A Litter of Bones

by J D Kirk

  “Bugger it,” Logan grunted, hurrying to keep up. Sinead was twenty years younger, though, and Logan had never been built for running.

  He caught up with her at the back gate. She stood there at the end of the house’s back path, watching a boy in school uniform digging with a rusty spade. The spade thacked when it hit the grass—the sound Logan had heard from out front.

  Halfway between the gate and the boy, the shed door stood open. A badly weathered padlock hung from its broken latch.

  The boy had his back to the gate and hadn’t noticed Sinead and Logan’s presence yet. He grunted with effort as he plunged the blade of the spade into the grass, and prised a little mound of dirt free.

  “Harris? Harris, what are you doing?” Sinead asked.

  Her little brother jumped with fright. He turned the spade clutched before him like a weapon.

  It was then that they saw the blood. It plastered the front of his jacket and smeared up his chin. It pooled between his fingers and ran down the handle of the shovel in long, weaving strands.

  Harris swallowed when he saw his sister and Logan standing there.

  “Sinead,” he said, his voice an anxious squeak. “Am I in trouble?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  What Hamza had assumed was the front door had in fact opened into a good-sized kitchen and dining area at the back of the house.

  The size was the only good thing about it.

  It had been tiled once, but damp had cancered the walls behind them, and most of the tile-work now lay smashed on the floor.

  Cabinets had fallen from their mountings, smashing through the rotten wood of the lower storage units below. And old-style porcelain sink had cracked in two, spewing a greenish-black gunge through the gap.

  The lino flooring was curling up in places, the edges pitted and gnawed away by rats. Alternate layers of mulch and moss and dust clung to most surfaces, and as Hamza creaked into the room, a carpet of woodlice hurried to clear a path.

  “Shit,” he ejected, burying his face in the crook of his elbow. He coughed, his eyes watering, his gag reflex demanding to know what the hell he thought he was playing at.

  His eyes travelled to the corners of the room, saw things there that they wished they hadn’t, then shot a longing look back at the fresh air of outside.

  The place wasn’t just giving him the boak, it was gift-wrapping it for him and presenting it on a silver platter. Every instinct told him to get out of there before he caught something. Every thought was of turning around and walking away.

  Logan was right, he’d had a long night. He needed to be in bed, not poking around in a decaying old death trap filled with beasties. He forced himself to look at the squirming mound of woodlice, then shuddered at the sight of them, and at the thought of the millions of others no doubt roaming around in the house like they owned the place.

  Something clacked onto the floor beside him, making him jump. Another of the fat, wriggling bugs lay on its back, legs bicycling frantically in the air. Hamza looked up, then jumped back into the doorway when he saw the ceiling was heavy with more insects. Not just woodlice but spiders, beetles, centipedes, and a variety of other bugs he didn’t know the names of but despised on sight.

  Part of the ceiling had collapsed, the plasterboard buckled to reveal part of a wooden beam and the underside of some floorboards above. Hamza retreated until he was standing under the doorframe. He’d heard somewhere that it was the safest place in an earthquake, as the house was less likely to fall on your head.

  He wasn’t expecting the ground to start trembling, but the house spontaneously collapsing on him felt like a very real possibility.

  Taking out his phone, Hamza snapped off a few photos. The light from the door didn’t stretch far into the room, so he took a few more with the flash on. The brightened images revealed more detail about the place but fell well short of conveying the horror of it.

  There were a couple of doors leading off from the kitchen area. Both doors were open, and by leaning forward a little, Hamza could see what looked like a small utility room through one of them.

  The angle of the second door blocked his view in that direction, but he guessed it must lead into the rest of the house. A living room or hallway, maybe. The window with the tree sprouting through it was in that direction somewhere, and while he was quite interested in getting a look at that, he was even more interested in getting back into the fresh air of outside, and away from this shitehole of a place.

  Besides, if Dylan Muir’s body was here somewhere, he didn’t want to contaminate the place.

  He cast a final glance around at the filth and debris.

  Contaminate it any more than it already was, anyway.

  Hamza was turning to leave when he heard the sound. Short. Sudden.

  Thump.

  He stopped, tensed, breath held, head cocked. His eyes moved left to right, seeing nothing as he listened.

  A few seconds passed.

  A minute.

  Hamza’s heart rate slowed. He allowed himself to breathe again.

  Nothing. Probably just his imagination going into over—

  Thump.

  There was no mistaking it, that time. No denying it. A sound. But not just a sound.

  A movement.

  Upstairs.

  Slowly—ever so slowly—Detective Constable Khaled leaned back, his eyes creeping to the ceiling above him.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Harris? What have you done? What did you do?” Sinead whispered, edging along the path towards her brother.

  Harris shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”

  “What wasn’t you, son?” Logan asked, eyeing the boy’s blood-soaked clothes and the spade in his hands.

  “I just found it.”

  “Found what?” Sinead demanded.

  The sharpness of her voice made the boy jump, and brought tears bubbling to the surface. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, so he stepped aside and pointed, instead.

  A cat lay on the grass beside the hole Harris had been digging. Most of a cat, anyway.

