“Yes, although this case just got a lot more complicated. Alina says the extra bone belongs to an adult. That means we’re looking for someone who might be killing indiscriminately. He’s not just taking victims of a certain type; he’s killing all and sundry.”
“That’s going to make finding potential victims via missing persons a lot more difficult,” she said, following him along the corridor to the exit. “We’ll have to look at everyone who’s gone missing in the last fifteen years.”
“Even longer ago than that,” he told her. “The ankle bone was underneath Daisy’s body, so it had been buried earlier. How much earlier is anyone’s guess.”
Morgan let out a sigh.
“And there’s something else we need to know,” Battle said.
“What’s that, guv?”
“We know he’s buried at least two bodies. How many more are there?”
Chapter 10
In the dim light cast from the naked lightbulb hanging from the cellar’s ceiling, Rob could barely see what he was doing. He’d filled in the first hole and now he was digging another at the opposite end of the cellar, the location guided by an ‘X’ on the scrap of paper from his father’s bureau.
The bottom of the hole lay in deep shadow. Rob had no idea how long he’d been down here digging, but he was almost waist deep beneath the level of the cellar floor.
“I guess this is what they mean when they say following in your father’s footsteps,” he mumbled to himself. His father had dug a hole in this exact location, sometime in the past.
The only difference was that his father had been burying a body, and he was digging it up.
Putting the bodies in places where the police would find them was his way of getting his father back for all the misery the old man put him through when he was alive. Wrapping the remains of the body he found last night—which he now knew from the news was a girl named Daisy Riddle--in a sheet from his father’s bed and laying the corpse on the altar of a ruined chapel had been an affront to his father’s atheism.
Not that Rob had any particular religious beliefs of his own, but it had still felt good to rebel against his father’s lack of them. His dad had wanted the girl to be kept down here, beneath the dirt, forever, but Rob had ruined the old man’s plans. And he intended to do the same with every body that was hidden down here.
Especially his mother’s.
If she’s here at all, he reminded himself.
He leaned the shaft of the spade against the side of the hole he was standing in and wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. Maybe he should have changed after the funeral; his suit jacket lay over the back of an old armchair in the corner of the cellar, but his best trousers and shirt were filthy from digging in the dirt.
Climbing out of the hole, he brushed himself down with his hands, but it was no good; the dirt was ground in.
He took off his trousers and shirt and, in his boxers, took them upstairs to the laundry room that was attached to the kitchen. Bunging them into the washing machine, along with his socks, and adding a scoopful of washing powder he found on a shelf, he switched the machine on. As it filled with water, he walked barefoot back into the kitchen.
His phone lay on the kitchen table. As he entered the room, the screen lit up. A text from Sonia. He picked it up and saw that he had a number of texts from her, as well as seven missed calls.
The texts were all along similar lines.
Rob, where are you?
Are you there?
Why aren’t you answering?
Helllooooo!!!!!
Where the hell are you?
It was pitch black outside. How long had he been here? He’d lost track of time while he’d been in the basement.
Returning Sonia’s call, he braced himself for the tongue-lashing he was about to receive.
“Rob? Where the hell are you?” she said as she picked up, repeating her latest text.
“I’m at my dad’s house.”
“Why didn’t you come home after the funeral? Sam isn’t feeling very well. He wants to know where you are.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s got a bit of a temperature and the snuffles. I gave him some Calpol and put him to bed. Do you want to speak to him? He’s right here.”
So that explained why she wasn’t going off on one; she was in Sam’s room.
“Of course. Put him on.”
The next voice he heard was his seven-year-old son’s. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hey, Sam, what’s up?”
There was no answer. Then Rob heard Sonia in the background. “He can’t hear you shrugging, Sam.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I just feel poorly.”
“Oh dear. It doesn’t sound like you’ll be going to school tomorrow.”
“Probably not,” Sam said. Rob detected a hint of a smile in the boy’s voice.
“Well, I’m sure that’s disappointing for you.”
Sam laughed, then coughed.
“All right,” Sonia’s voice got louder as she got closer to the phone. “Give the phone back to me.”
Rob heard the phone being transferred. “Are you coming home soon?”
Thinking about his clothes in the washer, he said, “Soon.”
He heard her sigh into the phone. “What are you doing up there that’s so important?”
“Just going through some of the old man’s things. There’s a lot of stuff here; he was a bit of a hoarder.” That was true; most of the rooms in the house were filled with items that James Gibson had collected over the years. Rob had no idea what might be worth saving and what might be junk. He also had no idea if any of it could incriminate his father.
Until he’d sorted through everything his father had hoarded, no one else was going to get a look at what was in this house.
He asked himself why he was bothered. Why not just tell the police about his father’s nefarious activities? Instead of giving the bodies back to their families one by one, wouldn’t that be the ultimate “screw you?” To tell the world who his father had really been, and what he’d done?
It would, but for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Digging up the bodies in the basement—his father’s ultimate hoard—and returning them to the world from which his father snatched them was meant to be an insult to his dead father’s memory, but it was a private thing between him and the old man.
