Dead Silent (11 page)

‘I gather we’re all she’s got now,’ he continued. ‘She can come and stay here in our flat on the top floor.’

Danielle placed her hand on the back of his, smiled at him. He looked at her hand and she withdrew it.

‘She’s given us tens of thousands of pounds of unpaid labour over the years. It’s the least we can do. I have nothing further to add.’ Adam stood up. ‘If she’s here in the evenings, she can help with bathtimes and bedtimes.’ He looked at Stone. ‘May I go? I have a very busy day ahead.’

‘Yes, you can go,’ said Clay.

He walked towards the door. ‘Being here, it’ll keep her mind occupied.’

When he’d gone, Gideon looked at Danielle and said, ‘OMG!’

‘Tell her, tell her she can stay with us for as long as she likes,’ Danielle said to Clay. ‘Tell her we’d love her to stay.’

Clay stood up. ‘We have to get going.’ She handed her card to Danielle. ‘If you need to contact me about anything, please do so immediately.’

As she headed back to the front door, Clay took in the various artworks around the hallway and gathered that self-expression was highly valued at The Sanctuary. A horse with legs fatter than its body. A man sitting in front of a bank of fog. A house with massive black blobs for windows and a tiny yellow square for a door. A brown chimney that looked like it was falling apart.

Adam, twenty-something, smiling in the sunshine of an upmarket marina, his father’s hand at the junction of his neck and shoulder.

At the front door, Clay turned to Danielle and Gideon. ‘Thank you for your time.’

From upstairs, the creak of a foot on a loose floorboard. Clay paused, looked up, expecting to see Adam, and made out the shape of a man. He stepped from the shadows and stood in the soft light at the top of the stairs. His hair was dark, his eyes open but empty. Dressed in plain black pyjamas, he stared into space, his face childlike, handsome, his gaze almost Christ-like. It was hard to call, but Clay pinned him in his late thirties, even though his expression took years off him.

Gideon walked quickly up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Abey!’ he said, his tone reassuring.

‘He sleepwalks. Every night. He comes to the same spot at the top of the stairs.’ Danielle checked the clock on the wall. ‘Six forty-five. Quarter to the hour every time. Different hour every time, but always quarter to.’

A wave of compassion flooded through Clay as the thought occurred to her:
Almost there, but always short of the complete lap of the clock.
She wondered where he’d be and what he’d be doing at that hour had he not had learning difficulties?

In Clay’s eyes, gentleness lay around the man like an invisible veil.

He’d be with his children, getting them ready for school, preparing himself for another busy day.

‘Come on, Abey.’ Gideon laid his hands on Abey’s shoulders, turned him around and gave him a gentle push between the shoulder blades.

‘Louise says she doesn’t have favourites,’ said Danielle. ‘But he’s her favourite by far. He follows her round like a shadow,’ she whispered. ‘He’s like the son she never had.’ She opened the front door.

Stepping outside, Clay took out her iPhone and asked, ‘Before I text DS Riley with your offer of accommodation, are you absolutely sure Louise can stay here?’

‘In spite of his religious faith, my husband’s not a naturally charitable man, DCI Clay. For him, The Sanctuary’s a profit-making business. Adam came into a lot of money when his father died and he saw a gap at the high end of the care market for people with learning disabilities. I’m not going to veto an opportunity for him to do something for someone else just for the sake of it. It’s a very pleasant surprise.’

‘We all have depths,’ said Clay. Some clear, some dark. ‘Sometimes we surprise ourselves as much as we surprise those closest to us.’

‘Bring her in later this morning.’ Danielle smiled. ‘We’ll be happy to give her shelter.’

Riley stared out at the sky across the Mersey and made a decision about the Louis Vuitton bag and the Jimmy Choo shoes that she was watching on eBay. Either or? No. She was going to put high bids on both and snuff out the competition.

Louise woke from her fitful sleep and cleared her throat. ‘Gina?’

