Grind Their Bones

by Cross, Drew

  I pulled a disgusted face.

  ‘I take it I don’t need to go on?’

  Lee shook his head slowly, frowning.

  ‘And there’s the letters to you with these ones. Where does that fit in?’

  He was asking rhetorically, but I answered anyway.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, but since the first Plymouth murder was thirty years ago, I’ll remind you that I’m not that old, Sergeant!’

  He blushed and looked momentarily panicked.

  Oh no, I wasn’t…’

  I cut him off and waved away his protestations.

  ‘It’s alright, I know you weren’t meaning anything by it, and the question’s definitely a valid one. The way I see it we just need to find the point at which these older crimes meet with a suspect who is somehow connected to me and that’s where we’ll find our man. So where do we go from here?’

  I asked and stood up to lean across the desk, helping myself to a mushy pea covered chip and popping it into my mouth. In comparison to the chicken sandwich it tasted like heaven.

  ‘Hey, get your own! Serves you right for settling for something you didn’t actually want for lunch.’

  He laughed and swatted away my attempt to net myself another chip.

  ‘It’s your fault for leading me towards temptation! You can’t eat a bag of chips in the office without expecting to have to sacrifice a few to your colleagues, it’s an unwritten byelaw!’

  He relented and lifted up the tray so I could help myself to a few more, and I tossed the remains of my sandwich into the bin ten feet away with a practised flick of the wrist.

  ‘Seriously though, looking at these as all belonging to the same series, with the older crimes as the key. What would you put at the top of your to do list?’

  I gave a bow to an imaginary appreciative audience for my impressive sandwich throw.

  ‘It’s got to be those two vehicles that were never followed up, they’re probably nothing but it should have been done anyway.’

  I nodded my agreement and began logging a request for information from the DVLA database.

  Chapter 66

  ‘For somebody whose home was so outwardly minimalist you have a ridiculous amount of stuff!’

  I huffed and wheezed as I carried heavy box number ten from the hired panel van through the hallway and upstairs into the spare bedroom, following Lee who was making much lighter work of his own load up ahead.

  I’d let him choose whereabouts he wanted to put his things, and much of it was now destined to find a new temporary home in the loft. But the stuff that he wanted to keep out was ending up neatly stacked in the smallest bedroom. We hadn’t yet discussed where he was planning to sleep tonight, and I was kind of hoping that if the day panned out as expected, it was going to be something which made itself apparent without the need for talk.

  ‘You’re the one who thought this would be a good idea in the first place, it’s a bit late to decide that you don’t like me bringing along my belongings now.’

  He put down his box and grinned to let me know that there wasn’t any malign intent in the comment, and reached out to take my box off me.

  ‘My arms are killing me, I’m going to need a rest soon or I’ll keel over.’

  I wiped a line of moisture away from my hairline and leaned back against the bedroom wall.

  ‘That’s most of it now anyway. The odds and ends can wait until your delicate lady arms and legs have recovered a bit!’

  He smirked in amusement.

  ‘Careful mister or you’ll be finding that new home elsewhere a lot faster than you thought!’

  I cocked an eyebrow and tried to look fierce and serious, but failed miserably and collapsed into a fit of laughter.

  ‘That’s better, I’ve not seen you have a good laugh often enough recently,’ he said, and placed my box down on top of some of the others.

  ‘Which is a crying shame by the way.’

  He took a step back towards me, smiling that self assured smile that had driven me to the very brink of distraction a dozen times a day from the very first moment we’d met, right up until the time when we’d inappropriately locked lips for the first time in the aftermath of securing the tough convictions of a gang of highly organised armed robbers.

  I felt time slowing down. I could still close my eyes and revisit that exact moment in my mind. The surprising softness of his lips on mine in direct contrast to the roughness of his short stubble against my cheek, the strong masculine smell of Boss aftershave and the strange uncontrollable trembling that had taken up residence in my arms and legs.

  ‘Oh, and why’s that, Detective Sergeant?’

  I asked in a low whisper that advertised my feelings about the current situation. I’d play hard to get another time.

  ‘Because you are the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen, Zara, and that effect is increased threefold when you laugh or smile.’

  He stepped in again, and we were suddenly close enough for me to feel his warm breath and see his black pupils dilating in arousal and anticipation. I could feel the trembling that had gripped me the first time starting up again now as I closed the final space between our bodies and he stooped ever so slightly to bring his lips down to mine.

  ‘The bedroom’s only next door.’

  I offered breathlessly, knowing full well that he’d been here often enough to be aware of that fact, but wanting him so much I was almost panting.

  ‘We won’t make it that far right now, Ma’am,’ he replied and began to unbutton my shirt, as we started to kiss more urgently.

