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

by Fiona Cummins

  Behind her, Davenport was laughing.

  ‘Gets ’em every time,’ he said. He grabbed the bird by its tail, and drew its body back along the wire and pulley system Fitzroy could now see above her. ‘It’s triggered when the door opens.’

  The fox was still snarling, still watching. It hadn’t moved.

  ‘They’re stuffed,’ said Fitzroy, heat staining her cheeks.

  ‘That’s right. This beauty here is a bird of paradise, and old Foxy is the first one I stuffed. He’s looking a bit threadbare these days, but I still love ’im. I like to think of it as me own little collection.’

  Fitzroy considered Davenport’s beer belly and tattoos. Sometimes, she thought, you just can’t tell. Slightly calmer now, she noticed dozens of eyes following her. A mouse climbing the telephone cable. The outspread wings of the magpie balanced on the back of a chair.

  The proud ears of a rabbit.

  ‘Right, let’s have a look in me book,’ he said, rummaging in a drawer.

  ‘Where do you keep your beetles?’ Fitzroy kept her voice light, her eyes fixed on the soft fur of the mammal.

  ‘Over there.’ He waved an arm in the vague direction of a doorway. ‘Don’t take the lids off.’

  The room was quiet and dark, warm, but not hot. The curtains were drawn. Seven or eight large fish tanks rested on a couple of tables, the only furniture in the room. Inside the aquariums were thousands and thousands of tiny black beetles, feeding on the remains of mice and rabbits.

  She risked a quick glance behind her. Davenport was still rooting around. She heard the hollow echo of pencils rolling around the wooden drawer, the clink of spare coppers knocking together.

  The beetles. The rabbit. Could it possibly be Davenport? Was he somehow involved?

  She was suddenly aware of her own vulnerability, her foolishness at coming here alone.

  A sickening, meaty smell filled her nostrils, one she recognized from the most horrific of crime scenes. From the mortuary slab.

  Decomposing flesh.

  A movement behind her. Above the scent of death, Fitzroy could smell beery air. Davenport placed his hand in the dip of her spine, and dangled the mangled remains of something in front of her, pale pink and slippery.

  Fitzroy recoiled from it, and Davenport laughed again. It was a cruel sound.

  He lifted the lid off the nearest aquarium and dropped it in.

  ‘Takeaway’s here, lads,’ he said, wiping his hand on his T-shirt.

  His other hand found its way to Fitzroy’s back again, pressing lightly against the fabric of her coat. She resisted the impulse to shake him off. Not before she’d got what she’d come for.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘You were looking for your book.’

  ‘Ah, that was it.’

  Davenport drew the tattered notebook from the waistband of his jogging bottoms, where he’d stuck it when he’d found it in the drawer. He flicked through dozens of pages filled with scribbled pencil notes.

  ‘I know it’s in here somewhere.’

  He stopped at a page near the back.

  ‘So, yeah, I found the ole geezer I was telling yer about. I ain’t got his number no more, ’cos me ex-wife borrowed me phone and dropped it in a glass of wine, silly cow, and those spotty-faced bozos at the phone shop couldn’t get me contacts back, but I did write something down.’

  He grinned hopefully at her.

  Fitzroy took in his absurd stomach, his balding head, the ladybird tattoo on his arm and suddenly Davenport seemed less of a sinister presence, and more one of ridicule. She could quite understand how his wife was now his ex-wife, but, at his next words, even she was tempted to kiss him.

  He waved his notebook at her. ‘It ain’t much, but it’s always helpful to know who’s buying what, in case yer can tempt ’em with another order. I was right. I dunno his name, but he did tell me he works for a museum.’

  66

  9.18 p.m.

  His hands tremble as he warms the milk in the pan, pours it into her favourite mug. She is still jittery. He does not blame her. So is he.

  She calls his name again, insistent, querulous, and he is back in the now of that moment. It’s yesterday teatime, and he is arriving home to shining windows in every room, fear biting into him.

  In less than a minute, he weighs up the risk.

