by Mark Roberts
A sense of awe overwhelmed her. She was amongst the first people to walk into the forgotten tunnel for over a hundred years.
They stopped at the instruction of the biggest boy, the leader.
‘Look at that!’ He pointed his torch up. Eve and the others followed and she gasped at the tall arch above her head: Gothic, torchlit, beguiling.
‘It’s like a church!’ she had said. The bigger kids turned to her.
The leader spoke, smiled at her.
‘Eh, Eve, you’ve got a point there, kid!’
Sandy broke into a faster stride, throwing the hood of his duffle coat over his head, obscuring his face. She caught up, came back into the moment.
‘I’m sorry for you but you’re lucky, do you know that?’ he asked.
His vaporised breath danced on the air from the edge of his hood.
‘What do you mean I’m lucky?’
‘You’ve always been an orphan. I’ve just become one. You’ve never argued or fallen out with your parents. You’ve never had to be sorry for what you have or haven’t said or done.’
Or known their love and support, thought Clay.
‘What have you got to be sorry about?’ She asked the loaded question with a casual air. It took him half a minute to speak.
‘Have you tried to find them?’ he replied.
‘The killers?’
‘Your parents.’
‘Yes I have, Sandy. Very much so.’
‘And?’
‘And I’ve had absolutely no luck whatsoever.’
‘Who brought you up?’ From a twist in his voice, the question he asked seemed to cause him a sharp and unexpected pain. It was a pain she understood and one that cast her into silence. ‘I’m sorry. That was a very personal question.’
‘It’s all right.’ She clung on to the raft that he’d pushed to her, pulled him from the cold waters of his grief. ‘You can ask me anything. I’ll tell you the truth. Because I believe you’ll tell me the truth about yourself. About your family. Do me a favour, lad?’
‘What?’
‘Hood down, it’s better if we can see each other’s faces, right?’
After a few moments, he pulled his hood down, his face red with cold and wet with tears.
‘If I can ask you anything, I want to ask the same question,’ said Sandy. ‘Who did bring you up?’
‘For the first six years, a lovely and remarkable old lady called Sister Philomena, a nun. She died and that was awful. That was my first encounter with grief.’ There was a permanent hole in her heart that always widened at the memory of her passing. For a moment, Clay wished she had a hood she could throw up to disguise her face and shield her emotions. My lovely Philomena, she thought, gone home to her God, the one I could never believe in after her passing.
‘So, Sandy, yeah, from the age of six to eighteen, it was Catholic Social Services.’
‘I’m sorry. Jesus? I mean, all those perverts, priests and the like.’
‘I was one of the lucky ones. No one harmed me like that. By and large, they were OK, the people who passed in and out of my life. They were just poor people doing what they could to put food on the table for their families.’
He was no longer crying.
‘Still?’ he said.
‘They fuck you up your mum and dad...’
He looked at her, shocked. ‘What?’
‘It’s a line of poetry and it’s not true for everyone. I’m speaking from personal experience – or the lack of it.’
‘Didn’t the people who took care of you keep records? About your parents, like?’
‘Yes. I have a very clear memory of seeing my file when I transferred from the convent into the children’s home. It was a big, fat card file stuffed with papers.’
‘How come you haven’t been able to track them down then?’
‘This was the 1980s. Computers were coming in but they were huge things back then, crude and rather unreliable. I’ve been told that my records were transferred onto computer but the hard drive crashed.’
‘What about the paper files?’
‘Electrical fire in the basement of the children’s home, where all the records were kept.’
‘That sounds like... Do you think that’s true?’
‘To be honest, I think there’s something not right. I know there was a fire and I know computers back then weren’t great. But I don’t completely believe it. I try not to be too paranoid about it. There was a lot wrong with the system and I’m not the only person whose records have gone missing.’
‘How bad does that make you feel?’
He looked at her and, despite the hell he was in, she could see the light of empathy in his eyes. He turned left sharply and headed to the Linda McCartney Children’s Playground. Clay couldn’t have wished for a better place to move the interview forwards.
‘How bad are you feeling?’ She turned it round.
She saw his face beginning to collapse and tried to counter it with energy and focus. ‘I want to catch the bastards who did this to your family. Who did this to you. And I need to do it fast so it doesn’t happen to another family.’
He closed his eyes.
‘You ready to answer a few questions?’
Clay placed a hand on the centre of his spine and guided him towards the swings. He drew in a breath and began weeping as she cleared the snow from the seat of the swing and said, ‘Sit down, Sandy.’
He sat down and gripped the swing’s chains.
‘Talk to me, Sandy.’ She spoke into his ear.
The trees loomed like silhouettes of giants in the milky fog. A lone figure materialised between the trees, the crude shape of a person, gender, age and size unrecognisable. The person moved between the trees, had the freakish look of a black matchstick figure, minus a layer of humanity. As quickly as it had appeared, it disappeared back between the trees.
Although Sandy was lost in the moment of acute grief, Clay didn’t have a second to lose. As he pushed himself on the swings, she glanced at her watch and felt the weight of time and space in the span of her wrist.
