A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  His sister came running to the door. She tried to get in, but Uddin blocked her.

  “Please go to the living room and sit down,” he told her.

  “Fuck you, you brown bastard. I won’t have you ordering me around in my own home.”

  Seconds later, Lottie Stoller was also in cuffs, but she continued to shout and swear, adding her voice to her brother’s. They were both moved to the living room, still bellowing, with Uddin to keep an eye on them. Hynes thought about gagging them, but was convinced he was in enough trouble already.

  He called Priestman again.

  “You’d best send the cavalry,” he said, but there was no levity to his tone, not with pictures of two dead women on the screen before him.

  “It’s coming. What about Stoller?”

  “Cuffed—for his own protection, of course, and the preservation of evidence. The sister, too.”

  “Leave Nabih to take care of everything. Tell him to get the train back, or cadge a lift. I want you here.”

  Hynes heard sirens approaching.

  “It’s all about to go to hell, isn’t it?” he said.

  “You mean it hasn’t already?” said Priestman, and hung up.

  Hynes went to the window. On Bradford, a city that was a quarter Muslim, the sun still shone.

  For now.

  CHAPTER LXXXIV

  The sun was also shining on the Joost truck stop at Meer in Belgium, not far from the Dutch border. De Jaager ordered three beers, and a coffee for Paulus. The air smelled of diesel and freshly mown grass. A waitress brought four plates of french fries, which they ate outside while watching a steady stream of trucks pass along the highway.

  De Jaager was receiving more updates on Eva Meertens and Cornelie Gruner. Meertens had been dead when she went in the water, which meant the police were now ruling out the possibility that her death had been accidental. The blow to her head, although severe, probably hadn’t killed her immediately. With treatment, she might have survived. Gruner, on the other hand, had been shot through the heart, but appeared to have suffered no further injury beyond a single blow to the head. Either torture had not been required to find out what he knew, or his killer had no interest in interrogation, and was concerned only with silencing him.

  “What will you tell the police when you return?” Louis asked De Jaager.

  “About Eva? I haven’t decided. But it was foolish of me to meet you at the Rijksmuseum: an old man’s taste for the dramatic. We were seen together, and the museum’s security footage will confirm our presence there, along with that of Eva and Gruner. The police will want to know who you are, and it won’t take them long to trace your presence in Amsterdam back to your arrival at Schiphol, which means they’ll have Angel on camera as well, and probably Paulus. If someone at the Oak should give a description of Angel that matches whatever is on the airport footage, well, I will have even more explaining to do. It pains me to say it, but you might be advised to seek the assistance of your FBI contact in New York to confirm your bona fides.”

  Louis couldn’t picture Ross riding willingly to their rescue. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t done anything wrong—well, beyond a little breaking and entering. Ross would want to maintain deniability for as long as possible, and it wasn’t as though he and Angel had any official status. They didn’t even own Junior G-Man badges.

  “We might have to wait for the situation to deteriorate before calling in that favor,” said Louis.

  “If it deteriorates any further,” said De Jaager, “he’ll be testifying at your trial.”

  The discussion was curtailed by the approach of a large blond man, dressed in a dark suit that, given his build, Louis guessed must have been made to measure. If he wasn’t ex-military, he’d watched a lot of movies to get the walk right, and he didn’t appear to be armed. He nodded at Paulus, and greeted De Jaager by name, but omitted any honorific, and did not offer to shake hands.

  “This is mijnheer Hendricksen,” said De Jaager, emphasizing the title, as though to point out the other’s failure to extend a similar courtesy to him, even if he seemed otherwise untroubled by it. “He is notoriously unrefined.”

  “And you are a crook,” said Hendricksen, before adding “by inclination and association.”

  His Dutch accent was very thick. He pulled up a chair and joined them.

  “Mijnheer Hendricksen,” De Jaager continued, “is also prone to moral judgments, and a lack of respect for his elders. Were I in a better mood, I might be inclined to joust with him. But not today.”

  Hendricksen waited for an explanation. It came from Paulus.

  “The girl pulled from the canal this morning,” he said.

  “One of yours?” said Hendricksen.

  “Yes,” said De Jaager.

  “Was she working for you when she died?”

  “She was watching Cornelie Gruner.”

  Hendricksen absorbed this information before turning his attention to Angel and Louis.

  “And where do these two fit in?”

  “They were also interested in Gruner.”

  “Cornelie Gruner was an old man who didn’t bathe enough, and ought to have been haunting houses for a living. Why should I be concerned about what happened to him?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” said De Jaager.

  “Because you told me I might learn something to my advantage, and I believed you. You may be a crook, but you’re not a liar.”

  Louis decided that either Hendricksen had history with De Jaager, or else he was predisposed to being difficult with everyone.

  “Carenor,” said Louis.

  That did the trick. Hendricksen reacted to the name, before displaying irritation at having given away his interest so easily.

  “Where are you from?” said Hendricksen.

  “Lots of places,” said Louis.

  “You’re American. That’s only one place.”

