by Mark Roberts
‘What’s the nature of your emergency?’
‘They’ve killed my dad, my grandma...’ Alicia struggled with the simple task of opening her bedroom door. ‘...my little sister...’ Her door opened. ‘Mum, get in with me!’
‘Lock yourself in now, Alicia.’
Alicia’s door slammed shut.
‘I’ve locked my door, I’ve locked my bedroom door.’
The kicking and banging on Alicia’s door began. Fierce, enraged hands and feet, and with that their voices started up.
‘How many of your family at home?’
‘Six!’ she sobbed.
Clay blocked out Alicia, the operator and the door being broken down, and focused on the attackers, on their noise.
In the deep growling that underpinned the sounds they made, Clay heard a series of clicks, almost like the sound of a heart beating from the wetness of their mouths, and between the clicking beats something phonically plausible made with a thin whistle of air.
She paused the recording, felt something shift in the darkness before her and imagined it was a picture of her mind spiralling into the depths of whatever strange speech this was.
‘Ka...’ The clicking tongues. ‘...Ri...’ Click clicking. ‘...Sa...’ There was a feral joy in the voices that sent a wave of cold nausea through Clay.
She noted the sounds in her notebook and underneath wrote: Linguistics Dept University of Liverpool.
Play. There was more than one voice making the sounds.
‘A...’
Then there was a sound that was buried beneath the door giving way and Alicia screaming, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’
Clay rewound, stopped, mined the darkness of the incident room and felt as if her whole being was getting sucked into the lengthening shadows around her.
‘When you look into shadows, you look into mirrors.’
Another voice from another time invaded her head. She wrapped her mind around that intrusion, smothered the words and suffocated the memory of that speech.
When she pressed play again, she dipped under the noise of the door coming down and Alicia’s pitiful cries for her mother and tried to interpret the last syllable.
‘...den.’ It was almost an out-breath, a satisfied reflex, a release from some inner tension.
As Alicia howled, the recording seemed to slow right down, emphasising the torment in the teenager’s voice as she stared certain violent death in the face.
Then the silence as the connection died.
Clay called police central operations and within two rings the operator picked up.
‘DCI Eve Clay. I need two more copies of the call from the Patel house on two separate pen drives.’
‘Where are you, DCI Clay?’
‘Trinity Road police station. I’d be grateful for those pen drives.’
‘They’re on their way as soon as.’
‘Thank you.’
Clay shut down the call and turned off the desk light.
In the darkness, she picked up her mug of coffee and sipped. It had gone completely cold. On the desk, she rested her head on her arms. Her team would be arriving in half an hour. She closed her eyes.
The building was silent, but Clay’s head was full of the voices from the recording. They latched on to the deepest places in her mind, where her blackest memories were housed like dangerous beasts in cages of darkness and silence.
On the desk, she looked at a framed picture of herself and Thomas, with Philip, newborn and sleeping, in her arms. In the photograph, she was looking at Philip and Thomas was looking at her. The glue that bonded them was unconditional love and Clay mouthed the words that the picture always inspired in her.
‘Hope. Absolute hope.’
The voices fell silent. And it felt like years since she had last slept.
Within moments, she was in the dark and dreaming of the distant past.
17
6.25 am
As she walked out of the St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children, Eve stared down at her feet, her sandals red and scuffed. The sound that called her was coming from beneath the ground. It wasn’t a voice, more the sound of stones being shifted and the rumbling of moving wheels.
She looked towards the River Mersey. As the sun sank into the water, she saw that the sky was alive with a golden light, swamped by overpowering bands of pink and red.
She glanced back at the home. No one had seen her leave. No one was there to stop her.
Down Smithdown Lane, past the steel-mesh fence that was supposed to keep children from entering. She reached the two huge brick arches, side by side in the sandstone wall; dark, gaping entrances to the tunnels that ran all the way under Edge Hill.
NO TRESPASSING!
DANGER!
