Authors: Mark Roberts
‘Where are you?’ asked Thomas.
‘Just off Lark Lane.’
‘Not far from home.’
‘I don’t think I’ll make it home to see Philip before he goes to nursery. Doctor, Doctor, I’ve got a chronic case of RMS.’
‘RMS? Slip behind the screen and take off all of your clothes...’
She laughed. ‘You’re a filthy animal, Doctor, but that’s not the only reason I married you.’
‘RMS? Hmmm... What symptoms are you displaying?’
‘Guilt, regret, feeling rotten because I’m hardly ever home.’
‘Rotten Mother Syndrome. You’re not a rotten mother. When you’re with Philip, you’re there 100 per cent for him. He loves you. He lights up when he sees you, and when you’re not here, he talks about you all the time. He’s only a small kid, but small kids are very good at working out who loves them and who doesn’t. And when you’re not with him, you miss him so much it’s like physical pain.’
‘You’re kind.’
‘I’m honest.’
‘Tell him I love him and if I can’t get home I’ll phone him before he leaves for nursery.’
‘I’ll tell him, but he always says the same thing when I do.
I know.
’
The smile returned to her face and the heaviness that clogged her heart lifted a little.
She looked over her shoulder, defensively, saw Karl Stone and was glad he wasn’t that near to or looking at her. Stepping away from the house, she asked, ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m in bed. I’m talking to you. Wish you were here.’
‘Me too.’
There was a tender lull between them. She pictured him in bed, soft lamplight falling on his hair and skin, the smile he shared with her alone, his hands on her body in their bedroom. The exact opposite of the carnage in Leonard Lawson’s room.
‘Are you praying?’ asked Thomas. ‘You just said
Jesus
.’
‘I was remembering something I’ve just been drowning in. The old man? I honestly don’t think there’s a modern precedent for it. I feel like I’ve been in a medieval dungeon.’
‘You’re going to be busy then. But keep this plate spinning for us: I’m going to do something really nice for you the next time we’re together. If you get a chance, think, what would I really like to happen to me?’
There were other reasons she loved her husband so much. The way he listened attentively but didn’t hustle for details. How, in the grip of the worst that people could do to other human beings, he gave her choices in life.
‘I’d really like to see Philip before he goes to nursery in the morning.’
As she spoke the words, a part of her couldn’t believe that their son was now three years old and had small friends of his own whom she knew by sight but little else – Eleanor and Luke – and a slice of life that didn’t involve her.
‘I have to tell you, Ms Clay, that you aren’t a rotten mother. I want you to get out of my surgery right now and get back to work immediately.’
Every other officer she knew who was married to a civilian caught various shades of hell because of the demands of the job. In over a decade, Thomas hadn’t given her a moment of grief. But the sound of other people
working
pulled her guilt lever.
‘I’ve got to go, Thomas.’
‘I love you too. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention: we missed a message on the answer machine. It sounded like an old man. He didn’t leave a name.’
‘What did he want?’
‘To talk to you. No name. No number. Said he had something to give you, something from a long time ago.’
A discordant note echoed deep inside her.
‘Did you do 1471?’
‘Caller withheld.’
Silence. ‘I love you.’
She closed the call down. Turning back to the open door of Leonard Lawson’s house, all thoughts of home dissolved as she returned inside. She wondered what the killers were doing at that moment.
No one
, thought Clay with growing certainty,
could have staged that death
alone
. She wondered if and when they’d killed before? And if and when they’d kill again?
Two killers. One murder. No time.
Clay identified two rooms of immediate interest in the old man’s house. Upstairs, Louise Lawson’s bedroom. Downstairs, Leonard Lawson’s study.
Although there was no sign of any disturbance in the bedroom, she knew Louise Lawson would never sleep in it again, never even cross the threshold of the house.
She stood in the middle of the bedroom. The dominant image was a picture of a feminised Sacred Heart of Jesus on the wall facing the bed, the closest Louise had come to allowing a male into her room. For a moment, Clay felt the weight of another woman’s loneliness, imagining her own self years hence, a widow with no one to hold her at night and a grown-up son who had left home. She chased the notion away.
