Day of the Dead: A gripping serial killer thriller (Eve Clay)

by Mark Roberts

  ‘I want to know about Rufus.’

  She looked at the fun and games and made out Jimmy Peace, the nicest but the toughest boy in the home, motionless in the middle of it all, watching her, and she wished he’d stop standing and come running over.

  With her free hand, Eve waved to him and, for the first time in the years she had known him, he turned away. Christopher’s eyes twitched towards the bustling crowd. She looked in the direction Christopher was exploring and saw nothing but children playing.

  ‘Rufus?’ she urged him, unaware she had just dropped the melting ice-cream cone into the grass.

  ‘The last but one door I locked was the back door, the kitchen door leading out into the garden – but guess what, Eve, guess what?’

  The door in Eve’s memory slowly started closing and the pictures in her head started fading yet the words but guess what, Eve, guess what? played out, over and over, as though there was a needle inside her stuck in scratched vinyl.

  But guess what, Eve, guess what? But guess what, Eve, guess what? But guess what, Eve, guess what? echoed over music from that day: the music of the ice-cream van, the melody of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’.

  ‘Guess what I heard, Eve, when I was locking the door? Guess what I heard, Eve, coming from the bushes at the bottom of the garden?’

  Mechanically, Clay got back into her car and began driving at speed down the deserted southbound carriageway of Edge Lane.

  As the door of her memory slammed shut, she accelerated to eighty miles per hour and when the slamming door echoed, she heard herself say one word.

  ‘Rufus?’

  27

  11.33 pm

  Cole looked at the image on his laptop of Justin Truman in the Day of the Dead procession, and felt the twinkling of a connection with a man who he furtively admired.

  He settled at his desk to email Sergeant Eduardo García of the Puebla City Police.

  Dear Eduardo,

  Please find attached a photograph that has just come to our attention. We firmly believe it is a picture of Justin Truman aka Vindici, a fugitive from the law in the UK. I would be grateful if you could circulate it to your colleagues locally and nationally with a view to looking out for Justin Truman and bringing him in to custody. Also, would it be possible to identify the location where this picture was taken? Thank you for your help and cooperation.

  Yours sincerely

  Detective Constable Barney Cole

  Merseyside Police Constabulary

  Cole copied in Clay, Stone, Hendricks and Riley and fired off the email. Then he picked up the receiver of his landline phone and called Clay. ‘Where are you, Eve?’

  ‘I’ve just turned off Edge Lane and I’m on Queens Drive heading for Mather Avenue.’

  ‘You want to hear Justin Truman’s back story?’

  ‘Most certainly. Thank you, Barney.’

  ‘It’s dull but patchy, an unremarkable childhood and adolescence in Tamworth, growing up with a doting mum with mobility problems and visual impairment, not blind exactly but she wouldn’t get a driver’s licence.’

  ‘He was a child carer then?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Yes, in an era when child carers truly were an invisible army.’

  The word invisible resonated in Clay’s head as she pulled up at the traffic lights at the junction of Queens Drive and Thingwall Road.

  ‘Then there’s a great big grey patch in his late teens. He went to London aged nineteen and more or less vanished from the face of the earth. Came back to Tamworth and his dying mother aged twenty-one. Vanishes off the face of the earth again and crops up seventeen years later as a serial killer using a Day of the Dead timetable and fully blown symbolic system.’

  ‘I’ve got a big why,’ said Clay. ‘Any fresh daylight on why the Day of the Dead festival is so important to him?’

  ‘The only person who could tell you that is Vindici himself. He really dished up information in interview and at trial but he clammed up on that one.’

  She massaged her disappointment with a little mental maths. ‘So that gives our girl about a fortnight to top other paedos.’

  ‘Basically, yeah.’

  ‘She’s going to go out again, Barney.’

  ‘For sure.’

