The Bone Keeper

by Luca Veste

  ‘There’ll already be liaison officers making their way to the address,’ Shipley replied, that strong jawline of his tensing. ‘We can tag along and see if we can get a head start.’

  ‘Okay, I’m with you.’

  ‘Those marks . . . I know where I’ve seen them before.’

  Louise held her breath, waiting for Shipley to work it out. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The crosses and circles,’ Shipley continued, stopping as they reached the end of the field. ‘That’s supposed to be his mark, right? What he’s supposed to leave behind?’

  ‘That’s the myth,’ Louise replied, shrugging her shoulders, but battling against the excitement and dread growing inside her. ‘All part of the same story.’

  ‘Maybe there’s more to it than I thought. I’m not saying the bogeyman is real, but it’s starting to look like someone is trying to make us think it is.’

  Louise didn’t reply, instead leaving Shipley to think about it more. She walked away, knowing he’d follow her. After reaching the roadside once more, calling over the uniform who had identified the body and getting the details from him, they got back in the car. The radio was repeatedly crackling into life as the news of the discovery began to take hold. It seemed as if nothing else was happening in the city – the only story being discussed was what was happening in that small patch of woodland.

  Louise wondered if this was the beginning. Whether there would be more bodies to be found. She had seen it etched on the faces of all those in the woods. The fear, the excitement. She could see it written all over Shipley’s face now as well. The idea that they had stumbled into something.

  She wondered how long they could contain it for. When the outside world would begin to talk about the local legend as a real threat to them.

  Within half an hour they were pulling up outside a nondescript terraced house, on a notorious council estate twenty minutes out of the city centre. This was the other side of Liverpool. One she saw less often now, since she’d left her days in uniform and moved to work further north in the city, where it was more affluent. The streets of graffiti-laden walls and unkempt grass verges. Metal gates at the end of alleyways, piles of broken furniture behind them. Net curtains twitching as yet another strange vehicle turned up.

  They parked behind a marked police car; there was another that she knew to be an unmarked one in front of that.

  ‘They’ve moved quickly,’ she said, snapping off her seatbelt as Shipley pulled up the handbrake. ‘not messing around.’

  Shipley went to answer, but a cry from the doorway of the house closest to them made them both look that way instead.

  ‘I’m guessing someone has just been told the bad news.’

  Louise could only nod her head as Shipley grimaced, then looked back towards the house.

  Seven

  Louise rocked on her feet, waiting for the uniformed officer to finally leave the room. When he was gone, she let out a long breath. There was silence now; the mother of the man they had found in the woodland had been taken to the morgue, she guessed. Waiting for her son’s arrival there. She found herself thinking about how the woman would be feeling at that moment. Whether she could see something of herself in there. She’d been a part of so many death knocks over the years, but could never really find a normal response.

  She knew the answer was different for everyone. No one ever dealt with these moments the same.

  Some would cry and wail. Scream and shout. Others would retreat into themselves. Some would find God, praying for a different outcome or for some peace.

  Then, there were the ones who would try to never even think about the act or what had happened to their loved one. They wouldn’t want to know the truth. They would simply pretend it had never occurred. That the person they had loved and lost had never existed. That the loss didn’t have any effect on them.

  The room was still, sun bleeding through the net curtains in the bay window. Louise walked towards the light, picking up a photo frame from the sill. An unseen draught rippled the nets a little as she lifted up the photograph. She traced a finger over the face of the young boy pictured there and wondered if it belonged to the body currently being unearthed.

  The look of innocence, before age ripped it away.

  ‘At least we didn’t have to break the bad news.’

  Louise jumped at the sound of Shipley’s voice, then placed the photo back down in its place. She turned and gave him a tight smile. ‘Small mercies.’

  ‘She’s got another child,’ Shipley said, seemingly not noticing her reaction. ‘Anna, thirty years old. So, I’m guessing most of the pictures are of the victim.’

