Dead Silent

by Mark Roberts

  He laughed sourly, briefly, and fell silent.

  ‘You can see me with the eyes in the back of your head. I can’t see you. I don’t want to talk to your back,’ said Clay. ‘Turn the chair round so that I can see you better and you can see me.’

  He turned his hand and the silver blade in his grasp shone in the moonlight.

  ‘Is that what you used to peel off Abey’s face and scalp?’

  ‘Poor Abey, he dead as doornail.’ He slipped from one voice to another, Adam to Abey.

  ‘Please don’t mock him. Isn’t it enough that you’ve killed him? Must you mock his speaking voice?’

  ‘He’s dead. Does it matter? If he was alive, would he understand?’

  ‘Abey Noone was a human being and he had dignity and feelings and deserved to be respected for what he was.’

  ‘What was he? I’d love to hear your take on poor little Abey.’

  ‘He was born into a nightmare. He had a brother, an identical twin, and by no more than a flip of a coin he was placed in solitary confinement from the moment he was born, deprived of language by a father figure who had no mercy. You want to know my take on Abey Noone? He wasn’t born disabled, his disabilities were inflicted on him by a man who had complete power over him.’

  ‘Poor little Abel, Abel B Babel, that surely is bad luck. But what of his other, his brother, his twin pea in the pod?’

  Clay froze, saw her breath in the moonlit air, felt her skin tingling. ‘What do you know of his brother, Adam?’

  ‘What do I know of his brother?’ Something in his voice shifted, became quite unlike either Adam or the mocking imitation of Abey.

  ‘Tell me about his brother.’ She heard the words leave her mouth and they sounded like they’d drifted in on some cursed wind.

  ‘A telltale?’ He sounded out the words. ‘I used to hear the boy, Eve.’ He raised an arm, pointed his finger up to the ceiling. ‘Up in the attic.’ Silence. ‘Crying. I thought it was a cat trapped up there at first. I was told I was the only one.’

  His voice was full of warmth and there was a music in there that compelled Clay to listen. He looked over his shoulder, his profile caught in a patch of light.

  ‘Abey? Is that you?’ She stepped forward, drawn to the voice like magic.

  ‘Eve.’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘I’m not Adam,’ he replied in a clear voice, deep and mature. ‘Don’t!’ he whispered. ‘Eve, born in similar shadows to us, but different. Yes, different but the same. You don’t have to come any closer. You are close to us already, Eve.’

  ‘Abey? Abel Noone?’ She remembered a trick from childhood, squeezed her toes to check if she was dreaming and found she was wide awake.

  ‘No. Abel was my twin. I am Cain. Abel is dead. I am his other half and he is my other half. His were the bones in the Garden of St James. He was the silent one, I was the voice.’

  He turned his head, his profile clear now. Clay felt as if a ghost had walked into her body, as if she had been cast out of her own flesh.

  ‘Cain?’

  ‘I’ve been dealing with unfinished business, Eve. Some things have gone well, others not. Do you understand?’

  Events and images danced inside her head, the first bare bones of a story knitted together. She thought of the dead man on the roof of the Vestey Tower.

  ‘What happened to Adam Miller?’ she asked.

  ‘He killed the security guard on the roof. And I killed him, took his face, his scalp. Took his clothes, left mine in exchange.

  ‘This is the house in which you were born,’ said Clay. She looked up to where he had pointed and imagined a cot, a changing mat and nothing else for the other half, the silent half. ‘Where the English Experiment took place.’

  She saw and heard the construct that was Abey, drawing pictures as she interviewed Louise in the Millers’ living room, making the impulsive noises of a man with the mind of a four-year-old child. Cain Noone was a consummate actor.

  ‘The First Born?’ asked Clay.

  ‘It’s true I was the first born. But that’s also a vehicle for an idea. An idea I sold to Gabriel Huddersfield and which he bought.’

  Clay was filled with grim enlightenment. In her mind, everything crystallised. She had assumed that Gabriel Huddersfield had had one visitor, Adam Miller. But Cain Noone was the other. Cain, always masked as the First Born. Adam Miller, masked for sadomasochistic sex.

