by Mark Roberts
‘Fluent.’
As if alerted by some primal instinct that she was being discussed, Aneta drifted out of the daydream and looked across at them.
‘She knows the blokes who lived in the flat above the deli,’ said Doyle. ‘They’re her friends.’
‘Aneta?’ said Clay, keeping eye contact with the woman as she approached her. Attractive and in her early thirties, she carried a leather holdall; beneath her smart black coat, she was dressed casually in jeans and trainers. ‘I’ve heard they were your friends?’ Clay spoke softly, seeing the woman was trying hard not to crack.
‘Are they dead?’ There was hardly a trace of accent and her voice was strong, in spite of the massive pain that registered in her eyes.
‘There are two bodies in the flat. It’s been burned out. I’m sorry.’
Clay showed Aneta her warrant card and said, ‘I’m DCI Eve Clay. I’ll be leading the inquiry into what we’re pretty certain is a double murder.’
Aneta looked away, as though searching for comfort from the ice and snow that lined the pavement. ‘What makes you think it’s murder?’ she asked.
‘A detail. I can’t discuss it with you, Aneta. I’m sorry.’
Cold wind blew across Aneta’s head and the ends of her neatly bobbed hair shook, releasing an aroma that Clay recognised as an expensive perfume.
‘I’d like you to come to my car. So we can talk.’
Aneta looked directly at Clay. ‘I want to talk to you, DCI Clay. They’re my friends. I’ll tell you everything I know. But I’ll tell you right now, Karl and Václav Adamczak had no enemies. They were good men – the best.’
4
9.20 am
Through the wall that separated the vestry from the church, Father Aaron heard the sound of an old lady walking down the aisle to a pew near the front, her heels clicking against the battered parquet flooring: footsteps that he recognised.
‘That’ll be Iris, always third to arrive every weekday morning...’
He looked at a statue of the Virgin Mary, dressed from head to foot in white, only her face and feet exposed to the cold air.
‘My heart’s heavy today, Mary.’ He wished that the Virgin would speak to him but all he heard was the movement of his parishioners inside the church. ‘I reckon that’s three in so far for morning mass, five if you include you and me. Now, if you don’t mind, Holy Mother, I need to get dressed for mass.’
In spite of the drab walls of the vestry and all the old brown wooden furniture, the room was brought alive with a row of vivid colours hanging from a tall aluminium clothes rail.
Father Aaron walked to the vestments and admired the colours of the chasubles: red, purple, black, violet and green, ritualistic robes that he had designed himself. He picked up the green chasuble and admired the grasshopper and the cricket, small creatures that were great symbols to him of God’s creation. Putting it back, he took the violet chasuble and stole and began to robe himself in the vestments required for the time of year.
‘That makes four, Mary, unless one of the three changed places to get out of the draft. No, they’re always in the same places. Creatures of habit. Keepers of the faith.’
As Father Aaron dressed himself, he looked at Mary and smiled. Her face and feet were pink and radiant. He looked at her eyes and noted that time may have dimmed the blue light that had once radiated from them, but her gaze was still hypnotic and chaste.
He knelt down on the cushion on the floor at the Virgin Mary’s feet. ‘This morning, Mary, I bring before you Lucy who is close at hand, I bring before you Kelly-Ann who is so far away, I bring before you Iris and Kate, and Mr Rotherham and all my other parishioners. Be with all of them this day, but mostly Kelly-Ann.’
He stood up and walked around the room to shift the stiffness from his knees.
‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven... And I know what your will is, Holy Father, you made your will clear to the Israelites...’ His mind was dancing. ‘Just as you made your will clear to Mary and she obeyed you as must I... Make me obedient always to your will, speak your will in my heart and give me the strength to follow Abraham’s example and be ever-obedient to you...’
He stopped and listened to the passage of time in the ticking of an old clock.
‘Where was I? Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we...’ He looked to Mary for strength. ‘As we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation... yes, but deliver us from evil...’
