The Revelation Room (The Ben Whittle Investigation Series Book 1)

by Mark Tilbury

  ‘Where’s Old Joe?’

  Marcus laughed. ‘Old Joe? There’s no one called Old Joe here, mate. You’ve been away with the fairies.’

  ‘My name’s not Benjamin. It’s Ben.’

  ‘Not anymore, brother. You’re one of us now. Once the Father swears you in tomorrow morning, you’ll be known as Brother Benjamin. You’d do well to remember that.’

  ‘I need painkillers.’

  Marcus shook his head. ‘Sorry. No can do. We don’t allow artificial substances. If you want to sit up, you can have a glass of water.’

  Ben’s head thumped like a bass drum in a heavy metal band. ‘I’m in agony.’

  ‘Pain is all in the mind.’

  ‘You tell my fucking shoulders that.’

  ‘Swearing’s also against the rules. I’m telling you that as a friend, okay? Everyone curses once in a while. It’s to be expected. But if you want my advice, make sure the Father is out of earshot.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘You’ll learn. It’s up to you whether you want to do it the easy way or the hard way.’

  Ben forced himself to sit up. His shoulders and knee would ever recover from his ordeal on the cross. He just wanted to dive back into the soothing black water again and never resurface.

  Marcus handed him the water. ‘Don’t gulp it; you might throw up.’

  Ben ignored him and drained the water in one long draught. Water had never tasted so good. So cold and invigorating. What the hell did it matter if he threw up? In the grand scheme of things, throwing up was the least of his worries.

  Ben’s stomach suddenly felt as if it was in the grip of giant pincers. He dropped the beaker on the floor and bent over double.

  Marcus put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Whoa there, buddy. I told you to take it easy.’

  Ben rocked back and forth on the bed as if the room had set sail in a rough sea. He dry- retched several times. Bile burned the back of his throat.

  ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do. Brother Bubba will look after you if you need anything. Right, Bubba?’

  Bubba grunted and rolled over on his bunk.

  ‘You can have my bunk for the night,’ Marcus said. ‘There’s a bucket in the corner of the room if you need to take a leak.’

  Ben stared at the bare boards as Marcus walked out of the room and locked the door behind him. He’d never given much consideration to the concept of Hell. It was just a load of made-up nonsense designed to frighten people into behaving themselves. But now he knew for sure that Hell existed.

  And he was in it.

  Chapter twenty-five

  Edward Ebb sat at the kitchen table, deep in contemplation. The Lord had laid plenty of food for thought at his table. Overladen it, you might say, but Ebb was old enough and wise enough to understand that Jesus would never ask him to do anything beyond his capabilities.

  This was clearly illustrated the evening Jesus had told him to kill his own mother. Right out of the blue, like a midge on a hot summer’s day, Jesus had interrupted Alan Titchmarsh during a gardening program on BBC Two to tell him that his mother must shame the shovel.

  ‘Uncle’ Reg had been watching the program whilst Ebb had been trying to do his maths homework at the dining table. Jesus had waited for Uncle Reg to nip to the loo before demonstrating the art of shaming the shovel. Jesus had used a pumpkin as a substitute head. He’d smashed that thing to a pulp. Liquidised it. Beaten every drop of juice out of it. Jesus had also performed a miracle to rival His water into wine trick: He’d turned the flesh and juice of the pumpkin into blood and brain matter. His white robe had looked more like a butcher’s apron than a holy gown. The program had concluded with Titchmarsh planting a row of runner beans in the blood-soaked ground and telling viewers about the importance of fertile soil.

  Ebb had needed no second invitation to beat his mother to death. No, sir. But even at the tender age of sixteen, he was fully aware that a murder required proper planning. Especially the murder of a close family member. The police always looked in the victim’s own backyard before they poked their noses further afield.

  Knowing the right time to kill his mother was simple. She got drunk in the mornings, slept it off in the afternoons, and started again in the evenings. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. He’d just have to find a good way to get himself out of school in the afternoon, nip home and smash her pumpkin to pieces with a shovel as shown on TV. One problem though: teachers had a nasty habit of checking if you were in class. Even Miss Parsons, and she was blind in one eye.

