by Mark Roberts
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Then I guess I’ll see you when I see you. Sometime late tonight perhaps?’
‘I’ll be late, yes, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you this morning.’
‘Don’t worry. Others have it worse than us. I love you, mate.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘Gotta go. Oh, 10M, what a life . . .’
He ended the call, watching the rain. She was bearing pain and discomfort with a spirit that reminded him of one of the many reasons why he loved her from the pit of his being. If it was him with a peptic ulcer, he’d have griped to Olympic standard.
Pocketing his phone, Rosen felt the sudden and subtle weight of a presence behind him.
He turned his head slowly to see DC Robert Harrison walking towards him from the back garden.
‘What are you up to?’
Harrison held up the digital camera in his hand.
‘Using my initiative, sir. Photographing the back garden in the absence of a direct order and with nothing else to do.’
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Where?’
‘Behind me, Robert, behind me?’ Listening in on my phone conversation.
‘I’ve just come out of the garden.’
The open gate to the garden swung back against the fence, slamming against the wooden frame and making the wind and rain seem suddenly sharper, even ill tempered.
‘OK, Robert. Go next door. You can be in charge of the fingertip search of number 24’s back garden.’
Silence.
‘Sure.’
Harrison walked away. ‘I love you, too,’ he muttered.
‘What was that?’ asked Rosen.
‘Just thinking out loud, sir.’
6
Julia Caton was woken by the kicking of her baby inside her womb.
For a few clouded moments, she thought she was dreaming. And in those seconds, as the baby moved, she felt his shifts, rolling and turning, the pressure of his hands and feet pressing the sides of the amniotic sac. It was these gathering sensations that made her realize that, even though she didn’t know where she was in that bizarre dream, she and her baby were alive.
Julia opened her eyes to pitch darkness. She ached all the way down her left side, from her shoulder to her ankle. She blinked a few times and strained to see but there was no relief from the dense blackness. She wondered if she’d gone blind.
She was floating on the surface of lukewarm liquid and her baby was moving with the growing impatience of a life waiting to be born. How could her bed be so liquid? Because it was a dream, that’s how, like a dream after too much wine.
As she grew more wakeful, she became aware, without checking, that she was naked.
She raised a hand close to her face, disturbing the surface of the liquid as she did so, but she couldn’t see her fingers even as they brushed the tips of her eyelashes.
The back of her hand came into contact with a smooth surface that felt curved and plastic. The word lid slipped into the front of her mind. Lids may lift.
She raised her other hand, palm up, and pushed with both against the cool plastic. The lid didn’t budge. Julia knew that they were locked in a container of some kind, floating, floating.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to fight down the rising panic, the unwanted gift of delayed shock. She listened to the air rushing into her nostrils, felt her ribcage rising with the intake, and this was all she could hear.
The baby – she had learned it was a boy on the second scan – stilled inside her. It was as if he was obeying some secret command telepathically delivered from mother to son.
‘Good boy,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t move.’ Her voice was ethereal in the liquid silence. Talking was a mistake. The physical action of speech set off a taste in her mouth and she felt the urge to be sick.
As the sound of her voice sank into the darkness, and smell and taste overtook her senses, memory erupted in nuclear flashes in her mind’s eye.
In the bathroom, she had felt a sudden sharpness in her forearm and a hand in her face. The sense that she was dreaming evaporated as the stone-cold wind of reality thrust her into wakefulness.
He didn’t come out of darkness, he was darkness itself. The thought assailed her, and the thread of then and now connected.
‘Jesus!’
She dipped her fingers into the solution on which she floated and sniffed them.
There was no perceptible scent. Slowly, she opened her lips and allowed her fingers to touch her tongue. Salt. Salt water. They were floating on a solution of salt water, locked in the dark with no sound coming in.
She recalled a name: Alison Todd, the second mother to go missing just over seven months ago, the discovery of her body filling the news headlines on the day Julia had learned that she was pregnant.
Of the four murdered mothers, Alison’s case had affected Julia most deeply, the thought of her mutilated body casting a long shadow over their celebratory supper.
Phillip had tried to dismiss Julia’s fears, but they had remained all through her pregnancy, sometimes singing loudly, sometimes muttering darkly, but always there.
There were sides to the thing that they were locked inside. Her fears took a collective breath and started screaming inside her head.
‘Oh my Jesus!’
Julia could feel the blood draining from her limbs, the lightness in her brain.
A stressed mother stresses an unborn baby!
A received wisdom from the antenatal clinic she’d attended came back to her like a radio signal from deep space, a message from a distant world that she and her baby were now no longer a part of.
A stressed mother . . . stresses . . . an unborn . . . baby.
She couldn’t get her breath.
She heard her heart beat against her ribs, picking up pace by the second, and felt it as a pulse behind her eyeballs.
Instinctively, she folded her arms across her middle, covering her baby with the armour of flesh and bone.
Phillip had tried to talk over television news broadcasts that had reported the discovery of Alison Todd’s body and the growing details that were released by the media. But Phillip wasn’t around all the time, as when he was asleep in the pit of night and she had wandered downstairs and come across the BBC twenty-four-hour news channel.
