by Mark Roberts
Christian, thought Clay. ‘Tell me what happened, Lucy? This morning?’
‘Where’s my dad?’
‘Your dad?’
‘When the woman from the O2 shop came to the uni to ask my permission to pass on my contact details to you, I said Of course, I understood that you’d probably want to speak with me in relation to the little girl I found in the Wavertree Mystery Park, so I said Yes, give them my details by all means but in the meantime I’ll go and see the police myself directly, and I asked who is it exactly who is looking for me and where is that person based to which she told me...’ She looked at Clay and said, ‘Detective Constable Barney Cole at Trinity Road Police Station in Garston. I came immediately from Abercromby Square. And here I am. Where is Detective Constable Barney Cole?’
‘He’s busy.’
Lucy gripped the edge of the table with both hands and leaned forward as if she was about to stand up and leave the room, job done.
‘Lucy, please,’ said Clay. ‘Relax. You’re helping us with our enquiries and we appreciate that greatly.’
‘Where’s my dad?’ She let go of the table and, as she folded her hands across her swollen middle, Clay thought, Here is a young woman who carries chocolate bars in her pockets wherever she goes.
‘I don’t know where your dad is, Lucy,’ said Clay.
‘He should be here. I phoned him and left a message on his answer machine saying where I was going and what I was doing. He should be here to support me.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Clay kindly, ‘he’s on his way. Tell me what happened this morning, Lucy.’
‘I left the house.’
‘Where’s home?’
‘The house next door to St Luke’s Roman Catholic Church, the presbytery. Albert Edward Road.’
‘The priest’s house?’ Clay double-checked, hearing a small noise in Hendricks’s throat, a note of incredulity from a man whom it was almost impossible to surprise.
‘My father’s a Roman Catholic priest, Father Aaron Bell. I was in my early twenties when he was ordained,’ said Lucy. ‘Where was I? I walked across the Mystery as I do every day to get the bus into work...’
‘One moment, please, Lucy.’ Clay turned to Hendricks.
‘Lucy told me she’s a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, history department,’ said Hendricks. ‘I did check it out, Eve. She’s also a PhD student. I asked a few other questions about you, Lucy, and your colleague speaks very highly of your teaching ability and your fairness in marking your students’ assignments.’
Lucy blushed and looked visibly calmer. ‘I do my best.’
‘Go on, Lucy,’ said Clay. ‘Tell me about this morning?’
‘It was misty. I saw the little girl standing stock still in the middle of the Mystery and, when I came closer, I recognised her face from the picture in the paper and on TV, though I noted with alarm that her head was shaven and she was very scared. I gave her the chocolate I was going to eat at morning break from my bag. I phoned 999 but then had to leave her because I was going to be late for the lecture I was due to deliver. I can’t be late for anything.’
‘Why can’t you be late for anything, Lucy?’
‘Because that’s the way I am.’ She folded her arms under her breasts, blocking out the message on her T-shirt. ‘I was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum when I was nine years old. I have Asperger’s syndrome.’
‘Your condition, Lucy, affects your life on a daily basis?’ asked Clay.
‘That’s right, DCI Clay. I have learned many hard lessons and have had much assistance to help me fit in, things that other people take for granted and learn easily.’
Clay noticed the dense meatiness of Lucy’s arms and the smallness of her breasts. Body and brain, left hook followed by a right. ‘Did Marta speak to you?’
‘Not a word. Just gobbled down my chocolate. Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. That’s all I know and that is all I believe. When I heard sirens coming towards the Mystery, I felt easier about walking away because I knew help was coming fast. The child was so still, I knew she wouldn’t be walking or running away.’ Lucy touched her head. ‘I worked out it was safe for me to go and safe for her to be there. Outside of my work, teaching undergraduates, I am very shy, DCI Clay. I do not seek attention or thanks. My encounter with Marta lasted less than one minute.’ Lucy sat back, as if exhausted by the effort of speaking.
