Dead Silent

by Mark Roberts

  ‘It’s home-made but well made,’ said Clay, her heart sinking, the chance to follow up a massive lead through commercial producers as dead as dust. The shaft itself looked old, an offcut, and could have been plucked from a skip on the street by any passer-by.

  The metal point was streaked with lines of Leonard Lawson’s blood and a small pool of blood had dripped on to the worn carpet.

  ‘OK,’ said Clay to herself. ‘The bigger picture.’

  She walked to the bedroom door and looked at the room as a whole, in a stable light, from the point of view of someone entering.

  She was struck by the unmade double bed, its blankets and sheets bunched up near the foot, a pair of blue pyjamas folded neatly on the pillow. Her pulse quickened as she imagined the old man, stripped bare in his bedroom and knowing he was going to die. She imagined his terror, his confusion, and wondered sadly what his last conscious thought had been.

  In the alcove beside the double bed was an old-fashioned dressing table with a trio of mirrors. The right-hand mirror had been closed over to cover half of the larger central mirror, leaving the left-hand mirror free to reflect what it caught in the room.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Hendricks.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘The left-hand half of the mirror is reflecting the torso of Leonard Lawson’s body, upside down, and the entire spear entering and leaving his body. Go and position yourself so that you can see what shows up in the open left-hand mirror.’

  Hendricks moved to the window.

  ‘I can see his head and his arms reaching up.’

  Clay moved towards the dressing table and carefully opened the right-hand mirror to the same angle as the left-hand one. She moved to the right. ‘I can see his legs suspended from the pole and his feet poking up to the ceiling.’ She stepped back. ‘Three mirrors on a dressing table and a multitude of ways of seeing one man’s death.’

  Hendricks explored the space in front of the window.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Clay.

  He pointed at the dressing table in the alcove. ‘It should be here!’ He pointed at the window. ‘To take full advantage of the light coming in from the window. I think the killer’s moved the dressing table.’ He looked down at the threadbare carpet. ‘But it’s so worn, I can’t see any indentations from its feet.’

  ‘To reflect his human sculpture,’ said Clay. The words lit a fast-burning fuse in her head. Death as a work of art.

  As Clay walked to the dressing table, she asked, ‘What’s the word, the name? When a painting’s in three linked panels?’

  She recalled such an item in the chapel of St Claire’s, the place she’d called home from when she was a baby until the age of six. It was golden and decorated with angels. ‘Triptych.’ She answered her own question with a word buried deep in childhood memory.

  There were four sections in the wooden body of the dressing table. Two long rectangular drawers in the centre and two hinged doors on either side.

  She opened the doors and drawers and they were all empty.

  ‘Bill?’ She looked at Leonard Lawson. ‘Why did he keep his wife’s dressing table and none of her personal belongings?’

  ‘Let’s talk to his daughter about her mother when she comes round.’

  His words prompted Clay to replay events in reverse.

  Louise Lawson was in the back of an ambulance with Gina Riley. She had had an epileptic fit on the street as she escaped from the scene of her father’s murder. If she suffered from photosensitive epilepsy, it figured that she had been in her father’s room at some point and must have seen his body.

  ‘I wonder what state she’s going to be in when she does come round,’ she said, sadness flooding through her.

  In the central mirror, Clay’s attention was seized by a discolouration on the wall opposite Leonard Lawson’s bed. She turned and saw it was a clean rectangle, the grime on the wallpaper around it defining the shape.

  ‘Terry! Bring a tape measure!’ she called. She pointed at the space. ‘The killer’s taken a trophy, a picture.’ Terry Mason’s footsteps seemed to echo as he came to the room. ‘It’s the first thing the old man saw when he woke up in the morning and the last thing he saw at night.’ Mason appeared. ‘Terry, can you measure the dimensions. Missing picture. But of what?’

  6

  2.59 am

  Clay looked at Leonard Lawson’s body, inverted and dehumanised in death, and focused on what it told her about the perpetrator. So much attention to detail. So little blood. Someone who’d clean the toilet with a toothbrush, maybe, beneath a framed cross-stitch on the bathroom wall: ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’.

