Dead Silent (35 page)

Louise looked at Riley. ‘But that was just a dream.’

Riley nodded.

‘I shouldn’t have told you. You’re a detective. I shouldn’t have burdened you with my dream when all you seek is the truth. Dreams belong in the ether. The truth is all around, if you look in the right places.’

‘Oh, I think we’re looking in the right places, Louise.’

Riley’s phone vibrated in her pocket. ‘Excuse me, Louise.’ She stepped out of earshot and connected. ‘Eve, where are you?’

‘Waiting for the lift. Are there armed officers there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want them to accompany the paramedics collecting Karl, and the Scientific Support officers heading up to the roof.’

Riley heard the sound of the lift doors hissing open on the fourth floor. There’s been a development,’ she said. ‘I’ve got Louise Lawson with me and Danielle Miller in the Lady Chapel.’

‘What about Adam Miller?’ asked Clay.

‘Bill Hendricks is chasing him.’

The doors shut and the lift rumbled as it descended.

‘The missing pages from Lawson’s manuscript were in the back of Louise’s cross-stitch,’ said Riley. ‘I’ve dipped in and it looks like Abey and his identical twin brother were the subjects of the English Experiment. Noone bought the babies, recruited Lawson and staged the experiment in Liverpool. Lawson was up to his eyes in it, trying his own aesthetic farce on the so-called
normal
one.’

Riley felt the depth of Clay’s silence. She looked at the archway leading to the ground-floor lift. ‘I’m twenty metres away when you hit the ground, Eve. Back pew. You need to read it. Am I adding two and two and making five?’

She watched the archway, heard a commotion near the porch of the cathedral.

‘Wait there with Louise. Have you got the manuscript with you right now?’

She took the cross-stitch from her bag and the lift doors opened. ‘Right here in my hand.’

Clay appeared in the archway. Riley held up her free hand.

‘Why have you got my cross-stitch?’ asked Louise, her voice filled with agitation.

Clay strode across the floor from the lift.

‘That’s my property, give it back to me. Please.’ Louise rose from her seat.

‘Louise, sit down!’

‘Give me my cross-stitch.’ She held out her hand. ‘Do you know just how much of my life went into that?’

‘Yes, I think I do know how much of your life went into that cross-stitch, Louise. And we need to talk. You. Me. And Eve Clay.’

As Hendricks walked at speed away from the closed but unlocked door to the internal staircase, he heard voices cutting across each other. He picked up pace and sprinted towards the front entrance. From the body language of the officers in the vicinity, he sensed that Adam Miller had committed another act of violence as he’d made his escape. The crackle of walkie-talkies partially masked the noise of a paramedic vehicle in the distance.

At the swing doors of the porch, a burly PC swept past him, muttering, ‘This is fucked, totally fucked.’

He saw a circular wall of Merseyside Constabulary high-visibility jackets, and a pair of paramedics pushing through the bodies.

A dark premonition flooded through Hendricks as he attached himself to the outside of the wall.

‘Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks, let me through.’

Without turning, without speaking, the bodies parted and Hendricks stood on the inside of the circle.

He looked down at the backs of two paramedics blocking his view of the body they were working on. The legs in the black trousers, and the black shoes, were still, helpless.

‘He’s dead,’ said one of the paramedics, standing up.

The young constable’s head hung at an impossible angle from his prone body. His left temple was red and swollen from what looked like a fierce boot to the artery. ‘What was the lad’s name?’ Hendricks asked.

‘Paul Jones. He’s just passed out from the Training Academy on Mather Avenue. It was only his fourth day on the job,’ said a voice, trembling with emotion. ‘He was top of his class. An Oxford graduate.’

Hendricks noted that Constable Jones’s cap and high-visibility jacket were missing, two items for which he had paid with his life.

He saw that the lad wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and wondered who would tell the young man’s mother and what she was doing right then, before the news came that would end her life as she knew it.

Hendricks went back inside and pictured Adam Miller walking out of the cathedral, past officer after officer, with the peak of the dead PC’s cap half over his eyes and disguised by his high-visibility jacket.

The darkness receded and Hendricks gave in to a bitter hope. That the dead man was an orphan.

