The Collector

Book 2: Collector Series

by Fiona Cummins

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Clara is clinging to the hope that someone will come and save her.

The Bone Collector has a new apprentice to take over his family’s legacy. But he can’t forget the boy who got away and the detective who had destroyed his dreams.

Detective Etta Fitzroy’s life collapsed when the Collector escaped. With Clara still missing and a new wave of uncannily similar murders beginning, will she be able to find him again?

The Collector is back, and this time he has nothing to lose....

Release date: December 18, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

10:17 p. m.

Saul Anguish was counting out the beats between the jagged spears of lightning and the groans of thunder tearing open the sky.

He was waiting for the rain. Praying for it. Because the rain almost always brought his mother home. And if she didn’t come home, she was dead. Not definitely dead. But possibly. Maybe. Saul spent a large chunk of his life braced for this Significant Life Event, the hushed tones of a uniformed stranger who would tell him the body of Gloria Anguish had been found in an alleyway or a deserted corner of the park.

Fat drops peppercorned the sand. He watched them turning the fine grains into damp crumbs, spreading until the jumble of broken-down rocks and shells and glass rubbed smooth over countless decades turned a dirty, unremarkable brown.

As he stood at the window, a watchman, night crept up behind him, touching the corners of the room with darkness and shadow. Touching his heart.

Saul, no longer a boy but not yet a man, hated this endless waiting for his mother. Because in the gaps of time between worrying and hoping and wanting, slid the Other Thoughts.

The Other Thoughts were itchy and twisty, and even though he tried hard not to scratch at them, he found them impossible to resist.

Saul reached into the pocket of his jeans for the worn twist of pipe cleaner and wool that he and his mother had made all those years ago. The school’s specialist learning mentor had searched out Mrs. Anguish at the school gates, suggested ever so gently that she and her nine-year-old son might benefit from a series of workshops that Leigh Park Juniors was running: “Enjoying Your Children.”

In that first session, Saul’s mother had twisted the pipe cleaner into a face with arms and legs and smiled down at her son with bloodshot eyes. His job had been to glue on the black strands of wool for hair, to draw a crooked smile on a pale scrap of felt.

A worry doll. For him to share his secrets. His fears.

The smudge of ink on its face had now been rubbed blank, the pipe cleaner’s fluff worn bare in places, exposing the metal beneath. That glimpse of silver made Saul wonder how it would feel to touch his fingertips to electrified barbed wire. To press his soles against the live tracks running through the train station at the bottom of the hill by the boats. To hold his mother’s face in the sand until she struggled and stopped moving. Fear for her safety always did that to him. It made him angry and confused and unsure what to feel.

The estuary spread out before him, mud and tide meeting like old enemies. Night had come calling and through its dense curtain, he searched for Gloria Anguish, torn between wanting his mother home and the freedom of never having to watch for her at the window again.

A movement snagged the horizon. A whisper of something. Saul strained into the rainy darkness, trying to read the shape of the night. He fingered the worry doll. Even at sixteen, he still slipped it under his pillow when he slept, although he’d never told his mother that.

And then, just as he was wondering whether he should go out and look for her, she was there, stumbling across the wide expanse of beach in front of their rented flat, her coat flapping open, the moon spotlighting her during a break in the clouds.

He did not need to smell the fumes on her breath to know that she was drunk.

Gloria Anguish turned awkwardly, threw a glance down the shoreline toward the distant lights of the refinery, and began to run with an unsteady gait. Saul could imagine that slight sheen across her forehead, the tumbled slur of her apologies when he opened the door and let her in to a tea of congealed baked beans and cold burnt toast.

A few yards from the bottom of the concrete steps that led from the beach up the grassy hill to their flat, Gloria stopped running, just for the briefest of moments. Her shoe had caught on the edge of a small rock and that lull in motion was followed by a loss of balance that sent her sprawling across the narrow strip of sand. Saul waited for her to crawl to her knees, to lever herself upward, and lurch unevenly home as she had done countless times before.

But his mother lay still, her jaw loose and slightly open, her black hair spread out like seaweed.

Like strands of wool.

