20/20

by Carl Goodman

  The car flipped and rolled until it struck the dry-stone wall. Rebounded. Metal boomed against stone. The world spun again, the other way this time. She felt the car drop. It fell, inverted. The sides of the ditch enveloped it, and it stopped.

  She couldn’t move. It wasn’t just that she was trapped. The seat belt kept her hanging, her shoulder-length blonde hair touched the crumpled roof. Blood pounded in her head but in that moment she couldn’t move. Her entire body rang as though it were a bell that had just been struck. She tried to focus, but there was nothing to focus on.

  Another noise. The sound of a diesel engine revving. She knew what had rammed them. She had seen it in the surveillance videos of Lynch’s yard. A Scania P380 tipper truck with a girder welded to its front. Ten tonnes of metal that could drag thirty tonnes of scrap behind it, hurtling towards them from the blackness of the T-junction. Headlights flared. The engine revved.

  Oh Christ. He’s going to hit us again.

  She managed to turn her head to face Dom, but Dom was motionless. Like her he hung upside down, trapped by his seat belt. His neck, though. The angle of his neck. Something about his silhouette, backlit by headlights. She realised then. Half his skull had been smashed in by the impact.

  The headlights swung around. They came towards her. Another collision, not so hard this time. The car jolted and it took her a moment to understand. When she did, a wave of panic hit her. The truck was driving over them. Someone was trying to bury them in the ditch.

  She screamed. The roof started to buckle and dark, fetid ditch water ran over her hair and her scalp. Icy cold, yet it still stank of pig shit and slurry. Her head sank into it. It was in her ears and in her eyes. She moved then. She thrashed as though she were fitting. Her arms flailed. Her hand hit something. Dom’s radio.

  A flash of light. The headlights moved once more as the tipper truck backed up for its next go. She grabbed the radio and shoved at the panic button. She shrieked. ‘Officers down!’ She howled again and again as the truck tried to push the car further into the mud. The roof pressed on her head and on her neck. She retched as she spat to keep mud from her mouth. A sudden moistness, in her groin and in her thigh. The sensation of warm liquid seeping over her abdomen and her stomach, trickling between her breasts, running down her neck and over her chin. She feared the acrid stench of urine. She recognised the thick, salty taste of blood.

  Another engine, a car this time. Laughter, loud and raucous. A door slamming, wheels spinning. The sound of a car being driven away at speed. Water in her mouth now, fast-flowing and freezing cold. Pain, in her head and in her neck. Sharp, unbearable pain. Another sound. Sirens.

  She couldn’t measure the time but it seemed as though only minutes passed between pressing the panic button and the road above her being flooded with light once more. She heard footsteps, the sound of at least one person jumping into the ditch. Torchlight played across her face. Somebody swearing. Orders being shouted. More sirens. Freezing water. She couldn’t feel her hands. Suddenly, she felt intense pressure, on her neck and in her chest. Her chest hurt. It hurt like hell.

  A splash, someone else jumping into the water. A woman’s voice. Another light and a flash of green nylon. Paramedic, she guessed. ‘Eva, can you hear me? I’m Donna. I’m going to make sure you’re okay to move before they get you out of there.’

  She knew she was lying. She was upside down in a crushed car with the wreck of a tipper truck on top of her. They would need heavy lifting gear to get her out. Her head felt like ice and her chest burned. The water kept rising.

  A hand shoved through broken glass. An arm wrapped in green nylon. Two fingers jabbed into the side of her throat. Black spots formed behind her eyes. Then a brilliant, searing light. A voice, screaming. ‘She’s going into cardiac arrest—’

  * * *

  Eva had to drag herself back to the present. Even after two years, she would sometimes wake in the night, drenched in sweat and unable to breathe, the pressure on her chest and neck still a vivid, glass-sharp memory. The consequences of the evening at Winter’s Gate Farm stayed with her. She knew they always would.