As she stepped out of the lift at the ground floor, Clay could feel the blood pounding inside her head and swirling in her eardrums. She walked into the body of the cathedral and saw Riley and Louise in the middle of the huge space.

‘He’s escaped.’ Hendricks’s voice echoed. Clay turned to it, saw him striding over to her. ‘He’s killed a constable in the process. What do you want me to do, Eve?’

‘I want you to help me lead the manhunt. We’ll leave enough officers here to guard the entrances and exits. Go and take control of it, I’ll join you in a minute.’

She looked around. The only civilians present were Louise and, in the Lady Chapel, Danielle Miller. Clay stopped a little short of Riley, weighed up the whole scene, settled her gaze on Louise. She took the cross-stitch from Riley, turned the writing towards Louise and lifted the back enough to see the hidden pages.

‘Gina, take Louise and Danielle back to Trinity Road. Ask the custody medic to examine Miss Lawson.’

‘Physically, I’m not harmed.’ Clay watched Louise, tried to read her but saw only a blankness born of horror. ‘Where is Adam Miller? He’s escaped, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘I’m afraid so.’

Riley showed the photograph of the two newborn baby boys to Clay. ‘From the back of Louise’s cross-stitch. Silence is golden. Cain and Abel Noone.’

‘Louise, which one’s Abey?’

Louise wiped her eyes and said, ‘Horror. I’ve seen such horror.’

Clay turned, called across as she headed back to the lift. ‘I’ll be back at Trinity Road as soon as I can. I just need to check the tower again.’

The wind whipped a stray band of snow across the roof of the Vestey Tower as Clay walked across it towards the mutilated corpse.
Abey Noone. Abel Noone.
She looked again at the way the body was positioned and remembered the fish-headed demon in Bosch’s
The Last
Judgment
, preparing to mutilate its victim’s face.

She looked at the pulp where there had once been a face, noted the bloody root of his severed tongue and the absence of scalp and hair on his head.

Clay thought about Adam Miller and how the other victims had been older men. So why murder Abey? It didn’t fit the pattern, and nor did the killing of the security guard. Was it for sexual pleasure? After all, Miller took pleasure in systematically harming Huddersfield – perhaps this was no different. She guessed the scalping and removal of Abey’s face had two dimensions: borrowing from Bosch, and giving him an erotic thrill. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that her ideas were round pegs and her mind a square hole.

‘Jesus!’ She pictured the scene and imagined Louise’s terror. ‘I’m sorry, Abey. I’m sorry I could scarcely bring myself to look at you earlier. The thing is, I have a son, you see. I have a son. His name is Philip. I’m sorry that you have suffered, Abey. I’m sorry for the sheer bad luck that you’ve had to endure.’ She listened to the wind, thin and lyrical as it whistled past her head.

She took out her phone and called DS Hendricks. Within one ring, he connected. ‘Bill, you’re going to have to lead the manhunt alone. I need to get back to Trinity Road.’

‘Do you want me to return Huddersfield to the station?’

‘I don’t think we have any further use for him at the cathedral.’

‘I’d like to speak to him before he goes back,’ said Hendricks. ‘We have to find out how he knew where those bones were buried.’

‘Send him back when you’ve done with him.’

In the education room of the Anglican Cathedral, the almost complete skeleton of a human being was laid out on a waxed cloth that covered a long desk.

Sergeant Price videoed as DS Terry Mason placed the last bone, the tip of the little finger of the right hand, in place.

A door slammed in a far-off place deep in the cathedral, emphasising the stillness and silence of the room.

Dr Lamb and her APT, Michael Harper, looked at each other and then with approval at Mason’s handiwork.

‘Absolutely nothing missing, nothing broken...’ Mason eyed the skeleton and was filled with awe at the construction of the scaffolding of the human body.

Harper measured the neatly arranged skeleton from head to foot. ‘Height, 152.5 centimetres.’

All eyes turned to Dr Lamb. ‘It’s a teenage boy. Look at the shape of the forehead and the narrowness of the pelvis. Average height for someone aged twelve to thirteen. No immediate cause of death evident based on the condition of the bones.’ She pointed at the eye socket. ‘In females this is rounded. In males it’s rectangular and the nasal aperture is long and narrow. Classically male.’ She lowered her face close to the skull, peered inside the mouth. ‘No fillings or signs of tooth decay, which is one indicator that this was a well cared-for child.’

