The Darkness of Bones (8 page)

J
ACK WAS SEETHING
, his hands white and trembling as he dialled the number of Benson’s office.

“Benson,” said the uninterested voice at the other end. “What can I do for you?”

“Do? You fuck! You can start by telling me what the fuck you’re playing at, informing the media that I had an argument with Adrian.” Jack held the offending newspaper article at arm’s length. It was on page eight. A small, but detailed account of local teenager, Adrian Calvert, missing since Wednesday, possibly a runaway, after an argument at home.

“Jack? Jack, calm down. I didn’t—”

“Don’t, you fucking bastard. Don’t even try that ‘it wasn’t me, Jack’. My son is missing and all you can do is try to cover your fat arse by leaking to the newspapers that I had an argument with Adrian? I thought I knew you, Harry. You were always rock-solid. What the fuck has happened to you in that place?”

“If you would just calm down and listen for one minute. I
had to make a report to Wilson. Someone tipped him off that I had instructed all personnel to be on the lookout for Adrian. I was lucky talking my way out of it. You know the procedure better than anyone, Jack. Wilson had me by the balls.”

“And you told the media that I had had an argument with Adrian? Why?”

There was a silence at the other end. Jack could hear a chair moving; he pictured Benson’s enormous bulk moving uncomfortably in the chair that seemed to have shrunk over the years as he piled the weight on.

“I had no other choice. Wilson wasn’t allowing any more manpower to be used on what he called everyday occurrences. Kids go missing all the time, Jack. What would the media say if they discovered we were giving preferential treatment to ex-cops? Or if they knew he was my godson? What would the fucking dogs say?”

Jack understood the logic behind Benson’s argument, knew he was only doing what he thought right. Still, it galled him. He had given too many years of his life to the force to be treated like a civilian.

“Jack? You still there?”

“Just.”

“My gut feeling on this is that Adrian will be back, sooner rather than later. Probably today—Saturday at the very latest.”

“
Your
fat gut? Wrong answer,” said Jack, slamming the phone down before making his way up the stairs, into Adrian’s room.

The cop in him said he shouldn’t enter the bedroom. If something had happened to Adrian, this room could be of vital importance and he was contaminating it. But the father in him won out. He couldn’t wait for his old buddies to come to their
senses, didn’t have that luxury. He had already phoned Adrian’s friends, hoping beyond hope that he was staying with them, only to be told that they hadn’t seen him in a few days. Even the manager at the local Warhammer shop—Adrian’s frequent hideout—couldn’t recall when he last saw him.

Stepping inside the room, Jack was amazed at how it had changed over the years. But amazement was quickly replaced by a feeling of guilt. Was it a testament to his own parental neglect that he had hardly been in this room in months? Or was it simply his granting of respect and privacy to a growing son? Superheroes had been replaced by scantily clad women and sporting personalities. Hard-rock posters had taken the place where maps of the world had once been.

Sighing, Jack resigned himself to the task ahead, hating the thought of going through Adrian’s possessions, knowing how protective his son was of his privacy. But slowly and surely the father was being replaced by the keen and relentless mind of a former detective.

Searching the wardrobe first, Jack was careful not to disturb too many items. A couple of magazines fell from a box.
Playboy
. He glanced at the pages, and couldn’t prevent a wry grin from appearing on his face.

“Used to be
Batman
comics.”

He wondered if Linda had ever seen the
Playboy
magazines, when she cleaned out the room. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have said a word. Still, he felt slightly embarrassed, as if he had intruded on his son’s most intimate thoughts.

Ducking down to peer under the bed, the stench of overripe fruit attacked Jack’s nostrils. Hardened socks, discarded, rested in knots covered with dust. A sticky sweet wrapper adhered to one of the socks, like a magnet.

He shook his head. “Now, those wouldn’t be tolerated by your mother, Adrian,” whispered Jack, the wry smile lengthening. “Dirty mags, perhaps, but never—
ever
—dirty clothes.”