  She and Moresby arrived at an apartment block less than a mile from the station, in an area frequented by students. This time there was a crowd. Close to twenty young people milled around the line of blue tape that cut across the entrance to the flats. Not gawkers, Eva thought as she ducked under the tape. The expressions on their faces spoke of anguish and downright horror.

  Moresby prowled behind her. A couple of the onlookers asked him questions, whereas they had ignored her. It was the uniform, Eva assumed, that and the fact that Moresby exuded authority with every lumbering step. When she turned around she saw he had stopped and was talking to several of the onlookers in a quiet, gentle voice. She listened as he told them what was known and what was not known, what would happen next and how long it would probably take. They responded to him. A couple of them thanked him, but that was Moresby for you, Eva thought. When it came down to it, all he had done was tell them the truth.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor. ‘Student accommodation,’ Moresby told her as they climbed the stairs. ‘One of those public–private partnership deals with the university. The students get them at a discount and pay for them with their loans. They’ve all got one living room, one bedroom, a shower room and a kitchen unit. They’re all in pretty good nick apparently, given that the occupants move on every couple of years.’

  Several of Moresby’s men guarded the route to the apartment. She knew most of them by name now. ‘Who’s the victim?’

  ‘Alicia Khan,’ Moresby said. ‘Somebody said she was studying computer animation, whatever that is.’

  Eva knew. ‘A pixel-pusher,’ she told him, even though she knew he would not understand. For some reason her familiarity with the subject made the revelation more poignant. Khan, another university student who had somehow fallen into the same trap as Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd. She knew computer animation required an unusual combination of both creative and technical skills. It was not a subject for the faint-hearted, so Khan must have been exceptional. A bright woman, talented and with a promising future in front of her, just as Gibson, Russell and Lloyd had been. Irina Stepanov had chosen a different path, but that, Eva thought as she mulled the details of the case through a fog of dejection, did not mean she had any less right to live. The nature and timing of the deaths only served to prove her point, though. Two killers, and two entirely different sets of motives.

  ‘Has the room been cleared for forensics?’ Eva asked Moresby.

  He nodded. ‘I’ve had it locked down. It’s probably safe to stick your head around the door, though.’ That was about the last thing she wanted to do, but Eva summoned up the courage and did it anyway.

  It was a small apartment, just as Moresby had described. The rooms were arranged off a space that might have been described as a hall, but for the fact it was barely two metres in length. Eva leaned around the entrance to the living area, taking particular care not to touch or brush against anything. There on her back in the middle of the room lay Alicia Khan, dark hair spread out around her, naked and with most of her skin carved away.

  ‘What an interesting and inventive son of a bitch we have discovered here today,’ Judy Wren hissed from over Eva’s shoulder. She had not heard Wren come up behind her. ‘I do love dealing with people who take pleasure in their work.’ Her voice dripped vitriol. She nudged Eva. ‘Gloves and overshoes, DI Harris. You’ll find them by the front door.’

  When Eva stepped back into the room Wren was standing over the body making notes. ‘No, I can’t tell you anything,’ she said before Eva could ask, ‘but give me ten minutes.’ Wren set her notepad down carefully, raised the camera that hung around her neck and proceeded to take photos. She took a lot, Eva noticed, almost enough to be used by the kind of photogrammetry software that could stitch the pictures back together to create a 3D model of the scene. She doubted that was Wren’s in
tention. As usual, Wren was just being thorough.

  ‘So, hypovolemic shock,’ Wren mused as she peered through the viewfinder. ‘That’s usually a good way to wind up dead.’

  She wasn’t going to let it go, Eva could see that. In the back of her mind she made a note to follow up with the news websites that were leaking snippets of her story, to try to find out who was supplying these morsels to them. So many of the details of the investigation, and ultimately the death, of Colin Lynch had been kept as effectively classified by the various agencies involved, only somebody with a degree of seniority within the police would be able to obtain them. It had to be somebody working for Razin. She knew she was being told to back off.

