Grind Their Bones (13 page)

The last question was a loaded one. He knew that I’d be blaming myself after the big row with her before she ran out.

‘They think she’ll be pretty much fine but that’s all I’ve been told so far. Do you know if Fred’s allowed visitors? I’m going to be up at the hospital later this afternoon with Emily and I’d like to stop in, if he’s up to it.’

Actually, if I was really honest with myself, I was much more comfortable with the idea of visiting him than my sister. I was also growing well and truly flustered as I recognised the implications of Fred Russell’s illness. Without him around I was the most senior detective in the department, which theoretically put me in charge. It wasn’t surprising that nobody else had broken their neck to come and tell me about what had happened; I was now ‘the boss’.

‘I can find out for you. Enough about everybody else though, how are you managing this morning? You do know that what she chose to do isn’t your fault right?’

I could picture him with grey eyes full of concern and I started to choke up.

‘Yes, I know. I’m okay…or I will be anyway. Just find something for us to do when I get in that doesn’t involve me having to sit around to be gawped at by all and sundry.’

I stifled a sob at the end.

‘Will do. I love you Zara.’

He said and ended the call.

I started up walking, needing to get home to freshen up a second time this morning, and a greying collie dog strolled leisurely out of one of the driveways to watch me curiously, ducking back in out of reach when I drew level. In the last dozen hours or so I’d been burned with hot food, attacked by my sister’s husband, considered my boyfriend as a possible murder suspect, and received news that my sister had tried to kill herself. Now my boss had keeled over too. What better set of circumstances could there be to take on the biggest promotion of my career right in the middle of a seemingly unsolvable serial murder case?

‘Shit Wade, you never take the easy route in life do you?’

I muttered under my breath, and began to force the pace again, relocating my resolve and wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand.

Chapter 42

When I arrived at the station Lee was already out in the car park waiting for me, with the mild breeze ruffling up his blond hair and pushing his pink tie over to one side. As I joined him he quickly briefed me on a possible development in the Grey Man case and handed over the keys to an unmarked Volvo together with a scribbled down note of the address. he knows me well enough by now to be aware that I prefer to drive than be driven.

‘It could be absolutely nothing, but a girl called Elizabeth Perry has gone missing from her home near Nuneaton and she matches a similar physical type to the others. She lives with her mother, but the home help reported her gone when she arrived to take over with mum’s care in the morning and there was nobody to let her in.’

I looked at him quizzically as I unlocked the car and we both climbed inside.

‘The mother has dementia and needs a lot of supervision, but Elizabeth works in the day so they have an assistant in to help out. The helper says the girl is fastidious to a fault, never gone AWOL without letting anybody know before.’

I started the engine and cruised slowly up to the car park barrier, waiting for the receptionist to raise it up for us.

‘What sort of age are we talking about for Elizabeth?’

The barrier lifted and I turned left, heading out towards the motorway.

‘She’s nineteen, a clerk for some kind of IT security company, very pretty apparently, but shy and keeps to herself according to the helper. She’s not affluent like some of the others, so we’ll have to reconsider the whole society angle if it is him.’

I glanced over and he looked lost in thought, we both knew that descriptions of character by others generally only reveal one facet of a person’s behaviour.

‘Let’s hope not for now, shall we? With any luck she just got overwhelmed playing nursemaid and went out to let off some steam for once. She wouldn’t be the first teenager to do so.’

My words sounded hollow even to my own ears, but my investigative brain was already counting her among the dead, and working out the possible significance of a victim from a less privileged background than almost all of the others. 

‘Do you think this is going to be a waste of time?’

He was referring to us having a chat with mum and the helper, since the mother’s condition was likely to make her of no use whatsoever. If Elizabeth was off gallivanting then she wasn’t necessarily going to let the carer in on her plans.

‘Probably, but I want to get a look at her room, so it might be worth a trip out anyway. Nine times out of ten teenage girls seem to have an irresistible urge to write down their misdemeanours in a diary.’

I flicked on the indicator and drifted off down a side road, taking a route that would keep us away from the busier roads.

‘That was before the information revolution. If there’s anything dark and dirty in her closet then it’ll be out in the blogosphere somewhere under an alias no doubt.’

He pulled a sour face. The internet was both a blessing and a curse for modern police investigations.

‘If she’s as insular as we’re being told then we might get lucky.’

I didn’t believe my own statement. If she was a strictly pen and paper girl then she probably wouldn’t be working in computing, and the perceived anonymity of the web made it easy for people to forget about how their movements online could be tracked without too much difficulty, but I’m an optimist most of the time so I was clinging to that small hope regardless. Please have left us something to go on Elizabeth.

‘You’re the boss.’

I caught his cheeky smile in my peripheral vision as I rounded another corner at speed, and despite everything I found myself unable to stop shaking my head in mock dismay and grinning back at him.

Chapter 43

‘Mrs Perry is not going to be much help to you I’m afraid.’

Ms Diane Lamb, the ‘professional care worker’ as she’d referred to herself at least four times in the two minutes since our arrival, directed her speech solely at Lee.

On another day I might have spoken up about her presumption that, as a man, he was automatically the senior officer here; but that assumption and her machine gun style of conversation allowed me the freedom to leave him to deal with her alone while I headed further into the house to explore.

‘I’ll be back with you in just a minute.’ I said, excusing myself and heading upstairs without the woman even acknowledging that I’d spoken.

