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

by Mark Roberts

  She replaced the receiver, called up Google on her iPhone – Dahlias facts – and clicked on a link: Ten things you (possibly) didn’t know about dahlias.

  Next to a picture of a yellow star-like dahlia, innocent words danced from the page, gripped her scalp and made her look at the writing on the envelope and card.

  Evette Clay.

  She thought of her file in the cabinet in Mrs Tripp’s office, her name in felt-tipped block capital letters.

  Sweets for the sweet.

  Long-forgotten childhood phantoms spun in the dark side of her brain.

  ‘Come and find me and all this will stop. Or shall I find you first?’ The menacing words, spoken to her so tenderly on the telephone, filled her with massive unease.

  Why? Why dahlias?

  She looked at the results of the Google search on her iPhone and replied to herself: That’s why!

  In silence she read the words: Dahlias, the national flower of Mexico, were first discovered by Europeans when the Spanish invaders found them growing wild on the hillsides of Oaxaca.

  Clay ripped the sleeve in which the dahlias were packed and separated the flowers out, looking for anything that might have been accidentally or purposefully left within the gift. And found nothing.

  Damp silence.

  31

  6.30 am

  Eve Clay stood in the bay window of her bedroom in Mersey Road looking into the dull light of a new day and listening to the caw of seagulls circling the river at the bottom of her road.

  She heard the front door of her house close and frowned when she saw her son Philip walk down the path and on to the pavement outside her home.

  The noise of the seagulls was sucked into the water beneath their wings and, in the new-found silence, she heard a speck of advancing sound at the edge of her senses.

  Wheels turning and the bray of a horse.

  She banged on the window with the heel of her hand but there was no sound other than the wheels coming closer and the beat of a horse’s heart beneath its heavy breath.

  ‘Philip!’

  Her mouth moved as she cried at the top of her voice, but all that came out was breath, and as it hit the window, her entire being was sucked into the glass, her being flattened and stretched within the thin, flat pane.

  The cars parked outside her house dissolved as Philip stepped from the pavement into the middle of the road, his body and head transformed into a skeleton costume.

  At the top of Mersey Road, a horse and cart turned the corner with a thin man in dark clothes and top hat holding the reins.

  Philip stooped and picked up a red cat that Clay immediately recognised from her childhood. Rufus.

  ‘Philip! Get back inside the house!’

  Her voice echoed back inside the narrow expanse of glass as the horse drew the cart and driver down the road towards Philip.

  In the empty cage at the driver’s back, she heard the sobbing and wailing of every abducted child kept prisoner behind its black bars.

  ‘Now! Now, Philip! Now!’

  The horse stopped and the driver stepped off the cart, a bag of sweets in his hand. He offered the bag of sweets to Philip as he approached him. Philip looked up at the bedroom window and said, ‘Goodbye!’

  In the glass, Clay howled as Philip dipped his hand in the bag and pulled out a bolt of lightning that drenched the scene in an overwhelming haze of white light.

  When the explosion of light faded away, everything had vanished except for a combination of sounds.

  Wheels turning as the cart raced away. A horse whinnying beneath the crack of a savage whip. And Philip sobbing and crying, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’

  *

  Eve Clay sat up straight at her desk in the incident room in Trinity Road police station, tears in her eyes and her heart racing.

  She looked at the clock, saw that she had slept for two hours and that exhaustion had hijacked her plan to go and sleep at home. She cursed the fact that she’d been beaten by fatigue.

  As she looked around the empty room, relief swamped her, yet an ever-present anxiety came with it.

  It had only been a dream, a bad, bad dream.

  But what if?

  What if?

  32

  6.45 am

  Clay looked around the incident room and saw that everyone who’d been instructed to attend had arrived earlier than first planned. The atmosphere was tense and she tapped the bottom of her empty cup against her desk, bringing the room to silence.

  ‘We’ll begin the main meeting at seven, but I want to give you food for thought, and a major talking point amongst yourselves. I think we’ve got a massive internal problem.’

