by Mark Roberts
Play. Pause. She gazed into another moment of the footage. Eyes. Mouths. Faces. Something.
Nothing.
76
11.37 pm
On the journey from Alder Hey in the Park to the Drakes’ house, Clay watched the footage on YouTube over and over. But when Riley pulled up outside the house, she was still none the wiser.
Frustrated, she turned to Riley. ‘Listen to what White says on the call. Pull out anything that strikes you as loaded.’
She stepped out of the car.
‘Bring it to me as soon as you finish transcribing. Bring it up to the loft. Don’t worry if you can’t make sense of it. We’ll put our heads together. I’ll be in the loft with Karl Stone and Bill Hendricks. We’re the only four allowed in there.’
‘What’s inside the house? The loft?’
‘Sickness,’ replied Clay. ‘Prepare yourself.’ She shut the passenger door and headed towards Hendricks and the squalor that was the Drake family home.
‘Bill, while I’ve been gone, Karl hasn’t mentioned anything to you about the loft space?’
‘No, he said you didn’t want him to spill the beans.’
‘The whole house is riddled with signs of profound psychological damage. But the loft, the loft is something I really need you to look at.’
‘Take me there, Eve.’
‘On one condition. You have to be completely honest with me. And that’s going to be most the difficult thing I have or will ever ask of you.’
They stopped at the door and the uniformed officer manning it looked away.
‘I’ll tell you the truth, Eve, however hard that is.’
77
11.47 pm
In the Drakes’ loft, the air was still, silent and bitterly cold.
‘I’ll go in first. You follow me.’
Clay clutched the file that Stone had guarded for her. She was torn between wanting to drop everything so she could devour its contents, and pushing ahead with the night’s work.
There’ll soon be time, she told herself, but it did nothing to douse the lifelong fire of not knowing.
She folded her arms and clutched the file to her breasts, watching Hendricks’s face as he emerged into the loft. He stopped dead on the ladder, just as she’d done when she’d first entered. Hendricks took in the whole room with a swivel of his head, then his eyes settled on Clay.
She was overwhelmed with emotion as Hendricks made the last few steps into the loft. As Stone followed him up the ladder, Hendricks stayed out of Clay’s personal space but looked her directly in the eye.
‘None of this is anything to do with you, Eve.’
‘Then who is it to do with?’ she asked, almost hugging herself, remembering exactly how she’d felt in the days after Philomena died and she was transferred to St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children. For a moment, she was six years old again, small and at the mercy of the world around her.
‘Anais Drake. You’re the centre of someone else’s mindset. It’s psychotic. We battle it, that’s what we do. You’re not alone. This is someone else’s belief system and that mindset and belief system doesn’t come from you, owes nothing to you. Anais Drake? How far down into her life will we have to dig to uncover the abnormalities in her experience? Not far.’
Hendricks turned a full circle and approached the altar. He looked at it for a few moments and then lifted the purple velvet cover, revealing the pornographic image of Eve Clay.
He covered up the image again.
‘There’s a two-step inversion going on here,’ he said. ‘Humanity as divinity. Divinity as demonism. We’re just not conditioned to think like that in the West. But Anais Drake does. If I’d caught the Baptist, it’d be me on these walls, not you.’
Clay nodded but completely disagreed with him. Everything in the small, dark, suburban chapel went far beyond her connection to Adrian White. The images on the inside of the roof were stepping stones that linked her whole life from her earliest days to the present. That someone had been following her, stalking her down the years without her knowledge, was horrific enough. But the fact that Anais Drake and her children knew more about her early life than she did herself was unbearable. Even the image on the altar could not compete with that.
‘What do you want us to do, Eve?’ asked Hendricks.
‘Read the writing on the walls. Look at the pictures.’
A candle died in the corner and the smell of smoke permeated the half-lit loft.
She drifted to the altar and placed the file down on the purple velvet. A desperate urge to look at the records of her life possessed her. But although she was in the company of two men she trusted with her life, not knowing what lay within those covers, she had no idea how she would react to what she found there.
She looked up and watched as Stone shone a torch onto the walls and Hendricks took pictures.
Do you want to find out here? her inner voice whispered. In this cesspit? There are better places, safer spaces for you to be in.
Clay looked down at the surface of the file and was transported back in time to Mrs Tripp’s office in St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children. Her name in thick black felt-tip capital letters across the battered surface of the card.
‘E V E T T E C L A Y’
She didn’t know whether it was a trick of time or the light, but she was certain that the file was much slimmer than it had been in the autumn of 1984. No, it had bulged on Mrs Tripp’s desk. On the Drakes’ altar, the papers inside sat neatly. Whatever was in there, much was missing.
‘Have you found any numbers?’ She heard her own voice and it sounded like someone else speaking.
‘No,’ said Hendricks.
‘I saw some numbers carved on a rafter,’ said Stone, pointing his torch at the wood. ‘07... 01... 78.’
‘That’s thought to be the day I was born. It’s when I get my birthday cards.’
She looked back at the file and wondered how on earth Anais Drake had acquired it.
