by Mark Roberts
France. By midnight. South. Never stopping. The Mediterranean. A bribe. A boat. A short crossing. Africa. By midnight tomorrow.
He glanced at the walls. The faces that had haunted him had become still. Fear morphed into hatred. He looked around, bit his lower lip so hard that the taste of blood filled his mouth. Anger rocketed through him. He picked a spade from the wall and smashed it into Christ’s profile. Into the weeping face above his head, he threw the sharp edge of the spade, into the eyes, blinding it.
A joyless smile was frozen on his face.
No time to lose.
He hung the spade back on the wall, dropped to his knees and placed his hands either side of the black box beneath his workbench. The familiar size and shape in his hands was a comfort, but he knew in his heart that, somewhere on the journey ahead, the box would have to be sacrificed. In the English Channel perhaps. A burial at sea for Adam Miller and the beginning of his new time on earth.
He pulled the box out and stood it up on its wheels, extended the handle and felt the weight of its contents. The whip, the knives, the sharp things, the things made of glass, the ropes and chains. The thought of them all sitting inside the darkness gave him a deep, dark thrill.
In his new world, he would be an oligarch and the possibilities would be endless.
The light inside the shed seemed to alter and his eyes were drawn to the small window. Gideon Stephens’s face and head filled the small frame. Gideon looked at Adam, impassive, unblinking. And Adam wondered how long the little bastard had been standing there, peering in, spying on his privacy. The happy notes that his future life had sounded crashed into discord. Anger ran through his veins at the invasion by the smirking man-child.
Breathing was hard work again. So he held his breath and looked directly back at Gideon, into his eyes. He sent two fingers of thought through the glass and into Gideon’s eyes, each finger gouging the fleshy bulbs from their sockets, leaving him hollow-eyed and repulsive.
‘Hello, Gideon.’ He breathed out, surprised at the depth and strength in his voice and the veil of charm. ‘Can I help you?’
Gideon said nothing, shook his head.
‘How long have you been standing there, Gideon?’
‘Not long, a few moments.’
‘Why are you standing there, Gideon?’
‘I was worried about you.’
‘Were you? Why?’
‘You don’t seem yourself. You almost ran through the house. You look sick.’
‘I can assure you, Gideon, that I am, very much indeed, myself.’
Mist hovered above Gideon’s head. It reminded Adam of a painting of Christ being baptised in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, with the Holy Spirit sitting above his skull in the form of a dove. ‘Why do things like that never happen to me?’ he said.
‘Things like what?’
‘Nothing,’ he replied, consumed with resentment. ‘Just thinking out loud.’ He propped the black box against the workbench, drank in the neat rows of tools around the walls and wished them all a silent farewell. ‘Say, Gideon, you’ve never been inside my shed before, have you?’
‘Abey has.’
‘I left the door unlocked. Careless. Would you like to come inside?’
‘OK.’ Gideon moved away from the window.
As he unbolted the door, Adam counted Gideon’s footsteps crunching in the snow. He opened up and smiled. ‘Come in!’
Gideon stepped inside and Adam pulled the door shut into the snugness of the frame.
‘You didn’t throw Abey out on his ear. He was in here for a good few minutes.’ Gideon looked around at the precise display of tools on the wall. ‘What were you talking about?’
‘Health and safety,’ replied Adam instantly. ‘I was explaining to Abey that sheds were nice places, but...’ He took the spade from the wall again. ‘That they could also be extremely dangerous places. This spade, for instance.’
‘You’ve been up to something, Adam!’
Adam took a sudden and heavy swipe at Gideon’s head, the edge of the spade connecting with the centre of his forehead. As Gideon blinked and gasped and staggered, a thick black line of blood formed on his forehead and he dropped to his knees. He looked at Adam, full of astonishment and confusion as the light in his eyes petered out.
Adam flipped the spade so that the flat of the blade was fully available and smashed it into Gideon’s face, sending him on to his back and into the back of the shed. The swollen orange inside his head was shrivelling. He stamped on Gideon’s groin three times and placed the blood-stained spade back where it belonged on the wall.
