Dead Silent (38 page)

‘They closed the flat down with tape. I heard the last officer leaving. But there’s someone inside Gabriel’s flat now. I can hear him. It sounds like Adam Miller.’

Clay paused at the bottom of the final set of stairs leading up to Gabriel Huddersfield’s flat, felt the weight of a spanner in her coat pocket. She saw the moon through the skylight, picking out the landing in an ethereal glow. From the space above, she heard Elliot Evergreen whisper, ‘DCI Clay?’

‘Mr Evergreen, sssshhh.’

She walked up the last few stairs, ears straining to hear what might lie behind the door of Gabriel Huddersfield’s flat. Silence. At the top, she took the door key from Elliot Evergreen. ‘Go inside, close your door, stay inside.’

Outside, she heard cars arriving, engines turning off, the mounting back-up behind her that, once she was through the door, would be of no use. The sound made her intensely aware of how alone she really was. She felt an emptiness that she hadn’t known since she was a small girl, when the truth had sunk in that she had no one in this world.

She listened, and for a brief second flew through time and space to her home in Mersey Road, watched Thomas giving Philip his dinner, both of them blissfully unaware of the danger she was in, both of them unable to see or sense the phantom of their wife and mother, desperate for what could be the final contact.

Back. Fast. Now.

Clay looked at the picture of Jesus on Huddersfield’s door, framed by the moonlight. She heard nothing behind it as she turned the key with infinite care.

The door opened without a sound. She stepped into the flat, left the front door open. A pipe gurgled. A tap spat out a stream of water. At the bathroom window the wind moaned. Every hair on her body stood up on end.

Clay turned on her torch, pointed it at the door ahead, at Huddersfield’s chapel, art gallery and torture chamber. She passed the bathroom door. A board creaked beneath her foot and her heart banged. Her head spun as it danced with the memory of his atrocities. She listened through the rising tide of blood inside her skull. No sound of life behind the door, but she could sense a presence there, waiting, waiting for her.

Her hand pressed against the surface of the door. She gripped the spanner in her pocket, wondered what she would look like stripped naked and without a face or scalp. She looked down on herself from the ceiling of the mortuary, watched as Dr Lamb pulled what was left of her to pieces.

‘I did see you in Liverpool One with your little boy, Eve
...
’
Dr Lamb’s words echoed on the wind outside the house. ‘
The man you were with, with the sky-blue eyes
...
I thought, no
...
You looked so happy
...
’

And she hoped against hope that she was wrong. That Elliot Evergreen was mistaken. She opened the door slowly and she knew she was not alone. Clouds passed over the moon. Wisps of moonlight illuminated the figures at the top of the three panels of
The Last Judgment
. She saw Jesus in his heavenly glory. Beneath his feet was a bank of shadows. She stared into the darkness and made out the shape of a man.

He sat perfectly still, directly beneath Jesus, like the silhouette of a statue.

Clay grasped the handle of the spanner in her pocket.

She listened to the even sound of his breathing in the dark.

The smell of blood, semen and testosterone flooded her senses and she felt violated by the air she was forced to breathe.

The wind pressed hard on the roof and exterior walls.

Clay took a step inside and froze when she heard a voice.

‘Stop!’

Was it Adam? She doubted her senses.

Freezing air rushed through the cracks in the old windows. It gave her the coldest kiss as it streamed by. The front door slammed shut.

‘Alone at last, Eve!’

The floor beneath her turned to wax.

Clouds sailed away from the moon and the room came alive with silver light. Something glinted in his hand, metal or glass.

Clay hung on to the silence as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The details of what lay before her came clearer as the seconds ticked past.

She pressed record on her iPhone, placed it on the floor. His breath sounded like a primitive curse.

‘Are you surrendering to me?’ she asked with a hollow calmness. ‘The building’s surrounded. The street outside is crawling with police officers.’ The silence was dense. ‘You came back here? You killed a man to run away. So why have you come back?’

Her vision focused and, in the moonlight, the features of the room gained definition. He sat with his back to her, facing the wall. The sheen of his body told her he was not in his own skin. She narrowed her eyes and saw he was wearing the leather body suit. She heard a zip being undone, watched as he lifted the leather mask that covered his face and head.