The tide, almost home, was lapping at the hem of her coat, like an over-familiar friend. In the time it would take Saul to tie his laces, to run down the stairs of their flat, across the road, past the benches with their memorial plaques and dying roses, and down the steep steps to the beach, his mother’s lungs could be filling up with saltwater.

Or perhaps, if he tried really hard, he might reach her just as the bitter liquid trickled into her mouth.

But Saul found his feet were stuck to the stained carpet, that although his eyes were fixed on the shape of his mother, he could not move.

The hands of his watch clicked onward, each tiny movement a chance squandered. He wondered if her eyes were open or closed.

It was hard to remember, the past all scrunched up in his memory like plastic carrier bags, but the sight of her lying on the sand triggered something, half buried like the condoms Posh Dan had hidden under the pier after his shift at the fairground last week.

He squinted, looking beyond the rest of his memories, seeking out that moment among the thousands and thousands of others.

And then he found it. The day he had sat his 11-plus exam. A month before his eleventh birthday.

“It’s important,” his mother had told him. “Don’t screw it up.” She’d rummaged in her purse then, brushed her thumb across his cheek. “I’ll see you afterwards. I’ve got enough money to buy us each an ice cream.”

And he’d listened to his mother, he really had. He’d worked through the papers quickly but diligently. He’d answered all the questions and even thought he’d got some of them right because he’d had a bit of time left over at the end to check his arithmetic.

He’d been smiling inside and out as he scanned the nest of parents waiting outside the school hall, could already taste the mint and chocolate, cool and delicious, melting on his tongue, but Gloria Anguish was nowhere to be seen.

He’d still been leaning against the railings when all the other children were long gone, whisked off for pizza lunches and trips to the cinema, and the proctor had come out carrying her coat and bag.

Eventually, Saul had given up and begun the long walk home.

She had been lying on the bed when he’d let himself in, a boy of not quite eleven in need of his mother. On her stomach, head turned to the side, her hair a black fan. Her eyes had been open, an empty bottle of vodka on the floor. The smell of despair and autumnal heat had drifted in the air.

“Mum,” he’d said. “Mummy.” He’d shaken her shoulder and patted her back, but Gloria did not answer him. She was somewhere else, and even her son’s voice was not enough to pull her back.

Saul had seen this before. Not often, but enough. He’d wiped the vomit from her chin with a wet piece of toilet roll and sat on the edge of the bed until his hunger had become too much and he took himself off to make a jam sandwich. Then he’d carried it back to her room and stayed with his mother until her eyes closed and day became night, and day again.

Saul’s head was nodding against his chest when his mother had finally sat up, the wrinkled sheets imprinted on the side of her face, the dawn’s light cold and unforgiving.

She had touched him lightly on the shoulder, and the boy had opened his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all but was merely resting until she awoke.

“Ice cream?” She had offered him a faint smile.

But Saul was no longer in the mood.

Five years on, he couldn’t bear the idea of ice cream, not even when Cassidy Cranston from the girls’ school had licked her cone suggestively at him during a trip to the West End last term. To him, it would always taste of disappointment.

Saul dragged his attention back to the beach. His mother was still lying there, the waves almost upon her. Her leg twitched, a violent gesture, and that seemed to unlock something in him. He bolted from the room, unexpectedly stricken by the thought he would get there too late.

Outside, the rising wind was frothing the waves to a fury. The letterbox rattled. He was halfway down the cliff steps before he realized he was shouting her name, already feeling the bile of betrayal in his mouth.

I’m coming, Mum. Hold on.

The rain was coming down harder now, glazing the concrete steps, misting the glow from the street lamps. Saul lost his footing a couple of times and grabbed the handrail to stop himself from falling. His eyes followed the tide, too close now. He searched for that first glimpse of his mother as he ran toward the beach and crested the brow of shingle and sand, suddenly terrified he would see the lumpen mass of her body dragged out to sea.

His eyes scanned the stretch of beach where she had been lying. The waves were claiming it, marching on. Soon, there would be nothing left but the inky swell of high tide. Saul swallowed but his mouth was dry. He stared into the water, looking for Gloria. Her black hair. A white sneaker. But she had simply disappeared.

