by Carl Goodman
Eva watched him as he prowled back into the station. I’ll get you Razin’s man, she thought as she made certain he was leaving, but all in good time. Irina Stepanov’s killer comes first.
* * *
The weather had definitely turned. Eva didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. At least the stifling humidity had disappeared, but now an almost constant downpour had replaced it. Pewter clouds chased each other through a leaden sky, twisting and broiling like vapour from some unseen cauldron. Another flicker of lightning froze the world for a moment, just as she drove her car towards the lane at the entrance to St Jude’s Hill. Rain hammered out deafening timpani on the roof of the car. The roads in Surrey were awash. She watched a supermarket delivery van as it churned through the puddles that had merged together on the tarmac surface, spraying dark-grey water along its wake. The leaden sky pressed down, dark and suffocating. Let’s see if we can do any better this time, she thought as she waited for the van to pass.
Eva turned her car into the entrance to St Jude’s Hill, drew to a halt beside the security gate and showed her card to the guard on duty. When she was inside the estate she followed the directions Raj had scribbled on a post-it note. ‘You can’t miss it,’ he had told her. ‘It’s about as inconspicuous as Windsor Castle.’
Raj had exaggerated, she thought as she parked her car at the front of a minor gothic palace, but not much. The house was mock Tudor and had been extended. A recently constructed wing spoke of spas and other such spurious opulence. Somewhat above my pay-grade, Eva mused as she dashed inside. She tried to convince herself it didn’t matter. She had never been a big fan of tennis.
Three women sat waiting for her at a table in the coffee lounge, acquaintances of Irina Stepanov with whom Raj had made contact. The inquiries into Jodie Swain and Paul Markham’s family, friends and associates had resulted in little of interest so far. Swain’s partner had been with her for less than a year, and although her work colleagues had been helpful, they had told Jamie Newton nothing that seemed immediately useful. Flynn was still chasing down Markham but she seemed to be suffering with a similar problem, an over-abundance of broadly useless information. Maybe these women clustered around a table would be more useful. Eva hesitated for a moment before selecting which face to wear. Ebullient charm, she decided as she walked up to them. Let’s all be girls together.
‘Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me,’ she almost purred as she sat down without being invited. ‘It must be so dreadful for you.’
Sasha Alexeev, Isabel Williams and Devi Hoyer. A Russian, an English woman and an American, Raj had told her. It was easy enough to work out who was who from the accents. They were all about the same age as Stepanov had been, all attractive women, although with markedly different styles about them. Hoyer’s hair was short and dark, Williams was more English rose and Alexeev had a sharper, Slavic shape to her face. Their clothes were casual-expensive. Eva did not feel the need to check for the designer labels that identified them, but she knew they would be there. They waited in quiet anticipation at a table covered with crisp white linen and laid with polished silver cutlery and bone china cups. White and silver. That and the soft ambient light that permeated the room from outside made them seem almost ethereal.
‘Do you have any suspects?’ Devi Hoyer demanded immediately, trying to sound authoritative.
Eva winced and gave her a deliberately knowing smile. ‘I think you know how I have to answer that question,’ she confided. Hoyer did not seem to mind the brush-off. At least Eva had indulged her.
‘It’s a nightmare,’ Sasha Alexeev said. ‘I mean we have really no idea.’
‘But do you know where poor Grigori Stepanov is?’ Eva asked, leaning towards her as she spoke. ‘We’re so anxious to talk with him.’
Isabel Williams gasped. ‘He’s surely not a suspect?’
Eva shook her head. ‘I think I can say he is not. We really are just worried about him.’
‘If I know Grigori,’ Hoyer said, with a sly sideways glance that said she really did know Grigori, ‘he’ll be hiding on that yacht of his. He’s probably doing laps of the Isle of Wight.’
Eva made a note to get Raj to follow that up. ‘That’s helpful, thank you so much. What else can you tell me?’
Williams laced her hands in front of her as she prepared to speak. At first Eva had expected Hoyer to be the spokesperson for the group, but she clearly deferred to the English woman. It took a moment for her to understand. Eva saw how carefully she chose her words. Irina Stepanov must have been someone special to Isabel Williams.