Placing the dirty socks in an unused laundry basket, Jack glanced about the room, his eyes resting at a chest of drawers. Stationed atop the chest of drawers stood an impressive array of highly detailed resin models from the worlds of Warhammer. It had always baffled Jack how such tiny figures could be so beautifully painted and with such loving detail, transforming tiny pieces of metal into works of art.

Opening the drawers and searching for anything, he found little. Only crumpled-up underwear and some school ties coiled like snakes basking in the sun. There was a picture of Linda, smiling, ruffling Adrian’s hair, Adrian looking embarrassed.

Jack smiled at the memory. Adrian’s tenth birthday. On the back of the photo was Adrian’s handwriting:
Mum, I will always love you.

The six words were too much for Jack. Fearing an emotional breakdown, he quickly set the photo back.

“Oh, Linda, what am I going to do?”

His eyes went to the small drawer attached to the bed. The drawer blended perfectly with the bed, almost camouflaging it.

Opening it, Jack was immediately shocked at the contents. “Oh God!” His stomach went cold, and he blinked a couple of times to steady his head.

“My gun? What have you been up to, Adrian? How did …?” Then something came to him; something vaguely mortifying. He remembered cleaning the gun while drinking beer and scotch, destroying his own commandments. There had been a reckless frustration in him, a frustration that bent all commonsense and prudence into a warped acceptance of
intolerable conduct, shooting at the TV, narrowly missing, hitting the armchair instead. He vaguely remembered what he was shooting at: Wilson, the bastard, his face that of a politician, boasting and lying in front of the cameras that crime was down; people were safer now than ever.

Jack shook his head with embarrassment at his dangerous behaviour. As if Adrian wasn’t going through enough. That’s all he needed—a drunk for a father, wallowing in self-pity and cheap fucking booze, a gun dangling from his hand. A loose cannon, in more ways than one.

“If Linda could see you now. Pathetic. Useless,” he mumbled, wishing for his son’s footsteps to sound on the stairs outside; wanting him to kick in the door, to scream and curse at him, asking what the hell his father was doing snooping in his room.

Sitting back on the chair, Jack wondered what to do next, where to search. It was then that he saw them, as startling as spilt oil on snow, nestling in the corner of the drawer. One black. One white.

The feather and the bone.

O
PENING THE DOOR
of Shaw’s office, Jack walked in without being invited.

“Ever hear of knocking?” asked Shaw, peering up from the rim of his coffee cup, his elbows a “v” on the tabletop. “I hear that you are now
persona non grata
. Are you trying to test my autonomy, get me into a quarrel with Wilson?”

“Any answers for me on that bone?” asked Jack. Impatience was gnawing at him, but he knew better than to rush or try to intimidate Shaw.

Shaw took an exaggerated sip before placing the cup down on a perfectly formed “o” branded into the wood by years of hot coffee.

“Monday mornings are bedlam here. Three murders, two
possible
suicides, and the day has barely begun; yet you want me to drop everything for one damn bone? The name is Claude, not God—though at times I have my doubts.”

“Is that coffee fresh?” asked Jack, pouring some of the
lethal-looking
black liquid into a badly chipped and stained cup,
ignoring Shaw’s acidic tongue.

“Coffee’s fine, but I can’t say the same for that cup in your hand. I used it last week to extract some ghastly-looking fluid from a corpse.”

Studying the contents of the cup, Jack brought it to his lips, and sipped. “Extra strong. Good. Just the way I like it.” He sat down, directly facing Shaw at the opposite end of the table. “What did you find?”

“It’s more complex than that. It’s like art; it takes time to form a picture. You being a so-called artist should know all about that.”

“Wasn’t it you who once told me that every bone is an author, and that your skill has always been to read the tales of death written on the bones? Just read what it tells you, then.”

“So, you did listen to me, all those times you were pretending to be asleep.” A wafer-thin smile wiggled on to Shaw’s face. “Almost as soon as the sun touches them, most bones start to tell their story. That’s true. But it’s not that simple. Except for the skull, few experts are able to distinguish between human and animal bones, with certainty. Any expert would have difficulty determining their origin.”

