by Mark Roberts
‘Aneta?’
The woman looked directly at Clay. Clay saw the onset of tears and the deepening of the knot in her brow.
‘Did you see anyone around about here on your way to the flat?’
‘Lots of people heading into town for work, and the other way. People waiting for buses, people getting off buses. Picton Road in the rush hour.’
‘Can you send this picture and any other pictures you have of your friends to my iPhone?’
She nodded. ‘There are many – over twenty, I think.’
‘Send them all.’
Clay handed the mobile phone back to Aneta and reeled off eleven digits. ‘All the pictures of your friends and pictures of anything in your gallery that relates to them, no matter how small it may seem. Everything you have on Karl, Václav or any of their associates.’
She looked out of the window; DS Bill Hendricks was approaching her car and another firefighter was emerging from the building.
Clay pointed at Hendricks. ‘Aneta, he’s going to come and sit with you, take your contact details, chat a little bit more.’
‘I want to get away from here.’
‘Soon enough.’
Clay stepped out onto the pavement and turned her back to the car.
‘Bill, Aneta Kaloza. Talk to her. She’s our 999 caller. I’ve got what’s happened so far today. I want you to go back and get the wider picture. We need to know who their enemies were. She says they have none. But I’d put my house on it. This has been premeditated and well planned. I’ll ask Barney Cole to contact the police in Pruszków to run a background check on them. They’re identical twins and jobbing construction workers. Try to get a picture of where they’ve been working, and if they’ve had any static on the building sites they’ve been on.’
As Hendricks got into the car with Aneta, Clay looked up at the blackened window behind which two corpses awaited her, and in a niche in her head an image formed of a tiny silver Jesus on a small silver cross, a tear rolling down his face; and she filled in the silence around him with a blunt observation.
‘Jesus wept!’
7
10.05 am
At the end of mass, Kate Thorpe remained on her feet at the back pew and watched Father Aaron leave the altar, pausing at the door of the vestry to glance at the back of the church. When his eyes connected with hers, he gave her the smallest of smiles before disappearing inside.
‘Morning, Kate,’ said Mr Rotherham as he struggled up the left-hand aisle towards the front door of the church. She watched his lips move and raised a hand in acknowledgement, made her way to the altar and saw Iris sitting still in her place on the front pew.
As she came closer, Iris turned to her and said, ‘There was one time in my life when I’d taken Holy Communion and I completely felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.’
Kate stopped and read her friend’s lips.
‘And the Spirit was so strong that my senses played tricks on me. I heard a choir of angels. When the Holy Spirit is in us, powerful and strong, It shows us things that aren’t really there, to teach us that there is much more to this world than the things around us. I understand that now after all these years. Father Aaron helped me to understand. He came to my house and he spent two hours explaining everything away. Has he been to your house?’
Kate shook her head.
‘I can talk to you about these things because I know you see visions of angels and saints. Oh? Yes, that’s what he said, Father Aaron. Sometimes, the Devil places visions in our way to confuse us and take us away from Jesus. But not you, Kate. God has blessed you. I can feel the Holy Spirit around you. Pray for me. Please pray for me.’
As Iris headed to the door, Kate made her way to the chapel of the Virgin Mary on the left of the altar. Passing the communion rail, she recalled receiving communion from Father Aaron ten minutes earlier, and it was this memory on which she intended to meditate.
She dropped a few coins into the slot and, taking a candle, lit it and placed it before the statue of the Virgin Mary. She knelt on the pad and held on to the small lectern, looking the Virgin directly in the eye, and praying silently for the strength and courage that had suddenly and recently deserted her.
Kate closed her eyes and bowed her head.
During communion, Father Aaron had paused in front of her at the rail, and said, The Body of Christ. She had mouthed the word, Amen, and held out her hands, right supporting the left. She had glanced along the communion rail but Mr Rotherham and Iris were already back in their pews.