‘That’s what you get for being a nosey parker!’
69
2.47 pm
Stone was waiting outside Abraham Evans’s house, 112 Knowsley Road, shivering in the cold.
‘What have we got on Abraham Evans?’ asked Clay, hurrying from her car to his front door.
‘Born in 1930,’ said Stone. ‘He lives here with his wife Mary.’
Eighty-eight years of age, thought Clay. Another of Huddersfield’s elderly victims.
112 Knowsley Road was a small detached mansion with enough space in the front garden to build half a dozen big houses.
Clay anticipated the imminent non-reaction when she rang the doorbell. The dead don’t answer doors, she thought, her finger pressed down on the bell, Stone and Hendricks at her back.
She eyed the Victorian wrought-iron gate at the side of the house and ran towards it, figuring that she could climb over it if necessary. The wind throbbed at the side of the house and the gate yielded easily to her touch.
She walked into the wind trapped between the tall red-brick wall that fenced off the property and the sheer face of the side of the house. She pictured her first impression of Leonard Lawson’s corpse and the strength needed to stage it.
The wind whipped around her head, slashing her ears with wild noise. Dread washed through her as she stepped around the corner to the back of the house. It was completely concealed from outside eyes.
‘Let me go in first!’ said Hendricks behind her, following.
At Pelham Grove, they had left the front door of Leonard Lawson’s house open as they left. Clay stopped, eyed the back door as she slipped on a pair of latex gloves. It was made of panes of frosted glass and the section nearest the handle was scored around the edges. Huddersfield and S&M Buddy: home visits are us, she thought.
The smell of death rushed from the house as she turned the handle and opened the back door.
She covered her mouth and nose with her left hand. Entering the house, she turned to Hendricks. ‘We’ve already seen Abraham Evans. His head. His feet.’
The smell grew denser with each step further in. Sickness danced in Hendricks’s eyes.
‘Wait here, Bill. I’ll call you when I need you.’
70
2.49 pm
As Clay stepped into the long, narrow kitchen, she pressed her hand against her nose and mouth and knitted the muscles at her core against the stench. A broken fluorescent light cast patterns into the space and filled her mind with the scene in Leonard Lawson’s bedroom. She looked around. Terracotta quarry tiles, white units from the 1970s, mouldy bread and a putrid slice of bacon on a surface to her left – a breakfast that never happened, a pan on the hob that was never quite fried.
But the worst of the smell didn’t come from the kitchen. It was drifting on stale air from deeper inside the house.
As she followed her nose, the first bead of sweat bobbed on the nape of her neck. An emerald light on the edge of her vision drew her gaze to the whirring of an old-fashioned white chest freezer near the kitchen door.
She lifted the collar of her coat to buffer her nose and mouth. Eyes closed, mind focused on the darkness within her head, she took a foul breath of air and hung on to it. Opening her eyes wide, she opened the kitchen door and flicked on a wall light.
‘Jesus!’
The main wall leading to the front door, parallel
to the staircase to her right, was covered with a pattern of arterial blood spray. She counted four fountain arcs of blood with individual stains in the pattern. Four, the number of times the victim’s heart beat as it pumped blood from the severed artery.
She turned her eyes from the wall and followed the diagonal line of the banister from the top of the stairs. Halfway down, something came into the line of her vision and she knew it was naked and that the flesh was rotten.
Clay took a step forward. Between her feet and the wooden flooring, she felt the multiple popping of dozens of small, living creatures for which, in the moments that it took for her to cross to the bottom of the stairs, her memory refused to supply a name.
Male or female, it was almost impossible to tell from the back, but judging from the size of what remained, it was an elderly female tied to a length of wood similar to the spear that had impaled Leonard Lawson’s body. This pole was angled against the banister post at the bottom of the stairs
‘Mary!’ Clay spoke her name out loud as she stepped in front of her. ‘Mary Evans!’
