Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set

by Catherine Moloney

  ‘Poor bugger,’ Noakes said unexpectedly as they made their way back to Medway car park. ‘Some folk jus’ never catch a break.’

  Markham too felt compassion for Belcher stealing over his heart. But he knew better than to be mastered by first impressions. He recalled the campaigner’s sinewy whipcord arms and the stealthy vigilance of his expression – like that of a cornered animal. The man had been frank about his hatred of Doctor Warr. But that could have been the double bluff of a diseased mind … And what about the sociopathic Mikey? Could he be pulling strings from inside the Newman?

  Noakes had stopped under a street lamp and was scrutinizing one of the poorly printed leaflets.

  ‘Seems like Belcher had teamed up with that bloke Hewitt, Guv. Y’know, the one whose wife died cos Warr screwed up.’ He peered closely at the grainy type. ‘They wanted Warr’s balls on a plate.’

  ‘In which case, they got more than they bargained for,’ Markham said curtly, thinking of the pitiful skeletal remains unearthed in Bromgrove Woods and the SOCOs in their white decontamination suits.

  Noakes had the grace to look embarrassed.

  ‘Sorry, boss, no disrespect intended.’

  The DI sighed. ‘It’s all right, Noakesy.’ Under the light, his face looked suddenly haggard. ‘I can’t help feeling there’s something particularly twisted about this one … the way Doctor Warr was just dumped and left to rot. Bones, teeth, dental records. The ultimate indignity. Whatever the man’s professional failings – he didn’t deserve that. His family didn’t deserve that.’

  Noakes stuffed the wodge of leaflets into his jacket pockets. ‘What d’you think Belcher meant about Warr’s girlfriend?’

  ‘Hmmm. He said they were both in on it, whatever “it” meant.’ Markham thought back to the opulence of Claire Holder’s office. ‘A financial scam of some sort … a revenue stream that didn’t bear close scrutiny. Or something worse … clinical malpractice.’ Wearily, he pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Intimidation of patients seems the least of it.’

  They had reached the car park.

  ‘Where to now, Guv?’

  ‘Let’s check in with Burton and then we’ll call it a day.’

  At that moment, Markham’s mobile rang.

  The call was over in a matter of seconds.

  ‘Results of the autopsy on Doctor Warr. Fracture of the hyoid confirming strangulation.’ The DI’s face wore a puzzled expression. ‘There was something else too. A transorbital wound.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Doctor Warr had been stabbed through the eye, most likely post mortem.’

  The DS looked baffled. ‘Why do that?’ Then his expression cleared. ‘Maybe it was part of some sicko ritual, Guv. Satanic, summat like that.’

  ‘“Eyes are the windows to the soul.”’ Markham spoke as though to himself. ‘By mutilating Doctor Warr’s eyes, maybe the killer was trying to send a message that he was evil.’

  Noakes looked dubious. ‘Or maybe he just got his jollies doing a spot of slice an’ dice.’

  ‘This puts a new complexion on things, Sergeant.’ Markham’s lean frame was taut with urgency. ‘We’ve got a seriously disturbed killer on our hands.’

  ‘One of the loo – er, patients, from the hospital, boss?’

  ‘We’ll need to check discharges and visitor records for the period before Doctor Warr went missing.’ The DI was thoughtful. ‘We could be looking at a former or current patient with a grudge against Doctor Warr. If current, then he or she could be playing someone on the outside.’

  Noakes lowered his voice. ‘Where does Chief Superintendent Rees fit into this?’

  ‘I wish I knew, Sergeant.’ Markham’s gaze was steady on the other’s face. ‘Maybe there’s no link between the patient disappearances and Doctor Warr’s death … though all my instincts tell me otherwise.’

  Suddenly, he remembered the strange picture inscribed with the words Your Friend.

  Were mutilator and mystery photographer one and the same?

  Had a secret from the past led to murder in the present?

  Was their killer mad or bad? Maniac or master manipulator?

  Despite the cold night air, he felt feverishly light-headed, as though his head might explode with unanswered questions.

  ‘C’mon, boss.’ Noakes said phlegmatically, opening the car door. ‘Knowing Burton, she’ll have it all mapped out on those ruddy flow charts she’s so fond of. An’ there was this poncey shrink manual she was rabbiting on about. Sounded like S & M for Beginners or some crap like that.’

