Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  The van doors were eased shut – Gar had been instructed very firmly not to slam them – and Ardwyn climbed up into the passenger seat next to him.

  ‘All set?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Let’s go.’

  He started the engine and drove them to the allotments.

  8

  TUSK MOON

  THE VESSEL HAD BEEN STRIPPED, TIED AND GAGGED securely, so when it woke all it could do was wiggle slightly and stare around at the inside of the shed with wide, terrified eyes. Everett would much rather that it remain unconscious – just as with the swine vessels and the German boy before that, he had no desire to inflict any more distress than was absolutely necessary – but neither he nor Ardwyn had any knowledge of how to keep a human being drugged and Gar could be a bit heavy handed. The vessel already had a broken nose, and there was a very real possibility that if Gar continued hitting it to keep it unconscious he might actually kill it by mistake, and they couldn’t risk that. Dead blood held no power. The big man was currently on sentry duty outside. Fortunately, it seemed that the old woman had decided to behave like a normal human being and sleep in a proper bed tonight, which was a relief. There were enough wrinkles in this new liturgy without the extra complication of unwanted spectators.

  Ardwyn was praying, her soft voice soothing him with a sense of peace and the righteousness of this night’s work. It was somewhat undermined by the smell of piss coming off the vessel, which was a lot more pungent in the enclosed space instead of the open clearing above Swinley.

  Yes, this was going to take some getting used to.

  He took the knife in his right hand and the nape of the vessel’s neck in his left and bent the vessel into a kneeling position over the pit. The shed’s false floor had folded back on hinges to expose the bare earth below, the pit that had been dug in it and the remains of Moccus that had been placed there, ready for his rebirth. The vessel’s eyes goggled as it saw, and it began to weep and scream in muffled bleats from behind the gag. Everett wondered if he should say something to it – thank it, possibly, the way Bill had thanked the German boy. There wouldn’t have been any point when the vessels of replenishment had been swine, but then he thought what would be the point now? Nothing he could say would alleviate its terror. Best to simply get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible.

  The deserter’s elbow bumped against the wall and he had to shuffle a bit to get into a position where his arm could move freely. Then he opened the vessel and held it as it thrashed, angling it carefully so that the blood jetted directly into the pit rather than up the walls because apart from the waste nobody wanted that clean-up job.

  ‘Moccus, be replenished,’ he and Ardwyn intoned together. ‘Moccus, be renewed. Moccus, be reborn.’

  Afterwards they wrapped the empty vessel carefully and put it back in the van, shovelled a foot of earth into the pit and put the floor back over it, then locked up and drove back to the farm. The tusk moon would not rise until after dawn, but they would stay up to toast its appearance as it journeyed out from under the shadow of mother earth and celebrate the first replenishment ceremony of their new church.

  Only five more to go.

  * * *

  3:07

  Dennie stared at the display of the bedside radio clock, trying to feel surprised, and failing.

  She couldn’t recall waking. It hadn’t been Viggo this time; he was downstairs as normal, shut in the kitchen. As far as she knew she might well still be asleep. It would make sense if she was, because how else was she to explain the fact that Sarah Neary was sitting in the chair in the corner of her bedroom?

  Sarah hadn’t moved or said anything since Dennie had become aware of her. The chair was just a tatty old piece of wicker furniture that she’d inherited from her own mother and which had followed them in the move from Birmingham; it was for dumping rogue pillows and underwear, and she wasn’t sure it would support the weight of a human being. But then Sarah had been dead for a little over ten years. She was wearing the same t-shirt, sweatpants, and pink slippers that she’d been wearing on the one and only visit Dennie had made to see her at HMP Bronzefield – and the last time she’d seen Sarah before she committed suicide. For some reason she was also cradling in her lap an old rag doll that had belonged to Dennie as a girl. Sabrina. She hadn’t thought of that doll since before she married Brian. What was Sarah doing with it?

  ‘I don’t know what you want,’ she whispered. ‘I helped you as much as I could. Please, leave me alone.’

