by Mark Roberts
‘Are you still there, Detective Sergeant Cole?’ His voice leaked from the receiver like a prayer lost on the west wind.
‘Yes, Deputy Commissioner Kasprzak. Could you give me a time scale on when you’ll be able to supply me with a full and accurate account of why Václav Adamczak is known to you.’
‘Hours. Today...’
‘You couldn’t give me a hint...’
‘Do you know every issue that is brought to the attention of the police on Merseyside?’
‘No.’
‘If you were asked for information from the police in Pruszków, would you inform them with poorly-sourced intelligence?’
Cole imagined his emotions if he turned in to work at Trinity Road one morning and Deputy Commissioner Kasprzak had performed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree life swap with Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay.
‘Do you want to know the circumstances in which Karl and Václav Adamczak died?’
‘Death is death. Murder is murder. The end, don’t you agree?’
‘With the greatest respect, no, I don’t agree. But I appreciate you returning my call and the professional rigour with which you are dealing with our request for information.’
‘I’ll phone you as soon as my officers have briefed me on what Václav Adamczak did to bring himself to our attention.’
‘According to people who knew them, Karl and Václav were watertight close, Deputy Commissioner Kasprzak. Was Karl involved in Václav’s activity?’
‘Wait on my call.’
‘When?’
‘When I know what I’m talking about.’
The line died and, as he put the receiver down, Cole soothed his frustration by looking at the sharpened-up diagram of the blurred graffiti that he’d been working on.
He started at the centre with the solid black circle at the heart of the symbol, and worked his way out to the edge. A band of black surrounded the central circle and this was mirrored in the dark band at the circumference. Cole counted the twelve lines that linked the circumference to the centre; each line was made of three parts. A short vertical line turned at a right angle into a horizontal line and this gave way to another vertical line that formed a link to the centre.
All that was left for him to do was to shade in four of these lines that he had outlined with his fine black line pen and ruler and to complete the last part of the circular circumference.
Cole picked up his pen, turned on his desk light and wondered what Google Reverse Image would throw up of this thing that looked like a cartwheel with crooked spokes, but was surely so much more.
26
1.45 pm
The fire was blazing nicely.
Jack looked around the frozen garden and wondered for the thousandth time if he would ever live in a house that had such a beautiful space at the back door. The trunks of the skeletal apple trees and two pear trees that lined the bottom of the garden against the tall sandstone wall were lined with drifts of snow, and something deep in the pit of his heart sank.
He warmed his hands on the fire and walked past the life-sized marble statue of the Virgin Mary standing next to a frozen fountain that he’d turned off because of the bitter cold. Jack listened to the music of the garden, the birds in the trees and Father Aaron’s beloved crickets and grasshoppers in the vegetation.
As he walked to the shed he reminded himself of Father Aaron’s instructions for the day: If it can be burned, please burn it. If you think it’s of value leave it in the shed and we’ll have a table sale to raise money for the good women running Levene House – the hostel in Garston for battered and vulnerable women and their children.
Jack picked up an armful of wood that was cracked and buckled. He walked towards the fire in the rusting brazier and watched the sparks rise from the belly of the blaze.
Back in the shed, he looked around. On top of a brown single wardrobe was a wicker chair, which looked like it would sell easily. He stretched up, but on dragging the chair down, immediately saw that the seat and backing canes were mostly broken.
‘For the fire, then,’ said Jack, walking the chair down the garden and snapping its arms and legs, folding it as small as he could in preparation for the flames. The fire roared and the flames danced as Jack fed it into the brazier.
He passed the Virgin Mary, her saintly face blank of the fine detail that paint could add to a statue; but he felt her eyes were following him, reproaching him for not offering a prayer up to her. He stopped, bowed his head and offered a silent Hail Mary.
Walking back to the shed, Jack looked at the tall rear elevation of the huge Victorian house, and saw Father Aaron standing at the kitchen window, at the sink with a cloud of steam rising from the hot tap, gazing into the garden with the look of complete sadness that filled his eyes when he thought no one was looking at him.
