20/20

by Carl Goodman

  Eva cursed herself then. She was just speculating. Get some bloody facts, she told herself. Either Milne is here or she isn’t. If she isn’t it doesn’t matter. If she is you can ask her yourself.

  The building seemed unoccupied. A decorative strip of light glowed under the edge of the reception desk but she could see nothing else. Then again, she thought as she checked and rechecked, she had seen how the examination rooms and operating areas were windowless. There were plenty of places within the centre where somebody could work at night and go unnoticed. And if somebody was still working, Eva reminded herself it might also be that their activities were entirely innocent.

  When she pushed on the front door though, the hair on the back of her neck rose. The building was unlocked. She had expected to need a key card to get in at this time in the evening, but the door was just the way it had been during the day. Eva stood in the reception area and listened, but could hear nothing. The light under the edge of the desk glowed. Now she was inside she saw also a plaque on the wall with the Bright Eyes logo on it, softly backlit by LEDs. She pushed on a door that led into a corridor. Chatham’s office was halfway down it, she remembered. Beyond that lay the operating area.

  Why was the building unlocked? Was it just an oversight? Or was someone sitting at a desk somewhere catching up on patient records? For a moment she thought about calling for backup, but there didn’t seem any obvious reason to do so. She walked down the corridor. On her left was the female nurses’ changing area. Eva pushed the door and stepped inside.

  Complete darkness. When the door closed she could see exactly nothing. Eva took out her phone and lit the flashlight. Even in the narrow beam of the phone the room was exactly as she remembered it. The next room would be where she and Chatham had washed up prior to going into the operating theatre. She went to push the door, but then stopped.

  She turned off the light on her phone. Just a precaution, she told herself. Just in case. She pushed on the door, gently, worried that it might creak, and then stepped into the almost complete blackness of the scrub room. From under the double doors that led to the operating theatre she saw a warm glow.

  Was someone in the room? Did she dare push the door? Had someone simply left the lights on? Did they always leave the lights on? She leaned her ear against the door, careful not to press too hard on it. She could hear something. She had no idea what.

  Even if someone was in the operating theatre she had no actual reason to assume they were a threat. Just be cautious, she thought as she finally decided to open the door.

  Warm light bathed the centre of the room. The edges lay in darkness. It took a moment for her eyes to adapt. When they did she almost screamed.

  A figure lay in the reclining chair in the centre of the room, the chair where Robin Chatham had so expertly cut open the eye of his patient. For a moment Eva didn’t recognise her, the woman tied to the chair with nylon straps. Surgical tape held her eyelids open, partly covering her face. Nicola Milne, Eva realised. Was she still alive?

  Before she went to find out she took her phone and texted two words to Moresby: BACKUP, NOW. Moresby would react instantly. She knew that for a fact. Eva stepped into the pool of light that enveloped Nicola Milne. As she did so, Milne groaned.

  A catheter was taped into her neck. The plastic tube ran down to a metal cleaning bucket. When Eva looked down she almost gagged. At least two pints of Milne’s blood was in the bucket. The tap on the catheter was closed, though. Somebody was in the middle of bleeding her to death, but for whatever reason they had interrupted the process. When she looked again she saw wires taped to Milne’s fingers. They ran to a transformer that should have powered the machine that irrigated the eyes during operations. Eva understood then. Somebody was torturing her.

  Milne let out another sound. ‘Please,’ she gasped, lips dry and voice cracking from loss of fluid, ‘I’ve told you where they are. Please let me go.’

  Eva touched the tape on the side of her neck. ‘Nicola, it’s DI Harris,’ she told her. ‘There are more police officers on their way. They’ll be here in a few minutes.’ The needle of the catheter was buried in her carotid artery. The puncture would bleed freely when she removed it. On the instrument table by the chair she found more surgical tape. She tore a strip several inches long, pulled the tape off Milne’s neck and then pulled the needle from the artery. A narrow jet of blood squirted from it, but Eva taped over it and pressed down hard. After a few moments the wound sealed itself enough for her to let go.