‘Give me... two... minutes...’ Push.
‘Sure.’ Although it was a hundred and twenty seconds she didn’t have to spare.
Push.
She counted the seconds down silently.
Push. Push.
Push.
22
8.35 am
Professor Andrew Bailey pressed the laptop headphones withthe tips of his index fingers, closed his eyes, focused and winced.Then he opened his eyes again and glanced at DS Stone.
Stone saw regret in the young professor’s face, but that didn’t deter him. ‘I’m very grateful to you for getting back to me as soon as you did and for agreeing to drop everything to see me. Are you ready to listen again, Professor Bailey?’
It was to be Bailey’s third time listening to the 999 call from Alicia Patel. By nature calm and polite, he’d been ruffled the first time he heard it, in spite of Stone’s warning to expect something deeply disturbing. ‘Jesus wept,’ he’d exclaimed, his handsome, James Stewart looks creasing in distress.
On the second run-through, he’d sat with the blood draining from his face, his head shaking like the toy dog that had used to nod away in the back window of Stone’s mother’s car.
DS Stone stood at an angle to him, so that he could register the linguist’s reaction to the recording without appearing in Bailey’s line of vision.
‘I’m ready,’ Bailey replied.
‘Before you listen again, I want you to try and disregard all your natural reactions to this horror and home in on those...’ He caught himself before blurting out the word kids. ‘...voices.’
Stone thought he saw Professor Bailey’s hand trembling as he rolled the cursor onto play. He shut his eyes tight, listening hard to the mayhem in his ears once again.
Stone drifted across to the window of Professor Bailey’s fourth-floor office and looked down at the snow spiralling against the rectangul
ar pillars of the tenement-grey 1960s Cypress Building. A strange homage to Soviet architecture, Stone thought, amongst the sprawling Victorian splendour of the University of Liverpool’s power base.
He turned, hearing the gentle sound of headphones being placed down on the desk.
‘I can hear tiny discrete units of sound – what we in linguistics call phones,’ the professor explained, ‘but they’re not strung together in the form of any global language that I can recognise.’
‘How many spoken languages can you recognise?’ asked Stone.
‘Three hundred and thirty, thereabouts.’
‘And how many languages are spoken around the world?’
‘Roughly six and a half thousand.’
Stone felt as if the floor beneath him had vanished. He laughed briefly and unhappily. ‘Professor Bailey, give me some good news.’
‘Well, yes, there is good news. With the phones and the clicking, I’m thinking it’s a hybrid of spoken language and some coded system of punctuation, a form of Morse code, which makes me think it’s a synthetic language.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Organic languages are based on recognisable sounds strung together in a commonly recognisable order. While there are some recognisable sounds in that recording, what these people are articulating is non-recognisable. There’s also a rhythm, but it’s uneven. Does it harmonise with the natural ebbs and flows of human physiology? I’d have to listen to an extended example. This is too brief. But I suggest that the only people in the world who know this language are the ones using it – I hesitate to say speaking it – plus whoever might have taught them it or developed it with them.’
Stone took a deep breath. He needed to get back to Trinity Road police station, but he never liked leaving sensitive evidence with an expert. He wasn’t just relying on their expertise, he was relying on their ability to keep information tight. And Stone just didn’t trust human nature. ‘You’re the only person to hear what’s on this recording. Keep the pen drives on your person at all times until you hand them back to me.’
‘OK, Detective Sergeant Stone!’ Professor Bailey held his hands up in ironic surrender. ‘I won’t breathe a word to anyone and I heard what you said when you came through the door. It’s a matter of life and death. Let me put your mind at rest. Two copies of the same recording.’ He held up the two drives, placed one in the inner pocket of his jacket and, brandishing the other one, said, ‘This one I’m going to clean up personally, out of earshot of anyone at all. I can get rid of all kinds of surface noise and pinpoint and highlight the voices of the assailants. I’ll do it quickly, I promise.’
‘I’d appreciate that, Professor Bailey.’
‘I had Radio City on in the car this morning. It’s that family in Aigburth, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Stone. ‘When can you feed back to me?’
‘Later today. I’ll call you.’
As Stone hurried down the echoing concrete staircase, his mind drifted back to the seven o’clock meeting and what Eve Clay had said about the killers wanting her to hear them. If it was a secret language, how could she understand it?
How could anyone understand the darkness that lurked within such broken language, other than the broken souls that it seemed had invented and used it?
23
8.40 am
In the Linda McCartney Children’s Playground, Clay sat on the swing next to Sandy. They were both still.
‘Ready now?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘I know this is hard for you, but I need you to talk to me, Sandy. You know that most murder victims are killed by people they knew?’
‘No one we know is capable of this. They didn’t have any enemies. None of the people we know are violent.’
Even though the snow was slackening off, the cold pinched and twisted Clay’s ears, nose and cheeks.
‘Tell me about the families you know. Start with the ones in Liverpool, the ones with kids.’
He blinked and wiped a snowflake from his left eye, his feet shifting from side to side like windscreen wipers.
