House of Bones Read online

  House of Bones

  Graham Masterton

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Note on the Author

  1

  They sped through the south London suburbs in their unmarked Vauxhall Omega, weaving in and out between buses and trucks and any other driver who showed the slightest hesitation.

  Detective Inspector Carter kept up a constant impatient commentary. “Come on, love. Hurry up, mate. For God’s sake, you’ve got a green light – move.” Beside him, Detective Sergeant Bynoe was engrossed in finishing off a pepperoni pizza.

  “So what did they actually say?” he asked, sucking his fingers.

  “Said they’d found skeletons. Scores of them.”

  Detective Sergeant Bynoe shook his head. “Bet it’s a wind-up. Skeletons! Bet it used to be a medical school or something.”

  They turned off the main street and into a leafy square of large redbrick Edwardian houses. Years ago, this would have been a very prosperous and exclusive place to live, but most of the houses had been divided into flats and all of them looked neglected and rundown. Slates were missing, gates were off their hinges, and the scrubby front hedges were thick with an early harvest of ice-lolly wrappers.

  Carter drew up on the south side of the square, where two yellow dumper-trucks were parked, and the remains of an imposing family house were surrounded by a plywood screen. Seven or eight demolition workers in hard hats were standing around smoking and talking to each other.

  “Mr Garrett here?” asked Carter, showing his warrant card.

  “Over there. Him in the white shirt.”

  “Mr Garrett?” Carter repeated, approaching a big, broad-shouldered man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a cricket club tie. “Detective Inspector Carter, Streatham CID. Do you want to show me what you’ve got here?”

  “Never saw nothing like it in my life,” said Mr Garrett. “I mean, we often find bird skeletons and cat skeletons. We found three babies’ skeletons once, when we was knocking down a house in Clapham. Every time the mother had another one she stuffed it up the chimney. But nothing like this, never.”

  He led Carter and Bynoe through the door in the plywood screening. They crunched across smashed brick and broken glass. The top two storeys of the house had been demolished, but the ground floor remained almost intact, although the doors and the windows had been taken out and stacked neatly against the fence.

  Carter could see right through to the back garden, where a child’s swing still stood, a silent reminder that this had once been somebody’s home.

  They walked into the hall. Some of the floorboards had been ripped up so they had to balance on the nail-studded joists. Mr Garrett led them along to a wide entrance, where double doors had once hung, and into a large dusty living-room.

  On the far side of the room stood a black metal fireplace. The wall next to it had been broken into, leaving a dark, gaping hole, still surrounded by brown flowery wallpaper. “Normally, like, we’d just smash the whole place down with a wrecking ball,” said Mr Garrett. “But I had a couple of men in here to take out the fireplace. They’re worth a few bob these days. Strip off that black paint and there’s your genuine arts-and-crafts steel fireplace under there.”

  Carter approached the hole. He peered into it, but it was far too dark for him to be able to see anything. What struck him, though, was the smell. Apart from the usual demolition smell of broken brick and crumbled concrete, there was a strange aroma that reminded him of the sachets of potpourri that his grandmother used to keep in her wardrobe. For a moment it brought back a sensation that he couldn’t quite define – a feeling of something very old, and forgotten.

  “Here,” said Mr Garrett, and handed him a wire-caged inspection lamp on a long lead. Carter held it up and took another look into the hole. Bynoe came up and stood close behind him and said, “Hell’s teeth, guv.”

  Inside the hole was a large cavity between the living-room wall and the outside wall, at least four metres square. It was heaped with human bones – hundreds of them: ribcages, shoulder blades, pelvises, thighbones and skulls. Some of them were brownish and ossified. Others were so fresh and white that they gleamed. As Carter lowered the inspection lamp, a skull cast a huge distorted shadow on the brickwork, almost as if it were alive.

  Carter had seen his fair share of dead bodies – people killed in car accidents, people stabbed and plastered in blood, people hanging from trees – but there was something about this huge clutter of bones that filled him with a kind of dread that he had never felt before. It was like the remains of a war.

  “How many do you think?” he asked Bynoe.

  “I don’t know, guv. Hard to tell until we get them out and forensics match up all those heads, bodies and legs. Twenty, maybe. Thirty. Maybe even more.”

  Carter took another look inside the hole. “There wasn’t any kind of serving hatch here, was there?” He peered upward. “No trapdoor from the room above?”

  “No,” said Mr Garrett. “The whole cavity was completely sealed off.”

  “And none of this brickwork is fresh?”

  “Well, no. You can see for yourself. It’s so old that some of it needs repointing. And this wallpaper must go back to the war.”

  “Right,” said Carter. “It looks like the whole works. Mobile incident room, scene-of-crime officers, photographers. I’d better call Barnett and tell him that we’ve got Armageddon on our hands here.”

  They worked late into the night, using arc lamps to illuminate the living-room as they opened up the wall brick by brick. Carter sat on a backless chair that he had found in the kitchen and drank scalding, tasteless coffee. Bynoe had gone to find out who had occupied the house before it was bought by the council, and who had occupied it before them, right the way back to the day it was first built.

