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

by Fiona Cummins

  ‘Yesss.’ He wobbles his front tooth with his tongue, eyes him warily. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. But you must be quiet. If you make even the tiniest noise, I’m afraid I won’t be able to take you to Mummy. Is that clear?’

  He might as well have tapped him on the forehead and set him bobbing.

  ‘I will, I will, I will.’

  ‘Good. Have you got everything?’

  It amuses him, to offer this simple courtesy, as if the boy is a house guest preparing to leave.

  He looks uncertain. ‘My blanket from the hospital—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, son.’ Dissolved in acid three days ago, in the cutting room in the cellar, but he need not know minor details like that.

  The boy peers up at him from under his lashes, his beautiful bones visible through the thin cotton of his pyjamas. The image of them stripped of their skin excites him.

  ‘Let’s wrap this around you,’ he says, and places an old rug across his shoulders.

  The boy stands quietly, awaiting further instruction. Unsure, yes, but Brian smells excitement emanating from him, just like he can smell his fear. Pheromones. He likes that word, likes the feel of it on his tongue.

  ‘Remember what I said about being quiet,’ he warns, and carries him down the stairs.

  He stands there for a moment, listening hard to the silence. Most of the neighbours will be asleep, but there is bound to be the odd insomniac. Don’t get sloppy, Brian. Even the car with the idling engine has gone quiet.

  He opens the side door to the garage, and, as quietly as possible, slides back the doors of the van. He winces at the scrape of metal on metal, then jerks his head.

  ‘Get in.’

  The boy turns to him, his eyes telling him that he absolutely does not want to climb into that dark, cramped place, but his mouth won’t move.

  ‘Get in or you won’t see Mummy.’

  The boy makes a small sound, but he clumsily places his knee onto the van’s bumper and hauls himself in. With the full weight of his body, Brian shoves hard, and Jakey lurches forward, gouging his forehead on the metal point of a toolbox. He begins to wail, his siren-like cries growing louder and louder. He wrenches the doors shut, muffling the sound.

  Brian scans the street through a small window in the main garage door. Still quiet, but at number 28, a light is now pressing against a frosted glass upstairs window. He gets into the van and starts the engine. The boy is crying, but the thrum of the engine drowns him out.

  He climbs out of the van again, to shut the internal door leading into his father’s house.

  Brian has watched with interest the newspaper headlines, the unstitching of the families under the world’s gaze, the growing agitation of the police. The hysteria over three missing children had heightened his enjoyment.

  But this is the climax, the moment he has spent most of his life waiting for.

  He had longed for the twin brothers to be reunited.

  But this will be better.

  Uncle and nephew.

  Almost as good as father and son.

  And then something catches his eye.

  91

  3.22 a.m.

  Fitzroy had been lying in an alcove, hidden behind a curtain. After Erdman had pushed her to safety, she had crawled further into the gap, some instinct for self-preservation propelling her onwards. Then she had crawled out again. Dragged herself up the wall until she was standing.

  Her blood still marked the floor, the boy skeleton, bones twisted in silent censure, still encased in glass. Imprisoned in death as well as life.

  Then she had heard Howley’s footsteps moving above her head.

  She hoped Erdman had the sense to stay hidden.

  Fitzroy’s breath had come fast and ragged. She’d inhaled, used the brief silence to listen to the darkness. Perhaps she should make a run for it. Every nerve ending, every instinct she possessed, was shrieking at her to get out. If he found out that she was still alive, he would kill her. But that would mean abandoning them. And Erdman. She wasn’t about to do that.

  She had slipped from behind the curtain, headed towards the cellar door. Down the steps she had gone, to a vision of Hell, pungent with death and putrefaction. The rotting-meat smell that pervaded the house was much stronger here, and she’d gagged and stepped backwards, tripping over something that clattered like dry bones. She could hear a clicking sound. Saw bottles of embalming fluid. Tools of torture. A child’s purse.

  Vomit had coated the back of her throat.

