Authors: Mark Roberts
He got into his car, but didn’t drive away immediately. Instead, he did the thing he’d been aching to do all day. He called Sarah on his phone.
‘Hi, David?’
‘Sarah, where are you?’
‘I’m in school.’ He was pleased. It was a safe place to be. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’ve just been to visit Julia Caton’s parents.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you all right, Sarah?’
‘I’m not all right. I’m amazed, I’m overjoyed, and I’m frantic with worry. You?’
‘All of those things.’
‘Will you be able to make it this afternoon for the ultrasound?’
Her words seemed to stream around his head.
‘David, are you still there?’
‘Yes, I am, I’m here.’
‘Will you make the scan this afternoon?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a certainty he didn’t feel. His copper’s instinct told him something foul lay close by, something he could not ignore. ‘I love you,’ he
said, guilt making his entire scalp crawl.
In the background, a bell rang harshly and Sarah said, ‘I’ll meet you in reception, St Thomas’s, at three. Got to go!’
And with that she was gone.
A
t a little after two-fifteen, as Rosen drove away from Albert Bridge Road towards St Thomas’s Hospital, his hands-free mobile rang on the
dashboard. He flicked it on to speakerphone, expecting it to be another bulletin from the British Library, telling him that Father Sebastian still hadn’t moved from his reading station.
‘DCI Rosen speaking.’
‘Hello?’ Clear, tentative, African, by the sound of the masculine voice on the other end of the line, and then an uneasy silence. ‘Is that Detective Chief Inspector David
Rosen, Metropolitan Police, England?’
‘Yes, it is. Who am I speaking to?’
‘I was speaking with your assistant an hour or so ago, Detective Sergeant Carol Bellwood. I am Sergeant Joseph Kimurer, Kenyan police.’
Rosen hit the tail end of a short queue at a red light.
‘Your assistant gave me your number.’
‘Thank you for getting back to us, Sergeant Kimurer.’
‘I’d like to say it’s a pleasure.’
‘No doubt Detective Sergeant Bellwood asked you about Father Sebastian. You have some information you’d like to share?’
‘Can we speak in confidence?’
‘We can speak in confidence.’
‘Father Sebastian is a well-known name in the Uasin Gishu District.’
Rosen shifted into first gear and joined the trickle of traffic through the junction.
‘Fame comes for many reasons, Sergeant Kimurer. What’s Father Sebastian’s claim to fame in your part of the world?’
‘He came in the name of Christ and left with the name of Satan.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Rosen.
‘Detective, Father Sebastian is a man who must be treated with great caution. He is a man to be feared. During his time in Uasin Gishu, he cast out many demons but, in the end, became
possessed by the chief demon he exorcised. He killed six children and six mothers.’
‘Do you think he was possessed by the devil, Sergeant Kimurer?’
Kimurer laughed across the distance of seas and continents, but there was no joy in that sound.
‘Not at all. I’m a rationalist, an atheist. I have a master’s degree in Psychology. Sebastian Flint is a paranoid sociopath. The problem is not his soul. It is his conscience
or, rather, his lack of one. He came to my country for fun, perverse fun.’
‘When you say he killed six women and their children, were the children
in utero
or had they been born?’
‘They had been born already.’
‘Why wasn’t he arrested?’
‘The people got to him first. They tried to kill him, though he survived. Then the Catholic Church found him and smuggled him from the Rift Valley province and back to England. Do you have
problems in England with dishonest policemen? Bribes?’
‘Indeed we do.’
‘We share a burden. High-ranking officers were given money and the case was made to disappear. Do you have Flint in your custody?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Who is being bribed by the Church?’
‘No one. He hasn’t been charged with a crime at present.’
‘Do you have him in your sights?’
‘I have him in my sights.’
‘Has he committed a crime?’ asked Sergeant Kimurer.
‘It’s my growing belief that he is connected to a series of unsolved crimes, though I have yet to prove it. Sergeant Kimurer?’
‘Yes?’
‘How positive are you that Flint killed six women and children? How certain?’
‘I am one hundred per cent certain.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I was a boy at the time of these killings. I lived twenty miles away.’
‘So you didn’t see Flint kill anyone with your own eyes?’
