by Mark Roberts
Louise stood behind Abey, her hands covering his eyes.
With a few deft moves, Adam tightened the rope at the guard’s ankles. He lifted the other end of the rope and looped it through one of the parapet’s decorative arches. He looked back at Abey and Louise. They were stock still.
‘You think the police are going to come storming through that door, don’t you?’ said Adam, securing the knot. ‘Nah! I’m in fucking charge here.’ He plucked the screwdriver from the guard’s eye and lifted the man’s body from the ground. ‘If they come through that door, you’re both dead. And here’s a fucking warning from me to all of you!’
He levered the guard’s body on to the top of the parapet wall and pushed it off the edge. His body slammed against the cold sandstone and the crack of bone filled the air.
‘Interpret this, faggot!’
84
4.14 pm
Clay watched someone from the Constables’ Lodge approaching the gathering of police officers in the nave of the Anglican Cathedral, saw the anxiety in his face and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘We’ve lost radio contact with the security guard on the roof of the Vestey Tower. And there are reports from people coming down from the roof that there are still people up there. A man. An old woman. A man with learning difficulties.’
Clay was flooded with a wave of nausea that turned her skin hot and her blood cold.
She took out her phone, saw Stone entering the cathedral with Danielle Miller. She tried Adam Miller’s number. It was still off. She turned to a WPC and pointed out Danielle Miller. ‘Hang on to that woman! Karl, quickly, come with me...’
Stone and Clay ran down the corridor at the side of the nave and across the vast space towards the lifts.
Clay felt another wave of nausea wash through her. ‘We need the hostage negotiator and firearms here as soon as possible, Karl.’
She pictured what lay beyond the lift doors: the journey to the top of the 300-foot-high bell tower. A lift to the fourth floor. A series of narrow stone corridors. Another lift to the tenth floor. More narrow stone corridors. One hundred and eight stone steps, winding higher and higher, past the bells, round corner after rising corner. The final steep staircase up to the rooftop.
She remembered how Liverpool looked from the top of the tower and the breathtaking descent from its summit to the ground below.
85
4.19 pm
In the space of a minute and a half, DS Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price, Scientific Support, had cut a clean square in the topsoil of the Garden of St James and lifted a piece of turf from the ground.
‘It’s like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle,’ said Mason as he laid the turf down on a section of plastic sheeting. In the glow of the arc lamp illuminating the dig, his face was drawn and tired and Hendricks heard his stomach rumble.
‘What did you have for lunch, Terry?’ asked Hendricks.
‘An hour’s sleep. These double shifts are killing me.’
Metal clanked against concrete as the edge of Price’s shovel hit the exposed space beneath. ‘It’s a small paving stone.’
Mason reached into his bag and pulled out a crowbar. He dug it into the space Price had made, repeatedly pulled the handle towards himself and began prising up the stone.
Price took one corner of the stone and Mason the other. With a silent count of three, they lifted it away.
The scene of Christ’s resurrection flashed through Hendricks’s mind. The large stone that blocked the space inside a cave suddenly rolled back by some invisible force. An angel of the Lord sitting on the tombstone, his appearance like lightning and his clothes as white as snow. A breath of life easing out of the darkness of the cave.
Hendricks looked into the hole in the ground, saw a crumpled black plastic bag, its folds made silver in the overhead light. He knelt at the edge of the small grave and lifted the bag with both hands, conscious of the sound of bone against bone.
The air was alive with the smell of soil as he placed the bin bag on the snow and untied the single knot that sealed its contents.
‘It’s the other half,’ said Hendricks, picking out Huddersfield. ‘But who is it, Gabriel?’ He opened the bag, looked inside, saw the hollow features of a human skull, the skeleton beneath in dozens of pieces. ‘Who is it, Gabriel?’
‘Here’s your answer,’ he replied.
Silence.
‘Who did you bury in the ground?’ Hendricks handed the bag to Mason and walked towards Huddersfield, his figure ghostly and still.
