Grind Their Bones (16 page)

Closing down the computer, she stood and walked over to the imposing oak bookcase that stood next to a floor to ceiling window, stopping briefly to take in the view out over rolling hills and fields that stretched to the horizon. There were drawers in the unit, but upon trying to open them she found that they were both locked, and she stood on tiptoes to run her fingers across the top of the unit and then underneath the edge of the desk in a futile attempt to locate the keys. She paused again, breathing more deeply from her modest exertions and glanced up at the horrible painting that hung on the wall above his desk chair as she left the room.

The picture was a print of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, a bulging eyed giant figure with wild grey hair and a mouth stretched wide open as it went to take another bite out of the partially eaten white corpse clutched in its hands. It was an image from your worst nightmares, and its presence kept the girls out of this space. She had asked him to take it down on more than one occasion, but he had insisted that it stayed, citing the presence of artwork from such a master of the form as being a source of inspiration in his work. To her it was ugly and terrifying, the work of a man descending into madness.

The television was playing to itself as she moved back through into the sitting room and the news was on. Another report on the serial murder case that had been holding this part of the country in its grip for months was on. She’d had her fill of the new revelations that emerged almost daily, so she reached for the remote to switch over the channel.

‘There is speculation rife that the so called Grey Man has struck again in the case of missing teenager Elizabeth Perry. The police have made no official acknowledgment at this stage, but we’re getting unconfirmed reports that detectives visited this supermarket in central Coventry and took away items.’

The Grey Man. She registered the nickname and this time the painting immediately jumped back into her thoughts, joined by a sick light-headed feeling that set her off trembling.

She quickly walked back through to the study and went straight to it, lifting it away from the wall and seeing a small key taped to the rear of the canvas. Whatever was in those drawers she was about to see for herself now.

Chapter 52

In the cool of dawn I ran along a narrow dirt trail bordered by high thorny hedges filled with nervously flitting small birds, narrowing my eyes against the clouds of dust and grit that were being whipped up by the wind. I was pushing the pace hard, harder than I perhaps should have been doing, punishing myself and feeling the growing burn in my lungs at the sustained effort. My mp3 was playing a pre-selected track list that I’d named ‘Angry Music’, and harsh invective from Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ was blasting into my ears to keep me company. I was concentrating hard on my discomfort, riding the waves of the feeling, and doing my damnedest not to think about what it would be like when I arrived in the office later that day.

The trail turned a sweeping corner and suddenly the wind was directly in my face, choking me with debris and sandblasting my exposed skin simultaneously, forcing me to slow down and turn my head over to one side. I spat chalky dust into the hedge bottom, coughing fiercely to clear my lungs but refusing to stop. Today I was in the mood for a fight and it didn’t matter whether that was with Lee, the elements, or the Grey Man himself. In fact, if he knew what was good for him the Grey Man would take the day off.

When I came to a fork in the trail I took the turning away into the woods, abandoning the dirt track in favour of the less vicious attentions of occasional flurries of wind agitated leaves, knowing from experience that this route eventually rejoined the other one back down at the back of gardens on the housing estate. There are any number of different routes towards the same objective if you know the goal that you’re aiming for well enough, Wade.

Rage Against The Machine gave way to Nirvana’s ‘Tourette’s’ as the path began to slope mercifully back downwards, and at last I was able to start catching my breath properly again. I wondered idly what different routes were at my disposal in tracking down the Grey Man, ignoring the seemingly remote possibility that he might be caught in the act of snatching a victim, using the mental exercise as a distraction from the growing physical pain in my legs.

There was my suspects list, but I was already starting to lose faith in that after last night, and a new profile was being discreetly prepared by Alan Hardwick’s replacement. A new official list had been drawn up off the back of Elizabeth Perry’s active secret second life, too. She had been living another reality underneath everybody’s radar, and I had colleagues assigned to speaking with a diverse list of casual one time only lovers. My instructions were that the information was to be kept strictly to ourselves, as it could damage public sympathy for her if we decided to make an appeal, and that in turn would prevent some people from coming forward. 

I remembered that Lee had taken on the task of looking into the deceased Doctor’s odd assessment of who we should be looking for, but he’d been notably quiet on any progress that he’d made. Was it reluctance, or merely an acknowledgement of how busy I’d kept him on chasing up other potential leads; and if it was reluctance, what possible interpretations were there of that?

I dwelt on what a close analysis of the Doctor’s movements and computer history might give me, and made a mental note to follow them up for myself with things lying how they currently did between me and Lee. The seed of the idea had been more of a hunch than anything else, but I’d had hunches proven right in the past and there could be no loose ends on this. I blanched at the thought that I’d only prepared half of an outline profile myself so far. Lee wasn’t the only one who was being dragged in all different kinds of directions at once, or who was shirking his responsibilities. Thank you very much for that one, Emily. I thought, feeling horrible for blaming her at the same time.

I rounded the final long arc in the woodland track, seeing a small rabbit fleeing from me into the tangle of ivy and bracken with white flashes of its tail advertising its progress and alerting any of its friends to the danger. I knew that I needed my friends back on board if this was going to have anything like justice at the end of it too. That meant biting the bullet and explaining my actions to Lee sooner rather than later. There wasn’t time for us to let our personal relationship get in the way with more young lives at stake.

Chapter 53

After the clean up the Grey Man stayed in remote cottage for another forty eight hours, seized by a cycle of alternately sleeping and then waking back up to eat. His waking state bordered on frenzy. He was initially exhausted with the effort that had been required in killing, butchering and processing the girl’s body. But once he had regained some of his strength, he disposed of almost all of what was left over in the woods and then made arrangements to swiftly get his packages onto supermarket shelves.