Jack placed the cup on the table. “Modesty doesn’t become you. You’re not
any
old expert, Shaw. You once boasted that all you needed to decipher an entire family of murder victims was a wisdom tooth. I’ve given you much more than a tooth.”

Shaw’s smile widened, exposing ill-fitting false teeth as yellow as hardened butter.

“If a bone has a pathology that can be matched to
pre-mortem
records, that’s a start. But it requires confirmation of human origin by applying the precipitin test. The problem is that up to ninety per cent of all remains brought to forensic
anthropologists turn out to be those of animals. Sometimes, however, the bones
do
turn out to be human.” Shaw brought the cup to his mouth and sipped noisily.

Jack’s heart moved up a beat. He wanted to reach over and pull the cup away, fling it in the corner. “This is one of those
sometimes
, isn’t it?”

“I can verify that the bone is human in origin, but it will take me some time to establish the primary characteristics—sex, age, height, etc.,” continued Shaw. “My belief is that the bone is more than likely to be pre-pubertal.”

Jack sucked a quick intake of air through his nose.
Oh lord
… “A child? Are you certain?”

“As certain as I can be. When we are born, the skeleton has almost three hundred and fifty bones. By the time we become an adult, we will only have two hundred and six. This is because, as we grow, some of the bones knit together to form one bone. I would say this is part of the three hundred and fifty.”

“How long has the child been dead? Can you determine that?”

“The child?” asked Shaw, his forehead frowning. “The subject, you mean. Be professional, Calvert. It’s a bone. No longer a child. Never allow emotion to cloud your thinking. Too damn dangerous. Anyway, there are several variables in determining how long the bone could have survived, but I have not as yet determined a time.”

“What about the feather?”

Swivelling on his chair, Shaw stretched and removed a large printed drawing from a specimen drawer. “It belongs to the most intelligent of birds.
Corvidae
. Crows, to you.”

“A crow?” Immediately, Jack’s brain began to work. Relations and chance: were the two items related, or was it simply chance
which had brought them together? He hoped for the former, but the latter seemed—for now—the most plausible. He didn’t want to divert attention to a dead end, wasting precious time on a hunch rather than a principle or on a handful of ruptured assumptions where only certainties needed to be.

“You never did say where you discovered the bone. I need that information for the report,” said Shaw.

Placing the cup to his lips, Jack took another brave sip from the brown substance, aware of Shaw’s hawk-like gaze.

“In my son’s room,” he said finally, reluctantly.

Shaw said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard Jack’s reply.

“I’ve got to get going.” Jack stood to go. “I suspect that bone belongs to the McTier girl, Nancy, the one who went missing three years ago.”

“Until I do more tests, you can’t be positive of anything related to the bone,” replied Shaw, looking slightly vexed.

“My son is missing out there. A week tomorrow. He’s not a runaway, Shaw. I’m going to find him. Of that I
am
positive.”

“You’ve always lacked good judgment in certain areas, Calvert, even with your acknowledged ability. But do not allow that ability to become a
liability
.”

Jack nodded. “I appreciate all that you’ve done, Shaw, but just for the time being, keep this between us. It’s important that I get some breathing space. I’m following my instincts on this, and they have rarely let me down.”

“I can’t avoid the bone. I must make a report. You know that. It would be unprofessional—not to mention hot water for me with Wilson.”

“How long?”

Lifting a pen from the table, Shaw tapped his teeth for a few seconds before replying. “Two days. Three at the most,
provided, of course, that I can find the bone which I seem to have misplaced somewhere …”

“Thanks.”

Shaw watched Jack walk towards the door. “What are you going to do?”

Opening the door, Jack replied, “Do? I’m going to be become very
unprofessional
. I’m going to find the remains of that
child
. Her bones will lead me to my son.”

