Dead Silent

by Mark Roberts

  ‘Hello, Gina,’ he replied, without looking up.

  ‘What are you up to, Barns?’

  ‘It’s bad enough being named after a cartoon character by my oh so ditzy mother – Barney Rubble, for God’s sake! – without you abbreviating it and making me sound like a rent boy.’

  Riley laughed. ‘Thank your lucky stars she wasn’t into Speedy Gonzales. Coffee, Barns? Black, three sugars?’

  ‘Lovely. I’m trying to get the last living cells of my brain around the carving on the spear. The dragonfly exiting a window. I’m breaking it down and seeing if it’s some sort of visual anagram.’

  She flicked on the kettle and they looked at each other.

  ‘Make it four sugars. I haven’t eaten for hours.’

  She looked at Leonard Lawson’s books, spread across three desks and open at a variety of colour and black-and-white plates of great works of art.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ said Riley. ‘The Last Judgment? Who’d want that on the wall? What’s the point? Really, what’s the point of them?’

  ‘Most of these paintings are moral lectures designed to scare the shit out of the viewer so that they give time and money to the Church,’ said Cole, continuing to draw straight lines on a piece of paper with a ruler and pen.

  She placed the coffee down and laughed, ‘You look like you’re doing your homework.’

  He looked up and smiled at her. ‘I am, in a manner of speaking.’ He held up the page and showed her straight vertical lines in three sets according to size.

  There were two 3-centimetre lines, two 2-centimetre lines and five 1-centimetre lines.

  She walked over and he handed her a picture he had printed off of the symbol engraved on the spear. On the white margin along the top, Riley read Hendricks’s neat handwriting: A dragonfly exiting a window.

  ‘I’ve been looking through Lawson’s books for something to chime with the dragonfly image, something from a work of art. Nothing. I’m by no means certain, but my instincts whisper that it’s a visual anagram of a word or letters. To me it even looks like a hieroglyphic.’ He pointed at his feet and the bin overflowing with scrunched paper. ‘I’ve tried all kinds of combinations. It could just be a random squiggle on a bar of chocolate. Every letter of the alphabet can be made linear. Take C for example: C has a recognisable curve in it, but you can also make a C out of two or three straight lines if all the other letters are linear. So, at the moment, I’m thinking language.’

  Riley’s mobile rang out and she connected.

  ‘Gina, where are you?’ asked Clay.

  ‘I’m in the incident room with Barney Cole.’

  ‘I’m about to go in to interview Gabriel Huddersfield. I’ve had a call from Terry Mason. Something in Huddersfield’s flat is making him very excited.’

  Riley picked up her bag and coat. ‘I’ll get over there right now.’

  ‘How’s Barney getting on with the puzzle on the spear?’

  ‘I’ll hand you over, Eve.’

  With Riley’s phone at his ear, Cole took a photograph of the neatly set-out lines, deconstructed from the image on the spear. ‘I’m sending you a picture, Eve. Is it language? Think language.’

  ‘Stick with it, Barney. I like the way your mind’s working.’

  As Clay sat in Interview Suite 1, waiting for Huddersfield to be processed at the desk by Sergeant Harris, Cole’s sets of lines arrived on her phone. She looked at them. The possibilities for rearranging them were endless.

  Seems and is...

  She scrolled backwards, pulled up a picture of where the symbol had been found, on the shaft inside Leonard Lawson’s staged body, a three-dimensional sculpture in flesh and blood and bone. She closed her eyes and Lawson’s body morphed into the naked figure being carried on a stick by the man with a platypus head in Bosch’s The Last Judgment.

  She studied the photo of the symbol itself. If it was a form of language, it had been deliberately buried in the depths of a macabre human sculpture. In her mind, language equated to knowledge, but the symbolic language on the spear was hidden and esoteric. Something stirred deep inside her brain and the symbol as scrambled language suddenly seemed like a strong possibility.

  She heard three sets of footsteps, two of them familiar – Sergeant Harris and DS Hendricks. She homed in on the rhythm of the third.

  Gabriel Huddersfield was coming.

