The Sixth Soul

by Mark Roberts

  THE SIXTH SOUL

  Mark Roberts was born and raised in Liverpool and educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College. He was a mainstream teacher for twenty years and for the last ten years has worked as a speacial school teacher. He received a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play of the year. The Sixth Soul is his first novel for adults.

  First published in hardback, trade paperback and E-book in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Mark Roberts 2013

  The moral right of Mark Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him 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 novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

  Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 786 2

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 787 9

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 788 6

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For my wife, Linda

  How beautiful you are, my darling!

  Oh, how beautiful!

  Your eyes are doves.

  Song of Songs 1:15

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  PROLOGUE

  In her dream, Julia Caton held her newborn child in her arms and was filled with the deepest love she had ever known. Slowly, the dream dissolved. At half past three in the morning she woke up and carefully positioned herself on the edge of the bed. She folded her hands across her swollen middle and whispered, ‘Baby.’ She stroked her bump. ‘I need the bathroom.’

  There was no need to switch on the bathroom light because of the amber glow from next door’s brash security light, triggered by a yowling tom-cat.

  She thought, This is a good rehearsal for all that getting up in the night. A smile spread across her face at the prospect of holding and feeding and loving her baby.

  Next door’s security light clicked off automatically.

  The bathroom was sunk into a darkness all of its own.

  The door swung back silently behind her aching spine.

  Julia made out the outline of her head in the mirrored cabinet above the bathroom sink. Outside, the tom-cat made a sound like a baby crying and the security light flared into life again. In the mirror, a shadow shifted. Her hands stilled at her side, her eyes two points of light in the glass. And beyond them, another pair of eyes glinted in the mirror.

  She felt a sharp pain in the back of her left forearm, something suddenly piercing her skin. She opened her mouth and drew breath.

  His hand flew to her face, his fingers digging into the privacy of her mouth, pressing down hard on her tongue and forcing down her lower jaw, stealing the scream from within. A hint of teeth flashed and the whites of his eyes shimmered in the dark surface of the glass.

  As she slumped into his arms, a chain of cold thoughts flashed through her mind about the stranger in her bathroom.

  She was the fifth pregnant woman he’d attacked. He was going to take her away. And she would never return.

  And as the door closed on her senses, a voice whispered into the void.

  ‘I did not come out of darkness. I am darkness itself.’

  1

  On the way to Brantwood Road, just after he’d burned through the third of four red lights, Detective Chief Inspector David Rosen had been pulled over by a pair of constables in a BMW Traffic Car. With the engine still running, he’d shown his warrant card to them as his window slid down. Their conversation had been to the point.

  ‘Herod, fifth victim, Golden Hour.’

  They waved him on.

  Minutes later, at the cordoned-off scene of crime, Rosen braked hard. In spite of the need to move fast, he was frozen for a moment by a memory of the funeral he’d attended yesterday. He could still hear the raw grief of Sylvia Green’s mother as her daughter’s coffin disappeared behind a curtain in the crematorium. It was the fourth funeral he’d been to in as many months. And with each murder, the interval between killings was growing shorter.

  Four victims, their faces and names, their lives, all constantly jostled inside his head.

  Four dead women, and the killer was as far away as he had been from the first. He tried to breathe slowly to release the solid band of stress around his chest.

  ‘Go!’ he said to himself.

  He hurried from his car to the back of the white Crime Scene Investigation van, where Detective Sergeant Carol Bellwood was standing, already suited and ready to enter 22 Brantwood Road. He snatched a white protective suit from the metal shelf of the van.

  Light beads of rain had settled on Bellwood’s black hair, arranged in plaited rows tight against her scalp.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ asked Rosen, dressing.

  ‘Three minutes,’ replied Bellwood.

  Rosen took a mental snapshot of the scene.

  It was just past seven o’clock on a dark March morning. Two rows of large 1930s semis faced each other across an affluent suburban road. The pavements on either side were lined with trees, and each house had three metres of garden between the front door and the fence that bordered the pavement.

  To the east, the crescent moon over Brantwood Road wasn’t the only source of light. Number 22, the house they’d been called to, was floodlit by the NiteOwl searchlight on the roof of the Scientific Support van.

  Rosen glanced at the house next door.

  ‘Number 24,’ he said. ‘It’s the only house I can see with the lights out.’

  Its windows were black. All the other houses, from the teens through to the thirties, were lit up, the neighbours awake and aware of
a rapidly growing police presence.

  Rosen, dark-haired, thick-set and middle-aged, was in a hurry to get his latex gloves on, but the more he hurried, the more he failed.

