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

by Fiona Cummins

  ‘Can I have a hug?’ said Miles.

  Amy put her arms around her husband but their bodies barely touched. He buried his face in the silk of her hair.

  ‘You do believe me, don’t you? I would never, ever hurt our daughter.’

  Amy could not bring herself to tell him that her trust was a gift, hard won and easily lost. That the look of him, the smell of him, even the sound of him now filled her with a curious sort of disgust. That she would, in all probability, never trust him again.

  50

  6.05 p.m.

  The streets are wet and just dark enough. He wears the weather like a disguise, drifting through the drizzle which obscures London. It is gone six.

  He smiles as he recalls the look on the detective’s face, the disgust, the fear. He likes it. He dreams of seeing it again. He longs to witness her expression when she finds out the boy is gone.

  The Bone Collector drives on through the darkness, the tail-lights of cars snaking their way back to their little lives, their homes. The boy will never go home.

  As for the girl, he has not yet decided.

  Marshall encouraged him to push boundaries, to see what he was capable of. To experiment. He considers it.

  When she is lost in her drugged sleep, he could flay the skin from her hands. He yearns to see those prehensile digits without their covering of tissue, the technicality of their grasp and pinch. He wants to study them at work, bone claws attached to living matter. He wants another first for his collection.

  But there is a chance she may die, of course. From shock and blood loss. From infection and pain. There is a chance she will escape. Attract unwanted attention.

  And he is growing used to having her around.

  But his decision can wait. Tonight, he has other important business to attend to.

  The boy. The backbone of his collection, the cervical vertebrae, the spinae.

  Fate has handed him another chance. There is another prize awaiting collection. Another Frith.

  The Bone Collector wants this one very, very badly. And he always get what he wants.

  51

  10.31 p.m.

  The Paediatric Intensive Care Unit was on the seventh floor of the Royal Southern Hospital, just above the maternity ward.

  Although its medical equipment could be noisy, and the children seriously ill, it seemed to Lilith to give off an aura of calm, an antidote to the emotional mayhem of her life.

  Lilith’s eyelids drifted downwards, but the sound of snoring from the woman opposite startled her back to awareness, and she sighed and sat up. The springs of her chair squeaked, and she heard the mother across the ward shift on her own makeshift bed before her snores resumed, louder than before. She rolled her neck. Fold-away beds were not allowed in PICU, and the relatives’ accommodation was too far away. A chair would have to do, but it didn’t make for a comfortable night’s sleep.

  Who was she kidding? Even with a king-size bed and total silence, Lilith would not have been able to sleep. How could she contemplate something so mundane when Jakey was so ill? What if he died while her treacherous self was dozing? No, her body would not betray her.

  The machines in PICU beeped and hummed as the nurses’ footsteps echoed on the floor, even at this late hour. There were always checks to be done, children to be brought back from the precipice. The rhythmic squeak of the cleaner wiping the floor was oddly comforting.

  Jakey was on a ventilator. A machine was breathing for him, inflating and deflating his little lungs. A machine, for fuck’s sake. Lilith had always taken the simple act of breathing for granted. But the events of the last few hours had taught her that it wasn’t simple at all. It was the product of half a dozen or more of the body’s complex processes.

  His body was as stiff as an exclamation mark, his lips slightly parted. The shadows thrown by the night-time lighting made his face look grey. A tube trailed from his nose. He was in a bad way.

  An X-ray had revealed the depressing truth.

  The growth of bone in his chest was restricting his lung function, and he had developed pneumonia.

  The consultant had warned her to prepare herself for a rocky ride, but she was barely listening when he explained, in that brusque tone of his, that even if Jakey survived the pneumonia, the new bone could prove catastrophic. In the pauses between his words, she had nodded her head, but she refused to believe him. Her son would not die. The force of her love would keep him alive.

  Her kidneys ached. She didn’t know if it was because of the awkward, half-twisted way she was sitting, or because she needed to use the toilet. She weighed up the chances of Jakey needing her in the next five minutes. Of leaving him alone. She wished Erdman was up here with her. But he was in the canteen, refuelling with yet more coffee.

