Blood Mist (Eve Clay)

by Mark Roberts

  She showed him the screen of her phone and scrolled on. It was a black bin bag. On again, and there was a brown evidence bag with a clear plastic panel down the centre. The next image showed four pieces of charred clothing. Two pairs of jeans and two padded jackets.

  They walked up the path.

  ‘Wherever Vincent and Robbie Pearson went the night before last, whatever they did, whatever they’re capable of, they didn’t make a very good job of destroying and getting rid of what they were wearing,’ said Stone.

  There was a Honda Civic parked in front of the house.

  ‘Looks like Daddy’s home,’ he said.

  Another text message arrived from Mason. This one had a picture of a laptop with a screensaver of the iconic image of Adrian White and, written in frozen blood-red letters across his chest: The Baptist.

  The message from Mason was simple: Robert Pearson’s laptop.

  Clay showed it to Stone.

  She looked at the tiny, second-hand image of Adrian White and his cold, dead eyes. ‘Part of me just doesn’t get this, Karl. I can see how a kid could be into gangsta rap, football, violent PlayStation games.’ In her mind, she reviewed the little she knew about the Pearson brothers’ life, from regular little boy scouts in an affluent area of St Helens to hanging out on an estate in south Liverpool. But there was much more than that. ‘They might look like run-of-the-mill scallies, but maybe that’s just survival, adaption to the environment. And what about their father? Who knows what sick shit he planted in their heads when they were little. Let’s get the paedo’s files sent over from St Helens.’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  Clay banged on the door and it opened a little, just like the door of the Patels’ house in The Serpentine had.

  ‘Jesus.’

  She touched it lightly to open it wider and called, ‘Hello, anyone there? Police! We’re coming in!’

  She could see that there had been no repetition of what she’d witnessed at the Patels’. She blew a sigh of relief.

  ‘Just as it was yesterday. Nothing out of place,’ said Stone.

  ‘We’ll have a chat with Mr Tanner. Pick his brains and then I’m going home for a couple of hours shut—’

  On the wall to her left, two lines finger-painted in blood. The lines were at a small angle to each other, and the right-hand line was three times as long as the line to the left. Pierced by coldness, Clay heard herself whisper, ‘Jesus!’

  She looked up the stairs.

  ‘Police!’ called Clay. ‘Call out to me!’

  She ascended the stairs.

  The silence on the first floor was deep and ugly.

  The harsh tang of other people’s blood hit her senses.

  Clay’s head filled with a sound.

  She could hear her own blood pounding inside her skull.

  48

  7.03 pm

  At the top of the stairs, Clay had a good view of the wide landing. Four bodies were laid out alongside each other on the floor.

  The bedroom doors were wide open.

  She took out her mobile.

  The landing walls were fairly clear of blood, but, angling her head to get a better view of the nearest bedroom, she saw the crimson spray that covered what looked like the boy’s room. A large poster of the Liverpool Football Club squad, their bodies and faces mostly obscured by the dead boy’s blood.

  Clay called DS Marsh, Scientific Support team leader.

  ‘Hi, Eve, did you get the pictures through OK?’

  The carpets were fairly old and worn and she could see no obvious drag marks as she played her torchlight on the floor.

  ‘Are you there, Eve?’

  ‘Thanks, I got the pictures.’

  ‘We’re about done here,’ said DS Mason. ‘We’ve come up with an interesting haul.’

  ‘I want you to leave the Pearson scene, right now. I need you at Ullet Road. The Baptist was right. They’ve followed up on The Serpentine and done it again. Bring your team. Hurry.’

  Mr and Mrs Tanner’s bodies were laid next to each other. They were at a small angle that had their heads almost touching but their feet half a metre apart. Mr Tanner was detached from his wife and children. The feet of Mrs Tanner’s daughter were connected to her mother’s feet in a continuing line. The boy’s head touched his sister’s head and the line of three bodies ended at the soles of his feet.

  Clay shone the torch onto Mrs Tanner’s face. The sockets were hollow and bloody, the eyes gouged out.

  ‘Karl!’

  ‘Yeah?’ His voice echoed.

  ‘Three children in the family, right?’

  ‘Rebecca, Daniel and Maisy. The youngest, Maisy, is non-verbal, has learning difficulties.’

  As Stone spoke, Clay drew closer to the bodies of the Tanner family, saw four marks in blood on the wall that provided her with an answer.

  g

  o

  n

  e

  She went through every room upstairs, knowing that the process was futile. Each space drew a blank.

  ‘They’ve taken a hostage,’ she said. ‘Call up Hendricks and tell him to issue a statement to the media on my behalf. He’s to get pictures of Robbie and Vincent out there. We want to talk to them in connection with the murders in The Serpentine. The public aren’t to approach them. DS Mason’s on his way over, to start pulling in the evidence here.’

  Clay picked her way quickly but carefully down the stairs.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ asked Stone.

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Give the Baptist a kick in the balls for me,’ said Stone. ‘What do you want me to do in the meantime?’

