by Jane Adams
And then the other one was there, the other angel with them in the room. The one that Harrison and Morgan argued over, fought to replace him with. Nate remembered that he ran over to the boy and began to untie his hands. ‘Help me,’ he commanded. ‘Help me get him out of here.’ But the other one just shook his head and Nate knew that he was right. It was impossible. They were as trapped, as unable to run, as Nathan himself.
* * *
‘There was another angel,’ Nathan told Katie. ‘Morgan and Harrison Lee argued over which one of us was most righteous. The other one . . . something happened to him. He started to act strangely. Lee and Daniel Morgan gave him drugs, I think, and then one day he simply wasn’t around anymore. After that they concentrated on me, but they still argued about us and sometimes . . . sometimes it was almost like they couldn’t decide which of us was real.’
He fell silent for a little while and Katie, getting wise to his moods now, waited patiently. Finally he began to speak again, his body still and tense and his gaze unfocused, as though he was watching something far away.
‘I watched the places where I knew he’d leave them. I knew he’d follow the pattern like last time, but I was wrong. He’d sacrificed the ritual so that he could let me know that he was as aware of me as I was of him. He brought the body here and left it outside my door, like a cat bringing in a mouse and expecting praise. I couldn’t have that, Katie. I couldn’t have him bringing the bodies to me. It was all wrong. So I took the boy and I laid him out where Lee left the first one. And I covered him up, tried to keep him safe.’
‘Who is it?’ Katie asked again.
‘He’s like me. He’s older and stronger, but he’s just like me. He slips through the shadows and he disappears into the sunlight and I can feel him. I know the way he thinks and when I moved the body it was like starting a conversation with him. Like we were performing in the same play.’
Chapter Thirty-four
Ray and Sarah woke to the sound of the telephone and Ray knew intuitively that it would be Beckett.
‘They’ve found Simon Ellis,’ he told Sarah as he replaced the receiver. ‘He was lying at the foot of the cellar steps in the Robin on the Green.’
‘You’ll be going now then?’
Ray nodded. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ he said. ‘It’s all wrong, I know, but I’m almost relieved. That’s the three of them. At least there’ll be no more.’
He met Sarah’s frank gaze, knowing that she would understand what he was saying and not judge him for it.
‘What about Katie?’ she asked softly, and Ray felt the knot tighten once more at the pit of his stomach.
* * *
Nate remembered how he had untied the boy’s hands and was helping him to his feet. The boy was gazing at him with a look caught between terror and admiration. He started to speak, but Nate hushed him and led him forward, his feet stumbling a little from the effects of the drug and immobility.
‘We have to be quiet, really quiet.’ He glanced back at the other one, the older boy who seemed to live in a world that no one else shared, and he hoped that this other angel would understand enough not to shout or make a fuss when they left.
He had Nathan by the hand and pulled him forward towards the big door. He held him back for a moment as he pulled the handle and the door swung inward, surprisingly light and balanced despite its mass. He wasn’t sure how they would get through the house. Hopefully there would be no one in the kitchen and they could get out through there without being seen. He didn’t even know if the others were in on this act of Lee’s. Harrison Lee had sworn him to secrecy and told him that if he spoke about any of it, he would end up as dead as the boys. He believed what Lee said. The man was so single-minded, so obsessed, he let nothing get between him and his goal. He didn’t know these others but had to assume they were the same. All he wanted now was for this to end. To get out with Nathan and then run as far and as fast as he could. He hadn’t given any thought to where.
But they didn’t even make it to the top of the basement stairs. Harrison Lee himself stood there, the height and weight of him filling the narrow doorway and blocking off the light.
‘Harrison!’
Lee didn’t even look at him. He reached out, grabbed the boy Nathan by the throat and flung him back down the cellar stairs, smashing his face against the wooden door.
* * *
‘I want to keep you safe,’ Nathan said. ‘I brought you here so you’d be away from him.’
Katie shook her head. ‘You can’t. Not this time, this is different.’
‘I kept you safe before. Morgan said I should wait until the others were sleeping, then bring you out. He meant for you to die that night. He knew that Harrison Lee had been arrested and wanted to complete the ritual before the police came. He knew they would, eventually, when they found out who Harrison was and what he belonged to. No one had heard about the Eyes of God before then. We were nothing until Harrison Lee.
‘He told me to stop you drinking the juice, quietly, so no one else would notice. Just make up some reason to get you away from the rest and bring you out when he fetched the car round. I hid you. I was going to tell him that you must have run away. I figured you’d be safe where I left you and if you hadn’t drunk the juice then you’d be all right.
‘Then I heard the sirens and I heard Morgan’s car drive away really fast. Without me. And I ran outside, ran up the road after him, and I could hear the sirens in the distance. It was such a still, cold night. The moon had a frost ring all around it and there were stars everywhere, shining down and sparkling through the frost. I must have chased a mile down the road after Morgan’s car and I realized that the sirens were getting closer. They would have been right up on the main road when I first heard them and the sound carried in the night, it was so still and so clear.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I remembered that, the other day when I came for you. Sound wouldn’t carry so far in the day, not with the rain and all the damp trees, but I remembered how the sound had travelled that night and I cut the engine, pushed the bike the final mile. I watched you all, poking around in the grass, trying to get it figured out.’