  The windows are lit, which means someone is there. But who? The police? Has he pushed his luck too far?

  Or has something awful happened to her?

  His blood pumps through his arteries, his veins. His lips are cracked and dry. He moistens them with his tongue. There are no cars, though. No flashing blue lights. He starts up the path, his mind whirring through possibilities. But he cannot abandon her.

  The fear of discovery drags him down, and he fumbles with the lock. In the face of opposition, Hunter and Howison stayed true to their beliefs, their methods. And so will he.

  ‘Is that you?’ Her voice is shrill.

  His heart swells in his chest. He hangs his jacket on the peg, puts down his bag, and begins to untie his shoes.

  ‘Is that you?’ she calls again, and he hears a rising tide of panic in her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Come quickly.’

  He lines up his shoes, and goes straight to her bedroom, but his eyes are deceiving him, playing cruel tricks. The bed is empty, the covers thrown back. He hears the whump whump echo of blood in his ears.

  ‘Where are you, my love?’ He forces his voice to stay calm.

  ‘The kitchen. Come quickly. Please.’

  She is sitting, hunched, at the table, her face almost touching the sunflower oilcloth, her stick propped against the chair. A thin nightdress covers her body, and she has managed to reach her dressing gown. It is two years or more since she has ventured from her room, and the curve of her spine snatches his breath.

  He remembers the first time he saw her, smiling up at him from her hospital bed. Before her deformity claimed her completely.

  There is something on the table in front of her. He closes his eyes, steadies his heart.

  Her face is wet with tears, and her thumb circles the sleeve of her robe, over and over, like she’s trying to rub out the stain of what she has seen.

  ‘I’m next,’ she whispers. ‘I’m going to be next.’

  ‘No,’ he soothes. ‘No, no, my love. No.’

  ‘I knocked my drink on the floor. I was so thirsty, and I didn’t know when you’d be back.’ He lets her know he forgives the reproach by stroking her arm. Her fragile body is shaking. ‘I found it, by the sink. Just now, just lying there, it was.’ Her voice rises again. ‘You heard what they said on the radio. It’s his calling card. I’m going to be next.’

  She lifts her glass to her lips. The surface of the water is disturbed by her trembling hands.

  ‘I don’t know how he got in, I turned on all the lights down here, but—’ She looks up, falls into his eyes. ‘We should call the police,’ she mutters.

  Pale meat still clings to the rabbit’s skeleton, ragged lumps of its skin. He wonders if the blowflies have laid their eggs yet. If there’s death, they’ll find it. He should never have brought it here. But he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone for any longer, had planned to finish skinning it while she slept, before taking it back to his father’s house for his colony to feed on.

  But now this. He knows she is like a dog with a bone. She will not let it rest.

  ‘Probably just local kids,’ he says, ‘having a laugh. They know you’re here on your own. See, it’s not even a skeleton, the meat’s still on the bone. Someone’s having a joke at your expense. A not very funny one.’

  The milk has cooled now, and he tips in the crushed remains of the pills. If he does not hurry, he will be late for his shift tonight. He carries the mug through to his wife, places it by her bed.

  He takes her shaking hands in his own, strokes the yellowing skin, the gnarled nails. He begins
to talk to her, calms her, until her breath is even and the colour is back in her cheeks.

  He stirs the drink, lifts it to her lips.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ he murmurs. ‘Leave everything to me.’

  67

  10 p.m.

  ‘Please, Etta. You can’t ignore us forever.’ The thin wail of a baby in the background. ‘Oh God, he’s crying again. Look, I have to go. Ring me, please.’

  68

  10.30 p.m.

  ‘John Hunter was a surgeon, lived in the seventeen-hundreds,’ said DC Chambers, leaning back in his chair and stretching both arms above his head. ‘Says here, he was born in Scotland but lived in London. Served as Royal Surgeon to King George.’ He peered closely at the screen. ‘A distinguished anatomist, he carried out dissections on bodies stolen from graves by his assistant Howison, and collected loads of weird shit.’

