The Sixth Soul

by Mark Roberts

  He called back, ‘Yes!’ but wasn’t sure that this was the truth.

  Rosen turned to the sound of Bellwood climbing over the fence. She jumped down gracefully into the garden of number 24.

  A bin, long overturned by some fox or other scavenger, lay on its side near the house. The rubbish – food packaging and newspapers showing headlines and sporting triumphs and disasters from eighteen months ago – lay matted on the earth leading to the back door.

  Rosen felt his pulse quicken as he got closer to the door. He looked at his watch again: it was a few seconds past eight. He thought of his wife, Sarah, and her appointment with their GP. Time was marching on. He wanted to go with her, he’d promised he would and then this . . . Herod’s fifth miserable excursion into other people’s lives.

  Something lurched inside him. Every nerve was made jagged by what he saw.

  The back door of number 24 was slightly open, a glass panel in the door absent from its frame, cleanly removed.

  Someone had gone to the trouble of not bashing the door down, not attracting the attention of the neighbours. Rosen eyed the area around the missing panel. It was a cautious job well done.

  ‘Carol?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can we rule the husband out at the moment?’

  ‘His story held up. I called his client. He was in Knightsbridge, as he said.’

  ‘There’s been a break-in. Who’s here from the team now?’

  ‘Harrison’s on float, DS Gold is with Caton, Corrigan and Feldman are here and knocking on the neighbours’ doors. David?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Harrison’s a liability.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Just when you were going into number 22, Caton said, Do you think Herod’s got her? And Harrison chimes in, It looks like that, yeah. Caton went into hysterics. I don’t like him, David.’

  ‘I understand.’ It explained Caton’s sudden sobbing fit. ‘Did Caton say anything – anything useful?’

  ‘He kept asking if we knew what Herod was doing with the foetuses.’

  ‘And you told him what?’

  ‘We didn’t know for sure. I avoided the forensic psychologist’s word trophy. Do you buy that rather obvious speculation, David?’

  ‘No,’ said Rosen. Unable to offer an alternative theory about the absent babies, he went for something practical. ‘Go and call for a second Scientific Support team for number 24.’

  Using the tip of the little finger of his left hand, he pushed the door open at its top right-hand corner.

  It was an old lady’s house.

  There was an aura, as if someone had died there long ago, undisturbed by compassion or duty, hidden in the muffled light.

  ——

  IN JUST UNDER twenty minutes, a second Scientific Support team had arrived, pulled in from Shepherd’s Bush. Silently and efficiently, they had plated the main passageways from the back door of number 24 to the front door, the stairs and each of the main doorways, upstairs and down.

  As the second officer came down the stairs, he said to Rosen, ‘There’s a cadaver in the bed, main bedroom, front of the house. It’s been there some time. We didn’t touch it.’ The team looked in a hurry to leave. ‘We really need to talk with DS Parker next door, sort out a game plan.’

  The Scientific Support officers left. Rosen, alone now, felt oppressed. Something of the earth, something foetid, perhaps a fungus, was growing in the fabric of the house, feeding on the wood its spores burrowed into, irrigated by the damp that seemed like an indoor weather system unique to number 24.

  Where were her relatives? A five-bedroom semi in Brantwood Road added up to a big inheritance. Where were the claimants to this legacy? Why had no one attempted to even clear the house, let alone sell it?

  He imagined his wife Sarah, old and alone, dying, and her death going unnoticed, their home crumbling, broken into by some lunatic, then explored by policemen desperate for clues.

  He tried the light switch but the power was dead. As he moved further into the house, it became dimmer still. The red-flocked wallpaper, turning green and brown from the damp, seemed to be dissolving into the deepening shadow.

  Persian rugs shifted under Rosen’s feet, reminding him of the uneasy sensation of the bogus floors of a fairground funhouse. But he could see no physical sign of an intruder, just an old lady’s world frozen in time. Somewhere else, in another room, a well-made mechanical clock still ticked, a heartbeat to the house.

