CHAPTER ONE
MID-MAY 1981, RUBERY, SOUTH BIRMINGHAM
When everything was drenched in sleep, Ava knew it was time. She eased out of bed, and when her feet touched the floor she became still. She glanced at the other bed: no stirring from Veronica, her younger sister—only soft snores. The trick at night was to banish all thoughts and let instincts govern. She must be stealthy and quick: the Small Hours were called small with good reason—especially as dawn approached. The dark was not absolute, only monochrome, though the night was her ally, and never harmed her.
Her pupils were matte black and massive in the gloom. She cocked her head to one side and listened. Only the tick tock of the clock. Her mother was sound asleep in her room at the end of the hall. Ava was the only thing awake.
She padded to the front door. She reached for her coat but did not put it on: the polyester lining rustled too much. No shoes: shoes were inflexible, rowdy. She tucked her pajama trousers into her sock tops. Thick socks lent silence to movement. After thumbing the latch off, she gradually pulled open the door.
Cold air nuzzled without bite as she stepped out onto the communal gallery. She tucked a wad of tissue paper between the door and the frame. Although the latch was on, Ava couldn’t risk either being discovered or being locked out. No moon, no mist: the ground dry as burned bone. Somewhere far away, a dog barked its warning to an unseen intruder. Ava’s nose twitched—petrol, earth, stone. Her skin prickled and her belly quivered with anticipation and the excitement of being out alone in the dark.
The apartment block hunkered in its trench, and faced the looming bulk of the Quarry. She scurried along to the central stairwell, which stank of ciggies and chip fat as concrete steps ascended and descended into blackness. She didn’t consider the noisy elevator. Ava swung her coat on, felt in her pocket for her blue pencil sharpened at both ends, retrieved her Red Book from behind the huge metal bin, and exited the open foyer. She swept into the laburnum bushes that hugged the low wall of the property then stepped forward into the gap with a view of the street, silent as an abandoned film set. The streetlights tipped everything in a pallid glow, and a strange peace wavered in it.
Ava surveyed the realm: no people, no animals. She straddled the wall, crouched, then ran for the sanctuary of the red telephone box on the corner of the next street. She pulled her hood over her face. She was darkness against darkness, therefore invisible.
Ava scampered to the dun maisonettes, to the last building in the row, which was a burned-out shell after a major fire the year before. It was supposed to be demolished, but it still stood, its scorched walls buttressed by scaffolding, its immediate perimeter protected by a high wooden fence. Kids avoided it because they thought it was haunted and grown-ups avoided it because it was unsafe. There was a gap in the fence closest to where the communal front door used to be, and Ava squeezed through. She dashed through its hollow bulk to the backyard, which smelled of mulch and a milder version of the stink that had been permeating the district over the last week. There was a tiny patch of balding lawn framed by untidy heaps of rubble and swept ash. The orange lights from the A38 meters away illuminated the garden in sepia tones.
In the earth, she could make out a crescent shape made of twigs, widely spaced, some aligned with an object: a small cardboard box, a piece of wood, a metal bowl. Each thing covered or partially covered the remains of dead animals. Those carcasses, uncovered, were left open to the whim of the elements. A few years ago, Ava had created a secret roadkill body farm to feed her curiosity about dead things. It was both cemetery and laboratory and this patch of it was the only site enclosed, because if local children crunched through bones suspiciously batched in one small area with lollypop-stick tags, then there would be an uproar. Therefore, it was sprawled across the housing estate, arranged as if the dead animals had died in their places naturally, and Ava would visit each subject once a week then record her findings in her Red Book. She noted how flesh decomposed in water, how much faster it decomposed in air, how much slower in earth; if temperature slowed it down or exacerbated the process; if corpses decomposed quicker beneath concrete slabs, in boxes; the effect of weathering and what time insect activity took place, the roles insects played in breaking down the corpses to skeletons. At the end of each study, she said the Rabbit’s Prayer from Watership Down because she believed it was the only invocation good enough. She thanked them then buried them properly so they could rest in peace.
Here, her experiments were more concentrated and in total privacy. She flitted to each twig, like a moth collecting macabre nectar, lifted each object to study what lay beneath and record its progress. She had never observed how death behaved at night, and she was taking this opportunity to do just that, in the quiet stillness, while the occasional car zoomed past on the road nearby, her back to the glowing streetlight beyond the fence so she could quickly note her findings with her blue pencil in her Red Book.
A few weeks before, she’d found a dead adder on the Quarry. She’d never had a reptile specimen for her observations before, so she’d placed it in her strange laboratory. In open air, and over the weeks, the snake’s skin had flaked and blown away, and its form had eventually skeletonized. It glowed like a barbed Möbius strip carved in ivory.
Having completed the task in the garden, knowing she would have to return to bury her subjects properly in daylight, Ava decided to view her prize specimen, and it was only a few feet away. She darted into bramble bushes, whose thorns tore skinny spite lines on her hands. She peeked out at the dip and rise of the embankment on which the big road bellowed. She could smell exhaust, and the malodor of rotting meat. She was close to the hidden place she’d found last autumn, situated where no kids went because, why would they? It was in the corner of the embankment that met the fence of the maisonette’s abandoned garden and concealed by a snarl of brambles beneath the roar of the road. It was a good place to conceal things and was the reason why she’d risked so much to see her latest find.
She was alert to subtle pressure changes; a reminder to beware. She reached into her pocket for the sharp blue pencil, and it reassured her. The cluster of psychiatric hospitals around had mythical maniacs escaping all the time. Just because there were no people around didn’t mean there were no people around. She didn’t feel watched, however: there was no familiar weight of judgment on her back.
