the way the rider kept a fixed distance between them and resisted all opportunity to overtake once they’d reached the dual carriageway made him think again.
The bike was old. Not one of the plastic-coated superbikes that all looked the same to Ray. He lowered the window, listening closely to the roar of the engine as it cut through the damp air. He thought at first that the bike was a big single, the slow lazy thump of the engine totally unlike the screaming revvy engines of its modern cousins, but no, he decided, it was an old twin, even strokes and a low, grating roar to the exhaust note. Ray had owned several bikes in his youth, been really keen until his wife’s nagging forced him to turn in his bike keys for a nice respectable car.
He slowed down deliberately and watched in his rear-view as the rider did the same, the engine note changing as he dropped the gear down a notch, then matching his speed again as Ray accelerated away.
They reached the outskirts of town. There were two major roundabouts where the A46 met the narrower A roads off to Thurmaston and Syston, and Ray deliberately hesitated before moving onto the first of them. The bike had anticipated his move. He held back, advancing slowly, waiting for Ray to pull off. This early in the morning there was little traffic and Ray decided to wait him out.
The biker drew level in the other lane and for a moment Ray was able to see more clearly the young man in dark leathers, his helmet visor pulled right down, before he accelerated away, leaving Ray with an impression of red and chrome and a roar of sound.
* * *
Since that night he had avoided the sun and kept himself in the darkened places where his soul could breathe. He had been the special one, the chosen, the cherished, protected by the faithful, and now
his time had come and the journey could begin.
The night that his mentor had died he had known it even as it happened, felt the strength of another soul flow into his own and another heart beating. And he had known that it was time to complete the circle and to make things whole. He had tried to show them, to call the faithful to abandon their false prophets and come back to the truth, but the response had been small. Other powers kept his words from being understood.
So now he painted it large upon the walls of the room, taking time to do it well. The Prophet’s words. Pigment and blood to give them power and worth.
‘Man is like an angel falling.’
Chapter Seventeen
By seven-fifteen there were two possibles. One was a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother had reported her missing having found her bed empty. Beckett felt that this could probably be discounted and waited confidently for the news that she had been found safe and well after sneaking out to see a boyfriend or sleeping over at a friend’s. None the less, he dispatched Emma Thorn to deal with the distraught parent.
A few minutes later a call came in which Beckett knew must be the one. There was an eleven-year-old boy by the name of Simon Ellis whose mother started work at eight and to get there on time left home at half-past six. A neighbour went in daily, just before seven, to make sure that he was awake and getting ready for school, and Simon then walked to school later with the neighbour’s own son. The last few days she had been driving them there and picking them up again in the afternoon.
This morning the neighbour had knocked on the door at ten to seven and been appalled to find it unlocked. She had gone inside. And what she found left her in no doubt that Simon had gone.
* * *
‘Someone followed me,’ Ray told George as they made tea. ‘Someone on a motorbike.’