Behind a stack of rusting garden tools, Jack’s eye was drawn to a two-shelf bookcase on which sat rows of well-preserved leather albums and scrapbooks. He picked up the first album. On the first page were old colour photographs of Father Aaron with a handful of other men outside a church beside a huge cross. It was a hot day and they all wore the same short-sleeved black shirts and trousers. Jack realised this was the first time he had seen his employer without a bushy grey-black beard.
He closed the album, putting it back where he found it; there were ten of them on the top shelf and eight on the one below it. He ran his fingertips over the spines on the top shelf and squatted to comb them with his eyes.
Jack stopped at the eighth spine, his attention focused on the neat black handwriting that was almost lost in the deep blue of the spine.
Kelly-Ann Carter.
He opened the book and saw a newspaper clipping with the headline: ‘TRIPLE MURDER OF SIBLINGS’.
Flicking through, he saw the scrapbook was dedicated to an American serial killer living on death row.
Jack heard Father Aaron’s footsteps coming towards the shed.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Father Aaron.
‘There are some books here. I haven’t looked through them all. I think they’re photograph albums and scrapbooks.’
He extended the scrapbook to Father Aaron, who turned the pages slowly.
‘Kelly-Ann Carter?’ asked Jack. ‘Who is she?’
‘I write to several men and women on death row. Kelly-Ann Carter’s one of them. She’s going to be executed by lethal injection in a matter of weeks.’ Father Aaron clasped the scrapbook to him. ‘I’ll keep this one. Burn the rest, Jack.’
‘But they’re old photographs of you.’
‘Remember that little chat we had a few days back? What did I say about the past? The past doesn’t exist. Erase any trace of it and don’t speak of it again. Listen, Jack. I’m taking this scrapbook back into the house for now. The reason I kept it out in the shed was Lucy. You know how sensitive she is. What’s about to happen to Kelly-Ann would give her nightmares. Please don’t mention her or this book to her.’
‘I won’t say a word. What do you want me to do with the garden tools? Keep them or burn them?’
‘Burn them.’ Father Aaron looked closely into the shed. ‘I’ll leave it up to you, Jack. Like I said, if you think we can raise some money with them, keep them. If you don’t, burn them. You can do what you want with everything. Well, would you look at that, Jack.’
A cricket chirruped from inside the garage, sitting on the photograph albums and rubbing its back legs together. Father Aaron chirruped back, an uncannily good impersonation, and the cricket flew onto his outstretched finger, landing on it. He admired it and then blew on it, sending it on its way into the garden.
‘Are you sure about the photograph albums, Father Aaron?’
‘Absolutely. Let’s have a fire that would put Old Nick to shame.’
27
1.45 pm
Outside 682 Picton Road, Clay stopped between two black mortuary vans parked near the entrance of the building and saw a pair of ghost-like pictures of herself re
flected in the sheen of their surfaces.
Looking away from the double mirage of herself and up at the blackened window, she heard voices drift from inside the murder scene.
‘Who’s inside now?’ she asked the young constable running the log at the door.
He double-checked his log. ‘DS Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price from Scientific Support. Harper and Kline, the APTs from the mortuary.’
The wind howled as she walked up the staircase. Over the force of the weather outside and the turning blades of the fan in the doorway, Clay heard the unzipping of a body bag.
‘Terry?’ she called.
‘Eve,’ replied Mason. ‘Wait at the top of the stairs, please.’
She stopped on the top stair and looked down the length of the corridor, the gloom of the windowless space now dispersed by a powerful arc light at the far end that made the pictures of the Virgin Mary shine on the walls.
Clay walked to the door and made eye contact with Mason in a room where the living narrowly outnumbered the dead.
‘We’ll help you take the bodies away from each other, Harper.’ For a micro-beat, Mason raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘But how are we going to do it?’
