by Carl Goodman
‘Easy boss,’ Flynn told her. Eva ignored her.
‘I’ll go,’ the younger of the two officers said. He peeled down to his underwear and prepared to lower himself into the water.
‘Wait,’ Eva told him. She said it with her jaw clenched so hard it hurt. ‘Photos first. I want everything recorded before we move them. Becks,’ she said to Flynn, ‘get hold of Will Moresby please and see if he can bring Judy Wren over. I’d like this one done by a friend.’ Then she photographed the scene on her phone.
She took stills and video. She spent five minutes recording every detail she could find. The screen came between her and the bodies, and she found she preferred that. After a while though there were no more pictures left to take, and so she nodded to the police constable waiting patiently in his underpants, who then lowered himself into the water and swam over to where the bodies lay.
‘You should record this too,’ the older officer said. Eva nodded silently and raised her phone once again. The younger officer slipped under the water for a moment. When he surfaced he held something in his hand. He brought it back to the side of the pool.
‘They’re weighted down,’ he told them. ‘Wrists, ankles, and around the waist and neck.’ He held up a small kettle bell, the kind you might buy from an online shop or find at the gym. ‘They’ve been tied together with loops of nylon. You can hardly see it underwater. It’s just been laid over them; it stops them floating up.’
‘Would it have been enough to drown them?’
‘No way. This is just to keep them down after they were killed. There are no obvious signs of violence either. Maybe they were poisoned?’
The image of Alicia Khan came back to her then. ‘Try the back of the head.’
He slipped back under the water and stayed under for almost a minute. When he surfaced he gasped for several seconds before he could speak, but he nodded as soon as he appeared. ‘Back of the skull, right-hand side near the top, it feels spongy. Blunt force trauma. I reckon someone gave them one hell of a whack.’
‘They wouldn’t have even known it,’ Flynn told her.
Eva didn’t answer. Another picture came to mind. Nicholson and Yu kneeling naked by the side of the pool, high on some concoction of drugs, waiting in excited anticipation for some existential experience that would lift them from this plane. Did they know Harred had finished the painting? Were they prepared for what was about to be done to them, or had they simply been tricked into believing it was merely a new game, a submissive prelude to some ménage à trois? Were they unknowing victims or willing participants?
The constable moved the weights one limb at a time. Slowly, because of the volume of water in their lungs, Nicholson and Yu drifted upwards until they floated just beneath the surface, arcing and rolling like dead fish. ‘Get them out,’ Eva instructed the officers as she turned to leave the pool. ‘And see if you can find something to cover them up with, please.’ Not that Nicholson or Yu would have given a damn about that, Eva thought as she stalked back to her car.
* * *
‘I’m not winning, ma’am,’ Eva admitted to Sutton as she drove. ‘I didn’t see this one coming. Nicholson and Yu just weren’t the profile. He’s gone for younger women before, students mostly, and he carved them up. None of that fits with these two.’ She gripped the wheel as she drove. ‘Christ. I feel like I let them down completely.’
She heard Sutton tut. ‘That’s a stretch. Neither of them was thought to be at risk. There was no reason to suspect they were, apart from the fact that they indulged in some risky behaviour of their own.’ She heard Sutton pause, almost as though waiting to see if her words had sunk in. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Harris,’ Sutton warned her after a moment. ‘That’s my job. If I’m not doing that then you’re probably in the clear.’
‘I actually liked them, ma’am,’ Eva admitted. ‘I mean they weren’t like anyone I’d ever met. They were totally out for pleasure, but never at anyone else’s expense.’
‘That’s a completely different problem,’ Sutton told her. Over the phone she didn’t sound so brusque. ‘Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.’
Coming from Sutton the words surprised Eva. ‘Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s the point.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Sutton agreed. ‘Huss or Harred?’ she asked.