Riley turned, walked over to the bed. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Half an hour...’

Louise touched the white plaster on her forehead. ‘It must have been the bump to my head...’ Riley leaned closer to her, watching her with an intensity that made the silence palpable.

‘Do you want to tell me something, Louise?’

‘I had the most bizarre dream. About my father’s picture. About
The Tower of Babel
. I only share my dreams with those who are in them.’

‘Was I in your dream?’

The buzz of an incoming text – ‘Eve Clay’ – split Riley down the middle. ‘The Tower of Babel?’ She kept the theme alive as she opened the text.

Adam and Danielle Miller, owners of The Sanctuary, have offered to have Louise stay with them for as long as she likes. Encourage her to say yes and to go there asap. It literally is her sanctuary.

‘Tell me about your dream,’ said Riley, holding Louise’s gaze.

‘The whole of the bedroom wall facing his bed was completely covered, from ceiling to floor, with
The
Tower of Babel
. You were walking beside me. We were walking towards the Tower of Babel. I asked you what had happened. You said Bruegel had risen from the dead and painted a mural on the wallpaper to replace the picture that had been stolen from my father.’

A dreaminess settled on Louise’s face as she seemed to turn over some details in her mind. Riley glanced down at the screen of her phone, closed the text and discreetly pressed record.

‘What happened next, Louise, in your dream?’

‘The whole room altered. It stopped being my father’s bedroom with a painted Tower of Babel on the wall and became a three-dimensional version of the scene itself. We walked. The earth was scorched. We headed towards the entrance. And the noise. The closer we came, the louder it became. It was horrific. Thousands of voices clamouring inside the tower and pouring out like red-hot windstorms. You put your hands over my ears. Your face was pinched and your eyes were slits, your hair was streaming behind you and you moved your lips and it looked like you’d mouthed the words
Jesus wept
, and I screamed back at you,
That’s a fact!
’

When Louise paused, Riley passed her a glass of water. As the old lady sipped delicately, Riley made a mental note never to underestimate the power of another human being’s inner life.

‘Go on,’ she said, hooked.

‘And as soon as I said
That’s a fact!
, all the noise stopped. Silence slammed down from the sky. We were near the entrance and you said,
Can you hear that?
I said,
No.
You looked up. One voice, high up in the tower, whispered. You pointed. There were two boys—’

‘Two boys?’ Riley interrupted, thinking,
Two killers
.

‘Yes, two boys... leaning out of the tower. Oh yes, I could hear it now, a noise like a house fly buzzing far away. One of the boys was whispering, but we couldn’t hear a word. The whispering boy stopped making the noise and then he... stuck out his hand...’ Louise extended her arm, turning it over so that her palm was uppermost and her fingers were parted. ‘Like this.’ She lifted her hand up slowly. ‘We rose from the earth. Like the boy had the power to make us levitate, the power in his hand.’

Louise paused and stared straight at Riley, as if daring Riley to make light of what she was telling her. Was this significant? Riley wondered. More importantly, perhaps, did Louise think it significant? Or were these just the ramblings of an elderly brain coming out of mild concussion? Either way, it seemed she wasn’t finished yet.

‘We rose higher and higher and when we reached the hole in the Tower of Babel where the boys were, there was only one boy there. The silent one. The whisperer had gone and we could see why the silent boy was silent. Underneath his nose, his mouth was sealed up with a single piece of skin that covered the whole of the lower half of his face.’ She reached out with both hands. ‘He touched both of us on the centre of our foreheads and, slowly, down we went. And when my feet touched the ground, it was no longer like being inside the Bruegel painting of the Tower of Babel. You had gone and I was alone in my father’s room, looking at the painting on the wall, the one that had been there for as long as I could remember. And I heard my father’s voice, behind me.
Louise?
I turned. He wasn’t there. Then I woke up. Here. With you. And you were looking out of the window.’

Morning had arrived and the blood-red sky unfolded into grey light.