  “If you say so.”

  De Jaager nibbled on a french fry, his eyes moving between the two men. He was still too troubled by the death of Eva Meertens to enjoy watching Hendricksen and Louis spar, but at least it seemed to be providing him with a measure of distraction. He tapped Hendricksen lightly on the left arm.

  “Why don’t you tell my friend here what you know about Carenor?” he said.

  “And in return?” asked Hendricksen.

  “He may help you discover what happened to Yvette Visser.”

  CHAPTER LXXXV

  Hynes was back in Priestman’s office. He’d have taken a seat, but didn’t trust himself to be able to get up again if he did. In fact, he was eyeing the underside of Priestman’s desk and wondering if he should just crawl beneath it and remain there until the world stopped falling down around his ears.

  First of all, he’d wasted his time trying to keep Harry Stoller from posting any more pictures of dead women on the Internet. It seemed as though every media outlet in the country, along with every racist, Islamophobe, and conspiracy theorist with access to a computer or smartphone had by now received the images—either directly from the same source as Stoller, or forwarded by someone else further up the chain. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle, and it didn’t matter that one of the murdered women had yet to be officially identified, and her relatives informed. The Internet would take care of that.

  They had a tentative name for the second woman: Kathy Hicks, twenty-four, a shop assistant; originally from Sussex, but living in Bristol—or now, more accurately, not living at all—and reported missing two weeks earlier. They still didn’t have any sign of a body, though, just pictures of Hicks with prayer beads in her mouth. MUSLIM SERIAL KILLER PRAYS ON WHITE GIRLS was the misspelled headline on one of the websites Hynes had already seen, but there were worse headlines out there, and fouler to come. Already, windows were being broken in mosques, and the house of an imam in Brentford had been set on fire. Reports were coming in of confrontations between gangs of white youths and young Muslims. In Stoke, detectives were
investigating the alleged gang rape of a woman wearing a hijab. Soon, Hynes knew, someone would be killed as a direct result of those photographs unless the police got a handle on what was happening.

  He put those thoughts out of his head for now, because Priestman was on the phone to the tech team, nodding, writing—“Yes, yes, I get it”—and Hynes dearly wanted to move behind her in an effort to read what she was scribbling.

  “Yes. Well done.”

  She hung up.

  “And?” said Hynes.

  “The pictures of Romana Moon were sent late last night from her own laptop,” said Priestman. “We’ve confirmed her private IP address.”

  “Christ.”

  Priestman was already on her feet and making for the door.

  “That’s not the half of it,” she continued. “They were sent from Gary Holmby’s apartment complex. Call Gackowska and tell her to lock it down. You join her as fast as you can, and bring bodies with you. Nobody enters or leaves that building until I arrive with a warrant, you hear?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Bloody Karl Holmby,” said Priestman, as he followed her from the office. “I knew he was a liar.”

  * * *

  ON THE COMPUTER SCREEN in his rooms, Quayle watched scenes of fire and broken glass; of men and women screaming obscenities at those of a different color and religion from themselves, and those others screaming back; of a policeman being carried from the entrance to a mosque, blood streaming from a wound in his head; of women once alive, and now alive no longer; of hate, violence, and loss. Before him lay the Atlas. Continents formed and disintegrated on its pages, potential new worlds being revealed for an instant before turning to ash. He felt the barriers between universes weaken further, yet still they would not break.

  And Parker was near: if Quayle could not sense his presence, the Pale Child could. From the corner of Quayle’s chambers, it whispered his name, over and over.

  A warning.

  An imprecation.

  “Let him come,” said Quayle to the dark, to the Child. “Let him come, and we will add him to the pyre.”

  * * *

  HENDRICKSEN TOOK THE FIRST pull on his beer. He’d decided to order one about halfway through the telling of his story, but it sat untouched until he was done. He had unburdened himself to these men—two of them strangers, and the third barely more than that—for no reason other than a word: Carenor.

  “Does Sellars have a criminal record?” Louis asked.

  “Other than tickets for speeding and parking, no,” said Hendricksen. “He’s clean, or seems to be.”

  “Except nobody clean does business with the Enclave,” said De Jaager.

  “Being the pickup and delivery man doesn’t make you dirty,” said Angel.

  “Ignorance is no defense in law,” said Hendricksen. “Carenor, by the nature of its business, must be aware of the Enclave’s reputation, and the likelihood of illegality in any transaction in which it might be involved. The company simply chooses to play the odds. I think Sellars does, too—or did, before Visser and I became interested.”

  “And then Visser disappeared,” said Louis.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel accountable?”

  Hendricksen met his eye.

  “Are you going to tell me I shouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know you. I’m not going to tell you to do anything.”

  “Then yes, I do feel responsible. I was the senior investigator. I should have reined her in.”

  “Doesn’t sound to me like she was the kind of woman anyone reined in.”

  Hendricksen gave a small, sad smile.

  “Nevertheless, I should have tried.”

  “Do you think Sellars killed her?” said Angel.

