Dead Silent (25 page)

Hendricks took out his phone. ‘Tell me about the body and the garden on the back of the triptych.’

Clay watched Gabriel’s eyes, saw the ebb and flow of his thoughts, coming in closer and pulling away. He pressed his index finger to his broken lips.

‘You spoke to me on the phone in Leonard Lawson’s house, Gabriel,’ said Hendricks. ‘You’ve got a very unusual voice. It was
you
talking about a body and a garden. Whose body? Which garden?’

A remnant of the blistering strobe light in Leonard Lawson’s bedroom danced behind Clay’s eyes and, in the eruption of light, she pictured
The Last Judgment
painted on the wall of Gabriel Huddersfield’s room. The darkness wiped his room away and when the light came again, she saw Leonard Lawson’s bedroom, his impaled body, the bed, the dressing-table mirror, the clean rectangle and its missing
Tower of Babel
. Light, dark, light, dark. Huddersfield, Lawson, Huddersfield, Lawson.

She got up, opened the door and said, ‘Sergeant Harris will take you back to your cell. It’s on the back of the triptych, Gabriel. You told us so yourself, back in the Royal. The name of the garden.’

‘He’s packed everything away so tightly,’ said DS Mason to DS Riley as she entered Huddersfield’s flat. Passing slowly by, he indicated the three rooms rammed with Huddersfield’s possessions.

‘I thought
I
was a hoarder,’ said Riley. ‘But he’s obsessively tidy, I’ll give him that.’ At the bathroom door, she glanced at the mannequin dressed in leather and chains and felt as if she’d had pornography forced on her.

‘Look at this,’ said Mason, pushing open the door of the main room.

Riley looked at the statue of Jesus dying on the cross on one wall and the three-sectioned mural of paradise, the world and hell on the second wall. She was alarmed at the skilfulness of the two representations. The smell of oil paint and varnish percolated through the aroma of stale incense.

She stepped between the corners of Huddersfield’s life. Art. Piles of dried-out rags and tubs of stagnant, oil-stained water; notebooks and sketchpads; bulging albums and dog-eared art books. Religion. Multiple Bibles, works of religious devotion, statues and crucifixes. Sex. A heap of pornographic magazines and sex toys.

‘Gina, we found this,’ said Mason. He handed her a framed print of Pieter Bruegel’s
The Tower of Babel
and she wondered what the jury would talk about as they killed time in order to give the impression of having conducted a detailed debate as to the guilt of Gabriel Huddersfield.

Her iPhone rang out. On the display: ‘Clay’. She connected and switched to speakerphone.

‘Gina, are you there?’

‘In the oh so charming apartment.’

‘
Whose body? Whose garden?
Huddersfield said the name of the garden where the corpse is buried is on the back of the triptych.’

‘I’m looking at the triptych right now.’ Riley examined the wall, the paint that covered the plaster. Her eyes were drawn to the bottom left-hand corner and the figure that had inspired the staging of Leonard Lawson’s body. Behind it was the head marching on disembodied feet and, underneath, just two tiny letters: G H. ‘There’s no paper on the wall that we can peel back to reveal the name of anything.’

‘The exterior is the gable wall at the side of the house,’ said Mason, chipping in to the conversation.

‘What have you got for me, Terry?’ asked Clay.

‘It’s in my hand,’ said Riley. ‘He found the framed picture of
The Tower of Babel
from Leonard Lawson’s room,’ said Riley.

Clay fell silent and then asked, ‘What are the dimensions?’

‘Fifty centimetres by thirty-five centimetres,’ said Mason.

‘Same dimensions as the print from Leonard Lawson’s room. The clean space on his wall measured fifty centimetres by thirty-five centimetres.’

Riley looked at the image of the doomed tower and placed it in the context of the entire room: the world according to Gabriel Huddersfield’s psychosis and the celestial forces that governed that chaos.

‘Terry,’ said Clay. ‘I want you to throw a ladder up to the gable wall. Examine every single brick that corresponds to the top floor and the space where the mural sits on the inside wall. ‘You’re looking for writing, the name of a garden.’

Without a word, DS Mason headed out of the room, at speed.

‘Anything else?’ asked Clay.

Riley looked at the initials
GH
, the signature on the base of the triptych, and felt electricity pulse down her spine. An idea formed in the back of her mind and she gazed at the two letters.

‘Are you there, Gina?’

‘You know how Barney’s thinking that the symbol on the spear is actually language, some sort of anagram... What was Leonard Lawson’s body staged like?’

‘Leonard Lawson’s body was staged as a work of art...’ Clay fell silent.

‘Huddersfield signed off his copy of Hieronymus Bosch’s work with his own initials, the cheeky bastard. I’m looking at his signature right now. I can feel the smile on your face coming through the silence. Go on! Call it, Eve.’

‘It’s their signatures. The dragonfly at the window is a visual anagram for the murderers’ initials. Let me call Barney.’

In the car park of the Anglican Cathedral, Adam Miller didn’t notice the passage of time. He sat at the wheel of his white van, the radio mumbling away, and stared up at the bell tower, imagining the stonemason and the security guard ridiculing him.

As his heart raced faster and faster, the temperature of his anger alternated with every beat. Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

He glanced at the dashboard, saw it was a minute away from one o’clock, the time the stonemason would leave for another job.

Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

Adam looked to the very top of the bell tower, where the security guard would at some point be alone, and decided he would get out of his van and make the journey back up there.

Hot cold, hot cold, hot cold...

‘So you’d talk to me like that, you fucking nonentity!’

Adam reached under his seat and felt the wooden handle of a hammer, pictured the terror on the security guard’s face as the metal head came flying at the bridge of his nose.

Hot cold, hot hot, hot hotter...