  She made sure she made direct eye contact with every man and woman in the room before she carried on. No one was excluded from what was coming next.

  ‘We’ve got a canary in our midst. It might be someone in this room. It might be someone from further afield who’s working to support us in this investigation and who has access to sensitive and secret information. It might be – and I hope this is the case – it might be someone not connected to us but in the Constabulary and with that same access.’

  She read the faces in the room and felt a glimmer of hope. No one looked twitchy; everyone met her eye. The glimmer died when she reminded herself that they were the most poker-faced group of detectives she had ever worked with.

  ‘Before she died, Frances Jamieson informed the medics treating her in A & E that the killer in her home was female. It’s a woman! Just one woman! These were her dying words.

  ‘Last night, at the highly secret cremation of David Wilson, my iPhone went off and I received a message from the killer via the switchboard informing me that she’s just killed Steven Jamieson, tortured his wife and there you go, Eve, here’s the address, 699 Mather Avenue. Not only did she know where to find Jamieson, she knew the time and date of Wilson’s cremation, and she timed the Jamieson murder to coincide with that cremation.’

  Red-eyed and looking like a man picked on by the gods, Detective Constable Bob Rimmer half raised a hand. ‘It could’ve been one of the undertakers,’ he said.

  ‘For now we can’t rule anything out,’ said Clay. ‘But the pall-bearers knew nothing until the last minute. The only guy who knew they were officiating at David Wilson’s cremation was the head honcho.’

  ‘I guess a piece of me would like that to be the case,’ said Rimmer.

  ‘I don’t like what I’m going to say now, but I’ve got to say it,’ asserted Clay. ‘I want you to watch each other carefully. And I want you to watch me. And I want you to watch any people ancillary to this investigation. If you see, hear or experience anything strange but with some definite substance, I want to know straight away. No information too big, no information too small. If you feel conflicted and you protect anyone who’s passing out our secrets, you’ll be following them out of the front door never to return. It’s as simple as it’s serious. Any questions?’

  The room remained silent and the tension had become solemn.

  ‘I’m sorry to get the day off to such a negative start, but I had no choice,’ said Clay. ‘OK, discuss amongst yourselves.’

  She turned her back on the room and, against a rising babble of restrained voices, looked at the picture of Justin-Truman-in-the-sun, blond, tanned and happy at a joyous festival in a Mexican city.

  Are you going to call me back, sometime, Justin? she thought. I’d love to chat with you. Have a catch-up. Maybe you could give me a name. Like the name of your greatest fan who’s carrying on your work right under my nose.

  ‘Who are the flowers from?’ Riley came up beside Clay.

  ‘It’s either Vindici himself or she who is currently hunting in his footsteps. Take a look at this.’ Clay pointed at the digits in the top left hand corner of the screen and the image beneath them.

  ‘CCTV 24.10.19 04.05 am. The front door of Trinity Road police station and not a sign of life. Then all of a sudden...’ said Clay.

&
nbsp; On screen, the images unfolded. A young man in a grey tracksuit, hood over his head, sprinted around the corner, threw the flowers at the door, turned and sprinted the way he had just come and out of the CCTV’s eye.

  ‘He’s the errand boy,’ said Riley.

  ‘But who’s he running the errand for?’ asked Clay. ‘If it’s not Justin Truman then the flowers will have come from the Wilson and Jamieson killer. If we find him, we find her.’

  33

  6.45 am

  She crossed Menlove Avenue at the lights outside the Derby Arms, clutching the plain black holdall in which she’d gathered her things and ignoring the marked police car that sailed past her in the direction of Hunts Cross.

  As she walked to the lock-up garage overlooked by Dovercroft, a fourteen-storey residential tower block, she lowered her eyes to the ground, looking at the unremarkable tops of her cheap mass-produced training shoes, the bottoms of her charity-shop-sourced black jeans and the black padded anorak she’d found abandoned outside an over-full clothes bank in a supermarket car park, and smiled.

