by Mark Roberts
‘Stick with me. I’m going to have a look around with the lights on. Then I’m shooting down to the Royal Hospital to watch the post-mortems. You stay in the house and latch on to Mason, pump him for his impressions, information. Look for and photograph any graffiti.’
Clay stopped and addressed the uniformed officer at the gate, who was running the log of people coming in and out of the scene.
‘Sergeant Cooper, I need DS Stone to join me in the house. When he’s finished door-stepping the neighbours, let him in.’
The stepping plates felt unstable against the ice. The walk from the gate to the house reminded Clay of crossing a rope bridge.
‘Where’s Bill Hendricks?’ asked Riley.
‘Still coordinating the troops out there.’ Clay paused at the door, indicated the CCTV camera. ‘Karl’s already pulled the footage.’
‘We could have them in the next twenty-four hours.’ Riley conveyed an optimism that Clay didn’t share. She thought of the fog, the taking away of the mother’s eyes.
‘Shit visibility,’ said Clay. ‘To quote Karl Stone. They won’t allow us to see them for who or what they truly are. Have you heard the tape from switch?’
‘No. But I heard about it. Is it as bad as people are making out?’
‘They sound like animals, sadistic beasts without any mercy. And making these weird clicking noises. Ready to go inside?’
Riley nodded.
‘DS Mason,’ called Clay, ‘we’re coming inside.’
The damp front door, covered with dark fingertip powder and an array of smudges at hand height and around the Yale lock, started to open slowly from within.
‘Eve?’ Behind her came Stone’s voice, advancing towards the house. At the door, he handed Clay a sheet of paper on which he’d written:
Hanif Patel, father – 50s
Kate Patel, mother – 40s/50
Nadia Patel, paternal grandmother – 70s
Alicia Patel – 15
Jane Patel – 7
Freya Patel – 2
‘Got the names and ages of the victims from the people next door.’
‘Thank you,’ said Clay, opening the front door.
With the lights on, bloodstained lines on the wall and the bloody drag marks on the carpet commanded a dreadful silence, broken when Riley released her breath.
‘Bloody hell.’
‘That’s what I think it looks like,’ agreed Clay. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
6
00.23 am
‘Terry!’ On the stairs, Clay called to DS Mason as she looked at the blood lines on the wall.
He appeared at the top of the stairs, digital camera in his hand.
‘Have you seen anything like this before?’
He shook his head and Clay knew how Columbus must have felt when the boat had sailed far away from home.
Alone on the stairs, she looked down at the space where father, grandmother and child had formed an irregular quadrilateral and up at the space where mother and daughters had been placed in a crooked W. The shape of the interlinked bodies tripped something deep inside her brain.
I’ve seen it before, thought Clay, and wondered if it was some trick of the mind played on her in the short passage of time between her first and second times at the crime scene. But warmth blossomed inside her and with it a dull light that promised to glow brighter.
‘Eve?’
She turned to Stone’s voice.
‘Next-door neighbour told me Kate and Hanif moved in over twenty years ago, along with Hanif’s mother, Nadia. It was the only home all four of their children ever knew—’
‘Four?’
‘Eldest son Sandy’s away studying at Durham University.’
‘Has he been told?’
‘DS Deborah Abbott, one of Durham Constabulary’s Victim Liaison team, is driving him back to Liverpool right now.’
‘Have you seen the CCTV footage, Karl?’
‘Some. It’s poor quality. The weather. Grime on the lens. The DVR’s pretty old hat anyway, but the pieces I’ve seen, it’s like the world’s being filmed through a cloud.’ Stone showed Clay a pen drive. ‘Two channels, front and back door. No internal footage. Glitch. When I clicked on selected files—’
‘Karl, no techno speak thanks. Did you save it on a pen drive?’
He showed her the USB stick.
‘Go back to Trinity Road and get back to me as soon as you’ve seen it. We could well have our savages on that stick of yours.’