  Despite his exhaustion, the DI’s lips twitched.

  ‘I think you’ll find she was referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Sergeant. Currently in its fifth edition. DSM for short.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I reminded her it’s a blooming police station, not Pervs ‘R’ Us. What the chuffing hell she thinks we’re going to learn from garbage like that is anybody’s guess….’

  Markham could only hope and pray Burton didn’t move on to Krafft-Ebing. George Noakes’s likely reaction to the murkier reaches of the Psychopathia Sexualis was something he didn’t care to witness.

  In the gloaming, Medway was deserted now, the only sign of life a dim silhouette at the window above Age Concern where David Belcher stood forlornly lost in his own thoughts.

  As Noakes had feared, Kate Burton was immersed in spreadsheets and flow charts when they arrived at the improvised incident room in the clock building. A pile of what looked like psychology textbooks and the dreaded DSM were at her feet.

  DC Doyle – a gangling redhead whose slick dress sense belied his fresh farm boy looks – greeted them enthusiastically. Judging from the look he exchanged with Noakes, the young detective had reached saturation point when it came to psychological theorizing.

  ‘Seen any fruit and nuts yet, mate?’ Noakes asked jocularly.

  Burton frowned.

  ‘I mean service users,’ he amended, with a shrug that spoke volumes.

  ‘They gave us a tour of the wards,’ Doyle answered, his tone constrained. ‘Seemed peaceful enough. The odd shuffling dead-eyed character, but what else did you expect in a mental hospital?’

  Markham glanced round from his inventory of the room.

  ‘Took you round the secure area as well, did they?’

  ‘Not as such, sir.’ Doyle was apologetic. ‘We just peeked through the doors.’ He looked anxiously at the DI. ‘There was a ward round, see …’

  ‘No problem,’ Markham replied smoothly, inwardly resolving to gain access to patients on that ward before the investigation was very much older.

  ‘It’s all state of the art,’ Burton said happily. ‘Everything biometric and eco-friendly. The patients have had a lot of input apparently.’

  She seemed perfectly at ease. Fresh from an MA in Gender and Modern Policing – via her sabbatical year at Bromgrove University – the case represented a sociological puzzle the DS was keen to unlock.

  Markham wished he shared her certainty.

  The adjoining archives room was the usual musty amalgam of mobile shelving, rolling stacks and old-fashioned index card cabinets. The mere sight of its polyglot layout gave the DI a throbbing pain in the temples. And yet, for all he knew, this unprepossessing space might hold the key to Doctor Warr’s murder and abuses going back years …

  Suddenly, there was a violent rattling and they all jumped. Through the long oblong side window which looked out onto a narrow path running between old and new buildings, Markham saw rain pouring down like a cataract. The elemental disturbance felt somehow appropriate.

  Noakes yawned ostentatiously. Burton, on the other hand, was conspicuously bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Just like the freaking Duracell Bunny, he thought disgustedly. Well, he’d had enough for one day. The guvnor too by the looks of it. Burton would get started on symptoms and syndromes, or some other highfalutin malarkey, unless he stepped in sharpish.

  ‘You up for a pint, Guv?’

&
nbsp; The dark eyes were grateful.

  ‘Not tonight, Noakesy. I need to check in with Dimples.’ As Doctor Doug Davidson the police pathologist was irreverently known.

  ‘Game plan for tomorrow, sir?’ Doyle clearly thought it politic to enquire.

  ‘I want you and Kate checking records for discharges and visits for the last eighteen months.’ It was the kind of methodical grunt work at which Burton excelled, though Doyle looked less than enthralled by the prospect.

  ‘What will you and Noakes be doing, sir?’ asked Burton jealously.

  ‘Visiting the Gazette’s offices for a word with whoever’s covering the missing patients story.’

  ‘Pete Darlington,’ grunted Noakes. ‘He’s a slippery customer an’ no mistake.’

  ‘After that, I want to speak to Ted Cartwright down at the council.’

  ‘Isn’t he the one who nearly got struck off?’ asked Doyle with a flare of interest.

