Dead Silent

by Mark Roberts

  One man. One van. One tip. One freezer. One head. One pair of feet.

  Stone needed to talk to Adam Miller.

  73

  3.07 pm

  Riley stood up and walked over to the window again, her back turned to Caitlin. Seagulls wheeled in the sky over the Albert Dock.

  She pressed record on her iPhone.

  ‘The love of Leonard Lawson’s life was another academic, Damien Noone. Leonard was from a comfortable but lower-middle-class background. Damien was from a moneyed family. They met during World War Two while they were in North Africa. As you can imagine, it wasn’t the best time or place for two young homosexual men to fall in love. But they managed to begin their relationship and no one ever found them out. Leonard was never big on detail, it was all dot to dot, but he said it was in Africa that Damien told him about his interest in the acquisition and non-acquisition of language and how the whole of his life’s work would be to study this. Leonard told me about Psamtik I’s experiment with the two newborns... I was horrified that anyone could even entertain such a thought.’

  Caitlin fell silent. Riley feared she was losing the will to carry on, so she stepped in. ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I know about that experiment. How could such a thing possibly happen? The whole thing smacks of an academic pipe dream, two young men giddy with furtive sex in the middle of a war zone. Either or both of them could have been killed at any moment. To have replicated the experiment in England after the war would have been criminal folly. Keep talking, please, Caitlin.’

  ‘They came back. Damien studied linguistics, Leonard studied art history. Damien was marked down for all kinds of future greatness; Leonard was due a little but not so much. They managed to continue their love affair by putting on a show of public disdain for each other. The same tactic that had worked for them in Africa. He told me that the secrecy between them, that bond, was the extra layer of glue that raised their love to an unimaginably strong level. It was them against the unsuspecting world. All talk of resurrecting the experiment drifted away as they were forced to address the day-to-day demands of their studies. This, Leonard told me, was the happiest time of his life. Realistically, he didn’t approve of the experiment. It was wild talk, Damien’s pet dream. Months passed, they graduated and gained teaching posts. Damien came into a huge trust fund. Life was good.’

  ‘And the experiment?’ Riley interjected, keen to cut to the chase.

  ‘Nothing, until one day, out of the blue, Damien casually announced they would be going to London for the day. He wouldn’t tell Leonard why, just told him it was part mystery tour and part test of his love. They arrived in London and travelled by cab to Whitechapel, to a set of rooms above a chemist’s shop. Damien explained that he had taken a lease out on the property for the next year. He asked Leonard what the definition of love was. Leonard told him, Love is when the lover puts the beloved before himself. There was a knock at the door. Damien told Leonard to open it, saying, Remember what you’ve just said. A man entered with two young women. The man was Dr Roger Pattison, only he wasn’t a doctor, not any more; he’d been struck off the medical register for a string of offences. He was a back-street abortionist, whom Damien had recruited to his cause. The women were poor pregnant girls with no means of support. They were at almost identical stages of their pregnancies. Eight weeks. Pattison had put a deal to the women. Instead of terminating their pregnancies, they could go through with them, deliver their babies and pick up £5,000 each, on condition they walked out and abandoned their children immediately. The deal specified that they were to live together with Pattison in the Whitechapel rooms in complete silence during the last days of their pregnancies. Once they had gone, they were never to return.

  ‘The women agreed. Damien told Leonard that he wanted him to leave his teaching post and accompany him and the babies to a remote house. Leonard would be the shepherd, but Damien was going to put a twist in Psamtik’s method. Leonard could speak continuously to one child, while the other would be subjected to total silence and sensory deprivation. Damien’s part in it would be to record everything on spool-to-spool tapes, take photographs and make notes.’

  In the sky over Liverpool, Riley saw a waxing gibbous moon. She wondered about the missing pages in Leonard Lawson’s Psamtik manuscript and asked herself how Lawson could have written about the English Experiment, even twelve pages, if his relationship with Noone had ended and he had taken no part in it.

