A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  “Let’s play a game of ‘Ask Nabih,’ ” said Hynes. “He loves that. Lives for it, does Nabih.”

  He took out his phone and called Nabih Uddin, who picked up on the second ring.

  “A question, Nabih. How does a GPS unit show a vehicle sitting in Cardiff when it was actually in Glasgow at the time?”

  “A spoofer,” said Uddin, without even pausing to think.

  “A what?”

  “A GPS spoofer. It broadcasts a fake signal that overrides the real one. Alternatively, it can rebroadcast genuine signals stored earlier to fool the receiver. The Fraud Unit found a spoofer on a truck just a couple of months back. A memo was circulated about it.”

  “Incredible,” said Hynes.

  “What?” said Gackowska.

  “Nabih reads memos. Who knew?”

  He hung up before Uddin could start swearing, and relayed to Gac-

  kowska what he had learned.

  “There you go,” he said. “A jammer and a spoofer.”

  “If he’s our bloke.”

  “He’s Chummy, mark my words.”

  Chummy: Hynes was so old school, Gackowska reflected, he probably still secretly thought of himself as a Peeler.

  Hynes checked his watch. “Maybe it’s time we asked Lynskey to summon Sellars, so we can have a little heart-to-heart with him. In the meantime, why don’t you call Scotland Yard and get Hamill or Mount on the phone, see what they have to say about this Visser business?”

  He left Gackowska to make the call, and returned to Lynskey’s office.

  * * *

  GACKOWSKA SPENT TWENTY MINUTES speaking about Christopher Sellars with DS Keryn Hamill of the Met’s Art and Antiques Unit. By the end of the conversation, she had taken six pages of notes about free ports, and particularly the one known as the Enclave; about misappropriated artworks; about allegations of blackmail by Sellars against Visser; and about the doggedness of Visser’s colleague, Hendricksen, who continued to contact Hamill on a regular basis to inquire about progress on the Visser investigation, of which there was none.

  It seemed also that in the months following Visser’s disappearance, Sellars had made allegations of harassment against Hendricksen, based on phone calls from Hendricksen to his landline and mobile, and sightings of the Dutchman near Sellars’s home and place of work. No charges were pressed, but Hamill had been forced to advise Hendricksen to keep his distance, although she was pretty certain that he continued to keep track of Sellars’s movements from afar.

  “He liked Sellars for it,” Hamill told Gackowska.

  “What about you?”

  “Sellars was certainly the last known person to see Visser alive, but we have her on the way to London while he was at home in Manchester, and unless he’s capable of bilocation, I can’t see how he could have harmed her in the timeframe we’ve established.”

  “How tight is the window?”

  “We’ve narrowed it to a couple of hours, but even allowing for a considerable margin of error, Sellars is still in the clear.”

  “What about Lynskey, the Carenor CEO? Were Visser’s allegations embarrassing enough for his company to justify having her killed?”

  “From what I’ve learned about the art world in this job, it’s virtually without shame, so the answer is almost certainly no. Hendricksen supplied us with a lot of information indicating that Carenor, probably on behalf of some of its clients, maintains regular contact with the Enclave. If Hendricksen is to be believed, and I don’t doubt him, the only reason anyone uses the Enclave is to avoid the attentions of the law, the taxman, or the rightful owners of stolen property. Hendricksen thinks that Sellars might have been picking up a little extra money on the side by smuggling, but Carenor isn’t blameless, either. If you do business with the Enclave, then you’re not just flirting with illegality: you’re taking it to bed and making it breakfast in the morning.”

  “How much of this would stand up in court?”

  “Almost none.”

  “And Sellars hasn’t come to your attention since then?”

  “No. How good is he looking for those murdered women?”

  “It’s too early to say. We want to talk to him, and examine the sat nav on the vehicles he’s been using.”

  “All I can tell you for sure is that he didn’t kill Yvette Visser, but…”

  “But?”

  “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have found someone else to do it for him.”

  * * *

  HYNES AND LYNSKEY WERE discussing Carenor’s GPS when Gackowska returned. From a cursory examination, it appeared no other drivers had been affected by similar problems, at least not when it came to gaps in the online records.

  “But we’d have to do a full cross-check to be certain,” Lynskey added.

  Hynes was already considering how much of this information they’d require in the event of an arrest and possible prosecution. All of it, he imagined. Obviously, they’d need their own digital forensics investigators to examine the equipment and records as well, but it wouldn’t hurt to have Carenor set the ball rolling.

  “Can you put someone on it?” he said.

  “It’ll be time-consuming,” said Lynskey.

  “Anything worth doing usually is,” said Hynes.

  Lynskey worried at his bottom lip with his teeth.

  “Did you want to say something?” said Hynes.

  “This is about the dead women, isn’t it?” said Lynskey. “The ones with the beads in their mouths.”

  Hynes no longer saw any reason to dissemble. They needed Lynskey.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I thought so.”

  “And?”

  “We’ll help in whatever way we can.”

  “Can the system tell us where Sellars is now?”

