Flesh and Blood (7 page)

“Oh, yes, sorry, I’ll drop it into the shared folder now,” said Emma. I found it and slotted it into place on the relevant page. There was her mum at the reopening ceremony, shaking hands with the mayor
and the leaders of the town council.

Neither of us said anything for a minute or two. We each stared into our screens and tapped at our keyboards.

Finally, Emma puffed out her cheeks. “Are you bored?” she whispered. “I’m getting bored with this.”

“There’s still plenty to do,” I said. “I’m happy to leave it for now, but we won’t have time tomorrow.”

“Oh bugger, yeah,” she sighed. “It’s that stupid careers thing all day. Forgot about that.”

“If you like, I could come over at the weekend. I mean, you only live a few hundred metres away!” Strange as it might sound, there really wasn’t any agenda behind what I said. I didn’t for a second think it might be a chance to make a move on her, or anything like that, and I certainly didn’t feel any of the burning urgency to see inside the Priory that was to consume me not long afterwards.

I would have asked her over to ours, but the thought of my mother going all gooey over her was too terrible to even contemplate. Emma would leave our house with the unambiguous impression that my parents thought of her as a lovely girl and ideal girlfriend material. Which, of course, they did.

She smiled at me. “No, you’re right, we should finish now.” Something must have flashed across my face, because she added: “Sorry, I’m not being funny, it’s just that I very rarely have anyone over to my house.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

She looked a little sheepish. “Well, I know it sounds silly, but I tend to guard my own personal space. If you see what I mean. I like to have lots of friends, as you know, and I like to be doing things and going places, but I also like to keep something that’s just for me. I keep my own home private. Sorry, I know that sounds weird.”

“No, not at all,” I said. It did sound slightly odd, but no more than that. “I try to keep my parents out of my room all the time! The notice on my door saying ‘sod off’ doesn’t seem to work, though.”

She laughed. “Mum and Dad think I’m peculiar. They have their cronies and business types over for dinner all the time.”

I looked back at the screen in front of me. “It must be strange, seeing your mum in the paper like that.”

Emma shrugged. “It happens now and again. You’d be surprised how blasé you get about it! Mum
and Dad are always being papped at charity dos – they love it. No, really, they do. They like to be seen to be doing their bit for the plebs.”

I blinked. Had I heard that right? “Sorry?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said.

“Plebs?” I said, with exaggerated emphasis.

“Oh, stop it,” she smiled. “You know what I mean. Charity work. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I agree.”

“They collected the money to set up a new food bank last Christmas. Sometimes, you have to step in and do things for people that they won’t do for themselves.”

I kept my tone deliberately jokey. “I thiiiink it’s more a question of
can’t
than
won’t
. I’m pretty sure users of food banks aren’t just too lazy to go to Tesco. Hmm, can’t say I had you down as a closet snob.”

“I am
not
a snob,” she laughed, wide-eyed. Her mouth wrinkled into a semi-grin. “It’s just that … y’know, there are some people … to whom I
am
superior.” She giggled. She was making a joke of it, but she said it with such ease that I felt I was glimpsing an aspect of her I’d never seen before.

Even so, it didn’t ring any particular alarm bells. It should have done, but it didn’t. Although it marked the first time I’d ever seen her as having ‘Hadlingtonist’ attitudes, I think I might still have forgiven her anything at that point.

Maybrick was full of snobs, I reasoned logically. Some of it was bound to rub off on her. She came from a wealthy family, so a little right-wing grit, a little detachment from certain realities, was simply a product of her sheltered upbringing and her privileged surroundings. No more than that.

I reasoned it away, but my heart took a step back from her. The first of many.

We brushed the subject aside and returned to our project. It took a while to finish, but we did it in the end. We got good marks for it, too.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to half term, I never so much as caught sight of her grandfather or her mother. Messages were relayed to me that my original appointment at Caroline Greenhill’s surgery had been rearranged, twice. Still wary, I missed both of them. In the continued absence of any clue as to why the Greenhills were so keen to get me there, continuing to keep my distance seemed the best
policy. I missed both rescheduled appointments, but nothing happened. Dr Greenhill appeared to give up asking after that.