Water seeped into the fabric of his own shoes, and he stumbled backward, then hefted his body over the concrete wall that lipped the edge of the beach. He should call the police. Or the Coast Guard. He should do something. But Saul didn’t know what. How could he tell a police officer that he had waited so long to help his own mother that the tide had taken her? They might arrest him. What if he went to prison? Cassidy Cranston wouldn’t be interested then.

Saul steadied himself by placing his hands on the wall and looked out across the Thames Estuary toward the horizon strung with orange fairy lights. Nausea pushed out every breath into the frigid air. His heart spiraled in his chest. Unsure of what to do next, he headed toward the hill steps, to the safety of the flat. Would it be home without his mother?

But as Saul turned, heavy-shouldered, away from the beach, a man’s curse drifted down the pavement toward him.

Saul glanced over to the wrought-iron shelter that stood a couple of hundred yards up the road on a wide expanse of grass favored by dog-walkers and kids on scooters.

A man with dark hair curling at the edges and a narrow, hard face was bending over a pile of clothes. A pile of clothes attached to a pair of legs wearing white sneakers.

Saul ran toward it.

Even though the man was hunched over and on his knees, Saul could tell he was very tall. He was vaguely familiar. And he was pushing his hands into the dip of Gloria’s chest.

Push. Push. Push. Push.

The man paused briefly, pressed his mouth against Gloria’s, blew in four short breaths.

Push. Push. Push. Push.

Saul watched him trying to cajole the life back into his mother. His hands were all twisted, like Saul’s late grandfather’s, whose arthritis had stolen his clock-making business and his dignity.

The man did not look at Saul. “Don’t just stand there. Take off your coat.” Push. Push. Push. Push. “She’s freezing.”

Saul slipped his jacket over his mother, trying to ignore the touch of the rain on his bare forearms. Her eyes were still closed. Saul felt himself slide away, disengage. A guilty party, he could not stand witness to his mother’s death.

And then she coughed.

Saul let out a breath and held it, his whole body still. Waiting. To see what his mother would do next.

She coughed again. Her eyes fluttered. She twisted onto her side, opened her mouth and released a trickle of watery red liquid.

Saul’s horror must have shown on his face. The man’s dark eyes followed his. “It’s not what you think,” he said, standing up and wiping his hands on his jeans. “It’s just red wine and saltwater.”

Saul bent to his mother, who was coughing weakly and shivering. He put his arm around her, heaved her to her feet.

As they half dragged Gloria Anguish up the steps to their flat, Saul and the man did not speak. Saul had no idea what to say. He didn’t like talking to adults. He did not trust them. But this man was not like most adults. He did not fill Saul’s ears with meaningless words, trying to make conversation. Silence sat well on him.

The man waited until Saul had opened the front door before he spoke again.

“You should take her to the hospital.”

Saul shrugged. “Maybe.”

A groan slipped from his mother. “No . . .” She was shaking her head, although her eyes were closed.

“S’all right, Mum. Don’t worry about it.”

“Get her into bed, then. Get her warm.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Saul, although when he looked at the sodden heap that was his mother he wasn’t sure whether he felt grateful or disappointed.

“Is your father home?”

“Nah.”

“What time is he back?”

Saul chewed on a nail.

“Doesn’t live here, does he?”

The man bit down hard on his lip and licked at a tiny bead of blood. His eyes closed briefly as he did so, and a coldness took root in Saul, reminding him it was raining and he was not wearing his coat. The man’s dark eyes pinned Saul to the pavement. His scrutiny made Saul uneasy, and it prized a laugh from him. Saul was always getting into trouble for laughing at inappropriate moments. His head teacher, Mr. Darenth, said he had a problem with authority. The man mistook Saul’s nerves for mirth and bared his teeth at him in a half-grin. As his cracked lips parted, Saul watched that pinprick of blood bloom again.

“Get her into bed before she freezes to death.” He looked down at Gloria. “And keep an eye on her. For breathing problems, that kind of thing.”

Abruptly, the man turned and left, limping across the road and down a set of steps that Saul knew led to the Old Town and a row of fisherman’s cottages, wind-beaten and dilapidated. They were rental properties, Saul’s mother had told him. Money for old rope. She had said it in a sneery type of voice, but Saul knew she would have given anything for the lifeline of her own rope, however frayed.

