by Mark Roberts
Clay showed the team Kate Patel’s address book.
‘DS Stone, pick a couple of officers to help you ring round the names in the address book and/or visit as necessary.’
‘How was Sandy Patel?’ asked Stone.
‘Either he’s an Oscar-winning actor or he genuinely is in shreds. I believe the latter, but we have to temper sympathy with suspicion. Things weren’t good between father and son. They went to church but quit going for a reason or reasons he didn’t know. We’re looking for friendships and associations with other families with three or more children. Riley, you still like visiting shoe shops?’
‘Twelve years since I last went past one without going in.’
‘I’d like you to chase up the footprint – high-street and retail-park stores, distributors, internet.’ She made eye contact with DC Alastair Ryan, a red-eyed bloodhound of a man, on the verge of retirement.
‘Yeah, I can help Riley snoop shoes till the last cow comes home,’ he said.
‘Where are you off to, Eve?’ asked Riley. ‘You keep glancing at the door and you’re talking faster and faster like you always do when you’re in a hurry to leave.’
‘If I didn’t know better, Gina, I’d say you were a copper.’ Clay took a deep breath. ‘I have got somewhere to go. I had a phone call from a social worker at Ashworth Hospital. Guess who wants to see me?’
A quiet descended on the room.
‘Don’t go anywhere near that bastard!’ said Karl Stone.
‘I have to,’ said Clay, calmly.
‘Why go anywhere near the little specimen?’ asked Riley.
‘Because I’m told the Baptist has no access to the media but knows there were six victims in last night’s massacre. He’s sent me a message via a social worker asking to see me, says he has information and it’s going to happen again very soon.’
‘When you look into shadows, you look into mirrors. When you look into mirrors, what do you see?’
White’s voice erupted inside her brain, along with fragments of the last words he’d spoken to her as he was led down into the cells.
‘The Red Cloud... the belly of the city... the river will run with blood.’
‘He said something about a red cloud.’ There was a space between her and the others that she had to fill with words. ‘Does that ring any bells?’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Hendricks.
‘You’ve got enough to do. Order up White’s records, everything we’ve got. I’ll collect from HQ at Liverpool One. The three books he wrote.’ Their titles came back to her in a rush, as did the sense that there was something about a red cloud in one of them. ‘The Beginning of the End of Time. The Elemental. The Matriarch.’
As she walked quickly to the door, Hendricks called, ‘Are you sure?’
‘He hasn’t spoken to anyone for seven years!’ replied Clay. ‘He’s in the know. I can’t turn him down.’
28
12 noon
It had stopped snowing by the time Clay arrived on the outskirts of Maghull, but she was still grateful for the satnav in her car, not only because the signs for Ashworth Hospital were obscured beneath the snow, but also because it made her feel slightly less alone.
‘It’s this way,’ said the psychiatric nurse who had met her at the main gate. ‘It’s like a park here when it isn’t snowing.’ Clay made out the shapes of trees and shrubs between the buildings. The whole place was enclosed by walls. It felt much more like a prison than a hospital.
‘You should come here in spring or summer,’ she continued. Only if it was a matter of life and death, thought Clay. ‘It’s soooo green.’
The surface of the snow was treacherous, like a back road in winter, icy and slick. They walked slowly and Clay felt the car journey from south Liverpool to Maghull as a deep pain between her shoulder blades.
As they headed to the High Dependency Ward, home for the past seven years to Adrian White, Clay prepared herself. She called to mind a teenage girl she’d met when she was six years old and newly arrived at the Children’s Home in Edge Hill. The girl had left a lasting impression. Her name was Natasha and she was seventeen. Natasha Seventeen. Natasha’s face never showed emotion, but her eyes stirred the deepest unease in adults and children alike. She left the home very suddenly one day and two short months later was said to have married the soldier who got her pregnant. Clay remembered hearing the staff discussing her. ‘You wouldn’t dare do anything but marry the po-faced cow, even with the whole bloody British army behind you,’ one of them had said, and they’d all laughed.
Standing outside the High Dependency Ward, Clay summoned up Natasha Seventeen’s face and assumed its unyielding stillness. Natasha. A playmate from the Williamson Tunnels.
The psychiatric nurse knocked on a glass panel of the double doors. After the unlocking and locking of two doors, a man opened the front door. As she entered, Clay noticed the name on his identity badge. Richard Taylor. And the telltale scar tissue on his upper lip from the cleft-palate operation he’d had as a baby.
Richard Taylor, who’d passed on the request from White.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay.’ She held up her warrant card
‘Yeah, I know who you are. I remember your picture on the front of the Liverpool Echo, years back.’
The door closed at her back and she felt the weight of the building pressing down on her.
He stifled a yawn as he opened the first of two doors.
‘Tired, Richard?’ said Clay.
‘Four people phoned in sick. There’s always some bug going round in here and we’ve got to keep a three-to-one staff-to-patient ratio on the day shift. So I’m working a double shift. I finish at 2 pm and then I’m off for two days.’
‘Carolina Hill mentioned your name on the phone...’
