Skeletal

by Lee Hayton

  The thought of the files hiding under the floorboards struck me. I didn’t even know if they were still there. What if the men yesterday had found them?

  I checked on Mum and walked out of the house. My insides twisted in two directions. I wanted to go as far away from the half-finished house as I could. There was only danger in going out there again. Either the papers were there or they weren’t. Me getting caught by some very nasty people on site wasn’t going to change that.

  But, but. I wanted to read through them. Commit the contents to memory. Then, if they were taken, at least I would know what they contained. At least I would be sure that all of this trouble and turmoil was worth it.

  In the end, it felt as though my mind would split apart if I didn’t take some action. And since one option was inaction, I took the other.

  The drizzle had stopped, but the day was still overcast and gloomy, even though the sun was high overhead. I was still wearing my school uniform, but at least it being midday there were less curious glances. It was perfectly reasonable that a schoolgirl might be out on her lunch break. I could start cursing my choice of clothing when I made the return journey. If I made the return journey.

  There was going to be no hiding in the grass today. The blades were sodden and drooping. If I dived into them now, there’d be an obvious Daina-shaped patch.

  But no one came.

  I crawled under the house. At one point, my knee came down hard on a stone and I swore aloud, before hushing myself. The files were where I’d left them. I tried to sweep as much debris out of the path as I could, but I still found a few sharp edges as I stretched out to retrieve them.

  So whatever the two men had been up to, they hadn’t found them.

  The glass tube was unbroken, the light amber liquid still sloshing around inside. I unzipped the front pocket and put some hankies around it so it wouldn’t accidentally break in my backpack, and then placed it by the side of the house, far enough in so it wasn’t sitting in collected rainwater.

  Then I spread out the files. I left the manhole cover up so that if needed I could plunge back under the building. The thought of letting that cover fall into place with no one above to lift it up if I couldn’t, made my blood run cold. But so did the thought of being caught. Need be, I could probably kick out a grate and get out that way.

  For a moment as I stared at the papers in front of me I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. There were formulas, there were sketches, there was the diagram that I’d recreated for the Grey Man earlier – this week? Surely it was longer ago? No – this week. It was a chromosome. Showing a genetic marker. There was an SNP number out the side, but it didn’t mean anything to me. It wasn’t like I could call up a catalogue and check it out.

  But the longer I stared at them, the more I could read their patterns. It was like looking at a complicated algebraic formula. You started off with the part you could most easily understand, and then worked forward or back or both until the whole relationship became clear.

  The first part was an isolation test. The fabric of the sample was reduced down and reduced down until only one part remained. And then there was a check to see whether the sequence of the material matched the standard sequencing formulas already recorded.

  A genetic test: Isolating and then comparing a specific gene on a specific chromosome, looking for a match, or looking for a known mutation.

  I could follow it up to there. I could understand the sequencing and the patterns, even if I couldn’t have replicated them or known how to get this out in the first place. I could see the overall structures even though the details would take me months, years even, to understand.

  But then it all changed. I could see that it was something to do with the sample I now held. I could understand that this was in some way connected with one of the mutations, rather than the expected results. I couldn’t see how it fit together.

  And it wasn’t like I could ask anyone. I didn’t even have a GP; there was no chance I’d meet a geneticist.

  I pulled the papers back together. There’d been the frisson of discovery, but the flat feeling of non-comprehension wore it back down to nothing.

  I swung my head back down through the hole. I swerved my eyes back and forth, back and forth, looking for the natural patterns that caught attention. There was a slight rise in the earth on the far right-hand side. If I put the folder behind there, it would be more hidden from view than it had been on the left. There, it had been inconvenient to retrieve, but not impossible to see. The slope of the ground in the new position, however, would form a natural hiding place. Forcing the eye to scan straight over it.

  When I tried to lever myself back down into the hole, I felt a wave of nausea overtake me, and then my head spun. I sat down on the cold earth, my strength gone, my body crumpled in on itself.

  My awareness didn’t fade. I could feel every muscle and every inch of my skin as it collapsed on itself. I could feel the cold chill of the ground where the temperature dipped by a couple of degrees from the air above it. I could see the dim shapes of the beams and the rough foundation walls. I felt as my left leg caught and twisted under the weight of my body. The sharp hammer of pain in my head as it clanged against the floorboard on the way down. I could feel a trickle of blood at my temple, and see how the light changed as the sun came out of hiding behind a cloud.

  I could see it all, feel it all, smell it all. But I couldn’t move my body. I couldn’t move a single muscle. And then my senses shut down one, by one, by one.

  Coroner’s Court 2014

  ‘Are you okay to pick up where you left off yesterday?’ the coroner asks Vila. She nods her head but her face is tight. She thought she’d be done with this yesterday. The pause in proceedings has spun it out too long. She wants to be home. She wants to be done with it.

  The air in the courtroom is leaden today. There’s no sun peering in through the windows, and the wood panelling that looks so deep and rich in warm sunlight looks heavy and dark in its absence.