Father Aaron had looked her in the eyes as he placed the communion wafer on the palm of her hand. She held his gaze as she took it and placed it on her tongue, The Body of Christ is in you and so is the Holy Spirit, Kate. Long may it remain so.
In the chapel, she opened her eyes and had the strangest sense that time had turned inside out and she wasn’t sure whether she’d been praying and meditating for minutes or hours. Kate looked to the altar where Father Aaron was watching her, smiling.
‘You’re one of God’s most beloved, Kate. When I gave you communion just now, I too could feel the power of the Holy Spirit around you that Iris constantly speaks of. But more than that, I can feel the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ coming through you. That makes you a very special woman. Your obedience to the Lord and your unshakeable faith have been rewarded. It is this obedience and faith that has led you to having visions. When God in his infinite wisdom took language and hearing away from you, he replaced it with something much more profound. However, the world is an utterly cynical and mean-minded place. There are millions of people who would love nothing better than to laugh at you because of your gift. I can hear them now. The godless. Dotty old woman! The mockers. Religious nutcase! Let’s make a chat room on the Internet and mock her even more. Kate, I don’t ever want you to become a laughing stock. You must protect yourself from the world. Wait until the Lord has completed the cycle of your visions and then I can help you work out the best way to communicate safely about what you have seen.’
Kate got onto her feet and nodded.
‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ said Father Aaron as he walked beside her up the aisle. ‘I know you’d love to stay and pray some more and I’d love for you to spend as much time as you like in this church but I have to lock the front door. There’s very little here of material worth, but if I left the door open, someone would come in and steal what little we have.’
In the cold morning air, Kate walked slowly back to the quiet solitude of her home on Grant Avenue, with Father Aaron’s words spinning around her brain, and her own words drowning them out.
I know what I saw. I saw what I saw. I saw what I saw and what has been seen cannot be unseen.
8
10.06 am
The door of the incident room at Trinity Road Police Station opened and Sergeant Carol White asked, ‘You wanted to see me, Barney?’
‘Come in, Carol.’ He rolled out a seat for her and she smiled as she sat down. ‘What are you working on?’
‘CCTV from the armed robbery on the jewellers in Liverpool One.’
‘Eve wants you to drop that and base yourself up here with me. We’re currently harvesting CCTV from the Picton Road scene.’
‘The double murder?’
‘Yes. This is the thing. I’ve had a call from the scene. There’s one CCTV camera pointing at the entrance to the flat on a wall of a mini-market. It’s relatively far away from the flat but if the perpetrators walked or ran away and towards the mini-market, there’s a good chance we could get a decent image.’
‘Do you want me to look through the footage with a view to seeing anyone entering the flat, Barney?’
Cole noticed the way Sergeant White held on to the base of her third finger, left hand, where there had once been a wedding ring.
‘Eventually, yes please, Carol. I’ve thought this through. Start simple and work our way up and outwards. We’ll start with late evening in to the early hours and hope for a hit. That’s o
ur best shot. I’m hoping there’ll be other footage coming in.’
‘I’ll go and tell my colleagues on the ground floor.’
As Sergeant White headed out, Cole asked, ‘How’s your little lad?’
She turned at the door. ‘Missing his dad. I’m not. The bastard.’
‘I can’t begin to imagine how hard things have been for you, Carol. I’m truly sorry.’
‘Every time I wake up, it hits me hard like it’s the first time over and over again. Still, I console myself with this. It can’t be much fun being a disgraced copper on a segregated wing with the sex offenders in Strangeways. I’m sorry to sound so bitter, but I am. Be back soon. I won’t mention him to you again.’
Nor will I, thought Cole, as the door closed after her.
9
10.10 am
In Alder Hey in the Park Hospital, Detective Sergeant Gina Riley stood in the corner of the curtained-off space in which Marta Ondřej was being examined by an A & E consultant and a young paediatric nurse. The translator Kate Nowak stood at the side of the couch on which Marta lay, holding her hand and feeding her the comfort of her mother language. Each question the consultant asked of Marta was met with the same response. Silence. And what little light was in her eyes sank further and further away.
