Authors: Graham Masterton
House of Bones
Graham Masterton
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 â
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 â 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 â 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 â people killed in car accidents, people stabbed and plastered in blood, people hanging from trees â 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 â 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 impossible,” 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?”
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 â 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.