  ‘The picture’s fifty centimetres wide and thirty-five centimetres deep,’ said Mason, heading to the door.

  Clay committed this fact to memory and resisted the urge to close Professor Lawson’s eyelids and give him back a crumb of dignity.

  Clicking on her torch, she shone the light into his face. Leonard Lawson’s mouth was partially open, revealing long incisors and canine teeth; all the back teeth were missing. His swollen tongue was trapped between his front teeth. She placed an index finger on his lower lip and pushed down, shining the light inside his mouth.

  You bit down on your tongue as he smacked you on the head, she thought, observing the small pool of blood and spit on the floor beneath his mouth.

  Somewhere in the house, the steady clicking of a camera resumed. To Clay’s ears it had the rhythm of a faulty clock, fast-forwarding through time.

  She saw something narrow and white in the professor’s mouth cavity and trained the light on it. It ran around the top of his tongue and disappeared down the sides. String.

  ‘Bill, look at this.’ She peered at the top of his tongue and made out a knot in the string. ‘The killer tied the old man’s tongue,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty certain Leonard Lawson knew his killer.’

  ‘The attention to detail?’ asked Hendricks.

  She stepped back, looked at the whole scene again. ‘And I don’t think the killer acted alone.’ Now that the initial shock was ebbing, the detail started to amaze her. ‘It’s too complex. The staging of the body. The strobe light. The use of mirrors.’

  Outside, the wind whipped through the street, sent a can rattling along a gutter and filled the house with what sounded like a painful dying breath.

  Clay phoned Karl Stone and he picked up immediately.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Stone. ‘I got the picture. Who or what are we looking for?’

  ‘You’re on the nail, Karl,’ replied Clay. ‘Dig up an address book, scraps of paper, anything. Look for any contacts of Leonard Lawson’s or his daughter’s, Louise. Anything to report?’

  ‘He stuck the glass pane back into the door at the point of entry.’

  A narrative rolled through Clay’s mind. He? They? They came in through the kitchen door, walked up the stairs, entered Professor Lawson’s bedroom, killed him, set him up in the corner like a hunted and trapped beast, set up a strobe light, took the only picture from the wall, walked back down the stairs and out of the house. How long? Fifteen, twenty minutes? Most of the work took place post-mortem. If they’d simply killed him, they’d have been in the house less than two minutes.

  She took out her iPhone and took three photos of the wall behind Leonard Lawson’s body. She texted the images to Riley, with a message: Gina, please ask Louise what the picture was in her father’s bedroom.

  ‘What are you thinking, Bill?’

  ‘The words medieval and torture. Motive. Sex? No. Money? No. It’s a revenge killing. This is the work of a highly intelligent and sophisticated monster. Looks to me like they are sending him to hell.’

  ‘We’re looking for someone human but uniquely inhuman.’ She laughed, suddenly, bitterly and, as quickly, fell silent.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘The way the body’s staged, it’s going to be a nightmare to move.’ As she spoke, she felt lightheaded and hot, as if she’d stepped into th
e heads of the perpetrators. ‘From a forensic point of view. How are we going to get Leonard Lawson’s body to Dr Lamb in the mortuary without corrupting the evidence?’

  7

  3.00 am

  The first of her senses to stir in the darkness was hearing. The woman heard the sound of hissing and, in the loop between wakefulness and sleep, imagined a snake winding through the gloom towards her.

  Light. In two lines. One vertical, where the curtains hung with the narrowest parting, and one below her bed, at the base of the bedroom door. The door led into the hall of their flat, with the bathroom at the end of it, where the hissing came from, the hissing of jets of water.

  The woman pictured the shower head and the lines of red-hot water cascading down his body. She didn’t know how her husband stood such fierce heat.

  The bedside table held three items. An alarm clock; it was three in the morning. A bottle of sleeping tablets. A novel about a good woman escaping a bad marriage.

  Her husband coughed as the hissing jets of water died. She imagined the tropical conditions in the bathroom, the clouds hanging in the air, condensation running down the walls and mirrors, pools forming on the floor.

