The Darkness of Bones (13 page)

I
T WAS TIME
to move on, thought Jeremiah, scanning the old newspaper. Judith had been correct—as usual. Time for the shop to close, for good. Besides, his heart was no longer in barbering. The place was losing customers at an alarming rate. Granted, having only one barber was a major factor—people had no patience, nowadays, wanting everything
now
, not in ten to fifteen minutes. But his own behaviour wasn’t helping: the dropping of instruments and the wrong change placed in outstretched hands, his mumbling response to queries concerning Joe.

Jeremiah always suspected that customers liked Joe more than him, preferred his easygoing personality, the jokes he sometimes told, his up-to-the-minute news on sport and politics. Liked him until the rumours began to spread, saying that he had had something to do with the little McTier girl. Now, the shop was tainted, frequented by a few diehard customers, customers who assured Jeremiah that they did not believe the rumours. They knew Joe too well.

He knew that he shouldn’t be thinking about Joe. But
he wasn’t strong; not like Judith. He thought about Joe most days; knew he was destined for hell for what he had allowed to happen—and all because of the boy. Had he left him to freeze to death in the forest, perhaps things would have been different.

Judith had promised to get rid of him, but so far she hadn’t kept her promise. She had always kept her promises, and this also he blamed on the boy. He was beginning to think that she was lying about her intentions—something she had never done before—and once again, he suspected that the boy was behind this.

It was all the fault of the boy. He was a Jonah, a millstone weighing them down. He was everywhere in Jeremiah’s head. Even the newspapers—the sinful rags he had promised never to read—carried articles about him.

‘Latest on murdered gallery owner’, exclaimed Monday’s miniature headline on page four.
“We’ve received some calls and some tips, but unfortunately we haven’t had a significant development on Saturday night’s shooting,” said a spokesperson for the police.

Police believe robbery was the motive, but have not completely ruled out a disgruntled artist. Bizarrely, the one-time and highly decorated detective, Jack Calvert, has been named as a ‘close friend’ of Ms Bryant. Calvert’s son, Adrian, disappeared in mysterious circumstances, almost two weeks ago
…

Highly decorated detective.
The three words made Jeremiah’s stomach do strange little kicks.

He couldn’t wait to close the shop. Once he got home, he would ask—
demand
—that Judith do something about the accursed boy. If she refused, well, he would have no choice other than to—

“Open for business?” asked a man’s voice.

The voice spooked Jeremiah. He hadn’t even heard the door jingle its alert.

“I … I was closing actually,” mumbled Jeremiah, quickly crumpling the newspaper into the wastepaper basket.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I got an unexpected call this evening, from an old flame,” said the man, easing his coat off, much to Jeremiah’s obvious annoyance.

Before Jeremiah could object, the man sat down on the chair.

“Been years since I saw her,” said the man, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Want to look my best. Know what I mean?” The man winked at Jeremiah, annoying him further.

Defeated, Jeremiah began to whisk a tankard of soapy liquid, transforming it magically into foam, before transferring it to the man’s skin.

Cut-throat razor in hand, he quickly attended to the soapy face, allowing the soap to settle but not congeal.

A good barber never allows soap to congeal
was the first rule Grazier had learned, all those years ago, as an apprentice.
If it congeals, it closes the pores; the stubble becomes like nails.

Whetting the razor, Jeremiah skimmed the thin strap of supple Russian leather until the metal gleamed. Expertly, holding the razor with thumb and three fingers, he made a swathe in the air with the lethal blade before commencing on the smooth and unproblematic areas of the man’s face.

The customer looked vaguely familiar, but Jeremiah couldn’t put a name to the face. Too tired even to try. Probably one of those morbid people who had heard about the shop, about Joe. Probably wanted to boast to his friends that he had been to
that
barber’s shop.

With a slight, invisible movement, Jeremiah’s razor removed
the peppered-black soap, leaving the man’s left cheek gleaming reddish pink.

“That was terrible about that little girl, the one they found in the woods,” said the man.

“What?”

“The little girl in the forest, a couple of days ago. Haven’t you heard?” The man looked at himself in the mirror. “Terrible to think what monsters there are lurking in a nice town like this. I’ve always said that it’s not the monsters under the bed we have to worry about, but the ones on top.”

Jeremiah felt his hands shake. He willed them steady.

