The Revelation Room (The Ben Whittle Investigation Series Book 1) (17 page)

Edward Ebb sat at the kitchen table,
deep in contemplation. The Lord had laid plenty of food for thought at his
table. Overladen it, you might say, but Ebb was old enough and wise enough to
understand that Jesus would never ask him to do anything beyond his
capabilities.  

This was clearly illustrated the evening Jesus had told him
to kill his own mother. Right out of the blue, like a midge on a hot summer’s
day, Jesus had interrupted Alan Titchmarsh during a gardening program on BBC
Two to tell him that his mother must shame the shovel.

‘Uncle’ Reg had been watching the program whilst Ebb had
been trying to do his maths homework at the dining table. Jesus had waited for
Uncle Reg to nip to the loo before demonstrating the art of shaming the shovel.
Jesus had used a pumpkin as a substitute head. He’d smashed that thing to a
pulp. Liquidised it. Beaten every drop of juice out of it. Jesus had also
performed a miracle to rival His water into wine trick: He’d turned the flesh
and juice of the pumpkin into blood and brain matter. His white robe had looked
more like a butcher’s apron than a holy gown. The program had concluded with
Titchmarsh planting a row of runner beans in the blood-soaked ground and telling
viewers about the importance of fertile soil.

Ebb had needed no second invitation to beat his mother to
death. No, sir. But even at the tender age of sixteen, he was fully aware that
a murder required proper planning. Especially the murder of a close family
member. The police always looked in the victim’s own backyard before they poked
their noses further afield.

Knowing the right time to kill his mother was simple. She
got drunk in the mornings, slept it off in the afternoons, and started again in
the evenings. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. He’d just have to find a good way to
get himself out of school in the afternoon, nip home and smash her pumpkin to
pieces with a shovel as shown on TV. One problem though: teachers had a nasty
habit of checking if you were in class. Even Miss Parsons, and she was blind in
one eye.

After weeks and weeks of trying to find a solution to his
conundrum, the answer came by virtue of a cross-country race. With their usual
lack of concern for kids that hated sports and loved chocolate, the school had
set up a two-hour course, which at its furthest point ran close to the river.
The plan was simple by design: all he had to do was leave the race, go home,
bash his mother’s head in with Uncle Reg’s shovel, and rejoin the race.

But here was the main problem: it would take too much time
to execute. And there would be teachers placed along the route to stop kids
from cheating. Ebb had wrestled with the problem, night after sleepless night,
as the race drew near. And then the answer had come to him in the early hours
of the morning after a fretful night listening to his mother at it with Uncle
Reg in the adjoining bedroom. All he had to do was cut across the dried-up
brook at the back of the park to get home and back again without being seen.
Then he just needed to injure his leg so it looked like he couldn’t move.
Nothing as radical as a break, though, because that would hurt like hell on a
cheese toasty. Just bad enough to swell it up so he could sit down and wait for
someone to find him. 

On the day of the race, Ebb consumed three Snickers bars to
prepare for his ‘marathon’. The initial sugar rush soon dissipated and left him
feeling as sick as a dog. What if he threw up all over the murder scene? By the
time he reached home, his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest.
There was a funny tingling sensation in his inner thighs.

He went to Uncle Reg’s garden shed and put on a pair of
surgical gloves stolen from the school science lab. Uncle Reg loved the garden.
Said you couldn’t beat home-grown vegetables. Jesus would have disagreed. Just
ask the pumpkin He’d beaten to a pulp with the shovel.

Armed with Uncle Reg’s shovel, Ebb went to the house. He
leaned the shovel up against the kitchen wall and polished off four glasses of
water. He then picked up the shovel and walked upstairs. Up the wooden hill to
Bedfordshire, as his mother used to say when Ebb was little and her brain
wasn’t so pickled. He made a mental note to raid her chocolate drawer before he
left. She wouldn’t be needing chocolate where she was going.

His guts felt as if someone was whisking eggs in there. He
stood in his mother’s bedroom doorway, the shovel dangling by his side. As
predicted, Veronica Ebb was lying flat on her back on the bed that seemed to harvest
‘uncles’ from the depths of its springs and lumps. The room stank of booze. He
felt sure that if he lit a match, she’d erupt in a ball of flame. But he didn’t
want her to die in such an impersonal way. He wanted to
feel
her die. He
wanted to
taste
her death. Savour it and digest it so he could relive
it, over and over again.

This was for all the times she’d sent him to bed with a
great big hungry bear growling in his tummy. For all the uncles who’d laid
their hands on him when he was too little to fight back. For all the times
she’d woke him up with her howling fake laughter. For all the times her
headboard had beat against his wall as a thumping reminder that she was a
whore. For all the times she’d called him Pixie-pea.

