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

by Fiona Cummins

  Slowly, the intimacy between them dried up like a stain on a sheet.

  Soon, she was spending every spare moment at work. So was he. And Fitzroy and David slipped between the cracks of each other’s lives.

  But this. This is what had sustained her, this had allowed her to hope, and even as she had stepped through the doors of the clinic that morning, she had still believed they would make it.

  But he hadn’t come. Which was as good as saying their marriage was over.

  ‘Shall I make you another appointment?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  Outside, the November morning was raw. And she had work to do.

  The escalator carried her deep into the underground, and as the motor turned on its endless cycle, so did Fitzroy’s brain.

  Most of the night had been spent rereading statements and scanning the contents of Grace Rodríguez’s case file.

  But she didn’t need to search amongst those pages to know that the rabbit skeleton found on the Heath was identical to the skeleton they had discovered – and dismissed – at the site of Grace’s remains.

  There had been no tube attached to its leg, though. Not like the one they’d just found on the Heath.

  So what? If we weren’t looking for it, it could easily have been lost.

  Perhaps that was why he had written the message. This time, there was no room for confusion. But she was still baffled. Was that skeleton intended as a calling card for Clara? If so, why had it been found on the opposite side of the Heath when she was last seen at a sweet shop in the village? There was no trace of a body, no trace of anything at all, except Erdman Frith’s blood. And what about the grey van at the scene? Was that the connection? She had to talk to Mr Frith, to see what he remembered.

  When she boarded the train at London Bridge ten minutes later, her was phone ringing. Her stomach jolted but it wasn’t David.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’ said The Boss. ‘I thought you were only going for coffee.’

  ‘Sorry, I got tied up.’

  ‘Well, untie yourself and get back here. I want to talk about the rabbits.’

  Back in the office, there was the buzz of a major investigation. The Boss beckoned her over.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

  Even though she had already written a memo several hours ago, she repeated what Dr Hall had told her.

  ‘Forensics are all over it,’ said The Boss. ‘But we’re not going to get much. The rain’s washed away our chances.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘Although it wasn’t the rain that washed away the evidence left by Grace’s attacker. We managed that all by our-bloody-selves.’ He shut his eyes, rubbed at the centre left of his chest with the heel of his hand. ‘Oh, and the note got wet. What a fuck-up.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘And Clara Foyle’s disappearance is giving me a major fucking headache. We’ve traced every known sexual offender in the area, bar one or two. The team’s still checking out their alibis. We need more warm bodies, fucking pronto, but we’re not going to get them.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘So now we’ve got two major bloody investigations and not enough specialist officers to work them. How do I decide whose life is more important? A teenager who’s been missing for a year or a five-year-old girl? I can’t decide, that’s the bloody nub of it. I shouldn’t have to.’ He took a breath. ‘Are you OK to have another crack at Miles Foyle later? He’s still saying nothing.’

  ‘Yes, but, sir—’

  ‘What is it, Fitzroy?’

  Now The Boss had finally stopped talking Fitzroy wasn’t sure if she was brave enough to say it out loud. She felt foolish, but the ting was telling her that she ought to speak up, that she’d regret it if she didn’t. She jumped in.

  ‘Has anyone checked the sweet shop for a rabbit skeleton?’

  He took off his glasses. His face was naked without them, the lines around his eyes more prominent, an indent either side of the bridge of his nose. He took a cloth from his pocket and polished them.

  Fitzroy blundered on. ‘I mean, the skeleton in the woods was just a few yards from Grace’s fingertips, right? It was meant to be found. But there’s no sign of Clara on the Heath, where the other skeleton was left. Shouldn’t we be looking for a more . . .’ – she paused, groping for the right word – ‘. . . concrete connection between the cases?’

  He put his glasses back on, rolled his tongue around his cheek. His tone was patient, but she still felt like an over-eager trainee on her first day at Hendon.

