by Mark Roberts
As they reached the railings around the lake, Sandy wrapped his arms tightly across himself.
‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Not a single duck or goose on the bank. They’re all huddled together on the island in the middle. Who says creatures are dumb?’
He rubbed his eyes and face. ‘I used to come and feed them with Dad. Especially on days like this.’
‘I used to feed the birds with Philomena. In Abercrombie Gardens, near St Claire’s, where I lived until I was six. Sandy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who was the leader of the church?’
‘Some woman. Can’t remember her name or what she looked like. Have you got many more questions for me?’
Clay knew she was walking into a dead-end. She shook her head.
‘Good. Because I really don’t feel like talking anymore. I need some time and space.’
He took out his packet of cigarettes, held it out to Clay and said, ‘I’m giving up.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Clay. ‘But is this a good time?’
‘There’s never a good time. Keep them for me in case I change my mind. I assume you’ll want to talk to me again.’
She took the packet of cigarettes. ‘I will do.’ When your head isn’t as scrambled.
Sandy stared at the island, a ghostly palace in the white air, unseen birds beating their wings against the cold.
She turned and walked away but stopped at the sound of his voice.
‘Just for the record, Sandy’s kind of a family pet name. When I was small, I had a speech impediment. My name’s Andrew. Andy. I couldn’t say it. I used to say Sandy. Mum took me to the speech therapist at the old Alder Hey, but it was Dad who did hours and hours of work with me to get me over it. What a way to pay him back. I should have tried harder in school. I’m sorry I was a disappointment to him. Really, really sorry...’
Clay stifled the urge to comfort him, knowing that words couldn’t help.
Instead, she trudged through the snow. Although it dragged at her feet, she soon found she was jogging. She glanced at her watch and started to run as fast as she could. She was in desperate need of two things. She wanted to start ploughing through Kate Patel’s address book, but, even more, she wanted to hold her son in her arms for a few precious minutes before she had to report in for the ten o’clock meeting.
24
9.20 am
On her way home to Mersey Road, Clay turned slowly onto Aigburth Road. She glanced back. On the other side of the dual carriageway there was a growing camp of news organisations at the sealed-off mouth of The Serpentine. Vehicles marked BBC, ITN and Sky were parked up and the pavement was blocked with reporters talking to cameras under the misty glow of the streetlights.
At the lights on the junction of Aigburth and Riversdale roads, the driver of a BMW did a U-turn. The passenger was carrying a boom microphone and the turning car had a Republic of Ireland licence plate. Bill Hendricks’s prediction was already coming true. The world’s media was descending fast.
Less than a minute later, Clay pulled up at the top of Mersey Road. The proximity of the crime to her home hit her hard. A fresh wave of anxiety passed through her.
What if? filled her head. What if? in the beat of her heavy heart. What if? What if? What if? She looked back over her shoulder. What if it had been us, not them? She tied a mental fist inside her head and hammered the bizarre idea as if it was an overfed pest. What if this is some personal and deeply buried nightmare playing out on the cold perimeters of reality?
She stayed where she was, knew she had to completely squash the feeling inside her before she could turn the corner and make a lightning visit home.
‘You can’t take this across the threshold of your home.’
A voice seemed to come from the back seat of her car. She turned, but there was no one there and she knew the voice was inside her head. It spoke to her with a comforting lilt, as if she was still a little girl, and it was from her childhood that the voice came.
‘Go and see your husband and son. You will see very little of them for who knows how long, Eve. Be a good wife and mother.’
Sister Philomena’s voice faded, as did the gnawing uncertainty that had built up inside her as she’d driven through the suburbs into Aigburth.
She parked outside the large red-brick terrace house that was home and thought ahead to meeting again with Sandy Patel. The clock on her dashboard read 9.22. She would have to leave by 9.40 for the ten o’clock meeting.
At the bottom of her road, a murky light was filtering into the sky above the River Mersey.
She opened the front door. Philip was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. Closing the door behind herself quickly, to block out the world beyond, she sank to her knees as her son bounced towards her with outstretched arms.
‘Cold,’ said Philip as she wrapped her arms around him. ‘Mummy’s cold.’
Relief ran through her and, though she knew it was only temporary, a weight lifted from her as she drank in the familiar scent of her son’s hair and skin. She looked at him, his body growing, his features changing, and kissed him on the forehead.
Thomas’s footsteps came towards her from the kitchen.
‘Eve?’ he called. Her throat was gridlocked and she couldn’t reply. ‘Eve?’ She heard him moving faster, then he came into view above the curve of Philip’s head.
His expression became more and more troubled as he crossed the hall. He dropped down and looked into her eyes, holding the sides of her face in his warm hands.
‘Eve, what’s the matter, love?’
He folded his arms around her and Philip was locked within the walls of his parents’ embrace.
She drew in a deep breath to stem a storm of tears.
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ she said. ‘Safe and...’ Alive. ‘...sound.’
