by Ben Oakley
“There are two Stansey King's?” I said.
“Exactly. It's not uncommon to have the same name in a world that has its foundations built on only a handful of letters. This one -” he threw the file over to me and I caught it with ease - “came in over two months ago, here for less than a day before she disappeared on unescorted leave.”
I opened it to scan the details of the British-born girl. She was the one pulled from the canal two months ago, I recognised the description of her.
“And the other?” I asked.
He threw the other one over to me, “Slovenian born, her name was sent over yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“I thought it was unique to have two girls of similar age with the same name but like I said it's not uncommon.”
I tested him, “is she here?”
“She never made it here, I was told she eloped the emergency ward. Again, it's not uncommon if they hadn't been sectioned immediately.”
“What is common here Doctor?” I was getting annoyed with him. “Who sent her name over?”
“From the UCH?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe it was Doctor Foster, he generally runs the psych team down there.”
I thought about it for a moment and something clicked in my head; it was the information of her being Slovenian that was on the file. I knew by this point that she was Slovenian, she told me herself but no one else would have known it to have put it on transfer records.
“We couldn't identify the more recent Stansey King,” I said, “because we were looking at the previous one's DNA and so we assumed her to be a Jane Doe. So how would someone know she was Slovenian if we didn't even know who she was?”
“The leading psychiatrist would have sent it over with his or her recommendation for sustained psychiatric care.”
“So it was Doctor Foster who would have put the information on there?”
“Pass me her file again,” he reached out his hand.
I passed it over to him and watched as he flicked through the slim papers within to find whatever he was looking for.
He continued, “yes. It was Doctor Foster who added her country of birth to the system.”
“But he wouldn't have known that because we couldn't identify her. Except he did know it.”
I stood and took the phone out of my pocket, almost as fast as Paine would have done. I impressed myself. I hit the speed dial button for Salt.
He answered quickly as usual.
I spoke first, “tell me you got him!”
“He left early yesterday and didn't turn up for his shift this morning,” Salt replied.
“Dammit,” I wanted to kick the desk but restrained myself. “It's him, Salt, it's him. He knew the identity of our Stansey King and didn't tell anyone. But he made a mistake by listing her country of birth on her transfer record.”
“Could it be false information?”
I wanted to tell him about Stansey but it wasn't the time. “You must trust me when I say the country of birth is correct.”
“I believe you, Lake. You have no worries with me. Where are you?”
“Linden.”
“They're letting you go through their records?”
I looked at Doctor Cobbs, “they're being incredibly accommodating.” Then back to the phone, “where's Foster?”
“He rents an apartment in Kensington, two officers have just arrived but no one is home.”
“Then he knows he's been rumbled.”
“Are you sure it's him?”
“I've narrowed down my suspect list and he's right at the top.”
“Who else is on your list?”
“You really wanna know? I told you, I don't trust anyone.”
“Enlighten me.”
“So be it. Detective Hallberg, Detective Paine, Paine's boyfriend, Stansey King, Miss Jameson, Michael Drake, the manager of The Outhouse, you and anyone who's life line I cross. You see how I work now?”
He chuckled, “well you can take me off the list, I have an alibi every night.”
“Not until I checked you haven't.”
“I really did unleash you didn't I?”
“Find out everything you can about Foster, he's gotta be somewhere and he's gonna have Paine with him. Dammit Salt, we've got twelve hours until he kills her.”
“I'll keep you in the loop, stay in signal.”
I hung up and pointed at Cobbs who looked like he was going to speak. I shook my head at him as if to say please don't open your finely crafted mouth until I ask you to.
“You're not hearing this,” I said to him.
I hit another speed call button on the phone and put it to my ear. The person on the other end answered.
“Stansey, did you find anything on Foster?”
Cobbs rose in his seat with his eyes wide but I pointed at him to sit.
“Harrison, there's a lot here. He's travelled all over the world and has at one time held three passports. Harrison, his face seems too familiar to me and its worrying me.”
Dammit, I should have told her but I didn't want her to lose control of her thoughts when she was alone.
“Don't worry about it just now. Talk to me about Foster.”
“Ten years ago he was struck off the General Medical Council but appealed and got his medical license back.”
“Why was he struck off?”
“You know it doesn't actually say and I can't find any information about it with the GMC.”
“One moment Stansey.” I looked at Cobbs, “what was Clive Foster struck off the GMC for? Come on, you must know. You worked with him.”
Cobbs nodded, “I believe he was removed from the register for – touching one of his patients inappropriately. A young girl and her family wanted to press charges but he agreed to end his career only to appeal at a later date. The appeal wasn't public knowledge and so it went through with ease with the help of some lawyers.”
I shook my head at him before putting the phone back to my ear. “Anything on finances or property?”