‘Brute force,’ replied Harper. ‘There’s no other way.’
He crouched down to get a closer look at where the bodies had melted into each other, and Clay joined him. Fire had turned their clothes to dust and the flesh around their abdomens and ribs had fused together.
‘Think of it this way, Eve. If you cooked two sausages across each other in a very hot oven and doused them in fire accelerant, they’d cook into each other where their skins and the meat beneath were exposed. But what would happen to the space where they were unexposed – where the sausages, or bodies in this case, were connecting?’
Clay thought about it and replied, ‘They’d remain raw on the inside.’ She looked at the bodies and took a huge breath. ‘Let’s just get on with this. Tell me what to do.’
‘Terry,’ said Harper. ‘Put your hands under the top of the upper cadaver’s thighs. Eve, the same but the right arm, right up into the armpit, I’ll do the same on the left-hand side.’ He looked at his young assistant and said, ‘Kline, take a step back and watch how this is done, in case you ever have to call the shots at a scene like this.’
As Clay felt the cooked meat of his armpit, she noticed how her other senses were suddenly sharpened. She smelled and tasted pork, and bit down her gagging reflex.
‘Are we all in place? Are we all secure and ready to tear them apart?’
‘Yes,’ said Clay, looking at the graffiti on the wall, the blurred geometric globe, and thought about the language on the wall behind her. Killing Time Is Here Embrace It.
‘On the count of three, then,’ said Harper. ‘Ready? One, two, three, lift.’ At first the weight of the man on top of the human sculpture and the glue of two melted bodies caused a stubborn resistance.
‘Brute force. Just keep lifting,’ said Harper.
Out of the corner of her eye, Clay saw Mason lifting the thighs higher as the skin above the pubic bone ripped away from the body beneath it; it sounded like Velcro being torn apart. From the pubic bone to the base of the ribs, flesh tore away from flesh as they separated the two bodies.
‘Get those thighs as high up as you can, Terry,’ said Harper.
Beneath the latex that gloved her hands, Clay felt a dampness in the roots of his armpit that made her skin crawl. Mason’s elbows jutted out and his shoulders rose as he raised the thighs. Clay summoned all her strength and the flesh in her hands rasped away from the flesh beneath it.
As they lifted the body clean away, it felt like a dead weight in Clay’s hands, a single body that felt like ten.
‘Lay him down,’ said Harper. ‘On his back.’
With her iPhone, Clay took pictures of both men. She selected the clearest pictures and sent them to Hendricks, Stone, Cole and Winters. She looked at the bodies in turn and back again, half-cooked and half-raw. She heard blood thumping in her head and, as the wind whipped the building outside, she imagined a stormy red sea lashing the darkened heavens.
What kind of savages are we dealing with here?
28
3.20 pm
Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks sat at the centre of a crowded lecture theatre in Abercromby Square, watching Lucy Bell give a lecture about Joseph Stalin’s rise to power. He looked at the faces around him and it wasn’t the fact that he was the oldest person in the room that caused him a momentary melancholy; it was that Lucy Bell’s students were mostly young enough to be his children.
Lucy was perfectly still, her voice level and loud enough not to need a microphone. With her back straight, she looked around the room as if trying to make eye contact with as many students as she could.
He looked at the screen behind her head, split down the middle by two portraits of the same man. Joseph Stalin. The young man, thin-faced, wide-eyed and with a mop of black hair swept back into an unruly quiff. The older man, his face filled out, eyes narrowed by time and greying hair slicked back.
Checking his watch, Hendricks saw that the lecture was due to wind up soon. He turned on the video on his iPhone and zoomed in on Lucy Bell, filming her as she rounded up what had been an entertaining and informative lecture on the brutal rise of an absurd but ferocious monster.
