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

by Fiona Cummins

  It still looked the same, even after all these years. He fished in his pocket for a small silver key.

  The milk she had drunk would keep her asleep for several hours, but he tied her hands and feet together anyway. He decided against a gag. Experience had shown him that this field would stay deserted now, until spring, at least. And she had to eat, to drink, until he had decided what needed to be done.

  He had piled blankets over the sleeping child, and rested his palm against the damp sofa, the scent of Calor gas and mildew in his nostrils. He knew how cold it could get here, but he’d be back just as soon as he had collected the boy and been to the hospital. It was only an hour’s drive or so.

  He had trudged back to the van then, returning with a suitcase filled with money he had squirrelled away over the years and a plastic carrier bag, stopping briefly to inhale the salted air. He slid the case under the sofa, took a large bottle of water from the bag and unscrewed its lid, slipped a straw into its open neck. Next, he tore open a packet of biscuits. Crumbs confettied the table. He carefully laid out some grapes. She would be able to reach them with her mouth, he was sure.

  Instinct was warning him that the police were pressing in, that he was right to have taken the precaution of moving her.

  Part of him was sorry now, that he hadn’t moved them together. But the risk of transporting both children at once would have been too great. The boy could come later, dead or alive.

  He watched a flock of redwings strip berries from a hedgerow before scattering into empty skies, caught a glimpse, in the distance, of the sea. She would be safe here. No one would find her.

  The daylight was waning as Brian Howley drew the curtains, locked the door behind him, and began his journey back to the city.

  And so, as dusk deepened into night and the darkness filled with a different kind of life, Clara slept on, not yet aware that her mother and father were further from her than ever before.

  78

  11.51 p.m.

  Erdman sat in the empty canteen, watching the hospital staff come and go, helping themselves to a bar of chocolate from the vending machine or a cup of lukewarm coffee. The lights were dimmed, the brushed-steel counters wiped clean in readiness for the breakfast rush. He soaked up the stillness. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. No one noticed a broken father, head in his hands. At the Royal Southern, it was not an unusual sight.

  It was a stupid idea, coming here. He’d nursed this vague notion that he could talk to the nurses, question them about what had happened the night that Jakey disappeared. But, of course, half the staff would be on different shift patterns now, and he felt awkward interrupting them, knowing that they were busy, that the children in intensive care needed their attention more than he did.

  But he couldn’t just sit there. The least he could do was look for Jakey’s stuffed toy. It had become a sort of talisman for him. As if by finding Mr Bunnikins, he would somehow find his son.

  He would go up to PICU, ask the nurses if they had found it, check Jakey’s bedside locker, just to be sure.

  He had no idea that Fitzroy had been searching for him, driven by that ting, that urge to confirm that Brian Howley was the man who’d been following him, to rope the loose threads of her investigation into a net of evidence strong enough to hold him.

  Erdman found the stairs and began the lonely climb to the seventh floor.

  TUESDAY

  79

  12.21 a.m.

  No one pays Brian Howley much heed as he walks softly past the beds, pushing his mop over the mottled blue flooring, an unhurried slosh and sweep.

  If they did notice him, they would see a thin man with badly cut hair and two deep trenches running from his nose to his mouth. A man who looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders; a man who needs a decent meal along with a wash.

  A man who has slipped quietly into work without telling his manager, even though it is his night off.

  Brian has worked the night shift at this hospital for almost forty winters; 1973 seems like a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like no time at all.

  His father had wanted him to take the job. Brandished the newspaper in his face. He had been reluctant, at first, but his father was most insistent. Useful, that was the word he had used. And it was. Especially when it came to selecting their specimens. But Brian has grown to love it, too.

  Forty years has taught him a lot. That the roar of the working day obscures many things, but there is a clarity to the night that suits him. He can listen, and watch.

  And of course, there is Marilyn. Miss Marilyn Grayson. Brian met her in the winter of 1974, and they’d wed six months later. If some days he finds it difficult to reconcile his bed-bound wife with that pretty-eyed girl full of hope, so be it. He is no looker himself, but the thatch of hair and clear skin of his youth had disguised that. Not now, though. Now he is an old man.

  Brian has an important message to convey to Namita Choudray, the senior house officer on the overnight shift in PICU. She must come quickly. Her specialist knowledge in the field of neo-natal head trauma is required on Ariadne Ward.

  At least, that is his cover story. He doesn’t have a message for Namita Choudray. He just wants to visit intensive care again.

  Brian can’t work out who in their right mind would name a children’s ward after the woman in Greek mythology who led Theseus to freedom after he killed the Minotaur, only to be betrayed by the cowardly prince. Surely it makes more sense to call a children’s ward something innocuous, types of trees, perhaps, or fish. Although there is nothing innocuous about a stonefish or the Japanese fugu.

  There is no one on reception when he rings the intercom and waits to be buzzed through. When they aren’t busy saving lives, the nurses tend to cluster around the nurses’ station, for mindless gossip about celebrities no one in the real world gives a toss about. And Monday nights are almost always quiet. When a pale-faced police constable nips out for a toilet break, Brian slips past her, like a leaf carried on the breath of the wind.

