Читать книгу Creep - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 6

Dave Leith sat alone in a haunted house. The house didn’t belong to him, but to the people upstairs. He had been on the North Shore since April and in this place since August, with his wife Alison and young daughter Izzy — they were away this week visiting Alison’s family in Parksville. He knew he was lucky to have landed the main floor of this sizeable home, even if the rent was hemorrhaging his bank account. He should be grateful.

Instead he was sulking. He sat on a dining room chair by the living room window, looking out at the rain splashing down on somebody else’s rising equity.

The ghost in the walls groaned. He ignored it. This was a nearly new monster house in a nearly new neighbourhood, and as far as he knew, it had no gruesome history. He hadn’t believed the warnings of the landlord’s young daughter the day he and Alison moved in. The kid had watched as they carted things from the U-Haul down to the side entrance, and on one of his passes she had told him, “There are ghosts down there, you know.”

He had thought it was cute. He’d smiled at the little girl like the big, brave man he was. But he had since heard the proof, usually late at night: the sighs and thuds of what could only be the residual angst of those who had passed on.

Leith was itching to leave this house. Not because of the ghosts, which he could take or leave, but because he wanted a place of his own, a place with property pins, a lawn, a concrete pad for his barbecue. All his life he had been a freehold landowner. Then he’d moved to North Vancouver and found himself out of his depth. Getting a house here was out of the question. A condo, maybe. Renting was just plain brutal. This was his third move this year, always on the lookout for a better deal.

His work cell rang, and he hoped it was the office wanting him to come in and do something. Anything. Sitting alone and listening to weird noises wasn’t fun.

“Leith,” he said to his phone.

The caller was Corporal Michelin Montgomery — known to staff as Monty. He was a silver-haired newcomer to the North Vancouver detachment, even newer than Leith. Unlike Leith, he had already made a ton of friends.

“Dave, sorry to spring this on you,” Monty said. “Looks like we’ve got trouble in Lynn Valley. Up to you, really, but we’re going to be all over this tomorrow, and I thought you might want to have a first-hand look.”

Leith jotted down the address, agreed to be on scene in twenty minutes, and disconnected.

He was putting away his notebook when something moved along the floor toward him. He jumped to his feet, toppling his chair, and stared into the shadows of the haunted house.

He looked down. Nothing but a large house spider scuttling along the floorboards. The spider was as startled as Leith was and had frozen in its tracks, waiting for this hell to pass.

Leith killed the spider with the slap of a rolled-up Westworld magazine, knowing that for a big, brave man, he had leaped fairly high. Not a good start to a new homicide. He stuck the mess in the kitchen waste bin, then fetched his fleece-lined RCMP jacket off its hook and headed out the door.

* * *

The rain poured on Lynn Valley. On a little spur of road that jutted up into the trees, out of line with the well laid-out suburbs, stood the subject house — behind the high fence that hid it. The spur of road was named Greer. Lynn Valley Road, intersecting Greer, was jammed with police vehicles. A handful of concerned citizens were out in their raincoats, talking to RCMP members about what the heck was going on here.

Leith popped open his umbrella and made his way through an open gate and into a yard. The yard was big by North Vancouver standards, he saw. There were several ugly trees growing here, leafless and hairy, throwing spooky shadows. The branches seemed polka-dotted with withered apples hardly bigger than cherries. An old orchard, maybe, though North Van was anything but fruit-growing country.

Light dazzled his eyes. A heaved cement path led to a front porch, but the action seemed to be at the side of the house. He left the path and crossed a stretch of soggy turf to join Corporal Montgomery and others in their rain capes. JD Temple was present, he was glad to see. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head and framed her face so that her eyes seemed larger than usual.

LED torches cranked high and spiked into the turf directed splashy light onto the side of the house and all around, the beams fanning out to make rain and faces sparkle. The group was looking toward the house, not up at its boarded windows, but down at its foundations. Leith followed the general line of sight and saw that where concrete met dirt was a man-sized hole. It looked to him like a poorly installed access hatch had rotted out some years ago, allowing in the elements.

