A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  A DATE WITH DEATH

  By Mark Roberts

  The Sixth Soul

  What She Saw

  The Eve Clay Thrillers

  Blood Mist

  Dead Silent

  Day of The Dead

  Killing Time A Date With Death

  A Date With Death

  Mark Roberts

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Mark Roberts, 2019

  The moral right of Mark Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design: kid-ethic.com

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  ISBN (HB): 9781786695130

  ISBN (ANZTPB): 9781786695147

  ISBN (E): 9781786695123

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Also by Mark Roberts

  Welcome Page

  Copyright Page

  The Past

  1977

  Day One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  The Past

  1979

  Day Two

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  The Past

  1980

  Day Three

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  The Past

  1982

  Day Four

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  The Past

  1977

  When her father returned from Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, she didn’t know if the new baby was a boy or a girl. She asked how the baby was and the answer came as a cold silence she knew so well, and that made her want to be sick.

  Following this, she knew not to ask after her mother.

  That night, as she lay in her bed wondering about the new baby and thinking about her mother in the hospital, she heard the telephone ring in the hall downstairs.

  She got out of bed and crept four paces – one for every year of her life – to her bedroom door and listened to her father answering the telephone.

  ‘Yeah?’

  He sounded at his angriest and, in one slurred word, fear overwhelmed her.

  There was a silence as her father listened to the person on the other end.

  ‘If you must know, the little bastard’s a boy!’

  Bastard?

  It was a word she didn’t know the meaning of, a word her father used frequently but one she had learned never to repeat again after the slap in the face he’d given her the one and only time she’d said it.

  Downstairs, he slammed the receiver in its cradle and she scurried back to her bed, burying herself under the blankets and pretending to be fast asleep.

  At some point, and she didn’t know when, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, nothing unusual happened.

  As usual, at a quarter to eight, her father left the house to run his businesses, leaving her alone with Mrs Doyle, the cleaning lady, who’d been given a few pounds to stay with her but who she’d overheard being given strict instructions not to talk to her and, especially, not to answer any questions about the little shit.

  Shit?

  Same as bastard, she guessed, as she watched the scene in the hall between her father and Mrs Doyle unfold through the struts on the staircase, the memory of his open-handed slap when she’d used the ‘b’ word causing her cheek to sting at the thought of it.

  She confined
herself to her bedroom and, as the morning rolled on, she wondered if there was something wrong with her baby brother.

  At lunchtime, when the antique grandfather clock chimed twelve in the hall downstairs, the phone rang and Mrs Doyle answered it.

  ‘Hello?’ Mrs Doyle sounded as plain scared as she felt.

  She listened and heard her father’s voice leaking from the telephone receiver. Not talking then, shouting.

  ‘Half past the hour it is then, sir?’

  Sir. The name Mrs Doyle had been commanded to call her father.

  She stood at the bedroom window but couldn’t see the whole of the garden and drive at the front of the house. On her knees, she pushed her toy box to the window and, when she managed to get it there, she climbed up and had a perfect view of what lay below.

  She waited and heard the quarter hour chime and guessed that something important was going to happen when the clock sounded the half hour.

  In the top left-hand corner of her bedroom window, she saw a fly struggling against the stickiness of a spider’s web and watched as the arachnid drifted towards its prey. It wrapped a tight thread around the fly and, before long, the captured bug looked like it was entombed in a mini blanket.

  The throb of the engine of her father’s Bentley as it slowed to turn into the drive at the front of the house brought her back into the moment.

  The gravel grated against the tyres of her father’s car and, as he pulled up to a sharp halt, she knew that things were not good.

  The driver’s door swung open and her father got out of the car, slamming the door shut as he did so. His mouth was moving as he fumbled with his house keys, making his way to the front door.

  She watched the Bentley as her father opened the door, stomped inside the house and threw the door back after himself.

  Slowly, the back door of the car opened and her mother stepped out on to the gravel. Even from the height of her bedroom window, she could tell that her mother had been crying.

  Mother was dressed in a fur coat and hat, wearing flat, black shoes and a green skirt; she knew her father had spent a lot of money on the clothes because he often repeated the same phrase to her mother – sometimes in anger, sometimes not – your outfits are costing me an arm and a fucking leg.

  Mother leaned into the back of the car and, after a few moments, she emerged with a small wicker basket, which she carried towards the front door.

  She looked down from her bedroom window into the top end of the basket and saw a ball of pink flesh. The baby’s face. Her brother. Her brand-new baby brother. All the uneasiness rose from her and was replaced by a sense of awe and wonder.

  In her head, a picture she had seen of Jesus walking on the water flashed through her memory and, as she watched her mother bringing the baby closer to the house, she said to herself in a brittle whisper, ‘It’s like a miracle…’

  The house was filled with the sound of the doorbell as her mother rang to be let in.

  ‘Don’t fucking talk to her, Mrs Doyle! Don’t say anything nice about the baby or I’ll fire you on the spot!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  She crept at speed to the top of the stairs and watched Mrs Doyle walk to the front door, her stomach dancing as a net of butterflies was unleashed inside her.

  Mrs Doyle opened the front door, stood to one side as her mother stepped into the house with her baby brother in the basket, and closed the door.

  Her father walked past her mother and the baby towards the door and flung it open again.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked her mother.

  ‘I’m going to register its birth at Brougham Terrace and then I’m going back to work.’

  Her mother placed the basket down on the ground and lifted the baby out.

  ‘Look at him. Look… at him! He’s the spitting image of you,’ said her mother.

