Killing Time

by Mark Roberts

‘There isn’t a single picture of either of them smiling,’ replied Cole. ‘What’s the second thing?’

  ‘There was a mother on the scene. She died when Lucy was eighteen or thereabouts. No sign of a mother in the pictures.’

  Cole scrolled and saw an image of Lucy at the front of a small group of women arranged in layers on the stone steps of the Metropolitan Catholic Cathedral. At the base of the image was the subheading ‘Easter 2012’.

  Dressed in a black shirt, cardigan and dog collar, Lucy was the youngest in a group of odd-looking female misfits of all shapes and sizes. He noticed how, for the first time in the photographs she had posted on Facebook, she smiled like all her Christmases had come together in a series of faith-inspired moments, and his head connected with his heart.

  ‘First picture without daddy,’ observed Winters.

  Cole moved onto the next image.

  Lucy knelt at the altar rail in front of the same group of women, her eyes closed and head tilted down. In front of her a bishop wearing a gold mitre had his hands on either side of her head and face, fingers spread to reach as much surface area as possible, his mouth open speaking the words of ordination, drawing Lucy deeper into the circle of the church. And Cole noticed, in the group of priests to the side and back of the bishop, Father Aaron Bell watched his daughter with a look of grim determination.

  He scanned the next set of pictures and noticed that she was either on her own or with people who were considerably older than her.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Winters. ‘Ballroom dancing with another woman. Eating cream tea in the parochial club. Watching paint dry in the church hall. And there I was thinking ET was the only image system that could make me want to cry.’

  There was a picture of Lucy with a group of women and children outside a tall building with a sign by the front door: Levene House.

  ‘She volunteers there,’ said Cole.

  ‘I’m Googling it,’ replied Winters, nimble thumbs on his iPhone. ‘Got it. It’s a refuge centre for women and children who’ve been on the receiving end of domestic abuse. They also take in women who are vulnerable because of homelessness and mental health issues.’

  Cole moved to the right of the page to check out Lucy’s fifteen friends. They were all young people, late teens to mid-twenties, posing into the camera, male and female giving their profile picture the best possible shot. He scrutinised each image for anything that jumped out. Smiling female, Mary O’Learey; pouting female, Jac Rivers; poker-faced male, Tom Head.

  ‘These won’t be real friends,’ said Winters, as Cole scrolled through the faces. ‘These’ll be her students trying to blow smoke up the crack of the lonely woman marking their assignments.’

  ‘I’ll email it all to Eve, and copy everyone in on what we’ve seen,’ said Cole.

  ‘What do you make of Lucy Bell?’ asked Winters.

  Cole made a note on his spiral bound pad and read it out loud. ‘Not a lot of joy in this lonely woman’s life.’

  31

  5.30 pm

  In the viewing gallery of the mortuary at the back of the Royal Liverpool Hospital, Clay looked at the photos of the two dead Polish men she had just taken on her iPhone. Above the white sheets that covered both of them from the necks down were two charred faces, identical in death as they had been in life: the murdered twins, Karl and Václav Adamczak.

  She heard footsteps approaching the viewing gallery and, recognising Aneta Kaloza’s voice accompanying Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks through the wall, felt a dead weight descend from the centre of her brain to the pit of her being.

  As Clay looked through the glass at the bodies on the table, pictures from religious books from her childhood flooded her mind. Jesus wrapped in a shroud. Jesus laid to rest in a shroud in a cave, then the entrance being blocked with a huge stone; the stone rolled aside and Jesus gone, the white shroud discarded on the ground just inside the cave.

  You see, Eve, not even death could defeat the redeemer.

  Sister Philomena’s voice was alive inside her, supporting her as she made a sudden and unwanted imaginative leap. She could not stop seeing the shape of her husband Thomas under the white sheet, his face burned out, bones and teeth exposed to the air; and then, rolling on fast-forward into the future, seeing her son Philip’s grown-up form, horizontal and dead in the viewing room. As the painful pictures faded from her mind, she was grateful for the memory of her surrogate mother and knew that the thought of Philomena would help her face Aneta Kaloza in the next few moments.

