by Cross, Drew
‘It’s completely out of leftfield Zara, especially for a guy who’s been so accurate on almost every other notable occasion. What are you driving at, exactly?’
He started to look interested despite his apparent frustration.
‘What if it was deliberately wrong?’
We locked stares and I paused to let the suggestion sink in.
‘I want us to discreetly do our own profile of the Grey Man, one that ignores the speculation as far as possible and focuses on what the evidence tells us.’
I stopped again to check that he was still onside.
‘Okay. And what exactly is that going to achieve?’
He frowned, but at least it wasn’t outright resistance.
‘I’m not one hundred percent sure just yet, beyond clearing out the crap and clarifying what we genuinely know. But it does give us a good reason to access any records that the good Doctor himself had a look at recently, don’t you think?’
We shared a slow knowing smile.
‘You think there’s something else in there that might have been held back?’
I watched Lee entertaining the possibility as he spoke, seeing the first glimmer of anticipation sparking in his eyes as I nodded my head.
It made some kind of sense that Hardwick hadn’t shared everything that he’d found out, otherwise why else would the killer have taken his laptop? Maybe he’d given us an inferior profile to work on while he worked on another angle, after all, he could always have let us in further down the line when he was sure about his facts without looking bad. There’d have been grumbling, but in the press it would be another famous victory and that was surely worth big book sales for his next opus.
We knew now from speaking to his wife that there were significant gambling debts in the background, and that they had been looking at selling their home just to survive. Perhaps he was gambling on a bigger hand, perhaps he’d even thought that he could catch the killer before we did? I’d seen it time and time again. Desperate people are driven to desperate acts. I felt the stirrings of my inner crime solver nodding along in approval.
Chapter 24
Grandma Madeleine discreetly watched her husband brooding while busying herself preparing the girl’s dinner, he looked uncharacteristically haggard and drawn, and she knew that spelled trouble if she wasn’t careful. He’d hardly spoken a word since arriving home this morning with the smell of petrol and smoke in his hair, casually handing over his clothes for washing without explanation. She’d flipped on the television in the kitchen and scanned the news stories, until the local broadcasts came on.
A famous forensic psychologist had been found brutally murdered at his home and the police were being tight-lipped about the details for now, and elsewhere in the county somebody had firebombed the empty offices of a solicitors firm for reasons as yet unknown, recounted the breathless young reporter. She breathed an inward sigh of relief at the second piece of news and took some small comfort in the aroma of his hair, then looked around for the remote and put it all out of her mind. If she chose to ignore it then it hadn’t really happened at all.
‘You should take a shower while I make lunch, I’m serving sea bass.’
She studiously avoided his gaze as she spoke, keeping her tone even and conversational, not a trace of accusation creeping in. He’d not vented his inner rage on her in several decades, but when he was like this, with demons swimming behind his dark expression, she was extra careful not to push the wrong buttons anyway.
‘I’ll do that,’ he eventually replied, turning his head to watch the girls running around on the decking in the growing warmth of the sun. The light caught their tanned arms and legs, which had been liberally coated with factor fifty sun cream before they’d been allowed out, and they glistened like basted poussins, mesmerising him for a long uncomfortable moment before he drained the last dregs of his strong coffee and retreated to the bathroom.
Madeleine watched him go with real concern. He usually tried to engage with the girls in his own fashion, which she knew wasn’t easy for him in view of his own upbringing. This morning he hadn’t bothered with them at all. She went across to the open French doors and leaned out to let the girls know that lunch would be ready in five minutes, and stopped to watch them play, taking genuine pleasure in their spirited haphazard waltz.
‘I’ll eat you all up!’
Shouted the youngest girl, making a grabbing gesture at her fleeing sister and baring her perfect white baby teeth.
‘No, I’ll eat you all up now!’
The slightly bigger girl suddenly switched roles and whirled back around, catching her laughing breathless sibling by the wrists and tumbling onto the warm dry grass with her, giggling fit to burst.
‘Your lunch will be on the table in five minutes girls; that’s if you’ve got enough room left for it when you’re done eating each other all up?’ she enquired, still smiling benevolently. The girls looked at each other and laughed some more, before the eldest assumed position as spokesperson.
‘We’re being a greedy Granddad who eats little girls.’
‘Just like a giant!’ Chimed in the other one and giggled.
‘Okay, well I’m off to start putting lunch onto plates in a moment, remember to wash your hands when you come back inside please.’
Her smile remained fixed in place, but an adult would have noticed that it took more effort now. She was thinking about the dead girl again, as she often did when her husband’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. She wished for the thousandth time that she’d never played any part in making the girl disappear forever.
Chapter 25
Do the people who believe they know us best really know us at all? How well do we even know ourselves until we take the time to explore those hidden recesses that house our darkest desires? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking moments, and I wonder whether they trouble other members of my species in the same way, but I strongly suspect not.
