The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Next Wednesday, then?’ Miss Stanislaus said.

  ‘Take your time,’ The Mother said, her voice as deep-chested as a man’s. It seemed to shift the air around us. ‘Like I done tell you, these things take time.’

  One of the women cast a fast glance at The Mother, raised her hand as if to say something, then dropped it.

  ‘Wednesday fine wiv me, Mother Bello.’ Miss Stanislaus patted her handbag and strolled over to me.

  ‘She don’t like you,’ I whispered, surprised by the satisfaction I got from saying that.

  Miss Stanislaus blinked at me, then looked away. Her fingers were restless on the clasp of her purse.

  She was silent on the way back, except for one moment when she turned from the window. ‘Missa Digger, what they teach you about murder in dat furrin-sick school in Englan?’

  ‘Lots of things,’ I said. ‘What you want to know?’

  She shrugged. She was still fidgeting with the clasp of her purse. Sweat was beading her forehead, but she did not pull out her tissue.

  I thought over the question for a while. ‘I s’pose, if there’s one thing I came away with is the fact that a killer kill according to a pattern. Is like they can’t help themselves, even the clever ones – same or similar technique all the time: a blow to the head, asphyxiation, poisoning, ritual murder – same procedure. As if a different part of the brain take over and insist they do it the same way every time. Similar victims too. Habit or perhaps something deeper than that. That’s what betray them in the end.’

  ‘What kinda pusson kill, Missa Digger?’

  ‘Any kinda pusson. Make the reason strong enough and anybody can. If they got the means.’

  Miss Stanislaus folded her arms and looked out of the window.

  ‘Don think I could. Not me.’

  ‘You say you got a girlchile?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay – that gun that Malan offer you. Let’s say you got it in your handbag and you know how to use it. You walk into your house and find some fella with his hand around your baby-girl throat. You goin stand up there with that gun in your pretty little handbag and watch him strangle your child?’

  She grunted as if I’d hit her in the stomach.

  ‘What turn your mind to all this talk ‘bout killing now?’

  ‘I only ask, Missa Digger. You the one dat talkin.’

  14

  It was all over the news by the time we set out for the office on Monday morning.

  They’d found a young man’s body – or what remained of it – in Easterhall.

  Malan had phoned the stations and told them that San Andrews CID had apprehended a man of Canadian origin who, he had reasonable grounds to believe, was connected with the body that had been uncovered. Miss Stanislaus called me from her cell phone. She sounded so confused I offered to pick her up.

  We didn’t speak. She was in a light-brown cotton dress and did not have her handbag. I imagined her jumping out of bed, slipping on her rubber sandals and rushing out of the house. She looked as if she was about to cry. I wondered if it was from the same betrayal I felt – that Malan was advertising his victory before he told us anything; or whether it was because he’d beaten both of us to it.

  She switched off the radio. I switched it back on. She switched it off again.

  When we walked in, Malan was at the interview desk. Pet and Lisa were answering calls and passing notes to him.

  I lifted a chair, dropped it in front of him and sat down. ‘Tell us what’s happening, because we ain’t hear nothing yet from you and you gone out there broadcasting it.’

  Miss Stanislaus retreated to her desk and sat there quietly. I could feel her bright brown eyes on us.

  Malan spread his fingers in my face. ‘Had to act fast, man. Time was running out.’

  ‘Don’t gimme no ole talk, Malan, because right now…’

  Malan shot to his feet. ‘Watch your mouth, Digger. Gimme some respect, y’unnerstan? Gimme some respect because…’

  ‘Because what? You’ll get me fired? You think you could run this office on your own?’

  ‘Digger! If…’

  ‘If what, Malan? You point your finger in my face again, I report you for assault. And I have everybody in this office here to back me up. In fact you’ll have to shoot me right here, because I not takin no abuse from you. Save it for your woman.’

  That caught him by surprise. To tell the truth I caught myself by surprise. I didn’t know how upset I was until I started speaking.

