Dead Silent (33 page)

The child who was given stimuli but otherwise cut off from the distractions of the modern world would be subjected to another experiment. He would be exposed, continually and without remission, to the works of two specifically related artists from a different historical era. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, both Dutch. Bosch, born circa 1450 and died 1516, and Bruegel, born circa 1525 and died 1569.

The English Experiment was the marriage of two brilliant minds and two spectacular concepts.

She flicked through the pages and words leapt up at her.
Birth... healthy... silent attic... mural... Last Judgment... Shepherd... tape recording... darkness... Bosch... Noone... normal... death... silent half... end...
She felt sick to the core.

Riley looked up and felt as if the ceiling of the Lady Chapel had descended to within inches of her head. There were pages more to read, but her brain was filling with fast-setting concrete.

In her mind, she travelled back to the ward in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital where she had watched over Louise and listened to the vivid details of her dream about the Tower of Babel. Two boys, high up in the Tower of Babel. One with a voice, one with a caul of skin condemning him to silence.

She turned the cross-stitch over, looked at the message that Louise had so lovingly embroidered and wondered at the true value of gold.
She phoned Hendricks. When he connected, she could hear he was outdoors. ‘Where are you, Bill?’

‘Coming inside with Terry Mason and the skeleton. He’s going to get the bones ready in the education room. Dr Lamb’s on her way over. What’s happening?’

‘I’ve got the missing twelve pages from Leonard Lawson’s book. The English Experiment.’

He was quiet for a few moments. ‘And?’

‘I’ve only dipped into it, but it’s looking bleak. I think Lawson and his pal Noone have tried to pull off something as cruel as any of the quacks that floated round the Nazi concentration camps—’

‘Bill!’ A voice in the background called out with urgency, interrupting their conversation. And again: ‘Bill!’ Riley could hear it coming closer to Hendricks. Then, chillingly: ‘Get into the cathedral quick. Eve wants you to take charge on the ground.’

Needles of cold pricked the nape of Riley’s neck. She heard Hendricks running.

‘Gina, I’ve got to go!’

She closed the call down and picked up the papers again. Her head was occupied with just one question.
Louise Lawson
,
just what do you know about the past? And will you live to tell the tale?

Clay pressed to open the lift doors on the fourth floor of the bell tower. The damp sandstone of the massive, cold walls felt like pepper in her nostrils.

‘We know he
was
on the roof,’ whispered Clay hurrying along the central section of the tight corridor towards the lift that would take them up to the tenth floor. ‘But what’s to say he’s not now waiting for us round the next corner?’

The corner ahead disappeared into darkness.

She lightened her footfall, tried to pad along more quietly. She held out her hands, turned her head to Stone and read the fear in his eyes. ‘Stay back!’ she hissed.

Something tightened at the core.
Move. Now.

She veered as far from the corner as she could, to the right-hand wall, turned the corner.

A cusp of darkness under an overhead light, silence and an empty space.

Her phone rang out and she gasped. She beckoned Stone forward and connected.

‘The clock’s ticking, bitch. Where are you?’

She carried on at speed to the second lift.

‘We’ve got your friend in our custody, Adam. Gabriel Huddersfield.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he snapped.

‘You don’t sound yourself, Adam. Is it the cold that’s making your voice shake or the completely impossible corner you’ve painted yourself into?’

At the second lift door, she jabbed the call-button.

‘Babble, babble, babble...’

‘Speaking of which...’ The lift arrived, the doors opened. ‘Just why did you and Huddersfield take Leonard Lawson’s picture of
The Tower of Babel
?’

As she and Stone stepped into the lift, the image of two bodies being buried alive in the same coffin crossed her mind. Her stomach lurched as the lift ascended.

‘Genesis 11:7:
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. He stole language first. Babble, babble, babble. Genesis 11:9: That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. He played God. We showed him what God thought of that, what God thought of him
.’

She listened to the wind whipping around the parapet of the Vestey Tower.

