Blood Mist (Eve Clay)

by Mark Roberts

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  For Linda and Eleanor

  It wasn’t a pearl at all

  It was the moon

  Prologue

  October 1984

  4.25 pm

  ‘You’ll be very happy here, Eve,’ said Mrs Tripp.

  From the other side of Mrs Tripp’s desk, Eve looked over the big lady’s shoulder at the scarlet sunset through the window. Beneath her, she felt the space between her feet and the floor, white socks and red sandals dangling above the carpet.

  ‘Eve, how old are you?’

  The little girl’s eyes flashed as she connected with Mrs Tripp, but she smiled. The fat lady opposite was the boss of the children’s home.

  ‘Twenty-nine... take away... twenty-three,’ she replied.

  ‘Clever girl,’ said Mrs Tripp, glancing at the bulging file in front of her.

  Reading upside down, Eve saw the felt-tipped letters of her name on the stiff brown card – ‘E V E T T E C L A Y’ – and wondered what lay in between.

  ‘Interesting,’ said the social worker at Eve’s side, indicating the file.

  ‘Very,’ replied Mrs Tripp. ‘These paper files will all be obsolete soon. It’ll all be going onto computers, all this very important information... Imagine!’

  Eve touched the edge of Mrs Tripp’s desk.

  The wood was the same colour as Sister Philomena’s coffin. The thing that held her heart in place snapped and everything inside dropped. Once, there wasn’t a day without Philomena but now she was gone.

  Her earliest memory: Philomena, her smile brighter than the sunshine surrounding her. ‘I’ve been waiting all my life for you, Eve.’

  Her last memory of Philomena in her coffin: Eve had tried to slip her fingers into Philomena’s hand, but all she touched was stone-cold death. As the chapel candles flickered, everything that was lovely, all that Eve had, was gone.

  Even though the new house, St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children, just off Wavertree Road and built on the crown of Edge Hill, had windows through which she could see for miles, Eve didn’t like the place. It wasn’t St Claire’s, the home she’d lived in for six and a half years. St Claire’s, where Sister Philomena had taught her to read and write, and all about numbers and Jesus and the Devil. St Claire’s was home.

  Mrs Tripp continued talking and smiling, but Eve was listening to the noise of the house. She heard the voices of children at play outside, while inside some grown-up or other sang along to happy nonsense on a radio.

  ‘Eve!’ The social worker’s voice brought the little girl’s attention back into the room and the present. ‘Take your hand off Mrs Tripp’s desk.’

  Her fingers and thumb were gripping the lip of the desk. Eve snatched her hand back and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Of course, you won’t be here forever, Eve,’ said Mrs Tripp. Her eyes dipped to Eve’s file, like a reader hungry to get back to a book she’d been forced to put down. ‘We can, we will find you a family to live with, a good Catholic family who want nothing more than a nice little girl...’

  Eve leaned forward so that the tips of her toes touched the floor.

  ‘I want...’ she said, from the heart.

  ‘Go on.’ Mrs Tripp oozed attentiveness.

  The wind pressed a dry brown leaf to the window. It scratched across the surface of the glass as the sky seemed to drift and dissolve in crimson clouds.

  ‘I want to live with Sister Philomena.’

  Mrs Tripp and the social worker exchanged glances. Eve tilted back into her seat, feet swinging over the empty space, the social worker’s uninvited hand on her arm.

  ‘Sister Philomena? But, Eve, she’s gone to live with Jesus.’

  ‘Then I would like to live with Sister Philomena and Jesus also.’

  ‘You know you can’t do that,’ said the social worker. Mrs Tripp nodded. ‘Sister Philomena was very old and not well and it was her time to go and live with Jesus. You’re a young girl and full of health. It isn’t your time to go to Jesus.’

  Outside, the wind made a noise like the deep pipe in the organ in the chapel at St Claire’s.