“Shabby,” he said. He’d been in the construction trade for a few years before joining the force, and he knew everything there was to know about foundations.

“Looks like the hole was covered with that bit of plywood, but it’s fallen down,” JD said. She pointed out the piece of wood half-buried in mud and a scattering of largish rocks that had maybe propped it up.

“Or dogs smelled something fishy and got at it,” Leith said. Dogs weren’t supposed to run off leash in the city, but sometimes they got away.

He could see water pooling in the dirt around the hole, building up and spilling into the crawl space. From the blackness within, a vague light shifted and flickered.

“The cause of all this fuss is in a duffel bag,” Monty said. “Ident’s in there, just checking if it’s human. In which case we got a problem, ’cause Dad sure isn’t going to fit through that hole.”

Dad, Leith interpreted — as he’d had to time and again since his arrival in North Vancouver — was Jack Dadd, the overweight coroner. Gauging the hole in the foundations now, he could see the problem. The wind shifted, and he could smell death.

“Freaky place,” JD said. She was looking up into the stark branches of the trees, the unappetizing fruit that hung there. “What can you grow in this part of the world? Crab apples?”

Monty looked around, too, but with something like admiration. “One week to Halloween, what a setting for a zombie bash. Great whadyacallit, ambience. Which reminds me —”

A grunt from the base of the house interrupted whatever Monty was reminded of, and Leith watched a white-suited Ident tech squirm from the hole — like a weird birthing — and into the hard beam of the floodlight. The tech made it to his feet and approached the detectives, removing his mask and spitting into the grasses.

“Yeah, well,” he said to Monty, “it’s a body, all right. Been there a while. Lying in a puddle. We got some pictures, but didn’t want to mess around too much. What d’you want us to do? Leave it as is, or haul it out?”

“How fragile is it?” asked JD. “Are we going to rearrange the anatomy if we move it?”

“I think we’ll get it out pretty clean.” The tech looked back at the foundations with a tradesman’s squint. “Shift it onto a tarp, pull it out slow. We got a clear path, no obstacles. I don’t see a problem.”

“It’s either that or a Jack-hammer,” Monty said.

Both he and the tech chuckled. JD appeared to get the joke, but didn’t seem to find it funny. A moment later, Leith got it, too. Jack Dadd. He obliged with a grin, briefly. Across the lawn the constables were toiling like concert roadies, setting up the polypropylene tent that would protect exhibits and equipment. Leith recognized one of them, a man who should be here next to him, in plainclothes, being a detective.

“So what do we know about who owns this place?” he asked Monty.

“JD’s given me a little history on that,” Monty said. “Eccentric dude named Harmon is on title, now living in Florida. We’re trying to contact him. He built it in the sixties, but not to code, and a few years ago it was declared unlivable and closed up. But he refuses to sell or upgrade. As a result, he’s blessed Lynn Valley with its first derelict mansion.”

“Wow.” Leith looked up at the house with interest. It was hardly a mansion, just a regular two-storey home, squat and graceless with a peculiar hip-roof construction and an odd wannabe-tower structure stuck at one corner. The roof was clad in dark metal, the siding in black-brown clapboards clustered with moss. In a neighbourhood of beautiful, bright homes, this one tucked back in the trees had the quality of a mould blemish.

Monty turned to the Ident tech. “Do we preserve the body in situ or do we preserve the hole? I guess we could rip up floorboards, approach it that way, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

Leith asked the tech how the ground in there was for prints.

“Lousy,” the tech replied. “All grit. We stayed off the drag path as best as possible and got a bunch of shots of scuff marks that aren’t going to tell us anything. Ripping up the floorboards will just drop a bunch of crap down, contaminate it all to hell unless we lay down some serious plastic. Again, not worth it. If there’s anything in there, it’s lost in the sand. We’re going to have to sift it all out one way or another.”

