Killing Time

by Mark Roberts

  As Jack scooped Winalot into Jasmine’s bowl, he said, ‘There’s something else I want to talk about.’

  ‘What?’ Raymond sounded completely defeated.

  ‘The other night when you left your laptop open, your iPhone was next to it. You’d written down the four-digit pass code on a piece of paper. Why?’

  ‘Because... the last time I changed the code to stop CJ from fucking with my phone, when I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t remember the new code and I had to take it to a shop to get it unlocked...’

  ‘Who is she, Raymond?’

  ‘She? Who? Who do you mean?’

  ‘You’re a catch, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.’

  Jack shut the kitchen door in Raymond’s face.

  When Jack left the house, Raymond counted to one hundred in his head, then thought, Fuck you, Jack. And fuck Risperdal...

  He took out his mobile phone and dialled.

  ‘Buster, it’s me. He’s gone now, the bastard.’

  19

  11.29 pm

  As Marta Ondřej woke up, her mother Verka held onto her hand and gazed at her with a mixture of unconditional love and deep sorrow.

  ‘Verka, remind Marta she’s in hospital and that she’s perfectly safe,’ said Riley.

  Verka spoke to Marta, but the girl didn’t look at her or appear to be listening. Instead, she looked directly up at the ceiling, her free hand pressing against her head, as if she was trying to stop it falling from her neck.

  ‘Verka, keep talking to her, please. Reassure her. Talk about happy times you’ve had as a family, good memories, birthdays, Christmases, anything,’ insisted Riley.

  Riley felt her iPhone vibrating in the inside pocket of her jacket. She moved away from the bed and on the display saw ‘Eve’.

  ‘How is she, Gina?’

  ‘She’s coming round. She’s eaten, she’s slept, she was shocked by her own reflection which shows self-awareness.’

  ‘Is Verka still there?’

  ‘She’s not moving from her bedside.’

  ‘Gina...’ said Kate urgently.

  ‘Excuse me, Eve. What is it, Kate?’

  ‘Look!’ She pointed at Marta, who was struggling to an upright position on the bed, her lips moving but no sound emerging from her mouth.

  ‘It looks like she’s starting to verbalise, Eve.’

  ‘Film it for me, Gina, send it to my phone.’

  Riley pressed record on her iPhone video and zoomed in on Marta’s face. She watched the girl’s lips moving, her mouth opening wider, bit by bit, as the volume of her speech rose. She looked at Kate, whose whole attention was focused on Marta, her brow lined, her eyes drinking in the shapes that her lips made and swallowing the sounds coming out of her mouth.

  Unable to understand a single word the girl was saying, Riley focused on the emotion behind the language and guessed that Marta was in no-man’s land.

  Time passed as she carried on speaking, stopping only to draw breath.

  Her eyes rolled as the volume rose and lowered, up and down, eyes and speech synchronizing, until her voice dipped and slowly sank back down into silence.

  And in that silence, her arms and hands came to rest, crossing each other on her chest.

  When Riley was confident that the girl wasn’t about to break into speech again, she stopped recording and looked at Kate.

  ‘Six minutes, thirty-one seconds.’ She took out her notebook, clicking her pen into action, and read bewilderment on Verka’s face.

  ‘It’s not good news, Gina,’ said Kate. Riley waited. ‘She was talking gibberish. It was like a crossover of Czech and some Roma dialect from the region. You’ve got to understand, different Roma groups have different dialects. Roma Group A meets Roma Group B, there might be certain bits of language they have in common but it’s possible that they just won’t understand each other at all.’

  ‘Maybe Verka can shine a little light on this,’ said Riley, more in hope than reason. ‘Verka, what did you make of all that?’

  Verka looked at Riley. ‘Upside-down talk. I didn’t understand.’

  Riley walked to Marta’s bed and said, ‘Marta?’

  The girl opened her eyes and looked up at her. She held out a hand and grasped Riley’s fingers with a sparrow-like grip. She opened her mouth but no sound came out.

  Then, drilling her eyes into Riley, Marta whispered, ‘Tma.’