  “No. He could account for his movements from the time he and Visser met at the service station to the moment we became aware she was missing. He had multiple witnesses, not just his wife, and made phone calls from his home number. He also worked overtime at Carenor during that period.”

  “He was making himself visible,” said Louis.

  “I believe so. He was manufacturing an alibi, so that when Visser disappeared he would not be suspected of any involvement.”

  “Hard to prove a suspicion like that.”

  “Impossible, one might say.”

  “And there was no other case in which you were involved that might have put Visser in danger?”

  “No. All our resources were focused on tracing missing artworks. We’d been working on almost nothing else for eighteen months. And you know, while a certain amount of money might have been involved, and the reputations of some institutions placed at minor risk, none of it would be worth killing for. The art world is riddled with fraud, theft, and double-dealing. It’s so crooked that I struggle to enter most modern galleries without wanting to piss on the floor, and whatever love I might once have had for art in anything but the theoretical sense has largely vanished. Many of the most elite galleries and auction houses regard scandals, court cases, and the occasional confiscation of stolen works as part of the cost of doing business. They’re irritants, but no more than that.”

  “Could someone at the Enclave have targeted Visser?” asked Angel.

  “That’s not how the Enclave operates,” said Hendricksen. “You have to understand how much money is represented by the assets it stores: we’re not talking billions of euros, but tens of billions. The Enclave is untouchable. It doesn’t have to kill people. It doesn’t have to make them disappear. It’s so far beyond the reach of an agency like ours that any investigations we might pursue would have zero impact upon it, and any trouble its clients might find themselves in with the authorities, tax or otherwise, would remain exactly that: their trouble, not the Enclave’s. No, whatever befell Visser occurred because we were looking too closely at Carenor, not the Enclave, and Sellars is the key.”

  “But you couldn’t pin anything on him?” said Angel.

  “No.”

  “Are your inquiries ongoing?” Louis asked.

  “We continue to work to trace missing art, just as we continue to monitor Carenor, or as much as we can with limited time and resources.”

  “What about Sellars?”

  “Unofficially, and without informing the British police, we tried to keep tabs on him for a while, but he didn’t leave the country again for many months, and when he did return to the Continent, he stayed well away from the Enclave.”

  Louis wished Parker were around to ask these questions; he was better at figuring out the angles. Louis and Angel were not private investigators, but career criminals. In another existence, Angel was stealing from the Enclave, and Louis was shooting anyone who objected. In this one, they served Parker. As Angel once remarked, something had gone horribly right with their lifestyle.

  “De Jaager said that you had connections to Maine,” said Hendricksen.

  “That’s right,” said Angel.

  “May I ask what they might be?”

  “We own some property there.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. We sometimes work with—or for—a man named Parker. He’s a private detective, based in Portland.”

  “Is Parker the reason you’re here?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Because, a few years ago, we traced payments from certain sales of looted art to a private bank in Bangor, Maine. These were the proceeds of paintings swindled from wealthy Jews imprisoned at a camp called Lubsko during World War Two. The prisoners surrendered the works in return for promises that their lives would be spared. They were killed shortly after, of course.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Louis, noncommittally.

  “We made no progress with the bank, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “In fact, we’d despaired of ever establishing the ultimate destination of those funds, until someone uncovered a nest of ancient Germans, living off the last of their stolen wealth in the comfort and security of the no
rtheastern United States.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit at all. That someone’s name, if I recall, was Parker.”

  “It would be.”

  “The same Parker whose interests you’re currently serving?”

  “If there are two of him, we’re all in more trouble than we thought.”

  “Interesting,” said Hendricksen. “At least one of those involved with this conspiracy suffered an unpleasant demise. Shot at long range, but not, it seems, by Parker.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Louis, again.

  “Although it was nothing more than the individual in question deserved.”

  “Ain’t that a relief?”

  Hendricksen regarded Louis with fresh eyes, and extended a hand.

  “I apologize for any earlier impoliteness on my part,” he said.

  They shook.

  “No apology necessary,” said Louis.

  Hendricksen shared a similar handshake with Angel, and said, “Yvette Visser was not only my colleague but also my friend. She left behind a partner and a young son. This is very personal to me.”

  “No chance she ran away to make a new life for herself?” said Angel.

  “None.”

  “Had to ask.”

  “I know, just as I know she’s dead.”

  No one said anything more for a time. The five men watched the trucks and cars pass through a dull landscape close to a border that barely existed. Eventually they returned to the business at hand, but with a new impetus. They were now all on the same side.

  “So why would Gruner be using Sellars?” said Angel.

  “Or vice versa,” said Louis.

  “Because Gruner collected art.”

  “And forged passports.”

  “Wouldn’t want to entrust forged documents to just anyone.”

  “But Gruner also bought and sold old books.”

  “Occult books.”

  “Which the parties involved might have been reluctant to entrust to the mail.”

  “Or even to a courier they didn’t know.”

  “If he bought and sold occult books, he must have been aware of the Atlas.”