  After weeks and weeks of trying to find a solution to his conundrum, the answer came by virtue of a cross-country race. With their usual lack of concern for kids that hated sports and loved chocolate, the school had set up a two-hour course, which at its furthest point ran close to the river. The plan was simple by design: all he had to do was leave the race, go home, bash his mother’s head in with Uncle Reg’s shovel, and rejoin the race.

  But here was the main problem: it would take too much time to execute. And there would be teachers placed along the route to stop kids from cheating. Ebb had wrestled with the problem, night after sleepless night, as the race drew near. And then the answer had come to him in the early hours of the morning after a fretful night listening to his mother at it with Uncle Reg in the adjoining bedroom. All he had to do was cut across the dried-up brook at the back of the park to get home and back again without being seen. Then he just needed to injure his leg so it looked like he couldn’t move. Nothing as radical as a break, though, because that would hurt like hell on a cheese toasty. Just bad enough to swell it up so he could sit down and wait for someone to find him.

  On the day of the race, Ebb consumed three Snickers bars to prepare for his ‘marathon’. The initial sugar rush soon dissipated and left him feeling as sick as a dog. What if he threw up all over the murder scene? By the time he reached home, his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest. There was a funny tingling sensation in his inner thighs.

  He went to Uncle Reg’s garden shed and put on a pair of surgical gloves stolen from the school science lab. Uncle Reg loved the garden. Said you couldn’t beat home-grown vegetables. Jesus would have disagreed. Just ask the pumpkin He’d beaten to a pulp with the shovel.

  Armed with Uncle Reg’s shovel, Ebb went to the house. He leaned the shovel up against the kitchen wall and polished off four glasses of water. He then picked up the shovel and walked upstairs. Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, as his mother used to say when Ebb was little and her brain wasn’t so pickled. He made a mental note to raid her chocolate drawer before he left. She wouldn’t be needing chocolate where she was going.

  His guts felt as if someone was whisking eggs in there. He stood in his mother’s bedroom doorway, the shovel dangling by his side. As predicted, Veronica Ebb was lying flat on her back on the bed that seemed to harvest ‘uncles’ from the depths of its springs and lumps. The room stank of booze. He felt sure that if he lit a match, she’d erupt in a ball of flame. But he didn’t want her to die in such an impersonal way. He wanted to feel her die. He wanted to taste her death. Savour it and digest it so he could relive it, over and over again.

  This was for all the times she’d sent him to bed with a great big hungry bear growling in his tummy. For all the uncles who’d laid their hands on him when he was too little to fight back. For all the times she’d woke him up with her howling fake laughter. For all the times her headboard had beat against his wall as a thumping reminder that she was a whore. For all the times she’d called him Pixie-pea.

  But here was the clincher: for the time she’d thrown him down the stairs when he was seven years old and almost turned her Pixie-pea into a mushy pea. He’d been unconscious for close on a lifetime. He’d woken up to find her bathing his head with a cold flannel that stank of TCP. A few days later, she’d had to take him to the doctor because he kept having fits. She’d made him tell the doctor he’d been sleepwalking and took a tumble down the wooden hill. Eb
b had done what mummy had asked. The doctors had prescribed some gloopy medicine, and pills to control the fits. Epilepsy, the doctor called it.

  As he looked at his snoring, gurgling mess of a mother, a thought struck him. What about blood? If he smashed her pumpkin head to a pulp, he would get covered in blood. It was one thing feigning an injury, quite another trying to explain to the teachers why he was covered in blood.

  The shovel saved him. The shovel told him to go to the spare room and put on a pair of Uncle Reg’s overalls. That way, Ebb could stash the bloody overalls in the garden shed, along with the shovel, and get Uncle Reg locked up for life. Perfect. Ebb almost fell to his knees and kissed the shovel right there in the doorway. The shovel also told him to put his tracksuit on over his PE kit and wear his mother’s pink wig, just in case he contaminated the overalls with any of his hair and skin.