‘Mum and Dad are friends with other couples with kids, yeah.’
‘Have they fallen out with any of them?’ asked Clay.
Sandy took a packet of cigarettes and a red disposable lighter from his pocket. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and offered the packet to Clay. ‘They don’t know I smoke.’
Clay, a lifelong non-smoker, took a cigarette and balanced it between her lips. He flared up her cigarette. She blew out a thin stream of smoke without inhaling, her taste buds bitter and stinging.
‘They’ve drifted apart from a few couples, but that’s just life. There’s been no blazing rows over money or whatever.’
‘Your mum and dad have four children. Any of their friends have three children?’
Sandy considered the question carefully, holding on to a huge lungful of smoke.
‘Why?’ he finally answered.
‘We’re following a lead, leftfield: three perpetrators, siblings maybe, maybe not. That’s why I’m asking about families with three children.’
A look crossed his face, as if she’d said, The prime suspects are aliens.
‘Have you got Mum’s handbag?’
‘Yes.’ Along with her body and the bodies of your sisters, grandmother and father, she thought. Her heart went out to the young man beside her.
‘Couples with three kids?’ she urged softly.
‘I seem to remember some, but I couldn’t even name them. They’ll be in the address book that Mum keeps in her handbag. Work your way through that.’
‘Does your mum have a job?’
‘She’s a housewife.’
‘Dad?’
‘He’s got his own company. Chemical research. Boring scientific stuff.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Patel Chemical Solutions. It’s over the Runcorn Bridge in Widnes,’ he added.
‘Boring scientific stuff?’
‘He loves anything to do with science. He’s obsessed. Correction. Loved anything to do with science. Was obsessed.’
‘You’re not such a big fan?’
Sandy turned his head away from Clay and said something brief and quiet. She squeezed his shoulder and his eyes turned towards her.
‘Say that again,’ said Clay.
‘I disappointed him.’
‘In what way?’
‘When I was a little kid in primary school, he used to take me to his laboratory and it was, One day, son, all this will be yours. I used to try really hard in school to do well at science. But the older I got, the more the game changed. Big equations. In-depth concepts zigzagging over each other. I just couldn’t hack it. He took it as a personal insult, like I was doing it on purpose to put a wall between us. Fortunately, Alicia was the opposite to me. Chemistry, Physics and Biology were a doddle for her. So he turned his attention away from me and poured it onto Alicia.’
Over a hundred metres away, on Menlove Avenue, cars rumbled along as if in slow motion, their engines droning through the still air.
Clay tried to inject some warmth into the conversation. ‘I bring my little boy here when I’m not working,’ she said.
‘Dad used to bring me here when I was little.’
‘I can tell you something, Sandy, about that period in your father’s life. However happy your memories of those times in the park, they’re nothing to the joy they would have brought your dad. Forget what flowed under the bridge after that. You gave him something that nothing and no one can take away. Just like my boy’s given me. One day you’ll know what I mean, when you bring your child to the park.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Sandy looked at her through the haze of his grief.
‘Your dad must have been proud of you getting into Durham University?’
He shook his head and uttered a flat, resigned, ‘No. Said I was doing a dead-end course.’
‘Wh
at are you studying?’
‘Theology.’
The carefully arranged bodies of Sandy’s family came to her mind, and the bloody graffiti on the walls.
‘Theology?’ she said. ‘The opposite of science?’
‘Yes and no,’ said Sandy, rocking gently on the swing. ‘We know so many things, but ultimately we know nothing. As in yesterday I had a family, today I’m all alone.’
‘Do you think your faith will help you?’
He had smoked the cigarette down to the butt. He flicked it through the snowflakes and looked at Clay, perplexed.
‘What faith? I was good at religious education in school. That and English literature and history. I study theology because I’m good at it. I’m a total atheist.’
‘Does that make you stand out in your classes?’
‘Well, there’s a heavy percentage of God-botherers, wannabe vicars and the like. Then there’s a number of students on the fence and a few atheists like me.’ He stood up. ‘I’d like to walk now.’
Clay dropped her cigarette outside the railings and closed the gate on the metal fence surrounding the play area. She followed Sandy onto the grass leading to the lake, the snow halfway up her shins as she trudged through it.
‘Your family weren’t churchgoers then?’
‘No. We used to be, but we just suddenly stopped when I was about twelve. Mum was the keen one. Dad used to go to make the numbers up.’
‘What church was it?’
‘It wasn’t a church church – you know, big building with pews and an altar. It was just like people in a meeting room, praying and singing about Jesus.
‘Why did your parents stop going to church?’
‘They never really explained it to me. Alicia was eight and Jane was a baby. Alicia was a bit of a handful, messing around when she should’ve been connecting with the Lord Almighty. Mum used to get stressed when she kicked off. I reckon she thought we’d just have a few weeks off, but Mum never took us back again.’ Something approaching a smile surfaced on his face. ‘I joined a Sunday League team, playing on Camp Hill. Dad said to me, Football is the new God and Camp Hill is where we shall worship.’