‘No, but I know people who were there, eyewitnesses, reliable people. One man told me that he saw Flint enter the house of his first victim. It was his neighbour’s house. Flint went
in and a minute later there were screams, a woman and a child screaming. He hurried over to see what was wrong. There was blood everywhere. Two mutilated bodies on the floor, an innocent woman and
her young daughter hacked to pieces. He saw Flint leaving by the back door as calmly as if he’d just paid a social call. Other people saw him get into his car and drive away. He was at the
wheel, covered in blood. One man tried to make Flint stop the car but Flint drove at him at speed so he had to throw himself out of the way.’
Rosen felt cold but wiped a film of perspiration from his brow.
‘I went looking for evidence in the archive but couldn’t find it. It had all been destroyed years ago. For money.’ The anger in Kimurer’s voice was fresh. ‘So I
went looking for people. In my own time, I tracked down eyewitnesses and have detailed statements from the other five attacks. There were twelve victims in all, before the people caught up with
Flint.’
‘Sergeant Kimurer, with respect, there must be many cold cases on your files. You feel strongly about this one. Why?’
‘It had a profound effect on me as a child – on all of us children. Flint became the stuff of nightmares. The world stopped being innocent. But that’s not all, Detective Rosen.
I dream of the day Flint comes back to Kenya to pay for his crimes. I will be there with the evidence I recorded before those witnesses died.’
You’re a good man
, thought Rosen, and wished Kimurer was on his team.
‘Detective Rosen, when you were a child, was there a murderer in your country who terrified you?’
A grim, iconic, black and white mugshot sprang to mind.
‘Yes. He terrified a generation.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Ian Brady.’
‘You must understand, Father Sebastian is our Ian Brady. He is a bogeyman, his name is used to scare young children even to this day.’
Rosen pulled his car into a pay and display grid.
‘Thank you, Sergeant Kimurer. You’ve been most helpful.’
‘Detective Rosen, if you go near this man, please remember, he has no remorse, so don’t turn your back on him for one second. You understand?’
‘I understand,’ said Rosen.
As Sergeant Kimurer hung up, the knot in Rosen’s stomach tightened.
In a matter of hours, he would come face to face with Flint.
‘I
don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous in my life,’ said Sarah.
He wanted to say, ‘You’ll be fine,’ but the best he could come up with was, ‘Let’s just take this one step at a time.’
They approached reception at the antenatal clinic in St Thomas’s Hospital.
‘I’m here for an ultrasound scan,’ explained Sarah.
‘Name, please?’ asked the receptionist, not looking up from her screen.
‘Sarah Rosen.’
The receptionist scrolled down her onscreen list.
‘You’re not here.’
Sarah tried to explain but her words became tangled.
‘We’re an emergency case—’ tried Rosen.
‘Well, your case notes aren’t here, either.’
At that moment, another woman arrived carrying a thick folder of case notes with a yellow Post-it attached to the front, and threw it down.
‘They’re my notes!’ said Sarah, seeing her name in block capitals across the top of the battered file.
‘OK, take a seat, please.’
Sarah picked up a leaflet from the low table before them while Rosen looked around without connecting with anyone’s eye.
Although there were around thirty mothers with partners, parents and friends in support, the waiting room was curiously quiet, as if even a little speech was somehow a dangerous thing.
‘What’s that you’re reading, Sarah?’
‘Just a leafet.’
She handed it to Rosen. A smiling mum, T-shirt riding above her bump, hands cupped above her pubic bone. The model was a young woman whose pregnancy was no doubt going to be a walk in the park
given the healthy glow she radiated – a wellness of being she no doubt took for granted.
‘What are you thinking?’ asked Sarah.
‘I think we have to be utterly realistic,’ said Rosen.
‘Could you be a little more precise?’
He didn’t want to say the words, he didn’t even know how to, but he tried. ‘We might not make it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice fracturing with fear. ‘I know.’ She looked at her husband. ‘It’s just so unfair.’ Her eyes brimmed but she took in a deep
breath, her spirit fighting back.
Their eyes locked in tenderness and, in a single moment, there was a deep connection. To lose a child again would be unbearable.
