House of Bones Read online

  “I couldn’t pull Liam back out. The wall was much too strong.”

  Lucy knelt down beside him and looked into the cavity, too. “Too dark. We should have brought a torch. Here – give me that hammer for a moment.”

  She cautiously poked the hammer into the cavity and moved it from side to side. Almost immediately, John heard a clokkk! noise and Lucy said, “I’ve hit something – there’s something here!”

  “Be careful,” John cautioned her. “Don’t put your hand in, whatever you do.”

  “It’s all right, I can catch it with the hammer.”

  With great care, Lucy manoeuvred the hammer around until she had hooked whatever it was that she had found. Slowly, she lifted it upward, until they could see what it was.

  “Oh, no,” John whispered.

  Suspended on the end of the hammer, with the claw through its eye-socket, was a human skull. It had no flesh or hair on it at all, and it shone white as if it had been polished.

  Lucy brought it out of the wall. Her hands were shaking so much that she dropped it on the floor, and it rolled a little way across the floorboards. It rocked noisily backwards and forwards and then it lay still.

  They both stepped away from it. It looked as if it were grinning at a private joke. Lucy clasped her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with shock.

  “It’s Liam,” said John. “It’s Liam – it must be Liam.”

  “Oh God, it’s horrible,” said Lucy. “It’s horrible, I can’t believe it!”

  John said, “Let’s go – come on, let’s go.” He had seen plenty of skulls before – in museums, in the biology lab at school – but not the skull of somebody he knew. “Come on, we don’t need any more evidence, let’s go.”

  But Lucy went back to the cavity and peered inside. “There are more bones in there. Lots of them. I can see them now.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said John, without taking his eyes off the skull. “Let’s just leave everything like it is and call the police.”

  “All right,” Lucy agreed, without any hesitation. She stood up and looked around her. “Just imagine. If this is the same as the Norbury house there could be dozens of skeletons in every wall. The whole house could be crammed with them.”

  John ushered her out of the room and hurriedly down the stairs. He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. Before he slammed the front door shut he gave one quick glance over his shoulder. He had a hideous feeling that Liam’s skull would be at the top of the stairs, following them, but of course it wasn’t.

  They had just reached the front gate when an elderly man in a flat cap came out of the house next door.

  “You’re not thinking of buying the place, are you?” he asked, a roll-up cigarette waggling on his lower lip.

  “Oh, no. We were just looking.”

  “Well, let me give you a word of advice. That place is better off empty.”

  “Oh, yes?” asked Lucy. “Why’s that?”

  “It’s an unhappy house, that’s why. I’ve seen seven or eight families come and go from that house, and it’s always the same. They arrive cheerful and then before you know it they’re screaming blue murder at each other. Running up and down stairs and shouting like mad people. Then they pack up and that’s it.”

  “Well, we’ll take your advice,” said Lucy.

  “You do that. You don’t want to end up like them, all that roaring and running up and down stairs. You’d think there was fifty of them sometimes, instead of five.”

  “It’s so scary,” said Lucy as they hurried up the street. “You know I didn’t really believe you at first.”

  John stopped. The rain had eased off now, and the ghost of a sun had appeared behind the clouds. “I think we should call the police now. The sooner the better.”

  “You look awful,” said Lucy.

  “I feel awful. I mean, this is not just some kind of trick, is it? It really happened. He really got dragged into the wall.”

  “Let’s find a café. We can have a cup of tea or something and you can call the police from there.”

  “I should have saved Liam. I tried my best, but I couldn’t.”

  “Stop blaming yourself,” said Lucy, taking hold of his arm. Together they walked down to Queen’s Road as stiffly and as mechanically as if they had just walked away from a plane crash.

  They found a little café just opposite the station. Its windows were all steamed up and it was crowded with bus drivers and cabbies. John went up to the counter to order two cups of tea while Lucy sat down at a table close to the telephone.

  “Eighty pence, love,” said the red-faced woman behind the counter. John reached into his jeans pocket for his wallet. It wasn’t there. He tried his jacket pockets and it wasn’t there either. He turned to Lucy in desperation.

  “My wallet – I must have dropped it in the house. It’s got everything in it. All my money, everything.”

  “Do you want this tea or not?” the red-faced woman demanded.

  Lucy came up to the counter and paid for it. “We’ll just have to go back,” she said, unhappily.

  It took them ten minutes to walk back to Madeira Terrace and they walked in silence. When they reached the house, they looked at each other and they still couldn’t put the dread that they were feeling into words. John opened the gate and went into the front garden. “I’ll try to be as quick as I can. But if anything goes wrong – you know – I’ll shout out.”

  “Just stay away from the walls,” said Lucy.

  John eased up the sitting-room window and climbed awkwardly back into the house. There was the same musty smell, and he had the same awful sense that something was waiting for him. He glanced back at Lucy and gave her a hesitant wave. Then, with his heart drumming, he stepped into the hallway.

  The first thing he did was look up the stairs, to see if the skull really had tried to follow him, but of course the landing was empty. He quickly searched the hallway itself but his wallet wasn’t there. He must have dropped it up in the bedroom when he was knocking that hole in the wall.

