Authors: Mark Roberts
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed, pulling out a black leather book, its cover embossed with gold letters: ‘Address Book’. She placed it on the desk and pulled at the bottom drawer, but that didn’t shift. She tugged again, then saw a keyhole near the top. Looking for the key, she ran her fingers across the underside of the desk. Nothing stuck there. She scanned the desktop, then lifted the heavy Imperial typewriter.
There was no sign of a key to whatever it was that mattered enough to Leonard Lawson for him to lock it away.
On the desk, Stone had the book open at a spread showing a colour plate of
The Tower of Babel
and a column of small type alongside it. He looked up as Clay reached across to take a paperclip from the bowl.
‘I was put on a disciplinary, years back, for popping a lock at a scene.’
‘I remember. Guy leading the case, DCI George Watson? Dickhead.’ Clay handed him the paperclip. ‘We all know you’re a born scallywag. If it’s at a murder scene and it’s worth locking away, it’s worth looking at.’
She opened the address book at the ‘A’ page. There were no entries.
She turned to the ‘B’ page and found that empty of names too. ‘C’. Blank. ‘D’. Blank.
Heart sinking, she continued leafing through it while Stone fashioned the paperclip into a makeshift drawer key.
She flicked through to ‘Z’. There wasn’t a single entry.
Stone kissed the tip of the paperclip.
Clay felt the victim’s isolation in a visceral lurch. The memory of long stretches of her own loneliness, as a child, as a young woman, came back to haunt her.
‘He’s gone from being a very important man to being completely forgotten. But not by the people who slaughtered him...’
As Stone showed her the paperclip key, the sound of voices and footsteps came through the front door. She recognised the intonation as Michael Harper’s, trusted assistant of the pathologist Dr Lamb.
‘I’ll leave you to it, Karl – the APTs are here. I’ve got to deal with Leonard Lawson’s body.’
As she headed for the stairs, she called, ‘DC Price!’
‘Yeah!’ He was in the front living room.
‘I need your body upstairs.’
He laughed as he followed.
‘In your wildest dreams, fathead!’ called Clay. ‘And in my worst nightmare.’
‘Brace yourselves,’ said Clay to Harper and his colleague as they followed her into Leonard Lawson’s bedroom. The two anatomical pathology technicians were silent, except for one sharp intake of breath and an almost inaudible muttering that could have been prayer but was probably blasphemy.
She watched the APTs look in disbelief at the body. Harper, fat and round; his colleague, thin. Laurel and Hardy in a horror movie. Clay followed their bewildered gaze. The sight of the old man’s suspended body sent a fresh tremor of shock through her. She remembered Thomas’s comment about the answer-machine message from another old man and wondered who the old man was and what he had of hers from the past.
‘What do you want us to do, DCI Clay?’ asked Harper.
Clay stationed herself by the dressing table to get the best overall view of Leonard Lawson’s body. She looked at the APTs and said, ‘Follow my instructions closely.’
She weighed up the situation. ‘Price and Mason, either side of the pole, top and bottom.’
They moved quickly into position.
‘Grip the top of the pole,’ she said, ignoring the scratching of stirred memory beneath her scalp.
Not now
. ‘Slide your fingers under the bottom. Thank you.’ She fell silent, waited until she could see confidence in their eyes.
‘Slowly, lift...’
Almost in slow motion, the officers lifted the pole from the surfaces supporting it, the old man’s body swaying as they did so. Clay noticed there was something odd about the old man’s torso, as if something was missing. The weight of his body shifted on the pole and for a few moments he swung from side to side like a piece of meat on a hook.
No man, no matter what he has or hasn’t done
, thought Clay,
deserves this
indignity
. Hendricks’s theory – that they were sending him to hell – made increasing sense.
Clay looked at Harper and his colleague. ‘As quickly as you can, I want an unzipped body bag on the floor in the space to where I direct Mason and Price. Take two of our evidence bags and a pair of cutters from your kit box.’ As they did this, Clay said to Mason, ‘Terry, the APTs are going to cut and bag the sections of spear sticking out of Mr Lawson’s body. They’re going to make those cuts over the body bag so that Mr Lawson can go straight into the vinyl.’
Harper laid a silver body bag on the old carpet and unzipped it.