“I don’t really want to discuss any of that, sir,” said Jeremiah, his voice strangely soft. “It’s an unsavoury topic for the town.”

“Unfortunately, we have no death penalty here. Anyway, I suppose the death penalty is too merciful for a bastard like that,” said the man, ignoring Jeremiah’s words. “I would take the bastard out to the forest and—”

“I don’t much care for your language, sir. I will have to ask you to refrain from swearing in my shop.”

The man looked embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to swear. But every time I think of that cowardly bastard, picking on the weakest members of society, well … my blood just boils something shocking. Probably a weak individual, himself. Women and kids. Good at that. But you put him up against a man and he will shit his pants, every time. He was probably a bully at school, a torturer of dumb animals. I bet that’s how he gets his
real
kicks, having sex with dogs.” The man laughed out loud. It was a bawdy, backstreet laugh. It ground against Jeremiah’s skull.

Gently, Jeremiah rested the razor on the pliable neck of the man, whose protruding Adam’s apple was the size and shape of
a sparrow’s egg.

Just one slice
, whispered a voice in Jeremiah’s head, as his hands began to shake again.
That’s all it would take, and
loud-mouthed
know-it-all will be gone into the night. You can do it. Show Judith you’ve got what it takes.

The man stared at Jeremiah, his eyes now suddenly piercing. He seemed to be reading his mind. The eyes seemed to be daring him.

“Are you okay?” asked the man, breaking Jeremiah’s thoughts.

“What? Yes … of course.” With a slight curve of his elbow, Jeremiah removed all remaining stubble. “That’s you, sir. Hope you’re satisfied with the shave?”

Carefully examining his face, the man ran his hand over the smooth skin.

“Excellent job. I’ll have to come here in future. My old place is being demolished, turned into a café, of all things.”

“There’s a lot of that happening everywhere,” replied Jeremiah, accepting payment in one hand while the other quickly worked the door. “Have a good night, sir. Safe home.”

“Thank you for the excellent shave. You’ll be seeing more of me in the future. That’s a promise,” said Jack Calvert, heading into the night air.

M
EGAN
T
HOMSON KNEW
that she shouldn’t have eaten the trout, freshly caught by her husband, Peter, at the rocky stream. Now she was paying the price, suffering from terrible bouts of diarrhoea, cramps stabbing into her gut like a hot bayonet.

“That damned fish you caught,” she moaned. “I shouldn’t have come on this trip.”

“Stop all the complaining, will you? No one else has said a word about the fish. You simply didn’t want to come with us. You made that plain enough last night, in the tent. Probably thinking of that pathetic loser, Kevin Hamilton.”

Uncomfortable, the other two members of the camping trip looked away from the quarrelling couple.

“You really are making a fool of yourself in front of all your friends—
again
. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just don’t take your sexual inadequacies out on me,” said Megan, feeling her stomach percolate. How long had he known about Kevin? She tried to keep her face impassive.

“When you finally kick the bucket, I’m getting you a
headstone that reads, ‘Here Lies My Adulterous Wife—Cold as Ever!’” Peter smirked at his wit.

“Your headstone will read, ‘Here Lies My Husband—Stiff At Last!’ Now, get out of my way!” shouted Megan, pushing Peter to the side, her bowels on fire, as she headed quickly—for the fourth time in less than two hours—towards the privacy of trees just beyond the campsite.

“Make sure you’re downwind,” laughed Peter, watching her scurry for relief into the trees’ shadows.

Just as Megan thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it began to rain.

“Fuck! I don’t believe this!”

As she moved further inwards, the rain quickened. She was far out in the forest now, and the trail leading back—the opening from which she had emerged—was no longer visible. She saw only a snarled wall of dark bushes and leafless, decaying trees.

“Far enough,” she whispered, removing the wipes from the packaging, as she crouched down, feeling instant relief as the shit flew from her arse. The relief was tremendous.

The weak moon was slowly vanishing behind inky clouds, leaving her limned in its dying light, making her feel uneasy and vulnerable, her confidence ebbing. She had never felt this way before, in all her camping trips, but there was something in how the darkness had suddenly come upon her, like a living, breathing thing. It felt hostile.

Ten minutes later, she stood unsteadily, drained. “Never again,” she vowed. “No more fish. No more fucked-up camping trips.”