  Sarah neither moved nor replied. One moment she was there, and the next she, along with Dennie’s childhood toy, was gone.

  * * *

  ‘You want me to drive you where?’ Lizzie’s toast froze halfway to her mouth in disbelief.

  ‘Stapenhill Cemetery.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that’s what you said. And that’s in…’ She waved her toast for Dennie to repeat it.

  ‘Burton, yes.’

  ‘Because…?

  ‘Lizzie, you asked me if there was anything you could do to help. This is it. Honestly, it’s not that far.’ She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Sarah’s appearance and so had tiptoed downstairs and sat in the kitchen drinking tea and listening to the World Service on Radio 4 until she knew what she needed to do. When she heard her daughter moving around she’d roused herself and got breakfast ready as if it were any normal day.

  ‘I understand that, but I was thinking more along the lines of cooking you a nice meal, perhaps, or doing a couple of loads of laundry. Not driving you to visit the grave of a convicted murderer who hung herself in her cell.’

  ‘Her victim was a monster of a man and she killed him in self-defence, remember.’

  ‘Yes, and then she cut him up and buried the bits in her allotment!’ Lizzie shouted. ‘It’s not the same as taking a bunch of flowers to Dad’s grave!’

  ‘Lizzie, I know that it doesn’t make much sense, but part of what’s been happening over the last few weeks is that for whatever reason, Sarah Neary has been…’ appearing in waking memories and now visiting me at night ‘… on my mind. I thought that if I visited her grave it might help to settle it a bit. I understand that it’s not what you planned to do, and you probably need to get back to the café, and I’m more than capable of driving myself, so if you really don’t want to…’

  ‘No,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘It’s fine. Of course, I’ll help. I just need to make a couple of phone calls, that’s all.’

  Lizzie made her calls and Dennie convinced Viggo that it was only a half hour drive and she’d be back well before lunchtime, and they left. Stapenhill was a modest-sized council-run cemetery on the other side of the River Trent from the town proper; up from the river’s broad sweep there was a green bank crowded with daffodils and a tree-lined walk and then the cemetery’s gateway of three tall gothic arches. Lizzie left her to her ‘morbid bloody obsession’ and took herself off for a walk along the river. The cemetery grounds themselves were broad and open, and it was easy to locate the Nearys’ cremation plot – it was towards the back, in the modern section away from the old Victorian graves, and close to a neighbouring housing estate. The funeral arrangements had been left to distant relatives who wanted shot of the whole horrific business as quickly as possible, and so in a final act of cruel irony after everything that Colin had done to Sarah when alive, her remains had been interred next to his. Even so, nobody was so thoughtless as to have their plaques engraved with standard platitudes like ‘Loving wife’ or ‘Devoted husband’. There was simply a pair of names, and a set of dates. There were no flowers, not even withered remains. Dennie wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see; it was just a simple patch of gravel with two low stone blocks and their metal plaques. It was as she was looking around, wondering what on earth had made her think this was a good idea, that she saw – through a line of thick trees and a heavy wrought-iron boundary fence – a familiar glimpse of plastic sheeting, small wooden structures and ti
dy vegetable patches in neat rows. There were allotments bordering on the cemetery. Colin Neary’s remains had been exhumed from one allotment only to be buried within sight of another, and she laughed. Serve the bastard right.

  The first thing Dennie notices about Sarah, before she even takes her seat in the prison visiting room, is how far along her second pregnancy is. She’s not allowed to give Sarah a hug so she simply squeezes her hand and asks. Seven months, is the answer. Dennie’s instinctive reaction is to feel sorry that the father will never see his new child, but she squashes it because it was the fact that he tried to make her lose it which led to her killing him in the first place.

  Are they treating her well in here?

  Fine, thank you, Dennie.

  And little Josh?

  He’s with her sister, Michelle, and her husband. She hopes to God that he’s too young to understand what’s happening.