‘Are you listening?’
‘Bring him towards me,’ Hendricks shouted, his heart pounding.
With a uniformed officer on each side, Huddersfield walked through the snow into the brightness of the arc light, his battered face coming clearer with each step.
They stood within touching distance.
‘I’m listening,’ said Hendricks. ‘Whose bones are behind me?’
Huddersfield cupped a hand to his ear and zipped his lips with a finger.
Silence sat between them like a frozen stream.
‘The silent one?’ said Hendricks. ‘The other half?’ Huddersfield smiled. ‘The silent other half. Tell me the truth, Gabriel. Whose bones are these?’ Hendricks waited. ‘They’ve been buried with care, with love, even.’
‘The First Born had a brother. The First Born loved his brother very much. So much so that the First Born put his loved one out of the misery that had been inflicted on him. This is all I know. That is all she would tell me.’
‘She...?’
‘The one who tends the flock, the keeper of the keys, the one who gave me shelter.’
Hendricks took out his phone and called Clay. ‘We’ve found the bones of a body. I think it might be Adam Miller’s brother. We need to know: did he have a brother?’
86
4.21 pm
At the door of the ground-floor lift, Clay waited anxiously, watched DS Riley cross the space towards her. In her mind she walked into Louise Lawson’s bedroom, saw the cross-stitch framed on the wall.
Silence is Golden
Beams of light flooded her and she was in the middle of Leonard Lawson’s study, looking down at an empty space in the unlocked drawer and the manuscript on the surface of the desk with the missing pages.
‘What do you want me to do, Eve?’
‘The sergeant running the log at the door of the cathedral is holding my bag. Louise Lawson’s “Silence is Golden” cross-stitch is in it. Ask him for my bag. Take it somewhere quiet and pull that cross-stitch to pieces, Gina.’
As Riley turned to follow her instructions, Clay’s phone rang. She looked at the digits on the display and connected immediately.
The wind sobbed.
‘Adam? Speak to me,’ she said. ‘Adam, are you there?’
‘It’s me, Louise Lawson.’
Clay’s spike of relief was immediately doused with anxiety. She jabbed at the call-button for the ground-floor lift.
‘What’s happening, Louise?’
‘Tell her!’ She heard Adam’s voice roar in the background, felt her stomach somersault.
‘I’m to tell you... he’s killed one man already and he’s going to kill me and Abey next. Unless. You.’ Her voice was cracked. She dropped the volume. ‘Please come and save us.’
‘Speak up! Speak up or I’ll finish him off now.’
‘He’s tied my feet together. He’s tying Abey’s. It’s what he did to the other poor man. He’s finished tying Abey’s feet.’ In the background, Clay heard Abey’s yells on the cold wind. Confusion and fear.
‘Give me the phone!’ A moment later. ‘DCI Clay? Listen. What time is it?’
‘Twenty-one minutes past four.’
‘You’ve ten minutes, until four thirty-one, to get up here. If you’re not here, they’re dead. The old woman and her little sloooow friend.’
‘Ten minutes.’ She masked her anxiety at the unreasonable demand. ‘It takes at least seven with the two lifts and all those sta
irs. Seven minutes if I dash. I’m not even inside the lift yet.’
‘Ten minutes. No excuses.’
The lift finally pinged its arrival. The door opened. She got in and pressed for the fourth floor. The crossing. Stone stepped in with her.
‘You’d better get a move on, because if you’re not here in the next nine minutes and forty seconds, I’m going to kill the pair of them, and then I’m going...’ He stopped, and when he continued, he’d slowed down and become more focused. ‘To stalk you down all those narrow corridors. Do you know the bell tower well?’
‘You sound like you’re enjoying yourself, Adam.’
‘You’re not going to make it in time, Clay. But guess what? When you do make your way up here, I’m coming to get you.’