  A student nurse in her dove-grey uniform is writing notes on a piece of paper pinned to a clipboard, and doesn’t look up as he walks by. He stifles a cough. Staff are used to frequent comings and goings, and they make it their business to know exactly who is doing the coming and going, but he is in uniform, and anyone curious enough to shoot him a second glance will assume the team of domestics assigned to PICU is short-staffed and he has been seconded to ease the burden.

  The lights have been dimmed, save for the three fluorescent strips that remain on, day or night. The curtains are pulled around three of the six bays. He hears the soft murmur of one mother telling her unresponsive son a story, and the wheezing breath of another child, but most of the kitty cats are sleeping. Time has a habit of bleeding into itself in hospital, and the divisions between seconds and minutes and hours, between night and day even, become indistinguishable.

  His skin is greasy, unwashed, and when he reaches around to scratch his back, his shoulder blade feels as sharp and hard as flint.

  Brian checks his watch. A surreptitious glance at the whiteboard by the nurses’ station tells him that the next round of obs is due at 12.30 a.m. so he has an opening of opportunity, but he needs to act quickly.

  He refastens a press-stud on the bottom of his uniform and slips on one of a pair of white latex gloves. Its powdery feel makes him shiver. He fits the head of his squeegee to his pole, and pushes it towards the bed in the far corner of the ward.

  The curtains, blue and pleated, are half-pulled, giving the illusion of privacy but not delivering it. He is so close he can read the label on them. Treated with Fantex antimicrobial biocidal protection. He thinks of the girl, hidden away. Protecting oneself is very important.

  Police tape surrounds the bed.

  It is quiet now, the children asleep, but he is overwhelmed by sensation. The rattle of machinery, the beep of the alarms, the buzz of the intercom and the smell of stale air mingled with alcohol scrub. He is alert, wa
tchful.

  He puts down his yellow triangle – Caution Wet Floor – and begins to methodically wipe, moving closer to the bed. He isn’t supposed to be here, and half-expects to find himself quizzed by one of the nurses as to why he is cleaning so late. But he remembers the maxim of his father: Present yourself with confidence and you can pull almost anything off. So he squares his shoulders and carries on wiping, as if it is the most natural thing in the world.

  When he is close enough, he glances over his shoulder. The nurses are still talking, their backs to him. The curtains around the other beds remain pulled. No sign of the police officer. He bends, fumbles in his cleaning cart for the cardboard box, and amongst the clean pyjamas and Roald Dahl books in the locker by the side of the boy’s empty bed, he places the set of rabbit bones.

  He shoulders his holdall, and pushes his way through the double doors, straight into the boy’s father.

  He ducks his head, turns his face away. He does not think the man has seen him.

  Brian walks briskly down the corridor, risks a look behind him as he turns the corner, clashes shoulders with one of those dole scroungers Karen Bitchface has just hired.

  ‘Merry Christmas to you too, mate,’ mutters a male voice.

  Christmas is a month away, you stupid fuck, he wants to shout. But now is not the time to draw attention to himself. He takes a deep breath, steps into the lift. Nerves are making him sloppy. And he is close. So close.

  The small, stuffy room on the ground floor of the Royal Southern Hospital is deserted.

  In six hours’ time, stained uniforms will be hastily removed and shoved into rucksacks; boots, woolly hats and bicycle helmets pulled free from battered lockers. The end of a night shift. Time to sleep.

  In six hours’ time, he will be lost amid the general hubbub of shouted farewells and the clanging of metal doors as employees of the hospital, mostly domestics and orderlies, ready themselves to leave.

  But not now. Now it is mid-shift, and there is barely a soul about.

  Condensation collects on the tall sash windows and drips in globules from the ceiling. Frozen air seeps through the cracks in the brickwork and hits the rising wall of heat from cranked-up radiators. A weak moon is climbing.

  Brian is dog-tired, but he cannot rest yet.

  ‘Never look back,’ his father said once, in a rare moment of reflection. They’d been on a beach in a dingy seaside town he’d never been to before, a few miles’ drive from their caravan. He couldn’t remember the name of the place now, just the feeling of being there. Could still hear the synthetic symphony of the arcade machines, the clunk of the coin drop, the waterfall of coppers hitting metal, the smell of them on his hands.

  ‘What do you mean, Dad?’ He had finished his doughnut, savouring its greasy warmth, and was licking the sugar from his lips. Then groped in the paper bag for another.

  ‘Regrets ain’t worth it. You do what you do. Never look back.’

  And he never has. Because even as he curses this place, there is something about it that anchors him. If anyone ever asks him why he is still working, he winks and says it’s because of the nurses. But the truth is, for all the crap thrown his way, being pressed up against brand-new life, bearing witness to the very start of it, renews him.

  But it is time to move on, to find somewhere new. The police are close, he thinks again.

  The shithouse for cripples stinks of piss. Shreds of toilet roll litter the floor. Avoiding the moat around the toilet bowl, he discharges his stream into the turd-coloured water. He quickly removes the soft cotton trousers and pulls his top over his head. Unzipping his bag, he shoves his uniform into the top of the pillow-case holding the confidential medical notes of a handful of patients with varying degrees of bone deformity.