E
ASING OUT OF
the car, Jack quickly scanned the vast landscape with its colourless collage of a dying winter, trying to feel some sort of direction, feeling lost yet paradoxically belonging, as if the land had been waiting for him all these years, whittling out shadows with its knife-sharp memories.

Suddenly, it struck him—to the exclusion of all other childhood memories—that he
had
been here before, as a child, exploring the vastness of never-stopping land, awed by the wonder and force of nature.

Under no illusions about the size of the task ahead, he tightened the hood of the windcheater close around his throat and bent into the wind, conscious of the rucksack on his back enabling the wind to make him sway like a reed.

Officially, they were on the other side of winter, when spring should be showing some telltale signs of encouragement, but there was still a nasty bite in the air, and Jack’s skin felt as if a potato peeler was trying to scrape it off.

At least the hardened snow was receding. Along with some
other revelatory signs of a reluctant spring, patchy areas of unfamiliar grass and weeds were tunnelling their way to the top, enabling his footing to stay the course. At the bottom was a rock-filled creek with ice patches along the shore. Further out, the ice thinned where the water ran faster.

Just this morning, an ornithologist from the town’s museum had informed him that the only place he would find a murder of crows, at this time of year, would be in the middle of—

“Barton’s Forest?”

“Yes,” the ornithologist had replied, somewhat puzzled but seemingly impressed by Jack’s quick assertion. “How did you know?”

“A hunch. An educated guess.”

Of course. It had to be Barton’s Forest. It was all beginning to make sense, thought Jack, trying desperately to place the pieces of the puzzle into their right positions. He could hear Adrian’s voice, lingering somewhere in the back of his skull, like a leaf from a notepad:
Dad, do you know if there was ever an old abandoned graveyard, over near Barton’s Forest?

Yesterday—shortly after talking to Shaw—Jack had called on Mister Fleming, Adrian’s English teacher. No, the pupils had not been assigned any essays on graveyards. Fleming had smiled at such a bizarre question but the smile had soon faded when he noticed the storm attached to Jack’s face.

Now, isolated and alone, Jack stood and observed the flat expanse of the lake’s glassy surface gleaming in the distance, ice coated firmly on top like a layer of smooth metal; he thought how easily a soul could slip into the thinness of the ice, mistaking its strength and calmness.

Could this have been where Adrian had been, that night when he came home soaked and shivering? Adrian had said that
he slipped over near Coldstream Dam. Had that been a lie?

Jack shuddered involuntarily and quickly banished any other negative thoughts from his head.

About to begin his journey, he saw a movement on the trees in the distance—a black vibrating friction. Hastily, he extracted the binoculars from the rucksack and tried to focus on the movement. Birds—crows?—somersaulting above the confluence of trees, finding the air current before returning to their nests, covering the treetops in blackness, as if the trees were wholly made from black feathers.

The sky beyond them was reddish with patches of purple, like torn and bruised flesh, and he tried to judge the distance and species, holding the birds in the circle of the binoculars. It was tricky, trying to measure distance accurately except by reference to something else: a solo tree, perhaps; another bird; a human.

“A mile. Has to be about a mile,” he mumbled, packing the binoculars, knowing it could be well over a couple of miles where the birds nested. And what if they aren’t crows? What if they are starlings, or simply—?

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up! They
are
crows, you tormenting bastard! They
are!
”

But waves of anxiety and doubt rolled through him the closer he came to the trees with their feathered lodgers. He could hear no telltale cawing, only wind and the sound of his heart thumping in his head, and already he felt the emptiness of defeat.

The intensity of the climb stole his breath, leaving him gasping for air. Exhausted, he collapsed unceremoniously close to the first group of trees, and closed his eyes. Too much liquor and too many TV dinners had taken their toll. He felt old and
embarrassed at his lack of fitness. His arse was cold and numb as the dying sun set neatly behind him, his shadow an obscenely long smear of darkness.