‘Fucking suck on that, you fucking motherfucking cunt!’ he screamed at the windscreen and the top of the bell tower.

Hotter hotter, hotter hotter, hotter hotter...

Years of aimless talk with counsellors withered inside him and he was eighteen again, on fire, alive with rage.

Hotter hotter hotter hotter hotter hotter...

His early years passed through his mind; snapshots of faces blown on a remorseless wind. At sixteen, the stranger whose face he glassed on the street. Sixteen again, the terror in the eyes of the old drunk he battered to a lifeless pulp. Seventeen, the shock of the lad he knifed in the guts in a pub car park. Eighteen, the ageing rent boy whose fingers he broke with a hammer and whose agonised cries still echoed in his ears and sent waves of pleasure right through him.

‘Fuck the consequences! I’ll wait in the shadows and when you pass...’ He gripped the handle of the hammer. ‘Right into your fucking skull.’

Music came from the radio, the one o’clock Radio Merseyside news broadcast. He felt a cold wind on the nape of his neck and focused on the radio. He turned up the volume.

‘Police have arrested and charged a man in connection with the murder of Leonard Lawson. They have named the man as thirty-eight-year-old Gabriel Huddersfield and are now seeking his accomplice. A spokesman...’

The fire that consumed Adam rushed to his gut and the rest of his body turned to ice.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

Who picked up Angel Gabriel’s phone?

The police.

Who called you back?

The police.

Who’s got Angel Gabriel’s phone?

The police.

Who can trace you?

The police.

He turned on the ignition and, tyres screaming against the red pavement, raced towards the exit barrier, the fire inside him rumbling hotter and hotter and hotter, ready to explode.

DC Barney Cole looked down with frustration at the paper on his desk.

‘Oh, Jesus!’

Cole looked across the incident room at Hendricks, who was hunched over a Bible and also brimming with frustration.

‘What’s the matter, mate? You can tell Barney!’

‘The sheer number of names in the Book of Genesis. Gabriel Huddersfield dropped it that maybe his accomplice’s name was buried in the opening book of the Old Testament. Dozens of them are way off the scale, because no one uses anything like them anymore, but it’s still like he’s sent us looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks.’

‘Is he playing games with us?’

‘I don’t know. How’s your afternoon, Barney?’

‘Pretty shit afternoon following on from a similar morning.’

He showed Hendricks the GH. ‘I can make a set of initials for Gabriel Huddersfield from the deconstructed symbol, but the trouble is, you can turn the lines into any letters you like if you try hard enough.’ Cole smiled but, in Hendricks’s mind, it only served to make his eyes look sad and tired. ‘Maybe, Bill, they’re leading us up a blind alley.’

Hendricks walked across the space to Cole and offered him the Bible. ‘Swap?’

Cole took it. ‘Halleluiah! Praise the Lord!’

As a band of fog rolled in from Sefton Park, Adam Miller arrived from the Anglican Cathedral at the corner of Croxteth Road, doing 15 mph, his headlights fully on. All he could see was dense mist in the glare of his headlights, yellow light trapped in a thick cloud.
This could be the death of me
, he thought, pulling over and parking, two wheels on and two wheels off the pavement.

Voices drifted through the fog from the direction of 777 Croxteth Road, the only other place apart from his shed that he could be himself.

Cautiously, he turned the corner, recognising the streetlight that looked like a frozen giant set to pounce.

Fucking hell, fucking hell...
If they (is it more than one or just one?) have picked up Gabriel’s phone and the phone was inside Flat 5, what else have they found? Calm down.
He took a set of deep breaths.
There are photographs in the flat, but my face is always covered. If someone’s found them, how could they link them to me? It could be anyone. Anyone.

The voices got louder the closer he came to 777. Across the road came the sound of a car revving up and heading away. Voices? Voices, three or four of them: a man, another man high up, his voice raised, sailing through the fog like something winged and lethal.

‘Tell Gina Riley, it’s impossible to see. I’m coming down the ladder...’

Oh, fuck’s sake. Who’s up a ladder? Why?
Competing sounds, voices, engines. Someone came down a metal ladder, seemed to be sucked into the fog. An eerie silence froze Adam to the spot. And from the silence came a sound that sent bolts of terror up and down his nervous system.

He turned to the sound of his father’s voice.
‘You shouldn’t have done what you did last night. You and your violent games. You shouldn’t have done what you did to me! I was your father, but you put an end to that.’

A darkness formed in the mist where the voice had come from, a darkness that came closer. ‘
What kind of a man are you, Adam? Killing? Killing your father for personal gain?’

Adam wanted to turn and run as the darkness came closer and the breath from it drifted through the mist. But he couldn’t move.

‘But you know best, don’t you, Adam?’

The darkness was upon him. ‘
Didn’t I teach you the fear of God, boy? I’ve got a good mind to take your pants right down and spank you until you bleed.’
The darkness entered his body, paralysed and blinded him.

Memory possessed him and he was young and small again, listening to the creak of his bedroom door as it opened and closed, his father’s footsteps coming deeper into the pitch-black darkness, the smell of cigarettes and tobacco, the meaty weight of his father’s hand on his mouth, and the only sound that came from his father, night after night after night: ‘Sssshhh!’

The darkness passed through his skin and bone, twisting his muscles and firing through his organs. Then it was gone.

The beam of a powerful spotlight – it seemed to hang in mid-air – pointed directly at 777, picking out the shape of the front door that seemed to be open.

Yes, people were moving around the building.

My secretions are all over the flat
, thought Adam. He felt as if his feet were sinking into the fabric of the pavement, his ankles dissolving into the granite of the paving stones, his legs sucked down into the hardcore underneath.

My secretions are all over the flat. And all they’ll need... My secretions are all over the flat.... is one... My secretions are all over the flat.... swab.