The Bone Keeper

by Luca Veste

  ‘Problem is, it’s sparked even more of that.’

  Louise turned in the direction the DC was pointing, a television on the wall tuned to the news channel, a yellow banner running along the bottom of the screen. A reporter was on screen, speaking to camera from the city centre.

  Where Steven Harris had been picked up by uniforms.

  ‘Town is crawling with them now,’ the DC said from behind her. Louise wished she’d bothered to learn his name, just so she could tell him to shut up. ‘A bunch are outside as well. It’s become the biggest news story around in less than a few hours.’

  ‘A serial killer has that kind of effect.’

  Louise moved closer to the television as someone reached across and turned the volume up.

  ‘Yeah, they reckon it’s this thing we all talked about as kids. Called it the Bone Keeper. I always said it was real. I had a mate who went missing after going into the woods. Never saw him again. Told him not to go in there but he didn’t listen. Everyone thought it was just a silly ghost story, but what if he has been living in the woods all this time, just waiting—’

  ‘Louise,’ Shipley said, making her heart quicken a little. She tore her eyes away from the screen. ‘They’re waiting.’

  Louise nodded and followed Shipley towards the meeting room, thinking of the reporters, the media, all converging on the city. Ready to ask their questions and unpick the story. Create their own, even. She knew they’d all be shielded from it, for the most part, but she could see the strain it was already placing on the detectives around them. The numerous officers who were now shuttling back and forth behind the scenes, being recruited from CID offices across the city, she guessed.

  This was now the largest investigation the city will have seen in a long time, she thought.

  Twelve confirmed murders, linked to one offender.

  A serial killer, working for years without anyone knowing.

  ‘All of the victims identified and found in the woods share a common history,’ DI Locke said, addressing the gathered detectives in the meeting room as Louise and Shipley went in and sat down. She turned to look at him, rather than back at the open-plan office and the photos of the dead displayed there.

  ‘Almost all of them?’ DI Locke added, glancing at the DS sitting next to him.

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Right, almost all of them. Adam Porter was different. Looks like he was just lost. Or something. The rest of them were all either homeless or living in refuges. Easily forgotten victims. That’s probably why their disappearances didn’t ring any alarm bells. No one was expecting them to be around for long.’

  ‘What about the body found in the hut?’ a DC sitting a row behind Louise said. ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Carl Groves,’ DI Locke replied, after checking the file in front of him. ‘Another local, staying at a hostel a mile or so away from Speke. Looks like he walked around a lot, according to the people spoken to there. A couple of the regulars there said he would walk as far as Hale some days. Looks like he walked past the wrong place. Now, we have a man in the cells below us, saying he killed the couple from last night. A copycat, by the looks of it. Our friends from Sefton CID have got a confession out of him, so they’ll be boxing that off by the end of the day.’

  Louise didn’t avert her eyes from the DI as people turned to look at her and Shipley. She drifted in and out as the DI kept talking, explaining the entire situation as if they didn’t already know it. Someone had killed twelve people, they didn’t have anything other than a name in Rhys Durham, and someone not unwilling to go into people’s houses and murder them out in the street.

  ‘We are linking Hazel Durham at this time. Which brings us back to Rhys Durham. He’s our man.’

  Which would mean he killed people as a young teenager, Louise thought.

  ‘He’s escalating . . .’

  There was a moment when she thought she’d actually sniggered out loud, but the fact that no one was paying any attention to her told her she was safe. It had become the new buzzword as soon as murders happened close together. Escalating. As if twelve people weren’t enough, despite the length of time between the murders.

  He escalated a long time ago, Louise thought.

  ‘What about Caroline?’ Shipley asked, breaking her train of thought. ‘We can we talk to her again, maybe show her a picture of Steven Harris and make certain he’s not involved?’

  ‘That would be great,’ DI Locke replied, shaking his head. ‘But she checked out of the hospital a couple of hours ago. We’re trying to locate her now. She wasn’t at the address she gave when she was checked in.’

  ‘Louise and I can do that,’ Shipley replied quickly, giving her a nudge as he said her name. She nodded towards the DI for added effect.

  ‘Yeah, good idea,’ DI Locke said, turning away before he’d even finished answering. ‘Finish up with Steven Harris first though.’ He turned back to the rest of the room. Filled with bodies now, as the machine grew and the cogs Louise and Shipley represented grew smaller. ‘Listen, I want feet on the ground. We’ve got enough resources now that we can use them more freely. Liaise with uniforms, go door to door. Someone, somewhere, will have seen something. That’s how we usually find answers. I know there’s a few of you going through CCTV, I want to know if you find anything. The entire area around Hazel Durham’s house should be covered. Extensive statements taken. I don’t want one stone left unturned . . .’

  Louise tuned out again as DI Locke continued giving out the usual clichéd platitudes. It was obvious there was now more going on than she and Shipley were aware of. The investigation which had started with the two of them now involved a multitude of people she would never learn the names of, it seemed. They were a backstory now. Nothing important. She chewed on a fingernail as she considered what to do next.