‘Bump to the head,’ said Louise. She gave the slightest shrug of the shoulders. ‘Fantastic dreams...’

‘Did the boys have names?’ asked Riley.

Louise shook her head.

‘The boy with the skin covering his mouth – did you see any other features?’

‘I’ve told you everything there was in the dream.’

The wind roared against the hospital windows.

‘You told me your father refused to speak about why he loved that particular painting?’

Louise thought about the question and Riley knew she had an answer of sorts. But there was something in Louise’s face that she couldn’t read. In answering the question, would she somehow be betraying her father’s memory? A confidence, maybe?

‘Once. He had a fever once. I nursed him back to health. When his fever was high, he talked about the painting. He said, and I think he was quoting a writer,
Every word is like a stain
on
silence and nothingness
. That is the truth of the Tower of Babel. For a man who wrote so many words, in his day-to-day life my father was a man of very few words. He could sit in complete silence for hours on end, locked inside the ebb and flow of ideas inside his head. We had no music in the house. No record player. I was the only girl in my class who didn’t own a record by the Beatles. We didn’t get a television until 1980. And even then I could only watch it when Father had gone to bed.’

‘He sounds like a strict father.’

She considered the observation. ‘Times were different then.’

Riley looked at the curve of her forehead, wondered at the vivid image systems that existed inside her, born perhaps of the constant exposure to art in her childhood.

‘You know you won’t be able to go back to your house for a long time?’

‘I understand. I’ll go to the Travelodge on Aigburth Road.’

‘There’s no need for that. You’ve had an offer of a place to stay.’

Louise sat up. ‘With whom?’

‘The Millers. The Sanctuary. They seem very keen for you to stay. I would take up that offer if I was you. You’ll be able to see all your friends.’

Riley watched the information percolate in the passing of a brief smile.

‘I will. Yes, I will stay there. You’re right. All my friends are there.’

‘Who are your friends in The Sanctuary?’

Louise’s face visibly brightened. ‘Tom Thumb – that’s not his real name, it’s Tom Thomas, but he’s only five foot tall. Oh...’ Louise looked at Riley. ‘Abey. He’s a wonderful man. But don’t tell anyone I said that. I wouldn’t want to hurt the other men’s feelings, and they do have feelings; deep, deep feelings.’

‘Louise, how about DCI Clay and I take you there as soon as the doctor says you’re free to go?’

She nodded slowly and, looking directly at Riley, said, ‘People are so kind, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ lied Riley. ‘People are kind.’

The Last Judgment
by Hieronymus Bosch (1482)

How they screamed for mercy that simply wasn’t there.

The First Born measured the ten years of his life with a sadness that he sometimes felt would kill him. He knew he must fight the pain, because he was terrified of what would happen after he died.

A sudden gust of wind raised the curtain, and light came in from the streetlamps outside. The three panels covering the wall facing his bed were immediately lit up. On the left was the Garden of Eden, and on the right was Hell. But it was the middle panel that scared him the most. Up in a blue sky sat Christ the Judge, and below him were all the people who would go to hell when they died. Some of them were burning and some were speared on horrible sharp hooks. There were so many twisted bodies, writhing in the dark. Hardly any bodies were flying up to join the angels in the blue sky. ‘No one knows the moment!’ The voice intoned inside his head. ‘The Last Judgment must come to all.’ It echoed from the plates of his skull. ‘The first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.’

The First Born scuttled beneath the blankets and was filled with a sensation that comforted him. He felt as if his whole body was shrinking to the size of a pea. And he told himself, pea-sized and hidden in the double-darkness of night and blankets, nothing could find him.

Except for sound. A mean and heavy wind pressed down on the slates of the house he had never stepped out from, in a place he had learned was called Croxteth Road. It seemed to him that the wind was wrapping around the walls, squeezing the sides of the house. Beneath the blankets, The First Born felt his chest tighten and his breath started to come in short gasps. He was sure these were the first steps on the road to death, and to the darkness that lay beyond.