  ‘Tma?’ Riley echoed back the sound.

  ‘Tma. That makes sense. It’s Czech for darkness,’ said Kate.

  Marta let go of Riley’s hand and shuffled down the bed, under the covers, hiding from sight.

  Riley sent the film of Marta to Clay’s iPhone and attached a message: Eve, Marta has spoken but it all appears to be meaningless, except for one word. Darkness. The first drip before the tap flows? I hope so. Gina.

  She looked at Marta’s shape, her entire body covered by bedclothes.

  Darkness, speculated Riley. Back to the sheltering darkness...

  20

  11.30 am

  Father Aaron Bell lifted the tenth clear plastic lid from the Perspex cage on the plain oak table in front of him and dropped in the grass and leaves he had harvested from the garden. He stooped and looked at his pets – five grasshoppers and five crickets that lived with him indoors, alongside the dozens who lived outside in the garden.

  He sat at the table that had been in the kitchen of St Luke’s Presbytery for over one hundred years and poured tea from a heavily chipped brown pot and milk from the bottle.

  He unfolded the Daily Telegraph and, ignoring the economic gloom on the front page, scanned through the domestic news on the following pages until he reached ‘The World In Brief’.

  His eyes were immediately drawn to an image of a woman on the cusp of middle age, in an orange jump suit, handcuffed and foot-chained, being led into court by police officers. Her dark but greying hair was tied back, and no emotion showed on her narrow face.

  Father Aaron drew in breath and prepared to read the paragraph.

  Kelly-Ann Carter, 58, has lodged a final appeal with the governor of the State of South Carolina to commute her death sentence into life imprisonment. Carter was convicted in 1990 of the triple murder of three teenagers from the same family. She has written at length about her remorse for her crimes and has spent the last thirty years alongside other women facing the death penalty on the Mountain View Unit in Huntsville. A demonstration outside the maximum security unit is set to go ahead if her plea for clemency is denied.

  Closing the newspaper, Father Aaron placed it on the table and brought his hands together in prayer. ‘Lord, please speak to the heart of the governor of South Carolina when deciding on Kelly-Ann’s life. May he be obedient to your will. Please be with Kelly-Ann as she waits on death row. Amen.’

  He looked at the image of Mary on the wall above his head.

  ‘Mary, Mother of Jesus, mother to all of us who believe in you, intercede on my behalf with God. May his voice be powerful and clear in the governor’s heart.’

  In his mind, Father Aaron conjured the picture from the newspaper of Kelly-Ann Carter and words rolled around in his head like millstones: It’s not going to be granted, it simply isn’t going to go her way.

  21

  11.35 am

  ‘Lift the seat up if you’re going for a piss, Buster!’ On the upstairs landing of his house, Raymond looked through the open door of the bathroom at the end of the corridor, where his friend stood at the toilet with his jogging bottoms and boxers around his ankles. ‘Last time you used the toilet, you managed to piss all over the floor and I got the blame.’

  Buster flipped the seat up and a stream of bright yellow urine hit the water.

  Just behind him, the sound of metal hitting wood drew Raymond’s attention and he turned to see CJ flipping the padlock on Jack’s door, up and down.

  CJ nodded at the door and the secrets that lay behind it.

&n
bsp; ‘Why’s he need to padlock his door?’ asked CJ.

  Raymond looked over the banister into the hall below, convinced that Jack had somehow sneaked back into the house to try to catch him out. The unnerving sensation this possibility caused just under his scalp made him want to spark up a joint the size of a ruler.

  ‘Because when he was in prison, he said there was no privacy. That’s why he locks his door.’

  ‘Have you seen that thing on the internet about Jack?’ asked Buster.

  ‘I have, yeah. Is it true, Raymond?’ said CJ.

  ‘Is what true?

  ‘That when he went to the nick, everyone was respectful to him because he battered three Pakis by himself, but he wasn’t happy with just that. He wanted to be top dog, so he followed the hardest lad in the place into the showers, called him a cunt and a queer, then laid into him.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Raymond, with a glow of pride and an explosion of fear and envy. ‘He told the lad that if he grassed to the screws that’s exactly what he would be in everyone else’s eyes. A fucking grass. He told the lad that if he did grass, he’d come after him again and that he’d really lay into him next time. The lad told the doctor he slipped and banged his face on the shower floor.’

