by Mark Roberts
‘It’s our lady killer, Bill,’ said Clay, as she watched the bubbles breaking on the surface. A sound like a window breaking beneath the water was followed by a huge bubble escaping to the surface, bringing up the rest of the body in a sudden gasp, her arms flailing beneath the water as if she were drowning and trying desperately to save her own life. Her skinned face, purple and covered with rotten leaves, burst out of the water, eyeballs bulging, jaws wide and her teeth clenched around a large pebble, gums exposed from the wide-open space where her lips used to be.
The earth exhaled her body from the water and, in the silence that followed, Clay watched as she floated still and defenceless.
Clay turned to Hendricks, Mason and Price, all looking at the victim, and, Clay guessed, bottling their shock just as she was doing.
‘Bill, can you organise a door to door on Menlove Avenue and Woolton Village that way, Allerton Road down at the other end of the path.’
‘I’ll organise it right now, Eve.’
She said, ‘Let’s get her out of the water and covered up as quickly as we can.’
‘What are you thinking, Eve?’ asked Hendricks.
‘I’m thinking The Ghoul is local to us. His expedition in the summer to Warrington was an out-of-town dress rehearsal. The big time home show is now well and truly on.’
Clay looked at the woman’s missing features as she floated on the surface and her rage turned into dark determination.
Two bodies within the same day. The words fell like fork lightning through Clay’s head, and when the lightning died down, the thunder spoke.
The Ghoul had held them in captivity at the same time.
19
4.43 pm
In silence, Detective Sergeant Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price folded out a sheet of clear plastic with the choreographed telepathy of an old married couple spreading out a bottom sheet to make up the marital bed.
At the Menlove Avenue end of the crime scene, Clay watched Harper and Kline, Doctor Lamb’s senior APTs from the mortuary at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, crossing the scene-of-crime tape and carrying a single grey body bag.
She watched the floating woman and, beneath the water, on her submerged wrist, she saw the dark discolorations of a tattoo, the detail of which she couldn’t make out.
Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks closed down a call and said, ‘The footpath’s sealed off at Allerton Road and Gina Riley’s orchestrating the troops on the door to door at that end.’
Mason and Price laid the plastic sheet down on the ground, pinning it down as it flapped in the wind that combed the sodden earth.
‘Thanks, Bill.’
‘Eve,’ said Mason. ‘You want us to get her body out of the water?’
She pointed in the direction of the approaching APTs.
‘We’ll have a word with Harper and Kline. Discuss what we’re going to do in a minute.’
Clay made out the bumps and indentations on the side of the woman’s head, the scarlet of her facial muscles washed out by the water in which she had been submerged. Her eyes, standing out from their sockets like lumps of blood-flecked putty, looked like they’d been inserted into her face by the hand of a blind and luckless sculptor.
She looked at the woman’s chipped and broken teeth and knew that the stone had been placed into her mouth cavity with considerable anger.
The unzipping of a body bag close at hand hauled Clay back into the wider scene. Harper and Kline laid the body bag on the plastic sheet.
‘What do you want us to do, Eve?’ asked Mason.
‘Stay on the plastic sheet, weigh it down.’
She looked at Harper and Kline as they assessed the body.
‘You need help getting her into the body bag?’ asked Clay.
‘If we take her feet, will you and DS Hendricks take her by the hands?’
Hendricks walked towards the top end of the body.
Harper placed two hands on her right foot and Kline on her left.
Getting to her feet from a kneeling position, Clay felt stiffness deep in her muscles and a ripple of electricity like pins and needles danced down her joints.
‘One.’ She checked Kline, Harper and Hendricks’ positioning. ‘Two.’ She took a breath, prepared for the weight of the lift. ‘Three.’
Lifting the woman from the water, Clay matched the lightness of her corpse with the slimness of her body. Water poured from her back and ribs as she was suspended in mid-air.
