IMPLANT

by Ray Clark

  Gardener thought for a moment. Was Bursley Bridge the hub of activity? Had something happened there that they needed to know about?

  He turned to Sergeant Williams. “David? Anything come to mind?”

  “Not straight away, but I’m probably not the man you want. I’ve only been the desk sergeant here for four years. Transferred from a force in Northampton.”

  Gardener didn’t think he was going to add anything else, but he did. “If I remember correctly, though, something had happened shortly before I came here, caused a bit of a stink.”

  “Can you recall anything?”

  “Not really, but I know a man who will. We both do.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Since leaving the doctor’s house, Graham Johnson’s mind had been a complete jumble of thoughts. What to do and where to go were his primary concerns. He couldn’t go home because the police were onto him. The shop would most likely be closed, blue and white tape all over it. Everybody in the town would have gathered outside, suspecting that he had something to do with the recent murders.

  Not that they’d be wrong, but he didn’t want them knowing his business. Why was it that small towns and villages bred the nosiest of bastards? They all knew everyone’s business. Didn’t they have lives in these small communities? He supposed that’s what came of being inbred. Most of them probably were.

  As for somewhere to go, that was another problem. He wasn’t married, which was probably a good thing. He doubted any woman would understand what they had done, despite having sound reason. Being single meant he didn’t have a large family.

  His sister, who had been married to the doctor, had died two years back. That had been a terrible affair. She had basically lost her mind after the death of their son Adam two years previous. She was finally admitted to a clinic, where she died under mysterious circumstances. That bitch of a nurse, Sonia Knight, had had something to do with that. He was damned sure.

  Graham Johnson had a brother who lived in London. But he couldn’t really go there. For one thing, the police were well known for using all the latest technology. They would more than likely have his van on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system, which meant major motorways were out. He had to stick to local roads, but there could be roadblocks.

  Johnson glanced at the van speedometer. He was within the thirty miles per hour limit and the road was pretty clear. But it was a major route. If the police had set up blocks along the way, the road he was on would be one of them. He drove for another fifty yards and took a small winding lane, which led out to Burley in Wharfedale, and eventually Ilkley and Skipton.

  His parents lived in that direction; he could head out that way. They were always an option. But would they understand? He doubted it. They had been gutted, naturally, at the loss of their daughter. Like all people of their generation, they had sought justice, but not in the way Graham had. In an ideal world, the police would have caught who was responsible and put them behind bars.

  Imagine how they would feel if it all came out, that their son was the one going to prison for exacting revenge for his unavenged sister.

  Johnson took a left and drove through Main Street. Burley was a lovely village that maintained an olde-worlde charm, with buildings made mostly of Yorkshire stone, including the pub. The whole place spoke of money. The problem was, it was very small, so he was exiting before he had realized.

  His thoughts went back to what he and the doctor had done. Why had he been so stupid as to allow himself to be talked into such drastic measures? It wasn’t fair to blame the doctor completely. To exact revenge in such an intricate way certainly did need both of them.

  The road in front of him was open and straight. Johnson was so frustrated by his limited options that he floored the accelerator, increasing the van’s speed. Perhaps he should live on the edge for a mile or two, see if he could replace his venom with a touch of adrenaline.

  He went back over the conversation he’d had with the doctor, particularly about the police having nothing on him. That wasn’t true. They had the white van with the brake light out. They had his registration number, which must have been spotted for them to even consider consulting him in the first place. So they definitely had something on him.

  The doctor had said that he could have told them anything to remove the tension for a while, till he thought of something better. What benefit would that be? It would have given him breathing space, but then they would have come back, and they’d have more on him because he’d have been lying.

  The van crept up to seventy miles per hour. He’d need to slow down soon because of a bend up ahead. But for now, it felt fucking great!

  Then a sudden thought hit him. One that nearly finished him off.

  A vision entered his mind. Two days previous, before the young ginger twins had brought the laptop in, he had lost his temper with the machine he was working on. The screwdriver had slipped and damaged a SIM card. In a fit of anger, he had thrown it across the shop. He did not go and search for it. But the police were in the shop. If they found the card, he was toast.

  His mobile phone chirped into life. It was lodged in a hands-free cradle. Johnson was so furious that he swiped his left arm across the dashboard, and sent the phone towards the footwell, immediately regretting his action. What if it was the doctor?

  He tried to think if there had been any opportunity whatsoever for the doctor to have modified him in any way.

  Jesus! He’d treated him for blood pressure. Johnson panicked, trying to think what he’d given him. He had to retrieve the phone.

  Johnson reached down to make a grab for it. Luckily his foot came away from the throttle pedal, reducing his speed now that he had his eyes off the road.

  He picked up the phone and saw it was a withheld number. Probably the cops. The bastards were on to him.

  As his eyes focused on the road again, the bend was suddenly upon him. Although he had spotted a yellow sign at the side of the grass verge, he had no idea what it had said.

