Naming the Bones

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MURRAY WATSON SLIT the seal on the cardboard box in front of him and started to sort through the remnants of a life. He lifted a handful of papers and carefully splayed them across the desk. Pages of foolscap, blue-tinted writing paper, leaves torn from school jotters, stationery printed with the address of a London hotel. Some of it was covered in close-packed handwriting, like a convict’s letters home. Others were bare save for a few words or phrases.

James Laing stepped out into an ordinary day.

Nothing could have prepared James for the. .

James Laing was an ordinary man who inhabited a. .

The creature stared down on James with its one ghastly fish eye. It winked.

Murray laughed, a sudden bark in the empty room. Christ, it had better get more interesting than this or he was in trouble. He reached into the pile and slid out a page at random. It was a picture, a naïve drawing done in green felt-tip of a woman with a triangular dress for a body. Her stick arms were long and snaking. They waved up into a sky strewn with sharp-angled stars; the left corner presided over by a pipe-smoking crescent moon, the right by a broadly smiling sun. No signature. It was crap, the kind of doodle that deserved to be crumpled into a ball and fired into the bin. But if it had been deliberately kept, it was a moment, a clue to a life.

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