‘Irina was lovely,’ Williams began. ‘She was a very dear friend. We all miss her tremendously. But the way she was killed…’, her voice trailed off. Then it seemed as though she suddenly realised. She stared at Eva. ‘My God, you were there. You were the police officer who almost caught him.’
She wondered then if she should have sent one of the others to do the interview. ‘Almost. He had a stun gun of some sort. He nearly killed my colleague too.’
Williams’ eyes seemed to cloud over. ‘Did you see her? Did you actually see her?’
Eva could not lie. ‘Yes,’ she told Williams as gently as she could. ‘I saw her.’ Williams lowered her head then. Hoyer reached across and put a hand on her shoulder. They sat in silence while Isabel Williams dripped tears onto the white linen tablecloth. ‘Sorry,’ she told Eva after a minute. ‘It’s just – why would he take her eyes? She was so pleased with them.’
The words hung in the air for a second before Eva managed to process them. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘She’d had laser surgery,’ Hoyer explained with a casual sweep of her hand, ‘it had gone really well. Irina was over the moon about how clear everything seemed. It’s just awful, the way that bastard ruined her beautiful eyes before he killed her.’
‘Laser surgery?’
‘You know, you see it advertised. Better than glasses or contact lenses they say. Irina said,’ Hoyer corrected herself.
‘It wasn’t laser.’ Williams was insistent. ‘It was like that, but not exactly the same. She did tell me about it but it made me feel queasy. Anything to do with the eyes and I’m a coward.’
‘I’m going to get it done,’ Sasha Alexeev said. ‘I’m going to the same place Irina went to. It’s a clinic in the Surrey hills. The surgeon there is brilliant and very kind, so Irina said.’
It felt as though her vision was narrowing. Breathe, Eva reminded herself. ‘Irina Stepanov had eye surgery?’
‘Loads of people have eye surgery,’ Hoyer said. ‘It’s almost as common as getting contact lenses now. This guy Irina saw, though. He’s expensive, but then he’s supposed to be a miracle worker.’
Eva managed to sound casual. ‘What clinic was this?’
Hoyer whipped out her phone. ‘I can email you,’ she told Eva.
Eva swallowed. ‘Please.’
Sasha Alexeev frowned. ‘He’s not a suspect is he?’
‘We just have to follow up on all leads.’ She waited while Devi Hoyer composed her email.
‘Done,’ Hoyer said after a few moment. Eva managed a smile.
‘And what about you, Detective Inspector,’ Sasha Alexeev asked. ‘The press seem to be very interested in you. What are all these weird stories about you on the news websites?’
Christ, Eva thought. Now what are they saying?
‘They said you almost died in an operation a couple of years ago,’ Hoyer agreed. Eva made a mental note to pursue the journalist in question with extreme prejudice, but Sasha Alexeev shook her head.
‘No, that was what was so odd. It was a mistake, obviously, but you would have thought a journalist wouldn’t be so stupid and careless.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Hoyer laughed. ‘What did they say?’
‘They didn’t say she almost died,’ Alexeev told them with a bemused look on her face. ‘They just said: she died.’
* * *
Eva dropped down in front of
Judy Wren’s desk. ‘How the fuck did we miss this?’
Wren raised an eyebrow and stared. ‘How the fuck did I miss this is what you actually mean. And in my defence I point to exhibit minus one, the distinct lack of evidence regarding Irina Stepanov’s eyes due in no minor part to their complete and utter absence.’
‘What about doctor’s records?’
‘You really don’t have a clue how this works, do you?’
She probably did not. ‘Enlighten me,’ Eva grumbled, trying to sound a bit more conciliatory.
Wren pushed her chair back and stuck her legs out in front of her. ‘If you go to the opticians and get a pair of glasses or contact lenses, that information doesn’t get shared with your GP, does it? That’s also true of elective surgery. There are no records outside of the clinic that performs the operation, and that’s the same for everything from laser surgery to breast implants. These are surprisingly unregulated industries. I mean, you wouldn’t want your GP to know if you got a tattoo in an intimate location, right?’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘It is as far as the regulators are concerned. People get to do elective surgery without the NHS or even their private GPs knowing about it. It’s just the way it works.’
