Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  Viggo thumped the floor again and grinned, tongue lolling.

  Dennie sighed, and the sigh turned into a yawn. ‘Look, Angie, I know you mean well but I didn’t come here for a lecture and I’m too knackered for an argument. I just came in to let you know what I saw, so that you can tell everyone else to check their security. That’s all.’ She flapped a hand at the laptop. ‘So just put it on your app thingy and I’ll toddle off safely back to my proper bed, where I promise I won’t be a nuisance to anybody.’

  Angie smiled. ‘Until next time.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  She left Angie to it and went home.

  Home was on the other side of town, but since Dodbury was quite a small town – not much more than a large village, to be fair – it was only a half hour’s walk. Nowhere near enough of a decent stretch for Viggo, but she promised him a good run around in the park that afternoon just as soon as she’d had a chance for a bath. She wouldn’t normally have one in the morning, since an overnight in the shed was nothing unusual and she was way past the age where she felt the need to be fragrant for anyone, but being so close to the Neary plot had left her feeling itchy and unclean.

  Briar Hill was a sunny rise on the north side of the village, so it was a pleasant amble downhill past the older and well-established houses of Greenlea to the crossroads which marked the top end of the High Street. There she stopped at Partridge’s Butchers, their sign boasting that they were the oldest family butcher to still be ‘preparing’ their own meat in the county, and picked up a bone for Viggo as he’d been such a good boy. She endured the standard banter from Phil Partridge about whether he could tempt her from her vegetarianism with his pork buns. Further down the High Street, past where it became pedestrianised and every other doorway was a charity shop, the street market traders were setting up under their green-and-white-striped council awnings. With Christmas long over and Easter a distant dream, they were resigned to trade being thin. There had once been a proper indoor market right at the bottom of High Street where it became fast-food outlets and hairdressers – a part of town known as Dogtown for no reason that she’d ever been able to discover – but that had been demolished in the age of austerity to make way for some urban regeneration project that had never got further than an enthusiastic councillor’s PowerPoint presentation. The resulting and perpetually empty lot was still called the Marketplace, and from time to time different enthusiastic councillors would propose revolutionary schemes to ‘revitalise the flagging fortunes of our once vibrant market town’ but nothing ever got built. Still, at least it gave the old men who wrote to the local newspaper letters of frothing indignation (and dubious grammatical accuracy) something to complain about other than fly-tipping and outrageous car parking charges foisted upon old-age pensioners.

  Nothing was going to revitalise Dodbury, Dennie knew, for the simple reason that there had never been anything particularly vital about it in the first place. It was why she and Brian had chosen it as a home to raise their family. It was unexciting, quiet, and safe – for the most part.

  Why the Neary plot, of all places?

  She shifted uneasily in her clothes and scratched.

  Left, then, at the top of High Street, past St David’s with its blocky Norman tower, and then the pub that wasn’t a pub – it had been the Hundred House for years before her time but when the brewery had gone to the wall it had been bought and transformed into an Indian restaurant called the Imperial Mint. Brian had hated it. Complained about how ugly the green neon and the Asian-style lettering sat against the old Victorian brickwork. ‘I like a curry as much as the next man,’ he’d said. ‘But why can’t they serve them up somewhere more appropriate?’ By which he didn’t just mean the architecture.

  It was the Handsworth riots of ’81 that had been the final straw for him. From their first flat just off the Lozells Road they’d been able to watch the fires and hear the police sirens screaming for three days, trying to explain what was happening to seven-year-old Christopher and his five-year-old sister Amy (little Lizzie was two at the time and only interested in chewing clothes pegs). Afterwards Brian had found Chris playing riots by smashing one of his toy cars into a Lego building; he’d cut out some tiny paper flames and coloured them in and stuck them to the car with Sellotape, and that was that. Within six months they had moved to a nice ordinary semi-detached in Dodbury which was quiet, safe, and came with a hefty mortgage that they had both worked hard to pay off, though to give him his due Brian had shouldered the heavier burden of it – a burden which had obviously been too much for his heart, however. A month to the day of their final payment he suffered a massive cardiac arrest and dropped dead in the middle of their driveway while taking the bins out.

