House of Bones (16 page)

“Come on!” he urged Lucy. She hesitated, but then there was another devastating crash at the door, and she climbed out after him.

“I'm slipping!” she panicked.

“Just take hold of my hand – that's it. Now slide right down as far as you can.”

John heaved himself over the edge of the roof, clung on to the guttering for two or three seconds, and then dropped into the front garden. He landed right on top of a gaggle of gnomes, scattering them in all directions. Lucy followed him – dangling from the gutter until he caught hold of her legs and helped her to drop to the ground.

Uncle Robin was still standing in the hallway, looking dazed.

“Go!” he told them. He took down Lucy's keys from the hook by the mirror. “Go on, go!”

“What about you?”

There was a wrenching noise from the open window of Lucy's bedroom, and then the sound of heavy oak feet crossing the floor. The statue appeared, staring down at them with terrifying equanimity.

“I'll be all right,” said Uncle Robin. “It's you that it's looking for, not me.”

And sure enough, the statue disappeared from the window and they heard it coming back out on to the landing.

“
Go
!” urged Uncle Robin. “Call me in the morning as soon as you can. We're going to beat this Mr Vane of yours if it's the last thing we ever do!”

Lucy's ankle was still painful, but she was able to drive. They swerved away from Uncle Robin's house and headed south, across Mitcham Common. Their single headlight made the trees and the bushes look as if they were cut out of cardboard.

John turned around. “Uncle Robin was right. It hasn't hurt him at all. It's coming out of the garden gate now. It probably wants to see which way we're going.”

“Where do we go now?” asked Lucy. “I can't wake up any of my friends, not at this time of the morning.”

“It's all right. It's a warm night. We can park on the common and sleep in the car.”

She glanced at him. “You'd better not snore.”

He didn't snore. In fact he didn't even sleep. He sat in the front passenger seat while she slept in the back, his eyes sore with tiredness, but he simply couldn't drop off. Every time he saw a bush swaying, every time he saw a tree dipping its branches, he imagined that it was the statue, still coming after them, determined to beat them to death.

The moon sank. The sky lightened. A man cycled past and stared at them so intently that he almost fell off his bike.

John and Lucy ventured back to Uncle Robin's house at about half-past six but there was no sign of the statue anywhere, except for the damage it had caused. Uncle Robin had managed to screw the front door back into place. He was obviously shocked, but he was full of determination.

He sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea. “Hitler couldn't frighten me out of my house and no Druid statue is going to frighten me out of my house, either.”

Lucy stayed for a while to have a bath while John went off to Streatham. By nine o'clock the morning was bright and dusty and very hot. When John arrived at the office Mr Cleat was sitting at his desk with a stack of particulars in front of him and a
ballpen in his hand but he was neither reading nor writing. He was staring across the office at a wasp that was crawling up the wall.

“Morning, Mr Cleat. Another hot one.”

Mr Cleat nodded.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr Cleat?”

“What? Oh, no. No, thank you.”

“Is everything all right, Mr Cleat?”

Mr Cleat put down his pen. “Not really,” he said. “And I think you can understand why.”

“It wasn't your fault, Mr Cleat.”

“Wasn't it? All those people … there must have been hundreds of them. And poor Liam, too. I don't know what I'm going to say to his parents. I didn't sleep a wink last night.”

You weren't the only one
, thought John. But then he said, “It's no use worrying about it. Worrying isn't going to bring them all back. We have to stop Mr Vane from doing it again.”

“I don't know how you're going to manage that.”

“We just have to prove that he
knew
what his houses did to people, and that's why he sold them.
Then
we can go to the police. You'll give evidence against him, won't you?”

Mr Cleat gave John a twitchy little glance. “I don't know … I did something once that Mr Vane knows about. If I spoke up against him … well, I'd be in a lot of hot water, too.”

“You
did
something? What?”

