The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (19 page)

35

Once I’d recovered and stripped the bed, I reached for my phone and dialled Obe.

‘Hi, Viv? You got any news?’

‘Maybe. Actually, I’ve got a bit of an odd question really. Leslie and her son were also snake shifters, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Do you know what type of snakes they were?’

There was a short pause while Obe considered the question. ‘Leslie was a ball python. Alister was something unusual, a vine snake I think.’

‘Thanks. How big was Leslie as a snake?’

‘About four foot. Why?’

‘It’s just something that’s come up. I’ll let you know if it means anything.’

I put both types into Google one after the other and confirmed it. The two snakes I’d seen in the underworld were a ball python and a vine snake. I knew Leslie was dead. That wasn’t a secret, but she was supposed to have died in a car accident a long way from home. The dead often head home if they die away from it, but only if they have a good reason. I couldn’t think of any reason they would go home just to eat themselves into obesity.

The image of the suitcase in the boot of the car came to mind, along with the neat criss-cross scars on the lid as if fangs had bitten it, trying to get out. If you were to lock a snake shifter in a suitcase and leave it there, it would die of thirst and hunger, and then revert to the human form and fill the case in a way it could never do alive.

And Alister? Dead children always stay close to their dead mothers. The vine snake and boy had been projections. And now there just happened to be a boy, who matched what Alister might have looked like at eighteen, who had turned up claiming to be Ben’s brother.

I slid my finger up my phone to unlock it. It was past eleven p.m. Dunne was likely home with someone’s foot in his face. The moving corpse was still a mystery, but if I was right, Leslie Brannick was the body in the suitcase. She’d been dead for fifteen years, and that wasn’t going to change. I lifted my finger from the phone. Dunne might also be pissed I hadn’t passed on the information about Per Ogunwale. I took the cowardly route and sent him an email detailing my theory about Leslie and my visit to Per.

I looked up at a tap at the door and saw Lorraine leaning against the doorframe. ‘I’ve put Sigrid to bed, but I didn’t have time to bathe her. You okay if I do it tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes, of course. Thanks, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

‘It’s a pleasure, love. I’m just lucky to have you next door. It’s a real peace of mind knowing my Barry’s being looked after.’

I smiled and nodded. ‘Looked after’ wasn’t quite right. Barry was busy spending his afterlife watching endless
EastEnders
reruns and eating a lot of pizza, which I understood wasn’t so different from what he’d done in life. Apart from the massive coronary at the end, of course.

After she let herself out, I wandered into the kitchen and replenished Vinegar’s food and water. I located a tin of tomato soup after a moment’s rummaging and poured it into a bowl. I buttered a hunk of bread while the soup heated up in the microwave.

I leaned against the counter and rubbed my eyes. Leslie Brannick was dead, but probably not in the way everyone thought. Her son was likely still alive, but where had he been for the last fifteen years? And who on earth was the other body? The one that was still moving, even if it shouldn’t have been.

I ate in front of the TV, interrupted only by the cat bopping his head against my hand as I ate. The news about Ben’s wings had broken. At the sight of the globby flesh, I changed channels and half-watched a rerun of a sitcom with a too-loud laugh track.

I fell asleep halfway through and surfaced around three a.m. with tomato soup on my legs, a heavy cat on my lap, and the TV blaring. I pushed off Vinegar, who gave me a dirty look, changed my pyjama bottoms, switched the TV off, and went to bed.

I woke to bright white light streaking through the cracks in the blinds where it made bars on the opposite wall. Sometime while I’d been sleeping it had started to snow again, and the room was filled with that bright light particular to snow days. The window was wide open, letting in the cold. I had a vague recollection of opening it sometime in the night, feeling suffocated by dreams filled with snakes and hunger.

Usually when I think it’s going to snow, I hang towels over the window before I go to bed to block the light, but I’d been half asleep and hadn’t thought about towels or anything else. I lay very still on my side, stomach churning and only partly due to a post-death hangover. We’ve all got our little hang ups. Snow on the windowsill is mine.