  ‘That part wasn’t on the internet,’ said Buster. ‘Go on then, Raymond. What’s in his room?’

  ‘Weights. I can hear the clanging of the bar on his bench press.’

  ‘How long’s he work out for?’

  ‘Hours and hours, every single day.’

  ‘Yeah but that’s not all he does in there, right?’ asked Buster.

  ‘There’s this kind of smoky smell comes out from time to time.’

  ‘Weed?’

  ‘It’s not weed. It doesn’t smell like weed. He doesn’t do weed. He doesn’t do anything. I’ve never seen him shit-faced.’

  ‘Boring fucker!’ CJ laughed and Buster joined in as Raymond looked down into the hall once more, and tried to delve under their noise as deep as he could into the house. He had looked the feelings up on the internet. This is pure fucking paranoia, he told himself, but knowledge of what it was called didn’t help.

  CJ lifted the padlock and dropped it against the door to Jack’s room. Over and over, metal banged against wood and Raymond’s anxiety spiked with each unpleasant beat.

  ‘Fucking stop doing that, CJ, you’re getting on my nerves!’

  Buster pulled up his jogging bottoms and boxers, turned and said, ‘You know, I remember what Jack used to be like before he went away. He was as fucking sound as anyone could be. But then he goes away and comes back fucking changed into this twat who thinks he’s like better than everyone else put together. He doesn’t even sound like he used to.’

  ‘I thought that, exactly,’ said CJ. ‘It’s like he’s been brainwashed, like... Did he get brainwashed?’

  Buster and CJ were now shoulder to shoulder outside Jack’s door, facing Raymond.

  ‘Ask him yourselves!’ said Raymond.

  ‘Fuck off,’ said CJ. ‘I’d sooner eat shit than do that. He’d twat me round the block.’

  Without moving his head, Raymond glanced down but he couldn’t see anything; he just had the clearest sense that something was moving with slow stealth up the staircase.

  ‘You know what I don’t get about him,’ said CJ. ‘He’s been offered really good money by every gangster in town to go and work for them, and he’s turned them all down flat. He might be hard but he’s a fucking dickhead.’

  ‘What about the cage-fighting promoter he turned down?’ asked Buster.

  ‘And then he goes and gets a job as a gardener for some melt of a priest in Wavertree,’ added CJ.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Raymond, heavily, recalling how Jack had turned down this legal option to work as a professional cage fighter and how he’d hoped with all his heart that his brother would say Yes and end up battered and broken by someone harder and quicker than him. The stinging on his cheek intensified and the words I didn’t touch you blossomed inside his brain. Raymond felt pulsing in his marrow; something was drawing nearer, but the dark music in his bones left him unable to move.

  ‘Shall we talk about last night?’ asked Raymond, eager to change the subject.

  ‘No!’ said CJ.

  ‘No fucking way.’

  ‘I mean as in like, where was we all last night?’ asked Raymond.

  ‘We were round at my Ma’s,’ said CJ. ‘She let you both in. You both came up to my room and we stayed there all night playing on my X-Box and smoking weed.’

  The sound of metal against wood made Raymond want to scream, but he caught himself on the inside, laughed and said, ‘Is correct! Leave his fucking padlock alone.’

  ‘OK.’ CJ looked at the padlock as it remained against the wood and said, ‘You know, I could get that open with a paperclip. Bet you any money I could do it in ten seconds flat, no shit.’

  Raymond’s eyes were drawn to the corner of the landing at the head of the stairs. He felt as if an invisible vice was turning on his skull as he peered into Jasmine’s accusing eyes, Jack’s white pit bull terrier, who stared back at him with contempt and accusation.

  She remained perfectly still, but the growl in her throat hit the air like an ominous prophecy. CJ turned to the sound and said, ‘I’m not standing round here like an arsehole chatting shit all day.’