  But her head was muddy with Zolpidem and to challenge him – ‘Where have you been while I slept?’ – would involve talking and she didn’t want to hear his voice.

  His footsteps came closer to the bedroom door; her dread increased with every one.

  The bathroom she could face in the morning.

  Again.

  He stopped at the bedroom door and she wondered why he was pausing, this man who never stopped. He switched off the light in the hall; as the door opened, darkness followed him in.

  She was already on her side, eyes shut, feigning the breathing of deep sleep.

  She felt the fabric of his pyjamas as his form fitted around hers, touching but only by the slightest degree. The dampness of his hair gave off an aroma like wet leaves and the heat pouring from his body created an unpleasant warmth that seeped beneath her skin.

  He smelled like his father when he was alive.

  But the thing that made her most want to give up the pretence of sleep was his heartbeat. Like a drum played by an overactive child on a mission to drive the adult world insane, his heart banged at his ribs and she could feel it as wave after wave.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he asked. ‘No.’ He answered his own question. ‘Working. Working in my shed. Fixing things I don’t have time to fix in the day because I am busy fixing other things in the day. You have seen me, have you not?’

  Your shed? she thought. Your precious shed.

  She opened one eye, looked at the clock, prayed for sleep and hoped for morning and to find him quiet beside her, cold where he’d been hot, his heart still where it had been pounding, dead where he had been alive, ready to rot away with his father.

  And that is the day when I take a sledgehammer to it and turn it to kindling.

  8

  3.30 am

  From the eighth floor of the Royal Liverpool Hospital, DS Gina Riley looked west, across the lights of the city centre to the Wirral Peninsula and its blanket of snow, heading inland from the North Atlantic.

  ‘Where am I?’ asked the elderly lady in the bed.

  ‘Hello, Miss Lawson.’ Riley sat on the chair near her head and in her eye line. ‘You’re in the Royal Hospital. My name is Gina Riley. I’m a police officer with Merseyside Constabulary.’ There was a softness in her voice that made her words sound like a lullaby. She began to guide her, step by agonising step, backwards through recent events. ‘I came here with you in an ambulance when you were unconscious.’ Riley watched as cold recall manifested itself on Miss Lawson’s face. ‘You had an epileptic seizure on Lark Lane. You hit your head on the pavement—’

  Miss Lawson raised her left hand, a woman seemingly sick to death of life, asking for silence with a small gesture. Riley noticed the friendship bracelet on her right wrist, three intertwined strands, gold, blue and green.

  Her eyes closed. ‘Oh no! No! No, no, no...’ Miss Lawson’s hands came together and Riley placed a hand across them.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Lawson.’

  Her lips moved and a small, almost inaudible sound came out on her breath.

  ‘Speak up, please, Miss Lawson.’ Riley pressed her ear closer to Miss Lawson’s mouth and listened hard.

  ‘Father?’ said Miss Lawson. ‘He’s been slaughtered? I’m not dreaming?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  In spite of the dressed wound to her head and the NHS gown, there was a natural refinement to the woman that said, ‘Dignity at all times, dignity at all costs’.

  ‘Is there anyone I can send for, anyone who can come and comfort you?’

  ‘No one. Who? Who can comfort me?’ She seemed utterly perplexed, and her eyes filled. Riley imagined the slow-burning horror of her dawning realisation. ‘My God. When I woke, I thought, a dream, a bad dream, a nightmare, my father... God, no...’ She clapped her hand to her mouth as if to press down a scream rising within her and her eyes widened. Noises sounded in her throat, inarticulate expressions of terror and amazement. Slowly the mounting tension in Miss Lawson’s body reached a peak and she wept silent tears, tears that Riley guessed she would shed for the rest of her days.

  Louise Lawson turned her face away. Her whole body convulsed with sobs, but the only sounds she made were fractured in-breaths.

  She held the friendship bracelet between her thumb and fingertips. ‘Why? Why my father?’

  ‘Miss Lawson?’ Riley leaned in to her. ‘Look at me. Please. I know how dreadful this must be for you, but I need you to look at something for me.’ Miss Lawson stared at her as if she had suddenly turned into an unspeakably cruel monster. Riley pushed on. ‘Will you look at a picture for me?’