In the top right-hand corner of the mirror, Father Aaron caught sight of an ageing picture of a youthful Jesus, the Sacred Heart, his long flowing hair and neat beard almost blond, his eyes blue like Mary’s and his skin pale with a rosy blush on either cheek.
In his head, he finished off the Lord’s Prayer. Looking around the vestry, and noting that nothing seemed out of place, he offered up a silent Hail Mary in front of her statue.
‘Bless me, Holy Mother.’ He bowed and kissed her feet, looking into the eye of the parasitic serpent trapped beneath her toes, a beast destroyed by the power of God and the virtue of the Virgin.
He opened the door into the church, picked up the bell and rang it, a sound that deepened the solemnity in his heart. He heard the creak of pews and bones as his parishioners stood up to welcome him.
Father Aaron walked towards the altar with his hands joined and his heart sealed in sorrow. Standing behind the altar, he faced the congregation of three with a combined age of over two hundred and forty years: Iris at the end of the front pew, left-hand side; Mr Rotherham in the middle of the third pew, left-hand side; and Kate on the very last pew halfway in, right-hand side, close to the church door.
Father Aaron drew a deep breath and said, ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.’
In one voice the three answered, ‘And also with you.’ But their voices were lost in the vastness of the dome above their heads.
5
9.20 am
Jack Dare stepped out of the kitchen and into the small garden of the three-bedroomed terraced house he shared with his mother and younger half-brother Raymond, closing the door without making a sound. He stepped across the ice-bound lawn and headed for the domed barbecue on the patio in front of the ragged leylandii at the bottom of the garden.
He carried a black bin bag between the index finger and thumb of his right hand, holding the bag away from his body.
You stupid idiot, thought Jack, looking up at the window of Raymond’s room where the blinds were still drawn. He estimated the teenage cretin was no doubt dreaming of the ever-shifting harem of sex slaves who would service his every need when he was running the country.
Jack wiped the snow from the dome of the barbecue and, lifting it, saw that it was dry inside, with a thick dusting of ash dotted with fragments of black coals – a leftover from a summer that felt like years ago. He looked at the tops of the leylandii that ran down the left- and right-hand side of the garden and at the back: a shield of dense green that meant the garden was not overlooked by any of the neighbours.
Not far in the distance, a bus ploughed through the sleet on Park Road and he wished that he was on board, travelling away from the Dingle in the direction of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, but the reality was he was stuck in the house he’d been born into twenty-three years earlier.
He placed the bag on the icy patio and felt the first flake of a new snow shower landing on his nose. Digging his hands into the bag, Jack pulled out a white firelighter and charcoal briquettes that he’d found under the sink. As he put them inside the barbecue, the smell of smoke from Raymond’s clothing drifted from his hands like an old curse.
Rooting through the bag, Jack did a mental inventory. Black North Face padded coat; red socks; blue jeans from George at ASDA; stained boxers; T-shirt decorated with a photo of a virtually naked woman, and a blue Le Coq S
portif tracksuit top.
Jack struck a match and touched the firelighter, then watched as thin ribbons of small blue flame raced down either side of the rectangle.
Too much to be burned in one session, thought Jack, eyes entranced by flame.
He dropped Raymond’s socks and boxers onto the fire. A wave of disgust at the dry semen at the front and the skid mark on the back sent his eyes skywards, where the falling snowflakes danced to earth like malevolent shadows.
Jack looked at his younger brother’s boxer shorts and was surprised to see a small twig and half a rotted leaf stuck to the elasticated waistband. ‘Just exactly what did you do last night, Raymond?’ he asked.
From his coat pocket, Jack took out a Stanley knife and slashed the stitching around the left armpit of the North Face coat, then set about cutting the garment down into manageable fire-friendly pieces. And his heart turned inside out at what lay ahead.