It was snowing the morning I killed my sister.

36

When I was twelve, I murdered my sister. I knelt on her chest and held her head under soapy water until she stopped thrashing and the little bubbles around her nose and mouth were still. It was her idea and I had only the best intentions, but we all know what they say about those.

Bringing people back from the underworld is a doddle. Bringing them back without profound psychological and spiritual damage? A little trickier.

It could be done. My mother did it with Stanley. He returned without the tumour that killed him. And I’d had some practice. Vinegar was hit by a car when I was eleven. I brought the cat back without any problems. He also came back without arthritis. It seemed a simple enough process.

Turned out bringing back a cat was a lot easier than bringing back a human.

Sigrid was suffering from what Stanley called sarcoma of the long bones—bone cancer for those lucky enough not to know—and on her second round of chemo. The survival rate for bone cancer is pretty good these days, but it was already quite clear that she wasn’t going to make it.

My sister thought very carefully about how she wanted to die. Poison would take too long and might be agonising, strangling would be too hard for my twelve-year-old hands, we didn’t have a car so monoxide poisoning was out, stabbing would be both painful and messy, and she heard you pooed yourself if you were hanged.

Neither of us doubted that drowning would be nasty, but we agreed it would be quicker and more effective than other methods and with less cleaning up afterwards.

I poured a bath then helped her in. The chemo had left her weak. Her ribs were ridges under my arms, but her weight was still too much and I let go too soon. The tub squeaked as she slipped under the water. Water slopped over the edge of the bath and all over the wooden floorboards. She came up dripping and shook her head like a wet dog. So much for not making a mess.

‘You’ll need to hold me down, Vivvie, no matter how much I struggle.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s a reflex. I read it in the encyclopaedia.’

‘
I know
.’

‘It’s important to get it right.’

The corners of her mouth turned down, and for a second I thought she was going to cry, but then her lips tightened. We’d had this discussion. She was going to die anyway. She might as well die quickly and live again, than die slowly and in pain.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was.

‘Yes,’ Sigrid said, but she didn’t move. Then she took one big breath, blew it out, and slipped under the water. She looked up at me, her eyes open. Small air bubbles slipped from her nose and mouth and popped on the surface of the water.

I slipped off my nightgown and stepped into the bath. I sat on her chest and put my hands on her shoulders.

I don’t think it was me she struggled against. I think it was the pain of drowning. She kept her mouth closed for the first minute, then it opened and she gulped water. Her eyes bulged and her body shuddered under mine. It only took a few minutes, but it felt so very long before she stopped moving.

I got out of the bath and wrapped myself in my towel. Sigrid lay still, her face an inch under the water. I waited another five minutes, then took her slippery wrist in my hand and checked for her pulse. I was never good at finding my own, so I took my time to be sure.

She was dead. I lay down on the wet floor in the bathroom and went after her.

In the underworld, she was still drowning, a not-me sitting on her chest holding her down. I shoved the not-me out of the way and pulled my dead sister into a sitting position.

She threw up water over her stomach and spluttered and coughed.

‘No, no, Viv. We have to try again.’

I hugged her tight.

‘You’re already dead, Siggie. Hold on. I’ll take you back.’

I woke to find my mother standing over me, her face tight with fury. Stanley stood in the doorway behind her.

She yanked me upwards by my wrist. Pain streaked through it. I heard something snap. ‘Stupid child. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.’ She turned back to Stanley. ‘Kill that.’

Kill what? It was a moment before I realised she was talking about Sigrid.

She pulled me along towards my bedroom. My toes scraped along the floor.

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid girl.’

She flung me to the wood floor. I fell on my shoulder, and it jolted against the bone in my neck. She left me there then and pulled the door closed behind her. I heard the click of the key in the lock.

I dried myself on a T-shirt and got dressed gingerly. My shoulder hurt, and when I touched it, my fingers felt something lumpy at the collar bone. I left my feet bare. My toes were scraped raw, and I couldn’t face putting socks on. I stood at the door and listened to the sound of her swearing and of Stanley’s soft placatory tones.

