Lilith found him hiding in the study, spinning round and round in Erdman’s chair. He had a large bruise on his forehead, and dried blood in the jagged edge of his cut. His chin was skewed towards his collarbone, but his eyes lifted to meet hers. The sight of his face, so like his father’s, made her eyes fill. He removed the thumb corking his mouth. Watched in silence as Fitzroy and Chambers put down their mugs and left.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ he said, as soon as they had gone.
She picked him up then, and the sharps of his bones dug into her flesh, but she didn’t care. Like a baby monkey, he wrapped his legs tightly around her waist. She registered the movement and let out the breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding. There was still mobility in his legs. No extra lumps on his back. It was a game she played every morning, uncertain what changes the night might bring. Unconsciously echoing Erdman’s gesture from a few hours earlier, she squeezed his body to hers, and her fingers played the bones of his ribs beneath his pyjama top. She felt the heat from his arm. His back.
She tried to frame the words so a six-year-old would understand them.
‘We’re not sure, sweetie. We’re looking for him.’
‘But what if you don’t find him?’
Lilith set him on the floor and half-crouched in front of him, gripping his twisted shoulders. She could read the doubt in his face.
‘Of course we’ll find him,’ she said. ‘Daddy will be home soon.’
Jakey tried and failed to shake his head, and he made an exasperated sound. Frustration was a common side effect, the support group had warned Lilith, especially if he remembered what it felt like to move freely.
‘Are you OK, sweetie? Shall we go and get dressed?’
But Jakey couldn’t speak, his young mind full of dark imaginings, magpied from his father’s tattered storybook and the television coverage about Clara Foyle.
Instead, he reached for Erdman’s notepad, and flicked gently through the pages. They were covered in his father’s mostly indecipherable scrawl.
The boy followed the loops and whorls with his finger, but his eyes were dead.
31
10.06 a.m.
A few miles away, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a figure slips into a museum.
Anyone who happens to glimpse him would assume that sickness has sucked the meat from his bones. His cheeks are sunken, the skin so stretched it looks ready to split. Clothes hang off his spare frame, a set of ageing bones held together by the flimsiest threads of sinew and flesh. When he smiles, it seems like a warning.
Anyone who stands too close might catch, beneath the musky, deodorized notes, the faintest whiff of something. They won’t be able to place it, will discreetly move away, too polite to comment, noses wrinkled in distaste. For those few who work in mortuaries or abattoirs, recognition will cleave through them as cleanly as a blade.
The Bone Collector treads softly across the marble floor with its dark twists that mirror the diseased bones upstairs.
It has been three days since his last visit, and the dead welcome him. He breathes in the odourless air, closes his eyes and steadies his heart.
The legacy of John Hunter is everywhere. In the shrunken quintuplets from Blackburn, the teeth of soldiers lost on the battlefields of Waterloo, and the thousands of other tempting curiosities that line the walls.
And walking in his shadow is Hunter’s faithful sidekick, Mr Howison. The bodysnatcher. The Bone Collector’s own flesh and blood. The one who began the family collection with grim treasures plundered from the graves of others and passed down through the generations, each son carefully selecting the rarest, most perfect, of specimens. A collection his own father curated, and handed down to him.
The ties that bind cut deep and bloody.
As he enters the Crystal Gallery, the Bone Collector allows himself to be pulled, briefly, in the direction of a three-month-old foetus, filleted down to its fragile bones. A dolly in a cigar-box bed.
From habit, he peers through the glass, but although its skeleton is no thicker than a splintered match, it no longer holds the same appeal for him.
Not now he has one of his own.
He hurries across the gallery floor, ignoring the cylinders of animal tongues and amputated limbs, until he reaches a glass case displaying the remains of the skeleton that once was Charles Byrne. This is what he has come for. He sinks to one knee and bows his head, a worshipper at the altar, reverent and humble.
It began here. And it is his pleasure and his privilege to continue Howison’s work.