‘We’ll just have to help each other,’ said Rosen. ‘Day by day, if things don’t go our way.’
‘I know you’ll help me, whatever happens.’
Suddenly, the weight of their shared history hit Rosen hard and he found to his shame he couldn’t look at his wife. In that unforgiving public space, he needed to separate himself from the
moment.
Across the aisle, he noticed a young man staring hard at him and automatically wondered what he’d arrested him for and when. He quickly reviewed his mental list and decided that he
hadn’t. The young man and his girlfriend, both aged about seventeen, in matching tracksuits, caught the hardness of Rosen’s stare and looked away.
‘What’s up with them?’ asked Sarah.
‘It’s the concept of us, at our age, having a sexual relationship and making a baby. That’s my guess, anyway.’
He watched the hands of the plain white clock shift from a minute after three to a quarter past, and felt the uneasy tugging of conscience, the anxiety of having to be in one place when another
called to him.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to a passing nurse, ‘is there a delay on appointments?’
‘Yeah, we’ve had extras thrown in at the drop of a hat.’
‘If you have to go, go,’ said Sarah.
‘Sarah Rosen!’ a sonographer called.
They followed the woman to a plain room with a scan machine and a green vinyl bed. Rosen closed the door after himself as the sonographer invited Sarah to lie down. He sat on a chair next to
Sarah.
Sarah squeezed Rosen’s fingers as the sonographer, whose face looked elderly but whose movements belonged to a young person, squeezed cold gel on her stomach. She smiled and asked,
‘Ready, Mrs Rosen?’
Laying the ultrasound transducer on the curve of Sarah’s womb, exploring and examining, the sonographer said, ‘Listen.’
‘Ectopic?’ asked Sarah.
‘Not at all. The baby’s in your womb. Absolutely normal place and position.’
There was silence for what felt like an age and then the rapid beating of a tiny heart registered onscreen as a soundwave. Sarah laughed and Rosen felt as if a bolted door inside him had
unlocked.
‘Look.’
A head. Two arms. Two legs. A body. The pathway of the baby’s spine.
‘It’s for real, then,’ said Rosen, withdrawing his eyes from the screen to Sarah’s smile, then returning them to the screen. The baby was still there, arm rising, thumb
to lips.
‘He’s sucking his thumb.’ Such a small action, such a huge event.
‘Could be a girl,’ said Sarah.
‘Could be, but I didn’t know babies did that in the womb.’ As he spoke, Rosen realized how much he might have to relearn. ‘Didn’t know that.’ Calming the awe
in his voice, he looked more closely at the screen. Still there. The baby was still there.
‘They do all kinds of wonderful things in the womb. When you’ve done as many scans as I have, you get to know something about babies. Their different personalities are stamped on
them already. From the jolly to the grumpy and all the places in between. Look at the face. Can you see?’
Rosen tried to focus on the tiny features but didn’t quite know where he was supposed to be looking.
‘This is a calm baby. The calm ones usually have an inborn sense that they’re wanted and loved.’
‘Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?’ asked Rosen.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Sarah, quickly.
Rosen wondered whether future Saturdays would be spent at White Hart Lane or reading the papers at some dance studio or other, though the only thing that really mattered was that there would be
future Saturdays to share with his son or daughter.
‘Some people want to know so they can plan ahead,’ the radiographer explained. ‘Painting the room, buying clothes, that sort of thing. We can’t be sure about the sex at
this stage, but I can try and tell you.’
‘Do you want to know, David?’
‘If you do.’
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘Look at the screen; we’ll wait till the baby turns a little this way.’
The sonographer focussed on the screen, then on Sarah, finally on David.
‘I can see the parents’ features in the facial shape. If you look at the shape of the baby’s nose, well, that’s you, Mrs Rosen, but the jawline is definitely dad’s.
The baby’s got elements of both of you but my hunch is, this baby’s going to be a ringer for you, Mr Rosen.’
Time and space collapsed and the jagged memory of his father leaving came into focus once more but, for the first time, without the ever-present pain that accompanied it.
‘I’ll never do that to you,’ murmured Rosen.
‘What was that, Mr Rosen?’ asked the sonographer. Sarah’s hand tightened around his.