  The overalls hadn’t been a very good fit because Uncle Reg was close on six feet. The arms came right down over his hands, and the legs gobbled up his trainers and made walking a dangerous experience. He’d nearly tripped over twice on his way back to his mother’s bedroom. But nearly was as good as never, as his mother used to say when she’d had a mouth capable of talking sense. To make matters worse, it was hotter than Hell in the three layers of clothing.

  Ebb picked up the shovel. He loved the shovel. Not the kind of dirty love his mother had for Uncle Reg. He never wanted any part of that kind of love. The shovel made him feel warm and cosy inside. The shovel understood him. The shovel loved him for who he was.

  He moved up close to the bed and raised the shovel above his head. In his excitement, he forgot about the brass ceiling light that Uncle Tom had fitted when he’d occupied Uncle Reg’s berth in his mother’s bed. The shovel clanged against it louder than a church bell at a wedding. One of the tiny glass shades smashed, raining a fine shower of glass down on the bed.

  Veronica Ebb opened her eyes and gawked at her son. She looked like a chicken looking at the dreaded axe. She opened her mouth to say something. Perhaps to ask him why he was wearing her pink wig. Perhaps to beg forgiveness. Perhaps to say goodbye to her little Pixie-pea.

  Ebb had been in no mood to find out what. He brought the shovel down on her face hard enough to splinter the bone in her nose. The corner of ther shovel gouged her right eye.

  Love of the shovel and hatred of his mother poured through Ebb in equal measures. He hit her again and again and again until exhaustion stopped him. He spent close on ten minutes resting on the shovel, gasping for air and looking at the bloody pulp that used to be his mother’s face.

  Ebb smiled at her. ‘You have shamed the shovel.’

  Veronica Ebb didn’t answer. Her face resembled a giant hamburger with bits of eyeball and tooth ground into the mix. Ebb wanted to stay in that moment forever, locked in a cocoon of pure pleasure. Just him and the shovel and his dead mother. But the time was ticking. He took off the blood-soaked overalls, rolled them up into a tight ball and took them down to the shed along with the shovel. He stuffed the overalls underneath Uncle Reg’s workbench and leaned the shovel against the wall.

  By the time he’d got back to the cross-country course, nagging doubt had replaced the elation of the murder. His head felt as if it housed a nest of baby birds, beaks open, waiting to be fed answers. To add to his problems, his plan to twist his own ankle wasn’t so easy to implement as he’d imagined. Every time he tried to roll the ankle over, his pain threshold refused to let him. Perhaps he could smash his ankle with a rock? Again, same problem. Self-preservation blocked the move. Ebb looked up at the sky and howled. What he needed right now was Jesus to tell him what to do.

  And so Jesus had. In the guise of a rook sitting high in the branches of a massive oak tree. Jesus had gone out on a limb for him, you might say. Jesus told him to climb right up in that tree as high as he could and then throw himself to the ground.

  Driven by desperation, and Jesus’s encouragement, Ebb climbed halfway up the tree and leapt to the ground. His left foot landed on the very rock he’d been considering using to smash his ankle with. Pain lanced the entire left-hand side of his body as his leg twisted and spilled him forwards onto the hard earth.

  He’d spent the best part of an hour under that tree before Mr Gibbs, the sports master, found him. By then, he’d been convinced that there were vultures circling overhead waiting to feed upon his carcass. After first looking angry, then concerned, Mr Gibbs had called an ambulance on his mobile phone and tried to pacify Ebb by telling him that only babies cried.

  Ebb had spent the rest of the day in hospital having a plaster cast fitted on his broken left leg. By the time an ambulance took him home that evening, the house had been cordoned off with police tape.

  He’d spent the following week recuperating at a neighbour’s house. Two days after the killing, Uncle Reg was charged with Veronica Ebb’s murder. The evidence was overwhelming. The only fingerprints on the shovel belonged to Reg the Veg, as Ebb now called him. The blood-soaked overalls belonged to Reg the Veg. Reg the Veg was found guilty of murder and given a life sentence.

  Ebb had left school that summer without any qualifications. He didn’t even bother turning up for the exams. He stayed in the house as long as he could, but with no money to pay the rent, let alone the utility bills, he was soon forced to leave. All he took with him in an old brown rucksack was a change of clothes, his mother’s pink wig, and the sunglasses she’d worn to cover her eyes when one or another of the uncles had got handy with his fists.

