Grind Their Bones (19 page)

He pushed aside the desire to kill her as he had on a countless number of occasions over the course of their life together, amusing himself with the thought that he was in all probability not alone in that respect. If it took an absence of emotion to accomplish the taking of multiple lives, then why were so many murders committed by people of the ones that they were supposed to love the most? He strongly believed that murder required a particular kind of passion, otherwise there would be no reasonable explanation for the overwhelming feelings that accompanied the commission of his crimes and that drove him to repeat those actions over and over again.

Killing Madeleine, who on some level was aware of the nature of what he was and what he was capable of, would be an acknowledgement that he was ready for this journey to come to an end. He had already decided long ago that he would carry on until the time came that he could look into the eyes of whatever had created him, if such a twisted being existed.

The desire to kill had been much stronger in him than he was accustomed to in recent times. He’d grown used to thinking of that part of himself as a vast black snake which required him to feed it to bursting every once in a while, but then coiled back up and lay sated and dormant. Gradually, as the years had passed, he’d become aware that the beasts appetite was growing quietly but insistently, and the spaces between ‘feeds’ had shrunk from years to a matter of mere months, which made the planning that much more difficult and imprecise. Now he realised that he’d killed three times in quick succession with barely a pause for breath in between. The Doctors death had been out of necessity, and one of the girls out of opportunity, to be sure, but the sense of inner quiet that should have descended after such an orgy of chaos and mutilation was notably absent.

He realised that he was out of bed and on the landing now, standing outside the guest room with the door ajar and the soft breathing of the two sleeping girls within clearly audible. The antique grandfather clock which lived at the top of the stairs, and that had been passed down from generation to generation, ticked slow tense seconds by, one hundred even rhythmic clicks before he turned with an effort of will and moved back away towards his own bedroom again. The dark and growing behemoth inside the man hissed in bad tempered discontent and settled into an unhappy and uneasy slumber, waiting for another chance to emerge.

Chapter 62

Lee’s arrival back in the Coventry CID office was greeted with lukewarm enthusiasm, since one or two of his junior colleagues had already been assessing the progression opportunities that would be afforded by his absence. I’d already filled him in on Geeta Badal’s valuable input in chasing up a loose end that we’d simply not had time for, and we were both in agreement that she was more than capable of handling some additional responsibility. As such, Lee’s first task had been to speak with her privately about taking a more prominent position in the Grey Man enquiry, while also being mentored by himself for a step up to the rank of Sergeant at the earliest possible opportunity. Predictably she’d jumped at the chance, and we now had her cutting an ultra efficient swathe through the list of previous offenders arrested by myself over the course of my career, sifting out those that were dead, incarcerated or just plainly wrong for these offences for other clearly definable reasons.

With a large burden of work off our shoulders we were able to backtrack over the curious activities of Doctor Hardwick in the course of his final months of life. Of particular note was the cluster of unsolved murders around Plymouth, the oldest of which had occurred more than thirty years ago. They were interesting because Geeta had found no discernable reason why he would have needed to view these cases. Hardwick hadn’t been working on cold cases, or on behalf of any other major enquiries which could feasibly tie in with those files while he was helping us with the Grey Man murders. So why on earth was he interested enough to quietly obtain and access them on multiple occasions?

‘Theories?’

I asked for the tenth time that day.

‘Well, they look like they’re connected to each other, but they don’t have any of the characteristics I’d associate with our guy, no cannibalism or staging, no letters to the police. The only discernable similarity is the fact that they’re all youngish female victims. Maybe the Doctor had some theories about who was responsible for them and was running a completely unrelated project of his own. There’d be some serious kudos in solving a big cold case like that surely?’

Lee looked as confused as I felt while he gave voice to the thought that neither of us wanted to accept might be true. There had to be something in here that we were missing. Serial killers weren’t exactly ten a penny in the UK like they appeared to be for our American and South African counterparts.

‘Who did they think they were looking for at the time?’

I played with a loop of my hair and sighed, waiting for something to strike me and make sense of it all.

‘There were various theories doing the rounds from what I can see, and probably another dozen that aren’t in the file. But there weren’t any reliable witnesses to the girls actually being taken, so just a vague physical description that could have been anybody, and nothing else concrete…Let’s see…they spent time talking to naval officers at the base, seemingly because knots found on some of the rope used to tie up the victims were of a type used by the navy. Not much ocean near to hear though. There are your usual half-snippets of hearsay too, a working girl who reported the number plate of a punter who supposedly confessed to one of the murders, stuff like that.’

He stopped and looked up at me, checking whether he should carry on.

‘Did they trace the punter?’

I was pacing around now, hoping that the movement would set the cogs in my head back into motion.

‘No. She wasn’t sure whether she’d mixed up the last few letters, and when they tried running both versions through the computer they came up with prominent persons who were too important to risk bothering, and too old to be their guy.’

He pulled an unhappy face and we shared a look of recognition. Connected to our offences or not, the officers on these cases hadn’t exactly turned over every stone. Any officer on my team using status as a reason for not troubling somebody in a murder enquiry would have been back in uniform before they’d finished offering the excuse.

Chapter 63

When we’d done for the day Lee had finally relented and agreed to move in with me, but only for a short period of time until he could find himself somewhere suitable to rent alone again. I didn’t argue with his assertions that we’d each still need our own space for a while yet, that we weren’t ready for that level of commitment in our relationship on a permanent basis, since I was relieved that that he’d even agreed to stay at all. Truth be told, I knew that the difficulty I’d had in trusting him with aspects of my life and the investigation made it impossible to argue otherwise, but at least our new reopening of lines of communication had allowed me to definitively cross his name off my list of suspects once and for all.

