Authors: Mark Roberts
He waited a moment, to see if there would be some idle, worn-out attempt to raise the lid of the tank but there was nothing, absolutely no sign, and he was assailed by a moment of blind terror:
Carrier dead, baby’s soul departed
.
He raised the lid quickly and something snapped.
One of the locks had not opened fully. The snapping seemed to echo. The body of the lock buckled and a piece of the catch flew away, clinking as it landed on the ground.
He lifted the lid and looked down on her.
One hand covered the curve of her womb, one hand reached out.
For what?
he wondered. The fingers of her outstretched hand curled in the stillness and her mouth moved but was
soundless.
Her lips continued to move but the probing hand sank back into the saline. She was so removed from the reality of where she was and what was happening, more so than the others, that he wondered
if the part of her brain that computed language had already started to decay, a process of living death inside the carrier.
Each time, he was getting better at piping in less oxygen to the tank: just enough to sustain the body and blow the mind.
She didn’t need all the functions of her brain to sustain the soul of the life inside her. As soon as she was dead, he had minutes to remove the child, minutes in which the retained soul
– still unblemished by original sin – swam in the flesh of the infant.
Herod unhooked the cloth catches of the sling and fed it beneath Julia’s body.
‘Bh-rhh!’ It was just a mental sneeze from her battered brain, but she had been the first to utter anything, whether consciously or not. She was further into her pregnancy than the
others and it was difficult to weave the sling underneath her distended belly.
He hooked the sling’s catches to the arm of the hoist.
Beneath her skin, the infant moved, blunt fumblings under her belly, waves in the womb.
He depressed the lift button and with a comforting, Norwegian-engineering-standard whirr, Julia’s body rose from the sensory deprivation chamber, hanging in the air like a cow being
transferred from ship to shore, swinging slightly, her arms and feet dangling down.
He looked at the sensory deprivation chamber, feeling a weight settle on his shoulders. He was used to cleaning it out because they all fouled it. Eighty kilos of salt and gallons of fresh water
were easy to come by. But the broken lock? He was useless at DIY but would have to try to mend the lock somehow.
A surge of hot anger shot up inside him.
She stared at him with empty eyes.
‘You know that greedy, money-grabbing plumber that you were married to, Julia?’ He paused, rubbing the side of his neck. ‘Do you want to know something? It’s quite ironic
or maybe just a coincidence but your husband . . .’
And just as quickly as the anger surged within him, a coldness replaced it.
There was no need to speak to the carrier, so why speak? There was no need to have feelings, so why feel? There was no need for opinion, so why think? All he needed to do was act.
So he acted.
Julia Caton’s body descended onto the table at 4.13 a.m. Times and dates were irrelevant in Satanic worship but he couldn’t escape his compulsion to pay attention to detail. He then
produced the oldest piece of surgical equipment, the first piece of kit he’d ever owned, from the battered doctor’s case he’d carried and loved since his two years as a medical
student attached to St Thomas’s.
No other doctor, no other medical student had one of these, but he was special.
Memory. Act. Ritual. Worship.
It was a thin piece of metal, three millimetres in diameter at the base, one at the sharpened tip; cut down from its original thirty-eight centimetres in length, it was now twenty centimetres
long. It was his childhood in a single artefact.
He had a mental snapshot of a bicycle, its wheel turning, a broken spoke pointing out at the sky, and he heard himself as he lay on the ground, a crying child.
Julia’s eyes rolled and her lips made a single smacking noise, as if blowing a kiss.
He adjusted her position, swung the sling over the table and pressed the ‘down’ button. She touched the table feet first, followed by her backside and spine. She seemed to squirm in
the sling and said, ‘Garld!’
Her eyes stopped rolling, became still, as he unhooked the straps from the hoist and the rest of her body slammed on the table like something dead. She shivered, and the surface of her skin was
raised in goosebumps.
He straightened her legs and placed at her side the arm that flopped over the table’s edge, as he surveyed her swollen form. She was dehydrated so that the bladder wouldn’t get in
the way of the womb.
