by Mark Roberts
Clay’s phone rang out. In the quiet of the autopsy suite, it sounded impossibly loud. On the display, she saw ‘Riley’.
‘What’s happening, Gina?’ she asked, still watching Dr Lamb.
‘Louise Lawson. She’s ready to talk. We’re on the eighth floor.’
Dr Lamb placed the heart in a silver tray.
‘I’m round the corner at the mortuary. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.’
As she closed down the call, Clay watched a trickle of blood seep from the heart into the silver tray. She pulled off the plastic apron, took off her blue smock and felt her pulse quickening. By the time she was on the stairs leading down to the ground floor of the mortuary, she felt a rush of nervous energy at the prospect of opening the doors that only Louise Lawson had the key to.
In the hours before dawn, the temperature had dipped a further three degrees below zero, but as Clay raced from the mortuary to the hospital, she felt feverish with the compulsion to know.
18
5.33 am
When she arrived at Louise Lawson’s ward, Clay paused in the doorway and saw Riley on the edge of the bed, dabbing the old woman’s face with a wet flannel. She noted the tenderness in Riley as she looked at Louise Lawson, her tough façade completely gone. She stepped out of sight and knocked on the door.
‘Hi, Gina!’
Riley’s back straightened and her expression returned to one of concerned neutrality.
Clay pulled up a chair and smiled at the elderly lady.
‘Is this...?’ Louise looked at Riley.
‘DCI Eve Clay,’ confirmed Riley.
‘How are you, Louise?’ asked Clay. Riley pressed record on her phone.
‘I’m exhausted.’
‘I’m sorry about your father. He was a very distinguished and intelligent man. You must be very proud of him, Louise.’
She closed her eyes and sighed.
Clay tried to take her to a good place. ‘All those books about art, ancient civilisations, old masters... I imagine when you were a small girl, Louise, your father must have taken you to many galleries and exhibitions.’
Louise was silent, seemingly remembering the past. Then she spoke. ‘During school and university holidays, he took me to art galleries in all the big cities of England. And Europe. The Musée d’Orsay, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He loved religious art in particular, though I’m sorry to say he wasn’t a religious man.’ A look of profound sadness swept across her face.
Clay understood that what had happened to her father was looming large in her head. ‘We have something in common, Louise.’
Louise didn’t respond, but the lines on her brow creased enough for Clay to know she had hooked her interest. ‘The woman who raised me until I was six was a Roman Catholic nun. She loved art, particularly religious art, and she showed me all kind of pictures in colourful books. We lived near the city centre and we were always in and out of the Walker Art Gallery.’
Louise looked away, picked up the cup of water, drank, then placed it back down as if it was a poisoned chalice.
‘Thank you for agreeing to speak,’ said Clay.
‘Where is my father’s body?’
‘It’s being examined, and then it will be prepared for the chapel of rest.’
‘He’d just turned ninety-seven. He wanted to reach a hundred. But it wasn’t to be, was it?’
‘Your father...’ Clay dangled the unfinished question in the air and Louise returned her full attention. ‘Did he have a healthy lifestyle?’
‘To live so long?’ She nodded. ‘Oh yes! He walked for miles every single day, up until last Thursday.’ She looked into space. ‘Around and around Sefton Park. Thinking his thoughts. Dreaming his dreams.’
‘He was a creature of habit, your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you say he walked for miles every single day up until last Thursday?’
‘He didn’t seem himself on Thursday. On Friday he said his legs were sore. I asked him to go to the medical centre and he refused. I knew not to make a fuss over it because fuss makes him agitated.’
There was an innocent kindliness about the woman that made Clay think she had been sheltered from the world.
As Clay counted silently to five, a series of snapshots developed in her mind, images that acted as stepping stones into Louise’s life. At home, caring for her elderly but active father. Two old people who had probably lived together for well over half a century. A dutiful daughter with religious belief as possibly her only outlet. A life suddenly overturned by a violent crime that would rob her of the place she called home. But time was tight and the minutes were slipping by. She had to broach the unthinkable.
‘I’ve been inside your house on Pelham Grove,’ she said. Louise’s body sank and her lips moved as she averted her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Louise,’ said Clay, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch that.’ She zoned in on Louise’s mouth, tried desperately to lip-read, but the movements of the old woman’s lips were so small and subtle that nothing was given away.
Louise was silent. Clay watched the tension in her face as she mustered the strength to speak. Then, ‘I said, it is a house of horrors.’
Clay glanced over Louise’s shoulder at Riley.
‘Go on, Louise,’ said Riley. ‘Tell Eve what you mean by house of horrors.’
‘If you’ve been in the house, then you will have seen something... Something...’ Louise raised a hand to the top of her head. She pressed down on her scalp and took in a sharp breath of air. ‘Even though... even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. I still have a father, a heavenly father. I must remind myself not to be afraid.’
‘Your courage is astonishing,’ said Clay. A thought, like forked lightning, shot through her. She pictured her own birth mother, her identity a mystery, a woman she had never met but who was probably of a similar age to Louise Lawson. She imagined her own mother going through hell and the urge to cry was sharp and urgent, but she drowned it.