Clay reached the top of the stairs and lights flashed as Marsh’s Scientific Support officers took picture after picture in the bedrooms of the little girl and the teenager. Their doors were on either side of the space where their bodies had been arranged with their mother. For a moment, from the corner of her eye, Clay thought she was seeing things. In the random patterns of camera flashlights spilling from the bedrooms, she saw the three bodies still gathered in that crooked W.
But there was nothing there.
Clay walked to the older girl’s room, its entrance blocked by Riley, who was staring into the teenager’s personal space.
‘Her name was Alicia,’ said Clay. ‘She was fifteen.’
Alicia’s door dangled from the frame by one buckled hinge. Everything faded and Clay heard the recording of the killers in their dehumanised pack and Alicia calling over and over for her mother as they cornered her.
Click click click click. Cameras synchronised with the wet clicking of their tongues.
Clay let her thoughts wander and was consumed by the sense of waste. Hours earlier, Alicia had sat on the bed, listening to music on her iPod through headphones that now lay on the carpet near the head of the bed, dreaming of a future, of university, travel, a career, love. Just as she herself had done as a teenager, night after night in her small bedroom in the St. Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children.
The boy bands on the wall, the make-up bag besides her mirror and the heart-shaped collage of pictures of her alive and happy with her friends were almost unbearable to look at.
‘Someone just walk over your grave?’ asked Riley.
‘Good luck to them if they did. I’m getting cremated, ashes scattered on the Mersey,’ replied Clay. ‘Excuse me, Gina.’ She walked into Alicia’s bedroom, the pink walls like diluted blood in the camera’s flashlight.
She looked at the bed, saw the bloody imprint of Alicia’s skull on the white pillow and a rectangle under the pillowslip. Clay reached inside the slip and pulled out the edge of a packet of ten Embassy cigarettes. She pushed the packet back where Alicia had hidden it.
‘They used a blunt instrument,’ said Riley. ‘Terry Mason estimated at least ten blows each. We can’t rule out any sexual violence, but her clothes were undisturbed.’
Mason appeared in the doorway of Alicia’s room
‘Terry,’ said Clay. ‘Talk me through what happened here.’
‘Someone, probably two of them, held Alicia down as another battered her to death.’
On her way out, Clay turned, looked at the pillow on the bed with its strange continent of blood.
There’s someone out there who would have loved you, she thought. Someone you’d have loved back and had a whole life with – joy, sorrow, a child or even children, a future, a life.
I’m sorry, Alicia. I’m so sorry. She hurried down the stairs and headed for the mortuary at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.
7
00.55 am
During the fog-bound drive from Aigburth to the outskirts of the city centre, DCI Eve Clay decided she would watch Kate Patel’s post-mortem. The gouging out of the eyes was unique to her and could provide an insight into the minds of the perpetrators.
As she drove towards the mortuary, she called Hendricks and told him to meet her at the front entrance.
The wind throbbed from the throat of Kensington, seeking ever deeper bass notes as Clay negotiated the glassy surface from the Royal’s multi-storey car park to the front entrance
of the mortuary. In the heart of a horrible night, she was glad to see Hendricks waiting for her at the front door and that, for a short time, she would not be alone.
With his long, black hair tucked behind his ears and the smile that was always present in his eyes, DS Hendricks looked like a TV gardener forced into a shirt and suit for some formal event he was obliged to attend. People – enemies, mostly – underestimated Hendricks and treated him like a dim-witted village idiot, unaware that he had a doctorate in forensic psychology. He was the most intelligent police officer she had ever met and that was the reason she wanted him at the post-mortem.
A security guard unlocked the door and, as they entered, addressed Clay.
‘You know the way to the Autopsy Suites?’
‘Thank you.’
As they walked up the stairs to the first floor, Clay glanced back, checked they were alone.
‘What do you think, Bill?’
‘It’s the biggest mass murder we’ve had in the UK for years. We’re going to be surrounded by media by tomorrow evening, from all over the world. Sunglasses on, bright lights in the face all round.’
Their footsteps echoed.
