The Darkness of Bones (17 page)

I
N A SPLIT-SECOND
judgment, Benson had fired, just as Judith fired the first chamber in Jack’s gun. Benson did not ask Judith to drop the gun. He did not ask her to surrender. He did not give her a second chance to pull the trigger again.

The shotgun blast hit Benson, slamming him violently against the door of the shed, filling him with disbelief that his godson could have done such a thing.

“Drop it!” shouted Johnson, tumbling to the ground, his finger already squeezing the trigger, the gun aimed directly at Adrian’s head.

Jack leapt, adrenalin and instinct guiding him, pushing Adrian to the floor, knocking the shotgun from his hands.

“You murdered her!” screamed Adrian, over and over again, punching and kicking Jack.

Seconds later, Johnson stood over Adrian, gun primed.

“Don’t!” shouted Jack. “He’s … he’s my son … don’t shoot … please don’t shoot.”

“Johnson … do … do as Jack says … lad. It’s … it’s over
…” groaned Benson.

While Johnson cuffed Adrian, Jack hastily knelt beside Benson, ripping his own shirt, hoping to stop the frightening flow of blood. The burly cop’s enormous chest had taken most of the blast. A large napkin of blood stained the top half of it.

“Easy, Harry,” whispered Jack, desperately trying to staunch the flow.

Benson’s tongue darted in and out, trying to capture air.

“It … it wasn’t his fault … Jack … Adrian …” Pink blood bubbled at the side of Benson’s mouth. “Should … I should have known better … fucking cavalry charges, at my age. You … should always go by … the fucking book.”

“Easy … easy, Harry. Don’t talk. Help is on its way … we’ll use the chopper. You’ll be in hospital in no time.”

Benson forced a smile. Another pink bubble appeared at the side of his mouth, followed by a spurt of blood. “If … you’re daft enough … to take that chopper, trust me, you … you
will
end up in hospital.”

Benson’s fingers worked their way into his coat pocket, returning a few seconds later.

“Here … take this.” Benson squeezed Grazier’s glass eye into Jack’s hand. “That fucker Grazier … saved … your life … Shaw … Shaw found it on Grazier’s body … I … didn’t catch on to that … Long John shit … on the phone … till Shaw handed me that … glass fucking eye …” Blood was flowing more fluently now. “The bodies … in Barton’s Forest … Grazier and Harris … throats cut …”

“Don’t talk, Harry. Save your strength. You’ll need it for all that fishing we’re going to do.”

“Stop making me … laugh … it hurts my ribs.” Benson attempted a smile. “Promise … promise you’ll … say nothing
about … the car crash … if you don’t promise … I’ll come back … and fucking haunt you …”

“Stop talking like that, you old bastard. You are
not
going to die on me. Do you hear me? I will not allow you to—”

“
Promise!
” hissed Benson, through clenched teeth. “That bastard Wilson … would take Anne’s … police pension … promise me …”

“I … I promise, Harry, I promise …” Jack allowed the blood to flow freely now. There was little point in trying to halt it. “Adrian didn’t mean to shoot you, Harry. You know that, don’t you? His head is all fucked up. Harry? Can you hear me, Harry …?”

Benson’s eyes stared up at his ex-partner, his best friend. He didn’t answer.

T
HE RAIN SOFTENED
the soil along the graveyard, adjacent to the Graham building, making the task of the mechanical digger a lot easier. For such a metal monstrosity, the digger moved delicately, almost pawing the soil before interrupting it.

Watching the digger, Jack became almost hypnotised by its movement mingling with the sound of falling rain on his umbrella.

“Are you listening to me?” asked Shaw.

“What? Sorry … my mind was elsewhere.”

“I said Wilson would never have authorised this exhumation. Too much manpower and overtime money wasted, for his mentality. It was a godsend, his unexpected resignation. Don’t you think?”

Jack detected just a hint of curiosity in Shaw’s voice. Everyone was speculating on Wilson’s sudden vocation for civilian life. Rumour was rife—something to do with the Graham building and protection money, and a can of worms spilling on to the streets, crawling all over town. Local politicians’ names were
being whispered. A judge and a member of the clergy had already been taken in for questioning by the police. Only Jack Calvert held the secret, for now. But soon the worms would find their way into the homes of so-called respected citizens, and into the mouth of William Wilson and his cronies.

The digger stopped abruptly, indicated to do so by one of Shaw’s assistants. Less than a minute later, a small, badly dilapidated box was removed.

“They couldn’t even grant the children a respectable burial,” whispered Shaw, surprising Jack with the emotion in his voice. “Too many bodies, Calvert. I’m afraid we’ve unearthed more than death in this wretched patch of earth.”

“When you live in a place, it becomes you whether you want it to or not, Shaw. We are all guilty of whatever this burial ground accuses us of. Each and every one of us.”