Just as he closed his eyes for a breather, a sound roused him. At first, it sounded like dry twigs being rubbed, but the more he listened, the more he was convinced it was the language of the crows echoing between the trees, whispering secret messages to each other, alerting one another to the danger of a trespasser.

Eager now, he pushed himself up, galvanised by the sound, and followed it; its siren-like power dragging his worn-out legs. A few times, he stumbled—once upon a hidden, jagged rock, tearing his pants and skin—but still he moved with purpose, and was rewarded, a few minutes later, by kamikaze crows, swooping down perilously close to his head, attempting to chase him back from whence he had come. Defensively, they began to shit, pancake his face and clothing with their droppings, pummelling the top of his windcheater.

“That’s right! Come on, you feathered bastards!” Removing the gun from inside his coat, he brandished it like a madman before firing directly into the air, deliberately missing, intentionally scaring.

It worked. Only a few brave stragglers remained while the rest flew to the summit of the trees, caw-cawing in an opera of indignation.

Slightly dazed, Jack proceeded onwards, finding himself deeper in the forest’s stomach. Again he heard sounds, but this time followed by stillness. This was the sound of nothingness, as if he had suddenly stepped off the edge of the world.

Had he travelled left instead of right, he would have missed it. He later wondered what would have happened had the crows not forced his redirection. Ridiculous, of course, to believe that
they had somehow purposely intended for him to find it: the carcass of a bird, perfectly shaped like a plastic toy discarded at Christmas, resting inside thorny, evergreen shrubbery.

Bending slightly—not yet touching—he simply observed the story before his eyes. The missing bone leg helped the story on. Jack imagined the dying bird being banished by the council of crows, its missing leg a liability, its oozing bloody scent an open invitation to every would-be predator and enemy from within a mile radius. The bird had probably risked the thorns, believing, rightly, that they would be a deterrent to any stalker: self-preservation—especially with death knocking on the door—being the greatest spur of all life.

“Smart little bastard!” He smiled before noticing the darkness beneath the carcass.

The bones rested upon a glove of feathers and Jack removed one cautiously, as if he were defusing a bomb. His heart beat with slight jumps as he placed the feather in a plastic ziplock, praying that Shaw would find a match with the one from Adrian’s room.

Rewarding himself, Jack removed a cigarette from his top pocket, added flame, and inhaled, gratefully, allowing himself some time to think, allowing the cigarette to burn in his hand while he played out the scenario in his head.

“You
were
here, son. I know it. You probably bent down at this exact spot.” A wry smile appeared on Jack’s face. “Did you find this bird, wounded, hobbling about the forest? Was it you who placed it in the thorn bush for safety? What else did you do? Where did you discover the bone? C’mon, Linda, help me here.”

With a Swiss army knife, he carved a marking into the tree adjacent to the bush. A few seconds later, he removed a notepad
and pen, scribbling down some information, trying to map exactly where he was. Lastly, he took a mental picture of his surroundings, wishing he had remembered to bring his camera.

There was one last thing he needed to do before heading back. He fumbled for his mobile, needing to alert Shaw that he had a feather and that it was vital to have it analysed, ASAP.

In his rush, he dropped the phone and it bounced on contact with his rugged boot, skidding off it like a skimming stone, before sliding down a small embankment of loosened rocks and hardened muck.

“Shit!” He cursed his clumsiness, blaming the fatigue settling in. Later, he would reflect on that minor incident and the major consequences it forced.

It was not a natural clearing. It was temporary, like the inhabitants. The bones were covered in decayed foliage, staining the original whiteness into a blackish green. At first, while retrieving the phone, he thought they were simply carcasses of other birds and that this particular area was a graveyard for them—one he had accidentally stumbled upon. But with the slightest tilt of his head and craning of his neck, he could see the saucer-sized piece of bone semi-hidden in the ground, protruding like a miniature moon. He knew instinctively that it was too large to be a bird’s; believed it to be a human skull; knew in his heart the ownership.