  No one, she thought, would look at you and guess. Just another badly dressed anonymous female in a world overfull of lonely women. The world sees you as this when you are another.

  She reached the double garage and, opening the lock, stooped to raise the door. The door was visible at street level from Menlove Avenue and overhead by dozens of windows on the tower block. A single-decker 76 bus sailed past. She looked and saw the only person on the bus was the driver, so she raised the door just enough to duck under it.

  Inside her lock-up garage, she pulled the door down to within two centimetres of the ground and, taking a torch from the bag, lit up the darkened space.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, her voice dead against the flat walls and ceiling.

  The fridge in the corner whirred, greeting her back.

  She took in the space as she walked to the far wall. A pair of female mannequins side by side. Two clothes rails near an open bag of fertiliser and deconstructed clocks. A bicycle propped against a wall. Unzipping her bag, she imagined the scene in the back bedroom at 699 Mather Avenue and, smiling, wished she could have hung around long enough to watch the Human Abomination being placed in a body bag by the mortuary technicians, wished she could have seen the look on the Slut Wife’s lidless face when she was forced to identify the shit that was his corpse.

  Placing the lantern at the feet of the mannequins, she felt that the place was transformed from an almost bare space into a shrine.

  The two mannequins were life-sized. One was naked and one was dressed.

  The dressed mannequin wore two items, a red duffel coat with the hood up and, beneath the hood, a blond wig. She looked them up and down, at their slender feminine legs and elegantly shaped bare feet. To her, their faces, with their inscrutable eyes and thin but perfectly sculpted red lips and delicate noses, were perfectly beautiful.

  Putting down the black holdall and removing the blue woollen gloves from her hands, she placed the side of her face against the cheek of the naked mannequin and exhaled, watching the vapour rise as if she was breathing out, as if she had come to life.

  She turned to the dressed mannequin and slipped her hand through the gap at the front of the duffel coat and cupped her hand around the hardness of the breasts. She slid her other hand up the coat and felt the cold closed plastic nothingness between her legs.

  ‘I have a present for your naked sister. It is also a present for you.’

  She steeled herself. There was work to do and time was finite.

  She looked at the school uniforms hanging on the clothes rail, the grey cardigans, the white shirts and grey skirts. On the tray at the base of the clothes rail were neatly folded knickers and vests, white socks and polished black shoes. Beneath the shelf at the bottom of the second rail, she saw the tips of sharpened bicycle spokes against the cold grey floor.

  Reaching into the holdall, she took out the present she had brought for them. She turned the mannequin in the coat to her undressed sister and opened the toggles.

  Raising the present up through the first mannequin’s legs and thighs, a shiver of pleasure ran through her. She lifted the straps and tied the buckle at the base of the mannequin’s back. Her hand ran across the shaft of the hand-carved wooden phallus, attached to the leather harness, and she positioned the head between the legs of the other bald, naked mannequin.

  The motor of the fridge revved, inviting her to the corner. She reached into the bag and took out a glass jar of pink-tinged white vinegar. In the jar floated Steven Jamieson’s penis and testicles. She deposited the jar on the top shelf just as she had done with the jar in which she had preserved David Wilson’s genitalia.

  Returning to the mannequins, she reached down and stroked the smooth wooden phallus and, with her other hand, cupped her fingers between the legs of the female.

  Tenderness consumed her and soon the space was no longer a lock-up garage, her dressing room for bloody and righteous murder. It became a palace of dreams where Vindici and she would consummate their love.

  And she was no longer handling lifeless mannequins, it was he and she. She squeezed down on Vindici’s manhood, felt the texture of her own body. Wood turned to flesh and plastic to the skin of her vagina; he entered her and she yielded to him.

  She heard them speak in the rising passion, heard their hearts beating.

  ‘Neither one thing,’ said Vindici.

  ‘Nor another,’ she replied, yielding to him.

  ‘Like us...’ They spoke with one voice. ‘Just like us.’