‘Are you still there?’ The lift doors slid open and a broken fluorescent light made a pattern of darkness that threw her for a moment into the strobe-lit horror of Leonard Lawson’s bedroom.

‘Where are you, Clay?’

‘On the tenth floor.’ She picked up her pace, blinked hard to blot out the projection of Lawson’s body, upside down and strung up like a hunted beast, seeping from her memory into her vision.

‘Well that’s just not good enough.’

‘God was a petulant child then!’ The words escaped her, had no identifiable beginning, no filter. She filtered the next word. Shit. He laughed and she hated the sound. ‘But this is the modern world...’

‘Big mouth, big mistake!’ He disconnected.

She ran along the gallery, past the huge chamber whose bells sat silently in the mist drifting through the slatted windows. She reached the bottom of the staircase to the roof. A hundred and eight steps to go. She began the ascent. Her footsteps echoed and mingled with Stone’s.

‘I’ve never been here before,’ said Stone at her back. ‘What can I expect?’

‘A spiral,’ said Clay. ‘Small sets of three or four steps, then a turn. More steps. Turn.’
And Miller ready to pounce at every one of them.

‘Let me go ahead of you,’ said Stone.

She saw her coffin being lowered into the ground, Philip holding Thomas’s hand and not understanding that she wasn’t coming back. She travelled through time, saw Philip as a seven-year-old at the dinner table with Thomas and his shiny new stepmother, heard him ask, ‘What was Mum like, Dad?’

Go! Away! Now!

‘Cover my back,’ she replied, turning the corner to the next set of steps. Nothing. She turned. ‘What was that?’ Deeper into the bell tower, below them, she heard a noise, a whistling sound drifting further away, and what sounded like a human voice, muffled but urgent. Clay looked at the stone platform ahead, then down at the curve of concrete masking the long line of steps below them.

Forwards and up? The noise could have come from outside... Backwards and down? The wind whistled, bringing a human voice on its tide. She looked up again and made an instant judgment call. Certain danger lay ahead. Possible danger lay behind them.

‘I heard it too,’ said Stone, turning away, knowing what Clay wanted him to do. ‘I’ll follow it. Be careful, Eve.’

A platform. Eight steps. Turn. Seven steps. Turn. Her mouth dried. Moving, moving, moving. She breathed in the mist around her, but it didn’t touch her parched tongue. Stone stairs blurred into each other as she felt the burn in her thighs and calves.

The final set of stairs lay ahead, the angle steeper than the others, fifteen, twenty steps from the door at the top. Night and snow drifted past the open door leading out on to the roof.

She took a deep breath. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, but the spinning in her head had stopped.

‘I’m here!’ she shouted as she attacked the final steps. ‘Less than ten minutes.’ Silence. Wind and snow greeted her as she neared the top.

She arrived at the doorway on to the roof and looked around, 360 degrees.

It was positioned in the middle of the scaffolding in the centre of the roof space.

She walked into the light.

Oh no!
she thought.
No, no, no, no, no...

Each step felt more perilous than the last. As Stone descended the stone stairs of the tower, reversing the route he had just done with Clay, he reminded himself that Adam Miller was alone and that there were two of them. He told himself his was the easier path, but that did nothing to dent the mounting dread inside him.

Stone listened. There was no other sound in the bell tower apart from his breathing and the padding of his feet.

He turned a corner into a blanket of shadow and felt his heart leap when the silence was broken by the screech of a seagull outside the bell tower.

He stopped and listened again. Silence.

The broken light danced before his eyes.

He could see the entrance to the lift space on the tenth floor.

There was no one there.
Turn. False alarm. Go and help Clay. Hurry.

He walked into the patterns of light and dark, kept his eyes fixed on the doorway to the lift. He had to be absolutely sure there was no one behind that final corner.

Near the corner, in a flood of darkness, he stepped quickly and felt something soft underfoot. It moved under his weight. He lifted his foot and looked down. It was shrouded in shadows.