Her hands were tied behind her at the base of her spine. Her head was forced down to her left shoulder by the cord that secured her to the pole and post, wrapping round her throat diagonally, winding round the back of her body and then diagonally again across her right hip, her vagina and round the back of her left thigh.
Clay’s mind was filled with images from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment. She zoomed in on the painting’s central panel, saw the suspended figure that had inspired the staging of Leonard Lawson’s body and moved directly back through the chaos, in line with it. She passed the monster riding a naked man on all fours and arrived at a figure bound to a pole propped between the flat roof of a house and the earth below. Mary Evans’s body had been arranged to replicate that figure – another direct copy of one of the damned souls in The Last Judgment.
She looked at the decay of Mary’s flesh and estimated that Mrs Evans had been dead for a fortnight, longer perhaps. The smell hit Clay afresh and she bit down on the urge to vomit. As she shifted her weight, she felt something pop near the tip of her left toes. A maggot – that was the word for the writhing pockets of life that littered the floor.
Clay turned and looked back at the blood on the walls. She guessed that no one could have heard the screams, the road being so far from the house, across the huge garden. She knew whom the arterial blood spray had come from. Abraham Evans. She wondered if they had cut his throat before they chopped his head off, or if they’d gone through the artery when removing his head from his body.
She was back at the Otterspool tip, looking inside the freezer at the head and feet of Abraham Evans. The head and feet that marched behind the suspended man in The Last Judgment. Leonard, Mary and Abraham, suspended, tied-up, decapitated.
She walked back into the kitchen, certain now of what she would find in the whirring chest freezer. Its green light stood out like an alien eye beneath the random fluorescence falling from the ceiling.
She touched the handle to raise the lid, gripped it and heard Hendricks’s voice outside the house. ‘Eve, are you all right?’
She lifted the lid. A naked body, bent into three and frozen solid. Blood frozen to the walls of the freezer, from the wounds where his feet and head had once been.
Bent into three. Folded over.
In her mind’s eye, Clay folded over the outer panels of The Last Judgment triptych, closed it, and saw, in grey, the images from Lawson’s book: St James and St Bavon, the figures on the back of the panels.
She walked towards the back door, each step faster than the last.
The back of the triptych? Whose body? Which garden?
It’s on the back of the triptych.
71
3.05 pm
From the top-floor kitchen window of Caitlin Braxton’s apartment in the Albert Dock, Riley looked out at the Liverpool skyline: the Anglican Cathedral and its bell tower, reaching up into the heavy sky, the Radio City Tower, the Catholic Cathedral and, closer at hand, the Liver Building next to the Cunard Building.
‘Here’s your drink, Detective Sergeant Riley.’ Caitlin Braxton, still attractive even though her hair was now a white mane, held out a mug of hot chocolate. Riley took it gratefully. ‘Professor Lawson was a strange man,’ said Miss Braxton. ‘Sit down. Please.’
Riley took a seat at the plain wooden table. ‘How was he strange?’ she asked, the ever-spinning plates in her head revving up.
‘He was notoriously silent. But he took a shine to me back in 1984. Not in an inappropriate way – though many others tried.’ She laughed and Riley liked her, felt she was a reliable witness. ‘I was the most junior lecturer in his department. He was the professor. God Almighty at the end of his career. One day in October, after I’d only just started working there – a Wednesday – he summoned me to his study.’
‘Wednesday? That’s specific.’
‘It was the first of many Wednesday afternoons spent alone with him. And it was always Wednesday. First time, I was terrified. It was like being summoned to the head teacher’s office.’ A dimness rolled around the brightness of her blue eyes, as the past unfolded inside her head.
In another room, a clock ticked and Riley pushed. ‘What happened?’