Footsteps sounded on the creaking ladder. ‘Who is it?’ she called.
‘It’s me. Gina.’
Clay looked to the entrance of the loft as Riley’s face appeared.
‘Weird!’ Riley exclaimed. She buried the shock and looked directly at Clay. ‘But so what?’ She climbed in, clutching her pen and notebook. ‘Look at this,’ she said, advancing towards Clay, not even glancing at the walls.
‘What have you got?’
Riley handed over the notebook. ‘I picked through the Baptist’s words and this is what I’ve come up with.’
78
11.55 pm
Clay scanned Riley’s neat handwriting.
fifty-three
forty
Adie enlighten you
warm to her sixty-two
out of the mouths of babes
sixty=eight
less than two
ninety-five
time’s a wasting
real sin
seconds die
death of time
final countdown
birthday (date of Eve’s birth)
sun finally set
fateful day
hunter and hunted
‘I think the numbers refer to time. He referenced time,’ said Riley.
‘If he’s talking on the surface about time then in my book he’s talking about anything else but time. The time talk’s a smokescreen,’ replied Clay. Riley pressed play on her phone and, as the recorded conversation drifted round the rafters, Clay could feel a presence growing behind her. A smell of musk and a vivid sweetness filled the air.
‘You could be right... You could be wrong... Out of the mouths of babes, Eve?’
Clay turned slowly as a cold breath danced on the nape of her neck.
She could feel the part of him that lived in her head seeping out of her like an evil spirit and solidifying in the shadows of the loft, hanging over her like a toxic red cloud that was aching to rain blood down on her.
‘What is the world to me?’
She zoned in on the recording, tried to block the rising dread within herself, joining in with his words under her breath.
You don’t know who you are, Eve. But I do. And soon so will many others.
Who do you think I am? Her voice sounded hollow, waiting for something to come and fill the vacuum.
The line went dead. The recording ended.
Under Riley’s notes, she wrote: fifty-three, forty, sixty-two, sixty-eight less than two, ninety-five.
My birthday? Seventh of January 1978. She jotted down: 7/1 78.
She read the numbers out loud as she converted them into digits with the pen.
53 40 62 68...
‘Less than two?’ she thought out loud. Minus two.
... –2 95 7/1 or 71 78.
A drop of icy water landed on her head and a chill spread through her. Another candle faltered and died and as she breathed in the smoke a sourness erupted on her taste buds, triggering a memory of the Linda McCartney Playground and then of the meeting room at Ashworth Hospital. Her reflexes sent her into her handbag for another look at Sandy Patel’s cigarette packet. She flipped it open and peered again at the marks the Baptist had made.
. n . w . - o
‘Stop what you’re doing!’
The words span around her head and the electrical storm on the surface of her brain caused speech to gridlock in her throat.
‘Eve, what is it?’ Hendricks sounded worried.
‘53...’ she managed to say... ‘point 406268 – the “n” on the cigarette packet is for north. Minus 2 point 957178. “W” is for west. They’re coordinates for an area in Liverpool.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Riley.
‘I’ve got a degree in geography, Liverpool Uni.’
She watched as Stone pressed the Maps app. He tapped search.
‘Read the numbers to me, Eve.’
‘53.406268.’
Stone typed as she spoke, placing the decimal point after the digits 53.
‘–2.957178
As he finished typing, Stone turned his phone screen towards her.
Immediately a street map appeared with a red-headed pin pointing to an exact location and the words Mount Vernon.
‘Edge Hill. Mount Vernon.’
Clay read the map and recognised the site overlooking the old Archbishop Blanche School and knew that it was now the location of Liberty Park, a modern block of student accommodation.
‘It’s close to where I lived in St Claire’s, until I was six years old. That set of coordinates...’ She shut her eyes, put her hands over her face as she sank into the darkness of the dream of her childhood adventure into the derelict house. She kept her eyes shut, remained locked in the darkness, and said, ‘I know why the Red Cloud staged the bodies in the way they did.’
Pictures appeared in the darkness, lit up suddenly and back to black. Hanif Patel and his mother and daughter in an irregular quadrilateral. Kate Patel and her two daughters as a crooked w. The bloody marks on the walls of the Patels’ staircase.
She opened her eyes and the dim candlelight was almost blinding, so deep was the darkness from which she emerged.
‘They staged them as maps.’
‘Maps? Of what?’
‘The Victorian tunnels under Edge Hill. The ones that have been discovered and mapped. There are still hundreds of tunnels that haven’t been located. But these shapes, the bodies...’
The idea came to her quickly and she was immediately convinced of what was coming next. The precise shape of the bodies at each of the three scenes suddenly made perfect sense to her.
Clay’s iPhone rang out. She looked at the display and saw: ‘No Caller ID’.
She pressed connect.
‘Come and get us, but come alone.’
‘I know where you are, Anais.’ Clay turned on speakerphone. ‘And I know why you picked the Williamson Tunnels.’
‘Yes. But do you know who you are?’
Day Four
79
00.01 am
‘Where am I, Anais?’