He threw it backwards and it landed at her feet. It looked up at her, the hollow eyes sinister in their emptiness. An aroma of sweat, blood and tears wafted up from it.

‘Masks. Do you ever wear masks, Eve?’ Something fractured in his voice, made him sound unlike himself, and she wondered if this was Adam Miller’s take on tender intimacy. ‘The answer is yes, Eve. I’ve read about you. I’ve been fascinated by you for years. You wouldn’t believe how pleased I was when you walked into The Sanctuary. Did I appear excited?’

‘No, you appeared annoyed. Disturbed from your bed.’

‘Masks, Eve. Masks. You wear masks, Eve. I know you do. You have to. You’re wearing one now. I can see you through the shadows with the eyes in the back of my head.’

He laughed sourly, briefly, and fell silent.

‘You can see me with the eyes in the back of your head. I can’t see you. I don’t want to talk to your back,’ said Clay. ‘Turn the chair round so that I can see you better and you can see me.’

He turned his hand and the silver blade in his grasp shone in the moonlight.

‘Is that what you used to peel off Abey’s face and scalp?’

‘Poor Abey, he dead as doornail.’ He slipped from one voice to another, Adam to Abey.

‘Please don’t mock him. Isn’t it enough that you’ve killed him? Must you mock his speaking voice?’

‘He’s dead. Does it matter? If he was alive, would he understand?’

‘Abey Noone was a human being and he had dignity and feelings and deserved to be respected for what he was.’

‘What was he? I’d love to hear your take on poor little Abey.’

‘He was born into a nightmare. He had a brother, an identical twin, and by no more than a flip of a coin he was placed in solitary confinement from the moment he was born, deprived of language by a father figure who had no mercy. You want to know my take on Abey Noone? He wasn’t born disabled, his disabilities were inflicted on him by a man who had complete power over him.’

‘Poor little Abel, Abel B Babel, that surely is bad luck. But what of his other, his brother, his twin pea in the pod?’

Clay froze, saw her breath in the moonlit air, felt her skin tingling. ‘What do you know of his brother, Adam?’

‘What do I know of his brother?’ Something in his voice shifted, became quite unlike either Adam or the mocking imitation of Abey.

‘Tell me about his brother.’ She heard the words leave her mouth and they sounded like they’d drifted in on some cursed wind.

‘A telltale?’ He sounded out the words. ‘I used to hear the boy, Eve.’ He raised an arm, pointed his finger up to the ceiling. ‘Up in the attic.’ Silence. ‘Crying. I thought it was a cat trapped up there at first. I was told I was the only one.’

His voice was full of warmth and there was a music in there that compelled Clay to listen. He looked over his shoulder, his profile caught in a patch of light.

‘Abey? Is that you?’ She stepped forward, drawn to the voice like magic.

‘Eve.’

‘Adam?’

‘I’m not Adam,’ he replied in a clear voice, deep and mature. ‘Don’t!’ he whispered. ‘Eve, born in similar shadows to us, but different. Yes, different but the same. You don’t have to come any closer. You are close to us already, Eve.’

‘Abey? Abel Noone?’ She remembered a trick from childhood, squeezed her toes to check if she was dreaming and found she was wide awake.

‘No. Abel was my twin. I am Cain. Abel is dead. I am his other half and he is my other half. His were the bones in the Garden of St James. He was the silent one, I was the voice.’

He turned his head, his profile clear now. Clay felt as if a ghost had walked into her body, as if she had been cast out of her own flesh.

‘Cain?’

‘I’ve been dealing with unfinished business, Eve. Some things have gone well, others not. Do you understand?’

Events and images danced inside her head, the first bare bones of a story knitted together. She thought of the dead man on the roof of the Vestey Tower.

‘What happened to Adam Miller?’ she asked.

‘He killed the security guard on the roof. And I killed him, took his face, his scalp. Took his clothes, left mine in exchange.

‘This is the house in which you were born,’ said Clay. She looked up to where he had pointed and imagined a cot, a changing mat and nothing else for the other half, the silent half. ‘Where the English Experiment took place.’

She saw and heard the construct that was Abey, drawing pictures as she interviewed Louise in the Millers’ living room, making the impulsive noises of a man with the mind of a four-year-old child. Cain Noone was a consummate actor.