  Lynskey confirmed with an assistant the number of the vehicle assigned to Sellars the previous day. Sellars’s first two pickups weren’t far from his home, and it hadn’t made sense to drag him all the way into the yard just to have him drive back the same way. Another van had towed Sellars’s assigned vehicle to his house late the night before, and left it parked outside.

  “That’s odd,” said Lynskey.

  “What is?” said Hynes.

  “The system’s telling me the van is still at Sellars’s home. It hasn’t moved since last night. He should have been on the road for hours by now.”

  “Why don’t you call him, see what he says.”

  Lynskey looked up the number, and made the call.

  “It’s gone to voice mail,” he said.

  “We can contact the SPOC,” said Gackowska, “and ask for a location on Sellars’s phone.”

  SPOCs, or “special points of contact,” were officers responsible for liaising with phone companies, and processing requests by police for communications data. While such requests were supposed to be accompanied by paperwork—a lot of paperwork—and could take days to work their way through the system, it was possible to obtain the information rapidly in the event of an emergency, and file the documentation later.

  “Or we could just go and knock on his front door,” said Hynes. “If he’s not there, we’ll send out the dogs.”

  Which sounded like a plan. Before they left, Hynes made sure that Lynskey had contact details for both him and Gackowska. If Lynskey heard from Sellars, he was to establish his whereabouts, and either get him to stay where he was, or come back to Carenor, before contacting one of them immediately. Hynes also reminded him of the importance of keeping his mouth shut about their inquiries.

  Lynskey understood, and made no objection.

  “You know,” he said, “I never really liked him anyway.”

  CHAPTER CXXI

  Parker walked the streets of London, largely heedless of his direction, or seemingly so. Had the legat Armitage been permitted sight of him, she might have discerned a pattern in what, to an untrained eye, were random actions: backtracking, pausing by glass, slipping through Underground stations, all in an effort
to determine if he was being followed, and by whom.

  Perhaps he was mistaken, and the Old Firm was a deserted shell, its inhabitants long since vanished.

  Perhaps, but he sensed a shadow.

  He continued to circle, slowly closing on St. Bart’s.

  * * *

  IN AMSTERDAM, DE JAAGER had attended the funerals of both Eva Meertens and Cornelie Gruner. The former, unsurprisingly, was a sad affair, De Jaager’s personal sorrow rendered deeper by his sense of responsibility for what had occurred. He could have avoided the service altogether, he knew, but elected instead to torment himself still further. At least there were no grieving parents with whom to contend, Meertens having been an orphan since her teens, a consequence of being born to a mother and father who had made consistently poor life choices—drugs and petty crime—that ultimately led to their premature demise. By taking Eva under his wing, De Jaager had hoped to ensure a different outcome for their daughter. Instead, he appeared merely to have hastened her end.

  Gruner’s last bow was a more sparsely attended affair, and untroubled by any excessive displays of grief. It took place at the Westgaarde Crematorium, which always reminded De Jaager of an upscale business park. Its interior was bright and modern, and its furniture colorful in a restrained manner; the facility might just as easily have accommodated a conference of thrusting dot com visionaries as a congregation of mourners. Those who gathered to send Gruner on his way were largely elderly, and mostly male. They were present more to gossip, and speculate on possible reasons for Gruner’s murder—his general unpleasantness being high among them—and the future of his book collection, than pay anything approaching their last respects.

  De Jaager’s people watched them all, just as they had monitored those attending the service for Eva Meertens. Identities were established, and backgrounds checked, but to little avail. No one arrived for either ceremony parading obvious guilt, De Jaager possibly excepted, and the two events had few attendees in common, again with the exception of De Jaager, and an assortment of undercover Dutch detectives engaged in a similar exercise.

  De Jaager’s sources had indicated to him that the investigators were as baffled by the two murders as he was. Meanwhile, his friends in the National Police Corps were aware that Meertens had been one of De Jaager’s protégés, and was working for him at the time of her murder. They also knew that De Jaager had been shadowing Gruner. He wasn’t a suspect—they knew De Jaager too well for that—but they were curious to know why Gruner should have been the focus of his attentions. This, in turn, had aroused their interest in Louis, who had been present with De Jaager at the Rijksmuseum on the day Gruner was killed. De Jaager informed them that he had simply been showing his guest around the museum, and had no knowledge of his current whereabouts, said guest having since moved on. The NPC continued to pressure him for further details, but softly: De Jaager’s reputation as an honest broker protected him for the present. The only blessing was that, when shown an image of Angel from Schiphol Airport, none of the bartenders at the Oak connected him with any customer seen on the premises during the night in question. Perhaps they were telling the truth, in which case darkness and rain had come to Angel’s rescue; or, more likely, they were lying as a matter of self-preservation, taking the view that whatever had befallen Gruner might also easily befall them should they cooperate with the police investigation. Moral corruption, De Jaager knew, was quite contagious.

  Yet De Jaager also had powers that the police did not possess. The Dutch might have been one of the most law-abiding peoples in the world, but this was not to say that all were equally open to assisting the law with its inquiries—as the staff at the Oak proved—however justified those same inquiries might appear by any objective analysis. In addition, De Jaager had quietly made it known that a reward was on offer for information enabling his people to lay hands on Eva’s killer before the police.

