by Mark Roberts
Her words trailed after Clay as she sprinted into the kitchen of the house in the heart of Edge Hill.
88
1.48 am
From the first floor came the sound of running water and the cries of a frightened child.
As Clay took the stairs two at a time, the water stopped running and the child stopped crying. The silence made her blood run cold. She followed the sound of dripping, down the first floor landing, along a narrow corridor, past one bedroom and another and then to the bathroom door.
Air bubbled though water as Clay stepped into the bathroom.
Maisy Tanner was pinned to the bottom of a bath full of water, weighted down by a chunk of sandstone. Her eyes were wide beneath the water and a stream of bubbles rose from her mouth as the breath passed from her body.
Clay reached in, heaved the sandstone away, grabbed the child by the shoulders and hauled her out of the water. She laid Maisy on the tiled floor. The little girl was frozen, her body like a sealed knot. The room span around Clay’s head as she squashed her lips against Maisy’s mouth and blew. She pressed the heel of her hand to her breastbone and compressed.
Maisy threw up a stream of water. As the little girl drew in a lungful of air, Clay felt a presence in the doorway behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw a streak of darkness flying at her head. She shifted and the metal bar cracked into the tiled floor. A man landed on his knees next to her, the bar still in his hands, his face covered by a black balaclava, his eyes wild.
Clay grabbed the shaft of the bar. She hung on as he yanked it towards himself and felt the dwindling strength in her fingers dissolve on the surface of the metal.
He pulled it clear away.
Clay slipped on the wet floor but made it up onto both feet.
Behind her, Maisy took another raw, gargling lungful of air.
He was on his feet too. She knew his eyes, but a name didn’t click. He lurched at her.
Clay reached up to his face and, with her index and middle finger, poked his eyes sharply.
One hand flew to his face as he swiped down with the bar. The bar connected with the side of the bath, arched back and clipped him on the mouth. He let go and the bar fell into the bath water.
With one foot, Clay pushed Maisy’s body as far into the corner as she could. Protect her, above all else. She steadied her weight and balanced. She lifted her foot and kicked him in the stomach.
A bomb of white light exploded inside and outside her brain as he punched the side of her head.
Her fingers connected with the rough surface of his mask. She tugged and the mask came away, exposing the lower half of his face.
His eyes swam with tears, the whites red raw. She knew him.
With one hand, fingers splayed, he aimed for Clay’s face. She bit down and trapped his index finger between her top and lower teeth.
She crunched hard on his flesh and bone.
He reeled back.
Clay pulled the bar from the water.
She lunged and poked his throat with the bar.
He held his hands up, spluttered, ‘No! No!’
‘Take the mask off!’ He had been at Ullet Road.
She poked his mouth with the butt of the bar, heard the crack of his front teeth. He had stood facing Hendricks.
‘Do you want some more?’ shouted Clay. He had posed as a cameraman.
‘Please, no...’
She watched sweat and blood leak onto the scar tissue on his upper lip. The hare-lipped cameraman at Ullet Road. Like the hare-lipped nurse at Ashworth Hospital.
Ullet Road. A vulture at the scene of the crime.
It all clicked into place as he raised the mask to the top of his head, exposing his face. Adrian White’s errand boy.
‘Was it all those nights in Ashworth, all those whisperings in the dark that turned you into this, Richard?’
The psychiatric nurse closed his eyes.
‘I’m talking to you, Taylor. Open your eyes and look at me.’
Richard Taylor tried to focus, but couldn’t. ‘I can’t see.’
She stuck the butt of the metal bar under his chin. Blood poured from his broken teeth and gums.
‘Did you pass messages between Adrian White and Anais Drake?’
‘He had me tied up in knots.’
‘Are you the go-between for the Baptist and the Red Cloud?’
‘Yes. Yes I am.’
‘Talk!’
‘If you came out of the basement alone, I was to kill you and leave your body in the tunnels. The rest was for the rats.’
Maisy sobbed for breath, her eyes wide open now.
