by Mark Roberts
‘You can’t magic evidence out of the air when there simply isn’t any, Dave,’ said Clay as she looked at the second picture, of Sandra O’Day’s body being hauled out of the water, the muscles on her face withered and brown and not resembling anything human.
She passed the top two images on to Hendricks and saw a third picture of Sandra in an unzipped body bag at the water’s edge.
She came to an image of two frogmen wading into the water and showed it to Ferguson.
‘They found nothing in the water. A team of six searched for two days and nights, Eve.’
Clay saw a picture of a laptop on a bed in a room that was predominantly pink.
‘She was on Pebbles On The Beach. That’s where she met him. They stopped communicating on the website and went on to mobiles. The Ghoul had her phone and guess fucking what, we came nowhere near his device. No Ghoul. No phone. It was as brutal as it was heartbreaking.’
Ferguson sighed and folded his arms across his chest.
‘Time wise,’ said Clay. All eyes turned to her. ‘The time between his first kill and second kill, we’re not going to get that luxury this time. It’s going to be weeks if we’re lucky, not months, until his next outing. His head’s probably swollen to twice its normal size. He thinks he’s Mr Undetectable. He’s taken on Warrington Police and got away with it. So far. Now he’s taken us on. Thank you, Dave. Do you have anything to add?’
‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’ He stood up and stretched the tension out of his limbs. ‘I’ll keep you posted, Eve, if anything crops up our end.’
‘Likewise, Dave.’
Clay watched him walk to the door of the incident room and felt a surge of sympathy for Ferguson.
‘Dave!’ He stopped, turned. ‘Thank you. This can’t have been easy for you. I appreciate you turning up in person so quickly.’
‘I’m quick to grab the glory when things go well. Got to hold your hands up when it all goes shit-shape. M62 in the rain for me now. Thanks for listening, everyone. And the best of fucking British.’
16
4.03 pm
When Eve Clay stepped outside her house on Mersey Road, she looked down the road in the direction of the river and was sucked into the recent past. She estimated that the place where Annie Boyd’s body had been discovered was a seven-minute walk from her front door.
‘Mum!’ Her son Philip’s voice came from the open doorway of their home, snapping her back into the present. ‘It’s freezing. Brrrhhhh! Come in.’
As she walked up the path, she smiled at Philip, who suddenly appeared much older than the pictures she carried of him in her head when they were apart.
‘Are you tired, Mummy?’
You’ve got a point, Philip, she thought, as she headed in his direction. Maybe fatigue’s playing tricks on my imagination.
‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you, love?’ she replied as she followed him into the house, shutting the door after herself.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘What I mean is for a six-year-old, you’re very grown-up in the things you say. Like a much older boy.’
From the kitchen, she heard a kettle whistling and her husband, Thomas, call, ‘Tea or coffee, Eve?’
Before she could answer, Philip chipped in, ‘Tea, please, Dad.’
‘The same for me, Thomas.’
He’s drinking tea now? She asked the question in silence and the element of surprise hit her beneath her skin.
Eve Clay followed her son into the living room and sat next to him on the sofa.
‘So, how long have you been drinking tea?’ she asked.
‘I made a cup…’
‘You made a cup of tea?’
‘I’m a big boy. I can handle a kettle. I made a cup of tea for Dad. Dad watched me. When his tea was cooler, I asked if I could have a sip. I liked it. So I made another cup for me. We sat and had a cup of tea together.’
Clay smiled but the weight of another missed milestone in her son’s journey sank inside her.
‘I think I know why you’ve got such a sad face on you, Mum.’
She smiled at him and said, ‘I’m not sad. I’m having a short break at home with you and that dad of yours. I’m not sad, love. Tired, maybe. That’s all.’
‘Well, OK, you say you’re not sad but it was on the radio, Radio Merseyside, about the dead woman found on the river. Are you chasing the baddie?’
‘I’m the Senior Investigating Officer, so yes, Philip, I’m very much involved.’