‘Did you call the police?’
Nathan nodded. ‘Should have done it before,’ he mumbled. ‘But I knew he’d kill me. Then when Morgan said Lee’d been arrested, I knew I had to try and do something. I didn’t know he’d rigged the place to explode. I just thought the juice would kill everyone. I heard the explosion as I turned to go back. I’d never heard anything like that. It was so angry, so loud, and the ground shook even though I’d run so far away. I picked myself up and walked back. I thought you must be dead. That what I’d tried to do hadn’t helped. By the time I got back to the Markham house the police were all over it and everyone else was gone.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I hid.’
The emergency services had set up dragon lights all around the house, but beyond the circle of light the darkness had been intense. He had watched and waited. Seen the others arrive. Bryant, Ray Flowers and his team. Seen the old man die and Katie lifted from the ruins. And he had known that at least he had done one thing right.
‘Later, I saw Martyn Shaw arrive. It was close to dawn by then and he drove up in his big old estate car, drove right past me, and when he got out of the car he left the door open and I climbed inside and hid under a blanket in the boot space. I hid there until he drove away.’
‘Martyn Shaw knew?’
Nathan shook his head. ‘No. I told him later. He knew nothing before. Morgan kept him away at university. Said he had to study and finish his education before he decided what to do finally. He knew that Martyn would never agree, but he thought that once everything was done, the Prophet would have nothing he could argue about. The avatar would be here and no one could undo it. Martyn suspected something, he kept getting visions of fire and death and someone running away, but he didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to believe it was as bad as it felt. Morga
n had been so important to him. Understood him when no one else had.’
Katie frowned. ‘We can’t do this on our own. I’m scared.’
‘He can’t get in here.’
‘No? What’s stopping him?’ She waved a hand, encompassing the room in her gesture. ‘This magic? I want to see my mum and dad.’
The look he gave her told her that he didn’t understand. Nathan, she was learning, lived by his own rules, played life like it was some complex game she couldn’t begin to understand. She had an awful suspicion there was only one other in the universe who would, and that one killed children.
‘I’ll take a letter to your parents,’ he said finally. That was the most he was prepared to do.
* * *
Ray had not bothered to ask for directions, he knew where Beckett would be. Since Ray had drawn his attention to the link with previous murders, Beckett had set a twenty-four-hour watch on the prospective locations. The second time, the real site was now a supermarket and the killer had left the body in the next-door building site. This time, Beckett told him angrily, he must have walked right past the four men on watch carrying the child’s body.
‘I needed more people. Look at this place. He could have come from any of half a dozen directions. I’d got roadblocks on all the main roads leading here but that still doesn’t cover the back alleys and cut-throughs. I’ve pulled in extra personnel from Leicester and Nottingham and it’s not enough. What the fuck are we dealing with here?’
Ray shook his head. He remembered the same frustrations from the last time. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I grew up round here. You could get the length of the street going across the garden walls and through the alleyways. All the demolition’s done is make it even easier.’
Beckett led him through to what had been the Robin on the Green pub yard. Ray could recall Sunday afternoons sitting here with his mum and dad. There’d been picnic benches and a bit of an area with swings for the kids to play in. Kids with their Vimto bottles and their bags of crisps, most waiting for their dads to come out of the public bar where children were banned. He’d not been back in eleven years. The wake for his mum’s funeral had been held in the reception room here and it had continued to be his dad’s local long after that. But his dad couldn’t face it, not once the boy had been found dead, and now the pub itself had been abandoned. Boarded up and left to rot.
‘There’s a cellar here,’ Ray mused vaguely.
‘We’ve searched it, top to bottom.’
Ray sighed. ‘Course you have. Clutching at straws. This one, the boy, it’ll be different.’
Beckett nodded. ‘The other two were practically unmarked. This one had the side of his face smashed, like he’d hit it on the corner of something.’
‘Little Nathan Brown had a shattered cheekbone and a long bruise down his face, as though he’d smashed into a door.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It wasn’t reported, not anywhere, about the other injury. His mum and dad might have told, of course, or the mortuary attendant, or the police officers who saw the body, or . . .’
‘Any one of fifty people. No such thing as nondisclosure, is there? Just restriction. But when it’s all over, people talk. You can’t expect them not to. Chances are, a great many people have the wherewithal to copy this, but I agree with you, it’s most likely someone who was witness to the killings last time. Though he hasn’t kept to every detail. Simon’s room, that was new.’
‘And I still haven’t figured out why. It seems excessive. Gilding the lily, so to speak. Unless he deliberately wanted the Eyes to be implicated and that was as important as the actual killing.’
‘Sounds like revenge. Someone wants to make them pay for . . . what? Letting Lee down? Killing someone in the explosion? Following false prophets? . . . When does he arrive, by the way?’
‘This evening. George has it all in hand.’
‘So I heard. Doesn’t mind what toes he treads on, does he?’