I still hadn’t had so much as a glimpse of Emma’s dad, Byron Greenhill, either. Sometimes, that Renault people carrier would be in the drive of Bierce Priory, and sometimes another car, a red sports model that I assumed to be his. I heard he spent a lot of time working away, or abroad.

There was nothing more in the papers about runaways or missing pets. The
Hadlington Courier
had a few slow-news weeks.

It was what happened with Mum and Dad that cranked up my suspicions again. No – more than that. Mum and Dad were the tipping point.

It was little things, at first. Dad stopped doing all the small DIY jobs around the house, and Mum stopped nagging him about them. The normal pattern of behaviour in our house was for Mum to identify something that needed doing, then she’d nag Dad to do it, then she’d nag him again, then he’d tell her to do it herself if it was so bloody important, then she’d say that she damn well would if she had the time, then he’d finally get it done. This fixed,
unchanging pattern had been completely cast aside.

It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that we had money now, that we could afford to have someone else do these things. They just left them undone, as if they neither of them could be bothered. A couple of the bannisters on the stairs had been knocked out of alignment when we moved in, when the removals people were lugging stuff upstairs. I asked Mum why they were left sticking out like that. She just shrugged and said, “Does it matter?”

Dad started composing songs again, which was something he hadn’t done in years, not properly. At first, I was delighted, for him and for Mum. I hoped it might signify a whole new lease of life for him. It seemed that by finally having commercial success, he’d found a fresh creativity. But what he played us on one of his guitars was terrible, nothing like the material he’d done in the past. Overlong, dreary, almost tuneless. Mum clapped and laughed. I just smiled and nodded, wondering what on earth he was doing. At the same time, he stopped adding to his collection of so-called memorabilia, despite for the first time having more than enough cash to indulge his habit.

On top of all that, Mum eased up on the work hours. Having her at home more was nice, but she also eased up on things like showering and putting petrol in the car. She was a good cook, much better than Dad, but her repertoire gradually shrank to three or four dishes, which she repeated day after day. When I tentatively asked her why, she seemed puzzled by the question, and told me if I didn’t like it then I knew where the kitchen was, you cheeky little sod.

Both of them were changing. Slowly, subtly, but definitely. And not for the better.

That slight oddity in their mood, the one I’d noticed before, was set in now. It was their normal state. I’m not sure if anyone who didn’t know them well, or at least fairly well, would have noticed much difference but to me, living with them, they’d become … the word that comes to mind is detached.

Finally, one evening, the reason suddenly hit me, because of something specific I noticed.

We were in the living room. I was reading and they were flopped on the (new) sofa, Mum ordering the groceries delivery on the laptop, Dad chuckling
at
EastEnders
. When the truth dawned on me, it felt like running into a brick wall.

The changes in their behaviour had reminded me of some aspects of what we’d been told to look out for in our friends, when they did the warning-us-off-drugs thing at school. I didn’t for one second think that Mum and Dad were getting hold of anything illegal. Dad had always steered well clear of anything like that, despite his music business connections. He’d had a friend who’d overdosed when he was still in his teens, and it had put him off for life.

And they weren’t drinking. They’d never really been drinkers. There were some beers and a bottle of wine in the fridge, but that was about it. Where was this peculiar dopiness coming from?

The icy sensation washed over me as several thoughts clicked into place, one after the other:

They seemed permanently laid-back, permanently pleased and smiley. Just like the Giffords next door. And the Daltons.

What did Mum and Dad, and the Giffords and the Daltons have in common?

Dr Greenhill’s GP surgery. Their pointless check-ups, as far as Mum and Dad were concerned at
least. Neither of my parents were exactly in poor health. The Giffords, being that much older, I could understand, but not the Daltons, or us Hunters.

Dr Greenhill was…?

Supplying them all with something? Tranquillizers, antidepressants? Something else?

There and then, I asked Mum and Dad about it, as subtly as I could. They flatly denied there was any kind of medication in the house, beyond a box of paracetamol in the kitchen drawer.

Were they lying to me? Were they even
aware
that they were lying to me?

Any why? For God’s sake, why?

