Nighthawking, p.1
Nighthawking, page 1
Also by Russ Thomas
Firewatching
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2021 by Russ Thomas
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Hardcover ISBN 9780525542056
Ebook ISBN 9780525542070
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Richard Ljoenes
Cover images: (bench in park) © John Cooper / Trevillion Images; (man) © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images; (leaves) Vnlit / Shtterstock
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To the people of Sheffield, who welcome strangers with boundless generosity
Contents
Cover
Also by Russ Thomas
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Breaking Ground
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Earthly Remains
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Breaking Ground
THE FIRST NIGHTHAWKER
Record of Finds
Date: Mon., Nov. 6
Time: 04:45 (approx.)
Location: Botanical Gardens, Sheffield
Finds: shilling coin (indecipherable year), pull tab (circa 1980s), arm
He climbs the wall slowly, the equipment strapped to his back working with gravity to pull him down to the pavement below. When he reaches the top, he pauses for a moment, sweat on his brow mingling with rainwater before trickling down his neck. A car swings around the corner, its headlights threatening to pick him out. He flicks left leg after right, launches himself into a free fall, and drops like a stone into the silent garden below.
He crouches in the flower bed and waits for his heartbeat to slow. There are no cameras here. No lights other than from the street beyond the wall, and the odd yellow square of a window in the row of terraced houses beyond the tree line. Sheffield is far from being “The City That Never Sleeps,” but it is still a city. He consoles himself with the thought that if he gets caught, the penalties won’t be all that harsh. Not from the police anyway.
He moves through the dark of the Botanical Gardens, staying clear of the more open spaces, hugging the walls and darting from tree to tree. The rain begins to ease, which is a bonus. As long as the clouds don’t dissipate; the last thing he needs is an almost full moon to pick him out. There’s still a faint whiff of smoke in the air from the bonfire parties and firework displays that took place earlier in the evening, in spite of the weather.
When he reaches the smaller, walled rose garden he hesitates, his eyes flicking toward the houses now clearly visible beyond the park boundary. This area is more overlooked than the rest of the Gardens but it’s where he needs to be. He has a job to do. He reaches up and takes hold of the strap cutting across his shoulder. The metal detector is light enough but it’s still a relief to lift it from his back. He slips on the headphones and hears the sharp whine of the machine as he switches it on. Time to go to work.
The detector arcs across the ground in long sweeps, its black plastic coil turning over fallen leaves and parting the stems of plants. The wind whips at his jacket and makes him shiver as it cools the sweat on his back. He listens carefully to the background hum of the detector’s negative response, his eyes focused on the digital control box. The glow from the display is small but it could be seen. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been caught, thrown off some irate farmer’s property or given a telling-off by a poorly paid security guard. Some people threaten to call the police or let the dogs loose, and once, an old man came out of his house and fired a shotgun over his head. But these are the hazards of the trade. He’s a Nighthawker, after all. A trespasser. A thief. He chuckles to himself.
He works for more than an hour, quartering the area, stopping to dig occasionally at the wet earth when he gets a reading, uncovering small items that for the most part will turn out to be worthless and shoving them into his backpack to examine later.
The clock ticks on. Four o’clock. Four-thirty. It won’t be long before lights begin to flick on in bedroom windows and early morning workers glance out to check the weather for the day ahead. He digs carefully, trying not to leave too much evidence in case he has to come back. Again. For this isn’t the first time he’s been here and each time he worries about the traces he leaves behind. Footprints in the flower beds, broken branches, flattened stems.
The wind is bitingly cold now the rain has stopped and he starts to lose the feeling in his nose and toes. His back is aching. He checks his watch again. Almost five. Perhaps one last sweep toward the wall and then call it a night. It’s disappointing, but it’s better than being caught.
He’s halfway to the wall when the detector screeches and he stumbles to a halt, desperate not to lose the reading. He backtracks, checks the display for confirmation—32. A midtone. Too high for aluminum or iron, too low for silver. The sweet spot for gold. But also the sweet spot for bottle caps, pull tabs, other low-conducting metals. He sweeps the ground a couple more times, triangulating the exact location, then he puts down the detector and begins to dig.
The soft, wet earth of the flower bed parts easily and he’s down inches in mere seconds; the soil here is freshly dug. And then he hits something. Is this it? He changes the angle and digs down again, finds the same stiff resistance. It’s something, but is it what he’s looking for? He can’t tell anything with the trowel and despite the city light pollution, he still can’t see much. He uses his hands now, his fingers sinking into the mud and feeling their way along and around the squishy protuberances. There are several of them. Thin tree roots, perhaps? Gnarled and sticky with some kind of sap. He grabs hold and pulls.
The hand emerges from the mud with the quiet pop of something snapping.
