by J G Alva
Cold, black terror clutched at his heart. Oh no. Oh no no no.
He hung up the phone and then called her directly back, and only got the impersonal female voice mail message, this line is busy, etc, etc.
He put the phone down. He didn’t know what to do. His mind was blank with a kind of stuttering blanket of fear. He tried her again: the same.
Janice.
Oh God.
He had to move.
*
Sutton ran from Westbourne Place to Elmdale Road. He never thought to take the car. Running just seemed the quicker option.
It took him three minutes, and when he arrived he was sweating and breathing hard and his lungs were burning.
He was three quarters of the way along the road when he spotted Janice’s black Ka, and with a sinking heart saw the driver’s side window in tiny pieces on the pavement and over the driver’s seat. Her phone was not there. Dr Bodel’s house was three doors up, set back behind a front lawn that had been tarmacked over. The night was quiet. The house felt vacant, but if what Janice suspected was right, then Dr Bodel was somewhere inside its walls, working in his laboratory. Dear God, what was he doing to her? It was an effort not to rush to the door and kick it down, but he told himself to be careful, he would be doing Janice no good if he managed to get inside only to have Bodel clobber him over the head with something that had enough weight to turn his grey matter to slush.
Or inject him with something that would be as effective, in its own way.
So, his heart almost aching with fright and anger and urgency, he dialled and listened while his mobile phone rang.
“Yes?”
“Detective Hill, this is Sutton Mills.”
“We haven’t found him yet,” Hill said, a little surly on the defensive.
“I think I might have,” he said.
A pause.
“I’m listening.”
Sutton gave him the address.
“You have to come now,” Sutton said. “I mean, now. Right fucking now.”
“Sutton, it will take me at least an hour to get there, let alone get the troops assembled-“
“Then you call somebody here, in Bristol, and get them moving on it.” He thought quickly. “Call Detective Bocksham. Tell him I’m calling in the favour. Right now.”
“Sutton-“
“Hill, he’s got Janice.”
A shocked pause.
“The nurse?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m fucking sure.”
“Alright, alright, calm down. I’ll call someone now. Just wait for me there.”
“I can’t wait. If he’s hurting her…”
“Mr Mills, you absolutely will not go into that building without either myself or-“
He hung up on Hill.
*
CHAPTER 22
TUESDAY
Sutton walked to the door, his eyes and ears alert for anything that might indicate occupancy. There was a feeling of vacancy about this old house, and he tried to determine what it might be, and in the end could only settle on those small signs that tell any visitor – if he cares to look for them – that a house is rarely used and most certainly not loved: dirty net curtains in the windows, peeling paintwork along the window frames, a drainpipe that had popped from its moorings and was leaning dangerously far away from the building. The front door was locked so he came down the stone steps and went around the side of the house, where more tarmac led to the back garden. This, in contrast to the front of the house, was more orderly and cared for. A spotless patio covered an area of about ten feet square directly beyond the French doors, and beyond that a well-tended kidney shaped garden was in residence, surrounded on all sides by very old, very tall trees. Bodel liked his privacy.
Sutton could not see anything to indicate there was a basement, no blacked out windows at ground level, no bricked up entranceway.
The French doors were unlocked.
He slid them open as quietly as he could, stepped inside and stopped to listen. The house was completely silent. He was in a wide kitchen, furnished sparingly, with a minimum of decor. He was acutely aware of how his progress through the house must be clearly audible to anybody who happened to be listening below, so he stepped lightly wherever he went.
But to his own ears he sounded like a fucking elephant.
Beyond the kitchen was a large, rectangular hallway, into which an old fashioned, sweeping staircase directly behind the door led up to the next floor and swooped around over his head; doors to other rooms were on his right and directly in front of him. He stepped forward and something crunched underfoot; the floor was old tile in a mosaic-like design, and it looked like it might be the original floor; his foot had unwittingly found one of the loosest tiles.