  Six officers carried the bones carefully out of the cavity and stuck numbered labels on them, so that the forensic pathologists would be able to reconstruct the way that Mr Garrett’s men had discovered them.

  Dr George Bott stepped out of the cavity in his white protective overalls and his green Wellington boots. He was carrying one of the skulls in his hand.

  “Look at this,” he told Carter. “This has got to be seventy or eighty years old if it’s a day. The dental work is late Victorian. But there are other skulls in there which can’t be more than five or six months old. How did they get in there?”

  “It’s the great Norbury bricked-up room mystery,” said Carter, draining his coffee. “They’ll probably still be talking about it when we’re in the boneyard.”

  He stood up, and looked at his watch. “I’ll come back in the morning, and see how you’re getting along. There isn’t very much I can do here, not till you’ve finished.”

  He was about to leave when PC Green came across the room carrying a brick. “Guv, you ought to take a look at this.”

  He brought it over and put it down on the seat of the chair. It was nothing more than an ordinary housebrick, except that out of one side of it a human shin-bone protruded – and on the opposite side there was the other end of the shin. The bone had penetrated the brick almost as if it were a crossbow bolt shot through a solid block of wood.

  Dr Bott picked it up and cautiously examined it. “That’s imp
ossible,” he said. “How can you drive a human bone through a brick? The bone’s too brittle, the brick’s too thick.”

  “Maybe the brick was made with the bone already in it.”

  “That’s impossible, too. The bone would be burned when the brick was fired.”

  “Sir, there’s another one here,” said PC Wright. He brought over a brick from which the tips of four fingers stuck out, like the last desperate appeal of a man drowning in brick. Then another officer found three adjacent bricks with a skull embedded inside them.

  “What does it mean, George?” Carter asked Dr Bott. “The whole place is full of clues but I can’t understand any of them. I mean, who were all these people, and why would anybody want to brick them up in a wall?”

  2

  John was ten minutes late, and the morning was already uncomfortably hot. He was hurrying along Streatham High Road when three of his old schoolfriends came rollerblading towards him – Micky, Tez and Nasheem. They were wearing baseball caps and T-shirts and shorts, and they were drinking bottles of alcoholic lemonade.

  Micky slewed around him in astonishment. “What’s the matter with you, man? You’ve got a suit on. You look like you’re going to your granny’s funeral!”

  “Yeah, what have you done to your hair?” said Nasheem. “And your earrings? What happened to your earrings? They were the lick.”

  Tez said, “I know. He’s eighteen now. He’s a man. So he thinks he has to dress like his dad.”

  “Listen, I’m late,” John told them. “I’m going to get the sack on my first day.”

  “Sack?” said Tez, “You mean you’ve got a job? You must be out of your mind, man! What did you want to go and get a job for, when you could have spent the whole summer hanging out with your mates? You’re not for real, you’re not.”

  “I can’t afford to hang out, not unless I work. Anyway, I’ve finished school now. I want to get on with making a career.”

  “A career?” gibed Micky. “What as? A bank manager? You said you were going to be the greatest rock singer that ever lived.”

  “I will be, when I can get a band together. But I sent off my demo and nobody wanted to know, did they? I need a really good band. I need more practice.”

  “So what are you going to do in the meantime?” Tez asked him. “Work for the Inland Revenue?”

  “I’ve got to go,” John insisted. “They said nine o’clock. Nine o’clock right on the dot.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Micky, circling around and around him on his blades. “And who said nine o’clock?”

  “The people I work for, OK?”

  “Oh, yeah? And who are they? Conservative Central Office?”

  John pushed Micky and Micky fell off his blades on to the pavement. “What are you giving me a hard time for?” he wanted to know. “What have you got going for you? Nothing! You’re going to spend the whole summer messing around and then what? Go on the dole? I mean, what a waste of time! Even if I can’t be a rock singer I’m still going to make myself some money. I’m still going to get myself some work experience.”

  “Go on, then,” Tez challenged him. “If you’re so proud of this career of yours, tell us what it is.”

  John hesitated, and then said, “OK. I’m working for Blight, Simpson & Vane.”

  “Huh? Who are they when they’re at home?”

  “Estate agents, OK? The best in Streatham.”

  Tez stared at him with his mouth open. “Estate agents? You must be joking! Estate agents! You’re going to work for an estate agents? What a career, man! What a career! That’s even worse than being a bank manager!”

  John swept his hand through his hair and carried on walking. Micky and Tez and Nasheem kept following him, teasing him and gibing, but he wouldn’t talk to them. He didn’t want to be an estate agent. He didn’t want to be anything but the greatest rock singer that the world had ever known, filling up Wembley Stadium, filling up the Rose Bowl and Madison Square Garden, singing his songs and playing his guitar. The roar of the crowd! But just before Christmas his mother had suffered a stroke which had partially paralyzed her left side; and his younger sister Ruth was still taking her GCSEs; and his father was working extra hours on the taxi-rank just to keep the family together.

  He had dreamed that his demo would lead to a million-pound recording contract, but all that he had received in return were letters saying “interesting, but sorry”. John was mature enough to know why they were saying sorry. He was good, but he just wasn’t good enough. And in the meantime, he had to make some money.

