A FROG HAS 159 BONES, THOUGH its skeleton gives the impression of fewer because it lacks a ribcage and its lower limb bones are fused together. It has no cervical vertebrae, so no neck, and its pelvis can slide along its spine. Last summer, Ava had studied a frog decomposing at her body-farm and it had rapidly liquefied in the heat, quicker than a mammal of equivalent size, its remaining skeleton made cartoonish by its large skull.
She and John were going to the Rezza to collect frog spawn for John’s garden pond, as they did every year. Few frogs ever returned to John’s pond to breed – it was an area heavy with cats, birds and motorcycle wheels – but it was always worth trying again. The Rezza was an oval stretch of water surrounded by banks of wire gabions in which spiders skittered. It was a flood-pool for the Austin, a fake lake beloved by ducks and mythical monster pikes.
Nanny Ash and Granddad were on holiday, and Trevor was working, so Colleen had gratefully accepted the Greens’ offer of a drive to Cannon Hill Park leaving Ava to her own devices.
It had become cold and wet again despite it being summer. Cars hissed on wet roads gleaming with oil rainbows. Few people were out because of the rain.
Ava and John chatted as they crossed through the gate leading to the hospital grounds; the road noise disappeared as if they’d passed through an aquatic portal. Cattle grazed in the field across the road and Ava skipped alongside, holding on to the barbed wire fencing. The bullocks swung their chunky heads to look and lumbered towards her, lowing and nudging. There was something odd in their behaviour, Ava noticed. They weren’t grazing across the field as they usually did, and seemed reluctant to separate.
The cows were at the fence line now, and Ava showed John how to scratch under their lower jaw, told him how a cow could climb upstairs but not down them, as their stifle joint didn’t allow for such movement. She lifted the thick top lip of one of the beasts to show him that they had no upper front teeth. When they patted them goodbye, the bullocks remained, whipping their ropy tails around their shit-caked arses.
The road swooped down to a bridge before its gradual ascent to the hospital area and surrounding fields. On either side of the bridge was a treeline, sparse on the left but a wooded area on the right which led to the Lanes. As they approached the bridge, a smell hit Ava and she stopped in her tracks.
John smiled, unaware.
‘What?’ he said, his smile fading when he saw her expression. Ava took a few steps back and lost the scent, then stepped forward and found it again, almost imperceptible, not yet in full bloom.
The wind lifted and pushed the scent towards them.
‘Can’t you smell it?’ Ava whispered.
John nodded. ‘Sort of like a cross between Camembert cheese and over-boiled cabbage,’ he said.
Ava walked around to the patch of trees in front of the John Connolly Hospital. There was no barbed wire required here: the trees were dense and perched on a disconcerting slope down to the stream. Ava negotiated the root-twisted incline with careful grace, down to the streambed and the mouth of the bridge tunnel. The yawn of the tunnel on this side of the road was narrower than the other side, and deep in shade. A smell of damp advanced and Ava sensed John’s nervousness rising. Blackbirds sounded alarm chirps in concert with the chuckling stream. Ava jumped to the far bank and scanned the length of it, searching for the source of the smell.
‘There’s nothing,’ John whispered. ‘I can’t smell it anymore.’
Ava agreed, but not entirely. From where they stood, they were below the road and out of sight of people walking or driving. This part of the bridge never encountered sunshine and teemed with cyanic slime and obese mosses. She blew air out through her nostrils, her mouth closed, then she straddled the stream with her feet in the water and faced the tunnel.
Suddenly, Ava caught the scent again, and she was certain now of the source.
Dead flesh.
Not totally rotten yet, she guessed, perhaps preserved due to the cooler weather. She peered into the tunnel mouth. The remains – of what she wasn’t yet sure – were either in the middle of the tunnel or at the other side. But she couldn’t see anything in the darkness, only a crescent of light.
Ava looked up at John.
‘Ava?’ John replied, his voice shaking.
Ava scrabbled back up the slope. Something was about to happen – something she had to be strong for. Something that John couldn’t be a part of, except as a bystander. Her suspicions might be wrong; it could be a dead duck or vole, or anything other than what she felt it was. Nanny Ash always said, ‘God judges, Fate listens, Cancer waits.’
Fate listens.
Ava could not believe Fate would call on her twice for the same horrible job. To find a human body is one thing – but to find two? It should be impossible, and it wasn’t fair.
Yet here she was.
Ava looked John up and down. He was dressed in dull tones, so he wouldn’t be spotted from the road against the treeline. Ava grasped his arms, looked into his eyes, and kept her voice ever-so-slightly Miss Misty.
‘John, stay here,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to look over the bridge, all right?’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said John. Ava shook him – not hard, not frantically, but enough to warn him not to disobey her – and he gasped.
‘No, John. You’re waiting for me right here.’
‘Why can’t I come with you?’
‘Because you can’t un-see what you see,’ said Ava. ‘It could be the worst thing of all.’
‘Why can’t we just leave it and call the police?’
‘I need to see if it is . . . if it’s him, and then we’ll call the police. I need to be sure. Please.’
It was the please that did it. Ava desperately wanted John to remain Normal, because if he couldn’t un-see what he saw he might never be Normal again. Ava was inured to the horror because she’d seen it before.
Finally, John nodded, and Ava firmly pushed him further amongst the trees.
‘Stay here and be lookout,’ she said.