Closing her eyes, she saw the flickering light of a candle and heard the steady drip of an underground cave. Then there was a second candle, and another and another, and she saw men stripped to the waist, carving out the underground sandstone.
Clouds of red dust rose into the air, sandstone particles billowing into the sky above.
The picture in her mind and the sound that had drawn her connected.
‘Come along, Eve.’
Sister Philomena was behind her. She opened her eyes and, as she tried to turn, felt the weight of Philomena’s loving hands on her shoulders.
‘Keep walking, little cherub, and don’t look back.’
‘Why did Mr Williamson build all those tunnels under the ground?’ asked Eve.
‘Nobody knows for sure, Eve, but one day, when you are much older, I believe you will find out. He was a rich man and he paid soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars to build the tunnels...’
The weight lifted from her shoulders, Philomena disappeared, and Eve continued walking forwards, to a row of three derelict terraced houses.
DO NOT ENTER
STRUCTURE UNSAFE
They were boarded up, but the board on the window of the house in the middle had been ripped away, no doubt by the older kids in her house and their friends in the neighbourhood.
She looked over at the towering Bear’s Paw pub, close by. There was no one coming in or out of the pub, not a soul hanging around. There was no one now except her and the sound of the subterranean men digging deeper and deeper.
Eve lifted herself up, holding onto the brick where the window frame had once sat. She knelt on the stone ledge and looked into the patch of blackness where the noise was at its loudest.
‘Hello!’ she called, and her voice came back as an echo.
She eased herself down and felt the floorboards rise and fall beneath her feet as she moved deeper into the gloomy room. Looking up, she saw that a huge section of the ceiling was missing. The slate roof was full of holes and the blood-red light of the dying day filtered through.
Below her, wheels moved as barrows of sandstone were shifted by the men.
And above her, streams of ruby light picked out the rubble that had collapsed into the centre and sides of the room.
She stepped over a chunk of fallen plaster and saw a square of wood set into the lines of the floorboards. Digging her fingers into its sides, she lifted the hatch and propped it against the damp wall of the derelict room.
The noise of the men working underground swelled as the light of their candles shifted and grew. The yellow from the centre of the earth shimmered against the crimson of the sinking sun and set her on fire as she stared into the entrance of the tunnel beneath her.
‘Hello...ooo...oo...o...’
In a moment, the noise of the men underground stopped and the light above and beneath her died. She looked into the darkness and heard a sound like a man whispering her name, wanting her to step down into the hole in the floor and meet with him.
She felt a sudden coldness touching the nape of her neck. She screamed and turned. But there was only darkness and the sound of her terror echoing in the tunnels beneath her.
18
6.29 am
Clay woke from her dream with a jolt. It was always the same dream, and it always left her scared to the core of her being.
‘Are you OK, Eve?’ She was shocked but pleased to hear Hendricks’s voice. His desk light came on and he sat looking in her direction.
‘Bad dream,’ she said. ‘Was I talking in my sleep?’
‘You sobbed a little. You were putting your head down as I was coming in. You’ve only been asleep for a few minutes.’
‘The children’s home I grew up in,’ she began. ‘It was in Edge Hill. We had a fantastic playground in those days, before health and safety became God Almighty.’
‘The tunnels?’ asked Hendricks. ‘Your carers let you play in Williamson Tunnels?’
‘They were busy playing cards, you nitwit. I took Thomas for a guided tour of the Williamson Heritage Society’s Smithdown Lane Tunnel. It’s all hard hats, health and safety now.’
She focused on Hendricks’s smiling face, saw him glance down at a piece of paper and knew he had something significant to tell her.
He stood up and walked towards her with a mug of coffee. ‘I made this for you while you slept.’
She took the drink. ‘You’ve got that Jeez, have I got news for you look in your eyes, Hendricks. You’re not pregnant again?’
‘The autopsy on Mrs Patel’s thrown up a potential shocker.’ The smile on his face dissolved; his eyes deeply sad.