‘But eye surgery?’
‘Laser surgery has been around for years. High-street companies make a fortune churning through eyes. Same with breast implants and penis enlargement, hair replacement, nips and tucks and God knows what else. Cosmetic surgery is big business, or hadn’t you noticed?’
‘Eye surgery isn’t cosmetic surgery?’
‘Well,’ Wren said, ‘I don’t think it is, but the government would disagree with you. If you have cataracts then the NHS will replace your lenses, but for everything else there’s spectacles. If you don’t want those then there’s laser and RLE, but that’s elective and therefore cosmetic.’
‘RLE?’
‘Refractive Lens Exchange,’ Wren said. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Maybe later,’ Eva said quickly. ‘But people make money out of this?’
‘Surgeons? A fortune. As do the high-street surgeries. Laser and similar is fast overtaking glasses and contact lenses for eyesight correction. It’s a massive industry and it’s growing.’
She thought for a while. ‘So it’s not unusual Irina Stepanov had eye surgery?’
Wren guffawed. ‘Her age and her money? With hindsight I suppose I’d have been slightly more surprised if she hadn’t.’
Eva sat mulling over everything Wren had told her. Maybe it was not an actual lead. Perhaps it was just a coincidence. It needed to be followed up, though. It had to be top of her ‘to-do’ list. When she drifted out of her reverie she noticed Wren was staring at her. ‘What?’
Wren uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. ‘So why has the press got its teeth into you? It seems like we get a new morsel about DI Eva Harris almost every day, but this latest stuff? “The cop that came back from the dead?” What’s that all about?’
Eva felt her jaw drop. ‘You’re bloody joking? They haven’t dredged that up?’
‘I don’t know what “that” is,’ Wren told her, ‘so I couldn’t say what they’ve dredged up.’
She closed her eyes. Razin’s men. They were telling her to back off. Gently for now, they were using knowledge and persuasion, trying to show they too could be subtle, but it was intimidation none the less. She had to trust someone. At least Wren would understand the technicalities of it, Eva thought. And so she told her.
‘That’s why you knew so much about hypovolemic shock,’ Wren said after a while. ‘Bloody hell, do you have any idea how lucky you are?’
Eva cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Funnily enough, yes. In any event the doctors explained it to me in great detail.’
‘I mean it’s not unheard of, but eight minutes is a long time.’ Wren frowned. ‘Are you sure there was no permanent damage?’
For a moment she could not answer. Confiding her secret to someone, anyone, after so long dredged up memories that were as jagged as they had been on the night they had first cut into her. ‘Depends what you mean by damage,’ she almost whispered after a moment. Wren was about to speak when the door to her office opened. She turned to scowl at the intruder, but it was Moresby.
‘Sorry,’ he began, ‘sorry to interrupt.’
His face, Eva thought. Moresby was ashen. She could guess why. ‘Oh Christ, not another one?’
‘It was inevitable,’ Wren said.
‘This wasn’t,’ Moresby told them. He took his phone from his pocket. ‘My lad on site just sent me this. Female victim, early twenties, a student by the sound of it, found by her roommate.’ He held the phone up so they could see the image displayed on its screen.
A young woman, carefully arranged. Naked, with striations cut along the length of her body. There was a second photo. A close-up of the eyes. The comparative crudeness of the slices was obvious immediately.
‘Un Chien Andalou,’ Wren muttered. ‘Our original eye-slicer.’
‘He’s back,’ Moresby confirmed. He stared at Eva. ‘You were right. It’s certain now there are two killers.’
Eight Minutes Dead
Chapter Twelve
Two years earlier.
Darkness, punctuated by stars.
The sun had set on a cloudless sky. To the right of the car a dry-stone wall marked the boundary of a field. A ditch lay between the edge of the road and the wall. In the ditch, fetid water slopped and gurgled as slurry from rain-sodden soil ran off through irrigation channels and churned the earth to mud.