  ‘Here,’ said Bellwood, gently. ‘Time is of the essence.’ She unrolled the bunched tangle on the back of his hand and Rosen felt a tingle of embarrassment at a young woman’s touch. ‘Curtains are flapping.’

  ‘I hope someone’s seen something,’ said Rosen. ‘Let’s find out what the uniforms have come up with.’

  Rosen stepped into his overshoes without any of the fuss the gloves had caused him.

  Three uniformed officers, a sergeant and two constables, stood at the gate of number 22, guarding the blue and white cordon, grim-faced, silent.

  ‘Chief Inspector Rosen,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Sergeant,’ replied Rosen, knowing his face from somewhere but not his name. ‘Who was here first?’

  ‘The constables responded,’ the sergeant informed him. ‘I took over the scene on arrival.’

  ‘Who’s in the house?’ enquired Rosen.

  ‘Scientific Support.’ The sergeant gave his book the merest of glances, checking the names on his running log of those he’d allowed through. ‘DC Eleanor Willis and DS Craig Parker.’

  ‘Where’s the husband?’

  The sergeant nodded towards a nearby police car, its back door wide open, where a big man in neat blue overalls, feet planted on the pavement, head down, vomited into the gutter.

  As Rosen watched the husband, he noticed a newly promoted detective constable, Robert Harrison, leaning against the passenger door of an unmarked car, staring in his direction. Caught in the act, Harrison turned his head away.

  ‘What did the husband tell you?’ Rosen directed his attention at the constables.

  ‘That he was called out at twelve minutes to three this morning,’ the first constable replied.

  ‘Twelve minutes to three? That precise?’

  The second constable pointed at a green van parked near by, a skilled tradesman’s Merc. ‘If you look at the van, sir.’

  ‘I clocked it on the way in,’ said Carol Bellwood. ‘It says on the side of the van, “Phillip Caton 24/7 Bespoke Plumbing Central Heating Engineer”. There’s a mobile number and a picture of Neptune wielding his trident and barking the waves down into submission. Mr Confident or what?’

  ‘Or what.’ Rosen observed Caton wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

  ‘He gave us a time,’ said the first constable. ‘And then he fell apart.’

  ‘We had to frogmarch him out of the house before he threw up all over the crime scene.’

  ‘Any sign of a forced entry into the house?’

  Their silence was enough. Caton raised his eyes from the puke in the gutter to the gaggle at his gate.

  ‘Robert!’ Rosen broke the moment and beckoned him over. Harrison came to the fence.

  ‘David?’ said Harrison.

  ‘Carol’s going to talk to the husband.’ Rosen pointed to Phillip Caton. ‘Listen to her questioning him, make notes, no butting in.’

  Rosen turned to the sergeant.

  ‘I’m taking over the crime scene now. Thank you for what you’ve done. Please stay on the door and allow only DS Carol Bellwood here over the threshold until otherwise instructed.’

  ——

  JUST AS HE stepped into the house, he could hear behind him a man crying out in renewed distress. Rosen was glad it was Carol Bellwood, not he, who had the task of extracting information from Phillip Caton. After so many years as an investigative officer, he could not help but wonder if he was witnessing a man in profound torment, or the performance of a magnificent actor.

  2

  Scientific Support had worked hard and fast.

  From the front door to the stairs, and up each step to the bathroom and bedrooms above, DS Parker and DC Willis had laid down a series of aluminium stepping plates. Rosen picked a path across the makeshift walkway, into the heart of the hall, any evidence left on the carpet being protected by the raised metal plates.

  Rosen paused at a picture. On the wall was a framed photograph, a wedding portrait of Phillip and Julia Caton: she veiled and pretty in white, he awkward in top hat and tails. But their smiles were broad that day and the sun had shone on them, just as it had done on him and his wife, Sarah, many years earlier.

  Rosen headed up the stairs with a renewed sense of sorrow.

  On the landing at the top of the stairs, DC Eleanor Willis, pale and red-haired, used a pair of long-handled tweezers to drop a hypodermic needle into a transparent evidence bag and then peered into it.

  ‘There’s blood on the needle,’ she said to Rosen as he passed.

  ‘But it won’t be his,’ he replied.

  DS Craig Parker was on his knees, cutting the thick, green carpet with a Stanley knife where it met the skirting board at the bathroom door. The carpet showed a fresh drag mark from the bathroom towards the top of the stairs. Parker pointed this out to Rosen.

  ‘He got her in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Dragged her to the stairs.’

  ‘I love the sound,’ replied Rosen, ‘of a Geordie accent on a cold, gloomy morning.’

