A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  Hood immediately tensed. He had his shotgun with him, but he was tired, and wanted only to return to his home, his chair, and the football. But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right; he had accepted a duty of care, and it would only rankle if he chose to neglect it. Anyway, it might just be hikers taking a breath at the hollow—and a detour from the usual public rights of way, it had to be said—or the latest of the murder tourists and general nosey parkers.

  He followed Jess, and saw her tail begin to wag. So this was not fear on her part, or the recognition of an intruder on her territory, but closer to pleasurable anticipation. The dog raced on, pausing occasionally to make sure Hood was following, until they came at last to the slight incline that acted as the boundary of the hollow. Hood looked down to see a man standing at the very center of the site, his hands by his sides, the wind catching the tail of a short black overcoat that ended just above his knees. He was perhaps slightly above average height, his hair graying, and if he was carrying any middle-age fat, it was well hidden. He glanced up as Hood appeared, but did not seem troubled by the sight of a stranger carrying a shotgun. Either he was familiar with the ways of the land, or he was familiar with guns.

  But those eyes…

  Hood had witnessed his share of grief and loss, and seen his quota of rage, too, but had never encountered such a perfect synthesis of all three, this quintessence, in one being. He felt as though he were intruding on some intensely private moment of communion with pain, and his first instinct was to retreat and leave the visitor in peace. Here was no gawker, no dabbler in mysticism and the esoteric; here was one who had suffered greatly, and whose connection to this place was somehow as intimate as Hood’s own. All this Hood understood in a single moment, and later he would wonder at the clarity and speed of his insight.

  And the site itself was altered; this, too, Hood recognized. Weeds had emerged from the soil, and the grass was blackened in places. The very air smelled bad—not of rot, but of a sweetness that verged on the sickly. Jess had also detected the change in her environment. She hesitated on the rise, and spun in a single anxious circle. Then, before Hood could stop her, she raced toward the man in the hollow. For a few seconds, Hood feared she might be about to attack, confused by this assault on her senses, but her tail continued to wag. She slowed as she drew near him, and made the final approach more cautiously, her tail still moving, her ears back slightly. Like many border collies, Jess was generally wary of strangers, and tended to keep her distance even when her master did not. Hood could not recall her ever displaying such open affection toward a stranger before. He noticed that she stayed close to the man’s right leg, and even as he stroked her head, she continued to regard suspiciously the ground around her—not sniffing, just watching, the way she sometimes did when she feared a wasp or bee might be hiding in the undergrowth.

  Hood walked down to join them, minding his step as he went. The damage to the grass was similar to that which had been visited on his own garden, although the weeds were unfamiliar to him. Their leaves were large and heavy, and green with yellow undersides, reminding him uncomfortably of amphibian bodies.

  The stranger nodded. The ferocity of his emotions, glimpsed by Hood in that single brief flash, had already been concealed. Had Hood not come upon him so unexpectedly, he might never have been permitted to glimpse it at all.

  “You have a fine dog,” said the stranger.

  “But willful,” said Hood, “when it takes her. I believe it’s a female trait.”

  The man smiled, but it was little more than a reflex action.

  “Is this your property?” he asked, and Hood now heard the American accent.

  “Some of it. Around here, it’s a complicated business. Parts of the moor are owned by the Ministry, parts by the National Trust. My land abuts this site, and I have grazing rights, but my sheep don’t trouble it.”

  Hood swatted at an insect. There were a lot of bugs, attracted by the new growth. The man ignored them, and allowed his gaze to move on to the ruins of the abandoned settlement, visible on the next rise against the setting of the sun.

  “Is that where they lived?”

  “Who?” said Hood.

  “The Familists.”

  “Are they what drew you here?”

  “What else might bring a person to this place?”

  “Curiosity, if you watch the news.”

  “The woman who died?”

  “That’s right.”

  Some seconds of contemplation, while he continued to pat the dog, then: “I guess you have a point. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t read about her, but she’s not the reason I came.”

  “Then what is, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  The stranger continued to stare at the jagged remains of the Familists’ village.

  “Those people tried to kill me,” he said. “They succeeded, in a sense, but I came back.”

  Hood thought he knew him then. He had read the reports on the Internet: an old church blown to rubble; a town half razed by fire; wealthy, self-interested men and women, driven to murder by petty jealousy, isolationism, and the desire to dictate the way their community should be organized. Running alongside, or beneath, the official version of events was a shadow narrative that some might have been inclined to dismiss as fantasy—rumors of disappearances, and killings unrelated to competition for seats on local councils—had the bodies of two missing young women not been discovered in unmarked graves in the local cemetery. They might not have been found at all had it not been for the explosion that destroyed the church and its environs, disrupting the soil, and questions still remained about how the girls had come to be buried so deep, and in such narrow fissures, almost as though they had not been interred but instead dragged vertically into the earth from below.

  “Who are you?” said Hood, because he wanted to be certain.

  “My name,” said the stranger, “is Parker.”

  And any last doubts were dispelled.