  ‘The detail stopped there. Leonard stood his ground and said no. Damien ended the relationship, told him he would never see him again. Leonard moved back to Liverpool, did his best to get on with normal life, with a wife and child as a disguise. That’s as far as he went.’

  ‘Thank you, Caitlin. Do you have anything else to add?’

  ‘No. That’s all I know.’

  ‘I can’t begin to tell you how helpful you’ve been. Did he mention that he’d reconnected with Damien Noone at any point?’

  Caitlin shook her head.

  Or if there was another attempt at the English Experiment? thought Riley.

  74

  3.09 pm

  At the cells in Trinity Road police station, Clay looked through the observation hole and saw Huddersfield standing in the middle of the space staring at the door, waiting.

  With his right hand raised, he made a gesture – come in – and she knew that he was waiting for her.

  Sergeant Harris unlocked the door and stayed in the frame as Clay went inside. Huddersfield held her gaze. She was within touching distance, and she could smell the bloody musk of his body.

  ‘Close the door,’ she said.

  ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Look for first things first.’

  ‘First things first?’ echoed Clay. ‘Give me a name.’

  ‘Look for first things first.’

  She knew in her heart that she had reached a dead end where once she had opened a door. But there was something else she needed to know.

  ‘First things first, Gabriel?’ Silence. ‘We searched the outside wall behind the triptych painted on the wall in your flat. We found nothing.’

  ‘First things first, most highly favoured lady. Who were the saints on the back of the triptych?’

  She saw the two saints in shades of grey and events spun backwards in her mind at blinding speed. Hours condensed into seconds and dragged her through the places she had been and the people she had seen since the call to her home in the early hours of the morning. And when she arrived at the front door of Leonard Lawson’s house, the rewind suddenly stopped.

  ‘First things first,’ said Huddersfield. ‘Always. Which triptych haven’t you looked at?’

  She walked up the stairs towards the disorientating pattern of the strobe light, entered Leonard Lawson’s bedroom and looked inside.

  ‘Open the door, Sergeant Harris!’

  Gabriel Huddersfield smiled.

  ‘First things first.’

  His words followed her as she hurried to the nearest exit of Trinity Road police station and to Leonard Lawson’s house beyond that.

  75

  3.10 pm

  And I’m telling you now, when the police, the police, the police come calling, I won’t be here... You’ve done it now... And they will come calling. I’ll be gone, gone, long gone... You’ve done it now... When the police come calling, and I’m telling you now... The voice inside his head was his but not his, as familiar as it was strange, sometimes laced with the absolute depth of his father’s disappointment and then himself as a child, cowed and baby-like. The words kept repeating like a stuck record.

  Adam Miller pushed the black box into the back of his van with a growing feeling that he was being watched. He looked around at The Sanctuary, to which he would never return, and to the park beyond. There were people passing, but no one seemed to be looking at him.

  He patted his coat and the pockets that lined it. His passport. His wallet.

 
He opened the briefcase in the back of his van and rifled through its contents. Bank books. TSB. Halifax. Money that the bitch Danielle knew nothing of. Santander. HSBC. Money that would save his skin. ISAs. Lloyd’s. Money that would soothe his mind as soon as he got to where he was going. The Wesleyan. Barclays. Money that made money. National Savings and Investments. Money that he’d worked hard for and was all his, his and his alone.

  ‘All there! All there! All there!’

  The words in his head piped through his mouth, so he clamped his lips and, in his head, repeated a cliché that Louise The Mug Who Worked For Nothing Lawson often told the retards when they were acting up. Silence is golden.

  And the effect was bizarre. As the words crept through the wetness of his brain, he heard her saying them as if she was on his shoulder.

  He turned.

  In the empty space he’d clocked moments earlier, Louise was there.

  ‘Silence is golden.’ She repeated the phrase, her eyes locked into his, and from behind her, like some animated shadow, Abey stepped to her side, his lopsided smile accompanied by a drizzle of spit on his square-jawed chin.

