Dead Silent by Mark Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

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.’

15
5.00 am
    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.
    Harper placed the camera near Leonard Lawson’s feet