‘Bill, you and me will hold the bag open, top and bottom end.’
They knelt down as Mason and Price guided the suspended body into place.
‘Cut the top of the spear!’
Harper cut and the section of spear fell into the bag his colleague held beneath it.
‘The bottom section, please.’
Snap. It landed with a rustle of paper.
‘Lower the body to the bag.’
Mason and Price negotiated Leonard Lawson’s back, head and bottom into the bag.
‘Harper, I want you and your colleague to untie the knots that are securing Mr Lawson to the pole. As one of you unties, I’d like the other to guide his hands and arms, legs and feet into the bag. Any questions?’
‘I understand.’
She looked across the length of the body bag and asked Hendricks, still kneeling at the bottom end, ‘Did you find out about The Sanctuary?’
‘Googled it. It’s a residential home for adults with severe learning difficulties. It’s private and, looking at their website, everything’s pretty high-spec. The people who live there are pushed to fulfil their potential, so they don’t just sit around watching TV all day. Guess what? It’s five minutes away.’
Harper manoeuvred Leonard Lawson’s untied hands and arms into the confines of the bag.
‘Thank you, Harper,’ said Clay. ‘Go on, Bill.’
‘It’s art therapy, music therapy, sports, drama, trips out, here, there and everywhere.’
The APTs took one leg each and tucked them into the bottom end of the bag. Mason and Price lifted the pole away.
Standing up, Clay looked around the room and said, ‘Thank you.’
She picked up an evidence bag and placed the strobe light into it. ‘I’ve had an idea, Bill, about the strobe light. It wasn’t put there just to disorientate whoever found the old man, it was a grim joke, a window into the killer’s view of life and death. I wonder if he
knew
that Louise Lawson is epileptic? Trigger the witness – the daughter – into a fit. What a punch line!’
For a moment, Clay imagined she was dead centre of the picture on the cover of Leonard Lawson’s Hieronymus Bosch book. She listened to the fractured birdsong in the dark, early hours, a blackbird disorientated by electric streetlights, and considered what Hendricks had said to her about The Sanctuary.
‘Bill, if The Sanctuary is a residential facility, they’ll have to have someone on duty through the night. There’ll be someone there now who may well know Louise Lawson. We’ll go there directly after the post-mortem.’
Clay watched the technicians carry Leonard Lawson from his bedroom. She wondered to herself if the section of the shaft that remained inside his body had pierced his heart, sealing his fate like some comic-book vampire and wiping him forever from the face of the earth.
‘Eve!’ Stone’s voice came from Leonard Lawson’s study. ‘Can you come down a minute?’
Clay descended the stairs to where Stone was standing, in the doorway to the study. He held a thick wad of yellowing A4 paper. She approached him, nodded at the paper and dropped her voice. ‘From?’
‘The desk drawer.’
She smiled. ‘Good. I like it.’
He turned the collection of papers so that Clay could see the top sheet.
Psamtik I
664–610 BC
The Quest for the World’s Proto-Language
by
Leonard Lawson
‘There are a load of photographs in the drawer that belong to this manuscript,’ said Stone. ‘I’ve googled it and been on a trawl through Amazon and AbeBooks. There’s no match for a book of this title at all. I can only suggest it was unpublished or it was published under a different title.’
Clay took the manuscript from Stone and examined it. The pages were dog-eared, from which she inferred that the book had been handled regularly over the years. She sat at Leonard Lawson’s desk and, turning over the top page, imagined him sitting in the same place and reading the text.
‘Did you look for the key?’
‘All over the study, but I couldn’t find it.’
‘So he really cared about the manuscript. Enough to hide the key.’
She looked at the second page, words from a former world, formed of letters from the metal stamp of an Imperial typewriter on an inky ribbon, letters with blurred edges.
ISNSSN
For DN
Now and for always
‘The dedication –
For DN, Now and for always
– is the same as in all his published works,’ said Stone. ‘But this manuscript has got this
ISNSSN
tag. It figures that the most important person in Leonard Lawson’s life was a DN, not an LL for his daughter. Not DL, who could’ve been his missus. Unless DN was his common-law wife, but I doubt it, not in those days.’ Stone looked around the room. ‘Interesting life, right. Dreadful conclusion.’