  Chapter 67

  I lay awake in the darkness, listening to the distant rumble of cars passing by on the main road with Lee’s heavy arm resting comfortably across my stomach. He’d been asleep for hours it seemed, and after an afternoon of considerable exertions that weren’t limited exclusively to moving and unpacking boxes, by rights I should have been too. Unfortunately, happy as I was with the first steps truly taken towards getting back on track with the most important relationship in my life, I couldn’t get thoughts of the investigation to leave me alone for long enough to be able to drop off.

  I thought about the crimes in Plymouth, five murders over the course of nine years that then stopped just as suddenly as they’d started when the killer moved on or changed his modus operandi and began to hide the bodies better. I knew from experience and from intensive courses that I’d attended that serial offenders tended to escalate, eventually so consumed by their twisted desires that they existed in perpetual frenzy until they were caught, or old age denied them the ability to continue to commit their unspeakable crimes. Our killer was getting older, but he was evidently not so decrepit that it had yet had an effect on his ability to murder and mutilate. Then there was the ‘gap’.

  I shifted around, trying to escape the gossamer threads of the investigative part of my brain, but the ‘gap’ kept coming back. It was impossible to escape the fact that there had been something like eighteen years between the final known Plymouth slaying, and the first in the Grey Man series. There was a strong possibility that somebody who’d been this careful and lucky had not wound up in prison during that time. If I was right, he’d remained free to kill whenever the mood took him for all of those years. Even if I didn’t factor in the likelihood of his need to kill becoming more frequent over time, a point that flew in the face of what the current murders demonstrated, that meant there were at least another nine out there that we didn’t know about, and probably very many more.

  Did he maintain a respectable façade, veiled behind the mask of a normal family life?

  I thought about the chaos left in the wake of the Gloucestershire serial killers Fred and Rosemary West, where there’d been a house full of children and frequent transient visitors, as well as neighbours and social services in close proximity, but seemingly nobody suspected that the two were a tag team of serial killing sexual sadists. There’d been a general acceptance that the number of murders in that
series was significantly higher than had been uncovered, again because of a large gap in between killings. Serial killers don’t take time off, they live for their crimes.

  I dwelt on that case for a moment, despite the feelings of tension and disgust that it provoked in me. There’d been whisperings of cannibalism there too, it seemed to be a natural progression for a certain type of offender who inhabited the dark outer regions of human behaviour. Was that why we hadn’t seen the link for ourselves yet? Had Hardwick seen the beginnings of something in those earlier cases that would incubate over time and then hatch out into this madness? If he had finally cracked both sets of cases why had he then kept that to himself? Why would any sane person put their own material needs ahead of the lives of innocent young girls?

  I ran back over what I could remember having read about the historic murders in my head, trying to make them fit with signs of a growing desire to consume human flesh. Laura Nightingale, strangled and badly beaten, with her throat slit after death, Imogen Jenkins, strangled and beaten too, her throat slit and the tip of her tongue missing, presumed to have been bitten off by herself in the struggle and then eaten by rats that were all over the scene. What if the rats weren’t to blame? What if Laura’s throat was slit to drain away blood for consumption? I felt the certainty growing inside me and made a note to check on the others for other question marks in the morning. Most of all I prayed that our man did not have his own ‘Rose’ to share his passion for murder with, but if he did then I’d see her locked in the deepest darkest hole I could find as well.

  Chapter 68

  Night had fallen and still her husband had not turned up. Madeleine had reassured the girls that he’d had urgent business to attend to that had caused him to rush out. But they were starting to get towards an age when they realised that adults didn’t always tell them the truth, and she could tell that Lexie in particular wasn’t buying the explanation fully. She’d searched the house from by room after they’d found breakfast made and the back door swinging in the breeze, convinced that he was hiding from her after the tough talking that had been done the previous evening, but there’d been no sign of him. It seemed liked a stretch to believe that he’d simply walked or run out of the back door, scaled the fence and headed out into the open countryside, but that was the only reasonable supposition left. The worrying thing was that they were a relatively long way out from civilisation, and the nearest shops and houses were a three mile hike along one track country lanes. Anybody walking along those was risking their life since people drove along them like lunatics despite the high stone walls and abundance of tight turns.

  She’d found herself being short with the older girl as she got her and her sister ready for bed, sick and tired of the constant questions that she couldn’t quite answer, and trying to fend off her enquiries about when their parents would be coming back to fetch them. The short answer was that she didn’t know at the moment. The phone calls from both parents had stopped a couple of days back, and when she’d tried calling their dad’s mobile the line wouldn’t connect and the number their mum had left as an emergency contact just rang out. The agreement had been that dad would pick them back up after a week, but that deadline had now long since come and gone.

  She scoured her brain for ideas about where he might have gone to in his current state of mind, pushing aside the snapshot image of Lexie crying out in pain when she’d brushed her hair far too roughly in anger. Her husband might believe that his movements were a complete mystery to her, but she’d developed certain instincts about the boltholes he might use in a crisis, and her money was on the cottage that they supposedly retained for family use up in the hills.