Ava was aware cars or people could arrive at any time, and the smell would only get worse if she dallied. She looked over the edge of the bridge. Barbed wire was wrapped around the rusting handrail so she had to tiptoe for a good look over. Initially, she saw little of interest except the widening stream, the mudbank on one side and an old chequered blanket on the other.
Ava’s gaze narrowed on the blanket, and she swallowed a sob. Icy dread trickled through her as steadily as the stream on its way to the city. This explained why the bullocks had stayed at the top of the field; why there were so many green bottle flies lazing around as if drugged. She focused on the object peeping from the blanket edge. Ava squeezed through the gap between bridge and fence post, careful not to get snagged on the barbed wire.
Ava drew level with the tunnel mouth, wider on this side and high enough that she could almost stand up straight – a suntrap with no moss or shade, bright with paintball splashes of lichen. The draught from its arched maw reeked of minerals and mould, and kept the air around the body relatively cool but not cool enough. The motor-like hum of flies turned to a roar when Ava approached the old blanket. Ava looked straight ahead, took deep, slow breaths, preparing for the initial horror. The smell was not all pervasive but it did intrude, and would only get worse if the temperature warmed by even a few degrees which it would do because it was summer.
Ava looked down.
Floating on the pebbles in crystal-clear water, among the lazy trails of green hair-like weed, was a small hand in a weird rubbery glove. It was a child’s left hand, half closed but not clenched, with middle and ring finger digits missing. Her gaze travelled to the small head poking out of the blanket, chin tucked into its folds. Ava stepped closer and saw grit in the scalp and hair, the birthmark on the forehead which proved this was little Bry Shelton, wrapped in a blanket as if sleeping. Closer, his skin was ashen with delicate black veins tracing beneath the surface. The glove on the hand wasn’t a glove at all, Ava noticed – it was the skin of his hand. Degloving, she thought – when the skin has been in water so long that it swells, loosens then pulls away. Ava could just see the grey tendons and the white bones beneath the hand – the same hand she’d sometimes held, warm in life, now disintegrating in death. The water relentlessly tugged at the flesh, tearing it little by little right before her eyes. His half-open eyes were no longer brown but dark blue, and the whites now brown-red (the result of petechiae, Ava knew); the inner canthi rife with fly eggs ready to erupt into jubilant larvae. From her viewpoint, Ava could see the jagged rip in his bruised throat.
And then she saw them: bite marks stamping his thin forearm.
The whole scene was bloodless, sedentary. Like the bramble hollow, this was a dump site. But Bryan hadn’t been thrown down recklessly – he’d been carried and wrapped, then tucked in as if sleeping.
Ava could see material packed under the remaining fingernails, and she knew this crucial evidence would soon be washed away by the stream if she didn’t do something about it. She wouldn’t touch anything else, for this was a crime scene, but if the fingernail evidence was precious then she needed to save that hand.
Ava pulled out the clear plastic bag and two rubber bands from her pocket then wiped the bag clean of any fingerprints. Her feet were sodden, but she didn’t notice as she carefully pulled the bag over the hand and gently secured it at the wrist with the rubber band, disliking the feel of the lifeless form. She then quickly secured the area around the hand with a pebble corral, stone on stone, until the water flowed either side of it and no longer troubled the flesh. The rest of Bryan’s body rested on land, sheltered under the bridge. Bryan was at least still recognisably Bryan, not the shredded mess of Mickey Grant, but that was set to change if she didn’t get a move on. She rinsed her hands in the stream and, even though she knew The Rabbit’s Prayer wasn’t good enough, she murmured it anyway – it was the only prayer she truly trusted.
A lowing close behind made her whirl around. The cows had silently approached, were on the verge of crowding, unsure of her presence. They wouldn’t stampede and trample her if she remained calm, but it was another incentive to leave immediately. She waded through the water to the opposite bank and noticed the peculiar footprints in the drying mud, so she sidestepped to avoid them, crouched then sprang up the bank, grabbing at dry grass to haul herself into the opposite field. She squelched to the gap in the barbed wire and slunk beneath on all fours, careful not to let the spikes gouge skin and hair.
She ran over to John and drew him further into the trees, her shoes squeaking with the wet. A car zoomed by without slowing, and they watched it speed around the corner and disappear. ‘It’s Bry,’ said Ava.
John turned from her and vomited his alphabet spaghetti lunch in one brutal heave.
‘Are you sure it’s Bryan?’ he asked shakily.
‘I’m sure,’ said Ava. ‘We need to call the police right now.’
Ava told him about the plastic bag, and stones, how she’d created a corral in a bid to preserve evidence on Bry’s disintegrating hand. She threaded her arm through his, and together they marched towards the main road.
Next to The Longbridge pub was a telephone box, one of the new metal ones. Cars rushed to and fro but there were still few people about. Before they stepped on to the main path, Ava pulled John to one side.
‘You’re making the phone call,’ she said in a tone that allowed no debate.
‘What?’ John looked horrified.
‘If Miss Misty speaks then that’s going to look suspicious. They won’t believe I’ve found two bodies . . . ’
‘I can’t believe you’ve found two bodies!’ said John.
‘If I use my real voice, Delahaye might recognise it. So, you’ll speak, but you repeat exactly what I say, OK? Just concentrate on that and you’ll be fine.’ Ava’s patience was waning. ‘John?’
John nodded reluctantly.
They crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing, giving both of them time to process and accept.
Huddled tightly together in the telephone box, Ava said, ‘Ready?’