‘Is that why you were staring down to the river just now?’
‘I was just working something out.’
Just how close to home death had appeared. The dark thought marbled her bones and, as she looked at her son, the words don’t come any closer dripped through her brain.
‘Didn’t you want to be a doctor like Dad?’ He slid off the sofa, his bottom hitting the floor. ‘He gets loads of free time, and helps people get better.’
‘Your dad was good at Sciences at school. I wasn’t. I was good at Geography, English Literature and History. Places, stories and people interested me. They still do.’
She watched him processing the information, the softness of his brow tightening.
‘Last night, when we were talking about you, Dad said, The world needs different people doing different things, and if it wasn’t for your mum and her team there’d be loads more bad people out there doing terrible things. The world needs me to be a doctor and your mum to be a police officer.’
‘You understand that?’
‘Of course I do. I’m on Turquoise seven on the Project X reading programme. I’ve gone up four levels in a year.’
‘I know and I’m proud of you and I’m impressed.’
He lay on his side and peered under the sofa.
‘There it is.’
Philip stuck his hand and half his arm under the sofa and pulled out a black and red toy truck, which he rolled up and down on the carpet.
‘Beep! Beep, Beep!’
‘What do you want to do when you grow up, Philip?’
‘I’d like to play for Everton.’
Thomas came in and placed two mugs of tea on the coffee table. Clay looked at Thomas, at Philip on the carpet moving his truck around the legs of the coffee table, and back at Thomas.
‘Suppose you couldn’t be a footie player,’ said Thomas. ‘What’s your next choice?’
‘I’d like to be a policeman.’ He half-pointed at Clay. ‘Just like you, only a man not a woman.’
‘Why?’ Despite her cast-iron ability not to be shocked by what she saw and heard, she was amazed. In her mind her career flashed before her and, as a mother, she lit a small flame in her heart that this was just a passing phase that he would soon grow out of, and that he would choose something entirely different to the path she had walked.
‘Why, Mum? You’re famous. All the big kids in the school, the ten- and eleven-year olds, come up to me in the playground and ask me questions about you. They’re dead impressed. One lad asked me about that night, years before I was in your tummy. He told me you escaped from a burning building from which you’d arrested a psycho, single-handed.’
The fire that she’d walked through as she arrested The Baptist flashed through her memory.
‘Like you say, it was before you were born, Philip. I was much younger, and he seemed to have given up on being a free man. It was like he wanted me to arrest him, like he’d had enough of the terrible things he was doing to people, like he was tired of the life he was living.’
‘What…?’
‘You know the rule, Philip. What happens out there stays out there. There’s no need for us to discuss the details behind our front door. This is our sanctuary. But I will tell you one thing. The building wasn’t burning when I entered it. The fire broke out when I was inside, and the only way out was through that fire.’
‘You didn’t get badly burned?’
‘A few scorch marks and some singed hair. T
he word miracle flew around the papers for a few days and then it was all forgotten when the next, bigger, better story came along.’
Anxiety crossed Philip’s face.
‘Philip,’ said Thomas. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. Your mum wouldn’t take an unnecessary risk. She can’t. She’s got you to think about now.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t take any big chance.’ She squeezed her son tightly. ‘So you get rid of your sad face. OK?’
‘Promise?’ pressed Philip.
‘I promise you.’ She changed the subject in a heartbeat. ‘Are Everton at home this weekend?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ replied Philip. ‘Me and Dad are going. We’ll be in the Lower Bullens, cheering the lads on, like we always do. It’s a shame you can’t come with us, Mum.’
Inside her coat, Clay felt the vibration of an incoming call on her iPhone. She connected and said, ‘Bill, what’s up?’
She stood up and walked into the hall, looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall.
There was silence at the other end and she rechecked the HENDRICKS on the display.
‘Bill, are you there?’