And Ava wasn’t afraid, as it was impossible for her subjects to harm her. Because they were, after all, dead.
The Flyover murdered animals every day as did its feeder road, the Bristol Road South. Pets and wildlife alike were victims of the ceaseless, grinding traffic: metal monsters spat furry corpses to either side, much too fast to eat them properly. Some of them died right before the horrified eyes of pedestrians, others with their insides more outside. Ava used to cry when she came across the mangled remains, but now her natural inquisitiveness trumped any childish sentiment left.
Over the past few months, the kills were fewer. Ava doubted it was because the road ran less traffic—if anything it had increased. Sometimes, there’d be evidence of a little death here and there—bloodstains or fur swatches—but the bodies were missing. It was why her latest find had become so important.
She’d discovered it two weeks ago, and it was her largest so far: a male fox (Vulpes vulpes—170 bones, 42 teeth), flung intact over the embankment, and hadn’t been dead long by the time Ava found it.
She bolted for the corner, kept her head down, careful not to show her pale face under the florid lights. She ducked beneath the natural arch created by branches and found the fox just where she’d left him—stretched out on the hard-packed earth, as if lazing in sunshine. The stench was solid, almost touchable. She frowned. There’d been warmer days the previous week but not enough heat to generate such explosive ferocity. The fox was the largest creature she’d ever found, but the smell was too immense to emanate from its sunken shell.
Ava observed that brown cocoons left by maggots after each molt littered the earth like bullet shells. There was desiccation around its head and limbs, and hidemoths and beetles paraded in the split seams. There were too many greenbottle flies: the cold made them slow, but they were too numerous for night or for a cadaver this advanced with decay. Gem-bright Lucilia caesar weren’t interested in mummified remains, and preferred juicier feasts for their babies. Something wasn’t right.
Ava adjusted her position to avoid cramp in her legs, and it was then she was accosted by the full wave of putrescence. Her eyes, now accustomed to the gloom, followed the sordid march of sexton and rove beetles toward their manna from heaven. Her gaze crept farther on, and then she saw him.
Mickey Grant.
Fourteen-year-old Mickey Grant had been missing for a fortnight. His school photograph had been on every news program every day, local and nationwide. He’d vanished so utterly it was as if he’d popped out of existence. He might have run away because sometimes teenage boys ran away. It was possible he might be with family in a foreign land. After all, grown-ups said, it was rare for boys to be abducted: it was girls who were usually fiend’s fare, but nobody had seen Mickey since the Deelands Hall disco two Fridays ago. Ava knew him as an unpleasant boy, a bully you couldn’t walk past without him saying something spiteful. When he went missing, Ava hadn’t cared.
But Mickey wasn’t running and he wasn’t safe with a far-off relative. He was dead. Slumped like a thrown scarecrow: a writhing slope of maggots that undulated in blubbery waves as they rose to breathe before plunging down into the stinking recesses. Viscous juice oozed into the drip-zone beneath. The once blond hair was patchy with despicable fluids.
Ava wasn’t scared. She wasn’t a girl who screamed even when hit, yet she sought inside for panic, terror, or disgust and found nothing but useless pity. She took mental photographs, recorded the entire scene for her Red Book. He hadn’t been in this space two weeks ago. This wasn’t the kill site, this was recent waste disposal.
Putrefaction had advanced, though Ava judged him to have been kept in a relatively cool place for a while before, but she’d no experience with such big furless animals. She wished she had a torch. Ava shifted position, out of the stench corridor: rotting flesh was a heavy scent that could be carried home on clothes and hair. She wouldn’t be able to disguise it with a spray of her mother’s perfume.
She could just make out familiar circular wounds etched along his forearm: human bite marks. Murder stained below and tainted above. Mickey Grant was carrion, as much so as the fox lying a few feet away, and all three shared a grim tableau. His parents would be devastated, and they seemed such nice people on telly. He’d been dumped here on purpose, as if whoever had murdered him had known the den was there, as if tipped as an ideal hiding place for the worst of secrets. Dead things were heavy and unhelpful when it came to changing their location. Ava scanned her surroundings: there was nowhere for a killer to hide on the grassy embankment.
Even though her common sense told her that the killer was long gone and not likely to be watching a girl out in the night on her own when she shouldn’t be, it was time to go.
Quickly, Ava said the Rabbit’s Prayer over the animal and to Mickey’s ruined face. She remembered good things about him: how he used to stroke every cat in the street, and smiling when he walked his dog, Starsky. She backed out of the hollow.
Ava scuffed her footprints with a twig. Footprints were bad news, even if her feet were small for a fourteen-year-old and there were a great many fourteen-year-olds in the world. She fled the den, and adrenaline ensured she thought of nothing else until she took a breath behind the telephone box. Nine-nine-nine calls were free, and if she disguised her voice nobody would ever know a girl had found the missing boy. Ava didn’t have to call the police but she did have to: it was only right. The kiosk was brightly lit and she risked being seen, but it faced away from the road so, if she was quick, she could be back in bed in minutes. Ava swung the heavy door open on its leather hinges, grabbed the clunky receiver, and rang 999 before she changed her mind. She’d no idea which Voice would arrive out of her mouth but when the operator at the other end said, “Emergency Services. How can I help?” it was Mrs. Poshy-Snob who spoke up.
“Hello? Yes! The police, please—immediately. Mickey Grant, the missing boy, is lying in bushes on the embankment of Rubery Flyover.” Mrs. Poshy-Snob was a woman with a low voice, flawless diction, and took no nonsense. “At the rear of the abandoned garden off Homemead Grove.”
Copyright © 2024 by Marie Tierney
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