  CHAPTER XCII

  Sellars and Mors met in the outdoor car park of a mall off the M1, one of those semicircles of retail hell that Sellars usually did his utmost to avoid, but that Mors favored for their anonymity. The news bulletins were dominated by reports of religious and racial tensions, to which the mystery surrounding the killing of the Holmby brothers would only add—especially the nature of Karl Holmby’s death, and the placement of his body. Sellars had to give Mors credit: she had a flair for the macabre. Moreover, the police were now chasing their tails trying to establish a connection between Romana Moon, the Holmbys, Helen Wylie, and Kathy Hicks. They wouldn’t find one, not beyond the theoretical. Sellars had killed Hicks before Gary Holmby had even chosen Romana Moon, and her body was now safely hidden in Walsingham, in the southeast of England.

  Gary Holmby’s death was almost certainly for the best. Once again, Sellars was forced to admit that he could perhaps have chosen a better accomplice, because Holmby had caused them no end of trouble, although, in Sellars’s defense, recruiting someone willing to kill young women was hardly an exact science. Oddly, Holmby had also held on to Romana Moon’s laptop for unknown reasons of his own, but Mors had recovered it before killing him, and used it to sow further confusion. A pity she hadn’t added some prayer beads to the remains of the brothers while she was about it, but never mind: the absence of misbaha would be at least as troubling to the police as their presence might have been, and he understood the reasoning behind her decision. Aside from adding another layer of complexity and obfuscation, it would allow Mors and Sellars to limit that particular detail to female victims, which would help to stoke the fires of intolerance currently burning across the country.

  And they had at least one body in reserve: the little doxie that Sellars had killed amid the Wittenham Clumps before burying her nearby, a red misbaha wrapped around her tongue. Funny, he still didn’t even know her real name.

  Sellars hadn’t stayed long at the
Clumps, and he’d buried her in a shallower hole than he might have preferred. It was the first time that he’d really understood the power of the locales selected by Mors and Quayle for the killings. He’d felt the weight of the past pressing upon him as he dug on Castle Hill, and could have sworn he heard voices and smelled woodsmoke, even though he was alone and no fires burned nearby. He was conscious of presences, and shifting forms, and wondered if, on the other side of some partition grown momentarily insubstantial, men and women from a distant time were regarding an umbrous figure digging a grave.

  But he didn’t mention this to Mors as they watched potted plants being stored in the trunks of cars, and families eating fast food in the sunlight. He was sure she wouldn’t have been surprised at what he’d experienced, but he didn’t want her to think he was troubled by it.

  “How many more?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  The window on Sellars’s side was open, and he kept his head turned toward it like a dog on a long journey, breathing the fresh air instead of Mors’s body odor. He’d done some reading on the subject, and was surprised to discover how many of those who survived attacks by serial killers mentioned a scent exuded by their assailants, a chemical expression of their moral corruption. He wondered if his wife now detected a similar stink coming from him. He suspected she might. She’d mentioned something the last time they’d made love, shortly after he’d cut Kathy Hicks’s throat, something that had bothered him. She’d asked if he was feeling poorly, and he saw her trying to breathe through her mouth as he moved on her, her face averted and her eyes closed, but not in anything approaching ecstasy. Not that they’d ever be making love again: she’d told him that morning about meeting with a solicitor, because she wanted a divorce.

  He’d been expecting it, of course, but the announcement still stunned him. Perversely, as soon as it was out of her mouth, he found himself determined to do all he could to prevent the dissolution of their marriage. It seemed that Lauren knew more about him than he’d thought. She’d found some e-mails on his laptop from a few years back, and she’d also kept one of his old phones. He thought he’d lost it, but she’d had it all along, holding it in reserve until the time came when she decided to use its text messages against him. They’d been going through a rough patch after Louise’s birth, and he’d slept with a couple of women while he was on the road. He’d managed to get it out of his system pretty quickly, though, which made the impending separation all the more frustrating. Lauren was leaving him because of past failings, when he was so much better now. He actually had little interest in sex at all, and would have been content just to tick along with her, doing it a couple of times a month but otherwise cohabiting companionably, making sure the kids were looked after. Okay, so he had progressed from sleeping with women to killing them, but no man was perfect.

  He stifled a giggle, and Mors looked at him curiously.

  All gone now, or that was what Lauren thought. But he had a surprise for her, one she certainly wouldn’t see coming.

  “Quayle feels the world changing,” said Mors. “We’re close.”

  Sellars recalled again the shades at the Wittenham Clumps, and knew she was right.

  “Have you chosen the next one?” Mors asked.

  “I think so,” said Sellars.

  “When will you take her?”

  “I’m not going to.”

  Mors looked puzzled.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t. You’ll have to do it.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I want the next one to be my wife.”

  CHAPTER XCIII

  Angel and Louis made it to Heathrow without incident, and the driver sent by Parker was waiting for them with a sign showing names that, while matching those on their passports, bore no relation to their actual identities. Angel was thankful for the pickup. He and Louis had spent a couple of hopeless minutes at the baggage claim trying to make some sense of the available escape routes from an airport that resembled interconnected circles of hell.