  ‘We actually have a family waiting in the wings, we think—’

  ‘No!’ Eve, feet on the floor and standing, snatched her arm away from the social worker. ‘I don’t want to live with a family!’

  She dug down into recent memory, to the instructions Sister Philomena had given her the very last occasion they had been alone together, for the time when she would no longer be there for her.

  The smile on Mrs Tripp’s face became a pout.

  Eve remembered.

  ‘You cannot make me live with a family if I do not give my permission.’

  ‘But, Eve...’ Mrs Tripp’s hands were on the edges of her file, pinching the spine and the papers poking out of the open side.

  ‘I will live in this place until I am old enough to leave.’ She remembered a long word Philomena had told her to use. ‘I am institutionaled from a baby.’

  ‘We’re happy for you to live here, Eve.’

  ‘I have human rights.’

  ‘But most children—’

  ‘I am not most children, Mrs Tripp.’

  Silence. Eve recalled sitting on Sister Philomena’s bed, before she fell asleep and was laid to rest in the chapel at St Claire’s. Philomena’s words danced around her head. It was time to play what Philomena had called the trump card.

  ‘You either find my real mother and father and I will live with them, or I will live here until I come of age.’

  The social worker turned to Eve with the look of someone seeing a ghost.

  ‘Eve, go and stand over there by the door.’

  Eve did as she was told but didn’t take her eyes off the women, one slug-fat as the other was twig-thin. They both held up their hands to shield their mouths as they fell to whispering.

  As Eve watched the women leaning into each other, she wondered if Mrs Tripp’s desk was made from the same tree as Sister Philomena’s coffin. Eve, who could hear shadows fall on silent seas, concentrated hard on the hissing back-and-forth until it stopped and Mrs Tripp ordered, ‘Come back, Eve.’

  Obediently, she returned, sat, and stared at her scuffed red toes.

  ‘So, Eve,’ said Mrs Tripp. ‘We’ll see how you feel about living with a family when you get a little older. You seem very set in your ideas for now. Is there anything else you’d like to say while you’re being so forthright?’

  Eve looked up from the toes of her sandals.

  ‘I’d like to ask a question,’ she said.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘What’s a bitch?’

  ‘Eve?’ Two women, one voice.

  Eve turned her attention to the social worker and addressed her directly. ‘You just said, She even sounds like the old bitch.’

  Mrs Tripp tapped the table hard with a biro. Eve met her eye.

  ‘Welcome to St Michael’s, Eve. We do not tolerate bad language here and we demand obedience in the name of Christ Jesus.’

  Behind her, coral clouds hung over the River Mersey as the sky dissolved into night.

  Mrs Tripp opened up her file and read as Eve followed the social worker to the door.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy here, Eve,’ said Mrs Tripp.

  33 years later

  The Beginning of the End of Time

  Day One

  1

  11
.55 pm

  At five minutes to midnight, DCI Eve Clay pulled through a red light, picking up speed on the snow-bound dual carriageway, listening and looking hard for other vehicles as she sped past the junctions.

  The blizzard had shifted north and west into the Irish Sea, but the air was thick with freezing fog and, through it, Clay caught the edge of sirens in the distance behind her. She knew she was at the head of the descending pack.

  The crime scene was a two-minute drive from her house in Mersey Road. In fifteen years of investigating violent crimes, it was the closest a scene had ever been to home.

  Minutes earlier, as she’d pulled up outside her house, the light in her bedroom had gone on and her iPhone had rung in the same moment. Connecting the call, she’d looked up through the twisting fog at the shape of her husband Thomas in the bedroom window as DS Karl Stone’s voice filled the car on speakerphone.

  ‘Eve. The Serpentine...’

  ‘I’ve just driven past it along Aigburth Road.’

  ‘Number 38. It sounds like a bloodbath.’

  A cold sickness radiated from her core to her scalp and the tips of her toes.

  ‘Listen to this recording from switch. Brace yourself.’

