Rattle: A serial killer thriller that will hook you from the start

by Fiona Cummins

  ‘I’ve just got to—’

  She waves a thin arm, doesn’t move her eyes from the screen. ‘I know, I know. They need to be fed and watered too.’

  Outside, the grass is damp, and the air scorched with fumes. The shed smells of hay. He inhales its sweetness.

  When he has finished in the garden, he sleeps for an hour or two. He showers. She is still watching television and she talks to the screen instead of him.

  They are interviewing the mother of Grace Rodríguez, she says. The Girl in the Woods. The teenager who disappeared on her way to a ballet exam.

  Mrs Rodríguez has been invited on to share her experience, she tells him, because a five-year-old girl has gone missing.

  He listens to the faux sympathy of the breakfast presenters, their Technicolor commiserations at odds with the bruised shadows beneath Mrs Rodríguez’s eyes. They remind their viewers of the salacious details; that when the police stumbled across Grace’s remains in Oxleas Wood, most of her body was missing. All except the tips of her fingers and toes, which had been sealed in small plastic bags and neatly lined up.

  He closes the door behind him, makes a sandwich, and wraps it in greaseproof paper.

  When he carries it through to her, he is wearing his suit. She does not ask where he is going.

  10

  3.46 p.m.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ said The Boss.

  Fitzroy studied the picture of Clara that was pinned on the wall of the Major Incident Room in the southern district of the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

  We’ll find you, sweetheart. I promise.

  Across the room, a dozen or so officers were at work, manning the phones, scribbling notes, their faces ghosted by the glare of their computer screens. The rest were out conducting house-to-house, or joining the search.

  ‘Fuck,’ said The Boss, and slammed down the phone. He popped a tablet from the blister pack in his pocket and dry-swallowed it. Outside, the pinprick lights of the city lit up the gathering darkness.

  Fitzroy cleared her throat. ‘Everything all right, sir?’

  ‘No, it fucking isn’t,’ he said, and rubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand. ‘Fucking newspapers are planning a story on Miles Foyle.’

  Fitzroy didn’t need to ask what kind of story. A few hours ago, as part of a routine check, she had run his name through CRIS and CRIMINT, the Metropolitan Police’s intelligence databases.

  Her eyes had widened at what she had read. Two cautions for kerb-crawling, less than six months old. One of the girls had been underage. Or, at least, under eighteen, which as far as the law concerning prostitution stands, was the same thing. There had also been an allegation of sexual assault and kidnap against a work experience girl, which had later been withdrawn.

  ‘Didn’t take them long.’

  ‘No, it fucking didn’t, and the timing couldn’t be worse, not with the press conference on Monday. We want the public to sympathize, not point the bloody finger.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘No choice but to ride it out, but I suppose we’d better warn him.’ He sighed, flicked through a couple of sheets of paper on the desk. She knew what was coming next.

  ‘Get down there, will you. Paying for sex with an underage prostitute does not make him guilty of abducting his daughter, but I want you all over Miles Foyle like a bloody rash.’

  When Fitzroy walked up the path to Pagoda Drive this time, the front door was wide open, a chandelier lighting up the chessboard floor. A young woman was coming out, her eyes red-rimmed, streaks of blonde in her cropped hair. Her hands were resting on the shoulders of a girl around seven or eight.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ said the girl.

  The woman nodded at Fitzroy, then lowered her gaze back to the child.

  ‘It might make you feel a bit better, lovely. You can’t stay indoors all day. Perhaps we can get a hot chocolate at that cafe you like on the way home.’

  ‘Is Dr Foyle in?’

  The woman’s fingertips whitened as she gripped the child’s shoulders. ‘He’s somewhere around. Upstairs, I think.’

  Fitzroy pressed the bell, and stepped into the hall. Waited. Leaned back out and pressed it again. For a second time, she marvelled at the grandeur of this house, so different from the home of her childhood, the austere atmosphere of the two-up, two-down in Kent broken only by her mother’s obsession with jazz 45s.

  ‘Gina,’ shouted a man’s voice. ‘Can you get that?’