  As the voices came closer, Clay was glad that the mortuary manager Barbara Peters had taken charge of the viewing.

  She spoke to Barbara on the other side of the glass. ‘Turn off the light, please.’ And the room in which the bodies lay was filled with deep darkness.

  The door opened and Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks said, ‘Step this way, please, Aneta.’

  Clay turned. Since she’d last seen Aneta outside the crime scene in Picton Road, it was like she had aged several years.

  ‘Thank you for coming to identify the bodies, Aneta,’ she said. ‘I know they’re your friends and I appreciate how difficult this must be for you.’

  Aneta nodded. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They’re behind that glass partition,’ said Clay. ‘When you’re ready to see them, Barbara will turn on the light.’

  Without hesitation, Aneta said, ‘I’m ready.’

  As the light came on and the shapes of their bodies became clear beneath the sheets, Aneta appeared to be punched on the jaw by an invisible fist. Her head moved up and away as her eyes stared at the ceiling above her.

  ‘Oh...’

  Then she looked down and directly through the glass.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aneta,’ said Clay, placing her hand on the woman’s arm. ‘Barbara can fold down the sheets covering them to show you any distinct marks on their bodies,’ said Clay. ‘But I have to warn you, Aneta, just like their heads and faces, much of their bodies have been badly burned.’

  Aneta wiped both eyes at once and took several breaths.

  ‘Did they have any identifying marks on their bodies?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Karl has a tattoo of the white eagle from the Polish flag on his left upper arm. Because the tattoo ink is white and he is white, it makes it look like the tattoo is raised from the skin,’ said Aneta.

  Barbara positioned herself at the head of the table and, as she folded the sheet down to reveal each of the victims’ upper torsos, Aneta fell forward onto the glass partition, stopping herself with her hands. Clay looked at Hendricks, who placed his hands on Aneta’s shoulders, raising her from the glass and supporting her.

  ‘It’s either Karl or Václav Adamczak.’

  ‘Aneta, if you can’t make an identification, we can always check their dental records and do it that way.’

  Aneta looked like she was desperate to say something, but that the words inside her head were moving at such speed that she couldn’t pin them down into speech.

  Clay caught Barbara’s attention. ‘Can you look very closely at both of their upper left arms, please?’

  Taking a torch from the pocket of her blue tunic, Barbara shone the light on the upper left arm of the victim furthest from the glass. She repeated the search on the next victim and, looking at Clay, stepped forward to the glass.

  ‘Both upper left arms are completely burned,’ she said softly. ‘The skin of their arms has melted into the flesh of their torsos.’

  ‘Absolutely no sign of a white eagle?’ Clay hoped out loud.

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Aneta,’ said Clay, ‘can you think of any other distinguishing features? For either man?’

  ‘Well...’ Aneta looked at the bodies behind the glass. ‘Karl.’ She turned to Clay. ‘Karl. His left ankle. Has this been burned to nothing?’

  ‘From the knees down there was very little damage to either man,’ replied Clay.

  ‘Let me see his left ankle.’

 
; Barbara moved to the other end of the table and, lifting the sheets back, revealed feet and ankles untouched by fire.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Aneta. ‘Can you see a tattoo of a spider on the inner ankle of either of my friends?’

  Barbara turned the left foot of the body furthest from the glass and said, ‘No.’

  Then she turned the ankle of the next body.

  ‘Yes...’

  ‘Don’t say what kind of spider it is!’ Aneta turned to Clay and Hendricks. ‘Can you see it from here?’

  ‘No,’ replied Clay.

  ‘It’s a tarantula,’ said Aneta.

  ‘Yes, it’s a tarantula,’ confirmed Barbara.

  Aneta pointed at the body nearest the glass and said, ‘This is Karl Adamczak. And the man lying next to him is almost certainly his twin brother Václav.’

  ‘So, definitely Karl,’ said Clay. ‘Almost certainly Václav? We’ll assume it’s Václav. But we’ll have to check his dental records.’

