A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  “He said Miss Moon had a scar on her belly, just above her—you know…” Thankfully, he left the rest to their imaginations. Hynes didn’t react, but the autopsy report on Romana Moon had mentioned an appendectomy scar.

  “Is there any other way that Karl might have known about the scar?” said Gackowska.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did Miss Moon take physical education classes at the school, or supervise sports? Did she swim?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “We found a gym membership card among her possessions. Was Karl a gym member?”

  “No, Karl doesn’t like sport. He looks the part, but he was always picked last for everything.”

  Hynes stepped in.

  “Ryan, we talked to your mum this morning.”

  Clifton didn’t appear happy to hear this. “Why’d you do that?”

  “We went looking for you at school, but you’d decided to take the day off. Your house was the next natural stop. She’s a nice lady, your mum. Cares about you a lot.”

  Clifton didn’t contradict this.

  “She’ll tell my dad that I skipped school.”

  The way he said it caused Hynes to wince.

  “No, she won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” Hynes repeated, “we made a deal with her: if you helped us, we wouldn’t cause any problems for you—or her. She’ll keep your dad out of it.”

  “I am helping you,” said Clifton. “Aren’t I?”

  Jesus, thought Hynes, he’s pleading What’s going on with him and his dad?

  “Yes,” said Gackowska, “you are.”

  Her reply cleared a little of the boy’s fear, if only to send it scurrying back to the shadows.

  “When we spoke to your mum,” said Gackowska, “she mentioned hearing an argument between you and Ryan over a remark you made about Miss Moon. Do you remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was that before or after Karl told you he’d slept with her?”

  Clifton didn’t rush to answer.

  “Before,” he said finally.

  “And did he tell you that he started sleeping with her before or after he left school?”

  “After.”

  “She’d been helping him with his studies, though?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Karl have feelings for her, even then?”

  “Maybe. He stopped joking about her.”

  “But you’re certain that the relationship, if it did happen, didn’t commence until after he left school?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know why their relationship might have come to an end?”

  “Karl said Miss Moon was scared about losing her job if anyone found out she was fucking an ex-pupil. Karl said he understood. Anyway, he’d had her by then. Time to move on, you know? He said she asked him not to tell. Made him swear.”

  “But he told you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m his best friend, or I was,” Clifton said, sadly. “He used to tell me everything.”

  Gackowska exchanged a glance with Hynes, like a soldier about to step into a minefield.

  “Were you envious of him, Ryan?”

  “Envious?”

  “Because he’d slept with Miss Moon.”

  Clifton registered genuine bewilderment. “No. Why would I have wanted to sleep with her?”

  “She was very pretty.”

  “She was old—nearly thirty.”

  Despite the circumstances, Hynes had to bite his lip as Gackowska—thirty-two, and with only a cat to warm her bed—did her best to keep her face from falling.

  “Well, thirty’s not that old,” she said.

  “Kind of is,” said Clifton.

  Hynes decided to take over, if only to give Gackowska time to compose herself.

  “Ryan, we’ve been asking this of a lot of people, and we’re going to be asking it of a lot more, so don’t feel that you’re being singled out, understand?”

  Clifton eyed him suspiciously. When someone told you that you weren’t being picked on, you usually were.

  “What is it?”

  “Can you tell us where you were on the night Romana Moon died?”

  Clifton thought about the question.

  “I don’t remember. Out somewhere, probably.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Not really.”

  “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  “I can’t. I’m out most nights. If not, I’m in my room.”

  “Any idea which one it might have been on that night?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether my dad was working late. If he was on nights, I was home. If he wasn’t, I was out.”

  “What’s he on this week?”

  “Nights, but it varies.”

  “Please make an effort to find the right answer before I die of old age.”

  Clifton did.

  “He was on days all last week,” he said at last, “so I’d have been out.”

  “Where would you have gone?”

  “The arcade, I suppose, the one at the back of Caddow’s pool hall. Terry lets me play for free if I help him clean up. Sometimes I look after things if he wants to nip out for a smoke, or if he’s busy. He’s all right, is Terry.”

  “So Terry’s the owner?”

  “Yeah, Terry Caddow. He’s all right.”

  It seemed that Terry was, conclusively, all right.

  “Would he remember your being there?”

  “Might do. Wait a minute.” Clifton counted on his fingers, and his face brightened. “It was the night a bloke ripped the baize on one of the tables. He was trying for some fancy shot, and tore a strip from it. Terry threw him out, and he had to get someone in the next morning to fix the table. They found Miss Moon’s body that morning. I know, because I was talking about it with Terry, while he was showing me the new baize. Terry’ll back me up. He’ll tell you I was there.”

  Clifton sat back, smiling.

  “Because Terry’s all right,” said Hynes.

  “Yeah!” said Clifton, before looking puzzled. “Do you know Terry?”

  * * *

  HYNES AND GACKOWSKA LEFT Ryan Clifton to his own devices in Albert Park. It didn’t seem worth sticking him in the back of the car and dropping him off at school. Let him sketch trees and ducks. He’d be a lot happier.

