Grind Their Bones (21 page)

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 from 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.

‘Thank you Jessie, Zara’s fine for me too, I only mention my rank when I’m being pretentious. I believe that you’ve already been made aware that I’m a Detective from Warwickshire, and that I’d like to ask you a few questions from back when you lived near Plymouth, if that’s okay?’

I smiled and she nodded, looking out at the gardens rather than at me, but still giving me her attention.

‘I remember the last one who came down to talk to me about then too. it would have been a few months ago now, I’m not precisely sure of the date since the days have a habit of falling into one another somewhat when you get to my age.’

She gave me a conspiratorial glance and then resumed her appraisal of the view.

‘Another Detective came to see you? I don’t suppose you can remember his name can you Jessie?’

I tried to mask my surprise, but did a bad job of it and the old lady picked it up immediately.

‘That’s one of the problems with modern day police forces, isn’t it? The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing so they say.’

She patted my leg gently before continuing.

‘Anyway, he wasn’t a policeman. He was only helping the police, and he was a Doctor of some sort, a very pleasant chap who brought flowers with him. Not much of a looker, but if I was a few years younger I might have tried my luck anyway. Such good manners are very hard to come by these days, and I’ve learned to admire them much more than physical attributes in the course of my lifetime.’

She gave me a wink and I smiled again, trying to push away a sudden image of Alan Hardwick’s ruined face when we’d found him.

‘What did he want to know about exactly?’

I tried not hurry her along, but the words came out with an edge of urgency that made her look up at me and pause before she spoke again.

‘He wanted to know about Joseph’s car of all things, a great big old Jaguar it was, and his pride and joy, he used to polish it to such a sheen as you wouldn’t believe. You could barely look at it on a sunny day.’

I felt the growing sense of anticipation again, I was firmly back on the right track.

‘It sounds like he was a very fastidious man. Was there anything else he wanted to know about it, Jessie?’

I kept my eyes trained on her expression, watching her delve into her memory banks for details of the conversation.

‘Yes, he asked about Madeleine too. That’s our daughter, or perhaps I should say that was our daughter until she chose to disown us. I haven’t seen her in a very long time now.’

I struggled for another question, striving to see the significance of the daughter in all this, but then Jessie volunteered more information and pulled the veil away for me.

‘She chose him over the life that we could have provided her with. A Navy boy with a less than distinguished service record and a foul temper to go with it too. Not that you’d have suspected it to begin with when you first met him, he was always so charming to our faces. Joseph even let him borrow the car from time to time, which was nothing short of a miracle. But he was a bad seed through and through, Zara, my daughter’s face told us that when we got wise to the fact that he was hitting her and tried to separate them. Then when he got his inheritance he packed it all in and took her away from us to travel here there and everywhere with the money burning a hole in his pocket, and there was nothing that we could do about it.’

Chapter 71

When I left the grounds of Jessie’s expensive nursing home my mind was spinning with what she had shared with me. I now knew that Doctor Alan Hardwick had been here before me and heard what the old lady had to say about the man that was in all likelihood responsible for a chain of serial killings that spanned more than three decades. My heart sank at how a man with a proud record of helping us to catch these monsters could keep a revelation like this to himself, and allow the Grey Man to carry on murdering and mutilating as frequently as he desired. I knew that Hardwick’s financial difficulties had forced him towards acts of increasing desperation, but in my mind he was now complicit in the two murders besides his own that had occurred since he’d managed to solve this puzzle. The darkest reaches of my thoughts couldn’t help feeling that he’d gotten his just desserts.

Oddly Jessie hadn’t been able to recall the full name of the man who had stolen her daughter away, just that his first name was John and that he’d been in the Navy up until the time that he received a very large inheritance from his parent’s estate. But perhaps I was being uncharitable since there’d been a lot of years pass since then. If her reckoning on the dates was accurate then he’d received the money shortly after the fifth and final Plymouth murder, and then left to visit a string of far flung destinations. She didn’t know how long he’d been abroad with Madeleine for exactly, because of the breakdown in communications with her daughter that had followed them leaving. But they’d have had the means and the time to be able to holiday at will over the years that followed. My skin crawled at what ‘John’ might have been able to get away with in a string of countries as he’d travelled and lived in the lap of luxury. There were many parts of the world where affluence bought immunity from suspicion and police officials could be paid to look the other way if they ever came knocking, and I felt a quiet fury as I promised justice for the unknown dead.

I climbed back into the car and left the radio silent as I pulled away, thinking now about Lee’s question from in the office as we’d bounced ideas around the other day. What defines our murders would you say? That they’re very controlled and planned as a general rule, obsessively so, and that they revolve around food and dining.

The food and dining was the clue that I’d missed the significance of. It was much more specific than that, his choice of methods was showing us whereabouts he’d been in the world. The sushi rolls, roasting over spits and open air char grilling of parts of his victims were like a sick in joke, advertising places he’d been and their respective cuisines, and with the possible exception of the dead Doctor, we’d all missed its significance completely. 

I wondered whether he was disappointed by our ineptitude, and whether acts such as the staging of scenes and the ‘gift’ of Elizabeth Perry’s head being made up to look like my own were his way of trying to prompt us further along the right path? I’d read before about how some of these types of murderer subconsciously wanted to be caught and prevented from committing more crimes, and my mind turned again to the creepy letters that he was leaving for me, in which he drew comparisons between us. If he did want to be caught then it was specifically me that he wanted to be the one to come knocking on his door, that much was becoming clear. I turned right out of the end of the long driveway and accelerated along the road that took me back towards the motorway, knowing that when I arrived back I would be armed with the information to finally uncover his identity and finish this thing. The only question besides that remaining now was what exactly what the nature of that connection to me was?