  A want so intense filled her up. She would find Jakey and Clara. She must. But where had he hidden them?

  Fitzroy was paralysed by indecision. But indecision was the province of the weak, the enemy of action. It snatched time. It stole lives. And yet. A slowing down was sometimes needed, a sense of measure, of caution.

  Memory pulled at her.

  After taking Grace’s mother on her lonely pilgrimage to the woods, she had guided Conchita Rodríguez, shell-shocked and dull-eyed, to a bench inside the station.

  ‘Stay there,’ she had whispered to the older woman. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Fitzroy had pounded up the stairs, ignoring the startled looks from her colleagues, to search the computer for an address.

  Once she had dropped Mrs Rodríguez home, waited for her friend to arrive, she had parked her car further up the road, and run the couple of streets to his flat.

  He had been walking up the path, his back to her, and she had pulled out her old baton, from her days as a uniform, and hit him, hard, across the back of his neck.

  The man had folded to the grass, his eyelids fluttering.

  For Fitzroy, it was not enough. She stood over him, hitting his arms, his stomach, anything she could reach, and there was a purity to it that cleansed her.

  Only when a neighbour had come running into the garden did she stop.

  And so it had begun.

  The investigation, the media frenzy, the bitter taste of failure.

  A mother still searching for her daughter’s body, for a chance to say goodbye.

  Tonight, she would seek vengeance of a different kind. On the floor was a boning knife, and she picked it up.

  Fitzroy climbed slowly back up the cellar steps, holding the blade in front of her. She listened for the sound of his footsteps. Was he still upstairs? Or had he slipped back down while she was searching his underground charnel house? A light bulb flickered.

  Then a voice.

  ‘There was a little girl,

  Who had a little curl,

  Right in the middle of her forehead.

  When she was good,

  She was very, very good.

  And when she was bad,

  She was horrid.’

  Brian Howley’s voice was a sing-song taunt as he watched her from the shadow of a side door, a claw hammer dangling from his hand.

  ‘Is this going to take long?’ His grin was sly. ‘It’s just that the Bone Collector is in the middle of something.’

  The Bone Collector. So her theory had been right.

  Blood smeared his face, like a scar, and he was limping towards her, his cheeks hollower than usual, like the flesh was being suctioned from the inside. His skin looked desiccated, as if a gentle tap would be enough to send him flaking to the floor in a pile of dust and dead cells.

  The Bone Collector’s black eyes were a mesmerizing pool, drawing Fitzroy in like a fish on a hook. There was something familiar in them, but a darkness too, a shadow in his challenging stare, and that was enough to shake her loose from their hypnotic pull, and remember the task she had set herself.

  ‘Where are they? she said.

  A buzzing sound. A loud pop. A shower of sparks.

  The smell of smoke.

  The Bone Collector’s nostrils flared as he sniffed at the air. A thin arm reached for her, and as his fingers closed over her wrist, a drenching cold unsteadied her. She fought against the urge to sit down. If she did that now, all would be lost. She fo
rced herself to concentrate on the idea of warmth. Long-ago summer holidays in France. The heat of the sun on her skin, the shadow of Mont Blanc. No, don’t think of the mountain in all its snow-capped majesty. Forget the cool dip of the valley and the creeping chill of night. Think of the midday burn, the sear of its rays on her face, the clouds of dry dust churned up by passing cars. Think of the forests on fire.

  Fire. The word flickered in her mind.

  And in the corner of the room, flames began to lick the staircase, grabbing hold of its spindles, rapidly travelling the length of the bannister, catching the varnished wood. Up and up they rose, until the paint on the ceiling began to blacken and split.

  The Bone Collector tightened his grip.

  Then he lifted his hammer and hit her in the mouth with as much force as he could muster. He enjoyed the soft, wet sound it made.

  Fitzroy crumpled, a concertina, her front teeth scattering the ground like leaves.

  Behind him, Erdman slipped from his hiding place beneath the stairs.

  The fire was spreading rapidly now, catching the mahogany cabinets and the wooden panels at the foot of the staircase, licking the cellar door.

