THE GARAGE DOOR SAILED UP and tucked into its niche above with ease. Ava immediately coughed – old smoke and petrol acrid to taste. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Ash was caked into corners by stale draughts and damp. Ava looked around slowly: this was it. This was the den.
Mickey’s bike lay on the floor to her left, his Grifter: chain rusted and wheels partially melted. Shelves had burned to a crocodile-underbelly texture.
A charred rug made from a large piece of tatty purple carpet was on the floor. There was a melted plastic chair, and a battered armchair. The armchair was stained with a filthy outline where Mickey had ‘sat’ steeped in his own effluvium. A wastepaper bin filled with burned litter was next to a weight-training barbell. On a small side table sat scorched copies of magazines, editions dating from last summer. A tipped-over ashtray, used butts smattering the floor alongside empty cigarette packets.
On the floor was a heap of burned fabric and the other trainer. These had to be the rest of Mickey’s clothes. Ava touched nothing because she knew better. She studied the bulkier stains, the blood spray and the blood spots. This was both kill-site and temporary storage, but it did not tell the whole story.
On the floor, in its own blotch, was an ordinary carving knife sheathed in gore: the murder weapon? The killer had left crucial evidence to be found – or perhaps he’d assumed this place would never be discovered.
Or he’d panicked, thought Ava. He’d panicked because he was surprised he’d done it, he’d done murder; he’d actually killed a person. The battle ended here but didn’t begin in this space.
Ava played through the most likely scenario in her mind. The killer had dragged the body in and propped it in the armchair – Mickey hadn’t simply been discarded on the floor. The killer had fled after the fire then returned a while later to discover Mickey’s body was about to morph into an out-of-control mess. What to do? The killer couldn’t just leave the body here, even though the den was far enough away from civilisation. If the killer had wanted Mickey to be found, wouldn’t he have dumped the body in a more obvious location than the bramble den Ava found it in? And this place was not Mickey’s den, but a monster’s lair. Only the monster was gone.
And there was more: older, chunkier stains; partial remains of the other slaughtered animals. Ava’s gaze narrowed on a metal container tucked behind the plastic chair. She stepped forward and crouched in front of it, spotting a thin pile of Polaroid photographs. She saw something in the top image.
She snatched it as she heard her name being called from a distance. Delahaye. She shoved the photograph into her pocket and backed out of the garage. Her exploration was not over yet, but the garage, with its burned, bloodstained den inside, would soon keep the detectives preoccupied.
‘Ava!’ Luke called out in harmony with Lines. Delahaye was closer now, visibly worried.
Ava stood in the gap in the wall so she was visible. The men approached; she could hear the crackle of their feet on the bones and stones, their forms fondled by the down-feathers in the air. She saw the horror in their eyes as they realised what was causing the snapping under their shoes. Delahaye was at the apex, with Luke and Lines flanking him, as they ran towards her. She lifted a hand and pointed at the garage. They’d have to work out for themselves that it wasn’t Mickey’s den. She needed them distracted so she could go and find the missing skulls.
Ava watched them see, heard their grunts of disgust as the stench hit; saw them cover their mouths with ineffectual sleeves, heard their coughing, observed their policeman instincts kick in. She jumped when Delahaye appeared, crouched before her, grabbing her hands.
‘Ava? Are you all right, sweetheart?’ His concern was genuine: he was sorry, guilty that he’d left her. But Ava forgave him – both because he was a good man, and because it suited her. She nodded. His eyes were massive, and in them she saw that he believed her. Then Delahaye turned to Luke.
‘Keep an eye on Ava for us,’ he said, but Luke was transfixed by the big bloodstain. Ava watched the detectives move into the den. She saw Luke move closer to the brown mark.
This was her cue.
Ava rounded the corner of the garage and found a slight incline of mud lined with smashed vertebrae and tiny ribcages. Her burning calf muscles told her the path was becoming steeper, and she tried to clear her mind of all thoughts and feelings. Tomita’s rendition of ‘Arabesque’ played in her head, as if to protect her from what was to come, from what she would see.
She was at the top of the slope now. In front of her, two rows of standing broomsticks marked a path, and atop each perched a large dog skull, all of them glaring down at her from eyeless sockets, their mandibles hinged by fragile dried tendons. Around their weathered pates were desiccated crowns of daisy chains. These were the main focus of the display, crude totems that heralded her passage.
Ava moved further into the macabre garden. And then stopped abruptly. Spread out before her was the ossuary arrangement of a truly deranged mind. Cat, rabbit, rodent and hedgehog skulls discarded on twigs lined the shabby path, margined with barbed wire, twisted brambles and dog roses. More skulls of bigger birds – hawks and ravens – and a chunky badger skull. The tall bushes either side gave Ava the impression she was in a labyrinth, their fronds clasping above her head, creating a mystical chamber. The musk of spilled blood and old meat pervaded the cold air. Above her hung a gruesome mobile: a starling’s wing and a raven’s tail twirled in a helix on thorns. Bells from cat collars chimed in the wind.