  ‘The very same,’ Markham confirmed grimly.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Noakes looked as though there was a bad smell under his nose. ‘Nasty piece of work. Finger in every pie an’ sly like you wouldn’t believe. Nearly got those psycho warders off.’

  ‘Nurses,’ Markham and Burton said in unison.

  ‘Living it large for a legal aid merchant,’ the DS continued ruminatively. ‘I mean ter say, how’d he come by that whopping great barn of his? Like summat out of Hello or one of them fancy magazines. My Muriel—’

  Mrs Noakes’s views on Bromgrove’s kleptocracy being only too familiar, Markham hastily cut in.

  ‘As you say, Sergeant, a shady character who I think repays closer examination.’ Markham gazed out into the watery darkness. ‘We need to get started on staff interviews here tomorrow as well. And I want to recce the Forensic unit.’ He nodded significantly at Noakes. ‘Get the lie of the land. Take a look at Mikey Belcher.’ Succinctly, he briefed the other two on his visit to Behind Closed Doors and the post-mortem mutilation of Doctor Warr’s body. Burton listened with rapt intensity, scribbling notes in her pristine pocketbook. Noakes and Doyle, meanwhile, rolled their eyes when they thought Markham wasn’t looking.

  There was a gentle tap at the door and a tall woman came into the room. Thick braids of wheat-coloured hair were coiled round her head in an old-fashioned style which somehow suited her statuesque beauty. Her eyes were blue and clear as crystal, her figure – in a simple wrap dress – superb. Self-consciously, Noakes and Doyle began clearing their throats and fiddling with their ties while Burton surveyed the intruder with territorial defensiveness.

  ‘I’m Anna Sladen,’ the newcomer said. It was a beautiful voice, thought Markham. Flute-like and melodious.

  She held up a hand deprecatingly. ‘I can see you’re all done in, but I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m the clinical psychologist in charge of the Research Centre. That’s the suite of rooms at the far end of the corridor,’ she added by way of explanation. There was genuine sadness in her voice as she said, ‘What happened to Jon was awful.’ She hesitated. ‘He lived for his work … a pioneer in many ways.’

  Discussion of Doctor Warr’s legacy could wait, Markham decided. But in the meantime, it was good to feel at least one member of the medical staff was an ally.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Sladen,’ he said, the handsome features alight with real warmth. ‘We’ll be conducting interviews tomorrow and looking at the intensive care unit.’

  Was it his imagination, or had the psychologist stiffened?

  Her voice suddenly expressionless, Anna Sladen bade them goodnight and slipped away.

  ‘Well,’ Noakes smacked his lips appreciatively. ‘I bet none of the crazies minds getting up close and personal with her.’

  For once, nobody corrected him.

  ‘C’mon, Benny Hill,’ Doyle chaffed him affectionately. ‘Let’s get off.’

  Burton’s nose was already buried in a tome of doorstop dimensions. Psychopathy in the Modern Era.

  Good luck with that, luv, thought Noakes sourly.

  Aloud, he said, ‘We c’n drop you off, boss.’

  ‘Will you be all right, Kate?’ asked Markham, ever the gentleman. ‘Don’t make a night of it, will you.’

  ‘I’m fine, sir. This place never sleeps.’

  Outside in the forecourt, looking back at the hospital, bathed in a pallid nimbus from strategically placed floodlights, those words came back to him like a warning.

  This place never sleeps.

  Distrustfully, he wondered if he could breach its defences.

  4. Phantom Threads

  WHEN TUESDAY MORNING DAWNED, it felt like coming to the surface of the water after deep sea diving.

  It had been a restless night. Eventually, so as not to disturb Olivia with his tossing and turning, Markham crept into his study and watched dawn come up over the neighbouring municipal cemetery, ranks of headstones and memorials emerging palely into view from the morning mist.

  It was a quirk of Markham’s to welcome this proximity to the dead. The third floor apartment’s view of the cemetery was the main reason he had moved to The Sweepstakes, a complex of upmarket apartments and townhouses at the end of Bromgrove Park, off Bromgrove Avenue. The ghosts of murdered men, women and children sometimes seemed more vivid than the world around him, for they were all still alive to him.