Carefully, he moved to the door opposite, and with infinite care opened it.
A stale, lifeless living room looked out on to the road. Chairs were arranged around the fireplace, and anonymous prints of horses and country scenes lined the walls; this room was never used.
He eased out and tried the next door along. Bathroom. This held more signs of life, with its bright towels and cluttered medicine cabinet, left partway open by whomever had lasted used it, but beyond that Sutton could see nothing of any interest, so he shut the door on it, and went gingerly back across the hall to the door beside the kitchen.
This room had been converted in to a study, and reminded him very much of Bodel’s office at the hospital, but he sensed that although this room was used, it was used rarely, perhaps to pay bills, or write letters. Bodel did not work here on anything more important than perfunctory matters; the air was too dry and motionless for that.
There was nowhere else to go, at least not on this floor. The small entrance hall, separated by a door with a frosted glass panel in it, offered only a small cupboard, behind whose doors the electric and gas meters slowly gauged the amount of energy burned in this home.
Sutton was about to search upstairs when something made him stop. There was something he had missed…A door, underneath the stairs. It was on a latch, but the latch had been broken. He pushed on the door and it swung open with a muted whine. It was a storage area only, cluttered with a frozen avalanche of brick-a-brack from the last fifty years: old hoovers and paint cans and dining room chairs. But he found something curious behind the door: an old medicine cabinet, very much like the one in the bathroom, affixed to the wall. This baffled Sutton. Why was there a medicine cabinet in a storage cupboard under the stairs? He stared at it, and in the mirror the frowning face of Sutton Mills stared back. He did not look good. The skin of his face was stretched tight, as if at any moment it might snap from the strain and go spinning off, like a rubber band.
He opened and closed the cabinet doors, and opened and closed the drawers; there was nothing in any of them, but the entire cabinet itself moved at these actions, as if it were nothing more than a plywood set for a cheap TV series. A false front. It took him only ten seconds, once he had realised, to find the latch for the door behind the medicine cabinet. One of the drawers had no back to it, and reaching inside, all the way to the back, his fingertips felt the handle; he grasped it, and turned it, and the whole medicine cabinet swung towards him.
*
Cold concrete steps went down to a room lit by a cold white light. Sutton got down on his knees to see more of it, and saw banks of powerful fluorescents buzzing merrily down on to workbenches and cabinets against the walls, each stainless steel worktop awash with textbooks, microscopes, racks of test tubes and other unrecognisable medical apparatus, organs in large jars of preserving fluid…and in the centre of the room the fluorescents starkly revealed, in perfect detail, Gavin’s naked body on top of a surgical table.
The secret lab.
Sutton felt fresh grief wash over him in a flood. He had only seen photos of the brutality visited upon his friend, but now, seeing the damage to the head and face, he couldn’t quite belie
ve it. It seemed like too much. Like an attack by a wild animal. The face was gone. A lot of the skull had been deformed by the blows.
Seeing his friend like this was like a powerful blow to the stomach, and for a brief moment Sutton could not draw breath through a catalogue of furious emotions that seemed to wrap around his chest like chains, constricting all movement. He had been his friend. They should have been friends until old age.
This couldn’t have happened. It just couldn’t.
But there he was.
Sutton could see no one else in the room, but hunkering down further, so that his head was only an inch from the next step, he could see another room beyond this one, which was hidden in darkness, except for the light from a lamp on a desk in the corner.
He could hear nothing but the buzzing of the fluorescents until a whimper came to his ears, desperate and miserable: Janice.
He went down the steps, cat-quiet on his toes. There were various medical cutting instruments on the table beside Gavin, and reaching out he picked the most lethal looking one, a thin strip of serrated metal with a silver handle on each end, that was liberally splashed with Gavin’s blood; a fitting weapon of revenge for the man who had done this.
Hang on, Janice. I’m coming.
The second room veered to the left, and Sutton had to go up a step into it. It was much darker in here, and the air was close.