  ‘And a very good morning to you, you cheerless Cockney git.’ Parker peered at Rosen above his mask and added, ‘Are you OK, David?’

  Rosen stooped. ‘Come here often, Craig?’

  By way of answer, Parker smiled sadly. ‘We can’t find a point of forced entry.’

  Craig Parker’s face was the human equivalent of a bloodhound’s. His weary eyes had seen enough and the bags underneath betrayed a tiredness that was three months short of retirement after thirty years in the Met.

  ‘Eleanor!’ Parker got to his feet slowly as his assistant appeared from the bedroom and handed the bagged hypodermic to Rosen.

  There was a little fluid left in the chamber. ‘Pentothal, no doubt. Herod’s anaesthetic of choice. The hypo must’ve fallen out as he got her out of the house,’ said Rosen.

  Willis stood opposite Parker. On the count of three they raised the piece of carpet in a single clean lift and carried it into the nearest bedroom, an empty space at the back of the house.

  ‘Anything in the bedrooms?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘Nothing so far.’ Nothing was certain; so far was full of hidden promise.

  ‘Craig, how long to go through the whole scene: house, gardens, street outside?’

  ‘Three days.’ Parker’s voice echoed in the back room.

  ‘If the pattern stays the same,’ said Rosen, ‘she’ll be dead by then. No sign of forced entry, you say?’

  ‘First thing we looked for. Nothing.’

  ‘Next door, number 24?’

  ‘No one lives there,’ Willis observed, heading to the bathroom, ‘judging by the back garden, the state of the windows and the paintwork outside.’

  By contrast, the interior window frames of the bathroom of number 22 were sharp, their brilliant whiteness highlighted as Willis dusted them with dark fingerprint powder.

  Rosen looked around at the closed bedroom doors. ‘Which one’s the baby’s room?’

  Willis pointed with the bristles of her fingerprint brush.

  Being in a nursery made for a baby who would probably never sleep in there, or play, or cry, or breathe between its cloud-daubed walls, filled Rosen with utter sorrow. His failure to do anything so far to stop what was happening was almost unbearable.

  Rosen caught the ghostly outline of his reflection in the glass of the window, the boy-like tangle of black curly hair contradicting the jumbled network of wrinkles and shadows on his pale face.

  He looked out on the neat suburban road, at the desirable cars and the enviable houses, and focussed on DC Robert Harrison standing behind Carol Bellwood as she tried to talk to Phillip Caton. His gaze wandered.

  The trees in the street were tall and broad and narrowly spaced apart.

  It was a discreet road, a secluded avenue, a nice place to live.

  Rosen called Craig
Parker, who joined him at the bedroom window.

  ‘Can you see across the street through the trees? Can you?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘No, I can’t see much, David,’ replied Parker.

  ‘And that’s exactly what he banked on. I’m going into number 24.’ I want to get out of here.

  ‘Why?’ asked Parker.

  ‘No forced sign of entry. No pregnant woman in London’s going to open her front door in the dead of night, not given the current climate, not given what’s happened. I’m going next door. I’m looking for a point of entry.’

  ‘David, man, how could he get into number 22 through number 24—’

  Rosen held up a hand. ‘I need to check.’

  When Rosen reached the street he noticed that, while he’d been inside number 22, Caton had turned a curious shade of yellow, the colour of wax. A terrible idea crossed Rosen’s mind. He hoped Caton’s anguish would not be compounded by having made an easy mistake as he left the house to go to the job.

  On your way out, Rosen wondered, in the dead of night, did you accidentally leave the front door open?

  3

  Each panel in the fence between numbers 22 and 24 Brantwood Road was old but perfectly intact. The decision to widen out the crime scene came from a combination of experience and instinct. Back in ’99, Rosen had been at a scene of a crime where there was no evidence of forced entry, but it had become evident that the killer had entered through a vent between adjoining flats.

  He looked up at the roof of number 24: a patchwork of slipped and missing slates, making the house and loft space vulnerable to the elements.

  He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. Time was flying. A whole hour had passed in what felt like a minute.

  To the front of the property, a locked garage attached to the side of number 24 blocked his way to the back garden. Taking hold of the top of the fence separating numbers 22 and 24, he steadied his foot on the thick knot of a shrub and hauled himself over. The fence panels creaked under his weight as he jumped down into the garden next door.

  He watched his feet. The ground was littered with the faeces of several types of beast. At eye level and within an arm’s length, a bird flew out of a bush.

  ‘All right in there, David?’ Bellwood’s voice came from the garden of number 22.