  Dennie thinks that Sarah would probably have put up with the abuse for years more, decades, and possibly the rest of her life if it hadn’t been for the imperative to protect her babies. Dennie can well understand this. Brian was nothing like Colin, but his childhood had its own problems and she’d had to set firm boundaries for him when Christopher was little. It had been the time that Brian had come home from work, tired and irritable, and found that Christopher had got into the laundry basket and ‘coloured in’ his Daddy’s favourite shirt with wax crayons, and he’d given the child a good solid wallop – the first and only one ever. Dennie had gathered the squalling child in her arms, fixed Brian with a look and told him that if he ever laid a finger on any of the children like that again, she would take them and leave. She meant it, and he knew it. He knew that she wouldn’t go to the police or try to divorce him, he would just never see his children again. She had known that the single worst thing for Brian Keeling – the fault-line which tracked right back into his troubled childhood – was to be abandoned, and she’d felt cruel to poke a finger in that crack but she’d done it without hesitation. Colin Neary had been more riddled with cracks than a badly laid pavement, and Dennie couldn’t begin to imagine how Sarah must have had to tiptoe through their marriage until the point came where it wasn’t just her that was threatened but her children. She hadn’t had to poke anything; Colin had crumbled beneath her feet all on his own.

  Is there anything she can get Sarah?

  No, thank you. She has everything she needs in here.

  There is something about her calmness, her placidity, which frightens Dennie deeply. ‘Sarah, please, if you’ll just let me tell them—’

  This gets a reaction. ‘No! We’ve been over this! What good will it do? I’ll still be in here whether it’s ten years or twenty, not that it will make much difference anyway because after the little one arrives I won’t be here at all.’

  ‘You need to stop talking like that. They’ll let you keep her. They’ll—’

  ‘In a cage? No, Dennie, I can’t allow that. I grew up in locked rooms. I won’t have that for her. I won’t.’

  One of the prison officers notices that Sarah is becoming agitated, and comes over. ‘I think that’s enough for today, Miss,’ she tells Dennie. Her eyes and voice are both steel. There’s nothing Dennie can do – nothing except the one thing that she promised Sarah she would never do, and that deep down she is too scared to do, and so she leaves in a fog of tears and shame at her own cowardice and her head ringing with the confession she can’t make.

  I helped.

  For a moment Sarah was still there when the world came back. She was sitting in her prison clothes at that small table on the grass next to her own grave, except this time instead of a round belly she held Dennie’s old rag doll Sabrina on her lap, and then she was gone.

  9

  GRAFTING

  APRIL ON BRIAR HILL ALLOTMENTS CAME IN A tumbling cloud of blossom and gauzy sunlight. The days warmed and lengthened, the weather woke up from winter and began falling over itself with sprees of hot sun followed by days of drenchings. From its elevated position the allotments had a view of the river ribboning along the valley, through a patchwork of fields, gleaming with pools, meres and wetlands. Curlews had arrived for the breeding season even earlier this year, and the grasslands echoed to their looping cries. The soil seemed hungry for planting – a crop sown would be springing shoots in a matter of days. Bean poles and netting were going up, tomatoes were coming out of greenhouses, and the ground was being prepared for courgettes, pumpkins and asparagus. Even the old Neary plot was defying the pessimistic older timers’ predictions and starting to green up. But the excitement was tempered with caution; there was still the threat of a late hard frost, and everybody remembered last April’s Storm Hannah that had wrecked people’s fruit cages and bean trellises and threatened flooding all along the Trent.

  For Dennie it was time to graft her tomatoes. After a run of several bad years in which blight had taken a heavy toll on her harvest she had decided to learn how to graft the fruiting ‘scion’ of the plant onto a hardier and disease-resistant rootstock. The seedlings had been doing well in her little greenhouse since mid-March, and on the first warm day in April she sat out with some plastic bags, grafting clips and a wickedly sharp craft knife. She’d let them settle for a week or two before planting them out, and hopefully get a better crop this year, if the god of slugs looked favourably on her.