Shaw looked away from the digger. “When you didn’t show up for Benson’s funeral, it caused a bit of a stir. But as I listened to Wilson’s last official speech about Benson’s bravery, I realised you wouldn’t have been able to control yourself. You did the right thing.”

Jack laughed bitterly. “The right thing? I wouldn’t know the right thing if it slapped me about the face. I’m no better than Wilson, Shaw. Make no mistake about that.”

The rain was falling in brown streaks, as if washing all the filth from the sky’s crust. Jack felt despondency seep in as the rain soaked through his clothes, chilling his bones.

“How is your son? You understand that it will take time and patience? Fortunately, there is a lot of help nowadays.”

Jack shuddered involuntary. He wanted to go home, but needed to talk to someone, someone with answers and explanations. Walls were never good listeners, despite what the
old war posters proclaimed.

“Murder charges have been reduced to involuntary manslaughter. I’m waiting to hear if he will be released on bail until the trial. All I can do is hope that eventually all charges will be dropped. It wasn’t Adrian who fired those shots. It was drugs and the brainwashing.” Jack looked away from Shaw. “I don’t know … I don’t know if he will ever be the same, sullied by such an experience and knowledge of evil … what he saw, what he went through. In times like this, I would have whispered a tiny prayer to God, but if this case has taught me one thing, it’s that God never did exist.”

The agnostic Shaw said nothing for a while. He appeared transfixed in his own world of the dead, as he watched the digger vomit up more soil and potential revelations.

“How is Miss Bryant? Thank goodness the newspapers were willing to print the red herring that she was fatally wounded.”

“I never thought I’d be grateful to any newspaper,” acknowledged Jack. “Sarah will need major surgery on her face. They still can’t tell me if she will ever regain the full use of her legs. The doctor said she was
lucky
. Time will tell what his definition of being lucky is.”

“I completed a toxicology test on the remains of both Jeremiah Grazier and Joseph Harris, yesterday. They had both been poisoned—though in different ways. Harris’s stomach revealed vitamin tablets laced with cyanide. He consumed a large quantity of alcohol—probably whiskey—preceding administration of the cyanide. Both men had their throats cut, also, prior to death. Not a very gentle death at all,” said Shaw.

Jack shuddered before sucking in a taste of dirty air. He dreaded asking Shaw the question, but had no other choice. “Do … do you think both murders were committed by one
person? The same person? You don’t think Adrian had anything to do with them?”

Almost tenderly, Shaw reached and touched Jack’s shoulder. “It really doesn’t matter what I think. My files on both deaths are now closed. Let us worry about the living, now. The dead can take care of themselves.”

“Harris had nothing to do with any of this,” said Jack. “We found the money he withdrew, along with his passport, in Grazier’s cupboard. It looks as if they set him up, using him to take us off their trail. Poor bastard. Even the child porn magazines, conveniently found in Harris’s cottage, were purchased by Jeremiah using his own credit card.”

An assistant was waving, indicating that Shaw was needed over at the tent that constituted a makeshift headquarters.

“I’ll call you if there are any further developments, Calvert,” said Shaw, turning to go. “By the looks of things here, it’s going to be a very long time before we get any answers. In the meantime, if you need anything, just give me a call.”

Removing a photo from his pocket, Jack said, “There
is
one thing I would appreciate you doing for me. This belonged to Judith Grazier. It’s a picture of a young boy called Michael Wainwright. He’s in there, somewhere among the dead. I want you to find him. I want you to do this. Understand? It would mean a lot to me. I need to give him a decent burial.”

Hesitantly, Shaw took the photo. “I’m not supposed to …” He sighed, looking from the photo to Jack. “I’ll do my best to locate the subject … the boy’s body.”

“Despite all that she did, I can’t help feeling sorry for her—for all those kids. The system failed, not only Judith, but literally hundreds of others, and I don’t suppose we will ever know the exact number.”

Shaw left, stumbling over the tiny hills of muck, cursing as he did so.

Fatigued, Jack turned and made his way across the sodden ground. Directly above, he could hear the sound of birds, crows, caw-caw cawing. Their sound was everywhere.

Sam Millar’s writing has been praised for its “fluency and courage of language” by Jennifer Johnson, and he has been hailed by best-selling American author Anne-Marie Duquette as “a powerful writer”. He is a winner of the Martin Healy Short Story Award, the Brian Moore Award for Short Stories, the Cork
Literary Review
Competition, and the Aisling Award for Art and Culture. Born in Belfast, where he still lives, he is married and has three children. Of his first crime novel,
The Redemption Factory
, the
Irish Independent
said: “He writes well, with a certain raw energy, and he is not afraid to take risks with his fiction. The result is a novel that can sometimes be as shocking as it is original.” He is also the author of one other previous novel,
Dark Souls.