  I wondered if I would have challenged him at all if I hadn’t seen Miss Stanislaus do so the first time she met him. It was as if the woman’s presence magnified all the things I did not like about Malan.

  Malan sat back. He looked chastised. I felt better. ‘So what happen?’ I pressed.

  It turned out that after our visit to Iona’s house, Malan began chasing a lead he said we gave him – Nathan’s Canadian friend, Simday.

  ‘Well, from inquiries I make in the Post Office where Nathan used to work, everybody talk about that whitefella who pick him up most evenings and drive him home. S’matter o’ fact, some of them girls believe that water more than flour between them. Straightforward when you think ov it.’

  The boast was creeping back into his voice.

  ‘Yesterday evening, while y’all enjoyin y’all prayers, I gather some fellas from Rapid Response and went up to that lil house by the sea. I raid the place and drag the culprit down to the station. I had twelve men ripping up the floorboards, searchin the yard and vicinity. About eleven o’ clock last night we got a result.

  That Simday-teacher-fella-from-Canada admit to everything except the murder. Then he start begging to call his embassy in Barbados.’

  I stood up. ‘So you ain’ charge him yet?’

  ‘If you listen to the news, or read this…’ Malan pushed a pile of newspapers towards me, ‘you’ll see A man has been arrested. We don’t name im yet. A lil bit more pressure and we’ll get the confession out ov him.’

  ‘Where he is?’ Miss Stanislaus was already at the door. She was looking at Malan over her shoulder.

  ‘South East Main Station,’ Malan mumbled. ‘Hold on, I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Nuh!’ Miss Stanislaus slammed the door behind her.

  Malan rubbed his head. ‘People got the fella; not so? That’s not what everybody want? Forget about de approach, man; people resolve de case.’

  ‘You secure the scene?’ I asked.

  ‘Course, man. What you take me for? I got a couple police fellas up there. They waiting for you.’

  ‘Not now,’ I said.

  ‘I not askin you, Digson. Is a order I givin.’

  ‘Order me round midnight. Maybe later. Like you know, I work better when is dark.’

  Malan jabbed a finger at the papers. ‘People out there waiting for explanations.’

  ‘Let them wait,’ I said and kicked the door close behind me.

  Chilman called my number. He did not even greet me. ‘Digger! Tell that jackass, Malan Greaves, he going about it wrong. Is not no pappyshow and is not about he. Keep me briefed.’ He coughed in my ear, then hung up.

  15

  I left home at 12.45am.

  Miss Stanislaus was waiting for me at the roadside.

  ‘Why so late?’ she asked.

  ‘Or why so early,’ I replied. ‘Depends on how you look at it. You talk to the Simday fella?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited for more from her but she pushed back the seat, folded her arms and closed her eyes.

  When we arrived, the policemen were in their jeeps smoking and talking among themselves. They barely acknowledged our arrival.

  Easterhall was the little sun-scorched peninsula in the southeast of the island where the foreigners preferred to live, protected by dogs as big as bulls. The walls surrounding their houses were so high they cast shadows on the soulless concrete mansions they protected, regardless of the time of day.

  This
rocky coastal outcrop, exposed to the assault of boiling seas and thrashing winds, was where men brought the wives and girlfriends of other men, wrestled with them in the sweaty darkness of their cars, leaving fluttering bits of tissue and crushed condoms among the parched mint grass.

  It was a place of secrets, and a silence that prevailed despite the thundering of the sea and wind. I’ve always wondered why foreigners were so drawn to Easterhall.

  I glanced up at the sky. A cold white moon against a flat black sky. A bright scattering of stars.

  I followed one of the policemen through the stunted manchineel and sea almonds. Miss Stanislaus stayed close behind.

  The officer stopped before a shallow excavation, grunted something and headed back towards the road. I directed my regulation searchlight at the pile of bones – long stripped of the cartilage, ligaments and tissues that held them together.

  The team that Malan sent before me would have taken photographs before and after digging. I would collect samples for the lab in Trinidad and do the measurements. But I was here for something else.

