by Mark Roberts
Clay recognised DS Terry Mason’s footsteps rising upstairs before she heard the lead Scientific Support officer call, ‘Eve?’
‘We’re in here, Terry,’ called Clay.
As DS Mason paused in the doorway, she listened to the rapid clicking of his camera and took a closer look at the back of Steven Jamieson’s body. The large bloodstain at the base of his back, just above his left buttock, had partially dried out and, on his left shoulder, she could see a single continuous line, the signature ‘Vindici’ written in elegant cursive.
‘Seven burn marks on this man’s back just like on David Wilson’s. Why?’ asked DS Mason, stepping inside the room. Clay recalled the seven red burn marks on Wilson and something Vindici had said at his trial – she’d seen it in a headline, a response to the Crown Prosecution Service barrister when she had asked him why he always burned seven incense cones on his victims’ backs.
‘First of all, I would like to make one thing clear. I never explain anything. Me, I’m a modern-day Mary Poppins.’
The CPS barrister had cross-examined Vindici for hours on the significance of seven but all she got was nothing.
Seven incense cones. Clay pointed at the statue of the Weeping Child. ‘But who is Sally? One name amongst so very many. Her name counts for something.’
The whiff of cooked human flesh crept through the dominant smell of blood and perfumed smoke.
The back of his legs were covered in thin, red lines and, to Clay’s eyes, it looked as though he’d been whipped with a thin piece of wood or metal.
‘This is new, Terry.’ DS Mason stepped beside Clay, paused in taking pictures. Clay pointed at his lower half. ‘The perpetrator didn’t whip David Wilson.’
‘Hang on a second!’ Hendricks sounded surprised, assaulted by a fresh thought. ‘I remember. Vindici – I say we drop this tabloid talk, the guy had a real name. Justin Truman used to whip any victim who used their position or authority in society to shield themselves or gain access to children. It was a case of you’re going to die but I’m going to really humiliate you before I finish you off.’
‘You’ve got a great memory, Bill.’
‘I analysed it in my thesis for my PhD.’
Clay looked at the side of Steven Jamieson’s face that was exposed to the air and the bruising where he’d been punched. The skin was purple and blue and his cheeks were swollen; blood had dried in his ear. She imagined the kind of anger that could power the killer’s fists into doing a job Mike Tyson would have been proud of.
‘Justin Truman’s got no connections with Merseyside that I can think of. The paedophiles he murdered were all in Greater London with one exception. Brighton.’
‘Oh, he has got a connection to Merseyside,’ said Hendricks.
‘What is that?’
‘It’s not a what. It’s a who. It’s you, Eve. He phoned you up. You had a cordial, brief and significant conversation with him. It was definitely him on the line, we know that.’ Hendricks’s phone rang. ‘It’s Barney,’ he said, walking out of the room.
As Mason took multiple photographs of Steven Jamieson’s corpse, Clay surveyed the seven scorches on his back and the mounds of ash that littered his flesh.
Seven, she thought, What is the significance of seven? A strange and unfamiliar sickness overwhelmed her as the smell of the burned human flesh on the bed seemed to crawl inside her through her pores and nostrils, sinking to the pit of her stomach and turning to hot jelly.
‘Hey, Eve.’ Hendricks returned, sounding anxious to talk.
‘What else has Barney come up with?’
Hendricks walked to the bottom of the bed, looked Steven Jamieson up and down and then at Clay. ‘Get ready for this.’
8
8.18 pm
She lay down in the hot bubble bath, her head the only visible part of her body. From the neck down she was completely covered with a layer of thick bubbles from the quarter-bottle of lavender-scented bubble bath from Avon.
The bathroom light was off but the room was infused with amber light from the streetlights outside the frosted window. Alone in the house, the only thing she could hear was the wind outside, shaking the branches of the trees and scattering dead and fallen leaves.
She scooped a handful of bubbles and massaged them into her short, smoke-scented hair and scalp and felt the onset of immense inner peace.
