Rattle: A serial killer thriller that will hook you from the start

by Fiona Cummins

  But even then, she didn’t believe him.

  Police moved through the house, their voices low and serious. They stood near the family computer, talking about grooming, and multiplayer servers and social media sites, even though Amy had repeatedly told them that Clara was too young to use them. She watched them watch Miles, trying to assess his reactions, and guessed they were watching her too. She heard them ask for a list of the patients he’d seen that afternoon. To confirm his alibi. That bizarre thought made her feel like she’d been cut adrift from her life. That the pattern of their Friday nights – wine, dinner, sex – had been redrawn in a way that was unrecognizable, ugly.

  One officer – she couldn’t remember his name, there were so many of them – stepped into the hall. His expression was bland, unreadable.

  ‘Dr Foyle, Mrs Foyle, I’d like you both to come into the sitting room, and take a seat.’

  Amy rested a palm against the wall to steady herself. She had a pain in her chest, like being scoured with a wire brush.

  Have they found her?

  They’ve found her.

  If she’s alive, he’d have told us by now.

  So she’s dead.

  Dead.

  No.

  Please, no.

  The officer who had come to get them was standing by the fireplace, his colleague by the window. Both men swallowed at the same time, and the jerking of their Adam’s apples reminded Amy of a hangman’s noose.

  ‘We wanted to let you know that a Child Rescue Alert has now been issued,’ said the first officer. ‘It’s a fairly new but very high-profile way of sending a quick message to all national media outlets to tell them that Clara is missing. If someone has seen Clara, we’ll know about it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Miles.

  ‘Interpol is issuing a Yellow Notice in case anyone tries to leave the country with her, and there’s a detective on her way who has a great deal of experience in missing persons cases.’

  ‘Good,’ said Miles again.

  ‘Um, earlier, you said you were going to wait a while before you issued the alert, that you have to be absolutely sure it’s the right thing to do, and that Clara’s probably just wandered off.’ Amy’s heart quickened. ‘I was just wondering why you’d decided to do it now.’

  The officers’ eyes met for the briefest of moments, and Amy felt the breath of fear on her neck. She caught the flesh of her cheek between her teeth and bit down. A dart of pain reminded her this was real.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but a credible witness saw a little girl matching Clara’s description outside a sweet shop in Blackheath Village this afternoon.

  ‘She didn’t see much, just the back of a head, but she was talking to a man.’ His face opened up to let pity slip in. ‘She left holding his hand.’

  6

  8.13 p.m.

  In the artificially lit hellhole that was the Royal Southern’s A&E department, Erdman was sitting with his head between his legs and taking deep breaths. A teenager with a broken leg sniggered. Erdman didn’t blame him. It was a ridiculous sight, a grown man, knees poking up either side of his head, a cardboard bowl in his hand. To put it bluntly, he looked like a twat.

  Lilith and Jakey were in the cafeteria, buying overpriced sandwiches. His son’s arm wasn’t broken. That knowledge brought with it a palpable sense of relief, but Erdman knew the next few days would be critical. Already, he was bracing himself for the possibility of a flare-up, the anguish on Jakey’s face as he clawed at his inflamed skin, coupled with his own helplessness as he counted and recounted the lumps that preceded the invasion of bone. He hoped the steroids would do their job, although they came with their own set of problems. It killed him every time to watch his son pitch from a kind of manic wildness into a depressive slump. Especially when there was only a fifty-fifty chance the medication would work.

  Christ, how much longer? Dr Hassan had promised there wouldn’t be much of a wait, but he’d been here for hours. If a cut like his was left untreated for too long, the window for sutures would close along with the wound.

  Cautiously, he lifted his head. The waiting room lurched sideways and he shut his eyes, the taste of vomit in his mouth. When he opened them again, the world was more or less steady. He wanted some water but he daren’t bend down to pick up his plastic cup. Instead he passed the time by watching the hospital’s unfortunate inhabitants.

