by Mark Roberts
‘Be careful,’ said Stone. ‘They could be up there.’
‘I do hope so, Karl!’ she said, swiping the metal arm menacingly in the air. But her heart banged against her ribs and her head buzzed with energy as she came closer to the square entrance.
The sloping roof-space was alive with light. She poked her head inside and froze at what she saw. Instinctively, she wanted to scuttle back down the ladder, but she couldn’t move.
Dread and terror waltzed inside.
The shadow that had pursued her from Ashworth settled on her back.
69
9.45 pm
The phone on Hendricks’s desk clattered into life and he snatched the cradle from the receiver.
‘Eve, what’s happening?’
‘It’s not Eve, Bill,’ said Sergeant Harris. ‘Sorry to disappoint you. It’s about the boy, Jon Pearson. He wants to talk to you right now. Says it’s very important.’
‘Did he say what it’s about?’
‘He wants to tell the whole truth. He asked for Eve but said that you would do. Any copper, really – they were his words. He’s insisting he wants to do it right now.’
‘I’ll call his mother, social worker and solicitor. Tell him it’ll probably take an hour.’ Hendricks looked at the time and sighed. Nine forty-five already. ‘Given his age and the time, this isn’t ideal.’
‘It’s all logged, Bill. He’s slept from coming out of the last interview. He’s just woken up.’
‘Tell him to get himself ready with what he wants to say. I’ll interview him as soon as his people are here.’
70
9.45 pm
‘Eve, what is it?’ Stone’s voice was tense and urgent.
Candles burned on the floor and on the beams, in every available space within the half-pyramid.
A switch clicked inside Clay and she carried on up the ladder, one foot following the other as she made it to the top and stepped into the loft.
She heard the ladder creak under the weight of Stone’s feet as he began to climb up after her. ‘No! No! No!’ she shouted. ‘Stay down there. You can’t, you can’t come up here.’
The floor was made of caber boards and in the centre of it was the mobile phone, still ringing. Clay walked over to it, but as she picked it up it stopped. Slowly, she turned a 360-degree anti-clockwise circle, her eyes fixed on the sloping walls. There wasn’t a centimetre that wasn’t covered with images. Pictures that brought tears to her eyes and left her consumed with a dizzying nausea.
She dropped the phone, shut her eyes tightly and buried her face in her hands.
‘Open your eyes! Look! Face what is before you!’
Voices slashed through her head at angles, voices she didn’t recognise, and for a moment she thought she was going to die.
‘Eve, what is it?’ Stone’s voice sounded like it was trapped in a bottle as the wind oozed and echoed like a whispered curse around the slates above her head.
She dropped to her knees, forced herself to remove her hands from her face and opened her eyes.
‘Eve, talk to me, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Karl.’ But she couldn’t say she was all right.
‘I’m coming up,’ he called.
‘No! You can’t. You mustn’t. I won’t allow it.’
She sat on the caber flooring and picked up a glossy white-trimmed square, a Polaroid colour photograph from the 1980s, a blurred image that seemed to dance with life in front of her eyes.
Clay gazed at the photograph and felt tears stream down her face.
In the photograph she was three years old, wearing a blue dress with white socks drawn up to her knees. She was smiling into the camera, her arms raised into the air, her hands lovingly held by Sister Philomena’s hands, on whose knee she sat.
She blinked away the tears, focused on Philomena’s face and was amazed at how youthful her features were. In the well of memory, Philomena always looked elderly, but now she understood that the key image of the first love of her life had been tainted by her end, by death.
‘We were so... happy together. Weren’t we?’
Her eyes drilled into the photograph.
‘Stay with me, don’t go away, help me!’
She slipped the photograph inside her coat pocket.
‘Look around you, Eve.’
Philomena’s voice comforted her.
‘Look.’
She encouraged.
‘See what is before you.’
