The Bone Keeper

by Luca Veste

  ‘There might still be something there,’ Louise replied, trying to keep any semblance of eagerness out of her tone of voice. ‘Wouldn’t take long for a couple of us to go through it all. We found Rhys’s full name doing the same thing. Makes sense to try the same thing now.’

  Shipley didn’t say anything at first, just looked down at her as she leaned back in her chair. In her mind she was the epitome of nonchalance. Just trying to be helpful, nothing more than that.

  ‘Go for it,’ Shipley said eventually, uncrossing his arms and tapping his pen on her desk. ‘Just don’t take too much time. Want as many people on trying to track Rhys Durham down conventionally as possible.’

  Louise waited for him to leave, then breathed a sigh of relief.

  She had her in.

  It didn’t take long to bring up the photos they had taken the previous day, enlarging them on her screen and taking screenshots. She felt for sure she knew the locations, of course, but she had to make Shipley see them as well. Recognise them. That was key, if she wanted the story to hold its weight.

  She couldn’t just tell him. He had to think he had been led to the place by his own path.

  She decided an hour would be enough for her to go to him with a simple query. Presented without fuss, just a quick question maybe. See if he bought the first part, before she turned the screw a little more. It was tricky; this wasn’t the normal way of doing things.

  This entire situation wasn’t normal though. It wasn’t as if they investigated murders every day. Or even every week. Things were usually very different.

  Louise closed her eyes for a second, hunching behind her computer monitor so no one else would see her. Breathed in and out a few times, settling her nerves, then stood up and walked over to Shipley.

  ‘Got a second?’

  Light and breezy, Louise.

  ‘Yeah, what’s up?’ Shipley replied, not looking away from his own screen.

  ‘Just going through these pictures from Jon Durham’s wall,’ Louise said, placing a few images down next to Shipley. ‘Does this look familiar to you? I’m sure I’ve seen it before.’

  Shipley looked at the image she had laid on top, frowning at it, pulling it towards him for a closer look. ‘I’m not sure. Could be any woodland area, for all we know.’

  Come on, Paul, Louise thought, trying to telepathically emit the correct answer towards him.

  ‘What about this one? Any idea?’ She slid the next photo his way, knowing Shipley now had to put the two things together. The second image was much like the first one, but it contained a small clue. She wouldn’t have known it was there if she wasn’t looking for it.

  In the top right-hand corner, almost hidden by what was pictured in the foreground, was the grey wooden slats that indicated the bottom of a small building. She knew what it was now, but without having first-hand knowledge of the area, she wouldn’t have known to look for it.

  She was counting on Shipley seeing it for what it was. A memory of it. The familiarity he surely had with the area, having grown up nearby.

  Shipley squinted some more at the photograph, covering the image with his index finger, moving along it.

  ‘There’s something really familiar here,’ he said softly, staring intently at the photograph.

  Louise’s heart beat against her chest, but on the outside she exuded calm. She was battling against her natural instincts, but doing a good job of doing so. Everything within her wanted to shout and point at the part of the photograph she wanted him to recognise. Instead, she waited, holding her breath.

  ‘Hang on a minute . . .’

  Yes, Louise thought, come on.

  ‘This can’t be what I’m thinking it is. It’s been years.’

  ‘What is it?’ Louise replied, hoping she sounded genuinely intrigued. ‘Something you recognise?’

  ‘I think so,’ Shipley said, scratching the back of his head with his free hand. ‘He needed to be almost invisible, but close enough to do these things. He’s just moved from one part of the city to another. That’s all.’

  Louise jumped as Shipley smacked the desk with one hand in triumph.

  ‘There is no Bone Keeper, Louise,’ he said finally, turning to face her fully, a broad smile on his face. ‘But there is someone living rough in those woods. Probably scaring kids still, and possibly a lot more.’

  ‘Which woods?’