  A man with a rumpled shirt and a face to match was holding a bag of melting sweetcorn to his right eye. His other was trained on a television mounted on the wall next to a couple of faded posters urging new mums to breastfeed and smokers to give up. A young mother, no older than twenty, was trying to soothe a baby, who was wailing thinly. She, too, was glued to the screen.

  Erdman swivelled his head a few degrees, trying not to move too quickly. I look like bloody Bubo, he thought. That’s where I should be, at home watching Clash of the Titans, not stuck in this shithole with the telly turned down.

  A blonde with a neat cap of hair and too-wide mouth was saying something Erdman couldn’t hear. Her make-up had settled into the cracks around her eyes. It made her look old, even though she must have intended the opposite. An image of a dimpled girl with bunches filled his vision, followed by live footage of police officers, and clusters of people holding torches.

  He strained to catch what the newscaster was saying but the volume was too low. His eyes scanned the yellow ticker at the bottom of the screen.

  Breaking news: Five-year-old Clara Foyle goes missing after leaving school playground on her own. Community joins officers to scour Greenwich Park and surrounding Heath.

  Another picture flashed up: Clara Foyle giggling with someone who looked like an older sister. The sun lit her hair from behind, softening her freckles and creating a halo effect. More footage, this time of a shop cordoned off with police tape. The ticker continued.

  Clara Foyle was last seen at a sweet shop in Blackheath, south-east London, around 3.30 p.m. She was wearing a yellow and black school uniform. Parents praying for ‘good news’.

  Erdman rubbed his eyes with his good thumb and finger. Poor sods. How would he cope if Lilith rang him at work one Friday afternoon, just when he was thinking about sneaking off to the Bank, and told him that Jakey was missing, that he hadn’t made it home from school? He shook the thought from his mind, as if that simple act of imagining might somehow make it happen. The uncertainty would be the most terrible part. And the waiting. Waiting for that knock on the door. I’m sorry, sir. We’ve found a body. How could any marriage survive that? No wonder so many lives unravelled when a child went missing, or died. Or was very, very sick. Erdman swallowed down the lump in his throat.

  ‘God, are you still waiting?’ Lilith appeared with Jakey trailing behind her, a limp triangle of cheese sandwich in hand.

  ‘Yeah, shouldn’t be long now.’

  Lilith plonked herself down on the chair next to him while Jakey inspected some drops of dried blood on the floor. ‘We were watching this in the canteen. I had to drag Jakey away in the end. He kept asking if someone had stolen her. Terrible, isn’t it? Her poor parents. Mind you, what on earth was she doing on her own?’

  They lapsed into silence, guiltily transfixed by the neatly packaged vignettes about a family just like them.

  After a few minutes, Lilith touched her husband on the elbow.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten about Monday afternoon, Erd.’

  ‘Um . . .’

  Lilith sighed. ‘You have, haven’t you.’

  ‘It’s Take Your Dad to School Day. Remember, Daddy? All the daddies are coming to my classroom. Miss Haines says it’s going to be fun.’

  Erdman couldn’t think of anything less fun. But he couldn’t tell his son that.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he said.

  They sat for a long while. Two paramedics rushed in with a stretcher, but the excitement only lasted a couple of minutes before their grey-faced charge was whisked away. A whiteboard on the wal
l informed new arrivals that the average waiting time was four hours. The evening sky deepened into a violent blue. Behind them, a cleaner in a yellow top and trousers pushed a mop back and forth.

  ‘God, what a dreadful uniform,’ muttered Lilith.

  Erdman’s stomach roiled, not helped by the shitty nappy smell from the baby a couple of rows back. Jakey lolled on the chair, his finger up his nose, Lilith’s foot jigged up and down, and the news ticker went round and round, one family’s story of heartbreak stuck on repeat.

  Erdman tried not to think about the needle’s sharp point, the thread burrowing through the holes in his skin, the way his vision went white around the edges whenever he had an injection. He wondered if it might be linked to some half-buried memory.