He lets go and falls backward, stifling a small cry, his own hands sinking into the muddy earth behind him, grateful to be washed clean of the contamination of rotting human flesh. He pants into the darkness, feeling the adrenaline flooding his weary limbs. He glances left, and right, suddenly sure there must be someone else here, someone watching him in the night.
He looks back at the hand lying flat on the ground before him, an arm bone trailing back to the hole he pulled it from. The whole thing is little more than a skeleton but there are remnants of tatty skin still visible that hang loosely around the bones like a torn glove. Around the middle finger of the hand is a thin gold ring. That must be what the detector registered. It looks as though the body it belongs to has begun to crawl its way from slumber. Because there is a body, there has to be. There was that slight resistance as he pulled. That small sound, more of a vibration really, that traveled along the bones and up through his arm. He shivers.
The smell hits him now. A curiously sweet scent mixed with the fetid earthiness of the soil. Rotting meat. The bile rises in his throat even as he realizes he can’t allow himself to be sick. He can’t leave behind any DNA. Assuming he hasn’t already.
He needs to go, but he still hasn’t got what he came for and now there’s zero chance he can come back. A light flicks on in the nearest house beyond the wall. He can make out the garden in its entirety now—the bushes, the wall, the entranceway he slipped through a couple of hours ago. He can hear traffic beginning to build outside. Passing cars, every few seconds or so, making it so much harder to escape undetected. He hesitates, making new plans, discarding them, trying to work out how this development changes things. But then another light comes on somewhere. And another.
With a small cry of frustration, the nighthawker grabs the metal detector and runs.
One
The man with the scar on his cheek looks down at the cold steel of the railway tracks and the morning sun glints back up at him. He wonders what it would be like to meet your end in this place. The wind picks up for a moment and he pulls his thick coat around him against the chill. The sharp breeze cuts into the scar on his cheek and makes it ache.
A dozen or so separate railway lines branch here, in a complex spider’s web of iron that stretches out to meet the platforms at Sheffield station. Another man, in a bright orange safety vest with reflective flashings, stands a few paces ahead, holding a black-and-white communications paddle. He’s there for protection, in case there’s a mix-up and a train gets shunted through on the wrong line. A radio crackles on his belt.
There’s not a great deal to see, of course. The body found here thirteen years ago is long gone, the parents of the teenage boy have put him to rest, and the blood and any other evidence have been washed away by countless rainstorms. And yet, the man trie
It had been late evening, snowing heavily, and East Midlands Trains were already running a reduced service. There were no witnesses passing on the final trains in from Manchester or Nottingham. The original investigation posited a rival gang, some turf beef that ended in a knife to the guts. Tragic and unnecessary but sadly not unusual. The death of young boys is an embarrassing stain on the reputation of this city, which once had a different reason for the fame of its knives. His parents and friends said he wasn’t in a gang but then they always say that, don’t they?
The boy’s corpse had been found the next morning, half-buried in a snowdrift and an unnaturally deep shade of blue, the body so unrecognizable the driver who reported it assumed it was an animal hit by a passing train. The woman sent out to check had needed weeks of counseling.
After a few months, the investigation stalled. The case was filed away with all the other unsolved cases. Which is what has brought the man with the scar here.
“Finished?” The railway worker has returned from the tracks ahead. “Only, the eight-fifteen from Plymouth’ll be through soon and if they have to divert, it’ll throw a right spanner in the works.”
They begin the short walk back to the platform.
“Can’t imagine what you thought you’d find after all these years. Reckon this was a bit of a waste of your time.” The railway worker clearly considers it a waste of his.
But the man with the scar has found something. A building that overlooks the crime scene. He knows no one in those offices was interviewed in the original investigation. Maybe someone in the building was working late that night. Maybe they saw something they didn’t fully understand at the time. Maybe they’ll remember it, thirteen years later. Maybe.
He thanks the railway worker and takes his leave of the station, following the curve of the Cutting Edge sculpture in Sheaf Square as it glistens in the morning sunlight. He walks up the hill past the university buildings and crosses Arundel Gate, cutting through the Millennium Gallery and the Winter Garden and onto Surrey Street.
Outside the coffee shop, a barista stares in disgust at a young homeless guy tucked up close to the wall against the chill. The man with the scar drops a couple of quid into the lad’s Styrofoam cup.
“You shouldn’t encourage them,” the barista scolds, and disappears back inside.
At the counter, the man orders his drink while the barista pointedly continues his conversation with a colleague, extolling the merits of his one-man war on destitution.
“I’ve a good mind to call the police,” the barista says, and holds a Sharpie poised against a cup. “What name is it?” he asks distractedly.
“Tyler,” says the man with the scar. “Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler.”
The barista manages a sick smile and hurries away to steam some milk.