‘Move a muscle and I promise you, I will kill you,’ said Clay. ‘And under the circumstances, I will get away with murder.’ She positioned herself to shield Maisy’s body, then smashed the bathroom window with the bar. ‘I’m up here!’ she called into the darkness.
Many sets of feet sprinted towards the house.
But Eve Clay was listening to another sound, a strange music from the basement, the ecstatic laughter of two sisters.
And she pictured them dancing for joy around their mother’s corpse.
89
3.35 am
In the interview room at Trinity Road police station, Coral Drake almost jumped out of her seat when Clay moved the table to one side.
‘Let me reiterate, Coral. You have the right to a solicitor—’
‘I don’t want a solicitor. I don’t need her here.’ Coral looked accusingly at the child-protection officer sitting in the corner.
‘You’re under eighteen. I need her here, even if you think you don’t.’
‘I need nothing.’ Her voice had dropped to little more than a whisper.
Clay moved her chair, closed down the distance between them. ‘How did your mother know Adrian White?’
‘She told me he is our father.’
Clay said nothing and, in silence, waited.
‘He didn’t live with us, he wasn’t like a regular father, he came and went. But even when he wasn’t there, he filled the whole house. Even years after the trial was over and his body had been locked away. I’d be alone in my room and I could feel him just outside the door, ready to walk in at any moment. My mother said it was his spirit. That he could send his spirit travelling to any place he wanted and that he continually visited the house and was watching our every move. There was no escaping him. Even at night when I was sleeping, he walked into my dreams. Do you know what I mean?’
Clay understood perfectly but remained silent.
‘My mother said he could physically walk away from the hospital at any moment he chose but that he was waiting for the right moment, the Beginning of the End of Time. And that he had people in the hospital who were on his side.’
Anger filled her face and then fear returned.
‘One night during the September fast... some months ago...’ Coral’s expression clouded and Clay wondered if she knew which year it was. ‘...there was a ring on the bell. At my mother’s command, I went to the door and opened it. It was a man. The Stranger. He said, The Beginning of the End of Time has arrived. Prepare to signal this to the Clouds across the world.’
Clay pictured Richard Taylor, terrified and crying, begging for mercy, his mask removed on the bathroom floor.
‘Every doubt I’d ever had about things my mother had told me vanished. She had been predicting this for years. The Stranger told me he would be in touch again and walked away. Time went on, the September fast ended. The Stranger returned in the night. I woke up from a nightmare of Father and he was at the foot of my bed. Your father has a message for you. His spirit is in my flesh. Obey your mother in all things when the Beginning of the End of Time arrives, or the doors of the hospital will open and he will reap vengeance on you. It is you and Faith and Adrienne or them.’
‘Them?’ asked Clay.
‘Those we killed in their homes.’ She paused. Before my eyes, the Stranger turned into my father and back into the Strang
er and I was convinced beyond any doubt.’
The silence was long and full of a pain that was beyond healing. Coral sank back inside herself.
‘This Stranger,’ asked Clay. ‘Was there any distinctive mark on his face?’
Coral nodded and touched her top lip. ‘A scar. Right here.’
‘Coral,’ said Clay, ‘were you hungry, in need of food, at this time?’
‘We are always hungry, Mrs Clay. Our bodies are cages, hunger sets us free.’
‘Are you hungry now, Coral?’
‘I’m starving.’
‘I’m hungry too, Coral, I haven’t eaten for ages. Shall we eat the same food together?’
‘Perhaps.’
Clay phoned the duty sergeant and ordered toast and milk.
‘When did the Stranger next come, Coral?’
‘A week ago, when the snow arrived. I was coming home from school, walking down Woolton Road into the first of the blizzards. He said, Tell your mother the Beginning of the End of Time is here. Harvest. Christian Grace Foundation. That was all.’
The sounds and letters comprising Anais Drake’s name flew around inside Clay’s head and settled, making order from chaos. A minute passed, then two, then five. Clay listened to the noise of starlings in a tree outside, hopeless birds fooled by artificial light into thinking night was day.
