The Sixth Soul (3 page)

Rosen walked back to the bathroom, Bellwood following.

‘Back in 1999, in Battersea, a thwarted boyfriend used the flat next door to get to the woman he both loved and hated. It was an ugly murder.’

Rosen looked around the bathroom, pausing on the ceiling for a beat, considering a possibility. He almost smiled as his eyes returned to Bellwood’s face.

‘Carol, I think I know how Herod got into number 22.’

T
en minutes later, back in the bathroom of number 22, Eleanor Willis arranged a set of folding steps beneath the loft door.

‘David, if you’re right about the loft space,’ said Parker, ‘you could have enough material up there to tell us what size shoes his granny wears.’

‘Am I going to get that lucky?’ asked Rosen. ‘I haven’t had much luck so far.’

As soon as he said it, Rosen thought of Phillip and Julia Caton, and the four other broken couples, and he deeply regretted the note of self-pity.

‘However, it depends upon the state of the loft space. It could be almost impossible to retrieve, for instance, a single relevant human hair from all that fibreglass insulation, decaying
newspaper, life debris, and whatever crap’s been up there since the thirties when these semis were built.’

Wearing latex gloves, Parker mounted the steps to the loft space, lifted the unhinged door and carefully removed it from the hatch, an enigmatic smile forming on his lips.

‘What is it, Craig?’ asked Rosen.

‘He sure had a good view of life in the Caton’s bathroom,’ said Parker, eyeing the loft door as he lowered it down to Eleanor Willis. As she took it by the edges Rosen resisted
the urge to say, ‘Be careful.’

‘Thumbnail-sized hole in the wood,’ said Willis. ‘Enough, I guess.’

Willis raised the door carefully in front of her face, closed one eye and peered through it directly at Rosen.

He mounted the steps into the chill air and considered:
a hole in the board covering the loft entrance. Enough to see through? Right into the bathroom. A good view into the most intimate of
moments.

He climbed another step and, raising his head above the loft entrance, shone a beam of torchlight into the darkness. A trivial combination of sensory details were indelibly stamped on his
memory: the distant roar of a bus, caught in the acoustics of the loft, and the intense cold trapped in the rafters. Then the rain started.

There was an adjoining wall between numbers 22 and 24, supporting the weight of the roof of both houses. A skin of fresh dust lay across the newly panelled floor of the loft of number 22. In the
middle of the shared wall, there was a small hulk of darkness where bricks were missing. He shone a light on the wall and took a close look at the gap. It was large enough for an average-sized man
to squeeze through.

Rosen eased his way down the ladder. ‘The mortar in the adjoining wall’s addled by the look of it, probably due to the state of number 24’s roof. It can’t have been a big
task to get the bricks out. He’s tunnelled his way through into here from next door. He broke into number 24, got into the loft and took the bricks out from that side.’

He turned off his torch.

‘This is his fifth time round, but it’s the first time he’s abducted from within the victim’s home. Either this isn’t Herod’s work at all or he’s got
the dangerous daring urge now. This could be costly to him, very costly. Maybe all of a sudden he believes he can be as reckless in abducting his victims as he is in dropping off around London
what’s left of them.’

Rosen picked up Willis’s sigh behind her protective mask, the subtle tightening of her body language. He noted too that Bellwood had noticed her colleague’s reaction to Julia
Caton’s probable fate.

‘Carol,’ he explained, ‘DC Willis was the first officer to see Herod’s handiwork with her own eyes, with no warning, no prior knowledge of what to expect.’

Eleanor Willis propped the loft door against the bath and took a string of pictures of it with her digital camera, then turned to Bellwood.

‘I was first to arrive at the scene when Jenny Maguire’s body was discovered,’ said Willis. ‘The surgical removal of the baby was clumsy, the work of one nervous butcher.
We found out from the autopsy that he’d used a surgical scalpel, but it looked as if he’d hacked away with a blunt tin opener. His technique improves each time, the line of incision
straighter, cleaner.’

The steady rain now fell harder on the shared roof of numbers 22 and 24 Brantwood Road. The noise of the rain clattering on the tiles echoed in the loft space above them.