  No one moved.

  Jasmine let out a single menacing bark, turned and bounded down the stairs.

  Raymond’s phone vibrated in his pocket and it felt as if it was pulsing poison into his marrow.

  ‘Fucking hate that fucking dog,’ said Buster.

  Raymond took his phone out, saw that it was Jack and connected immediately.

  ‘Are they there?’ asked Jack.

  ‘No, I’m alone.’

  ‘I can smell them from here. Tell them to get out of the house right this minute.’ Jack disconnected.

  ‘I’d love to slit her throat.’ CJ stared at the space where Jasmine had just been standing.

  Be careful, thought Raymond, she might hear you. ‘You’ve got to go, the two of you, right now,’ he said, as the sonic poison travelled from his hip through his spine and into the plates of his skull.

  As CJ and Buster walked downstairs, Jack’s voice scratched the bone beneath his skull. Better get it into your soul. Better get it into your soul. Better get it into your soul.

  22

  11.55 am

  Jack Dare circled the area around the Gate House on the edge of Sefton Park and Ullet Road, looking for signs of scorched tarmac on the pavement. As he did so, he pictured his brother Raymond and the way he walked, shoulders rolling back and forth and legs moving as if his feet were on little springs.

  ‘Liar!’ he said, as a stream of traffic turned from Ullet Road onto the road that ran round the park.

  A park ranger pulled up at the lights across the road and Jack caught his attention, flagging him down when the lights changed to green.

  The ranger wound down the window and asked, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘My car got robbed last night.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I know. I know. I was told that someone’d burned a car out right here, but there’s no sign of a fire. I was wondering have there been any burned-out cars in Sefton Park, last night?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ the ranger fired back immediately.

  ‘Absolutely not?’

  ‘No way. The police would’ve called me to attend. It’s happened in the past but not last night.’

  ‘Well, thanks for that, much appreciated.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I hope your car turns up.’

  Jack watched the ranger drive away, filled with cold contempt for Raymond.

  He took a series of cleansing breaths, boxed off the anger in his head and his heart and tried to think positively about the day that lay ahead. Turning his back on his brother’s latest lie, he ran as quickly as he could in the direction of Wavertree.

&
nbsp; 23

  12.05 pm

  At the door of Interview Suite 3, Clay took a few deep breaths to calm the antagonism she felt towards Lucy Bell. Walking inside, she weighed up the woman facing Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks. Lucy didn’t move at the sound of the door opening, or turn to look at Clay as she moved to sit down next to Hendricks.

  Clay noted the curve of fat on Lucy’s back beneath the rich purple fabric of her T-shirt, and the sleek, shiny quality of her jet-black hair, cut straight across the centre of her forehead and styled into a shoulder-length bob. Her face was round and there was a wedge of unshiftable fat under her chin.

  As she sat next to Hendricks, Clay saw that Lucy looked puzzled and anxious. Homely girl, she thought. The negativity she had felt towards her since she had left Marta alone in the Wavertree Mystery was punctured by a note of compassion. She noticed her stubby, ring-free fingers and concluded, Late twenties, early thirties and probably convinced she’s on the shelf.

  ‘My name’s DCI Eve Clay,’ she said evenly, showing Lucy her warrant card.

  Lucy glanced at the card and seemed to look through it.

  ‘Thank you for finding Marta and calling 999. Lucy, I want you to sit back and focus. I’m getting the feeling that this event is leaving you a little stressed out.’

  ‘I’m very stressed out,’ said Lucy, blinking slowly, drawing Clay’s attention to the precise but vivid black eye-liner around her deep brown eyes.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks,’ said Clay.

  ‘Yes, he told me his name while we were waiting for you.’

  Clay glanced at the dominant image on the front of Lucy’s T-shirt, the palm of Jesus’s hand with the fingers and thumb stretched up. At the dead centre of the palm was a perfect hole forming an O; on either side of it were three other letters making the word ‘LOVE’ –Jesus’s punctured hand post-crucifixion, and a message that could have been a personal cry for help.