‘Did you ever go to a Christian church with your mother?’
‘No.’ It was the first and only note of amusement Clay would see in Coral Drake. And it was brief.
‘Did your mother ever refer to herself by another name?’
Clay recalled the text from Hendricks.
‘Such as?’
‘Karisa Aden.’ The anagram of Anais Drake, the aka she’d used to bleed dry the families of the Christian Grace Foundation.
‘No.’
There was a knock on the door. Clay went over, opened it wide enough to take the toast and milk from a young WPC, thanked her and closed it again. Clay had the clearest sense that there was something dark in the room, something that needed shielding from everyone but her. She looked at the child-protection officer in the corner. Though the blood had drained from her face, Clay could not dismiss her from the room.
Coral fell on the toast, ripping it with her teeth and over-filling her mouth. As she swallowed the milk in one long set of gulps, Clay looked away and thought, You have systematically been reduced to the level of a beast.
‘Do you have any friends in school?’
‘No, I am what I am to this world. Invisible. They look at me, but no one ever sees me.’ Coral licked her finger to gather the crumbs from the plate and stuck it in her mouth.
‘Do you know two boys called Robbie and Vincent Pearson?’
‘I sold them a laptop last week. For £5. The screensaver was my father. I made it impossible for them to wipe that image. They thought they were fooling me. Imagine!’
The thought of Robbie and Vincent turned Clay’s mind to another victim. ‘How did you know I’d be in Calderstones Park with Sandy Patel?’
‘We followed you in the car, my mother and I. She left me there to watch you.’
Clay remembered the blurred figure appearing then disappearing in the trees.
‘I waited until you’d gone and followed the boy. He was at the lake. I told him who he was. I’d seen his picture on the wall in his house in The Serpentine. I walked onto the ice with him. I told him, Death is your only friend now. I watched him drown. He changed his mind, reached out his hands to me. I said, I deliver you from this chaos.’
‘And you told this to the Stranger?’
‘I told mother.’
Who passed it on to Richard Taylor, thought Clay.
‘When I went to the Patels’ house in The Serpentine, you called me on the telephone. How did you know I’d be there?’
‘We watched you enter the house. We were close at hand. Just as we have been for years. Watching you.’
Clay fell silent, pressed down on the rising sickness inside.
She watched Coral as something heavy passed through her mind. ‘When are you going to gather the Clouds?’ she asked.
‘Never. It isn’t the Beginning of the End of Time. I am not the Matriarch. You’ve been lied to, Coral. Your mother. Adrian White. The Stranger. Lies.’
Coral looked puzzled, but then another thought crossed her mind and face in the same moment. ‘All this was for nothing?’ Instead of anger, Clay saw the opening of a bud, the first touch of relief, and then concern. ‘Where is my sister Faith?’
‘With your other sister. Alder Hey in the Park Hospital.’
Coral frowned and quizzed Clay with a glance. ‘But you don’t understand, Mrs Clay, do you?’
‘What don’t I understand?’
‘Adrienne isn’t my sister. She’s my daughter. My father had sex with me in the sanctum. Over and over. He couldn’t get enough of me. Where she was conceived, she was born. I was ten. The pain of creation was nothing to the agony of giving birth to her. The last message from the Stranger, on the morning of the night we visited The Serpentine, was that it would be Faith’s turn next if we didn’t obey Mother. And, full of my father’s spirit, the Stranger was to be the one who took her body. I couldn’t let that happen, could I, Mrs Clay? Could I?’
A door opened in Clay’s mind. Anais’s choice of Coral as her first human sacrifice had a simple explanation. She was jealous of Coral because of the enthusiasm with which White had raped her.
Clay looked at Coral and, for a moment, she looked no more than ten years old. The hideous reality of White’s crime against Coral hit Clay hard. She recalled the powerful muscles of the Baptist’s body, and the frailty of the child before her filled Clay with a sorrow that she knew she would remember to her dying day.