  80

  12.38 a.m.

  Brian Howley was wrong. Erdman had seen him. Or, at least, he had seen the familiar greying hair, the cadaverous frame.

  By the time his body had caught up with his brain, the double doors to PICU were already closing behind him, and Erdman turned, slammed the heel of his hand onto the exit button.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘Come on.’

  The doors dragged themselves open with maddening slowness, and he squeezed his body through the tightest of gaps. His trainers slapped on the hospital floor. He reached the corner, had no idea whether to go left or to carry on running. Scanned the corridors but they were empty.

  The man’s a cleaner.

  At this hospital.

  Jakey was right under his nose.

  Just like my brother.

  Ignoring the fading ache from his week-old injuries, Erdman bolted down seven flights of stairs, to the main reception area. Scanned the drunks, and the victims of domestic rows, and the walking wounded. Caught a flash of hair in the hospital security lights.

  He ran outside, towards the car park.

  An ambulance screamed into a bay at the front of the hospital, obscuring Erdman’s view. He dodged behind it, looking, all the time, for the stranger who was haunting his life. His lungs hurt, every inhalation a reproach.

  A small white car was driving up to the ticket barrier.

  A white car with a familiar driver. Not a grey van at all. Erdman guessed that was parked in a garage somewhere, away from prying eyes.

  He strained for a glimpse of the number plate, for a clue to share with the police. Except Erdman didn’t know much about makes and models and engine sizes. What can you tell us about his vehicle, Mr Frith? Um, the paint was sort of rusty, and there might have been a scratch down one side, but it was kinda dark so it was hard to tell.

  He glimpsed the red blur of tail-lights turning right. Erdman ran to his own car, dropped his keys on the tarmac. By the time he started the engine, the car had driven off.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, knocking his fist against the door.

  The wind was lifting, sending clouds scudding across the sky. He imagined the darkness tightening around him. His son’s life could hang on the decisions he made in this moment.

  He pressed down on the accelerator.

  Erdman caught up with him at the traffic lights in Rushey Green, slid as low as he dared in his seat. What the fuck was he doing? He wasn’t a hero. He had no phone, no means of contacting the police. But he couldn’t let him disappear.

  Let the follower become the followed.

  81

  12.59 a.m.

  The trees were stripped down to their rafters, and a bitter wind exhaled across the sloping landscape of the park. The dark had settled in for the night, turning bushes into indistinct smudges. A moon was rising in the cloudless sky.

  From where she was standing, Fitzroy could just make out the office blocks of Canary Wharf, rising from the ground like monoliths. A plume of steam curled up from One Canada Square, once the tallest building in the City and now surpassed by the Shard. The traffic of the A2 was a distant hum. Even the march of the seasons could not dent Greenwich Park’s beauty.

  She had gone straight from the hospital to the Major Incident Room, but had sat there, feeling pissed off and useless, wondering where the hell Mr Frith was, and mulling over Karen’s words.

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ she’d said when she’d found Fitzroy in the hospital car park, ‘but I wondered if you knew about the house.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d forgotten all about it, but I was sitting in my office, thinking about Brian and how little I knew about him, when I remembered something that happened last year.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Karen’s face had been illuminated in a whitewash of light from a passing car’s headlights. ‘He didn’t turn up to work for three weeks. No explanation, no phone call. Nothing.

  ‘In the end I went to see him. Looked bloody awful, he did. Turned out his father had died. Well, he looked so crushed, I felt sorry for him. I knew his wife was ill, so I offered to help him clean out his father’s place, said I could send a team from the hospital, if he wanted. On the
quiet, mind.’

  Karen’s face tightened. ‘He starting shouting at me, said it was none of my business, that the house was his now, and he would clean it out in his own’ – her nose wrinkled in distaste – ‘cunting time.’ She had tutted. ‘He hardly spoke to me for months after that.’

  His father’s house.

  A perfect place to hide things that needed to stay hidden.

  Using Howley’s date of birth from his personnel file at the hospital, Fitzroy had scrolled through the database containing birth records and found his father’s name. From there, it had been easy to trace an address for Marshall Howley on the electoral roll. Being Fitzroy, she also ran a credit check through Experian, searching for Brian Howley’s previous addresses.

  There was only one. They matched.

  Her instincts sang to her, the orchestra in her synapses striking up its overture. She had to rule it out. For her own peace of mind, if nothing else.

  Telling no one, she had slipped out of the office five minutes later.

  Fitzroy began to run again. It was so dark she could barely see anything, except the soft explosions of her breath hitting the air.

  She should call it in. She should. But The Boss had made his feelings clear, and he would pull her off the job. Karen was right, it was probably nothing. If she was quick, she could check it out, and still be back in time to interrogate Howley.

  Her coat was damp and heavy, her skin chilled by the wind’s cruelty. She thought she sensed movement behind her and turned sharply, but all she could see was the moon’s glow as it seeped between the gauze of the trees, illuminating branches shaped like capillaries.

  She gazed into the distance, across the sprawling lights of the City.

  No one would judge her if she walked away now. She could start a new life. As a florist. Or a librarian.