  ‘Not looking, not listening!’

  On his way out, her father closed the door with the same sour energy that he had opened it.

  Her mother looked at Mrs Doyle, who was slipping her arms into the same coat she had worn forever.

  ‘Mrs Doyle…’ said her mother.

  Mrs Doyle shook her head and opened the front door to leave.

  As Mrs Doyle left, her mother placed her baby brother back in the basket and took off her fur coat. The baby started to cry and her mother said, ‘All right, all right.’

  Her mother pulled up her sweater and, picking up the baby, fastened him to her left breast, walking around the hall and rocking him.

  The baby stopped crying and her mother walked out of the hall and deeper into the house.

  She listened and through the walls of the house came a sound she knew very well.

  As her mother fed the new baby, the grandfather clock ticked, hitting the air with a stern metal finger.

  And beneath this there was that other sound.

  In the morning room, her mother wept.

  Day One

  Wednesday, 1st December 2021

  Catoptrophobia

  Fear of mirrors

  1

  6.44 am

  The tide went out and death came in.

  Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay walked along the mudflats of the River Mersey towards the remains of a human being, guiding herself forward in the pre-dawn darkness with a torch that sliced the freezing gloom before her.

  Walking further away from the concrete promenade that followed the twisting path of the river, Clay felt her rubber boots being sucked into the thick silt beneath her feet.

  Tall and slim with long brunette hair snatched back in a ponytail, Clay looked ahead at the random pattern of jagged black rocks and the dead person beyond them but knew there was no mileage in using them as stepping stones. Being floored on the mud with a broken ankle was simply not an option.

  Clay glanced back at Otterspool Promenade.

  Beneath a pair of arc lamps, Clay saw the marked police car and the constables who had discovered the body. Beneath the artificial light, rain raged in the wind and into the deluge a black mortuary van pulled up alongside Detective Sergeant Gina Riley, a small, rotund woman with fair hair and a dreamy expression that hid her quicksilver mind. Riley raised an arm, acknowledging Clay.

  Three supporting officers climbed down the concrete steps from the railings and on to the riverbed.

  She carried on, stepping as lightly as she could and shivering in the ice-cold wind, her eyes fixed on the body washed up on a rock at the centre of a large pool of water.

  Female, thought Clay, as she concentrated on the body that was becoming clearer with each step forward. On your back. Naked.

  A foghorn sounded in the distance, its moan like the dying breath of a mythical beast.

  Young. Eyes wide open and startled, the gate to your soul exposed to the elements.

  In her head, a clock started ticking, taking her into the recent past and a crime scene outside Liverpool that she hadn’t been directly involved in but one she remembered clearly.

  Number two, she thought. But a first time outing in Liverpool for the perpetrator.

  She looked back and saw Detective Sergeant Karl Stone, a tall thin man with prematurely grey hair slicked back, at the head of an advancing human triangle, the base of which consisted of Detective Sergeant Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price from Scientific Support.

  A seagull landed close to the woman’s body, looked it up and down with jet-black eyes.

  Clay quickened her pace in the direction of the body, deeper into the freezing mist that masked the Wirral Peninsula on the opposite bank of the River Mersey.

  The destruction to the dead woman’s face was now clear to see.

  Her eyeballs poked out of the sockets and her swollen and bitten tongue jutted out of her mouth.

  Definitely number two.

  Clay recalled an image from a local television news broadcast that had quickly progressed into the national media.

  Sandra O’Day, a slim blonde woman in her mid twenties
, slaughtered in the late summer twenty or so miles away in Warrington.

  Clay looked down at what was left of the woman in front of her and thought, yes, the same again.

  Where her shoulder-length hair should have hung down in sorrowful clumps, there was nothing except the side of her head, her left ear missing, leaving a pitiful hole in her face.

  Clay stood where the seagull had just flown up from and looked at the body from the feet upwards.

  Her feet were blue but there was no apparent damage to them.

  ‘Anything?’ called Stone.

  ‘She’s not the perpetrator’s first. I’m guessing she was a natural blonde,’ replied Clay.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Her legs were slim and long, just like the other victim she knew of, and her face was a knot of purple muscle.

  ‘He’s skinned her face and scalped her.’

  In the sky to the east, the first crooked finger of muddy light appeared, pointing down in the direction of the docks at Garston, and reminded her of just how close to home she was.

  Clay pictured her son, Philip, asleep in his bed and her husband, Thomas, getting up in their bedroom, ready for the start of another day without her because she had been drawn away by the imperative of work.

  She dismissed any notion of home as her eyes paused at the surreal sight of the woman’s limp hands, fingers floating strangely in the shallow pool around them, as if there was a semblance of life still in her.

  What’s he doing with the part of you he removed? she asked herself, taking a series of deep breaths to bottle the sour emotion the question provoked and the bitter taste in her mouth that accompanied it.

  Stone arrived just behind Clay.

  ‘Last August in Warrington,’ replied Clay. ‘Sandra O’Day. She was blonde and in her mid twenties. She was dumped in the River Irwell after being missing for ten or eleven days, scalped and with her face removed.’

  They stood in silence over the woman’s body, the dark air around them studded with flashes of light as Sergeant Paul Price took a series of photographs.

  Clay stooped, pointed her torch at the base of the woman’s neck and up to her jawline, and saw the place where the perpetrator had cut away her scalp and face.

  She pushed into her memory to recall the name given to the killer by the tabloid press when he’d first struck in Warrington but it eluded her.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Stone.