Jack felt the first stinging of cold in his ears and decided to bag up the partially dissected coat and stash the remaining clothes in the miniscule shed to his immediate left. As he did so, a memory assaulted him from nowhere, of the day he’d come home after being away in the Young Offenders Institution at Altcourse. He remembered standing in the doorway of Raymond’s bedroom for the first time since his arrival.
On the wall facing Raymond’s bed was a hand-painted collage of thousands of people packed together in disciplined ranks with beams of white light pouring from the ground to the night sky.
‘Did you paint this?’ Jack had asked.
‘Yeah,’ Raymond had replied.
Jack looked closer at the wall, saw that each individual head was represented by a dot of paint, and that the dots around were all different shades of black and grey, to make each person in the crowd stand out. Looking deeper into the picture, Jack saw that to the right of each head there was an upturned diagonal line, a dash of paint.
‘What’s this, Raymond?’ he’d asked, though he already knew the answer.
Silence.
‘If you don’t know what this is a picture of, why have you taken such time and trouble to paint it on your bedroom wall?’
‘I’ve been doing the Second World War in school. I’m dead interested in it, all of it like. The Nazis. See the picture there, I did it from a photograph that was taken at a rally in Germany before the war, it was called the Nuremberg Rally.’ Animation kicked into Raymond’s monotonous nasal drone. ‘Hitler made this speech, right, and everyone got carried away because it was so brilliant, he had the masses in his hands...’
As Raymond grew more excited, his words turned into a stream of meaningless babble.
It had been a hot day in June with no movement in the warm air. He’d walked to the window and looked out into the garden where his mother was pinning clothes to the washing line. She’d paused and looked up at the window. Jack raised his arm to acknowledge her, and wondered why she had allowed Raymond to put up Nazi imagery in his bedroom.
He turned back to his brother, who half-shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Well...’
‘Well?’ pressed Jack. ‘The Nazis?’
‘I’m interested in them.’
‘What about your mates?’
‘They’re interested in them as well.’
Jack had walked to the bedroom door, stopped and pointed at the Nuremberg Rally. ‘How long did it take you to paint that?’
‘Three months,’ replied Raymond, with barely concealed pride.
‘You’re not interested in the Nazis. You’re obsessed!’
*
Jack tossed the bag of Raymond’s clothes onto the pile of junk in the shed. As he walked away he saw his mother walking down the garden through the thickening smoke escaping from the burning barbecue.
‘What’re you doing, Jack?’
‘It’s Raymond. He’s up to something. Again. I know he’s heading for big trouble so I’m burning the clothes he wore last night.’
‘Jack? You don’t know that...’
‘I do know that, Mum.’ He looked at his mother closely. ‘Trust me. You look really sad. What is it?’
‘I got a call from the doctor at Broad Oak yesterday. Raymond stopped going to his therapy three months ago. They wanted to know how he was, if he was still alive even.’
Jack drank in the distress in his mother’s eyes. ‘I’ll take him to the GP and get Doctor Salah to fix an appointment at Broad Oak. I’ll frogmarch him there if necessary.’
‘You’re a good lad. We can’t give up on him.’
Jack kissed his mother on the forehead. ‘I can’t give up on him, Mum, even though he drives me mad. When he got sick, I wondered if it was me going away that tipped him over the edge.’
‘Jack, it wasn’t your fault. It’s nothing to do with you. Don’t torment yourself with shadows.’
‘Thanks, Mum. Leave him with me. Do we know if he’s been taking his medication?’
They looked at each other in silence.
‘I’ll deal with that one before I go to work,’ said Jack.
‘How is Father Aaron?’
‘He’s good. He’s got a few jobs for me to do, cash in hand.’
Jack saw his mother shivering in the cold air.
‘Thank God that priest believes in you, Jack.’
‘Yeah, he does. I just wish others were like him. Come on, Mum. Let’s get indoors. It’s freezing out here.’