‘Tell me about Leonard. Tell me about your earthly father.’
‘My father taught me all about courage, how to be brave in the face of adversity.’ Louise looked at Clay, her expression searching. ‘Did you go into his bedroom?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Did you?’
‘Why did God allow this to happen? People will say that. Imagine! As if we’re all puppets and have no free will. God isn’t responsible for what happened to my father.’ The old woman hung on to Clay’s gaze.
‘Louise, we need to talk about this. We must talk about what happened. But I have to warn you, I’m going to have to ask you some difficult questions. I need to catch whoever’s done this and I need to do it as quickly as I can.’
Clay looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Louise, can you tell me anything about what happened yesterday in your house in Pelham Grove?’
‘He didn’t go walking in Sefton Park, so it wasn’t quite a normal day, but it was a normal evening. My father followed his regular bedtime routine...’
19
5.33 am
‘Any forensic evidence from the killer will have been as good as wiped away by contact with Mr Lawson’s internal organs and bodily fluids,’ said Dr Lamb, carrying the section of spear taken from inside the old man to the aluminium sink.
In Autopsy Suite 1, Hendricks stood at a short distance from Dr Lamb as she inspected the central shaft of the spear. He attempted to watch matters from the point of view of the person who had murdered the old man.
What remained of his body had been decimated.
Dr Lamb held the bloody shaft in the sink and turned on the tap. A trickle of water fell on to the wood and diluted blood drizzled into the sink. She moved the shaft slowly through the stream of water, turning it as she did so, and within a matter of thirty seconds, the water washing from the wood was clear.
‘Harper,’ she said, ‘bring me a light.�
�� She looked at Hendricks. ‘I’ll act as your second pair of eyes, shall I?’
She handed the shaft to her second APT.
Standing behind, and towering over, Dr Lamb, Hendricks watched as Harper stroked the wood with light, from top to bottom. The APT turned the shaft, made darker by the water, and Harper repeated his inspection. Vulture-like, Hendricks watched and hoped.
‘Stop!’ he said, seeing a dark scratch, a line on the surface of the wood, roughly in the centre. ‘Please keep the light where it is, Harper, and can you turn the wood, please.’
The junior APT turned it and the line extended into a geometric shape of interconnecting lines carved into the curved surface of the wood.
‘Hold it still, please,’ said Hendricks.
The whole shape was there on the curve of the wooden shaft. Hendricks counted ten separate linked lines. There was a large, dominant shape made of four lines – a rectangle – and at its base a pair of straight joined lines with a triangle projecting from the central body, a shape that suggested movement; flight, even.
He took a series of photographs and inspected them. Of five shots, three were clear and, of the three, one was excellent.
As he took more pictures of the carvings, Hendricks became convinced that they weren’t a random set of scratches. The precision of the geometric lines said it wasn’t a mindless doodle, and their position on the spear indicated that they were meant to be left inside Leonard Lawson’s body.
‘Let me see the rest of the shaft, please,’ he said.
Harper sent the light across each square centimetre of the shaft as the junior APT slowly turned the wood. There were no more lines.
Hendricks looked to Dr Lamb. ‘What do you think?’
She took the wood. ‘It’s not uncommon to look at something and see different things in it. I look at this and see a word, or letters even, that have been pulled apart and reassembled into a shape.’ Hendricks looked hard but couldn’t get what Dr Lamb meant. ‘What do you see?’ she asked.
He tried to come up with a unifying image, a title that would describe the picture that was connecting with his mind.
‘What do you want me to do with the wood?’ asked Dr Lamb.
‘When it’s bone dry, put it in a plastic bag and bring it to DS Terry Mason at Pelham Grove please.’
In a split second, Hendricks’s eyes somersaulted between Leonard Lawson’s detached intestines, his carved heart in a bowl, the empty cavity of his torso and the separated rib cage. It was as if the old man’s body had exploded. In a flush of inspiration, a cold certainty settled in his mind and he wanted to share it with Clay.
He sent Clay the three best images and a message: Eve, the killer is a complete sadist and hated Leonard Lawson with a vengeance. This picture shows an encoded message on the section of shaft left inside LL’s body.
He turned to the action of the saw as Harper brought the spinning teeth down on the old man’s skull. In the grinding of metal on bone, Hendricks imagined another sound caught within it: the hysterical laughter of the person who had reduced the old man from a human being with a long and distinguished past to a set of disconnected body parts in a pathologist’s laboratory.
He looked again at the image on his phone and the carving on the wood.
‘I know what the carving looks like to me, Dr Lamb,’ he said. ‘It looks like a dragonfly escaping captivity through an open window.’
Hendricks started composing another message to Clay.
20
5.44 am
‘He’d had a bath by seven thirty and at eight o’clock he was in bed. At eight thirty it was lights off and time to sleep.’
Deep inside the hospital, someone laughed, a single voice projecting five braying blasts of mirth, and then there was silence.
‘Did you see your father at all during that hour?’