Eventually, the Bone Collector lifts his face, flicks out a tongue to wet his lips. The Irish Giant. Seven foot seven of mystery and bone.
Decades on, professors discovered what Hunter had never managed to. The mutated gene, the cause of his unnatural height. But the Bone Collector is grateful to Byrne, and the way his skeleton beguiled and bewitched the surgeon. Because authorizing the theft of Byrne’s body gifted the Bone Collector’s ancestors a legacy more wonderful than Hunter could possibly have imagined.
His eyes linger on Byrne’s femur and travel the length of his body, drinking in the ischium, ilium and scapula. He puts a finger against the glass and traces his vertebrae and ribcage bound together by brown string. Some bones are missing from his feet. He wonders what secrets those missing bones will yield.
Marshall first told him about the museum as a young boy, despite his mother’s disapproval. But Sylvie need not have worried. It did not frighten him, even then. It intrigued him.
His father had been gratified by his interest. He encouraged questions. Told stories of grave robbers and spirits. How Howison had switched the giant’s body with paving stones and stolen it for Hunter. Of their family’s connection to the place, to the men behind its exhibits.
It was then that Marshall introduced his son to the concept of familial duty. Began his education that would culminate in killing sprees born of a desire to preserve and protect medical rarities.
And he was eager to learn, to carry on the traditions of his bloodline.
An hour passes, and then another. But the Bone Collector doesn’t notice the stiffness in his legs, or the tourists nudging into him for a closer look. He stares at the display case which houses Mr Jeffs, his twisted back a trophy. He thinks of his own trophies, and the promise of the one he has yet to acquire.
After a while, he glances at his watch. He hopes she will be eating the lunch he has left on the chair by her bed. She has hardly been touching it lately, a bite here and there. He will buy her a treat to tempt her appetite, which dwindles with each passing day.
He thinks about going back, feels the pull of her. But he has a meeting in Woolwich in an hour or so. If he doesn’t move quickly, the dealer will sell the new colony to a rival collector, and that will not do at all. The beetles belong to him.
And then there’s the boy. He must get to the school for the close of the day. He has much work to do.
Twelve miles away, in a faceless room at the top of a house, Clara Edith Foyle was practising spelling her name. She said the letters over and over again. She knew that each part of her name contained five letters, and that her whole name had fifteen. She repeated her name to remind herself that she still existed.
When she had first arrived, Clara had called out for her mother and father. For Gina and Eleanor. After a while, she had come to understand that they were not coming. That the only one who ever came was the Night Man.
A few hours earlier, Clara had watched a spider scuttle across the floor to the corner nearest the door. It was spinning a web, following its natural instinct to hunt prey, even though the freezing temperatures meant that Clara had seen no other insects during her captivity.
A bit later, she had found herself drawn back to the web. To her surprise, a small creature was snared in its sticky strings, moving with a frantic, wasted energy. It was flat, and shiny black. A beetle, she thought, rolling the vowels on her tongue.
Lying on her tummy, studying t
he spider, she had nodded off, and in her dreams, she had been back at home, tucked safely in her own bed with her night light on, and Christmas just around the corner. She dreamed of a door opening and closing, of her mother coming in, kissing her on the forehead and smoothing down her covers.
When she opened her eyes to the pockmarked walls of her cell, Clara gave a little sob, the memory of her mother’s touch already fading. The girl wiped away her tears with the back of her hand, and began to repeat the letters in her name again. The school playground had taught her that crying wouldn’t change things, and the pointing and stares of others had helped Clara to solder each painful experience into a steel core.
This inner strength – the Don’t Cares, Clara called it – was keeping her alive.
Stiff and uncomfortable from falling asleep on the hard floor, Clara tried to pull herself upwards but her arms wouldn’t move properly. At first, she was certain the Night Man had tied her wrists together again and, panicked, she tried to free them. They came loose easily, and her heartbeat slowed. It was just her bed sheet, tangled around her limbs.