87
4.22 pm
In the subterranean quiet of the Lady Chapel, DS Gina Riley sat on the back pew and looked down at the framed ‘Silence is Golden’ cross-stitch from Louise Lawson’s bedroom. She was surprised at its weight. She admired the skill of the needlework and wondered why Clay had taken it from the old woman’s wall and why she wanted her to pull it to pieces.
A text came in from Hendricks: Round Robin. Danielle Miller is en route to us. Anyone who talks to her, question one: does Adam Miller have a brother?
She turned over the sampler, examined the four edges and the brown tape that sealed the hardboard back to the frame, and dug her thumbnail into the top right-hand corner. As the seam came loose, she felt the tension of something long suppressed pushing against the weight that held it down.
A sheaf of white paper had been packed tightly between the cross-stitch and the hardboard back. She lifted the back away.
Blank A4 paper.
She scooped out the sheets, estimated there were about ten pages and, turning them over, felt a shiver run from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. The pages were old but perfectly white, and the print on them was not the clean, black product of a modern printer but the uneven, inky dots made by an old-fashioned manual typewriter.
Riley inhaled sharply and looked at the title.
The English Experiment
A small colour photograph of two naked newborn baby boys slipped to the stone floor. She picked it up and, for a moment, wondered about the children she would never have, imagined for the millionth time what it would be like to go through the agonies of labour and have her baby placed on her breast. It had taken years of frustration and four failed attempts at IVF to begin the long route to acceptance.
She began to read the truth that Lawson had tried to hide.
It began as a dream in a desert in North Africa during World War Two, a dream that came to life in London in the 1950s, the shared idealistic vision of two young men with a hunger for forbidden knowledge, a dream that was nurtured over the next twenty-five years and finally came to fruition in the summer of 1980 and ended in 1993.
Riley felt a sudden dip in the temperature of the Lady Chapel and a mounting sickness inside her. She turned her head to the Noble Women Windows on the staircase, stained-glass images of Elizabeth Fry, Christina Rossetti, Kitty Wilkinson and Catherine Gladstone and whispered a plea.
‘Come on, girls. Give me the strength to carry on.’
The premise was simple enough and came from antiquity. Psamtik I took two newborn children and subjected them to a shared upbringing of complete silence, with a view to seeing which language they spoke instinctively, a search for the world’s proto-language.
In the early 1950s, Damien Noone, the leading linguist of his generation, had the time and resources to replicate Psamtik’s experiment and adapt it to his own specific ends. Two expectant mothers were recruited to deliver two genetically different children in exchange for a very generous amount of money.
Conducting the experiment alone proved too much for Damien Noone. Finding himself locked alone in a set of rooms with two babies, he effectively became their twenty-four-hour carer. The silent regime he sustained alone for two months, and the demands of meeting the infants’ physical needs, led to a deterioration in Noone’s physical and mental health.
Nine weeks into the experiment, Noone took the brave decision to smoother both children. He travelled to the Isle of Man with both bodies concealed in his luggage and buried them in a cave. To this day, their bodies have never been discovered.
Riley paused, bit down on the sorrow that caused tears to form in her eyes and the anger that made her want to find Noone and kick him to death. She took a breath and continued reading.
For many years Noone abandoned his dream because the experiment was one he could not perform alone. But as time passed, his desire to try again increased. After his retirement in the early 1970s, Noone decided to contact his former friend and colleague Professor Leonard Lawson, to seek the assistance Lawson had so unwisely declined to lend to the 1950s English Experiment.
With Lawson’s assistance and the support of a compliant young female, Noone started preparing the English Experiment.
This time, preparation was key.
This time, the emphasis of the experiment was different. Noone took two genetically related babies and separated them with a view to comparing and contrasting the effects of language deprivation on one of two identical twins. One was to be given the full stimuli afforded a normal baby and the other was to be locked in silence, with no toys, no colours, no touch, no love, in complete isolation from birth. The building blocks of humanity. Cain and Abel.
Lawson, an art historian, agreed and supplied the compliant female assistant, on one condition.