  He spent the next two years sleeping rough and begging on the streets. Fourteen years later, he exhumed his mother’s skeletal remains and pinned them to the wall in the Revelation Room. It was a shame that the original shovel was unobtainable.

  He’d gone back once and had a look at the old house. It now boasted new windows and a new front door. Reg the Veg’s vegetable garden had been levelled off and grassed over. The shed was gone. In its place, a kids’ swing and slide set. A strange mixture of sadness and nostalgia passed through him. A yearning. A longing to break in and go up to his mother’s old bedroom and relive the beautiful experience of killing her.

  Chapter twenty-six

  Maddie sat on the edge of her bed staring at the floor. A filthy red rug covered the bare boards in the middle of the room. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling cast shadows across the room.

  Dixie looked across at her. ‘What did Tweezer do to you? Sister Alice reckons he’s in deep shit.’

  ‘Language!’ Emily said.

  Dixie ignored her. ‘What did he do?’

  Maddie thought Dixie might have been pretty, but life had marked her face with harsh edges. Her faded denim eyes looked kind enough, but Maddie didn’t know if she could trust her. ‘He came to see me when I was handcuffed to Ebb’s bed.’

  Dixie raised her eyebrows. ‘And?’

  Maddie looked away and shook her head. ‘I don’t want to say anything out of turn.’

  ‘Then shut up,’ Emily said.

  Dixie turned to Emily. ‘Go to sleep.’

  Emily yawned. ‘I would if you two would shut up yacking.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop listening instead.’

  Emily rolled over onto her side and turned her back on Dixie. ‘Whatever.’

  Dixie sighed. ‘Moody cow.’

  Emily rolled back to face her. ‘So would you be if you were in my shoes.’

  ‘Oh no, not the dreaded phantom pregnancy again.’

  ‘It’s not a phantom pregnancy. It’s real.’

  ‘And who got you up the duff, then? The Tooth Fairy?’

  Emily looked away. ‘You can mock me all you like. I don’t care.’

  ‘Or maybe it was the Father?’

  ‘Don’t be revolting.’

  ‘Nope. Couldn’t have been him, because he couldn’t raise a smile when it comes to women.’

  ‘I’m not interested in your filthy thoughts.’

  Dixie laughed. ‘Perhaps it was the Holy Ghost, then?’<
br />
  ‘Piss off, Dixie. I’m not in the mood.’

  Dixie turned back to Maddie. ‘So what happened? What did Tweezer do to you?’

  Maddie told her about the attempted rape.

  Dixie whistled. ‘And you knocked that bastard spark out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did Ebb say?’

  ‘He told Tweezer to get dressed. Then he rambled on about “shaming the shovel” or something stupid like that.’

  ‘Did Ebb do anything to you?’

  Maddie shook her head. ‘No. A bit later, Sister Alice released me and brought me down here with you guys.’

  Dixie chewed her index finger. ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘You call that lucky?’

  Dixie did. ‘It looks like you were spared the initiation.’

  Emily propped herself up on one elbow. ‘He’s all right if you don’t antagonise him.’

  Dixie laughed. ‘That’s not what I remember you saying after your initiation. If I remember rightly, you couldn’t walk for a week.’

  ‘That’s because I hurt my knee.’

  Dixie rolled her eyes. ‘Course you did.’

  ‘He gave me wine earlier,’ Maddie said. ‘He kept going on about Satan being inside me.’

  Dixie smiled. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘If he met Jesus Christ himself, Ebb would be convinced that Satan was inside him.’

  Emily crossed herself. ‘You shouldn’t mock Jesus.’

  Dixie snorted. ‘I don’t need to mock Jesus with that crazy bastard on the loose. He does enough mocking for the rest of us put together.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘Christ knows. It must be at least three years. Give or take a life sentence.’

  Maddie’s breath hitched in her throat. She wanted her father. Wanted to feel his arms around her, holding her tight and reassuring her. ‘I just want to go home. I don’t want to do this.’