  61

  12.35 pm

  ‘Do you want legal representation, Gabriel?’ Clay sat next to Hendricks across the table from Huddersfield.

  He shook his head.

  ‘What other name does the First Born go by?’

  She could see a change in his state of mind since she’d last interviewed him in the Royal Liverpool Hospital. The theatrical lunacy was absent and there was a heat in the once cold blue eyes and a bead of sweat on his top lip. In patches, his shirt stuck to his body and the skin tones and body hairs were visible.

  ‘Whenever you get a pair of people involved in a murder, Gabriel, there is always a leader and there is always a follower.’

  He looked to the left of Clay’s head.

  ‘I know you’re listening, Gabriel. I honestly believed that after DS Hendricks gave his informed assessment you’d stop playacting.’

  ‘I’ve got a severe mental illness!’

  ‘Every single human being on this planet can pretend to be something they are not, regardless of age, culture or mental state. Animals do it. Pretending is the thing we can all do when we need to. It’s a survival technique. Look at me, Gabriel. Look at me! Your job isn’t to convince me you’re crazy at the moment. Your job... No, Gabriel, I’m not going to spoonfeed you. You tell me who the smart one is in this set-up.’

  The only muscles Gabriel moved were in his eyes. He looked at Hendricks, long and hard. ‘How do you know the colour of Jesus Christ’s eyes? The end of the world?’

  Hendricks didn’t respond.

  ‘Where the soul of Judas Iscariot can be found?’

  ‘I understand you, Gabriel, let’s put it that way. You’ve got a conscience of sorts and you also have a lot of fear inside you. Fear of ending up in the wrong place, both on this side of the life–death continuum and on the other. Prison and hell. Are you with me on that one?’

  Huddersfield nodded.

  ‘Let’s go back to DCI Clay’s idea, Gabriel.’

  ‘Who’s the one, Gabriel,’ said Clay, ‘who’s going to serve the most time in the highest-category unit in the penal system?’

  ‘The leader.’

  ‘There’s no way the instigator in this murder is ever going to get out of jail. Ever. The follower gets a life sentence with parole.’

  ‘There was no way we could get caught. We were immune from the danger of being caught because we were serving God. The First Born convinced me.’ Competing fears flashed across the surface of Huddersfield’s face.

  ‘Did you need a lot of convincing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did the First Born tell you?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Serve God, stay free, go to heaven. Ignore God, suffer the perils of the earth and go to hell.’

  ‘Seems and is, Gabriel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The First Born said this is the case and it seems the First Born was wrong. You didn’t even last twelve hours before we pulled you in. The perils of the earth? You could have been killed running away from DS Hendricks and into that motorcycle. The First Born got it wrong. But you still thought you were safe at that point, that the arrest was a blip, that the First Born could save you because the First Born is infallible. I see now, I see. All that acting out in the Royal. You were amusing yourself at our expense, but that was foolishness. A big mistake, Gabriel. A big mistake.’

  ‘When did the First Born make you his angel?’ asked Hendricks.

  ‘When his voice took residence inside my skull. His words went round inside me even when he wasn’t there, especially when he wasn’t there.’

  ‘How long did it
take him to brainwash you, Gabriel?’ Clay watched as the silence unfolded and whatever strands of logic remained connected in his brain. The look on his face was excruciating. Clay went for him. ‘What is the name of the person who brainwashed you, Gabriel?’

  He looked at Hendricks. ‘You seem right, but surely... Genesis... you’re wrong.’

  ‘Gabriel, in hell there are mansions. I believe this. Mansions where like attracts like. Just like prisons on earth. Murderers sleep next to murderers. Sex offenders with sex offenders. If the First Born is wrong about what happens on earth, then surely... surely... Where are you going when you die? Who or what are you spending eternity with?’ asked Hendricks.

  Huddersfield’s mouth moved, but no sounds came out. His body shook and his eyes rolled.

  ‘Gabriel, give us the name of the First Born.’

  A noise like steam escaping from a crack in a pipe came from Huddersfield’s mouth as his lips moved faster and faster. A body of noise weaved into the hissing and it sounded like two voices were coming from the same mouth, a pair of competing voices struggling to articulate the same word.