The world would never know that James Gibson had been a killer because it was none of the world’s business. It was a private matter between him and his father.
A secret that Rob had kept locked away since he was a young boy.
He sat at the table and pushed the phone away, closing his eyes and recalling a night more than twenty years ago, when he’d awoken to the sound of a distant scream.
The noise that woke him sounded like a distant scream. He sat up in bed and rubbed his bleary eyes with the back of his hand. He had no idea what time it was, but it was still dark outside, and the moon was high in the night sky, making the distant hills and the woods near the house glow silver.
Reaching over to the bedside table, he grabbed Sam, his Action Man. Sam’s presence made Rob feel better whenever he was lonely or scared, and holding the toy now made him feel brave.
“Did you hear that, Sam?” he whispered.
Sam remained stoic and silent.
Still holding the Action Man in his hand, Rob slid out of bed. The wooden floor was cold beneath his bare feet. He inched his way to the bedroom door, ears straining to pick up any other sounds in the house and opened it quietly before peering out at the darkness beyond.
The house was quiet now, and he wondered if the scream he’d heard had been nothing more than a dream.
Leaning out of the doorway, he looked across the landing, at his father’s bedroom door. It was closed, and Rob wondered if his dad was asleep, or not in the house at all.
It wasn’t unusual for his dad to go out at ni
ght. Sometimes, Rob would be awakened by the sound of the car starting up, and he’d look out of his bedroom window to see the vehicle driving away. At first, he’d worried about being in the house on his own, but as time—and the number of night time departures—went on, he became used to it, and simply went back to sleep.
His father would be always be in the kitchen in the morning, making Rob’s breakfast, and that was all that mattered, really.
He never raised the subject of the night time journeys with his dad, and his dad likewise never mentioned them.
But tonight was different. He hadn’t just heard the car driving away; he’d heard a scream.
Or he’d dreamt it. He wasn’t sure.
He crept to his dad’s door and opened it as quietly as he could. A sliver of moonlight coming through the window illuminated an empty bed.
Rob swallowed nervously. Had his dad gone out, leaving him alone in the house, and had someone broken in? Was there a burglar downstairs?
Don’t be silly, he told himself. Why would a burglar scream?
Holding Sam up in front of his face, he whispered, “We should go back to bed. Dad will be here in the morning, and he’ll probably make pancakes for breakfast, like he did today.”
He wondered if his whispering was too loud and might be heard by anyone else who happened to be in the house.
He braced himself, ready to run back to his room if he heard footsteps on the stairs.
But no sound reached his ears.
Breathing a sigh of relief, and telling himself he’d just had a bad dream, Rob padded back to his room, yawning as he went.
As he reached the doorway, a sound from downstairs stopped him in his tracks.
He’d heard a voice. And he was sure it had been his dad’s. The words had sounded distant, but Rob was sure his dad was downstairs.
Was it morning already? He didn’t think so, because it was still dark outside.
He went to the top of the stairs and looked down at the shadowy hallway below. If his dad was up, why weren’t the lights on?
Stepping tentatively onto the top stair, he listened, hoping some further sound would let him know what was happening. But silence had descended over the house.
“Do you hear anything, Sam?” he breathed into the Action Man’s plastic ear.
Sam didn’t reply, of course, and Rob hadn’t expected him to, but he did hear his father’s voice again. His dad was speaking to someone, but the other person didn’t seem to be replying.
Overwhelmed with curiosity, Rob descended the stairs and stood in the hallway. He was sure his dad’s voice had come from the kitchen, so he went in there, expecting to find his father sitting at the table reading the paper or, better yet, standing at the cooker, making pancakes.
But there was no one in the kitchen. The door that led to the cellar was open, and the light was on down there, because some of it spilled out of the open doorway and onto the kitchen floor.
Rob never went into the cellar. His dad kept the door padlocked and had explained that by saying it was dangerous down there, and full of rats. That had been enough to satisfy the young boy’s curiosity, even though he walked past the locked door every time he was in the kitchen.
Now, the padlock sat on the kitchen table, and the light beyond the open doorway seemed to beckon him.
Squeezing Sam tightly in his hand, Rob walked over to the doorway and looked inside. Wooden steps led down to a dirt floor. The lights were on down there, but Rob couldn’t see anything other than the floor from his vantage point.
“Dad?”
There was no reply, but Rob heard scuffling from somewhere down there. He hoped it wasn’t a rat, because if it was, it was a really big one.
“Dad?” he repeated.
More scuffling, and now he knew it wasn’t a rat because he heard someone trying to say something, but their voice was muffled.
Then his father’s voice drifted up from the cellar. “Don’t come down, Robert.”
“I can’t sleep,” Rob said. “I heard a noise.”
“It was nothing. Go back to bed.”
He heard the muffled voice again. It sounded like someone who couldn’t open their mouth. But was trying to scream.
“What’s that?” he asked.
