by Peter James
He was thinking about that terrible image of the skeleton, lying exposed in the ragged hole in the path. He could not get her out of his mind.
‘The Waste Land?’
The young patient’s words jolted him back to reality. ‘I grow old,’ he said. ‘I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’
Freya Northrop frowned.
‘“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”,’ he said, and beamed. ‘But enough of that. I’m sorry if I’m not totally with it today, I saw a terrible thing last night, and I’m a bit upset. I’m a doctor, I try to make people better. I couldn’t help that poor woman. But that’s enough about me, let’s talk about you. Tell me why you are here?’
‘Olivia Harper recommended you. I’ve just moved to Brighton from London.’
‘Ah yes, indeed, what a lovely lady Olivia is. Quite a delight. Yes, of course. Forgive me, I’m very discombobulated this morning. But of course you don’t want to hear that. Tell me what brings you here?’ He smiled, his eyes suddenly alive and twinkling with humour. He held his elegant, black pen up in front of him and stared at her, as if through it.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel ill or anything.’
‘Of course not – why would you want to see a doctor if you were feeling ill, eh?’ He grinned and it was infectious. She grinned back, relaxing a tad.
‘Totally,’ she replied. ‘Why would anyone?’
‘Exactly! I only like to see patients who are feeling well! Who needs sick patients? They take up far too much time – and they reflect badly on me.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Always come and see me anytime you are feeling well, yes?’
She laughed. ‘It’s a deal!’
‘Right, well, nice to meet you, Freya!’ He feigned standing up to say goodbye, then sat down again, chuckling. ‘So, tell me?’
Now she got him! ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve met this guy – that’s why I’ve moved down here – I’ve been off the pill for a while – but I’d like to go back on it again.’
There was a long silence. He peered at her and his demeanour seemed to have stiffened, and suddenly she felt a chill of unease. Had she touched some kind of nerve in him?
Then he smiled, a big, warm, friendly beam that lit up his entire countenance. ‘The pill? That’s all?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You’re planning to have sex with this – guy?’
‘Well, we are already having sex. But—’
He raised his hands in the air. ‘Beware! Too much information! You want the pill, I’m your dealer! No problem. You are a very delightful young lady. Anything you want, just come and see me. So, OK, let me take some details about you, then I’ll give you a check-up. Tell me first some of your medical history?’
She recounted, as best she could recall, her appendectomy at the age of thirteen, her broken shoulder from snowboarding at sixteen, her chlamydia at eighteen, and, blushing, her recurring thrush more recently.
He tapped it all into his computer, seeming to take a particular delight, unless she was mistaken, in her venereal disease history. He then directed her behind the screen to remove her clothes.
While Freya Northrop was undressing, he tapped notes into his computer. Then he stared across the room at the green screen. He twisted the barrel of his pen so that the rollerball tip appeared, then retracted again.
That body in the Lagoon was really playing on his mind.
‘I’m ready,’ Freya said.
He continued to stare at the tip of his pen.
‘Freya Northrop,’ he said, almost silently, to himself. He liked her name. Nice lady! He liked her. ‘Bye for now!’ he said a little while later, as she left. He liked everyone to leave him with a smile.
20
Friday 12 December
The forensic archaeologist, Lucy Sibun, was a professional-looking woman in her early forties, with neat brown hair and square, modern glasses; she was accompanied by two juniors, here to learn from this rare scene. At this moment she was on her knees, studying the remains intently. Most of her face was hidden behind a gauze mask secured by tapes, and the rest of her slim figure was parcelled, unflatteringly, in a baggy white crime scene oversuit and clumsy-looking overshoes. It was just past 10 a.m. Under the watchful eyes of the similarly suited-up forensic pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha, the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay, and crime scene photographer James Gartrell, the whole skeleton had now been exposed.
It lay, facing up at the bright, jury-rigged overhead lights from its jagged-edged shallow grave. There were fragments of fabric, and mouldy dark stiletto-heeled shoes lying by the foot bones, which would appear to confirm the assertion by the doctor, who had appeared out of the blue last night walking his dog, that it was female.
The most immediate question Roy Grace had for Lucy Sibun was the age of the remains. A key factor in a discovery like this would always be how long the remains had been here. Was this sufficiently recent that the offender or immediate relatives might still be alive, or were these the bones of someone who had died so long ago that anyone connected would now be long dead? In which case a homicide enquiry would be much more challenging.
He turned for guidance to the archaeologist. She was shaking her head, looking angry. ‘Why didn’t the workmen stop last night the moment they saw the bones, Roy? By carrying on, they could have destroyed crucial evidence for us.’
‘So you think this might be relatively recent?’
‘No. The path was laid around twenty years ago. I’m speculating that whoever killed this woman was aware the path was going to be laid, and buried her a short while before, knowing she would be covered. The remains must pre-date the laying of this path. Just like the Mafia reputedly bury bodies beneath motorways under construction. Maybe it was even one of the workmen who laid the path. One thing I am pretty sure about, this is the deposition site, but I don’t think it was the murder scene. The body has been dug up and reburied.’
‘Why do you think that?’