  In her mind, Clay saw Vindici’s eyes in the Met’s mugshot and the picture of him in the Day of the Dead procession, and understood how a woman could fall hopelessly in love with an iconic stranger, so much in love that she would kill for the object of her flawed passion.

  ‘For sure, Barney. For sure she will.’

  28

  11.53 pm

  As Clay stepped out of her car at 699 Mather Avenue, she saw Detective Sergeant Terry Mason carrying a large plastic stacker box to a white transit van parked in front of the furniture removal lorry she had ordered. Behind him, his assistant Sergeant Paul Parker wheeled a metal filing cabinet on a trolley.

  Steven Jamieson’s Citreon was loaded on to a Merseyside Constabulary car-carrier trailer.

  ‘We’re almost done now,’ said Mason to a group of five non-uniformed officers standing near the gate of the house. He hung on to the stacker box as if it was a small child. ‘Eve wants the house stripped and the floorboards up. If you come up with anything, anything that stands out, call me back immediately!’

  Dressed in protective white suits, the quintet of officers walked in silence against the cold wind that blew down Mather Avenue.

  Parker pushed the filing cabinet up a ramp on to the Scientific Support transit van, as Detective Sergeant Gina Riley came towards Clay clutching a book.

  ‘How’s it going, Gina?’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ said Riley. ‘I’ve worked through his address book and I’ve looked at some documents from his filing cabinets related to his business. According to what I’ve seen, there are no personal links to anyone on Merseyside. His address book’s full of details of contractors, a lawyer called Daniel Campbell and estate agents in Sheffield and the South Yorkshire area. As soon as he got in the shit with our brothers and sisters across the Pennines, he transferred all his assets into his wife’s name, closed his company down and reopened it trading under a new name. His wife took over the reins while he was inside and as soon as he got out and moved here, he took it back over and ran the business in Yorkshire from Merseyside.’

  ‘Good work, Gina. Did you speak to anyone?’

  The wind whipped the trees on the central embankment and it sounded like the sky was shushing the earth into silence.

  ‘His solicitor, Daniel Campbell.’ Riley paused and laughed.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I got him on his home landline. He tried to deny all knowledge at first, dismissed me as a crank caller, threatened me with the police. I said, Cut out the middleman, I’ll have a word with me. I gave him two minutes to drop the bullshit and call me back. Which he did. He pretty much confirmed everything I’d worked out. Gave me a nice little lecture on the law being impartial and fair to all.’

  Sweating in spite of the bitter cold, Mason and Parker came to Eve’s side and waited for her, their breath heavy and white on the night air.

  ‘What do you want me to do now?’ asked Riley.

  ‘Hand over all Steven Jamieson’s contact details to South Yorkshire Police and get your head round the task of organising the uniformed officers for their joyous day ahead, warning child sex offenders on Merseyside to watch their backs. Anything comes up from their dealings with the paedos, you’re the first point of contact.’

  Clay turned to Mason.

  ‘Go on, Terry. Show me what you’ve got on the transit.’

  Clay and Riley followed Mason and Parker. Mason opened the back doors and Parker shone bright torchlight inside the vehicle.

  ‘The brass bed and mattress that Jamieson died on. We didn’t get single print from it.’

  Parker illuminated the details.

  ‘That’s no surprise, Terry,’ said Clay, thinking back to Vindici’s heyday. ‘She’ll have been wear
ing white gloves. Justin Truman always did.’

  ‘We’ve got the chair his wife was tied to, the TV set, DVD player and Sky box. We cut out a bloody section of carpet from the hall and the bottom of the stairs – that’s in the bubble wrap. The killer must’ve battered the shit out of him as soon as she was over the threshold.’

  ‘She’s a hard-knock, for sure,’ said Parker.

  ‘That’s right, Paul,’ said Clay. ‘Dr Lamb said she used her fists on Jamieson’s head, not a blunt instrument. An up-close-and-personal revenge killing.’

  Parker’s torch lit up the filing cabinets.