He could see the bones of the skeleton waiting patiently underneath the puckered and hardened soil, waiting for this moment to tell their tale like a gathering of cairns; could see the latent brains squeezed out like toothpaste.

The laddering of the ribs was almost perfect, and the skull seemed so small that he felt he could hide it in his palm. But the rest of the skeleton—from the waist down—was violated,
unmoored from any decency the earth afforded it, the clothes it had once worn now threadbare rags.

Jack stared at the small body, mangled beyond belief, but not so mangled that he couldn’t tell it had belonged to a girl. There was little doubt in his mind that this was the McTiers’ little girl, Nancy. The skin—what little was left—was a blue hue. The ghostly blue was there in every line of her devastated face. Those who had loved her were going to suffer grief beyond measure and there was nothing he could do to help them, knowing that he was barely able to help himself at this moment.

Not yet seven, you had hardly begun your life before it ended
, thought Jack bitterly.
Who could do such a thing to a child, commit such a crime?
Especially such a crime as he knew this most certainly would be revealed as. The post-mortem would have the final say but he knew the outcome. Yes, he was very afraid that he knew, and someone would soon be knocking at the McTiers’ front door, telling them what had happened to their little girl, offering condolences that meant sweet fuck all to a devastated parent.

He tried to pull his eyes from the partial face with its long dishevelled hair, but his eyes returned with a will of their own, forcing him to look. A symphony of sensations—mainly revulsion—played inside him, but he quickly pushed them away. Shaw was correct: become emotionally attached and all you will do is hinder, never solve. Be callous, detached and professional. Think analytically—and who the hell knows? You just might catch the perpetrator of this ghastly crime.

Dusk was just darkening the skyline, giving it a vague purple tinge that made the filthy dying snow look shabbier, the scene more subdued and wasted. Leaning against the tree, Jack removed another well-earned cigarette. He struck a match
and its sulphur stung his nostrils. Slightly dazed by the whole experience, he inhaled, and the smoke—like his thoughts—meandered through the air, drifting lazily upward, unfettered. Only after the cigarette was finished did he make the phone call, not to Shaw but to Benson.

“Harry? No, I’m not pissed off at you. Will you stop blabbering? Shut
up!
Just listen. I need you to get a team together, along with a chopper. I think I’ve found the McTier girl. I’m out at Barton’s Forest, at the eastern part of the lake, just where the mass of trees begins. Hurry—darkness is falling very quickly here.”

That was all he said, before snapping the phone shut, chopping off Benson’s hyped voice and the million questions escaping at once from his friend’s eager mouth.

Initially exhausted, both mentally and physically, Jack felt strangely lucid now as he pocketed the phone, waiting for the whirl of the chopper to penetrate the sky above.

He glanced at his watch. Fifteen to twenty minutes, if luck was on his side.

Regardless of his training, he was conscious of the body, a few feet away, and knew that he should ignore it, isolate it from his mind. He tried to conjure some kind of sequence of proceedings to bring her to this moment, to trace a chronology of events that explained her disappearance.
Don’t allow yourself to be sidetracked. Conscious observations might turn potentialities into actualities, and you wouldn’t want that, would you? Changing probabilities? No, of course not. Too sore at the minute, cloaked in self-pity and useless to everyone—especially this little girl and your son.

It was the body’s left hand that drew his attention to the item poking slightly from a curled finger bone.

Bending slightly down, he used his pen to tease the item out carefully, spearing it with the nib.

A surge of panic rose up in his throat. It was a sweet, its wrapping badly damaged by the elements. He could make out only the slightest colour from the wrapper, faded almost white. The colour was red, swirling like a barber’s pole.

Yet, despite the wrapper’s wretched condition, something in his stomach told him that this was similar to the wrapper he had found in Adrian’s room. The one stuck to Adrian’s socks.

“Oh dear lord …”

This startling revelation was the final straw, and suddenly Jack Calvert could no longer contain the despair that had been building inside him; the despair he had camouflaged so well. He sobbed, bitterly and alone.