Dead Silent

by Mark Roberts

  She listened to the wind whipping around the parapet of the Vestey Tower.

  ‘Are you still there?’ The lift doors slid open and a broken fluorescent light made a pattern of darkness that threw her for a moment into the strobe-lit horror of Leonard Lawson’s bedroom.

  ‘Where are you, Clay?’

  ‘On the tenth floor.’ She picked up her pace, blinked hard to blot out the projection of Lawson’s body, upside down and strung up like a hunted beast, seeping from her memory into her vision.

  ‘Well that’s just not good enough.’

  ‘God was a petulant child then!’ The words escaped her, had no identifiable beginning, no filter. She filtered the next word. Shit. He laughed and she hated the sound. ‘But this is the modern world...’

  ‘Big mouth, big mistake!’ He disconnected.

  She ran along the gallery, past the huge chamber whose bells sat silently in the mist drifting through the slatted windows. She reached the bottom of the staircase to the roof. A hundred and eight steps to go. She began the ascent. Her footsteps echoed and mingled with Stone’s.

  ‘I’ve never been here before,’ said Stone at her back. ‘What can I expect?’

  ‘A spiral,’ said Clay. ‘Small sets of three or four steps, then a turn. More steps. Turn.’ And Miller ready to pounce at every one of them.

  ‘Let me go ahead of you,’ said Stone.

  She saw her coffin being lowered into the ground, Philip holding Thomas’s hand and not understanding that she wasn’t coming back. She travelled through time, saw Philip as a seven-year-old at the dinner table with Thomas and his shiny new stepmother, heard him ask, ‘What was Mum like, Dad?’

  Go! Away! Now!

  ‘Cover my back,’ she replied, turning the corner to the next set of steps. Nothing. She turned. ‘What was that?’ Deeper into the bell tower, below them, she heard a noise, a whistling sound drifting further away, and what sounded like a human voice, muffled but urgent. Clay looked at the stone platform ahead, then down at the curve of concrete masking the long line of steps below them.

  Forwards and up? The noise could have come from outside... Backwards and down? The wind whistled, bringing a human voice on its tide. She looked up again and made an instant judgment call. Certain danger lay ahead. Possible danger lay behind them.

  ‘I heard it too,’ said Stone, turning away, knowing what Clay wanted him to do. ‘I’ll follow it. Be careful, Eve.’

  A platform. Eight steps. Turn. Seven steps. Turn. Her mouth dried. Moving, moving, moving. She breathed in the mist around her, but it didn’t touch her parched tongue. Stone stairs blurred into each other as she felt the burn in her thighs and calves.

  The final set of stairs lay ahead, the angle steeper than the others, fifteen, twenty steps from the door at the top. Night and snow drifted past the open door leading out on to the roof.

  She took a deep breath. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, but the spinning in her head had stopped.

  ‘I’m here!’ she shouted as she attacked the final steps. ‘Less than ten minutes.’ Silence. Wind and snow greeted her as she neared the top.

  She arrived at the doorway on to the roof and looked around, 360 degrees.

  It was positioned in the middle of the scaffolding in the centre of the roof space.

  She walked into the light.

  Oh no! she thought. No, no, no, no, no...

  89

  4.29 pm

  Each step felt more perilous than the last. As Stone descended the stone stairs of the tower, reversing the route he had just done with Clay, he reminded himself that Adam Miller was alone and that there were two of them. He told himself his was the easier path, but that did nothing to dent the mounting dread inside him.

  Stone listened. There was no other sound in the bell tower apart from his breathing and the padding of his feet.

  He turned a corner into a blanket of shadow and felt his heart leap when the silence was broken by the screech of a seagull outside the bell tower.

  He stopped and listened again. Silence.

  The broken light danced before his eyes.

  He could see the entrance to the lift space on the tenth floor.

  There was no one there. Turn. False alarm. Go and help Clay. Hurry.