‘The First Born?’ asked Clay.

‘It’s true I was the first born. But that’s also a vehicle for an idea. An idea I sold to Gabriel Huddersfield and which he bought.’

Clay was filled with grim enlightenment. In her mind, everything crystallised. She had assumed that Gabriel Huddersfield had had one visitor, Adam Miller. But Cain Noone was the other. Cain, always masked as the First Born. Adam Miller, masked for sadomasochistic sex.

‘I wanted to mark the end of Leonard Lawson’s life with the same cruelty he’d brought to the start of mine and my brother’s. I wanted vengeance for my other half and the miserable life he’d endured.’

He pointed at the figure in the corner of the central panel of the painting, the naked man suspended from a pole, carried on the shoulder of a human dressed in white and blue, his face covered by a mask, part bird, part platypus; man as monster. ‘
This is where you are now, Leonard
, I explained.’ He pointed to the panel of hell. ‘
And this is where you are going for what you did to me and my brother.
I pretended, in his bedroom, that Huddersfield was my brother come back from the dead to take him over to the other side. The Angel of Destruction. You should have seen his tired old face, his eyes, his terror. It was sublime.’ He raised the point of the dagger to his temple. ‘I have a picture of it here. I wish you could see. I wish you’d been there to see, Eve.’ He stood up. ‘I did it for us. All of us. You, Eve. All the accidents of birth, those of us born into darkness.’

The knitting bones in her mind took on flesh, developed galloping feet. ‘Gabriel Huddersfield and Adam Miller?’

‘Oh, the things they did in the name of love, if love is the word for what bound them together. Gabriel and Adam, in this very room, my old bedroom.’

‘Adam Miller was never involved in the murder of Leonard Lawson?’ asked Clay. ‘Or of Abraham and Mary Evans?’ She saw him nod. ‘Cain, how did Gabriel come to live here, where you used to live?’

‘The Shepherd saw to that. She got to know him in the park. He told her about his past, his crimes against elderly men. He told her about his religious obsession. She showed him compassion and offered him shelter at no cost. He was grateful to her, wanted to please her. She gave him the paints and brushes when I told him to touch up the fading mural of
The Last Judgment
. I told him to learn that this was what happened to those who sinned, to learn it by heart, to know it with all of his head and heart and soul. But that there was a way to save himself, and that was to punish the wicked.

‘The Shepherd told him that I was coming. The First Born. And when I came, I told him everything. From my first memory to the body in the Garden of St James. Who it was. Where to find him.’

‘Tell me about Leonard Lawson?’

With his index finger, he drew an arc in the air across the span of
The Last Judgment
.

‘Leonard Lawson. Every day. Bosch. Bruegel. Filling my head with other people’s imaginary horrors and passing them off as the truth. Making me look at the pictures for hours and hours on end, beating me if I closed my eyes or looked away as he spoke about the images before me.
Disobey your teacher and this is where you’ll end up, packed into a pan with all the other sinners and boiling forever in hell
. He gave me hell when I was small and young. When he was old and weaker than me, I served it back to him.’

‘As for Adam Miller, I can’t tell you just what a bad man he was. The things he said and did in front of those who had no voice. My name is Cain, but I lived for one year as Abel. I lived as a disabled man for a whole year. It was a perfect mask: I saw everything, I heard everything.’

Slowly, he stood and turned towards her.

‘Why did you come back here, to this room?’

‘To lift the mask and tell the truth. You understand how things work in the dark, Eve. It’s written on you, on your skin. I saw it when I stood on the landing of The Sanctuary early this morning, a sleepwalker watching you.’ She saw his face, his whole face. ‘We choose our masks. But no one chooses the where or when or who they are born to. I have worn the mask. But tonight the mask has to drop.’

‘How did your brother die?’

‘He was sick, so sick.’ He faced her directly and it felt like the space between them was closing down, at the will of some invisible power. ‘He couldn’t stop crying. He was a pitiful thing. He babbled between his tears and he smeared his own filth across his face, making a soiled mask of what he was, of what he’d been turned into by the Creator. We were thirteen. The Creator was gone. I released Abel. I murdered my brother out of love.’