by Mark Roberts
58
7.00 pm
The night felt particularly dark when Eric Watson turned the corner of Woolton Road into the lengthy line of large semi-detached houses on Childwall Park Avenue. The place he called home. He tugged at Patch’s lead. Patch, a brown twelve-year-old mongrel, paused at a neighbour’s wrought-iron gate, sniffing the scents of other exotic dogs. Eric tugged harder than he meant to and Patch looked at him, his eyes doleful beneath the streetlight.
‘It’s cold, Patch, we’re nearly home. Come on. Walk. Not far away.’
Eric’s breath formed clouds in the cold air.
Their fifteen-minute walk had extended to twenty because Patch had lingered over emptying his bowels. It was a routine the dictatorial mutt would only do in a certain spot in Black Wood, on the corner of Woolton Road and Aldbourne Avenue.
Eric looked at his mobile phone. No call from his wife. One minute over the quarter hour, she was normally on his case.
Although Eric was exhausted after a blistering day in court, cross-examining a snake-eyed drug dealer for the Crown Prosecution Service, the time spent in Black Wood had soothed the niggling sensation that everything was somehow terribly wrong. Irrational anxiety, he reminded himself. Mistrust is the curse of your life and profession.
In Black Wood, moonlight had played on the snow-streaked trees that stood like giants reaching up to the stars. In the black sky a red cloud had hovered in front of the moon like something from another world, observing the passage of life on earth.
Through the snow on Childwall Park Avenue. ‘Not far now, Patch.’
Patch barked.
‘Hush, you big ball of mischief.’
The mongrel barked and barked, tugged at the lead suddenly and broke free from his master. He sprinted off, his bark dissolving into a sustained whimper as he got close to home.
A vice turned on Eric’s skull. He started to run but immediately slipped over on the icy pavement and landed on his hands.
Patch stood in the gateway of their home. As Eric hurried, holding onto the railings and walls of his neighbours’ houses, Patch fell silent.
Three houses to go.
Patch’s whole body shook, the way it did during thunderstorms and on Bonfire Night.
There was a pile of snow on the front lawn. With the streetlight to guide him, Eric had cleared the front path when he came home, trying to shake off the stress of the day. Now there was a form on the snow, lying perfectly still. At first glance, he thought it was a doll, but it was too big to be a toy.
The front door was open. His heart collapsed.
‘Mary!’ he shouted to his wife inside.
For a moment, Eric thought it was Louise, his youngest daughter, on the snow, but as he walked up the path he saw it was a child he didn’t recognise.
‘Louise! Terry! Sarah!’ He called to all his children, but all that came back was silence.
There was a smear of blood on the double-glazed front door.
He pushed it open and heard the sound of the lead flapping against the snow as Patch ran away at speed.
A front door opened nearby. And another. And several other doors across the wide, leafy road.
The doors of the houses to either side of his flew open. But then he couldn’t hear any more doors opening or the noise of any animal fleeing. Because the only sounds Eric Watson could hear were the harrowing screams coming from inside him and the blood pumping through his head.
59
7.10 pm
Hendricks, Riley and Stone stood over Clay at her desk in the incident room as she took Mrs Harry’s mobile phone from the evidence bag.
Clay opened the back of the phone, lifted the battery and saw the SIM card tucked neatly into the back of the device.
‘If the call on the Patels’ answer machine didn’t come from that phone, then where?’ asked Riley.
Clay’s mobile and landline phones rang out simultaneously.
‘DCI Clay, it’s switchboard. 302 Childwall Park Avenue, there’s been another family attacked in their home.’
‘How many dead?’
‘Four.’
‘Survivors?’
‘Two.’
Clay turned to Riley. ‘Whoever took Mrs Harry’s phone has cloned the SIM card and placed the clone in a compatible model. Looks like,’ she said, ‘the call to the Patels’ landline didn’t come from the phone we found in Jon Pearson’s house.’
She turned to Stone. ‘Karl, go to Barnham Drive. We need to talk to Mrs Drake and Faith, Jon Pearson’s classmate. And her sister Coral.’
Then she turned to Riley. ‘Gina, come with us to Childwall Park Avenue.’ She swiped her bag from the desk and, heading for the door, said to Hendricks, ‘You’re coming with us too.’
Sliding his arms into his coat, Hendricks followed. ‘Let’s go in my car,’ he said.
Just over a minute later, Clay climbed into the passenger seat and asked, ‘How quickly can we get there?’
‘Five minutes. There are five sets of lights. If they’re red I’ll burn them.’
60
7.31 pm
As he pulled his car up in Childwall Park Avenue, Hendricks’s tyres slid across the icy surface of the road. There was a crowd on the pavement, contained by two uniformed constables. It seemed as if every light in the road was on, every curtain open.
Clay snatched open the passenger door, raced over and placed herself in the space between the constables.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay!’ She brandished her warrant card and spoke sharply to the crowd. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to go home and close your doors. At the moment you’re endangering the integrity of a crime scene. Go!’
In complete silence the crowd dispersed. Twenty-eight seconds later, she heard the last front door shut.