  My gift was reading bones. It was a talent I almost did not discover. During my year abroad, I could never make sense of the bodies of the victims they laid out under strip lights on those long stainless steel tables. I used to stand amid the other students feeling helpless and diminished as they prodded and poked cadavers, and whispered to each other.

  I failed the osteology exam twice; would be forced to return home embarrassed if I did not succeed in my third attempt. One Friday evening a fuse blew somewhere in the building and the weak emergency lights came on. One of the students pulled out an LED torch and I happened to glance over his shoulder. Suddenly that single, frigid beam was like a connection to my brain.

  I told the other students everything they missed and what I thought it meant: the shattered radius and ulna of the left arm, the slightly larger trapezius, deltoids, brachii and pectorals of that arm. Left handed, I concluded.

  I imagined the dead man raising that arm to fend off a blow from something blunt and heavy. A small sledgehammer perhaps, aimed at the head. And given the location and the nature of the lesion on the parietal region of the head, he’d probably seen the blow coming and tried to duck. The instructor looked at me for a long while. Then he shook my hand.

  Here in Easterhall, the desolation of the place – the blackness of the dripping precipices shouldering back the ocean, the stunted, hunched-down vegetation – made me want to finish as quickly as I could and head home to my bed.

  I switched off the searchlight, slipped on a pair of Neoprene gloves and pulled out my LED. I stooped before the bones and directed the narrow finger of light.

  I began to speak my thoughts.

  ‘Bones have their own language, Miss Stanislaus. They say a lot about the person who owned them.’

  I pointed at the mastoid process. ‘See how it stand out? See how the angle of the jawline sharp and how the pelvis narrow? That telling me these bones belong to a fella. The tailbone telling me the same thing too. Look how it angle forward. Shallow pelvic basin – you see? A woman would have a lot more room down there to hold a baby. You also got the size and thickness of them bones. So everything here shouting loud and clear that these bones belong to a male.’

  But that, I told her, was not enough. I wanted something more from these remains. I wanted to know what happened in the last moments of Nathan’s life – for I had no doubt that it was he; no doubt at all that the lab in Trinidad would prove me right.

  I ran my light along the limbs for fractures. People use their arms to protect themselves, and if they have any fight in them, they kick out or try to run. That is instinctive. That is life looking after itself.

  I did an inventory of the subsided rib cage. The mess underneath was the business of the lab.

  I took some pictures, then some samples. I turned over the skull: smashed frontal bone, cracked maxilla, fractured mandible.

  I went on like this while the world around me faded to a hum and I fed my mind with details. It was all I could do; all that was required for now. What I had before me was a mess – more than three year’s worth of what nematodes and the soil in its slow reclaiming had already erased.

  I had to work like this until, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, these observations rearranged themselves and delivered a pattern, or better still, a story – or some crucial part of one. Problem was, it didn’t always happen, or sometimes it happened too late.

  I stood up. ‘Nothing above the ordinary,’ I smiled. ‘Broken parietal bone.’ I pointed at the back of the head. ‘Fractures on the forehead when that Simday fella throw him in. Some trauma to the arms and spine. Smashed occipital bone. As you see yourself, we find Nathan face down.’

  That reminded me of something else. ‘In some parts of the world, Miss Stanislaus, if you want to disrespect the dead, that is what you do. You bury the body face down.’

  As far as I was concerned my job was done. When I got to the office I would file my report, draw the appropriate conclusions and leave the rest to Malan and the law.

  The sky was brightening in the east. There was no sign of movement in or around the jeeps. I didn’t blame the officers for grabbing a chance to catch a nap.

  I glanced at my watch. Five o’clock. I had spent four hours over Nathan’s bones. It struck me that Miss Stanislaus had been standing there for just as long.

  I took her arm. ‘Let’s get out of here. This is no place for humans. And by the way, Nathan wasn’t wearing no sandals; the fella was barefoot. S’matter of fact he didn’t have no clothes.’

  ‘No undergarment either?’ Miss Stanislaus sounded shocked.

  ‘S’far as I could tell he didn’t have undergarments.’