Her clothes were caked in wet sand, which rubbed against his fingers as he helped her up the narrow staircase. The flat was freezing, the gas meter out of credit. In the bathroom, he stripped her, averting his gaze from her protruding ribcage, her small breasts. The shower was broken so he stood her in the bath while he boiled a kettle and handed her a wet sponge to clean the seaweed and sand from her body. There was a large bruise already forming on her forehead.

When she was finished, he handed her one of the old T-shirts she liked to wear to bed and his own gray hooded sweatshirt. She was shaking and, with her thin white legs on show, she looked like a child. Pathetic and weak.

“Saul, I—”

“Just leave it, Mum. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She didn’t try to speak to him again but looked longingly toward the kitchen. He could see her mentally opening the cupboard, taking down a glass.

“I’ve poured it down the sink,” he said.

She laughed guiltily. “No, no, I was thinking about tea, honestly. Hot and sweet.”

“Get into bed then. I’ll make it.”

When he carried the mug through to her room, she was already under the covers, curtains pulled tight to keep out the memories of that night, to obscure the reality of what had nearly been.

He was struck by the contrast of her black hair against the pillow, her wan, tired face.

“Thank you,” she said.

He wasn’t sure if she meant the tea or the fact that he was taking care of her again. He turned away without answering, suddenly exhausted by her neediness, the relentless drama.

Later that evening, when the moon was pooled on the outgoing tide, and his mother was finally asleep, Saul, gazing out across the cockle sheds and moored boats, remembered the flash of light in the skylight of the old fisherman’s cottage he’d seen a night or two earlier. Like a torch or something.

He blinked, waited for it to come again, but the darkness stayed dark.

Next to the sofa, Gloria’s dressmaking scissors were lying on a pile of cheap fabric she’d bought to make dresses to sell at the Thursday market in town.

Saul slipped his hand into his back pocket and pulled out the worry doll. It stared up at him, blank-faced. Frayed and falling apart. Stringy black strands of hair so like his mother’s.

Saul picked up the scissors and cut off its head.

Ten hours earlier

Detective Sergeant Etta Fitzroy walked down the path and through the cemetery gates. She’d spent more time than most at funerals, supporting the families of the dead: car crash victims; young gang members stabbed in the street; a talented ballet dancer and teenager on the brink of womanhood, now forever carved into history as the Girl in the Woods.

The last time she had been here, this tiny little cemetery in an under-the-radar corner of the city, not far from home, she had refused herself the luxury of tears. That privilege had belonged to someone else.

Conchita Rodríguez had gripped her hand so tightly as the coffin was swallowed into the frozen earth that Fitzroy had thought her fingers might break. She’d endured the pain; welcomed it, almost. It was a fraction of what Mrs. Rodríguez’s daughter Grace—reduced to ashes and memories—had endured at the hands of the psychopath Brian Howley.

His name tasted bitter on her lips.

She walked along the verge to the graves on the far side of the lawns, past marble tombstones with names etched in gold leaf and a bank of leftover flowers from an earlier burial that were already beginning to decay.

In a tidy patch of grass, away from the main pathways, was a quieter part of the cemetery. The stones here were much smaller, lined up like children in the playground. There were teddy bears and windmills and brightly colored plastic flowers, the poignant echoes of what might have been.

Fitzroy averted her eyes, could hardly bear to read the inscriptions of loss and love, although she knew most of them by heart.

Past JEMIMA SOPHIE CROSS (aged 7) and ALEX JAMES HARRIS (13) and OLIVIA MAY BARRETT (9) and TOBY GRAFTON (11) until she reached a plain gray headstone.

Fitzroy placed the cloud of baby’s breath she’d carried from her own garden on the swell of earth that held her son. He would have been five today. Five. The same age as Clara Foyle.

By now, those tiny fingers would have grown into strong hands that could hold a pencil and catch a ball. They might have picked apples and fired pretend guns and sliced through the water of a swimming pool. They would have held her own, bigger, hand.

Sometimes, she could hear his voice. A child’s giggle, infectious, unstoppable; crying and shouting; singing with joy. The mumbled mouthful of vowels and consonants: Mummy.

The sounds of a family made real.

Her family.

