A Litter of Bones

by J D Kirk

  The car thumped into another pothole. The sudden stop threw Hamza forward in the seat and sent his phone clattering into the passenger footwell.

  Hamza took a moment to check nothing was broken, then looked out over the dash. The sheep glowered in at him with its big boggly eyes. It gave an accusing baa, then trotted across the track, up the banking, and into the trees that lined the left-hand side.

  “Thanks for that,” Hamza called after it.

  Then, with a tut, he unfolded the map, glanced around him, and tried to figure out where he was supposed to be going.

  Forbes Bamber swayed in the doorway of his house, scowling out at the morning sunshine, and the two police officers standing on his step. His eyes were taking it in turn to blink, like they’d fallen out of sync at some point, and had never been able to get their timing right since.

  If you were being generous, you might describe Bamber’s house as a ‘detached two-bedroom’. That was, on a strictly technical level, correct. In reality, it was a hideous concrete cube not much bigger than a shoebox, with barely an ant’s pube-width gap between it and the two identikit hovels on either side.

  A good Estate Agent could also argue that it had a garden, although they’d gloss over the fact it was eight feet long, made of broken bricks and rubble, and covered in dogshit.

  Bamber stood in what might generously be described as a porch. There had presumably been an internal door hanging in the frame behind him once—the holes in the wood suggested the presence of hinges at some point—but it had been removed.

  The sound of a child screaming came through the opening. It wasn’t a scream of pain or fear, but rather one of those high-pitched screeches some kids liked to do for the sole purpose of being annoying. Judging by the hollered, “Fucking shut up!” the screams earned from a female voice further back in the house, it was proving to be a successful strategy.

  “Ye can’t come in,” Bamber said. His voice was a slur that dribbled through his rotten teeth and down onto the front of a filthy t-shirt that was big enough to drown him. A faded print on the front of the t-shirt showed a grinning blue cartoon character with a white hat and glasses.

  Irony, thought Logan, thy name is Brainy Smurf.

  Other than the t-shirt, Bamber was dressed in mismatched socks and faded grey boxer shorts that Logan didn’t even want to think about.

  “We don’t want to come in,” The DCI said. This was true. The last thing Logan wanted was to set foot inside this house.

  “Ye need a what-do-you-call-it to come in. The paper ‘hing.”

  “A warrant,” said Sinead. “Well, we do, and we don’t.”

  “Again, though, we don’t want to come in,” Logan reiterated.

  “Warrant, aye,” mumbled Bamber, his brain slowly catching up. “Have ye got wan o’ them?”

  “No. We don’t have a warrant,” PC Bell admitted.

  “Cos, if ye don’t, ye’re no’ getting in.”

  Bamber pointed to the ground.

  “’At’s my garden.”

  Logan twitched, irritated. “What?”

  “’S my garden,” Bamber said. “’S my property, an’ that. Ye’re no’ allowed on my property.”

  “Well, we are…” Sinead said.

  “Naw, yer no’. I’ll call the polis.”

  Sinead shot Logan a glance. “We are the polis, Forby. That’s why I’m dressed like this.”

  Bamber leaned back and peered down his nose at her, as if just noticing her outfit for the first time. “Seriously? You’re the polis?”

  “Aye.”

  He wiped his nose on his bare arm, leaving a silvery trail along it and briefly revealing the crook of his elbow that was a pincushion of red dots and bruising.

  “If you’re the polis, ye need wan o’ them ‘hings before ye can get in. What’s it called?” Bamber slurred. “Ye shouldnae even be in my garden.”

  Logan had had enough. Bamber yelped as one of the DCI’s hands clamped down on top of his head and tore him out of the house. Logan marched along the path, dragging Bamber by the hair.

  “Hoi! Fuck off! Ye can’t do this!”

  Logan opened the gate, pulled the struggling scrote through it, and slammed him hard against the outside of his fence.