  Ever since he had turned up so unexpectedly yesterday, he had struggled to cope with spending more than a few minutes at Jakey’s bedside. He had wept when he had seen his son, Jakey’s eyes shuttered against the world. Against him.

  As Lilith had witnessed his distress her anger had melted to nothing. She understood. He couldn’t bear to see his son this way. Neither could she.

  Jakey had not moved, not so much as an eye twitch or muscle spasm.

  Why did it have to be her family?

  Always her family.

  She hated this hospital. The memories that stalked the corridors. The reminder of that terrible day when Jakey was born, a life not yet two hours old, but already with a sentence of death.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the doctor had said, his face grave, leaden.

  ‘Sorry about what?’ Erdman had put his arm around her, a tired, baffled smile on his face, while Lilith had taken a taut breath, pulling her baby in closer.

  ‘Your son has Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva.’

  She could still remember the sight of Erdman’s mother Shirley raking her fingernails through her permed puff of hair.

  ‘My son?’ Lilith laughed. ‘No, he hasn’t.’ Then. ‘What’s Fibrodis . . . ?’

  And so he had told them. Shirley had shut her eyes, but Lilith hadn’t noticed. She was too busy watching her future fall apart.

  Later that night, Erdman had brandished a sheaf of papers at her, printouts from the Internet. The doctors had counselled them to wait, to process Jakey’s diagnosis before seeking information, but he had ignored their advice. When Lilith had sent him home for forgotten maternity pads, he’d gone straight to the computer and searched online for hope amidst the despair.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll have a mild form,’ he said. ‘It says here that a handful of sufferers live into their sixties.’

  ‘What kind of a life is that?’

  Tears filled her eyes at the memory, and she rested her head on the bed next to her son’s sleeping form. She longed for the uncomplicated days when she spent her time looking after Jakey and resenting Erdman. She wanted her old life back, with all its imperfections and frustrations. She wanted to be a mother and wife. Now she might never have the chance. The foundations of her marriage were weak, unstable. Her son was dying.

  And then his mouth began to move.

  ‘Daddy,’ he murmured. ‘Daddy.’

  Her heart swelled with an unexpected sort of hope. Jakey had a breathing tube going through his nose into windpipe. Physically, he shouldn’t be able speak.

  ‘Nurse,’ she shouted. ‘Nurse.’

  Footsteps slapped across the floor of PICU. ‘What’s happened?’ said the nurse, panting slightly. ‘The alarm didn’t go off.’

  ‘He was talking,’ said Lilith.

  The nurse, a ward manager called Anna Murphy, looked at Jakey. His eyes were shut, his breathing wheezy but even.

  ‘Do you think that perhaps he may have been grunting in his sleep?’

  Lilith was suddenly unable to speak.

  ‘It can happen occasionally,’ said the nurse. She checked the monitors measuring his pulse, the levels of oxygen in his blood, and squeezed Lilith’s shoulder.

  The nurs
e arranged the sheet over Jakey.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of good news, actually. The doc says I can tell you.’ Her face broke into a smile. ‘The results of the second X-ray have come back, and it seems as if the bone growth in his chest isn’t as invasive as we feared. If it stops growing, stops pushing into his lungs, and if we kick this blasted pneumonia . . .’ She left the fact of his recovery unspoken, but Lilith heard it. ‘There are no promises, mind. There’s still a long road to travel.’

  Lilith grinned faintly. Was it in relief or disbelief? She wasn’t quite sure. The nurse squeezed her shoulder a second time, and was gone.

  Her back throbbed again, and she stood, slipping on the flip-flops she had tucked beneath the chair.

  She hadn’t imagined it. Jakey had been calling for his father.

  He must have been dreaming.

  Now Jakey’s nurse had left, the room was empty, apart from the sleeping patients, and one or two parents, also asleep, and she blinked as she stepped into the corridor, disoriented by the sudden brightness. There was a whiteboard on the wall with Jakey’s name written in green marker pen, the times of his obs, his next medication.

