Dead Silent (3 page)

Light bounced from a bedroom and shadows danced inside the light. Mason and Price were on the upstairs landing, heading towards it.

The dizzy days of Clay’s youth flashed through her mind, school discos and rock concerts. ‘It’s a strobe light!’ she said. And the strangeness of such an item in this place made her wonder out loud, ‘But why?’

‘We’ll soon find out,’ said Hendricks, at her back.

‘Paul?’ DC Price looked at DS Mason. ‘As soon as we’ve plated up here, I’ll carry on upstairs while you go down and look for a point of entry.’

They were at the bedroom door and Clay was at the top of the stairs.

‘OK!’ said Clay. ‘Stop there! Thank you.’

‘Eve!’ Stone called from the front door. ‘The neighbour told me he’s been asleep since ten o’clock last night. Didn’t hear or see a thing. Doesn’t know jack.’

The father?
thought Clay.
He’s been slaughtered.

Her senses flared into life.

‘Karl, as soon as DC Price has finished putting the plates downstairs, I want you to start rooting through the house with him and looking for any information you can about the Lawsons.’

Clay turned her attention back to the bedroom door.

Light. Bright, fast-moving, repeating patterns of pure white light poured from the bedroom, swamping the darkness of the rectangular upstairs landing.

At the bedroom door, DS Mason handed her the stepping plates inside an evidence bag.

She looked at him. ‘Go and prepare downstairs.’

Deeper inside the house, Clay heard air rattling in the pipes. The screw at her centre turned, clarity increased and she was compelled to get inside the bedroom.

The faintest smell of blood sharpened in her nostrils.

She opened the bedroom door wide enough to place down two plates, sufficient for her to stand inside the room and look at what had happened under the relentless white light of the stroboscope.

She glanced back at Hendricks and caught her own reflection in an oval mirror on the landing wall. The pattern of light transformed her into something other than her normal self. Her tall, thin body hidden by a white protective suit, her black hair concealed by a hood, only her face visible.

Turning back to the bedroom door, Clay heard her own voice – ‘Call out if you can hear me?’ – even though she knew in her heart there would be no sign of life, that she had arrived at a place made forever different because a killer had called there. The wind whispered ‘Murder’ as it pushed on the window frame.

She stooped, pressed her little finger to a spot near the bottom of the door and began to open it.

Clay looked through the widening gap in the doorway and counted to three as strobe light bombarded the walls and ceiling and darkness drummed inside its stark white rhythm.

She entered the room and her eyes settled on the right-hand corner and the source of the disorientating light. The effect was bizarre.

An old man’s naked body appeared to hang upside down in mid-air. His arms stretched straight up to the ceiling. His legs, bent at the knee, feet parallel to his hands, mirrored the arms. The flat of his back was half a metre from the carpet, a human being as a crooked U, defying gravity.

She took out plates from the evidence bag and, advancing towards the corpse, laid them down and stepped on them.

‘Come in, Bill. Take a video on your phone as you do so! I want a filmed record of what the killer wanted us to see.’

He stepped in behind her and she felt a crumb of comfort, sensing his tall, physical presence. ‘I’m filming!’

‘I need to get closer. I need to know what’s really going on here.’

As she stepped nearer, Clay made out the shape of a long, thin line above Leonard Lawson’s body, a line that came and went under the bullying light. She reached out her right hand and with her index finger touched the solid shape of the line. It felt like wood. She looked closer, at his wrists and his ankles, and saw that he was tied to a wooden pole by dark, ragged rope.

His head lolled back, thin wisps of long, grey hair dancing in the mean breeze that leaked through the old wooden window frame behind his suspended corpse.

She concentrated on his face and head. His eyes showed just red-streaked white, the irises having rolled to the back of his head. On the left-hand side of his skull there was a vivid mark, where a blunt object had smacked him with force.

Clay looked for the beginning and the end of the pole from which he was hanging. She traced the top of the pole to the corner where two walls met and the bottom to the base of the bed beneath the mattress.