  Shipley stopped smiling, but puffed out his chest a little. ‘Ever heard of the Big Mummy in Speke?’

  Louise wanted to sigh with relief, but kept calm instead.

  They were going to get this guy. He was there, in those woods. Keeping the story alive.

  Now, they would stop him.

  Sixteen

  Blood had pooled around the body of Carl Groves. His skin now slashed and torn.

  The woods breathed life for him, as his body was still and lifeless.

  The glint of the sun broke through the trees above the broken man, catching the blade of what looked like a knife, as it twirled and bounced on the surface of the unmoving body.

  Carl would have been glad not to be alive now. To not feel the pain of each slice into his skin.

  The woods grew silent, in reverence almost. As if they knew what was happening within its clutches.

  As if they were aware of what had taken them over.

  If you were walking through the woods at that moment and closed your eyes to the scene of death, nature would explode in your ears. Every small movement in the undergrowth apparent, breeze rippling through the trees almost like waves crashing on the shore. Whispers of the unknown, the forgotten.

  If it was never found, Carl Groves’s body would slowly decompose in these woods. Left to become just another part of the ecosystem. A lifeless presence there, making the atmosphere around it thick and substantial. The smell would become a part of the scenery, eventually coalescing and becoming natural.

  His last breaths had been in agony. His jaw clenching, his efforts to scream into the darkness. All in vain. Nothing there that would save him. That could save him.

  Carl’s life had been cruel and hard. His death was no different.

  The woods were now home to more than just natural beauty. To the animals that had made it their own.

  There was something else in there now.

  Young people would go there and scare themselves. Less often than they had used to, but they came now and again. Their harsh laughter breaking through the trees and branches. Disturbing the quiet.

  They wouldn’t come as often after today.

  The sounds around the clearing where Carl Groves lay on the ground changed. Natural sounds replaced by an outside presence. Footfalls on fallen leaves, breaking them down, crackling like logs on a fire.

  Someone had found the secret the woods had been hiding.

  Seventeen

  Shipley pulled the car to a stop near a field which led into the woods themselves, as Louise fiddled with her seatbelt, eager to get moving. Within minutes, they were walking in step across the field towards the treeline ahead.

  ‘It’s about ten, fifteen minutes’ walk. That’s if I’ve remembered it right.’

  Louise mmhmmed a reply, trying to remember the time she had been there before. The vagueness of her memory of it, mixed in with a multitude of other teenage recollections. Escaping her grandparents’ house to drink cheap cider with a group of people who would never amount to much.

  ‘It’s much bigger than you’d think,’ Shipley continued, his voice low. They weren’t bathed in sunshine, but it was much lighter than it had been recently. The clouds above had lifted overnight, so the dusky fog-like atmosphere wasn’t surrounding them now. The ground was soft underfoot, a consequence of the rain that had been a feature of the previous week. It wasn’t until they broke through the trees and found the path within that she realised how ethereal the light around them was. Almost as if someone had taken a sepia-toned photograph and brought it to life. It grew quieter still within the woods, the sound
s of traffic from a nearby A road being lost in the density of their surroundings. The trees there, old and dark brown. Almost grey in places. The bark would break off and crumble if Louise had reached out and taken a piece. She kept moving, following Shipley as he moved further in.

  ‘It’s not until you start making your way into it, or see it from above, that you realise why we called it the Big Mummy woods,’ Shipley said, his voice lower now. Louise could barely hear him now, as if the surroundings were having an effect on the way he wanted to speak. ‘You could get lost quite easily in here. You’d eventually find your way out, but you could end up in Hale – or worse, Widnes – before you realised it.’

  ‘It stretches that far?’ Louise asked, watching her step carefully as the path ended and they began traipsing through thick leaves yellowed and brown with age.

  ‘Yeah, but it turns into fields before you get there, I should say. Surprising though isn’t it, considering where we are.’

  ‘Did you come here a lot when you were younger?’