I avoided the mother’s room for now, eager to take a quick look around Elizabeth’s personal space unaccompanied, and knowing straight away which bedroom was the girls out of three possible choices from the nameplate on her door. Even without the plaque the scent of perfume and skin products emanating from that section of the house would have left little doubt that this was a younger woman’s domain.

There was some resistance as I pushed open the door, but it proved to be nothing more sinister than a discarded bath towel, still slightly damp to the touch. An explosion of cosmetics was randomly arranged on top of an old table, together with a chipped mirror, the two seemed to function as a makeshift dressing table, and on the bed was evidence of a young lady preparing for a very big night out. I lifted the corner of the pile of discarded dresses with a biro, just in case anything in here became of evidential value further down the line. They were at the expensive end of high street, which was at odds with the description of the girl as someone who never socialised. Who were you dressing up for Elizabeth?

Realising that I couldn’t risk spending too much time in here before somebody asked where I was and what I was up to, I opened up each of the drawers in a battered old unit in turn, hastily scanning through the contents while trying not to make too much noise. Nothing screamed out ‘diary’ to me, and the same was true of the interior of the wardrobe, even after I opened up the shoe boxes in the bottom and checked to see whether the board at the base could be lifted out. I stopped for a moment, thinking fast and then deciding on the underneath of the mattress as my best chance. Jackpot. Not a diary, but a username and password for a computer, although there was no sign of one in the bedroom itself. I decided that I’d ridden my luck enough for the time being and pocketed the scrap of paper before exiting leaving everything just as I had found it.

‘Elizabeth? Elizabeth? Is that you?’

The voice came from behind the door opposite as I moved back across the landing, making me jump in surprise; the voice of a younger woman than I’d been expecting to hear.

Footsteps approached from downstairs as Diane Lamb heard her calling and began to make her way up, followed by Lee. Forced to improvise, I chose door number three and was relieved to find that it was a bathroom. I flushed the toilet and then switched on the tap for a few seconds, counting to ten before I switched it back off and emerged onto the landing for a second time.

‘We’re okay to speak to Mrs Perry now.’

Lee eyed me quizzically while the carer pushed past me towards the sound of the ill woman, and I gave him a wink as I turned to follow.

Inside the bedroom was the scent of bleach and disinfectant, but they failed to completely mask the aroma of something rotten underneath. I tried and failed to keep my smile in place for Mrs Perry’s benefit, but swiftly realised that it didn’t matter since she was virtually oblivious to our presence.

‘These two people are friends of Elizabeth’s, they just wanted to ask if you know where she’s nipped out to Mary?’

Diane tried her best on our behalf, but the sick woman stayed silent.

‘Okay, we’ll leave it at that for now, Diane. Just let us know if she tells you anything which might help at all later, even if it doesn’t seem particularly significant.’

Lee smiled quickly wanting to escape this place sooner rather than later.

‘A rich old man to take care of us both,’ said Mrs Perry softly and looked up with fierce intensity for a long moment, meeting my brown eyes with her own virtually colourless ones, and then her head drooped back forward again and she was beyond our reach once more.

I don’t suppose that all that many people are particularly fond of visiting hospitals, but I have an especially strong dislike for them that is born out of the unusual amount of time that my job has required me to spend in such places. I walked down the corridors of the University Hospital Coventry without needing to stop and ask anybody for directions. I’d already been told which wards both Emily and Fred Russell were being treated on and the maze of identical hallways no longer held any mysteries for me anymore. I passed signs for endocrinology, cardiology and the ENT – Ear, Nose and Throat clinic – in turn, weaving around the occasional dawdling confused straggler and the roving bands of medical staff striding with single minded intent past them.

Finally, I reached the ‘A’ wards, designated for those who required varying levels of psychiatric assistance, stopping at a forlorn looking reception area to explain who I was and why I was here to the disinterested young man behind the desk, until he sighed and buzzed me through without attempting a single word of conversation. Psychiatric wards have come a long, long way since the times of the infamous Bedlam Hospital, where the mentally ill were viewed as good entertainment for those who could pay to see them treated like animals, and the corridors were quiet and still.

‘Can I help you?’

A severe looking nurse in a grey uniform with white collar and sleeves stepped out in front of me, effectively barring my progress. Her expression suggested that she had no intention of helping me in any way whatsoever, if it could possibly be avoided.

‘I’ve come to visit my sister, Emily Foster, I believe she was admitted late last night.’

I offered a placatory smile to deflect her suspicious hostility and she regarded me steadily as if weighing up what to tell me.

‘She’s in a quiet room of her own on the left at the very bottom of this hallway. I’m sure it would be entirely unnecessary for me to tell you that she’s in a particularly fragile state at the moment, and that anybody, family or otherwise, causing her distress would swiftly find themselves leaving my ward?’

She carried on past me without waiting for acknowledgement, and I tried to consider what she dealt with every day so as not to feel too aggrieved. I reached Emily’s room two dozen echoing paces later and knocked softly before entering.

Emily was awake and sitting up as I walked in, with dark rings around her sunken eyes. She was wearing a cheap hospital night dress and she looked pale, drawn and exhausted, a shadow of her former self. I fumbled for something to say, feeling intensely awkward due to the circumstances of our last conversation and the fight that had followed, and having to look away from her distant watery gaze for fear that I’d burst into tears.

‘I know this is probably the most stupid thing to ask you at this minute in time, but how are you feeling?’

I pulled up a blue hard plastic chair, designed to stop visitors getting too comfortable it appeared, and sat down beside her bed, reaching out and taking hold of a limp clammy hand.