“Not in the police check but the other research you have here is so complete and full, I don't know how you did all of this.”
“It wasn't me.”
“Who was it?”
“The brother of Jennifer Cane,” I told the truth.
“Okay, well in his research files regarding Doctor Foster, he points to three different bank accounts and a property in – Essex.”
She fell silent. I knew why and my heart dropped. “Stansey, focus on my voice.”
“Okay.”
“Is there an address for the property?”
“There is a line in some kind of deed relating to an acre of land in Essex but there's no map and no address at all in anything. He does have family but it seemed they disowned him after his dismissal and they moved to Ireland so I don't think they are going to be much help.”
“Do you – do you remember if you were being held in the countryside or the city?”
“I'm sure it wasn't a busy place so it must have been the countryside. I couldn't hear much, I don't know.”
“It's alright. Is there anything in Cane's research regarding drugs or drug testing?”
I heard her tapping away on my computer on the other end. I waited for a moment but she came back on pretty quick. “Not that I can make out. There's a lot of info here, you think this is the guy?”
“It probably is but we can't confirm just yet. Don't worry, just stay where you are and feed me information as and when you find it. Stay in contact.”
“Thank you Harrison. Thank you for believing in me.”
“Don't thank me just yet.”
I ended the call and looked back at both of the Stansey files. I was trying to work out Foster's motive. If he was the killer and I was becoming pretty certain that he was then he was hiding something I couldn't even work out.
Then I remembered something and looked over at Cobb.
“I need to see room 18 on the Red
Ward.”
Forty Three
We left the office and walked at a steady pace along the central corridor towards the room. It was situated on a slight curve near to the smoking areas for both wards. Room 18 was currently occupied by a patient, so Cobbs recommended to bring her out before looking at it.
“What's she in for?” I asked him.
“She's here because of self-harming but she's been diagnosed with acute depression.”
“Name?”
“She prefers to be called Maggie. She's a 17-year-old white girl from Manchester who moved to the area two years ago. Maggie's been here for 21 days at the present time. Here, this is it.”
We stopped near the room and I took a peek inside the top window to see a girl laying on her bed, reading a book. I felt like I was intruding on someone's privacy so I glanced up and down the corridor to see it completely empty. Then I looked beyond the glass door to the smoking area which also had high dividing walls, similar to the border wall.
“How the hell did he get over that?” I said to myself, as I walked to the door.
Cobbs followed me to the smoking area door and I pushed it open, taking in a rather fresh breath of air. It was in stark contrast to the staleness of Cobbs office, the stuffiness of it had tired me more than I wanted. We both stepped outside and the door closed gently behind us.
I pointed to a slightly lower wall on the far side, “is the boys ward on the other side of that?”
“That's correct, it was a relatively new wall built about seven years ago if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, when the hospital split its sexes,” I said quickly.
“How do you even know all of this?” Cobb asked.
I imagined Michael Drake scaling the wall from the other side. I physically pointed at his descent to the girl's smoking area and followed his likely route along the ground to where I was standing.
I turned and looked through the glass door, through to room 18.
“Cobbs, do me a favour and open the door to the room. Keep it wide open.”
He did it without question, I watched him knock on the door first and then unlock it before keeping it fully open.
I watched him stand beside the door just as Doctor Foster would have done. Beyond him there was an NHS hospital bed in clear view of the smoking area. Maggie was now sitting on the end of the bed as Cobbs explained the situation to her. At least I hoped he was. I would hate to be responsible for delaying anyone's recovery process. Still, I was seeing things exactly as Drake would have done.
Michael Drake was right.
He had the entire view of the room and it looked exactly as I had imagined it. He had seen Foster lean in with a needle as the door closed. The entire scene was laid out for me as if it had happened right then.
I knocked on the window and beckoned Cobbs back outside. I looked beyond him as the room door closed slowly but surely.
“Did that help?” he said when he came back outside.
“Would there be any situation where a doctor would inject a patient in their room?”
“There is precedent, yes. We do have some very violent patients as you can imagine but there would need to be at least two staff present in the room, including the one administrating the sedative.”
“So no one person can inject a patient without having someone else present?”
“Correct.”
“What sedative would you use?”
“Well there's any number we could use but we rarely do, we find other methods of calming someone down. We don't always resort to drugs.”
“Humour me.”
“Intravenous Diazepam can have an effect within five seconds, Promethazine can also be given by intramuscular injection but it can take up to thirty minutes to take effect. It also depends if the patient had been previously restrained. There's a lot of risk in attempting to inject someone when they're in a bit of a crisis.”
I looked back through the glass and then at the cameras along the corridor.
“Security is round the clock?”
“There is someone in the staff base watching all the time.”