Clay turned to the sound of Philomena’s voice, but all she saw were pinpoints of candlelight and the images that dominated the interior of the roof.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and got to her feet. There was an altar at the centre of the loft, a table covered with a rich purple velvet cover, and it was here that her instinct told her to start.
Clay stood at the front of the altar and worked out that she could follow a chronological thread between the images.
First, there was a blown-up and crude radiographer’s scan of a foetus. Slowly, her eyes followed the curve of the unborn child’s spine. Notch by notch, she felt as if a finger was tracing the same path down her backbone. The child’s fist was tight against its mouth, a thumb placed firmly inside. She made out the curve of the baby’s middle and the tapering bones of the legs, all the pieces of an incubating human life beneath a storm of white static.
Her eyes drifted in an anti-clockwise direction and she saw a picture that made her gasp. A woman’s legs wide open, her inner thighs splattered with blood and water, her vagina gaping and a baby’s head emerging into a pair of waiting hands. She looked away and saw the next picture of herself, minutes old and cleaned up, the edge of the placenta still visible.
Clay kept turning. The next picture was taken from a distance. A blurred shot of her on a swing, aged three. Then she was ten years old, snapped through the railings of Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Primary School. She was alone in the playground, lost in thought.
Looking at the posed photograph of herself in cap and gown, taken on the day she graduated with a first-class degree in geography from the University of Liverpool, she remembered how she’d given her allocation of family tickets to a girl who had a family to see her go through the rite of passage.
She picked herself out from the group shot of her class at the Merseyside Police Training Academy. In spite of her cap, and the formal face she’d been told to keep fixed, the joy and pride in her eyes was unmistakeable. In the next picture, she marched behind Stephen Jones, a handsome and charismatic young man who’d never known how strongly she’d felt about him and who had unwittingly broken her heart by becoming engaged to the girlfriend back home in Wrexham.
She felt the weight and cold touch of a drop of water on her head and looked up to the roof. There was another drop forming in the crack to the sky. It felt like she’d been smacked on the skull with a hammer.
‘Talk to me, Eve. What’s up there?’
‘Karl,’ she mumbled, trying to reassure him she was alive and conscious even though she was lost for words. Tucked into the shadows was a thick rectangle of card. She picked it up and felt as if her feet were going to rise from the floor.
‘E V E T T E C L A Y’ was spelled across its front. The file on Mrs Tripp’s desk from thirty-plus years ago. She placed it down and looked around.
‘What are you looking at, Eve?’
On a wooden beam facing her Clay noticed something gleaming in the candlelight. She walked towards it, drawn magnetically to the tiny object. Close to it, in the shadow of a cross-beam, she saw its twin.
‘Jesus,’ she said softly, and wished he was there to pray to.
She closed her eyes and tried to wipe her mind clean, but she knew she was saddled with a memory that would never leave her.
‘Eve, what can you see?’
‘I can see Kate Patel’s eyes staring directly at me. I think they’re hers, judging by the photos I’ve seen of her.’
In the silence, she w
asn’t sure whether she’d said the words out loud or just thought them. She stepped to one side, glanced again at the disembodied eyeballs and took in the space into which they stared.
She pivoted left.
‘I can see another pair of eyes.’ She walked towards them. ‘I’m not sure whose they are.’
Clay looked away and saw a collage of images of herself. She was drawn to it by a large picture close to the centre. She was on the main path in Calderstones Park, pushing Philip in a pram, the autumn sun shining through a shower of falling leaves. The picture was clear, close-up, as if it had been taken right over her shoulder.
Now she knew they had been within touching distance of her for years and she’d never even known it. She scanned the other pictures. Newspaper cuttings about her arrest of the Baptist and pictures of her outside Preston Crown Court were pasted on the lining of the roof alongside pictures of her with Thomas on the deserted beach in Formby during their first winter together.
