Dead Silent (28 page)

Caitlin clammed up and Riley could see the conflict in her face.

‘I understand that you swore not to reveal the content of those afternoons and you’ve skilfully managed to skim over the detail while still giving me enough information to make me feel I was there in that study all those years ago. I’m a police officer, Caitlin. Information, however implausible it may seem, can be the difference between life and death. Professor Lawson’s already dead. As are others. There’s a very dangerous man out there. Help me. What did Professor Lawson say to you?’

In the hall of 112 Knowsley Road, Stone tasted sick in his mouth and the back of his throat as he watched two Scientific Support officers, whom he knew by sight but not by name, take photographs of Mrs Evans’s body. Skin hung from muscle like wet dishcloths, the keynote image from a living nightmare.

Pulling the fabric of the hood of his protective suit tighter around his face, Stone turned away and walked towards the front door, past the blood-splattered walls, and considered what he had seen in the freezer at the Otterspool tip.

‘Ah, Christ!’ Michael Harper’s voice cut through the stench, the air that was almost impossible to breathe.

Stone turned to him. ‘The remains in the freezer are one thing, but this...’

‘We’ll just have to take her down quick and get her as fast as we can to Dr Lamb. Call Dr Lamb as soon as we’re in the van and warn her.’ Harper’s natural shyness was forgotten in the demands of the moment. ‘This is far worse than we were told to expect. Are you done?’

‘We’re almost done,’ said the Scientific Support officer.

There were pieces of paper and a landline telephone on a table near the door. Stone walked towards them. He picked up the papers and started sifting through them.

An A4 leaflet from a nursery advertising Christmas trees for sale.

A colour advert for a firm installing stair lifts.

A white sheet:
Handyman in a White Van
. Words around a logo portraying just that. Beneath them, a list of diverse household and transport services offered. The name and mobile number of the handyman were in bold print at the bottom of the page:
Adam Miller: 07714936634
.

Stone frowned. Adam Miller? The co-owner of The Sanctuary, the place where Louise Lawson volunteered every day. A link formed in his mind. Adam. Louise. Leonard. Abraham. Mary. Adam’s name was in Genesis. He looked again at the words on the leaflet and was drawn to two: White Van?
Just how many men in white vans are there in Liverpool?
Stone asked himself.
But only one visited the Otterspool Tip to dispose of a freezer containing Abraham Evans’s head and feet.

He focused on the Scientific Support officer. ‘Can you come and bag this flyer?’

Stone headed into the kitchen and out into the fresh, bitterly cold air of Knowsley Road.

One man. One van. One tip. One freezer. One head. One pair of feet.

Stone needed to talk to Adam Miller.

Riley stood up and walked over to the window again, her back turned to Caitlin. Seagulls wheeled in the sky over the Albert Dock.

She pressed record on her iPhone.

‘The love of Leonard Lawson’s life was another academic, Damien Noone. Leonard was from a comfortable but lower-middle-class background. Damien was from a moneyed family. They met during World War Two while they were in North Africa. As you can imagine, it wasn’t the best time or place for two young homosexual men to fall in love. But they managed to begin their relationship and no one ever found them out. Leonard was never big on detail, it was all dot to dot, but he said it was in Africa that Damien told him about his interest in the acquisition and non-acquisition of language and how the whole of his life’s work would be to study this. Leonard told me about Psamtik I’s experiment with the two newborns... I was horrified that anyone could even entertain such a thought.’

Caitlin fell silent. Riley feared she was losing the will to carry on, so she stepped in. ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I know about that experiment. How could such a thing possibly happen? The whole thing smacks of an academic pipe dream, two young men giddy with furtive sex in the middle of a war zone. Either or both of them could have been killed at any moment. To have replicated the experiment in England after the war would have been criminal folly. Keep talking, please, Caitlin.’