  She took the tape from Milne’s right eye. Whoever had done this had to still be in the building. She knew she had to get Milne out of the chair as fast as she could. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Milne croaked, ‘they wore a mask. They wanted the copies I made of the patient records from the faulty batch. They’re deleting everything,’ Milne hissed as Eva pulled the tape from her left eye. ‘He put cleaning fluid in my eyes,’ she sobbed. ‘Then he used the cables on me. I’d already told him, but he did it anyway.’

  She pulled the wires off Milne’s fingers. She could see burn marks where the current had scorched her flesh. The plastic ties wouldn’t budge. ‘I need a knife.’

  ‘Scissors,’ Milne gasped, ‘by the packs of dressings.’

  She cut the ties and then pulled Milne from the chair. When she did so though, the optometrist collapsed. Backup should be here soon. Christ, Eva thought as she tried to coax Milne to stand, hurry up.

  A noise, from the corridor beyond the operating theatre. Somebody was coming. Would it be one of Moresby’s men? She stopped trying to lift Milne, picked up the scissors instead, brandished them like a knife and ran over to the door of the operating theatre. She stood beside it, back to the wall, scissors raised.

  She wouldn’t give him a chance. If it wasn’t a police officer who came through the door she would stab him in the neck, whoever he was. She couldn’t afford not too. She waited, gripping the scissors so hard her fingers hurt, ready to strike.

  Another door opened, one that had been hidden in shadows. Eva turned to lash out with the scissors but the stun gun caught her full in the face. A brilliant, blinding light as her head hit the wall. Then, nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Eva awoke some time later. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious. She seemed to be lying on her side, in darkness. The world around her almost floated. It moved and swayed in a way that seemed familiar. Every now and then she sensed a red glow coming from somewhere behind her, and that seemed familiar too. It took her a while to figure it out, but after several minutes she realised she was in the boot of a car.

  She couldn’t move. She didn’t seem to be tied, but her limbs felt like lead. For a moment she wondered if, as with Milne, he had drained her blood, but in what felt like slow motion she cast her mind back to the crash, back to hanging upside down in an overturned vehicle, back to the body of Dominic Bradley suspended beside her. It astonished some part of her that she could even think about such things in a calm and detached fashion, but that part of her felt distant from the rest. The rest of her just wanted to sleep.

  It wasn’t the same. Not the same as the sensation of blood running down her body from a severed artery, not the sense of falling that hypovolemia had induced. This was different. She wondered about it for a while and then realised. The bastard had sedated her.

  Her mind drifted. After a while she fell back into dreamless sleep.

  This time she woke with a start. The world shifted from black to red and then to brilliant diffuse white in a handful of seconds. Her skin erupted in sweat. Her heart raced, a sudden tachycardic beating that pounded in her ears and pulsed in a vein inside her eye. Her chest hurt. She felt a sudden cold constriction, as though her ribcage were collapsing, crushing her lungs. Then suddenly everything went into reverse. The pressure on her lungs disappeared and she sucked in air with a strangled gasp, like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface of a lake. Her mind was in overdrive. He had sedated
her; now he must have countered the effects of that with a stimulant.

  The world snapped into sharp focus. She was in a room, not one that she had ever seen before. She searched for an adjective. It looked unfinished. Bare concrete floor, bare plaster on the walls, no shade on the light bulb that hung in the middle of the room. It would be an apartment, she could see that, perhaps in just a few months’ time, once the decorators had done their work, but not yet. She was above ground level. There was a window. She could make out the shapes of familiar buildings in Kingston town centre. One of the new developments down by the river, she guessed, one of the expensive ones that sat on the opposite bank from where her flat had been. Third, maybe fourth floor. Her mind raced, the combined effects of fear and the stimulant.

  She was upright, in a chair, wrists and ankles bound. Another pain, in the side of her neck. Eva looked down. A clear plastic tube led from her neck into a cheap blue decorator’s bucket. There was no blood in it yet, she noticed. There would be soon, she assumed. She didn’t know whether to shake silently or scream. Then the drugs swept through her again and all she could feel was rage.

