Reprobation

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘The Angel of Death is a figure that appears across religions and cultures. The spirit that extracts one’s soul from the body at the moment of death. Michael and Gabriel have acted as Angels of Death in Judeo-Christian religion. Azrael is the Islamic Angel of Death, who sometimes appears as a horrifying spirit with eyes and tongues covering his entire body. But Death isn’t always given a terrifying form; sometimes he is kind and friendly. And sometimes Death is female. In Norse mythology, the Valkyries were beautiful young women who served both as Odin’s messengers and as escorts to the souls of warriors killed in battle.’

  At the mention of Scandinavia, Helen thought of Mikko, that bizarre night and morning, and she smiled at herself and continued.

  ‘So why do we personify Death?’

  Helen always tried to mimic Margaret’s stage presence, beginning at the lectern and then moving around the stage, trying to engage her eyes, her hands. It didn’t come naturally to her but she was improving, and she enjoyed the challenge, the adrenaline rush of performance.

  ‘Why do we personify Death? It is something that humans have done across cultures, in order to make sense of dying and mortality, to give an abstract, terrifying concept a recognisable form. And sometimes an accessible, almost amusing form. It is for similar reasons that we are entertained by horror movies and Halloween – because they allow us to face our greatest fears in an acceptable way.

  ‘It was the European plague, the Black Death, in the fourteenth century that really cemented our Western cultural view of Death. And now we have the ubiquitous Grim Reaper, whose form varies from terrifying to comical.

  ‘So for this week’s assignment, I’d like you to choose one particular religion, or culture, and research that religion or culture’s attitude to death. If anyone has trouble with reading lists for this, please email me sooner rather than later. Now, we have a few minutes left if anyone has any questions?’

  A hand was raised and there was that young man again – Paul, the same one as last week, leaning back and looking even more cocky and cynical. Helen had a feeling he was going to be asking questions every week, and she tried to tell herself that was a good thing.

  ‘Sorry, Dr. Hope, I’m just still struggling with the whole philosophical premise of the course. Trying to find out what happens when we die. Because surely the whole point of life is that we don’t know what will happen when we die.’

  ‘Well, the first point, Paul, is that we’re not trying to find out what happens when we die here. I think you know that, you’re being a little provocative there. But you have hit the nail on the head in a sense, because yes – human order is based on the fact that we don’t know. Can you imagine if we did?’

  She paused and looked around for effect. Blank faces; phones were being switched on, bags packed and stomachs growling, they were ready for lunch now. But the body on the beach was on her mind.

  ‘There’s a word for it actually. Antinomianism. Antinomianism means literally “against law”, and in Christianity an antinomian is one who takes the principle of salvation by divine grace to its logical conclusion; that those who are saved are not bound to follow the Laws of Moses. Imagine if you knew you were going to Heaven, no matter what crimes you committed in your life? Or vice versa: to Hell no matter how well you lived your life? A nightmare in the wrong hands, no? So thank goodness we don’t know who is to be saved.’

  As she spoke, the doors opened at the top of the stairs at the back of the lecture theatre, and Helen saw the two detectives who had visited her last week.

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d like to look it up then, Paul, and that could be the basis of your essay for the week. Thank you everyone.’

  ***

  Kenilworth House was not far from the University; indeed the huge council tower had housed hundreds of first year students until their accommodation had been updated with modern blocks nearer the city centre. When the door of the apartment opened the first thing Helen saw was two people moving around in hazmat suits and masks.

  ‘There isn’t a body is there?’ she asked, in almost a whisper.

  ‘Did we say anything about a body?’ said Swift, unnecessarily blunt.

  Helen noticed the female detective wince at her superior’s harshness, and she also noticed that harshness didn’t suit him. Perhaps he was new; perhaps he was still feeling around for his detective personality. He really seemed to have it in for her, and yet he was drawn to her, bringing her to a potential crime scene in a way that she couldn’t imagine was orthodox. There was definitely some personal beef with religion there, and he reminded Helen of that student, Paul; like a moth to a flame drawn towards belief systems he professed to dislike.

