Dead Silent (20 page)

‘Go on, beat it back to the house now!’ Adam held his finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Ssshhh!’

When Abey was out in the snow, Adam closed the door and pulled the bolt over. He took out his mobile phone and connected to the one contact on it. AG.

‘I want more, more of the same, Angel Gabriel.’ He spoke to the ringing of the phone. The phone had one function. To manipulate Gabriel. It rang out. Gabriel wasn’t picking up, was probably too weak to get out of bed.

Adam disconnected and placed the axe back on the wall.

When his phone rang out, a wave of shock hit him. Gabriel was under strict instructions never to ring him. He guessed at a cold call from some PPI repayment scammers but was shocked to see ‘AG’ on the display.

Adam connected and said, ‘Do you realise you’ve just
disobeyed
me?’ There was silence. ‘Do you realise that actions have consequences?’ Silence. It sounded like AG’s place – the sour ambience, the hollow spaces. Coldness crept across Adam’s skin as footsteps echoed in another room and men spoke in the background. ‘Are you there?’ Something was wrong. ‘Talk to me.’

He disconnected, stared at the phone and wondered if Gabriel had visitors and if so, who they were. He unbolted the shed door and locked it on the outside. Looking up the garden, he felt the first wave of giddy panic crash inside him as a police siren sounded, passing the front of the house.

He had made a call and that call had been returned to the same place. His shed. Adam looked at the sky. Satellites. Calls could be pinned down to the shed.

In the distance he heard more sirens, but the loudest siren was inside his head.

As Clay walked into the main room of Huddersfield’s flat in 777 Croxteth Road, she picked up the buzz of excitement in the air.

‘I was just about to call you, Eve,’ said Mason.

The floor was filling with three categories of Huddersfield’s possessions.

Paints, canvases, brushes, modelling plaster, books, magazines, prints.

Statues of saints, crucifixes, Bibles, pictures of Jesus, pamphlets, books on spirituality.

Ropes, chains, knives, vibrators, magazines, whips, handcuffs, ankle shackles.

Art. Religion. Sex.

‘Good God, you’ve been working hard,’ said Clay.

Mason held out a small, cheap phone. ‘Huddersfield’s mobile.’

Clay walked over to him and squinted at the eleven digits on the display panel.

‘I think the First Born called.’ Mason smiled. ‘I answered a call to Huddersfield’s phone, I played the silent card, the caller hung up. But this number came on the display.’

‘When did this happen?’ asked Clay.

‘A minute ago. We’re already on to the service provider and should have a name and address within the next few minutes.’

‘Did you call back?’

‘I did.’

‘And did the caller speak?’

‘Yes. He said,
Do you realise you’ve just disobeyed me?
Then something about actions having consequences. I bet it’s Huddersfield’s sadomasochistic other half.’

‘You have this taped?’

‘Of course.’

‘Hey, Terry!’ A voice from another room called.

It felt as if the coldness of the entire house had manifested itself as an invisible finger that brushed the back of her neck. A name was coming and with that name an address, an identity...

A face framed in a white hood peered from the doorway. She watched the mouth picked out by a landing light, a mouth that seemed disembodied, and the effect was chilling.

‘News from the service provider...’ She watched vapour pour from the mouth. ‘Their system’s down. All the client data’s locked up in a glitch.’

Clay felt it like a direct punch to her stomach and, for a moment, she feared she was going to throw up.

‘Their engineers are working on it.’

Cold mist, abysmal news.
Was the First Born at work, using humans as toys and meddling with mankind’s toys and gadgets?

‘They’re going to phone us as soon as they’ve fixed their systems and can divvy us a name.’

‘No!’ Clay was surprised at the volume of her own voice and the way it seemed to fill the room. ‘Don’t wait for them to phone back. Phone them back every minute on a free line.’ She headed for the front door. ‘They’ll fix the system and fail to call us back because there’s been a change of shift and someone forgot to tell!’ She stopped at the door, anger peaking. ‘Terry, get the biggest pain in the arse you’ve got to get his or her teeth into their ankle!’