On the wall above Louise’s three-mirrored dressing table, which looked identical to the one in her father’s bedroom, was a framed cross-stitch sampler, the writing a neat and elegant linked script.
Silence is Golden
Clay looked around, distracted by a nagging itch.
Have I missed
something?
A spinster’s single bed with a padded pink velvet headboard and a duvet cover with a repeating pattern of red roses. She looked at the wall adjoining Louise’s father’s room, considered both rooms and the study downstairs.
‘Everything is here,’ she said to herself.
She unfolded a set of aluminium steps, climbed it to get a view of the top of the wardrobe and saw nothing but a thick layer of dust. She stepped down, opened the wardrobe. Skirts, blouses, cardigans, a jacket and three coats. Shoes along the bottom. Shoes to the left for autumn and winter. Shoes to the right for spring and summer.
There was a smell in the air of a manufactured fragrance, a perfume that Clay hadn’t come across since her childhood in St Michael’s Catholic Home for Children in Edge Hill. Mrs Tripp, the home’s manager, used to wear enough of it to repel insects.
She focused on the walnut dressing table with its triptych of mirrors. On a china tray there was an assortment of jewellery – gold brooches, a pearl necklace and earrings. Between the teeth of her brush, dozens of white hairs were trapped, knotted around each other in tufts.
There were two drawers and two doors in the dressing table. She opened the left-hand door and found a black leather Bible. She flicked through it carefully and, finding nothing wedged between its pages, put it back. Behind the right-hand door, nothing. Clay opened the top drawer and found three rows of neatly folded knickers. She lifted each row, feeling the fabric carefully, but there was nothing concealed. The back of the drawer was clear. In the bottom drawer, grey tights were set out in tightly sealed balls, next to a section of plain white bras. She lifted the bras out, then the tights. Nothing hidden in her most private of places.
Louise Lawson, thought Clay, wouldn’t have to face that further trauma that victims of violent crime and their loved ones often had to endure. The exposition of their secret lives. The surface of the room told Clay that if Louise Lawson did have any secrets, they existed only in her heart and mind.
On the dressing table, a box of pills. ‘Lyrica. L Lawson.’ She glanced at the manufacturer’s information sheet inside the box. Miss Lawson’s epilepsy tablets.
Clay looked at the china jewellery tray, moved it with her thumb and revealed a piece of pink paper. She unfolded it. It was a photocopied flyer.
Open Day and Summer Fair
The Sanctuary
Croxteth Road
Saturday 9th June 2018
‘Bill?’
‘Yeah?’ His voice filtered through from Leonard Lawson’s room next door.
‘Come and have a look at this!’
‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘So far, the only possible link to other people in her life. The Sanctuary? Can you find out what it is?’
Watching Louise Lawson drifting through the margins of consciousness, Riley felt like an astronaut travelling deeper into space, not sure if she would ever return to the noise and bustle of earth.
On her phone, she looked for the umpteenth time at the dominant image she had pulled up for
The Tower of Babel
. It was a painting by an old master called Pieter Bruegel, but she could see nothing in it that would make an elderly man want it on his bedroom wall or prompt the person who killed him to take it away as a trophy.
She regretted her inability to ever get past the cafe on the ground floor of the Walker Art Gallery and her consequent lamentable knowledge of art.
She focused. An old painting of a conical brown tower that was incomplete at the top, a work in progress. Black rectangles, windows into a void, were arranged around the tower’s walls. The foot of the tower was surrounded by scorched brown earth and its unfinished summit poked through the clouds.
Riley gave Louise’s hand a firm touch and the old lady opened her eyes.
‘Louise, you’re going to have to help me here.’
Her head turned towards Riley, her breathing slow and deep, her eyes closing and opening.
‘I’m going to show you a picture of
The Tower of Babel
.’ She turned her camera so that Louise could see. ‘Was this the picture on your father’s bedroom wall?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, Louise,’ said Riley. ‘He must have liked this painting a lot, your father?’ Silence. ‘To have it on his bedroom wall?’
Louise settled back on the pillow, fresh tears rolling down her face.