  “Didn’t these people once have an empire?” Angel asked Louis, as they gave up on the map.

  “So the story goes.”

  “Maybe they still do, and no one can figure out how to get to it.”

  The journey to their hotel took about an hour, and Louis immediately made some calls once they were safely checked in. He and Angel were now sitting in a corner of a pub in Balham, South London, regarding a middle-aged man robotically feed coins into a slot machine with more flashing lights than a Christmas tree. Sometimes he won. Mostly, he lost. When he eventually ran out of coins, he would walk to the bar, hand over a bill in return for change, and start again. His blank expression never altered, regardless of the result. Angel, who deemed gamblers to be half-wits at the best of times, found the whole spectacle profoundly depressing. A pair of televisions displayed a soccer match that no one was watching, and the carpet smelled of stale beer and fresh urine. Angel had drunk in some dumps over the years, but even dive bars had character. This was less a dive than a morass, a vacuum with a name over its door. They’d ordered drinks, but only to maintain the pretense of custom. If Angel had known how bad this place would be, he’d have brought along his own glass, and maybe some coveralls for his clothing.

  A newcomer entered, ordered a soda—for which, they noticed, he didn’t pay—and approached their table. He was in his early fifties, with dark curly hair flecked by gray, and the kind of eyes that would always betray amusement, even—or especially—if they were watching someone being tortured. Had Angel come across this man drowning, he’d have thrown him a concrete block and waited for the bubbles to stop. A blue canvas bag was slung over one shoulder. It looked very old. Drawn on it in black ink were the logos of various bands: Stiff Little Fingers, the Jam, the Clash, Rudi, the Undertones.

  “You must be the Americans,” he said, placing the bag at his feet. His voice held the hint of an accent so soft that Angel might have mistaken it for Scottish instead of Irish were it not for their reason for being in this drinking hole, “hole” being the operative word.

  “How did you guess?” asked Louis.

  “You’re too well dressed to be natives. Well, you are. Your friend is just too differently dressed. No offense meant,” he added to Angel.

  “Fuck you,” said Angel.

  He smoothed his shirt defensively. Everything Angel wore matched, just not necessarily with anything else he happened to be wearing at the time.

  “You know,” said Louis, “when someone says, ‘No offense meant,’ you can take it that offense was meant; and if the other party replies, ‘None taken,’ it means they’re offended.”

  “That’s very enlightening. What if the other party replies, ‘Fuck you’?”

  “Well, that just means ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  The new arrival shifted in his chair, but it was the only sign he gave of any displeasure at the exchange. His amused look remained unchanged throughout, which confirmed to Angel that painted glass spheres might just as easily have been lodged in his sockets for all his capacity to communicate real emotion.

  “Kirwan says hello, by the way,” he informed them.

  “I don’t know anyone called Kirwan,” said Louis.

  “He told me you’d say that. I suppose it makes you legit.”

  “And what makes you legit?”

  “What I have in this bag. My name’s Danny.”

  “I don’t recall asking,” said Louis.

  “Pleased to meet you anyway.”

  Danny offered a hand. It wasn’t accepted. He inspected it, wiped it on his jeans, and tried again. After letting it hang in the air for a few seconds longer, he took it back.

  “You’re being very unfriendly,” he said.

  “That’s because we’re not here to make friends.”

  “You’re going the right way about it, then.”


  “We’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Danny sighed, and sipped his soda.

  “Are we done with the niceties?” said Louis.

  “Nearly, I suppose. You got a discount on these, you know.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Yeah. Since it was Americans that sold them to us in the first place, it seemed only fair. We have plenty more where they came from.”

  “You’re very talkative, aren’t you?” said Louis.

  “I don’t like long silences. They remind me of the grave.”

  A phone rang twice in Danny’s pocket, stopped, and rang twice again. He made no effort to answer it, but instead stooped to pick up his bag. He struggled with it for a moment, as though it had caught on the leg of his chair, but he got there eventually. As he stood, Angel felt something strike his ankle.

  “Goodbye, now,” said Danny. “If you get into any trouble, be sure to call someone else.”

  He walked into the sunlight, sucking some of the light from the day in the process.

  Angel looked down. Another blue canvas bag, smaller and newer than the first, lay at his feet. Nobody else in the bar seemed interested in what they were doing, but that didn’t mean anything. Angel wondered which of the scattered denizens was also working for the man named Kirwan. In a movie, it would have been the guy playing the slot machine, in which case he would have been in line for an Oscar, so engrossed did he seem in losing money.

  “You were unfriendly, even by your standards,” said Angel.

  “I don’t like his kind.”

  “Then maybe we should have dealt with someone else.”

  “Time was pressing, but I’ll be sure to bathe later.”

  When they left, the canvas bag was still on the floor, emptied of its contents. Seconds later, the bartender picked up the bag. He dropped it in a bucket of bleach and water, before returning to making change for the slot machine, and waiting in vain for a better class of clientele.

  CHAPTER XCIV