‘No,’ said Clay. She sighed. ‘I think that’s enough for now, Coral.’
‘There’s something else. Something Faith and I agreed upon for a time such as this. Anais dead. Anais gone. We have a message. Record this on your phone.’
Clay glanced at the camera filming the interview, took out her iPhone and, pressing record, held it close to Coral.
‘Are you listening?’ asked Coral.
‘I’m listening,’ replied Clay.
‘Then you must be our witness.’
90
4.15 am
In the small back bedroom of Richard Taylor’s house there were three filing cabinets packed with folders and lever-arch files.
Hendricks turned to Clay. ‘We haven’t had time to go through it all, but it looks like Taylor’s written down every single word that White’s uttered over the last seven years. He’s obsessed with him, totally consumed.’
He handed Clay a diary. ‘He didn’t even take his annual leave, managed to use the staff shortages and sick leave of other colleagues to be there as often as he could.’
Clay listened to the sound of footsteps running up the stairs and she recognised it as Riley.
When she appeared in the doorway, she looked rattled to the core.
‘Two bodies have been discovered at Otterspool Promenade,’ she said. ‘Robbie and Vincent Pearson. Carbon-monoxide poisoning. It looks like a suicide pact.’
‘We know it’s definitely them?’ asked Clay.
‘They killed themselves in my car.’
Clay pictured Mrs Pearson’s face, sitting in the interview room with Jon, and wondered how much more sorrow a woman could endure before she crawled into the nearest corner and willed herself to die. ‘Has their mother been informed?’
‘Stone’s on his way to see her. The bodies are at the mortuary. He’s going to take Mrs Pearson there for a formal identification, but yeah...’ Riley looked around the blank walls of the nondescript bedroom. She took out her iPhone. ‘He sent me this.’
She turned the screen of her iPhone to Clay and showed her a picture.
Robbie’s head nestled on Vincent’s shoulder. They looked like they were sleeping in a dark cloud.
C
lay walked to the door.
‘Where are you going, Eve?’ asked Riley.
‘If anyone needs me I’ll be at The Serpentine.’
She held up a dog-eared card file filled with pieces of paper and bearing the felt-penned letters: ‘E V E T T E C L A Y’.
Time hurtled. The compulsion to connect with love overwhelmed her.
Walking down the stairs, she phoned Thomas.
‘Eve? What’s happening?’
‘It’s over, Thomas. Come home as quickly as you can.’
She pictured the scene when she first stepped into the Patels’ house and hoped that her next visit would be her final one.
91
5.05 am
Clay stood at the open back door of the Patels’ house, the security light picking out the plume of breath coming from her mouth. She breathed in and pictured the turned-off CCTV cameras over the front and back doors.
She blew out a thin stream of smoke-like air and thought, Alicia, it wasn’t the forces of darkness that spiked your family’s CCTV cameras.
Clay closed the door, took out her phone and dialled DS Stone.
Stone picked up.
‘How is Mrs Pearson?’ asked Clay
Stone shook his head. ‘She’s under sedation. It was horrific.’
‘Jon?’
‘Jon’s been put into emergency foster care.’
Clay saw a crack of light in the sky.
‘What do you want me to do, Eve?’
‘Go home, Karl. Watch a slasher movie. Relax.’
‘Will do. Anything at your end?’
‘No word back from the CCTV engineers?’
‘Not yet.’
‘We won’t hold our breath on that one. I think I know why the CCTV at the Patels’ house stopped working. When her parents went to bed, Alicia went outside for a sly smoke. She probably turned the system off and didn’t live long enough to turn it back on.’
In the sky, the crack of light widened.
‘What if the CCTV had been on?’ asked Stone.
‘If it had been on, I don’t think it would’ve done the Patels any favours. The Red Cloud had their orders from White. What did they have to be afraid of? It was the Beginning of the End of Time and they were born to announce that.’