  ‘What’s in them?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Initially, it looks totally related to his property business in South Yorkshire,’ said Riley.

  ‘We’ll fine-tooth-comb through the filing cabinets once we’ve fired off the other evidence to the relevant people.’ Mason tapped the list out as he spoke, right index finger on left-hand palm. ‘We’ve got both sets of clothes they were wearing when their unannounced visitor called and the bags you gave us, including the one with a blond hair on the ropes, they’re at the lab already.’

  Clay heard two sets of footsteps and recognised them as Hendricks and Stone approaching.

  ‘When the guys have emptied the house,’ said Mason, ‘we’re coming back to strip out all the carpets. You can’t see it because all their other belongings are in the way but we’ve got their marital bed, bedding and mattress at the front of the space.’

  As Hendricks and Stone flanked Clay, Mason glanced at the small stacker box in his hands.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Clay.

  ‘The goose that laid the golden egg, I think,’ said Mason. ‘When we were picking up the mattress, I felt something heavy and solid inside the fabric. OK, we know the killer’s pulled the laptop from his study but she didn’t hang around long enough to go truly rooting. I found a cut-out in a section of mattress on his side of the bed, thirty-six centimetres long by three centimetres high. I stuck my hand inside and guess what he’s been sleeping on?’

  He lifted the lid of the stacker and Clay felt a smile light up her entire face.

  ‘His really special laptop,’ said Hendricks.

  Clay looked at the black Lenovo laptop, the cable, plug and transformer, and saw an infinity of opportunities for the darkest truth.

  ‘It’s locked, but fully operational,’ said Mason.

  ‘Well done, Terry. Take it to Trinity Road right now. Get Poppy Waters to crack it open.’

  Parker closed the back doors of the transit van.

  ‘We’ll have one last walk through the house, Paul,’ said Mason to his assistant. ‘Double-double-check everywhere.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Riley as she followed Mason and Parker back to 699 Mather Avenue.

  Clay looked at Hendricks and Stone, read the question on their minds and answered it.

  ‘I’d like you to pool all the information we have, comparing and contrasting the Wilson and Jamieson murders, compose an email, let me check it out and edit it, and then we’ll copy the whole team in with the message Read, read, read. Team meeting, seven am, incident room, Trinity Street. But I want everyone there for six forty-five.’

  Clay turned at the sound of the door of 697 Mather Avenue opening and saw a bewildered-looking man in the doorway.

  ‘Is it true, what they’re saying about him on the radio?’ he asked. ‘But he looked so normal. And he lived so close. Next door. My God.’

  ‘I’m sorry this has distressed you,’ said Clay, wishing for arrival of the arrival of daylight. ‘Did you hear or see anything?’

  He thought about it.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  Part 2

  The Souls of Returning Children

  Day Two

  Thursday,

  24th October 2019

  29

  3.15 am

  Pale moonlight poured into the darkened room though a skylight directly above her head and she felt connected to every distant piece of the universe. Lying on the floor, she interlocked her fingers, placed her hands on the wall of muscle at her core and felt a throb of pleasure at the physical memory of squeezing Steven Jamieson’s throat until his eyes bulged.

  In the ethereal light, a picture of Vindici formed in the air, an imaginary hologram projected from her mind. Vindici, eyes smiling not at just anything, but directly at her. Justin Truman, photographed by the police, freshly arrested for murdering ten so-called men. Vindici Justin Truman looking calm, happy and satisfied with himself for a series of jobs well done.

  Vindici Justin Truman, being neither one thing nor the other, like me, just like me...

  The projection of Vindici’s face descended towards her; his eyes, shining with loving kindness, locked on hers and, although his lips were sealed, she heard his voice falling from the stars.

  Neither one thing nor the other, like us, just like us...

  And his features dissolved into another face.