  ‘As I said, I didn’t see Daina for a few days. She wasn’t at school, and then my Dad had that run-in. When she wasn’t at school the next day either I went by her house.’ She rubs above her right eyebrow and sneaks a quick look at my mother. Judging the reception. My mother meets her gaze and inclines her head. Permission granted.

  ‘Mrs Harrow was passed out in the living room. We’d known that she was an alkie – it doesn’t take more than a visit or two to pick that up – but there was other stuff on the table,’ she pauses while she feels different words in her mouth, ‘Drug paraphernalia,’ she chooses.

  ‘I was scared. I’d never met anyone who did drugs, or even knew someone who did drugs. You say things and pretend things at school, but nobody does it. Or, if they do it’s just weed or pills or something. She was injecting.’

  My mother doesn’t bow her head. She keeps her chin up and gives a short nod at Vila. Acknowledging her actions. She’s come a long way. I’m so proud of her.

  ‘I couldn’t talk to Mum or Dad about it. They wouldn’t hear her name in the house. If I’d tried to bring her up, they probably would’ve been more likely to call the police, than to help me find her. And you don’t want to do that sort of thing, not to your friend.’

  She shifts her weight on the seat and moves one shoulder in a circle to ease her back. It’s stalling. There’s no way she’s uncomfortable – physically uncomfortable – after only ten minutes up there. If that. But the next part, she’s already trying to pull away from it.

  The coroner picks it up too. He has some idea of what’s about to come. There were talks in hushed tones before they made the decision to let Vila go up there and talk about this. After all, the probability is it’s not relevant. And it’s certainly going to be distressing.

  But warts and all. That’s how the coroner likes to run his courtroom. Better to have too much information than to have too little. He’s already noted down a few names that he’ll be calling back in here. Information th
at should’ve been provided but is mysteriously absent.

  He doesn’t like mysteries, our coroner. He’s worked his whole life to pull all the little disparate pieces together until they make a pattern that fits. And having one loose piece left over, a large and obnoxious piece at that? It’s not the way he runs things.

  Vila presses her fingertips briefly to her cheekbone. The pressure leaves pale marks on her skin that quickly fill back in with colour.

  ‘The next day was when my dad died, so I lost track of her after that.’

  The bald statement hangs in the air for a moment, swaying this way and that, looking for a place to fall.

  And then Vila’s emotional control shatters and she bursts into violent tears. Her statement crashes to the floor.

  #

  When I came to, it took a few minutes to work out where I was. In the darkness my first thought was I was home, it was night. The cool hard earth registered, and I thought I’d fallen out of bed.

  When I sat up, I hit my head on the floorboards above me. Flashes of light and a band of pain. But it tripped my other senses, and I realised where I was.

  Panic gripped me as I tried to get up through the manhole again. I could see that the cover was still off. I could see that there was a clear exit to jump out of. But panic insisted that I was trapped. That I would never get out. That I would die here, in this wide abandoned grave.

  The adrenalin rush gave me enough strength to lever my body through the hole. I pushed the cover back into place as quickly as I could. I couldn’t relax while that open mouth was there waiting to swallow me again. I caught my fingers underneath the closing lid and stuck them in my mouth to calm them. I pushed myself into the centre of the room and sat breathing hard for a minute before standing and backing further away.

  I couldn’t have been out for long. The light outside was still strong. The smell of the rain was still fresh. The papers were still out on the floor, but there was no way I was putting them back down under the house tonight. I retrieved my backpack and stuck them in. I felt the phial to make sure it was still okay, still whole.

  And then I got to my feet and slowly started to walk the long trek home. My exhaustion was overwhelming, but there was no other option.

  There was a build-up of traffic as I joined the rush of suburbia again. I’d taken so long that my uniform melded back into the flow; the last bell of classes had rung just before I swept past the school.

  I didn’t want to go home. I hoped that the Grey Man would catch up with me at some point, but he was staying away. Keeping me out of the spotlight, maybe. Certainly keeping his distance.

  With no particular place in mind, I found myself turning in the direction of Vila’s house. She’d be on her way home. She’d be pissed off at me, no doubt, but if I could catch up with her, I could try to issue her with a warning too. Make sure her Dad got it from both sides.

  The cars were piled back to the roundabout, and then further back to the traffic lights.

  Some careless dude inched his way across just as the lights turned, and discovered that he couldn’t pull his car far enough forward to get out of the cross road.

  Horns tooted and someone with their window down clearly swore at him, but there was nothing he could do. Traffic stalled in two directions.

  There were lights flashing on the road in front of me. Red and Blue. My first thought was construction: they were digging up the street for some reason and backing up the traffic because they had no sense of appropriate timing. But as I drew closer I recognised the familiar boxy shape of an ambulance. Off to one side was a police car. Their presence reduced the traffic to a single lane, marked out with cones and their own parked vehicles.

  The dread and panic that had been my companions for the past two days compacted into a single pulsating beam. It was here. Whatever I feared, it was here.