  Thank God he and Lilith had been switched on enough to make sure Jakey’s childhood immunizations were administered orally. He’d heard terrible stories about the effects of injections on children like Jakey. Doctors in Pennsylvania were breaking new ground with their research, but there was still no cure. He breathed out slowly, and tried to quell the panic that threatened to consume him whenever he thought about Jakey’s future. He looked at his son, who was staring, oblivious, at the floor.

  ‘I’m bored,’ whined Jakey.

  ‘You and me both, champ,’ said Erdman. Wasting his Friday night in this depressing place was not his idea of fun either.

  Lilith was scrolling through news websites on her phone. She yawned without covering her mouth.

  ‘Why don’t you take Jakey home?’ He hadn’t known he was going to say that and regretted it as soon as he did.

  ‘You sure?’

  But Lilith’s question was perfunctory. Already, she was on her feet, pulling on her coat, and helping Jakey with his.

  ‘I’ll take the car, shall I? You’ll be all right on the bus . . .’

  Yeah, course I will. ’Cos I really love getting the bus home with all the Friday-night drunks.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  As he watched Lilith and Jakey disappear through the hospital’s automated doors, towards Car Park A and the drizzling darkness, he was still half-hoping she would stay.

  He couldn’t blame her. The hours she had spent here with Jakey. That both of them had. He hated this place almost as much as she did.

  The minutes crawled by.

  ‘Erdman Frith,’ called a knackered-looking nurse.

  At last. He followed her into the treatment room, stumbling into a Caution Wet Floor sign. He raised an apologetic hand at the cleaner, who nodded in return.

  A doctor with a droopy moustache examined Erdman’s hand, and let it drop. He had his back to his patient, but Erdman caught his exchange with the nurse all the same.

  ‘Tell Kaleb to stop wasting my fucking time. We’re busy enough as it is.’

  The nurse smiled her tired smile. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been waiting for such a long while, Mr Frith, but Dr Levison doesn’t feel you need sutures. I’ll dress it for you, but the cut isn’t as deep as we first thought.’

  By the time he left the hospital, the rain was sheeting in his face. The wind had picked up and it chilled his wet skin. What he wouldn’t give to be sat in front of the telly with the heating cranked up to block out the draughts, marital or otherwise.

  He peered at the timetable. If he’d read it right, it promised a bus in twenty minutes, but he wasn’t convinced he had read it right. He was still trying to decipher the fine black print when a single-decker rolled into view.

  Erdman fumbled in his coat pocket for his Oyster card, dropped it on the rain-stamped floor, picked it up and swiped it across the yellow reader, his cheeks pinking. He found a seat by the window and stared, unseeing, through condensing fug.

  As the bus drove into the night, Erdman briefly shut his eyes and wondered who would notice if he didn’t make it home.

  But he should not have wasted time feeling sorry for himself.

  His son was already in danger.

  And Erdman had ten days left to save his life.

  7

  9.31 p.m.

  Lilith tipped the last of the glass shards into the pedal bin and turned her attention to the dining room floor. The blood from Erdman’s hand had hardened into rusty pennies and she scrubbed against the polished wood to clean them off.

  She sat back on her haunches, surveyed her handiwork. God, she was tired. And she still had the remains of their spoiled dinner to clear up. Erdman was not back from the hospital yet, but at least Jakey was in bed. He had been so difficult since they had got home, moody and withdrawn, and although he’d apologized for The Car Incident, she’d been relieved to shut his door on him, and come downstairs on her own.

  Lilith didn’t know what had got into her usually mild-mannered son, but whatever it was, she didn’t like it. She made a mental note to book their crappy car in for a service.

  As punishment, she had refused to read him a bedtime story. Not that Jakey had seemed to care. It was one of Erdman’s books, some creepy folktale he’d had since he was a boy. The cover was a tall, thin man with a grinning skull for a head. A bogeyman who preyed on children. It gave her the heebie-jeebies. But Jakey had asked for it every night since he’d found it in a box of Erdman’s old things. Not tonight, though. Instead he had thrown it across the room.