  Ignition back on.

  ‘Play it for me, Karl!’

  Three-point turn.

  She’d taken a right turn at the top of Mersey Road onto Aigburth Road, the dual carriageway, as she listened to the recorded voice of a teenage girl, shrill and terrified: ‘I’ve locked my door, I’ve locked my bedroom door...’

  Your bedroom door? Clay’s foot sank harder on the accelerator.

  Someone – something? – kicked and banged at the girl’s door and, amid this chaos, some voices chanted, voices stripped of humanity, a babble that Clay couldn’t pin down.

  ‘How many of your family are at home?’ The operator’s professional calm evaporated at the sound of the door giving way.

  ‘Six.’

  ‘How many are they?’

  ‘I’ve seen three.’

  The wood cracked as the door yielded. The girl howled and cried out. ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’

  Beneath her screams, the wet clicking of the intruders’ tongues and dislocated sounds like random syllables.

  Then sudden silence. The line went dead.

  ‘Karl, how far away are you?’

  ‘I’m coming out of Garston. I’m putting my foot down.’

  ‘Gina Riley and Bill Hendricks?’

  ‘I told switch to call and instruct them to attend the scene.’

  ‘Find out where the closest Scientific Support Unit is.’

  Closing down the call, she peered through the glare of the headlights into the swirling milk on the dual carriageway ahead of her. A red traffic light formed a patch in the fog like blood mist. Tension rolled inside her, head to heart, heart to gut.

  The Serpentine was a minute away and, for a moment, she was fired with the hope that the perpetrators would still be in the house or close by. Her pulse rate picked up at the prospect of facing them directly and then her chest tightened as instinct whispered, The conditions favour them. You’re too late. They’re well away.

  As Clay turned off the broad space of Aigburth Road and into the enclosed S-shaped channel of The Serpentine, the quality of the fog changed. It became thinner and seemed to roll backwards, as if the mouth of the road was breathing in the clouded air from the dual carriageway and tumbling it round the darkness between the rows of large detached houses.

  But then again, Eve...

  Deeper into The Serpentine, she drove fast along the winding road, shapes forming to either side. Mature trees lined both pavements, electrified Victorian lamp posts spilled yellow light and behind the whispering fog loomed the vast front gardens and well-appointed homes of its affluent residents.

  She saw two points of light heading towards her, car headlights coming up The Serpentine from the opposite direction, slowing down as she stopped her car dead in the middle of the road.

  If it was them, they wouldn’t get past her.

  The car stopped and a tall figure stepped out, a shape she recognised immediately. She hurried out of her car as sirens came closer, but the memory of the silence when the girl’s phone died sat like something wet and fibrous in her ear.

  The advancing silhouette called out. ‘Eve?’ And DS Karl Stone moved into a yellow puddle of light. Tall and thin, with his prematurely grey hair slicked back and a dark overcoat that looked three sizes too big for him, to Clay’s eyes he was the human incarnation of a vulture.

  The wrought-iron gate of the house was wide open.

  Following Clay into the front garden, Stone hit a beam of torchlight over her shoulder and onto the ground ahead of her. The compacted ice was as hard as stone and the frozen surface was rippled by all manner of indentations, but with nothing that resembled a human footprint.

  ‘Scientific Support?’ asked Clay, heading towards the front door.

  ‘Nearest unit’s trying to bypass a King Kong RTA on Upper Parliament Street in Toxteth.’

  ‘I’ve got to go into the scene now,’ said Clay. ‘Paramedics?’

  ‘Coming off Ullet Road.’

  ‘There could be survivors in there. I’ll go in alone to minimise scene contamination.’

  ‘What if the perpetrators are still inside?’

  ‘I’ll shout for you. Stay at the front door.’

  Closer to the house, Clay saw that the front door was partially open, like a family secret exposed to the gaze of strangers. Darkness sat in the open space and she was drawn by the strange and ugly silence that lay behind the door.

