Authors: Mark Roberts
‘First off, Danielle, does your husband have a brother?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ A shadow fell across Riley’s mind and she wondered about the truth of Huddersfield’s claims about the body in the garden.
‘I’m certain. What’s happening?’
‘I’ve just had a phone call, Danielle. Your husband’s still somewhere in the cathedral, probably in the bell tower.’
‘Has he harmed anyone?’
Riley measured Danielle’s emotional temperature and lied. ‘I haven’t heard the details. I need information and I haven’t got time to play games.’
‘I’ll be absolutely truthful with you.’
Riley handed her the picture of the babies and the twelve pages from the back of Louise Lawson’s cross-stitch.
Danielle looked at the babies and asked, ‘Who are they?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ replied Riley.
Danielle moved the picture into the light and looked closely. She sighed and said, ‘Could one of them be Abey? They both have his eyes. I had no idea he was an identical twin though.’
As Riley tucked the twelve pages and the photograph back inside the ‘Silence is Golden’ sampler, she made a horrible connection between the picture of the babies and the pages she had just read.
Danielle indicated the needlework. ‘Louise is very talented with a needle and thread. But why would she have this picture?’
Silence is golden
, thought Riley, and suddenly understood the full horror of what Abey had been through.
The English Experiment. The story of the first thirteen years of Abey’s life. He was an identical twin, brought up in cruel and bizarre circumstances.
‘How did Abey come into your care?’ asked Riley.
Danielle reached into her bag and handed Riley an unmarked red card file. ‘I was asked to bring this. DCI Clay said she wanted Abey’s documents.’ Riley’s eyes drilled into her. ‘Abey used to be in a residential facility on the other side of Sefton Park from us. Holland House. He was there from the age of eighteen, transferred over from children’s services. He moved to The Sanctuary one year ago, when he was thirty-eight.’
‘Holland House? I’m assuming it was a lot less high-end than The Sanctuary.’
‘It’s private, but it was pretty basic.’
‘So where did the money come from to move Abey upmarket all of a sudden?’
‘It’s all in the red file: the lawyer’s correspondence, the will. He came into a huge trust fund last year. His father’s been dead for years. He had no other family. The day after he came into money, he came to us.’
‘Who brought him to you?’
‘Louise Lawson. She met him when she was volunteering at Holland House, before she volunteered for us. She visited me in the months leading up to his money kicking in, arranged the move herself.’
‘She had the authority to do that?’ Inside her head, Riley felt the sun burning away clouds, and the shapes she perceived were worrying.
‘She’s his legal guardian.’
‘Is she now!’
‘Is there something wrong with that?’
Riley stood up, clutched the red file and the cross-stitch, attracted the attention of the uniformed officer up on the gallery. ‘Constable, please stay here with Mrs Miller until I return.’
She stepped into the aisle and, opening Abey’s red file, took out the top sheet, the personal information. She homed in on the top line, his name.
‘Is this his name?’ she asked.
‘It’s his full name. Abel Noone.’
‘Is there a birth certificate in here?’
‘There’s nothing that pre-dates his admission to us except the legal papers.’
‘Please stay right here, Danielle. I need to talk to you about your husband, but I need to talk with my colleagues before I go any further. Just one question before I go. Does your husband have a criminal record?’
‘I’m very, very scared of my husband. No, he has no criminal record because he hasn’t been caught.’ Her frail composure collapsed and her sobs echoed around the arches of the Lady Chapel. ‘He killed Gideon. Has he killed anyone else since?’
‘No one. No one as far as I know,’ replied Riley.
‘I hate him. I absolutely hate him.’
‘Why did you marry him, Danielle?’
‘Where I grew up, there was a lot of grinding poverty. It terrified me, left a scar on the inside that still hasn’t healed. Adam was charming at first and I ignored his angry outbursts. I thought I could tame him. I married him because he was wealthy and hard working with it. I married his money because I was terrified of being poor.’
‘Stay here, Danielle,’ said Riley, heading for the stairs up to the ground floor of the cathedral and nodding at the constable as she went.
Abey
, thought Riley.
Abey Noone, surviving adoptive son of Professor Damien Noone.
And, she wondered, if Abey was Abel, was the other half that Huddersfield talked about called Cain? Cain Noone. Did Abey know that Cain was dead?
