Dead Silent (24 page)

‘Aaaahhh. Sorry. There’s nothing on the back of the picture of you and Sister Philomena, but there’s a really spidery scrawl on the one of the old priest. And it says...
Come and see me here. God bless and keep you, Evette...
That’s odd.
The Shrimp.
’

She knew who the pictures were from and the temptation to turn at the next junction and head straight for the Catholic Cathedral to find the old priest was intense. But duty kept her where she was and she knew she didn’t have time for any diversions.

‘Can you take pictures of both of them and send them to my phone?’

‘That was to be my next trick.’

Tenderness and vulnerability consumed her. She was glad that there was no one else there in that moment.

‘I recognise that silence,’ said Thomas. ‘Go on. Ask.’

‘Shall we run away together, Thomas?’

‘One day.’

‘I’m a lucky woman to be so loved.’

‘No luck involved. You deserve to be loved. Go crack that case.’ He closed the call down.

He’s right
. Philomena’s voice sounded inside her head and Clay wondered how on earth she had survived the twenty-two-year passage in her life, from her sixth year when Philomena had died to her twenty-eighth year when she met Thomas by chance in the stalls of the Liverpool Playhouse.

The opening night of Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
: 15th September 2006.

As she took her seat, number 34 in row C, she noticed the giant in B 34. The man next to her, in C 35, quashed her long-held conviction that there was no such thing as love at first sight with two simple actions and three words. He smiled at her, stood up and said, ‘Let’s swap places.’ She extended her hand, thanked him and felt a jolt of sadness when he let go.

They hadn’t so much fallen in love as hurtled into it, and the tenderness that the memory evoked inside her turned into a mournful wish: that Philip would never know the loneliness that she had taken as read until she met Thomas.

An incoming text arrived on her phone and a call came in. On the display: ‘Mason’. She forced herself back into professional mode.

‘We currently have the pleasure of Gabriel Huddersfield’s company,’ she said, not bothering with any preamble. ‘How are things in his boudoir, Mason?’

‘You’d better get over here, Eve, as soon as you can. There’s something you’ve just got to see.’

When DS Gina Riley returned to the incident room at Trinity Road police station, DC Barney Cole was hunched over his desk, engrossed, talking softly to himself and drawing short, sharp lines on a blank page with a pen and ruler. He appeared not to have heard her enter.

‘You look like you’re having fun,’ she said.

‘Hello, Gina,’ he replied, without looking up.

‘What are you up to,
Barns
?’

‘It’s bad enough being named after a cartoon character by my oh so ditzy mother – Barney Rubble, for God’s sake! – without you abbreviating it and making me sound like a rent boy.’

Riley laughed. ‘Thank your lucky stars she wasn’t into Speedy Gonzales. Coffee,
Barns
? Black, three sugars?’

‘Lovely. I’m trying to get the last living cells of my brain around the carving on the spear. The dragonfly exiting a window. I’m breaking it down and seeing if it’s some sort of visual anagram.’

She flicked on the kettle and they looked at each other.

‘Make it four sugars. I haven’t eaten for hours.’

She looked at Leonard Lawson’s books, spread across three desks and open at a variety of colour and black-and-white plates of great works of art.

‘I don’t like them,’ said Riley. ‘
The Last Judgment
? Who’d want that on the wall? What’s the point? Really, what’s the point of them?’

‘Most of these paintings are moral lectures designed to scare the shit out of the viewer so that they give time and money to the Church,’ said Cole, continuing to draw straight lines on a piece of paper with a ruler and pen.

She placed the coffee down and laughed, ‘You look like you’re doing your homework.’

He looked up and smiled at her. ‘I am, in a manner of speaking.’ He held up the page and showed her straight vertical lines in three sets according to size.

There were two 3-centimetre lines, two 2-centimetre lines and five 1-centimetre lines.

She walked over and he handed her a picture he had printed off of the symbol engraved on the spear. On the white margin along the top, Riley read Hendricks’s neat handwriting:
A dragonfly exiting a window
.

‘I’ve been looking through Lawson’s books for something to chime with the dragonfly image, something from a work of art. Nothing. I’m by no means certain, but my instincts whisper that it’s a visual anagram of a word or letters. To me it even looks like a hieroglyphic.’ He pointed at his feet and the bin overflowing with scrunched paper. ‘I’ve tried all kinds of combinations. It could just be a random squiggle on a bar of chocolate. Every letter of the alphabet can be made linear. Take C for example: C has a recognisable curve in it, but you can also make a C out of two or three straight lines if all the other letters are linear. So, at the moment, I’m thinking language.’

Riley’s mobile rang out and she connected.

‘Gina, where are you?’ asked Clay.

‘I’m in the incident room with Barney Cole.’

‘I’m about to go in to interview Gabriel Huddersfield. I’ve had a call from Terry Mason. Something in Huddersfield’s flat is making him
very
excited.’

Riley picked up her bag and coat. ‘I’ll get over there right now.’

‘How’s Barney getting on with the puzzle on the spear?’

‘I’ll hand you over, Eve.’

With Riley’s phone at his ear, Cole took a photograph of the neatly set-out lines, deconstructed from the image on the spear. ‘I’m sending you a picture, Eve. Is it language? Think language.’

‘Stick with it, Barney. I like the way your mind’s working.’