  Instinctively, Adam reached his hand to his lower face, felt the narrowness of his lips, the receding dimples of his chin and heard himself gasp.

  ‘Golden, golden, golden,’ said Abey, and Adam wanted to raise the fists that were bunched at his sides and pummel the little bastard into an inhuman pulp.

  ‘As God is your judge?’ Louise’s words caused the skin on his spine to pucker and a bead of sweat to slalom through the goose bumps on his back.

  ‘As God is my judge, what?’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, Adam, as God is the judge of all, you being one of God’s creations.’

  He threw the case of clothes he’d hurriedly packed into the back of his van.

  ‘Would you like to talk about my father?’ asked Louise.

  ‘I’m very sorry about what happened to your father.’

  ‘I was thinking about boxing up his possessions, clearing the house of all that’s in it. I was thinking about your little chat...’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘In time. Now isn’t the time.’

  She kept her eyes on him, her gaze deep and steady.

  ‘I’m very busy at the moment. I’ve got work to do.’ It felt like an invisible hand had seized his throat, choking the words into a killer silence.

  ‘Ken say.’ Abey pointed at him. ‘Naughty.’

  ‘Ken?’ He frowned. ‘Oh yes, Ken. No.’ He slipped into the voice he’d adopted for the first time that morning. ‘Adam’s not naughty.’

  ‘Stop it, Adam!’

  He was surprised at the steel in Louise’s voice. He turned away from them and headed for the driver’s door.

  ‘Where are you going, Adam?’

  He had never heard anything remotely like anger in Louise’s voice and the effect was vivid. He laughed. ‘Where are you going, Adam?’ He mocked her.

  ‘I’ve just realised something,’ said Louise. ‘Ten minutes ago, I was in the kitchen, looking out into the garden. I was watching. I watched you come out of the shed. I watched you lock the shed. I watched you walk through the garden and back to the house. Carrying your black box. It was when I was watching you walk that I remembered.’

  ‘You remembered what?’

  ‘It was the way you walked that triggered something very clear in my memory.’

  ‘I’m going!’ He opened the driver’s door.

  ‘I watched you walk out of my father’s room in the early hours of this morning. You were with Gabriel Huddersfield in my father’s room. You didn’t speak, he did. But I watched you walk out of the room. You killed my father and strung him up like a beast. You. You and Gabriel Huddersfield. Gabriel Huddersfield pretending to be the Angel of Destruction. And you. You. Pretending to be the First Born. Making yourself out to be something bigger and more powerful than you could ever be.’

  ‘Dead. Dada dead. My dada dead.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t even try to deny it!’

  A jogger thundered past them.

  ‘Calm down, Louise,’ said Adam.

  ‘Don’t patronise me. I will not be silenced. Not any more.’ The anger in her voice had turned into outrage and her eyes shone.

  ‘All right, Louise.’ He walked to the passenger door and opened it. ‘You’ve had a traumatic experience. You think I’m responsible for your father’s death.’

  ‘You are responsible! I was there! I saw you!’

  ‘Get in the van, Louise. I’ll take you to Trinity Road police station. I’ll come in with you and you can tell the desk sergeant all about your suspicions about me. Then he can get that Clay woman to come and interview me. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  Louise said and did nothing.

  ‘I’m being reasonable here in the face of some very serious allegations.’ He moved quickly, opened the passenger door.

  She linked hands with Abey.

  ‘Get in the van, Louise. Tell the police what you’ve told me.’

  She stood her ground. ‘Murderer!’

  He slapped her face hard, grabbed Abey and bundled him into the passenger seat. ‘Fucking get into the van or I swear to God I’ll kill your retarded pet.’

  He drew a knife from his pocket, grabbed her arm, hustled her into the seat next to Abey and slammed the passenger door shut.

  In the driver’s seat, he pulled away and headed towards Croxteth Gate.

  ‘Trinity Road’s in the opposite direction,’ said Louise.