  Whether to think about the note back home in her kitchen and what it meant. If everything she knew about her past had been a lie until now.

  The box on her bed, full of memories of a time she couldn’t quite remember. Blurred and malformed.

  Yet, she still had a job to do.

  She needed to speak to Steven Harris.

  She needed to be sure.

  Thirty-Nine

  Steven was sitting across from them once more, only this time he seemed even more diminutive, thinner and scared than he had earlier in the day. Almost as if life had begun seeping from him, leaving behind only a thin shell of a young man.

  ‘Why did you go into the house?’ Shipley said, continuing his line of questioning.

  ‘To kill the people living there,’ Steven replied, sounding as if he were answering something entirely different. Void of emotion, as matter-of-fact as if he had been describing what he’d bought on a shopping trip. ‘The voices told me that was what I had to do. So I did it.’

  ‘How did you get into the house?’

  ‘I’ve told you this,’ Steven said, tracing a circle on the desk between them with a finger. ‘Why do I have to keep saying it?’

  ‘How did you get into the house, Steven?’

  ‘I’m the Bone Keeper. Stop calling me that. When we talk about these things, I’m the Bone Keeper. Not Steven. Steven would never do these things.’

  Steven wasn’t above talking about himself in the third person though, Louise thought. The disassociation he had between what he had done and who he thought he was rang alarm bells for her. She knew what a lawyer would do with that information. He seemed to veer between having emotion and being blank. She knew guilt had driven him into the city centre and then into this interview room, but it almost seemed as if he was able to ignore it sometimes as well. Also, he had started adding this information about hearing voices, which she thought was a nice touch, but didn’t believe in the slightest.

  ‘Just explain again,’ Shipley said, his voice as measured as it had been at the start. ‘Please.’

  ‘I walked into the house. Didn’t need to break in. He . . . the man who lived there left the back d
oor open after he finished smoking. It was easy. I just waited for him to finish and go back inside and walked in.’

  ‘Where did you wait?’

  ‘Just in the garden. Out of sight. No one ever saw me. Then, when I got inside, under the bed in their spare room.’

  Louise thought about the small man, secreting himself easily in the garden. She’d only looked at it briefly, but could see how he had done so. There were a number of bushes at the back of the garden that it would have been simple to hide behind and be out of sight.

  She thought about someone waiting underneath a bed in a room you barely used. You could never be sure who was in the one place you were supposed to feel safest.

  The burnt pieces of wood on her kitchen worktop could attest to that.

  ‘You waited for a long time,’ Shipley said, staying professional and emotionless. She could imagine this would be released once he’d been found guilty at trial. Shown on true crime programmes endlessly, the lack of guilt playing to a crowd. Or, as she thought more likely, shown to a jury to prove Steven wasn’t mentally competent.

  ‘I had to,’ Steven continued, taking a quick swig of the water he’d demanded before talking again. ‘Otherwise it wouldn’t have been right.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it have been right?’

  ‘That’s not how the Bone Keeper works. I couldn’t just go in the bedroom early, it had to be the right time. When they weren’t expecting me to be there, otherwise he wouldn’t be happy.’

  Shipley didn’t catch the slip, but Louise did. Shipley made as if to speak again, but Louise got in there first. ‘Who wouldn’t be happy?’

  ‘The Bone Keeper.’

  ‘I thought you were the Bone Keeper though?’ Louise asked, as if it were just a throwaway question. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve been telling us? Why wouldn’t you be happy with yourself?’

  ‘I am now, but I wasn’t before. That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘Explain this to me,’ Shipley said, cutting in again. ‘I don’t understand. Who is the Bone Keeper then?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘But there’s someone else as well? There’s another one, who told you how to do what you’ve done?’

  ‘There’s many of them, all speaking at the same time. We’re all doing the same work.’

  Shipley looked at Louise, shaking his head slightly.

  He didn’t believe Steven, she thought. He had put it down to his hearing-voices declaration, when she suspected something else entirely.

  Shipley was still talking as Louise considered what to do next. The investigation was closing and she knew she wouldn’t be needed for much longer. Which meant she could concentrate on what was happening to her.

  Leave all this behind and see if the ghosts from her past had really returned.

  Yet, she carried on listening as the interview began to go in circles again. Nothing new being revealed, Shipley becoming more and more exasperated as they went along.

  By the end, there was no doubt in Louise’s mind. Despite the obvious issues Steven Morris had, he’d been at his most uncomfortable when talking about one particular aspect of the crime.

  ‘What did you do to Karen Marshall after you killed her, Steven?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did you take off the duvet from her body, Steven?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You do remember. I can see you want to talk about it, don’t you? You want to tell us what you did after you stabbed her. Why don’t you concentrate on that part for now?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t supposed to do that. I wasn’t supposed to touch her in that way.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I had sex with her.’

  Louise felt the burn of anger in the back of her throat, as she thought about the utter absurdity of the sentence. As if raping a dying woman was just the same kind of sex as any other.