Moving cautiously, she edged out of the designated toilet area only to feel something squish beneath her feet, making her
slip, tumble forward and scrape her face on thorny bushes.

“I don’t believe this,” she whispered, disgustedly. “I’ve slipped on my own—” Her voice slowly trailed off when something told her that it wasn’t her own shit, but something else, something more sinister.

“What on earth …?” Everything around her seemed suddenly removed, hardly real, as she stared, zombie-like at the ground. Momentarily, she seemed to be robbed of all breath, as if under water, and felt pain beginning to swell her head. She tried to move, she tried to run, but there was a gap, a delay between the thoughts in her head and screams from her mouth. She began to dry heave.

“Help!” she screamed, over and over again, until her voice was nothing more than a croak. “
Help me
…”

The bodies rested side by side, pressed into the dirt, their exposed throats black with blood, their ribs resembling rusted radiators.

E
ASING FROM THE
vehicle, Jack saw his reflection in the side mirror and he hesitated, held there by his own weary eyes. He looked dead. Six weeks of searching for Adrian had aged him terribly. He felt that at any moment a nervous breakdown could come crashing down upon him, leaving him a drooling fool trapped in dark memories. Worse, it would leave Adrian without hope, and that alone was the spur that forced him not to succumb.

In the encroaching dawn, he reluctantly stood, binoculars tight against his eyes, scanning the vastness of the Graziers’ land, scouting for any additional messages. Unbeknownst to him, less than two miles east and more than four hours previously, Megan Thomson had become a discoverer of dead things.

In the distance, the remote farmhouse and surrounding area came into view. The building looked disjointed—a mirror fractured. The land was lumpy and the edges were contoured, girding the lone road leading to the large farmhouse. The road itself shone with the black, denuded glare of ageing asphalt, guiding the way like a liquorice tongue.

Unnaturally, the place was absent of the noise of machinery and human occupancy. Only the sounds of branches rubbing together, like stridulating crickets, could be heard; and the only movement came from a pageant of crows swooping in for landing in one of the haggard-looking fields where three scarecrows took centre stage, guarding.

Ignoring the ragged sentinels, the crows rummaged at will, drilling with their beaks.

The scarecrows’ spectral strangeness absorbed Jack, making him think of an effigy of Calvary.

The Graziers’ farmhouse clung, crab-like, to the side of a massive barn. Jack could make out rusted machinery poking from the barn’s dilapidated siding. Everything seemed chaotic and unused as if no human hand had touched it for decades. Off the side of the road, he could see the bulky outline of an old car, a dent the size of a portable television blazoned along its side. The car rested in the shadow of the farmhouse, arrogantly or complacently exposed. There was little doubt in his mind that it was the same car that had come at him on a snowy night all those weeks ago, recklessly indifferent.

Through misty morning light and shadows to the last line of fields, Jack began to wend his way cautiously in the direction of the farmhouse, avoiding the carved path. The soil beneath his feet was slightly sodden and spongy. It stank with the smell of rainy green. Overhead, the sky was ugly and gorgeous, like a bloody salmon gutted to the neck.

Red sky in the morning,
he thought, gently touching the gun housed inside its shoulder holster, reassuring himself.

He had no evidence of wrongdoing by Grazier—only raw belief; but more importantly, he had no right. Benson would explode if he knew what he was up to, compromising the case
on
raw belief
. Wilson would have him arrested. That was a certainty.

He had to be careful, though. Search enough, but not too far. Find something—something sufficient to allow Benson to have a search warrant issued—then quickly get the hell away from this godforsaken place.

Hunkering down, he edged his way towards the Graziers’ car, tumbling awkwardly beside it, feeling like an old fool acting out a stuntman manoeuvre.

The car sat crookedly, one tyre in a muddy hole. Running his hand over the dent, his eyes scanned the tiny particles of blue scratched alongside the original white. There was no doubt in his head that the blue was his own car’s paint.

There was a single window halfway to the corner and he moved to that now, crawling on belly and elbows, crouching so low to the ground that his shadow hurrying along beside him looked deformed, misshapen.

Knackered, he rested his head directly below the windowsill.

Easy now … don’t rush it … don’t mess up at this stage of the game.