  34

  6.54 am

  Clay sat at her desk flicking between two images of Justin Truman on her laptop.

  She looked at the classic mugshot of Truman taken when he was arrested, an image she had seen in the newspapers and on TV in reports of his fluke arrest. Olive-skinned, handsome, his bright brown eyes shone with inner peace and happiness. Clay recalled reading a magazine article about one of the hundreds of lonely women who wrote to him in jail. She understood the deluge of mail, many proposing marriage, and devotion that would last until death and beyond. She focused on the smile that was absent from his lips but saw it stamped in his eyes.

  She loaded up Google and typed in Television news reports on the first day of Vindici/Truman’s trial and then hit Videos.

  Loading up the first clip on YouTube, she saw Metropolitan Police motorcycle outriders ahead of a white prison van speeding towards the Old Bailey and throngs of people held behind a line of uniformed police officers. As the van approached, the crowd applauded and chanted, ‘Vin-di-ci! Vin-di-ci! Vin-di-ci!’ When the vehicle sailed past, people cheered and threw red roses. It was like the return of a hero.

  ‘Strange days.’ Hendricks’s voice came from behind her.

  She closed down Videos and returned to the mugshot of Justin Truman.

  ‘He was loved as much as the police who hunted him were hated,’ said Clay. She clicked on to the picture of Justin-Truman-in-the-sun.

  Truman appeared to be in a procession in Mexico. Dressed in an immaculate white suit and shirt, Truman had changed from the way he looked in the Met’s mugshot, but it was still undeniably him. On either side of him were the backs of men and women dressed as skeletons following a procession heading towards a church.

  ‘He’s turned around,’ said Clay. She took a moment to process the image. ‘Stopped in the flow of the crowd and turned to pose for this photograph. It’s the one he offered me through a third party. But why? Why, after years of nothing, does he make an appearance now?’

  ‘And on a Liverpool-based Vindici website, when his copycat’s active in the city?’ added Hendricks.

  Fuller in the face and tanned, it was his eyes that drew Clay’s attention. He had the same smiling eyes as in the Met’s mugshot and, although he looked older and his thick black hair was now short and platinum blond, there was something about him that made her uneasy, something she couldn’t quite pin down.

&
nbsp; The unease at her core sparked a sensation beneath her scalp, as if an ant was running in random patterns across the surface of her brain. She looked around the room, caught Barney Cole’s eye and beckoned him with a smile. ‘Over here, brainbox.’

  She could hear in her voice how dry her mouth was and threw down half a cup of cold coffee as he made his way to her.

  ‘Less of your sarcasm, Eve. What’s up?’

  She pointed at the picture of Justin Truman, smiling in the sun. ‘Have you heard back from Sergeant Eduardo García about this?’

  ‘He’s circulated the picture locally and nationally, and he’s working on identifying the manufacturer of the Weeping Child statuette. To be honest, I feel sorry for the guy. Huge swathes of Mexico has shut down for a fortnight, like it is round Christmas over here.’ Cole looked at the image on Clay’s laptop. ‘What do you think he’s up to, Eve?’

  ‘He’s making a statement,’ said Clay. ‘Years and years of reported sightings on every single continent but no photographs. Maybe it’s a seal of approval for the copycat. Anything else, Barney?’

  ‘I’ve been digging up information about the Day of the Dead. Want me to share it with the troops?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She looked at her laptop and then at the SmartBoard as Karl Stone called up the picture of Justin-Truman-in-the-sun. Just for a moment, she could see only one detail in his smiling face.

  ‘Gather round, everyone!’ she called across the room.

  That detail was the compassion that radiated from the eyes of a multiple murderer.

  And she was filled with a disturbing sense of déjà vu.

  35

  7.00 am

  ‘Before I hand you over to Barney,’ said Clay at the SmartBoard, ‘have you all seen Hendricks’s and Stone’s email detailing the similarities and differences between the David Wilson murder scene and our girl’s second excursion on Mather Avenue?’

  She looked at every face in turn and saw no doubtful expressions.