I offered to help him start packing up boxes, but he politely declined and now I’d been left alone to return to an empty house, which seemed strange and disquieting after I’d been growing accustomed to both his and Emily’s presence around the place in recent times. In an attempt to fill the silence I found myself switching on the television and the CD player to keep me company, as I prepared something to eat and ran back over the latest points of interest in the Grey Man case. The more I pondered the significance of the Plymouth murders, the more it seemed likely to me that Hardwick had reason to believe that they were the work of the same offender. The question was, what had he seen to connect such geographically disparate chains of offences that we were managing to miss? It was too big a stretch to put it down to pure dumb luck or simple chance, so that had to make it something relatively big, surely?

I combined single cream to a beaten egg and added it to a mixture of cooked spaghetti, bacon, garlic, and grated courgette, stirring it through and letting the residual heat from the pasta cook the liquid briefly before tipping it into a large bowl. Thank you for this one Emily, you taught me to make courgette carbonnara and in return I helped drive you to a suicide attempt and then back into the arms of your scumbag husband. What a rock I turned out to be for you.

I sat down on the settee, which still bore the faint orange scars of mine and my sister’s fight, trying to recapture the feeling of personal triumph that had briefly surfaced in the kitchen as I quietly celebrated cooking a meal that didn’t involve packets, tins or the use of a microwave. But the thought of Emily ruined my enjoyment of both the moment and the meal. Memories, a blessing and a curse. Wait. I stopped with my fork halfway up to my open mouth, tuning out the background noise from the TV and radio while I chased the tail end of a fast escaping thought. How had Hardwick connected two separate serial murder cases that were so far apart? It had to be because he had prior knowledge of the Plymouth crimes. Hardwick must have worked the profile or consulted on those cases at some point in the pass. Yes, now I thought about it, hadn’t there been a distinct southern accent in there somewhere? Taking the theory one step further, had Hardwick somehow worked out who was responsible? Was that why he had to die?

I realised that the fork was still hovering in mid air in front of my face and put it back in the bowl, all traces of my appetite vanishing at the growing realisation that this was the beginning of the breakthrough that I so badly needed. If my hunch was right and Hardwick had indeed unravelled this puzzle, then all we needed to do was find the connection for ourselves and follow the trail to our killer.

The Grey Man was hiding somewhere in the fine detail of the Plymouth files, I’d stake my pension on it.

Chapter 64

The two girls, Lexie and Annabel, woke Grandma Madeleine with a start, greeting her with the sight and sound of clanking porcelain from the breakfast tray of toast, coffee and orange juice that they were carrying into the bedroom. She realised right away that her husband was gone, sliding her hand over to his side of the bed and feeling the cold that told her he’d been up for hours.

‘We’ve been making famous chef’s breakfast!’ announced Lexie, handing over her side of the tray and urging the younger Annabel to do the same with an excited grin. Madeleine rubbed the grit out of the corners of her eyes as she sat up and stifled a yawn.

‘Thank you very much, it’s not every day that I get served my breakfast in bed, especially by famous people like yourselves.’

She replied, playing along with a quick wink and a tired smile and lifting a slice of lukewarm toast up to bite with exaggerated enjoyment for their benefit.

‘Is it nice Grandma asked Lexie?’ looking all of a sudden very serious.

‘Yes it is. In fact it might just be the best breakfast I’ve ever had! Where’s your Granddad got to anyway?’

She sipped some of the fresh orange juice and made the question seem casual.

‘He’s making pancakes for us in the kitchen. He says we can have our break now!’

They beamed in unison while she tried not advertise her surprise at what they were telling her. In over thirty years together she’d never known him to fix her breakfast. That was a woman’s job he’d announce grandly, a fragment of outdated residue from his own upbringing, but one that she minded much less than some of the others.

‘Could you bring this tray back downstairs between you for me so we can all eat at the breakfast table together, please?’

She handed the tray back over and got up, putting on a white towelling dressing gown quickly and following them back downstairs, urging them to take their time.

The sound of the radio blaring out from the kitchen reached her ears before she arrived at the foot of the stairs and her concern and confusion deepened immeasurably. The volume was up way too loud; playing the kind of music that he always referred to as ‘inane crap’ and refused to have on in a room that he was sitting in, and that was another first. The girls pushed on ahead before she could obey her instinct to stop them, bursting through the half open door singing ‘Granddad, Granddad, Granddad’ excitedly, and she hurried through after them.

The extractor fan was whirring, competing with the noise of the radio for attention, and a plate of scotch pancakes rested next to a pot of honey, one of chocolate spread and one of strawberry jam on the island unit that served as a breakfast bar along one side. Granddad himself was nowhere to be seen, and the door leading out to the gardens was left hanging wide open.

‘Girls, you both sit down and make a start on these pancakes, I’m just going to track down Granddad to join us.’

She propelled them to their seats with gentle but insistent shoves, pasting a taut smile in place and scanning the view out of the window as she did so. Wherever he’d gone to it wasn’t the garden, there was nowhere to hide for a person of his size on the open expanse of neatly manicured lawns and flowery borders, but apparently he wanted her to believe that he’d gone out that way. She closed the back door and turned the key in the lock, taking one last look back to make sure the children were okay before she set off to search through the each of the rooms in the rest of the house. He was in here somewhere or she’d have heard the car on the driveway.