Flesh and Blood (8 page)

There was nothing concrete to go on, nothing definite and proved, but I was rapidly getting the creeping sensation that the Greenhills were hiding something truly horrible. Taking everything into consideration, I thought that the most probable scenario was that there was simply a streak of insanity in the family. Byron seemed the likeliest current candidate, because of those overseas correlations. Did he have periods of insanity? Did he battle severe psychosis? Had he murdered the man in the park, and attacked that dog I’d seen? Had members of earlier generations suffered from the same forms of illness?

Might that be the true explanation for the face I’d seen at the window? The unnatural expression, the staring eyes?

Could that be what drove Byron’s research? Was he trying to cure himself? Were the other Greenhills desperately trying to keep his secret, and hush it all up?

At the end of the half-term week, I slapped the laptop shut and buried my face in my hands. I was beginning to think that the only insane person was me.

Downstairs, in the living room, that week’s edition of the
Hadlington Courier
reported another dead body found on the banks of the Arvan, this time well out of town, about ten miles upstream. Its hands and feet had been removed.

“At least that one’s got nothing to do with Elton Gardens,” said Dad, flicking over to the Property section. “Crikey, there’s one for sale at the end of Maybrick Road for nearly three million.”

I was watching my parents closely now. They remained ‘adjusted’, perfectly contented in themselves, but speculation about what might be coursing through their veins kept me wary and on edge, and more determined than ever to uncover some hard evidence.

On the local TV news that teatime, the parents of the second missing girl, Kat Brennan, the one Jo used to know, made a tearful appeal for Kat to get in touch with them. The girl’s mother, barely able to look at the camera, begged her daughter to come home. It didn’t matter what she’d done, she sobbed, they just wanted her home safe. It was heartbreaking. And, once again, I couldn’t help but leap to a troubling conclusion.

A photo of Kat stayed on screen, as a reporter interviewed Chief Inspector Leonard Greenhill. His officers were actively pursuing several lines of enquiry, he said, but as Elton Gardens was a notorious area for gang activity, he felt that there were grounds to fear the worst. No, it had not been his idea to hold this press conference here today. Yes, he would appeal to any member of the public to come forward if they were able to provide any further information relevant to the case.

I called Jo, and arranged to meet her dad at the
Hadlington Courier
the following morning.

The offices were located in the middle of the town centre, two upper floors of a small building that also housed a row of shops and a dentist’s practice. The weekly paper was only sparsely staffed on a Saturday, but it was easy to imagine the place alive with activity. Desks were close together and surrounded by filing cabinets. Papers were piled up on almost every surface.

Jo’s dad, Martin, was a plump man with thick glasses and neatly parted hair that was going grey in a ragged band around the edges. His crisp white shirt was rapidly coming untucked from the front of
his trousers. He showed me into a small section of the office that was partitioned off, and wheeled a squeaky swivel chair out for me to sit on. He plonked himself down behind his desk.

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Sam,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, suddenly conscious that I might be in a job-interview situation. “Jo, umm, mentioned that I might be able to do some work experience here. Maybe after the spring term?”

Martin sniffed and nodded a couple of times. “Yes, I’m sure we can sort something out. It’s good to find someone your age who’s keen. It’s a dying trade, I’m afraid. Local papers will be all but gone in a few years.” He held out both palms. “Don’t want to put you off!”

“You won’t,” I grinned.

“OK, Jo said you had something for me, that might be a bit … iffy?”

I opened the lever arch file I’d brought with me. Suddenly, I felt very foolish. In the file were over a hundred pages of text and photos I’d printed at home, and sitting there in that office they suddenly seemed to amount to nonsense.

“Er, well,” I said. “It’s more that I’d like your 
opinion. What I’ve got here is… Well, I hope… Perhaps I should just start with what’s happened since I moved to Hadlington?”

He sat back a little. “Off you go, I’m all ears.”

With nerves biting at my stomach, I outlined what I’d observed and experienced, and set out the research I’d done over the week. As I spoke, I removed pages from the file and placed them in front of him, pointing out things in photographs or old newspaper reports. He looked at them all carefully, peering beneath his glasses to examine one or two items more closely, and stacked them all neatly to one side of his desk.

