A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  “My God,” said Priestman, “this man is a vigilante.”

  “Or an avenging angel,” said Gackowska.

  Priestman peered at her in a manner that could only have been more disapproving had it also involved rapping Gackowska across the knuckles with a ruler. Gackowska, though, wasn’t easily intimidated, not even by her superiors. It was one of the many qualities Hynes admired in her. He liked to think he was partly responsible.

  “Depends on how you look at it,” Gackowska added, doubling down, which caused even Hynes to bite his lip in mild apprehension.

  “He’s a killer,” said Priestman, with considerable emphasis. “He should be in jail.”

  “It’s interesting that he isn’t,” said Hynes, seeking to steer the conversation in a marginally less fraught direction.

  “And why do you think that is?”

  “Good luck?” Hynes suggested. “Bribery?”

  Priestman’s eyes narrowed, which was always a bad sign. Hynes decided he’d had his fun.

  “Or because it suits the higher-ups to have him roaming free,” he offered instead.

  “He’s not just roaming free,” said Priestman, “he’s roaming here. Do we have any idea where exactly he is?”

  “None,” said Hynes. “Yet.”

  Hynes had already been in touch with the Home Office, but the private investigator named Charlie Parker had entered the United Kingdom as a tourist, and had therefore not been required to supply evidence of the address at which he would be staying. Clearly, he was not a tourist in any meaningful sense, which raised the possibility of deportation if required, although it would be hard to prove he was actively in breach of immigration law.

  “At least we know why he was interested in Romana Moon’s death,” said Priestman. “We need to talk to him.”

  “In case he has anything useful to offer?”

  “And to advise him that this isn’t the United States, or more particularly the Wild West. Kevin Moon told you that Parker claimed to have spoken with Douglas Hood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then someone should talk to Mr. Hood as well, just in case Parker shared anything useful with him.”

  “I tried,” said Hynes. “Hood isn’t answering his phone.”

  “Mobile?”

  “Home. He doesn’t own a mobile phone.”

  “I don’t blame him, bastard things. If Parker did tell Hood anything useful, I’m sure he would have called us. Might still be worth sending a PC to talk to him, though, just in case. Nabih can always bring someone up to speed. What about Manchester, and Christopher Sellars?”

  “We’ll be on our way as soon as you’ve finished with us,” said Hynes.

  A woman named Jan Watts had come forward to say that, a month earlier, she’d seen Gary Holmby at the Trinity Square center in Gateshead in the company of a courier named Christopher Sellars. Watts and Sellars had enjoyed a relationship some years before, when she was working in Liverpool. It ended when she discovered that Sellars was married with two young children. Watts had taken the deception badly, and left the city for a new job in Newcastle. She’d noticed a Carenor van parked at the mall, which reminded her of Sellars, and minutes later had spotted him drinking coffee with another man whom she now knew to be the late Gary Holmby.

  “It seems thin,” said Priestman. “I recognize that we’ve been given a certain amount of latitude with our budget for this investigation, but I’m not sure it extends to funding day trips to Manchester to follow hunches.”

  Hynes met her eye. Like Gackowska, he was no pushover, and sometimes you had to go with your gut.

  “Respectfully, I disagree. Gary Holmby’s taste in art extended to the kind of stuff that comes free when you buy a cheap frame, and he collected old computers, not Old Masters. Carenor, on the other hand, specializes in high-end art transportation and storage, and when I called them, they had no record of a client named Holmby. Neither was Sellars supposed to be stopping off in Newcastle that day: the schedule had him in Edinburgh early in the morning to pick up ten small sculptures, which had to be moved to a temporary exhibition at a gallery in Leeds by close of business. Admittedly, the quickest route from Edinburgh to Leeds is the A1 south, which puts him within shouting distance of Gateshead, but what’s he doing coming off the motorway and entering the city? If he needed to stop for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, he could get them along the way. And even if Sellars was in Gateshead for something related to the art business, why meet up with a man who didn’t appear to have any interest in art?”