  A patch of yellow light appeared on the wall, its source directly behind him. Rosen span round and Carol Bellwood stepped from the shadows.

  He was pleased that the newest member of the team was backing him up.

  ‘How’s Caton holding up?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘Not good, but we’re done with him for now.’

  As they ascended the stairs, years of stale air formed a backdrop to dust motes that shimmied in the torchlight.

  Rosen stopped near the top. Every door upstairs was closed, except one.

  He walked towards the open bathroom door.

  Weary light filtered into the gloom through the frosted glass.

  ‘David? Are you OK, David?’

  He was staring, lost in thought, looking directly up at the ceiling, at the wooden door to the loft space.

  ‘Let’s check the bedrooms,’ he said.

  ——

  IN THE MAIN bedroom, the top of a human head was visible on the pillow. The quilt on the bed was raised, giving the impression of a relief map, with the outline below that of a human body. Rosen tugged the edge of the quilt but it was stuck to the sheet on the mattress. When he pulled a little harder there was a tearing sound, cloth from cloth, surface from surface. Bellwood entered behind him, her torchlight illuminating what was left of the body.

  I’m sorry, thought Rosen. I’m sorry you’ve been left here without anyone to mourn you or mark your passing.

  She lay foetal in death, a frail skeleton, knees tucked to elbows, carpals to teeth, her skull nestled on a clump of grey hair.

  Rosen lowered the quilt.

  Whatever had caused her death, she’d been left to rot into the bedding and dry out. The thought angered and saddened Rosen in equal proportions.

  Tweed. There was a half-used bottle of Tweed perfume on the old lady’s dressing table and an ivory hairbrush in which a gathering of grey hairs remained for ever trapped in the network of bristles. Her jewellery box was open, neatly arranged, undisturbed. On the dressing table next to it was a gold, heart-shaped locket. It was open. On one side of the heart, a picture of two children, a teenage girl and a small boy; on the other side, a small lock of dark hair.

  ‘Who are you?’ Rosen asked the children in the locket.

  ‘And where are you now?’ Bellwood stroked the locket with her light.

  ‘What about the other bedrooms?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘All empty save the one next to this. Shall we?’

  The room next door to the old lady’s room was a museum piece. A teenage girl’s room, early to mid-1970s, Jackie magazine open on the single bed, an early stereo system with an RAK 45 record of Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’, and posters on the wall of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Paul Gadd as Gary Glitter.

  ‘I wonder?’ said Rosen, eyeing a framed photograph of a skinny thirteen-year-old girl. He picked up the frame, speculating as to what had become of her.

  ‘Maybe the old lady was hanging on to a moment in time, the girl grew up and—’

  ‘Maybe.’ He looked at the photo – the girl’s clothes, her blonde hair in a feather-cut, and figured it was around 1973. ‘She was a few years older than I was back in 1973. Not that our paths would have crossed in a million years,’ said Rosen, wistfully.

  ‘How come?’ asked Bellwood.

  ‘ I grew up in Walthamstow. This kind of street, this neighbourhood, was beyond my dreams.’

  Rosen was quiet for a long time as he stared at the girl’s picture. He sighed; the dusty air was thick
with memory of a time before Carol Bellwood was born.

  ‘I had a daughter . . .’ Rosen stopped articulating the thought that had escaped unchecked from his mouth and averted his eyes from the bewilderment in Bellwood’s face. He turned his mind away from the thought of Hannah, the baby who’d once slept in his arms, and raised his voice a little. ‘Come on, let’s crack on. I think I’ve seen a precedent for this.’

  Rosen walked back to the bathroom, Bellwood following.

  ‘Back in 1999, in Battersea, a thwarted boyfriend used the flat next door to get to the woman he both loved and hated. It was an ugly murder.’

  Rosen looked around the bathroom, pausing on the ceiling for a beat, considering a possibility. He almost smiled as his eyes returned to Bellwood’s face.

  ‘Carol, I think I know how Herod got into number 22.’

  4

  Ten minutes later, back in the bathroom of number 22, Eleanor Willis arranged a set of folding steps beneath the loft door.