  ‘I wanted to mark the end of Leonard Lawson’s life with the same cruelty he’d brought to the start of mine and my brother’s. I wanted vengeance for my other half and the miserable life he’d endured.’

  He pointed at the figure in the corner of the central panel of the painting, the naked man suspended from a pole, carried on the shoulder of a human dressed in white and blue, his face covered by a mask, part bird, part platypus; man as monster. ‘This is where you are now, Leonard, I explained.’ He pointed to the panel of hell. ‘And this is where you are going for what you did to me and my brother. I pretended, in his bedroom, that Huddersfield was my brother come back from the dead to take him over to the other side. The Angel of Destruction. You should have seen his tired old face, his eyes, his terror. It was sublime.’ He raised the point of the dagger to his temple. ‘I have a picture of it here. I wish you could see. I wish you’d been there to see, Eve.’ He stood up. ‘I did it for us. All of us. You, Eve. All the accidents of birth, those of us born into darkness.’

  The knitting bones in her mind took on flesh, developed galloping feet. ‘Gabriel Huddersfield and Adam Miller?’

  ‘Oh, the things they did in the name of love, if love is the word for what bound them together. Gabriel and Adam, in this very room, my old bedroom.’

  ‘Adam Miller was never involved in the murder of Leonard Lawson?’ asked Clay. ‘Or of Abraham and Mary Evans?’ She saw him nod. ‘Cain, how did Gabriel come to live here, where you used to live?’

  ‘The Shepherd saw to that. She got to know him in the park. He told her about his past, his crimes against elderly men. He told her about his religious obsession. She showed him compassion and offered him shelter at no cost. He was grateful to her, wanted to please her. She gave him the paints and brushes when I told him to touch up the fading mural of The Last Judgment. I told him to learn that this was what happened to those who sinned, to learn it by heart, to know it with all of his head and heart and soul. But that there was a way to save himself, and that was to punish the wicked.

  ‘The Shepherd told him that I was coming. The First Born. And when I came, I told him everything. From my first memory to the body in the Garden of St James. Who it was. Where to find him.’

  ‘Tell me about Leonard Lawson?’

  With his index finger, he drew an arc in the air across the span of The Last Judgment.

  ‘Leonard Lawson. Every day. Bosch. Bruegel. Filling my head with other people’s imaginary horrors and passing them off as the truth. Making me look at the pictures for hours and hours on end, beating me if I closed my eyes or looked away as he spoke about the images before me. Disobey your teacher and this is where you’ll end up, packed into a pan with all the other sinners and boiling forever in hell. He gave me hell when I was small and young. When he was old and weaker than me, I served it back to him.’

  ‘As for Adam Miller, I can’t tell you just what a bad man he was. The things he said and did in front of those who had no voice. My name is Cain, but I lived for one year as Abel. I lived as a disabled man for a whole year. It was a perfect mask: I saw everything, I heard everything.’

  Slowly, he stood and turned towards her.

  ‘Why did you come back here, to this room?’

  ‘To lift the mask and tell the truth. You understand how things work in the dark, Eve. It’s written on you, on your skin. I saw it when I stood on the landing of The Sanctuary early this morning, a sleepwalker watching you.’ She saw his face, his whole face. ‘We choose our masks. But no one chooses the where or when or who they are born to. I have worn
the mask. But tonight the mask has to drop.’

  ‘How did your brother die?’

  ‘He was sick, so sick.’ He faced her directly and it felt like the space between them was closing down, at the will of some invisible power. ‘He couldn’t stop crying. He was a pitiful thing. He babbled between his tears and he smeared his own filth across his face, making a soiled mask of what he was, of what he’d been turned into by the Creator. We were thirteen. The Creator was gone. I released Abel. I murdered my brother out of love.’

  In the moonlight, his eyes shone with tears.

  ‘I laid Abel’s body in the attic until it was bones years later. When I left to wander, I placed his relics in the ground. I prepared his grave with love and when I left, I buried them and sealed the sacred space with a stone. I showed Gabriel Huddersfield where it was, so that he could show you. Will you make me a promise? Will you bury his bones in a good place?’