  “What do you think?” said Gackowska.

  “We’ll talk to Terry, who’s all right,” said Hynes, “but I don’t believe Ryan Picasso back there is lying about anything. I can’t see the point.”

  He took out his phone and called Priestman to let her know they’d found Clifton, and to share with her what they’d learned.

  “Karl Holmby told us that he didn’t sleep with Romana Moon,” said Priestman. “He claimed to have made the story up to impress Clifton, and maybe as revenge on Romana for rejecting him.”

  “Well, Ryan Clifton says that Holmby showed him a pair of Romana’s used knickers, and told him about the scar on her stomach. I haven’t met Karl Holmby, but even without that, I’d be inclined to give Clifton the benefit of the doubt.”

  Hynes could almost hear Priestman coming to the boil. He thought the phone was starting to grow hot in his hand.

  “We’ll bring Holmby in,” said Priestman. “Even if he has an alibi for the night in question, that little bastard lied to me about Romana.”

  “Do you still have eyes on him?” asked Hynes.

  “No, we’re on our way back to Newcastle.”

  “Gackowska and I can pick him up. Where’d you leave him?”

  “At the uni, but last I saw, he was heading off campus.”

  Priestman gave him Holmby’s address before hanging up, still in a rage, leaving Hynes to explain the situation to Gackowska. They got in the car, Gackowska driving.

  “You’re right, you know,” said Hynes, as they pulled away.

 
“About what?”

  “Thirty’s not that old.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  He waited a heartbeat.

  “Now thirty-two…”

  CHAPTER LVIII

  Louis made his way on foot to the Rijksmuseum. Despite the afternoon heat, he wore a black wool jacket and vest over an open-necked white shirt, and gray trousers. The vest was just loose enough to hide the shape of the little pistol tucked into the waistband holster. The gun would be awkward to reach, but Louis had no desire to make it more accessible only to find himself staring down the barrels of weapons wielded by twitchy Dutch anti-terrorist police.

  He had made a promise to himself never to return to Amsterdam, yet here he was. He could not deny the beauty of the city, but had never warmed to it. The killing of Timmerman had provided the justification required to turn his back on this place. Louis prided himself on his dispassion, or used to until he and Angel were drawn irrevocably into Parker’s orbit, but he had enjoyed ridding the world of Timmerman. The hit was quick—two shots to the chest as Louis closed on him in the underground car park, followed by a double-tap to the head—but it remained one of the few occasions on which Louis would have been more than content to let the target suffer. In an ideal world, he’d have crucified Timmerman, pulled up a chair, poured a glass of Malbec, and watched him fade away, but even allowing for the Serb’s modus operandi, the similarities to Jos’s murder might have caused difficulties for those left behind.

  As for the Zemuns, Louis knew that they would have neither forgiven nor forgotten the death of one of their enforcers, even if they would probably have been forced to deal with Timmerman themselves, in time. Men of his stripe were rarely astute enough to rise to a position of authority sufficient to ensure their own safety, however relative. Shifting allegiances eventually made uneasy bedfellows of former enemies, and sacrifices were required to salve old wounds. The world would never run short of sadists, and so its Timmermans—particularly as they aged, and accrued bad karma—occasionally had to be thrown to the lions as a gesture of good faith. But the time and place of that oblation was for their masters to determine, and not for outsiders to decide. Unendorsed killings and unavenged deaths were bad for morale, and undermined the integrity of the whole. After all, why should men like the Zemuns be feared if they could not even protect their own? Thus it was that the Zemuns would continue to trail silken strands linking Timmerman’s husk to themselves in the hope that, someday, one of those filaments might twitch.

  Louis arrived at the Rijksmuseum an hour before closing, its halls already growing quieter. When last he was in Amsterdam, the main building had been shuttered for renovations that would ultimately take almost a decade to complete. Under other circumstances, Louis might have dawdled longer in the museum’s restored halls, but instead he made his way directly to the great Night Watch Room, where visitors clustered at one end before the massive Rembrandt that gave the space its name.

  The man he had come to meet was at the other end of the chamber, far from the crowd, the only figure seated before a huge altarpiece. De Jaager had barely changed in the ten years since Louis had last seen him. His white hair and tanned features were fractionally thinner, and his clothing hung marginally looser on his body, but otherwise time was being gentle with him. He looked to be in his early sixties, but was closer to eighty. When he turned his face to Louis, his eyes were those of a bright, curious child.

  “My old friend,” he said, shaking Louis’s hand. “Come, sit with me.”

  Louis sat, and together they took in the altarpiece.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” said De Jaager.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The Last Judgment by Lucas van Leyden. He was barely into his thirties when he began it in 1526, and wouldn’t live to see forty. This is only the second time in half a millennium that the altarpiece has been permitted to leave Leiden. We are safeguarding it for the Museum de Lakenhal while it undergoes repairs. I thought you might find it interesting. See, the good people are congregating to Christ’s right, while the sinners are being fed into the mouth of Hell on his left. Hell is always to the left of Christ. As a left-handed person myself, I find this invidious.”

