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

by Mark Roberts

  ‘Last time I saw an arse that size,’ Stone’s voice was behind them. ‘I was in the elephant enclosure in Chester Zoo.’

  Hendricks’s iPhone rang out and he connected. ‘Hi, Eve, where are you?’

  ‘I’m not far.’

  ‘Do you want me to come and meet you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You safe?’

  ‘I need you to do something for me, Bill. I need to know what’s going on around the Littlewoods Building at the moment?’

  ‘I checked the building out after the bomb didn’t go off. You weren’t there, nor was Hawkins. I came across a classic Vindici altar and Hawkins’s clothes. I went outside and Hawkins was naked on the ground.’

  ‘So the building’s empty?’ asked Clay.

  ‘No...’

  Clay could hear ‘Für Elise’ and knew that Hendricks was taking the call outside the Littlewoods Building.

  ‘I sent Hawkins back inside to get dressed.’

  ‘He’s on his own in there?’

  ‘The only people in the vicinity are me, Karl Stone and Gina Riley. We’re outside. Hawkins is inside the Littlewoods Building.’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Bill. I’ll be back soon...’

  109

  01.06 am

  ‘Turn around, Eve.’

  His voice was rich with a layer of warmth that didn’t come through on the telephone or the taped interviews that the Metropolitan Police had supplied to her, as though technology had eroded an essential piece of him.

  ‘Turn around and look at me, Eve.’

  She turned.

  He took off his bloodstained white gloves and dropped them to the ground. She watched his face, the way he smiled in the moonlight, and noted that he looked genuinely pleased to see her.

  He took his mobile phone from his pocket, looked in the direction of the Littlewoods Building. ‘Anyone in there as we speak?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ replied Clay.

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death. I need to know.’

  Clay weighed it up, pushed back at the rising suspicion inside herself and said, ‘One person. Hawkins. My colleague told him to go inside and get dressed.’

  ‘Definitely no one else in there apart from Hawkins?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  He walked a few steps away from her in the direction of the Littlewoods Building and pressed a digit on his phone’s keypad.

  A slice of wind whistled through the wet grass and, a moment later, there was a boom in the near distance followed by the sound of windows smashing out from the Littlewoods Building.

  He turned, put his phone away in his coat pocket and held out a hand to Eve. ‘It was under the altar, the real bomb. There was no way I was going to put you in danger. It wasn’t a big bomb but it was big enough to finish a job I’ve been meaning to finish for years.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Clay. A call came through on her iPhone and she was back to Hendricks. ‘Bill, what’s happening?’

  She read shock in his silence.

  ‘There’s been some sort of small-scale explosion inside the building. Jesus, my ears are ringing.’

  ‘Do not go in, any of you!’

  ‘No way! Do you know what’s going on, Eve?’

  ‘I’m not sure...’ She closed down the call, saw a ribbon of smoke drift from a broken window in the Littlewoods Building. ‘What do you mean, a job you’ve been meaning to finish for years?’

  110

  1.06 am

  Hendricks, Riley and Stone stood at the boundary between the land around the Littlewoods Building and Botanic Gardens. Above their heads, the air churned as the police helicopter hovered in the sky.

  Hendricks raised an arm and directed the pilot’s attention at the door of the Littlewoods Building through which Hawkins had entered minutes earlier.

  The helicopter’s powerful beam picked up the open door, the wall and the ground around it.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ asked Riley.

  ‘What?’ asked Stone.

  Bang and the sound of breaking glass.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stone.

  In the doorway, the helicopter’s light picked out something small and black moving out of the building.

  ‘A rat?’ asked Stone. ‘Two rats...’

  ‘They’re not rats, Karl,’ said Hendricks. ‘They’re hands.’

  A human arm emerged supported by a hand, and then another, and then a blackened head. The smell of burning flesh accompanied Christopher Hawkins as he dragged himself out of the building and into the bright light.

  Soon, on all fours, black and red from head to foot, his smoking body made it into the fresh air. He fell and rolled on to his back.

  Hendricks stepped towards Hawkins’s body, stooped and looked into his blackened face. Hawkins blinked, opened his eyes, his head flopped to the left and he made a noise like air rattling in a pipe.

  The dim light in his eyes faded and there was silence.

  ‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ said Riley.

  ‘No point, Gina, said Hendricks, looking down at the still, leftover meat of a human life. ‘He’s dead.’

  111

  1.07 am

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Clay.

  He smiled at her through the darkness and the light of her torch.

  ‘You just triggered that explosion?’

  ‘Yes.’ He held up his right hand.

  ‘With Hawkins in the building?’

  ‘With this hand. With this finger. Do you want to hold my hand?’

  Even though there was no menace in his voice and Clay read his words as a simple invitation for human contact, she summoned up every monster she had ever encountered and survived and said, ‘I’m not scared of you, Justin.’

  She dialled Hendricks on her iPhone.

  ‘Jimmy Peace was my best friend. I don’t want you to be scared of me. That’s the last thing I want. He told me all about you. And he was right.’

  He nodded in the direction of the Littlewoods Building.

  Pick up, Bill, she thought, anxiety mounting as the ring tone burned into her ear.