The sheer physicality of dragging the women to the bottom of the pool, of holding them down while positioning the weights. ‘Harred,’ Eva pronounced. ‘I think he killed Berta because the painting is finished. She couldn’t do anything more for him, and at a guess I’d say he didn’t want her funding any more artworks. It’s his masterpiece; he doesn’t want anything competing with it. He had it planned all along. As soon as he made the last brushstroke her fate was sealed, and he saw Berta and Lily as part of the same package. He talked them into some sort of submissive sex game and brained them while they knelt by the pool. It’s Harred,’ Eva said again, with certainty. ‘He was responsible for Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell, Grace Lloyd and now Alicia Khan. He picked on students because they were easy meat. He knew the power of the painting, how all he had to do was sit back and wait for them to come to him. Once he knew where they lived it would be easy for him to get access, he would just turn up and say he wanted to draw them or had sketches to show them for the fresco, some easy pretext like that anyway. They would have invited him, let him in. Harred is the eye-slicer. He’s the Andalusian Dog.’
‘I think so too,’ Sutton said. ‘So where’s Huss?’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It came to her again as she headed along the long stretch of road that took her between two of the many landmarks of the darkened county, the same feeling that permeated her mind in the silent snow of Banská Bystrica and that had come over her in both the supermarket and in the streets of Kingston town centre – the sense that she was being followed.
At one end of the road she passed the old royal palace with its Lion Gate, which had sat on the banks of the river for half a thousand years. It was itself the scene of so much murder and bloodshed. At the other end she would meet the low stone arc of the bridge that crossed back over the swathe of the Thames, lit at night by ornamental lamps that turned the faces of passers-by the colour of bloated corpses. In-between them, she drove along a road lined on both sides by ancient walls made from brick the colour of oxblood, which kept the competing herds of fallow deer in two parks apart. Rows of English oaks formed a canopy above her and hid the stars from view. She had no evidence. Nothing and no one had appeared to give her any clue, and yet she knew with absolute certainty it was true. Somebody was watching her.
The snarl of the one-way system seemed almost comforting. She voice-dialled a contact. When Will Moresby answered though, any sense of relief evaporated. ‘Well, we got her phone,’ Moresby admitted. ‘We’re still looking for Nicola Milne.’
‘Fuck!’ Eva swore as she slapped her hand on the steering wheel. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘In a car park down the road from the Chatham Centre, the same place you got the anonymous texts from. Her car was parked there. We found it around four this afternoon. It was empty.’
‘Oh my God, Will.’ Eva almost yelled. ‘She’s got to be in trouble.’
‘I know that’s a possibility,’ Moresby said. ‘I’ve got people checking every known location for her, not that we’ve got much to go on. One of the nurses from the Chatham Centre is trying to help us but she doesn’t really know Milne that well. She’s suggesting places though, and we’re going through the list.’
‘Near the car park?’
‘I’ve got a dog team out.’
‘Jesus,’ Eva wondered, ‘how did this happen?’
‘I had people on it as soon as you called. You don’t even know yet if this is connected to you going to see Chatham.’
‘Too much of a coincidence for it not to be.’
‘Eva, we don’t know for certain that Milne is missing. She might have sloped off wit
h somebody. She might have decided to do a runner herself because the news was out. It’s too early to jump to conclusions.’
She knew he was right. ‘I need her found as a priority, Will.’
‘I promise you, we’re on it,’ Moresby said.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she cut the call.
Where was Milne? The question pressed down on her but it seemed as if she struggled with even framing the thought. The shock of seeing Nicholson and Yu had numbed her mind. Stuck behind a queue of cars waiting for a light to change, for a moment Eva closed her eyes. Could anyone else have done any better?
She tried to answer the question as honestly as she could, but even in the privacy of her own mind she found she struggled to do so. Perhaps a more experienced DI would have had some greater intuition, some better instinct that she had lacked. She doubted it, though. She’d followed the leads with the help of her team, and they’d led her to the Chatham Centre and to Mathew Harred. And to Semion Razin’s fixer, and to her own private investigation, she reminded herself, putting the car back into gear and easing away as the lights changed, but those were problems for another day. Now she needed to find Milne and Harred. Nothing else mattered. She wanted to call Flynn, Newton and Chakrabati to find out how they were progressing, if they were even progressing, but that would have just been micromanaging people who really didn’t need it.