  He hit the brakes, and the tyres screeched as he spun the steering wheel. He was pretty sure that the van was on two wheels going round the corner.

  The van returned to the road surface with a loud bang, and for a fraction of a second, he felt relieved.

  Until he saw the trailer full of steel less than ten yards away, and the shocked expressions of the men working at the side of the road.

  He had no time to brake or swerve. The last thing he saw was the red and white triangle letting him know that more than one of the lengths of steel overlapped the bed of the trailer.

  It was the longest one that crashed through his windscreen, taking his head through the rear window.

  Johnson’s foot was still on the throttle pedal as the van was lifted off the ground, leaving the engine to scream and the back wheels to spin out of control.

  His head bounced and rolled for at least twenty yards before disappearing into a ditch.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Williams had been right. They definitely knew a man who would know exactly what had happened four years ago in Bursley Bridge.

  Gardener approached Cragg and told him everything that had happened, bringing him up to date on Ronson and the cards.

  “Ronson? I thought that old soak was invincible.”

  “Seems not,” said Gardener. He then mentioned the reason he was there to see him, about the possible unsolved crime from four years ago.

  “Four years ago?” said Cragg, his face wrinkled up.

  “Yes, Sergeant Williams seems to think something had happened, and that you may remember.”

  Cragg snapped his fingers, and Gardener thought he had the answer, when the desk sergeant suddenly said, “I know what I did forget to tell you. You asked me about it yesterday.”

  “What?”

  “Sonia Knight. There was something involving her a couple of years ago.”

  “Go on.”

  “She was a duty nurse at an institute near Harrogate. I
can’t remember the name of the place, but it wouldn’t be that hard to find. She used to care for patients on the night shift. She was relieved of her duties. There was talk of patient neglect at the time, especially after one of them died.”

  “Can you remember anything more?”

  Cragg rose from his chair and put his empty glass on a small coffee table. “Let’s go downstairs. I know where I can lay my hands on the story.”

  The two men left the upstairs quarters. Gardener returned to the incident room, noticing Williams as he entered.

  “Did you find Sergeant Cragg?” he asked.

  “Yes, he’s in the back room digging out some files. Have you got anything on Graham Johnson yet?”

  “No sir, no one’s seen him.”

  “Any idea where Sergeant Reilly is?”

  “Mr Reilly is outside with the local police from Ilkley. Apparently there’s been an accident out on the road between Burley in Wharfedale, and there. Pretty bad, by all accounts.”

  Cragg came rushing into the room with an old, faded newspaper in his hand.

  “I’m sorry, it’s a macabre hobby of mine. I tend to keep stories of crimes that we’re linked with. You never know when you might need to refer to something.”

  Cragg put the paper on a desk and rifled through it.

  “Here it is.”

  Gardener noticed the headline: ‘Local Nurse On Murder Charge’.

  Whilst Cragg read the details, Gardener walked over to the ANACAPA chart, and did his best to draw more lines and add whatever information the desk sergeant came up with.

  The door opened, and Reilly walked back in with the traffic police from Ilkley.

  “Oh my God,” Cragg said suddenly.

  Gardener turned, not sure who to speak to first.

  “Boss,” said Reilly, making Gardener’s choice for him. “We’ve found Graham Johnson. It’s not good, I’m afraid.”

  “Go on,” said Gardener, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  “He’s just been killed in a road traffic accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure just yet, sir,” said one of the traffic squad “Apparently, he took a bend too fast, didn’t see the roadworks, and ended up running into a flatbed full of steel. I’m afraid he was decapitated.”

  Gardener couldn’t really say anything about that. Had they lost a suspect, or a victim? Had something premeditated happened, causing the accident? And why the bloody hell would you not see a flatbed full of steel?

  “Are the police at the scene now?”

  “Yes sir, we’ve cordoned off the road while we clean up.”

  “Check his van for a phone,” said Gardener. “If you find it, I want it back here. I also want his body taking straight to the mortuary. DS Reilly will give you the details.” Gardener started at Reilly. “Sean, can you ring Fitz and brief him?”

  “I’d rather not,” said Reilly.

  He turned to Cragg. “Maurice, pull up everything you have on Graham Johnson, in particular, a medical history.”

  Could Graham Johnson have been a victim of his own involvement? Did he have a device inside his body with a Bluetooth chip simply waiting for the right moment? Even if Johnson had been involved, Gardener felt that they had yet to find the main man.

  Cragg drew his attention. “I haven’t got much better news, either, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  “One of the patients in Sonia Knight’s care died from an overdose of a drug she should never have been given. At the very least, it should have been manslaughter, but Ronson was her brief and he somehow got her off.”

  “How the hell did he manage that?”

  “Anything was possible with Ronson,” said Reilly. “Who was the patient?”

  Cragg glanced around the room solemnly. “Theresa Sinclair, wife of Robert, and sister of Graham Johnson.”

  Gardener was busy trying to take everything in when Maurice Cragg dropped another bombshell.