‘Walk backwards, please, Harper, Kline. There are no obstructions on the path between you and the body bag.’
As Clay and Hendricks stepped forwards, past the sides of the hole, the woman’s head flopped and bounced, and the stone in her mouth sat caged behind her teeth.
With both hands wrapped around the woman’s wrists, Clay felt a wet stiffness in the flesh, and felt her own hands slipping down towards the woman’s hands.
‘OK, Eve?’ asked Hendricks.
She nodded, tightened her grip and said, ‘Can we get a move on here, please?’
Clay counted twelve heavy paces before they arrived at the body bag.
‘Lower her down,’ said Clay.
Her disfigured head was the first part of her to enter the body bag, followed by her back, buttocks and legs.
Oxygen escaped from the flooded pothole and, to Clay’s ears, it sounded like the water was sobbing for the woman it had yielded to the earth.
Clay saw the tattoo on her wrist.
MAND-E.
‘Get a picture of her tattoo, Paul,’ said Clay.
Clay and Hendricks folded her arms at her sides and, as she zipped up the bag covering the woman’s dignity, she estimated that she was five feet seven in height.
MAND-E.
Clay wondered if her name was Mandy or Amanda.
Like the others, she thought, rising to her full height, you’ll be blonde. Pretty, no doubt. Lonely. Woefully unlucky.
She shivered as Harper and Kline lifted her from the ground in the body bag.
‘Where’s Doctor Lamb?’
‘Waiting for us in the mortuary.’
‘Bill, will you go with them, watch the autopsy and feed me any information as and when it crops up.’
Hendricks followed the APTs towards Menlove Avenue, the saddest of funeral processions.
Clay took out her iPhone, felt the dead woman’s skin on her palms and fingers as if she was still holding on to her flesh.
The rain began again. Ripples formed on the surfaces of flooded potholes and the wind pressed down on the back of Clay’s head as she trudged through a tunnel of misery.
20
4.45 pm
The Ghoul opened the door and stepped into the next room.
The basement was red and black.
From the ceiling, the red glow from the faulty fluorescent light was broken up by flashes of stuttering darkness that plunged the space into night.
There was writing on the wall facing the beds, words they could read over and over and trigger wonder as to their meaning.
The bare brick walls that held up the weight of the house were textured with blood and tears, human excrement, sweat and urine, physical outpourings of misery in a space with no window, a space that had never seen the light of day.
Against the left- and right-hand walls, at the furthest point from the wooden steps leading down into the basement, were two narrow beds, their thin mattresses coated in the same cocktail of substances that covered the walls. Attached to the walls alongside the beds were heavy chains, piled up on the mattresses as their former guests no longer had need of the shackles.
The Ghoul’s condensed breath looked like a haze of blood in the moments when the red fluorescent light poured into the space and the engines of the coolers that kept the room at freezing point whirred like mythical birds sent down to earth by angry gods to punish womankind for her heinous sins.
Between the beds, at the dead centre of the basement, was a metal table on wheels, loaded with surgical imp
lements, hypodermic needles and clear and coloured chemicals in plastic containers.
Looking directly up at the faltering light, The Ghoul wondered how long it would take the next woman held captive here to show the first signs of despair, to stop screaming for the light to be turned off and demanding absolute darkness. And then, when that happened and the entire basement was flooded with impenetrable darkness, how long it would take before she screamed for the light to be turned back on again.
The Ghoul stepped back into the adjoining room.
Extending across the length of the room was a washing line.
The Ghoul lifted a hand and ran an index finger along the line, listening to memories of their screams, of their silence, of their hysterical sobbing, of their voices straining to appear normal and offering all kinds of wild promises in exchange for mercy.
And the most loved sound of all, after they had delivered on their promises, and they realised mercy was not forthcoming, the animalistic groan deep in their throats, a key note of hopelessness from the centre of their beings.
Finger hovering on the washing line, The Ghoul came to three eyeless faces hanging in the air, their scalps clipped into place by pegs buried in their hair.