  ‘You had the power of life and death over that man. You chose to spare him. I had the power of life and death over him and I chose to destroy him. You put your life on the line tonight for a man you have every right to despise, a man who would have robbed you of your innocence and may well have warped what you became as a human being. I kidnapped and tortured him, put him through extreme mental anguish by strapping a fake bomb on him. By the way, I’m sorry I put you through that theatre. There was no way I wasn’t going to damage him, kill him if possible, but if I failed in that I wanted at least to make him experience something that would give him nightmares, that would make him wake up screaming every single night for the rest of his miserable existence.’

  She noticed that, in spite of the cold, he had a sheen of sweat on his face. His left hand rested on the left of his abdomen.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ asked Clay.

  Hendricks connected.

  ‘Eve?’ said Hendricks.

  ‘Is everyone safe, Bill?’

  ‘We’re all fine, Eve. Apart from Hawkins. Doctor Lamb isn’t going to have much to work on with his body.’

  ‘Keep away and stay away from the building!’

  Clay closed the call down and stared hard at the man in front of her.

  ‘Can you smell that, Eve? On the wind, burning human flesh?’

  ‘Hawkins is dead, Justin. The others are safe.’

  He glanced in the direction of the Littlewoods Building with a look of quiet satisfaction.

  ‘I’m going to arrest you,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you are. I came to here to be arrested by you, Eve.’

  In the distance, the sound of a train’s horn curled in on the wind as it made its way into Lime Street Station and Clay’s head was filled with the rhythm of its heartbeat and motion.

  I-need-to-buy-time, I-need-to-buy-time,
I-need-to-buy-time...

  ‘You chose one path, Eve. I chose another. I finally found out how you turned out, and I’m happy. You did your best, you did your duty, but don’t feel sorry for him, you can’t.’

  ‘Like yourself, I can’t help the way I feel.’

  ‘How do you feel about your husband and son?’

  ‘I absolutely love them.’

  ‘If Hawkins had managed to attack you, what might that have done to you as a person, a human being? He could have put you in a place where you wouldn’t be the woman you are today, the mother you are to your son, the wife you are to your husband. He wanted to curse you and in cursing you, he would have cursed the people you love in the next generation and beyond. That’s why I spent my life doing what I did. The only safe paedophile is a dead one. Jimmy saved you. I saved hundreds and thousands. My life was a mission and tonight my mission is accomplished. Well?’

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘And I disagree with you. I’m a mother. I applaud your strength of feeling about protecting children.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Not a but, an and.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you put your life and liberty on the line for that principle. But...’

  ‘But?’ he echoed.

  ‘What if everyone was remotely like you? You’ve got millions of admirers around the world and down the years, people who sit around in pubs saying, If only there were few more Vindicis on this earth, what a great place this would be, while doing absolutely nothing about it themselves. But eventually one person did do something. A deeply challenged teenager from Liverpool...’

  ‘Oh, Eve...’

  ‘I’ve listened to you; you listen to me. This kid’s made two hits in a fortnight and one of them wasn’t even a convicted paedophile. Suspected? Yes. Convicted? No. You know something, Justin, you were great at what you did best but just how old were you when you began your murder spree?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘Did you know Lucien Burns had not long turned eighteen?’

  ‘He told me he was twenty-three.’

  ‘Even with that fabrication, you could have told him to hang fire – Wait until you’re as old as me if you want to follow in my path. He might have grown out of it.’

  ‘It felt like the stars, fate, God – whatever you want to call it – were reaching out to me, using him as a bridge to bring me back to...’

  ‘...to me? Me?’

  I-need-to-buy-time, I-need-to-buy-time, I-need-to-buy-time...

  ‘Yes.’

  Clay looked at him, scrutinised the bone structure of his face and felt a pearl of recognition form at the centre of her brain.

  ‘Paedophiles are nasty, sly, manipulative, horrible, despicable, but there isn’t one person in their right mind who would’ve wished that destiny on them on the day they were born,’ said Clay.

  ‘Yes indeed. But I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in protecting the innocent, kid.’

  ‘Kid?’

  He held out his hand to her. ‘I’m not well, kid.’

  ‘What happened to Jimmy Peace?’

  ‘He grew up, moved to London to work – casual labour, building sites, hotels, anything and everything he could get. He made friends with another young drifter called Justin Truman. He told Truman all about that autumn day in 1986. Jimmy wanted you to know that he never forgot about you and that he loved you very much.’

  ‘But if he loved me...’

  ‘He did love you, Eve. Believe me. Catholic Social Services moved him out of Liverpool. He moved around the country, usually every three months or so. Physically, he couldn’t get near you.’

  He stopped walking, looked at her with the rarest tenderness, and she felt the stirrings of a deeply buried and indefinable emotion. She felt the texture of his fingers, the heat of his blood in her hand.

  ‘I’m sick of life, Eve. Do you understand?’

  ‘How long have you got left?’

  I-need-to-buy-time, I-need-to-buy-time, I-need-to-buy-time...

  ‘A year.’ He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and carried on walking. ‘I want to die in peace. I’m sick of looking over my shoulder. I’m tired of hiding.’