Suddenly, Marta sat bolt upright and snatched her hand away from Kate. She looked around as if she’d just been reminded of an abominable truth. Her eyes settled on the jug of water to her left.
Hands in the air, she lurched to her right and, picking up the jug, she slurped water from the rim, drinking with wide eyes and mouth and spilling the water down the loose blue NHS gown she had been changed into by the nurse.
When the water was gone, Marta looked inside the hollow vessel and dropped it onto the floor, then flopped back onto the couch.
The consultant turned to Riley and said, ‘The initial examination’s shown she has no visible signs of abuse. But she’s clearly been left short of food and water and is dehydrated. No obvious broken bones, bruising or abrasions.’
Riley looked at the smudge of ink on the girl’s left wrist. It looks like the person who held you captive, she thought, drew on you with washable felt pen. Unless you did it to yourself.
‘Kate, could you please ask Marta again who drew on her arm and wrist and what it was?’
‘I’ve asked her that question several times and in as many different forms as I could think of. I’m sorry. It’s like she’s deaf.’
Riley turned to the consultant. ‘Are you going to admit her?’
‘She has a room of her own on the third floor. We need to do an MRI scan to see if there’s any damage to her internal organs or her brain, and I’ve alerted the consultant psychiatrist. Is she capable of speech?’
‘According to her mother, yes.’
‘What about security arrangements for her?’
‘I’m going to be with her permanently, and when I can’t be here there’ll be another plainclothes officer.’
‘I’ll send a nurse to take you to her room. I’ll leave you to it, DS Riley.’
The consultant and the nurse stepped out through the curtains.
‘I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings...’ said Kate.
‘Go on?’
‘Even if she can talk, I don’t think she’s going to for some time. I helped the police up in Bootle on a similar case and it took the boy three weeks to speak. In that case, the person who kept the boy captive told him that if he spoke, made any sound with his mouth or shouted for help, he’d track him down and cut his tongue out. It was only when I convinced him that his tormentor was banged up and out of reach that he started speaking.’
Riley looked at the bagged-up clothes Marta had been wearing – striped pyjama bottoms and a matching top. ‘Marta?’
Slowly, Marta turned towards her, and Riley was filled with sadness and compassion. Head shaved and in a baggy, blue NHS gown, the girl looked at Riley and Kate in turn; silent tears rolled down her face.
‘Kate, tell her that she’s perfectly safe now. That she’s going to be staying in a nice room in Alder Hey, a hospital especially for children. Tell her that there will always be a police officer guarding her room as long as she’s in here.’
Kate spoke calmly and kindly to Marta but fear mounted in the girl’s face, her eyes darting left and right as if looking for somewhere to run to. As she walked to the bottom of the bed, Riley hoped that the girl’s mother would turn up soon and bring comfort to her daughter. Discreetly, she took a string of pictures. Slowly, the girl turned her head to look at her; seeing what she was doing, she frowned, held her arms out in Riley’s direction and made a shield of her upturned hands. She lowered her face behind her hands and fell onto her back, her thin legs and bony knees making her appear even more vulnerable. She placed her hands over her face and started sobbing. As Riley moved the hem of the gown over the girl’s knees, a heavy stream of urine flooded from her body, soaking the trolley and the gown she was wearing.
‘Kate, can you do me a favour, please? Can you go and ask the nurse if we can have another gown? I’ll stay here with Marta,’ said Riley.
‘Sure.’
As Kate left the cubicle, Riley stroked Marta’s head. She patted the water from Marta’s face and neck and, as she wrapped an arm around her shoulders, the girl rested her head against Riley’s shoulder.
‘You’re safe now, Marta. You’re all safe with Gina.’