25
9.27 am
Eve faced Thomas across the kitchen table. Her husband was almost but not quite stand-out handsome and, each time she looked at him, she was always drawn to his sky-blue eyes. He placed a plate of toast and a mug of tea in front of her. She gripped his hand, tilted her head up and kissed him on the cheek.
‘I’ve taken a few days off from the surgery,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ve got a locum covering my list.’
‘That’s music to my ears,’ she replied. ‘So you’ll be with Philip all the time...’
‘One of the advantages of being in charge! I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘You bet I am, doc!’
She rose, drifted past him to the double-glazed French window and checked the handle. It was locked.
‘Can’t you pass the case on to someone else?’ asked Thomas.
‘There is no one else,’ she replied, looking into the tight space of their walled garden.
‘What do you mean?’ He was behind her, looking with her at the white-capped rose bushes and small lawn thick with frozen snow. The wind rolled against the cold brickwork, sounding like a ghost trapped in a bottle.
‘Everything and everyone is stretched to the limit. The spending cutbacks have seen to that. Chance stuck me at the scene first – I was there in the Golden Hour, I’ve already begun this investigation and I can’t turn my back on it. Stone liaised with the duty superintendent and the super’s ordered me to shelve anything else and lead the case. I’ve instructed my team. I want to catch them. I need to put them away before they do this to another family.’ She pointed through the glass. ‘What’s that?’
At the bottom of the garden, near the wooden gate that led to an alleyway between Mersey Road and the backs of the terraced houses on Horringford Road, it looked like a black bin bag was being played with by the cold wind.
The bag turned and it wasn’t a bag at all. It was the largest, sleekest crow and something fibrous was hanging from its beak. It stepped forward a few paces through the snow, its eyes fixed on the French window. Then it turned and dug its beak into the snow, pulling at what lay beneath. Clay felt the vibrat
ion of an incoming call on her iPhone.
She banged on the glass, but the crow remained, feeding on the body beneath the snow.
‘Is the back door locked?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ She felt the weight of Thomas’s hands on her shoulders, his fingers rubbing the iron-tight muscles, reassuring her. ‘It’s only a bird. It’ll go away in a minute.’
‘It’s feeding,’ said Clay.
It resumed stabbing the snow with its beak.
She took out her iPhone and pressed accept. But she couldn’t turn away from the window.
‘Is that DCI Eve Clay?’
She checked the display. It was a mobile number she didn’t recognise.
‘Who is this?’ she asked.
‘My name’s Carolina Hill.’
The crow turned and looked directly at her, its black eyes catching the weak morning light, its yellow beak red from its meal. ‘I’m a social worker...’ The crow rose, landed on the back wall of the garden and fixed her with one beady eyeball. ‘...at Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital in Maghull.’
Immediately and with complete certainty, Clay knew what the call was about.
‘How did you get my mobile number?’
‘I rang your office and a DS Hendricks gave me your number when I told him why I was calling.’
She heard Philip singing as he came into the room. The crow stayed motionless on the wall.
‘Go ahead, Carolina. What’s up?’
Thomas pressed his weight into her and she felt Philip’s hands around her legs.
‘I’ve had a request from one of our patients. He wants to see you.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Adrian White.’
The crow rose from the wall and flapped out of her range of vision.
‘DCI Clay, are you still there?’
‘Yes.’ The Baptist. The arrest that had put her face on tabloid papers worldwide. The arrest that almost killed her.
‘Why does he want to see me now?’ she asked. But she knew what was going to follow.
26
9.32 am
‘It’s a really unique request from Adrian.’ There was something in the way the social worker said Adrian that made Clay want to reach a hand through time and space and punch her face. ‘Adrian hasn’t had a visitor in his seven years at Ashworth. He’s had thousands of requests, people wanting to visit him, but he’s turned them all down flat – not that we’d have sanctioned ninety-nine per cent of them, you understand.’
‘Wait a minute, Carolina.’ She opened the door leading into the garden and stood out in the cold. ‘OK, you can go ahead now.’
‘You remember Adrian White, of course?’
‘I remember Adrian very well.’ She aped the awe in the social worker’s voice.
‘He says he needs to see and talk to you. He says he’s anxious to do so.’
Psychopaths don’t suffer anxiety, thought Clay. Adrian White is the purest psychopath I know of. He is lying.
‘Did he give you any indication as to why he wants to see me so urgently?’
‘Yes, but I don’t really understand what he meant.’
‘What did he say, Carolina?’
‘He said he needs to talk to you about the Red Cloud. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘Anything else?’
‘He says he has some information about your new case, the one you’ve just started working on. He said he can help you. He said, and he was very definite on this, he stressed, Six so far and there will be more soon and many more quickly after. He said it three times. I asked him other questions, but he didn’t utter another word. I’m just passing on his request and the things he did say. I’m sorry I can’t be of any more help.’
‘Oh yes you can,’ said Clay.
Through the morning she’d heard reports about the murders on local Radio City news broadcasts, had seen the national media camped outside The Serpentine. It was a massive breaking story.
‘Does White have a television set in his cell?’
‘No. He was offered one but refused it.’
‘A radio?’