  My body tensed up, and I started to move more quickly along the footpath. A police officer was talking with a couple of people standing at the side of the road. Taking notes. Another officer had a roll of tape which he was using to mark out two vehicles.

  There had been a car crash. One vehicle had pole-axed the other broadside. The hairs raised along the back of my neck. The first car was a large black saloon. Its licence plate was the same as the one parked outside the school. The one that stuck out like a sore thumb.

  I turned quickly to look in all directions. The men who had been inside it, whom I presumed were also the men from the half-house, were nowhere in sight. The car's doors were open. The airbags inside looked like grotesque balloons. Both had inflated. There had been a driver and a passenger in the car. Now empty.

  As I walked closer, I recognised the second car as well. It was the one that had been parked in Vila’s driveway the day before. The one that her father drove.

  I continued to walk forward on legs that felt like jelly. A hum started up in the back of my mind, and my chest started to have to work to get air.

  This car was empty too. But its occupant was easily located. Strapped to a gurney being loaded into the back of the ambulance. There’s a manner that people have when they’re working hard to save somebody. A rush of activity, but the speed is focused and productive.

  The paramedics weren’t rushing. They pushed the gurney into the back. No one jumped up to assist with a smooth journey. No one jumped up to keep airways open or pressure applied. Two paramedics slammed the door shut and then walked around to the front of the vehicle.

  The ambulance turned its lights off as it pulled away from the crash scene.

  I’d seen dead people before. But not anyone I knew. Not anybody who mattered to people I knew. Not anyone that I felt responsibility towards.

  I continued to walk. Past the crash scene. Past Vila’s house.

  I stopped in the park nearby. Sat on a bench. Stared at the ground in front of me.

  The papers felt heavy in my backpack. I could feel the movement of the liquid in the glass tube the way I could feel my blood pulsing through my bloodstream.

  I was surprised when a couple walked by with their dog running joyously ahead and didn’t cast a second look in my direction. Surely there were beams of light shining out of my bag. Surely there was a sign notating guilt that pointed directly at me.

  When the sun started to cast longer shadows, and my arms started to shake from the cold of the late afternoon, the Grey Man joined me in the park. He sat on the bench next to me. He faced forward. His expression set cold and hard.

  ‘Run,’ he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Coroner’s Court 2014

  With Vila finished, the whole thing is winding down. Look at all this evidence. Look how neatly it all ties together. Guilty.

  Christine and my mother exchange long whispered conversations together in the courtroom. Their heads tilt in towards each other, and sometimes one of them will issue an inappropriate giggle.

  Thick as thieves.

  My Grey Man is now a constant companion. He doesn’t talk to me, though, he’s too interested in his own thoughts on the matter. I can feel them pulsing at me as each sentence is spoken aloud in the room. I ignore them to form my own.

  Erik Smith is hovering. This’ll be interesting. Someone’s “lost” something. Something important. The coroner is not happy. DSS Smith is not happy. Someone in his department looks like they might be careless. Or they might be on the take. Either way, not strong qualities in a serving member of the police force.

  That’s okay by me, though.

  There’s a whispered conference going on at the front of the room now. The coroner breaks off the conversation, and his little minion scurries away. She was ordered to recall someone yesterday and she’s just told him they’re back.

  On with the show.

  The forensic pathologist takes the stand again. She’s not happy either. Had to break a date with a mouldering corpse that was dragged out of the Avon river. Dragged out with a car for a coffin intact. With a very old licence plate.
<
br />   Even this many years after the earthquake spewed up its bounty the river still holds a few secrets. There are still a few deep pockets left unexplored. New surprises.

  But instead, she’s been called back to finish a duty she was told was finished once already.

  Introverts are funny to look at. Their faces are blank half the time, one-quarter they’re deliberately animated with the expressions they think they should have. And the last quarter is reserved for the expression they can’t keep off them. Expressions like, I’m seriously pissed off because I’ve better things to do. There’s no one in this courtroom who doesn’t know what this witness is feeling.

  The coroner doesn’t bother with the offer that he made to my mother last time. He already knows that she doesn’t want to leave the room. She was the one that put forth this request. Christine prompted her to do so; whether that’s just because it upsets DSS Smith I can’t quite tell, even in my exalted state.

  She’s still sworn in from last time so the coroner just starts.‘You talked last time of how the body of Daina Harrow appeared when you first arrived at the scene.’

  The witness nods, and then clears her throat. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mentioned that there were papers found with the body and a small phial of liquid.’ He’s looking back through his papers, but I’m not the only one who can tell that’s more to do with avoiding eye contact with the glare coming his way than to actually reference the information.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you get a good look at the contents of either of these?’

  ‘No.’

  Ouch. It’s like pulling teeth, Without anaesthetic.

  The coroner sits back in his chair. ‘Did you see anything of the contents?’

  The pathologist relents a little bit. No one’s off the hook, but she wants to get out of here more than she wants to make everybody pay for her inconvenience.

  ‘I skimmed through a few of the papers. I don’t know anything about the liquid, except it was amber coloured and partially opaque.’