  ‘Dig out their address book and any databases with contact details. Look for any connection with the Patels and inform their contacts about what’s happened here. If there are any mutual contacts, let me know. They’ll need round-the-clock protection.’

  Clay hit the cold air and took several deep breaths.

  A black taxi pulled up just outside the gate. The back door opened and, head bandaged, Riley stepped out. She walked towards Clay.

  ‘I called the office, they told me you’d be here,’ Riley said. Her eyes were panda black.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I signed myself out. There’s too much to do.’

  ‘Go home, Gina.’

  ‘What’s happened here?’

  ‘Adrian White was right.’

  ‘And you’re telling me to go home?’

  ‘OK, masochist, get back to Trinity Road. Two of White’s books need recording – The Beginning of the End of Time and The Elemental. Karl’s done The Matriarch.’

  ‘Yes, sure...’

  ‘And phone your husband,’ Clay called back over her shoulder, walking away. ‘If you drop down dead, tell him not to sue me for insufficient duty of care.’

  As she made her way back to her car, Clay looked to the east, saw two blood-red fingers of light separating from each other and felt the weight of eleven dead bodies shackled to her feet.

  49

  9.24 am

  In the time it took to drive to Maghull, Clay had listened to most of Stone’s recording of Adrian White’s The Matriarch, pausing and listening again as she waited at traffic lights or in lines of vehicles backed up at junctions and roundabouts.

  ‘Back again so soon,’ said the same nurse, escorting her once more to the front door of the building where Adrian White lived and would one day die. Sooner rather than later, hoped Clay.

  ‘I couldn’t wait for the spring,’ she said.

  ‘Second visit he’s had in two days over seven whole years. Amazing.’

  As the front door to the High Dependency Ward opened, Clay fixed her face. Natasha Seventeen. Po-faced cow, ready to stare down the Devil.

  ‘Where’s Taylor?’ she asked, as the snooker-playing nurse who she’d mistaken for a patient opened the door. His name badge: George Green.

  ‘It’s his day off.’

  She remembered him t
elling her the day before.

  The opening and closing of inner and outer doors took less than a minute but to Clay it felt like a painfully long time.

  ‘We told Adrian you were coming. He refuses to see you,’ said Green.

  ‘Well he damn well can’t, Georgie-boy,’ said Clay. ‘This is a formal police interview, not a hospital visit. I’ll see your patient Mr White in the meeting room, here and now. His alternative is to come to Trinity Road police station in the Speke–Garston district of Liverpool. Cell. Inconvenience. Not calling the shots. Clothes on. Make that clear to him!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if I need your help, I’ll call for you. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, walking ahead of him and noticing how the scene in the day room was almost exactly as it had been a little under twenty-four hours earlier, like she was walking through a living museum exhibit called ‘The Blandness Of All We Hold Evil’.

  50

  9.35 am

  Adrian White entered the meeting room, the muscles of his lean, naked body clearly defined, like a model from a Michelangelo sketchbook.

  He sat down across the table and she looked past him at George Green.

  ‘Wait outside. Thank you.’

  She glanced at the small black tattoos either side of his heart, on the right the number 1 and on the left the number 7.

  She pressed record on her iPhone.

  ‘DCI Eve Clay. Date: Twelfth of December. Time: 9.35 am. I am with Adrian White in the meeting room in Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital.’

  She placed the iPhone down on the table.

  ‘Congratulations, Adrian. You were right.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘There was a seventh victim from the Patel family. And there was one survivor from last night’s carnage. A little girl with learning difficulties called Maisy Tanner. She’s ten or thereabouts. So how do you know her?’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘She’d have been about two or three when you were arrested, so I’m putting it to you, Adrian, that you did know her, just as you knew the Patel family. How do you know these families?’

  ‘I’m only a human being.’

  Technically.

  ‘Yet, Eve, you seem to be following the much-travelled path of so many fools who give me credit for gifts I don’t possess, who make assumptions about what I can do and what I know.’

  ‘You told me that there was going to be another massacre. You told me there was going to be one survivor. The child concerned has been taken hostage. How did you know there’d be one survivor?’ The words conspiracy to murder flashed through her mind, but she stayed silent. It would be like flicking a tea towel at a tank.

  ‘What about the symbols? On the walls?’ she asked.

  ‘Symbols? Symbols on walls?’ White was enjoying himself.

  Clay changed direction. ‘One survivor. You called it correctly. How?’

  ‘I have visions, waking dreams. We discussed this at length seven years ago. You said I was no better than the Yorkshire Ripper with his voices from God. That was offensive, Eve.’

  ‘Throughout your whole life, you displayed no paranoid schizophrenic tendencies – until you were caught.’

  With the tips of the fingers of his right hand, he tapped hard against his heart, between the tattooed 1 and 7, a few times. ‘That hurts.’

  ‘How do you know the Patel family?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘How do you know the Tanner family?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Which family is going to be targeted next?’

  ‘Why should I tell you anything?’

  ‘Who, where and when?’

  ‘You don’t believe I have visions. You think I’m a fraud.’