  “I remember now what happened four years ago. Young lad was found dead at five o’clock in the morning by one of the local traders, covered up with an alcohol-soaked blanket. That was your unsolved crime. Local folk say it had a lot to do with drugs, but no one’s ever been brought to justice.”

  “Unless what we’ve seen recently contradicts that. Who was the victim?”

  “Robert Sinclair’s son, Adam.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Gardener put the pens on the table and decided not to bother with the chart for the moment. Instead, he crossed the room and took the newspaper from Cragg, sat down, and read the article about Sonia Knight. When he’d finished, he asked Cragg to try and remember exactly what he could about the unsolved crime surrounding Adam Sinclair’s death.

  “It’s my opinion that Adam Sinclair was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure we had witnesses that say he was coming home through the town by himself one night. It was late. I think he’d been to a party.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened, but a few last-minute revellers leaving a lock-in say they saw a chase. Three men running from what looked like Smiddy Hill through to Birdgate, two men after one. There wasn’t any shouting or cursing, but they were going at it pretty fast. No one seemed to think it was serious, so no one bothered to see where it ended up. We see that sort of thing all the time. Not all of it leads to crime.”

  “On Monday morning we find Alex Wilson crucified in his uncle’s shop. Was Alex Wilson involved in this fracas four years ago?” Gardener asked.

  “I think so,” replied Cragg.

  Gardener continued. “On Tuesday morning, we find Sonia Knight glued to a chair in the waiting room of the Bursley Bridge railway station, who subsequently dies when we get her to the hospital.”

  Gardener stopped talking and called Fitz on his mobile, inquiring about Wilfred Ronson. Despite the fact that the elderly pathologist couldn’t tell him a great deal, he did confirm that he had found an ICD in Ronson’s chest, with external wires going into his heart and elsewhere on his body. From what Fitz could see, Ronson’s heart had been fried.

  Gardener ended the call and continued with his summary.

  “This morning, we meet a solicitor off the train at Shipston. We now know he was victim number three. Fitz found an ICD in his chest, which delivered a massive electrical charge to his heart, killing him instantly.

  “We have an idea that two people are involved, one of whom – Graham Johnson, the electronics genius – is now dead. That leaves us with the medical man.”

  Reilly took over. “And your man here tells us that we have one very respected medical man whose wife and son have died in mysterious circumstances, and our victims are involved. Doesn’t take a genius to work out that when we dig a little deeper into this, we might find they’re all implicated.”

  “I agree, Sean, but we still need to connect all the dots.”

  The traffic cop coughed and drew Gardener’s attention. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have to get back to the scene.”

  “Yes, thanks for letting us know. Can you make sure you follow up on what I asked?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man left the room and nearly collided with Steve Fenton, the CSM.

  “A couple of important things for you, sir.”

  “I hope so,” said Gardener, rising out of his chair. He didn’t really like talking to any of his team from a sitting position, unless they were seated as well. Apart from the fact that he felt at a distinct disadvantage, he saw it as bad manners.

  “The call to Ronson’s phone came from a mobile owned by Graham Johnson.”

  “Johnson?” replied Gardener, astounded. “Have you any idea where he was?”

  “Not exactly,” replied Fenton. “We’ve traced all the masts in the area. Nearest we can get it is Bursley Bridge.”

  Gardener wondered where. He couldn’t possibly have been back in the shop, because they had it sealed off and it was currently being searched. A man h
ad been posted outside all night, and he hadn’t reported anything. So where the hell had Johnson been?

  “Any chance you could really narrow it down? Tell us to maybe within fifty yards where it came from?”

  “It’s a tall order, but we can try.”

  Gardener thought about what Cragg had told them. Graham Johnson was Robert Sinclair’s brother-in-law. Perhaps that’s where Johnson had been. The case against Sinclair was building, but there were still things he needed to know.

  “You said you had a couple of things. What’s the other?”

  “I can’t work this one out. The call to Sonia Knight’s phone yesterday morning at the station came from a pay-as-you-go mobile that hasn’t been used for four years. There have been no calls to or from this phone in all that time.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Reilly. “You’ve found out the phone belongs to a dead man.”

  The CSM stared at Reilly with a strange expression.

  “Adam Sinclair?” asked the Irishman.

  “How did you know?”

  “Call me psychic,” said Reilly.

  “I can think of a lot of things to call you, but that wouldn’t be one of them.”

  It was the only comment of the whole morning to raise a smile.

  “Maybe Johnson and Sinclair have been in it together all along,” said Reilly to Gardener.

  “I was just thinking the same thing. Perhaps Johnson spent the night with Sinclair so they could plan what to do next.”

  “Or get their stories right,” said Reilly. “Have you thought that Johnson crashing his van was no accident?”

  “That’s why I asked Maurice for his medical records.”

  “You think Sinclair might have put a small insurance policy in place?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Maurice Cragg. “Not Robert Sinclair. With all due respect, sir, I think there must be some mistake. I know the man’s been through a lot, but he’s a pillar of the community.”