by Mark Roberts
The top part of Aidan’s skull lay on the ground, spongy, bloodied brain tissue nestling in the bone. Wedged in between bone and brain, a single piece of paper poked out. The beam of a torch revealed words carefully centred on the paper, printed and orderly.
It was a poem. ‘Can you read that?’ asked Wilson.
‘No.’ said Rosen.
‘It’s a poem. “The Sick Rose”. You want me to read it to you?’
The text of the poem sharpened on the screen, making the writing clearer.
‘No. What’s that other writing down the margin of the page, the handwriting?’ asked Rosen.
‘It’s an address,’ said Wilson.
‘Read it!’
‘Caxton Farm, near Uckfield, East Sussex, TN22 6RP . . .’
As Rosen recited the address, he wrote it down. Bellwood typed the words into Google Maps and called out, ‘I’ve got it!’
Rosen handed back the iPhone to Corrigan.
‘Stay with them, Jeff. This is DS Corrigan on the line. Describe the scene as you relay it to him.’ Rosen turned to Bellwood.
‘It’s way off the beaten track,’ she said.
Rosen looked at the onscreen map.
‘The A22 southbound to East Sussex . . .’ Rosen could feel his pulse pumping at the side of his neck. Uckfield, small to the point of insignificance, was suddenly the centre of his universe. He looked around the room and asked, ‘How many Authorized Firearms Officers here?’ Bellwood and Gold signalled with their hands.
Rosen dialled the number for CO19, Central Operations Firearms Command, and called to everyone in the room, ‘I want all available marked police cars to spread through central London to keep the roads as clear as possible to the mouth of the A22.’
Clarity descended as if a bright light had gone on inside him. Around the incident room, his instructions were being relayed with grim urgency.
At the other end of the line, at Leman Street Police Station in Whitechapel, Rosen was connected to Chief Superintendent Doug Price, CO19’s most senior on-duty officer.
‘DCI Rosen, what’s happening?’
‘I need support, Doug. Herod’s abducted another woman. We have his location. I need firearms assistance now.’
‘What do you need?’
‘Three 9mm Glock 17 self-loading pistols for my team. We’re going to Caxton Farm, outside a small place called Uckfield in East Sussex. We’ll meet at the head of the A22, and go in one convoy. How many officers have you got available?’
‘Six immediately, but we can call in as many again within the hour. They’re all top marks. Is this a siege?’
‘If all the information’s correct, he’s got a woman with him, a prisoner in the farmhouse.’
‘David, leave it with me. See you soon. We’ll be ready to roll in minutes.’
Rosen put down the phone.
‘David . . .’ It was Bellwood. ‘This could be total bullshit, this address – another piece of theatre.’
‘It could be,’ replied Rosen, ‘but it’s all I’ve got.’
Baxter came over and said, ‘David, I don’t think this is right, you going anywhere near this address in East Sussex.’
‘How are you going to stop me, Baxter? I’m leading this Murder Investigation Team.’
‘I’m not going to stop you going. You need to coordinate the operation. But I’m ordering you . . .’ He looked at Bellwood. ‘Are you getting this, Bellwood? Are you hearing me? I’m ordering you not to go into the building with a firearm. I know you’re an AFO and I’m guessing you’ve just put in the call to Leman Street. Did you ask for firearms for your MIT?’
‘Yes.’
‘Including yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you go inside that building and use a gun on Dwyer, you’d better be damned sure you can justify it in a court of law. It’s on your own head. Don’t go in, stay outside, that’s my order, OK?’
‘I’ll make all my operational decisions based on the reality of what’s on the ground. You can’t control an operation like this from a distance.’
Rosen looked around at the many faces watching him, waiting for his orders, and was consumed with a painful vision of his wife, alone, terrorized by the things he had told her about Herod’s victims.
A feeling like fire swept through him. He would do anything to get to her.