Allowing his left hand to crawl up over the warped windowsill, its decayed wood crumbling on the pads of his fingers, he could feel chunks of peeling paint, and knew instinctively at that terrible moment that they contained lead. If someone had ever placed them across the tongue of a little girl called Nancy, they would have caused her to go into convulsions and die—a terrible and excruciating death.

He could hear Shaw’s gruff, acerbic tongue, mocking him, relegating him to a non-professional civilian:
Calvert, speculation is reincarnation. Neither can be established without proof, you fool.

Proof? You want proof? I’m going to get you tons of the stuff; so
much, in fact, that you’ll not know what to do with it, you nasty old bastard.

Removing his gun from the shoulder holster, Jack checked it one last time, making sure the initial chamber was empty—a precautionary tactic in case of an accident—and then returned it to its warm bed of leather, before standing, upright, his back tight against the wall.

Leaning forward, he peeked inside the window. Too dark. Impossible to see a damned thing. His armpits were damp. He could smell his own body odour and something else. It wasn’t pleasant. Not fear, he told himself. Caution.

Taking a deep breath, he moved stealthily towards the front of the farmhouse.

As expected, the large front door wasn’t locked. Miles of rocky roads and forests isolated the Graziers, and a visitor would be an irregularity, an oddity. The Graziers certainly had no need for locked doors. Perhaps others did.

Manoeuvring steadily, Jack eased into the darkness of the hall, making a sharp right in the direction of a room. Falling into the room, he allowed his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It was a bedroom—of sorts—with a single bed stretched out in the centre. The bed was accompanied by a small chest of drawers, paradoxically making the room look even emptier. It was the barest room he had ever seen in his life.

Atop the chest of drawers were sealed hair tonics. Hair clippers sat alongside smirking cut-throats. There were a few magazines in the room, honeycombed into a wooden bracket against the wall. The magazines were mostly, not exclusively, back copies of
Barbers’ Times.

Jack scrutinised the inside of the chest of drawers, careful not to disturb the contents. Socks and underwear. A few shirts,
white and heavily starched. Did Jeremiah wear those? Jack cast his mind back to his experience in the barber’s shop, when he had thought that Grazier was going to cut his throat.

The room reeked of loneliness, though the unmade bed contradicted that. Could this be a visitor’s bedroom, a fugitive’s? Could this be Harris’s bedroom?

Cautiously, Jack proceeded out of the room and down the thin hallway where the darkness was easing, a little at a time, to a uniform grey. Eventually, his surroundings brightened enough so that he was able to look about and take stock.

The other rooms in the house flowed easily into one another, devoid of any clutter or furniture. They were almost clinical, unlived in, like props for a stage. The furniture was neat and perfectly rendered, as if from a picture. The rooms disturbed him, though he couldn’t say why—only that their ambience was tranquil, yet strangely menacing.

Stepping out of a room, Jack scanned the hallway. A closed door to his left beckoned. Beneath the door wrote a pencil of thin light, beckoning him towards it. He eased opened the door, revealing a bedroom far larger than the lonely specimen he perceived to be a visitor’s. This room did not have a woman’s touch, but Jack speculated that it belonged to Judith and Jeremiah, if only by a process of elimination.

He panned his eyes around the room and was automatically drawn to a lone picture adorning the wall.
Susanna and the Elders
, stated the inscription. It was a print of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist familiar to Jack as one of the first women artists to have achieved recognition in the male-dominated world of post-Renaissance art. A fiend by the name of Tassi had raped her, and the trauma of the rape and subsequent so-called trial had impacted on Artemisia’s life and paintings. Her graphic
depictions were cathartic and symbolic attempts to deal with the physical and psychological pain inflicted upon her by men.

Susanna and the Elders
told the story of a virtuous young wife sexually harassed by the spying elders of her community, as she sat bathing; they had hoped to blackmail her into having sex with them. The painting depicted the gesture of one of the Elders raising his finger to his lips, warning Susanna to be silent, while the other Elder loomed large, leering menacingly and conspiratorially. The canvas spoke volumes with a single scene, and the finger to the lips was exceptionally chilling.

There were two wardrobes stationed on either side of the painting, guarding it. One had its doors slightly ajar, and he could see quite clearly its contents of plain-looking dresses. Above them, a rack of shoes—black, conservative—rested. They looked well used and scuffed—travelled, a more diplomatic word. The astringent smell of mothballs was overwhelming.