  ‘It will be done with dignity and respect,’ said Clay. She watched a tear fall from his face. ‘Where have you been for all these years, Cain?’

  ‘I have been a restless wanderer on the earth, in the Land of Nod, east of Eden. I promised the Shepherd I would return. I returned.’

  ‘What happened to Damien Noone? Who wore the mask – the Creator?’

  ‘I was thirteen. The Shepherd went out with him one day, but he didn’t return. This is why I came back. Also to tell you that my work is done. To tell you that the Shepherd is good. To tell you that I am tired of wandering. To tell you that I am tired of masks. To tell you that I mourn my brother. To tell you, Eve, who was born in hell, just as we were. To tell you that I want to join my brother in paradise.’

  An intense grief consumed Clay, placed her at the centre of her own past and future. She balanced the pain of her own childhood against her fear for her son’s future and imagined the torment that had driven Cain Noone to the spot on which he now stood, in a sordid room near the top of a perpetual house of horrors.

  ‘Will you protect the Shepherd when I’ve gone?’ asked Cain. ‘I came back to tell, but I came back to ask this also.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to the Land of Nod.’

  ‘You don’t have to go.’

  ‘I’ve cast off my mask before you and I have settled the score. Listen!’ he whispered. The window frame rattled. ‘Look!’ The waxing moon, more than half full but obscured by a band of darkness to the east. ‘Words?’ He touched his head. ‘Are seeded here.’ He touched his heart and lungs. ‘And are given life here.’ He touched his mouth. ‘And are born from here. Listen, Eve! Look! No more words. No more masks.’

  He opened his mouth wide.

  ‘No!’ called Clay. ‘Don’t do this. I can help you.’

  ‘Can you turn back the hands of time? Can you undo the things that were done by others when you were no more than a little girl?’

  ‘Ask me what I can do!’ demanded Clay.

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘I can take the knife away from you.’

  ‘Then do so.’

  He turned the point of the knife to his mouth. She stepped towards him, felt the walls and ceiling shrink in on her, pressing life out of her. Hopelessness.

  She reached out her hand. ‘Cain, please, I’m begging you.’ She gripped the handle of the knife. ‘Let go, Cain. Give it to me. If you really want to settle the score, settle it by living.’

  ‘They took possession of our lives from even before we were born. We were nothing. They were little gods. Are you another god? Are you in possession of me now? At the bitter end? Do you have the power to sit above all this in the last judgment?’

  ‘I only have the power to speak, to plead with you...’

  Words piled up inside her, crashed into each other and forced her into a debilitating silence. She looked into his eyes and saw agony that could never be resolved.

  ‘I made a vow.’ She tightened her grip. ‘Let me go, Eve. I made a vow in blood. Let me go and find my Abel. Let me go, Eve.’

  She felt her hand falling back. ‘Please, Cain, please...’

  ‘I made a blood vow.’

  He held her gaze. He thrust the blade hard and high into the roof of his mouth, hands tight around the shaft. He sank to his knees, released one hand and extended his arm towards Clay. His eyes closed and he twisted on to his back.

  On her knees, she held on to his head, fixed her eyes on his.

  ‘You’re not alone,’ said Clay. ‘In the dark.’

  She watched as the spark in his eyes went out and moonlight polished his forehead.

  104

  7.51 pm

  ‘I wondered if you were ever going to pick up, Eve,’ said DC Barney Cole. He sounded pleased with himself.

  ‘I wondered the same,’ replied Clay, as she turned on to St Mary’s Road on the way back to Trinity Road police station.

  ‘Are you OK, Eve?’

  ‘Ask me at some point in the indefinite future, Barney.’

  There was a throb in the centre of her head that threatened to explode into a full-scale migraine. Hands on the steering wheel, she could still feel the texture of Cain Noone’s hair on her fingertips and the coldness of death as he’d lain in her arms.

  In the silence that followed, she felt Cole’s good mood deteriorate.

  ‘What’s happened, Eve?’

  ‘Insane talk from the 1940s in a North African desert finally came to rest in the here and now.’

  She pulled up at a red light, looked at the cranes of Garston Docks on the skyline and wished she wasn’t there.