  “There, now we’re not on your property,” the DCI hissed. Ignoring the potential health risks, he was right up in Bamber’s face, a hand still clamped on his head. “Now, Forby. I’ve got some questions for you. Are you going to help me out by answering them?”

  Logan tightened his grip on Bamber’s hair, drawing a sob through those rotten tooth-stumps.

  “Or am I going to get to do this the hard way?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hamza sat in his car, his eyes flitting from the map sprawled open across the steering wheel to the ramshackle house that slouched in the trees ahead of him.

  It was bigger than he’d been expecting, more of a manor house than a croft. The forest had been working to claim the ground back for a while now, and a tree was growing out through one of the building’s downstairs windows.

  Like the rest of them, this window had been boarded over, but the tree had made short work of that, and the square of plyboard now lay rotten on the ground in front of the house.

  “Is this it?” Hamza wondered aloud. He fished around in the footwell until he found his phone, and checked Google Maps. He had one bar of phone signal, but no data connection. According to Google, he was right in the middle of a desert, with nothing of note for miles in any direction.

  It wasn’t too far off the mark, he supposed.

  With nothing to tell him from this distance if he was in the right place, Hamza refolded the map, tossed it onto the passenger seat, then got out of the car.

  Birds chirped and tweeted and hoo-hoo’ed from the treetops, singing to him as he turned towards the house. He locked the car, more out of habit than any worry that someone might try to nick it out here. Unless the squirrels were crafty bastards, he was pretty sure he didn’t have to worry about that.

  The forest had closed in around the back of the house, making it almost completely inaccessible. The front was mostly mud, stones, and weeds, with the track Hamza had followed, leading off past the building to the left. If the map was right, it came to a stop half a mile or so further on, becoming just a footpath that eventually led in a wide loop around to the main road half a day’s walk away.

  Picking his way through the mud, and avoiding the gloopy brown puddles as best he could, Hamza approached the house.

  A nagging voice still told him that this couldn’t be the place, although the only thing he had to base that on was the mental picture he had of traditional croft houses. He had no idea where that mental picture had originally come from, though. For all he knew, all croft houses were two storey mini-mansions.

  It was only when he saw the sign above the front door that he concluded he was in the right place. A smooth piece of wood had been fixed above the lintel, a single word carved studiously but inexpertly into its well-sanded surface. Moss and time had stained the edges of the letters, but Hamza was able to make the word out.

  Ravenwood.

  This was the place, alright.

  The door, unlike the windows, wasn’t boarded up. Hamza tried the handle. Locked. The wood had seen better days, though. One good shoulder would open it.

  But, what would be the point? There was no-one here. Or, if they were, they’d been dead a long, long time.

  With a final glance up at the house, Hamza headed back towards the car. He was barely halfway when he saw the imprint in the mud. It led from a little further down the track from where he’d left his car, curving towards the front of the house.

  Tyre tracks.

  Motorbike.

  Recent.

  Hamza tapped the screen of his phone. The solitary bar had become an empty right-angle triangle in the top right corner.

  “Magic,” he muttered.

  He stood rooted to the spot, halfway bet
ween the house and his car, tapping his phone against the side of his leg.

  “Bugger it. I’ve come this far,” he decided.

  And then, slipping his phone in his pocket and adopting his best policeman’s walk, DC Khaled approached the building’s front door.

  Chapter Thirty

  “It was just a guy! Just a guy!”

  Logan gave Bamber a shake. Beside the men, Sinead glanced along the street at the twitching curtains and parted blinds.

  “What guy?” Logan demanded. “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know! Just a guy! He just looked like a guy!”

  Logan produced his phone, opened the photo app, and swiped until he found the mugshot of Ed Walker. “Was this him?” he asked, holding the phone up in front of Bamber’s face.

  “I don’t know, I cannae see it. It’s too close,” Bamber said, his eyes blinking in turn as he tried unsuccessfully to focus.

  Muttering, Logan released his grip on the scrote’s hair and brought the phone back a foot.