He pulled a face. Her! He shut the inner door, locked it. The Ward filled Clay with a sense of claustrophobia. ‘Come with me, DCI Clay. I’ll give you a guided tour of Adrian White’s humble abode.’
She followed him.
‘What we’re coming into now is the communal area, but White’s never been in here. He doesn’t want to know any of the other patients.’ His voice dropped. ‘Which suits us just fine.’
Clay saw two very ordinary-looking psychopaths, one in his forties and the other in his fifties, playing snooker and getting on with the business of killing the only thing they now could. Time. A handful of other men were scattered around the room, some listlessly watching the game unfold, some with headphones listening to music, others staring into space and reading broadsheet newspapers.
‘The snooker guys? Anyone I should know?’ she asked.
‘The snooker guys aren’t patients, DCI Clay, they’re psychiatric nurses.’
She laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ His face softened into a winning smile.
‘The joke’s on me,’ said Clay. ‘How many on the ward, including White?’
‘Fifteen.’
The place felt largely empty.
‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘Work. Within the hospital grounds. We’ve got an electronics workshop, a handicrafts department. The patients’ rooms are down that corridor.’ Taylor pointed at various anonymous doors and stopped at the one signed ‘Meeting Room’.
‘This is where you’re talking to him. Alone. We’ll be outside.’
Adrenaline pumped through her.
Taylor took out his phone and hit speed dial. He spoke as his colleague connected. ‘You and Danny, where are you? You were supposed to with us at the Meeting Room.’ Pause. ‘Yeah, I’m there now with her. Right now this second. Yeah, well, be faster than that.’ He hung up. ‘There’ll be three of us outside when you go in, but there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Anything I need to know?’ asked Clay.
‘We haven’t had a single incident with him in all his time here. But, yeah, one thing. He hasn’t worn clothes at all for seven years. It’s part of his religious observation. We had a Sikh nu
rse at the time. White said, ‘Make me wear clothes but make him take off his turban first.’ Taylor dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Wait here. I’ll go and get him.’
In her mind’s eye she recalled Adrian White’s face, impassive across a wall of flame. They were on the top floor of a derelict building, she with her back against a windowless wall and he close by a door that led out to the stairs and the front door.
‘Come and get me, Eve!’
She recalled the smile on his face, the glimmer in the dead cast of his eyes and the certain knowledge that she was going to die.
The smoke curled inside her, burning her throat and filling her body with poison.
She had no choice. She hurtled through the flames, the smell of her singed hair more sickening than that of the dense smoke around her, her eyes shut tight, her face hot, like she was passing through one world into another. Then she was on the same side of the room as White, the safe side, the side with a way out.
She opened her eyes. He puckered his lips and blew a stream of breath in her direction, making a gesture with his hand like a priest administering a blessing.
‘Eve, you stood in the flames and yet you are untouched, unharmed.’
‘I ran through them.’ She glanced at her hands, her clothes, warm but not burned.
‘Did you?’
Silence, then the sound of approaching feet.
She held her breath and released it slowly.
‘Eve.’ His voice was exactly as it sounded in her head, when things he’d said to her sprang into her mind from nowhere, from her darkest, secret places. ‘Eve, I’m so glad you could get here so soon. How are things in the Red River City?’
She turned towards his voice.
White smiled at her. His eyes were dead. His dreams were not.
29
12.15 pm
Adrian White.
From the other side of a heavy wooden table, Clay faced the man known around the world as the Baptist.
His hair was now long and crow black, but there were occasional strands of pure white. His naked back was broad and as flat as a wall, smooth and toned, the muscles clearly defined beneath his flawless skin.
The so-called aura that the journalists covering the trial had written about surrounded him like an invisible shield. Clay’s rational mind denied this aura existed, but, faced with him after so many years, there was something that separated him from the time and place in which he existed and she knew it came from a personal truth that lived deep inside him. All that mattered was his twisted faith. Having neither fear nor love for anything human, he was exempt from the rules that bound ordinary people. Locked up until his dying day, he was freer than a bird. Psychiatrists labelled him criminally insane. He called himself a Satanic saint and prophet.
‘Time has been kind to you,’ said White, his voice light as if he’d just bumped into her at a cocktail party. ‘Are you enjoying motherhood and married life?’
Clay locked eyes with him. A sickly heat spread within her at the same time as a coldness raised goose bumps on her skin.
Physically, he’d hardly changed at all, but she had no desire to return his compliment.
‘You kept your maiden name...?’
‘For the purposes of work.’
With a tiny gesture of his left hand, he beckoned her to lean in closer. She didn’t move a muscle. Clay saw the black stars tattooed across his hairless hand and fingers: his map of the shift that would occur in the universal heavens when the time came for everything to change.
He had lived in Ashworth, saying little and doing less. She had got married and given birth to a son. One September, he had gone on a month-long hunger strike, claiming it was religious observation, a fast. She had led an ever-changing team of detectives, catching twelve murderers. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour that baffled doctors when it shrank and disappeared of its own accord. She had tried to unearth the missing pieces of her early life, but they too had disappeared.