Riley considered the one picture on her own bedroom wall. Emily, her niece and goddaughter, aged five. Smiling, milk teeth missing, her first school photograph. Riley’s soft spot, her pride and joy, as she couldn’t have children of her own.
‘Why was the picture so important to your father?’
Louise replied, but Riley needed confirmation.
‘I’m sorry, Louise, could you repeat that?’
‘It was a non-discussable matter.’ Her voice croaked with emotion.
‘He refused to discuss why a painting,
The Tower of Babel
, was so important to him?’
She closed her eyes, nodded.
‘Were there other non-discussable matters?’
‘Yes. Stop. Please stop. My head is splitting. I might have another turn...’
‘Louise, I apologise. I’ll be quiet now. I promise. Silence.’
Riley walked to the door, stepped into the empty corridor and dialled Clay’s number.
Clay connected.
‘Eve.’
‘How is Louise Lawson?’
‘Really, really delicate. Eggshells. I managed to get it out of her. The picture on her father’s wall is Pieter Bruegel’s
Tower of Babel
.’
‘That figures,’ replied Clay. ‘Leonard Lawson was an academic, an art historian. I’m in his study now.’
‘An art historian who refused to discuss with his daughter why that painting meant so much to him. Along with other topics as yet to be identified. I’m sorry, but he sounds like a crank to me.’
Leonard Lawson’s study was full of damp and the walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with over a thousand books.
‘I reckon Leonard Lawson probably retired around thirty years ago, in the 1980s, before computers were compulsory.’ The typewriter keys were grimed with dirt and Clay guessed that Mr Lawson had done a lot of writing in his time.
On the desk surface there was a small bowl of dusty paperclips, a block of white writing paper and one small wooden picture frame. Flicking on the 1960s anglepoise desk light, she picked up the black-and-white photograph. Two young men, dressed in gowns and mortar boards, smiled broadly in the sunshine on their graduation day. Clay timelined it: late 1940s or early 1950s. The place, from the background, Cambridge or Oxford. In all probability it was Leonard Lawson with a university friend. As she placed the photo back down on the desk, she wondered,
Did Lawson think more of the young man in the picture than he did of his own daughter?
She looked around. It was the only picture in the room.
Or was it just a totem of a simpler, happier time in his life?
She took several snaps of it with her iPhone.
DS Stone brought over an armful of large books, selected from the brimming shelves. ‘Eight so far, all by Leonard Lawson,’ he said, placing them on the desk.
The book on the top of the pile showed a painting of Jesus Christ in a blue heaven, surrounded by angels and disciples and looking down over a dark, violent pandemonium that Clay assumed was earth. The title, along the top of the picture, read: ‘Hieronymus Bosch: Divine Visions’; along the bottom: ‘Leonard Lawson’.
‘Anything on Pieter Bruegel?’ she asked as she lifted the book from the stack and sat down in Leonard Lawson’s seat, taking in the room from his point of view. All kinds of books with the names of artists on their fat spines, but the only picture in the room was the photo on the desk.
‘Yes,’ said Stone, retrieving a volume from the middle of the heap. In between the words ‘Bruegel’ and ‘Leonard Lawson’, the cover showed a small army of skeletons reaping havoc on the human beings they had hunted down. She looked at the title of the picture: ‘The Triumph of Death’. The image caused Clay a strange sensation, a cold spot on the crown of her head that spread across her scalp.
She opened the book. There was no author photograph on the rear dust jacket for her to check against the picture on the desk, but there was a brief biography. She read out loud: ‘
Professor Lawson was born in Liverpool in 1921. After serving in North Africa during World War Two, he was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, 1946 to 1949. In 1955, he was appointed professor at the University of Liverpool.
’
Stone had the Bruegel book open. ‘Word for word, the same biography.’
‘Have a look for anything he’s written on
The Tower of Babel
. He refused to discuss the painting with his daughter, but he couldn’t very well do that with his readers.’ She stood up. ‘Have a seat, Karl.’
As Stone sat down to read, Clay knelt at the side of the chair. It contained two drawers: a small one at the top and a deeper one beneath. As she opened the top drawer, the light fell on her blue latex glove, giving her hand the strange glow of an alien claw.