  ‘Torch please, Karl.’

  He passed it over her shoulder and she directed the beam to the space above the open door. She paused. Feather-like fingers seemed to drum against the crown of her skull. She lit up the discreet CCTV camera over the door.

  ‘Soon as you can, Karl, your first job, get the footage. If they got in through the front door...’

  ‘Shit visibility, Eve.’

  The conditions favour them.

  ‘Which is why...’ She fished a pair of blue plastic overshoes from her coat pocket and stepped into them. ‘...they came out tonight.’

  She used the tip of her little finger, right hand, to push the flat edge of the front door wider, giving herself enough room to enter without touching any surface.

  Clay raked the darkness with the torch, froze at what she saw and stifled her instinct to turn and hurry away. ‘What on earth...’ she heard herself whisper, then finished the thought in silence,... has been here before me tonight?

  2

  11.59 pm

  In the dark hallway, the silence was exploded by the loud mechanical chime of the landline.

  ‘Police!’ She shouted. ‘If you can hear me, call out!’

  As she stepped deeper inside, the fear that had gripped Clay vanished. She was overtaken by a keen curiosity that dried her mouth and throat and made her heart beat faster. And with this passion to know as much and as quickly as possible, she felt her senses sharpen. The darkness around her became clearer; shapes formed before her eyes. The silence between the ringing of the phone was peppered with minute sounds in and around the house, from the air in an under-floor pipe to the snow-packed roof resisting the wind. Her focus converged into the time and space she inhabited.

  Her pulse raced as instinct drew her attention to the stairs above the trio of bodies on the hall floor. ‘If you need help, call out to me!’

  A clock ticked in the rear of the house and the blood on the walls and floor hit the back of her throat as the taste of wet metal. There was a distinct aroma, as if each particle of air was infused with blood. She took a step, felt and heard the sticky rip as she lifted her foot from the carpet.

  Like being locked in a butcher’s shop, she thought. With no ventilation.

  She picked out a path of light along the carpet, past elongated bloodstains, towards the three corpses and the bottom of the stairs.<
br />
  As she followed the path, she stopped and lit up the display panel on the phone.

  ‘Karl! Check out this mobile. 07700 934763. Who’s it registered to? Where’s it calling from?’

  The ringing stopped and the answer machine kicked in.

  ‘You have reached the Patel family...’ The mature voice of the mother, Clay estimated, as she arrived at the configuration of bodies.

  A girl, about seven years of age. An elderly woman. A tall middle-aged man. In torchlight, they looked like they’d been savaged by a pack of wild dogs. Their heads were pulped and shapeless above their contorted faces.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re not able to take your call...’

  The bodies had been arranged carefully into an irregular quadrilateral.

  The old lady lay on her side, her head resting on her shoulder and left arm outstretched. The man was on his side, his arms reaching beyond his shattered skull, his fingers connecting with the woman’s feet. Bent at the hips, his body formed a right-angle. His long legs tapered to the little girl’s head, his toes touching her face. The girl linked up the three sides formed by the adults: she was on her back, her feet touching the old lady’s face. A little girl’s corpse tucked neatly in death between her father’s and grandmother’s bodies.

  Clay made a mental snapshot of the shape their bodies made.

  ‘...but if you’d like to leave a message after the tone...’

  As the fog crept in from behind her, she felt a gentle heat rising from the ground; the warmth of bodies not yet cold.

  ‘...we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’

  The signal to record played. Silence. Then the caller exhaled, a long, death-like sigh, whispered softly, a sound beneath her hearing, and hung up.

  The little girl’s eyes were brim-full of astonishment. She was a few years older than Clay’s son, Philip, but her long, dark hair was the same colour as his. She squashed the connection and pushed it deep down inside.

  Get on, get on with the job...

  Clay drew the light across the hall, saw bloody marks where the bodies had been dragged for arrangement at the foot of the stairs.