“Well, I don't want to go into too much detail, but one of our clients was a very old lady. A week before she died she altered her will and left me quite a lot of money.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“The circumstances were a little irregular, that's all.”

“What? You mean, you
forged
it?”

Mr Cleat sucked in his cheeks. “That's rather a direct way of putting it. But, yes, I wrote her name for her on her behalf. She was only going to donate the money to the Donkey Sanctuary, and I suppose I thought that I was a worthier charity than a field full of broken-down donkeys.”

He paused. “The only trouble was, the day before she died, the old lady had a sudden moment of lucidity. She called the office to remind me that all of her money
had
to go to the donkeys. She thought she was talking to me, but I was out that day, and she spoke to Mr Vane. He didn't tell anybody what I had done, but he never misses an opportunity to remind me.”

“That's blackmail, isn't it?”

“Perhaps it is. But it would be very hard to prove. Mr Vane hasn't tried to extort any money out of me and he hasn't directly threatened me. But he does expect my absolute loyalty and my absolute discretion.”

He paused for a moment, and then he said,
“However, if there is anything I can do to assist you and Lucy to close down the special list for good and all … then you can count on me.”

“Thanks, Mr Cleat.”

“Let's not stand on formality, John. I've made a clean breast of things now. Call me David.”

Lucy came in just after half-past eleven. Mr Cleat and Courtney had both gone out on appointments so they were alone in the office together.

“I think we've come up with something,” said Lucy, holding up a large brown envelope. “Uncle Robin called up his builder friend, and his builder friend had this book on south London in Victorian times.”

She took it out of the envelope and opened it up at a torn paper marker. “We looked up Laverdale Square and Abingdon Gardens and Mountjoy Avenue. Well … they don't show any photographs of Laverdale Square – but look at this.”

She pointed to a sepia photograph of several tophatted men in black frock coats standing outside a large newly-built house. The road was unpaved, and a horse and carriage stood on one side.

“You don't know where it is? Read the caption.”

Mountjoy Avenue, SW – the directors of Messrs Voice Bros outside one of their quality suburban mansions in July, 1897
.

“That's number 66,” said John. “I didn't recognize it without all of those bushes.”

“Unfortunately the men were moving so you can't clearly see their faces. But when you look up Voice Bros in the index, you get this.” She opened the book at another paper marker, and read:

“‘In the 1890s, Messrs Voice Bros gained a considerable reputation for building large suburban houses of exceptional quality and value. They were extremely selective about the sites that they chose, and the construction materials which they employed, frequently bringing in stone from Wiltshire and Somerset to enhance their window frames and their interiors.

“‘They won several awards for their houses, including the Dobson Cup from the Institute of Chartered Architects, seen here being presented to Mr Charles Voice at the Royal Albert Hall.'“

Below the text there was another photograph of men in top hats and frock coats, but this time their faces were clearly visible. A portly man with large side-whiskers was presenting the cup. Accepting it, with an expression completely devoid of any humour, was a tall, thin man with slicked back hair.

“
It can't be
,” said John, peering at it more closely. “This was taken over a hundred years ago.”

“It could be his grandfather, I suppose. But if his grandfather was called Voice, then
he
would be called Voice, too, instead of Vane.”

John said, “Do you mind if I make a copy of this?”

“Of course not.”

He set the Xerox to “magnify × 10”. In a few seconds, out came a huge enlargement of Mr Charles Voice receiving the Dobson Cup, and there was no doubt about it at all. It was Mr Raven Vane. Not a relative. Not a double. He even had the same mole on the left side of his chin.

“It's him,” said John. “And he looks exactly the same as he does today.”

“Uncle Robin's friend said he remembers Voice Bros. They went on building quality houses until the 1960s, but they refused to use modern building techniques like prefabricated panels and chipboard flooring and in the end they priced themselves out of the market.”

Courtney came back into the office, carrying his lunch – two vegetable sarnosas and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. “Everything all right?” he asked them. “You look as if you've see a ghost.”