I waited. It wasn’t the first time I’d been confined to my room for some infraction, and I didn’t expect it to be the last. This was a pretty big one, so I wasn’t surprised when the door was still locked the next morning. And the next.

I was there two days without food or water before I realised she didn’t intend to let me out and I tried to escape by climbing out the window.

It was winter, and the window was slippery with frost. My bedroom was on the second floor, and the space to the ground below looked higher than I’d ever imagined. The window was next to the drainpipe. I think I had some idea of shimmying down neat as a fireman. Instead I fell onto the concrete slabs outside the kitchen door and shattered my calves, the bones splintered and shiny against the red of my flesh.

I woke in my own bed to see Stanley binding my legs against a plastic broom handle on one side and the remains of the mop on the other.

He pulled it tight. I screamed.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he murmured. ‘I saw worse than this in the trenches. It’ll heal up nicely. You keep still.’ He didn’t meet my eyes.

In the afternoon, he came into my room bearing his toolbox and a tray with a glass of water and a bowl of cold pea soup. I drank the water, but the soup made my stomach turn.

‘Uncle Stanley, please. Please let me go to the doctor.’

He shook his head.

‘What if I get an infection?’

Stanley disappeared around the door and reappeared with a pile of two-by-four wooden beams. He boarded up the window. Once he finished with the window, he cut a hole in the bottom of my bedroom door and installed a cat flap.

Finally he said, ‘I’ve been told not to talk to you.’

And that was that.

My mother was dead for six months before Malcolm and the team at the Lipscombe knocked the door down. Then I was seventeen, and I’d been locked in my bedroom for five years.

37

In my early twenties, I spent a year and a half with an Australian boyfriend touring his home country in an old Toyota. We spent a little time in the cities, but mostly we went camping. It was an eye-opener for someone born and bred on concrete.

We’d be out in the middle of nowhere, miles from anything or anywhere, and the moment we switched off the lamps at night, there would be no artificial light. Nothing except the stars and the moon, the Australian moon somehow a hundred times bigger than the London one, and stars so numerous and so beautiful I spent many nights just leaning back in my camp chair staring up at them.

Sometimes, on the days when the sky was clear, I went into the back garden and gazed at the stars. It was never the same. Light pollution rendered them dimmer, less interesting. That was when I wondered what I was doing there. The answer was always Sigrid. I could take her away with me. Not Australia—too many drop bears—but someplace where there were country lanes instead of piss-smelling pavements, where the stars looked the way they were supposed to.

And more importantly, somewhere it didn’t snow.

I twisted the cord, and the blinds shut with a snap. I’d been given food. Stanley had pushed it through the cat flap on a daily basis and emptied the piss pot I’d given him in return. And if I hadn’t had food? If I’d just stayed in there and starved? Perhaps I’d also be a severely obese dead woman, eating as if my life had depended on it.

If Leslie Brannick had starved to death in a suitcase, someone had covered it up. Someone had lied about her death, lied that she was in the States, falsified paperwork, explained missing bodies. The idea was nonsensical, but I was certain that was what had happened.

It explained the obese woman, it explained the too-small suitcase with the parallel grooves, and it explained Ben’s mystery older brother. Little Alister Brannick was key. He had been somewhere for fifteen years, and he must have turned up again for a reason.

I showered, then took an age to find something appropriate to wear, as almost all my clothes were squashed into an overflowing laundry basket. I finally settled for a lightweight flowered blouse, stripy skirt, and a thick pair of patterned stockings I’d bought on a whim. I surveyed myself in the mirror. If I were lucky, everyone would think I looked either arty or just a little bit eccentric. I dragged the basket to the machine and dumped half of the contents inside.

The woman I needed to speak to wouldn’t be in the office for at least another two hours, so I made a mug of instant coffee and poured a bowl of cornflakes, which I ate dry. I skimmed the news on my phone while I ate and checked Twitter and Facebook. I saw a documentary that said people who multitask while eating were more likely to eat more, and be fatter than people who didn’t. I intended to worry about it the moment I struggled to roll out the door in the morning.