The marrow in her bones turned cold and sour. She felt a profound sense of violation. Suddenly, seeing her own life laid out around the walls became too much for her. I need, she thought, to stand for an hour – no, more – for hours under a blistering hot shower. From her scalp downwards, her skin felt filthy and uncomfortable, like she’d contracted a malevolent virus that had targeted her and her alone, leaving the rest of humanity untouched.
Clay sighed bitterly as she looked away. Another beam and the third pair of eyes. All three were directing their unseeing gaze at the same point in the loft.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked as she moved towards the focus of their attention. ‘What do you want me to see?’
The focus of the three pairs of eyes was the altar.
Clay arrived at the table and, holding the edges, slowly pulled the purple velvet cover away.
Instinctively, she shut her eyes, but the picture was already printed deep in the fabric of her brain. It would stay there forever.
She forced herself to look again, to test reality. Her bones dissolved and a whip cracked dead centre through her brain. Now she couldn’t look away, even though every piece of her will screamed at her to throw the cover back on the altar and escape from the obscenity that decorated it.
71
9.55 pm
On the surface of the altar, vivid colour dominated a universal sky. Shooting stars and meteors flashed through the shifting colours of night, the planets of the solar system laid out in order at the bare feet of a black-robed goddess, her arms outstretched, controlling order with the fingers of one hand and orchestrating chaos with the other.
Her robe was open. A serpent suckled one breast and a demonic infant fed on the other. She hovered in space, her legs wide open astride a dragon-like Satan who exhaled fire as he shot red-hot bursts inside her.
Sooner or later, Clay thought, focusing on the goddess’s face, other people will have to come in here and see this. I cannot keep the world away from this insanity. A beam of clarity came to her through the madness.
‘Karl!’ She stared at the features of the goddess. ‘Take a deep breath. When you come up, tell me if you think I’m going out of my mind.’ There was a wistful smile on the painted face, but the eyes were hard and cold, like the Baptist’s.
Clay listened to the creaking of Stone’s footsteps as he ascended the ladder, then the stillness when his head came through and he saw the Satanic temple.
Then he exploded. ‘Jesus! What is going on here?’
‘It would seem my life is not my own. What I thought was my life wasn’t. Isn’t.’
Stone climbed into the space. ‘Whatever’s going on here, Eve... This is not you!’
Clay couldn’t take her eyes away from the painted face on the altar, the faint smile and the dead eyes, the skin tone and the overall expression. The title of the Baptist’s book flooded her mind. The Matriarch. Eve Clay was looking down at a lovingly painted image of herself.
‘Karl, come and look at this. This is what they think I am.’
72
9.56 pm
Bill Hendricks looked across the table in Interview Suite 1 at Jon Pearson, who was flanked by his mother, social worker and solicitor. He glanced at the video camera in the corner of the room and formally opened proceedings.
‘This is a most unusual hour for an interview to take place with a person of your age. Just for the record, Jon, would you tell me what you said to Sergeant Harris, the custody sergeant.’
‘I told him I wanted to speak to a copper right now because I’m not tired because I’ve been fast asleep and I’ve lost sense of what time it is but I’m wide awake and I want to tell the truth.’
‘Fair enough, Jon. Sergeant Harris told me you wanted to tell the whole truth.’
‘Yeah.’
There was a dip in the boy’s bravado. He looked at his mother and she said, ‘Tell the truth, Jon. Just tell the truth.’
‘I feel... dead embarrassed.’ He indicated the book bag. ‘I want to talk about the drawings.’
Hendricks concealed his crashing disappointment with a neutral, ‘OK. We can talk about the phone in a minute.’
‘Can I ask you a question...’ The boy checked the ID badge hanging from Hendricks’s neck. ‘...Mr Hendry?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Can you get into trouble for making drawings like these?’
‘That would depend on how old the people in the drawings are. How old are they?’
‘Ten.’
‘And are they real children or imaginary?’
‘Real.’