‘There’s been another body found. Same MO as Annie Boyd. On the public footpath between Allerton Towers and the golf course, off Menlove Avenue.’
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ She disconnected and said, ‘Philip, Thomas…’
‘I know,’ said Thomas, following Philip from the living room into the hall. ‘You’ve got to go.’
As she opened the front door, she felt Philip’s hand on her back. She turned and looked at him.
‘Don’t take any risks. You promised.’
17
4.05 pm
The basement.
The Ghoul.
The Ghoul’s eyes opened slowly under a naked red light, and in a room full of shadows, there were only two sounds that mattered. The constant rhythm of the skipping rope hitting the floor and the slap of bare feet that followed the connection of skipping rope to floor.
Eyes closed, The Ghoul blocked out the noises in the room and focused on something superior. The sounds inside, the beat of a huge heart and the blood pumping inside.
Faster. Harder. Faster. Harder. Faster. Harder.
And although the room was fridge cold, beads of sweat poured down from each pore. Face, neck, the entire surface of a body that had been skipping for what felt like well over an hour.
All sense of time was lost.
Under the alluring rouge of the light, memory exploded into life.
The past crashed into the present and next door came alive.
The locked door leading to that other, adjoining space where Annie had waited.
Annie. Her mouth. Her eyes. Annie’s body, slack but still alive.
And then there was the other one, more alive because she’d been there for a little less time than Annie. Her voice was trapped inside her throat, her mouth stuffed with a rag. The sound of her chains as she tried… what was she trying to do as the chains smacked the wall at the side of her mattress? Stupid. Not a bit compliant, not a bit like little Annie.
Sitting on the edge of Annie’s mattress now, looking at the other one, she turned her head and made eye contact and terror shone there in the faltering red light and flashes as dark as hell itself.
Staring at her but addressing Annie, The Ghoul spoke.
‘Annie? Annie…’ Her eyes were fixed, dizzying terror now dancing in them. ‘You’re probably wondering what that table is for, the one between the mattresses, and what those knives and scalpels are for…?
‘That’s where you’re going next, when it’s all over for you. I’m going to perform a little cosmetic surgery, post-mortem. Look at the writing on the wall. The writing on the wall says, And, so, off she floats to nowhere.’
Annie made a noise like a newborn baby overwhelmed by her journey into the light from the dark seclusion of the womb.
The Ghoul stood over Annie’s roommate.
‘And this is the same for you… Look at me… Lurrrammmmeeee…’
The human voice was lost and The Ghoul ascended.
18
4.38 pm
As the world plunged deeper into the darkness of early night, rain tripped over itself as it hurtled to earth from the iron sky.
At the Menlove Avenue entrance to the public footpath leading down to Allerton Road, the rain picked up intensity and stung DCI Eve Clay’s cheeks as she dipped under the scene-of-crime tape stretching from the hedge on the edge of Allerton Manor Golf Course to the railings surrounding Allerton Tower Park.
‘Who’s on the scene?’ Clay asked the constable running the log.
‘PC Woodrow. We were first here after the call came through from switch. We were on our way to a domestic in Woolton Village…’
‘Have you sealed off the Allerton Road end of the footpath?’
‘It was too far with the time we had. PC Woodrow sealed it five metres from the body.’
‘You did well. Thank you. The caller?’
He pointed down the path. ‘On the other side of the tape. Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like it.’
As Clay hurried down the public footpath, past the sandstone wall to her left and mature shrubs to her right that sheltered the claustrophobic space, rain bounced up from the ground.
Senses raised and razor-sharp, she heard a pair of doors slam on the dual carriageway and recognised a familiar sound: the front doors of the Scientific Support van used by Detective Sergeant Terry Marsh and Sergeant Paul Price.
Twenty metres down the footpath, she saw a pair of feet and lower legs, feminine and slender, resting on the rough ground.
Where’s the rest of the body? thought Clay, as she passed a gaping, waterlogged pothole at the side of the path. She looked up, saw rain dripping into the hole from a series of thick branches that acted as a black canopy.