‘It’s all upside down and back to front, Bill.’
‘You’ve been at the centre of the scene. I haven’t. Why do you say that?’
‘It felt stagey, like a grotesque game. There were all kinds of confusing markers.’
‘Such as, Eve?’
‘They trashed the family, left the bodies linked in interconnecting shapes, daubed the walls in blood likewise.’
‘Hunch call.’ He fell silent for a few moments. ‘Did they have fun?’
‘They had the absolute time of their lives. And there’s something else as well...’ Clay’s iPhone vibrated and buzzed. An incoming message.
‘There’s a structure—’
They reached the first floor.
‘There’s a structure behind the chaos. I don’t know what it is, Bill.’ Three dead females flashed through her head, death branching out from death. ‘It’s beyond sinister.’
As they approached the Autopsy Suites, Hendricks said, ‘Do you need to deal with your phone?’
She glanced at the display.
The message had been from Thomas, from home. It would be the film of Philip sleeping in his bed. ‘Better not just now.’ Her heart sank.
At the door of Autopsy Suite One, Clay fell still when she heard the sound of a circular saw spinning into action. Her thoughts immediately turned from her son to the head injuries she’d seen. As the blade connected with bone, she knew the saw was working through a skull. Two to one odds it wasn’t an adult.
As she watched Hendricks walk into Autopsy Suite One, a faulty wall light blinked. Her attention was drawn to the progression of serrated steel through human bone, a voice from the past weaved through her memory.
‘When you look into shadows, you look into mirrors. When you look into mirrors, what do you see?’
8
1.10 am
Hendricks came out of Autopsy Suite One and said, ‘Post-mortems for the three children are happening in there. The adults are in Autopsy Two.’
The whizzing saw in Autopsy Suite One stopped.
‘I want you with me in Autopsy Suite Two.’
As they stepped into pants and smocks, in the small gowning room of Autopsy Suite Two, Clay saw Hendricks looking at her. There was a smile buried within his gaze.
‘I want you to witness Mrs Patel’s post-mortem,’ she said. ‘Do you know any of the details specific to her?’
‘Other than the fact that she was battered to death, no.’
Clay had instructed Stone, Riley, Marsh and the other Scientific Support officers to keep the information from Hendricks. ‘Good. Then I’ll get a really clear idea of your first impression.’
She knocked on the door of Autopsy Suite Two and called, ‘DCI Clay.’
‘Come in, Eve,’ replied the pathologist, Dr Mary Lamb. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
Clay entered the room, with its cold, chemical air and harsh overhead light, and was glad Mary Lamb was on duty. A small, slim woman on the verge of retirement, Dr Lamb appeared older than she was and this had been the case through all the years Clay had known her. From the back, even though she was dressed in the blue smock and trousers of the mortuary, there was something about her that reminded Clay of Sister Philomena. In the sombre dark of winter, the thought of the nun brought a fragment of warmth.
‘You asked on the phone if you could see the post-mortem on Mrs Patel?’
‘That’s correct.’ Clay’s footsteps were deadened by the flat acoustic of the room.
‘We’re just about to begin.’
Clay turned to the rattling of metal implements on an aluminium surface. Dr Lamb’s Anatomical Pathology Technician, Michael Harper – painfully shy, obese, baby-faced – wheeled the pathologist’s tools towards the table.
Clay recalled Kate Patel’s expensive designer nightdress and its bloody discolouration. ‘One of your Scientific Support officers helped us undress her,’ said Dr Lamb.
She looked around the room, saw the edge of Mrs Patel’s body and felt the urge to find a sheet to cover her dignity. ‘She took the lady’s nightdress away in evidence bags, as she did with the rest of Mrs Patel’s family.’
Clay looked at Mrs Patel’s face. Under the glare of the mortuary’s brash light, the absence of her eyes was freshly alarming. From the remains of her shattered skull, she looked down the length of her body and saw the massive swelling, the purple and black discolouration to the skin from internal bleeding.