  She peered into a bright room that looked like a hospital clinic, but before she had managed more than a cursory glance she was ushered into Shepherd’s bedroom. The first thing she noticed was the terrible clutter, the lack of surfaces, the papers, scrawls, piles, but her eye was drawn to something that took her away from the room entirely. A colourful drawing in pencil and crayon, crudely done, perhaps by a child, on white A4 paper. It was pinned to the wall in a prime position, partially obscuring other pinnings, most of which were newspaper cut-outs that seemed to be about near-death experiences. There on the drawing was the black silhouette of a wrought iron gate, with a cockerel weather vane on top, also silhouetted against a dark yellow/orange sky. Beyond the gate lay a meandering path, and half-way down the path, where it forked, stood a hooded figure. In his hand was a double-headed axe. And beyond the fork in the path, one half of the earth was light, the other dark. It was clichéd, crude, and almost exactly the image that had been described to her by Mikko. This was what he had seen on the brink of death. She gripped her wooden cross tightly and held it to her chest.

  ‘Dr. Hope. Dr. Hope?’

  Helen was shaken from her reverie.

  ‘What can you tell us about these writings?’ urged Swift. ‘This is a manhunt now, so anything you can give us might be useful.’

  Helen realised that she had not yet looked at the rest of the items stuck to the wall, and she scanned them carefully; fascinated, horrified. In places there were pages torn from the Bible, passages highlighted and underlined, sometimes underlined furiously, multiple times. Other papers were handwritten, question-marked, stuck to the wall with sellotape or pins, seemingly in great haste.

  ‘Dr. Hope?’

  As she tried to piece together the different strands of Shepherd’s thought, a theme of a very particular spiritual struggle was beginning to emerge.

  ‘It’s interesting… very interesting,’ she began. ‘Many of these quotations, these ideas, are in precisely the same vein as the one on the beach, almost as if he has gone through the Bible looking for… well, looking for evidence of predestination. Look here: Samuel 24.13: As the proverb of the ancients says, ‘Out of the wicked comes wickedness.’ And here: Matthew 7.18: A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.

  ‘But there’s a difference from the potter quotation on the beach; here he seems to be focused on birth, rebirth, the passing on of sin. All of us are born with sin, and he seems to be struggling with that. But there’s a dichotomy; he is also looking at evidence of the opposite.’

  ‘You’re losing me, sorry. Is there anything here that suggests which church he might belong to? We need to find him as quickly as possible.’

  But Helen was in her element now. ‘Look here – Jeremiah 13.23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil. He is looking for evidence of God’s forgiveness, of man’s ability to change. This is someone engaged in a fundamental spiritual battle with himself. And it’s remarkably appropriate to the study of Calvinism.’

  She trailed off, drawn back to the crayon picture of the iron gate, which for some reason she didn’t feel inclined to mention to the police.

  Swift sighed to himself; this was getting them nowhere. ‘Do you recognise these men? Rem
ember any of them visiting the convent or the church at any point?’

  He showed her the photograph of the three geneticists, but she drew a blank. She looked around at the books, the journals. ‘So he’s a scientist, a geneticist? And you think he is the murderer?’

  They didn’t answer her. She could see that they had all but given up on her being useful to them; Swift was busying himself with his phone and Quinn began supervising something on the other side of the room. They were then interrupted by a uniformed officer who knocked on the open door:

  ‘Boss – initial door-to-door; no-one has seen him this week. Or her.’

  ‘Her?’ Swift and Quinn both looked up.

  ‘Apparently there’s a girl living here as well. No name yet. Sounds like they kept themselves to themselves.’

  The police appeared to have forgotten Helen was there, and she took the opportunity to look around the room for more information. The place was spellbinding, terrifying. She saw a partially-hidden degree certificate in a cracked frame, with the name ‘Andrew Shepherd’, and she made a mental note. She also made a mental note of the research institute and date on the photograph they had shown her, resolving to look it up as soon as she got home.

  6.