Clay looked at the contents page.
Part One: The Ancient World
Part Two: The Modern World
‘As soon as we have a chance to catch our breaths, I want you and Bill Hendricks to get your heads together on this.’ She handed the manuscript to Stone. ‘You read “The Ancient World”, he can read “The Modern World”, or vice versa.’
She reached into the open drawer, took out a collection of photographs, prints and postcards and started flicking through them. A stone tablet decorated with elegant Egyptian hieroglyphics and with a pharaoh in attendance, holding what looked like a lamp in his hand. She turned it over and read the neat handwriting:
Psamtik
I making an offering to Ra-Horakhty.
A warmth illuminated the darkness inside Clay and her instincts twitched. She stayed exactly where she was, but a piece of her mind went travelling through time and space and the room seemed to fade away. Outside, the wind that smothered the house seemed to roar suddenly as her sense of hearing sharpened. Leonard Lawson’s manuscript was alive with something hidden and dreadful and dangerous.
‘What are we on to?’ Stone’s voice dragged her back into the moment.
She looked at him in questioning silence.
‘You just said,
We’re on to something with this
...’
She looked at the next picture. A drawing of a man swathed in rags and carrying two bundles on his back. ‘I want you and Bill to see if there’s anything in the manuscript, anything he’s written, that could have incurred the wrath that we saw staged in the bedroom.’ Aware of the need to get to the mortuary for the post-mortem, she checked with Stone as she headed for the door, ‘Anything else?’
He held up a piece of paper. ‘I found this in the drawer.’ He read, ‘709 6010.’
‘Admiral Street police station?’
‘PC Stephen Rimmer. It’s handwritten contact details.’
‘Get on to him immediately!’ She glanced at the front door.
‘I already have done. He’s on his way over now.’
Leonard Lawson. 71.3 kg. 168 cm. Eye colour blue. Hair colour grey, balding. Caucasian. Male. 90+ years.
In the long, narrow rectangle that was Autopsy Suite 1 of the mortuary behind the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Clay watched the APTs lift Leonard Lawson’s body from the body bag on to the rubber board on which the post-mortem would be conducted.
She looked at Hendricks and followed his gaze to the centre of Leonard Lawson’s rib cage. Blood-stained wooden circles plugged his body back and front. This detail, the sawn-off ends of the spear that had impaled him, gave the old man’s body an unreal quality, emphasised by the fact that his eyes were now shut and his face was neutral.
‘Eve, we must stop meeting like this.’ The voice of the pathologist, Dr Mary Lamb, came from behind her. ‘And at these ungodly hours.’ She was close to retirement age and looked a decade older, but she walked past Clay with a gait that was sprightly.
Clay watched Dr Lamb’s reaction as she made an initial visual assessment of Leonard Lawson’s corpse. Her expression gave nothing away, but she said, ‘I spoke with DS Stone on the telephone and he furnished the details of the scene of the crime.’
Over the light blue autopsy suite smock and trousers, Clay tied the straps of a green plastic apron tightly behind her back.
‘In thirty-five years,’ continued Dr Lamb, washing her hands at the sink, ‘I’ve never known the like.’ She turned to her APTs. ‘Get some pictures of him, please.’
Michael Harper, the senior APT, pointed a digital camera at Leonard Lawson and took the first of multiple images.
Clay made eye contact with Dr Lamb. The pathologist smiled.
‘However, I did see you in Liverpool One with your little boy, Eve. You were lifting him on to a bouncy castle. The man you were with, with the sky-blue eyes?’
‘My husband, Thomas. You should have come and said hello, Dr Lamb.’
‘I was going to... and then I thought, no. The only places we ever meet are here or in the Crown Court. You looked so happy. I didn’t want to drag this side of your life into your personal space.’
Dr Lamb dried her hands with the same slow, precise movements Clay had seen her use in dozens of post-mortems. ‘What’s your little boy called, Eve?’
‘Philip. Little but getting bigger and mouthier by the day.’
The smile dissolved from Dr Lamb’s eyes and Clay steeled herself, forced herself back into professional mode, pushing all thoughts of Thomas and Philip away.
‘Turn him on to his side, please,’ Dr Lamb said to her APTs.