‘They came back. Damien studied linguistics, Leonard studied art history. Damien was marked down for all kinds of future greatness; Leonard was due a little but not so much. They managed to continue their love affair by putting on a show of public disdain for each other. The same tactic that had worked for them in Africa. He told me that the secrecy between them, that bond, was the extra layer of glue that raised their love to an unimaginably strong level. It was them against the unsuspecting world. All talk of resurrecting the experiment drifted away as they were forced to address the day-to-day demands of their studies. This, Leonard told me, was the happiest time of his life. Realistically, he didn’t approve of the experiment. It was wild talk, Damien’s pet dream. Months passed, they graduated and gained teaching posts. Damien came into a huge trust fund. Life was good.’

‘And the experiment?’ Riley interjected, keen to cut to the chase.

‘Nothing, until one day, out of the blue, Damien casually announced they would be going to London for the day. He wouldn’t tell Leonard why, just told him it was part mystery tour and part test of his love. They arrived in London and travelled by cab to Whitechapel, to a set of rooms above a chemist’s shop. Damien explained that he had taken a lease out on the property for the next year. He asked Leonard what the definition of love was. Leonard told him,
Love is when the lover puts the beloved before himself
. There was a knock at the door. Damien told Leonard to open it, saying,
Remember what you’ve just said
. A man entered with two young women. The man was Dr Roger Pattison, only he wasn’t a doctor, not any more; he’d been struck off the medical register for a string of offences. He was a back-street abortionist, whom Damien had recruited to his cause. The women were poor pregnant girls with no means of support. They were at almost identical stages of their pregnancies. Eight weeks. Pattison had put a deal to the women. Instead of terminating their pregnancies, they could go through with them, deliver their babies and pick up £5,000 each, on condition they walked out and abandoned their children immediately. The deal specified that they were to live together with Pattison in the Whitechapel rooms in complete silence during the last days of their pregnancies. Once they had gone, they were never to return.

‘The women agreed. Damien told Leonard that he wanted him to leave his teaching post and accompany him and the babies to a remote house. Leonard would be the shepherd, but Damien was going to put a twist in Psamtik’s method. Leonard could speak continuously to one child, while the other would be subjected to total silence and sensory deprivation. Damien’s part in it would be to record everything on spool-to-spool tapes, take photographs and make notes.’

In the sky over Liverpool, Riley saw a waxing gibbous moon. She wondered about the missing pages in Leonard Lawson’s Psamtik manuscript and asked herself how Lawson could have written about the English Experiment, even twelve pages, if his relationship with Noone had ended and he had taken no part in it.

‘The detail stopped there. Leonard stood his ground and said no. Damien ended the relationship, told him he would never see him again. Leonard moved back to Liverpool, did his best to get on with normal life, with a wife and child as a disguise. That’s as far as he went.’

‘Thank you, Caitlin. Do you have anything else to add?’

‘No. That’s all I know.’

‘I can’t begin to tell you how helpful you’ve been. Did he mention that he’d reconnected with Damien Noone at any point?’

Caitlin shook her head.

Or if there was another attempt at the English Experiment?
thought Riley.

At the cells in Trinity Road police station, Clay looked through the observation hole and saw Huddersfield standing in the middle of the space staring at the door, waiting.

With his right hand raised, he made a gesture – come in – and she knew that he was waiting for her.

Sergeant Harris unlocked the door and stayed in the frame as Clay went inside. Huddersfield held her gaze. She was within touching distance, and she could smell the bloody musk of his body.

‘Close the door,’ she said.

‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Look for first things first.’

‘First things first?’ echoed Clay. ‘Give me a name.’

‘Look for first things first.’

She knew in her heart that she had reached a dead end where once she had opened a door. But there was something else she needed to know.

‘First things first, Gabriel?’ Silence. ‘We searched the outside wall behind the triptych painted on the wall in your flat. We found nothing.’

‘First things first, most highly favoured lady. Who were the saints on the back of the triptych?’

She saw the two saints in shades of grey and events spun backwards in her mind at blinding speed. Hours condensed into seconds and dragged her through the places she had been and the people she had seen since the call to her home in the early hours of the morning. And when she arrived at the front door of Leonard Lawson’s house, the rewind suddenly stopped.