  As a younger man he’d shown her a stash of impressive looking knives and a pristine crossbow that he kept in a locked box up there, his face alight with an excitement that she’d seldom seen in a man who was usually almost monotone in his emotions. He’d been a keen hunter for years even at that point, and he’d often told her in moments of quiet reflection that the most valuable things his own father had taught him were how to kill cleanly and effectively, and how to butcher your kill. There’d been a period of time after he was discharged from the Navy when he’d travelled the world on hunting trips, and sometimes she’d accompanied him, although she never went out on the hunt herself, preferring to listen to his anecdotes afterwards and then chide him until he took a shower and washed the blood off his hands and face.

  When he went without his trips for too long he became edgy and difficult, and that’s when they’d hit one of their rocky patches and he’d even raised his fist to her on more than one occasion. She’d resolved that glitch by removing the restrictions on him and allowing him to hunt whenever the mood took him. While she didn’t entirely approve of shooting things as a way of letting off steam, it definitely beat becoming the object of his terrifying rage and frustration. She didn’t approve of wastefulness or killing big game at all, but he’d promised her that he never took down prey that was any bigger than she was, and after all, he made sure he always ate what he killed.

  Chapter 69

  Feeling slightly guilty for having leaned on super keen DC Badal for the majority of my recent legwork, I tackled the follow up on the car registrations from the Plymouth murders myself. The requests had been treated as a priority, and it quickly transpired that neither of the keepers from the time, or their immediate family, stacked up as likely suspects. A quick couple of calculations told me that former Sergeant Major Joseph Reilly-Dunstan would now be pushing a hundred years of age if he was alive, and that ex Conservative MP Michael Huntley-Sheridan would be almost ninety. Between them there was only one child, born to the Sergeant Major and his wife, and that was a daughter who would be in her early sixties now. I made a note to trace her details later for an informal chat on the off chance that she could offer something of value.

  I weighed up my options and finally decided to check up on both the Major and the MP until I could formulate a better plan, knowing that if there was anything to find here then it certainly wasn’t going to be a geriatric cannibal sneaking out of his nursing home at night to terrorise the city streets, but running out of viable options. On a whim I chose the army guy first, reasoning that there was a vague military link if I accepted the Naval theory that had come to dominate the hunt for a while at the time. An hour later I’d discovered that both the Sergeant Major and the MP had died some years previously, and that in the military guys case he was survived by a wife who was now very elderly, but according to the staff who tended to her at the nursing home at least, was still entirely compos mentis. I thanked them for their time and help and scheduled an appointment to visit her the following day, feeling an indefinable sense of something which told me I was finally on the right track.

  I fired off an email to Lee, who was out and about taking down details of a possible witness who swore that they’d seen Elizabeth Perry in a black Range Rover on the motorway hours after she’d gone missing, and got up to make coffee. I wanted him to help me look for links between any of the men from the Naval base who’d been routinely questioned all those years ago as the knot theory began to prevail, and the remaining names on my ragged looking and ever shrinking suspect list.

  When I arrived back at my desk with the coffee I found myself with some time on my hands to kill, and decided to make a start myself while I waited for him to acknowledge me or return to the office, scanning my emails for one from Geeta which contained copies of those short voluntary interviews. I moved down the column of names first, hundreds of them all matching the vague description from a single eyewitness and all of them entirely unremarkable on the surface of things. I was looking for something that I recognised, perhaps a family surname that related to an offender that I knew, or that triggered an association with somebody involved in the Grey Man case, however peripherally. But nothing jumped off the screen at me.

  I sighed and leaned back, taking a gulp from my over sized ‘World’s Best Aunt’ cup, a present fro
m Emily’s children, sent through the post rather than hand-delivered. It seemed like something of a joke at the time, on account of how little I got to see them, but I cherished it anyway and kept it at work where I spent the majority of my time. Finally I decided that I’d delayed for long enough, and I got down to the part that I’d been least looking forward to, starting alphabetically and opening up the first transcript from one of the Plymouth Naval interviews to begin the first of many long hours of reading.

  Chapter 70

  ‘It’s always lovely to get visitors, not that it happens much these days my dear, but nevertheless it’s wonderful that you’re here.’

  Mrs Jessie Reilly-Dunstan was a surprisingly sprightly but tiny lady of eighty six, who looked as if she’d dressed for an important occasion, with a cashmere wrap over a tailored looking cream top and beige slacks. She greeted me like an old friend, and I was enveloped in the scent of roses and vanilla from her perfume as she embraced me.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you too Mrs Reilly-Dunstan. I’m Zara Wade, and I have to say already that I’m deeply envious of those pearls that you’re wearing.’

  I smiled and took the seat that she was guiding me onto, alongside her own and facing out over landscaped gardens and an open view of the countryside beyond the fence.

  ‘Please call me Jessie, dear, it’s been said before that Mrs Reilly-Dunstan is too big a name for such a small lady.’

  She delivered a line that I imagined had been well-used over the decades, her eyes twinkling with pleasure at a private resonance that I wasn’t privy too.