Doctor Alan Hardwick believed that he knew me from a hand full of snapshots of a single facet of who I am, and from that he believed that he could predict my actions when we finally came to meet. Yet with all of his years spent dissecting his fellow human beings, when push came to shove he was still wrong.
I took his eyes and tongue because they were wasted on him, Zara. What do you suppose that you could live without?
I stopped reading the Grey Man’s latest note and jotted down my immediate impressions, aiming to capture my gut reaction before my deeply ingrained need to analyse everything took over. Lee was away slowly working his way through the details of Hardwick’s comings and goings over the last six months, looking for anything that might help our unofficial composite profile. I wrote down three words in auto-pilot before I had to stop and re-read what had come out. They were simply: WE HAVE MET in thick black capital letters, not exactly the depth I’d been looking for. I tried to dig underneath the thought, to expose the roots of where the notion had come from, and I leafed back through transcripts from the other seven cases to try to pinpoint exactly what it was.
Do you still retain the ability to feel for them Zara? If it’s true that repeated exposure to horror blunts the human emotional response as a coping mechanism, then we’re not really so very different after all. I wasn’t always a monster.
I’ve never known what it was like to be entirely ‘normal’, and in a different way you too turned your back on normality to pursue your chosen path in life, Zara. Did they tell you how much it would cost you when you started out? Nobody was there to tell me how every single small step was another step away from the rest of the human race either.
It’s almost funny to contemplate now, but the first time out I was physically sick with fear. I lived in agony for the longest time afterwards. The second one was better. They seemed to be playing a role, and I have to say they were perfect in it. Don’t you find in life that some people are born victims, Zara?
I stopped reading and looked at my three
words again. Not ‘have we met’, but ‘we have met’, a statement not a question. This man had made me part of his fixation, which was not a new consideration, it had already been raised a dozen times throughout the ongoing investigation. The problem was that we’d never been able to nail down why that was. A review of some of my old cases had been held in an attempt to identify whether there were any viable suspects from my past, who might type as a possible Grey Man, but there’d been no breakthrough and we’d dropped it in favour of other potentially more productive avenues of enquiry.
I’d been a murder detective for eight years now, but I’d been in the force for fifteen, and there’d been interactions with too many criminals of all varieties to hope to be able to quickly recollect one in isolation who might be capable of offences like this series. Truth be told, I’d met a hundred who struck me as capable of serial murder and mutilation, violent angry men with holes where their hearts should have been. All that most of them lacked was that additional unknown factor that might transfer their rage onto strangers as objects to act as an outlet for their warped reasoning, rather than those poor unfortunates who chose to live their lives around these human time bombs.
I sat back and tapped the pen against the top of the desk, contemplating my options and ticking them off in my mind. I needed to approach this case differently. This man had reason to feel a connection to me, and I was certain that we’d met, even if it had been more significant for him than for me. I needed to make a list of every man I could remember coming into contact with throughout my career so far, not just the obvious lunatics, if he’d been one of those then chances were we’d have found him already. I needed to begin methodically ruling them out one by one until the last man remained.
Chapter 26
Eleven thirty at night and I was throwing my best shapes on the crowded dance floor in a trendy club with Emily. It was incredibly hot among the tangle of lithe sweating young bodies, and the fact that I found the music both too loud and completely unfamiliar should have been proof enough that I was too old for this stuff now. This impromptu night out had been another one of Lee’s bright ideas, and he’s waved me and my protestations away from work with a laugh, a lingering kiss, and a cheery ‘have fun, but not too much’. Surprisingly, my sister hadn’t needed asking more than once when I brought up the possibility of a night on the tiles, and now we were both pleasantly drunk on over-priced cocktails. Anybody watching would never have guessed that there had been any animosity between us to begin with.
A group of testosterone oozing students were starting to move in our direction, so I decided to beat a tactical retreat, gesturing to Emily that I was fit to drop, sticking out my tongue and crossing my eyes to emphasise the point and noticing again how alike we looked when she laughed. I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me properly until we got away from the giant speakers, but I trusted that she would follow me out into the fresh air and I began to apologise my way back to the doors.
The drop in temperature back out on the street was exaggerated by contrast with the oppressive humidity inside the club. I immediately began to shiver as the moisture on my skin suddenly cooled and my clothes starting to press up against me uncomfortably. I looked up at one of the largest moons I’d ever seen hanging in the night sky, breathing in big lungs full of the crisp air and wondering why it looked so close sometimes and so far away at others.
The seconds slipped past and Emily still didn’t emerge to join me, I pushed aside my annoyance and fidgeted impatiently, plaiting my hands together for warmth and checking the messages on my phone to pass time. Lee had sent me a smiley face and a single kiss an hour ago, but for once the rest of the world was allowing me to have the night off.
‘Where the hell are you, sis?’
My breath formed the suggestion of a cloud as I muttered to myself and rubbed at my bare arms in a feeble attempt to restore some warmth to them.
‘Fuck this.’