‘Then yes, technically speaking, whoever did these drawings has made a pornographic image of a minor. That’s a very serious offence. Do you understand what’s going on in the pictures?’
Hendricks slid the paper back inside the book bag.
‘Yes, I do understand. Kind of.’
Hendricks looked at each of the women to cover up his glancing at Mrs Pearson, freefalling for the hundred thousandth time over many sorry years. ‘How come you understand?’
‘When I lived in St Helens, when I was a little kid, there was this man in our street and he used to make me sit with him and watch films of men and women and sometimes women and women and sometimes men and men and sometimes two women and one man... Sometimes he used to say what was going on, like a... a... like a...’
‘Like a football commentator on telly describing what’s happening in the match?’
‘Exactly.’ The little boy fell silent, stared into space and slowly returned his attention to Hendricks. ‘I want to tell the truth. I admit...’ He held up his right hand. ‘...this hand wrote the words on those dirty drawings. But I only did it because she made me.’
‘She, Jon?’
‘There’s this girl in our class. She told me she’s a witch and I believe her because she can read my mind. Do you believe in witches, Mr Hendry?’
‘I believe there are people who do some pretty strange stuff because they think it will please invisible powers and will help themselves and harm their enemies.’
‘No. Honest to God, she’s a witch. She can predict what’s going to happen before it happens.’
‘Has this witch in your class got a name?’
‘Yeah. She whispers, Mrs Harry is going to lose her temper and shout in ten seconds’ time. Count in your head, Jon. And she does. And it makes me go cold and hot. And I’m scared of her. She did the drawings, not me. And she made me write those things down. She said she’d put a curse on me. That I’d get taken away from my mum. When I woke up, just now, my head was, like, dead clear. And I thought, Yeah, the curse has worked. She can’t do anything worse than have the coppers come to the house and take me away from me mum, so now I’m not afraid. I’ve not got nothing to hide. I’m going to tell on her, the nasty little cow!’
Jon panted, his face loaded with anger.
Hendricks poured him a glass of water and he downed it in one.
‘Did she give you the pictures?’
>
‘Told me to hide them in my house but not to look at them or open my book bag under any circumstances or it could unleash the curse.’
Hendricks looked at Jon and said, ‘Faith Drake?’
The boy looked astonished. Hendricks glanced at his watch.
‘It’s not magic how I know, Jon. All that stuff she’s been peddling is mumbo-jumbo. Dangerous and nasty mumbo-jumbo. Take it from me, everything that happens can be explained.’ He took in the group. ‘Mrs Pearson, stay with Jon. I need to get the ball rolling to release him from custody.’
‘Oh no,’ said Jon. ‘I want to stay here. And my mum. I don’t mind being here so long as me mum’s here. We’re safer here. Aren’t we?’
Outside the interview suite, Hendricks speed-dialled Clay.
‘Bill?’
‘Eve. Jon Pearson—’
‘Faith Drake planted the phone and the pornographic drawings on him.’
‘Yes. He thinks she’s a witch.’
‘She is a witch,’ said Clay. There was a brief silence. ‘As are her mother and sisters. They’re a blood coven. You need to come to Barnham Drive as quickly as you can, Bill.’
73
10.10 pm
Stone pulled the scene-of-crime tape across the top of the Drakes’ staircase.
Clay stood at the bottom of the stairs, her personal file under her arm and the Nokia E63 phone from the loft in her hand. The Liverpool skyline picture glowed red against the hall wall. As the wind whistled outside, images from the display in the loft fast-forwarded through her head. Stone came downstairs and she looked him in the eye and said, ‘Stay here with the constables until I send cover. We need to circulate the Drakes’ pictures nationwide.’
‘But there isn’t a single photograph of them in the house, Eve.’
‘Look at these, Karl.’ She opened the photo gallery of the Nokia, the same model as Mrs Harry’s mobile, and scrolled. ‘Here, take the phone. Nine pictures from three crime scenes. What can you see?’