On Croxteth Road, in the thickening fog, Riley almost collided with Clay. iPhone in hand, Clay said, ‘I was just about to call you.’

The disappointment Clay had just experienced lifted when Riley said, ‘Successful trip to the Hart Building. I’m waiting on Justine Elgar to come up with some people who knew Leonard Lawson back in the day.’

‘Gina, walk with me to my car, please.’

As they walked, Clay realised she could barely feel her feet. The cold had numbed them. She blew into her hands and wished for spring.

‘Leonard Lawson spent the best part of his life hiding something,’ said Riley.

‘Go on,’ said Clay.

‘His whole career at the University of Liverpool was marked by an almost supernatural blandness. Decades passed and he never missed a lecture, never missed a beat. Then, in the early eighties, he was offered megabucks to go Stateside and cough out twenty lectures. He turned it down with a, an excuse and b, a complete lie.’

‘The excuse being?’

‘Teaching commitments in Liverpool. He could have easily got out of them. And the unnecessary lie was that such a trip would involve him taking Louise out of school. I did the sums. Louise was hitting thirty when he turned the gigs down. It was a
don’t bother asking again
lie.’

They approached the constable manning the edge of the scene of crime. He looked cold and miserable. Clay met his eye. ‘Thank you for keeping all those nosey bastards from getting under our feet.’

He laughed as they passed him. ‘No problem, ma’am.’

‘Don’t be so old-fashioned, lad. What’s your conclusion, Gina?’ asked Clay.

‘Two hundred thousand bucks for twenty lectures versus fourteen thousand pounds before tax for a whole year in Liverpool Uni tells me that he’d done something or had been involved in something that made him want to be like the Invisible Man. He’d have been the Led Zeppelin of the academic world.’

Clay opened her driver’s door and Riley got into the passenger seat. Clay put the heater on and warm air danced around their feet. ‘Any ideas?’ she asked.

Riley opened Leonard Lawson’s photocopied file and pulled out his book review from
The Spectator
. ‘This is
really
odd.’

Clay turned on the overhead light and began to read. Three sentences in, she stopped, looked sideways at Riley. ‘
In this absolutely brilliant and ground-breaking study of the need to follow monastic principles of silence and meditation as a means of enhancing the
quality of life, Professor Noone outlines how the systemised retention of language could eliminate crime, poverty and a whole range of social ills
.‘ She raised her head. ‘
Absolutely brilliant and ground-breaking
?’ she queried.

‘Read on. He’s only warming up, Eve. This is the one and only time he stuck his head over the rampart in decades. Noone’s proposition is that if a man can gain a profound understanding of how a child acquires language – how the blank canvas is filled – then he can control how people think en masse. Whoever controls language would have the tools to change the world and re-create it in his own image. It strikes me Professor Noone’s book is a control freak’s Bible.’

It took Clay two minutes to read the review and weigh it up. She sighed. ‘
Professor Noone is a mesmeric intellect and his inspirational ideas, if adhered to, would lay the foundation for a new world order that would foster the best qualities in human nature and make war, famine and disease a thing of the past.
’ She looked at Riley. ‘King-size Messianic Complex. Absolutely bloody barking mad. But who’s the bigger head case?’ In spite of the cold, Clay suddenly felt hot. ‘Professor Noone?’ Illumination was near and the light threatened to be blinding. ‘Or Professor Lawson?’

Clay took out the framed photo from her bag. ‘This was the only photograph in Lawson’s house. This young man is Leonard Lawson and that young man is...’ She checked the author’s name on the review. D.L. Noone.

‘What are you smiling at, Eve?’

‘Every dedication in every book that Lawson published was to this man. I thought at one point they were to Denise Nicholas, the maiden name of Louise’s mother.’ Fireworks set off inside her head and a knot tightened in her stomach. ‘Gina, google Professor DL Noone, please.’

As Riley pulled out her phone, Clay flipped over the framed photograph and released its back panel. She took the picture from the frame, saw that there was a line of neatly inked words on the back and held them up to the overhead light.

‘The first page up is Wikipedia,’ said Riley. ‘Looks like meagre pickings.’

‘
In sepulchrum nos sequitur silentium nostrum
.’ Clay read the words as she showed them to Riley.