Fitzroy fumbled in her bag for a Tupperware box, opened it up and pulled out a small cake. Into soft icing of the palest blue she inserted five silver candles and placed it on the grave next to the flowers.

Crouching on her knees, Fitzroy cupped her hand around an ancient lighter that her estranged husband David had left behind at the flat when he’d moved out before Christmas and lit each candle in turn.

Happy birthday, Nate, my darling boy.

Head bowed, Fitzroy waited for the wind to blow out each tiny flame, liked to imagine it was Nate’s breath carried to her on the currents of air.

Minutes passed. Fitzroy always hated this part of her visits to Nate because it was like saying good-bye to him all over again. Today, she was even more reluctant to leave because she knew what lay ahead.

She thought about the email sitting inside her phone, waiting to be passed on to Amy and Miles Foyle, and how the gleam from this nugget of new information would be dulled by questions she did not have answers to. She checked her watch, pressed her lips to her son’s damp headstone.

Time to go.

1:26 p.m.

A my Foyle had always hated balloons. The stench of overstretched rubber. That shriveled, embarrassed emptiness when they burst. She had wanted Chinese lanterns and a nighttime vigil. But Miles had overruled her. It wasn’t fair to Clara’s friends, he’d said. They’d want to remember her too.

As soon as she’d arrived on the Heath, Amy knew it had been a mistake to invite Clara’s class. Children were everywhere. Their little heads weaved from side to side, excited by the dozens of white balloons restrained in oversized nets and the weekend sighting of their friends.

Amy’s fingers stroked the cool silver of her hip flask. The urge to unscrew its cap and swallow down its burning contents was ferocious. Even three months on, the other mothers remained awkward around her, averting their eyes if they bumped into her in Blackheath Village or in the playground when she was collecting Eleanor. But she had promised herself she wouldn’t drink today. It was about respecting Clara. The hip flask was security, that was all.

She scanned the gathering crowds, noting several faces that she recognized. Mr. and Mrs. Bruton from next-door-but-one. Megan Ambrose, an “auntie” from Clara’s old pre-school. Clara’s friend Poppy Smith and her mother, Miranda. Amy bit down on the inside of her cheek.

In another ten minutes or so, there would be a speech and they would release the balloons, and then she could go home and carry on marking out the hours and minutes since her youngest daughter had been snatched.

A girl with exactly the same shade of hair as Clara’s wandered past, and Amy had the strangest sensation that her body was peeling away from her mind. She wanted to grab at the child, to spin her around and find herself staring into Clara’s eyes. To take her hand, and lead her across the common, back to their home. To explain that something terribly sad had happened, but that it had nothing to do with them.

Amy took a step toward her, and another and another, but the whistle of feedback from the public-address system intruded, jerking her back to herself, and she dug her nails into her palms instead. She would not unspool in front of her audience who, she had recently sensed, were becoming weary of this drama. Miles hated it when she spoke like that, but Amy knew. Now the novelty of Clara’s disappearance had muted, the masses were growing restless, but they still expected to be “entertained’—fresh sightings, TV bulletins, a nervous breakdown perhaps, or the discovery of Clara’s body. Their appetite for bad news was endless.

Miles. She looked for him across the sea of bodies filling up the Heath. He was talking animatedly to a woman she didn’t recognize. His skin was the color of lazy days on the beach, and he had lost weight. He looked—there was no other word for it—good. He had flown in from Spain yesterday but he’d turned down Amy’s offer to stay in the home they’d once shared. He didn’t want to confuse Eleanor, he’d said. He wasn’t ready to return to London yet. Amy had felt like saying that Eleanor was already confused, living with a basket case for a mother and a father who’d vanished from her life a few weeks after her little sister, but instead she had just nodded and said she understood. The events of the last few months had changed her. Her daughter’s disappearance had shown her that no amount of hysteria or bitter accusation would alter that singular painful fact: Clara was gone.

Three months on, the shock of it had not receded, as others had promised, but had become a painful burr lodged in her heart, scratching her afresh with every compression of muscle, every rhythmic pump and beat. Really, what was the significance of a hundred days? Exactly the same as ninety-seven or sixty-three or thirty-one.

As for Him, she did not allow her imaginings to linger down that dark alleyway. Until Clara was found, she w. . .