  An oblong of fur and flesh had been torn from its side, exposing part of its ribcage and a purple jelly of intestines. Its back legs hadn’t been broken so much as mangled, bones jutting through meat at a range of stomach-churning angles.

  “Jesus,” Sinead hissed.

  “It was… It was on the pavement,” Harris said.

  “And what? You picked it up?” Sinead yelped. “What were you thinking?”

  Harris sniffed. His blood-spattered face burned with shame.

  “You can’t just pick up dead cats, Harris! That’s mental!” Sinead continued. “You should be in school. Do you have any idea how worried I was? Do you?”

  Harris shook his head, keeping his gaze fixed on the ground between them.

  “It’s not just me, is it?” Sinead asked, turning to Logan. “It’s mental?”

  “Well, I mean…” was all Logan could really add.

  “It had been in an accident,” he croaked. His shoulders shook. “Like… Like Mum and Dad were. I couldn’t just leave it. I couldn’t just… I couldn’t just…”

  Sinead was at him in three big steps, her arms around him, pulling him in. He dropped the spade and buried his face against her high-vis vest, his body wracked by big breathless sobs.

  Logan watched Sinead’s bottom lip start to wobble, then had the good grace to look away. Bending, he retrieved the spade.

  “Why don’t you two go inside?” he suggested. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “You’ve got to bury it,” Harris told him, turning his face but not releasing his grip on his sister. His words were wobbly, carried on unsteady breaths. “When things die, we bury them. That’s just what we do.”

  Logan nodded. “You’re right, son. We do. And, I will. I promise.”

  Sinead shot him an apologetic look, but he dismissed it with a shake of his head. “Away inside. Get him calmed down and cleaned up. It’
s fine.”

  “Thank you,” she mouthed, then she turned with her brother and steered him out of the garden and around the block.

  Logan waited until they were out of sight before squatting down, leaning on the spade for balance as he examined the cat.

  It could’ve been an accident, he supposed, but the hole in the animal’s side was neater than he’d have expected to see, the size and placement making it a near-perfect window into the poor thing’s insides.

  Similarly, the leg breakages were messy, but calculated. It was possible that a car could’ve done damage like that, but unlikely. The bones had splintered in opposite directions, so each leg was a mirror image of the other. Unless the animal had been lying with its legs spread in an open invitation to an oncoming tyre, Logan couldn’t imagine how they had broken the way they had.

  The front of the cat was in perfect condition, other than the redness matting its black and white fur. Its eyes were closed, its mouth open. It was missing a few teeth, Logan noted, although nothing out of the ordinary.

  He wanted to believe it was an accident. He wanted to believe that nobody would do something like this on purpose. But, the unfortunate truth of it was, he’d seen similar to this before.

  Too similar.

  Once, in particular.

  Fishing a pen from his pocket, he carefully prodded around at the edges of the wound, trying to figure out if the flesh had been torn off or cut away. The smell from the cat’s insides snagged at the back of his throat and filled his mouth with saliva. He swallowed it down, still leaning on the spade as he continued his inspection.

  He was looking closely at the injury when the cat twitched, its eyes opening, its face contorting in pain. It mewed desperately, piteously, its front paws kicking at nothing, its tail sticking straight out behind it.

  Logan jerked back and jumped to his feet, the cat’s pained cries carrying across the garden and up towards the house. Its head twisted. Its eyes met Logan’s. Frightened. Desperate.

  “Poor wee bugger,” Logan muttered.

  And, with that, he raised the spade.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Hamza stood halfway up the stairs, darkness hanging heavy and oppressive overhead.

  The lack of signal had rendered his phone mostly useless, but at least the shite Vodafone service didn’t affect the torch function. He clutched the phone in his rubber-gloved hands, directing the torchlight upwards. It pushed back against the gloom, sending shadows scurrying across the peeling wallpaper and the blooms of black mould.

  Each step groaned beneath his weight, a chorus of suffering singing him up the stairs.

  There had been no more sounds since he’d left the kitchen beyond those he made himself. Creaking floorboards. Rustling clothes. The odd panicky gasp whenever something scurried out of a hole in the plasterboard or scuttled across the floor.

  From the rest of the house, though, came only silence.

  The upstairs landing was L-shaped, with six doors that Hamza could see, and probably at least one that he couldn’t because of the corner. None of the doors looked particularly inviting. One had a little brass plate fixed to it that announced it as the ‘Little Boys Room’.

  Bathroom. Almost certainly. And yet, that particular choice of words meant Hamza had no choice but to check.

  The door opened with a nudge. Hamza shone the torchlight inside, then stepped back, burying his face in his arm again. An overflowing toilet stood in the corner, a jagged hole in front of it where the floor had collapsed down into the room below. He flashed the torch across the rest of the room, finding nothing but a wash basin, an empty bath with a mildew-stained curtain hanging limply from a rail above it, and a generous amount of decay.

  Hamza closed the door again, and turned his attention to the rest of the landing. The five other doors were unmarked. One stood ajar, giving him a glimpse of a carpet so damp it was literally sprouting mushrooms.

  He decided to leave that one for now, and considered the others, instead. He thought about calling out, but a tightness in his throat prevented him. He told himself it was his body’s way of resisting the urge to vomit. That was all.