“Why might it not be watched?”
“In an emergency if we are short staffed or if the security nurse is requested to leave by a superior.”
“Such as a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
I put my hands on my hips, took another deep breath of fresh air and walked around in a small circle, before facing him again.
“Tell me Doctor, could you keep someone under sustained sedation for weeks on end?”
“Most patients are sedated in some way or another, it's the nature of the ward.”
“And what if you wanted to bring someone out of sedation quickly?”
He fluttered his eyelids at me, I assumed and hoped it was his way of thinking. “To bring someone out of an intravenous Diazepam sedation quickly you would need access to Flumazenil. It's a relatively new drug which reverses the effect of many Benzodiazepines and is generally administered through injection.”
I scratched my head, “so you could technically bring someone in and out of sedation as often as you wanted.”
“Technically but the effect on the mind would be tremendously negative and more susceptible to coercion. If it were to be combined with a hallucinogenic for example then you might have the ability to control another human.”
I stuttered but lost my train of thought. Did he just say what I thought he said? Controlling someone through sedation and hallucinogens?
“What, like LSD?”
“Precisely.”
“Do you – do you run any medical experiments here?”
“All the time but we call them trials and not experiments. Mental health is an increasing area of medicine and we're constantly adapting to pharmaceutical developments.”
“But what else do you do here?”
“I'm not sure I understand.”
“Do you use the patients in trials against their will?”
“Don't be absurd!”
I stepped closer to him and looked directly into his eyes, “listen to me very carefully. Doctor Clive Foster might have killed at least seventeen young women and he has unlimited access to this facility. I have a very reliable witness who claims he saw Foster enter that room and administer an injection to whoever was in there at the time.”
“Well that wouldn't be possible.”
“You've gotta work with me here,” I said with urgency. “Linden is going to collapse on the news that one of your own is a murderer. All the victims had been in room 18, and I'm guessing they were under Doctor Foster's care. You've been here long enough. What else goes on here?”
He pointed his finger at me, “we help thousands of patients every year don't you ever forget that.” He lowered his finger and his voice, “but I've had my suspicions for a while. It's why I wasn't surprised when I heard you mention Foster's name. The guy creeps me out. Coming in here like he owns the place. Although he wasn't resident here, he had unlimited access to all the patients.”
“Go on!”
“Room 18 is only seen by one camera. Ever since the refurbishment, it's been blacking out for no obvious reason.”
“Foster's been messing with the cameras,” I said.
I thought back to the strategic placement of the camera in the private ward at the UCH. He's had control since the beginning.
“Come here,” Cobbs said.
He took my arm and led me to the corner of the smoking area. Another deep breath with a little bit of stagnant smoke residue was never a bad thing. Damn, I could have smoked a whole pack if someone put it in front of me. And still I restrained myself.
“Let me guess,” I said, “black spot?”
“Every facility has one.”
I looked around for the cameras and it looked like he was telling the truth. I heard some movement on the other side of the wall. Some boys had gone into their smoking area and had started chatting about the Formula One Championship.
“Tell me about Foster,” I said quieter than before.
“Missing information on files, absent pages, details incomplete. A patient can enter this hospital one day and not exist the next.”
“How is that even possible?”
“Data protection, you believe that? There will always be a record of everyone who enters, as you know because you have the records of the seventeen you wanted.”
“Tell me about the files.”
“Anyone who works here can change the records, anyone apart from the external staff. But you get what I mean. Over the past six months I've noticed a lot more deleted information on the records. I noticed also that Foster was the last one to have access to them and I approached him about it.”
“What did he say?”
“A ton of bullshit came my way. Sometimes it was because the patients had changed their identity, other times it was because they were the subject of an MI6 investigation. You don't question these things, you can't. If Foster was claiming things were above my pay-grade then I didn't have a legal course of action to take.”
“MI6?”
“Yeah but it wasn't, it was what he was telling me so that he could legally change the records without further investigation.”
“Are you telling me the girl's just disappeared?”
“No, but there were in no state to leave this place and he signed off on unescorted leave on various patients. This was against the wishes of some of the care workers.”
“He could do that?”
“He's one of the top dogs here, I told you, he can pretty much come and go as he pleases. No one searches incoming staff, they could be hiding anything in their pockets but I wouldn't be able to prove it.”
“Let me guess; he signed off on the transfer of the patients from the UCH to Linden.”
“He mostly does anyway if it comes from there.”
I looked around at the walls of the smoking area, everything was becoming clearer. This was a power thing and Foster had everyone under his control through a veil of deceit and lies.
“So he would have had a large choice of victims to play with,” I said matter-of-factly.
“He's sent thousands this way over the years,” Cobbs confirmed.
“And he chose the ones that would disappear with no questions asked.”