  He walked into the patterns of light and dark, kept his eyes fixed on the doorway to the lift. He had to be absolutely sure there was no one behind that final corner.

  Near the corner, in a flood of darkness, he stepped quickly and felt something soft underfoot. It moved under his weight. He lifted his foot and looked down. It was shrouded in shadows.

  Stone took out his torch and flicked its light into the gloom at his feet. At first he thought it was a dead animal. He squinted, crouched down on to his heels and looked more closely.

  A small pool of slimy red liquid oozed from the place where it had been cut. He followed the curve to its red tip, made out the pattern of dots that covered the surface and the grey fur at the flat end.

  He heard the sound of a single out-breath behind him and, in the same moment, the impact of a heavy item against the back of his skull.

  He dropped his torch as darkness descended. Before the cry in his throat was released, Stone fell into an unconscious heap next to the thing that had caught his attention and distracted him from the menace in the shadows at his back.

  He lay perfectly still, a trickle of blood pouring from his ear in the direction of a severed human tongue.

  90

  4.33 pm

  As she walked to the scaffolding at the centre of the roof space, Clay saw the knot on the masonry first, then the other end of the rope and the body dangling from it, swinging upside down in the twilight from the parapet of the Vestey Tower.

  A second body was laid out on its back, naked, feet together, knees together, arms outstretched and pointing away from the head as if beseeching heaven, a friendship bracelet around the wrist, genitals shrivelled and pitiful in the freezing air.

  She looked at the neatly folded clothes set to his right and recognised them immediately as Abey’s. The jeans he’d worn earlier that day when she’d interviewed Louise in the Millers’ living room. The black trainers and white socks. The replica Everton top.

  Too much blood, Clay thought, near the head and face. She found she couldn’t look directly at him, his face, his eyes.

  From the feet to his head, look at him, Eve, look at him! she commanded herself.

  She started with his feet, dialled Stone, knew his phone would silently vibrate wherever he was. The ankles were slightly parted, his feet flat down on the roof. The phone rang twice, three times, four. His knees were together and bent. His back was flat and his arms were wide: a crucifixion without a cross or nails, on the ground. Another torturous detail lifted from the central panel of Bosch’s The Last Judgment.

  The phone rang out and Clay felt increasingly nauseous as intuition told her something had happened to Karl Stone to stop him picking up her call.

  Stone’s voice on his answer-phone message. ‘You’ve reached DS Karl Stone...’ The wind picked up and the slender comfort of his voice was lost. She looked around and knew she was all alone on the roof.

  His stomach. His chest. The redness around his neck, on the ground around his face and head.

  ‘Jesus!’ Shock hit her and she hit back by pressing the soles of her feet against the surface of the roof and forcing herself not to blink but to stare directly into the space around his face and skull and gaping mouth and process the information in front of her.

  She disconnected the call to Stone. She looked away. She had to raise the flag.

  She called Hendricks and he answered immediately.

  ‘Miller’s escaped with Louise Lawson as his hostage. He’s murdered Abey. Something’s happened to Karl Stone. He’s not picking up.’ She looked again at the body, the neatly stacked set of clothing. ‘I need you here. Miller’s got to be in the cathedral somewhere with Louise.’

  The snow fell on to the
corpse. She imagined her son Philip exposed to the same barbaric treatment and she felt a slashing pain down the centre of her body, as if her left side was about to separate from the right. She stood firm, watched her own breath rising through the snow and headed back towards the stairway.

  Karl Stone. Find him. Right now.

  ‘How did Miller kill him?’ asked Hendricks.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ The image tumbled inside her skull, a picture she knew she would never forget. ‘But he took a souvenir. He took away his tongue.’ She was on the steps, hurrying back down, the wind whistling through the slatted windows and into the bell tower. ‘And he took away his face and scalp.’

  91

  4.37 pm

  On the back pew at the left side of the Lady Chapel, DS Riley looked again at the photograph of the two naked newborns, the twelve pages of the manuscript gripped tightly in her hands.