‘Did you see anybody else?’
‘She was alone. If I had seen someone, say, the person who may have kidnapped her, I would have challenged them or taken a picture. But it was just me and Marta.’
Lucy looked into the space between Clay and Hendricks, and nodded as if listening to some invisible person whom only she could hear. Slowly, she stood up, pushing the chair away from her with the backs of her legs.
‘We haven’t finished yet, Lucy,’ said Clay. ‘Sit back down, please.’
Lucy sat down on the edge of the seat, her backbone like a weather vane.
‘As I said earlier, you’ve been through a stressful experience,’ Clay continued. ‘Stress plays tricks on the mind. I’m handing you my card, my contact details. If you remember something you’ve failed to mention now, I want you to call me immediately.’
Lucy took the card without looking at it and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. ‘There is nothing. I wish I could help you more.’
‘Did you not think that maybe being late was preferable to leaving a missing child on her own, even if only for a minute?’
‘Of course I thought about it. But as I say, I was confident that she’d soon be in your care. Oh? Another thought I had about the child was that she had some sort of global delay. She had a look on her face that I’ve seen on many, many such children. She wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t want to stay and answer questions there and then because, like I say, I had a lecture to deliver and you surely would have made me late.’
There was a sudden knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ said Clay.
Sergeant Harris stepped into the room.
‘Hello, Sergeant Harris,’ said Lucy.
‘I have something else to ask you, Lucy,’ said Clay. ‘Why did you turn your phone off?’
‘When I’m not making calls, I always do. I turn it on when I need to make a call. And when I do that, I return any calls I’ve missed, if any, and there aren’t many. I have to have it that way. Has my dad arrived, Sergeant Harris?’
‘Sorry, Lucy. No, he hasn’t.’
She looked disappointed to the core, and the last hot ember of Clay’s frustration towards her turned to ash.
‘I’ve got to ask you, Lucy. How do you get on in a packed lecture theatre? It must be stressful.’
‘Yes, but not like this. In front of a crowd, I talk history and when I talk history, I know what I’m talking about, be it to one person or two hundred. That makes me happy. This is the up-side to my condition. My confident streak comes out and God gives me any other strength I need.’
Clay held Lucy’s gaze.
‘DCI Clay,’ said Sergeant Harris. ‘I’ve had a call from DS Mason at the scene of...’
Clay walked into the corner of the interview suite, behind Lucy’s back, and Sergeant Harris followed.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Clay.
‘Terry Mason’s ready for you to OK the removal of the bodies by the APTs to the mortuary.’
‘I want to be there when it happens.’ She looked at Lucy’s back. ‘I’ll suspend the interview.’
Returning to the table, Clay said, ‘We’re going to catch up with you at some point later, Lucy, but for now you’re free to go. There are plenty more questions I want to ask you.’
‘I understand.’
‘Where and when’s your next lecture?’ asked Hendricks.
‘This afternoon, 19 Abercromby Square, two o’clock. Why?’
‘We just want to get an idea of your whereab
outs,’ said Clay. ‘We’re all done for now. I know you don’t want to, but I need you to promise me you’re going to keep your phone on.’
‘I. I—’
‘Lucy, we could have been really cross with you for walking away from Marta!’
‘Then I promise I’ll keep my phone on.’
‘Come on, Lucy,’ said Sergeant Harris. ‘Just a few questions from me at the desk and then you can go.’
She stood and followed Harris to the door and without a backward glance, left the room.
As the door closed, Clay turned to Hendricks. ‘We need to check what Lucy Bell’s told us against what Marta comes up with. I want you to find out as much as you can about Lucy. Go and catch her lecture this afternoon. I want to know how she holds up in front of a crowd. It could be crucial when all this winds up in court.’
Clay weighed up the interview as a whole and the work that lay ahead of her. ‘I’m going to visit her father. Father Aaron Bell. Let’s see what that throws up.’