  He held her stare for a second longer, then broke away, looking around the room. Louise followed his gaze, seeing the multitude of photographs on every available surface. Four on the walls above the leather sofa. More on a sideboard. A couple on the mantelpiece. All from different stages of his life. School images, dressed up in uniforms which probably fit well at the beginning of the year, but looked more uncomfortable by the time the pictures were taken.

  ‘She’s not taking it well at all.’

  ‘Would you?’ Louise replied, a little more harshly than she’d intended. Shipley didn’t seem to notice, so she kept talking. ‘He’s obviously the golden child. There’s barely any pictures of the daughter. I bet you anything he was always in trouble, her little rogue. The daughter will have been nice and normal – just enough to slip under the radar and never get any attention.’

  ‘He was living here off and on according to the uniforms who got here first. He would just turn up unannounced and stay a few days.’

  ‘Then disappear off again,’ Louise said, finishing the thought. ‘Heard this one before. Transient lifestyle, relying on the backup of a parent when things get a little too tough.’

  ‘Probably why he wasn’t reported missing. She didn’t know anything had happened to him. Going to be tough creating a timeline because of that. We don’t know the exact day he disappeared or was taken, unless we can find associates willing to talk. Or when he died, without the post-mortem, of course.’

  ‘Did he have his own room?’

  Shipley nodded, extending an arm towards the doorway and up the stairs beyond it. Louise took the lead, taking the steps up two at a time, reaching the small landing area in seconds. She waited for Shipley to catch up and then opened the closest door. She moved on, as she revealed nothing more than a bathroom, then reached for another as Shipley made it onto the landing. The main bedroom door had been left ajar, easily and instantly recognisable as the sleeping quarters of an older woman. Louise removed gloves from a packet in her pocket and placed them over her pale hands.

  ‘She said he keeps some personal stuff up here, but nothing she thinks will help,’ Shipley said, waiting behind Louise as she checked another room. ‘She’s been through it all before. We might be able to spot something that wouldn’t make sense to her, I suppose. Probably need to put on gloves.’

  ‘Of course,’ Louise replied, turning to Shipley and revealing her hands already adorned. ‘Always thinking ahead, sir.’

  Shipley smiled at her, showing teeth which were almost perfect apart from a couple of minor crooked ones on the bottom row. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t call me sir. I’m not that old. Makes me feel middle-aged. I’m only a few years older than you.’

  At least five or six, Louise thought, but didn’t say it aloud. ‘I’m supposed to call you Shipley? That doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘How about you call me Paul, like I’ve asked you to a million and one times?’ Shipley replied, his face relaxing as he stopped smiling. ‘That is my name, after all. We’ve been working with each other long enough for you to call me by name.’

  Louise hummed a reply, turning her back on Shipley. ‘Paul it is,’ she said, pushing open another door. She stepped within and blew out a surprised breath. ‘Christ, we’ve just travelled back in time.’

  ‘It’s like a museum.’

/>   Hanging on the wall, one side drooping down a little – the Blu-Tack holding it there had finally given up the ghost – was a poster featuring the Gallagher brothers in typical Mancunian gurning pose. Next to that, an everton team photo from almost two decades earlier. On the wall opposite, a poster for the film Trainspotting.

  ‘How old was he exactly?’ Louise said, moving into the room. ‘I realise I should have asked that earlier.’

  ‘Thirty-two apparently,’ Shipley replied, standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips, shaking his head as he looked around the room. ‘I’m not sure he’s lived here at all since the nineties, looking at this place. It’s like Britpop threw up in here.’

  ‘Obviously just never got around to updating his decor. Or just enjoyed the nostalgia of it all. Maybe it was a reminder of better times.’

  ‘I could be in my own teenage bedroom here,’ Shipley continued, crossing the room and picking up a Stereophonics CD from the bedside table, then placing it back down. The alarm clock sitting beside it blinked numbers in red light, showing a time that would have been correct nine hours earlier. ‘Make a start on that chest of drawers there. I’ll see if there’s anything in here.’