  Up that driveway now, past the spot where she’d found him, his face grey, but don’t think about that, it’s not for now, through the side gate (never the front door, not with Viggo’s feet), tossing the bone to him in the back garden so that the great lolloping idiot could enjoy it in peace, and through the back door and into the kitchen. She stripped right there and stuffed all her clothes into the washing machine, and who cared if anyone in the houses behind her back fence was in a position to get an eyeful of this stringy old bird? Let them look. Then she went upstairs to run a bath.

  While the water was running she quickly checked in each of the upstairs bedrooms. Not that she was checking for anything, she told herself, because of course nothing would have been changed or disturbed. How could it, when she was the only living soul here? There wasn’t much to disturb anyway. The children’s rooms had been stripped back to a spartan utility – no toys, books, posters, or clothes. She’d made sure that when each of them had left home they’d taken anything of sentimental value with them and given the rest to charity shops, and when Brian had ventured the opinion that this seemed a bit cold she’d told him, ‘It’s an empty nest, not a bloody shrine. They’ve got their own lives now and that’s the way of it.’ On the rare occasion when they all came back – Christmases, birthdays, Brian’s funeral – she happily let their bustle and mess flow over her while it lasted, and then when they were gone again she replaced the bed linen, hoovered up, and shut the doors. To keep the warmth in and the dust out, she told herself, but she really knew it was because of the echoes.

  There was a particular kind of echo to her children’s empty rooms that she found unnerving. It wasn’t an echo in the strictest sense of the sounds being repeated – more like the way the noise she brought in with her, even the whisper of feet on the carpet or the click of the latch, would resonate a little more, as if bouncing off extra corners in the room that shouldn’t be there. More than once in the long, dark months after Brian’s passing, before she’d learned to close the doors, she’d fancied that the sounds she made just moving around on her own might get caught in those odd corners and be amplified, feeding on themselves until they took on a life of their own and started whispering to her.

  That was another good thing about the shed: it was too small and cluttered for echoes.

  She quickly popped her head into each of the rooms to check that of course they were okay, closed them again and went to settle into her bath. She lay back with a sigh of contentment, letting the heat seep into her old bones. Just a quick one to scrub off the unclean feeling, not a long soak; it was only ten in the morning, after all.

  It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before she heard Viggo making a fuss at the back door, scrabbling and whining to be let in.

  ‘Sod,’ she grumbled. ‘Couldn’t you have waited…’ But as she moved, and the bathwater sloshed around her, she realised her mistake. Viggo had waited. The little carriage clock on the window ledge told her that it was nearly eleven, and the water in which she’d been lying for nearly an hour was barely lukewarm. Viggo whined and scrabbled, scrabbled and whined. If he hadn’t, how long might she have gone on sitting there?

  Shivering with more than just the cold, she got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a towe
l, and went to let him in.

  2

  NEW NEIGHBOURS

  DENNIE KEPT AWAY FROM HER ALLOTMENT FOR THE rest of the weekend but went back again on Monday morning because she needed to get a start on chitting her potatoes. It was comforting and repetitive work, picking out the unwanted eyes in the little seed potatoes and setting them with their sprouting ends uppermost in some old egg boxes by the shed window, and it allowed her to forget about the strange events of Friday night. Every so often she would pause to lob Viggo’s slobber-sodden tennis ball down to the end of her plot, and he would make a great fuss about hurtling to retrieve it and then drop it at her feet.

  When she spotted Angie through the half-open shed door walking on the Neary plot she thought at first that the secretary of the allotments association was following up on her report about the intruder, but then she saw that Angie was accompanied by two other people – a man and a woman, neither big enough to have been the huge figure from that night.