64
The snap fastener on the lower lock lifted. A vibration on the case of the box in which she was trapped told Sarah that the hour had come. Now, there would be no turning back, no delay, no mercy.
Beneath the lid, she prepared to imitate the deadness of the eyes in the hapless men and women she’d observed at length in the day room of the psychiatric unit in which she’d recovered. She fixed the pattern of her breathing, sharp gasps taken by mouth to the tops of her lungs, the first stages of respiratory failure. I cannot think, I cannot breathe, therefore I am no threat, she said in her head as he raised the lid.
The red light in the basement played over her skin, and her arms came up in goose bumps, the soft hairs standing on end. A finger, his finger, touched her shoulder and arrived at her elbow in a single slow and gentle tracing. His hand settled on the back of hers in a gesture of tenderness. The motion of his head told her he was drinking in her nakedness with his eyes, her guess confirmed by a deep and hushed grunt of sensual approval.
As he examined her face, she rolled her half-shut eyes, keeping up the dense manufactured rhythm of struggling respiration.
He pressed his lips close to her left ear. ‘Are you ready?’
He checked her face again and slapped her hard on the cheek. She held on to her breath and didn’t flinch.
‘She’s all gone,’ he muttered.
He picked up a hypodermic needle balanced on the nearby hoist and, half turning his back, inspected the fluid in its chamber. A bolt of fear ran through her. He replaced the hypodermic needle on the hoist next to what looked like a single spoke from a bicycle wheel.
‘Unflesh the womb of its foetus and preserve the unblemished soul of the child.’ It was as if he was recalling the instructions from a manual.
He threaded the harness under her back, through the saline, and pulled it up under her ribs. It supported her shoulders and the lower half of her back. As he hitched the ends to the hooks on the arm of the hoist, she felt his breath on her collarbone and winced within her staccato breathing.
She resisted the urge to wrap her hands around his throat and break his neck: he was just a little too far away to give her maximum leverage.
She felt her weight tug on the cradle of the hoist, still suspended in the saline, and from the corner of her eye saw him move out of her sight. She waited. A clip snapped and something tinkled under the soft vibration. She saw the hypodermic needle and the bicycle spoke resting side by side on the hoist.
Post mortem, she knew that the others had had minute traces of drugs in their bloodstreams but they’d had a lot longer than she to turn to jelly. Each woman had died from cardiac tamponade from a thin sharp implement. She knew she had glimpsed the murder weapon, and the thought made her want to throw up.
The lurching in her stomach grew worse when, by the flick of a switch, he raised her body from the water of the chamber. He pulled the wheeled hoist, his hands tight around the central bar from which she was suspended, the clattering of the wheels less noisy under her weight.
He’s taking me somewhere else to kill me, thought Sarah.
As he pulled her through the doorway to the next room, made soft by candlelight, she glanced back and saw the oxygen tank under the sensory deprivation chamber, the low ceiling. These might have been the last things the other women had seen, depending on how far gone they’d been. At least for her it had not been an endless ordeal of waking and sleeping, and waking and becoming hysterical, before being brain dead by degrees.
The lack of natural light confirmed in her mind that this was indeed a windowless basement. Her anxiety rocketed. The thought of dyi
ng in a dark cellar at the hands of a madman made her want to cry out.
Her arm brushed the door frame and made the sling sway, making his job a little harder as he pulled her towards a table. She immediately knew that it was the place where she would be deposited. At its base sat a long metal box. It was covered with red velvet, reminding her of the altar in the chapel at the school where she taught. Religion, she thought. Man and his bloody rites.
As he twisted the contraption around, she caught sight of the top of his head, wet and black and shining round his small, shrimp-like ears.
How you hate your mother, she thought, and how I am about to pay for that.
The ceiling turned slowly as she span beneath it. The hoist made a whirring sound as she was lowered. Her buttocks were first to touch the surface of the table.
But there was no chanting, no noise, no artificial drama in this ceremony.