  Louis had to give credit to van Leyden for his visual imagination. Hell’s mouth was that of a huge serpent, lit by fires from deep within, while various demons tormented naked sinners before consigning them to the flames. He saw one with a face for a groin, a tongue poking like an engorged phallus from its mouth, and another that—

  He leaned forward before standing so he could more closely examine the altarpiece. He was not mistaken: one of the demons appeared to be a Green Man.

  “What is it?” said De Jaager.

  “I’ve seen something like this before.”

  “Where?”

  “In a chapel in Maine, before the building was destroyed.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “We blew it up.”

  “Well, I trust you’ll restrain your more extreme critical impulses here.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Louis resumed his seat.

  “I must admit I’m surprised by your return,” said De Jaager. “The Zemuns turned out to be fonder of Timmerman than anyone could have imagined. They asked some awkward questions following his demise.”

  “Of you?”

  “Of everyone.”

  “Yet you appear to have weathered the storm.”

  “Fortunately, others chose to take credit for the killing: a previously unknown offshoot of Al-Qaeda, which was harboring some residual bitterness about the Muslim blood on Timmerman’s hands. It didn’t seem worth going to the trouble of contradicting them. Consequently, the Zemuns believe the outside contractor to have been Muslim, possibly Sudanese.”

  “Glad it worked out so well.”

  “As are we all. I just thought you might like to know that the Zemuns are unlikely to connect your presence here to what happened a decade ago. You can probably dispense with the gun.”

  “I didn’t think it showed.”

  “It doesn’t, but I hardly expected you to go out underdressed, and I supplied it for you in the first place. How is Angel?”

  “Recovering, slowly.”

  “But sufficient to travel safely?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. It shows resilience. I always liked him, you know. He is one of the better Angels.”

  And De Jaager smiled briefly at his own joke.

  “The man with you,” he continued, “this Parker, is more problematical. I believe there was some difficulty at the airport.”

  “Armitage: one of the local FBI legats.”

  “She’s well regarded. Hers is not attention I would invite.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Yet you indicated that the information I received came from the FBI.”

  “Through unofficial channels.”

  “You lead a complicated life. Be careful you don’t trip on its entanglements.”

  Together they contemplated the altarpiece silently, until Louis asked, “Did you choose the Rijksmuseum just so you could show this to me?”

  “Not for this alone. Let’s walk.”

  The old man stood, and he and Louis made their way from the hall, De Jaager pausing occasionally before paintings as the inclination took him, until they came at last to the gallery overlooking the reading room of the Cuypers Library, one of the world’s great collections of art history. From where they stood, they could look down on its lines of desks, most of which were now unoccupied, apart from a pair of young women reading alone in one corner, and an elderly man who appeared to have deliberately positioned himself as far from them as possible. He was hunched over an enormous volume that almost exceeded the span of his arms, and further smaller books stood piled around, a fortress of paper and print. His gray hair was long, and tinged with yellow. Although the library was warm, the scholar had dispensed only with his ragged black overcoat, whi
ch hung on the back of his chair, while retaining multiple layers of cardigans, vests, and sweaters. Up close, Louis knew, he would smell unwashed.

  “Who is he?” asked Louis.

  “Cornelie Gruner. He’s a book dealer, although that hardly does justice to the scope of his endeavors. He lives above an old bar called Het Teken van de Eik—the Sign of the Oak—and keeps a bookselling business beside it, but the doors are rarely open, and the lights rarely lit. It may not look like it, but he has money. He owns the building occupied by the Oak, and the adjoining one housing his bookstore. He’s usually in the latter, hiding like a rat among its contents, and answers the bell when the mood strikes him. The rest of the time, he’s either in his rooms above the bar, or haunting the city’s more esteemed libraries. Lately, he’s been spending a lot of time here, and at the Ritman, which specializes in Hermetic manuscripts. He’s also been scouring the archives of the Scheepvart Museum, which houses one of the largest collections of maritime records in the world, and those of the Ets Haim, the old Jewish library. It’s quite a remarkable burst of activity by his reclusive standards.”

  Gruner emitted a series of coughs, like old bones rattling in a box.

  “He sounds unwell,” said Louis.

  “If he is, he hasn’t consulted any physician known to us. I suspect he sleeps in those clothes, and bathes only at Christmas, whether he needs to or not. He stinks of piss and perspiration, has never married—perhaps unsurprisingly—and appears to be entirely asexual. He maintains a handful of associates, most of them book dealers like himself, but none he would call a friend. Gruner is, by all accounts, a brilliant man. He has doctoral qualifications in law and the physical sciences, although he has never practiced in either field. He’s also an occultist, and a forger.”

  “What kind of forgery?”

  “Documents, mostly, both historical and more modern. There were rumors he had misled some private collectors, and a number of American universities, with fake leaves from medieval manuscripts. One of the collectors, a Finn named Koskinen, kicked up a public fuss and threatened to sue.”