  Both looked to be in their twenties, and were obviously a couple. The man was normal-sized, dressed in jeans and boots with his hands stuffed into the pockets of a long winter coat. His hair was dark and close-cropped, but not shaven like a thug, and probably good looking if you liked your men a bit dark and angular. Every so often he would kick at the soil a little, as if inspecting it. She was the taller, dressed in a style that would have been dismissed forty years ago as hippy chic: heavy boots, a tie-dyed gypsy shirt and denim jacket covered with patches, swathes of tasselled and glittering scarves over a loose-knit burgundy jumper that hung past her hands in ragged cuffs. She was also extraordinarily pale, with an oddly square jaw framed by masses of curling dark hair tipped over to one side.

  They were chatting and smiling with Angie, standing right on the Neary plot as if they were just passing the time of day on a normal allotment like any other.

  Journalists, Dennie decided. They popped up from time to time like weeds whenever they found out about the murder for the first time and thought they could unearth a unique new angle to an old story, but they never did – mostly because of what Angie was doing right now. Not warning them off, exactly, just making it clear that there was nothing more to be found.

  ‘Shall we go and give her a hand?’ Dennie asked Viggo. ‘Shall we? You can bite him if you like.’

  Viggo picked up his ball and trotted after her, but they weren’t even halfway there when he started growling.

  ‘I wasn’t serious about the biting,’ she said. ‘Shut up, you big idiot.’

  He subsided, but with her hand on his collar she could feel the tension bristling in him all the same.

  When she was close enough to hear their conversation, it turned out that they weren’t talking about the Nearys at all. They seemed to be having a conversation about, of all things, the optimum growing conditions for kale. Dennie approached the Neary plot as close as she was going to, but no further.

  ‘Morning, Dennie,’ said Angie. She wore a pleasant enough smile of greeting but something about the intensity of her eyes – a little too starey – came across as a warning. ‘This is a nice surprise,’ said her mouth, while her eyes said Shut up. Whatever you were about to say, just shut it. ‘Let me introduce you to your new neighbours. Mr Everett Clifton and Miss Ardwyn Hughes, Mrs Denise Keeling. They’ll be taking on Plot 27. Isn’t that nice?’

  Plot 27. Not ‘the old Neary plot’ which was what everybody called it. Not ‘the plot where a terrified young woman had buried the remains of her brute of a husband after enduring years of beatings and abuse before finally snapping and killing him with a kitchen knife’. Not that place.

  ‘Since when?’

  If Mr Everett Clifton found her curtness rude, he didn’t show it. He actually looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘since yesterday, as a matter of fact. And it’s just Everett, please. None of that “mister” silliness.’ There was a hint of a Welsh accent in his voice. He put out his hand to shake hers, but that would have required her to step onto the Neary plot to reach him.

  ‘Everett and Ardwyn were telling me that they’ve recently just moved into Dodbury.’

  ‘Well, we’re renting a little place just outside town,’ said the young woman, whose accent was much more pronounced. ‘We were having a nice lazy Sunday afternoon stroll, looking around, and we spotted this place and I just fell in love with it at first sight, so we called to make an appointment to look at it.’

  Everett stepped forward, hand outstretched, and Viggo began to growl.

  ‘Okay.’ He stepped back a pace. ‘He’s a protective chap, I see.’

  Dennie shook his collar. ‘Be nice!’ and the dog subsided. ‘Sorry about that. He’s a rescue dog – doesn’t take to strange men too well. This is Viggo.’

  ‘As in the actor,’ put in Angie. In response to his blank look, she clarified: ‘Viggo Mortensen? The Lord of the Rings films?’

  ‘Yes, of course, I love those.’ The easy smile was back, and Dennie thought You’re lying. You’ve got no idea what she’s on about, have you? But why would he bother to lie about such a trivial thing? She put on a smile of her own and gestured at the wild growth of the Neary plot. ‘Well, you’ve certainly taken on a challenge. I’m surprised Angie didn’t suggest something a bit tamer.’ She turned to Angie. ‘There are one or two other vacant plots, aren’t there?’

