Free Dead Silent by Mark Roberts Page B

everyone – and this is when the crowd really turned against the nutter – he said that...’ PC Rimmer took out his notebook, flicked to the relevant page and read: ‘ Just as you have condemned half to the silent void, you and your other half will be condemned to the eternal silence of hell. ’
    ‘You took the Bible-basher’s details?’ ‘I did, yes. Samuel Forster. Date of birth: 14th August 1984. Address: here we go, 201 Ullet Road. It all checked out. I sent him away with a stiff warning. Pull any more of this and it’d be the cells and the magistrate.’
    ‘ Here we go , 201 Ullet Road?’
    ‘It’s a home for recovering alcoholics. Only most aren’t recovering...’
    ‘Did you get a picture of him?’
    ‘Tom did. He sent it to my phone.’ PC Rimmer took out his phone and showed the screen to Stone.
    A human face. Stone reeled off eleven digits. Rimmer keyed them into his phone and sent the image to Stone’s phone.
    The man faced the camera. His eyes were a piercing blue and his nose was large and hooked, giving him the look of an eagle. His mouth was big and fleshy and his chin was square and strong, but Stone kept looking back at his eyes. Intensely cold and blue, with a glint of poison in the dead black pupils.
    ‘Give me your notebook, please,’ he said.
    Rimmer handed it over, open at the relevant page, and Stone took a picture of the words the constable had written down and dated as Thursday 13th December 2018, 11.54 am. He turned the page and took a picture of Forster’s personal details.
    As Stone handed back PC Rimmer’s notebook, he noticed something melting behind the constable’s bullish façade, and he suspected he was holding something back. ‘What is it? Spit it out. It could be important.’
    ‘I felt unclean when I was near him. And ever since last Thursday, I’ve felt like there’s something under my skin. I never dream. But I have since Thursday – every night. About him.’
    ‘It’s an occupational hazard,’ said Stone. ‘We all come across it at some point.’
    ‘ Come across it ?’
    ‘Evil,’ replied Stone, hurrying to the front door and wishing he could be in Ullet Road in the blink of an eye. ‘Pure evil.’

22
6.01 am
    In the multi-storey car park of the hospital, Clay paused at the driver’s door of her car and, looking out at the lights of the city centre, felt the weight of her iPhone in her coat pocket. As she took it out, she drank in the ethereal patterns of light cast by the moon across the dark waters of the Mersey.
    She looked at the display – ‘Hendricks. 1 jpg.’ – and opened the picture.
    At first sight it looked like a leftover piece of wood, a dark offcut set against the aluminium background of the mortuary. Then her focus fell on to its dark markings. She read the attached message.
    Eve, Dr Lamb thinks it’s a scrambled word or letters. It gives me the impression of a slightly disfigured dragonfly escaping through an open window. What do you see?
    Her scalp crawled as she looked at the primitive image that had been forced into the centre of Leonard Lawson’s body, saw what Hendricks was getting at. She was certain it was no accident.
    The snow started to fall again, floating past the white lights of the city. She imagined the lines carved on the spear falling past her face, driven by the wind and gravity, disguised as snowflakes and hidden by snowflakes. And on this night of great savagery, she found a beauty in the light and dark that prompted her to do something that not another soul knew about. She prayed to the dead guardian of her childhood, Philomena, opening her heart and mind to release whatever came from them and receive whatever arrived in return.
    I am still your child. Please help me. Help me see. Help me understand.
    ‘What do you think of it?’
    The voice, familiar but distorted as it echoed, came from the shadows of the empty car park and Clay nearly cried out. She turned and saw Hendricks walking towards her.
    ‘I