  She sighed, and scraped congealed gravy and cold potatoes onto a plate. Perhaps it was his medication, or he was just tired from the strain of being at the hospital for most of the evening. Perhaps she should give him the benefit of the doubt, but Jakey had been damn rude. It hadn’t helped that she’d been trying to drive home in torrential rain when the car had beeped its first warning, flashing up this message on the dashboard.

  Rear seat belt unbuckled.

  ‘Jakey,’ she had snapped. ‘Don’t mess around with your seat belt. Do it up now, please.’

  ‘I haven’t undone it.’

  ‘Jakey.’ Her voice was steel.

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell fibs.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he half-shouted. ‘I haven’t touched it.’

  Lilith knew he was lying. That message only showed up when a back-seat passenger undid the belt, or didn’t do it up in the first place.

  She tried a new tack. ‘Sweetheart, if we have an accident in this dreadful weather and you’re not wearing your belt, you could be seriously hurt. Please do it up now. For Mummy.’

  ‘I haven’t undone it,’ he insisted.

  Lilith had slammed her hand against the steering wheel, and the car swerved into the oncoming lane. Panicked, she’d overcorrected herself, causing the driver behind her to lean heavily on his horn.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I haven’t undone it,’ he said again, more softly this time.

  She ignored him, her eyes scanning the dark roads for a place to pull over. She would damn well get out of the car and do it up herself. But the rain was making it difficult to see, and now the ribbon of red tail-lights ahead was forcing her to brake.

  Stuck in a line of traffic, she had half-twisted to look at him. The pale smudge of his face stared back at her, illuminated in the headlamps of passing cars. ‘C’mon, Jakey. I just want you to be safe.’

  ‘I haven’t undone my seat belt,’ he said, and burst into tears.

  She had thought about explaining to him that the weight of a passenger’s body triggered a sensor that alerted the driver when the belt was unbuckled, that there was no one else in the back so it had to be him, but she didn’t think he’d understand.

  Her eyes flicked down to Jakey’s buckle.

  It was done up, the metal clip securely in place.

  But the message hadn’t changed.

  Rear seat belt unbuckled.

  She checked to see if her handbag was on the back seat next to him. She carried enough crap for it to register about the weight of a small human being, but the seat was empty.

  It was just a glitch in the system of a car that had seen better days.

  She ha
d started to apologize, to tell him that adults sometimes make mistakes too, when she heard him mutter beneath the ceaseless drumming of the rain.

  ‘Go away,’ he hissed. ‘Go away and leave me alone.’

  ‘Just because you say it quietly doesn’t mean I can’t hear you.’

  ‘Mummy, I—’

  ‘I know it’s been a tricky, tiring day, but that’s no excuse. You don’t speak to Mummy like that.’ Lilith’s fingers tapped the gearstick.

  ‘But I—’

  ‘And you’re still talking back to me. How about you say sorry instead?’

  ‘You never listen,’ he burst out. ‘Never, ever, ever. You’re the meanest mummy in the world. I want my daddy.’

  The traffic began to move again, the rain easing off. She could see Jakey’s face in the rear-view mirror, pinched and miserable, and regretted her sharpness, felt the itch of motherly guilt.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to jump down your throat.’

  But he didn’t reply, just stared out of the window into the rain, his eyes filmy with tears, and singing that strange little song.

  She had left it at that, but as soon as they got home he had asked to go to bed. When she had come up to tuck him in, he had turned his back on her and refused a goodnight kiss.

  Now she was alone, she realized that he’d been right. She hadn’t bothered to listen to him, or given him a chance to explain. Some children were compulsive liars, but Jakey, until now, had always been scrupulously honest.

  It wasn’t his fault they didn’t have enough money to buy a better car.

  She found she couldn’t settle. She finished clearing up and paced restlessly about their house, waiting for Erdman.

  Thank God Jakey’s arm was OK. She had been so sure it was broken, had already given him an extra dose of steroids to calm the inflammation. But when the doctors had ordered an X-ray it had only been badly bruised.

  She thought about his arm’s lumpy, swollen, misshapen appearance, and offered up a silent prayer.

  Just a bruise, the doctor said. Just a bruise. Please God let it stay that way.