When I’d finished, he sniffed again and took a final look through the pages. He leaned forward on his desk, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“OK,” he said at last, “here’s the good news. Young man, you have the makings of a first-class journalist, you really do. You’ve clearly got a nose for a story, and this research is better than most of the hacks in this place could turn in.” He sat back and paused. He was choosing his words carefully. “The bad news is, there’s nothing I can do with this, and you’re almost certainly wrong.”

“You think so?” I said. “I do actually want to be wrong, believe it or not.”

“Look at it this way,” he said, scratching his nose. “Which of these two scenarios is the more plausible? One, the Greenhills are drugging people, for purposes unknown. Or perhaps, going on the rest of what you’ve got here, in order to keep people docile in case they happen to spot funny goings-on at Bierce Priory. Goings-on, such as: the Greenhills might be involved in an assortment of very nasty crimes, which is possibly, according to your theory, to do with one or more of them suffering psychotic episodes. Yeah?”

I nodded cautiously.

“Scenario two. The Greenhills are well known, very respected, generous donors to charity, and so on and so on. The person raising questions about them is a lone teenager, and from the look of you a rather stressed-out one, at that. You’re putting two and two together and making six and a half. Which of those two scenarios would
you
believe?”

“The second, obviously,” I said glumly. “I do realize how weird it sounds. Do I really look stressed out?”

“You do,” said Martin. “I’m guessing this has been preying on your mind? But cold viruses
can
hang around for months, these days, y’know? Look, the Greenhills are important people in Hadlington, but I’m not exactly their biggest fan. Ken Greenhill is an arrogant son of a bitch, frankly. I’d love to print something that’d take him down a peg or two, I really would. And Byron Greenhill makes a lot of people’s flesh crawl. ‘Self-basting’ our editor here calls him. But what you’ve got here are suspicions and loose connections. You need hard proof. Catch Caroline Greenhill with a syringe in her hands. Photograph Byron running amok with a meat cleaver. Anything less is nothing at all. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You might get one of the tabloids in London willing to run with something, but even then it’s unlikely. And you know why? I’m not sure you’ve considered this angle yet.”

I frowned. “Why?”

He sniffed. “Ninety per cent of the law in this country has got nothing to do with justice, young man. Remember that. It’s about protection.
The protected survive, the unprotected fall. The Greenhills have a lot of influential friends, and they have enough money to pay for a whole army of lawyers. If you start throwing accusations at them, they’re going to start throwing lawyers at you. Fact. And everyone at this paper, if we printed those accusations.”

“You’re right,” I sighed, “I hadn’t considered that.”

“Those instances you mentioned, of stories appearing briefly? You can bet your life that the Greenhills got their legal Rottweilers to squash them. If there’s no hard proof, it’s all just opinion. You haven’t put any of this stuff out online, have you?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way, unless you want lawyers and a million online loonies howling at you.”

I gathered up all my research, and clipped it back into the file. I felt like an idiot.

“Look, Sam,” said Martin. “It’s not even like I don’t believe you. No, scratch that, I don’t think you’re right, not for a second – the implications are just beyond rational. But I’m willing to be proved wrong. OK? I’m willing to keep an open mind. Jesus, you’ve only got to look at the headlines from
the past few years to see that the most astonishing cover-ups are possible. In politics, in the media, in the police, almost anywhere. And for every one that gets exposed, you can be sure there are a dozen others, maybe a hundred others. Money is power, and enough power means you can do whatever the hell you like, right or wrong, good or bad. The only rule people like that stick to is: don’t get caught.”

I clutched the file to my chest and stood up, the swivel chair squeaking loudly. “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time.”

Martin laughed. “You haven’t. Honestly, Sam, you haven’t. You could be really good at this job. When you want to arrange to come in for a week, give me a call.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. OK?”

“Thanks,” I said through a half-smile.

I walked home instead of taking the bus. I needed to think. Running through all the research in my head, and everything I’d seen for myself, the only thing that became clear was that no explanation I’d considered so far appeared to fit
all
the evidence. No, mustn’t call it evidence. It wasn’t evidence yet.

What could I do now? Should I wait, and hope that something more substantial would turn up? And what would that mean anyway? More deaths? How far did all this have to go before I could and should start blaming myself for not getting proper evidence sooner?

They had to have me marked down as a potential troublemaker, because of my refusal to go to Caroline Greenhill’s surgery. They were probably keeping an equally close eye on me.

Did they know I’d just been to see Jo’s dad?