There was a door to a third room. Intuition seized her. In that room were the remains of the babies. Here, now, beneath the scent of him, she could smell the dry aroma of charcoal and the chemical reek of formaldehyde
She knew he hadn’t used fire before, as there were no burns to the others.
It took all her willpower not to scream, because there was a first time for everything, including fire.
She listened to the dry scrape of a match on the emery of a box.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
The flame hovered between his face and her eyes. He stared at her with intensity.
Holding the flame closer, he said, ‘This is not for you, this sacred fire. This is for your baby. Does the name Alessio Capaneus mean anything to you? No. Why should it?’
The flame swam around the matchstick before expiring in a blue death on the narrow stem of wood, sending up a wisp of grey smoke. He blew it away, his breath hot on her eyes, easing down her face.
‘Can you hear this?’ he asked. He shook the matchbox, the rattle of plenty. Another match ripped into life across the coarse sandpaper. ‘Can you? Can you hear it?’
65
Rosen’s eyes dipped to the speedometer. Bellwood at the wheel was tipping 120mph. From the passenger seat, Rosen had felt her nerves jarring at every grind of the clutch as she’d shifted gears on the agonizing route out of central London.
The blaring siren of the lead car and those behind echoed the clamour in Rosen’s mind, a place where he couldn’t hide from the image of his wife’s naked body, cold, vulnerable, with no defence against the stab wound to her heart and the incision to her womb.
‘David?’ said Bellwood.
At first he didn’t respond but after some time he replied, ‘Can’t you go any faster?’
‘David, three forces are working on the hoof to keep the roads clear between London and the South Downs. They can’t guarantee every side road. If something does pull out—’
‘I know, we’re all going faster than it’s safe to.’ He paused. ‘Safe for us.’ But not Sarah, not for her, not for our baby. He turned his head and made a noise in the back of his throat, a brief rattling sound, the desperate melody of a senseless hymn.
Rosen pictured a white tent at the midpoint of Vauxhall Bridge Road with scene-of-crime tape flapping around it in some vile wind. In his mind, he crossed the tape and recalled: this is the end where the letter A is linked from side to side. A for Alessio, A for Alpha, the opening in which he had left her alone on the first floor of the North Wing of St Thomas’s Hospital. He had been running late as usual, too late to save her from being the sixth victim.
Rosen’s mobile exploded into life, its sudden ringing jolting him.
‘David, it’s Feldman.’ Despite his urgency, Feldman sounded pleased.
‘What is it?’
Rosen turned his phone on to speakerphone and felt the weight of the gun in his other hand.
‘Williams and Waters estate agents, in Eastbourne. They handled the sale of Caxton Farm to a Paul White, eighteen months back.’
‘White?’
‘That’s what he gave his name as. They keep an archive of all the properties they sell, and they’ve given a detailed description of Caxton Farm’s interior.’
‘Go on.’
‘The farmhouse is large and it’s got an expansive basement. Ground floor has a kitchen, living room, dining room and large hallway; upstairs has four bedrooms and a bathroom. Bill Williams, the agent who sold the property, remembered Paul well. “Weird” was the word. Seemed more interested in the basement than the rest of the house, so it was the selling point for our man. The basement consists of three interconnecting rooms. The entrance to the basement is through a hatch in the floor in the pantry, which is next to the kitchen at the back of the house. You go down a set of wooden stairs. The stairs lead down into the middle room.’
‘Any other entrances or exits to the basement?’ asked Rosen.
‘One more.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s a door in the wall of the smallest of the rooms. It leads to a diagonal shaft that comes out into the yard outside, via a trapdoor. It’s an old grain shaft. When it was a farm, it was used to slide sacks of grain down into the basement, where they were stored.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No, just two entrances to the basement, one through the kitchen and down some steps, one outside the house and down a chute.’
‘Good thinking, well done.’
‘It was your idea, boss; you told me to phone round the estate agents!’