As Clay sat in Interview Suite 1, waiting for Huddersfield to be processed at the desk by Sergeant Harris, Cole’s sets of lines arrived on her phone. She looked at them. The possibilities for rearranging them were endless.

Seems and is...

She scrolled backwards, pulled up a picture of where the symbol had been found, on the shaft inside Leonard Lawson’s staged body, a three-dimensional sculpture in flesh and blood and bone. She closed her eyes and Lawson’s body morphed into the naked figure being carried on a stick by the man with a platypus head in Bosch’s
The Last Judgment.

She studied the photo of the symbol itself. If it was a form of language, it had been deliberately buried in the depths of a macabre human sculpture. In her mind, language equated to knowledge, but the symbolic language on the spear was hidden and esoteric. Something stirred deep inside her brain and the symbol as scrambled language suddenly seemed like a strong possibility.

She heard three sets of footsteps, two of them familiar – Sergeant Harris and DS Hendricks. She homed in on the rhythm of the third.

Gabriel Huddersfield was coming.

‘Do you want legal representation, Gabriel?’ Clay sat next to Hendricks across the table from Huddersfield.

He shook his head.

‘What other name does the First Born go by?’

She could see a change in his state of mind since she’d last interviewed him in the Royal Liverpool Hospital. The theatrical lunacy was absent and there was a heat in the once cold blue eyes and a bead of sweat on his top lip. In patches, his shirt stuck to his body and the skin tones and body hairs were visible.

‘Whenever you get a pair of people involved in a murder, Gabriel, there is always a leader and there is always a follower.’

He looked to the left of Clay’s head.

‘I know you’re listening, Gabriel. I honestly believed that after DS Hendricks gave his informed assessment you’d stop playacting.’

‘I’ve got a severe mental illness!’

‘Every single human being on this planet can pretend to be something they are not, regardless of age, culture or mental state. Animals do it. Pretending is the thing we can all do when we need to. It’s a survival technique. Look at me, Gabriel. Look at me! Your job isn’t to convince me you’re crazy at the moment. Your job... No, Gabriel, I’m not going to spoonfeed you. You tell me who the smart one is in this set-up.’

The only muscles Gabriel moved were in his eyes. He looked at Hendricks, long and hard. ‘How do you know the colour of Jesus Christ’s eyes? The end of the world?’

Hendricks didn’t respond.

‘Where the soul of Judas Iscariot can be found?’

‘I understand you, Gabriel, let’s put it that way. You’ve got a conscience of sorts and you also have a lot of fear inside you. Fear of ending up in the wrong place, both on this side of the life–death continuum and on the other. Prison and hell. Are you with me on that one?’

Huddersfield nodded.

‘Let’s go back to DCI Clay’s idea, Gabriel.’

‘Who’s the one, Gabriel,’ said Clay, ‘who’s going to serve the most time in the highest-category unit in the penal system?’

‘The leader.’

‘There’s no way the instigator in this murder is ever going to get out of jail. Ever. The follower gets a life sentence with parole.’

‘There was no way we could get caught. We were immune from the danger of being caught because we were serving God. The First Born convinced me.’ Competing fears flashed across the surface of Huddersfield’s face.

‘Did you need a lot of convincing?’

‘No.’

‘What did the First Born tell you?’ asked Clay.

‘Serve God, stay free, go to heaven. Ignore God, suffer the perils of the earth and go to hell.’

‘Seems and is, Gabriel.’

‘What?’

‘The First Born said this
is
the case and it
seems
the First Born was wrong. You didn’t even last twelve hours before we pulled you in. The perils of the earth? You could have been killed running away from DS Hendricks and into that motorcycle. The First Born got it wrong. But you still thought you were safe at that point, that the arrest was a blip, that the First Born could save you because the First Born is infallible. I see now, I see. All that acting out in the Royal. You were amusing yourself at our expense, but that was foolishness. A big mistake, Gabriel. A big mistake.’

‘When did the First Born make you his angel?’ asked Hendricks.

‘When his voice took residence inside my skull. His words went round inside me even when he wasn’t there, especially when he wasn’t there.’

‘How long did it take him to brainwash you, Gabriel?’ Clay watched as the silence unfolded and whatever strands of logic remained connected in his brain. The look on his face was excruciating. Clay went for him. ‘What is the name of the person who brainwashed you, Gabriel?’

He looked at Hendricks. ‘You seem right, but surely... Genesis... you’re wrong.’

‘Gabriel, in hell there are mansions. I believe this. Mansions where like attracts like. Just like prisons on earth. Murderers sleep next to murderers. Sex offenders with sex offenders. If the First Born is wrong about what happens on earth, then surely... surely... Where are you going when you die? Who or what are you spending eternity with?’ asked Hendricks.

Huddersfield’s mouth moved, but no sounds came out. His body shook and his eyes rolled.

‘Gabriel, give us the name of the First Born.’

A noise like steam escaping from a crack in a pipe came from Huddersfield’s mouth as his lips moved faster and faster. A body of noise weaved into the hissing and it sounded like two voices were coming from the same mouth, a pair of competing voices struggling to articulate the same word.

‘Genesis?’ Clay asked.

He fell silent.

‘Genesis?’ she repeated. ‘Genesis?’

‘Look at every single name you can find in the Book of Genesis and ask the question,
is this the one
?’

As Gabriel spoke, Clay wrote on a spiral-bound pad in front of her. She pushed the pad towards Hendricks and he read the words in silence:
The First Born shares his name with a character in Genesis.