  ‘What’s happening, Barney?’

  ‘Two pieces of news. Good or gooder?’

  ‘The best you can possibly come up with.’

  ‘Karl Stone’s conscious. He’s had a scan and there’s no major damage. A burst blood vessel in his ear and a heavy dose of concussion.’

  A layer of dead weight lifted from her.

  ‘Get this. The symbol on the spear’s shaft. I’ve think cracked it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I made a list of the names of all the relevant people, past and present, and crunched them down into their initials, name and surname. Using angular writing, no curves, the combining of the initials of two people resulted in only one possibility. It was a joint signature on a gruesome work of art.’

  She pulled away as the light turned green, considered what Cole had said.

  ‘Did you get LL and CN, Louise Lawson and Cain Noone?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  The lines forming in her mind distracted her from the sadness that threatened to overwhelm her. She glanced up at the waxing moon, at the shadow that masked its full face. ‘Your four largest lines, two 3-centimetre lines and two 2-centimetre lines form LL, the initials of Louise Lawson,’ said Cole.

  ‘How do you get CN?’ asked Clay

  ‘The five 1-centimetre lines. two form an angular C and three form a standard N. Cain Noone.’

  ‘Louise Lawson and Cain Noone locked in an eternal bond. They masked it well. They were stating the obvious and we were all blind to that. Thank you for seeing that, Barney. Send it to my phone.’

  She closed the call down and within seconds heard the text arrive. She slowed down at a red light and opened it.

  The taller letters of Louise Lawson’s initials contrasted with the smaller initials of Cain Noone. In Clay’s mind, the Letters LL and CN blurred into an image. A shepherd guiding her charge onwards and onwards...

  105

  8.04 pm

  Clay looked through the observation hole of Cell 4 and watched Louise Lawson sitting perfectly still, spine straight, on the edge of the bed.

  At Clay’s back, Sergeant Harris said, ‘She’s been like this since I put her in the cell. She hasn’t moved. She hasn’t touched the food and drink we’ve provided for her.’

  ‘And she hasn’t spoken?’

  ‘She talked to me when you left, Eve,’ said Riley.

  Clay let the down th
e eyehole cover and turned to Sergeant Harris. ‘Open the door, please.’

  Louise didn’t react, didn’t seem to see or hear as Clay and Riley entered the cell.

  ‘Bring me a chair, please, Sergeant Harris,’ said Clay.

  ‘Louise?’ said Riley. ‘Do you want to tell DCI Clay what you told me or do you want me to tell her?’

  Louise looked up at Clay. ‘Has he gone, my stolen child?’

  Riley sat down next to Louise.

  ‘He loves you. He told me that,’ replied Clay. ‘Before he left.’

  Harris placed a plain plastic seat behind Clay. She sat down and, at eye level with Louise, spoke softly. ‘Please look at me. No more masks.’

  Their eyes locked.

  Riley spoke. ‘When Cain and Abel were thirteen years of age, Louise heard a sound that she hadn’t heard before. She heard the sound of Professor Noone weeping. He was alone in the kitchen. Louise walked in and asked him...’

  ‘Why are you weeping?’ Louise took up the story. ‘I knew the answer because I’d watched him day by day, as weeks turned into months and months into years. I watched the truth sink in. He resisted the truth with his whole being, but the truth was bigger than he was and stronger and better. At first he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t take his hands away from his face. After many minutes, he told me to get away and, on a night of firsts, I did something I hadn’t done before. I defied him. I said, Make me. Make me go away.

  And I said, You know, Damien, I don’t want to bring you any more bad news at a time like this, when you have finally realised that the dream of your lifetime has been an unmitigated failure. But I don’t want you living in ignorance either, because ignorance isn’t bliss, Damien, ignorance is purely ignorance and who wants to live in the dark when the world is so full of light and colour? I watched the news on television, Damien, and a child has gone missing from the town of Douglas on the Isle of Man. They’re looking in the place where you left the children you murdered, from the first English Experiment all those years ago. I wonder what would happen if... The largest search for a missing child in the island’s history is underway... I wonder... I wonder...’