Grind Their Bones

by Cross, Drew

  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.

  ‘Thank you, Geeta. I appreciate that.’

  I let her know that she hadn’t crossed a line with a small smile of acknowledgment, and she smiled in return, gathering up some paperwork off the printer and walking towards the door. As she went I suddenly realised that I could use her eagerness to save me some time and free me up to at least try to get through to Lee.

  ‘In fact, Geeta?’

  I caught the desperation in my voice and cleared my throat loudly.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  She stopped in the doorway looking back over her shoulder at me.

  ‘There’s an assignment that I’d asked DS Mead to work on but which he hadn’t yet got round to. It’s not hugely exciting, but I’m hoping that it might yield some important information for the case.’

  Chapter 55

  The Grey Man sat captive in his silver car and waited for his turn to reach the young police constable and submit to a search of his own vehicle. The detached girls head in the boot began to assume a heavy presence in his mind, and he could picture it rolling around to face in his direction, watching with interest to see how events might unfold. He had not come remotely close to being caught in possession of incriminating evidence for many, many years, and that was in no small part down to the extreme caution that he usually exercised in the aftermath of a killing. His current recklessness born out of a newly acquired level of supreme arrogance was uncharacteristic, and he silently cursed himself for making a mistake, vowing not to do so again once this next part was over with.

  He realised with a start that the car in front had moved on again, leaving a sizeable gap between the two vehicles and prompting the driver behind him to hit their horn. The young officer was only five cars ahead of him now, and he looked up at the sudden noise before speaking a few words to the driver of the car that he’d stopped and beginning to make his way over towards the source of the disturbance. The Grey Man felt the tension creeping into his fatigued muscles, and a solitary bead of sweat rolled from underneath his arm down inside his shirt. he found himself holding his breath as the uniformed figure drew level with the silver Jaguar.

  The policeman passed straight by and knocked on the window of the car behind that had sounded its horn, and the killer released the air from his lungs in a long steady stream, loosening his tight grip on the thin bladed knife that he kept in the glove compartment for emergencies. His tension had nothing to do with the prospect of having to kill the man when he asked to search the Jaguar’s boot, and everything to do with knowing that he’d have to do so in front of multiple witnesses without anybody suspecting what was happening.

  Having weighed up his scant options he’d settled on pulling his car close up to the police vehicle and around on enough of an angle to conceal his actions from the queue behind. That would allow him to drive the blade up into the cop’s heart underneath the breastbone without being seen, although he’d have to open the car door in order to accomplish this feat unimpeded and risk doing so from a sitting position. If he pushed the cop away hard enough with his foot, then there was a good chance that he’d end up in the shallow overgrown trough at the roadside, and that would conceal him for precious seconds before the driver behind saw the dying man and came to his aid. He’d have to rely on a modest slice of luck in respect of nobody remembering the details of the false registration plate or a physical description for him, of course, but nobody would have reason to commit those details to memory until after the event and eye witnesses were notoriously bad at remembering such minutiae.

  The officer finished rebuking the woman in the blue Citroen behind him and took a slow stroll back to his position at the roadside, waving in the next in line and making a quick cursory search of the interior as with the others. Me next. The Grey Man watched the car pull away with a cheery wave from the policeman to the occupants, and he rolled slowly up into position, concealing th
e knife beneath one of his thighs and opening up the driver’s door.

  ‘That’s what I like to see, saving my legs and pulling up close.’

  The younger man smiled, speaking confidently in a thick Birmingham accent, smoothing back his dark hair.

  ‘Control to Charlie Tango four three, over.’

  The crackle of a police radio drew the cop back over to his car before he was in range for the blade.

  ‘Excuse me for just a moment please sir. Yes, go ahead control.’

  He lifted out a handset and spoke into the receiver.

  ‘Officer in need of assistance on Aldermans Green Industrial Estate, can you travel?’

  The young man hesitated and looked back at the outwardly calm older gentleman in his expensive looking car. He didn’t look like a monster.

  ‘Yes, travelling now. I’ll be there in less than ten minutes.’

  He ended the transmission and smiled at the older man again.

  ‘It seems that you’re getting away with it this time,’ he remarked with a smile. and climbed back into the police car, pulling away with tires spinning and the siren beginning a long mournful wail.

  Chapter 56

  I arrived back in the CID office late in the afternoon, slightly sweaty from a frustrating day of unsuccessfully attempting to track down Lee. I’d called, texted and even emailed him in a vain attempt to elicit some kind of response, explaining that I understood how hurt and betrayed he must be feeling, and that I wouldn’t try to stop him from leaving for Birmingham if that was what he truly wanted, but that we needed to at least make some time to talk first. Nothing worked though, and it all remained resolutely silent from his end. Visiting his home had been no more successful, it was obvious that nobody was in and his car wasn’t in its usual parking space. I scoured my brain for a better idea of where he might go when he was this upset with me, but got no further than ‘anywhere that I wasn’t likely to find him.’