  How different he looked now from the picture the Metropolitan Police took of him on the day he was arrested. His eyes hovered inches above hers and, as she drew in the sweetness of his breath through her nostrils, desire rose up inside her like a trapped moth beating its feathery wings within the walls of her iron pelvis, sending wave after warm wave to the space between her legs.

  Vindici Justin Truman tilted his head, placed his lips close to her ear and she felt the soft curve of his lips on her earlobe as he whispered something hot and inviting.

  ‘Come with me to the carnival. Come with me to the Day of the Dead, when we welcome back the spirits of dear departed loved ones.’

  The picture of him flashed through her, caught the corner of her soul and came alive. He smiled at her and he turned back to follow the human skeletons, and the white sleeve of his arm descended on her shoulders as she processed with him through the heat-baked and noisy street. The moving pictures faded and she sighed as he slowly pulled away from her ear and his face drifted over hers.

  His lips settled against hers and she drank in his breath, and with his breath she absorbed his essence, his goodness and strength, his thirst for natural justice and the sheer weight of his righteous anger, and she was transformed from female to male, from male to female and two became one and one was neither one thing nor the other.

  ‘Like us, just like us,’ she whispered as his face faded and re-formed as their face, his and hers, yet not his or hers.

  Within the mind, a picture formed of a small girl on a hot day, walking alone and calling, ‘Rufus?’ It was a story someone had published on a Vindici website. Hovering above, the mind’s eye saw someone was following the girl, someone very, very bad. But the bad someone was followed by the infinitely good someone.

  She had gone on to read everything she could find about Eve Clay on the internet.

  And with each step the little girl took, she aged a year and by the time she reached the corner of the street where she lived, she was a fully grown woman. The fully grown woman spoke.

  ‘My name is Eve Clay,’ said the woman charged with hunting her down. ‘And I too am neither one thing nor another. Part woman. Part demon.’

  The mind’s picture erupted and a devastating firestorm wiped everything away and the marrow in her bones changed to the marrow in their bones.

  Eyes open. Look up.

  Through the skylight, nuclear fires exploded on a distant star against the abominable frozen wastes of space.

  30

  4.30 am

  Entering the empty incident room at half past four, Clay turned on the lights and thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Her whole attention was captured by an explosion of colour on her desk where a huge bouquet of vivid red dahlias in a plastic bowl of water stood out against the bland greys and browns of the work space.

  Sitting at her desk, she looked at the flowers and her mind turned to her husband Thomas. She looked at the time and decided that she wouldn’t wake him, that she would thank him la
ter in the morning when she went home to see him and their son Philip before he went to nursery.

  ‘How can that be?’ she asked herself, thinking back to her last movements in Trinity Road police station, and thinking, too, But Thomas always gives me red roses.

  Clay picked up the bouquet and trying to drink in the aroma, found there was no discernible smell as she looked inside the flowers for a card. She dug her fingers into the stems and pulled out a small white envelope.

  Evette Clay, dahlias, she read the writing on the envelope. Sweets for the sweet.

  She tore the envelope open and pulled out a white card bearing the same disguised block-capital handwriting as on the envelope.

  ‘Jesus...’ The word rose from her like a blessing dressed up as a curse. ‘Come and find me and all this will stop. Or shall I find you first?’ She read the words aloud and then silently, over and over, hearing Vindici’s voice from the phone call and wishing he’d call again.

  She picked up her landline receiver and connected to the custody sergeant on the front desk.

  ‘Sergeant Penny Canter, how can I help?’

  ‘Penny, it’s Eve Clay.’

  ‘Eve Clay as in you’ve either got a very attentive husband or a secret admirer?’

  ‘When did the flowers show up?’

  ‘Within the last half hour, I reckon. They were left at the front door.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Penny. Have a flick through the CCTV and see if you can get a picture of the person dropping them off.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll do that right now.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever known flowers being left an-onymously at the door of the station. Nobody saw anything?’

  ‘Not that I know of, Eve.’

  ‘OK. I’d be grateful if you could get on the CCTV. Thanks.’