Mind made up, I went back inside and starting retracing my route back to our spot on the dance floor in case she’d missed the point and decided to stay put.
I was greeted by a sauna-like wave of heat and the rhythmic bass thump-thump of a track that sounded exactly like the last dozen or so that I’d heard since we’d arrived. Two tanned and shirtless young guys with matching short Mohawks moved into my field of vision, treating me to pelvic thrusts presumably designed to impress me, as I was forced to squeeze in between them to pass. I looked from side to side intently, scanning the sea of unfamiliar faces as I moved, but Emily was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t quite tall enough to see as far as the bar, but I decided that I’d head for where we’d been first before doubling back that way if she wasn’t there.
I fought hard to keep the rising sense of unease inside me in check, but I could feel the tension forming knots in my back and neck as I started to lose my cool. She wasn’t dancing and after skirting back around I couldn’t see her in the crowd at the bar either. I checked my phone again, nothing, and horrible considerations began jostling for attention in my head.
Chapter 27
I hesitated and weighed up the options, eventually deciding to check out the ladies loo's before I started causing a scene. Perhaps she'd had more to drink than I'd realised, and was washing her fringe in the toilet bowl right now. There was quite a queue developing when I arrived, so I was forced to loudly explain myself half a dozen times as I negotiated my way towards the front to look inside for Emily, and even then I had to endure a sea of hostile stares.
'Emily ...? Are you in here, Sis?'
My voice echoed back off the tiled walls, but there was no response. Unsure what else to do I pushed on the nearest one of the cubicle doors and it swung open to reveal a rough looking redhead snorting a line off the top of the cistern.
'Do you fucking mind?'
She scowled and kicked the door back shut in my face. Count yourself damn lucky that I'm otherwise engaged, missy, or I'd have you in the cells tonight for that.
I took a deep breath and moved on to the other two with no luck on either, then gave it up as a bad job and decided to head back out towards the door staff I'd seen lurking in the lobby.
As a general rule I try to avoid prejudging the diverse range of people that I meet, having long since learned that they have a tendency to spring all manner of surprises on you when you're least expecting it. However, as I approached the group of bouncers for help, all of whom had no necks and shoulders that appeared to sprout from out of their ears, watching them nudge each other and snigger, I doubted somehow that they were discussing the finer points of neuroscience and astrophysics, and my guard shot straight up.
'Hi, my sister Emily was in here with me and now she seems to have disappeared from view, I was wondering…'
Before I could finish what I was saying the head doorman cut in.
'She probably went home, or to somebody else's home, but I could always keep you company now if you're left all alone?'
He leaned his arm across behind me in a move that could be interpreted as either protective or as preventing my retreat, and my inbuilt moron detector virtually exploded.
I pulled out my warrant card and thrust it up into his face, holding it there for long enough for him to register that I was no mere beat bobby, and catching him wilt slightly as he took his arm back out of my way.
'That's better. as I was saying, she looks like me, but brunette with shoulder length straight hair and wearing a tight red dress. I'm sure you'd have noticed her, since you'd have had to retrieve your piggy little eyes from her cleavage when she passed.'
I smiled sweetly and without sincerity, watching him exchange a worried look with two of the other gorillas.
'What?'
I asked impatiently, waiting to be let in on what they knew.
'She headed into the gents about five minutes ago with a group of guys.'
His expression burned with dawning realisation at the whole world of shit he was about to land in, and he suddenly found
it hard to meet my stare.
'Just so we're clear. You watched an obviously drunk woman being led into the male toilets by a group of guys, and you didn't do anything about that? Say goodbye to your licences gentlemen, if that term can be applied to low lives like you.'
His eyes suddenly flicked up and past me, and I tensed as I felt a hand rest on my shoulder, relaxing again when I heard a familiar voice.
'It's okay Zara, I'm fine, I just want to go home now,' said Emily, and then threw up all over my shoes.
Chapter 28
'Just when I was beginning to believe that we were making progress, she went and screwed it all up royally again.'
I was over at Lee's ultra neat rented house mouthing off about Emily and her antics again, noticing how this was rapidly becoming a feature of my life at the moment. Lee was fresh faced and chipper this morning, in stark contrast to my current condition, and his evident enjoyment of that fact was doing nothing to help my mood. I was nursing the kind of hangover that made anything more strenuous than blinking painful, and I was pretty sure that I looked like the bride of Frankenstein right now.
'Not that I necessarily approve of what she did, but it's not exactly a hanging offence in this day and age, and she's hardly the first person to seek a little solace in strangers, is she?'
He took a gulp of coffee and reached for a slice of buttered toast, smiling as my stomach performed a spin cycle and I glared at him belligerently.
'For the record, if you ever find yourself seeking solace in the arms of a stranger then make sure that you really, really enjoy yourself. Because, by the time I'm through with you, it'll be the last time that you're physically able to perform that particular act.'
I could feel the heat of indignation rising up in my face.