No, probably not. The only people who knew I was going to that office were me, Jo and her dad. I hadn’t told my parents. They thought I was going into town to look for new clothes. The only way the Greenhills could know was if they were having me followed 24/7.

I swung around, scanning the pavements behind me as I walked. There was nobody there. I was just being paranoid. If they thought I was
that
much of a threat, and they were as determined to maintain a cover-up as I suspected, they could simply have had me snatched off the street, couldn’t they? The fact that I was still here, free to investigate, must surely
indicate that I didn’t bother them all that much!

No matter which way I looked at it, I kept coming back to the idea that one of the Greenhills was insane and that the others were hiding it. It obviously wasn’t Emma, she wouldn’t have had the strength to overpower someone like the man in the park. Everything pointed to Byron, who had perhaps inherited something from his grandfather Gottfried. A faulty gene? A hormone deficiency? I didn’t know enough about the subject to form a realistic opinion.

Perhaps drugs kept Byron normal most of the time. Perhaps they kept having to change his medication, as the effects of one drug wore off when his system got used to it.

Perhaps this might explain their doping in Priory Mews. Perhaps they used their immediate neighbours as guinea pigs, as if they were lab rats, testing new control drugs so that when Byron – or whoever – needed new medication, it was ready.

That made a nasty kind of sense, didn’t it?

When I got home, I found Mum and Dad in a positively bubbly mood. Mum was hoovering, and Dad was lifting his feet up to let Mum hoover under them.

“Did you buy anything?” said Mum.

“No,” I said.

“You can go in the expensive shops now, you know.”

“I know.”

Mum switched off the Hoover. “How are you getting on with Emma over the road?”

“Didn’t you ask me that already?” I grumbled.

“I’m asking you again.”

“Fine. We get on fine.”

“I’m so pleased,” said Mum, squeezing up her shoulders and face in an ‘ahhh’ gesture. Then she nodded towards the mantelpiece above the gas fire.

There was a large white rectangle of card propped up against one of Dad’s ornaments. I picked the card up and read it twice. It was an invitation, for the following Saturday, November 2nd, to attend the Annual Greenhill Family Halloween Ball at Bierce Priory, Priory Mews, Maybrick Road, Hadlington at 8pm.

RSVP.

I don’t know what it was that drew me to keep watch at the back of the house on the night after we got the invitation. It was possibly nothing more than the nagging doubts that were haunting me. More likely, Martin’s advice about gathering evidence was still foremost in my mind, but without any firm idea of how to go about it, simply watching and waiting seemed as useful a strategy as any.

I set up a webcam to watch the front of the Priory from my bedroom. I watched the back, from what was still a spare and as-yet-unused bedroom, on the rear corner of our house opposite my own room. I could see across our back garden, and all the way down the hill to the river. Beyond that was the park and, slightly tucked away to the right, the edge of the Elton Gardens estate.

I kept the lights off, and had a pair of binoculars and a camera with me. The image from the webcam
glowed on the laptop at my feet. It was gone eleven o’clock. Mum and Dad had gone to bed, and I sat on an old fold-out chair with my elbows propped up on the window sill.

There were a few lights visible in the park. Lamps lit the cycle lanes that skirted the main lawns, and in the distance was the illuminated sign outside the leisure centre. A sickly glow came from the direction of the estate, the street lights and house lights mingling into a dull, orange-yellow shine. Now and again, you could see a glitter of light reflecting off the black surface of the river. These occasional glitters were all there was to remind you that it wasn’t some gaping, bottomless trench down there. The waters sloughed along, cold and heavy, like a fat and hungry snake sliding through the landscape.

The path leading down to the river, the one that led from Maybrick Road to the green metal footbridge, was almost unlit. It was only when my eyes adjusted to the gloom that I could see it at all. An icy night mist was beginning to form in the dip where the river lay. Very gradually, it started to thicken, to creep up the hill and across the park.

I’d been sitting there watching the darkness for
about an hour before I thought of packing it in and going to bed. I hadn’t seen a single living soul, or heard a sound. The sombre tranquillity of it all was somehow reassuring, though. My thoughts drifted off, until they came full circle and froze around the subject of school, and the people in it, and the endless bloody homework on my schedule.

Give it half an hour,
I thought. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all. I was getting tired and yawning.