  Shipley didn’t say anything for a while, probably considering his response, Louise thought. He wouldn’t want to say the real reason, but she was wondering how close he would get to the truth.

  ‘Not really. It wasn’t technically allowed. All our parents had heard the same stories we had. We moved here when I was about five or six. Even when we were a bit older and braver, we didn’t tend to come this far out. It’s a bit of a walk from the estate.’

  ‘What kind of stories were they?’

  There was a hefty sigh as Shipley stepped over a thick fallen branch. The trees were old; Louise imagined during heavier storms they would no longer stand up as well as they had done in the past.

  ‘His stories. You know.’

  Louise didn’t know how to respond. She knew who Shipley meant, but wasn’t sure how far to push it. ‘Oh . . . of course.’

  Shipley stopped, almost causing Louise to walk directly into him. He turned to face her, tilting his head slightly to one side and frowning. ‘Look, I know it sounds ridiculous, but we were kids. It’s not like I still believe it’s true. Despite what everyone keeps saying the past few days.’

  ‘I understand,’ Louise replied, as if she was accepting his explanation. He seemed to buy it. ‘What was the story round here then?’

  Shipley looked at her for a little while longer, then turned around and continued walking. ‘He supposedly lived in these woods. In a little shack, which was hidden deep into them. I didn’t think the hut even existed until I saw it one day.’

  ‘You came looking for the Bone Keeper,’ Louise said, her voice a whisper on the breeze. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Shipley replied, his voice dripping with derision. ‘There was nothing to find. That didn’t mean we couldn’t all get riled up though. We were kids – must have been no older than eleven or twelve. All trying to wind each other up. Before we’d even got this far in, we’d lost half the group. Only a few of us remained when we broke through to where it was supposed to be. There was an older lad with us – Eddie, his name was. We all looked up to him because he was a young amateur boxer, with a fair few trophies and that’s what we all wanted to be back then. That, or a footballer. Anyway, he was leading us all to see this place and said we could peek inside the window and see where the Bone Keeper lived. It was too big an opportunity to miss.’

  ‘I’m guessing the story was more involved round here than where I grew up. With the woods on your doorstep almost. Must have been exciting as well. Like an adventure.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Shipley said, almost breathless now. He couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice as he remembered. Louise felt a wave of affection for him suddenly crash over her. It was gone almost as suddenly. ‘We all thought we were in The Goonies, or Hook, you remember that film? It was the nineties, so that’s all we knew, those old kid-adventure type of films. It was either that, or we’d be playing Ghostbusters on Damwood Road. Watching the planes coming into Speke Airport and pretending they were bringing in ghosts and that sort of thing. We were young. We made up stories.’

  ‘What happened when you came here then?’

  ‘We didn’t see a thing. Didn’t get close enough, I suppose. Just caught sight of it, then got scared and ran away. Didn’t stop us telling people that we’d seen him and that he’d tried to get us, of course.’

  Louise had heard similar stories over the years. Everyone growing up in Merseyside seemed to know the tale. It was a rite of passage, it seemed. There were numerous different takes on the same legend. It had been the local evil. Something to keep children in line, keep them scared. That’s the way of things everywhere.

  The only discernible difference seemed to be that this myth was suddenly being used by someone real.

  ‘What about you? Didn’t you ever go searching for the Bone Keeper?’

  ‘Not really,’ Louise replied, not wanting to tell him that she didn’t really know. That her memories of her childhood were almost non-existent. ‘Probably once or twice. I tried to ignore it as much as possible. All a bit too creepy for my liking.’

  ‘Not far now,’ Shipley said, slowing down considerably. Louise wasn’t exactly sure what he expected to find there. It seemed like he had wanted to experience his childhood again – that sense of danger, of excitement. He had been almost giddy when he’d decided they should come down and check out the area. She wondered if it would have been better to wait, to see if they could have possibly come with more officers and detectives, rather than just the two of them.