Lorraine arrived at seven-thirty, and I helped her change Sigrid and get her into the bath. I left the house and headed towards the station around eight.

Rain bucketed down as I stepped onto the train and thundered on the roof of the carriage. It stopped just as I exited at Streatham Hill, and for the first time in weeks I caught a glimpse of blue sky among the clouds. Winter sunlight filtered onto my upturned face, too weak to be warm but welcome nonetheless. And then it was gone, covered by scudding grey clouds.

Streatham is stuffed with ghosts—the result of having a larger than average number of burials due to the natural springs that were reputed to heal but usually didn’t. Spirits swarmed the pavements.

An influx of young professionals looking for cheap housing to the area meant that every time I visited, there seemed to be more independent coffee shops with spaces for buggies and wipe-clean tables, but the part I was going to was definitely pre-gentrification. Graffiti increased as I headed east, and after five minutes’ walk I found myself at St Anguiculus Children’s Home, or at least before the concrete wall surrounding it. The wall was unpainted and topped with barbed wire. Only a small plastic plaque screwed to the wall next to a solid wooden gate told me I was in the right place.

I pressed the buzzer and said my name, and the gate clicked open. The building wasn’t much more than a solid rectangular block, but it was painted all round with murals of smiling happy children and brightly coloured snakes. An enormous rockery, slick with rain, sat adjacent a standard issue children’s playground with swings, seesaw, and climbing frame.

Rows of pots with scraggly winter pansies led up the steps to the main door. It opened just before I got to it, and a short, middle-aged woman with blond permed hair and overlarge glasses appeared. I received a kiss on each cheek, accompanied by the scent of talcum powder. Margery held me by the shoulders and took a good look at me.

‘Vivia. Lovely to see you. Gosh, it’s wet, isn’t it? I got your message. Sounds mysterious. Did you bring your Lipscombe ID?’

I rummaged in my backpack then handed it to her.

‘Sorry, we’ve been getting more threats recently. I’m on holiday from next week, so just need to make sure your photo is on the approved list and the cover doesn’t call the police on you.’

I followed her into the building, through the reception area, into a small corridor, and then into an office leading off to the right.

Margery carefully copied both sides of my ID on a multi-function copier, gave it back to me, then waved me over to one of the two desks in the room.

A teddy bear holding a shiny cardboard heart sat on top of her monitor, and a full row of toy animals sat on the shelf behind. Most were teddies, but there were also two mice, a rabbit, and what might have been a wombat. All were either pink, red, white, or some combination of the three.

Photos of children covered the wall, about half in human form.

I sat down in the office chair opposite her desk. ‘I’m looking for a boy, he’d be about eighteen now. The family thought he was dead, but it turns out he might not be.’

Margery leant under her desk and switched on her computer. ‘What is he?’

‘Vine snake.’

She stopped fiddling with her computer and stared at me. ‘You’re looking for Alister Brannick.’ And then, ‘Oh my God, I never thought... Are you sure?’

‘I think so. How do you know I’m asking about Alister?’

‘Vine snakes are incredibly rare. I only know one dead one, and I know the family. The Comforts. Shirley Comfort used to volunteer here before she died.’

‘Shirley? I don’t know her.’

‘She was Samson, Leslie, and Jillie’s mother. How can Alister be alive? The whole thing was so senseless. He died in a car wreck in the United States, in one of the middle states, one of the big ones, I forget which one.’

‘That’s what I thought, but now I’m not so sure.’ I gave her a breakdown of everything that had happened. ‘Do you know anything about a vine snake calling himself Oliver?’

She stood up, crossed over to the windowed side of the office, and dropped to a crouch to pull open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet.

‘Vine snakes are common in Southeast Asia but not here. Most London snakes are either cobras or pythons because those are the snakes most common in our society’s collective psyche. In the US, you can add rattlesnakes to the mix. So when another vine snake turned up here, I did think of Alister, but I’d never actually met him. It never occurred to me they could be the same child. Animal shifters come in trends, like children’s names. You don’t know any babies named Beatrice and then suddenly there are five in a year.’