But here was the clincher: for the time she’d thrown him
down the stairs when he was seven years old and almost turned her Pixie-pea
into a mushy pea. He’d been unconscious for close on a lifetime. He’d woken up
to find her bathing his head with a cold flannel that stank of TCP. A few days
later, she’d had to take him to the doctor because he kept having fits. She’d
made him tell the doctor he’d been sleepwalking and took a tumble down the
wooden hill. Ebb had done what mummy had asked. The doctors had prescribed some
gloopy medicine, and pills to control the fits. Epilepsy, the doctor called it.

As he looked at his snoring, gurgling mess of a mother, a
thought struck him. What about blood? If he smashed her pumpkin head to a pulp,
he would get covered in blood. It was one thing feigning an injury, quite
another trying to explain to the teachers why he was covered in blood.

The shovel saved him. The shovel told him to go to the spare
room and put on a pair of Uncle Reg’s overalls. That way, Ebb could stash the
bloody overalls in the garden shed, along with the shovel, and get Uncle Reg
locked up for life. Perfect. Ebb almost fell to his knees and kissed the shovel
right there in the doorway. The shovel also told him to put his tracksuit on
over his PE kit and wear his mother’s pink wig, just in case he contaminated
the overalls with any of his hair and skin.  

The overalls hadn’t been a very good fit because Uncle Reg
was close on six feet. The arms came right down over his hands, and the legs
gobbled up his trainers and made walking a dangerous experience. He’d nearly
tripped over twice on his way back to his mother’s bedroom. But nearly was as
good as never, as his mother used to say when she’d had a mouth capable of
talking sense. To make matters worse, it was hotter than Hell in the three
layers of clothing.

Ebb picked up the shovel. He loved the shovel. Not the kind
of dirty love his mother had for Uncle Reg. He never wanted any part of
that
kind of love. The shovel made him feel warm and cosy inside. The shovel
understood him. The shovel loved him for who he was.

He moved up close to the bed and raised the shovel above his
head. In his excitement, he forgot about the brass ceiling light that Uncle Tom
had fitted when he’d occupied Uncle Reg’s berth in his mother’s bed. The shovel
clanged against it louder than a church bell at a wedding. One of the tiny
glass shades smashed, raining a fine shower of glass down on the bed.

Veronica Ebb opened her eyes and gawked at her son. She
looked like a chicken looking at the dreaded axe. She opened her mouth to say
something. Perhaps to ask him why he was wearing her pink wig. Perhaps to beg
forgiveness. Perhaps to say goodbye to her little Pixie-pea.

Ebb had been in no mood to find out what. He brought the
shovel down on her face hard enough to splinter the bone in her nose. The
corner of ther shovel gouged her right eye.

Love of the shovel and hatred of his mother poured through
Ebb in equal measures. He hit her again and again and again until exhaustion
stopped him. He spent close on ten minutes resting on the shovel, gasping for
air and looking at the bloody pulp that used to be his mother’s face.

Ebb smiled at her. ‘You have shamed the shovel.’

Veronica Ebb didn’t answer. Her face resembled a giant
hamburger with bits of eyeball and tooth ground into the mix. Ebb wanted to
stay in that moment forever, locked in a cocoon of pure pleasure. Just him and
the shovel and his dead mother. But the time was ticking. He took off the
blood-soaked overalls, rolled them up into a tight ball and took them down to
the shed along with the shovel. He stuffed the overalls underneath Uncle Reg’s
workbench and leaned the shovel against the wall.

By the time he’d got back to the cross-country course,
nagging doubt had replaced the elation of the murder. His head felt as if it
housed a nest of baby birds, beaks open, waiting to be fed answers. To add to
his problems, his plan to twist his own ankle wasn’t so easy to implement as
he’d imagined. Every time he tried to roll the ankle over, his pain threshold
refused to let him. Perhaps he could smash his ankle with a rock? Again, same
problem. Self-preservation blocked the move. Ebb looked up at the sky and
howled. What he needed right now was Jesus to tell him what to do.

And so Jesus had. In the guise of a rook sitting high in the
branches of a massive oak tree. Jesus had gone out on a limb for him, you might
say. Jesus told him to climb right up in that tree as high as he could and then
throw himself to the ground.

Driven by desperation, and Jesus’s encouragement, Ebb
climbed halfway up the tree and leapt to the ground. His left foot landed on
the very rock he’d been considering using to smash his ankle with. Pain lanced
the entire left-hand side of his body as his leg twisted and spilled him
forwards onto the hard earth.