  ‘David, if you’re right about the loft space,’ said Parker, ‘you could have enough material up there to tell us what size shoes his granny wears.’

  ‘Am I going to get that lucky?’ asked Rosen. ‘I haven’t had much luck so far.’

  As soon as he said it, Rosen thought of Phillip and Julia Caton, and the four other broken couples, and he deeply regretted the note of self-pity.

  ‘However, it depends upon the state of the loft space. It could be almost impossible to retrieve, for instance, a single relevant human hair from all that fibreglass insulation, decaying newspaper, life debris, and whatever crap’s been up there since the thirties when these semis were built.’

  Wearing latex gloves, Parker mounted the steps to the loft space, lifted the unhinged door and carefully removed it from the hatch, an enigmatic smile forming on his lips.

  ‘What is it, Craig?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘He sure had a good view of life in the Caton’s bathroom,’ said Parker, eyeing the loft door as he lowered it down to Eleanor Willis. As she took it by the edges Rosen resisted the urge to say, ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Thumbnail-sized hole in the wood,’ said Willis. ‘Enough, I guess.’

  Willis raised the door carefully in front of her face, closed one eye and peered through it directly at Rosen.

  He mounted the steps into the chill air and considered: a hole in the board covering the loft entrance. Enough to see through? Right into the bathroom. A good view into the most intimate of moments.

  He climbed another step and, raising his head above the loft entrance, shone a beam of torchlight into the darkness. A trivial combination of sensory details were indelibly stamped on his memory: the distant roar of a bus, caught in the acoustics of the loft, and the intense cold trapped in the rafters. Then the rain started.

  There was an adjoining wall between numbers 22 and 24, supporting the weight of the roof of both houses. A skin of fresh dust lay across the newly panelled floor of the loft of number 22. In the middle of the shared wall, there was a small hulk of darkness where bricks were missing. He shone a light on the wall and took a close look at the gap. It was large enough for an average-sized man to squeeze through.

  Rosen eased his way down the ladder. ‘The mortar in the adjoining wall’s addled by the look of it, probably due to the state of number 24’s roof. It can’t have been a big task to get the bricks out. He’s tunnelled his way through into here from next door. He broke into number 24, got into the loft and took the bricks out from that side.’

  He turned off his torch.

  ‘This is his fifth time round, but it’s the first time he’s abducted from within the victim’s home. Either this isn’t Herod’s work at all or he’s got the dangerous daring urge now. This could be costly to him, very costly. Maybe all of a sudden he believes he can be as reckless in abducting his victims as he is in dropping off around London what’s left of them.’

  Rosen picked up Willis’s sigh behind her protective mask, the subtle tightening of her body language. He noted too that Bellwood had noticed her colleague’s reaction to Julia Caton’s probable fate.

  ‘Carol,’ he explained, ‘DC Willis was the first officer to see Herod’s handiwork with her own eyes, with no warning, no prior knowledge of what to expect.’

  Eleanor Willis propped the loft door against the bath and took a string of pictures of it with her digital camera, then turned to Bellwood.

  ‘I was first to arrive at the scene when Jenny Maguire’s body was discovered,’ said Willis. ‘The surgical removal of the baby was clumsy, the work of one nervous butcher. We found out from the autopsy that he’d used a surgical scalpel, but it looked as if he’d hacked away with a blunt tin opener. His technique improves each time, the line of incision straighter, cleaner.’

  The steady rain now fell harder on the shared roof of numbers 22 and 24 Brantwood Road. The noise of the rain clattering on the tiles echoed in the loft space above them.

  ‘David, Carol, come and have a look at this,’ Craig Parker called from next door.

  Rosen and Bellwood followed the sound of Parker’s voice to the door of the smallest of the five bedrooms, used as a boxroom. Parker made a theatrical gesture towards an assortment of junk and said, ‘Voilà, man!’

  ‘What am I looking at, Craig?’