He drew a straight line with his finger from her right hip to her left hip. Once open, the womb could not be missed.
And he held the tip of the spoke against her chest cavity.
Julia Caton let out a cry that froze him, and then there was a noise of running liquid.
Fluid poured across the table and dripped onto the floor. Her waters had broken.
He plunged the spoke into her heart.
At 4.17 a.m., Julia Caton let out a long sigh and died.
He raised his sharpened scalpel and gave thanks to Alessio Capaneus, Satanic prophet, before turning his attention to the unborn.
And the last of her oxygen passed to a little boy who would have been called Jamie.
R
osen was drifting into what felt like a deep but troubled sleep when he felt Sarah getting out of their bed and heard her walking through the
darkness of their room.
‘You OK, love?’
‘Yeah, just going to the loo. Go to sleep . . .’ Her voice tailed off as she moved in the direction of the bathroom.
He felt himself rise from the tug of sleep. Since he’d picked her up from school, he’d noticed she’d seemed unsettled, distracted, a bit unhappy, even. He’d asked her as
gently as he could if there was anything wrong but she’d insisted she was fine, just a little tired, and he’d told her she ought to quit as teacher-governor: it was a thankless and
time-consuming role, when her life was already cluttered enough.
He opened his eyes wide and blinked, growing accustomed to the darkness around the digital display on his bedside clock. Halfway between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, he
wondered how Julia was, whether she was alive still; alive and terrified or just plain dead.
Sarah was taking her time in the bathroom.
Rosen waited, rolled over into her space to keep it warm for her and saw the curtains twitched by a stray March breeze. Original windows were Sarah’s passion; he’d have to press the
case for double glazing sometime. As he waited, he was seized by acute anxiety.
Unsettled, distracted: was she on the downward curve? Was this the first step towards illness, a recurrence of the depression that had crippled her?
He got out of bed, walked to the bathroom and tapped on the door.
‘Are you OK, love?’
She didn’t reply.
‘OK if I come inside?’
She didn’t reply, and his apprehension rocketed.
He pushed the door open, slowly so as not to alarm her.
‘Sarah, is everything—?’
She stood between the door and the toilet, with something white in her hand, plastic, her face streaming with tears.
‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’
By way of answer, she held out her hand, the one with the device in it, and Rosen recognized it for what it was. This was confirmed by the rectangular box in the sink with the words
‘ClearView digital pregnancy testing kit’ printed across it.
‘Sarah, what is this?’
She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sob from the heart that cut him in two. A massive heat rose up behind his eyes and the weight of their grief and despair pressed down
inside him.
‘Sarah, we have to accept the truth, we can’t have a child. I thought we’d accepted that—’
‘Look!’
He looked, not quite understanding what he should be looking for in the device in his wife’s hand. A small grey rectangular screen at one end read:
Pregnant
.
‘Sarah, love, listen to me. It looks like the kit is saying you are but let’s not run away with ourselves. It could be faulty, it could be a mistake . . .’ He was about to say
you
but stamped it down. ‘We can’t have children, Sarah. We haven’t got the ability.’
‘I’ll tell you what I haven’t got, David. I haven’t got a peptic ulcer. I’m pregnant. Aren’t you happy about it?’
He looked at the screen and then snatched up the box because he just couldn’t answer his wife’s question in the affirmative. He scanned the instructions. They stated that the digital
kit would deny or confirm pregnancy. They also advised that a confirmation should be sought from a health practitioner.
He laid the box back down in the sink, looked at Sarah and then at the screen on the kit.
‘You know I want a baby as much as you, of course I do.’
But
, he thought,
I don’t want the despair that I can feel just around the corner.
When he saw her break into a smile, he did the only thing that seemed right.
He put his arms around her and said, ‘I love you.’