  He climbed the stairs as quietly as he could. The fifth stair let out a low groan, almost as if it were human, and he stopped and listened for nearly ten seconds, holding his breath. He heard nothing more, except the seagulls crying in the wind outside, and so he carefully continued until he reached the landing.

  He entered the bedroom – and there, to his relief, he saw his wallet lying on the floor, close to the skirting board. But with a tingle of fear and bewilderment, he saw that the skull had disappeared.

  Not only that, the hole in the wall was patched up. Not so much patched up as healed, so that even the faded wallpaper had closed over itself, like skin.

  He heard a creak in the attic above his head. He scooped up his wallet and this time he was out of the house so fast that he bruised his shoulder against the front doorframe. He didn’t even stop to open the garden gate, but jumped straight over the wall.

  “Come on!” he panted, snatching at Lucy’s sleeve. He began to run up the road and she came running after him.

  “John, stop! What’s the matter? John, I can’t keep this up!”

  John slowed down to a hurried walking pace. “It’s gone! I went up into the bedroom and it’s gone!”

  “What’s gone? What are you talking about?”

  “The skull, that’s what’s gone. Liam’s skull. And the wall – it looks like we never knocked a hole in it at all.”

  She had to skip once or twice to keep up with him. “The skull can’t be gone – not unless somebody’s taken it, and who would want to do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t like this at all.”

  “Well, let’s go back to the café and call the police.”

  “And say what? We haven’t got any evidence now, have we? And we’ll sound like we’re mad. Well, perhaps we are mad. Perhaps we’re having hallucinations.”

  “John, you know very well that we did go into the house and we did knock a hole in th
e wall and we did find Liam’s skull.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve got to think about this.”

  “All right, then. Let’s go back home and think about it. But we can’t just forget about it, can we? We can’t just pretend it never happened.”

  They had nearly reached the station when John had the oddest feeling that somebody was following them. He stopped, and turned around, but there were so many people walking up and down Queen’s Road, some of them still carrying umbrellas, that he couldn’t be sure. Yet he thought he glimpsed a man in a dark coat step quickly into a shop doorway, as if to avoid being seen.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lucy.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  They carried on walking, but then John turned around again, and this time, for a split-second, he saw the man in the dark coat for a second time. Almost immediately, though, the man vanished behind an umbrella and when John searched for his face again, he had gone.

  But even in a split-second, there was no mistaking that face. It was pale as ivory and utterly calm. It was the face of the sculpture that John had found on the bed at 66 Mountjoy Avenue.

  10

  “It can’t have been,” said Lucy, as the train sped JL through the Surrey countryside and back to the suburbs. “You’ve just got the ab-dabs, that’s all.”

  “It was. It was the same face. I swear it.”

  Lucy shook her head and turned to look out of the window. They were both tired now and feeling fraught. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to conceal Liam’s disappearance for very long. His flatmates must already be wondering where he was, and on Monday morning Mr Cleat would want to know what had happened to him. And then there was the question of Liam’s car, still parked outside 93 Madeira Terrace.

  “We’ll have to visit some more of Mr Vane’s houses,” said Lucy. “What we need is a map, with all of the special list properties marked on it.”

  “We’ll only have time to look at two or three.”

  “That’ll be enough. So long as we can find some more evidence. And next time we’ll take it with us.”

  John said nervously, “What do you think’s doing it? All this screaming and running and sucking people into the walls?”

  “Nothing I’ve ever heard of before, and I used to read tonnes of horror books. I mean, it’s not vampires, is it, no matter what Liam used to say about Mr Vane. I suppose it could be a poltergeist. You remember in that film when the little girl got caught inside the television? Poltergeists are supposed to make a lot of noise and throw things around.”

  “What about the statue?”

  “John, I know it looked like the statue, but it couldn’t have been. All you saw was a man with a very pale face. Your mind made the connection, and click, you thought it was him. Or it, rather.”

  John shrugged. He knew what he had seen, but he was too tired to carry on arguing any longer.

  The next morning, Lucy told Mr Cleat that Liam had phoned her over the weekend to say that he wouldn’t be coming into work for a day or two, on account of a bad summer cold.

  “I suppose he didn’t want to lose a sale by sneezing all over the clients,” said John, impressed by his own quickness. Mr Cleat gave him a pinched, intolerant look.

  Before lunch, John had to go out with Courtney to show a young newly-married couple around a small maisonette backing on to the main London-Brighton railway line. When they got back, Lucy was waiting for him, but he couldn’t go out with her immediately because Courtney wanted a cup of coffee and Mr Cleat wanted him to staple together a pile of particulars.

  “Which house do you reckon we should look at next?” he asked Lucy, in the kitchen.

  “This one is the closest … 112 Abingdon Gardens, Tooting. If Cleaty wasn’t here we could get the key.”

  At that moment, however, Mr Cleat came in and said, “John, I shall be out for half an hour. If anybody wants me, they can get me on my mobile.”

  “OK, Mr Cleat.”