‘He told me to sit down. He indicated an armchair facing away from his desk, giving me a view over Abercromby Square. The neat garden in the first flush of autumn, fenced in by jet-black railings. At first the silence seemed to last for hours. When the fear I’d walked in with had dissolved enough, I asked, Is there anything in particular you wish to talk to me about? He replied, What is love? I thought about it and said, When the happiness of another person matters more than your happiness and the happiness of anyone else in the world. He told me he agreed. He agreed! With me! You could never be relaxed around Professor Lawson, but I came as close as I think was possible. He thanked me for coming to his study and told me to come at the same time next week. I didn’t look back at him as I walked to the door. I figured if he wanted me facing away from him and out of the window while I was with him, he didn’t want me to look at him when I was leaving. I stopped at the door and said, Professor Lawson, I swear on the lives of all those I love and hold dear, I will never breathe a word about what passes between us in this room.
‘I know you won’t. I could almost sense a smile on his face in the way he said those words. Then he said, We’ll talk about love again at some other time, when we know each other better. The next Wednesday, I knocked on the door and when he told me to come in, I walked straight to the chair in the window overlooking Abercromby Square. I didn’t look at him ever, in all those Wednesday afternoons. Each week, the format was the same. A long silence and then a question for me. What is the truth? Is it possible to be truly happy? What is great art? Why are people afraid of silence? Why should we speak? Each week. He said very little; questions mainly. I grew more talkative as time progressed. And then the final Wednesday came. He said, We’ll end where we began. What is love? In May, I gave him the same answer as I gave in October. And then the most incredible thing happened. He spoke for the rest of the afternoon. About love. About the love of his life.’
Caitlin clammed up and Riley could see the conflict in her face.
‘I understand that you swore not to reveal the content of those afternoons and you’ve skilfully managed to skim over the detail while still giving me enough information to make me feel I was there in that study all those years ago. I’m a police officer, Caitlin. Information, however implausible it may seem, can be the difference between life and death. Professor Lawson’s already dead. As are others. There’s a very dangerous man out there. Help me. What did Professor Lawson say to you?’
72
3.07 pm
In the hall of 112 Knowsley Road, Stone tasted sick in his mouth and the back of his throat as he watched two Scientific Support officers, whom he knew by sight but not by name, take photographs of Mrs Evans’s body. Skin hu
ng from muscle like wet dishcloths, the keynote image from a living nightmare.
Pulling the fabric of the hood of his protective suit tighter around his face, Stone turned away and walked towards the front door, past the blood-splattered walls, and considered what he had seen in the freezer at the Otterspool tip.
‘Ah, Christ!’ Michael Harper’s voice cut through the stench, the air that was almost impossible to breathe.
Stone turned to him. ‘The remains in the freezer are one thing, but this...’
‘We’ll just have to take her down quick and get her as fast as we can to Dr Lamb. Call Dr Lamb as soon as we’re in the van and warn her.’ Harper’s natural shyness was forgotten in the demands of the moment. ‘This is far worse than we were told to expect. Are you done?’
‘We’re almost done,’ said the Scientific Support officer.
There were pieces of paper and a landline telephone on a table near the door. Stone walked towards them. He picked up the papers and started sifting through them.
An A4 leaflet from a nursery advertising Christmas trees for sale.
A colour advert for a firm installing stair lifts.
A white sheet: Handyman in a White Van. Words around a logo portraying just that. Beneath them, a list of diverse household and transport services offered. The name and mobile number of the handyman were in bold print at the bottom of the page: Adam Miller: 07714936634.
Stone frowned. Adam Miller? The co-owner of The Sanctuary, the place where Louise Lawson volunteered every day. A link formed in his mind. Adam. Louise. Leonard. Abraham. Mary. Adam’s name was in Genesis. He looked again at the words on the leaflet and was drawn to two: White Van? Just how many men in white vans are there in Liverpool? Stone asked himself. But only one visited the Otterspool Tip to dispose of a freezer containing Abraham Evans’s head and feet.
He focused on the Scientific Support officer. ‘Can you come and bag this flyer?’
Stone headed into the kitchen and out into the fresh, bitterly cold air of Knowsley Road.