On a whim she drove past the station and turned left onto Portsmouth Road. A couple of hundred metres down she pulled into a resident’s space and stopped. Eva took a card from the glove compartment that had a Surrey Police badge printed on it and put it in the car window, where it would be visible to anyone who might object to her parking there. Then she locked the car and crossed the road.
Beyond a low barrier made from old black wrought iron a dozen steps led down to the pathway that ran beside the river. On the road above, cycle lanes protected by steep concrete kerbs dominated the route into the town. Here though, the pedestrian pathway ran alongside the black water of the Thames. Half a dozen small boats were moored nearby. An olive-green box-like structure with a shallow, sloping roof was tied against the bank. A painted sign above it held up by two short metal bars proclaimed the name: ‘Mould’s Boathouse’. On the door at the side she could just see, in the light cast by a street lamp on the road above, times and prices for a river trip to Hampton Court. The paint on the boathouse was faded. Even in the darkness she could see where it flaked. It seemed like an artefact from an age of innocence, from a simpler time, when a journey down the river was an adventure in itself. Perhaps it was, Eva thought as she drew her coat around her and settled on one of the curving wooden benches that were dotted along the riverbank. Perhaps it would be again.
Harred’s rendition of the tunnel universe still haunted her, as it was intended to. She could imagine this simple wooden structure and the boat tied up next to it drifting along some peaceful, infinite river for whatever remained of eternity. In the light reflected from the river she could just make out its name: Kelpiette, the sign on the prow read. She didn’t know what it meant.
Moresby’s people were already scouring the county for Harred and Huss, she thought as she stared into the black water of the river. On balance now it seemed more likely that Harred had killed Nicholson and Yu, but where did that leave Huss? Was he an accomplice or a victim? It was Huss’s photograph of Lily Yu that had alerted her to him in the first place, but what if it had just been coincidence that Huss had taken it and Harred had used it as inspiration? If it was Harred who had killed four women and who had now murdered Nicholson and Yu, even if she caught him would she ever be able to understand the motives of the mind that had painted the fresco and sliced the eyes and opened the skin of his victims?
Flynn’s question came back to her. Now that the fresco was finished, what would Harred do next? Were Nicholson and Yu his swansong? He hadn’t mutilated them, she thought as she watched ripples turn the reflections of the street lamp to fractal noise, but he had painted them that way in the fresco.
Something flew past. A bat, Eva thought. It too must be avoiding the road and following the river. She had to leave Harred to Moresby for now. There were no more logical connections to be made. Moresby had people looking for Huss’s car, Flynn was searching both Nicholson’s house and the church, they had people watching CCTV, and ANPR algorithms were tracking every vehicle in the county. She had to let them do their job. Milne was her immediate concern.
Nicola Milne, senior optometrist and anonymous informant. What, precisely, had she known? She had known about Laska and his concerns, which implied that to some extent or another Robin Chatham had known too. Had he simply ignored the warnings? Was the lure of fame and money so great that he had dismissed the prospect of broken lenses as something that could be dealt with in the future? By the time Bright Eyes started to show their design flaw Chatham would have been retired and probably spending his days lounging in the sun in some tax haven somewhere. Responsibility would fall to Kleinmann Incorporated to manage the fallout from a slew of patients suddenly blinded by fracturing lenses. Chatham and Jelen would be long gone by then.