Looking at the surface of the bubbles, she squeezed the muscles of her feet, her toes, her calves, her thighs, her buttocks and made a mental picture of a mermaid, floating on a warm green sea, the scales on her tail glittering in the overhead sun and the perfect sky, her mane of human hair shimmering in the water as it reached down to where her tail met her human half.
The mermaid turned in the water, her breasts small and firm, nipples the colour of coral, waist tight and arms long and slender.
She hung on to the picture, and was excited by the sensual details that she imagined.
She couldn’t see in the half-light, but on the surface of her bubble bath, a red cast had risen from her skin and coated the soapy bubbles like scum on a pond.
‘I wish I was a mermaid,’ she said to the shadows who absorbed her wish and sealed it with their silence. ‘Half-woman, half-fish. She’s just like me,’ she confided to the darkness. ‘Neither one thing nor another, yet both fish and woman.’
She opened her eyes to gaze into the amber-infused darkness. ‘Just like you, half-light around me, neither darkness nor light, yet both darkness and light. Neither one thing nor another, like me, just like me.’
She sank beneath the bubbles and fully submerged, imagined herself transformed into a mermaid by the power of wishful thinking and, in her mind, she was deep beneath the warm current, looking up through green ripples at the silhouette of the mermaid of her dreams as her dark tail swished and her arms, hands and fingers danced gracefully and her hair fanned out under the tender caress of her lover, the sea.
Neither one thing nor another, she thought, like me, just like me.
9
8.18 pm
‘Barney says he’s only just scratched the surface on this one but Steven Jamieson served five years of a nine-year sentence in Strangeways for abusing an eight-year-old girl. In prison, he turned to Jesus and made all the right noises, attended all the courses. It was the tip of the iceberg but South Yorkshire Police couldn’t make anything stick apart from the one girl. Jamieson had serious money and connections. People were either bought off or intimidated into silence. He didn’t move back to Sheffield. He came to Merseyside when he was released from nick, where he had no connections whatsoever, so he could hide anonymously. He registered as a sex offender at Belle Vale and hasn’t been the subject of any police investigation since then.’
At her sides, Clay’s hands turned into fists. She unclenched her hands and stuck them in her coat pockets. ‘Anything else, Bill?’
‘Barney’s been in touch with DCI Lesley Reid, the Senior Investigating Officer who put Jamieson away.’ Hendricks turned to Mason. ‘Terry, you’re going to have to empty the contents of Jamieson’s mouth.’
‘What’s in it?’ said Mason.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t touch his face. But there’s something in there.’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, no,’ said Clay. She recalled the advice of the pathologist to who she had delivered David Wilson’s remains, if there was a next time. ‘Dr Mary Lamb wanted the body delivered to the mortuary as it was discovered at the scene. We need Doc Lamb’s Anatomical Pathology Technicians down here with a body bag as soon as possible. We’ll leave it to them to bag him.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Mason.
‘After you’ve gathered all the forensic evidence you can I want you to order a furniture van. I want the house stripped bare. I want the floorboards up.’
She left the room and headed downstairs towards the front door. She needed to call her husband Thomas with a request but had no intention of making a call home from inside that building.
10
8.29 pm
DS Gina Riley stood on the pavement of the ambulance loading bay, clutching her coat at the throat and shivering as a cold wind blew in from the River Mersey. Only one ambulance had arrived in the five minutes that she had been there, and a check with reception confirmed that Frances Jamieson was still on her way.
Slowing down from forty miles per hour, an ambulance turned the corner and headed to the front entrance, its siren off but its blue light flashing. The paramedic driving pulled up so that the rear of the vehicle was close to the entrance to A & E.
As the paramedic jumped from the driver’s door and ran towards the back of the ambulance, Riley became aware of voices and people coming towards her from the hospital.
The driver opened the back door and a pair of doctors and three nurses streamed past Riley.
Riley moved forward and looked at the blonde paramedic who had been riding in the back with Frances Jamieson as she checked the time on her watch.