I didn’t realize it was them, at first. I caught sight of two people walking slowly down the hill, along the path. It was about a quarter past midnight now.

I picked up my binoculars to take a closer look. It was only when I’d scanned around for a few seconds, twisting the focus dial first one way and then the other, that I could see clearly. One was taller than the other, the taller one in a dark overcoat, and the other with a hood pulled tight.

It was Emma and her grandfather, Ken Greenhill. I was sure of it. Over the weeks, Emma’s body language had imprinted itself on me, the same way you can identify a close friend or a member of your family at a distance, by the way they walk or the way they move their head. I was all but certain that
I could see Emma’s rolling, almost gliding motion. And that semi-march of the person beside her was definitely her grandfather. Wasn’t it? I could make out the walking stick swinging at his heels.

If either of them had been on their own, I’d have been less sure. As I couldn’t see their faces, one of them alone wouldn’t have grabbed my attention so firmly. But the two of them together made me scramble for the camera.

I put the camera on full zoom, but I couldn’t get a decent image of them that way, not at such a distance and in low light. I held the camera lens against the binoculars and tried to home in on them that way, as if I had one of those large telephoto attachments. I clicked a dozen or more pictures, but flicking through them afterwards showed little more than motion blur and two vague figures in mid-stride.

As I watched them through the binoculars, I could see that Emma was carrying something. It looked like a large box with a handle, and it took me a minute or two to realize that it was a cat box. It wasn’t a particularly large one but it had something in it – the way Emma was carrying it, it looked like
it weighed at least a couple of kilos.

I was fully awake now, the binoculars pressed tightly to my eyes. Emma and her grandfather walked down the path, along the flat area close to the river, over the footbridge, and away to the right, into Elton Gardens. I caught a slightly sharper glimpse of them just before they moved out of sight, because they walked under one of the park’s lamps and for a second they were lit up much more.

When they’d gone, I checked the time. 12:22 a.m.

What were they doing over there? When were they coming back?

I kept the binoculars trained on that patch of light beneath the lamp. They would have to pass it again, if they were going to return home the same way.

I waited, hardly daring to breathe. I kept glancing at the clock screensaver on my phone. 12:29… 12:36… 12:41…

Several times I almost gave up. I thought they must have been on their way to somewhere up in town, and I wouldn’t see them again. But then I wondered where they could possibly have been going, the two of them, at that hour of the night.

It was nearly ten minutes past one when they
came back. By then, I was so used to staring at an empty patch in the distance that I didn’t consciously register them until they were almost past the glow of the park lamp. I started with surprise, losing sight of them completely until I could refocus the binoculars.

They were heading home. Emma was still carrying the cat box, and it appeared to contain the same weighty object it had when they first set out. Both of them had more of a spring in their step this time, like a couple of kids hurrying as innocently as possible from the scene of a prank. I still couldn’t see their faces – Emma’s was shielded by her hood and the broad collar of her grandfather’s overcoat was turned up against the cold. Within a couple of minutes, they had vanished into the darkness close to the top of the hill.

I watched again at the same time the following night, but saw nothing. The night after, I swapped places with the webcam.

I didn’t see anything else for the rest of the week. Emma was her usual self at school, chatty and friendly. On the Thursday, she asked if my parents and I were coming to the Halloween Ball
on Saturday, and I said yes, we were, and that I was really looking forward to it. She beamed at me and said she was glad. I was indeed looking forward to it, because it would give me a chance to finally see inside the Priory, and take a closer look at the Greenhills in their own home.

On the Friday, that week’s
Hadlington Courier
reported that a middle-aged man had been found dead in his flat in Elton Gardens, where he lived alone. His body had been discovered on the previous day after council pest-control officers had been called to the building, when neighbours saw rats on the communal stairs and detected an odd smell coming from behind the man’s front door.

He’d been dead for several days. Jo, her face wrinkled up in theatrical disgust, told me that her dad had missed out a number of details from his
Courier
report, which to save its readers’ delicate sensibilities had said that the corpse was simply in a ‘state of decomposition’. It had been feasted on by the rats. Most of its organs had gone, and the flesh on its head and neck had been largely stripped away.

The police did not suspect foul play. The pest-control officers dealt with the rats. An editorial
in the
Courier
tut-tutted at the lack of community spirit in the area, that this poor man could lie dead, unnoticed by those who lived around him.