‘A teenage boy?’ said Mason. ‘What about a short adult?’

‘The skull,’ replied Dr Lamb. ‘The sutures, the gaps between the plates, are mainly open.’ She drew her finger across a pair of fused plates at the front of the skull. ‘This frontal suture closes fairly early on in life.’

Mason looked at the narrow gaps between the plates across the rest of the skull.

‘They start closing over when a person is in their twenties.’

The education room was filled with a poignant silence and Mason, thirty years into the job and veteran of the worst that human beings could inflict on other human beings, felt a sadness for the lonely boy buried in a shallow grave and exhumed in a rising tide of chaos.

With his imagination, he furnished the boy’s bones with flesh, gave him a face, eyes to see and a mouth to speak with. He dressed him in simple clothes and, silently, told him to
sit up from the table
.

‘We know it won’t be natural causes that claimed him,’ said Dr Lamb. ‘It could have been strangulation, a knife wound even. But the bones are perfect. Untouched.’

Stand up! Walk away! Live your life!

Mason watched him walk to the door, open it and leave without a backward glance.

‘Terry, are you all right?’ asked Price.

Mason looked down at the bones on the table and turned to Dr Lamb. ‘We’ll bag his bones and deliver them to the mortuary. Thank you for coming out so promptly. It’s been a busy, demanding day for all of us, hasn’t it?’

As the last of the departing officers streamed out of the cathedral car park to the zones in the city centre and the suburbs where they had been directed, Bill Hendricks suddenly felt small and alone under the massive bulk of the Anglican Cathedral.

He phoned Sergeant Harris, the custody sergeant who had accompanied Gabriel Huddersfield to the cathedral.

In one of the gardens of the modern houses to the west of the cathedral, the wind played merry hell with a chime as it rolled in from the River Mersey.

The ring tone sounded in Hendricks’s ear.

There were only two other signs of human life in the car park. The police van in which Gabriel Huddersfield was detained and a white van that had been checked out as Adam Miller’s vehicle.

‘Sergeant Harris, I want to talk to Gabriel Huddersfield.’

‘I can see you, DS Hendricks.’

Hendricks walked towards the white van and pictured Adam Miller driving up to the gate of the Otterspool tip and dropping off the freezer that morning. He looked through the windscreen and saw only darkness within. The driver’s door was locked. He walked round, opened the back doors and shone a torch around the interior. He opened the closest bag to him, saw the bank books and a passport, and noted the black box, like a makeshift coffin with a padlock to ensnare the spirit of the dead things inside it. He recalled the scenes in Gabriel Huddersfield’s flat and whispered, ‘Fun and games, eh?’

The passenger door was open, a clear indicator that Miller had become careless and was falling apart under the pressure of his crimes.
I so want
, thought Hendricks,
to be in the interview suite with you and Eve Clay
.

He sat in one of the passenger seats, turned on the overhead light, opened the glove compartment and took out the only item in it. A leaflet from the Anglican Cathedral, the calling card of Adam Miller, a master of disguise hiding behind the vastness of the church.

Behind him, Sergeant Harris opened the back door of the police van and then the cage in which Huddersfield was contained. Through the rear-view mirror, Hendricks watched him march Huddersfield over to Miller’s van.

‘Get in, Gabriel. Sit down.’

Huddersfield, bound by handcuffs and in the early stages of extreme fatigue, slumped into the space next to Hendricks. Sergeant Harris closed the passenger door and Hendricks pressed record on his phone.

‘Nice and cosy,’ said Hendricks. ‘Home from home for you.’

‘How do you mean?’ The wind picked up, lashing the empty space of the car park, causing the van to shake. The chime sounded louder.

‘You must have travelled in this van with Adam Miller?’

After a long time, Huddersfield replied. ‘No.’

‘I want to establish some basic details, Gabriel. It’s too late for lies. Tell me the truth. How did you and Adam Miller travel to Leonard Lawson’s house?’

‘We didn’t.’

‘Did you meet him there by pre-arrangement?’

‘No.’

‘Did he arrive first and let you in or vice versa?’