‘As historians you must never seek to avoid analysing the psychology of the leader. Stalin did what he did through choice, and his choices were beyond mitigation. Never allow yourselves to shift the blame to abstractions or make excuses based on faceless historical forces. Stare the evidence in the face and base your conclusions on facts, but never ever allow your subject off the hook. Essays in a week Monday, 10 am. No extensions. No excuses.’
Hendricks watched the students as they filed out in front of Lucy, but none of them stopped to engage directly with the young lecturer, to ask a question or seek clarification of some difficult point from the hour-and-a-half lesson.
Watching her through the eye of his iPhone’s video, he recorded reversible change. Ninety minutes earlier, she had transformed just as quickly from a wallflower to a full-on and confident teacher; now she switched back to a woman who looked uneasy with who and what she was. Her head, which she’d held so high during the lecture, drooped as she focused on placing folders and books inside her brown leather satchel. The ramrod spine started to bend and her shoulders developed a stoop that reduced her in height.
‘Excuse me? Can I get past please?’ A timid female voice at Hendricks’s side sent him straight to the inner pocket of his coat for his warrant card. Keeping the iPhone on Lucy, he glanced sideways at a tall wholesome-looking girl with pigtails, the nineteen-year-old manifestation of the fictional child Pippi Longstocking.
‘Do me a favour,’ said Hendricks. ‘And please don’t take this the wrong way.’ He showed her his warrant card. ‘This is nothing to worry about, but please sit down. I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask you.’
He sensed a sudden infusion of low-level panic as the student sat next to him.
The flow of human traffic passing Lucy Bell thinned and, as she finished placing the last of her papers and books in her bag, Hendricks noticed she had fully completed the metamorphosis: the confident and assertive spirit fled her body and the soul of a diffident and doubt-ridden loner had resumed its tenancy.
She turned a chair round so that it faced sideways-on and sat down with her back to the door.
Hendricks kept filming as she placed the satchel on her knee and stared into space, her lips moving slightly as if she were talking to herself, praying to a God he guessed had allowed her to be that other person as she got on with her job. He pressed stop, feeling utterly sorry for her, understanding how her lack of confidence may have led her to walk away from Marta Ondřej.
Smiling, he turned to the young woman at his side and said, ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks. I’m with the Merseyside Constabulary. And you are...?’
‘Jenny. Jennifer White. Jenny.’
‘Thanks, Jenny.’
Lucy stood up and, with her back to Hendricks and Jenny, walked towards the door, her movements mechanical as she left the lecture theatre.
‘I – I saw you filming Lucy with your phone,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s not in trouble with you, is she?’
‘No. We’re at the very earliest stages of a complex investigation and I really can’t divulge any information to you. But please don’t worry about Lucy. Really. She’s done us a favour this morning.’
Hendricks smiled and felt Jenny softening as she looked at him, weighing him up, reassured by the genuine kindness he felt towards a young woman with an openness that could make her a very useful witness.
‘I need to know a little bit about Lucy,’ said Hendricks.
‘Such as?’
‘Is she forgetful?’
‘Forgetful? Why do you ask that?’
Hendricks indicated the space that Lucy had just vacated. ‘She’s left her satchel behind.’ Just like she left Marta Ondřej behind, thought Hendricks. ‘What’s she like as a teacher?’
‘She’s a brilliant teacher but when she’s not teaching she’s massively shy. She’s like...’
‘I think you’re going to say an actress, but didn’t want to use that word because it sounds like she’s some kind of fake.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ she confirmed, with the air of a woman on the receiving end of a deep secret at a séance.
‘I knew a girl when I was at uni in Cambridge,’ said Hendricks. ‘She was totally withdrawn, so much so she used to go to a counsellor. No one heard her speak for eighteen months. Then, on her counsellor’s suggestion, she joined the Drama Society, and when the spotlight hit her on stage, she turned into this colossus of confidence. Three months after joining, she played the lead in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Once the greasepaint was off, well, she wasn’t as quiet as she had been, but she was still pretty much withdrawn. It’s not unheard of.’