She didn’t remember wrapping herself in a sheet. Especially not a sheet like this. It didn’t have that smell, like the one on her bed where she’d had an accident. This sheet was soft with faded printed roses on it and it smelled clean, and she had never seen it before.
It was getting colder so Clara wrapped the sheet around her shoulders, and bent to take a closer look at the beetle in the web.
Whilst she had been sleeping, the spider had wrapped its prey in silken threads.
32
1.46 p.m.
Fitzroy was cursing the rain. Not only was the downpour fucking up her crime scene, it was ruining her shoes.
As she stared down at the watery traces of blood on the grass, she wondered if The Boss was still punishing her.
Although Fitzroy had a keen sense of justice, it was the children who clamoured for her attention, who drove her to spend long nights sifting the evidence for patterns. Which was why she was so angry that he’d sent her on this wild goose chase when she should be directing all her energies towards finding the little girl.
So Erdman (what the hell kind of name was that?) Frith had been beaten up and shot. Clara Foyle was missing, believed abducted. Both incidents had happened less than half a mile apart. As far as she could see, that singular fact of location linked the cases. As for the ‘grey’ van, the witness didn’t have the faintest idea if it was silver, dark grey or even light blue. But The Boss was under pressure from on high, and this was a lead, no matter how tenuous.
Served her right for staying at work all night instead of grabbing a few hours’ sleep at the flat. For the first time in their four-year marriage, David hadn’t bothered to text to see if she was coming home. He’d left a terse message just after dawn, presumably while he was getting ready for work, telling her that Nina had rung twice. Fitzroy hadn’t called either of them back yet. She would see David at the fertility clinic tomorrow, try to smooth things over. As for Nina, she still couldn’t face the smug triumph of a new mother.
Etta would never say that to her sister, of course. But although she loved her, she could not bear that Nina had trumped her again. Except this time, it wasn’t about exam results or who could persuade their father to smile, but at something that Etta had no control over, which made it all the more cruel.
It was this rend in her own life that drove her to fill the space by searching for Grace and Clara, to push David in a direction he was reluctant to travel. She was dreading tomorrow, and the prospect of David’s detachment, the way he sighed out his displeasure. But that was then, and this was now.
So here she was. On Blackheath Common, deserted apart from a few officers scouring the ground, soaked to the skin in freezing rain and up her to ankles in mud.
The weak afternoon light would be fading soon. A few weeks ago, The Boss had made a big song and dance about how he was ready to give her more responsibility again, and she felt its weight like a monkey on her back.
She watched the forensics team combing the grass, framed against the pretty church with its spire clock, every passing minute a rebuke that Clara was still out there, still lost. They’d be lucky if they found a cigarette butt in this weather, but The Boss had ordered teams to scour the vicinity until they found a clue, any clue, to her whereabouts. Five days on and they were still looking. Chambers thrust an expensive coffee from the village in her face and bent down to wipe his mud-spattered trousers with a napkin.
‘Clean on today, these were.’
‘Makes a change.’
Fitzroy blew on her drink. It was hot and bitter, and just what she needed.
‘Thoughts?’
‘Well, I’m cold, my trousers are filthy, and I quite fancy a pint.’
Fitzroy rolled her eyes at Chambers, and he shrugged, took a slug of his own coffee.
‘Mr Frith doesn’t seem like your average drug dealer.’
‘That’s my instinct.’ She looked at the photograph in her hand. He was an unusual-looking man, so rangy, and with his pale, freckled skin and reddish hair, he looked like a Renaissance painting, and had one of the saddest faces she had ever seen. ‘But we all know that appearances can be deceptive.
‘Look, he’s not known to us. He lives in neither a squat or a penthouse. His wife seems genuinely distraught. Even if he’s a small-time user, why would he be messing with these boys? They’re hardcore. Until yesterday he worked at a little-known psychic magazine. Something doesn’t add up.’
