Grind Their Bones

by Cross, Drew

  I stepped back away from the door and kicked out at the section just above and to the side of the handle with all of my force, feeling the surge of adrenaline as I connected and a section of the frame tore away, allowing the door to fly open unimpeded. I shone the meagre blue torchlight inside, realising immediately and with a vague spike of relief that it was a bathroom and that the noise could well have been just a blocked drain. That was when I saw the first of the blood, a handprint smear across one of the walls, more of it in spots and puddles on the lino floor and running down the tiles behind the sink. I heard the sound of Lee thundering back through the house and up the stairs to join me, startled by the crash as I’d smashed in the door, and I reached out and pulled the cord to switch on the main light. Then I saw

  the woman in the bath, lying prone in an inch of her own blood with her face beaten beyond recognition. The low gurgling sound was coming from her.

  Chapter 84

  ‘Oh God. Is she…?’

  Lee arrived on the scene two seconds after I’d switched the bathroom light on, taking in the horror scene that I was still trying to process for himself.

  ‘No, she’s making a noise that suggests she’s still able to breathe, but it doesn’t look good does it?’

  He shook his head quickly in response as I looked around for something to stem her bleeding and settled on a couple of clean white bath towels.

  ‘We’re going to have to try to move her out of there so we can get a proper look at where all this blood’s coming from besides her face.’

  I moved around towards the lighter feet end and reached down into the tub and underneath the backs of her knees, immersing my hands and wrists in her cooling blood to achieve the feat. Lee wrapped his arms around her chest, tipping her forward so he could get around and under her arms, and getting a deep moan from her in response. That was a good sign. If she could still communicate her discomfort, and our backup arrived in record time, then she might just make it.

  Thankfully she was only slightly built, because trying to manipulate a limp and badly injured person in the confined space of a bathroom, and without causing them further damage, is a recipe for disaster. The blood made her skin slippery to the touch, and more of it, both new and old, fell to the floor as we hauled her out onto one of the towels, trying hard to stay upright ourselves as the surface became a deadly skating rink.

  ‘There are some deep cuts on her wrists and forearms, as well as a lot of blood from the facial damage, I say we do what we can for the arms and then finish off our search. I’m taking it you didn’t find anything yet?’

  I looked up at him and saw in his expression that there’d been nothing so far, before returning my attention to wrapping towels around the woman’s wounds so he wouldn’t see the pain in my expression. Judging by the grey hair and where we are, this has got to be Madeleine, the murderer’s wife. So where are the girls and where is Reimoore?

  ‘Nothing, but I was going to check out the garden when I heard all of the commotion. There’s some kind of old shed down among the bushes, I think, and it looks like somebody had been digging some kind of pit or grave but got disturbed.’

  He made the sudden connection between my question and its subtext, and realised what he’d just said.

  ‘Oh shit. It could have been anything, and I got as far as having a quick look in before my attention was pulled this way. There was definitely nobody in it and I didn’t see much blood anywhere downstairs.’

  We moved the old lady onto her side and arranged her in the recovery position. Without a few years in medical school and some bags of plasma we couldn’t do anything more for her at the moment anyway.

  ‘Let’s go check out that shed and the pit, and do me a favour and see where the hell armed response have got to. If he’d greeted us with a shotgun then we’d be two more to add to the tally by now.’

  I couldn’t keep the fear and anger out of my voice, there’d been a fuck up somewhere along the line and I couldn’t decide whether that rested with me or elsewhere.

  ‘Agreed.’

  He stood up and caught a glimpse of his reflexion in the mirror behind my head, his hands and shirt were growing stiff with blood and gore, and a broad scarlet smear ran from the middle of his forehead down to the side of his right eyebrow where he’d touched his face with a bloody hand.

  ‘Looking like we do at the moment, I’m betting we’re odds on to end up face down on the ground with guns aimed at our heads when they do arrive.’

  He offered a wry smile, since the comment was more observation than it was joke, and the ‘gunslingers’, as they were occasionally referred to, had a reputation for drawing their weapons at the slightest sign of trouble and asking questions later. Thankfully they weren’t so quick to actually fire them.

  Lee turned and stepped out of the door as I rose to follow close behind, and at that instant I heard an odd mechanical click and felt the air vibrate, just as he screamed and went down in a sudden hot spray of blood.

  Chapter 85

  He’s been shot. I’m trapped in the bathroom with a dying woman and now the man I love is about to join her, and the Grey Man is out there with a gun waiting for me. The terror exploded inside me, wrapping a veil around my ability to reason and causing me to hyperventilate. Any moment I expected to see the barrel of a gun come into view around the doorframe, followed by his familiar face, and then that would be the end of my life. Long seconds stretched out, and finally I was able to rationalise again, realising that I’d heard a click and a vibration, not the deafening roar of a gun firing, and seeing Lee miraculously able to pull himself along the floor back into the bathroom.

  ‘Shut the door too and we’ll try to keep it pushed closed between us Za…’

  He clenched his teeth against the pain and the colour started to drain out of his expression. It was almost impossible to see where he’d been hurt since he was already saturated in Madeleine’s blood.