  Fitzroy wondered what had happened to the Foyles’ family liaison officer. When no one appeared, she tried calling out instead.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’

  Miles Foyle stuck his head over the bannister. When he saw Fitzroy, he ran his fingers through his hair and started down the stairs. It was now almost twenty-six hours since Clara had vanished, and every moment of that loss was painted in his bloodshot eyes, the stubble on his chin.

  ‘Amy’s gone for a walk. She was going mad, cooped up in here all day.’

  So that’s where the FLO had gone. ‘It’s not Mrs Foyle I’ve come to see.’

  ‘Gina was here.’ He looked vaguely around him. ‘She said something about taking Eleanor to see a friend.’

  ‘Dr Foyle, we’re still waiting for that list of patients you saw on Friday afternoon. Can I ask you to give it to me now?’

  He glanced up, startled. ‘Um, I’m not sure I can do that.’

  ‘Is there a staff member in your practice who can photocopy it for me? I can send someone to collect it. Or perhaps they can email it.’

  Miles rummaged in his pocket for his hanky and blew his nose. ‘I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.’

  Fitzroy’s eyes flicked to the left. Hanging from the key hook in the hall was a laminated identity badge attached to a lanyard, the initials RSH emblazoned across the plastic.

  ‘Were you working elsewhere that day? I gather you sometimes see non-private patients.’

  He followed her gaze. ‘Yes, at the Royal Southern, but that’s usually on Tuesdays.’

  Fitzroy’s impatience ignited.

  ‘Dr Foyle, do I really need to remind you that your daughter is missing, most likely the victim of an abduction? I have no desire to arrest you for obstruction, so I suggest you try to be a little more helpful—’

  ‘I can’t give you a list because I don’t have one.’

  ‘You were at your office, though? We picked you up from there.’

  He let out a long sigh. ‘Yes, I was there.’

  ‘So why don’t you have a list?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t seeing patients on Friday afternoon.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t think that’s too much of a problem. If you were catching up with paperwork, I’m sure your receptionist can vouch for you.’

  ‘I sent her home.’

  Ting.

  ‘Well, there must be someone who saw you in your office, or perhaps you spoke to them on the phone. All we need to do is verify where you were when—’

  ‘—Clara went missing? That’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it? That I had something to do with my own daughter’s disappearance.’

  She could read his outrage in the line of his lips, the fleck of spittle on his chin. She understood it, and would have been surprised by its absence. But Fitzroy had seen that expression before on other faces, on the faces of fathers who had raped and strangled their little girls.

  ‘No one is saying that, sir. But we do need to know what you were doing. It’s a standard line of inquiry.’

  ‘Look, I was with someone, OK? Happy now?’

  Fitzroy gave herself a moment to allow his words to settle on her.

  ‘Who? We’ll need to speak to her. Or him.’

  ‘It’s a her.’ His face was a smooth mask. ‘And you can’t speak to her.’

  ‘Why not, Dr Foyle?’ Fitzroy waited a beat. ‘Is she a prostitute?’

  He looked away. Fitzroy watched his left cheek moving, his teeth biting int
o its fleshy interior. She tried a different tack.

  ‘Are you aware that tomorrow’s newspapers will be running stories about your predilection for kerb-crawling?’

  His face caved in. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Does your wife know?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I suggest you tell her.’

  ‘I can’t.’ His voice was a whisper.

  ‘Believe me, it’ll be worse if she finds out from the papers. In the meantime, I want you to think very carefully about what I’m asking. As I told you before, failure to provide relevant information to an ongoing inquiry could be regarded as obstruction. When you’re ready to talk, you know where to find me.’

  The temperature had dropped by the time Fitzroy found herself outside again. The bite of frost in the air was as raw as her memories of the search for Grace Rodríguez.

  The woods had been covered in white needles, the unmistakable hallmark of a hoar frost. Their feet crunched against the iron earth.

  They had moved through the trees, beyond Severndroog Castle, the ancient folly built by a grieving widow in memory of her husband. She had wondered then what horrors this gothic tower had witnessed.