The archaeologist pointed at several barely visible marks on the bones. ‘I think these were made by a tool like a spade. She was buried somewhere else, in a temporary grave. Then she was dug up, clumsily, probably by someone nervous and in a hurry, who nicked her bones in several places during the process.’
Grace had a lot of respect for this woman’s expertise, which had been proven to him on several previous occasions. ‘Anything else that makes you think that, Lucy?’
‘Yes. Although this path was laid twenty years ago, I think she’s been dead for closer to thirty years. For starters, the shoes are a good indicator. I had a pair like these in my teens. But let’s ignore them for the moment and focus on the human remains.’ She pointed at a small bone fragment suspended from a tiny strip of desiccated skin. ‘See that U-shaped bone – it’s the one that keeps the tongue in place. It’s often an indicator of the cause of death – the hyoid often gets broken during strangulation. But it’s intact here. There are a number of indicators that this was a woman aged about twenty. There is little wear on the teeth, but wisdom teeth present. The pelvis shows auricular surface phase one, and pubic symphysis phase one.’
Grace tried to follow where she was pointing. ‘See the wide sciatic notch? Triangular-shaped obturator foramen? The long pubic bone and the wide subpubic angle? The subpubic concavity?’
He nodded, although he did not fully understand.
Then she pointed at the skull, which was partially on its side. ‘Less prominent supraorbital ridges. Sharp superior orbit. More upright frontal bone. Small mastoid process. Small rounded nuchal crest. It’s definitely female. There’s a lot of water under here. If she had been buried ten years before the surface was laid, I think she would have risen towards the surface and it would have been noticed by the original workmen.’
‘I’ve already tasked an officer with finding out who laid the path – and to see if any of the council workmen are still around. It’s quite possible they are. Do you have anything that might tell us who she is – wa
s?’ Glenn Branson asked.
Lucy Sibun pointed at the jaw. ‘There’s a deciduous tooth and several fillings that could give us dental identification – if she was local,’ she said. ‘DNA’s a possibility.’ She looked up at Nadiuska De Sancha. ‘There might be more you could get from a full post-mortem.’
As the strong wind shook the tenting above them, the pathologist nodded, and turned to Roy Grace, then to the Coroner’s Officer. ‘Yes, I think that would be best. Can we recover the remains to the mortuary, please.’
‘I have to go,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll leave DI Branson here.’
He went back to the CSI tent and pulled off his protective clothing, then hurried towards his car. Before driving off, he sat and made more notes. Dental records were a possible method of identification, with a big but. There were thousands of dentists throughout the UK, but unlike fingerprints or DNA there was not, as yet, a central dental records database. You needed to have an idea who someone might be – and know who that person’s dentist was. And if she was from overseas, there was no chance at all.
DNA wasn’t a great prospect either. Going back twenty or so years, it was highly unlikely, even if she had been arrested for an offence, that her DNA would have been taken and logged. If it was thirty years ago that she had died, there was no chance of DNA. Their best hope, he decided, would be the lengthy process of a trawl through all the female missing persons within the time frame that Lucy Sibun estimated. To be on the safe side that would entail checking all female mispers, aged fifteen to thirty, from fifteen to thirty-five years ago.
There were many thousands of people on the current missing persons register of people who had been gone for over thirty days. It would be a massive task and the only way would be to start local.
Assuming the remains were of a local person.
He started the car and headed off towards Kemp Town, to the apartment building underground car park from where Logan Somerville had disappeared.
21
Friday 12 December
‘How long? How long are you going to keep me here? How long, whoever the hell you are? Let me go!’ Logan shouted out into the green-tinged darkness. ‘I need sugar, I need water! Please.’
The sheer terror of her situation had made her forget about her toe, until now. It was throbbing painfully. The restraints across her stomach, wrists, thighs and legs felt as if they were cutting into her flesh. Her right leg was cramping and she desperately needed to stretch it, but she could not move. She tried again to lift her head, but immediately something cut into her neck, choking her.
Her mouth was dry and her lips were sticking together, but her body was clammy. She recognized the signals that she was desperately low on sugar. Soon, she would have a hypo and pass out.
Who had screamed earlier? Was there someone else in this place with her?
Anger had momentarily replaced the deep, sick sensation of fear inside her. How long had she been here? Wherever here was? Was it Jamie doing this? What was he going to do? Keep her here until she agreed to marry him after all? That sure as hell would be a great start to a life together.
Yeah, she broke it off, so I drugged her and locked her in a cellar and starved her and refused to give her any sugar or let her pee until she agreed to marry me.
Two weeks till Christmas. Two crucial weeks for her, for Chrissake. She was really starting to contribute to the clinic’s profits, and being able to put aside a little money to top up her savings would allow her to buy a small property for herself after she and Jamie parted.
But every day counted. She had no idea of the time, nor how long she had been here. It was her mother’s birthday today – if today was Friday – and she had planned to call her, in advance of driving this weekend to see her parents.
Compared to her previous boyfriend, who was serially unfaithful, Logan had found Jamie, initially, a breath of fresh air. He was kind and gentle, a good cook and she liked his humour.