  “Naw. Naw, that’s no’ the guy. He looked different.”

  “Different in what way?” Logan asked.

  “Just different. Like… different,” Bamber slurred.

  Logan sighed. “Jesus Christ. Older? Younger? Fatter? Thinner? Different how?”

  “His face was like…”

  Bamber gestured vaguely to his own face.

  “…different. Aye, like, it wisnae the same. Know?”

  “I know what ‘different,’ means, aye.”

  “He didnae have a beard for wan thing,” Bamber said. “Aye, like no’ like a beard.”

  “Right. OK. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Bamber’s pock-marked brow furrowed. “Or maybe he did. I cannae mind.”

  Logan clenched his jaw, swallowed back his rage.

  Behind him, Sinead’s radio squawked into life on her shoulder. “Control to PC Bell. You there, Sinead?”

  Sinead looked to Logan for his approval, then retreated when he gave her the nod. “It’s Sinead, Moira. What’s up?” she asked.

  Bamber watched her, his face fogged with confusion. “That’s a shite phone,” he remarked. “I’ve got a better phone than that.”

  Logan caught Bamber’s chin and turned his head so the junkie’s glassy eyes were focused vaguely in the DCI’s direction.

  “You’re wasting my time here, Forby. Right now, we’ve got evidence that connects you to the abduction of a child. I could haul you into the station now and keep you there for days,” Logan told him. “When did you have your last fix, Forby? How do you fancy a week of cold turkey in a wee grey box?”

  His eyes went to Bamber’s house.

  “A different wee grey box, I mean.”

  The expression on Bamber’s face made his thoughts on the matter very clear.

  “No, thought not,” Logan said. “So, you need to give me something useful. Something more than ‘just some guy.’”

  A few yards along the street, PC Bell’s swore urgently.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said, scrabbling for her phone.

  “What’s the matter?” Logan asked.

  “It’s my brother, sir,” Sinead said, hurriedly thumbing through her contacts. “School’s been on the phone to the station. He hasn’t turned up.”

  Logan checked his watch. “Ten past nine. Could he no’ just be late?”

  Sinead shook her head. “He goes to Breakfast Club at eight. I walked him to the end of the road before I came in. He wasn’t there, either, so I don’t—”

  A car trundled past. Sinead put her finger in one ear, pressing the phone more firmly against the other. “Hello? Hello, Anna? It’s Sinead. Harris’s sis—Aye. No. No, he definitely left. He should’ve been at Breakfast Club.”

  She listened for a moment, her face telling the story of what the person on the other end was saying. “Well, where is he?” she asked, her voice rising. “Where is he?”

  Logan jabbed a finger in Bamber’s face. “Don’t leave town. I’m not finished with you,” he said, then he placed a hand on Sinead’s back and guided her towards the car.

  “Get in,” he told her. He held his hands out for the keys. “I’ll drive.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Roundabout! Roundabout!”

  Logan held steady, siren screaming as he flew across the junction in a near-perfect straight line.

  “It’s painted on. It doesn’t count,” he said, shooting a glance back in the car’s rear view mirror.

  A bus chugged along ahead of them. Jerking the wheel, Logan swung out onto the other side of the road, then immediately swung back in again to avoid a head-on collision with a delivery van coming the other way.

  “Jesus, is everyone deaf around here?” he asked. “Sirens, people, sirens.”

  He made a non-specific but almost certainly rude gesture to the driver of the van, then eased out enough to see past the bus. It had indicated to the left and was slowing down to let him by, but the road ahead was clear now, so he gunned the engine and roared on past it, blue lights licking across the Shiel Buses logo painted along the vehicle’s side.

  “Where now?”

  “Left past the traffic lights. Across the bridge, then left again.”

  Traffic lights. Traffic lights.

  There.

  The lights were on red. He ignored that fact and sped through, hanging a left at another roundabout—a proper one, this time—just beyond them.