  ‘In this case it actually saved my life,’ she told Wren as the older woman continued taking photos. ‘A chunk of windscreen had severed the femoral artery in my leg so yes, I went into hypovolemic shock due to loss of blood. That caused cardiac arrest though, which ironically reduced pressure on the wound. The fact I was hanging upside down helped things a bit apparently. The problem was I was trapped inside the car and the paramedics couldn’t get to me. Luckily, I also had my head in a stream of freezing-cold water.’

  Wren stopped taking photos and looked at her. When she saw the expression on her face Eva felt crestfallen. Judy Wren seemed downright delighted at that piece of information. ‘Seriously? Has anyone written a paper on you?’

  ‘Fuck off, Judy,’ Eva grumbled.

  Wren snorted and went back to taking pictures. ‘Hypovolemic shock and no heart activity for eight minutes would normally cause irreversible brain damage,’ she muttered as she clicked. ‘Mind you, I’m not saying it hasn’t.’

  ‘See previous comment.’

  ‘Except that you had your head submerged in freezing water, which presumably mitigated the effects of being technically dead.’

  ‘So they tell me.’

  Wren ignored her terse tone. ‘So how did you get out?’

  Eva shrugged. ‘I owe my life to a psychopath.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, not really. Just to a nut-job of a firefighter who wouldn’t give up when everybody else in their right mind already had. His name was John Wilson and he decided it would be a good idea to ram the lorry parked on top of me with a fire engine. Completely, utterly, totally insane, except it worked. Damaged the fire engine but it meant that Donna, my favourite but also lunatic paramedic, was able to get a line into me, rapidly followed by a defibrillator. I still keep in touch with them,’ she added, a little wistfully.

  Wren lowered the camera and gazed at her. ‘So what’s it like then, being dead and all?’

  Eva rolled her eyes. ‘Like being asleep but without the dreams. Seriously, I don’t remember anything.’

  ‘A veil of darkness, then,’ Wren said as she went back to photographing the corpse.

  ‘Fuck off, Judy.’

  The memory brought back her blackest fears, but she couldn’t let them show. That would reveal a weakness, one she had to keep hidden from everyone. What had really happened to her? She remembered the incredulity she had felt when the doctors had told her, and she still cringed at the memory of ice-cold pig shit in her eyes and in her mouth. They had shaved her head to cover it in sensors that probed for brain damage. She had kept it almost that way so as not to remind her of the sticky, glutinous mess that had tried to invade her.

  She remembered the sight of Dom, head caved in, hanging next to her, limp and lifeless. Dominic Bradley. A torrid affair that had begun on the back seat of a car on a late-night stake-out, and which had ended in almost the same way. They had both known it was wrong, that it couldn’t go anywhere, but they had done it anyway. It had been madness. Snatched sex in reckless, often public places, the danger of being discovered adding an extra layer of excitement to their couplings. They had known it was a transgression, though. Dom was married, he had two children, he did not want to leave his wife and Eva did not want him too either, and so they had decided to stop. They could have been just friends, Eva insisted to herself. She believed they still would have been. But the fact remained. Her heart had stopped for eight minutes, and what she had told Judy Wren was not the truth. She did have memories, but they were ones she would not share with anyone for the sake of her own sanity. They were hazy recollections she intended to take to her grave. Again.

  Eva found it impossible not to like Wren, despite her acerbic humour. Wren, however, frowned, lowered the camera and crouched down at the head of the corpse. ‘These cuts,’ she said, referring to the striations that ran the length of the body, ‘are literally only skin deep. He’s been very careful not to slice too far. And the amount of bleeding is less than I would expect.’

  ‘Exsanguination again?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s no sign of a struggle. I think she was dead some time before she was mutilated.’

  Eva forced herself to stare at the body. The patterns – she couldn’t think of any other way to describe them – seemed both obviously intentional and familiar. ‘Bridget Riley,’ she muttered as Wren started probing tentatively at the skull.

  ‘Why do I know the name?’

  ‘She was popular in the 1960s. She was a leading light in what was called Op art.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wren agreed, ‘I do remember now. Lots of parallel lines, mostly in black and white. Yes, I sort of see what you mean. He thinks he’s using the body as a canvas.’