It had only been as she got to know him better that she began to understand quite how limited Jamie was. In the first few months of dating, they did everything together. Drinks, meals, walks, movies, watching stuff on television. It was very gradually and subtly that she began to realize he really didn’t have many interests of his own, beyond watching sport on television and occasionally going to the AmEx stadium to watch Brighton and Hove Albion home games. He was like a chameleon, fitting into her life by adopting everything that she liked to do.
Last year, when she had begun training for the Brighton Marathon, he took up running for a short time, to train with her. She loved road cycling, so he bought a fancy road bike himself, to accompany her. In those early days she’d been all for it, it was nice to have companionship – not many of her friends were that sporty. But gradually she had started to miss her solitude. A big irritation had been three months ago, when she had joined a book group, and immediately, although he rarely read books, except genre thrillers, he asked to join too. After the first meeting at which he’d insulted everyone present by calling them pretentious nobs, he’d abandoned the idea.
He had taken it hard and been tearful when she’d told him she had decided she did not want to marry him, and they should go their separate ways. But never in her wildest dreams did she imagine he would do this to her, kidnap her and keep her prisoner.
If it was him.
It had to be him, surely?
Jamie was not a violent or cruel person. It didn’t make any sense. Was there something deeper in his character she had missed? Was he going to keep her down here until she agreed to marry him?
She saw a light moving. A faint green glow. Coming closer.
‘Jamie?’ she said. ‘Jamie, please, let’s talk.’
She heard something sliding above her head.
Then a beam shone directly in her eyes, momentarily dazzling her. The beam moved away for a moment.
Someone was standing right above her. Their face obscured by what looked like a gimp mask.
Then she felt something pressed against her lips. Something sweet. She tasted honey and gulped it down. Then two capsules were placed in her mouth, followed by water from a plastic cup.
She heard the sliding sound again above her. Then muffled footsteps receding.
As the sound faded she had a ghastly thought and a terrible slick of fear slid through her.
Was she being illogical in her thinking? What if it was not Jamie? Where did the man in the car park fit in? Were they working together?
What if this was a total random stranger?
22
Friday 12 December
Jacob Van Dam, seated behind his desk in his Harley Street consulting room, peered like a wise owl through small, round tortoiseshell spectacles. A diminutive figure, with large patches of liver spots across the top of his head and on the backs of his bony hands, the psychiatrist was dressed in a grey pin-striped suit that seemed a size too big for him, as if he had shrunk in the years since having it made, and his collar, knotted with a club tie of some kind, hung around the loose wrinkled flanges of his turkey-like neck.
During many years of practising forensic psychiatry, dealing with a wide range of violent criminals, he had been assaulted on a number of occasions, and these days preferred to keep the barrier of his desk in front of him, for safety.
At seventy-seven he was long past the age at which he could have retired, but he loved his work far too much to ever consider that. Besides, what the hell would he do if he did retire? He had no hobbies, his work had always been his life. He held an endless fascination with human nature – which he saw daily with his patients.
The walls around him were lined with books on medicine and on human behaviour, quite a few of them bearing his name on the spine. His published works, lined along one shelf, included a book on why the public had adored Princess Diana, and another which was considered the definitive analysis of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who had been convicted of murdering thirteen women. Further along were the t
hree volumes of which he was most proud, which came out of his time working as a psychiatrist within the high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor, where one of the criteria to be an inmate was to be diagnosed criminally insane.
What had always intrigued him, from his earliest student days, was the whole notion of evil. Were some human beings born evil, or did something happen to turn them evil? And first, of course, you had to define evil. That was the topic he had explored in these three volumes, without coming to a conclusion.
In forty-seven years in psychiatry he had not yet found, definitively, any of these answers. He was still looking for them. Which was why he still came here every weekday morning and saw patients until the early evening, thanks in part to the understanding of his beloved wife, Rachel.
He was writing up his notes on the patient who had just departed from his office, an actor almost as old as himself who was unable to cope with the fact that women no longer threw themselves at him, when his secretary buzzed to announce that his next patient had arrived. Dr Harrison Hunter.
Hastily, he looked up the man’s name and the referral letter from his family GP, a Dr Edward Crisp in Brighton. The letter was short and terse and the first referral he’d ever had from this doctor. Harrison Hunter was suffering from anxiety, with frequent panic attacks, and Dr Crisp believed him to be delusional. Van Dam pressed his intercom button and asked his secretary to show him in.
Instantly, for reasons the psychiatrist could not immediately define, this new patient simultaneously both excited and intrigued him – but also sent a wintry chill through his bones.
Van Dam stood up to shake his hand then ushered him to sit on one of the two hard, leather-cushioned antique chairs in front of his desk. For a moment they were forced into silence as an emergency vehicle siren screeched by outside. As the siren faded the only sound for some moments was the hiss of the gas fire in the grate.
Harrison Hunter’s body language was extremely awkward. Fifty-five years old, according to the referral note, he looked pleasant enough, conservatively dressed in an off-the-peg business suit, dull shirt and clumsily knotted tie, tinted aviator glasses and sporting a mop of floppy blond hair rather like the style of the politician, Boris Johnson. The hair did not match the man’s eyebrows and he wondered if perhaps it was a wig.