  Louise turned and moved over to the chest of drawers, which stood opposite the bed. There was the sound of a drawer opening in the bedside table and a quiet exclamation followed quickly. Louise continued with her own search. She bent over, removing the bottom drawer and placing it on the floor. She dropped to her knees and began rifling through what was inside, going through old receipts, a Loaded magazine from almost two decades earlier, scraps of paper with various scribblings on them. Phone numbers that would have to be checked but which she imagined were probably out of use now. Landline numbers from back when everyone used them instead of mobiles.

  A few packets of Rizlas, yellowing with age. A box of filter-tips, a squashed cheap cigar and a few old coins.

  ‘Anything over there yet?’ Shipley said.

  Louise began separating what she’d found into piles. ‘Just a load of rubbish probably.’

  ‘Just old underwear and T-shirts over here. About what we’d expect, I suppose. You haven’t found anything about the Bone Keeper then?’

  She could hear the lightness in Shipley’s tone; he was trying to show that he was joking, but she knew he would be having second and third thoughts about his initial feelings. ‘nothing jumps out at me.’

  ‘He’d be the right age for when it was at its height, I think,’ Shipley said, his voice growing quiet, almost as if he was remembering his own history with the local myth. ‘It was huge in the late eighties, through the nineties. Makes you wonder if they still talk about it now?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Louise replied, knowing from an earlier search online that it was true. She would eventually lead Shipley to look at it himself, but for now she was content to let it bubble under the surface. ‘Kids aren’t really that different these days. They’ll still be finding ways to scare each other.’

  ‘True. It’s an old story though. You’d think they would have moved past it onto something else by now, surely?’

  ‘The old ones are the best. Most people our age have probably passed it down to their kids by now.’

  ‘When did you first hear the story?’

  Louise paused, thinking back to the time her brother had first mentioned the name.

  He’s called the Bone Keeper. He hides in the woods and takes people away. You remember Dennis, who lived in the road behind us?

  They moved, didn’t they?

  That’s what the grown-ups want us to think, Lou. He went missing and never came back. They were so scared that they moved to get away from the Bone Keeper. He was going to come after them next.

  You’re lying . . .

  Why don’t you go into the woods on your own then? If you think I’m lying, go and look for yourself.

  Louise smiled to herself, remembering her brother’s impish grin as he tried to cajole her into believing in the legend. She had so few memories of him that the ones she did have she held onto with a vice-like grip. She never had gone into the woods alone though. Not even as she grew older.

  She hadn’t needed to.

  ‘Must have been at school,’ Louise said eventually, not turning to look at Shipley in case he caught the lie. ‘Same way as everyone else. There was something in the woods. He would take people away. Make them disappear. Almost as if they’d never existed. He’d slice your flesh and keep your bones. That old chestnut. You wouldn’t hear him coming, almost like a ghost—’

  ‘Or a monster,’ Shipley said quietly, then shook off the word with a shudder, as he seemed to recall a time when he thought of those things.

  ‘Right. Only, we don’t believe in ghosts or monsters do we? Things that hide in the woods and make people disappear? We grow up and realise it was all just stories we used to scare each other. It’s just a story.’

  ‘Those markings on the trees . . . probably kids, right?’

  ‘Would be some coincidence if they were. I mean, in the same place as we actually found a body?’

  She didn’t get a further response, so took the next drawer out and continued her search. The sun suddenly decided to show its face, blaring through the single-paned window between her and Shipley. Dust motes danced in the air in the space between them, becoming increasingly abundant the more the pair moved things around in the bedroom.

  The second drawer didn’t yield the same results as the first, containing instead a few old annuals – Beano and Match – an old Guinness Book of World Records and a couple of knackered electronic toys. Unwanted Christmas present drawer, she thought to herself with a smile, remembering that she’d had something similar when she was a teenager. Usually filled with cheap hair straighteners, ropey perfume and various other bits her grandparents had thought would count as something she’d actually want. Another thirty minutes of searching the room didn’t produce anything more.