  “Maybe Holmby and Sellars were just friends,” said Priestman.

  “How? We can find no school connection, no work ties, nothing.”

  “Any signs that Holmby might have been gay, or bi? If so, he and Sellars could have hooked up online.”

  “None,” said Gackowska. “From what we know of Holmby, he went through the eligible female population of Newcastle like a dose of salts, which doesn’t mean he wasn’t open to experimentation, I suppose. And Sellars is married, although that doesn’t mean much, either, these days.”

  Gackowska, Hynes thought, could be distinctly moralistic when the mood struck her. Meanwhile, Priestman was wavering, so he moved in for the kill.

  “Sellars has access to trucks and vans,” said Hynes, “and a reason for traveling around the country. There was a limit to what I was prepared to ask Carenor about his movements, particularly over the phone. So, we go over there, take a look at the driver rosters for the last month or so, and see what we can find.”

  “And what if Carenor won’t give you access to them?” said Priestman. “You don’t have enough for a warrant.”

  “I can be persuasive,” said Hynes.

  “He can,” said Gackowska. “Sometimes even charming.”

  Priestman looked from one to the other suspiciously.

  “If I thought for one moment that there was something going on between you two…”

  “Yuck,” said Gackowska.

  Hynes held up his right hand. “I’m a married man.” He scowled at Gac-

  kowska. “But ‘yuck’ is a bit strong.”

  “Sorry, heat of the moment,” said Gackowska. “I think I got sick in my mouth, though.”

  “Have you finished?” said Priestman.

  “Yes,” said Hynes.

  “Yes,” said Gackowska.

  “Regardless of what we get from Carenor,” said Hynes, “we’ll talk to Sellars and try to establish the nature of his relationship with Gary Holmby. Never hurts to shake the tree.”

  “Actually,” said Priestman, “it sometimes does. That’s how people get hit on the head by coconuts. Where’s Sellars today?”

  “Manchester,” said Hynes. “Carenor doesn’t only transport art—it would go broke if it did—so its drivers do more general courier work as well. Sellars is rostered for the local area, but only for a half day, so he isn’t due to begin making collections until after two o’clock, and probably won’t be back at base until close to seven. That gives us some time to go through the paperwork, and have a conversation with his boss. If necessary, we can ask for Sellars to be called back early so we can have a chat with him.”

  “Any chance he might be forewarned by someone at Carenor?”

  “There’s always that possibility, but I don’t think it’s likely,” said Gac-

  kowska. “After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with secretaries, I was put through to Carenor’s CEO, Dylan Lynskey. I made it clear that anyone hindering us could be in a lot of trouble. Lynskey was the one who checked the schedule for the day Sellars and Gary Holmby were seen together in Gateshead. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t the first time he’d fielded questions about Christopher Sellars.”

  “Why?”

  “He gave a sigh when he heard the name.”

  “Anything on Sellars from CRO?”

  The Criminal Records Office was no longer officially known by that title, but its initials had survived, largely because most poli
ce retained an instinctive suspicion of change—an instinctive suspicion of everything, really, which was why they were police.

  “No club number,” said Hynes. “He’s been a good boy, or a careful one.”

  Priestman took all this in. She trusted Hynes. He wasn’t averse to putting in the hours, and didn’t allow drudgework to cloud his eye for detail, but he was also clever and imaginative, and the years were sharpening him rather than rendering him duller. That he preferred to hide many of his better qualities, and indulge his worse ones, was a source of puzzlement and frustration to her, as was his apparent lack of any obvious ambition. Hynes was that rare beast: the man who had found his perfect role in life, and saw no reason to alter it. Gackowska, like some of the others mentored by Hynes, would go on to greater things, and he would regard her ascent with pride, although Priestman thought he might miss Gackowska more than the rest. He had a fondness for her—a blind man could see that—even if Priestman believed he wasn’t foolish enough to imagine it could become anything more. At least, she hoped he wasn’t.