  He came back into the room with the swagger of a man who had just snorted cocaine. Masked, of course. The same jet-black balaclava and cycling goggles that she had seen in St Jude’s Hill. She wanted to kill him. With almost tedious predictability the first thing he did was punch her in the face.

  Her head snapped backwards. Eva snarled. ‘Big man, hitting someone when they’re tied up. Let me out of this chair and we’ll make it a fair fight. Give me a knife and I’ll cut your fucking throat.’ She felt the spittle fly from her lips. It was the stimulant, she realised. She was probably as stoned as he was.

  Under the mask, he laughed. ‘Obviously, that’s not going to happen.’ His voice was muffled by the hood. An educated voice, but not one she could identify just yet. Black fabric concealed its identity. ‘The first thing I want to know is, what do the police actually have? Are there documents from Slovakia? Have you got reports from ProOptica? What about Isherwood? Has anyone exhumed his body?’

  He doesn’t know Isherwood was cremated, Eva realised. ‘We’ve got better than that,’ she sneered. ‘We’ve got Shapiro and Pearce in protective custody, we’ve got samples of the lenses, we’ve got Laska’s statement, we’ve got patient records from Milne and we’ve got the MHRA going through the procedure for closing down the Chatham Centre.’ Not all of that was strictly true, she thought, but this bastard didn’t deserve the truth. ‘There’s not going to be anything left for Kleinmann to buy.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to punch her again, but instead he turned to the window and stared out. ‘We put everything into making that deal work,’ he said, as much to himself as to her. ‘I’ll lose everything. House, car, investments, the lot. All because some fucked-up lens designer couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘No,’ Eva said.

  He turned on her. ‘What? What do you know about it?’

  ‘More than you it looks like,’ she hissed at him. Spit and drool spattered over her chin. ‘Laska isn’t your problem. Antonin Jelen is your problem. Jelen falsified the tests on the resin. This is down to Jelen, not Laska.’

  ‘It would have worked,’ he bellowed. ‘It would have fucking worked if Laska hadn’t interfered.’

  She stared at the insect red that covered his eyes. ‘So you did know about the resin.’

  ‘Jelen wasn’t that smart. It was a good idea but he didn’t have the technical knowledge to make it work.’

  Of course he hadn’t, Eva thought. It needed somebody with both skill and contacts, and an understanding of how the regulators functioned. Jelen’s idea, an outstanding idea from the context of people who wanted to make a bucketload of money, but Jelen couldn’t see it through on his own. He needed more expertise. Skills that had to have come from the Chatham Centre, and that meant a very small group of suspects. Which one? The voice gave her no clues, but the words he spoke had a vaguely familiar cadence to them. She took a gamble. ‘That stupid hood looks bloody uncomfortable, Jeremy. Why don’t you take it off?’

  He stared at her for a moment. Then he pulled the hood from his head. Jeremy Odie, business director of the Chatham Centre, ran his hand through his hair and glowered at her. ‘When did you work out who I was?’

  ‘You were always on my shortlist. Once we found out about the lenses we knew it had to be someone associated with the centre. There weren’t that many options, Jeremy. I could have practically flipped a coin between you and Neal Garrick.’

  ‘Do the police know?’

  Eva scolded. ‘What the fuck do you think we are? We do actually talk to one another. Your picture is plastered all over a whiteboard in the incident room.’

  Odie spat. ‘You think you’re so fucking clever. Let’s see how clever you think you are when I drain your blood into a bucket.’

  ‘I’m not looking forward to it,’ she admitted. She managed to keep her voice calm and steady, even though inside she was terrified. ‘It means I’ll miss the sight of you having your brains blown out by an armed respond unit.’ She saw the look that crossed his face then. ‘Oh Jeremy, you don’t seriously think you’re getting out of this alive do you? Serial murder and a cop killer?’ She felt the sense of outrage growing within her. She didn’t feel the need to suppress it. ‘Will Moresby would snap your neck like a fucking twig, but he won’t have to,’ she said, voice rising to a shout. ‘An ARU will think they see you try to draw a weapon, even if you haven’t got one. Have you ever seen the mess a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle makes of a body? They will blow you to fucking hell, Jeremy,’ she shouted at him. ‘You are going to die, and it’s going to fucking hurt.’

  ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ Odie yelled.

  ‘I don’t fucking care!’ Eva screamed. ‘Let me out of this fucking chair.’

  He paced. Turned. Grasped at his hair. He spun to face her. ‘What do I get out of it if I do?’ he shouted.

  ‘You get not to have your brains blown out. You get not to die, and maybe your family won’t be turned out on the streets. Got any kids? They’d be taken into care. How’s your wife going to face up to your creditors? What’s she going to have to do to keep them happy? She better give fucking good blow jobs.’ It was the stimulants, she thought as she screamed, it had to be. She had never known such hatred as she felt for Jeremy Odie, she told herself, but even as she framed the thought she knew it was not true.

  He kept pacing. ‘You bitch,’ he snarled.

  Eva laughed. ‘Coming from you that doesn’t even register does it? Let me out of this chair.’

  ‘I could give myself up,’ Odie barked.

  He knew he couldn’t win. He had to know it was over. Odie had failed trying to delete the record Milne had concealed and Laska’s statement would destroy everything. A remorseless killer but not a psychopath, she told herself; could she use that to save her own life?

  ‘Depends. How’s Nicola Milne?’

  For a moment he looked bewildered. ‘How should I know? You saw her last. I heard you say you’d called for backup so I just dumped you in the boot and got the fuck out of there.’

  The news washed over her like cool water. Milne would still be alive. ‘That’s good, Jeremy.’ She forced herself to sound calm again, even though she panted as she breathed. ‘That counts as a plus point. What else have you got?’

  ‘Chatham,’ he stopped, held his head in his hands, paced again. Eva didn’t speak. She wrapped silence around her like a cloak and waited for him to fill the sudden vacuum. ‘Chatham thinks he has a way to remove the lenses before they do any damage. He thinks he can use the same machine to replace them.’

  She remembered the mechanism that had inserted the lens inside an eye as she had watched. ‘So Chatham knew everything.’

  ‘Not at the start,’ Odie said. He squatted down on the floor as though exhausted. ‘None of us did, not even Jelen I think. It took a while for us to realise. By then the first
lenses had been implanted and Kleinmann had expressed a serious interest.’ He stared into her eyes. ‘It’s more money than you think. Kleinmann will double the purchase fee if we hit our targets in the first two years. I’d have walked away with almost two hundred million dollars. What would you do for that?’

  She could almost see him looking back down the road he had travelled, from over-excited business development director, presumably with a mild cocaine habit, to serial killer and torturer. The look in his eyes spoke to her. How the fuck did this ever happen? Jeremy Odie was asking himself.

  ‘You need to untie me,’ Eva said, voice quieter now. ‘This has to end. It’s not going to be good, Jeremy, but at least you’ll come out of it alive. At least your family won’t be destroyed. That matters to you, doesn’t it? That’s still something you can hang onto?’ He slumped. She saw his shoulders fall as though gravity had suddenly become too much to bear. Jeremy Odie’s head hung down when he nodded.

  He took a scalpel from his rucksack, perhaps the same scalpel he had used to cut out Irina Stepanov’s eyes. ‘We should do this properly,’ Eva said. ‘Do you understand?’ For a moment he didn’t, but then he nodded his head again. ‘Jeremy Odie,’ Eva said, voice as firm as she could make it, ‘I am arresting you for the murders of Irina Stepanov, Jodie Swain, Paul Markham and Katarzyna Liege. You do not have to say anything,’ she continued.

  Then the lights went out.

  What the fuck? Odie hadn’t touched the switch. She had seen him walking towards her, scalpel in hand. She was as certain as she could be that he had been about to cut her ties, not her throat. So what the hell had happened? Had the fuses blown? Then she heard a sudden crash, a sound like a door being kicked in. In darkness, somebody surged into the room.