  The cool air of the parents’ bathroom was a relief from the stultifying heat of the unit. The cleaner nodded at her as he left, pushing his mop in front of him. She splashed her face with water to wake herself up, and looked at her reflection. A ghost stared back. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying and lack of sleep, and their fan of fine lines had deepened into grooves. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten properly, and her clavicles were prominent above the scooped neckline of her cotton top.

  She braced her hands on the sides of the sink, and closed her eyes, letting the tears fall against the porcelain. They trickled into her mouth and she tasted anchovy saltiness.

  She looked at her pale fingers gripping the white porcelain, and took a deep breath. Jakey was going to die before her. On some instinctive level, she knew that. But he was still alive, and she had no choice but to build a citadel around her emotions to protect him from the force of her grief.

  She washed her hands. Toilet paper was sticking to the floor, and she could smell urine beneath the disinfectant. Lilith sat on the toilet seat, and stared at the blank, hard tiles on the wall. Minutes ticked by.

  A sudden waft of cold air filled the cubicle, and she turned, half-thinking a window had broken free from its catch, that it had swung open to let in the frozen night, but there was no window, just a wheezing vent. An overwhelming sensation to get back to her son gripped her, and before she registered what she was doing, she was out of the stalls, running towards the ward, stumbling over her flip-flops in her haste to get to him.

  Please, no. No, no, no.

  A team of medical staff (was that a senior house officer? She didn’t want a fucking SHO, only a paediatric respiratory specialist) was clustered around his bed. To Lilith, it seemed as if their arms were flailing all over the place, without direction or success. Jakey’s pillow was on the floor.

  Please God. Let him live.

  She knew she shouldn’t go to his bed, that it would only distract the medics who were focused on bringing him back, but she could not help herself.

  As she ran towards them, their movements seemed to slow down and there were so many bodies around his tiny one that she could not see him.

  She could not see him.

  A nurse grabbed her by the arm – ease up on the pressure, bitch – and then she was being propelled along a corridor, into a room, and told to wait.

  But she knew. She knew even before she had gone to the bathroom. She had seen it written in the architecture of his body; in the limpness of his arms, the pallor of his cheeks.

  Only half an hour, but in that time, Lilith aged a decade. Fear tightened the muscles around her mouth, hunched her shoulders. She thought how fear had reduced Clara Foyle’s father to a husk of a man, how the disappearance of his daughter – how suspicion – had rinsed him of all colour, and she understood how that could be.

  Erdman was ushered in, jaw taut, nerves stretched wire-thin. ‘What’s going on?’ he whispered. And she had looked at him, and his body had deflated, as if air was slowly seeping from a pinhole.

  A junior doctor came to tell them, not even the consultant, but a junior doctor. It said so on his badge. The tremor in his hands triggered a flash of insight. This was his first time breaking bad news to parents.

  She watched his mouth as he spoke. There was a smattering of stubble on a jaw soft with youth. It hadn’t hardened into experience yet. Today was one of the steps in that particular journey.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Frith—’ His voice was scorched with tiredness and emotion, and there was a hesitancy to it. She almost felt sorry for him.

  She dipped her head in acknowledgement but didn’t trust herself to speak. He couldn’t meet her eye, and the words, when they came, were a mumble.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m afraid we’ve lost your son.’

  A ball of anger seemed to catch in the pit of her stomach, and her hands tightened into fists. If the doctor hadn’t been so young, she might have thrown her bottle at him, but instead she let it drop to the floor. She hadn’t put the lid on properly, and water gushed in rivulets across the relatives’ room, like the day that Jakey was born, almost two weeks late, and the doctor broke her amniotic sac with a hook. She remembered the matter-of-fact way he had put on a glove and torn a hole in the very thing protecting her baby. Now here was another doctor, tearing a hole in her heart.

  ‘Wha—’ She made a sound as convention dictates when one is in the middle of a conversation. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, it was just a collection of vowels and consonants that came out of her mouth.