His father appeared in the section of the cellar Rob could see from the top of the stairs. He was wearing a red and black checkered shirt that Rob was sure he’d never seen him wearing before. He looked hot and sweaty. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and he was breathing hard. In his hand was a knife. Rob had never seen that before, either. It looked like a hunting knife.
“You go back to bed,” he said. “And we’ll have pancakes in the morning, with maple syrup.”
Rob didn’t move. He wanted to go back to bed, because he felt tired, but he also wanted to know what was going on in the cellar. Who else was down there with his dad?
For one fleeting moment, he wondered if it was his mother. He could barely remember his mother; she’d left when he was just six years old, abandoning him and his dad in the middle of the night and going to live somewhere else. Maybe she’d come back.
He wasn’t sure why that thought had crossed his mind. Surely, if his mum had returned, she’d want to see him. She’d be in the kitchen, hugging him, not hiding in the cellar.
“Rob,” his father said in a warning tone. He glanced to his right, at a part of the cellar Rob couldn’t see, then looked back at his son. “Actually, perhaps you should come down. Come and look what I’ve got down here.”
Now that he’d been invited, Rob hesitated. Something in his father’s voice sounded odd. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but it sounded as if his dad had kept his true voice caged up in his throat all this time and was only now releasing it.
“Come on,” his dad said. He beckoned for Rob to come down the stairs, but the hand he beckoned with was the one holding the knife, which made the gesture a lot less inviting.
When Rob didn’t move, his dad sighed with frustration. “Either come down or go to bed. The choice is yours.”
Rob looked down at Sam, as if the plastic doll could offer some guidance. When none was forthcoming, Rob’s curiosity won out over his tiredness. He moved forward and descended into the cellar.
His phone beeped, drawing him out of the memory. Reaching for it, he noticed that his hands were trembling.
It was another text from Sonia. Sam asleep. Please come home as soon as you can.
Rob hadn’t realised until now that he’d named his son after the Action Man he’d played with as a child. He remembered that when they were expecting Sam, Sonia had suggested that they each write a list of names, which they would then narrow down. The only name he’d put on his list had been Sam. Since the same name had appeared on Sonia’s list, their son’s name had seemed like destiny.
Rob hadn’t thought about Sam the Action Man since that night in the cellar—and he hadn’t seen the toy since then, either—but the name must have been floating around in his subconscious or something.
He wasn’t ready to go home yet. The memory of waking up on that fateful night and being invited into the cellar by his father had made him determined to find another body and remove it from the old man’s buried hoard.
Still in his boxers, he went back down to the hole he’d been digging and climbed back into it. The air in the cellar was cold against his dry skin, and he shivered as he picked up the spade. After a couple of minutes of striking the blade into the soil, he began to feel warmer.
It wasn’t long before he felt the spade strike something hard in the ground. Getting to his knees, he scraped the dirt at the bottom of the hole away to reveal denim. Someone was buried here, and they were wearing jeans.
He began to dig with his hands, uncovering more of the remains. At times, he had to use the spade to lever parts of the body out of the ground. It took at least an hour, but he finally revealed what the dirt had been hiding. Climbing out of the hole, he examined the result of his labour.<
br />
At the bottom of the hole lay the body of a dark-haired girl. She was curled into a foetal position, and Rob could almost imagine that she was simply asleep. She wore jeans and a faded grey T-shirt. The exposed parts of her skin—or what was left of it—were leathery and stretched tight over the bones beneath.
Rob needed something to wrap her in. He’d used one of the sheets off his old man’s bed the last time, and that had worked well enough to keep the body intact while he’d taken it to Temple Well. He went back up to the kitchen, then upstairs to his father’s bedroom, where he pulled another sheet off the bed.
Back in the cellar, he got into the hole with the corpse and carefully wrapped it in the sheet. By the time he was done, he was sweating and breathing hard. He was also covered in soil. Tightening the wrapping, he lifted the body out of the hole and climbed out after it.
Standing with his hands on his hips while he got his breath back, he wondered how many bodies there were down here. The scrap of paper had seventeen Xs marked on it, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be more graves.
He wondered if his mother’s resting place was marked with an X, or if her grave was unmarked.
He no longer believed the story about his mother leaving them one night when he was little. He’d woken up one morning and his father had told him that she’d left the previous night, without so much as a goodbye.
As a child, Rob hadn’t questioned it, but even then, he already knew the type of person his father was. He’d seen the rage in the old man’s eyes—although his father hadn’t actually been old then—the evening before the morning when he’d been told the story about his mother leaving.
He’d never believed she’d leave him here, in this house, with his dad. And later, when he’d discovered what his father was doing in the cellar, he’d put two and two together and begun to suspect that his mum had met a gruesome end and had been buried somewhere beneath the house.
He picked up the swaddled body of the girl and took it upstairs, lying it on the kitchen floor.
His phone began to ring. It was Sonia again.
Silence of the Bones: A Murder Force Crime Thriller Page 6