She turned briefly to look down the bristling funnel and pondered that awful handprint, brown now, and dry. Mickey had grasped to purchase anything solid, desperate, terrified beyond imagining, but holding on so that he wouldn’t be pulled under. He’d still fought to the end. And the only witnesses were the severed heads of slain animals.
The earth had taken the stains away: the blood percolated into the soil though its scent of rusty iron and boiled sugar remained. Before Ava, the ground dipped then rose in a dry ravine. The bushes huddled closer: their dead fruit shrivelled baubles. The spiked skulls leaned in too, a scene despicably beautiful, wrought from a Grimm fairy tale plucked from Baba Yaga’s bliss. Discarded on the ground was another barbell and, still clinging, was gore and bone shards, tiny as a bird’s. But not a bird’s – these were human. Ava stared at it and blinked. In her head, she tried to match the barbell with the wounds she’d seen on Mickey’s corpse. Was this the tool used to smash his chest? As Ava approached an altar-like structure directly ahead, she saw it wasn’t an altar but a slab of solid granite; a worktop balanced on oil drums, with a giant crack in its centre, like Aslan’s resurrection stand in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There were cups and playing cards, used batteries, a smashed torch bulb with blood flaked on the surface: more evidence of a fight and not a sacrifice. Not ritual then – but resistance.
Ava tried to imagine what occurred that night. Mickey had come here on a whim after the disco and on arrival, he’d found his sanctuary had transformed into a charnel pit over the winter. All these bones and feathers had been a shock to the boy because Ava knew Mickey had loved animals, especially cats.
Mickey was known as a ‘hard rock’ by the local boys. He was a scrapper; fearless. So he’d confronted his killer. There’d been shouting into the night, screams. When Mickey had threatened to tell, that was when he’d been attacked. Mickey was lifted high then thrown down onto the makeshift table, hard and agonising – cracking it with the force. Fighting broke out, but not the typical way men fight, because the experienced predator had weapons and was not afraid to hurt in ways most people considered taboo. A terrified boy against somebody much stronger: somebody with no morality, or fear of law and consequences. Was that all this was? Mickey’s desire to confront a criminal, and his attacker’s desperation to prevent his crime’s disclosure?
In nature, every species recognises its own, and in human culture every tribe knows its kith. Ava descended from ferocious women who’d escaped a starved Ireland for the bellowing factories of industrial England, and from stubborn men blackened and bent from generations in Welsh coal mines. Yet she possessed no root into her history, no pull in her genes. In this place, however, she sensed a rogue in her species, a predator that preyed on his own.
‘DS Delahaye!’ Luke yelled.
Dear Luke, darling Luke, running towards her, his face a Greek mask of tragedy. She pondered how Red Riding Hood won in the better versions: the beast had met its match in hers. It was why Ava was here. It was why she was Ava. With this beast, she was not the hunted but the hunter. Ava pulled her hood over her head and the wind lifted her onto her toes. Her tears made clean tracks in the ash on her cheeks.
Ava was custodian of the dead; this she understood. The idea of hurting an animal, by accident or on purpose, was anathema to her. Even at the height of her curiosity, she would never cut them open to explore their interior anatomies – she was content with books to learn such details. All her subjects were buried intact, they were mourned, and they were given back to nature as nature intended. In the moments before giving them back, they were loved. It was Ava’s calling.
In this atrocious place she had discovered another custodian. But, unlike her, their calling was taking – a thief who stole not only respect from the dead but also life from the living. With this monster there was desecration instead of reverence. His hate poisoned the spikes of wire and thorns. Ava’s mind rattled faster and faster as her body slowed into an inexplicable exhaustion. Perhaps it was because of the weight of secrets: Mickey’s savaged body, the fox, and the tortured cat.
‘Ava!’
The shout came from behind her but Ava could barely hear it. She knew that the monster was not like her; that it had no desire to respect the dead. But her brain was too tired to fight off another awful epiphany: that this killer was just herself turned inside out: her fatal inversion.
‘Ava!’
Luke. It took all of Ava’s effort to focus on Luke as he ran to her, and she tried to capture him in her mind like a snapshot: the highlight along his cheekbones, the glint of gold in his ear, and the tuppence-bronze of his eyes. Her knees buckled. She hadn’t asked them to, they just buckled even when she tried to stop them they still dropped, as if crumbling like the wall.
Luke reached and caught her before she hit the ground, Delahaye in his wake, and Ava collapsed into him. He held her close. But the darkness held her closer still.