  The whispers started, and De Jaager listened.

  A car recalled; not all the numbers and letters on the license plate remembered, but some. A woman, small, and possibly with reddish hair, noticed in the vicinity of Gruner’s place of business. A similar sighting—perhaps, just perhaps—near Lijnbaansgracht. Slowly, they were putting the pieces together, and De Jaager, the hunter, was sharpening his knives. He had been fond of Eva.

  He would skin her killer alive.

  * * *

  ROSANNA BELLINGHAM SAT IN Rules of Covent Garden, a glass of wine almost empty before her. Rules was London’s oldest restaurant, once the haunt of Dickens, Thackeray, and H. G. Wells. She knew Bob Johnston would appreciate its literary antecedents, and dining there might introduce him to the joys of steak-and-kidney suet pudding, and steamed sponge with custard.

  Except Johnston was now an hour late for their early dinner, and their table had been given away. The maître d’ assured her that every effort would be made to secure another once her guest arrived, but Rosanna was starting to feel annoyed. She had not yet progressed to being concerned, although that might follow. For now, she tried Hazlitt’s for a second time, only to hear the phone in Johnston’s room ring out again. On this occasion she left a message with the front desk, asking that it be passed to Mr. Johnston should he return. She supposed he might have become caught up in his researches, and failed to notice the time, or else have forgotten entirely about their meeting. If the latter were subsequently revealed to be the case, she thought, Bob Johnston could take his sorry self back to the United States, books and all, without ever glimpsing her face again. She had her pride.

  The bartender approached.

  “Would Madame like another glass of wine?”

  She looked at her empty glass. What was the other choice: to return home to a ghost, or stay here with the living?

  “Why not?” she said. “And would you happen to have a newspaper?”

  12

  Deflores: Yes, and the while I coupled with your mate

  At barly-break; now we are left in hell.

  Vermandero: We are all there, it circumscribes us here.

  —Thomas Middleton, The Changeling

  CHAPTER CXXII

  Gackowska and Hynes stood outside the door of the Sellars home on Heaton Street in Prestwich, listening to a child crying inside. It sounded like a little girl. The two officers weren’t yet concerned enough to begin breaking down doors—if the police reacted like that to every distressed mite, half the doors in the country would be off their hinges—but there was an edge to the sobbing that Hynes didn’t like.

  The house was semi-detached, with a garage to one side in addition to an empty driveway at the front. A child’s scooter lay abandoned by one of the flower beds. As Lynskey had indicated, the unmarked Carenor van sat at the curb.

  Hynes tried the doorbell again, and through the frosted glass saw a figure quickly descending the stairs. The door opened, revealing a woman standing before them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the crying, she looked harried.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Hynes and Gackowska showed her their warrant cards. She gave them a quick glance, and softened slightly.

  “Mrs. Sellars?” said Hynes.

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to come down,” she said. “One of the girls had a fall. I’ve warned them about playing too roughly.”

  “Is she okay?” said Gackowska.

  “She has a bump on her head, but she’ll be fine.”

  “We were hoping to speak with your husband.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “He’s supposed to be at work.”

  “Well, we noticed that his vehicle is parked outside.”

  “I was wondering about that as well. I’ve tried calling him, but he’s not answering his phone.”

  The crying hadn’t stopped, and was now being punctuated by wails of “Mummy!”

  Hynes picked up an odd smell. He associated it with households in which cleanliness had been relegate
d to a luxury, and used dishes were left to grow mold in sinks. Sometimes it was a consequence of poverty and neglect, but equally he’d noticed it in homes where life was just temporarily getting on top of a person, perhaps because of a new addition to the family. But from what he knew about Sellars, his girls were no longer infants.

  “Look,” said Hynes, “do you mind if we come in for a moment?”

  The woman opened the door wider, and stepped aside to admit them.

  “You’re welcome to join us,” she said.

  Which was an odd way to put it, Hynes thought. The sour smell grew stronger as he passed, and he realized it was coming from her. She needed to give her clothes a good wash, in his view, and maybe her body along with them. Jesus, she was pale, with hair resembling filaments of steel, and eyes more white than blue, like bleached water.

  “Maybe you could introduce us to the kids,” said Gackowska, as the door closed behind them.

  “I’m sure,” said Mors, “they’d like that very much.”

  CHAPTER CXXIII

  The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great—or St. Bart’s, as it is generally known to Londoners—dates back to 1123, although half of the original structure was destroyed in the sixteenth century, leaving an interesting combination of Norman, later Middle Ages, and Tudor architecture. St. Bart’s had survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the Reformation, the Great Fire of London, and the German Blitz, making it not only the oldest parish church in the city but also unique.

  Yet there is blood in the ground here, too, and not all of it shed by animals at the meat market nearby. Smithfield was long the favored site for the execution of heretics, who were burned at the Smithfield Stake in their hundreds, while swindlers and forgers—for coining was High Treason—would be taken there to be placed in vats of oil and boiled to death, or simply set to roasting on the woodpile.