Grind Their Bones (26 page)

‘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 please. 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 then 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.

When the bad dreams do come they’re mainly concerned with the final moments after I had leapt into the fire pit. The moments when I rolled around on the cool grass to put out my burning clothing and hair, hearing the death rattle of the Grey Man beside me over the screams and sobs of Lexie and Annabel, and I felt like my entire skin was melting away. Thankfully that hadn’t been true, although the pain was excruciating, my burns were not at the worst end of the spectrum, and the majority of the damage had been done to my legs and the areas of my arms which were exposed by short sleeves. My face had been ‘merely singed’, to use the words of the cheerful nurses who had changed my dressings and administered more pain relief when the dull aching had grown back to an agonising roar. Now my hair was almost back to its unruly usual state, and I’d recovered the majority of my eyebrows, although the left one was noticeably more sparse than the right.

Lee’s injury had been serious but not life-threatening in the end, the blood loss brought back under control when the troops had arrived to find the horror show that was waiting for them. Subsequent surgery had restored most of the mobility to his shoulder joint, although it was never going to be quite the way it had been before. Bless him, but he was deeply ashamed that he’d not been able to come to my rescue in what he saw as my hour of need, and I’d had to have stern words with him in order to partially snap him back out of it.

Unfortunately the woman in the bathroom, who had indeed been Madeleine as we’d suspected, had not been so lucky. She’d held on for long enough to make it to the hospital, which was nothing short of miraculous in view of the amount of blood that she’d lost, but then died on the operating table as surgeons tried to do something about the catastrophic brain injuries that had been sustained.

Lexie and Annabel were staying with mine and Emily’s parents now, Emily had been released from hospital and predictably gone back to David again now, but was not deemed to be in a position to cater for their additional needs yet. Outwardly at least, we were all hopeful that the situation would change soon. My heart bled for both of the girls, and all that they’d had to see and endure. I’d wanted to pull them into my arms and tell them that everything was okay now when I’d killed Reimoore right in front of them, but I was in too much pain to speak or to be touched, and they’d been forced to sit beside me until our backup had arrived, not knowing whether I would live or die too. So much pain and horror at such a young age and from the ones that they’d been taught to love and trust the most. It was going to take time, patience and luck for their scars to fully heal. I’d been told to expect that mine never would, although their appearance would improve eventually.