  ‘One day, I’m telling you, the answer will be left on a whiteboard for us,’ Shipley said, standing up from checking behind the small radiator. ‘It’d make things much easier. Wouldn’t have to go through someone’s underwear drawer, for a start.’

  ‘That actually happened to me once.’

  Shipley stopped in his tracks and turned towards Louise, eyebrows raised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Louise replied, looking around the bedroom for a stone left unturned. ‘Well, not a whiteboard, as such. I was looking into the welfare of someone when I was in uniform. A young girl, can’t have been much older than seventeen. She was living with an older man and the parents didn’t approve. Probably right to, considering what happened. Can’t remember her name now. Anyway, we go to the last known address and don’t get an answer. Sergeant gives us the okay to break in and we get through the door quite easy. In the hallway, propped up against the stairs, is a chalkboard. Says on it “She’s in the shed. She wouldn’t stop arguing with me. Please bury us together.” ’

  ‘Well, that was nice of him.’

  ‘We expected to find him dead, but he was lying on the bathroom floor holding a razor blade. Couldn’t bring himself to do it, could he? Turns out she wasn’t dead either. Just locked in the shed, with a blanket thrown over her. He thought he’d killed her during an argument, but he’d just fractured her skull.’

  ‘Do you ever think our job would be boring without domestic violence? Like we wouldn’t have much to do?’

  ‘We’re here now, aren’t we? This doesn’t look like a couple who’ve had an argument and the bloke has done his partner in.’

  ‘Unless Nathan was seeing Caroline and she’s just confused, of course.’

  ‘Yes, that’s usually what happens. People have an argument, then you kill yourself and bury your own body in some woods.’

  ‘What if it was the other way around?’

  ‘So, Caroline slices herself up after burying her boyfriend? If we find a link between the two of them maybe, but I have a feeling these t
wo will never have met before.’

  Shipley clearly couldn’t disagree with her, so turned his back instead and pulled away the chest of drawers Louise had inspected from the wall. She moved out of his way, still thinking about the long list of domestic incidents she’d investigated over the years. One day, she wanted to work out the percentage of her cases over the years that had been the result of arguments which had ‘got out of hand’, as her least favourite phrase went.

  She imagined it was high.

  She’d thought about how someone could be pushed to that point of no return. How love could turn to hate in an instant, the desire to hurt overwhelming a person in one moment and changing lives forever. The level of toxicity needed to snap in that instant, wanting to hurt the one you supposedly loved more than anyone.

  Frustration boiling over and turning to violence.

  Was any killer different? Did everyone have that capacity for brutality within themselves?

  ‘There’s nothing of interest behind these drawers,’ Shipley said, breaking into her train of thought. Louise welcomed it, a brief reprieve from the muddled thinking that was beginning to invade her mind. ‘or anywhere else in here.’

  ‘There’s a few bits and bobs in the bottom drawer, but nothing that screams evidence to me. Give me a hand with moving this bed. Let’s see if there’s anything better underneath.’

  Shipley shook his head and mumbled something under his breath, but still moved to help her. Probably at his own mistake of not checking himself. They lifted the bed and moved it closer to the door, revealing what was underneath. Old magazines, scattering as they moved the furniture which had held the pile in place. Louise could see from the covers that they were more explicit than the copy of Loaded she had found earlier. Old tissues had been stuffed down the side of the bed, now disseminated alongside the magazines, matted together. Louise decided not to move them any further.

  The smell was murkier now, dissipating and rising around them.

  Shipley stood up fully and wrinkled his nose as the smell reached him. ‘Quite usual for a teenage boy’s room, but this guy was much older. No excuse. Still, at least it’s in keeping with the rest of the room.’