  ‘Tell me about your visions.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Sandy Patel. I broke the thin ice with the same jagged rock, slipped beneath the ice with him, sank beneath the freezing black water, held onto my breath at the moment he changed his mind but found himself face upwards against a thick wall of ice. I tasted the scummy water as it flowed down his throat and felt the weight of it pressing down against his lungs as the air pumped out of his body in bubbles that burst against the ice. I felt his eyes widening as life left him and darkness encircled him, enfolded him and drank in his mortal soul. I have visions.’ A hypnotic energy flashed through his eyes, animating them for a moment, and then came the death stare. ‘Do you believe me now, Eve?’

  ‘Do you have a vision of the future?’

  ‘In exchange for something, perhaps.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you have a cigarette, Eve?’

  ‘You don’t smoke.’

  ‘Nor do you. Give me a cigarette, Eve, and I might be able to see more clearly in spite of the smoke.’

  Clay placed her bag on her lap and pulled out the cigarettes and lighter Sandy Patel had given her. ‘The NHS has a non-smoking policy in all its buildings. This is an NHS hospital. Therefore you’re not allowed to smoke.’

  ‘Good old Aristotle. A cigarette, Eve, please.’

  She flipped the lid and he took out one of the last three cigarettes in the packet. He put the cigarette in his mouth and leaned back in his seat. Clay sparked up the lighter.

  A single flame danced between them. A thin smile spread across his face.

  ‘This reminds me of our first face-to-face meeting, Eve.’

  The memory of him across a wall of fire careered through her head, set all her senses tingling. Sudden heat and the sting of nettles beneath her skin.

  He leaned forward and she extended the lighter towards him.

  White drew on the cigarette, leaning back, exhaling a thin line of smoke, his eyes never leaving Clay’s.

  ‘This is nice.’

  ‘When are the killers going to strike again?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I haven’t envisioned that. Yet.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘After dark. Always, always in the dark.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Liverpool.’

  ‘A family?’

  ‘That’s the pattern.’

  He flicked ash on the table and rubbed it into the wood with the tip of his left thumb.

  ‘Do you know a pair of teenage brothers, Robert and Vincent Pearson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know of them?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘They’re followers of yours.’

  ‘I know none of them, none of them know me, therefore I have no real followers.’

  ‘Good old Aristotle. Information, Adrian, please.’

  ‘Eve, you’re looking in the wrong places. Have you ever considered why these murders are happening? What the absolute root cause may be?’

  ‘It’s you, Adrian.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘All those many followers who you don’t know and who don’t know you, the ones you’re denying, they’re aching to gain your attention, your approval, hoping that your so-called magic rubs off on them so that they can have followers of their own, people who can pour time, attention and affection onto them and who they in turn can ignore, dismiss and reject, thus making the hunger stronger, the passion richer and the vicious circle tighter.’

  ‘You are so close to the truth, Eve, but you are so far away.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me who, where and when?’

  His eyes drilled into hers and she felt her blood pressure rising. He flicked ash and smeared it on the wood with his thumb.

  ‘Someone, somewhere, tonight.’

  ‘Who are the Red Cloud?’

  ‘Signifiers of the Beginning of the End of Time. Have you read my writing? The truth’s all in there. Everything you want to know. Look for it, Eve. You’re a detective.’

  ‘Evening is on a the is the fall all...’

  ‘You’re getting warm, Eve.’

 
; ‘...and a on child of actor...’

  ‘Am I still a liar?’

  ‘...artifact...’

  ‘Or do you now believe? You are standing so close to the hot spot. Look.’

  He turned the cigarette round and stubbed it five times against his heart, between the tattooed 1 and 7. A shiver of pleasure flashed across his face. He fixed his gaze on Clay, as if she was the most important thing in the universe.

  He pointed at the wound on his chest and crossed his lips with his right index finger. Small embers burned in his flesh and the smell of meat cooking filled her nostrils.

  Clay stood up, walked backwards to the door and knocked on it.

  George opened the door, sniffed. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m going back to my room now,’ said White, walking past the nurse. ‘Our little chat is over. Farewell, Eve.’

  As she stopped recording on her iPhone, two nurses followed White, watching him.

  Clay gathered up her bag and went towards the day room.

  On a large plasma TV on the wall, two images: Robert Pearson and Vincent Pearson. The image switched to Ullet Road, the pavement outside the Tanner family home. In the background there were TV crews from all over Europe; NBC from America. DS Hendricks faced a camera.

  ‘We want to talk to both brothers in connection with an on-going investigation. If members of the public see either Robert or Vincent Pearson, they are not to approach them directly. Anyone with information...’

  The camera angle changed and the picture now showed the journalists pointing cameras and microphones at Hendricks. She looked into the wall of faces, hungry for whatever Hendricks would feed them, and there was something in the image that made her say, ‘Stop! No. Go back...’ when it switched back to Hendricks.

  There was something familiar in the bank of journalists’ faces. She told herself that she had dealt with the media for years and knew several newspaper men and women. But in the brief footage, there had been something jarringly out of place.