‘Not so as I’ve noticed. All right, let’s have a look then.’
He crossed somewhat reluctantly to the body, which was already prepared for removal. The boy lay swathed in a blanket, over-wrapped in a white sheet, and was packed into the black body bag. His face was bloodied and swollen. The wound had had time to bleed and bruise before he died. Ray closed his eyes and prayed silently that the child had been unconscious when the blow landed and shattered the bones of his cheek and jaw.
‘And now there’s only Katie,’ he said.
* * *
Katie had grown tired of wearing the same clothes, feeling dirty and dishevelled, and earlier she had bathed and then washed her clothes in the bath, using shampoo to get them clean. Nathan had lent her an old shirt. It was too big for her, the sleeves coming down over her hands and the tails reaching to her knees, but she wore it now, sleeping peacefully on the cushions. He had lain down beside her, curling his body around hers. She smelt of peach shampoo. He had bought that thinking she would like it and her still-damp hair held on to the fragrance. He breathed it in as he lay there, closing his eyes until his mind was filled only with the warmth of her body and the scent of her perfume, of clean skin and peach shampoo. It was the closest Nathan had been to another person in more years than he could think. It revived memories, so ancient as to be almost sepia-toned, of someone holding him, touching him, stroking his hair and making him laugh at some long-forgotten joke. He felt confused and bereft and very scared. This, he thought — a moment of clarity breaking into the confusion — must be what her parents are feeling now, so afraid that they have lost her and that she might be gone for ever.
He waited another hour, until the evening would have closed in and darkness eaten up what little light there had been that day. Then he took Katie’s letter and slipped outside, wheeling his bike back up the ramp and locking the doors tight behind him.
He delivered the letter to Ray’s office rather than her parents’ hotel, not certain even if the Fellowses would still be there. Ray would find it, either later that night or tomorrow morning, but they had to understand, he must keep Katie safe.
As he rode back through Mallingham he became aware of the other one. His presence on the streets, marking them with a scent that permeated everything. Nathan caught the smell of it, the familiar death smell wrapping itself around the buildings like a fog. Thicker here, lighter and more diffuse there. Bleeding through into the houses and infecting lives. He could feel the other one getting stronger, so much stronger. Could hear the voice that spoke directly into his mind, clear enough now for him almost to catch his every word.
* * *
Since that night he had kept the curtains closed and blocked out the sun. Even in the daytime, when he was forced to walk outside, he carried the shadows with him, wrapping them about himself like a cloak of dark wings.
Once, when he had been really sick, he had tried to make a cloak of wings. The wings his precious moths sacrificed to him, flying into the blinding light until it scorched the life from them and they fell lightly onto the wooden floor. Sometimes so many falling that it felt like rain, the soft thud of their little bodies as they hit the floor filling him with a tainted joy.
But he had nothing with which to sew the wings, nothing to fix them, and they would not let him have needle and thread. They had no understanding, when they forced him out into the garden, into the sunlight, that all he wanted was to hide away in the dark before the light burned the life from him as it had from the sad little moths.
Later, much later, they had given him paint and he had learned to capture the images the artist had once painted on the walls. Imperfectly at first, then with more confidence as his skills grew. And he learned then that he did not need the moth wings to protect him from the sun. His mind could create its own winged shadow and he could walk in bright sun and his soul would keep from burning.
Chapter Thirty-five
Ray had been dreaming about Katie and they had not been good dreams. He woke to the ringing of the telephone and for a moment he lay the
re, breathless with fear, as the ringing stopped and he heard Sarah speaking to someone and then calling for him.
She looked pale as she handed him the telephone. ‘It’s Beckett,’ she said. ‘There’s been another abduction. Another boy.’
Ray stared at her in disbelief and then took the receiver from her hand. ‘What the hell . . .’
‘Marcus Ellwood. Eleven years old, mixed race, lives with his grandparents in Elsingham Terrace. That’s the new flats out towards the A47. They put him to bed as usual last night. This morning, he wasn’t there.’
‘But surely . . .’ Ray’s voice faded. He couldn’t say the words. Surely, there should only be three. Lee only killed three.
‘That’s what I thought. I told myself, he’d gone off with friends. He was playing some kind of trick. He was going to turn up any time now. But then I saw his room. Ray, his grandparents sleep in the next bedroom and they never heard a thing. The flat’s on the ground floor, the small window had been left open, and he used that to reach in and open the main one. Came in, took the boy and took time out to make certain we’d know it was him.’
‘More graffiti?’
‘Last time was nothing. Look, get over here. I want you to see this, see if it rings any bells.’
Ray replaced the receiver. He was shaking, he realized, and wanted to cry, unreasonable and infantile as that might seem to be. He felt the sobs choking his lungs and twisting at his guts and he tried to force breath back into his body, but his throat seemed blocked. Sarah came to stand beside him, wrapping her arms tight around his too big, too clumsy body.
‘I was so sure.’ The words came out in painful gasps.
The phone rang again and Ray groaned, certain it brought more bad news. Sarah picked it up, listened, and once more proffered it to Ray. ‘It’s Rowena,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a letter. It’s from Katie.’