  ‘What did he hit you with?’

  I helped him the last couple of feet, taking hold of his arm and physically pulling him across the slick floor.

  ‘A dart or an arrow of some kind…it passed straight through, I saw it embedded in the wall…I think he’s hurt too…he was moving away from me as I fell, but his right arm was hanging down…’

  His skin turned a horrible shade of grey and he vomited in his own lap. Not a gun, a crossbow, that’s what the click was, and if he’s wounded then he’s going to have difficulty reloading it.

  ‘Okay Lee, listen to me now, if you’ve got the strength then call in everything you can to the armed response team. When they finally choose to arrive I want them shooting at everything that moves that isn’t us.’

  I pressed the final semi-clean towel in the room into his hand so he could use it to stem his own bleeding and stood back up straight.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He looked at me with wide imploring eyes, realising the answer to his own question and reaching out as if he intended to hang on to my trouser leg. I stepped away from reach and took hold of a heavy ceramic soap dish as the only likely makeshift weapon immediately to hand.

  ‘I’m going after him. The girls could still be out in that shed or a room that hasn’t been opened, and if they are they might still be alive. If I stayed in here while he went down there and butchered them then I couldn’t live with the knowledge that I might have been able to stop him.’

  He stretched out his arm again and I locked eyes with him so he could see that my mind was made up on this.

  ‘Za…?’

  His voice was weaker now as the pain really hit him hard.

  ‘Yes?’

  I crouched down to hear him properly.

  ‘Don’t get yourself killed or I’m going to have to join you.’

  He smiled and I kissed him on top of the head.

  ‘From where I’m standing you’ve got a head start at the moment. Now shut up and concentrate on stopping the rest of your blood from leaking out ple
ase. I’m not going to die today.’

  I sounded much more certain than I felt as I stood back up and moved cautiously out through the broken door, scanning the shadows on the dark landing for signs of movement. He could be in the bedroom, there was time for him to hide in there while you were dithering and trying to find some courage. Your best course of action is to check there first and then go downstairs, but a bloody soap dish isn’t going to help if he’s headed for the knife drawer in the kitchen, even if he is injured.

  I told myself off inside my head and realised that a better choice of weapon was staring me right in the face, the crossbow bolt that had passed through Lee and now jutted out of the landing wall. It was an effort to lever it back out, but the plaster work was old and beginning to lose its structure now, finally giving up the steel pointed dart and dislodging a shower of dust onto the floor. I held it like a miniature spear and set off to stalk and catch a killer.

  Chapter 86

  Nobody was waiting for me in the solitary bedroom and as I crept down the stairs, the rest of the house was quiet and watchful. The only original source of light, the candle that had been burning in the living room, had been snuffed out, although I couldn’t say whether that was by accident or design, and the darkness was a heavy velvet cloak over everything. Halfway across the hallway I asked myself why I was still stalking along in the dark when I was already disadvantaged by surroundings that were entirely alien to me? Wherever he was lying in wait I wasn’t realistically going to be aware of him before he was aware of me, so I might as well sacrifice the remote possibility of being so quiet that I somehow managed to sneak up on him, for the ability to see him coming when he made his presence known and came for me with murder in his eyes.

  I flipped on the hall light and immediately felt better, illumination of any kind removes the biggest factor in fear every time - the unknown parts that your imagination fills in for you. This monster was terrifyingly real, I didn’t need to let my mind embellish any of the details for me. Growing bolder I kicked the door off the hallway open and stepped back away, brandishing my crossbow bolt like a sword and then darting forwards to switch on the light in there too. Still no sign of the Grey Man, and I was starting to run out of lights and doors; he surely wasn’t going to be afraid of me, so where the hell was he hiding?

  Left with few other options, I moved through into the small kitchen, starting to feel desperation setting in and kicking open the door to what I had thought was a pantry before I realised my error. What I saw inside made me felt momentarily queasy. There was a narrow long space with an assortment of jagged cutting tools, a large ceiling hook hanging over a gully that acted as a drain away, and worst of all a machine for mincing meat. At least I now knew where poor pretty Elizabeth Perry had met her end. I pulled the light on in there too, although there didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide something the size of a full grown man, and saw dark stains showing through the glossy paint on the walls as I quickly switched it off again. I could detect the faint odour of raw meat coming from in the very fabric of the space, and I tried not to think about whether she, and others before her that had been in this room, had been alive or dead when he began to butcher them like slaughterhouse cattle.

  Eventually I turned back away and closed the door again, overwhelmed with a sudden barrage of emotion at all of the suffering and all of the senseless loss of life because of the choices and actions of one damaged man. Okay lady, there’ll be time to grieve for them later. Right now you need to get your act back together, or else you’re going to be swinging from that hook yourself and watching your guts drop out onto the floor, followed pretty swiftly by Lee.

