23rd December, 1981
JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU can’t cope, just when you think that life can’t get any worse and does, just when you think you’ll never get over the shock, the misery, the grief – the mind folds over and you’re still alive, still functioning. You take whatever lessons you can learn from horror and you move forward. There is no choice. It’s how the strongest humans survive.
In five days, Ava would become fourteen years old: a nondescript age about which no songs were written. It was the same age that Neville Coleman had been when he’d signed up to fight in the trenches. It was the same age that Mickey had been when he’d fought then was killed by the Wolf. War and murder, then, but not songs.
Delahaye vacated the Range Rover and squished through slush to where Ava waited, leaning against the street sign proclaiming her new neighbourhood. Ava clocked the red-haired, Sophia Loren lookalike in the driver’s seat, and the telltale glow in Delahaye’s cheeks.
He had a heavy carrier bag dangling from his wrist. He smiled at her. ‘Ava.’
‘Delahaye,’ she said. He studied her face for breakdown, insomnia – but he knew he’d find only Ava. They’d corresponded via telephone and letter but this was the first time they’d met in person since the Night of the Wolf.
‘How’s your new room?’ he asked.
‘Mine!’ she said, and he laughed.
He glanced around at the tidy cul-de-sac with its neat houses. ‘How’s Mr Bax?’ he asked.
Ava shrugged. ‘Behaving.’
‘If that changes, you call me, yes?’
Ava nodded. He handed her the carrier bag and she saw a manila file, a few envelopes, and a small wrapped gift. He also handed her a folded piece of paper. ‘It was found in the Sky Den,’ said Delahaye.
She opened it and saw it was a list. There were over a hundred boys’ names written into sections, local areas, and beside each name was written a confectionary: Jacob Knott – chewy nuts; Lee Smith – jelly babies . . . It was a list of potential victims, and the bait to tempt them. He saw her tremble as she recognised some of those names but the look of relief told him she couldn’t find John Eades’ name because he wasn’t on it. She refolded it, handed it back to Delahaye and wiped her hand on her coat.
‘It’s a horrible thing,’ she said. Delahaye knew she’d have to carry for the rest of her life the secret knowledge that some of the boys she knew had been a hunter’s target . . . but not John. ‘Why show it to me?’
‘You needed to see that John’s’ name wasn’t on it,’ said Delahaye. ‘You’d want to know and if I’d said he wasn’t on it you’d never have believed me.’
‘This is true,’ she said.
‘The more important the victim, the more expensive the sweets Nathaniel gave them,’ said Delahaye.
‘The sugar mouse for Bryan,’ said Ava.
‘Yes,’ said Delahaye. ‘Nathaniel got his friend Karl to steal certain sweets from Hardy’s Gifts then Nathaniel gave them to certain children. They had to keep his generosity secret, which they did.’
He knew she didn’t like Karl so he said, ‘I believe Karl when he said he didn’t know, Ava. He told me he stole them as a favour to Nathaniel. They were friends. I don’t think he’ll ever get over it.’
She nodded, scuffed her boot in the slush then said mischievously, ‘I saw Dr Tremblay on telly last night,’ and Delahaye grinned. Dr Tremblay wanted to interview Ava but Delahaye had made excuses because the joke was, after one session with Ava, Tremblay would probably be the one needing therapy.
‘There are scrapbooks of Nathaniel’s drawings I’d like you to look at, and a couple of copies of his autopsy X-rays,’ he said. It didn’t cross his mind not to trust her or that speaking to a child about such things was abnormal.
‘X-rays,’ she said, honoured.
‘We are our bones,’ Delahaye murmured.
‘We are,’ said Ava. She nodded towards the woman waiting in the car. ‘Lady friend?’
‘Fingers crossed,’ Delahaye said. ‘She’s Professor Angela Simmons, the forensic pathologist who took care of our boys.’ And Nathaniel.
Ava brightened, and waved at the woman who waved back.
‘Little Adam’s asking to see you,’ said Delahaye. ‘Have you seen John recently?’
‘He visited yesterday,’ said Ava. ‘His hand was bandaged. He’s given everyone the excuse of tripping over on the ice and falling on it. His granddad had studied the War Room every time we’d left it, and he’d known we’d been conducting our own investigation into the murders.’
But only Ava and Delahaye knew the exact role Ava played in Nathaniel’s death. Delahaye had explained Nathaniel’s eye and head injuries as those sustained by his defending himself with the only weapon he had.
Paul Ballow and Luke Bax would never speak of that night. It was because they were loyal to Ava and it was because the death of a child-killer pardoned the visceral appeal of eye-for-an-eye justice. There was also the possibility that nobody would have believed them if they’d said anything.
Her mother and sisters would never know, and Delahaye would never tell them even though he really ought to. Ava might have been killed, after all, but she hadn’t been. Delahaye was sure that night would catch up with her, and that she would feel it all to relive it in bad dreams and waking nightmares, but not yet. Past trauma was like a predator in that it waited for when you were at your most vulnerable or your most happy then it pounced.