I almost dismissed the whole thing as beyond belief. What possible reason could our GP – any GP – have for dosing up a whole street? But, again and again, my mind kept snapping back to Emma’s mum, and Emma, and her grandad, all taking for granted that I was going to comply with the check-up thing. “I’m sure you’ll feel better for a chat,” Emma’s grandad had said.

The more it churned around inside me, the creepier it got.

And what was it old Mr Gifford had said
on the day after we moved in? About Emma’s dad? The ex-surgeon. One of the country’s leading psychopharmacologists. And what do psychopharmacologists do? I looked it up immediately. They create drugs. Ones that affect mood, and thinking, and behaviour. Some of the things that had been developed over the years were terrifying.

These thoughts and connections spiralled through my head because of that specific thing I noticed: I could see tiny, thin lines on Mum and Dad’s upper lips. Had they not been there before? Had they only just appeared? Had I been missing them for days? I didn’t know. Mum and Dad now had the same barely-there, slightly yellow runny noses that all the neighbours had when we met them for the first time.

Correction, that the neighbours
still
had, because I’d seen Mr Dalton ferrying Greye to his playgroup only the day before, and I’d talked to Mrs Gifford as she’d tidied her front garden at the weekend. I’d seen them dab the same little trails from their noses as they’d done weeks earlier. And I’d thought to myself that, yuck, that virus was hanging around for a long time.

My parents and the neighbours showed the same behaviour. And had apparently caught the same tenacious virus. Which I miraculously hadn’t. The only difference was that I’d never been for a check-up with Dr Greenhill, and they all went regularly.

There seemed to be only one logical conclusion. Something was being done to them.

I had no proof. Coincidences and suspicions weren’t proof. The utter absurdity of my so-called logical conclusion kept hammering away at my brain, throwing out questions, until I just couldn’t hold it all in my head at once.

After all the wavering, and the indecision, and the puzzling, I decided to do some research on the Greenhills. I’d caught the scent of the story I’d been after, it’s true, but more than anything else I wanted to investigate for my own peace of mind.

I hoped I was wrong – I want to make that clear. I didn’t want to discover that my parents, or anyone else, really were being doped up by Caroline Greenhill. It seemed both horrific and ridiculous.

More than once, it has crossed my mind that it might have been easier to give in, avoid any emotional pain and go for those check-ups myself.
I could have let myself get with the programme, and remained in blissful ignorance.

But I needed to find the truth. If these new fears were true, how did this connect to what I’d witnessed that night? Had someone, perhaps, been testing medication on that dog? Could it be that it wasn’t injured, but doped? Had the scream been one of discovery after all? Had Emma – or someone – walked in on the experiment? And if there was some sort of experimentation involved, were there now any reasons to connect the Greenhills to the murder in the park? Could the victim have been part of some sort of experiment himself, as I’d originally thought? Had I been too quick to believe the prevailing view about the killing? If so, why had that particular man died, and not some other?

What my research would actually accomplish, I didn’t stop to consider. Beyond the self-centred chance to write it all up for the
Courier
, that is.

Half term started on October 18th. Once school work was out of the way, I’d have the best part of a week to dig up whatever I could. As we left school on that Friday, I let Liam and Jo in on my plans. I mentioned my suspicions of doping, and
my reasons for them, but I also laid it on so thick that even I baulked at the idea. Nevertheless, we had a long conversation in which they flipped from alarm, to derision, and back again.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just become Emma’s boyfriend and ask?” said Liam. “I think she likes you.”

“She doesn’t have boyfriends, remember,” said Jo.

“OK, close friend, then. Get yourself invited over to her house.”

“She doesn’t do that either,” I said.

“That’s true,” said Jo. “I don’t know anyone who’s seen inside her house.”

“I want to keep my distance, anyway,” I said.

“I think Sam’s right,” said Jo.

“About the Greenhills?” said Liam. “Don’t be daft.”

“I meant about keeping his distance,” said Jo. She gave me a look that I couldn’t quite interpret. “I’m keeping an open mind about the Greenhills. If you unearth anything scandalous, can my dad have the exclusive?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“I assume you’re going to be too busy to come over and help me build a new computer then?” said Liam.