  ‘The forensics team has already checked the route Clara walked when she left the school playground, Fitzroy. They’ve checked the Heath twice. They’ve checked the sweet shop, her house, even her parents’ car. They’ve checked everything they can bloody well think of.’

  The shame of that morning’s events at the clinic began to crowd out her confidence, and she dropped her head, suddenly weary of fighting everyone, at home and at work. Of David and his lack of empathy, his inability to see beyond his own restricted horizon. On their wedding day, an elegant but low-key registry office affair in central London, she had believed he was her future, but now even that seemed uncertain.

  Her lack of progression in her job. She’d been so sure that The Boss had been hinting at promotion before that incident last year. Now she was lucky to be here at all.

  She thought of the New Grandson card she had seen by Nina’s hospital bed. Her father had never acknowledged what had happened to her, and couldn’t understand the point of coming to the funeral of a baby who had died before he’d lived, that he had never known and would never know. She had barely noticed at the time, her own grief deadening the pain of his disinterest. But now it consumed her, and was one of the reasons they barely spoke any more.

  And she was beginning to realize that unless she moved on from David she may never have a child of her own.

  She was messing things up in every part of her life.

  Sometimes she felt more like a seven-year-old than a thirty-seven-year-old.

  Silly girl.

  ‘It was just a hunch,’ she said. ‘A stupid hunch.’

  ‘Fitzroy—’ said The Boss, and something about the way he said her name made her square her shoulders and lift her head. Made him more of a father than her own ever was.

  Her eyes met his.

  ‘Check again.’

  40

  8.31 a.m.

  On Thursday, 22 November, two days after his father disappeared, and less than an hour after Fitzroy had concluded her marriage was over, the unwelcome light of dawn climbed over Jakey’s windowsill and declared it morning. He squeezed his eyelids shut and a tear trickled down his cheek, causing a stain to bloom on his Spider-Man pillow.

  His heart hurt. Not like his body did when the bones had begun a fresh incursion, and his mother gave him medicine, and it stopped for a bit. Or that teeth-grinding pain which kept him awake at night, and made his mother cry when she thought he was asleep. This went deeper, like he was carrying something heavy inside and it was dragging him down.

  Go away, Ol’ Bloody Bones, Ol’ Tommy Rawhead. Leave me alone.

  Jakey hadn’t slept much. And when he did, his dreams were filled with pictures of a shadowy man with his sharp teeth, and skinny arms, and his father.

  Oh, Daddy.

  Jakey made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a sob. His father had promised to protect him but he’d left him behind.

  Daddy, please come home.

  In the playground of his imagination, Jakey saw the figure from his father’s childhood stories reaching for him, his fingers outstretched, black eyes watching.

  Jakey was only six, and, in the way that children have, the man in the book and the man on the television had become muddied, and then distilled into the same creeping threat.

  Ol’ Bloody Bones had taken the little girl. He had seen it on his television.

  Now his daddy was gone.

  If Ol’ Bloody Bones was real, as the boy believed he
was, it would mean that all his fears and anxieties were made flesh.

  And he, Jakey, would be next.

  As for Clara Foyle’s mother, her own imagination was dragging her down a dark path that she did not wish to travel. Her days and nights were simply defined by the ebb and flow of light and shade, and she often found herself dozing off at odd moments and then jerking to, discovering afresh on each awakening the distress and horror of her daughter’s disappearance.

  The black box of her curtainless window signalled it was night again. Clara, Mummy misses you. My precious girl. I hope you’re sleeping.

  She reached for the glass of clear liquid by the side of her bed. She swallowed, took another burning sip. She wasn’t sure if it was the vodka or the MS blurring her vision.

  The bedroom was quieter than usual without the animal grunts of Miles’ snoring, but his side of the bed was cool and empty. He was still with the police. Her hand was shaking as she turned their silver-framed wedding photo onto its face.

  She had always insisted on the best of everything. Designer clothes, expensive linen, luxury holidays, but as she lay in the yawning darkness of her home, she had much to regret.