‘David, Carol, come and have a look at this,’ Craig Parker called from next door.

Rosen and Bellwood followed the sound of Parker’s voice to the door of the smallest of the five bedrooms, used as a boxroom. Parker made a theatrical gesture towards an assortment of junk
and said, ‘Voilà, man!’

‘What am I looking at, Craig?’

Parker pointed directly at a set of aluminium ladders propped against the wall. ‘Herod gets down from the loft, then uses Caton’s ladders to straighten up the loft entrance, putting
the ladders back in place here in the boxroom before he swoops off with the missus.’

‘What do you make of it, David?’ asked Bellwood.

Rosen glanced at his watch. It was twenty past nine.

‘His nerves have settled and he’s reached the stage where he’s absolutely buzzing from what he’s doing. What do you think?
’
Rosen batted the question back
to Bellwood, Parker and Willis.

‘If he’s changed course midstream,’ said Bellwood, ‘and he’s stopped taking women from public spaces to start making home visits, can you imagine how that’s
going to play in people’s heads when it comes out?’

‘How many pregnant women are there in Greater London?’ asked Parker.

‘Ninety thousand or thereabouts,’ replied Willis.

‘Ninety thousand women like sitting ducks in their
own homes
.’

Rosen imagined the public terror this new development would cause and hoped, in the face of the evidence, that this was not the work of Herod. But when he considered everything that had happened
in the Catons’ home and in the house next door, he could not see how it could be otherwise.

‘This hasn’t been some random choice. This home visit’s been a ninety thousand-to-one call. Herod knows this building better than the people who live in it.’

R
osen stood outside the kitchen door of 22 Brantwood Road at the side of the house. A trio of newly arrived uniformed officers, dressed in
protective suits, approached him.

‘Sir, where do you want us to start? Front garden or back?’

‘Back garden, number 22. Then, move it over next door. I apologize in advance. It’s an absolute mess. But that was the run-up to his point of entry.’

The rain was steady and cold. Alone again, Rosen scrolled to SARAHMOBILE on his phone. It rang.

His wife had recently had sharp abdominal pains, leading her to take time off from her teaching post. She had only ever been off work once before for a protracted period of five months’
sickness. Anxiety gnawed at Rosen about what might or might not be causing her such pain. He wished that he believed in God so that he could pray it wasn’t anything life threatening. But he
didn’t believe in God and neither did she.

‘Hi, David.’

She sounded bright.

‘Have you been in to see the doc?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘He thinks – he’s pretty certain it’s a peptic ulcer.’

‘Good!’

‘Good?’ Sarah laughed.

‘It’s not good in itself . . .’

They had briefly discussed the possibility of cancer on a few occasions and it had played constantly on Rosen’s mind ever since.

‘Yes, I know what you mean. It could’ve been a whole lot worse.’

‘Where are you?’ He changed tack.

‘I’m in the car park at work, summoning up the courage to face 10M, today’s lesson, “Where is God in the face of evil?” Where is God in the face of 10M?’

In the middle distance, Phillip Caton got into the back of an unmarked police car with DS Gold up front. It would be taking him to Isaac Street Police Station for a more formal interview.

‘A peptic ulcer,’ said Rosen. ‘So what’s next?’

‘He’s referred me to Guy’s. I’ve got to have a barium meal and a scan just to clarify if his diagnosis is correct. Oh, oh God . . .’

‘Sarah, what’s up?’

Her car door opened and he heard the sudden lurching of his wife being sick on the car park tarmac.

He waited for what felt like a long time.

‘I’ve just been sick,’ she confirmed.

‘Any blood in it?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Good.’

‘David, you’re starting to annoy me. Intensely.’

‘I’m sorry. Maybe you should go home.’

‘I might as well be in discomfort but surrounded by people and busy, than sick and at home alone. Besides, I don’t think I’ll be sick again.’

‘When’s your appointment?’

‘The GP has to contact the hospital, and the hospital send for me when they have a space in clinic. I’ll have to go whatever the time.’

The wind shifted direction and a blast of rain hit Rosen directly in the face.

‘How’s it going there?’ she asked.