  The Bone Collector lunged towards his collection, but the heat forced him back.

  He let out a cry of anguish.

  The wall of heat was beginning to singe the fine hairs on Fitzroy’s face. The heat and smoke would overcome her if the pain in the bloody pulp of her mouth did not. She struggled to sit, eyes signalling at Erdman to go back to his hiding place, to stay away from this killer, this thief of bones.

  But Erdman was not looking at the detective. He was looking at the glass case containing the skeleton marked ‘C’.

  The Bone Collector followed her eyes. Turned. Smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘A family reunion.’

  Erdman murmured a promise of freedom to the brother he had loved and longed for all of his life, and shoved as hard as he could.

  A scraping sound, the sound of glass dragging against the surface of wood.

  Then the display case was tipping.

  Falling.

  Splinters of glass showered the boy’s distorted bones like stars.

  ‘Now, why did you have to go and do that?’ said the Bone Collector, and took a step towards him.

  The blood in Erdman’s veins pumped faster and faster until he thought his heart might stop.

  As the man drew closer, and Erdman breathed in his stink, a coldness took root inside him. He had smelled it before, when Lilith had thrown away some out-of-date chicken, but forgotten to empty the bin. The country had enjoyed an unexpected heatwave, and when they came back from their holiday, the kitchen reeked of spoiled meat. It had taken days to get rid of it.

  Erdman couldn’t speak, couldn’t seem to form the shapes of the letters in his mouth.

  The Bone Collector raised the hammer in his hand.

  Erdman lunged, and felt, through the shards of glass and the rising wall of heat, for the twisted skeleton of Carlton Frith. For the briefest of moments, he cradled his brother and then held him high above his head.

  ‘Where is my son?’

  The Bone Collector laughed.

  Erdman threw the young boy’s remains into the flames.

  ‘NO,’ shouted the Bone Collector, scrabbling towards the heap of bones, which had landed in the centre of the blaze, dark eyes flashing with fury.

  He dropped his hammer and reached into the fire.

  Erdman ran towards Fitzroy, half-dragged her away from the spreading blaze. Her eyes were closed. The Bone Collector looked back towards the cellar and grinned.

  Through the cracks in the door, a cavalcade of undulating blackness swarmed the hallway, driven out by the heat warming up the bricks of the house.

  Erdman recoiled as the sea of beetles advanced towards them, thousands of tiny pincers seeking out dead or decaying flesh, the amplification of their movement creating a low-level hum.

  They were pouring in now, carpeting the floor, three or four bodies deep. This veil of darkness pressed down on him, paralysing him.

  The Bone Collector lifted a shiny shoe and stamped on Fitzroy’s abdomen and now the fire was inside her as well as out. She fell forward, her face in a mass of insects, crawling inside the mess of her nose, her ears, seeking their own escape from the rising heat.

  Erdman grabbed her wrists, dragged her from the beetles, flicking their tiny black bodies from her face, from his own arms.

  ‘I have to find Jakey,’ he shouted above the roar of the flames. And then he started back towards the staircase, towards the certainty of his own death.

  A piece of burning wood fell from the ceiling and struck the Bone Collector’s shoulder. He slapped at the collar of his jacket, at the hair at the nape of his neck, his arms as frantic as a hummingbird’s wings.

  It was enough.

  On her knees, Fitzroy tried to crawl back towards Erdman, through the beetles and the intensifying heat. Her jaw was almost certainly broken, but even that was not as painful as the knowledge that his victims might still be inside, that even now their young bodies might be burning, and there was nothing to be done. That if she had told The Boss she was coming here, lives might have been saved.

  Her heart hurt at the desecration of the evidence that would help them identify the lost and the missing through the years. The bodies stolen from the hospital’s Chapel of Rest. Grace Rodríguez.

  But another, quieter voice, calmed her.

  For the victims, strung up and displayed to fuel his sick appetites, this was a cremation, of sorts. An honourable farewell.