  Lucy went to the front of the office to make sure that he had gone. Then she went straight into Mr Vane’s room.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Courtney demanded. “Cleaty would have a fit if he saw you in there.”

  “We’re going to take a look at another of Mr Vane’s houses,” said Lucy. John watched from the doorway as she went to Mr Vane’s desk and tugged at the drawer handle.

  “Locked,” she said. “He’s only gone and locked it.”

  “Perhaps he’s guessed what we’re up to,” said John.

  “This is out of order,” Courtney protested. “I’m supposed to be the senior staff member here when Cleaty’s away. I can’t just let you ransack Mr Vane’s office.”

  “John, get me a knife, would you? Maybe I can force this open.”

  “No,” Courtney insisted. “I know you think that Mr Vane’s up to something weird, but you can’t break into his desk. Not when I’m in charge, anyway.”

  John looked at Lucy and he was sorely tempted to tell Courtney what had happened to Liam, but he knew that it wasn’t the right time, not yet. Lucy said, “All right, then. If you don’t want to help us, then don’t. But we’re still going to go and look at Mr Vane’s houses.”

  “I don’t know what you expect to find.”

  “More bones, that’s what. More skeletons. And more evidence that Mr Vane knows exactly what happens when people go to live in his houses.”

  “I can’t believe any of this. How could he have got away with killing all of those people? Don’t tell me that nobody missed them.”

  “Of course people missed them. But if somebody disappears for ever and you never find out where they’ve gone, what can you do about it? Nothing. In the end, you can’t help forgetting about them, can you?”

  “But you’re talking about dozens of people. Men, women and children. And just look at Mr Vane. He’s as skinny as a rake. He wouldn’t have the strength to step on an ant.”

  “You don’t need to be strong to kill people,” John put in. “All you need is a way to do it.”

  “Like what?”

  Like a house that can suck you into its walls, thought John, but Lucy said, “We don’t know exactly. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Well … I don’t know,” said Courtney. “But all right, then. Go and take a look at the house if you want to. If Cleaty comes back, I’ll tell him you’re out with a client.”

  “You believe us?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve always thought there was something fishy about Mr Vane and his special list, and even if he hasn’t been murdering people I’d like to know what it is.”

  Abingdon Gardens was a quiet side street off the main Mitcham Road. While the rest of the area had been taken over by discount tyre companies and kebab restaurants and the pavements were cluttered with newspapers, Abingdon Gardens had retained most of its suburban gentility. The houses were large redbrick family properties screened from the road by laurel bushes, and almost all of them had names like “Windermere” and “Ivanhoe” and “The Laurels”.

  Number 112 was right at the very end, and much more neglected than any of the others. It had a For Sale sign outside, with the added instruction to “contact Mr Vane personally”. The laurels were overgrown and weeds sprouted up between the red and white tiles of the path.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t do this,” said John. Now that they were actually here, he was beginning once again to feel that terrible sense of dread. Even on a warm summer day, this house had an atmosphere that was even more unwelcoming than 93 Madeira Terrace.

  Lucy took a deep breath. He could see that she was just as frightened as he was. But she gave his hand a quick squeeze and said, “Come on. We have to. Nobody else is going to do it if we don’t.”

  John climbed out of the car. He waited until Lucy had joined him and then he went across the weedy grass and peered into the garage window. It was very dark inside, but he could just make out the shape of a large car, draped in tarpaulin.
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  “Look at this,” he said. “Who leaves their car behind when they move?”

  “I don’t know. What if they haven’t moved?”

  “You mean—”

  “What if they’re still in the house?”

  “In the walls, you mean? Like Liam, and all those other people in Norbury?”

  John stepped away from the garage and looked up at the house. “Perhaps we shouldn’t do this,” he repeated. But he knew that they had to.

  They tried to see in through the living-room windows. “Looks empty,” said Lucy.

  John said, “We’re going to have to tell somebody about Liam sooner or later.”

  “I know. But not yet. Not until we can prove what happened to him. And this is the only way we can prove it.”

  They made their way through long grass and brambles to the back garden. At the far end there was an overgrown strawberry bed and a tennis court with a sagging net. A stone Cupid had fallen on his side and a snail was leaving a silvery trail across his cheek. Most of the rear of the house was taken up by a conservatory. Inside they could see two or three frayed basketwork chairs and a row of earthenware pots containing black, shrivelled cacti.

  John tried the conservatory door handle but it was locked. He stepped back into the garden and looked up at the first-floor windows. “Maybe I could try climbing up on to the conservatory roof and opening that small skylight.”

  “Too dangerous,” said Lucy. “If you fell through that roof you could be killed.”

  “Then how are we going to get in?”

  They were still thinking when John thought he saw one of the upstairs curtains moving. Then – for a terrible split-second – he thought he saw a white face looking down at them.

  “There’s somebody in there!” he said, pointing up at the bedroom. “I saw them! There’s definitely somebody in there! Run!”

  Without any hesitation, they ran back through the weeds until they reached the front garden. Lucy had scratched her arm and it was beaded with blood.

  “I saw a face,” John panted. “A really white, white face.”

  “Perhaps it’s a squatter, or a tramp or something.”