6
9.21 am
In the back of her car, Clay took out her iPhone and showed it to Aneta. ‘I’m going to record our conversation, is that OK?’
Aneta nodded.
‘How far did you get inside the building?’
Aneta looked out at the front door leading up to the flat.
‘Take your time. How close did you get to the room where the fire was?’
‘I opened the front door and there was thick smoke on the stairs. I climbed up until I could see the door leading into their flat and smoke was coming out from the gap at the bottom, like the fire was dying. I turned around, walked outside and dialled 999.’
‘Why were you there, Aneta?’
Aneta looked at Clay. ‘I’ve got a key to the flat. They pay me to clean twice a week. They’re construction workers and they both get up and leave early for work – here, Manchester, St Helens, anywhere and everywhere.’
Aneta looked directly ahead, her brow creasing into a pained frown; Clay wondered if it was from the physical effort of forcing herself not to cry. She took in an Olympic-sized lungful of air and breathed out very slowly.
‘Construction workers?’ asked Clay.
‘Both. Karl was a bricklayer. Václav a joiner.’
The thought chased round Clay’s mind. Two physically fit construction workers murdered in the same narrow space? This isn’t the work of an individual, she concluded.
‘On the pavement, I looked up at Karl and Václav’s bedroom window and it was jet black like something from a horror movie.’ Aneta shook her head. ‘But I realised that something was horribly wrong before I even arrived. I saw their van still parked in Wellington Road. It was just after eight o’clock. They’re working in the Anfield district at the moment. They should have been long gone. They never miss a day’s work, they never have. And they’re never, ever late, not for anything, but especially work. When I arrived at the building, I opened the front door leading to the stairs and in the smoke there was another smell. Like cooked meat.’
‘They must have trusted you to give you the key to their flat.’ Clay offered a thread of comfort.
‘We’re all from Pruszków. It’s not a big city. It’s near Warsaw. I went to school with the Adamczak twins.’
‘Is there a chance we could be looking at more than just Karl and Václav in the flat?’
As Aneta considered the question, Clay took her in. Although dressed for a cleaning job, her bag and coat and the attention she had put into getting her hair right spoke of a woman who took great pride in her appearance.
‘The boys would never have anyone over their doorstep. Except me. Karl used to say, once the front door is closed, the world outside is closed. To nasz dom.’
‘To nasz dom?’ asked Clay.
‘This is our home. I called 999. And then I called Karl Adamczak on his mobile phone, hoping against hope, but it was turned off. Karl never turns his phone off. He was the go-between for his brother in finding work because he had better English. Then I tried Václav’s phone. Off.’ Aneta took out her mobile phone, unlocked it and scrolled. ‘I waited outside the building for the firefighters to arrive. And the police. And the ambulance, even though... I knew in my heart it was too late.’
She stopped interacting with her phone and asked, ‘Would you like to see a picture of my friends?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Clay.
Aneta handed over her phone, then turned and faced out of the open window.
Clay looked at the picture: two men dressed up in smart jeans, designer shirts open a button too many, the same silver crucifixes nestling on the chests of identical twins out for a night in Liverpool city centre, standing in front of the Pumphouse near the Albert Dock. She saw a human chain made of two identical links: hands on each other’s shoulders and bottles of beer in their free hands, smiling as the sun went down behind them on the River Mersey.
‘You took this, Aneta?’
‘Yes. It was my birthday in July. They take me out. They treat me as a queen.’
‘Do you mind if I zoom in on the image?’
‘Do whatever you have to do, Detective Clay.’
Clay focused on their faces and saw how handsome and just how identical they were.
She scrolled down the picture and zoomed in on their silver crucifixes – Jesus nailed to a cross. Panning out, their arms were knotted with muscle and they both had powerful V-shaped torsos. The shapes of their thighs were visible through their denim jeans, as if the muscles were straining to get out.
You must have met up, thought Clay, with someone or some people with considerable power to have attacked you.