  Toxteth Community Pharmacy was one of the few remaining places of business on Granby Road, amongst boarded up shop fronts and dilapidated red-brick terraced houses, some of which that had once been grand. The pharmacy was a forlorn establishment whose main purpose, judging by the barred windows and preponderance of security cameras, was to provide methadone to locals engaged in heroin recovery. Mr. Sawhney, the owner, stood behind the counter glass looking sheepish when Swift and Quinn presented him with the box of dexamethasone. The serial number on the box had traced it unmistakeably to his dispensary.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, peering at the date. ‘February this year. We did have an issue with our previous assistant pharmacist, Natalie Curran. I caught her falsifying prescriptions. It’s not unusual around here, but this was quite odd, not just because she worked here, but because the drugs she was stealing were not what you would expect.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Normally it would be methadone, oxycontin, things like that. Not steroids. Also, she was only taking small amounts, nowhere near enough to sell, for that amount of risk. I thought perhaps she might have been one of those compulsive thieves, or perhaps had some sort of Munchausen’s. Or perhaps something to do with her… her weight… some sort of misplaced self-medication.’

  ‘So you fired her, but you didn’t report her.’ Swift looked severe, and the pharmacist began to panic.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was such a small amount and she was very… vulnerable.’

  ‘Right, OK, Mr Sawhney. We’ll get on to… what was her name again? Natalie Curran.’

  ‘She just lives around the corner actually.’

  ***

  Natalie Curran lived only a couple of blocks away, in a bungalow on a new-build council estate. Swift and Quinn rang the doorbell and looked into the camera, and after a long wait the door clicked itself open. They heard a voice from inside saying, ‘Just let yourselves in.’ The bungalow smelt a little fetid, and they saw a folded wheelchair leaning against the wall. They went into the hallway and heard, ‘Come through,’ as they went into a bright double-length room, which acted as both bedroom and sitting room. Natalie Curran was sitting on a two-seater armchair which she filled entirely. An oxygen tank and mask stood next to the chair, on the arm of which lay her activity centre: remote controls, crossword magazine, bottle of Coca Cola. She was morbidly obese and clearly not getting enough help.

  ‘You’re welcome to help yourself to tea or coffee, it’s all in the kitchen,’ she said, gesturing vaguely into the back, but they declined. Swift came straight to the point.

  ‘Natalie, we know you were fired from Toxteth Pharmacy for falsifying prescriptions. Jason Hardman is now dead. Why was he taking dexamethasone?’

  Her face turned white with fear. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know Jason Hardman himself, I only saw him when he came to collect his prescriptions. It’s Andrew Shepherd that I know; he was the one who asked me to do it.’

  ‘How do you know Andrew Shepherd, Natalie?’

  ‘He used to come in to the pharmacy and he was so nice to me, then he started helping me to get home, helping me in and out of the wheelchair, and he sort of became my boyfriend really.’

  ‘Did he tell you why he needed these prescriptions?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask, I thought it was better not to know, I suppose. He felt bad when I got fired. He kept coming round for a while, doing bits of shopping for me, but he’s stopped now. As you can see I’m in a bit of a mess.’

  She almost didn’t have the energy to cry, and looked beyond shame in her abandonment.

  ‘When was the last time he visited you Natalie?’ Quinn asked.

  ‘About a month ago. He said he’d be back the following week, but I haven’t heard from him since and I never had his phone number. I know he was just using me for the prescriptions. But still…’

  ‘Do you have any home help, Natalie?’ Swift asked kindly.

  ‘I’m on disability, but no help, no.’

  ‘Perhaps we can have a word with social services, see what they can do,’ he said as they got to leave.

  But then Natalie said, ‘Was the dexa a cause of Jason’s death?’

  ‘No, Natalie, it doesn’t look like it, but we don’t know yet.’

  ‘And what about the other bloke, is he OK?’

  Swift and Quinn both sat down again quickly. ‘What other bloke?’

  ‘I was falsifying prescriptions for two different names. Exactly the same drug for both. One was Jason Hardman; the other was… er… Stuart Killy, yeah that’s right, Stuart Killy.’

  ***

  As they left, Quinn remarked, ‘So sad that someone could let themselves get like that.’

  ‘I know. So many lonely people behind closed doors.’ Darren was racked with doubt at his own abilities. He was cursing himself for not asking such an obvious question – was Jason Hardman the only prescription recipient. Shit, you almost missed it. You are not up to this.