As she arrived on the ground floor, she looked towards the main entrance of the cathedral and saw DS Terry Mason and his team heading in her direction.
In Mason’s hand was a bin bag. She made the connection to the body in the garden outside and wondered if the bones belonged to Cain Noone or some other as yet unidentified victim of the English Experiment.
Their names chased each other round her head. Abel Noone. Cain Noone. Cain and Abel, Abel and Cain. Abel No one. Cain No one. No one. No one. No one. The person Louise had asked for when Riley had asked her if there was anyone she wanted when they were in the Royal Hospital.
No one.
On the tenth floor of the bell tower, Clay felt as if her heart was about to stop beating. As she hurried towards the lift, Karl Stone’s body lay motionless in a pool of blood. She slowed down.
‘Karl!’ she shouted. No sign of life.
Around the corner, the noise of the lift doors closing jolted her. They closed, but not all the way. They closed, jammed, and pulled open again.
Close, jam, open.
She knelt beside him, pulled down his chin and checked that his airway was clear. Clay listened to the thin rhythm of his breath and felt the faintest pulse in his wrist.
Close, jam, open.
His face looked haunted in the direct glare of his torch and she looked away as she called Hendricks on her phone. He connected.
Close, jam, open.
‘Karl’s been attacked.’
‘Paramedics are in place, ground floor.’
Close, jam, open.
Clay placed her hands on Stone’s shoulders, shook him gently. ‘Alert them. Bell tower.’ She cursed the wound that was making blood leak from his ear. ‘Tenth floor. It’s a head wound.’
Close, jam, open.
Clay sized up the scale of the problem. The endless stone staircases. The lifts. The maniac in the shadows in between.
‘Is the firearms unit there yet?’ she asked.
Close, jam, open.
‘They’re coming across to the lift, I can see them.’
‘Where’s Gina Riley?’
Close, jam, open.
Clay eyed the stray lump on the ground near Stone’s head.
‘Talking to Danielle Miller.’
Close, jam, open.
‘Karl, listen to me, mate, we’re going to have help with you as soon as...’
A freezing wind squeezed her face, her skull.
‘Stay on the line, Bill!’
Close, jam, open.
She pictured Adam Miller standing in the lift just around the corner, one foot in the doorway causing the door to jam and open, over and over and over, his hand over Louise Lawson’s mouth. She saw his face as he listened to her frantic conversation with Hendricks, the buzz of sadistic excitement in his piggy eyes.
Close, jam, open.
She stood up and made her way to the furthest point from the corner behind which the lift doors lay.
Close, jam, open.
Clay took a deep breath, prepared to fight whatever was beyond that corner.
Profound fear seized her, but the necessity to
get on
came in an adrenaline rush that forced her round the corner.
The lift doors opened on their own. Began closing. Jammed. They paused. They opened to their full extent.
There was no one there.
‘What’s happening, Eve?’ Hendricks’s voice on the end of the phone.
As the doors began closing again, Clay’s eyes dipped to the metal runner and saw a lump, dead centre at the entrance to the lift.
She stepped towards it. The doors closed on the lump, squeezing its soft, pliable mass, and she thought,
this is what it must be like in hell
.
Another piece of corrupted evidence, another piece of horror.
The crumpled facial skin took another compression from the base of the lift doors, giving it the look of an undiscovered species teeming with life. The doors opened out. The hair on the scalp was matted with blood, unrecognisable as anything human.
‘Miller can’t have taken Louise down by the lift,’ said Clay, picking the skin from the runner. ‘He’s either still here on the tenth floor...’
She placed the skin on the cold stone floor.
‘There’s another way down,’ said Hendricks.
Clay watched the skin unfold on to the flatness of the floor
‘There’s an internal staircase from the bell tower to the porch door at the front of the cathedral.’
She held the lift door with her foot, glanced at the corner beyond which Stone lay unconscious and vulnerable. ‘Where’s the door into it up here?’
‘I don’t know. You still want me in the bell tower?’
She worked it out. If he’d been quick, if he’d abandoned his hostage, Adam Miller could already be outside the cathedral and away.
‘No. Try and intercept Miller, but you need to be armed.’