  “All right, get going—but I’m not signing off on any hotels, so you’d better work fast. What car are you using?”

  “Thought I’d take my own,” said Hynes, already making for the door. “The job ones all smell funny.”

  But Priestman was too canny for that game.

  “Don’t you dare put in a claim for mileage.”

  Hynes reacted as though he’d been shot. “No mileage?”

  “No mileage, not if there’s a perfectly good job car you can use.”

  Hynes shook his head in sorrow. “Penny pinching. We’ll be asking people to arrest themselves next.”

  “Hardly worth making the trip if you can’t milk the system,” added Gackowska.

  “When this is all over,” Priestman told her, “you and I need to have a long talk.”

  But Hynes had already rallied. It was hard to keep a good man down.

  “We’ll make it up from receipts thrown away at motorway services,” he reassured Gackowska, as they vanished from Priestman’s sight. “Spread them over a month or two. Nobody ever checks the dates…”

  Their voices faded, leaving Priestman to think in silence. If Sellars was bent, Hynes would know, and Gackowska too, because Hynes had trained her well, and made her better than she already was. And if something came out of it—a lead, an arrest—Gackowska would benefit more than Hynes. She was already in line for promotion, and another year would see her make DS. After that, she’d be on her way: DI, DCI, onward and upward. How would she look back on her mentor then? Hynes, with his pockets full of receipts, some more dubious than others, and his perpetual willingness to accept free meals and drinks at his regular ponce-holes, as the old guard liked to refer to the pubs and coffee shops on their patch that occasionally saw fit to reward weary police with something for their efforts. Hynes wasn’t greedy, accepted only what was offered, and didn’t bear grudges. Most of the time, he paid anyway.

  But Gackowska, as Priestman knew from her sources, paid all the time.

  Gackowska would reject Hynes in the end, Priestman decided. When inevitably forced to do so, Gackowska would make him the Falstaff to her Hal. She would turn her back on him, because to do otherwise would endanger her own career. She would nod at him in the canteen, or exchange brief words with him in court, but no more than that, and in the aftermath only those closest to Hynes would be able to spot the flash of hurt in his eyes.

  Priestman gathered her notes. She willed Hynes to be right. She willed Sellars to be the one.

  * * *

  ARMITAGE RECEIVED THE CALL from a friend in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs while she was applying hydrocortisone to the fingers of her right hand, where the itching was worst. This whole decline in her health had begun with Gruner’s death. She feared she might have contracted an infection from that filthy man.

  Armitage and the State Department guy had dated while she was in training, and sometimes hooked up when she returned home on leave. He was shrewd, which she liked, and ambitious. It would never be more than a casual thing between them, which they both understood, but each saw in the other a kindred spirit, and a possible ally for the future. For now, he was useful to Armitage because he spoke Arabic.

  “Can I ask where you found that word?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  He laughed. “Doesn’t matter, just curious. It’s not terrorist-related, or nothing that sets bells ringing. It’s Arabic for sure, but the reference is mythological.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That word,” he said, “is djinni.”

  CHAPTER CXIV

  Parker was met in the lobby of Lockwood, Dodson & Fogg by the lesser of the two goons who had escorted him from the building on his previous visit. The security guard hadn’t gained any further communication skills; if anything, he was even more sullen than before. Once Parker obtained a visitor’s pass, the guard shepherded him through the first floor of offices, past a mostly empty canteen, and into the currently unoccupied outdoor plaza.

  Now that he could view it properly, it was clear to Parker that the remains of the Old Firm did not extend fully across the space but extruded into it, leaving a gap of a few feet at either side. Some restoration work had obviously been done in the past, although it was hard to say how long ago; repointing was visible on parts of the exterior brickwork, but the roof tiles looked old, and a massive sheet of reinforced glass protected the exterior. As with the back of the building, the windows on two of the remaining three sides were bricked up, but four of those facing LDF remained uncovered. Paintings of rooms stood behind each, lending a trompe l’oeil aspect to the interior. The lower panes revealed a lawyer’s chambers, unoccupied, and a waiting area with a fireplace and a clerk’s desk. The upper, from what Parker could make out, depicted two aspects of a considerable library. It was eerily effective. As he drew closer, he noticed that the windows were not original. This side had once been a blank wall, into which the windows had subsequently been set. The whole exercise was a strange combination of preservation and cosmetic alteration.