  And now the name Killy. Everyone in Liverpool knew that name: the biggest crime family in the north-west, with a drug-dealing network that spread across the world.

  ‘Is there any crime in this city that doesn’t involve that family?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Colette. ‘There are loads of Killys though.’

  ‘But where d’you think the big boss man lives?’

  ‘Meathead? I don’t know. Where?’

  ‘Take a guess. Where’s posh?’

  ‘Blundellsands?’

  ‘Formby. Just around the corner from those nuns.’

  ‘Shit.’

  They stood in the street while Darren took out his phone to call for an address on Stuart Killy, when Colette said, ‘Actually I think I know Stuart. Yes, that was one of my first cases on the force, when I was stationed at central. There can’t be more than one Stuart Killy, right? Armed robbery, and I remember because there was something a bit sad about it. Stuart was one of the Killy nephews and had a low IQ. He was the driver I think. And I remember thinking it was a shame that he went down for the same time as the rest of them.’

  Swift got on the phone, and by the time they had walked back to the car Stuart Killy’s identity had been verified.

  ‘You’re right, Colette, he went down four years ago, but listen to this – he was released six months ago on electronic tag, and guess where he lives? Kenilworth House.’

  ***

  Back to Kenilworth House, and this time they were on the ground floor, knocking on the door while a group of children on bikes and skateboards looked on from behind, muttering about how they hated ‘the bizzies’ and playing at being intimidating. There was no answer, and eventually Swift shouted through the letter box. ‘Mr Killy, we know you’re there, we’re comin
g in now.’ But before he had even finished the sentence, he winced at a foul smell emanating from the letter box. According to the probation service, Killy’s electronic tag, and therefore his person, was in the apartment, but something was very wrong.

  This time Swift had no hesitation in breaking and entering, and he called in a team who arrived within minutes.

  As they entered, the smell of rot was immediately overpowering – rancid bins and rotten food. But there was something else as well, something much worse. The uniformed policeman who had knocked down the front door was first to the living room, and he collapsed back slightly against the door frame, put one hand to his mouth and pointed with the other, which was still holding the battering tool. Swift and Quinn moved into the room and saw Killy’s heavy round electronic ankle tag, dutifully plugged into the wall and beeping intermittently to signify, somewhat plaintively, that it was fully charged. The tag was lying in a pool of dried blood on the rug. And attached to the tag was a foot, neatly removed at the ankle, and beginning to rot. Swift put his hands to his face and rubbed his fingers over his mouth.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ***

  Back at the station, Swift flicked through the updated Policy Book and Action Book, pleased with the way things were going. He called a meeting to update what they had found about Andrew Shepherd, feeling confident; two days in, and good policing had identified their man. Surely an arrest was imminent.

  ‘Right, our prime suspect is Andrew Shepherd.’ He pinned up a photo, obtained from Tomlinson’s personnel file. ‘He’s dangerous, he’s missing, and he’s potentially responsible for two other missing persons, so let’s do this update quickly then get to work. Quinn, let’s have a quick bio.’

  ‘Andrew Shepherd, aged forty-five, registered as living at Kenilworth house in Toxteth for the past fifteen years. Very strange employment history: PhD in Genetics from Cambridge University, worked on the Human Genome Project at the Wellcome Institute there from 1995 to 2001. All seems very prestigious. But after he left Cambridge it all goes blank. He has claimed benefits at various times, and at other times disappeared off the radar completely. According to his medical records he was signed off work repeatedly with clinical depression. The only record of employment we have is that he worked at Tomlinson Young Offenders Institute from 2014 to 2015, teaching science with a qualification that was not verified, and we can’t find a confirmation of it. He was fired for religious grooming, his grooming target being Jason Hardman. Apparently he continued to see Jason Hardman after he was fired. No evidence of a sexual relationship between them, but we don’t know. We also don’t know why he was procuring him steroids, or what the hell he was doing with the mad home laboratory.’ As she spoke Swift was pinning up photos of the various rooms in Shepherd’s apartment, with their bizarre and dark incongruities. ‘But the religious junk in his flat has been confirmed by an expert as being directly linked to the quotation at the crime scene, so we almost certainly have the killer identified.’