  ‘She was still alive, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I didn’t know. If I had, I wouldn’t have done it until she was actually dead.’

  As if that made it any better.

  ‘Why didn’t you want to do it, Steven?’

  ‘He . . . the Bone Keeper isn’t supposed to do anything like that. He’s supposed to be pure. I thought . . . I thought if she was already dead it wouldn’t matter as much. Now, he’ll know. He always knows.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Shipley said, becoming more exasperated again. Louise could already see the outcome with him. He wouldn’t believe this version – Steven talking to another person, being guided by them. It was easier to think he was a copycat. Someone using the name to kill.

  Yet, wasn’t that what was happening anyway?

  ‘No one,’ Steven replied, withdrawing into himself once more. There was something so childlike about him that Louise couldn’t help but wonder what had been done to this young lad. What had affected him so much to lead him to this point. Then, she thought of what he had done just over twenty-four hours earlier, and her empathy disappeared.

  ‘Interview terminated at 7.35 p.m.’ Shipley said, glancing towards her and rolling his eyes again. It was fast becoming his signature move, she thought. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Louise didn’t argue with him, even when he slammed his notebook closed and pushed his chair back with enough force to knock it over. She quietly cleared her own equipment away, trying not to look across the table at Steven Harris.

  There was a pause as they waited for someone from custody to meet them and escort Steven Harris back to his cell. He sat quietly in the chair, staring at the table, seeming to contemplate its surface as if it was something new and unexplored. He looked up slowly, locking eyes with Louise as she sneaked a glance at him.

  A small smile crept across his face. Louise glanced behind her, looking for Shipley, but he was moving away from them, staring up the corridor for someone to relieve them. Louise moved closer to Steven, gripping the side of the table for support.

  She had the sudden urge to ask him the question that was still bothering her. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘He’s coming,’ Steven whispered, the smile still on his face. ‘And there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘You’re not crazy,’ Louise replied, hands shaking with anger. ‘This is all one big act. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison. Why?’

  ‘Because he told me I had to. We do everything he tells us.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who,’ Steven said, his voice different suddenly. More measured now, as if a light had been switched on inside him. ‘I couldn’t live with it – that’s why I’m here – but he can. He has always lived with it. He wants you to stop ignoring him. To go and find him finally.’

  ‘I’ve got no intention of doing anything,’ Louise said through gritted teeth. She resisted the urge to reach out and slam his head against the table, but instead just gripped the edge harder. ‘This is about the woman, isn’t it? The one from the woods earlier this week. She escaped and it’s all unravelling for poor Rhys.’

  Louise turned to check Shipley wasn’t listening, but he was still a fair distance out of the room, in the middle of the corridor. When she turned back, Steven was chuckling to himself.

  ‘You don’t get it. You don’t know who she is.’ Steven sat back further in his chair, a different man now. ‘You don’t know who Rhys is. But you know the Bone Keeper. I’m going to a hospital, not a prison. They’ll think I’m mad. And you’ll be dead if you don’t accept who you are.’

  Louise would have believed him if she didn’t have any knowledge of the criminal justice system. Steven wasn’t going anywhere other than prison. He might be able to pull the wool over Shipley’s eyes, but he wouldn’t be able to do the same to professionals. She let him think that though, not correcting him.

  ‘Tell me . . .’ Steven said, folding his spindly arms across his chest. ‘Did you like the offering – the message from him? I delivered it for him, before I killed those two people.’
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br />   Louise couldn’t speak for a moment, trying and failing to work out exactly what she’d just been told. It made no sense on the surface yet, somehow, she knew it was true.

  She had more of a connection to this case than she’d first feared. The burnt pieces of wood, fashioned to look like bones, should have been more important than the message.

  There had always been this link to her past.

  Now, she was in too deep.

  She opened her mouth to ask more questions, but she was too late.

  ‘Come on, Steven,’ Shipley said from the doorway, seeming not to notice anything amiss. ‘Time to go.’

  She watched him leaving the room and being escorted away. He adopted the same lost look he’d been showing them for the previous few hours. Shipley shook his head as the young killer was taken away, then looked at her. A shadow crossed his features as he searched her face.

  ‘You okay? You look a bit shaken up.’

  Louise couldn’t answer him.

  Before

  She could hear them down there, talking about her as if she weren’t only a few feet away. Garbled voices, the floorboards beneath her turning normal conversation into something low and rumbling.

  Anywhere else, she would have stayed where she was. At home, that was. She had never slept anywhere other than her own bed, in her own house, for any length of time.

  That wasn’t possible now.

  Never would be again.

  She pulled back the covers, disturbing yet another waft of the unfamiliar scent into the air around her. Sickly sweet lavender. She felt like she didn’t care if the floor creaked underneath her feet, yet she still moved as slowly and softly as she could.

  She wanted to hear what they were saying about her.

  The bedroom door was open, as she’d demanded when they’d put her to bed an hour earlier. They didn’t argue with her. Simply looked at her with sadness in their eyes, heads tilted to the side, as if they were dogs waiting for a treat. Concern written across their features.