  Fitzroy tore off a nail with her teeth. ‘What, it actually says “weird shit”?’

  ‘Hunter was married and kept a collection of living animals so he could study their anatomy. Some people even donated their bodies to him, post-mortem, in the interests of medical science. He was profoundly influential in his day.’

  ‘I don’t think we need to look very far to see that he’s still having an influence.’

  Fitzroy closed her eyes, imagined keeping them closed. Sleep lured her. But Clara and Jakey were out there. Were they alive? Truth be told, she didn’t think so. But she badly wanted answers for their families. For Conchita Rodríguez. Wouldn’t sleep until she got them. But those answers eluded her, darting along her neural pathways in a dozen different directions instead of contributing to the more intimate communications between her little grey cells.

  The hours, the days, were passing by with terrifying speed. All of them – the families and the police – knew that the chance of a happy outcome was trickling through their fingers like water.

  The faces of the abducted haunted her.

  ‘I need some air,’ she said.

  London Bridge Tube was Sunday-night quiet. Fitzroy placed her feet on the escalator and allowed herself to climb, to become subsumed by the low thrum of moving metal. Her thoughts settled like dirt in the grooves beneath her feet.

  Three victims. Two of them with bone deformities. But, if that theory was correct, how did Grace fit in? She had no bone disease, no medical issues at all. But the answers remained out of reach and Mrs Rodríguez was still not at home to ask.

  Fitzroy stepped off the escalator, turned left, and rode to the summit again. The station was almost empty now, and she was grateful for it. The handrail moved stickily beneath her hand.

  Three rabbit skeletons. Found at the woods, the Common, the sweet shop. But none yet for Jakey Frith. What did that mean?

  She was certain the cases were connected, but she couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

  Two messages quoting Ezekiel. A rabbit kidney, and two personal letters addressed to her quoting the scientific notes of anatomist John Hunter. But was Davenport right? Did his client – a tall, thin man with greying hair – really work for a museum? And if so, how many of those could there be?

  And then she remembered what Dashiell Hall had told her when she’d emailed him earlier. Fourteen hundred staff worked at the Natural History Museum. It would take months of police work to talk to them all. Months and months. And that was just one museum. What about the British Museum? The Horniman? Then there was the Science Museum. The V&A.

  Off she stepped, back down the escalator again. Fitzroy drew in a troubled breath and blew it out over the heads of a couple of late-night drinkers, who scurried across the concourse below.

  Her eyes rested vaguely on the posters that lined the walls of the station, designed to snag the interest of a captive audience.

  Posters advertising West End shows, and art exhibitions, and Christmas concerts, the fodder of the metropolis. A dancing girl, the smiling face of a singer, a poster of a skull.

  A skull.

  Visit London’s Best-Kept Secret. The Hunterian Museum. In the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  In her mind’s eye, Fitzroy saw the words he had scratched into paper and offered up with the rabbit bones, heard the rise and fall of Chambers’ voice, reading aloud from the book documenting Hunter’s medical notes.

  The words on the poster swam in front of Fitzroy’s eyes, the tinging in her brain as loud and as sweet as a bell.

  MONDAY

  69

  7.31 a.m.

  He has always enjoyed the way that night segues seamlessly into the glory of morning. He visualizes a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up darkness to reveal the winter white of dawn. There is a bite in the air as he makes his way home from work, the streets unfurling into life; dustcarts and milk floats, and a fox slinking slyly behind the bins.

  He is dog-tired. He will fry himself a bacon sarnie when he gets in. Pour a glass of cold milk. If Vishnu has managed to get himself a new paperboy, there might even be a newspaper waiting. Apparently, they’re a bitch to hire these days, banging on about minimum wage and employee rights. When he was a kid, you got what you were given, and were bloody grateful at that.

  There is something special about an unread newspaper. These days everyone is stuck to their iPads, or mobile phone apps, or whatever the hell they are called, barely looking up to make eye contact with the person sitting opposite them. Nothing beats turning those virginal pages. Once his wife has been attended to, he likes to read his paper, the radio on in the background, sipping at the dregs of his drink, perhaps with a digestive or two.