As she passed the next hole in the footpath, Clay slowed down, stopped and tuned in to the piece of her brain that processed her senses and turned their data into hard memory.
‘Are you filming this, Terry?’ she called to Mason, whose rapid breath she could hear coming up behind her.
‘Pricey’s doing it, Eve.’
‘Sergeant Price, come here alongside me, please.’
Clay focused her whole attention metres away from herself on the knees, legs and feet and the sinkhole in which the rest of the body was hidden.
Two seconds ticked down and she felt the young officer’s presence at her side.
‘Wait, please, Sergeant Price. PC Woodrow!’
PC Woodrow looked over the scene-of-crime tape. The woman on the other side with him had her back turned on the horror she had uncovered. Dog lead in hand, her black Westie lay on the earth like a discarded puppet, its eyes brimming with sorrow.
‘DCI Clay,’ said PC Woodrow. ‘When we arrived the top half of her body was floating. It sank under two minutes ago.’
‘Please take this lady back down the path.’ She pointed in the direction of Menlove Avenue. ‘Out of sight and sound and away from the scene. Put her in your car and out of the rain. Thank you, madam. I’ll need to talk to you very soon.’
The woman turned and looked directly at the victim’s feet and lower limbs. She turned back around suddenly and was violently sick on the path.
‘Come with me,’ said PC Woodrow.
‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…’ she said, free hand acting as a blinker at the side of her face as PC Woodrow led her away from the scene.
‘Sergeant Price, focus on the knees, legs and feet, and the hole in the ground.’ He nodded. ‘Walk with me.’ She stepped forward slowly. ‘I’m walking towards what appears to be a pair of disembodied feet and legs. Her toenails are painted and there is no sign of hair on her legs. There are dark marks on her knees. Bruising? Maybe.’
The rain’s intensity slackened and, as Clay reached the dead woman, it stopped as if some unspoken prayer to an anonymous god had been granted
.
‘Closer to the hole and the body, I can see water brimming to the top of the hole, and I estimate that the rest of her body, above her knees, is beneath the surface of the water. This time, the MO hasn’t altered but the water he’s chosen to leave her body in has scaled down from a river in the first and second instance to what amounts to an oversized puddle. Why has he done this? Did he run too much of a risk leaving the body on the mud of the Mersey? Did he run too much of a risk operating in such a wide-open space? Did he throw Annie’s body in the water as the tide was going out? Or did he leave her on the mud?’
She looked around at the intimacy of the space and concluded, ‘He wanted privacy.’ Clay reached the edge of the water.
‘Judging by the fact that most of her body’s concealed by water, I estimate this pothole is probably at least three-quarters of a metre deep.’
Beneath her feet, Clay felt something vibrating in the ground, subtle but gaining in strength with each passing second.
‘I can only make out the shape of her legs and, after that, nothing. To the naked eye, her body ends at the top of her legs.’
Torchlight from DS Mason’s hand played over her shoulder, danced on the surface of the water.
‘In the water,’ said Clay, ‘the tops of her thighs are moving up and down under some force or other, and I guess the rest of her corpse is doing likewise but I can’t see it.’
A bubble broke on the water’s surface and the vibration beneath the ground turned into an anxious growling, as if there was a feral creature buried alive beneath the path.
‘How are Doctor Lamb’s APTs going to fish her body out of the water?’ asked Sergeant Price.
‘They’ll have to haul her out, plain and simple,’ replied Clay.
‘Do you want us to do that now, Eve?’ said Mason.
‘Yes, please. Help her.’
‘Eve.’ She heard Hendricks approaching quickly and was glad to hear his voice.
Under the water something went crack. A stream of bubbles broke on the water’s surface. Crack-crack-crack, louder each time, and the loud noise of air escaping under the water disturbed the surface. Clay watched as air trapped beneath breaking ice escaped, disturbing the hole.