Closing her eyes, she digested the details in her mind and prepared to empty her senses to focus long and hard on the whole picture: Leonard Lawson strung up like a beast, his body staged above a strobe light.

But the shadow-rich cave in her own head was invaded by the patterns of light and dark that had battered her retina. She opened her eyes and looked again.

The light fell with such energy and recklessness that it stripped death from the old man’s features. It turned his face into a shifting façade of extreme emotions, almost within the same second. In silence, he laughed hysterically then veered into an ecstasy that morphed into absolute madness.

‘What’s that?’ Clay asked, her skin crawling, noticing another piece of wood that had been shielded by the thick pole from which Leonard Lawson’s body was suspended. She angled her head and drove a beam of torchlight on to this other length of wood. Then she crouched on to her haunches and checked his bare back.

‘We’ll have to turn the strobe off and the main light on.’

She reached down to the electrical socket on the skirting board and plunged the room into virtual darkness. Second-hand streetlight seeped in through a gap in the curtains and Clay used her torch to make it back to the door.

‘Jesus! What have you seen, Eve?’ Hendricks asked.

‘Have a look for yourself. Are you ready?’

Clay turned on the main light and called central switchboard.

‘DCI Clay. Pelham Grove off Lark Lane is now a murder scene. I want as many officers as we’ve got in and around the Sefton Park area.’

Stone weighed up the spaces downstairs in the Lawsons’ house, noticed that there was no sign of disturbance or violence.

Starting in the hallway, he gained an overview of all the downstairs rooms with the lights on and doors wide open. In the living room at the front of the house, DC Price brushed the door with black fingerprint dust.

Stone moved to the next room. Door open and light on, the room was full of books and dominated by a huge walnut desk on which sat an old Imperial typewriter. Professor Lawson’s study.

Next to the study, Stone discovered a small parlour with a three-piece suite and a coffee table; the best furniture so far, from a bygone age when perhaps the Lawsons received visitors.

At the kitchen door, Stone listened. From upstairs, Clay and Hendricks’s voices travelled through the fabric of the building and Mason moved around with stealth and speed.

A lightbulb hung from the ceiling, thinly disguised by a brown lightshade. He turned the kitchen light on and off and on again and saw a stove from the 1970s and a 1960s Formica-topped dining table and chairs.

Coldness sailed into Stone’s face from the back door as he looked for a point of entry. He counted: sixteen rectangular pieces of glass in the wooden door, each of which appeared whole and untouched. The wind crawled under the door and round the top and side, whispering, hissing.

Stone looked at the door handle, the skeleton key in the mortise lock and the pane of glass closest to it. He clicked his torch on and explored the edges of the pane. Fine flakes of gloss paint littered the ledge, sitting among sand-like grains of glass.

He turned the key in the lock and opened the door, calling, ‘Pricey, can you stop what you’re doing and come here right now!’

Brush and dust pot in hand, DC Price marched across the kitchen.

‘What have you got, Karl?’

‘Put your hand by that bottom ledge.’ Stone pointed at the glass rectangle nearest the lock. As Price put his brush into the dust pot to free up his right hand, Stone crouched outside the kitchen door. ‘Don’t move your hand!’

Stone pressed both index fingers into the top corners of the glass rectangle and it moved, slowly at first, then falling easily into Price’s hand.

‘Neat and tidy. Taken out and put back in its place,’ said DS Stone.

Holding the glass by its top two corners, DC Price held it up to the light and examined the surface. ‘Not that neat, not that tidy.’

Stone took the glass from Price and saw a set of clear fingerprints. He handed it back and said, ‘We need to get this off to be processed against the national fingerprint database right now.’

On his iPhone, Stone opened Messages, Contacts and texted Clay:
Eve, we have a point of entry, the back door of the house leading out from the kitchen. There are clear prints on the glass. If they belong to the killer and he has a record, he might as well have left his name and address.

He pressed send and watched Price, in the hall, slip the glass into a plastic evidence bag and hand it to a constable at the front door.

Stone walked into the front living room and looked around. With no pictures on the walls, an old-fashioned green velvet three-piece suite and a basic television set, it felt miserly.