“Text me in a few days,” I said.

By Monday, I’d begun work. From my room, I combed through every publicly accessible database I could find. I paid for temporary membership of various online academic and news media archives, and got Liam to hack me into a couple more I needed to be an employee to use. I sifted through information at the upgraded Hadlington public library and the County Records Office, and found half a dozen slim volumes on the history of the town and the surrounding areas.

I even managed to contact the author of one of those volumes by email, and asked her a few questions based on what she’d mentioned about Bierce Priory in her book. To my surprise, she’d worked alongside Ken Greenhill, Emma’s grandfather, at the town council and had known the Greenhill family in years gone by. Off the record, she repeated a number of items of minor tittle-tattle about them, and in particular about Ken Greenhill.

In just a few days, I’d managed to piece together a reasonably detailed picture. The thing about being The Country’s Leading Whatever is that a lot of other
people know who you are. The same goes if you’re someone who used to appear on TV, no matter how long ago. Or if you used to be a leading light in local politics. Between them, Byron, Caroline and Ken Greenhill had notched up hundreds of mentions in local and overseas newspapers, official documents, academic and medical journals, scientific blogs, political diaries and expert testimonies, plus a smattering of interviews and entries in various high-society calendars, even a few appearances in gossip columns.

Assembled from many sources, my research into the Greenhills could be summarized like this:

Emma’s parents, Byron and Caroline, were both born in 1972 and met as undergraduates at Oxford University. Caroline’s family were very wealthy, one step away from aristocracy, but by the time she married Byron in 1993 her only surviving relative was her elder brother Vincent, who is now a parliamentary undersecretary in the Home Office.

Byron’s father, Ken Greenhill, was originally called Kurt Hugelgrun. The Hugelgruns were a dynasty of industrialists from Austria. (Many of these details came from a German public archive, which
Jo managed to translate bits of for me – she was taking German at school.) The Hugelgrun fortune was created by two things: munitions manufacture for the German army during World War I, and a patented medicine produced by a pharmaceutical company they owned, which was used extensively during the flu pandemic of 1918/19, an outbreak that killed well over fifty million people.

The Hugelgruns kept out of politics, playing no part in the formation of the Third Reich or the horrors that followed. However, they left Austria in 1938, eleven months before the outbreak of World War II. Upon their arrival in Britain, official records list them as being refugees from the Nazis, escaping persecution. However, there was no record of them doing anything in Austria that could have got them persecuted. Their reason for leaving the country might have centred around a series of murders that took place in the suburbs of Vienna in the mid 30s. Over a period of two and a half years, the bodies of seven women and three men were found dumped in the city’s narrow, twisting alleyways. All had been sliced open with surgical precision, and internal organs removed, including eyes, brains and lungs.
Comparisons were inevitably drawn with the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in 1888.

Suspicion fell on Gottfried Hugelgrun, Ken/Kurt’s father. Three of the victims had worked for Hugelgrun companies and Gottfried, then aged thirty-six, had twice been seen by other employees at locations that tied in with crime scenes. Gottfried was a biochemist, but was known to have an extensive laboratory at his home, where numerous preserved organs – human and animal – were openly on display for guests. There was no actual evidence to link him to any of the killings so charges were never brought.

Nothing relating to these murders appears in any UK information source, and there are no mentions of them in any true crime books I’ve been able to find. This is probably because the original investigation appears to have been patchy, and there’s very little documentation beyond the initial autopsy reports.

Gottfried sold up and arrived in England with his wife, Marta, his mother, Helga, and his infant son, Kurt. Almost the first thing he did was to become a British citizen, translating his name from German to become Godfrey Greenhill, his son becoming Kenneth, his wife becoming Martha. Some mystery
surrounds the fate of Helga. She vanishes from official county records during World War II, and it’s not known how she died. Ken was only four years old when the family left Austria, and claimed in later years to have no recollection of his original home. Gottfried bought Bierce Priory less than a month after landing at Dover.

The house was built in 1812, on what was then open land. The area where Priory Mews was added in the 1920s was originally stables. There exist several poorly preserved photographs of liveried footmen standing beside the low, shed-like stable buildings. It seems that a great deal of work was done to Bierce Priory at the same time as the three Priory Mews houses were being constructed, but what exactly was done is not recorded, beyond the addition of that annexe to the side of the main structure.