They both looked at the Wikipedia page for Professor D.L. Noone. There was a black-and-white close-up of his face. A striking, good-looking man with eyes that appeared jet-black and stared darkly at the viewer. He was the other man in the little portrait in Clay’s hand.

Riley read: ‘
Professor Damien Noone was born in London in 1921. A conscientious objector, he served as a stretcher-bearer in the North African campaign during World War Two. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, 1946 to 1949. In 1958, he was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge University.
’

Clay found an English to Latin translator on her phone, typed in the words
In sepulchrum nos sequitur silentium nostrum
. The
ISNSSN
on the dedication in the Psamtik manuscript.

The brief details of Leonard Lawson’s biography flashed through her head. ‘They met in North Africa during the war and went on to study at the same college in Cambridge.’

A cloud of thrushes swept across the sky.

‘Do you have anything else?’ she asked, clicking on translate.

‘Just waiting on a call from Justine Elgar.’

‘Look at this. Look what
In sepulchrum nos sequitur silentium nostrum
translates to in English.’

Riley read: ‘
Our silence follows us to the grave.
’

With a plainclothes constable stationed at the main entrance of the Metropolitan Catholic Cathedral and another at the exit in the basement, DS Bill Hendricks entered the building. He walked slowly around the curve of the circular interior, pausing in front of every one of the thirteen dedicated chapels, hoping Gabriel Huddersfield would be in there on his knees, looking for affirmation or forgiveness.

As he walked, Hendricks repeatedly glanced over his shoulder, distracted by a growing unease that someone or something was right behind him. But each time he turned, he was alone. He put the sensation down to the atmosphere in the cathedral.

Serene blue light from the stained glass of the huge central tower filled the interior and the place swam in competing silence and echoes. Hendricks completed his first circuit at the Amnesty International chapel, the place he had started, feeling as if he was going to explode with frustration.

He walked to the back row of benches near the main door, to watch the entrance, the feeling of being watched or followed coming back at him with increasing intensity.
This time
, he thought,
ignore it
.

The smell of candle wax and floor polish became infused with a floral note. He sniffed. Lavender. Softly, footsteps echoed towards him.

He watched the door.

‘Can I help you?’

He turned towards the gentle, husky voice and saw an elderly priest.

The priest smiled at him. ‘You seem as if you’re looking for someone?’

Hendricks stood up, towered over the old man and offered him his seat.

The priest looked around at the dozens of empty benches. ‘May I ask, who are you looking for?’

Hendricks smiled at the hand-rolled cigarette behind the priest’s left ear. He took out his warrant card and showed it to him. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘I’m with the Merseyside Constabulary.’ He called up the picture gallery on his iPhone and showed him an image of Gabriel Huddersfield. ‘This is the man I’m looking for.’

The priest looked at Hendricks and nodded. ‘Oh dear. What’s he been up to now?’

‘You know him?’

‘Yes.’

‘A serious crime, Father.’

‘Oh no.’ His face filled with sadness. ‘Gabriel’s not very well. His mind is full of confusion.’ Hendricks gazed into the priest’s eyes, which seemed to draw down the cool blue light of the stained glass in the tower. ‘He’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’

‘How do you know that, Father?’

‘I was a doctor before I became a priest and I practised medicine as part of my priestly vocation before I was put out to grass.’

‘How do you know Gabriel Huddersfield, Father?’

‘You came here looking for him, didn’t you, Bill? That was an astute move. He’s a regular visitor here. As am I. We speak. He asks me questions. He is conflicted. Questions, questions, questions.’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘
What are the colour of Jesus’s eyes? Where is the soul of Judas Iscariot? What will happen when Creation breaks and falls away?
’

‘What do you tell him?’

‘What would you say?’

‘Brown. Hell. Global nuclear war.’

‘Wrong on all counts.’ The priest smiled and Hendricks found himself smiling with him. ‘If he’s committed a serious crime, it’s my belief that his mental health will suffer a major downturn. This will make him quite easy to catch because of the delusional state, but the same delusional state will make the process of interviewing him about his crime difficult.’