  She pulled up the photo gallery on her iPhone and opened the shot of the wall opposite Leonard Lawson’s bed.

  ‘Miss Lawson, I want to show you a picture.’ She turned the screen towards her and slowly drew the image into her line of vision. ‘Can you see the picture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it a picture of?’

  ‘It’s... it’s... his bedroom... where... the wall opposite his bed... but... it’s missing... his picture...’

  ‘The picture on your father’s wall, Miss Lawson. It was a picture of your mother?’

  ‘No... no, not Mother. It was the tower...’

  ‘The tower?’

  Miss Lawson looked at Riley with pleading eyes. ‘Please don’t... please... please don’t make me relive it... because I can’t... think... remember... hope... no hope. The house... Think straight... I... I can’t... I keep seeing him... like that... the horrible flashing...’ She jabbed a finger into space. ‘It’s like it’s there, right there in front of me.’

  ‘It’s not there, Louise. You’re safe with me. You’re in a state of shock. Your mind’s playing tricks on you. Who can I get for you? Louise, do you have a relative? A neighbour? A friend?’

  ‘No one.’

  A cold wash of sorrow passed through Riley. She looked at the woman, the decades that had lined her face, and the thought that she was utterly alone in her greatest hour of need made her unbearably sad.

  ‘No one?’ she whispered.

  ‘No one.’

  Memory seemed to play out across the old lady’s exhausted features, rolling through her mind and crunching the muscles of her face into a knot. Riley felt as if she’d contracted a virus from her: the physical weight of Miss Lawson’s terror ran through her own body like a red-hot vibration.

  ‘Louise, the person who did this to your father took away his picture of the tower. This is significant. This could help us catch him.’

  ‘I hear. Thank you. I understand. Can we just. Be.’ Louise looked at the wall opposite. Riley followed her gaze. Her attention was drawn to the chaos of the wind and the approaching snow outside. ‘Babel.’

  ‘The Tower of Babel?’ Riley confirmed.


  ‘The Tower of Babel.’

  Riley walked into the furthest corner of the room, saw Louise close her eyes, and looked into the sky. The night clouds were pregnant with snow. She called Clay and within a few moments, she connected.

  ‘The missing picture on Leonard Lawson’s wall is an Old Testament scene, Book of Genesis. It’s the Tower of Babel.’

  Clay knew the story well. It was one that Sister Philomena had taught her at an early age. ‘Mankind at odds with God, the ensuing wrath of the Almighty and the scattering of people,’ she said.

  Outside, the snow started falling.

  9

  3.35 am

  Outside Leonard Lawson’s house, Clay took out her phone and saw that she had missed a call from her husband, Thomas. And although she didn’t have time, she needed to hear his voice, to counterbalance the freak show she was mired in and reassure her, in the fist of night, that there was another side to life. After four rings, he picked up her call.

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘Hi...’ Freshly stirred from sleep, she could tell he was happy to hear from her. ‘How’s the wandering old woman?’

  ‘Her name’s Louise Lawson and her father’s Leonard. She’s alive and in the Royal. But her father’s been murdered...’ She felt the smile fall from her face.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Just off Lark Lane.’

  ‘Not far from home.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll make it home to see Philip before he goes to nursery. Doctor, Doctor, I’ve got a chronic case of RMS.’

  ‘RMS? Slip behind the screen and take off all of your clothes...’

  She laughed. ‘You’re a filthy animal, Doctor, but that’s not the only reason I married you.’

  ‘RMS? Hmmm... What symptoms are you displaying?’

  ‘Guilt, regret, feeling rotten because I’m hardly ever home.’

  ‘Rotten Mother Syndrome. You’re not a rotten mother. When you’re with Philip, you’re there 100 per cent for him. He loves you. He lights up when he sees you, and when you’re not here, he talks about you all the time. He’s only a small kid, but small kids are very good at working out who loves them and who doesn’t. And when you’re not with him, you miss him so much it’s like physical pain.’