He handed her the paper. It was a photograph of Mrs Patel’s abdomen, and underneath this image was a smaller picture focused on the pubic bone.
‘Let me tell you about the measurements on this,’ said Hendricks, ‘and then you tell me if we’re ready to share it with the whole team in fifteen minutes or so.’
The door opened and Clay looked up. Stone walked into the incident room and showed her the pen drive.
‘CCTV,’ he said.
‘What’s the word?’ she asked.
‘Weird. Someone or something out there’s ganging up on us. And I don’t bloody well like it one little bit.’
19
6.58 am
The incident room of Trinity Road police station was full but silent, all eyes on Stone as he inserted his pen drive into the laptop.
Clay thought about the picture Hendricks had brought back from Kate Patel’s post-mortem. Mrs Patel, laid out on Dr Lamb’s table, her abdomen and pubic bone covered in bruises. The memory of the killers’ voices as they broke down Alicia’s door floated through the numb quiet and slipped inside her ears, chasing a never-ending loop deep within her brain.
For a moment the room, everyone and everything in it, dissolved as a switch tripped and a series of moving pictures consumed her imagination.
She was inside the Patels’ house, the kitchen lights on against the dark and the heating turned up against the bitter cold outside; the walls of the staircase were still unbloodied as Alicia Patel walked out of the kitchen to answer the ringing at the door. Mr Patel appeared at the head of the stairs, raised from his bed by the late-night caller.
‘Who is it, Alicia?’ Mrs Patel next to her husband now, yawning as her husband marched down the stairs.
‘How do I know?’ laughed Alicia, pointing at the solid wooden door.
‘This had better be good.’ The father’s voice behind the teenager as she reached the front door.
‘Who is it?’ The grandmother looked over the banister at the top of the stairs.
The bell rang again, this time longer, insistent: you must come to the door, must open the door, you must let us in...
‘It could be a matter of life and death!’ said Alicia, taking off the chain and unlocking the dead bolts as her sister’s feet landed on the bedroom floor upstairs and the little girl walked across the room above her head.
She opened the door and...
‘Eve!’ Gina Riley’s voice snapped her back into the present reality. ‘They’re all waiting for you.’
Clay looked across the room and most people were turned in her direction, waiting for her to lead them deeper into the events at the Patels’ house.
She picked out Stone, standing at the laptop hooked up to the Smart Board, and Hendricks, writing in a spiral-bound notebook.
Looking around at their expectant faces, Clay said, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done on a long and difficult night, and for getting here through shitty weather conditions at this horribly early hour. That’s the good news done with...’ She pointed at DS Stone. ‘The first piece of really bad news relates to the CCTV from the Patels’ house. Karl?’
‘I’ve got together two pieces of f-footage,’ said Stone with the bitterness of someone cheated of his birthright in broad daylight.
Clay picked up the stumble in his speech, recognising the telltale stammer of Stone’s childhood, which reappeared whenever he was tired and stressed. ‘I’ve already seen this,’ she said quickly, ‘so are you OK if I talk the troops through it?’ She looked at Stone. ‘If you’ll play and pause, Karl...’
‘Sure.’ He shrugged blithely, but she saw relief flash through his eyes.
The screen came alive with a picture of the entrance to the Patels’ house and a swathe of snow-capped garden.
‘This was yesterday afternoon,’ explained Clay. ‘It’s a random selection from hours of footage that shows you what should happen when someone approaches the house. It was around three, a couple of hours after the storm had shifted out to the Irish Sea. You see three figures approaching... It’s three of our victims, the girls. You see the two little ones, Jane and Freya, trailing after their big sister Alicia, who’s carrying a plastic sledge.’
As the girls came closer and closer to the camera above their front door, the atmosphere in the room became dense with tension and a silence loaded with unspoken advice. Turn around, go away, your home will soon no longer be safe...
‘Pause,’ Clay said. The best close-up of the girls showed Alicia struggling against the cold to turn her key in the lock, the little ones behind her laughing and exhilarated.