‘The same. No. He has no access to the news media in his cell. He lives like a hermit. He’s declined all creature comforts. I think it’s a form of self punish—’
‘Between eleven o’clock last night and now, who has he had access to? Who’s he spoken with?’
‘Richard Taylor, the psychiatric nurse. Richard was on night shift when Adrian asked him to talk to me. He hasn’t spoken to anyone else at all. He only speaks when he wants to.’
Something twisted inside Clay. The social worker spoke about Adrian White as if he was a star. People in Ashworth Hospital were no doubt touched by White’s dark charisma, the so-called aura that only existed in the gullible minds of people hungry for sensation.
‘Are you aware of any significant crime that’s been committed in the last twenty-four hours?’ asked Clay.
She heard the crow calling in the middle distance, a noise not unlike the cruel laughter of a sadistic child.
‘No.’
‘Have you discussed any crime with Adrian White?’
‘We don’t have discussions with Adrian. He speaks. We listen.’
‘What did Mr Taylor report to you? During the night was there any exchange between the nurse and Adrian White about a specific crime?’
‘None. Just his highly unusual request for you to visit him.’
Clay looked at the small patch of red on the white ground and felt the weight of the snow-filled sky pressing down on her head.
‘So what shall I tell him?’
‘Tell him nothing,’ said Clay, closing down the call and walking towards the bloodstained snow.
It fed and left, thought Clay. End of.
‘Who was on the phone?’ asked Thomas, appearing in the doorway, Philip in his arms.
‘Hendricks,’ she lied.
‘What is it, Eve?’ asked Thomas.
‘Work,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go.’
She kissed Philip and Thomas, put her wet coat back on.
‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘But I’ll call you whenever I can, Thomas. I need to hear your voice.’
‘I wish we were both off. We could bolt the door,’ said Thomas.
She took a lingering look at Philip’s face. It was definitely changing.
If she lived long enough to see him grow into a man, chances were she would be able to see what her own father had looked like.
She left as quickly as she could, afraid that she would attract the past and all its darkness into the home if she stayed a moment longer.
27
10.01 am
In the incident room of Trinity Road police station, the whole team was present, seated in a circle and focused on Clay. She looked at the clock on the wall. It felt like a year had passed in just over ten hours, but it also felt as if those hours had disappeared in seconds.
‘I want an impression, first of all, so...’ Clay opened up to the room. ‘...those of you who’ve been making domestic visits, anything to report?’
There was silence.
Clay looked to Hendricks.
‘Everyone reported back to me. All the kids in Mrs Harry’s class were home. Some were up, some were in their beds asleep. There was absolutely no sign of trauma or distress.’
‘Foot size?’
Hendricks handed Clay a list of eleven names and their respective shoe sizes.
Melanie Waters 1
David Jones 1½
Imran Choudhary 3
Jon Pearson 2½
Paul Peters 1
Donna Rice 3½
Connor Stephens 3
Tom Tanner 2½
Megan Odemwingie 1½
Ryan Nolan 4
Sally McManus 2½
‘Everyone verified the parents’ and children’s answers to this question by watching the kids stepping into their shoes,’ said Hendricks. ‘No one aske
d to see a warrant. Everyone cooperated fully.’
‘Must’ve been like a beautiful moment from Cinderella,’ smiled Clay. ‘Faith Drake, the kid I saw, was a size 4. No sign of anything there either.’ Clay took in everyone in the circle with a long glance. ‘No sign of stress in any of the kids you saw?’
No one responded.
‘What about the parents’ and carers’ criminal records, Bill?’
Hendricks held up one finger. ‘Sad but probably not significant. It wasn’t a conviction because it didn’t get that far. Jon Pearson. I managed to speak to the officer from St Helens CID who was on the case. Jon’s father, Timothy, committed suicide when his back was against the wall. They had him for downloading child porn. It was part of a wider investigation into a paedophile ring. After the father topped himself, the mother moved to Liverpool to disappear in the big city.’
‘And when did all this take place?’ asked Clay. ‘As in how old was Jon Pearson when he moved to Liverpool?’
‘Four years of age. Came in the August, started reception class in St Bernard’s the following month,’ said Hendricks. ‘His brothers were ten and eleven years old and went in to the top junior classes.’ He consulted a note on his desk. ‘Robert and Vincent. It was a riches-to-rags story. Dad had a good job in banking, but when he topped himself it came out they were riddled with all kinds of debt. They went from an affluent suburb to an estate in Liverpool.’
‘Anything coming out of the children’s writing?’
‘I’m still ploughing through the school books. Stone’s helping me now he’s back from the uni. This’ll appeal to you, Eve. The kids have done a local history project on Williamson Tunnels.’
Clay smiled at the link to her childhood and she heard herself say, ‘Have a close look at those pages.’ The smile was gone. Each passing second tapped against her skull. ‘How’d it go at the uni, Stone?’ she asked.
‘Professor Bailey’s feeding back later today. But on first hearing he reckons it’s a synthetic language created by or taught to the perpetrators. It’s secret to the killers.’