Stone took out his torch and flicked its light into the gloom at his feet. At first he thought it was a dead animal. He squinted, crouched down on to his heels and looked more closely.

A small pool of slimy red liquid oozed from the place where it had been cut. He followed the curve to its red tip, made out the pattern of dots that covered the surface and the grey fur at the flat end.

He heard the sound of a single out-breath behind him and, in the same moment, the impact of a heavy item against the back of his skull.

He dropped his torch as darkness descended. Before the cry in his throat was released, Stone fell into an unconscious heap next to the thing that had caught his attention and distracted him from the menace in the shadows at his back.

He lay perfectly still, a trickle of blood pouring from his ear in the direction of a severed human tongue.

As she walked to the scaffolding at the centre of the roof space, Clay saw the knot on the masonry first, then the other end of the rope and the body dangling from it, swinging upside down in the twilight from the parapet of the Vestey Tower.

A second body was laid out on its back, naked, feet together, knees together, arms outstretched and pointing away from the head as if beseeching heaven, a friendship bracelet around the wrist, genitals shrivelled and pitiful in the freezing air.

She looked at the neatly folded clothes set to his right and recognised them immediately as Abey’s. The jeans he’d worn earlier that day when she’d interviewed Louise in the Millers’ living room. The black trainers and white socks. The replica Everton top.

Too much blood
, Clay thought,
near the head and face
. She found she couldn’t look directly at him, his face, his eyes.

From the feet to his head, look at him, Eve, look at him!
she commanded herself.

She started with his feet, dialled Stone, knew his phone would silently vibrate wherever he was. The ankles were slightly parted, his feet flat down on the roof. The phone rang twice, three times, four. His knees were together and bent. His back was flat and his arms were wide: a crucifixion without a cross or nails, on the ground. Another torturous detail lifted from the central panel of Bosch’s
The Last Judgment
.

The phone rang out and Clay felt increasingly nauseous as intuition told her something had happened to Karl Stone to stop him picking up her call.

Stone’s voice on his answer-phone message. ‘You’ve reached DS Karl Stone...’ The wind picked up and the slender comfort of his voice was lost. She looked around and knew she was all alone on the roof.

His stomach. His chest. The redness around his neck, on the ground around his face and head.

‘Jesus!’ Shock hit her and she hit back by pressing the soles of her feet against the surface of the roof and forcing herself not to blink but to stare directly into the space around his face and skull and gaping mouth and process the information in front of her.

She disconnected the call to Stone. She looked away. She had to raise the flag.

She called Hendricks and he answered immediately.

‘Miller’s escaped with Louise Lawson as his hostage. He’s murdered Abey. Something’s happened to Karl Stone. He’s not picking up.’ She looked again at the body, the neatly stacked set of clothing. ‘I need you here. Miller’s got to be in the cathedral somewhere with Louise.’

The snow fell on to the corpse. She imagined her son Philip exposed to the same barbaric treatment and she felt a slashing pain down the centre of her body, as if her left side was about to separate from the right. She stood firm, watched her own breath rising through the snow and headed back towards the stairway.

Karl Stone. Find him. Right now.

‘How did Miller kill him?’ asked Hendricks.

‘I’m not sure.’ The image tumbled inside her skull, a picture she knew she would never forget. ‘But he took a souvenir. He took away his tongue.’ She was on the steps, hurrying back down, the wind whistling through the slatted windows and into the bell tower. ‘And he took away his face and scalp.’

On the back pew at the left side of the Lady Chapel, DS Riley looked again at the photograph of the two naked newborns, the twelve pages of the manuscript gripped tightly in her hands.

She heard footsteps coming down the steps to the chapel and a voice from the gallery above.

‘DS Riley, Danielle Miller to see you.’

‘Thank you, Constable,’ she replied, without turning.

In the body of the cathedral above her head, Riley heard voices, the busy movement of bodies.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Danielle Miller sitting in the right-hand back pew. She listened to Danielle breathing, heard the tears in her throat. She stood up and crossed the chapel, sat in the row in front of Danielle.