  Same as his father. Always the same as his father.

  Fatigue dogs his footsteps but he pushes on; only a handful of streets to go and he’ll be there. Food, an hour or so’s sleep, and then he’ll head out again.

  This place has changed in the years he has been here, but he has stayed still. He isn’t one of those desperadoes, always wanting to move on to something better. This is something better, as far as he is concerned. He loves his job, the daily human contact, the opportunity. There is a drama to it more compelling than any of those murder mysteries on the telly, and it encapsulates the ebb and flow of life, as constant as the tide, washing up the detritus and the pearls.

  But perhaps the time has come for him to move on.

  At last he is home. The house is silent. It smells of stale food. He trudges up the stairs, and washes his hands, a routine almost as old as he is.

  He flexes his fingers, crooked and misshapen. The cold air is making them ache again, but he is used to it. Another of his father’s legacies.

  Absently, he rubs at them, and memories submerge him.

  He had been down in their basement, and he was eleven, and he had forgotten to wash his hands again. His father had called him up to the kitchen, and he’d found him standing by the table, a smile on his lips, an arm behind his back.

  ‘Sit down.’

  He had sat, an expectant look on his face. Perhaps his father was going to give him some pocket money at last.

  ‘Lay your hand out flat.’

  ‘What for, Dad?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  He had done as his father had ordered, the palm of his hand sticking to the vinyl tablecloth. He was used to his father’s strange behaviour, and a sixth sense warned him it was safer to oblige. His stomach rumbled. He was hungry.

  He was looking at the kitchen clock, wondering if his father would buy chips or make fish-paste sandwiches for tea, when his fingers detonated in a blaze of pain. He screamed, fire shooting up his wrist until the sensation blurred into one pulsating flare of agony.

  A claw hammer dangled from his father’s hand.

  ‘Next time, make sure you wash them. One finger for every time you forget.’

  His father had an obsession with cleanliness.

  He pads through the hallway, into the kitchen and lets himself out of the back door. The shed is unlocked and he scoops up a large handful of pellets, which he carri
es over to the hutch. A warm feeling he identifies as pleasure engulfs him.

  Once the rabbits have eaten, it is his turn.

  Still she has not opened her eyes, so he makes one sandwich and one cup of tea. He enjoys the simple act of preparing his breakfast. He picks up the newspaper. More stories about the missing children. Endless speculation about where they have gone and who might have taken them. When he has finished, he carefully washes his plate and cup, and shuts the kitchen door behind him. He dislikes the smell of grease and the way it clings to his hair and clothes. He changes into an old T-shirt and some baggy joggers which also smell, not of bacon fat, but bedtime fugginess.

  He sets his alarm. There are things that need sorting out. Like the girl. Today, he thinks. Today. But sleep is whispering its seductive song, and before he knows it, he has crawled into bed, and his eyelids are drooping shut.

  He wakes an hour later, refreshed but still tired. No time to sleep, though. No time at all. After a shower, he rifles through his wardrobe and selects his clothes with care. He shuts the front door behind him, and heads out into the cool morning.

  70

  9.54 a.m.

  Fitzroy heard him before she saw him, footsteps slapping across the pavement.

  ‘Got here as fast as I could,’ panted Chambers. ‘All the pool cars were taken so I had to catch the Tube.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you could do with getting reacquainted with the gym,’ said Fitzroy, pushing open the door. ‘Let’s get a move on, they’re expecting us.’

  At the sound of voices in the lobby below, the Hunterian’s Deputy Director appeared at the top of the staircase and hurried down. She was small, dark, with a patterned scarf wound elegantly around her head.

  ‘Professor Hayley Abrahamson,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to my office. We can talk in there.’

  They followed her back up the staircase and through a small door. As she entered, Fitzroy glanced behind her, and glimpsed rows and rows of glass jars with specimens floating inside. She was used to seeing dead body parts, but this gave her an odd feeling, as if they were in a state of suspended animation and might spring to life at any moment.