His phone vibrated. ‘Clay Msg’ with attachment. He opened the text and paused mid-breath. Not quite believing his eyes, he blinked and looked again.

It was a picture of Leonard Lawson, under the ceiling light; dead, naked, hanging upside down like a slaughtered beast, hands and feet tied to the pole.

Price entered the room with his brush and pot of fingerprint dust. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’ he asked.

Stone turned the screen so Price could see it.

‘Upstairs, right now?’

Stone nodded. ‘I guess we drew the long straws tonight.’ He looked at the photo again. ‘What’s that?’ he said out loud, noticing something he’d overlooked in the initial shock.

‘What are you looking at?’ asked Price.

Stone zoomed in on a single detail around the old man’s torso, isolating it, making it bigger. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. Have you?’

Under the plain ceiling light, Clay took a series of photographs of Leonard Lawson’s body, with several close-ups of the spear on which he was impaled. The top end of a narrow dark-brown shaft stuck out from his shoulder. The central section of the shaft was buried inside his chest cavity and the top end with the bloody metal point protruded from the base of his back rib cage.

‘Ten to four,’ said Clay.

‘How do you mean, Eve?’ asked Hendricks.

‘If the top and the tip of the spear were the hands of a clock...’ She drew a large circle in the air, corresponding to the position of the spear. ‘It’s pointing at ten to four.’

She looked at the point of the spear. Two roughly cut triangular sections of metal, soldered together, and the base of the triangle hammered into the wood on which it sat alongside small tacks.

‘It’s home-made but well made,’ said Clay, her heart sinking, the chance to follow up a massive lead through commercial producers as dead as dust. The shaft itself looked old, an offcut, and could have been plucked from a skip on the street by any passer-by.

The metal point was streaked with lines of Leonard Lawson’s blood and a small pool of blood had dripped on to the worn carpet.

‘OK,’ said Clay to herself. ‘The bigger picture.’

She walked to the bedroom door and looked at the room as a whole, in a stable light, from the point of view of someone entering.

She was struck by the unmade double bed, its blankets and sheets bunched up near the foot, a pair of blue pyjamas folded neatly on the pillow. Her pulse quickened as she imagined the old man, stripped bare in his bedroom and knowing he was going to die. She imagined his terror, his confusion, and wondered sadly what his last conscious thought had been.

In the alcove beside the double bed was an old-fashioned dressing table with a trio of mirrors. The right-hand mirror had been closed over to cover half of the larger central mirror, leaving the left-hand mirror free to reflect what it caught in the room.

‘Anything?’ asked Hendricks.

‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘The left-hand half of the mirror is reflecting the torso of Leonard Lawson’s body, upside down, and the entire spear entering and leaving his body. Go and position yourself so that you can see what shows up in the open left-hand mirror.’

Hendricks moved to the window.

‘I can see his head and his arms reaching up.’

Clay moved towards the dressing table and carefully opened the right-hand mirror to the same angle as the left-hand one. She moved to the right. ‘I can see his legs suspended from the pole and his feet poking up to the ceiling.’ She stepped back. ‘Three mirrors on a dressing table and a multitude of ways of seeing one man’s death.’

Hendricks explored the space in front of the window.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Clay.

He pointed at the dressing table in the alcove. ‘It should be here!’ He pointed at the window. ‘To take full advantage of the light coming in from the window. I think the killer’s moved the dressing table.’ He looked down at the threadbare carpet. ‘But it’s so worn, I can’t see any indentations from its feet.’

‘To reflect his human sculpture,’ said Clay. The words lit a fast-burning fuse in her head.
Death as a work of art
.

As Clay walked to the dressing table, she asked, ‘What’s the word, the name? When a painting’s in three linked panels?’

She recalled such an item in the chapel of St Claire’s, the place she’d called home from when she was a baby until the age of six. It was golden and decorated with angels. ‘Triptych.’ She answered her own question with a word buried deep in childhood memory.

There were four sections in the wooden body of the dressing table. Two long rectangular drawers in the centre and two hinged doors on either side.