Clay looked around. Two figures remained. Sitting on the pavement with his back against the wall of 300, there was a man with his face in his hands, weeping.
On the snow mound on the lawn of 302 was a child, a young girl, with a constable standing over her. Clay rushed across to her.
‘I’ve ABC’d her, DCI Clay!’ said the constable. ‘Physically, she’s OK, but she’s out of the game.’
Clay looked at the child’s face. From a photograph of the Tanner family she’d seen, Clay knew it wasn’t Maisy. She gazed at the snow mound where the little girl lay in death-like stillness. Clouds drifted and the moon made her skin look bloodless, her fair hair laid out on either side of her head in almost perfect symmetry. Clay resisted the compulsion to take off her coat and lay it across the child. Instead, she headed towards the partially open door.
Sirens approached from three directions.
Clay looked to Hendricks and indicated the man on the ground. ‘Who is he?’
‘The neighbours said he’s the father of the family. Eric Watson.’
Clay knew the name but wasn’t sure where from.
‘We think his wife Mary and three children are inside.’
‘Did the neighbours know who that girl is?’
‘None of the neighbours could identify her.’
Hendricks crouched on his heels, made eye contact and spoke to Eric Watson.
Clay looked inside, through the gap in the doorway. Four bodies were laid out at the bottom of the stairs and Clay recognised the shape immediately. It was the same irregular quadrilateral that Hanif Patel, his mother and daughter had formed on the first night in The Serpentine, only this time the shape was larger and formed from four bodies. By the patterns of blood splatter on the walls and the spray on the ceiling, it looked like they’d all been killed in the hall.
Sirens closed down as vehicles stopped a little way behind her. She turned, attracted the attention of a paramedic and pointed to the child. ‘She’s unconscious, no visible injuries. I’ll send a guard and a child-protection officer to Alder Hey.’
She looked back at the bodies and noticed there was something small and black placed close to the mother’s eyeless head.
A phone rang out from the hallway.
‘Quickly, DS Marsh.’
He dropped the first two plates. The ringing came from the floor. The phone and answer machine had been placed close to the mother’s ear.
Clay threw down four plates to create stepping stones through the hall to the bodies and the ringing phone. On the fourth ring, she strode inside. Two more careful steps and a fifth ring. She could see the display panel on the sixth ring. 07700 934763. The same number that had called the Patels’ house, the number traced as Mrs Harry’s mobile phone.
A mechanical voice on the Watson’s answer machine said, ‘There is no one to take your call at the moment. Please leave your message after the tone.’
As the tone sounded, Clay looked at the hollows of the mother’s eyes and then at the display panel again.
07700 934763
Silence. And then an out-breath that shaped a sound.
‘Eeeeeeeee...’
Silence.
The double click of a tongue like the beat of a diabolical heart.
Silence.
Double click.
Silence.
Double click.
Silence.
Double click.
Silence.
Double click.
‘...vette.’
The caller hung up.
Clay hurried back across stepping plates and outside. ‘Hendricks?’ she called.
Hendricks looked up at her. Eric Watson had slumped down the wall and appeared drunk with grief and shock.
‘Car keys, please, Hendricks.’ Clay gestured for him to stand up, took the keys and spoke into his ear.
‘The killers have just called the Watsons’ answer machine. They spoke my name.’ She pointed at Eric Watson. ‘I don’t care how you do it, Bill, but get him talking as fast as you can.’
‘Did they say anything else?’
‘Only my name.’ She ran to Hendricks’s car. ‘They used mouth clicking,’ she shouted.
Within the screech of the car’s tyres against the ice, Clay imagined she heard the sound of a mother and three children screaming as they died in their home and wondered what she’d find when she arrived at the Drakes’ house in Barnham Drive.
61
7.53 pm
DS Stone was in the paved front garden outside the Drakes’ house. All the curtains were drawn. The lights were off and there was no one home. Clay hurried over.
‘I’ve only just got here,’ said Stone. ‘Guess what? No one home.’
‘Order a ram to bang the door open, and a search warrant.’
Clay knocked on the right-hand neighbour’s door and Stone, phone in his other hand, knocked to the left.
After an eternity of seconds, an elderly woman opened the door to Clay. She squinted at Clay’s warrant card.
‘Oh dear.’
‘We need to talk to your neighbour Mrs Drake.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘She went away with the girls for a few days.’
‘Do you know where she went?’
‘She didn’t tell me.’
‘When did she go away?’
‘Today. She was scared to death for the girls and herself after what happened to those poor families in Aigburth and Toxteth, so she upped and left, went to stay with relatives outside the city somewhere.’ Clay looked at the old woman’s mouth as she rattled out the words, the motion of her wrinkled lips hypnotic. ‘She said she’d have to come back for work but that the girls would stay away until the police caught whoever’s done these terrible things.’ Clay imagined her own heart beating in time with the woman’s language.
‘She said to keep an eye out on the house.’ Five double beats of her heart, a beat per word.
If the old woman was right, Mrs Drake had taken exactly the same precaution that she had with her own son in this storm of madness.