  Not fear.

  His feet scuffed on the bare floorboards of the landing as he turned to the next door. An army of ants swarmed across the edges of the frame and up the wall between that door and the next.

  Hamza had just decided to give this door a miss for now, too, when he saw the blood.

  He didn’t realise it was blood. Not right away. It was a dried puddle, a stain, a congealed pool of blackish red that had seeped out under the door and glossed the floorboards.

  The truth of what he was looking at hit him with a sudden jolt that forced him back a step and brought a hissed expletive to his lips.

  He should go, get out, drive until he found a signal and call for back-up. That was what he should do. No question.

  He reached for the handle. Turned. Pushed.

  The door remained closed. It took him another couple of attempts before he discovered it opened outwards.

  The smell hit him first. It was unlike anything he’d ever smelled before—richer, blacker, more pungent.

  The bones came next. They rattled and clunked out of the cupboard and onto the floorboards as an avalanche of yellows and browns. Long. Thin.

  Child-sized.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Hamza croaked, the phone shaking in his hand, the trembling torchlight making the bones’ shadows dance.

  Dylan Muir. Had to be.

  THUD.

  Everything but Hamza’s eyes froze. They darted instinctively in the direction the sound had come from.

  Around the corner. The other leg of the L.

  He held his breath. Stood his ground. A voice in his head screamed at him to run. Another voice—Logan’s, he thought—warned him not to fucking dare.

  Do your job, that one told him. Just do your bloody job.

  He checked his phone screen again, just in case. Still no signal.

  The floorboards shifted noisily as he crept towards the corner and peeked around it into a shorter branch of the upstairs hallway. A single door stood at the far end. Mounted to the wall above it, the antlers of a deer’s skull stabbed up at the decaying ceiling.

  He heard the thump of movement from beyond the door again. There was more though, this time. A squeak. A sob. The whimper of a wounded animal.

  Or a frightened child.

  The uncertainty that had been crippling Hamza evaportated and he knew, with crystal-clarity, what he had to do.

  He reached the door in three big creaks, and threw it open.

  Hamza didn’t notice the room. Not at first. All he saw was the chair, and the ropes, and the wide, staring eyes of a boy whose face he had previously only seen in photographs.

  “Connor,” Hamza exhaled. “Connor? It’s OK, I’m with the police. I’m with the police, OK? I’m here to rescue you.”

  Bound to the chair, Connor Reid wheezed desperately into his gag. He kicked his bare feet, thudding his heels against the rotten carpet, squirming and thrashing in panic.

  “Shh, it’s OK, it’s OK,” Hamza promised. “I’m going to get you out. I’m going to get you home.”

  He took a step closer. The floorboards squeaked.

  Twice.

  A voice came from right behind him.

  No, not a voice.

  A whisper.

  “Naughty, naughty,” it said.

  And then, before Hamza could turn, something cold and sharp was buried low down in his back, and his world fragmented into shards of pain.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Logan stood by the kitchen window drinking tea from a chipped mug and admiring the view. The house looked directly onto Ben Nevis, and the mid-morning sun was dappling the mountain’s snow-covered peak.

  He’d never been much into climbing himself, but looking up at the mountain now—The Ben, as the locals referred to it—he could almost see the appeal.

  Almost.
r />   A train rattled past just up the road from the house. There was a steam train that ran along this route, he knew. Part of the track up towards Glenfinnan had featured in the Harry Potter movies, and fans flooded the area during the summer, trying to get a glimpse of the train, or paying through the nose to ride on it.

  It was a bog-standard old diesel that came thundering past now, though, vibrating the breakfast dishes in the sink. Probably headed to Glasgow, Logan thought, and part of him wished he was sitting on it.

  Although, he noted with interest, maybe not as big a part of him as he’d have thought.

  He turned away from the window. Sitting at the kitchen table, Harris immediately turned his head, trying not to let on that he’d been scoping the DCI out. Logan could hear Sinead through in the living room, explaining the situation to the school. By the sounds of things, she was glossing over the ‘he’d picked up a dead cat,’ thing. He couldn’t really blame her.

  “How you doing, son?” Logan asked the boy.

  Harris looked young for his age. Physically, at least. Not behind the eyes, though. Behind the eyes, where it counted, he was old. Older than his sister. Older, perhaps, than Logan himself.

  Harris shrugged.

  “Aye. Get used to that. When you get to my age, that’s pretty much the default,” Logan said. “In fact…”

  He shrugged.

  “…is a good day once you’re past forty. Enjoy your…”

  He shrugged again.

  “…while it lasts.”

  Harris smiled. Logan rewarded himself with another sip of tea.

  “Do you think I’m mental?” Harris asked.

  Logan did him the courtesy of not answering right away.

  “I think we’re all mental, son,” he told the boy. “Some of us more than others. If it’s any consolation, you’re way down near the bottom of the list.”

  Harris’s brow furrowed.

  “No. I don’t think you’re mental,” Logan clarified. “I think you tried to do a good thing, even though you knew it’d get you into trouble. There’s hee-haw mental about that.”