She slowed the car to a halt, turned off the ignition and waited. On the other side of the road lay a T-junction that branched away from the country lane. The moon had not yet risen, but the sky glowed. The constellation of Orion hung low over outlines of trees. Rigel and Betelgeuse gleamed blue and red, so that even in the darkness of the rural night she could make out the shining roof tiles and rounded chimney pots of Winter’s Gate Farm.
In the passenger seat of the unmarked car a man made visible only by his silhouette lifted a police radio. He blocked the green glow of the LED with his hand as he spoke into it. His voice stayed quiet and even. The kind of voice you could trust, she thought. The voice of a man who could be relied upon. Perversely, the thought saddened her.
‘KB47, DI Bradley and DS Harris taking up position at location Kilo. Ensure backup is on stand-by, anticipate suspects arriving within the next thirty minutes.’
The handset hissed white noise. Sunspots, she imagined. Radio frequency background sounds that could have originated a mile down the road or on the edge of space. A female voice answered from the ether. ‘DI Bradley, this is KB47. Confirming backup is on standby and waiting for your instructions. Good hunting, Dom.’
Dominic Bradley did not acknowledge. He did not need to. They all wanted this. The officers in the control room, the Armed Response Unit waiting a mile down the road, the two of them on surveillance. A chance to bring a cop-killer to justice. Perhaps, even though none of them would have admitted it, a chance for revenge.
PC Carrie Brenner had just turned twenty-one when Colin Lynch cut her in half with the blade of a bulldozer. She had been responding to a report of a stolen vehicle seen in Lynch’s scrapyard. It had seemed like a routine inquiry. When Brenner pulled open the back door of the van the last thing she expected was to find it stuffed with drugs. Just shy of two million in heroin, the coroner had estimated.
Lynch chased her across the yard in a JCB. A forty-year-old man in a seven-tonne machine bearing down on a fifty-kilo girl whose screams were recorded for posterity courtesy of her radio. He had driven the upper half of her body a hundred metres before he tossed it into the compactor. He had left her legs where they fell.
She remembered the incredulity. Not just the anger, in the station and beyond, but the sheer incredulity that Colin Lynch and his crew had not appeared on anyone’s radar. One of the biggest drug traffickers in the south of England an
d the National Crime Agency did not have so much as a post-it note on him. It had not taken much to figure out Lynch was being protected.
Dominic Bradley tried to hide the hate in his voice, but she knew him too well. ‘I don’t want any risks. These bastards are too dangerous to mess with. I just need confirmation. I need a photo of Lynch.’
Detective Sergeant Eva Harris watched as he checked his camera’s night-vision scope. ‘And a photo of whoever it is with him. Then we call in the ARU.’
He nodded. She saw the movement as his head blotted out the stars of the belt of Orion. He turned towards her as though he wanted to say something else, but it seemed he couldn’t find the words. She touched the side of his face with her hand. She spoke for him. ‘It’s okay, Dom. It really is. We all make mistakes.’
‘You’re not a mistake. Not to me.’
She smiled. A tired smile, but Dom couldn’t see it. A man who could be relied upon. Certainly not the kind of man who would leave his wife and kids for a woman ten years his junior. She wanted to tell him she understood, that they could still be friends. She wanted to but she could not. Because in that moment DS Eva Harris realised the constellation of Orion had completely disappeared.
Fucking hell.
She didn’t know if she screamed out loud or if it was only inside her head. The stars vanished into a rectangle of black that grew in moments from nothing to something that encompassed the sky. She tried to start the ignition, but her hand barely had time to reach the keys. Then it hit.
Glass showered her face. The side of the car split apart. Noise, so loud it hurt. Screeching, metal tearing. A sudden sideways force that bent her like a rag doll and felt like it would rip her limbs off. Her seat belt sliced into her throat. The sensation of being airborne, spinning. Something smacked her hard in the face, so hard it might have broken her cheekbone. Even as the world spun around her she realised. It was Dominic’s head that had hit her.