Chatham had not killed Irina Stepanov and the others, though. Was it simply some thug Jelen had set loose? Even as she thought that she dismissed the idea. It would have had to have been a thug with surgical knowledge precise enough to remove the eyes and leave no evidence behind. If Jelen had someone murder the group who had received the faulty batch before the lenses could shatter, they would still have had to remove the eyes. At some point someone would have made the connection with the Chatham Centre, and then more questions would have been asked. Somebody like Judy Wren would have been suspicious. Would they have tried to examine the lenses during an autopsy? It seemed at least a possibility, at which point further suspicions would have been raised and the deception would have begun to unravel. It all came back to the very first thought she had on that hot and cold day when she arrived in Surrey. Somebody had thought this through in painstaking detail.
They had not accounted for Nicola Milne, though. Was she a mere optometrist who had derailed some nameless, godlike surgeon’s perfect plan? It didn’t matter how much Milne knew, she had known something – that something was badly wrong with the lenses. Perhaps she would have contemplated contacting the regulator until patients started dying. Was she afraid of Neal Garrick’s ferocious temper? If she was it seemed she had good reason to be.
So where was Milne? Not at her home address. Nor so far as Eva knew lying dead in bushes near the car park from where she had sent her texts. Had she been trying to send another message? Had she simply left her car there intending to return to it later? She could be anywhere, Eva thought as she stared into the black water. But where should she be?
Lex parsimoniae, she reminded herself, the rule of simplicity. When presented with competing hypothetical solutions, select the answer that makes the fewest assumptions. Where Milne should have been was at the Chatham Centre. Suppose, Eva wondered as she watched ripples on the surface of the river, she had been there all along? Suppose, like Irina Stepanov’s killer, she had never left?
She glanced at her phone. Eight thirty-seven. At this time of the evening she could make it to the Chatham Centre in less than forty minutes. Should she alert Moresby? She hesitated. It was too thin, she decided, not enough to divert officers from the rest of the search, not yet anyway. If she found anything she could call for help. They would be there in minutes, she told herself. Then again, she thought as she scanned the sky for bats, she should at least check in.
‘Do you need backup?’ Moresby asked when she phoned.
‘I’ll shout if I do,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got a team nearby, right?’ She knew he had, combing the woods for any sign of Milne.
‘Did DS Flynn come back with you? DS Newton was trying to get hold of her.’
‘She’ll still be at Berta Nicholson’s place,’ Eva said. ‘Did you manage to get hold of Judy Wren?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Moresby assured her. ‘She’ll take care of them.’
Eva didn’t want to talk about that any more. There was nothing left to say. She took one last look at the rolling darkness of the river, put her phone into her pocket and walked quickly back to her car.
* * *
A little over half an hour later she turned into the darkened driveway of the Chatham Centre. Traffic had been lighter than she expected. Again she didn’t bother with the speed limit.
The building stood in darkness. Nobody was working late, or so it seemed. All of the lights in the building appeared to be off. She did a lap of the car park looking for other vehicles that had been left there. She found three. Three cars left in various bays for no obvious reason, all of them older models, none of them in any way unusual. None of them were Chatham’s car, she thought as she peered at them. She imagined he would drive some expensive Mercedes saloon. Neal Garrick she fancied as a sports-car driver, a Maserati or some such. She already knew Nicola Milne drove a BMW, and she knew where that had been found. Even now, not much more than a mile away, dog teams were searching woods for Milne’s exsanguinated body if indeed she were dead. Eva prayed she was not. So who did these cars belong to? For a moment she thought about calling for a PNC check on them but there didn’t seem much point. If one of them belonged to the killer he would have covered his tracks. A PNC check would only tell her what he wanted her to know.
She left her car and walked to the front of the building. A fine, mist-like rain began to fall. It clung to her neck like perspiration and sent a chill through her. She took her phone from her pocket but didn’t open the flashlight just yet. In the distance she could see the glow of a street lamp. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, which cast just enough light for her to make her way around the building.
Why would Milne still be here? She had imagined she might be working late. Not at her job, but at finding out more from the Chatham Centre’s records. Maybe that was why she had left her car in the other car park, so she could return to the centre unnoticed.