‘You’re in the sanctum. The sacred space. There is another sanctum. Do you like how we have set it out for you?’ Anais spoke softly, with a mixture of reverence and suspicion.
Clay knew it was possible to get a telephone signal in the tunnels. She’d been chided by a guide for not switching off her mobile when she’d last been on a Williamson Heritage Centre tour of the U-shaped section at Smithdown Lane.
‘Where’s Maisy Tanner?’ she asked.
‘Are you going to come and get her?’
‘What do you want, Anais?’
‘Come to us, but come alone. You’ve been misguided from the day of your birth. Do you want to know about your birth?’
‘How do you know about the day of my birth?’
‘Many people know about the day of your birth. The seventh of January is a special day to us. To all of us. And you will come to us. You must come to us.’
‘Are your girls there? Faith? Coral?’
‘Are your colleagues there? Stone? Hendricks? Riley? They shouldn’t be in the sanctum. But that’s all part of the confusion surrounding you. It won’t last. It can’t. My girls are here. They are waiting for you. So am I. Shall I tell you something about Faith and Coral? They have no fear of death whatsoever.’
‘Why don’t you leave the girls where they are, and you and me, we’ll meet in the Mount Vernon tunnel. I know exactly where the entrance is.’
‘There are many ways in and we know several that no one else knows.’ Anais’s voice had taken on a menacing tone that rattled Clay and sent her mind spinning with anxiety.
‘What about Adie?’ she asked, switching tack. ‘Do you want to know how she is?’
‘She’s well. She’s perfectly normal. We are all normal, we are right, we see things clearly, for what they are. It is the world that has one blind eye and the other one blinkered and short-sighted. Adrienne can see the clearest of us all.’
‘Is that why you left your child in Childwall Park Avenue?’
‘My child?’ Anais laughed. ‘It isn’t your fault.’
Clay sensed that Anais was talking as much to herself as she was to her.
‘What’s not my fault?’
‘That you don’t understand. That you don’t see straight. That you listen but you cannot hear.’
‘Adrienne? Did you name her after Adrian White?’
‘You’ve been abused, Eve. Horribly misguided in all... Adrienne has been brought up in quite the opposite way. I am going to go now.’
‘I don’t think you’ll ever see little Adrienne again. How does that make you feel, Anais?’
A moment of quiet passed.
‘Proud. Come, but come alone. Let me make myself clear. If you bring anyone with you, I will kill Maisy Tanner and both of my girls before your eyes.’
‘How will I find you?’
‘You will know.’
‘But there are miles of tunnels under Edge Hill.’
‘Indeed. And there are many more miles still to be unearthed. But they will be. And we know a way in that no one else knows. And we shall see you in the dark. And we shall see you are the dark and the darkness will wind her way to us and we will welcome the darkness and drink it in and become united with the darkness.’ Silence. ‘You’ve got an hour. If you don’t make contact with us in that hour, I will make martyrs of my daughters and food for the rats of Maisy. When you look into shadows, you look into mirrors. When you look into mirrors, what do you see?’
The line went dead.
‘You can’t go into Williamson Tunnels alone,’ said Stone.
‘It’s a trick,’ said Hendricks. ‘They’ll kill you and we’ll never find your body.’
The same sour music ran around the inside of Clay’s head.
‘We’ll come down with you,’ said Gina Riley.
‘If any of you go down, you’re as good as dead. They can probably make
their way round the tunnels in the dark. You can’t. You might as well say goodbye to your loved ones right now. They want something from me. That’s why I’ve got a chance. I’m going on my own. I’m going into the dark. I have no choice.’
Clay looked at her watch. There were many hours until daylight.
‘You need to track down the people who maintain the tunnels. Call him or her and tell them to meet me at the back of The Bear’s Paw pub in Edge Hill. Cordon off the area from the Royal to the junction of Wavertree Road and Tunnel Road. Curfew. No one in the neighbourhood is to leave their house.’
She felt the life lines on the palms of her hands moisten.
‘And we need paramedics and mortuary vans on standby at the edge of the exclusion zone. 53.406268, –2.957178.’
There was something else about the place that ran as a deep current beneath the waves in Clay’s head, but she kept it to herself.
She was down the ladder from the loft two steps at a time.
Clay had fifty-nine minutes to make contact with the Red Cloud. As she headed towards the front door, she wondered if she would still be alive when morning came.
80
00.10 am
As the phone rang out in the nurses’ station, George Green turned over a seven of spades and his game of solitaire turned into a dead-end.
He picked up and said, ‘Staff nurse...’
‘Is that you, Richard?’ A young female.
‘Er... no, Richard Taylor’s off sick. George Green speaking. Can I help you?’
‘Have you looked in on Adrian White lately?’
The line went dead.
Green looked around at the dark, empty day room. He phoned his colleague on the night shift.
‘Where are you, Eddie?’
‘Just outside. Been for a smoke.’
‘Hurry.’
George Green did the sums. There should be four if one of them needed to enter White’s room. There were only four on the shift. Danny Wilson was on his break and Tim Keyes was doing his usual. Hiding.
Eddie let himself into the ward. He followed George at speed. George told him about the call.