The Ghoul pictured them in life, felt the softness of their skins, the silkiness of their hair and the hollowness of their eyes.
Love. Was it real?
Was it real?
Love. Love. Love.
The thing that inspired the things that came to pass for Sandra and Annie and Amanda.
Love that gave The Ghoul the right and the freedom to pursue wild dreams and act on them.
Love… Love… Love.
The writing on the wall came into The Ghoul’s heart like divinely inspired poetry.
‘And, so, off she floats to nowhere. Love… Love… Look at me!’
Love. The thing that the basement was all about.
21
4.54 pm
In the back of PC Woodrow’s marked police car, parked on the grass verge on Menlove Avenue, the caller sat huddled with her Westie now asleep on her knee.
Clay approached the constable and asked, ‘Who is she and how is she, PC Woodrow?’
‘Her name’s Jackie Graham and her dog’s called Oscar. She’s articulate but shock’s setting in fast.’
Clay walked around the police car to the back door and the empty space next to Jackie Graham. She tapped on the window and, as she opened the door, the dog shook from his sleep and whimpered.
She sat next to the witness, closed the door and, seeing how dark it was, was glad that Jackie didn’t have to speak in cold light. Outside the car, tall sodium street lights on the grass verge in the middle of the dual carriageway cast down a dull amber glow.
‘Jackie?’ Clay’s voice was filled with kindness but under the surface there was an urgency that made the woman turn her head immediately. ‘I’m sorry you had to see what you saw but I thank you for having the presence of mind to call us as soon as you did. The switchboard operator you spoke to stressed how quick and precise you’d been with her.
‘This is my warrant card. My name is DCI Eve Clay. I’m going to tape our conversation. Are you OK with that, Jackie?’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Please tell me everything that happened, everything you saw or heard, Jackie.’
Clay saw Jackie flatten the wet fur on the dog’s head and Oscar’s eyes glinted in what the street lights cast down from the dead sky behind them.
‘I walked Oscar down Menlove Avenue from Vale Road and once we’d passed the house where John Lennon lived as a boy we crossed the road at the same point we do every time we go for the walk.’
The smell of wet dog hit Clay and she sensed the witness sinking inside herself.
‘Where was that spot, Jackie?’
‘By the high-rise flats, at the 76 bus stop, over the road from the footpath that cuts across the golf course. Oscar’s a creature of habit. He dictates.’
‘Did you see any pedestrians?’
‘No. If I did, I didn’t notice.’
‘Any cars going either way down the dual carriageway?’
‘A few. Either way.’
‘No one speeding?’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘Where did you go once you’d crossed the road?’
‘Up the wide footpath. There’s a gap in the hedge that leads on to the left-hand side of the golf course. Oscar dragged me through it, same as usual. We walked across the golf course towards Allerton Towers.’
‘Anyone on the golf course?’
‘Oscar saw someone, something. He made this noise in his throat…’ She lowered her voice. ‘It’s a pathetic note. It’s the noise he makes when he’s really scared. He ran towards it.’
‘Jackie, if he was scared, why did he run towards it?’
‘It was plain strange. As you say, why run to something he’s scared of? But the fact is he did. He pulled on the lead so hard that I let go and he started running at full pelt across the golf course towards the footpath on the other side. He disappeared through the hedge on to the footpath and I thought, that’s it, he’s lost, but when I got through the gap in the hedge, there he was, stock still. I called him but he didn’t come. I called him but he didn’t so much as make a noise. I walked towards him. He was standing at the side of the pothole. I thought at first it was a mannequin. Some stupid teenage prank. I saw the legs and the feet on the path and the rest of the… her I couldn’t see.
‘You’re a naughty boy, Oscar, I said as I came closer. He slinked off a little and flopped himself down on the path.’
Clay heard the sound of staunched tears in Jackie’s voice.