24
12.45 am
Alone in the house, Raymond Dare lay on his unmade bed and looked at the screen of his phone. As he pressed the green messages icon, he debated whether to delete the messages and pictures he had been sent. He felt his cheek sting and a surge of rage overwhelmed him. He put the phone down on the duvet and walked out of his room to Jack’s bedroom door.
Looking over the banister, there was no sign of Jasmine.
‘I’ve put your fucking mutt in the kitchen, you arsehole, so what are you going to do about that?’ he seethed at the door, squeezing the padlock and wishing it was Jack’s throat. ‘You’d better get that into your fucking piece of shit soul, twat.’
He heard the roar of traffic on Park Road and entered a regular daydream about Jack.
Jack would be mown down by a bus, not killed because that would be too easy for the bastard. No, he would have to spend months in hospital, paralysed from the neck down being spoon-fed by pretty young nurses, one Asian, one African, who as soon as the feeding was over would hoist him to the bathroom to remove his shitted-up pad and smile at each other behind his back as they wiped his now sagging and bed-sore-covered arse.
In his mind, Raymond opened the door of Jack’s room with the invisible key he now had in his control. It was a plain white room, the way Raymond had designed it, and there was a narrow bed with railings up the side to stop Jack falling out onto the bulging bag of bright yellow piss at his side.
He entered the room and turned on the bare red light bulb, then walked over to his brother who lay motionless on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Raymond picked up the switch next to the catheter bag and elevated his brother so that he was at an angle that would allow him to see into the room.
‘Hello, you crippled sack of shit. We’ve got visitors. Get in here now, bitches!’
The African nurse followed the Asian nurse into the room, and Jack made a noise that signified the onset of tears.
‘Let me see,’ said Raymond, eyeing the women up and tormenting Jack with a glance. He pointed at the African nurse. ‘You wipe his arse!’ He prodded the Asian nurse under the chin, forcing her to look directly at him. ‘Bend over, look back up at me and smile as I fuck you up the arse!’
The sound of Jasmine growling up the stairs brought the vivid fantasy to a crashing end, and he bounded for his own bedroom door.
As her breathing came closer his heart pounded. From his doorway, he saw she was watching him with evil in her eyes. Raymond tried to stare her out, but she remained perfectly still, growling at him, glaring up at him, daring and goading with defiant dog eyes.
Raymond slammed the door and, sitting down on the edge of the bed, felt his palms turn clammy as he pressed CJ on speed dial. The phone rang out and CJ’s answer service kicked in.
‘It’s CJ. Leave a message, like...’
Yeah, you dickhead, thought Raymond. For the coppers to listen to. Oh, God, shit, shit, shit. My phone’s been bugged by the police.
He dialled Buster and after three rings, Buster connected with, ‘Right, la!’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the lock-up.’
‘Who you with?’ Raymond found a roach on his cluttered bedside table and sparked it up with a disposable lighter.
‘Who the fuck do you think I’m with?’ asked Buster.
‘CJ?’ Raymond frowned, sucking on the roach ‘Like, CJ and you went to the lock-up without me.’
‘You said you didn’t want to go. When you chucked us out from yours. We asked you to come with us.’
Raymond had no recall of the exchange. He held a ball of smoke deep in his lungs and wracked his memory.
‘You said, I’m knackered. I said, I don’t want to be around your house if Jack shows up. Come to the lock-up with us, bag up some weed and make some money. And you said, I can’t be arsed. You don’t remember us talking?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he lied.
‘You don’t sound right, lad. What’s up?’
‘Can you and CJ get back to ours as soon as you can?’
‘So Jack can kick our arses? What’s up with you, Raymond?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
Behind the door, Jasmine’s growling grew louder and she started scratching on the wood. If my phone’s been bugged, he concluded, why not the rest of the house? The red-raw thought made Raymond feel like his bones had turned to Vaseline.
‘Fuck it, I’ll meet you at the lock-up, Buster. Keep your mobile on, lad.’