“Let’s haul it out. What d’you think, get some good video footage as we go?” Leith asked Monty.

Monty agreed. “Let’s do that.” And to the tech, “Bag got a zip, or what?”

“Drawstring at the top. Knotted, like, a million times. We had to cut a flap in the fabric to see in. Could see the top of somebody’s head and looked like part of a hand. I mean, if we cut the bag wide open, it’ll be that much harder to get it out clean. Best just to bring it out in one piece, bag and all, extra careful.”

“Go for it,” Monty said.

The full team filtered in over the next hour. The rain tapered to a light drizzle. Beyond the fence, Leith knew, the neighbourhood was wide awake now. The more inquisitive neighbours would be hanging about, coats and gumboots over their pajamas, asking questions and trying to get a glimpse through the gates. Here in the yard, the night sky was blotted out by the glare of the LEDs. Jack Dadd arrived. The grisly sack was tugged into view. The army-green canvas was soaked at the bottom, dry on top. Inch by inch, it was transported on its tarpaulin-cum-sled to the shelter. Dadd gave the okay to open the bag.

Some of those present wagered on a Halloween prank even to the last moment, until the heavy canvas was peeled back and what lay within killed all conversation. The corpse was stiffened into a twisted huddle — male or female, it was impossible to say. The camera flashed as the body, released from its bondage, slouched into a gentler curl against the tarp.

Even uncurled, the head remained tucked into its chest, as if shying from their prying eyes. The internal organs would be soup, seeped into the duffel bag’s fabric and the sand below, the rest gutted by bugs. No eyes visible, a mouldering nose, a fine gold chain around its neck.

“Female,” Monty guessed.

“Male,” JD said.

Leith was thinking male, too. The corpse had to have been a young man. Fair-sized in life, probably, but shrunken in death. The head was shaved almost to the scalp but for a bisecting flop of dark hair, flattened and brittle, the modernized Mohawk style. He wore faded black hipster jeans that were shredded in places, a mouldy-looking hoodie, also black, and one dark-blue running shoe. The body had brought with it that foul smell, dissipated by the open air, but unmistakeable. It was that odour that had caused the citizen’s complaint that had brought out the uniforms. Those first responders had made some calls, cut the padlock, entered the lot. Their flashlights had picked out the hump of bag in the crawl space, and they had decided it was sinister enough to call in GIS. And here they all were.

“She was young,” Monty said. “Time of death, Doc?”

Coroner Dadd was the only one present not huddling and grimacing at the rain, his grimace reserved for the fate of the victim before him. “It’s John, actually, not Jane. I’d guess two months, three at most.”

“Two to three months ago? How come we’re only getting complaints now?” JD said.

“The big rains only started this month,” Leith pointed out. “If the crawl space flooded recently, and the body was lying in water for the first time, it could have released the odours in a bigger way. A wet dead mouse smells a lot worse than a dry dead mouse, believe me. Also, we don’t know when that hatch came down. If it was recently, that could be another reason.”

JD looked at the house and the high fence that surrounded it. “October, September, August. Whoever dumped this guy knew the area, knew this place was sitting empty.”

Leith had to agree. It wasn’t a busy neighbourhood. Whoever had done this had lived close by long enough to observe that the house was up for grabs. Possible, too, that whoever had done it was an out-of-towner driving in random circles. That person might have driven by and noticed the Do Not Enter signs posted around and thought to himself — or herself — Aha, nice.

But what about the locks on the gate?

Looking around, he suspected the fence marched in an unbroken rectangle all around. Nothing but a shrubby lane ran along the side of the house and, maybe, continued around back. Must check for a weak link first thing. Or a weak board, in this case.