‘I… I saw her toenails were painted and I thought, mannequins don’t have painted nails. I touched her ankle with the tip of my little finger, right hand, and I felt bone beneath the skin. And then. And then. It was as if the story on the news about the lady found on the riverbed somersaulted into my mind. Water. Dead body. I don’t remember taking out my phone and calling emergency services but the next thing I knew I was talking to some woman on a switchboard. I told her where I was and what I – what he, what Oscar had found, and I waited there. It seemed like hours but it was probably seconds, a minute or more maybe. I heard the siren coming and I thought, what if the person who’s left this woman’s body here is still around? What if he takes me next? What if I end up in a ditch? Or a river?’
She gathered her dog to her body and held on to him as if her life depended on his closeness to her.
‘Jackie, did you see anyone at all?’ asked Clay.
‘I saw a light, a torchlight, a speck of moving light heading down to the houses on old Allerton Road. Then it disappeared as it got too far away.’
‘A man?’
‘Too far away to tell.’
Clay smiled, wanted her facial expression to register in her voice.
‘You’re doing very well, Jackie. Come on now, stay with me, keep going.’
As she spoke, Clay knew in her heart that the woman sitting next to her in a marked police car on a dismal day on Menlove Avenue had, by sheer chance, walked over a line that most people would never cross in the course of a lifetime.
‘I heard an engine revving up at the Allerton Road end of the footpath. I heard a vehicle driving away.’
Jackie Graham loosened her grip on Oscar.
‘Did you have any overall impressions about what you saw, Jackie?’
She was quiet for a moment and said, ‘Yes. How can one man carry a dead woman to that spot on his own? Maybe one of them got away with his torch. Maybe the other got away through the golf course. Whoever he was or they were, they were in a hurry to disappear into the dark. I was convinced in my own mind there must be more than one of them. I think that’s all I can tell you, DCI Clay.’
Clay handed her a contact card. ‘If you think of anything else, call me. Nothing too small, this is a big, big deal, Jackie.’
Jackie reached for
the lock.
‘It can only be unlocked from the outside,’ said Clay. She pointed at PC Woodrow. ‘He’ll let us both out in a moment.’
Clay stopped recording and listened to Oscar’s empty stomach growl in the confined space.
Clay’s iPhone buzzed with an incoming call. ‘Excuse me, Jackie.’ She glanced at the display and connected. ‘Barney, what’s up?’
‘Cathy Jones, Annie Boyd’s best mate, she’s just showed up in reception. She wants to talk to you.’
‘I’ll be there in ten to fifteen minutes, Barney.’
22
5.19 pm
‘Thank you for stepping forward to talk to me, Cathy,’ said DCI Clay.
In Interview Suite 1, DCI Eve Clay turned on the audio recorder on the table between herself and Cathy Jones.
‘You were next on my list of people to talk to,’ said Clay.
‘I’ve spent all day going over everything,’ said Cathy. ‘As soon as I had it all straight as I could in my head, I came to speak to you, DCI Clay.’
She turned her wedding ring round and round her finger like she was performing a ritual protecting herself from harm.
‘Cathy, you’re not a suspect,’ said Clay. ‘You’re assisting us with our enquiries. I know how stressful this must be for you, but please try and relax.’
Cathy nodded, glanced at the digits on the audio recorder, counting down time. Clay poured Cathy a glass of water and pushed it in front of her. She drank it down in one.
‘When we first met in Annie’s house, I got the distinct impression from your facial expression and body language that you didn’t want me to talk about Annie’s internet dating activities in front of her father. Is that correct?’
‘It’s correct.’
‘Did her parents know she was doing internet dating?’
‘No. They didn’t. But I know they’d never have approved in a million years. Annie had a theoretical conversation about it with them after they’d watched a documentary on TV together. They didn’t like it because of the risk element and the strange fish the sites attracted. So when Annie joined Pebbles On The Beach, she asked me not to tell anyone in case it got back to her parents.’