For himself, he retained only certain select portions of her meat, together with Elizabeth’s head, which he had placed on the dressing table by his bed while he rested. He had no fear at all of being discovered, and he was no longer troubled by nightmares and flashbacks about his actions in the way that he had been as a younger man, and so it was that he slept the deep, dreamless, sleep of the truly tired.

When the last of her flesh had been cooked and eaten, and the tiled room housing his mincing machine and associated tools had been comprehensively hosed down and then freshly repainted, it was time to think about going back home again. He contemplated the logistics of retaining her head for longer, even in death and without her body it still retained a certain beauty, but eventually ruled out the idea with deep regret.

‘I only wish I could bring you back to life and do it all over again, Elizabeth. You were perfection.’

He lifted the head up by its long dark hair, wearing gloves now, and dropped it into a hessian sack that had been previously used to store potatoes in the outhouse, before placing that bag inside a larger plastic sack, twisting the top shut to prevent any spillage of fluids while it was in transit. He had special plans for where the bag and its contents were going to end up.

He manoeuvred the car out from where he had moved it under the shade of trees at the rear of the cottage and put the bagged up head in the boot, climbing into the driver’s seat and setting off back into town. While it might not have looked like it, the cottage was on private property and remained unvisited by anybody except himself, and selected guests like Elizabeth, for ten months of the year. The other two months he let family stay for short breaks, but he always had large amounts of time in between in which to put everything back as it should have been.

On a whim he took a different route back around the town, intending to approach Coventry from the North of the city since he had no particular desire to sit in traffic all the way back. However, he realised it had been a mistake when he found himself queuing along a road that was usually pretty clear. He craned his neck out of the window as they crept along at walking pace for a few dozen yards at a time before stopping again, but couldn’t initially see what the cause of the holdup was. More vehicles joined the slow procession behind the Jaguar, preventing him from easily changing his mind and turning the car back to take another route. The narrow lane would have been tricky enough to negotiate a turn in even without the additional obstacles.

He stretched out again as they queued around a bend and finally caught the reason for their slow progress. A solitary police car with its blue lights flashing was partially blocking the access. Stopping each of the cars to take a look in the back and then inside the boot. This was either related to the missing girl or to some other unrelated crime, but whatever the truth it was extremely bad luck. Even the fresh faced young constable up ahead was unlikely to miss a severed head in a bag, and trying to turn around now would draw attention to himself and risk some kind of police chase. In his favour was that the number plates on his car were registered to a fictitious company. He’d taken to swapping them as a precaution if the vehicle was ever spotted near to one of his tableaus or the scene of a disappearance. He opened the dashboard seeking inspiration, and what he saw inside gave him the seed of a plan. 

Chapter 54

Lee wasn’t in the office when I arrived which was highly unusual for him. at times when we’d first met I’d entertained the suspicion that he was living in the station since he always seemed to beat me here. I said a quick hello to one of the other detectives working under me, an intense and highly intelligent Asian girl called Geeta Badal, and received a tired smile and a nod in return. Geeta had entered the force on an accelerated graduate scheme several years previous and quickly demonstrated her value through a precocious aptitude for solving cases.

I wasn’t quite sure where to begin without Lee’s presence. I’d been intending to sit him down first thing for a frank discussion before getting stuck into further enquiries, as I hadn’t wanted to get sidetracked and look as if I was either ignoring him or unconcerned by his prompt disappearance from my life. I headed for the canteen on the top floor and fixed myself a strong coffee to kill a little time, deciding that should give him enough scope to slope in late if he was stuck in traffic.

My phone began to vibrate in my trouser pocket as I was adding milk to the cup and I took my drink back down to my computer before I checked the message.

I put in for, and was granted immediate leave ahead of my request to transfer to Birmingham CID as soon as possible. I wish you a speedy resolution to the current case. Please don’t call me. Lee.

The text message was grammatically precise and straight to the point, Lee Mead all over, and I was forced to adopt a casual attitude under the watchful gaze of Geeta and another junior colleague who’d just taken a seat at the desk opposite my own, even though my mind was spiralling.

It can’t be true. He wouldn’t just walk out on a case that has been his world for months on end, that’s gotten right under his skin, without seeing it through to the end. Would he?

There was a stabbing pain of rejection in my chest, and I felt like I was going to be sick as I read the text over and over again, looking for some sign that it wasn’t as I had first interpreted it.

‘Ma’am. Are you okay?’

Geeta shifted uncomfortably as she hesitantly asked the question, peering at me over square framed glasses as she spoke. I knew that while she was incredibly effective, she was much more at home with facts and figures than with the emotional spectrum, and I’d had to deploy her with that in mind on the cases that she’d been assigned to in the past.

‘Yes…sorry, I’ve just had news that we’re losing a man from our team and the timing couldn’t be worse to be honest with you. It’s DS Mead, he’s put in for a transfer to Birmingham and it appears that the request has been granted without the needs of our own ongoing investigation being taken into consideration.’

I forced a breezy business-like tone into my reply to mask the cover up the sound of my heart breaking inside me.

‘I’m sorry to hear that Ma’am, but I’m very much at your disposal for any further support that’s needed, if you can’t change his mind.’

She measured out the words carefully and at that moment I knew that she was hungry for the opportunity, but that she’d also somehow been aware of the nature of mine and Lee’s personal relationship too.