‘Another abduction, another death, no doubt,’ answered Rosen.

‘Where is God in the face of evil? Answer: there is no God, just a whole lot of evil,’ concluded Sarah.

‘And you the head of RE in a Catholic school, Mrs Rosen.’

‘Don’t pipe it too loud, David. Remember, two salaries are better than one. What time will you be home?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then I guess I’ll see you when I see you. Sometime late tonight perhaps?’

‘I’ll be late, yes, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you this morning.’

‘Don’t worry. Others have it worse than us. I love you, mate.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘Gotta go. Oh, 10M, what a life . . .’

He ended the call, watching the rain. She was bearing pain and discomfort with a spirit that reminded him of one of the many reasons why he loved her from the pit of his being. If it was him
with a peptic ulcer, he’d have griped to Olympic standard.

Pocketing his phone, Rosen felt the sudden and subtle weight of a presence behind him.

He turned his head slowly to see DC Robert Harrison walking towards him from the back garden.

‘What are you up to?’

Harrison held up the digital camera in his hand.

‘Using my initiative, sir. Photographing the back garden in the absence of a direct order and with nothing else to do.’

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Where?’

‘Behind me, Robert, behind me?’
Listening in on my phone conversation
.

‘I’ve just come out of the garden.’

The open gate to the garden swung back against the fence, slamming against the wooden frame and making the wind and rain seem suddenly sharper, even ill tempered.

‘OK, Robert. Go next door. You can be in charge of the fingertip search of number 24’s back garden.’

Silence.

‘Sure.’

Harrison walked away. ‘I love you, too,’ he muttered.

‘What was that?’ asked Rosen.

‘Just thinking out loud, sir.’

J
ulia Caton was woken by the kicking of her baby inside her womb.

For a few clouded moments, she thought she was dreaming. And in those seconds, as the baby moved, she felt his shifts, rolling and turning, the pressure of his hands and feet pressing the sides
of the amniotic sac. It was these gathering sensations that made her realize that, even though she didn’t know where she was in that bizarre dream, she and her baby were alive.

Julia opened her eyes to pitch darkness. She ached all the way down her left side, from her shoulder to her ankle. She blinked a few times and strained to see but there was no relief from the
dense blackness. She wondered if she’d gone blind.

She was floating on the surface of lukewarm liquid and her baby was moving with the growing impatience of a life waiting to be born. How could her bed be so liquid?
Because it was a dream,
that’s how, like a dream after too much wine.

As she grew more wakeful, she became aware, without checking, that she was naked.

She raised a hand close to her face, disturbing the surface of the liquid as she did so, but she couldn’t see her fingers even as they brushed the tips of her eyelashes.

The back of her hand came into contact with a smooth surface that felt curved and plastic. The word
lid
slipped into the front of her mind. Lids may lift.

She raised her other hand, palm up, and pushed with both against the cool plastic. The lid didn’t budge. Julia knew that they were locked in a container of some kind, floating,
floating.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to fight down the rising panic, the unwanted gift of delayed shock. She listened to the air rushing into her nostrils, felt her ribcage rising with the
intake, and this was all she could hear.

The baby – she had learned it was a boy on the second scan – stilled inside her. It was as if he was obeying some secret command telepathically delivered from mother to son.

‘Good boy,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t move.’ Her voice was ethereal in the liquid silence. Talking was a mistake. The physical action of speech set off a taste in her
mouth and she felt the urge to be sick.

As the sound of her voice sank into the darkness, and smell and taste overtook her senses, memory erupted in nuclear flashes in her mind’s eye.

In the bathroom, she had felt a sudden sharpness in her forearm and a hand in her face. The sense that she was dreaming evaporated as the stone-cold wind of reality thrust her into
wakefulness.

He didn’t come out of darkness, he was darkness itself.
The thought assailed her, and the thread of then and now connected.

‘Jesus!’

She dipped her fingers into the solution on which she floated and sniffed them.

There was no perceptible scent. Slowly, she opened her lips and allowed her fingers to touch her tongue. Salt. Salt water. They were floating on a solution of salt water, locked in the dark with
no sound coming in.