On either side of his heart, was a pair of jet-black tattoos.
1 7
‘You don’t know how pleased I am to see you, Eve.’
He smiled and it sharpened the effect of his eyes. An occasional glimmer of life would move beneath their waxy surface like a little fish shifting just below the stillness of a pond. At White’s trial, even Edward Carter QC, the Crown Prosecution Service’s most successful barrister, had lost his rhythm at several points during his cross-examination.
‘Remember what my last words to you were?’
‘No,’ she lied.
As he was taken down to the cells, cuffed to two police officers, Adrian White had stared across the crowded courtroom, his eyes fixed on Clay and nothing else. Journalists speculated that there was some sort of bond between him and the woman who had hunted him down.
‘The Red Cloud will rise from the belly of the city and when the Red Cloud rises, the river will run with blood.’ His words rang out across the silent courtroom like the coded message of a secret lover.
The memory made her scalp feel like it was crawling with lice. She resisted the urge to scratch her head. Stillness was her only option. Anything else would immediately be seen as a sign of weakness.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ asked Clay.
‘Oh, this and that.’
Slowly, White rose to his full height, six foot six.
‘Tell me about this and that, Adrian.’
‘Let’s change places, Eve. Sit in my seat.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I’m speaking metaphorically.’ He towered over Clay and although he didn’t move, the space between them felt like it was shrinking. ‘I want you to see things from my point of view. That’s what you do, isn’t it, Eve? See things from other people’s perspective, to try and bring the wicked to justice.’
With each word, the volume of his speech dropped and by the time he’d stopped speaking, Clay doubted whether the nurses outside the door could hear anything of what he was saying.
She had to tilt her head to keep eye contact and, as the moments drifted by, she understood why the living closed the eyes of the dead as a reflex action. Looking at him was like staring death in the face.
‘Information,’ said Clay.
‘Yes?’
‘Carolina Hill—’
‘Who?’
‘The social worker who you saw this morning. She said you had some information for me.’
‘He died soon afterwards.’
She knew that was a reference to Edward Carter, prosecuting counsel, recognised the diversionary tactic from over a hundred hours in the interview suite.
‘Are you playing games with me?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Then I’d like to hear this information you have for me relating to my current case.’
‘Did you know I was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic?’
‘It’s the reason you’re in a hospital and not on a Category A wing at Durham or some other prison.’
‘It’s an incorrect diagnosis.’
‘Information, Adrian. Now.’
Slowly, he sat down and looked over her shoulder at the wall.
‘Can you see that little window?’
‘I saw it on the way in,’ she replied. She had absolutely no intention of looking over her shoulder or turning her back on him for a second.
‘That was very observant of you, Eve, but then again, that’s just one of your many talents. It’s just like the one in my room. But just how observant are you? To what degree can you see?’
At the edge of her vision, she saw a pair of eyes peering through the observation slot in the doorway and then the slot closed.
‘Tell me about last night, Eve.’
‘No, you tell me what you claim to know.’
‘All things have a beginning, including the end. Last night, the end of all things began with a signal that called you to its heart. Are you listening?’
‘I’m listening.
’
He tilted his head and looked up at the ceiling. As he swallowed, his Adam’s apple rose and fell, reminding her of a snake consuming the living body of another creature.
The Baptist dropped his head and she was there, ready to meet his gaze.
‘What did you do with my books? The Elemental. The Matriarch. The Beginning of the End of Time.’
‘After the trial ended, your property was put in a central store for evidence. It’s standard procedure.’ And because the thirty-three people we convicted you of murdering were not all of your victims, thought Clay. There were more, many more.
‘That works in your favour.’ Something tiny moved in the darkness of his pupils. ‘Ask me the question that’s crawling beneath your scalp, Eve.’
‘How do you know there were six victims?’ she asked.
‘Six?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘There’ll be one survivor at the next one.’
‘Are you in contact with the perpetrators?’
‘A hostage, if you like. I’m in contact with myself. Now I’m in contact with you. And that is all.’
‘How do you know there’ll be another killing?’
‘It’ll be tonight, Eve. Another family. Do you need reading glasses? Remember that day, right at the end of my trial, when I told Mr Edward Carter QC he was going to die shortly from a massive cardiac arrest and the judge cleared the court and unleashed a barrage of fury against me. That was the best part of the whole trial and no one was there to see or hear it.’
‘Carter was twenty stone and a heavy smoker. That prediction, that piece of theatre, doesn’t make you Nostradamus.’ Clay leaned closer. ‘I haven’t come here to talk about the past.’
‘You’ve come here for a vision of the future.’
‘So, where exactly?’ asked Clay.
‘Where what?’
‘Where’s this killing you’re predicting?’
‘I do not predict, I prophesy.’
‘Where do you prophesy it’s going to happen?’
‘Right under your nose, Eve.’
She noticed something in his face, a closing down of the muscles beneath his skin, something the dead sheen of his eyes could never have given away. It was an almost invisible shift that she’d come to know over the days and weeks of interviewing him. He was drifting away, sinking back inside himself and time was against her.