He turned to stare down to the far end of the long thin second room. The lamp on the desk threw off enough light to see most of the major details of the room: the desk; the papers; the books; the computer.
Sutton couldn’t quite believe his eyes.
Sitting in an office chair, with Bodel standing to the right and pressing a hypodermic needle to his neck, was Gavin Thompson.
Gavin.
Alive.
Unharmed.
Unbelievably, Bodel smiled.
“Well,” he said, in his soft voice. “You’ve found us.”
*
How could he be alive?
He looked terrible. He was wearing clothes too big for him, or he had lost weight. His face was thin, and his eyes had sunk into his skull.
But he was alive. Thank God.
Gavin struggled feebly in the chair, his eyes bulging with hope and fear, his face red, his skin dappled lightly with sweat.
Sutton said distinctly so that Gavin could hear, “help is coming.”
Bodel stared at him, wryly amused.
Bodel: doctor, physician, confidant…killer.
“Let him go,” Sutton said, his voice thick with anger.
“And leave you free to come at me with the Satterlee Bone Saw?” Bodel said, indicating the weapon Sutton held in his hand with a nod of his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. In this needle is a lethal mix of potassium chloride. If you take one step further into this room, I will depress the plunger and you can have another funeral, but this time for the real Gavin Thompson. Am I understood?”
“Don’t,” Sutton barked.
“Remember what I told you in my office, Mr Mills? That feelings of guilt would lead you to do things that might cause you harm? Well, look where it has led you. Was I not right to warn you? You should never ignore the advice of your doctor.”
“And just allow you to get away with killing Gavin? How could I?”
“But Gavin is not dead!” Bodel pointed out, seemingly delighted…as if this were all a big game.
“What about Janice? Where is she?”
Bodel frowned.
“I have absolutely no idea.”
There was nowhere for him to be hiding her in here. Sutton looked back into the main lab. There did not seem to be anywhere he could be hiding her in their either.
So where was she?
“What about the other people you killed? Was I supposed to do nothing about them too?”
Bodel seemed disappointed in that moment.
“What are you? Protector of the modern world? Avenging angel? Come, come. What I am doing here will eventually cure millions of people. In time, who will be regarded as the hero? You, for stopping me? Or me, for stopping cancer?”
“You still killed people.”
Bodel nodded.
“That is true. I’m not going to deny it. But it occurred to me very early in my career that major advances in medicine have been halted by sentimentality, that most banal of all emotions. It has only been a hundred and seventy years since the Anatomy Bill was passed in 1832 allowing the use of cadavers to be donated to science for study. Before that the population were so ignorant and sentimental that only criminals – who were believed not to have souls – could be dissected. It is my hope that it won’t be another hundred and seventy years before live human specimens will be donated to science for study. Not contributing members of the public you understand, not men and women of standing and education, but those whose only purpose in life is to provide illumination for those who seek the answers to man’s greatest adversary, the black maw through which we must all pass.” He looked fierce and determined in that moment. “I will not let sentimentality and ignorance stop me. Understand, it is not because I do not have these feelings, only that I have the strength to usurp them to do what must be done. Sentimentality is weakness, and I will not allow it to rule me. I am better than that.”
Dr Bodel’s madness struck Sutton again. He might truly believe that what he was doing was great work, necessary work, and he had built up this plausible structure of justification to give what he did credence, but in the end that was all it was, just a justification, to allay his own fears for his sanity, to allow him to do what he liked to do without concern…which was to experience the pleasure of killing.
Bodel turned to Gavin and patted his head lovingly. Gavin flinched away from him.
“Look what sentimentality does,” he said. “Sentimentality brought you to me. Sentimentality forced you to put yourself in harm’s way for your friend. Sentimentality has affected both reasoning and coherent thought…” He looked at the blade in Sutton’s hands. “You’d do well to remember that...before doing something rash.”