  ‘Genesis?’ Clay asked.

  He fell silent.

  ‘Genesis?’ she repeated. ‘Genesis?’

  ‘Look at every single name you can find in the Book of Genesis and ask the question, is this the one?’

  As Gabriel spoke, Clay wrote on a spiral-bound pad in front of her. She pushed the pad towards Hendricks and he read the words in silence: The First Born shares his name with a character in Genesis.

  Hendricks took out his phone. ‘Tell me about the body and the garden on the back of the triptych.’

  Clay watched Gabriel’s eyes, saw the ebb and flow of his thoughts, coming in closer and pulling away. He pressed his index finger to his broken lips.

  ‘You spoke to me on the phone in Leonard Lawson’s house, Gabriel,’ said Hendricks. ‘You’ve got a very unusual voice. It was you talking about a body and a garden. Whose body? Which garden?’

  A remnant of the blistering strobe light in Leonard Lawson’s bedroom danced behind Clay’s eyes and, in the eruption of light, she pictured The Last Judgment painted on the wall of Gabriel Huddersfield’s room. The darkness wiped his room away and when the light came again, she saw Leonard Lawson’s bedroom, his impaled body, the bed, the dressing-table mirror, the clean rectangle and its missing Tower of Babel. Light, dark, light, dark. Huddersfield, Lawson, Huddersfield, Lawson.

  She got up, opened the door and said, ‘Sergeant Harris will take you back to your cell. It’s on the back of the triptych, Gabriel. You told us so yourself, back in the Royal. The name of the garden.’

  62

  12.45 pm

  ‘He’s packed everything away so tightly,’ said DS Mason to DS Riley as she entered Huddersfield’s flat. Passing slowly by, he indicated the three rooms rammed with Huddersfield’s possessions.

  ‘I thought I was a hoarder,’ said Riley. ‘But he’s obsessively tidy, I’ll give him that.’ At the bathroom door, she glanced at the mannequin dressed in leather and chains and felt as if she’d had pornography forced on her.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Mason, pushing open the door of the main room.

  Riley looked at the statue of Jesus dying on the cross on one wall and the three-sectioned mural of paradise, the world and hell on the second wall. She was alarmed at the skilfulness of the two representations. The smell of oil paint and varnish percolated through the aroma of stale incense.

  She stepped between the corners of Huddersfield’s life. Art. Piles of dried-out rags and tubs of stagnant, oil-stained water; notebooks and sketchpads; bulging albums and dog-eared art books. Religion. Multiple Bibles, works of religious devotion, statues and crucifixes. Sex. A heap of pornographic magazines and sex toys.

  ‘Gina, we found this,’ said Mason. He handed her a framed print of Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel and she wondered what the jury would talk about as they killed time in order to give the impression of having conducted a detailed debate as to the guilt of Gabriel Huddersfield.

  Her iPhone rang out. On the display: ‘Clay’. She connected and switched to speakerphone.

  ‘Gina, are you there?’

  ‘In the oh so charming apartment.’

  ‘Whose body? Whose garden? Huddersfield said the name of the garden where the corpse is buried is on the back of the triptych.’

  ‘I’m looking at the triptych right now.’ Riley examined the wall, the paint that covered the plaster. Her eyes were drawn to the bottom left-hand corner and the figure that had inspired the staging of Leonard Lawson’s body. Behind it was the head marching on disembodied feet and, underneath, just two tiny letters: G H. ‘There’s no paper on the wall that we can peel back to reveal the name of anything.’

  ‘The exterior is the gable wall at the side of the house,’ said Mason, chipping in to the conversation.

  ‘What have you got for me, Terry?’ asked Clay.

  ‘It’s in my hand,’ said Riley. ‘He found the framed picture of The Tower of Babel from Leonard Lawson’s room,’ said Riley.

  Clay fell silent and then asked, ‘What are the dimensions?’

  ‘Fifty centimetres by thirty-five centimetres,’ said Mason.