‘I’m guessing they’d been down to Otterspool Promenade to play on the sledge. Play.’
The girls entered the house for the last time, and the middle sequence began.
Night. The darkness in the garden and at the front of the house was hemmed in by the glow of the streetlights on the pavement beyond the gate. A security light tripped by a stray cat padding past the front door.
‘Check the time in the corner. 11.33. We know from Alicia’s 999 for help that the killers were in the house at 11.45, by which point they were in the second phase of their massacre. This must’ve been a minute or two before they got there.’
And I got there, thought Clay, about a minute after they escaped.
In bald white security light, the garden looked like a scene from a snow dome. And then there was nothing. The screen went suddenly black.
‘Off goes the CCTV and doesn’t come on again,’ said Stone, removing his pen drive.
‘Karl’s sent the CCTV equipment away for forensic examination, but at this point I can only conclude that the system was working perfectly well up to the minute that the killers arrived, and then it turned itself off.’
She glanced around at the faces of the extended team. Riley and Hendricks looked tired but calm. The others looked quizzical and confused.
‘Gina Riley’s going to tell you what happened with Scientific Support.’
Riley stepped forward. ‘This is a first-impression narrative based on me tailing Terry Mason at the scene. The killers – there were at least three – didn’t break into the house. If they were strangers, they probably tricked their way in. Or they were known to at least one member of the family and the Patels felt safe opening the door to them at that late hour. Going by the condition of the pillows and duvets and the fact that the only person not in night clothes was Alicia, the younger children, grandmother and parents must have been in bed. With the exception of Freya, they all came down. They must’ve gone into the kitchen and that was when the slaughter started.
The perpetrators smashed the father, grandmother and middle daughter to death in the kitchen. Several blows each to the head. The eldest daughter, Alicia, managed to get upstairs. Alicia, her mother and the youngest child were killed on the first floor. The killers were lightning quick.’
‘Thanks, Gina.’ Clay turned to the team. ‘I think I can add something to that. I’ve listened over and over to the whole recording of Alicia’s call. Mrs Patel died trying to defend her daughters. She didn’t even try to get to the potential safety of Alicia’s room because she was in her youngest daughter’s doorway trying to bar the way. When Alicia and her mother escaped from the kitchen, they could both have run straight down the hall and out of the front door, but they didn’t. They turned left and went upstairs to where the baby was. Any questions so far?’
‘Those schoolbooks and paintings on Hendricks’s desk – what’s that all about, Eve?’ DC Christopher Dillon, who looked like he was made of truck tyres but could actually outrun anyone in the room, pointed at the box from St Bernard’s.
‘Chris, I’ll come back to that,’ said Clay. ‘It’s a big lead. Hendricks and Stone will be spending time following that up.’
Hendricks stepped forward and called up the slideshow he’d loaded onto the laptop.
‘I’m going to pause it in a few frames,’ said Hendricks.
The images of Kate Patel’s battered body lingered on the screen for a few seconds as the slideshow played out. Clay watched the room as Hendricks paused on a close shot of Mrs Patel’s face, the dark hollows of her eye sockets causing a few reflexive intakes of breath.
‘I’ll move on,’ said Hendricks.
An overview of her whole body, a body that looked like it had been dragged across a mountain by wild beasts. Every bit of her was injured. Her torso was black and her arms lay on the table at odd angles, the bones broken in several places.
‘Dr Lamb counted ninety-eight wounds on Mrs Patel’s body.’
Her legs from the hips down were swollen and purple.
‘They attacked her in the kitchen,’ said Clay. ‘Before or after they’d murdered her husband, mother-in-law and daughter Jane. They did it in front of Alicia, and then they let mother and daughter out of the kitchen. They wanted an endgame, a chase.’ A dial turned inside her head and everything suddenly became clear. ‘They were in control of everything that happened in that house. They wanted Alicia to put that call in. They wanted me to hear them in action.’