Footage from the scene of the discovery of a body: blue and white tape cordoning off an area around Lambeth Bridge; the grimness of the reporter’s face as she recounted from the place where a second body, believed to be that of Mrs Todd, was found by a man walking his dog at dawn.
The police were refusing to reveal whether the mother was dead or alive when the killer performed a forced Caesarean section to remove the baby, along with pieces of the womb. The precise cause of Alison Todd’s death was unknown; there had been a media blackout on the detail, to weed out crank confessions.
Rather her than me.
Her own words burned a hole in her memory.
She wept in the darkness, using all the strength in her diaphragm to still the scream, the cry from her heart and her throat. When her baby gave a sudden sharp kick, her willpower collapsed.
The lid was low and her scream bounced back into her face. She drew in another breath and cried out for her mother, plummeting into hysterical tears as the word died on the lid inches from her face.
7
Know Your Enemy . . . London’s Drug Dealers and Addicts.
The bank of faces on the wall of the open-plan office of Isaac Street Police Station gazed into the fluorescent silence. In contrast with the faceless Herod, they looked like a reasonable bunch of boys and girls. As with budgets, space was tight and the office doubled up as the incident room for the ongoing murder investigation.
It was nine o’clock at night and DCI David Rosen had been on duty for just over fifteen hours. Reaching the point of fatigue that should have sent him home for food and sleep, he remained in the office, held there by an
uneasy instinct. He’d phoned his wife Sarah, apologized for his absence. It was nothing new to her, and she was up to her eyes in marking her pupils’ exercise books.
Spread across Rosen’s desk was a colour map of London, on which abduction points were marked with red crosses and numbers. The body drops-offs, the blue crosses, seemed to form no discernible pattern. Jenny Maguire, victim one, in the lake at St James’s Park. Alison Todd, victim two, under Lambeth Bridge. Jane Wise, victim three, at the corner of Victoria Street and Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sylvia Green, victim four, outside the Oval cricket ground. Where would Julia surface? Rosen pored over the map, hoping for inspiration.
He opened Outlook Express. There was one potentially meaningful email, with an attachment, from Carol Bellwood.
David, I loaded all the significant information from this morning’s scene of crime at 22 Brantwood Road and 24 Brantwoood Road into HOLMES. Two hours later and every data permutation possible, I’m sorry to say there have been no matches.
Sorry, Carol
PS check att, with regard to this morning’s talk, is this what has happened to the babies?
HOLMES contained all the recorded data for every reported crime, solved and unsolved, in the United Kingdom. If Bellwood, the best HOLMES reader Rosen knew, couldn’t squeeze something useful out of the database that cross-matched details from all crime recorded in the UK, then no one could. It was a blow and he swore sourly as he breathed out.
He clicked on the attachment, opened it and muttered, ‘Jeez!’ at the picture on his screen. It was a stock image of a foetus preserved in a specimen jar, the whiteness of its perfect skin patterned with an elaborate network of veins. The world around him fell away. There was something unbearable about the picture.
He shut the image down. Exhausted and disturbed by what he had seen, he left the office to make coffee in the small, adjoining kitchen.
When he came back to his desk, the red light of the answering machine on his desk blinked continuously. He filled his cheeks with air and blew out.
There was a message. Rosen pressed play. There was a lengthy silence at the beginning of the message and then a voice.
‘My name’s Brother Aidan Walsh. I’m the abbot of St Mark’s, a Dominican community near Faversham in Kent. One of our community, Father Sebastian, thinks he can help you with your current investigation into the abducted women. Perhaps you could ring me.’
Brother Aidan Walsh left a number and the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Faversham in Kent. Rosen knew the countryside around there well and was intrigued by the message. He dialled the number he’d jotted down on a spiral pad and waited.
The phone rang. He lost count of how many times. They’d probably all be in bed by eight o’clock, rising in the dead of night to pray, no doubt. He decided to give it a few more rings and then he’d hang up. He could try again in the morning.
The phone stopped ringing as the receiver at the other end was lifted. Silence. And then, ‘Yes?’
‘Is that Brother Aidan?’
‘No. I’m afraid he’s just gone to evening prayers.’
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Rosen, London Met. I’m returning Brother Aidan’s call. Who am I speaking to, please?’
As the man at the other end replied, the line crackled.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosen. ‘It’s a poor line, can you speak up?’
‘I’m Father Sebastian’
‘Brother Aidan mentioned you on the message he left.’
‘Could you play the message back for me?’
Rosen ignored the request.
‘Technology’s a big thing when you live a simple life as we do.’
Rosen looked at the scowling faces of London’s drug dealers and addicts, and said, ‘Brother Aidan said you could help.’
‘Yes, perhaps I can.’
From his desk, Rosen had a view of the closed door of Chief Superintendent Baxter’s office; it was a door he disliked, to the room he loathed, of a man he hated.
‘Fire away.’
‘I think I might have some information for you.’
‘Regarding?’
‘Could you come to St Mark’s?’
‘ To St Mark’s? Brother Aidan mentioned you’re near Faversham . . .’