  ‘I think we’ve come the more difficult way, sorry,’ Shipley said, coming to a stop at the bottom of a small trench. Ahead of them, a raised bank of earth that ran a few metres in both directions. Trees lay at the top, beyond which Louise knew was the back of a small shed, or shack.

  ‘It’s just up here,’ Shipley continued, checking his belt for ease of access to what he had insisted they both come with. An extendable, telescopic baton and handcuffs. She suddenly had a premonition that they wouldn’t be using them.

  She thought of the last time she’d been in these woods. Fear coursing through her veins, scared and frightened. The smell of sulphur in the air, assaulting her senses. The sound of the teenager at her side, breathing heavily, but trying to hide his own fear. Putting up a front, so she didn’t see what was obvious. How scared he’d been.

  The past has a way of pulling you back, nostalgia a masked assassin. She had to ignore it, put her head down and keep moving.

  Louise took the lead, walking up the small bank, which turned out to be steeper than she’d anticipated. Fifteen, twenty years ago, she would have leapt up something like this, but now age was slowing her down somewhat. She planted her feet, bending over slightly for balance, careful not to put her hands down on the ground and into the damp earth.

  Shipley followed her, making more noise as he hefted his bulk up through the muddy bank.

  Louise stopped at the top, already able to spy the hut through the trees, the sight of it bringing her to a halt. Shipley appeared in her peripheral vision, but she couldn’t take her eyes off what was in front of her.

  A childhood memory, come back to life. A blurred distortion of a reality she had remembered down the years, now real again.

  ‘There it is,’ Shipley said, sounding almost in awe of it. ‘God, it hasn’t changed at all.’

  Louise moved her hand slowly to her side to grip the baton at her side. This suddenly felt very wrong. Like she had been led into a trap, easily, without any real effort. An unseen force guiding her there of her own volition.

  This was a mistake.

  Going there was her fault.

  ‘There’s someone here,’ Shipley said, his voice a whisper. He ducked down a little and moved forward slowly. ‘I can hear them.’

  There was a pause, then Louise could hear the same noise. A shuffling, almost like water running. The smell became more powerful as it drifted towards them. She began to feel her chest constricting as t
he fear of what was near them grew. She tried to concentrate on her breathing, but the odour of death seemed to increase with each inhalation she took.

  ‘We need to get closer,’ Shipley said, looking over his shoulder towards her. He was still crouched over, baton in his hand, seemingly oblivious to the cloying stench. ‘He’s round the front. We need to separate and go around each side. Block him in.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we call for backup?’

  ‘No time,’ Shipley replied, breathless as he moved swiftly across the ground to the corner of the hut. The grey slats of wood were more aged now she could see them better. Brittle and broken. The passage of time marked along each piece.

  Louise moved to the opposite corner. She heard another sound and turned to where Shipley had been standing, but he had already disappeared out of sight.

  Over to her left she heard a slight noise, but there was more sound coming from around the front – branches snapping, leaves being pushed aside. But she followed Shipley’s lead and moved around the side of the hut.

  The noise grew, along with a new odour. Crackling, as she placed what it was she had detected in the air.

  Burning.

  There was a flash of something in her vision – a memory, or a sensation of one – which disappeared in a blink. More movement off to her side, but her focus remained on the hut, the sounds emanating from within. The growing heat in the atmosphere around her.

  Fire.

  The hut was burning down.

  Eighteen

  It was a mistake.

  Being in those woods.

  Being drawn to the fire.

  They rounded the corner of the hut just as the fire really took hold. The heat from it, scorching across her face, turning the air around them black with smoke. The smell of burning flesh came next, before the assault on her senses became too much. The memories it conjured up, the past and present blurring together.

  The hut is in flames. Now. It’s the present and you’re here.

  For now, Louise listened to the voice.

  ‘Call for backup,’ Shipley said, shouting over the sound of splintering wood and the roar. ‘There’s someone in there.’