‘You’re right.’ Chambers moved the cup to his other hand. He breathed out a curl of white smoke as he spoke. ‘Wrong place, wrong time?’
‘Could be. But why shoot him? Sounds like they’d already kicked the shit out of him.’
‘Because he saw something he shouldn’t have?’
‘Possibly.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘Had a row with his wife, lying low with a mate?’
‘But what about the van?’
‘Coincidence? Human error? It’s difficult to be precise about colour when it’s dark.’
‘So what’s the connection to Clara Foyle?’
Fitzroy bit her thumbnail. She was groping for a link between the cases, but couldn’t see one, couldn’t feel its hard mass in the shape of evidence. She was used to relying on her instincts, to listening for that ting in her brain which drove her on, exploiting every lead, no matter how flimsy, until the clanging stopped, and the answers were found. But not today. Today all she could hear was Clara’s voice, urging her to hurry, and the fainter echo of Grace Rodríguez. She tapped a reminder into her phone to ask Mrs Foyle if she knew the Frith family, but already she could guess the answer.
‘Come on.’ She jerked her head at Chambers. ‘This is a waste of time. Let’s go.’
The officers were walking back to their car when one of the white suits suddenly crouched down, and let out an excited yell. The rest of his colleagues clustered around him, peering at the same spot on the ground. Someone held an umbrella over his head. Fitzroy exchanged a look with Chambers, then ran back across the Heath, ignoring the squelching beneath her feet.
‘What is it? What have you found?’
From his hunkered-down position, the white suit pointed to the grass. Lying half-submerged in a puddle of muddy water was an old shoebox. Inside it was the carcass of an animal. Stripped down to its skeleton, which was a sort of dullish, pale colour, it had a small, slightly elongated skull and a curved vertebrae. Its feet were spindles of bone.
‘What the fuck is that?’ said Fitzroy, her mind already tearing ahead, rifling through the evidence, sifting pieces of the puzzle, slotting them into what she already knew.
Building a new and wholly unexpected picture.
‘What the fuck indeed,’ said the officer who had found it, signalling for a scenes of crime photographer. ‘Take a look at this.’
Gingerly, he lifted the fragile skeleton from the puddle. The b
ones were bare, but just enough of the animal’s connective tissues remained to hold them together. With gloved hands, he removed a small plastic tube attached to its hind leg.
‘Interesting,’ he murmured. He delved into his pocket for a pair of tweezers, used them to extract a thin cigarette paper from inside the tube. With a deftness which belied the size of his hands, he carefully unrolled it and scanned its contents.
‘I think you’d better read this.’
Fitzroy leaned over his shoulder, the scrawled ink jumping before her eyes.
‘. . . the bones came together, bone to bone.’
Adrenaline sluiced through her. ‘Bag it. Now.’
Her hands wouldn’t stop trembling, and she buried them in the pockets of her jacket. She turned to Chambers. ‘Get onto the Identification and Advisory Service at the Natural History Museum. Tell them it’s urgent, tell them not to go until we get there. I’m going to make a call. I need to speak to The Boss.’
33
2.11 p.m.
Erdman swallowed down a painkiller and switched on the telly. Then switched it off again.
Even that simple movement set off several flashes of pain. Every part of him hurt, and not just his body.
He shifted against the cushion, trying to get comfortable. Amber had left a plate of biscuits on the coffee table, but he wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t exactly sure what he felt.
Lilith would be worried, he knew that. But he couldn’t bring himself to ring her. Last night, when he’d been taken to A&E and realized that his phone and his wallet were missing, he’d had every intention of asking one of the nurses to call her.
But by the time they had finished patching him up, the embers of his anger had reignited, hot and immediate.
A tiny piece of him wanted her to suffer for all the terrible things she had said. He felt bad about Jakey, but Lilith would have to deal with that. This was her fault, after all.
Rattle: A serial killer thriller that will hook you from the start Page 12