  ‘Missa Digger,’ she said, ‘you ever wonder why Missa Chilman make finding Nathan so important?’

  ‘All the time. Why?’

  ‘I tell you when the time come. Or p’raps you could work it out yourself?’

  Before she got out of the car, Miss Stanislaus looked at me. ‘You member you tell me that some kind ov killin cult… erm…?’

  ‘Cultural,’ I said. ‘A mad idea I have. For example, here on this island: let’s say a man meet his woman makin fancy noise under another man: he go berserk, he take a cutlass an do something terrible. He don’t think knife or stone or piece ov wood, even if they right in front of him. He reach for what he using all his life – from the time he small – for clearing, cutting, cleaning… everything. He reach for a cutlass. Then he give up himself or run in the bush and hide. All we have to do is drag him out or go to his place and pick him up. Look at overseas… Look at the things they do to children. You think that could happm here? You think…’

  ‘What’s cultural about dis one?’

  ‘Ask me that tomorrow. Right now I can’t think. My mind full up. I tired.’

  ‘Dat’s why you talkin so much nonsense?’ She patted her bag and started to get out.

  As soon Miss Stanislaus pulled her door shut, I took out my phone and texted Dessie.

  12cu.

  It was the first time that I’d asked to see her. It had always been the other way round.

  We hadn’t met up since my return from the UK, although we kept in touch with brief exchanges – mainly question marks and exclamations. The desperation I’d detected in her voice all those months ago resurfaced from time to time, however far back in my mind I’d tried to push it. Dessima Caine had her own life, not so? Whatever her trouble was, she had family and the money to get her out of it, or through it.

  I waited for an answering ping, then realised I was probably one of the few people on the island who was awake at this hour in the morning.

  I drove home but could not sleep; stretched myself out on the sofa and listened to the village stirring – the splash of water followed by the giddy shrieks of children, the smell of burning charcoal and kerosene, cooked provisions and fried bakes, women’s voices harassing their kids to get ready for scho
ol.

  I went to my little cabinet in the corner of the kitchen, poured raw rum, cane syrup, freshly squeezed lime juice into a glass. Stirred. Dropped in a couple of ice cubes.

  I fed a CD into the player on the kitchen worktop. I sipped, laid back and closed my eyes. John Coltrane’s Crescent took me back to Beach Bum Bar, and a woman who called herself Alana Joi sitting on the lee-side of a rock at the northern end of Grand Beach. She was looking out to sea towards America where, she said, all the hurt had been.

  She wore a pleated cotton dress, a coloured headband printed with what I later learned were Adinkra symbols. A small, smoothly groomed Afro. Leather sandals. A book in her lap entitled The Bluest Eye.

  Earlier, at the end of my shift, she’d called me over to her table, pointed at a Camaho cocktail on the menu. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Three measures of Bacardi, one Cinzano, one fresh orange juice and a suggestion of cinnamon.’

  ‘You gat time?’

  ‘For?’

  ‘To sit and talk? Just talk.’

  I guessed her age to be about twenty-five. Her face had the smoothness of a doll’s, except for the very fine lines radiating from the corners of bright, honest eyes towards her temples. Not magga-bone thin, but with a flimsy delicacy that made me feel I could easily lift her up and run with her in my arms.

  ‘I’m about to go home, Miss. Besides, staff not allowed to do that on the premises.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Sit with clients.’

  ‘We walk, then?’

  The sensation of her was all that remained with me now: the smell of essential oil on her skin, the press of her head against my chest as she settled between my knees, stared out at the sea and began talking in that sleepy, exhausted drawl of hers about the lover she’d escaped from.

  ‘I’m like Trane,’ she chuckled. ‘Trane knows pain.’

  She reached into the folds of her dress and pulled out a music player – a small, flat silver thing that looked like jewellery in her palm. She woke the screen with a circular movement of her thumb and turned to plug the headphones into my ears.

  ‘Oh! Not that one!’ She moved to change the music, but I’d already heard the opening notes, felt them sinking into me, already felt the sudden expanding and release. I held her wrist. At the end of the music I let go.