  ‘Karl got the tattoo on his eighteenth birthday against his mother’s wishes. When she found out, Mrs Adamczak was furious and threw him out of the house. He stayed a while with my family. Václav begged his mother to forgive his twin and in the end she gave way and took him back home.’

  ‘Was there any significance to the tattoo being a tarantula?’ asked Clay.

  ‘It was his nick-name in high school. Tarantula.’ A fleeting smile pierced the depths of sadness in her eyes and then sank under the weight of her grief.

  Barbara covered their ankles and feet and lay cloths over each of their charred faces.

  ‘Why Tarantula?’ Hendricks’s voice was just above a whisper.

  ‘Because he was hairy and scary to look at, but he was completely harmless. There was no...’ Aneta paused, looking for the word, ‘...venom in him. He was a lovely boy. And as he grew older, he became an even lovelier man.’

  In the silence that followed, Barbara looked at Clay and said, ‘Can I take them to the autopsy suite now?’

  As Hendricks led Aneta out of the viewing room, she broke down into hopeless sobbing. Alone, Clay looked into the empty space where Karl and Václav Adamczaks’ bodies had been and felt a rush of bitter sadness.

  They should have been working, joking with each other and drinking tea on the building site, sending money home to their mothers and families, planning on where and when to go for a few pints and to watch a football match at the pub.

  Instead their lives had been stolen. Killing Time Is Here, thought Clay. Embrace It? She had no choice. She was certain other bodies would show up in an open season for slaughter.

  32

  8.30 pm

  Father Aaron Bell was woken from a disturbed slumber on the couch in his living room by the ringing of the phone on the table in front of him.

  In the corner of the room, disjointed modern classical music drifted from Radio Three. Father Aaron reached out for the receiver and when he placed it to his ear, knew immediately that the call was from far away.

  There was a pause and in that second, Father Aaron looked at the time on the small grandfather clock on the wall opposite him.

  Eight-thirty UK time. He did the maths. Six hours ahead here. Two-thirty in the afternoon in South Carolina.

  ‘Aaron Bell?’

  He recognised the voice of Simon Wheatley, the Welsh human rights lawyer who had handled Kelly-Ann Carter’s appeal for clemency for the last ten years.

  ‘Simon, thank you for calling,’ said Father Aaron, making it to an upright position. In the background, he heard voices chanting a slogan – a demonstration in progress.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aaron. It’s bad news. The worst. Kelly-Ann’s appeal to the governor of South Carolina has failed. She’s going to be executed by lethal injection in a little over three months’ time.’

  Father Aaron stood up and turned off the radio. ‘How did she take the news, Simon?’

  ‘As she always does. With dignity and self-respect. It was the last chance, and it’s gone.’

  ‘I suppose it’s inevitable,’ said Father Aaron. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘She still provokes a lot of anger here,’ said Simon. ‘She’s a hate figure. The governor knows, everyone knows, that if he’d given her clemency there’d have been race riots on the streets. He did the thing the British government would have loved to have done to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. But they didn’t have the luxury of the death penalty.’

  ‘So she’s still hated that much?’

  ‘More so with the passage of time. She’s the bogey woman. People don’t believe her remorse; they don’t buy that she’s changed.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Father Aaron.

  ‘That she will welcome death as a bride meets her groom, and that she hopes the Lord will take mercy on her embattled soul. She will spend the next three months in constant prayer. She thanked me for trying to save her life. She asked me to pass on her remorseful apologies to the families of her victims. And she had a message for you, Aaron.’

  ‘What was that message?’

  ‘She says she’s grateful to you for all the letters you wrote to her while she was on death row, that your words of comfort helped her get through some dark times. She’s sorry that you never managed to visit her in person but she understands why you couldn’t, and she wants you to forgive yourself for not making it over. She wants you to pray hard for her and she says that she’ll pray for you until the last moment.’ The line crackled. ‘Will you make it over to visit her during the next three months?’