  Deeper into the woods. Into the frozen darkness of a winter morning.

  ‘I don’t usually walk this way,’ the man had said, his dog nosing the backs of his legs. He pointed to the ballet case, its pale pink outline visible against the ground.

  Fitzroy had stared at the name sticker, peeling now after days in the damp and cold, but still clinging defiantly to the leather.

  ‘Get forensics here now,’ she had shouted, and the woods had echoed with her fear.

  Even a year after Grace’s disappearance, Fitzroy’s frustration had not diminished. Her thoughts jumped back to Miles Foyle. He was a conundrum. She did not know yet if she believed him, although his distress had seemed genuine enough.

  And yet . . .

  Most abductors of young girls were known to their victims. Most were white, unemployed. Most had a record. Three out of four. The odds were not in his favour.

  And he had no alibi. At least, none she had managed to confirm. But she was reluctant to bring him in. The tar of an arrest – especially a father’s arrest on suspicion of child abduction – took years to scrape clean. But she would be back. She would give him a couple of days and, in the meantime, the family liaison team could keep a close eye on him. If he began to unravel, she would know about it.

  From a downstairs window in Pagoda Drive, Miles watched the detective walk down the path to her car, footsteps echoing against stone. As the red tail-lights turned the corner, he picked up his jacket and left the empty house which no longer felt like a home.

  11

  4.36 p.m.

  Mostly, he prefers to wait until they’re dead before setting to work with his knife. He enjoys the art of dissection, the careful removal of organs, the peeling back of the skin; the rest he leaves to his colony.

  When he has cleaned and oiled his tools and set loose the dermestids, he mops the floor of the cutting room, climbs the basement stairs of his father’s house and locks the door behind him. He will return in a few hours, when the beetles have finished their ghoulish striptease, coaxing the flesh from the fragile bones. He sniffs his pinstripe jacket. The scent of dead matter clings to it.

  Up here, the silence enfolds him. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply. Here is where he belongs. Amongst the bones of his family’s collection. The Ossuary.

  A treasure trove of oddities passed down through countless generations. Seeded in a grave robber’s alliance with a king’s surgeon, harvested by the male bloodline, his bloodline, and displayed here, in this house.

  He wanders the rooms. There is no furniture, no family photographs. In what was once the kitchen, a small glass box displays a stoved-in human skull. Next to it, the pockmarked ossified remains of a syphilitic. In the wood-panelled hallway, the bones gleam in their glass cases. He knows their secrets, and it excites him. But it isn’t enough. Not now.

  He checks his watch. He has lingered too long, and will have to drive fast through the rain-slicked streets.

  He wonders what Mr B, the funeral director, will have for him this time, and feels for the brown envelope in his breast pocket. He accepts most of Mr B’s offerings. No car crashes, though. Or jumpers. Too messy. Too much damage. Occasionally, he finds something from their corpses to salvage and sell on. Skin, perhaps, an organ or two. There is always someone who is willing to pay. But invariably, it is not worth his time. Too much effort and too little return, as his father would say.

  Like the living, the dead can be bought.

  The house and its shadows subsume him. He lingers in the hallway, drinks in the shape of the boy’s skeleton trapped in its twin prisons of glass and bone.

  He thinks, then, of the other boy, and the thrill of possibility unfurls inside him.

  Frith. Meaning freedom. He smiles at the irony. The name rolls off his tongue. It cannot be coincidence.

  In the stillness of the house, the air vibrates with sobbing so faint he wonders if he imagines it. Obsessively, he fingers the thin silver chain he wears around his neck. Its pendant, a curio inherited from his father, feels warm to the touch, heavy with the weight of its bloody history.

  He closes his eyes, grasps the pendant between thumb and forefinger. Shadows enfold him like a lover. All this darkness reminds him of his father, the lessons of his youth.

  Memory pokes at him. Takes him back to his eight-year-old self. The look of scorn on his father’s face; the burden of his father’s hand on his shoulder; the taste of failure on his lips when he cannot do as his father bids.