  She heard footsteps coming down the steps to the chapel and a voice from the gallery above.

  ‘DS Riley, Danielle Miller to see you.’

  ‘Thank you, Constable,’ she replied, without turning.

  In the body of the cathedral above her head, Riley heard voices, the busy movement of bodies.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Danielle Miller sitting in the right-hand back pew. She listened to Danielle breathing, heard the tears in her throat. She stood up and crossed the chapel, sat in the row in front of Danielle.

  ‘First off, Danielle, does your husband have a brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ A shadow fell across Riley’s mind and she wondered about the truth of Huddersfield’s claims about the body in the garden.

  ‘I’m certain. What’s happening?’

  ‘I’ve just had a phone call, Danielle. Your husband’s still somewhere in the cathedral, probably in the bell tower.’

  ‘Has he harmed anyone?’

  Riley measured Danielle’s emotional temperature and lied. ‘I haven’t heard the details. I need information and I haven’t got time to play games.’

  ‘I’ll be absolutely truthful with you.’

  Riley handed her the picture of the babies and the twelve pages from the back of Louise Lawson’s cross-stitch.

  Danielle looked at the babies and asked, ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ replied Riley.

  Danielle moved the picture into the light and looked closely. She sighed and said, ‘Could one of them be Abey? They both have his eyes. I had no idea he was an identical twin though.’

  As Riley tucked the twelve pages and the photograph back inside the ‘Silence is Golden’ sampler, she made a horrible connection between the picture of the babies and the pages she had just read.

  Danielle indicated the needlework. ‘Louise is very talented with a needle and thread. But why would she have this picture?’

  Silence is golden, thought Riley, and suddenly understood the full horror of what Abey had been through. The English Experiment. The story of the first thirteen years of Abey’s life. He was an identical twin, brought up in cruel and bizarre circumstances.

  ‘How did Abey come into your care?’ asked Riley.

  Danielle reached into her bag and handed Riley an unmarked red card file. ‘I was asked to bring this. DCI Clay said she wanted Abey’s documents.’ Riley’s eyes drilled into her. ‘Abey used to be in a residential facility on the other side of Sefton Park from us. Holland House. He was there from the age of eighteen, transferred over from children’s services. He moved to The Sanctuary one year ago, when he was thirty-eight.’

  ‘Holland House? I’m assuming it was a lot less high-end than The Sanctuary.’

  ‘It’s private, but it was pretty basic.’

  ‘So where did the money come from to move Abey upmarket all of a sudden?’

  ‘It’s all in the red file: the lawyer’s correspondence, the will. He came into a huge trust fund last year. His father’s been dead for years. He had no other family. The day after he came into money, he came to us.’

  ‘Who brought him to you?’

  ‘Louise Lawson. She met him when she was volunteering at Holland House, before she volunteered for us. She visited me in the months leading up to his money kicking in, arranged the move herself.’

  ‘She had the authority to do that?’ Inside her head, Riley felt the sun burning away clouds, and the shapes she perceived were worrying.

  ‘She’s his legal guardian.’

  ‘Is she now!’

  ‘Is there something wrong with that?’

  Riley stood up, clutched the red file and the cross-stitch, attracted the attention of the uniformed officer up on the gallery. ‘Constable, please stay here with Mrs Miller until I return.’

  She stepped into the aisle and, opening Abey’s red file, took out the top sheet, the personal information. She homed in on the top line, his name.

  ‘Is this his name?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s his full name. Abel Noone.’

  ‘Is there a birth certificate in here?’

  ‘There’s nothing that pre-dates his admission to us except the legal papers.’

  ‘Please stay right here, Danielle. I need to talk to you about your husband, but I need to talk with my colleagues before I go any further. Just one question before I go. Does your husband have a criminal record?’

  ‘I’m very, very scared of my husband. No, he has no criminal record because he hasn’t been caught.’ Her frail composure collapsed and her sobs echoed around the arches of the Lady Chapel. ‘He killed Gideon. Has he killed anyone else since?’