‘First things first,’ said Huddersfield. ‘Always. Which triptych haven’t you looked at?’

She walked up the stairs towards the disorientating pattern of the strobe light, entered Leonard Lawson’s bedroom and looked inside.

‘Open the door, Sergeant Harris!’

Gabriel Huddersfield smiled.

‘First things first.’

His words followed her as she hurried to the nearest exit of Trinity Road police station and to Leonard Lawson’s house beyond that.

And I’m telling you now, when the police, the police, the police come calling, I won’t be here
...
You’ve done it now... And they will come calling. I’ll be gone, gone, long gone... You’ve done it now... When the police come calling, and I’m telling you now...
The voice inside his head was his but not his, as familiar as it was strange, sometimes laced with the absolute depth of his father’s disappointment and then himself as a child, cowed and baby-like. The words kept repeating like a stuck record.

Adam Miller pushed the black box into the back of his van with a growing feeling that he was being watched. He looked around at The Sanctuary, to which he would never return, and to the park beyond. There were people passing, but no one seemed to be looking at him.

He patted his coat and the pockets that lined it. His passport. His wallet.

He opened the briefcase in the back of his van and rifled through its contents. Bank books. TSB. Halifax. Money that the bitch Danielle knew nothing of. Santander. HSBC. Money that would save his skin. ISAs. Lloyd’s. Money that would soothe his mind as soon as he got to where he was going. The Wesleyan. Barclays. Money that made money. National Savings and Investments. Money that he’d worked hard for and was all his, his and his alone.

‘All there! All there! All there!’

The words in his head piped through his mouth, so he clamped his lips and, in his head, repeated a cliché that Louise The Mug Who Worked For Nothing Lawson often told the retards when they were acting up.
Silence is golden.

And the effect was bizarre. As the words crept through the wetness of his brain, he heard her saying them as if she was on his shoulder.

He turned.

In the empty space he’d clocked moments earlier, Louise was there.

‘Silence is golden.’ She repeated the phrase, her eyes locked into his, and from behind her, like some animated shadow, Abey stepped to her side, his lopsided smile accompanied by a drizzle of spit on his square-jawed chin.

Instinctively, Adam reached his hand to his lower face, felt the narrowness of his lips, the receding dimples of his chin and heard himself gasp.

‘Golden, golden, golden,’ said Abey, and Adam wanted to raise the fists that were bunched at his sides and pummel the little bastard into an inhuman pulp.

‘As God is your judge?’ Louise’s words caused the skin on his spine to pucker and a bead of sweat to slalom through the goose bumps on his back.

‘As God is my judge, what?’ he replied.

‘Yes, Adam, as God is the judge of all, you being one of God’s creations.’

He threw the case of clothes he’d hurriedly packed into the back of his van.

‘Would you like to talk about my father?’ asked Louise.

‘I’m very sorry about what happened to your father.’

‘I was thinking about boxing up his possessions, clearing the house of all that’s in it. I was thinking about your little chat...’

He glanced at his watch. ‘In time. Now isn’t the time.’

She kept her eyes on him, her gaze deep and steady.

‘I’m very busy at the moment. I’ve got work to do.’ It felt like an invisible hand had seized his throat, choking the words into a killer silence.

‘Ken say.’ Abey pointed at him. ‘Naughty.’

‘Ken?’ He frowned. ‘Oh yes, Ken. No.’ He slipped into the voice he’d adopted for the first time that morning. ‘Adam’s not naughty.’

‘Stop it, Adam!’

He was surprised at the steel in Louise’s voice. He turned away from them and headed for the driver’s door.

‘Where are you going, Adam?’

He had never heard anything remotely like anger in Louise’s voice and the effect was vivid. He laughed. ‘
Where are you going, Adam?
’ He mocked her.

‘I’ve just realised something,’ said Louise. ‘Ten minutes ago, I was in the kitchen, looking out into the garden. I was watching. I watched you come out of the shed. I watched you lock the shed. I watched you walk through the garden and back to the house. Carrying your black box. It was when I was watching you walk that I remembered.’