Time. More seconds lost on the ground floor. She wanted to scream.
‘I’m sorry, Karl.’
I have no choice. Nothing is certain.
If Miller was still in the tower, she wondered what macabre carnage he might weave from Karl Stone’s vulnerable flesh.
She stepped inside the lift, pressed to go down, watched the doors slide closed and felt a sickening lurch as the lift descended and she left her friend and colleague behind.
At the ground-floor lift, DS Bill Hendricks picked out the sergeant from the firearms unit in the gathering. The police medic was deep in conversation with two paramedics and the civilian hostage negotiator stood at a discreet distance from the group, talking on her mobile phone.
‘Sergeant!’ said Hendricks, taking the paperwork from him and pulling a pen from his own pocket. He signed the dotted lines and took the Glock 17 pistol and an extra cartridge of ammunition.
‘Bill, what’s happening?’ Riley’s voice behind him.
‘Karl’s taken a heavy hit, Eve’s in the tower, there’s a door by the porch at the front. I’ve got to go. There’s a chance—’
Above the lift doors, the screen lit up and a downwards arrow announced the descent of the lift from the fourth floor to the ground.
‘Back from the doors, everybody!’
The small space had evacuated by the time the indicator showed the lift had reached the third floor. As it hit the second, Riley was at the corner to the left of the lift doors and Hendricks was flat-backed against the wall to the right.
Riley took a Glock 17 from the arms sergeant and scribbled her name on the paperwork.
‘First floor, Bill...’ She peered from the corner. The descending arrow flashed and flashed. G. The lift stopped. ‘The doors are about to open.’
Riley dropped to one knee and pointed her gun up. The doors opened. Hendricks stepped in front of them, gun pointing squarely at head height. At first, it was as if he’d seen a ghost.
The lift appeared to be completely empty.
He looked down.
In the left-hand corner, on the floor of the lift, Louise Lawson cowered, made herself as small as was humanly possible.
Hendricks lowered his weapon. ‘All right, Miss Lawson, you’re quite safe now.’
She looked out, at DS Gina Riley, as if she was peering through fog.
‘Louise, it’s me, Gina. Gina Riley. I went to the hospital with you last night.’
Hendricks’s footsteps echoed as he hurtled towards the porch at the front of the cathedral.
Riley stepped into the lift, crouched to Louise’s eye level. ‘I want you to stand up. Are you ready?’ She folded one hand around Louise’s frozen left hand and another hand under her armpit. Slowly, she lifted Louise to her feet, felt the wetness that soaked her coat. ‘Walk with me, Louise.’ The lift door closed and Louise’s eyes widened. ‘It’s all right, Louise.’ Riley opened the doors again. ‘You aren’t going back up there. Walk with me.’
With her weight supported by Riley, Louise stepped out of the lift.
‘Will you speak?’ asked Riley.
In the lights of the cathedral, Louise’s white hair glistened with silver dots of condensation as she shook her head. Her body shivered as Riley guided her to the nearest seat, in the back pew of the cathedral.
Riley sat herself down in the seat directly in front of Louise. ‘Louise, please try and speak.’
She looked beyond Riley at the huge stained-glass windows above the main altar. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Louise?’ Her eyes drifted towards Riley’s gaze. ‘Every word is like a stain on silence and nothingness.’
‘Pardon?’ She exhaled the word.
‘Your father quoted an Irish writer to you. You quoted your father to me. Silence. Nothingness. Only silence isn’t nothing. It’s precious. Like gold. How much work did you put into that beautiful cross-stitch?’
Louise turned her face away, looked up at the huge ceiling above her head. Riley said nothing, waited.
‘Abey’s dead,’ said Louise. ‘I’m numb. With horror. Horror after horror.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So am I. I loved him. And he loved me.’
‘How long have you known Abey?’
‘A few years.’
‘Abey? Was that short for Abel?’ Riley handed Louise a paper handkerchief. Louise’s hands shook as she wiped her face and nose. ‘Abel had a brother called Cain, didn’t he?’
‘Yes he did. In the Book of Genesis.’
‘No, in your dream. The boy who spoke and the boy whose mouth was sealed by a layer of skin. Cain and Abel? Were they the two boys in your Tower of Babel dream?’