In the late 1940s Gottfried, like his mother, vanishes from official records. Ken Greenhill went to a private school in Surrey, then to Cambridge University, and volunteered for army duty rather than being called up for National Service. He left the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1958 and went straight into local politics.

Ken Greenhill spent his entire career at Hadlington’s council offices, in one capacity or another, retiring in 1995. Among many other things, he was responsible for a number of housing developments, including Elton Gardens. Newspaper pictures from 1963 show him shaking hands with the chairman of a large building company. He also had the path behind Priory Mews laid, the one leading down to the river, and he set the catchment areas of all the local schools. Given the frequency with which he was applauded for one municipal project after another, he must have built up an enormous network of influential contacts, as well as having the trust and support of the town’s population. It seems he was a demanding person to work for, and caused controversy several times by sacking council staff whom he deemed to be not pulling their weight.

Ken married a woman called Vivienne Hobcourt in 1971. Like Ken’s eventual daughter-in-law Caroline, Vivienne came from a well-connected family, the heirs to a large fortune made in South African diamond mining. They had two sons, Byron and Leonard. The younger brother is now chief constable of the county’s police, a man
highly respected for taking a tough stance on crime (although why Elton Gardens apparently remains a permanent trouble spot is a mystery). Vivienne is said to have run away in 1975, abandoning her sons, although where she went, and why, is unknown. The incident caused local tongues to wag, but public sympathies were totally on Ken’s side.

Byron Greenhill has had an even more glittering career than either his brother or father, winning a number of international prizes and serving on three government committees relating to medical issues. His research work has been mainly in the field of developing medicines for use in psychiatric wards, for calming and controlling dangerous and disturbed patients.

Between 1988 and 1993, when Byron was in his teens and early twenties, a string of murders and other serious crimes took place in and around Hadlington, which caused a brief but intense flurry of interest in the national media. Seven corpses were found, dissected and dumped. Organs and other body parts went missing from Hadlington’s nearest hospital. A doctor at the hospital was found stabbed
to death. It was thought he stumbled upon one of the organ thefts taking place, and was subjected to what the press called ‘a frenzied attack with a knife and a pair of scissors’. The police officer leading the investigation, Detective Inspector Jeffrey Coombs, received a commendation for tracking down and arresting a homeless alcoholic called Albert Small, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and then killed in Pentonville by another prisoner in 1996. Small’s defence lawyer had argued that his client had an unshakable alibi for two of the deaths, and showed that the man’s health prevented him from having the physical strength necessary to commit the crimes.

Nothing whatsoever links Byron, or any of the Greenhills, to these crimes, apart from the coincidence that Detective Inspector Coombs was a close friend of Ken Greenhill. However, Byron was involved in an incident reported as a brief ‘late news’ item in the
Hadlington Courier
in March 1993, which then received no further coverage at all. He was arrested by police after a woman, walking alone through the park, claimed she was grabbed from behind and threatened with a knife. That single, short news
report is the only evidence that the incident ever took place. Byron’s accuser was committed to a psychiatric unit in January 1994.

Caroline Greenhill made a similarly brief appearance in a national tabloid’s salacious rumours column in 2007, although her actual name wasn’t printed. A two-paragraph boxed section beginning ‘Which ex-TV doc and wife of a prominent scientist…’ claimed she’d been questioned by police following ‘an attempt to threaten’ a senior officer. The man in question, who was two command ranks below Chief Inspector Leonard Greenhill, was reassigned to a neighbouring police force a few months later.

The only reports relating to Emma Greenhill I could find were notices in the
Courier
about her wins with the school badminton team, and her triumphs in the district Under-Sixteens music contest.

I compiled my dossier on the Greenhills with a growing sense of unease. There was more than I’ve summarized here. By cross-referencing facts about Byron Greenhill’s work – mainly comments in medical journals about where in the world he was conducting research – it was possible to correlate extended times
he spent in both Chicago and Berlin with reports of ‘dissection’ murders carried out in those cities.