He had him. Sutton could not hope to tackle Bodel without there being a decent chance that he could pump Gavin full of potassium chloride…and he knew Sutton couldn’t take that chance.
Where was Janice?
Sutton lowered the blade. Gavin made some unidentifiable noise deep in his throat at this, as if he disagreed. Sutton saw the look in his eyes. Maybe he did.
Hill was on his way. He had to remember that. What he needed was time.
He had to keep him talking.
Sutton said, “you killed somebody who looked like Gavin, but really you kidnapped him. Why?”
Bodel pulled a face.
“Believe me, it was no easy task finding a man to match Gavin Thompson’s statistics, but I had a number of months, after I had begun to realise Gavin’s special gift, in which to find someone who could pass for him, in death, if not in life.” Bodel paused. “You’ve met Scott, I believe,” Bodel said. “Scott is a useful man. A long time ago, at the height of his addiction, he was performing fellatio on middle aged men to fund his habit. By chance, I came across him in the BRI after an overdose. It seemed to me that, in some strange way, we shared a disregard for those weaker aspects of the human condition that prevent people from doing the thing that needs to be done, as opposed to what is dictated by their emotions, to get what we want. I managed to get him transferred to the Jefferson Out Clinic and enrolled him in one of my drug treatment programmes. However...Scott is a compulsively addicted personality. Even without the physical dependency, Scott must have his fix. Treatment which has cured so many other patients of their addiction has failed to work on Scott. And that too intrigues me. What makes him immune to all treatments and programmes when others are cured? As long as I supply him with diacetylmorphine, or any morphine derivative for that matter, he is controllable.” Bodel stared at Sutton. “I won’t bore you with the details, but in July of this year Gavin came to me beca
use he was sick. As I recognised the symptoms, I quickly diagnosed Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. I took samples, and we did a number of tests. And then…then something happened. I have yet to find a reason for it, but Gavin’s body cured itself of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. He came to me, confessing that he felt better, and when I tested him I thought that there must be some mistake. But no, in August Gavin was free of NHL.” Bodel seemed confused, but shook his head to clear it. “I have been able to derive a way of artificially introducing cancerous mutation in certain cells, using a mutated version of the Epstein-Barr virus. So I infected him again with it, to see if his body would yet again rise to the challenge…and once more it did. You could not know how incredible this discovery was, Mr Mills. I had waited all my life for something like this, a man naturally immune to NHL, perhaps to all cancer. He was the culmination of my life’s work, the answers I had spent my whole life searching for! But for some reason he began to be suspicious of me. I cannot tell you what did it, but I soon learned that he had gone to another doctor, and that could only mean that he must know he was cured, and in no more need of my consultations. But I had to study him! I could not allow him to go unstudied, the fate of millions resided in that body of his!
“So, in those interim months, I managed to locate a man who was approximately the same age, height, eye colour and blood type as Mr Thompson. I was not concerned with facial features. Scott’s fists would make our duplicate all but unrecognisable. But we had to control him somehow, so that we could make him go to Mr Thompson’s house...thankfully he was an avid drug user, which made him eminently pliable. So, on the night of the 12th of December, Scott entered Mr Thompson’s home to affect the swap…with our duplicate helping as an accomplice, unaware of his role as surrogate to Mr Thompson.” Bodel was pensive. “I was unaware at this time of the investigation and surveillance of Mr Thompson, and can only be thankful for Scott’s quick reactions that meant that he was able to despatch the two police officers, leave behind our beaten doppelganger, and escape with Gavin’s unconscious but very much alive body. To think that something as petty and insignificant as that investigation might have ended my work before it had even had a chance to begin...it does not bear thinking about.” Bodel shook his head in dismay. “Unfortunately, however, that one event brought you to my door. Can you honestly tell me that your curiosity would have been peaked had all the people you talked to been convinced that Gavin’s death was nothing but a simple robbery gone wrong? I think not.”