  ‘Same dimensions as the print from Leonard Lawson’s room. The clean space on his wall measured fifty centimetres by thirty-five centimetres.’

  Riley looked at the image of the doomed tower and placed it in the context of the entire room: the world according to Gabriel Huddersfield’s psychosis and the celestial forces that governed that chaos.

  ‘Terry,’ said Clay. ‘I want you to throw a ladder up to the gable wall. Examine every single brick that corresponds to the top floor and the space where the mural sits on the inside wall. ‘You’re looking for writing, the name of a garden.’

  Without a word, DS Mason headed out of the room, at speed.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Clay.

  Riley looked at the initials GH, the signature on the base of the triptych, and felt electricity pulse down her spine. An idea formed in the back of her mind and she gazed at the two letters.

  ‘Are you there, Gina?’

  ‘You know how Barney’s thinking that the symbol on the spear is actually language, some sort of anagram... What was Leonard Lawson’s body staged like?’

  ‘Leonard Lawson’s body was staged as a work of art...’ Clay fell silent.

  ‘Huddersfield signed off his copy of Hieronymus Bosch’s work with his own initials, the cheeky bastard. I’m looking at his signature right now. I can feel the smile on your face coming through the silence. Go on! Call it, Eve.’

  ‘It’s their signatures. The dragonfly at the window is a visual anagram for the murderers’ initials. Let me call Barney.’

  63

  12.59 pm

  In the car park of the Anglican Cathedral, Adam Miller didn’t notice the passage of time. He sat at the wheel of his white van, the radio mumbling away, and stared up at the bell tower, imagining the stonemason and the security guard ridiculing him.

  As his heart raced faster and faster, the temperature of his anger alternated with every beat. Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

  He glanced at the dashboard, saw it was a minute away from one o’clock, the time the stonemason would leave for another job.

  Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

  Adam looked to the very top of the bell tower, where the security guard would at some point be alone, and decided he would get out of his van and make the journey back up there.

  Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

  ‘So you’d talk to me like that, you fucking nonentity!’

  Adam reached under his seat and felt the wooden handle of a hammer, pictured the terror on the security guard’s face as the metal head came flying at the bridge of his nose.

  Hot cold, hot hot, hot hotter...

  ‘Fucking suck on that, you fucking motherfucking cunt!’ he screamed at the windscreen and the top of the bell tower. />
  Hotter hotter, hotter hotter, hotter hotter...

  Years of aimless talk with counsellors withered inside him and he was eighteen again, on fire, alive with rage.

  Hotter hotter hotter hotter hotter hotter...

  His early years passed through his mind; snapshots of faces blown on a remorseless wind. At sixteen, the stranger whose face he glassed on the street. Sixteen again, the terror in the eyes of the old drunk he battered to a lifeless pulp. Seventeen, the shock of the lad he knifed in the guts in a pub car park. Eighteen, the ageing rent boy whose fingers he broke with a hammer and whose agonised cries still echoed in his ears and sent waves of pleasure right through him.

  ‘Fuck the consequences! I’ll wait in the shadows and when you pass...’ He gripped the handle of the hammer. ‘Right into your fucking skull.’

  Music came from the radio, the one o’clock Radio Merseyside news broadcast. He felt a cold wind on the nape of his neck and focused on the radio. He turned up the volume.

  ‘Police have arrested and charged a man in connection with the murder of Leonard Lawson. They have named the man as thirty-eight-year-old Gabriel Huddersfield and are now seeking his accomplice. A spokesman...’

  The fire that consumed Adam rushed to his gut and the rest of his body turned to ice.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

  Who picked up Angel Gabriel’s phone?

  The police.

  Who called you back?

  The police.

  Who’s got Angel Gabriel’s phone?

  The police.

  Who can trace you?

  The police.

  He turned on the ignition and, tyres screaming against the red pavement, raced towards the exit barrier, the fire inside him rumbling hotter and hotter and hotter, ready to explode.

  64

  1.01 pm

  DC Barney Cole looked down with frustration at the paper on his desk.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’

  Cole looked across the incident room at Hendricks, who was hunched over a Bible and also brimming with frustration.