Raymond saw snow falling past his bedroom window and it reminded him how cold a day it was. He went to the wash basket in the corner of his room for his black North Face coat, and felt an ever-deepening sickness when it wasn’t there. He rummaged but none of his clothes were there.
Mum’s washed them and put them away, he hoped. He opened his wardrobe and the sickening inside him mushroomed when his coat and clothes just weren’t there.
Outside, Jasmine’s growling developed into barking, and she clawed and clawed and clawed at the door. He dropped the roach onto the laminate flooring and crushed it with the sole of his trainer.
Raymond walked to the door, placed his fingers round the handle, and summoning up all his strength, opened it wide quickly.
Silence.
He looked down.
Jasmine wasn’t there.
He moved to the head of the stairs and looked down into the hall.
Jasmine was at the bottom of the stairs.
Better get it into your soul... The words drifted from the surface of the dog’s skin as if Jack himself was standing there. Calmly, she turned away from Raymond and made her way back to the kitchen.
Something shifted on the surface of Raymond’s brain and everything suddenly seemed massive, the stairs river-wide, the ceiling where the sky used to be. He hung on to the banister and, for a moment, felt like broken glass was flowing through his veins.
He struggled but had no memory at all of his conversation with Buster, absolutely no memory of choosing to stay in the house while they went to the lock-up.
Memory? Memory...
No memory.
25
1.30 pm
Cole got up and stood behind Sergeant Carol White as she stared at her laptop. On her screen was a stretch of shops on Picton Road, with the door to the Adamczaks’ flat next to Mr Zięba’s Polish delicatessen far from the eye of the camera.
‘How’s it going, Whitey?’
‘Lots of people have walked past the door in both directions but no one’s come out of the flat and no one’s gone in. It’s half-past one in the morning and the volume of people passing the door has thinned to a trickle.’
Cole’s landline rang out. When he saw the +22 followed by seven digits on the display, he lined up his notepad and pen and picked up the receiver. ‘Detective Constable Barney Cole, Merseyside Constabulary.’
‘Hello, my name is Deputy Commissioner Aleksandar Kasprzak from the Pruszków police, Poland.’
‘Thank you for returning my call so promptly, Deputy Commissioner.’
Eyes still on the screen, White gave Cole a double thumbs-up and said, ‘That was a quick call back.’
Cole noted the man’s voice. He spoke English confidently and with a minimal accent, and sounded like he was in his late forties or early fifties. ‘Can I just confirm that you are in overall charge of the police station in Pruszków?’
‘I am in charge.’
‘And that you have a picture of my warrant card with you?’
‘Yes, I am confident that you are who you say you are.’
‘We’re looking to run a background check on a pair of identical twins who are...’ Cole chose his words with infinite caution ‘...in the UK for the purposes of work...’
‘Karl and Václav Adamczak? The junior officer who took your call did pass on their names to me. Are they in trouble?’
‘They’re not in trouble.’
‘So why’re we having this conversation?’
‘They’ve been murdered.’
In the briefest of silences, Cole heard fleeting voices in the background and, beyond that, the rumble of traffic.
‘This is an investigation at the very earliest of stages, sir, and we’re looking for any information that could help us build a picture of the victims.’
‘Karl Adamczak has no connection with the police in Pruszków. His identical twin Václav is known to us but has no criminal record. When their names were passed to me, I instructed two of my officers to build a detailed picture of exactly how and why Václav Adamczak was on our radar before he left Poland to live and work in the United Kingdom. In the interests of clarity, I want to be as precise as I possibly can be with you.’
Cole heard a deep intake of breath and the fizz of a bottle of carbonated liquid being unscrewed.
‘Could you give me an idea of why Václav Adamczak was known to you?’
‘An idea is simply that. What you need is a fully factual record of what we know.’
Cole held the receiver away from his ear and bit down on the frustration he felt at Deputy Commissioner Aleksandar Kasprzak’s teasing precision.