  Amy, who, at barely thirty, was a mother without one of her daughters and the wife of a cheat. A woman who had taken for granted a life of privilege, greased by money and prestige.

  But she would give it up, every last penny, if she could just see Clara again.

  41

  9.04 a.m.

  Dharamdeep Atwal was tipping bags of coins into the till when Fitzroy walked in. He shook his head slightly.

  ‘What you want now? This not good for business.’

  ‘A little girl is missing, Mr Atwal. Surely you don’t begrudge me half an hour of your time?’

  He slammed shut the drawer. The coins jangled. ‘Of course not. But the police, they already turn it upside down.’

  ‘I just want to have another look around. It won’t take long.’

  Fitzroy didn’t wait for an answer. In situations like these, she felt a bit like soiled goods. The police had swarmed Mr Atwal’s shop on Friday, as soon as it became clear that Clara was missing. Her colleagues had spoken to him several times since. By the time it was her turn, he’d had more than enough of Her Majesty’s finest.

  But she needed to be here. It was the last place Clara had been seen alive.

  Mr Atwal’s was a proper sweet shop. It didn’t sell tins of beans or frozen pizzas or shiny rolls of biscuits, just dozens of jars of brightly coloured confectionery, slabs of chocolate wrapped in foil and paper, lavishly beribboned gift bags of retro sweets. The smell of sugar stuck in her throat. She saw Clara, beguiled by choice, walking up to the counter, a coin clutched in her hand.

  Mr Atwal kept his shop tidy. Nothing out of place. The shelves filled with stock. She stood between the lollipops and the pre-packaged cones of fizzy cola bottles, and tried to imagine where he might have hidden it. If he had hidden it.

  She walked forward, back through the front door, heard the ting of its bell, and the answering ting in her mind. She corrected herself. He wouldn’t have hidden it at all. He’d have wanted it to be found.

  Fitzroy looked in the bin outside, down the alleyway at the side of the shop. She went back in, scanned the shelves, behind the counter, the tiny room at the back which held Mr Atwal’s coat and packed lunch, a chair and kettle, and not much else.

  I’m wrong, she thought. But she didn’t feel wrong.

  A delivery truck pulled up outside the shop, its engines running. Fitzroy watched its driver carry in a stack of cardboard boxes, watched Mr Atwal exchange a joke with the man, and sign for them.

  He lifted one on the counter and slit open the tape with a Stanley knife.

  Packets of sherbet lemons spilled out.

  Mr Atwal began to put away the sweets straight onto the shelves. He hummed whilst he worked, a tuneless sound that grated on Fitzroy’s already shredded nerves. When he finished, he placed the box on the floor, and started on the next one.

  In her mind’s eye, Fitzroy glimpsed the collapsed shoebox on Blackheath Common.

  Ting.

  ‘Mr Atwal,’ said Fitzroy, ‘where do you store your empty cardboard boxes?’

  He kept his back to her. ‘At the back of the shop, mostly. We leave them out there for the recycling guys.’

  Fitzroy could hear, inside her head, the whoosh of blood in her veins.

  ‘When do they come?’

  ‘Thursday mornings.’

  She ran.

  The boxes were stacked against an overflowing rubbish bag in a small alcove that smelled of urine behind the shop. Some had been flattened to make space, but the smaller ones had not. They were damp and soft with rain. Something unpleasant was leaking from the bag, but Fitzroy ignored it.

  She pulled a plastic glove from her pocket, and reached for the pile of boxes, felt the texture of disintegrating cardboard between her fingers. She flipped open the first set of flaps. Nothing. Reached for the next one. Nothing. The third box fell apart in her hands, sending dirty rainwater or worse onto her shoes. She forced herself to slow down, to stop fumbling. If Clara had been snatched by the man who had taken Grace Rodríguez, hope was almost certainly lost.

  Only a couple of boxes remained, and Fitzroy felt the sick twist of failure in her gut. The traffic crawled by. Commuters pounded the pavement just a few feet away.