  ‘It’s easy,’ Marshall had told him. ‘Imagine you’re drawing a curtain, pulling down a blind. Become part of the scenery, like you’ve always been there. Simple as that.’

  He had squeezed shut his eyes, tried to do as his father had asked. But he could not make himself disappear.

  ‘Watch me.’

  Marshall had stood in the busy high street, a blank look shuttering his face. Women were carrying boxes of overripe fruit, the market vendors shouting to one another. Weaving between the stalls, he had melted into the Saturday crowds. Now and then, the boy had caught a glimpse of his father’s jacket. And as the traders had gone about their business, Marshall had stolen their money belts stuffed full of notes.

  Later that day, they had gone down the road to the tobacconist, and Marshall had turned to him and grinned. Above the cashier’s desk, the fluorescent lamp flickered. His father had prowled the shop, helped himself to a packet of Wills Embassy, a bottle of Scotch. He had blown out smoke rings as they had walked home.

  ‘It’s easy,’ his father had said again.

  Years it has taken him, to perfect the skills prized by his father and forebears, but now he has learned how to turn down the dial and fade into the background, to move undetected through the shadowy edges of life. Not in an otherworldly way. Not like a ghost. It is just something he can do. Like some people can cross their eyes or are ambidextrous. It just is.

  He is late for Mr B, but no matter. Mr B can be relied upon to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. Mr B understands his needs. He calls him ‘A Collector of Curious Bones’. The Bone Collector. He likes that.

  Mr B’s philosophy is uncomplicated. If a family expects their loved one’s body to be inside a coffin, why disabuse them of that notion? It’s a simple case of mathematics. The weight of an average human body is roughly equal to two large paving slabs.

  Yes, mostly he prefers to wait until they’re dead before setting to work with his knife. But sometimes it cannot be helped. Sometimes he cannot make himself wait.

  Take the girl, for instance. She promises so much. And there is much to admire in a specimen such as her, much to discover. He yearns to experiment, to peel back the layers of her skin and look upon the bone. To display an exhibit that still moves and breathes.

  And yet.

  He finds himself l
istening at the door to her childish mutterings. Once or twice, he has let himself in to straighten the sheet covering her sleeping form.

  She reminds him of who he could have been in a different sort of life.

  But there’s risk, of course. Always risk.

  The question is: to keep or to kill?

  Flesh or bone?

  SUNDAY

  12

  4 a.m.

  The baby’s face was red and screwed up and his cry, an insistent wah-wah-wah which carried across the sticky floor of the maternity ward, lodged itself slap bang in his mother’s middle temporal gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex.

  Oblivious to the burst of activity in her brain precisely one hundred milliseconds after his first mewl reached her ears, she stretched out a hand to rock the hospital-issue crib. Her eyes were still shut as she tried to cling to the last vestiges of sleep, but it was no use; she was biologically programmed to attend to the cries of her seventeen-hour-old son.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she murmured. ‘S’OK.’

  Her stomach was soft from the birth and raw from the C-section, and there was a smear of blood on the sheets. Her breasts flopped out of the front of her unbuttoned nightie and a bead of colostrum gathered on the tip of her nipple. Her face was blank with tiredness. But she didn’t care. She was swollen with love, with wonder.

  Two beds down, from behind drawn curtains, a second wail went up, building in volume and intensity. Another baby joined in, and then another, until the cacophony of crying babies forced the duty night sister from her flirting with the on-call doctor to soothe her ward back to sleep.

  The mother – Nina Harper – reread the message scribbled on the small rectangle of card that had been hand-delivered that afternoon with the shiny It’s a Boy! balloon.

  Congrats! He’s gorgeous. Love, Etta x

  She hadn’t mentioned it to Patrick, but she was worried about her older sister. Etta was busy, career-driven, Nina understood that, but sometimes she worried that the job would swallow her. Just like it had swallowed their father. As for David, she could see what Etta did not. But how to tell her that the man she’d chosen to remake her life with was seduced by promotion, not procreation? That as much as she loved her sister, Etta’s tunnel vision often blinded her to the needs of others.