‘Cause of death could have been cardiac arrest due to massive shock, but, looking at the condition of her head, it’s pretty certainly a brain injury.’
Michael picked up a pair of barber’s shears from the aluminium trolley and, lifting a handful of her blood-matted hair, cut close to the scalp.
‘Is she the only one they took the eyes from?’ asked Hendricks.
Clay looked at him. Hendricks was transfixed by Mrs Patel’s face, the gaping dark spaces where her eyes had once been.
‘Yes. Can you think of any precedents?’
‘There was a killer in the US, Charles Albright. His victims were all female. He took the women’s eyeballs away. I referenced him briefly in my doctorate. Leave it with me,’ said Hendricks.
Carefully, Michael placed her hair into a transparent plastic bag.
‘Tell me about any symbolism at the scene,’ said Hendricks.
‘The way the bodies were laid out. The finger-painted blood marks on the wall. They were strangely familiar, but I don’t know why.’
From the left side of Mrs Patel’s head, Michael cut another bloody clump of hair.
‘This could be the key,’ said Hendricks. ‘Put aside the poetic notion about eyes being windows to the soul...’
‘And replace it with... ?’
‘Where did she die, Eve?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘Order of deaths?’
‘I heard Alicia calling her mother on the 999 recording. I think either Alicia or her mother was the last to die.’
‘Did Alicia die upstairs?’
‘In her bedroom.’ The exchange with Hendricks gave Clay the sense that the fingers of her mind were hovering over a concealed truth. ‘When I first saw Mrs Patel, the question I wanted to ask her was, What didn’t they want you to see?’
Michael handed round large transparent goggles. Clay slipped them on, her own eyes domed behind plastic.
‘Pass me the circular saw, please, Michael,’ said Dr Lamb, tone neutral and polite, as if she was asking for the sugar bowl. ‘We’ll take the front of the skull away, the most damaged section.’
Michael drew a black line across Mrs Patel’s forehead and Dr Lamb turned the saw on.
‘The call to switch. What do we know about Alicia’s last moments, Eve?’
Clay turned her eyes away as Dr Lamb connected the spinning blade to the skull j
ust above Mrs Patel’s left ear. She looked closely at Hendricks’s face as he followed the procedure. She knew he wasn’t watching the action of the saw. He was focused on Mrs Patel’s face.
‘She called out for her mother, then the line went dead.’
Six hours ago, thought Clay, you were alive at home with your family, and everything was normal.
When the blood-flecked saw died, Clay watched Michael take it from Dr Lamb. A wider picture of what might have happened on the upstairs landing formed in Clay’s mind.
‘Remove the section of skull, please, Michael.’
Michael’s shoulders tensed and his elbows moved. He followed Dr Lamb’s instruction with slick professionalism.
‘What are you thinking, Bill?’
‘When the killers moved upstairs, I think they killed the mother first. But then, even though the mother was dead, they didn’t want her to see what they were going to do to her daughters. So they confiscated two body parts, her eyes. I think she represented some sort of authority to them. If they’re males, we’re looking for savages, but they’re also mummy’s boys.’
‘I believe,’ said Dr Lamb, ‘I can see the most probable cause of death. Record, please, Michael.’
Michael held a small dictaphone towards Dr Lamb’s mouth.
‘A splinter of skull bone, approximately nine centimetres long, judging from the wound to the upper skull, lodged in the brain. The blows to the skull from blunt, heavy objects, the wide flatness on the blows to the head... Yes, feet, human feet, consistent with wounds to the legs and torso. They kicked her body into a pulp and then finished her off by caving her head in. I’ve seen it all before. Saturday night usually. But never this extensive, never this brutal.’ She paused. ‘Turn the dictaphone off, please, Michael.’
‘This level of aggression,’ said Hendricks. ‘What does it suggest to you, Eve?’
As Clay processed the information, she felt the urge to pray to a God she believed didn’t exist. She wanted to pray that she was wrong. Instead, a parade of some of the low points in human history passed through her mind.