No wonder... thought Riley. No wonder you write about yourself in the third person. Bastard.
The child who was given stimuli but otherwise cut off from the distractions of the modern world would be subjected to another experiment. He would be exposed, continually and without remission, to the works of two specifically related artists from a different historical era. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, both Dutch. Bosch, born circa 1450 and died 1516, and Bruegel, born circa 1525 and died 1569.
The English Experiment was the marriage of two brilliant minds and two spectacular concepts.
She flicked through the pages and words leapt up at her. Birth... healthy... silent attic... mural... Last Judgment... Shepherd... tape recording... darkness... Bosch... Noone... normal... death... silent half... end... She felt sick to the core.
Riley looked up and felt as if the ceiling of the Lady Chapel had descended to within inches of her head. There were pages more to read, but her brain was filling with fast-setting concrete.
In her mind, she travelled back to the ward in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital where she had watched over Louise and listened to the vivid details of her dream about the Tower of Babel. Two boys, high up in the Tower of Babel. One with a voice, one with a caul of skin condemning him to silence.
She turned the cross-stitch over, looked at the message that Louise had so lovingly embroidered and wondered at the true value of gold. She phoned Hendricks. When he connected, she could hear he was outdoors. ‘Where are you, Bill?’
‘Coming inside with Terry Mason and the skeleton. He’s going to get the bones ready in the education room. Dr Lamb’s on her way over. What’s happening?’
‘I’ve got the missing twelve pages from Leonard Lawson’s book. The English Experiment.’
He was quiet for a few moments. ‘And?’
‘I’ve only dipped into it, but it’s looking bleak. I think Lawson and his pal Noone have tried to pull off something as cruel as any of the quacks that floated round the Nazi concentration camps—’
‘Bill!’ A voice in the background called out with urgency, interrupting their conversation. And again: ‘Bill!’ Riley could hear it coming closer to Hendricks. Then, chillingly: ‘Get into the cathedral quick. Eve wants you to take charge on the ground.’
Needles of cold pricked the nape of Riley’s neck. She heard Hendricks running.
‘Gina, I’ve got to go!’
&n
bsp; She closed the call down and picked up the papers again. Her head was occupied with just one question. Louise Lawson, just what do you know about the past? And will you live to tell the tale?
88
4.25 pm
Clay pressed to open the lift doors on the fourth floor of the bell tower. The damp sandstone of the massive, cold walls felt like pepper in her nostrils.
‘We know he was on the roof,’ whispered Clay hurrying along the central section of the tight corridor towards the lift that would take them up to the tenth floor. ‘But what’s to say he’s not now waiting for us round the next corner?’
The corner ahead disappeared into darkness.
She lightened her footfall, tried to pad along more quietly. She held out her hands, turned her head to Stone and read the fear in his eyes. ‘Stay back!’ she hissed.
Something tightened at the core. Move. Now.
She veered as far from the corner as she could, to the right-hand wall, turned the corner.
A cusp of darkness under an overhead light, silence and an empty space.
Her phone rang out and she gasped. She beckoned Stone forward and connected.
‘The clock’s ticking, bitch. Where are you?’
She carried on at speed to the second lift.
‘We’ve got your friend in our custody, Adam. Gabriel Huddersfield.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he snapped.
‘You don’t sound yourself, Adam. Is it the cold that’s making your voice shake or the completely impossible corner you’ve painted yourself into?’
At the second lift door, she jabbed the call-button.
‘Babble, babble, babble...’
‘Speaking of which...’ The lift arrived, the doors opened. ‘Just why did you and Huddersfield take Leonard Lawson’s picture of The Tower of Babel?’
As she and Stone stepped into the lift, the image of two bodies being buried alive in the same coffin crossed her mind. Her stomach lurched as the lift ascended.
‘Genesis 11:7: Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. He stole language first. Babble, babble, babble. Genesis 11:9: That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. He played God. We showed him what God thought of that, what God thought of him.’