He’d spent the best part of an hour under that tree before
Mr Gibbs, the sports master, found him. By then, he’d been convinced that there
were vultures circling overhead waiting to feed upon his carcass. After first
looking angry, then concerned, Mr Gibbs had called an ambulance on his mobile
phone and tried to pacify Ebb by telling him that only babies cried.

Ebb had spent the rest of the day in hospital having a
plaster cast fitted on his broken left leg. By the time an ambulance took him
home that evening, the house had been cordoned off with police tape.

He’d spent the following week recuperating at a neighbour’s
house. Two days after the killing, Uncle Reg was charged with Veronica Ebb’s
murder. The evidence was overwhelming. The only fingerprints on the shovel
belonged to Reg the Veg, as Ebb now called him. The blood-soaked overalls
belonged to Reg the Veg. Reg the Veg was found guilty of murder and given a
life sentence.

Ebb had left school that summer without any qualifications.
He didn’t even bother turning up for the exams. He stayed in the house as long
as he could, but with no money to pay the rent, let alone the utility bills, he
was soon forced to leave. All he took with him in an old brown rucksack was a
change of clothes, his mother’s pink wig, and the sunglasses she’d worn to
cover her eyes when one or another of the uncles had got handy with his fists.

He spent the next two years sleeping rough and begging on
the streets. Fourteen years later, he exhumed his mother’s skeletal remains and
pinned them to the wall in the Revelation Room. It was a shame that the
original shovel was unobtainable.

He’d gone back once and had a look at the old house. It now
boasted new windows and a new front door. Reg the Veg’s vegetable garden had
been levelled off and grassed over. The shed was gone. In its place, a kids’
swing and slide set. A strange mixture of sadness and nostalgia passed through
him. A yearning. A longing to break in and go up to his mother’s old bedroom
and relive the beautiful experience of killing her.

Maddie sat on the edge of her bed
staring at the floor. A filthy red rug covered the bare boards in the middle of
the room. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling cast shadows across the room.

Dixie looked across at her. ‘What did Tweezer do to you?
Sister Alice reckons he’s in deep shit.’

‘Language!’ Emily said.

Dixie ignored her. ‘What did he do?’

Maddie thought Dixie might have been pretty, but life had marked
her face with harsh edges. Her faded denim eyes
looked
kind enough, but
Maddie didn’t know if she could trust her. ‘He came to see me when I was
handcuffed to Ebb’s bed.’

Dixie raised her eyebrows. ‘And?’

Maddie looked away and shook her head. ‘I don’t want to say
anything out of turn.’

‘Then shut up,’ Emily said.

Dixie turned to Emily. ‘Go to sleep.’

Emily yawned. ‘I would if you two would shut up yacking.’

‘Why don’t you stop listening instead.’

Emily rolled over onto her side and turned her back on
Dixie. ‘Whatever.’

Dixie sighed. ‘Moody cow.’

Emily rolled back to face her. ‘So would you be if you were
in my shoes.’

‘Oh no, not the dreaded phantom pregnancy again.’

‘It’s not a phantom pregnancy. It’s real.’

‘And who got you up the duff, then? The Tooth Fairy?’

Emily looked away. ‘You can mock me all you like. I don’t
care.’

‘Or maybe it was the Father?’

‘Don’t be revolting.’

‘Nope. Couldn’t have been him, because he couldn’t raise a
smile when it comes to women.’

‘I’m not interested in your filthy thoughts.’

Dixie laughed. ‘Perhaps it was the Holy Ghost, then?’

‘Piss off, Dixie. I’m not in the mood.’

Dixie turned back to Maddie. ‘So what happened? What did
Tweezer do to you?’

Maddie told her about the attempted rape.   

Dixie whistled. ‘And you knocked that bastard spark out?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Ebb say?’

‘He told Tweezer to get dressed. Then he rambled on about
“shaming the shovel” or something stupid like that.’

‘Did Ebb do anything to you?’

Maddie shook her head. ‘No. A bit later, Sister Alice
released me and brought me down here with you guys.’

Dixie chewed her index finger. ‘You were lucky.’

‘You call that lucky?’

Dixie did. ‘It looks like you were spared the initiation.’

Emily propped herself up on one elbow. ‘He’s all right if you
don’t antagonise him.’

Dixie laughed. ‘That’s not what I remember you saying after
your initiation.  If I remember rightly, you couldn’t walk for a week.’

‘That’s because I hurt my knee.’

Dixie rolled her eyes. ‘Course you did.’

‘He gave me wine earlier,’ Maddie said. ‘He kept going on
about Satan being inside me.’

Dixie smiled. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘If he met
Jesus Christ himself, Ebb would be convinced that Satan was inside him.’