  The Association meeting in the Pavilion bar on the first Friday of the month was particularly well attended and had only one item on the agenda: that of the upcoming VE Day celebrations. This year the government had moved the May Bank Holiday, which would ordinarily have been on the 12th of May, back four days to coincide with VE Day on the Friday before, so that the country could celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II with a three-day weekend. The topic had been raised in Association meetings now and then since the change had been announced last June, but typically it was with only a month to go that any sense of urgency began to be felt. Angie led the charge, of course, having been asked by Dodbury Village Council to come up with ways in which the allotments could contribute to the festivities, and she spent the meeting begging, cajoling and browbeating anybody who showed even a hint of interest into forming subcommittees for the production of bunting, vintage costumes, cakes, and even sandbags to give it an authentic feel. Hugh Preston and Ben Torelli were excused on grounds that, being ex-servicemen, they would be participating in the wreath-laying ceremony at the cenotaph on the village green. Then Margaret and Fred Pline, another pair of married old-timers, announced that they were going to build an actual Anderson shelter on their plot this year so that the younger generation could get a sense of what it had been like to endure the Blitz, which caused much excitement.

  With all this activity it wasn’t surprising that it took a good fortnight for Dennie to realise that Marcus Overton hadn’t been working his plot. To be fair, he hadn’t been working it for the last few years anyway, but after seeing how vigorously he’d been attacking the weeds back at the end of March she’d thought to have seen him around the place a bit more. The chances were that whatever respite he’d been enjoying from his arthritis had been short-lived and he’d probably gone and made it worse for himself by overdoing it, but if that were the case then maybe someone should have been looking in on him. He was known to be something of a recluse, usually only seen hobbling into the village for his morning paper. It was unclear whether he had a partner or relatives, or even a carer to look after him. She asked around but nobody seemed to know.

  Angie took a bit of persuading to give her his address, which was one of the larger, posher houses in Greenlea – a bit out of her way but the extra exercise would do both her and Viggo good.

  They were all detached properties along here, separated from their neighbours by thick hedges and high walls. Overton’s car – a sky-blue Audi – was in the drive but when she knocked on the front door and called there was no reply. Viggo went for an exploratory sniff in the bushes while she peered through the
letter flap.

  ‘Mr Overton?’ Her voice echoed down an empty hallway. ‘Marcus?’ She could see a glimpse of a darkly polished parquet floor with an ornate Turkish carpet runner and, if she angled her face just so, a drift of mail on the floor inside the front door. Most of it was glossy junk, but there were enough white and brown envelopes in the pile to tell her that wherever he was, he hadn’t been collecting his post.

  Now she was genuinely worried. She had visions of him lying dead, maybe having fallen out of the shower on unsteady knees and slippery tiles, cracking his head and starving to death, calling for help from someone who would never come.

  Dennie dug out her phone and dialled 999.

  * * *

  Matt Hewitson was sitting on the swings in the kids’ playground on the old Marketplace smoking a cigarette and necking a can of Red Bull when the guy from the barbecue came up to him.

  ‘You’re Matthew,’ he said. It wasn’t a question, and it pissed him off straight away because nobody ever called him Matthew except his mum.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said. So what if the bloke had treated everyone to a free hog roast? That didn’t give him the right to go around using people’s names.

  The bloke grinned, and Matt didn’t like that either. It was a piss-taking grin if ever he’d seen one, the kind he’d like to punch. ‘I’m Everett,’ he said, as if that mattered. ‘I’ve come to offer you a job.’

  ‘Digging potatoes?’ he sneered. ‘I told you, fuck off.’

  ‘It starts now,’ Everett continued, as if he hadn’t heard, and then just as Matt was about to get up and in his face, the guy pulled out his wallet and offered him a twenty. Just like that. ‘This is your first pay cheque, and all you’ve got to do is let me buy you a beer and listen while I explain the terms.’

  Matt looked at him closer. He didn’t seem like a homo, and this didn’t feel like a come-on. He wasn’t old, wasn’t young, with dark hair and weird eyes. He dressed a bit better than the locals – a dark shirt and jeans over boots rather than a hoodie, sweatpants and trainers – and he must have a bit of money if he could afford that meal. ‘Make it forty,’ he said.