She found the file she was looking for and came back to the desk, handing it to me.

I opened it and recoiled at the glossy photo on the first page. ‘Bloody hell, warn me next time.’

‘Sorry.’ She didn’t sound it.

‘What happened?’

‘The surgeon thought he was stamped on. Either that or beaten with something heavy. There was so much damage, it was difficult to tell for sure. If he’d been an ordinary snake or ordinary human, he wouldn’t have survived it.’

‘But he did?’

‘With reconstructive surgery and a lot of shifting back and forth. Each time, the tissue damage healed just enough. He’s still not a hundred per cent, but he can walk and talk, and that’s a lot more than he came in with.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘Not a lot. I’m sure they’ve got a file somewhere, but it happened while he was in snake form, so as far as they were concerned, it was all just a terrible misunderstanding. They weren’t all that interested.’

I turned to the next page in the file and skimmed the report.

‘You didn’t try tracing his family?’

‘Sure, but we didn’t really expect to find anyone. Most snake babies are abandoned at birth. You know that.’

I made a note on my phone of the date he’d been brought in. They’d called him Oliver Gale. Oliver because he called himself what they thought was Ollie, and Gale because of a tradition of naming the children after famous literary orphans.

‘Who brought him in?’

‘Street cleaners. They found him in a gutter in Wimbledon.’

I turned another page and found another two photos. One was of a beautiful snake, its scales a patchwork of green, white, and black. It looked like the same snake I’d seen in the underworld, but I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one and another.

The other photo showed a little boy in a wheelchair, his face oddly lumpy.

‘Do you have a current photo?’

‘Um, I suppose I must do. I’ll have a look.’ She began clicking through folders on her desktop. She clicked a few buttons, and the printer next to her began to whirr. ‘I don’t have photo paper.’

‘That’s okay.’

The printer finished, and the picture slid out and slipped onto the floor. I ducked under the desk and picked it up.

It was the young man from Andy’s photo.

‘Did you ever mention Alister Brannick to him?’

‘Well, I told him there had been another vine snake in London about his age, but he knows that doesn’t mean they were family.’

‘When did you tell him?’

‘Last time I saw him. It was just before Christmas. He came in with a card and some sweets for the children.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘I’m not sure where he’s staying at the moment, but I can give you his phone number.’

I programmed it into my phone. ‘If you’ve got a current photo, I assume he wasn’t adopted.’

‘He grew up here. He arrived just before the ban on adoption came in, and by the time it was lifted, he was too old for an easy placement.’

‘Ban? I didn’t know about that.’

‘It was never official. You know how it goes. No one wants the snakes and the spiders, so we only ever got the really desperate mums and dads. They’re happy with a nice soft baby, then one morning they see scales in the crib and overreact. We had too many adopters telling us the kid just shifted and disappeared. Except they’d never turn up in the parks or the sewers like the other strays. It was happening more often than you might think, and you’d be surprised how much the police don’t care.’

‘That must have been hard.’

‘It was. Now we make the prospective adopters spend time here with the children in snake form for at least a month to be sure they won’t freak out. It’s working, but we’re still short of adopters.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. You know, I was at Alister’s funeral. I remember it so clearly. It was at the Sacred Heart in Wimbledon. It was a lovely service, but I’ll never forget the sight of that tiny white coffin. I can’t believe our Oliver might have been him all this time.’

‘Was it an open casket?’

‘God, no.’

My mind was whirring along, and I had a theory percolating nicely. Alister-Oliver had gone back to the place he had been found. Somehow he’d hooked up with Ben, who would have told him he was supposed to be dead. And then what? And then Malcolm just happened to zombify at the same time? I knew there had to be a connection. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I thanked Margery for her help, and she saw me out.

I stood on the pavement outside the home and dialled Oliver Gale’s number. It went to voicemail. I left a message.

I needed to speak to Dunne. I’d wanted to find Ben first, but this was no longer just about one missing boy.