‘Do you know the area?’ asked the priest.
‘Indeed I do,’ replied Rosen, scenes from his childhood tumbling in the back of his mind. ‘When would you like me to come to see you?’
‘Time’s not on your side, Detective Rosen.’
‘It’s normal for people assisting an inquiry to come here to Isaac Street.’
‘There’s nothing normal about this . . . situation. I gather you need help,’ said Father Sebastian. ‘Herod accessed the Catons’ house through the adjoining property. Didn’t he, Mr Rosen?’
In a single movement, Rosen sat up and shifted his weight, hooked by the detail Flint had so casually supplied. It had been withheld from media reports of the fifth abduction. First thing in the morning, Rosen decided, he would be at St Mark’s.
‘What else do you know, Father Sebastian?’
‘A motive, a concrete motive for doing these appalling . . . acts.’
A motive? A concrete motive? He’d have walked naked down Oxford Street for a concrete motive, upside down on his hands if necessary. But there was a glitch with this information and offer of help.
‘Father Sebastian, the only person who knows the killer’s motive is the killer himself or someone who knows the killer, is a trusted confidant of the killer and . . . and is shielding him.’
‘I disagree. We don’t live in a vacuum, sealed off from each other, unaware of the wider concerns of the world in which we live and the universe in general.’
‘I’ve got some time tomorrow. Is eight o’clock good for you?’ asked Rosen.
‘Oh, you know, I’m not so busy.’
‘I have to ask you, how do you know what his motivation is?’
‘Some years ago, in the mid-nineties I was based at the Vatican. I was the pope’s key adviser on all matters relating to the occult.’
So far, three forensic psychologists had independently ruled out the occult motive. Four of them agreed that Herod was the emperor of woman-hatred, with a Christian string to his bow.
But the priest on the other end of the phone had an assurance that Rosen found persuasive.
The voice on the phone fell silent. Rosen nursed the silence.
‘You’ll have to trust me, Detective Rosen. I can help you. You do want me to help you, don’t you?’
There was a photograph of Sarah on his desk, smiling in the sunshine. It had been taken the summer after her nervous breakdown and hospitalization. Depression had stopped her eating and drinking, following the winter when their daughter Hannah had died. Two years old, she had been taken from them, without warning, by cot death. Sarah had tried so hard to fight it but depression was the stealthiest demon. He picked up the picture. It was a snapshot of love, of all he held dear, his reason to keep going. It had been a difficult birth and, after two short years, an unbearable loss to both of them.
‘Do you know where we are?’ asked Father Sebastian.
‘I know where you are. I used to pick hops there when I was a kid.’
‘For pocket money?’
‘No. My mother was on her own with six—’ Rosen curbed the sudden and inexplicable compulsion to give personal information to a stranger. ‘See you in the morning, then,’ he said. ‘At eight.’
He went to put down the receiver when he heard Sebastian’s voice once again. ‘Mr Rosen, just one thing.’ An afterthought.
‘Father Sebastian?’
‘After he’s finished with Julia Caton and her baby, I believe he’s going to do it one more time. One more mother, one more baby.’
‘Are you going to tell me you’re psychic?’
The priest laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know as well as I do that the only entity that knows the future with ce
rtainty is God.’ Father Sebastian hung up.
‘I believe in the future,’ said Rosen to the drug dealers and addicts of London. ‘But I don’t believe in God.’
It was time to go home, to catch a few hours’ sleep before hitting the road to Faversham. In reaching for his coat, his attention was drawn to Chief Superintendent Baxter’s door; sound was condensing behind it, two voices. The door opened.
‘Well, thank you for keeping me in the picture.’
Baxter stepped out, clearly surprised by Rosen’s presence.
‘Working late, David?’
‘Fifteen- to sixteen-hour days as per.’
Baxter moved to one side and Detective Constable Robert Harrison emerged from the office. He didn’t look at Rosen as he marched, with the overconfidence of the under-intelligent, across the open-plan office, puckering his lips to whistle but failing to form a tune.
‘David, I think we need to talk,’ said Baxter.
Baxter went back into his office, leaving space for Rosen to follow. He hated Baxter almost as much as he hated the smell of hops.
8
Every so often, a sharp hiss punctured the darkness in which Julia Caton was trapped. It happened when the vice-like tightness in her chest became a fire.
It slowly dawned on her, as she heard the hiss and felt the rush of fresh air into her body, that Herod was throwing her scraps of oxygen, just enough to keep her alive but not enough to allow her to think clearly.
Julia Caton was in a state of self-doubt about what was real and what was not, whether she was awake or whether she was moving through a dream.
All sense of time had disappeared, and she wondered, as she slipped off to sleep, how many days or years she’d been in the dark.
In the silence that swallowed her and the endless darkness before her eyes, Julia was jolted by the sight of a distant star.
It appeared distant at first, though it moved slowly towards her in an elegant curve. If she were asked, as she was sure the starry starry night would, she could no longer tell whether she was awake or asleep, but she had the strangest notion that she was coming slowly to a standing position, moved by some invisible force of nature outside her physical body or mental will.
