by Luca Veste
Praise for The Bone Keeper
‘The Bone Keeper will corrupt your days and shatter your nights’
Val McDermid
‘A dark and brilliant thriller from a writer who just gets better and better. The Bone Keeper is tense, chilling and HUGELY scary’
Mark Billingham
‘Luca Veste proves you don’t need to go to the Bayou or the Everglades to find something terrifying in the deep, dark woods . . . An entertainingly nasty piece of work’
Christopher Brookmyre
‘Candyman meets The Silence of the Lambs’
Eva Dolan
‘Terrifying, gasp-out-loud, totally compelling and twisted . . . I loved it!’
Miranda Dickinson
‘Urban legend meets serial killer thriller – a terrifying book that walks the line between crime and horror, not unlike Thomas Harris’s best work’
Stuart Neville
Praise for Then She Was Gone
‘A page-turner’
Sunday Times Crime Club
‘Luca Veste’s Murphy and Rossi series hits the very pinnacle of modern crime fiction. Totally compelling’
Steve Cavanagh
‘Socially incisive, emotionally fraught and utterly gripping, Then She Was Gone is another triumph’
Eva Dolan
‘Murphy and Rossi’s Liverpool is as dark as the Mersey . . . Veste’s grip on social issues remains bang on the money, it’s all tied up in a breathtaking and satisfying plot’
Nick Quantrill
Praise for Bloodstream, Dead Gone and The Dying Place
‘This is a twisty, psychological crime debut in a gritty setting: a new favourite for police procedural lovers’
Clare Mackintosh
‘Top read for police-procedural aficionados looking for a fresh beat’
Sunday Times Crime Club
‘A darkly impressive first novel, disturbing and intelligent’
The Times
‘A chilling debut from a writer to watch’
Mark Billingham
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For Steve Cavanagh – my PodBro, my shaky idea fixer, my guide, my confidante, but above all else, my friend.
When it was over, there was silence.
It wasn’t a calm type of quiet. Peaceful or tranquil. It was a suffocating stillness, as reality settled over us all.
On me.
No turning back now. No changing our minds. No fixing our mistake.
I can still feel the mud under my fingernails. I could feel the blood that didn’t belong to me on my skin. The smell of sweat and fear.
I could scrub myself clean over and over and it would never be enough.
It would still be there. Ground down, seeping into my skin. Turning my blood black and cold.
The dirt.
The pain.
The evil.
This was my mistake. My fault.
In the beginning, there was a boy. A small, anonymous young boy, who you wouldn’t look at twice. Quiet and thoughtful.
He would become a killer, but that happened later. For now, while he was a child, there was only the song.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells at Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells at Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know,
Says the great bell at Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead
The children would sing that song and play their game – never including him.
That’s how it began.
That’s where he learned how to use it. The words meaning so much. Giving him something he never had.
He started with dolls. Removing their heads, lighting his candles.
Then, later, they didn’t provide what he had needed.
It had to be something more real.
Chip, chop. Red candles, lighting them to death. Endless sleep.
It gave him power. Revenge.
Relief.
Finally.
One
Our phones had pinged at the same time. A smile on our faces as we read the latest message in the group chat, turned to each other, and both agreed without saying a word. That’s how we live our lives now. A series of moments, interspersed with mobile phones vibrating or dinging away to let us know what is happening around the world. We’re instantly contactable. When the world ends, we’ll find out from a breaking news notification, I imagine.
There’s a point when you know age has finally caught up with you. That you’re not young anymore and time is marching on. Life is happening and you have to make a decision to catch up with it, or try and stop it somehow. That you are no longer in your teens or your twenties – that forty isn’t that far away and you have to start growing up.
For me, it was when I bought my own house and went to a nineties-themed music festival.
The two were unrelated, but happened in the same week.
The blurred line between nostalgia and my unfolding future. An invisible line, drawing the former to a close, and starting the latter.
The music festival had come as a link in that group chat. Chris had sent it, Michelle had replied with some emojis, Stuart took a day to respond with a thumbs up and a list of bands he hoped would be there. Alexandra and I were already discussing whether it was too close to our moving-in date, deciding within a few minutes it would be fine.
We had saved and saved, scrimping together every last penny for the deposit. The monthly payments were more than manageable; less than we had been paying in rent, strangely enough.
Now, it was ours. The very first place we could properly call home.
This belonged to us. It was only bricks and mortar, but when Alexandra and I had picked up the keys and let ourselves inside for the first time, there was a definite feeling of arrival. Into adulthood, home ownership, being.
It’s bizarre the way inanimate objects can suddenly become the catalyst for relief.
The boxes were inside the house, but remained firmly unpacked. All clearly marked and not by my hand. I’d come back to the rented flat we shared one day to find a load of boxes with different rooms noted on them.
