Grind Their Bones (20 page)

Chapter 65

One in the afternoon, and I was eating a flaccid unsatisfying chicken salad sandwich at my desk in the CID office while Lee enjoyed a heavily vinegar saturated bag of chips with gravy and mushy peas opposite me. We were discussing my latest brainwave about Hardwick’s interest in the Plymouth series in between mouthfuls, and I was trying hard not to launch myself over the desk and face first into Lee’s lunch in preference to my own undoubtedly healthy but ultimately tasteless option.

Geeta Badal had swiftly established that the Doctor had been involved with those cases in a peripheral capacity, as it had turned out that he was something of a maverick and a rising star in the pioneering field of British forensic psychology at a facility nearby at the time. However, that still didn’t explain why he’d made an automatic connection to the Grey Man series all these years later, and we were sounding out different similarities while we waited to stumble across something striking.

‘What about the fact that restraints were used on all but one of the victims? I know that fact in itself isn’t especially unusual, but what about the method and techniques? Is there anything that could constitute a signature?’

Lee tapped away at his keyboard for a few seconds, locating details of the bonds used in some of our cases. I watched him intently, smiling at his concentration face and trying unsuccessfully again to ignore his chips.

‘The knots used on our victims aren’t exactly the same as the ones before, but they’re still nautical ones, like those used by sailors of all varieties, which is a link of sorts. What defines our murders would you say?’

He looked across at me expectantly and I took a bite of my sandwich to buy myself more thinking time before I answered.

‘That they’re very controlled and planned as a general rule, obsessively so in fact, and they revolve around food and dining. Sarah Jennison’s leg was hacked off and roasted over hot coals, Charlotte Thomas had sections of her abdomen used for sushi rolls, Carla Tonelli’s upper arm was pot roasted with seasonal vegetables…’

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.