  After a while, his friends grew bored of following him, and skated away. He turned around and watched them streak away through the crowds, whooping and punching the air. He felt a pang of jealousy.

  He reached the offices of Blight, Simpson & Vane. They had an old-fashioned-looking frontage, right on Streatham High Road, with oak-framed pictures in the front window. The traffic roared past so that he could hardly hear himself think. Highly desirable five-bedroomed family residence overlooking the common. Compact two-bedroomed maisonette. Garden flat with use of garage. They were all so expensive that he could never imagine being able to buy one.

  He could see his own reflection in the window and he hardly recognized himself. Last week his hair had been a wild tangle of curls. Now it was neatly cropped, right around his ears. Last week he had been wearing hoops and daggers in his ears. Now all he had was holes. He was wearing a new Burton suit and a new Burton tie and he looked just like every other pale-faced office junior in the whole of Britain – just on the verge of handsomeness, just on the verge of maturity, with dark brown eyes and a strong, clearcut jawline, and one angry spot right next to his nose.

  He held his air guitar in his hands and played Susan’s House in front of the window, watching himself as his fingers ran up and down the invisible frets, pouting and moving his hips. Eat your heart out, Eels. Move over, Beck. This is John French, the greatest rock guitarist in the history of the universe.

  He had almost reached the climax when he opened his eyes and saw a long, disapproving face staring at him from over the top of the oak-framed property pictures. Instantly he stopped playing air guitar and pretended that he had been stretching instead. But the front door of Blight, Simpson & Vane was instantly opened, and a thin, beaky-nosed man came out – the same thin, beaky-nosed man who had interviewed him when he first applied for the job.

  “You’re late,” he rapped. “I didn’t think that you were going to turn up at all.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. It was the bus.”

  “Well, you’ll have to make better arrangements in future. And in this practice, we say ‘yesss’ with an ‘esss’, not ‘yeah.’”

  “Yeah, all right then. I mean, yesss, all right then, yesss.”

  “You’d better come in and start work, don’t you think?”

  “Yesss, I think I’d better. Yesss.”

  “You don’t have to hiss at me, for goodness’ sake.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  The man led him into the main office. It was painted pea-green, with five desks arranged diagonally down either side. The lighting was flat and fluorescent and made everybody look as if they’d been up all night. At the back of the room were rows of grey steel filing cabinets and a large-scale map of south London.

  “Right, then, you probably remember that my name’s David Cleat but here in the office you’ll call me Mr Cleat. I’m the deputy manager.”

  Mr Cleat took him to the first desk, where a solidly-built, red-haired boy in a bright green shirt was eating an apple and reading The Racing Post. He had eyes as green as crushed bottle-glass and a splash of freckles over his nose. “This is Liam O’Bryan. Liam, I’d like you to meet John.”

  “Well now, welcome to the wonderful world of estate agency,” said Liam, shaking his hand very hard. “You, too, can take one-and-a-half percent of everybody’s hard-earned money without lifting a finger.”

  “Liam has a slightly irreverent attitude
to what we do,” said Mr Cleat, pursing his lips. “Though he manages to sell rather a lot of houses. It’s the blarney. The Irish gift of the gab.”

  “Oh, come on now, Mr Cleat,” said Liam. “Isn’t estate agency all blarney? Calling a house semi-detached when it’s semi-stuck-together-to-another one.”

  Mr Cleat ushered John to the next desk, where a young black boy was sitting, poring over a list of house prices. In front of him was a perspex name-block that announced him as Courtney Tulloch. He was so smart that he was almost unreal. He wore a navy-blue designer jacket and a red silk tie, and his hair was cropped so that the top of it was absolutely flat. He looked up and gave John a broad, unaffected smile.

  “Don’t take any notice of Liam,” he said, shaking John’s hand. “If you play your cards right, you can make a fortune in estate agency. You want a BMW? With alloy wheels? And a Kenwood sound system? You’re in the right job.”

  “Let’s think about service and integrity, as well as profit,” said Mr Cleat, sniffily.

  “But don’t let’s forget about getting ourselves a great set of wheels,” Courtney grinned at him.

  Mr Cleat took him along to the last occupied desk, where a brunette girl in a yellow linen jacket was sitting in front of a word-processor, typing out the details of a desirable two-bedroomed maisonette within easy reach of shops.

  “Lucy Mears,” said Mr Cleat. “Lucy, I’d like you to welcome our newest recruit.”

  “Hi,” said Lucy, giving John nothing more than a quick sideways glance. “Hope you’re good at making coffee. Mine’s black, one Hermesetas.”

  “Right then,” said Mr Cleat. “I’ll leave you in Courtney’s capable hands. That door to the left leads to the kitchen, where you can make tea and coffee, and also to the smallest room. The staff make weekly contributions towards refreshments, and also towards, well, tissue.”

  John stared at him, uncomprehending. Mr Cleat flushed, and contorted his face into an extraordinary expression of embarrassment, pushing his upper teeth out like Bugs Bunny. “He means bog paper,” said Liam, without looking up from The Racing Post.