T
he advantage of driving around in a vehicle that looked exactly like a paramedic ambulance was that everyone noticed but no one saw. It was a
thing of despair, and other people – motorists, passengers and pedestrians – consciously or unconsciously pushed the thing of despair to the margins. It was all right to drive a little
too fast, and acceptable to be a bit too slow, but most of all it was OK to hit a steady 35mph, as Herod did when he was gathering in the carriers and disposing of their remains.
The one thing he never did was turn on the flashing light or blare the siren. He had disabled both features. A light and a siren made the almost invisible screamingly obvious, and works of faith
required discretion.
Julia Caton was in the back wrapped in a thick black plastic sheet, her womb filled with a smooth-surfaced rock: five kilos of ballast to keep her where she needed to be at the drop-off
point.
She was foetal in pose, and balanced on a four-wheeled scissor stretcher.
It was to be a river drop-off, this time near Albert Bridge Road. As he negotiated the streets of SW11, the night was clear and the traffic was light, for which he gave praise and thanks in
abundance.
He backed up the ambulance. Two unskippered boats bobbed on the swell, the sound and the sight of the water restorative to his ears and eyes.
He grew impatient with having to wait He got out and stood at the back, conscious of the cold through his green paramedic’s uniform.
He could hear the traffic but not see it, which meant no one could see him. He opened the back of the ambulance and had a good look around.
A tramp wandered near the water’s edge, along the river’s westward curve, and dissolved into the darkness. If some unfortunate soul happened to disturb him as he wheeled the
stretcher to the water, he was ready with a story: ‘I’m retrieving the body from the water. It looks like suicide. Could you just come a little closer, my partner’s down there,
see, if you could just – come here . . .’
So far, the work had been undisturbed – his prayers had been answered.
He untied the plastic sheet and tipped her into the water. It lapped over her and would ebb to reveal her as night gave way to dawn.
If he complied with instructions, he would succeed where Alessio Capaneus had failed.
He lingered a moment, observing the form beneath the water. She’d been the prettiest of the unbirthed and, now that she was no longer under his influence, he was surprised by a feeling
that had swamped him in childhood, something he believed he’d long overcome.
In the ambulance, he slipped through the light traffic that surfed the dead of night, but couldn’t shake off the feeling.
In an attempt to drown it out, he thought about the detective who was running round in a circle after his own tail. David Rosen.
He turned on the radio to hear the sound of human voices and kill the unfathomable depths of his loneliness.
A
bank of cloud fell away from the moon and a beam of pale light picked out the face of Jesus Christ. His eyes were closed and the upper half of
his face covered by a length of gauze.
Eyes wide open, sleepless, Father Sebastian stared up at the wall and the picture of the Messiah above his bed.
Dawn was an ocean away. He turned his eyes to the window and the night sky. Judging by the position of the stars, Aidan and the others would be filing into the chapel for Matins – prayers
at two in the morning – and it was there, at the door of the chapel, that Sebastian was going to address the leader of the community.
He closed the door of his room and walked through darkness.
Even at the height of summer, the corridors of St Mark’s were cold, and in March there was a bitterness seemingly designed to turn a man against his own body, creating enough discomfort to
make him yearn to cast off his skin, so that the death and decay of flesh and bone would be a thing to look forward to.
There was a window seat, cut into the wall, and it was here that Sebastian waited, unnoticed by the thin trail of men who fled past him into the chapel. He counted them in like sheep.
Aidan’s footsteps stopped in the corridor as he looked around.
‘I’m here, Aidan. I’m here.’
Aidan stared into the darkness.
Sebastian stood up from the window seat, separating from the shadows in the moonlit corridor.
‘You’re joining us for prayers, Sebastian?’
‘I’d like to make a request.’
Aidan’s eyes flicked from the chapel door to Sebastian’s face, settling uneasily on the priest.
‘And your request is?’
‘I want to go to London.’
‘Why?’
‘ To visit Detective David Rosen.’
‘If you want to see Rosen, surely he would come here as he did last time.’
‘I’ve recalled something that could prove useful to Detective Rosen.’