‘She passed out in the back of the ambulance,’ said the paramedic. ‘At the junction of Mather and Booker Avenue.’
‘Is she still breathing?’ asked a young doctor.
‘Yes,’ replied the paramedic.
‘Excuse me,’ said Riley. The doctors, nurses and paramedics all turned to her and she guessed from the looks on their faces that they had her down as a voyeuristic ghoul.
She showed her warrant card to the doctor nearest to her and then spoke to the paramedic. ‘Is she critical?’
‘She’s not going to die, if that’s what you mean!’
‘When she comes round and you’re done with her, I need to speak with her.’ Riley looked at the paramedic. ‘In the meantime, can we talk?’
The paramedic nodded and said, ‘Sure.’
Riley addressed the nurses, making eye contact with all as she spoke. ‘I’m going to need a private room to speak with your colleague. Can you please fix that for me as soon as possible?’
‘Follow me,’ said the oldest nurse of the three.
The paramedic manoeuvred Frances Jamieson on a wheeled stretcher on to the pavement and Riley said, ‘Just a moment.’
Riley looked at Frances Jamieson’s face, the wind blowing her short dark hair. She turned her lidless eyes to the sky and looked stunned by the stars.
‘Finished?’ asked the male paramedic.
‘Thank you,’ replied Riley.
A sudden strong wind whipped in singing and laughter from a distance.
‘Come with me,’ said the nurse. ‘I’ll take you to the family room.’
11
8.35 pm
In the family room in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, Riley faced the brown-haired female paramedic who had been with Frances Jamieson in the ambulance, and pressed record on her iPhone.
‘Did you speak to her...’ Riley took in the woman’s ID badge. ‘...Cara?’
‘I asked her if she wanted pain relief. I was setting up a spray to keep her eyes moist and I explained to her that her eyelids could be rebuilt and would grow back from a small graft taken from the roof of her mouth – reassuring her, like.’
‘Did she say anything to that?’ asked Riley.
The paramedic shook her head. ‘I set up the spray and called to Kevin, my colleague, to drive away. She was lying on the wheeled stretcher at this point, looking away from me. I put two and two together. I realised she was either a paedophile herself or was married to one, and tolerated all that nastiness. As we turned right to get into the lane leading towards town, I asked her who’d done this. She made this noise, like an animal caught in a metal trap, and she said, It! Kind of horrified, like.’
‘She definitely said, It?’
‘Definitely. Absolutely. It.’
The paramedic drew a deep breath.
‘OK, take a minute. What happened after that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you sure that’s everything?’
‘That’s everything.’
Riley pressed stop and said, ‘Thanks for that, Cara. If you think of anything else, anything you’ve missed, here’s my card. I’m based at Trinity Road. I’d be very grateful if you can keep everything you’ve seen tonight to yourself. Don’t even tell your nearest and dearest.’
‘Definitely, Brownie’s honour. I wouldn’t want to infect anyone with what I’ve seen and heard tonight.’ The paramedic shuddered. ‘What she was watching on TV... Sick...’ She shut her eyes and, Riley guessed, was trying to block out the memory.
When the paramedic opened her eyes, she asked, ‘Is Justin Truman involved, like everyone’s saying he was involved in that paedo getting topped in Aigburth last week?’
‘It’s an ongoing murder investigation,’ explained Riley. ‘I’m not at liberty to reveal any details, or to speculate openly about the identity of the perpetrator.’
‘Oh, OK...’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Cara.’
‘It’s not that. I understand the need for confidentiality. It’s just I’ve got a six-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy. That’s how old the girl was in the DVD she was watching. It got me. And yeah, I am disappointed it’s not him personally. Send every paedophile in Liverpool running for the hills and keep all our kids safe.’
Riley held the door open and allowed the paramedic out. She followed her down the corridor, spoke to her back.
‘It? That was all she said?’ asked Riley, wondering if the paramedic knew more and was holding back information.
‘That was all. It.’