  Ardwyn shrugged. ‘I know, and I can’t explain it, but this one just seemed to call to me. Growing things – crops, I mean – it’s all about transformation, isn’t it? Seed to shoot, shoot to fruit, fruit to earth, earth to seed, round and round. Something about changing this barren plot into a garden feels more meaningful than taking on one which is all clear and ready to go, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Well, if you can transform brambles into lentils or whatever it is you’re thinking of growing on this, power to you.’

  ‘Oh, I quite like the brambles,’ said the young woman, turning to gaze speculatively at the head-high tangles. ‘I bet they produce some incredible blackberries in the autumn.’

  ‘They do,’ said Dennie. ‘But we don’t eat them.’

  ‘What a waste! Why ever not?’

  Dennie looked at her youth and enthusiasm, the energy she was apparently prepared to pour into the hopeless task of turning this haunted wreck of an allotment into some kind of Edenic garden-of-plenty, and found herself feeling desperately sorry for her. ‘Has Angie actually told you about this place?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just about to do that,’ Angie interrupted, and Dennie thought Like hell you were. ‘As a matter of fact, I was just going to pop back to the office and get all the paperwork. Dennie, could you come and help me please?’ To the young couple she said, ‘We won’t be long.’

  Everett smiled. ‘That’s fine. We’ll just survey our new empire a bit more.’

  Dennie plucked Angie’s elbow once they were out of earshot. ‘You haven’t told them, have you?’

  ‘Told them what? There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Angie—’

  ‘There is nothing. To. Tell.’ The other woman shook her arm free and walked on without looking at her.

  ‘They deserve to know.’

  Now Angie stopped and faced her squarely, arms crossed. ‘Deserve to know what, Dennie? That something terrible happened there probably before either of them was born? What good would it do them? Or us, for that matter? We need new young people, Dennie. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the average age of our tenants is “geriatric old fart” years old and we need to do something about that before we’re all compost. So what if they’re a pair of starry-eyed millennials who’ll give up after six months when they find that they can’t grow avocados? It’s going to be hard enough for them as it is without you telling them bloody ghost stories. For once, will you just please leave it?’

  ‘What about the intruder I saw?’

  ‘You mean the one you think you saw after a broken night’s sleep in a draughty old shed?’

  ‘I
t’s not draughty! I’ve made sure that it’s perfectly well…’ She stopped. The word wouldn’t come. She wanted to refute the accusation about her shed and tell Angie that it was this other thing, she’d put this thing in the walls to keep her shed warm, this thing that she couldn’t say because it wasn’t that the word was stuck, it was actually gone, like a fish slipping between her fingers; it had fallen into the empty space in her mind where bits of time sometimes went, the place where the echoes came from. She stood there with her mouth open like an idiot, groping for it, more confused than scared. ‘Fine,’ she managed to reply, and patted Viggo’s neck. ‘Come on, you.’ She left, and he trotted after her.

  ‘Dennie?’ Angie’s irritation had given way to concern, and that was worse. ‘Is everything—’

  ‘No, it’s fine!’ she yelled back without turning. ‘I won’t say anything. I won’t scare them off. But I’m not wrong! I’m not seeing things!’

  She went back to the shed and spent the rest of the afternoon chitting her potatoes, because they didn’t care about who was right or wrong, who died or who lived, they were going to need planting out all the same.

  ‘Insulated,’ she whispered to them, to Viggo, to the world, but mostly to herself. ‘It’s perfectly well insulated.’

  * * *

  ‘Will it do?’ asked Everett as they left the allotments.

  Ardwyn shrugged. ‘It’ll have to. There’s no time to find anywhere more suitable.’

  ‘I don’t like the number of people around. There are other places with blood in the ground that are a lot less conspicuous. Battlefields, like that one we passed at Hopton Heath.’

  ‘You read the same report that I did,’ she reminded him. ‘The Neary woman didn’t just murder her husband, she dismembered him. That’s ritual, whether she intended it or not. Moccus’ spirit is strong here. Gar tasted it. He agrees.’