Dead Silent (39 page)

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.

‘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...

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 the 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...
’

Clay noted the steady motion of Louise’s mouth as she spoke and the voice that poured from her was full of the strength and energy of a woman half her age.

‘I left him in the darkness and left the darkness to do the rest of the work for me. When morning came, he hadn’t slept at all. But he was his usual self, cold, distant, silent but anxious now, very, very anxious.

‘In the morning, he told me that
we
were going to the Isle of Man. That
we
were going to reclaim the skeletons of the infants from the original English Experiment. That
we
were going to bring them back and bury them in the wild seclusion of the garden of 777 Croxteth Road.

‘My father was left in charge of the house and the boys and by lunchtime Noone and I were on our way to the Isle of Man. We walked for miles without a word and then he stopped. There was nothing, no one in sight. It didn’t look like a cave. It was more of a crack in the grassy rock with a large stone covering it.’

Louise took a deep, slow breath.

‘I found strength I never knew I had and I moved that stone enough so I could squeeze inside, into the darkness. He followed me in.
They’re on a high ledge
, he said.
You’ll have to climb up to reach them.
Those were his last words. I hit him with that same newfound strength. He dropped to the ground, unconscious, but he wasn’t dead. He was breathing and had a pulse. I left the cave, moved the stone back and packed the crack with smaller stones, completely concealing the entrance. It was as easy as drawing a curtain for me.’

There was a lightness about Louise, a dead weight rising from her shoulders.

‘When I came home, it was to a house in chaos. Cain had rebelled against my father, had attacked him, sending him fleeing from the house. But not before my father had managed to burn all the years of evidence. All that remained was a picture of the boys when they were perfectly healthy babies. And two teenage children, one of them damaged by design.

‘That night, we all went to bed, Cain and Abel and I, but not as normal. Cain insisted on sleeping with his brother in the big double bed that their father had no further use for, in the room next door to mine. I woke up in the early hours. I went next door and Cain was standing over Abel, who was lying perfectly still in the bed. Cain had a pillow in his hand.
I cannot bear his
suffering
. He lay down next to his dead brother.
I cannot bear my own suffering.

‘I took Cain’s hand.
Leave your brother for now. And leave behind your thoughts of death. Come with me.
He lay in my bed and we started talking. And talking. And talking. And I taught him what the world outside was like. And we talked. For hours and days and weeks and months until he finally said that he wanted to live. And that is exactly what happened. I explained what had happened. And I prepared him for the real world. I would follow him at a distance as he went into shops. I would travel on the bus in a different seat to him. I would watch him cross the road. For years. And years and year and years. I gave him the skills he needed to survive in the real world.

‘One day, shortly after Cain had turned twenty, I returned to the house and he was gone. The only thing he left was a piece of paper on which he’d written a handful of words.
To my loving Shepherd. Do not come looking for your sheep, for your sheep is not lost but
roaming. Do not leave your father. Guard the monster. I will return, I swear, and we will settle this score and silence that voice forever
. The only things he took with him were his brother’s bones. After many, many years of waiting, I thought he has gone forever and would never return. But he did. Just over a year ago. The sheep returned to his Shepherd...’