  Were there any graves at the Newman, he wondered. The old asylums like Broadmoor had their cemeteries, because that was the last stop for some poor souls who rotted away there and had a pauper’s burial. Modern special hospitals – those high-tech hangars with their air locks and airport-like scanners – presumably did things differently.

  But what about the hopeless cases? Were they destined to remain in the Newman till the recording angel said ‘time no longer’? Was some hidden corner of that NASA-style compound reserved for unsanctified outcasts like Mikey Belcher? Or would they only finally find freedom when their ashes were scattered to the four winds, like Hindley or Brady?

  He shivered. Olivia would say he was being thoroughly morbid. But David Belcher’s face had haunted his dreams. In his sleep, he followed Belcher along unnaturally bright corridors to a glass sliding door. On the other side of the door was an operating theatre where a white-clad patient lay strapped to a gurney, surrounded by gowned and masked figures like hieratic friezes on some ancient monolith. ‘Look there,’ Belcher urged. ‘Don’t you see?’ As he spoke these words, one of the figures detached itself from the tableau and began to walk towards them. The figure lowered his surgical mask and Markham recognized the features of Chief Superintendent Philip Rees. He was saying something behind the glass – his lips were moving – but Markham couldn’t hear what it was. Then a chasm suddenly opened beneath his feet and he was falling…. After that, there was nothing more. Belcher, the operating room and the patient on the bed were gone.

  Markham thought back to his meeting with the Chief Super on Sunday, shortly after Jonathan Warr’s body was discovered.

  Rees was crisply imperturbable, the epitome of executive efficiency, his square-jawed good looks set off by pristine pips and epaulettes. No different from usual. ‘Doctor Warr was an eminent practitioner in his field and a valued member of the police authority consultative panel.’ His encomium – as brief as it was sensible – showed no self-consciousness.

  There was nothing tangible to go on. Nothing apart from those lethal little slips of the tongue in minutes from the Newman’s patients’ council.

  There’s a copper knows … the top man … owns the place … Magnum….

  Magnum.

  Rees’s station nickname. An ironic nod to his uber-manliness.

  And there it was in the mouth of a patient.

  Deranged rodomontade? Or something more sinister?

  Muriel Noakes, with her infallible nose for the false note, for the single detail a hair’s breadth off centre, had felt it too.

  Too much at home, she had sniffed about Rees’s demeanour at the hospital’s Open Day.

  W
as it ‘access all areas’ for Rees and, if so, why? How had he insinuated himself into the Newman? If he roamed the corridors, who gave him the keys?

  Markham reminded himself he would have to be careful. Who would believe dangerous mentally ill patients over a police officer of Rees’s pedigree, holder of the Queen’s Police Medal for distinguished service?

  No-one.

  If Rees was involved in abuse, then hospital staff were most likely complicit and would now close ranks.

  Birds of a feather.

  Was Doctor Jonathan Warr part of the conspiracy? And why did he have to die?

  No answers came to Markham as he sat in the raw morning light turning things over and over in his mind.

  Coffee, he decided. Strong and black. The sovereign remedy for insomnia and jaded senses. And then off to the Gazette to speak to Noakes’s ‘slippery customer’.

  Once out of the apartment, with the cold clear air blowing freshly over his face, Markham felt the violence of his agitation begin to subside.

  Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.

  His eyes wandered one last time from The Sweepstakes to the sprawling cemetery by its side – rested there thoughtfully, as he watched the feeble wintery sun warming the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  His superstitious fears clung to him out of doors, as they had clung to him in his study in the chill early hours. Impatiently, he strode briskly towards the garages at the rear of the apartment block as though by that means he could outrun them.

  Pete Darlington’s cubicle in the Gazette’s offices was almost as frowsy as Noakes’s workstation. With his mop top hair and anaemic weediness, the young reporter possessed a certain waifish vulnerability which no doubt stood him in good stead when it came to winkling out confidences from vulnerable members of the public. Puffing away on an e-cig, he eyed them warily.

  ‘Look, gents, even if I knew anything about this so-called tip-off, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.’ He assumed an expression of candid ingenuousness. ‘Gotta protect my sources, y’see.’

  George Noakes was not a man to be propitiated by ‘the soft answer which turneth away wrath’.