  From the right of the Old Firm appeared a man in his sixties, dressed in a custodian’s overalls. His dark skin bore a thin sheen of sweat, and he was holding a bunch of keys in his left hand.

  “This is Glenmore,” said the guard, the first words he had spoken to Parker since his arrival. “He’ll show you around.”

  The guard took a seat at one of the tables dotted across the plaza before removing his cell phone from his pocket and swiping through images on its screen—probably films of kittens drowning, or children weeping as their toys were placed out of reach.

  Parker extended a hand toward the custodian.

  “Mr. Glenmore,” he said. “My name is Charlie Parker.”

  Glenmore held up his right hand in apology. “I’m dirty,” he said. “It’s a mess in there.”

  But when Parker’s hand was not withdrawn, he relented and shook it.

  “Glenmore is my first name,” he said, “so just Glenmore is fine.”

  “It’s unusual.”

  “Not where I come from.”

  Parker noticed that Glenmore was staring intently at him. He had no idea why.

  “Which is?”

  “Jamaica originally. Lot of people called Glenmore there.”

  “There’s a Glenmore Avenue in Jamaica, Queens,” said Parker, “except I don’t think that Jamaica is named after your island. If I remember correctly, it’s something to do with beavers.”

  If Glenmore the custodian found this fascinating, he did a good job of hiding it. Parker could hardly blame him.

  “Huh,” said Glenmore, before allowing a short, awkward silence to elapse. “Well, you want to look inside the Old Firm?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Not a problem. Won’t take long, though. Not much to look at, and you’re going to get dirty like me.”

  A camera was fixed to the brick
work by the top left-hand window. Parker wondered if Emily Lockwood was keeping an eye on him.

  “I’ve come this far,” he said. “No point in turning back now.”

  He followed Glenmore to an open steel door set into the western wall, and entered a dusty hallway lit by a pair of low-hanging bulbs. A flight of stairs extended upward, ending at a small gallery that ran behind the windows to the left, and another brick wall to the right. A series of metal struts had been added to support the stairs and the gallery from beneath. The rest of the space was occupied by small gardening implements, tools, brushes, paint tins, and assorted wooden boxes. In one corner stood a table, a chair, a transistor radio, and an electric kettle, along with a mug, a box of tea bags, and a plastic container with a sandwich and an apple inside. This was clearly Glenmore’s personal space. It was very quiet, the glass and brick combining to smother most noise, even with the door ajar.

  Parker tested the internal walls with his fist before trying the first two steps of the stairs. They creaked under his feet, but felt solid enough.

  “I wouldn’t advise it,” said Glenmore.

  “Have you climbed them lately?”

  He didn’t receive a reply, and turned to look at Glenmore, who frowned at him.

  “Did you say something?” said Glenmore.

  “I asked if you’d been up these stairs lately.”

  “Yes, but I try to avoid it.”

  “Still, you’ve survived this long.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. Any other advice?”

  “Don’t fall.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  Parker reached the top without incident, although the second-to-last step protested loudly under pressure. The brickwork to his right was of a different shade from the rest. It looked as though a second wall had been raised over the original, probably in the latter half of the last century after the firm of Quayle finally closed its doors. But he was no expert on construction, so it seemed wise to check.

  “When was this new wall put up?” he called down to Glenmore. Again, he received no immediate reply, and began to understand. He descended the stairs, and stood before the custodian. Glenmore’s hearing aids were tiny, and colored dark to match his skin, while his hair hid the hooks holding them in place behind his ears. Yet even with them, Parker knew that Glenmore remained very deaf, and relied on lip reading to supplement the little he could hear.