  She felt the weight of the past in her coat pocket, a frozen moment in a square of captured light.

  Clay took the Polaroid photograph from her pocket. He shone his torch on the image of her, seven years of age and smiling under the Christmas tree in the dining room of St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children.

  ‘This was on the altar. Where did you get this?’

  ‘Jimmy gave it to me just before he last went to sea. He asked me to take care of you. It was like he knew something terrible was going to happen, that he was going to die. One of the members of staff brought the camera in. It was her Christmas present. She let him take a picture of you. You were amazed at the speed with which the photograph came out of the camera.’

  ‘I remember. It was Maggie Anderson’s camera.’

  The threads of the past came together in her head, tied themselves into neat bows.

  ‘When the police took him away, I looked out of an upstairs window and saw his face framed in the back window of a police car.’

  In the silence, she felt her heart turning inside out. In her mind’s eye, she looked out of Mrs Tripp’s window, and she didn’t see the blur of Jimmy’s face but remembered his bone structure, his eyes, his mouth.

  The pearl of light in her brain swelled to the brightness of the moon, illuminating the whole of her consciousness.

  She stopped in the open gateway into Botanic Gardens, looked at him and recognised him as she heard herself ask, ‘What became of the real Justin Truman?’

  He said nothing, smiled at her.

  ‘Tell me...’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She stared into his face and was filled with awe. ‘Tell me the truth. What happened to Justin Truman?’

  ‘He died of an AIDS-related illness, kid. I survived the sea. I was in big trouble with the law. When Justin died, his legacy to me was that I could take on his identity and avoid jail. I’d battered a paedophile within an inch of his life. When I survived the SS Memphis Star disaster, I went to live with Justin Truman’s mother in Tamworth. His mother was almost blind, a cripple with dementia. She didn’t know I wasn’t her son. Jimmy Peace was forever lost at sea. Case against him closed. Jimmy’s dead. Long live Justin.’

  Clay looked at him intensely, saw the imprint of the boy’s face in the man’s features, after years of trying to visualise him as he was taken away, at the age of fifteen.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Yes, Eve. Hawkins was a detail in the margin. You’re the full page. I came home to see you before I died and to let you know there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about you. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t love you. You were the best thing that ever happened to me and you made my life worth living. My name’s Jimmy Peace and you’re going to be all right, kid, you’ve got to know that.’

  112

  2.05 am

  At the door of the holding cell in Trinity Road police station, Sergeant Harris showed Clay a bottle of tablets.

  ‘How is he?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Very calm. Waiting for his lawyer to arrive.’

  ‘What are his tablets?’

  ‘Ponatinib,’ replied Sergeant Harris. ‘He’s got chronic myeloid leukaemia.’

  Clay made a massive effort to keep her face neutral even though her heart was in freefall.

  ‘I’ve explained to him that he’ll have to be under guard but he’ll get chemo or whatever he needs medically.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘No chemo, he’s not putting off the inevitable. He wants pain relief, nothing else.’

  She looked away for a moment and then nodded.

  Clay knocked on the door of the holding cell and Sergeant Harris opened it.

  Jimmy Peace sat on the bed, looking
up at Clay.

  ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’ asked Clay.

  ‘I’d like to see Lucien Burns. Is that all right with you, Eve?’

  It’s like you can read my mind, thought Clay. ‘He’s three doors away.’

  *

  Clay opened the observation slot and saw Lucien lying on the bed, arms across his chest. ‘Sit up, Lucien,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

  Lucien sat up slowly and Clay stepped back, making space for Jimmy Peace to stand in the cell’s doorway. Head slumped and eyes downcast, Lucien looked beaten and terrified.

  ‘Look at me, Lucien!’ said Jimmy.

  Lucien looked up and the brokenness lifted from him. He leaped to his feet, his face lighting up with shock and disbelief.

  ‘Stay where you are, Lucien,’ said Jimmy, walking into the cell. ‘What did Eve Clay tell you to do?’

  ‘Sit up!’

  ‘So why are you standing?’

  Lucien sat on the bed again, his eyes fixed on Jimmy and welling up with tears. ‘I have a dream, Vindici, of you and me as man and wife.’

  ‘Is this to do with the thing you told me of, about yourself?’

  ‘I have two parts to my sex. They thought I was a girl when I was born.’

  ‘I’m old enough to be your father, Lucien. How can that dream ever come true?’

  ‘I’m a boy as well. I can be anything you want me to be.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  Lucien stood up and sidled closer to Jimmy.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here, Vindici.’ Tears flooded Lucien’s face. ‘I’m not sixteen. I’m eighteen. When I was born, they thought I was a girl. When I was a child, I developed a urine infection. The doctor discovered I was a boy. He found a penis and testicular tissue inside my vagina. Caroline died and Lucien was born. I’m an adult hermaphrodite. I can be anything you want me to be.’

  ‘Do you know what I want you to be?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I want you to be completely truthful with Eve Clay. That’s what I’m going to be. That’s what I want you be. Will you be completely truthful with her?’

  ‘If you say so.’