  In the distance, Fitzroy heard the drone of a fire engine, the blare of sirens. A sense of déjà vu washed over her. She lay down on the floor, blistering heat at her heels.

  Behind her, the door to the garage slammed.

  Then the sound of boots kicking against the front door, the tantalizing smell of fresh air and rain and freedom, and The Boss was helping her to her feet, and she was coughing, and saying Erdman’s name over and over again.

  And all the while, burning rain fell upon the House of the Dead.

  92

  3.31 a.m.

  He wants to stay and watch the detective burn, fear spreading across her features like a port-wine stain. But he has no choice. He must leave.

  Fuck. His hands are marked with blisters, but he ignores the pain. Smoke is in his throat and he coughs. Fuck. In a few minutes, his father’s house will be destroyed. His precious collection, gone.

  A black hole opens up inside him, and then he’s around the back of the van, sliding open the doors. The boy is lying prostate on the floor, and he pulls out his scalpel. The boy’s eyes watch him, but the Bone Collector knows this is not the moment. That will come later. A dirty rag will do for now, and he places it in the boy’s mouth, ties the ends together so the gag bites into his cheeks.

  His pyjamas have slid down, and he sees the white glare of his backside. He yanks them up. It isn’t right, an old man like him, looking at a young boy’s bottom.

  The boy is still, but he is listening, he can see it in his heaving shoulders, the rise and fall of his chest.

  ‘Can. You. Hear. Me?’ he says. He doesn’t reply. Kids, eh? What can you do?

  But they must leave before the police find them and the whole place comes down.

  His fingers are slippery with sweat and he wipes them on his trousers. Hears the boy mumble something.

  ‘What’s that?’ he says. ‘What did you say?’

  The cold in the garage is making his hip burn, and his burns sting. He pulls out the gag, puts his ear close to the boy’s mouth.

  His breath is a white whisper. ‘I want my Mummy.’

  The flat of his hand stings the boy’s cheek.

  He shoves the gag back in, damp with spittle and fear, and limps back around to the front of the van.

  The sounds of his own panting fill his ears, and he pauses, drawing in deep lungfuls of air. He is fired up, alert, the adr
enaline doing its job, but his body isn’t as young as it once was.

  The noise of his breathing recedes, and that’s when he hears it. The unmistakable sound of footsteps scuffing the garage’s concrete floor.

  Brian freezes, holds his breath, but the sound of his own blood pumping around his head is too loud, and he lets it go with a whoosh.

  There it is again. He spins around, his fingers closing around the scalpel in his jacket pocket, heart beating faster now.

  During his sixty-seven years on this earth, Brian has seen many things. The ruined bodies of the corpses he has stolen, the shadows of death at the edges of his life. His father trained him to see it all, to feel his way around the jagged contours of other people’s truths and insert himself into their stories without becoming a suspect.

  He hasn’t seen this, though.

  In a patch of moonlight leaking through the square of the garage window is Erdman Frith. In his hand is the Bone Collector’s hammer.

  In an ordinary London street, on a lonely November night, Brian sees his past and future collide.

  It is something he has always feared, and he senses its inevitability, as surely as darkness follows dusk.

  A gust of wind sends the moon back behind her clouds. When he looks again, Erdman is gone.

  Then he feels an explosion of pain at the back of his head.

  He staggers against the van, raises a disbelieving hand to the wound, hears the distant cry of voices, moving closer and closer. There’s smoke in his nostrils, the bob of a flashlight outside the garage, like a will-o’-the wisp. There is no point in running.

  His fingers close around the scalpel in his pocket.

  When the father comes at him again, he will be ready.

  93

  3.33 a.m.

  Erdman had never hit a man before. But he had heard a child’s cry that sounded just like his son. Jakey was in that van, and he had to get to him, before the smoke curling under the door filled up the garage and the house collapsed around them.

  He had swung the hammer wildly, and it had somehow connected. But the Bone Collector was not lying on the floor. He was moving back towards the doors of the van. To Jakey.