Emily crossed herself. ‘You shouldn’t mock Jesus.’

Dixie snorted. ‘I don’t need to mock Jesus with that crazy
bastard on the loose. He does enough mocking for the rest of us put together.’

‘How long have you been here?’ Maddie asked.

‘Christ knows. It must be at least three years. Give or take
a life sentence.’

Maddie’s breath hitched in her throat. She wanted her
father. Wanted to feel his arms around her, holding her tight and reassuring
her. ‘I just want to go home. I don’t want to do this.’

Dixie walked over to Maddie and sat down next to her on the
bed. ‘I can’t help you there, love. But I can help you learn to play the game
and get through this, if that’s any help?’

Maddie’s shoulders collapsed beneath the weight of the day.
Her chest felt as if it was about to explode and spill the contents of her
heart all over the floor. Every emotion, every secret, every last piece of her.

Dixie held on to her as Maddie rocked back and forth on the
bed. She cried for her mother, lost to a worthless civil war in Rwanda. She
cried for her father, who would never see her again. And she cried for a life
which was over before it had begun.

After a few minutes, Dixie pulled away and rubbed Maddie’s
arm. ‘At least that bastard never got a piece of you. That’s one up to you.’

Maddie nodded.

‘Brother Tweezer has always been all right with me,’ Emily
said.

Dixie rounded on her. ‘Really? Maybe you can be Tweezer’s
bitch one day.’

‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Just because I happen to
believe in what we’re doing.’

‘Believe in what we’re doing? Do you really think we’re
going to build a spaceship and go to Heaven?’

Emily nodded.

‘Then you’re more stupid than I thought.’

Maddie remembered Emily’s letter home. ‘What spaceship?’

Dixie rolled her eyes. ‘Ebb tells everyone he’s building a
spaceship ready for the Rapture. What he really means is he’s getting members
to milk money from their families to pay for his lavish lifestyle. You’ve been
up in his room, Maddie. Does it look the same as the rest of the farmhouse?’

‘It looks like a penthouse suite.’

‘He’ll ask you to get your parents to cough up, just like he
asked Dozy over there to ask hers. How much did he ask for, Emily?’

‘None of your business.’

‘A hundred grand?’

‘None of your business.’

Dixie laughed. ‘You sound like one of those villains going
“no comment” to the cops.’

‘Go to Hell. I know who I am and where I’m going.’

‘First she reckons she’s pregnant, now she thinks she’s
going to Heaven to give birth to the new baby Jesus,’ Dixie said.

‘Mock me all you like, Dixie. But it’s you who will pay the
price on Judgement Day. Not me. Not Sister Alice. You. You and all those
non-believers out there who think it’s clever to mock Jesus.’

‘I’m not mocking Jesus. Just you.’

 ‘You’ve so got it coming to you, Dixie. You and your
filthy mouth.’

‘And you’ve got a cuckoo in your nest.’

Emily ignored her. ‘If you’ve got any sense, Maddie, you
won’t listen to a word she says.’

‘Please don’t fight,’ Maddie said.

Dixie glared at Emily. ‘She’s as batty as Ebb.’

‘I’ll report you to the Father if you don’t shut up, Dixie.’

‘Would that be the same upstanding Father who grows cannabis
in the basement?’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘Yes, he does. Marcus sells it on the streets, along with a
shitload of other drugs. Do you know what he calls it? The Crop of Christ. The
Crop of fucking Christ? How sick is that.’

‘You’re lying,’ Emily said.

‘It’s good shit. I’ve had some. Me and Marcus sometimes
sneak out to the barn and have a toke.’

Emily sat up. ‘You’re a liar. Marcus doesn’t take drugs.’

Dixie took a deep breath and continued. ‘Apparently the
basement is massive. Marcus says Ebb’s got rows and rows of cannabis plants
growing down there under artificial lights. There’s even a ventilation thingy
to keep the plants healthy.’

‘That’s all just a great big fat lie. Marcus doesn’t take
drugs, and he certainly doesn’t sell them. He goes to Oxford to spread the word
of Jesus.’

Dixie looked at Emily. ‘He’s a dealer, you stupid girl.’

Emily stood up. ‘That’s a lie, Dixie. Take it back.’

Dixie stood up and faced Emily. ‘It’s not a lie. He sells
heroin, crack cocaine, weed, amphetamines. You name it, he sells it.’

‘You’ll rot in Hell for all your lies,’ Emily shrieked.

‘And you’ll get a slap in a minute.’

‘He wouldn’t sell drugs. It’s wrong.’

Dixie laughed. ‘What do you care what he does?’