  Sinead gasped and grabbed for the solid plastic handle of the door as the car swung around the corner, rear tyres smoking.

  “Been ages since I’ve done this,” Logan said.

  “I couldn’t tell,” Sinead hissed, bracing herself against the seat. “Left up here past Farmfoods.”

  More lights, but the filter arrow was green this time. The tyres howled in protest as Logan skidded the car around the bend. Sinead caught a glimpse of a terrified looking older driver in the opposite lane, but then they were past it, leaving the junction behind them in a cloud of burning rubber.

  “And there’s nowhere else he’d go?” Logan asked, crunching up into third and kangarooing past a couple of cars whose drivers had had the foresight to pull into a bus stop.

  “No. Nowhere. He must’ve gone back home. He has to be there,” Sinead said. “If he’s not…”

  Logan shot her the briefest of sideways glances, before returning his eyes to the road. “He’ll be there. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.”

  He added the ‘Please, God’ silently in his head so Sinead couldn’t hear it, then he jammed his foot down on the accelerator and powered the car along the narrow, winding road towards whatever awaited them ahead.

  DC Neish looked up from his computer screen. “Email in from up the road, boss. There was a hold-up with the DNA stuff. We’ll have it in the next twenty minutes.”

  “Good. About time,” said Ben. He was perched on the edge of his desk, studying the Big Board. “Any word back from Hamza yet?”

  “Nah. Want me to give him a ring?”

  “Please.”

  Standing, Ben followed the strands of wool around the board, pausing to take in the contents of the Post-It notes dotted all over it. He’d read them so often now that he knew most of them off by heart but he read them again, anyway, in case this time they triggered some new idea, or potential line of enquiry.

  “Dead, boss,” said Tyler.

  Ben turned. “What?”

  “His phone. It’s dead. Probably no signal.”

  “Oh. Right. Aye.”

  DI Forde turned back to the board. He sucked in his bottom lip, his gaze falling on the little black rectangle circled on the map. He scratched his chin, his fingernails rasping across a day or two’s worth of stubble.

  “You fancy checking on him?”

  Tyler looked down at the phone. “Already tried, boss. Told you, no signal.”

  “No, I get that. I was asking if you fancied taking a drive up there and checking on him,” B
en said. He looked back over his shoulder. “And, to be clear, I wasn’t actually asking.”

  Sinead rattled the handle of her front door, finding it locked.

  “He’s not in. He’s not here,” she said, panic rising like a bubble in her throat. She pushed back a jolly-looking garden gnome that stood at the edge of a small lawn that hadn’t seen a mower in a while. Something metallic shone from the dirt below.

  “The key’s still there. He can’t get in without the key.”

  Cupping his hands around his eyes, Logan peered in the downstairs window into the living room. A pair of blue pyjamas was spread across a couch, one leg turned inside-out. A mug and a plate sat on a little coffee table, half a slice of toast left on top.

  “Can’t see him in there,” Logan remarked. “Is there a back door?”

  “Aye, but it’s locked. The key’s in it on the inside. There’s no way in,” Sinead said. “Shit. Where can he be?”

  “We’ll call it in, get folk out looking for him,” Logan told her. “We’ll find him.”

  Sinead chewed her thumbnail, her eyes shimmering with worry. “Right. Aye,” she mumbled. She reached for the walkie talkie on her shoulder and was about to thumb the button when Logan caught her by the arm, stopping her.

  “Wait. Hang on,” he said, lowering his voice. “Listen.”

  Sinead listened, as instructed, but the thumping of her own heart and the traffic passing out beyond the end of the garden path made it difficult for her to hear anything.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Round the back,” Logan said.

  Sinead moved to hurry past him, but he blocked the way. “Wait. Let me go first.”

  “Why?” Sinead demanded. She searched his face. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But stay behind me.”

  Constable Bell shook her head. “No. Sorry, sir, but no.”

  She ran up the path and out of the front garden, then sprinted off towards the house at the end of the block.