The concert roadie constable who should have been a detective — Cal Dion — approached from the area of the driveway. He looked both soaked and overheated, his cap removed and jacket unzipped. He skirted the corpse on its tarp, not even glancing down, as if to show how little he cared. He nodded briefly at JD and Leith and told Monty, “We’re done here. Constable Randall wants to know if it’s all right to go get a full statement from Mr. Lavender now.”

“Mr. Who?” Monty said.

Dion pointed south. “Mr. Lavender. Lives across the road there. He reported the smell.”

JD made a noise that Leith heard as a snort of laughter, while Dion clarified his request to Monty. “Jackie Randall and I were first on scene. We talked to Lavender and said we might be back. Randall wants to finish up with him. She also wants to start canvassing the neighbourhood. I told her we need permission.” He looked at JD as if daring her to laugh again. “So I’m here.”

Monty shrugged at Leith. “Want to weigh in?”

“Somebody else can deal with Lavender,” Leith said. “And we’re certainly not canvassing anybody this time of night. The body’s been down here a while. Another few hours won’t matter. Thanks, Cal.”

Leith had first met Dion on a case in the Hazeltons earlier this year, but it was a complicated working rela­tionship, the kind he felt was best left at a comfortable distance. He got the distinct sense that Dion felt the same, only more so.

Though Dion nodded a yessir without argument and walked away, the story didn’t end there. A minute later, a shorter, stouter figure came squishing across the lawn to challenge Monty on the same issue, but with a lot more pepper. This was a constable Leith didn’t recognize. Young, probably new to the job, but already taking charge. “Constable Jackie Randall, sir,” she informed Monty. “Half the neighbourhood’s out on the sidewalk, so it seems a good time to ask questions.”

“Last I looked, the neighbours cleared out back home. Nothing to see,” JD said.

“All the more urgent to get knocking on doors,” Randall shot back at her. “Before lights out. And I do want to hand in a full report, which means completing my statement from the man who called in the complaint.”

“Anybody can talk to the man who called in the complaint,” JD said.

“I’m not anybody.” Randall was a head shorter than JD, but a few decibels louder. “I was first on scene.”

Leith opened his mouth to deliver his final no, but Monty beat him to it with a compromise. “If Mr. Lavender is willing, go talk to him, but leave the canvassing for now. As Dave here has just advised your partner, another few hours isn’t going to change things. The first forty-eight is long gone.”

Randall opened her mouth, but Monty made a motion like a magician sending his assistant up in smoke. She gave a brisk shake of the head that said, Wow, I’m working amongst idiots, and tramped away.

“What a little fireball.” Monty grinned. “That girl’s going places.”

There came exclamations from the area of the tent, and JD jogged over to hear the news. Leith and Monty followed. The dead male had been shifted over to expose his bad side, and his body on display was now speaking out — or screaming, more like. The left arm had been amputated at the elbow, and the face was mostly gone. Not taken by rot, but like flesh had been ripped from bone. The mouth gaped as though whatever agonies the man had suffered still coursed through him, showing a set of teeth chipped and knocked from the gums.

“Here’s the arm,” somebody said.

The severed limb was lodged between the dead man’s knees.

Leith wondered about the significance of the crude packaging. A deliberate insult, or a matter of disorganization? It didn’t strike him as either symbolism or panic, but it did point to a certain spontaneity.

He turned away from the body and its attendants, taking a break from the view. He had been through some scary cases in Prince Rupert, and in other postings during his years in the service. Transferring down to the metropolis sure hadn’t gotten him into a better class of crime. But whether in Prince Rupert or North Vancouver or Happy Valley, horror happens.

Some days ago he had told Alison — maybe trying to convince himself more than her — that down here in the big city, there was at least a better support system. The more mules, the lighter the load, right? He had told her as well that his North Van workmates seemed like an excep­tional bunch. Broad-minded, empathetic, and smart.

Beside him, Monty said, “Hoo-boy, that’s some bad mincemeat job. Almost enough to turn you vegan, eh, Dave?” and laughed.