  ‘I doubt it. Can you tell her that I am praying long and hard for her and that I will pray for her just as I have been doing for the last thirty years.’

  Behind the silence between himself and the lawyer, the demonstrators were now singing, and Father Aaron could hear bitter tears being shed outside the jail.

  ‘No more words for now then, Father Aaron,’ said Simon Wheatley. ‘I don’t care what time it is. I’m going for a beer.’

  Father Aaron heard him hang up and for many moments kept the phone pressed to his ear, listening.

  The dead tone.

  33

  8.30 pm

  The only sound breaking the peace in Levene House was a baby crying in one of the upstairs bedrooms and, from the large living room at the front of the hostel, the television set, where the older children were enjoying cartoons.

  After two hard hours of giving their mothers a break, bathing younger children and settling the little ones down for the night, Lucy Bell poured herself a cup of tea and helped herself to a chocolate digestive from the biscuit barrel. She dunked the biscuit into the hot tea and enjoyed the moistness of the base and the creamy, melted milk chocolate on her tongue.

  ‘You did so well to give up chocolate, cakes and biscuits for Lent, Lucy.’ Elsa Warwick, the hostel’s duty manager, came into the kitchen and closed the door.

  Lucy, who had fallen several times in the run-up to Easter, blushed a little. ‘It’s warm in here tonight, Elsa.’

  Elsa sat across the wooden table. Lucy poured her a cup of tea, and eyed the biscuits in the barrel with anticipation and pleasure.

  ‘I really appreciate you coming in at such short notice to help out,’ said Elsa. ‘We’ve had an outbreak of flu, and we’re so short-staffed.’

  ‘You can’t expect mothers who’ve been beaten black and blue within the past few days to take full responsibility for their children. They don’t just need counselling, they need someone to give them a lift with their kids,’ said Lucy, taking another chocolate digestive.

  ‘I wish we had three Lucy Bells volunteering here. Life would be so straightforward.’

  Lucy looked at the closed door, and then at Elsa. ‘You don’t normally close the kitchen door. Is something the matter?’

  ‘She’s gone missing again.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dominika Zima. She slipped out last night without telling anyone. One of the other mothers saw her from her bedroom window, heading away from
the house, across Garston recreation field. She said Dominika was dressed extremely provocatively.’

  Lucy pictured Dominika’s three-year-old son. ‘Has Luka asked for his mother, or where she is?’

  ‘Once or twice. He’s grown up with her frequent absences.’

  ‘She’ll come back with her tail between her legs. She always shows up. At least she’s consistent in that.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s a massive problem this time. I know the rule, you know the rule, and Dominika certainly knows the rule because I spelled it out in no uncertain terms the last time she flitted off for over twenty-four hours. Three strikes and you’re out. This is her third disappearance.’

  ‘You could choose to overlook it and say if this happens again, there just will not be another chance. I think that’s what Jesus would do.’

  ‘Jesus with all his godliness didn’t have the problem of running a women and children’s refuge where nobody misses anything. If I flouted the three strikes rule, every wayward woman in the house would start taking the mickey. I throw Dominika out, I throw Luka out with her. I couldn’t sleep last night, worrying about her and worrying about what must happen when she turns up, God willing.’

  The quiet in the kitchen was disturbed by the sound of chirruping from the Welsh dresser along the back wall, and Lucy’s attention was drawn to the large green cricket in a transparent plastic box.

  ‘The children love Buddy,’ said Elsa. ‘I’m going to write to your father and thank him for his thoughtful gift.’

  ‘He’d like that. Why did you call him Buddy?’

  ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets.’

  Lucy frowned and looked questioningly at Elsa.

  ‘They were a rock ‘n’ roll group in America in the 1950s. Buddy Holly was the leader of the Crickets.’ There was a sharp spike in the laughter from the children in the front room. ‘You’ve never heard of them?’

  ‘No. Buddy Holly? Was he an Afro-American?’

  ‘No, he was white but he played black venues at a time when it was utterly frowned on to do so.’