  The doctor misunderstood her.

  ‘The police are on their way.’

  He shifted awkwardly and fiddled with a button on his white coat. She wondered whether his mother or girlfriend washed it for him, or if he did it himself.

  I’ll never get to wash Jakey’s clothes again.

  A tunnel of emptiness yawned before her.

  Oh my God, there’ll be a post-mortem.

  She’d seen a TV programme on post-mortems. They sawed through the ribcage and cut open the skull. They couldn’t desecrate her little boy like that. She wouldn’t let those bloody butchers anywhere near him.

  Erdman said nothing, just stared blankly at the doctor. She would have gone to him, if she could. But her legs didn’t appear to be working.

  A nurse came in, wringing her hands, and she saw it was Anna Murphy, the PICU manager who had checked on Jakey earlier.

  ‘Mrs Frith, Mr Frith, I’m so sorry about this . . .’

  ‘I . . .’ Lilith hesitated, suddenly unsure of what to say. A rolling wave of grief hit again, and she swallowed down a mouthful of snot and tears, not caring if anyone saw her wipe her nose on the cuff of her cardigan.

  Tears trickled from beneath her lids. Once she had said a last goodbye to Jakey, once she had held his hand and kissed the soft petals of his eyes, once she had fulfilled her necessary duties, she would find a bottle of pills and she would go to sleep for a long time.

  Erdman continued to stare at the young doctor, who fiddled with his biro and could not meet his gaze.

  The nurse was now chewing her lip, and shooting worried glances at them. Lilith took a shuddering breath. Of course Jakey was going to die before she did, but she had never expected it to be so soon, and in such heartbreaking circumstances.

  How to tell people? His school? His friends? Those terrible phone calls would make his death a reality in this horrific new dreamscape of her life.

  The nurse touched her arm, and Lilith rose.

  ‘I want to see him,’ she whispered. ‘He’s frightened of the dark. He won’t even go to the toilet on his own.’ She turned towards the nurse, trying to muster a watery grin, but the expression on the nurse’s face stopped her. ‘What is it?’

  Nurse Murphy opened her
mouth, and then shut it again. She looked at the junior doctor, and he lowered his eyes. When the nurse spoke, it seemed like it was an enormous physical effort.

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve quite understood.’

  Erdman spoke for the first time. ‘Understood what?’

  ‘I’m so sorry to be the one to break it you, but I don’t believe in beating about the bush.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Jakey is missing. As far as I can gather, he disappeared from PICU between forty and fifty minutes ago. We’re in the process of checking everywhere in the hospital, but, as it stands, we cannot locate him. We will find him, Mr and Mrs Frith. Seriously ill children don’t just vanish. But this is mortifying and embarrassing for the hospital, and in all my years of nursing—’ She stopped suddenly, a mottled blush climbing her throat.

  ‘He’s not dead?’ Lilith sucked at the air and let it fill her lungs. Held it there. The nurse gave a brisk nod. Lilith let her breath go.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Jakey was just here. Someone must have taken him for another scan while I was in the toilet.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’ Nurse Murphy softened her voice. ‘We’ve already checked.’

  ‘Let me get this absolutely clear,’ Erdman said slowly. ‘You’re telling me that our son has vanished?’

  The nurse looked him straight in the eye. ‘Yes, Mr Frith. I’m afraid that does appear to be the case.’

  Lilith took a step forward, but her knees buckled and then she was pitching straight towards the floor. The young doctor, who had been sidling closer to the door, to his escape route, made a half-hearted lunge and just caught her, his fingers digging into the hollows of her armpits.

  She hadn’t fainted. There was no loss of consciousness, no let-up in the feedback which was screeching in her temples. More a weakening of her limbs, the taken-for-granted gravity which held her upright simply dribbling away. She leaned against him. He smelled of deodorant and peppermints, and an underwash of sweat, and the lapel of his coat was rough against her cheek. The reality of what he represented slammed into her, and then she was snatching at the air for breath, gasping and crying.