That had always been Alexandra. I had no issues with organisation, but when she was excited about something, I didn’t stand a chance. I took a breath and she’d already done it.
‘Matt, have you seen the roll-mat?’
I wondered for a second or two what the hell a roll-mat was, then remembered just in time. I didn’t want another lesson in camping if I could help it. I looked around the room, wondering how we’d manage to find anything and then spotted it wedged between two boxes marked LIVING ROOM. I shouted up a confirmation to Alexandra and continued making a playlist for the car.
Each song was a reminder of another time.
‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ – Snap! That one was from 1992 – Year Six in primary school. First disco I remember in school. I danced for the first time in front of people. I’d tried to avoid doing the same thing ever since. Same year as ‘End of the Road’ by Boyz II Men and ‘S
tay’ by Shakespeare’s Sister. Also ‘I Will Always Love You’ but I’d rather forget that song and the film Alexandra watched on a yearly basis, for some unknown reason.
1993. First and second year in high school. The year of Wet Wet Wet and that song that seemed to be number one for the entire year. I wasn’t a fan, but stuck it on the playlist anyway. Also added Mariah Carey’s version of ‘Without You’, Pato Banton, D:Ream, and East 17.
1997. Year Eleven in high school. Puff Daddy missing Notorious B.I.G. Will Smith with ‘Men in Black’. No Doubt, Natalie Imbruglia and The Verve all got added. I stuck Hanson in for the laughs it would surely generate.
And the mass sing-a-long.
1999. Final year of high school. The year I lost my virginity and the pickings in music became even slimmer. Steps and S Club 7 had arrived. ‘Tragedy’ had to go on there. As did Shania Twain. Then, it was the greatest pop song of all time – in my humble opinion – ‘Baby One More Time’ and the ridiculously young Britney Spears.
I smiled to myself, each song coming to mind instantly and vividly. The soundtrack of my youth. I threw some Cast and Space tracks on the list because they were ace and local to us. And they would annoy our Manc mate Stuart too.
The weekend was going to be filled with reminiscing and sore throats from singing songs we somehow still knew off by heart.
‘We’ve just bought a house and now we’re swapping that for a tent in a field,’ I said, as Alexandra walked into the room. I stopped updating the playlist, looking up at her from the sofa that wouldn’t stay in the position we’d dropped it in the day before. ‘I don’t understand how this happened. We’ve got a proper bed here. And walls.’
‘Stop moaning,’ she replied, shaking her head and smiling to herself. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure? We’re not too old to be going camping, you know?’
‘I’m just saying, surely we’ve got to the point where we can afford to have proper walls now. Walls, Alexandra. They’re this new invention that stops us freezing to death at night.’
‘Sarcasm is your least attractive trait. And where’s the fun in that? This whole weekend is about recapturing our youth, right? Well, that means we’re going to be in a field with thousands of other people.’
I took a breath, ready to argue my point further, but could see it was pointless. Truth was, I was just as excited about it. Still, it was October and my feet never felt warm at the best of times.
‘Did you put that thing under the car?’
I frowned, then remembered what she was talking about from the roll of her eyes. ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t like the thought of leaving a spare key fixed to the car. Seems to be asking for trouble, isn’t it?’
‘It’s totally safe. And anyway, it’s just a precaution. If you lose the car keys in some field near Bath, you’ll be complaining for weeks after about the cost.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it when we get there.’ The little black box was on my desk. A combination lock and a spare car key inside. You could affix it in the wheel arch and it was unbreakable apparently. I wasn’t so sure. I used our anniversary as a memorable date to unlock it. Our newest anniversary date.
‘Are you ready to go?’ Alexandra said, adding yet another thing to Backpack Three – the other two were already in the boot. ‘We’ve got to meet the others in fifteen minutes.’
‘Yeah, just finishing off now. Just trying to remember that song Michelle used to sing in Science in Year Ten . . .’
‘“Saturday Night” by Whigfield.’
‘That’s the one,’ I said, typing it into the search bar. Over two hundred songs on the playlist now. Mostly nineties era music, with a few eighties power ballads thrown in for good measure.
‘Well, hurry up,’ I said, then smiled when Alexandra came over to me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders as I sat in my desk chair. I leaned back and rested my head against her body. ‘You know how they get if we’re late.’
‘I know. I’m just thinking though . . . we haven’t christened this room yet.’
I was grinning as I stood up, and like giggling teenagers, we closed the curtains.
We were late.
*
An hour or so later, we were making our way down the M6, singing along to Aerosmith at the top of our lungs. Michelle and Stuart in the backseat – Chris and Nicola in another car behind ours.
Michelle had always been the singer in the group. Now, she was blaring tunes from the backseat as if it were karaoke time at the Coopers pub in town. Loud and almost never in tune. She’d cut her hair into a bob a week or so earlier and it bounced around her face as she moved. I kept glancing in the rear-view mirror and smiling through my own monotone delivery.