From under her coat, Ava presented Delahaye with all of her Red Books. He accepted them with surprise, obviously pleased that she’d remembered him saying he’d like to see them. ‘Are you sure, Ava?’
‘I don’t need them anymore,’ she said, tapping her temple. ‘I have it all in here.’ She had a new interest to test her anyway.
Delahaye extended his hand and she shook it. ‘Thank you always, Ava.’
* * *
In the wonderful privacy of her own room, Ava pulled out the varied contents of the manila file. She studied the X-ray copies of Nathaniel’s head and neck.
The human skull, the most identifiable of any species, and heavily laden with symbolism in every culture, is a symmetrical 3-D jigsaw, composed of twenty-two bones – fourteen facial and eight cranial – and thirty-two teeth. Much can be made of cephalic indexes and cranial capacities, but the skull’s main functions were to house and protect the oversized, incredible human brain and scaffold the muscles that control the expressive human face. Professor Simmons had highlighted in red pen the odd little notch in Nathaniel’s magnum foramen that had developed due to his holding his head up while on all fours since childhood but this subtle anomaly paled into insignificance to the impact trauma caused from falling from a great height, and the older injuries caused by his accident the year before. The right side of his face was smashed, but the left side was intact, and Ava experienced a wave of sorrow as she traced with her fingertip the spectral shadow behind his beautiful mask.
She tucked the X-ray back into the folder and retrieved the scrapbooks. In them were drawings, childlike yet obviously already proficient with proportion and perspective, and all signed by Nathaniel at various ages from five to ten years old. The subject of each picture was the same: a small happy boy surrounded by a pack of happier dogs. Like Ava, Nathaniel had preferred to render more detail on the animals rather than the human figures and, when she looked closely, the dogs had human eyes and the boy had dog’s eyes – he hadn’t replicated his heterochromia iridum in any sketch.
Nathaniel had once been happy. His true happiness had been running wild with his grandfather’s dogs, and Zasha, as surrogate mother. He’d loved his grandfather dearly despite the old man’s neglect but the boy hadn’t felt neglected in the embrace of the pack; he’d been safe, secure; free. When Nathaniel was stolen twice, it had frightened him, he had become mistrustful when he’d been forced to learn that two-legs were the only good and four-legs were bad. The accident might have made him mad but not exclusively – some seed of awful had grown quickly thick after his near-death experience. His grievance about being thrust from happy and into unhappy, his envy for the boys he saw around him, who were loved and knew their place in that love, had spawned pulsing rages. A lost temper was its own freedom, an exaltation that rivalled that on the run in the hills. Killing was the reward for withholding for so long before unleashing. Like all hunters, his desire to hurt was nothing personal – it was just easier to kill the small ones with the soft throats and softer underbellies, be they feather, fur or human flesh. Killing reset a balance long since neglected. The dogs he’d loved whether or not they were his own: the lost and missing were given the gift of a boy to love them into the afterlife. He’d come to this ritual when he’d found the fox at the mouth of the den in which he’d laid Mickey.
The more recent drawings were the designs for the wolf suits, ugly in their macabre magnificence – further proof he’d deliberately fed the beast within and starved the saint without. He’d chosen evil and learned to enjoy it.
As ill as Nathaniel was, he’d become a man, and the reason why bad men do bad things is because they want to – and sod the consequences. No excuses or reasons would convince her otherwise because such soft comprehension led to sentiment, which had no place, for it allowed evil to thrive unchecked, and mocked the bereaved. For Ava, it would have to be Mercy, for Mercy unlocked ignorance and ushered empathy through its heavy doors just once.
Ava suspected the Wolf kept Trigger alive because there had been something about the Scottish boy that had reminded Nathaniel of Mickey. Mickey had been his one regret, his mistake, and he hadn’t wanted to make the same terrible decision, the same horrible choice. Mickey’s murder had been the catalyst for the Wolf to take over Nathaniel because it meant his rage could be truly free to rampage, but he hadn’t wanted to kill his friend – and he hadn’t wanted to kill Trigger. The boy’s escape had caused the Wolf’s mask to slip until the urge became too strong to deny.
Because murder cleansed the anger for a while, he’d believed himself cured and happy – but he was neither and it had become his nature.
Monsters born and monsters made. Monsters would be her new hobby: the study of the rogue hunters of humans. She retrieved all her father’s Crime & Punishment magazine folders from the War Room, and she had obtained the very few books of the subject from the library. She had new purple notebooks to fill with her observations. She had already begun with her collection of ‘vampires’ from Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century: Peter Kurten had been the first she’d learned about but there were others: like Fritz Haarmann, Karl Denke, Carl Grossmann . . .
Ava tucked the scrapbook and folder under a box beneath her bed then rummaged in the carrier bag for the other items. She opened a Christmas card signed by the whole of the investigation team, and another from Steve Lines. She opened the note from Delahaye attached to the gift and it simply said, You never know. She unwrapped the present and found a slender silver box. Inside was a set of beautiful, new blue pencils sharpened at both ends.
Ava smiled.