Easing the doors of the other wardrobe open, Jack scanned quickly, finding nothing of significance; he chastised himself for wasting time, being a voyeur. He needed something tangible, something to convince Benson of the necessity of a search warrant. Deep down, he was beginning to believe that he was clutching at straws. Whatever he was searching for wouldn’t be here, waiting for him to find it. It would be well hidden.

It was a splinter of morning sun coming through the window that made him glance over his shoulder. The golden sliver reflected off a box perched on a shelf, catching his attention.

The circular box was quite beautiful, if somewhat macabre. The dark, mahogany lid depicted a decapitation scene. It was more of Gentileschi’s work in the form of the beautiful, if somewhat ghoulish,
Judith Slaying Holofernes.

Holding the box in his hands, Jack shook it gently, as if
not wishing to disturb the contents. Something sounded from within.

For a heart-stopping moment, the bedroom door opened slightly. His body stiffened, but it was only the morning wind flexing its muscles. Nervy but undeterred, he spilt the contents of the box on to the bed.

Photos. Twelve. All Polaroid. Children. Naked. Different poses.

Jack shook his head. He wondered immediately what the implications were. He didn’t want to find this sort of stuff, confirming his worst fears: Grazier and Harris were obviously working as a team.

But why would Grazier keep the pictures in his bedroom? Wouldn’t his wife discover them? Was she in on it as well? Shit, he was unprepared for that. Up to now, he had assumed that paedophilia was exclusively an all-male disease—a perfectly reasonable assumption when he thought back to the people arrested while he was in the force.

There
had
to be a logical explanation. Perhaps Grazier and Harris had threatened her, forced her with threats?

The thought made him fear for Grazier’s wife, almost as much as he feared for Adrian. Why was she not about? What had Grazier done to her? What if Harris hadn’t fled the country, but was here, somewhere on the property, armed and lurking about?

Jack knew that, unlike the magazines found at Harris’s cottage, there could be no turning up his nose at the photos. The clue to Adrian could be staring him in the face, at this very moment.

Deliberately forcing himself to enter clinical mode, Jack no longer allowed the pictures to be repulsive. If he allowed them
to shock, then they—not he—would hold the power.

Turning to the task at hand, he studied the photos, trying desperately to find some clue as to their location or the perpetrator who introduced them to the world. He remembered once, down at the station, how they had enhanced a
similar-type
photo and got lucky when the taker of the snapshot was exposed in the fear-filled pupil of the child. But he doubted very much that luck would be with him on this case. So far, luck had avoided him. Besides, these pictures were grainy, not too professional looking. They were battered and finger-worn. Why was that? Paedophiles could update their collections at an alarming rate, via the Internet. So why hold on to these coarse items? Why were they so special that Grazier or Harris refused to dispose of them, and risked getting caught?

Initially, he had thought that perhaps one or two of the pictures would be of the McTier girl, but the more he studied the pictures, the more he understood their startling truth: they were all of the same child, a boy.

The face of the little boy was obscured by carefully placed shadows. The taker of the photographs didn’t want the boy’s entire face to be exposed. Why was that? Fear that the face would betray him, lead a trail right to his door, if the boy were recognised?

The boy was bony and awkward, with stunted chest and ribs that jutted out like plastic butterflies. But it was the tortured eyes that Jack kept returning to. They looked dead, impassive, but still betrayed something, something that went beyond terror and fear. There was power in the darkness of the pupils, unmerciful power. They seemed to be laughing at him, mocking, as if knowing the power they would one day wield. He had witnessed the eyes someplace else, but he couldn’t recall,
almost as if they had hypnotised him into not remembering.

Think. Where?

Debating whether to pocket the photos or return them to their wooden enclosure, Jack finally decided on the latter, placing the box back perfectly, resting it just where the barely visible dust ring left a halo on the shelf.

Time to leave
, he told himself, retracing his steps down the hallway.

Stepping outside the farmhouse, he was immediately assaulted by the cold, refreshing his face. He felt terribly unclean, tainted by the photos. He was gasping for a cigarette, but resisted the urge. He would wait until he got back to his car. Now was the time to leave, alert Benson to what he had seen. He hoped that his ex-partner would have a good squad of cops here within the hour, depending on the rough terrain. A helicopter would get them here in less than ten minutes, but he doubted if Benson would try to get Wilson to authorise that.