  The only explanation left was that he’d headed out of the back door, which was bad news because we were out in woodland and I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of trying to hunt him through bushes and around trees, without letting him get close enough to slit my throat. Would he have been able to reload his crossbow by now? I had no idea whether that feat could be accomplished with one hand, or without seeing his wounds for myself, if he was sufficiently mobile to be able to manage it with two hands anyway. He wouldn’t have to sneak up on me then, he could just pick me off from a safe distance and then move in to finish the job when I was incapacitated.

  A sound reached my ears from outside, a whoosh like petrol being ignited, which was so unexpected that I almost dismissed it as a product of my imagination, until I realised that an amber glow had filled the kitchen. It had to be him. I abandoned all caution and sprinted across the room, out of the door and straight into a nightmare.

  Chapter 87

  Tall flames were leaping up out of the pit in the middle of the garden, and the ferocious heat they were giving off forced me to put the brakes on my dash. Through the billowing clouds of black smoke I could see the figure of John Reimoore, the infamous killer who had labelled himself the Grey Man and who had confounded multiple police forces up and down the country, standing at the opposite side of the pit and staring straight at me. Just as Lee had said one of his arms hung uselessly down by his side, and he was spattered with blood, much of it seemingly from a wound that he’d taped up on his forehead. I thought back to the badly injured woman in the bath tub, his wife of so many years, and how I had entertained the suspicion that she was involved in his atrocious crimes. Now I was changing my mind.

  He had both of the girls with him by the edge of the pit, wrists bound together with his signature knots no doubt, and Lexie was kneeling down in front of him while he held Annabel in a standing position with the blade of a large serrated hunting knife at her throat. Both of the girls were sobbing in abject terror, and blood and mud streaks were on their faces. The smoke and flames obscured some of my view, but I couldn’t see any obvious injuries on them, so it seemed likely that the blood was not their own at least. I concealed the crossbow bolt next to my wrist in the hope that he had not seen it.

  ‘I’m so pleased that you could join us, Zara. Do you know what it was going to be?’

  He was forced to raise his voice to be heard over the crackle and roar of the flames, and he nodded towards the fiery pit and winced. The injury is to his shoulder and collarbone rather than the arm itself. I retained the information in case I could get close enough to him to put it to use.

  ‘It looks like a primitive version of a barbecue, but on a larger scale.’

  The words coming out of my mouth were calm and detached, completely at odds with how I felt, it was as if I was separating from my physical body and I wondered if I was already deep in shock.

  ‘Not a bad guess.’

  He smiled approvingly as if we were two old friends on an evening out and then carried on.

  ‘Given sufficient time it would be a Fijian lovo. You don’t usually cook with the flames, instead you let the fire die away, and there are particular types of stones in the base which retain heat for a very long time afterwards which you use to do the cooking. The meat is placed into the pit with the stones and then buried for several hours until it’s so tender that it’s practically falling of the bone, at which point you dig it up and feast. I’ve done it before when I was in the South Pacific, and it was delicious.’

  He stopped to savour my reaction, but I was outwardly numb, existing somewhere deep inside myself that was designed to protect me from the reality of what was about to happen in front of my eyes. I saw the flash of annoyance on his face in the orange light, and felt a fresh wave of searing heat as the breeze fanned the flames towards me.

  ‘As much as it would be a waste, in the interests of time I may just have to use the flames after all on this occasion.’

  He gestured as if to slash the standing girl’s throat and pressed his knee to the back of Lexie as if to push her forwards into the fire, both of them closed their eyes as more tears squeezed out of the corners.

  ‘NO, WAIT!’

  I held up my hand and he stopped mid gesture looking amused.

  ‘If you’re going to try to appeal to my humanity th
en I can tell you now that you’re wasting your time. I don’t have any.’

  The smile dropped away from him now, and I saw the sheen of madness in his eyes.

  ‘Let them go and I will take their place in the flames, your letters were addressed to me, I’m the one that you want.’

  I maintained eye contact and kept my voice calm and firm. inside I still felt strangely absent, but adrenaline began to drip slowly into my bloodstream in anticipation of what I was about to do. Reimoore relaxed his hold on Annabel and the knife moved precious inches away from her slim neck.

  ‘Go on then. Throw yourself in.’ He said, eyes narrowing in disbelief, and without hesitation I ran forward and leapt, knowing that I might not make the other side in one go, but needing to land close enough to continue the forward movement.

  The heat of the fire blinded me as I passed through it and time seemed to slow to a near standstill, and then I was suddenly at the other side, screaming with my hair and clothes on fire as I thrust the crossbow bolt into the killer’s chest and got my arm up between the knife and Annabel’s throat.

  Chapter 88

  After an extended stay in hospital the world outside seemed to hold fresh new wonder, and I found myself transfixed by everything from morning dew on the petals of a rose, to the playful high jinks of a young boy with his Doberman puppy out on the park now. I’d taken to telling the kind faced psychologist from the occupational health unit that the nightmares had finally stopped, eager to get my mind back on work and away from the unwelcome flashbacks that haunt me. We both know that it’s too soon for that to be true, but he is that rarity amongst the members of his profession from what I can see, and he has promised to sign me fit for office based duties at first. Followed by a gradual ease back into full duties later on, when my final skin graft operation is over and done with.