  Parker pointed directly at a set of aluminium ladders propped against the wall. ‘Herod gets down from the loft, then uses Caton’s ladders to straighten up the loft entrance, putting the ladders back in place here in the boxroom before he swoops off with the missus.’

  ‘What do you make of it, David?’ asked Bellwood.

  Rosen glanced at his watch. It was twenty past nine.

  ‘His nerves have settled and he’s reached the stage where he’s absolutely buzzing from what he’s doing. What do you think?’ Rosen batted the question back to Bellwood, Parker and Willis.

  ‘If he’s changed course midstream,’ said Bellwood, ‘and he’s stopped taking women from public spaces to start making home visits, can you imagine how that’s going to play in people’s heads when it comes out?’

  ‘How many pregnant women are there in Greater London?’ asked Parker.

  ‘Ninety thousand or thereabouts,’ replied Willis.

  ‘Ninety thousand women like sitting ducks in their own homes.’

  Rosen imagined the public terror this new development would cause and hoped, in the face of the evidence, that this was not the work of Herod. But when he considered everything that had happened in the Catons’ home and in the house next door, he could not see how it could be otherwise.

  ‘This hasn’t been some random choice. This home visit’s been a ninety thousand-to-one call. Herod knows this building better than the people who live in it.’

  5

  Rosen stood outside the kitchen door of 22 Brantwood Road at the side of the house. A trio of newly arrived uniformed officers, dressed in protective suits, approached him.

  ‘Sir, where do you want us to start? Front garden or back?’

  ‘Back garden, number 22. Then, move it over next door. I apologize in advance. It’s an absolute mess. But that was the run-up to his point of entry.’

  The rain was steady and cold. Alone again, Rosen scrolled to SARAHMOBILE on his phone. It rang.

  His wife had recently had sharp abdominal pains, leading her to take time off from her teaching post. She had only ever been off work once before for a protracted period of five months’ sickness. Anxiety gnawed at Rosen about what might or might not be causing her such pain. He wished that he believed in God so that he could pray it wasn’t anything life threatening. But he didn’t believe in God and neither did she.

  ‘Hi, David.’

  She sounded bright.

  ‘Have you been in to see the doc?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He thinks – he’s pretty certain it’s a peptic ulcer.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Good?’ Sarah laughed.

 
‘It’s not good in itself . . .’

  They had briefly discussed the possibility of cancer on a few occasions and it had played constantly on Rosen’s mind ever since.

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean. It could’ve been a whole lot worse.’

  ‘Where are you?’ He changed tack.

  ‘I’m in the car park at work, summoning up the courage to face 10M, today’s lesson, “Where is God in the face of evil?” Where is God in the face of 10M?’

  In the middle distance, Phillip Caton got into the back of an unmarked police car with DS Gold up front. It would be taking him to Isaac Street Police Station for a more formal interview.

  ‘A peptic ulcer,’ said Rosen. ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘He’s referred me to Guy’s. I’ve got to have a barium meal and a scan just to clarify if his diagnosis is correct. Oh, oh God . . .’

  ‘Sarah, what’s up?’

  Her car door opened and he heard the sudden lurching of his wife being sick on the car park tarmac.

  He waited for what felt like a long time.

  ‘I’ve just been sick,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Any blood in it?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘David, you’re starting to annoy me. Intensely.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe you should go home.’

  ‘I might as well be in discomfort but surrounded by people and busy, than sick and at home alone. Besides, I don’t think I’ll be sick again.’

  ‘When’s your appointment?’

  ‘The GP has to contact the hospital, and the hospital send for me when they have a space in clinic. I’ll have to go whatever the time.’

  The wind shifted direction and a blast of rain hit Rosen directly in the face.

  ‘How’s it going there?’ she asked.

  ‘Another abduction, another death, no doubt,’ answered Rosen.

  ‘Where is God in the face of evil? Answer: there is no God, just a whole lot of evil,’ concluded Sarah.

  ‘And you the head of RE in a Catholic school, Mrs Rosen.’

  ‘Don’t pipe it too loud, David. Remember, two salaries are better than one. What time will you be home?’