It had been Chris’s idea to do this. Almost as if he knew that it was something we all needed – a way of drawing a line under our youth and accepting the fact that we were all now in our mid-thirties and it was time to move on with the next stage of our lives. Stuart and Michelle hadn’t needed much convincing. For them, it was simply an opportunity to reunite and continue the longest on-again, off-again relationship since Ross and Rachel.
It was a music festival with a difference – every band booked had been either genuinely half-famous twenty years earlier, or were tribute acts for the bigger names. No-Way-Sis for Oasis. Blurred for Blur. Slice Girls for . . . well, I got the point quick enough.
As a group of friends, I suppose we all had a little arrested development. In our thirties and only just buying our own house. None of us were parents yet. We’d travelled the world instead, lived in rented accommodation, had jobs instead of careers.
We were the people tabloids liked to castigate with the term Millennials.
None of us enjoyed avocado on toast, so we had that going for us at least.
Alexandra placed a hand on my thigh as I tapped the wheel in time to the music blaring from the car speakers. The satnav on my phone told me we still had a few hours’ travelling ahead of us. I looked across at her and grinned. She responded by placing her other hand over her heart and matching Celine Dion’s voice echoing around the car.
If I’d believed in perfect moments – another nineties song – that would have been one. I wanted to capture it in a bubble and live in it forever.
Even as clouds drifted across the sky and darkened the day enough for me to prop my sunglasses on my head. Even when spots of rain splashed across the windscreen. Even when Michelle and Stuart began bickering in the backseat . . . I kept smiling.
As if nothing bad could ever happen to us.
Two
Stuart and his thinning mop of blond hair calmed down a little, unable to match Michelle’s stamina beside him in the back of the car. I looked up in the rear-view mirror and saw the approach of middle age written in the lines creasing his face. Around the eyes, mostly. His skin was still the colour of bronze sand, the stubble perfectly sculptured on his face not greying as yet. I tried to imagine him as someone in their forties or fifties and failed. Simply accepting he was the same age as me was difficult enough, given he still looked like a man in his twenties.
The journey continued, carried along on a wind of nostalgia. ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’ and ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ particularly loud highlights. Every hour or so, we’d stop at a passing services and people would swap cars. We somehow managed to turn a three- or four-hour journey closer to six and a half hours.
Not one of us stopped smiling the whole time.
On one of the stops, I stood with Chris sipping on coffees in the October sunshine. Alexandra was passing a can of Carlsberg over to Nicola from a cooler bag. They’d be wasted by the time we arrived, I guessed. It wouldn’t take long for Chris and I to catch them up.
On the wall outside the entrance, there was a missing person’s poster. A young man, late teens. The picture looked like a mug shot and I wondered if he really was missing, or had simply forgotten to tell his family he had been sent to prison for something. Someone had scrawled the words ‘Can
dle Man’s got him!’ across the picture.
‘Candle Man?’ I said, raising an eyebrow in Chris’s direction. He glanced at the poster and rolled his eyes.
‘You’ve not heard that story?’ Chris replied, shaking his head with a snort of derision. His hair flopped over as he moved, becoming less copious by the day. There would be a time when his previous nickname of the Scouse Hugh Grant wouldn’t fit any longer. ‘That’s that serial killer who is supposedly responsible for every missing person in the country. Someone went missing up our way a few months back and the police actually had to come out and release a statement to try and stop the rumours spreading about it online. You work in computers, you should know about it.’
‘I don’t know everything that happens on the internet because I work with computers, Chris.’
‘I know, I know, I just thought you might have come across it.’
‘I think I have,’ I said, something rattling away in my subconscious. ‘Was there a documentary or something?’
Chris shrugged his shoulders and sipped on his coffee. ‘Not sure. Michelle was telling us about it in the car. Apparently a red candle appears or something, and there’s a dude who has killed all over the country for years and years. Probably something that makes families of people who go missing feel better. Michelle reckons it’s true and that the police are just trying to keep it quiet.’
‘Sounds like rubbish to me.’
‘To anyone with half a brain.’
‘Good idea this, mate,’ I said, patting Chris on the shoulder and changing the conversation. ‘Just spent twenty minutes singing Spice Girls songs.’
‘Yeah, well, thankfully they won’t be at this thing.’
‘You always had a soft spot for Baby Spice.’
‘It makes more sense than your Sporty obsession.’
I laughed and shook my head. ‘It’s only because of the accent.’
‘Reckon it’s time we grew up?’
‘We already have,’ I said, seeing Alexandra and Nicola walking back out towards the car. We followed them across the car park and I smirked at Chris. Tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘We’re gonna start trying for a baby. And, in preparation for that, I’m buying a ring.’