10
10.15 am
As she stepped onto the bottom stair leading to the flat above the deli, Clay felt the strong pulse of air from the fan at the front door and drank in the leftover cocktail of smoke and petrol. She focused on her breathing as she walked up the stairs, and told herself she was imagining the aroma of cooked human flesh that crept into her nostrils and the back of her throat.
Near the top of the stairs, her skin puckered into countless goosebumps and she imagined the pure despair that the victims must have felt when they were faced with death. And although she was very cold, Clay felt a bead of sweat roll down her forehead.
Reaching the top of the staircase, she stopped and looked at the open doorway to the flat in which two dead bodies lay waiting. Crossing the threshold, she saw two pairs of well-worn boots lined up neatly near the door. She looked down the dark, windowless corridor and flicked on her torch.
‘Police!’ she called, and wished in vain that a voice would come back to her, hoping that the firefighters had got it wrong and that one or both of the Adamczak brothers had somehow survived.
She glanced into the kitchen and saw a clean and tidy space with a poster on the wall of the Polish national football team; there were handwritten notices around it. She flicked her light onto the writing and saw the men’s names: Karl. Václav. And underneath, days of the week, writing against each man’s name. Rotas for cooking and washing dishes, guessed Clay.
Looking in the bathroom, she smelled the freshness of lavender in the space, saw that there were no splashes of urine around the toilet and that the seat was down. She came to a door with a key in the lock. She turned the key and saw an empty box room.
As Clay made her way to the bedroom, the air felt warm and gritty. She stood at the open doorway and threw a beam of light into the charred darkness of the men’s shared bedroom.
She looked at the positioning of the two bodies in the centre of the room and the aroma of burned flesh was now undeniable.
The twin single beds were blackened pits and there was a charred line leading from the bed to the two interconnected and burned bodies.
She used her torch to explore the floor and walls and couldn’t see a single drop of blood. Clay sent the beam onto the first fire-ravaged head and then the second skull.
They hit you with a blunt instrument, thought Clay. Maybe. You didn’t die where you’ve been positioned. Or you were strangled? Manual strangulation or ligature? In her mind she was now absolutely certain: this couldn’t have been the work of one individual.<
br />
She saw an empty bottle of Jack Daniels and wondered if the brothers had been weakened by drink before they were attacked. She moved closer to the remains of the Adamczak twins. One of them was on his back on the floor and his brother lay face down across his centre: two bodies in the single shape of an X, the flesh of their separate cores melted into each other.
Together, thought Clay. Together in the womb, together in death. You were dead when they set you on fire. Or did they leave you barely alive to watch you dying of smoke inhalation? Someone must have hated you. What did you do to deserve this?
She lit up the charred head of the twin lying across his brother’s centre and drew the torch light down his body. Just below his knees, she saw patches of pink flesh that the fire hadn’t reached and she was filled with an almost unbearable sadness.
‘Eve?’ Detective Sergeant Karl Stone’s voice drifted from the front door of the flat – a welcome sound. ‘You OK?’
Clay called back, ‘I’m fine!’ through the poisoned air. A couple of seconds later, Stone appeared in the doorway. ‘As soon as Terry Mason and Paul Price have gathered all the evidence, you can call the mortuary. We need Harper and another APT here as quickly as possible to remove the bodies and get them to Doctor Lamb.’
She looked at the fusion of two cremated human bodies and turned away. As the full horror of the twisted human sculpture hit her, her intestines tightened and her scalp crawled.
Something dark appeared at the edge of her vision and she moved to face it.
One wall was largely untouched by the fire; even though the striped wallpaper was darkened by several shades of smoke, she made out a distinct shape that made the pulse in her ears throb and the pace of her heart quicken.
She trained her light along the wallpaper and came to a piece of black graffiti: a dark, smoke-obscured circle with intricate geometric shapes inside. She stayed where she was, sensing in her bones that in finding one thing, she was overlooking something obvious.