  He picked up speed to 45 mph.

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I heard you,’ said Adam, reaching under his seat. ‘I’m in the driver’s seat. And I’m telling you, we’re going on an errand. I owe a man something and it’s payback time. Then I’ll take you to Trinity Road. I’m the driver and what I say goes. I don’t want to hear another word from either of you.’

  Beneath the seat, he felt the shaft of a hammer, touched the sharpened point of a screwdriver next to it and, concealing it with his hand, buried the screwdriver inside his coat pocket.

  ‘Who do you need to pay back so urgently at such a time?’

  The words hit Adam hard. Like the voice of a stranger had melted into a sentence. He looked at Louise, bewildered, wondering if his mind was bending to a point where it would break so badly that it would never be mended again.

  ‘Who do you need to pay back so urgently at such a time?’ said Louise, but it sounded like her voice was masked.

  Adam wanted to scream because his senses were warping and the walls inside him that separated what was real and what wasn’t had suddenly collapsed.

  ‘Who do you need to pay back so urgently at such a time?’ asked Louise. On the third time of asking, her voice sounded like her own.

  He heard the words, recognised the speaker, but wondered if his sense of hearing was warped by stress.

  Pay back, thought Adam. Someone who deserves everything that’s coming to him.

  76

  3.25 pm

  Outside Leonard Lawson’s house, the itch beneath Clay’s crown became almost unbearable. Everything is here. Her own words, from the dead of night, followed her through the front door.

  In the downstairs hallway, the nearest human being to Clay was the constable on the doorstep, guarding the scene of the crime. As she hit the stairs, it felt like he was already thousands of miles away.

  She looked at the landline telephone and recalled Huddersfield’s words to Hendricks and Stone. ‘There’s a body in the garden.’

  She hurried up to Leonard Lawson’s bedroom with one specific goal and Huddersfield’s words like a gang of demons at her back. First things first. The dressing table. The triptych of glass in which she’d first seen the old man’s naked limbs, suspended from the ground as if by some magical force. But as she arrived at the top of the stairs, her attention was diverted to Louise Lawson’s room, the door wide open.

  The cross-stitch on the wall facing her
bed.

  Silence is Golden

  She felt a drum beat at the centre of her being, a faint tap that increased in volume and speed with each new beat and a child’s singsong voice echoed inside that beat as she walked into Leonard Lawson’s bedroom.

  ‘Silence is golden! Silence is golden! Silence is golden...’

  The dressing table and the wardrobe were the only items still left in the professor’s room. She turned on the light to dispel the gathering gloom and the room came alive with dust motes. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and took the torch from her pocket.

  The wooden body of the dressing table was covered in dark dust and there were rectangular strips where the dust had been lifted to salvage finger-and palm-prints.

  Clay flicked on her torch and crouched in the alcove to face the back of the triptych of mirrors. The space was cramped and dark.

  Starting at the back of the widest, central, mirror, she combed the black wood from the top, left to right, saw the grain of the wood beneath the dark surface, noted the odd little scratch as she dropped the light down and went back right to left.

  ‘You’re missing the obvious,’ she said out loud. ‘First things first.’

  She reached the centre of the mirror’s back and hope collapsed. Left to right, another blank line. Right to left. She was close to the bottom and still nothing had been revealed. By the time she reached the bottom, she cursed Gabriel Huddersfield for playing games with her and herself even more for falling for it.

  She stood up, made her way to the front of the mirrors. Carefully she unfolded the wings and exposed their backs.

  Then she beamed in on the back of the right-hand mirror, using the same top-to-bottom, left-to-right and then reverse system. On the second right-to-left trawl, she paused suddenly, felt her stomach flip. In tiny letters carved on the surface of the wood:

  St Bavon

  St Bavon? She juggled the letters in her head as she carried on combing the wood, but there was nothing else; every other strip to the bottom drew a blank. There was no garden she knew of named after a saint she had never heard of and it seemed an unlikely anagram.