Emily opened her mouth to speak.

‘Well?’ Dixie persisted.

Emily sat back down on her bed. ‘God is watching you.’

Dixie snorted. ‘Fuck God.’

‘You are so going to Hell, Dixie.’

‘I don’t care what you say, you silly little cow. Or anyone
else for that matter. I know it’s true. Marcus helps Ebb cultivate it. As for
all the other gear, Ebb gets it from the contacts I gave him.’

‘Contacts
you
gave him?’ Maddie said.  

Dixie nodded. ‘Dealers I used to know when I was on the
game. I used to carry drugs for my pimp as well as whore for him. Ebb picked me
up one day. I could tell straight away he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill punter.
There was something odd about him. You get this kind of instinct for weirdos.
You have to. It might save your life one day. Anyway, he came cruising along in
this battered old Vauxhall Nova looking for a pickup.’

‘More lies,’ Emily muttered.

Dixie ignored her and carried on. ‘We used to operate out of
my pimp’s flat. So I took Ebb back there, but he told me he didn’t want sex.
Well, like I said, I had a feeling about him. I mean, telling a whore you don’t
want sex is like telling a barber you don’t want a haircut, right? So I’m
thinking he’s going to ask me to do something sick. You wouldn’t believe what
turns some of those perverts on. But no, not Ebb. He paid me fifty quid so he
could show me Jesus.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Emily said.

Dixie continued. ‘I thought he was trying to trick me. Maybe
“Jesus” was a code name for something else. Something bad. But I was
 intrigued. Interested. I hated what I’d become. I wanted out. I’d been
selling myself since I was fourteen. Selling myself and taking drugs to numb
the pain.’

Maddie tried to digest Dixie’s words. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘You don’t know the half of it. Anyway, the more time I
spent with Ebb, the more I realised he wasn’t just using me. The more he spoke,
the more convinced I became that he was genuine.’

Emily rubbed her stomach. ‘He
is
genuine.’

‘He told me he had somewhere safe I could go. Somewhere I
would be protected forever. All I had to do was steal my pimp’s money and
drugs. And trust me, the flat was swimming in the stuff. Plus all the gold
chains, watches and medallions.’

‘You stole it all?’ Maddie asked.

Dixie nodded. ‘We planned it for weeks, right there in the
heart of Jazz’s shitty little empire. The day we made off with everything was
the best day of my life.’

‘Stealing is also a sin,’ Emily said.

Dixie turned on her. ‘Considering Ebb instigated the whole
fucking thing, I won’t lie awake at night worrying about it.’

Emily didn’t respond.

‘We took off with the best part of a hundred grand, bags of
cocaine and weed, gold, the lot.’

‘Liar.’

Dixie ignored her. ‘On the day we did him over, he was
waiting to do a huge drugs deal. Ebb hid under the bed and waited for him to
come home. Ebb had a gun and a hunting knife. As soon as Jazz opened the safe,
Ebb came out from under the bed and pointed the gun right at his head. Jazz’s
face was a picture. He couldn’t have looked more surprised if an alien had
landed a spaceship in the middle of the flat and invited Jazz to tea.’

Maddie tried to digest what Dixie was telling her. It was
like trying to digest a fifty-course meal.

Dixie took a deep breath and continued. ‘If it wasn’t so
scary, it would’ve been funny. This little bald fat dude pointing a gun at the
man who’d made my life a misery for longer than I could remember. Jazz opened
his gob to say something and Ebb blew half of his face away. Just like that.
Poof. Jazz’s head exploded. There was blood and bits of brain all over the
wall. He fell to the floor, twitched a few times, and that was the end of
Jazz.’

‘She’s making it up,’ Emily said.

‘We had all the money in the safe,’ Dixie said. ‘Jewellery.
Drugs. Everything. We stuffed it all into two massive holdalls and walked out
of that flat as calm as you like.’

Maddie looked at the floor. What did you say to something
like that? Congratulations, it pays to plan?

‘Just before we left, Ebb shot Jazz another five times. Then
he knelt down by his side and prayed for his soul.’

Maddie shook her head slowly.

‘I puked on the way back to the farm. I was both excited and
scared witless. For the first time since I was a kid, I was free. Free of Jazz.
Free of punters. Free of beatings. Free of that flat. How was I to know that
within a month I’d end up wishing to Christ I was back at that flat and working
the streets?’

The lights went out. Darkness wrapped itself around Maddie
like a thick black fog.

‘Try and get some rest,’ Dixie said. ‘It’s going to be a
long day tomorrow.’

‘Especially for sinners,’ Emily mumbled.

Dixie sighed. ‘Especially for the deluded.’