  ‘Sick bastard,’ Eva spat.

  ‘A real psychopath this time,’ Wren agreed. She had her hands around the back of Alicia Khan’s head. ‘I wonder if she knew him?’

  ‘No sign of a struggle,’ Eva agreed.

  ‘And I may have just found the cause of death. I can feel some quite severe displacement in the parietal bone. I’ll confirm it later but right now I would guess she was hit around the back of the head with extreme force. Something soft-edged maybe, but heavy. A rubber mallet perhaps? Something like that anyway. The skin under the hair is scuffed, but not broken. He didn’t want her to bleed there. It wasn’t part of his aesthetic. I think death would have been instantaneous. She literally would not have known what hit her.’

  Eva forced herself to crouch down next to Wren. Alicia Khan’s eyes were collapsed inside her skull. He had cut them so she could not stare back at him as he mutilated her. ‘Not the same as the others,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Wren agreed. ‘Not in the least.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Another long, winding drive, Eva noted. They seemed almost de rigueur in the heart of the affluent county. The sheer number of large, seven- and eight-figure houses with carefully manicured grounds she had seen in the past few weeks had started to inure her to them. At some point she knew she would have to find something more rural to bring her back to reality, but for now she had a job to do.

  The Chatham Centre occupied a low, modern building that tried to blend in with its surroundings. The sign near the gate was restrained and discreet. If you wanted to have your vision sorted out, Eva thought as she parked her car, this was probably the place to do it, assuming you could afford to. Irina Stepanov had, she thought as she made her way to reception. The question was, who else?

  Sir Robin Chatham exuded charm from every pore. Tall, lean, just on the right side of sixty and with a patrician face that reminded her of Jeffrey Cowan’s, Chatham greeted her in the sumptuous reception area, where a stunning Asian woman sat in oversight.

  ‘Detective Inspector,’ he said as he took her hand. For one cringing moment Eva thought he was going to kiss it. ‘So lovely to meet you. I wish it were under different circumstances.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Eva agreed as he led her to his office. ‘I’m sorry if we came across as heavy-handed in our approach, but as you will be aware our murderer doesn’t seem inclined to stop.’ Flynn had almost certainly come across as heavy-handed, Eva thought. That would have accounted for the somewhat prickly response she had received from the Chatham Centre.

  ‘And I hope my assistant
didn’t seem obstructive,’ Chatham answered in turn, ‘but as you will also be aware we are discussing patients’ private medical histories. You can imagine how much trouble we’d be in if we shared them with you without permission and they took exception.’

  ‘Which is why,’ Eva said, reaching into her coat pocket, ‘I have a subpoena.’ She passed it to Chatham, who glanced over it.

  ‘Thank you. Is it okay if I take a photocopy for our records? Then all of the legal niceties are behind us.’ Eva nodded. Chatham disappeared for a few moments. When he returned he handed the paperwork back to Eva.

  ‘In answer to your question. Irina Stepanov, Jodie Swain and Paul Markham were all patients here, although I have to say that isn’t a great surprise given that they were quite well off, lived in the area and were all in their forties and fifties.’ He frowned. ‘The fact they were all murdered and in such a fashion is clearly very worrying for us.’

  ‘You didn’t think to contact us when you saw their names in the press?’

  He spread his hands. ‘No one would have realised. We just would not have made the connection. We do have quite a large client base.’

  Probably true, Eva conceded. In any event the police themselves had tried to play down details of the killings with the press. ‘I have to ask the obvious question. I presume you can think of no reason why three of your patients would have been murdered in this way?’

  ‘Good God no,’ Chatham gasped. ‘I mean, it’s horrific. If I were to guess at a motive I suppose I would have to say jealousy. Our implants are quite expensive at the moment.’ Eva thought back through the information she had gleaned from their website. On reflection the Chatham Centre had made a lot of noise about ‘perfect vision’ and ‘leading-edge technology’, but there hadn’t been many specifics. ‘Contact us to learn more’ had been the strap line.

  ‘Implants? I thought you did laser surgery?’