*
Riley called Clay and when they connected, Clay asked, ‘Have you caught up with Frances Jamieson, Gina?’
‘I’m sorry, Eve. She was passed out in the ambulance en route and they’re working on her right now in A & E.’
Clay swallowed the expletive that sprang to her lips. ‘Did the doctors give you any idea of when she’ll be able to talk to us?’
‘We haven’t assessed her yet, they said. We couldn’t possibly estimate. Wouldn’t even give me a ball park.’
‘Did she say anything in the back of the ambulance?’
‘She said, It. When the paramedic asked who’d done this to her. Want me to stick around here?’
‘I’ll send Maggie Bruce over. When Frances Jamieson comes round she can talk to Big Maggie.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Get back here – 699 Mather Avenue – and see if you can work out who the Jamiesons’ associates are. Let’s see who they know and who knows them. We’ll start in Liverpool and work out. The killer could be known to them.’
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of inconclusive news, Eve.’
‘I guess it could be worse,’ said Clay. ‘I could be a Catholic.’
12
8.35 pm
In the car park facing Myrtle Chapel, DS Karl Stone looked in the direction that the funeral cars had taken as they left the crematorium and its darkened grounds, and wished in that moment that he was one of the undertakers.
Instead, he was in the passenger seat of Sandra Wilson’s car, in the middle of a stand-off between mother and daughter. Samantha stood in front of the vehicle staring in accusation at her mother who sat motionless, in the driver’s seat. And Stone felt like one corner of a septic triangle.
The silence inside the car was deep and the five minutes it had lasted felt like five hours.
‘Look at me!’ said Samantha. Mrs Wilson continued staring down at the steering wheel. ‘Or have you opted for deafness as well as selective blindness?’ Arms tightly folded across her chest, Samantha repeated, ‘Look at me!’ The pain in her face made Stone want to reach through the windscreen, to touch her, to reassure her. Compassion softened his bones and flooded his whole being.
Silence followed, and then Sandra Wilson spoke, but in a voice so small and lost that Stone had no idea what she had said.
‘Can you repeat that, please, Sandra?’ asked Stone.
‘I... I didn’t know...’ she s
obbed and her head sank down on to the steering wheel. ‘I swear to God I didn’t know what was going on.’
Right under your nose, thought Stone, staring ahead at Samantha.
‘I’ve said I was sorry, over and over again, but she won’t accept it.’
Mrs Wilson lifted her head now and looked at Stone. ‘What do you think, Detective Sergeant Stone? Why won’t she forgive me?’
Stone was astonished by the self-pitying tone in her voice and told himself to disguise his incredulity when he replied. ‘I’ve spoken at length with Sammy over the past week and a half. She told you what her father, your husband, did to her.’ He waited and saw And? behind the tears in Mrs Wilson’s eyes. ‘You didn’t believe her. Stone wall. Not even a crumb of doubt. How come?’
‘She was always at odds with her father from being knee-high. She never got on with him and she was always telling lies about all kinds of things. She got in trouble in school for lying. He had to go up to the school because of her lies.’
‘What kind of lies, Mrs Wilson?’
Stone looked at Samantha and the total compassion he just felt gave way to hopelessness. There was nothing he could do or say to repair the damage done to her and he chided himself for thinking he could make a difference even if it was only for a few moments.
‘That she was signed up for a deal with CBS Records...’
‘How old was she when she said this?’
‘Twelve. Thirteen maybe...’
‘Given her age that’s hardly lying, Mrs Wilson. It’s fantasising out loud.’ And hiding from the stark horror of her home life, thought Stone.
‘She told terrible lies about her father in school. That he took photographs of the children in the school playground opposite our home with a telescopic lens. That’s when he first had to go up to her school, to clear his name. Do you think he’d do such a thing?’
We found those pictures on his laptop, thought Stone, along with a whole load of other things.
‘Then she told a teacher in school... her father... was crawling into her bed at night and... forcing her to do all manner of... disgusting things.’