He recalled issuing the instruction but it felt as if he’d done so in a dream he’d once had in some past existence. The muscles in his face twitched. The sirens screamed. His throat was desert dry.
His phone went off again as soon as he ended the call from Feldman.
‘DCI Rosen?’ It was a voice he didn’t know.
‘Yeah?
‘DCI Rick Murphy, Sussex Constabulary. We’ve closed all the roads near Berwick, but the path to Caxton Farm’s going to need local knowledge. I’ll take you the quick way,’ said Murphy.
‘Meet us on the edge of the exclusion zone,’ said Rosen.
‘The best place is a little north of a village called Alciston. There’s a really narrow road from Cuckmere Reservoir, about half a mile from Caxton Farm. We’re waiting for you. Where are you?’
‘We’re on the A22 heading south. We’re minutes away.’
Rosen ended the call and stared at the road ahead.
66
He lit a wax taper, pausing to observe the flame, and then dipped out of her sight to the base of the altar. Whatever he was igniting was on the floor, out of her line of vision. She reached out to the mechanical hoist, to the bicycle spoke and the hypodermic needle, but they were a thumbnail beyond her grasp. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his outline start to rise up beside her and dropped her arm again onto the velvet surface beneath her. For the first time, she was aware of what he was wearing. White. A white shirt and white trousers. Clothes, ordinary clothes.
He walked around the altar, a wisp of smoke drifting up from the floor where he’d just been crouching. As he pulled the hoist away from the altar, the sharp spoke and hypodermic needle moved further and further away from her grasp. She ground her back teeth in frustration. You should’ve leaned further forward and grabbed them while you had a chance, stupid!
There was a patch of perspiration on his back, making his shirt stick to him, highlighting the colour of his skin, the badge of his humanity. Her arms ached from having lifted the lid to breathe.
It was quiet, although not altogether silent because of a humming that Sarah recognized as the noise of the house; each house having its own peculiar relationship with the air within it and around it. It was the sound that kept adults awake at night and fuelled the nightmares of children.
It seemed to grow louder by the smallest degree.
He hurried to the back of the altar and fell to the ground. She lifted her head to look. He was prostrate, his hands and feet scrabbling to touch p
articular points on the floor, his head in the dust. She saw the daubings beneath him, the only identifiable sign of occult symbol making.
It looked like some sort of triangle, or a buckled letter: an A or an N, maybe.
Her head dropped back again as she took in the hoist and the sharps, and although she was nearer to the weapons than he was, she remained unmoving. She tried to feel her legs. She had been still for a long time. When she woke up on an ordinary morning, she couldn’t move quickly for the stiffness of middle age in her limbs. One sudden move on her part and he would get there before her.
He rose to his full height.
‘Are you awake?’ he said, his gaze heavy upon her. His eyes were close to hers, as close as David’s when he kissed her goodnight. ‘Are you ready?’
A column of smoke spiralled behind him.
A single fingertip on her left hipbone, a light touch that felt like a crashing fist. He slid his finger across her skin to the other side, a line from hip to hip, marking out the first incision of the Caesarean.
She breathed the smoke of sunny Sundays, the white fragrance of the barbecue, and felt the full weight of the knowledge that this was to be her fate and that of her baby: she for the spike, her baby for the flame.
His finger remained at her hip and she went cold at the realization that he was enjoying the touch of her skin. His breathing shifted up a gear, the earliest stirrings of intimacy and arousal. She heard him swallow his saliva as he brought his face close to hers.
He lifted his finger and pressed it down between her ribs. His face and finger receded. Then, the unmistakable clatter of the spoke and the needle as he picked them up from the hoist.
He coughed, swallowing a mouthful of rising smoke, and came towards her. He coughed again, this time a little more rawly, as the smoke bit deeper in his throat. He coughed as he stood over her and placed the spoke and the needle on the altar, the spoke within her reach, the needle way beyond.