The woman’s words sank beneath the other sounds clogging up Clay’s brain. The message on the answer machine. ‘Eeeeee...’ Five double clicks of the tongue. ‘...vette...’
The pent-up pressure in Clay’s head began to ease. She turned away from the old woman. There was a sudden sense, deeper in her brain, of a trickle building to a cascading stream.
‘Karl!’ She felt light-headed. ‘Stay here. Right outside the Drakes’ house. I’ve got to get back to Trinity Road.’
‘Are you OK? You look like you’re about to keel over.’
‘I’ll be back here as soon as I can. Call in some of the team for support. If you see Anais Drake or her two daughters, Coral and Faith, call me immediately and bring them in for questioning.’
62
7.58 pm
Hendricks sat in the back of a marked police car parked ten metres away from the Watsons’ house on Childwall Park Avenue. The house had been sealed off. Another family home turned into a crime scene.
Beside him, Eric Watson sat in silence, staring blindly at the snow on the grass verge outside the passenger window.
‘OK, let’s go,’ said Hendricks to the young constable in the driver’s seat.
Eric Watson looked up and stared at the back of the driver’s head. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, his voice thick with emotion.
‘Eric,’ said Hendricks. ‘You can’t stay here all night. I do need to talk to you and I understand completely that you don’t feel like answering questions at the moment.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘We’re going to Trinity Road police station.’
‘Why?’
‘A change of scenery.’
The mortuary van was on its way. Hendricks pictured Eric Watson being haunted for ever by the vision of his wife and children being carried out of the house in body bags.
‘What happened, Eric?’
‘I took the dog for a walk. We were gone about twenty minutes, maybe a little longer, I don’t know. We came home and then—’
‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No pedestrians. The odd car. Nothing significant.’
‘Have you been following the news, Eric?’
Hendricks wondered if Eric had heard him. His eyes looked like he was lost in another place.
‘Eric!’ Hendricks gave him a gentle shake and made eye contact. ‘The murders...’
‘What murders?’
‘It’s been all over the news.’
‘No. I’m in the middle of a massive court case. Drugs. I’m a CPS barrister.’
‘One of us, eh?’
‘I’ve been up to my eyes in it. I’ve scarcely been home. Time for the news? No time even for my wife and children.’ He spoke bluntly and self-accusingly. ‘Why do you ask about the news?’
‘You’re a brief. You know the drill in murder cases.’
‘I’m the nearest and dearest, therefore I’m the prime suspect. Good luck, Detective Sergeant Hendricks.’
‘I’m not taking you in because I think you’re responsible for what’s happened to your family. I want to get you some support here. And I need to get some background from you.’
Needles of snow fell, melting on contact with the car windows.
‘Have you got anyone you want to call, put them in the picture? Somewhere you can stay?’
‘No. We keep ourselves to ourselves. We don’t have any family. We don’t cultivate friendships.’
‘There are advantages to that,’ said Hendricks. ‘Can I ask you a question, Eric? Do you go to church?’
‘Personally, I go to eight o’clock communion at Christ the King, Queens Drive on Sunday mornings if I can. Mary and the children don’t. Why are you asking?’ In spite of his grief, Eric Watson looked at Hendricks with seasoned wariness.
‘Did you ever belong to a church called the Christian Grace Foundation?’
Eric closed his eyes, shutting
out the world if only for a few moments. He took a deep breath and looked directly at Hendricks.
‘The Christian Grace Foundation? So it’s finally come back to haunt me.’
63
8.15 pm
At her desk in the empty incident room, Clay switched on her desk light and plugged the earphones into the iPad.
In her head she replayed the message on the Watsons’ answer machine. ‘Eeeeeeeee...’ Five double clicks. ‘...vette.’
On a piece of Merseyside Constabulary headed notepaper, she jotted down:
E – – – – – vette
Quietly, she spoke to herself.
‘E, syllable. Five double clicks of the tongue. Like five heartbeats? Vette, syllable.’
She pressed play on the iPad and listened to the words that had carouselled around her head as she drove from Childwall back to Garston.
‘Evening is on a the fall all and a on child of actor artifact the one to one to one to who reigns parasite yes you in darkling red cloud oneness.’
She pressed stop.
A given syllable. Five beats. A given syllable.
Hastily, she drew seven lines and wrote the letters of her name at the beginning and end of the set of dashes.
E vette
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
She opened Adrian White’s book and listened again, this time following the text with her eyes, tapping out the beats on the desktop with her index finger.
‘Evening is on a the is...’
She pressed pause. She picked up her pen and filled in the gaps.
Eve ning
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Clay looked around, desperately wanting not to be alone, but there was no one there, just the sound in her head of the voice on the Watson family’s answer machine.
‘Eeeeeeeee clickclick clickclick clickclick clickclick clickclick vette.’
She stood up and walked away from the desk. She stopped and gazed into the darkness in the corners of the room.
In her mind she travelled back to Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital and watched as Adrian White walked naked into the meeting room, the numbers 1 and 7 tattooed on either side of his heart.