“Perhaps we have,” said John, and held up the Xerox. “Who do you think this is?”

“Mr Vane, of course. Why?”

“This picture was taken in 1898.”

“What?”

“Take a look at it. September, 1898.”

Courtney frowned at it and approached it closely. Lucy showed him the book. He studied it for a very
long time and then said, “There can't be any question, can there? It
is
him. It's incredible.”

John said, “Let's think about it. If it really
is
him, then he's lived for at least a century without getting any older. It's like those Druid spirits. They've lived for nearly three thousand years without getting any older.

“And if Mr Vane has been helping them – by building them sacrificial temples, by feeding them with human sacrifices—”

“Then this could be his reward,” said Courtney. “The Druids have promised him life everlasting, just like theirs.”

They all stared at each other, awed by the immensity of what they might have discovered, and yet equally aware that it might be nothing more than a ridiculous mistake. After all, it was much more likely that Mr Vane had simply been Mr Voice's double.

Yet when they looked at the picture again, they were convinced. He had the same expression, the very same look in his eyes. Two men might look facially identical, but no two men ever looked out at the world in quite the same way, and certainly nobody looked out at the world in quite the same way that Mr Vane did.

“What are you going to do now?” asked Courtney.

“Keep on digging. I was looking in the library for
background information on Mr Vane. Now I'm going to start looking under Voice, too. After John's appointment, that is.”

“We've got the keys,” said Courtney. “Maybe I should start looking at some more of Mr Vane's houses.”

“Not yet,” John told him. “It's too dangerous, just at the moment.”

“Well, I'd like to do
something
. I can't let Liam get killed and do nothing about it at all.”

“You can do something. You can lend me your mobile phone this afternoon. We're going to see if I can get Mr Vane to admit what he's been doing, and record it.”

Courtney undipped his phone from his belt. “Here – good luck. And don't trust that man a single inch. I can't come along with you, because I've got two viewing appointments. But if you really need me, just call me on my pager. I promise you, man, I'll drop everything and I'll be there.”

Lucy drove him to the end of Mountjoy Avenue, with Uncle Robin sitting in the back.

“Listen!” said Uncle Robin. The afternoon was swelteringly hot and the sky was the colour of tarnished bronze. But in the distance, they could hear the deep grumble of thunder. “Sounds like we're in for a storm.”

John climbed out of the car. “Be careful,” Lucy warned him. He gave her a thumbs-up, even though he was feeling far from confident.

Uncle Robin said, “Just remember – one shout for help and we'll come running.”

John dialled Lucy's number on Courtney's mobile phone. Lucy's phone warbled and she answered it.

“It's me. Can you hear me all right?”

“Fine. Loud and clear.”

“OK, then. Get the tape recorder ready.”

John walked down the road towards number 66. By the time he got there, his shirt was sticking to his back and his underpants felt like wet swimming trunks.

Mr Vane had already arrived. His black Rover was parked in the driveway, with its black tinted windows closed tight. As John approached, one of the windows slid down and Mr Vane's skull-like face appeared. “You're late,” he said. He must have had the air-conditioning in his car turned to “Arctic”, because a wave of cold came out of the window that made John shiver.

“Sorry. It was the bus.”

“You should make provision for the vagaries of public transport.”

“Yeah, I suppose I should. Yesss.” He couldn't take his eyes off Mr Vane. He was even more like “Charles Voice” in the flesh than John could have imagined. There was no question in his mind now that he was one and the same man.

Mr Vane looked at his watch. “We've got five or ten minutes to spare. Would you care to see inside?”

“All right. If you want.”

“It's what
you
want that's important,” said Mr Vane. He closed his window and then slid out of his car like a shadow sliding under a doorway. He laid his
hand on John's shoulder and guided him towards the front door. The two stone lions stood patiently on either side of the steps while time and the weather gradually blurred their features and covered them in moss.
Unlike some people I know
, thought John.