* * *
• • •
Dave Carver arrives at the Botanical Gardens early that morning, just as he always does. His official shift starts at ten but he likes to get here earlier. Sometimes he’s even here before the council workers who open the gates, and he has to wait patiently until they arrive.
He likes to grab a takeaway coffee—black, filter—from one of the High Street chains that have sprung up like mushrooms along Ecclesall Road. He remembers a time when there were far fewer coffee shops in Sheffield, when people made do with what they had at home. Now you can’t move for cardboard cups and the smell of roasted coffee beans. He’s filled with disdain for these capitalist multinationals, enslaving the downtrodden poor of South America so some middle-class student can part with £3.50 of Daddy’s money for a syrupy concoction that costs the purveyor no more than eight pence a cup. It’s obscene and he despises himself each time he goes into one of these places. But he goes anyway, every week. Because she loved them so much.
Once through the entrance to the Gardens, he wanders up the steep path that leads to the greenhouse with the signing-in book. Then he tracks right, never left—he stays clear of that side of the Gardens if he can—and turns right again into the small walled area they call the Marnock Garden.
He finds it peaceful here, a small enclave within the busy, breathtaking city, like the eye at the center of a storm. Here he will sit, until the start of his shift, on a wooden bench with a small brass plaque. Sometimes he gets so lost in memory he ends up late for work. So often in fact that he has a reputation for tardiness and poor timekeeping among the other volunteers. It has become a running joke. Speedy Dave. So early, he makes himself late.
This morning is different, though. As he enters the garden he glances once at the giant stainless-steel ant sculpture made from scrap metal and idly wonders, as he often does, if any of the parts were made with steel he had a hand in tempering. But then, as his eyes swing back round to the rose garden along the left-hand side, he sees something that causes him to stop short.
At first—and later he’ll laugh at the absurdity of this notion—he sees it as a living organism. Some new plant he hasn’t seen before, pushing its way out between the succulents. Five stubby branches and a long, thick trunk. And then, of course, he realizes what it really is. A human arm. Five fingers loosely clenched, as though it has begun crawling its way toward the path.
The blood drains from Dave’s face and his knees lock. He stands perfectly still, staring at the hand. It seems to beckon him in some way, even as it crawls its way ever closer. Come over here. Join me. Then, behind him, a woman screams, and as though the noise has given them permission, his legs give way beneath him and Dave falls to his knees on the gravel path.
* * *
• • •
Detective Constable Mina Rabbani braces the desk with the back of her neck and head, and lifts, shoving a folded-up copy of yesterday’s Sheffield Star as far under the front left leg as she can manage before the weight becomes too much for her and she has to let go. She hears the monitor above her rock back and forth and then settle, and breathes a sigh of relief. That would really go down well with IT if she managed to smash her PC so early into her new role.
PC. Personal computer. Or Police Constable. Except it’s DC now. Detective Constable. She wonders whether she’ll ever get used to that. She knew there was nothing particularly glamorous about the role but she’d hoped she might get to see a bit more action than fixing a wobbly desk. Still, it means something. She finds herself smiling. It means a lot.
She straightens up and glances around the room. Still no sign of Tyler. Well, there was no reason to suppose today would be any different from yesterday but it’s becoming more and more difficult to cover for him. If Jordan finds out, she’s going to lose the “Detective” bit before she’s even got used to it.
She decides to keep her head down in the hope no one will notice her. Or the fact that Tyler’s missing. She goes back to the case she’s been reviewing but within a few minutes her mind is wandering again. For some reason she finds herself wondering if her brother, Ghulam—he’s a doctor, you know!—ever has to stop his desk wobbling with yesterday’s newspaper. She leans forward and puts her head in her hands, digging the heels of her palms into her eye sockets. It isn’t that she’s ungrateful. Really, it’s not. She’s got a lot to be thankful to Tyler for, not least for saving her life. It’s just that none of this is what she expected. None of this is what she wanted!
She knows police work isn’t like it is on the TV or at the movies. Cases like the one she was involved in last year don’t just crop up every day, she gets that. She’s grateful for it, really. Otherwise her mother wouldn’t even let her out of the house. Ay, Mina! Jaan, why can’t you get a different job? She knows the job involves a lot of paperwork and maybe it isn’t as hands-on as it is for the Murder Room team. It isn’t as though Doggett had wanted her anywhere near his squad after what happened anyway, but that was fine. She was happy to give up her original dream for a chance to work with Tyler. It’s still CID and, to be fair, she would have taken anything as long as she got that word “Detective” in front of her name. It isn’t even that she doesn’t believe Tyler when he tells her how important it is to review cases. It’s there in the name, after all. Cold Case Review Unit. She gets that. She’s done every crappy job Tyler’s asked of her, and more. It’s beyond boring, but has she complained? No. Not even once.