  ‘No one. No one as far as I know,’ replied Riley.

  ‘I hate him. I absolutely hate him.’

  ‘Why did you marry him, Danielle?’

  ‘Where I grew up, there was a lot of grinding poverty. It terrified me, left a scar on the inside that still hasn’t healed. Adam was charming at first and I ignored his angry outbursts. I thought I could tame him. I married him because he was wealthy and hard working with it. I married his money because I was terrified of being poor.’

  ‘Stay here, Danielle,’ said Riley, heading for the stairs up to the ground floor of the cathedral and nodding at the constable as she went.

  Abey, thought Riley. Abey Noone, surviving adoptive son of Professor Damien Noone.

  And, she wondered, if Abey was Abel, was the other half that Huddersfield talked about called Cain? Cain Noone. Did Abey know that Cain was dead?

  As she arrived on the ground floor, she looked towards the main entrance of the cathedral and saw DS Terry Mason and his team heading in her direction.

  In Mason’s hand was a bin bag. She made the connection to the body in the garden outside and wondered if the bones belonged to Cain Noone or some other as yet unidentified victim of the English Experiment.

  Their names chased each other round her head. Abel Noone. Cain Noone. Cain and Abel, Abel and Cain. Abel No one. Cain No one. No one. No one. No one. The person Louise had asked for when Riley had asked her if there was anyone she wanted when they were in the Royal Hospital.

  No one.

  92

  4.37 pm

  On the tenth floor of the bell tower, Clay felt as if her heart was about to stop beating. As she hurried towards the lift, Karl Stone’s body lay motionless in a pool of blood. She slowed down.

  ‘Karl!’ she shouted. No sign of life.

  Around the corner, the noise of the lift doors closing jolted her. They closed, but not all the way. They closed, jammed, and pulled open again.

  Close, jam, open.

  She knelt beside him, pulled down his chin and checked that his airway was clear. Clay listened to the thin rhythm of his breath and felt the faintest pulse in his wrist.

  Close, jam, open.

  His face looked haunted in the direct glare of his torch and she looked away as she called Hendricks on her phone. He connected.

  Close, jam, open.

  ‘Karl’s been attacked.’

  ‘Pa
ramedics are in place, ground floor.’

  Close, jam, open.

  Clay placed her hands on Stone’s shoulders, shook him gently. ‘Alert them. Bell tower.’ She cursed the wound that was making blood leak from his ear. ‘Tenth floor. It’s a head wound.’

  Close, jam, open.

  Clay sized up the scale of the problem. The endless stone staircases. The lifts. The maniac in the shadows in between.

  ‘Is the firearms unit there yet?’ she asked.

  Close, jam, open.

  ‘They’re coming across to the lift, I can see them.’

  ‘Where’s Gina Riley?’

  Close, jam, open.

  Clay eyed the stray lump on the ground near Stone’s head.

  ‘Talking to Danielle Miller.’

  Close, jam, open.

  ‘Karl, listen to me, mate, we’re going to have help with you as soon as...’

  A freezing wind squeezed her face, her skull.

  ‘Stay on the line, Bill!’

  Close, jam, open.

  She pictured Adam Miller standing in the lift just around the corner, one foot in the doorway causing the door to jam and open, over and over and over, his hand over Louise Lawson’s mouth. She saw his face as he listened to her frantic conversation with Hendricks, the buzz of sadistic excitement in his piggy eyes.

  Close, jam, open.

  She stood up and made her way to the furthest point from the corner behind which the lift doors lay.

  Close, jam, open.

  Clay took a deep breath, prepared to fight whatever was beyond that corner.

  Profound fear seized her, but the necessity to get on came in an adrenaline rush that forced her round the corner.

  The lift doors opened on their own. Began closing. Jammed. They paused. They opened to their full extent.

  There was no one there.