Louise considered the question. ‘Only at one point. At a quarter past eight. I went to say goodnight to him, just to check everything was in order.’
‘So your father was fully independent in these matters?’
‘He was a very fit man, in mind and body. He was ninety-seven, but he could outpace people half his age.’
‘Did he say anything to you when you last spoke to him?’ asked Clay.
‘I’ve checked the doors and windows. Double-check them yourself before you come up and don’t go to bed too late. He said the same thing every night for years and years. It’s strange...’
Clay watched her face closely. She was drifting deeper inside herself and, Clay guessed, back in time.
‘What’s strange, Louise?’
‘I’m thinking back to when I was a little girl and how everything changes, everything turns around and reverses.’
‘In what way?’
Louise paused, seemed to be looking for the right words. ‘When I was a little girl, when he used to come and wish me goodnight, I used to tell him to make sure all the doors and windows were locked. I’ve never really thought about how we changed places.’
‘How long have you lived in your house, Louise?’
‘I’ve always lived there. I was born in the house – literally, in my mother and father’s bedroom.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Died when I was very young. I don’t remember her.’
‘Tell me what happened after you’d said goodnight to your father?’
‘I came downstairs and I watched a nature programme. I fell asleep in the armchair and when I woke up there was an American film on. I was woken by the sound of guns, on the TV. I don’t know what time it was, but it felt late, way past my usual bedtime of ten thirty, after the news. I stood up, but I stood up too quickly and I felt dizzy, so I sat down again and composed myself. I... I got up again, slowly, and turned off the TV and I was going to do as my father had told me, but when I stepped out of the living room and into the hall...’
She covered her face with her hands and Clay was afraid that Louise would clam up.
‘Go on, Louise,’ she encouraged. ‘Go on!’
‘The light, the light was pouring from upstairs. I thought at first it was a fire, but then... It’s all my fault.’
‘It’s not your fault, Louise.’
Louise took a deep breath and hung on to it. She shut her eyes tightly and shook her head as she breathed out.
‘And then?’ Clay coaxed. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Louise opened her eyes and looked at Clay. ‘I went upstairs. I knew something was very, very wrong because the light was coming from my father’s bedroom. It felt like nothing was still, that there was something terribly wrong. And I wondered if I was having one of my awful dreams. I have a lot of bad dreams.’
The wind moaned down at the river and pressed against the window of Louise’s hospital room.
‘But when I got to the top of the stairs, I knew. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Everything was wrong. I called out to him. Father? I held my hand up to my face to shield my eyes from the light. I sensed Father wasn’t in his bed, even though I couldn’t see. Do you understand?’
Clay understood perfectly. Instinct had woken her up two nights earlier when her son Philip was out of bed and on the landing at two in the morning.
‘Father? But he didn’t answer. The light flooding from his room, it was horrible, disorientating. I turned on the light switch on the upstairs landing, but it didn’t do anything to help because the light... pulsing... from Father’s room was... I pushed his bedroom door open a little and he wasn’t in his bed. I stepped inside the room and... someone – he must have been standing by the wall behind the door – slammed the door shut, trapping me in the room. I looked – the light was unbearable, white light and black shadows. No! Where was my father? I couldn’t believe it. But it was my father, naked, like a beast hanging from a pole with all that hideous light pouring over his body. My head felt empty, but my body was like stone.’
She held her hands to her face, pressing her fingers over her mouth.
‘
Did you see anyone in your father’s room?’
‘I felt him,’ replied Louise. She touched the nape of her neck. ‘Right here. I faced away from Father, the dreadful light was at my back, then it stopped and the room was plunged into darkness. Black. Deep, black darkness. That was when I felt his breath on me, on my neck, and his hands on my shoulders, pressing down on my shoulders. My legs were like water and all my strength had left me. He was in control of me. He laid me down on the floor. I thought I was going to die.’
Clay watched memory play out on Louise’s face. ‘Did he speak?’
‘I heard a voice. I am the Angel of Destruction and I am watching over you. The First Born has spared you. Death, who we serve, has shown you mercy.’
‘What was the voice like?’
‘Strange. He didn’t sound like a man, but he didn’t sound like a woman either. Like something in between.’
‘It was completely dark?’ asked Clay, a knife turning in her core. The proximity of Louise to the killers and the absence of light equated to the cruellest form of mockery.
‘There was some light, leaking in through the bottom of the door into the hall, and streetlight coming in through a crack in the curtains. And my eyes – I suppose they were getting used to the dark. I don’t know how long it all went on for because I lost all sense of time.’
‘Could you see his face?’
‘I could see shapes. He stood up. I think he was tall, but I was lying on the floor and he may have appeared taller than he was.’
‘Did he walk near the curtains, near the light?’
‘He stayed in the dark. He stood very still. In between me and Father. His back was turned to me, I think. He stood still for a long time. I think he was looking at Father through the darkness.’
Louise looked into the middle distance, but, to Clay, she didn’t seem to be looking at anything in the hospital room. She was reliving the nightmare and converting it into stone-cold reality.