  She reached for a small box with black lettering on the side, its ink beginning to run, and opened its flaps.

  Fitzroy’s heart was a trapped bird in her chest.

  In the corner of the box, its bones stripped and fragile, was the huddled carcass of another rabbit skeleton. A note rolled in a tube, just like before. ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter you.’

  Lying next to those bones was a torn paper bag of strawberry bon bons, pink icing sugar spilling across the cardboard like coffin silk.

  42

  11.31 a.m.

  Like Fitzroy, Lilith had now been awake for several hours. Doubt had been her bedfellow, and in those lonely pre-dawn hours, when the rest of the world was slumbering, she’d convinced herself that Erdman was in trouble.

  Darkness had a way of amplifying one’s fears. He was lying in an alleyway, leaking blood onto the pavement, overcome by his injuries, unable to cry out for help.

  The cold wash of daylight brought her back to her senses. Not Erdman. He would never have left the hospital if he still needed treatment. He was sulking, that was all.

  She tried to ignore the niggling doubts that wouldn’t go away. At one time, she’d have sworn he would never give up on their marriage, but she’d been wrong about that, hadn’t she? What else was she wrong about?

  That detective had phoned earlier and asked to speak to Erdman. She had wanted to lie, to pretend he was out, but her conscience wouldn’t let her. She had told DS Fitzroy that he hadn’t come home, that she had heard nothing from him. The silence at the other end of the phone had felt like a judgement on her wifely virtues.

  ‘I need to talk to him,’ the detective had said.

  You and me both, thought Lilith.

  After the call, she had climbed the stairs to check on Jakey. He was asleep again, his breath rattling in and out of his lungs. School was not an option today. She would take him back to the doctor later this afternoon. Ask for another prescription of steroids, perhaps some antibiotics. She hoped it was no more serious than that. The thought of those long hospital corridors closed up her throat.

  While Jakey slept, she prepared a simple lunch. A chunk of cheese, a green apple cut into slices, a buttered roll. She ate alone, listening to the radio, covered Jakey’s share with clingfilm in case he woke up hungry.

  The soft chime of the doorbell cut through the presenter’s phone-in on the new Director-General of the BBC.

  Erdman? Is that you?

  ‘Hello, lovey,’ said Mrs Cooper from next door. ‘I just wondered if your husband was back yet.’

  Lilith drew
in a breath to steady herself, her eyes filling. Mrs Cooper’s wrinkled face softened in sympathy and she patted the younger woman’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do? Anything you need?’ Her motherly concern was comforting.

  Lilith pictured Erdman, lost and hurting somewhere in the city.

  ‘Actually, there is something,’ she said. ‘Would you mind sitting with Jakey for a couple of hours? I’m going to look for my husband.’

  When Lilith stepped outside, it was clear that winter had arrived. Sleet was stinging her face as she hurried down the road, uncertain where to start.

  The pubs wouldn’t be open yet. She tried to think where he might go, who he might be staying with. Most people had replied to her increasingly frantic messages, but Amber Collins hadn’t called her back. Erdman had told her once that his colleague lived near the Blue Elephant Theatre. Perhaps she should start there.

  She dithered briefly by the car. There was no guarantee she would cover a greater distance, not with London’s traffic. In the end, she walked down to the bank of bus stops by Lewisham police station. The 436 would take her straight to Camberwell.

  As the sleet turned into rain, Lilith could make out the top deck of her bus, rumbling along the road. As she reached into her bag for her Oyster card, her phone began to ring. She fished around amongst the tissues and tampons until she found it. The name on the screen made her mouth go dry.

  Home.

  ‘Lilith?’ The panic in Mrs Cooper’s voice caused the pulse in her throat to flick-flack. ‘You need to come back, lovey,’ she said.

  ‘What’s happened? Is it Erdman?’

  Mrs Cooper’s voice sounded far away, like she was speaking to Lilith from the other end of a long tunnel.

  ‘No, dear, it’s Jakey,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid he’s collapsed.’