by Andy Maslen
“Adam, are you coming to watch the film? It starts in a few minutes,” Lynne Collier asked through the narrow gap she’d created.
He sighed. He needed her. But he couldn’t confide in her. A teaching assistant in a local primary school? Christ! She’d have a fucking breakdown.
“Coming, darling,” he said, levering himself up from the chair. “Why don’t you fix us both a drink?”
“Already have. Come on, I don’t want to miss the beginning.”
Later, in bed, he freed his right arm, which she was using as a comforter, propped himself on one elbow and shook her awake.
“Huh? What is it, darling? Was I snoring?”
“No. You were fine. It’s just, there’s something I need to discuss with you. Something important.”
“Can’t it wait? I was having such a lovely dream.”
“No. Come on, wake up properly. I’ll go and make us a cup of tea.”
He could feel his wife’s baffled gaze on his back as he got out of bed, put on a dressing gown and left for the kitchen.
Returning with two mugs of tea, he sat on the edge of the bed and handed one over. Lynne was sitting up in bed, the duvet pulled up over her chest.
“Adam, what is it? What’s up? You normally like to fall asleep cuddled up after we’ve done it.”
He sipped his tea, which was too hot, and scowled as he burned his lip for the second time in three days.
“Do you remember that FBI guy we met that time we all went to Chicago for a holiday?”
“Yes. Why?”
“The thing is, he’s invited me, well, to be honest he’s pretty well begged me to go over there.”
“What do you mean. To give a talk or something?”
“No. For a sabbatical. They have a programme for international law enforcement officers.”
Lynne was wide awake now. She placed a hand on his free wrist.
“A sabbatical? For how long?”
He shrugged.
“The standard period is six months but off the record Eddie told me they’d be well disposed to recruiting a senior detective from the Met on a permanent basis and of course, we’d have to get citizenship, but apparently the Bureau really get behind you and as you can imagine that counts for a lot when you’re talking to —”
“Hold on, darling. You’re going way too fast. You’re gabbling. Tell me again, slowly this time.”
Collier realised he was nervous. His heart was racing, and he could feel the tightness in his chest that normally only appeared when he was meeting very senior law officers or politicians. He took another sip of tea. Inhaled.
“Six months to begin with. But if it works out, they could make it permanent. If,” he reached for her hand, “we both felt it was for the best.”
Lynne Collier sighed.
“Well, it’s not as if my career’s holding us back, is it? A teaching assistant in an inner city primary school where half the children are destined for the dole queue and the other half for encounters with the police.”
“That’s funny. I thought you’d be dead set against it. That I’d have to do some serious heavy lifting to persuade you. So you’d be OK with it? Leaving London. Moving to the States?”
She shrugged.
“Why not? If it’ll help your career and get me out of this country, I’m all for it.”
Collier smiled.
“Then I’ll call Eddie tomorrow. I’ll need to speak to Rachel Fairhill, too. But she’s already given her blessing in principle, so with the Deputy Assistant Commissioner behind me, the rest will just be a formality.” He paused. He knew why Lynne hadn’t offered so much as a single word of opposition. Tonight was going to be one of those nights. He rolled his head on his neck and heard the joints in his spine crackle.
“You’re thinking about Theo, aren’t you?” he asked her.
“Why? Aren’t you?”
“Not all the time. But yes, of course I think about him.”
“I carried him, Adam. Nine months inside my belly. Then in a sling, or on my hip while you went straight back to work. I carried him in my arms when he was poorly and couldn’t sleep. And since that bastard stabbed him after that concert, I’ve carried him in my heart. He was nineteen, Adam. My baby boy was only nineteen. He had his whole life before him. An engineering student. The brightest in his year, that’s what he said his tutor told him. He was going to design spaceships, or solve global warming or invent cheap computers for poor kids in Africa. And what did that little thug do? Stuck a knife in his chest because he wouldn’t give him his wallet.”
Collier felt the old familiar lump in his chest. Like a cold block of stone. Hated how it made him feel. Powerless. Weak. Useless.
“Lynne, please don’t let’s do this again. You know—”
“I’ll tell you what I know, Adam,” she interrupted, eyes flashing now. She pointed her right index finger at him and for a moment his gaze dropped to her breasts where the duvet had fallen away. “I know that our son died because some junkie mugged him for twenty pounds. I know that even when the police finally arrested the little shit, his rich, privileged, entitled parents hired the best lawyers in London and saw to it that he received a ridiculous sentence. What did that defence barrister say? Oh, yes, I remember, ‘A long spell in prison would ruin every chance of redemption this troubled young man has. He has admitted he cannot remember the circumstances of that fateful night. He has agreed to enter a drug rehabilitation programme …’ Shall I go on? I can recite his whole closing speech from memory.”
Collier realised he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled slowly.
“No. Please stop. I was in court, too, Lynne. Remember? I was the one who held your hand, who got you home without having to face that pack of jackals on the court steps. I was the one who got you into therapy at that private place. I was the one who paid for the psychiatrists, the drugs, everything!” He heard how his voice had increased in volume, and roughened in tone, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you think it’s been easy for me? Having to pretend to colleagues everything at home was just fine when all I had to come home to was a zombie for a wife so off her head on antidepressants and tranquilisers she hardly recognised me? Having to sit in meetings where some well-meaning bleeding-heart liberal or other from the Prison Reform Society lectured us about prisoners’ rights and police brutality? I miss him, too. God, how I miss that boy.”
Lynne was crying now and he leaned over to wipe the tears from her cheeks with the back of his finger.
“He’s in Leeds now,” she said, sniffing.
For a moment, Collier imagined his wife was taking about their son.
“Who is?”
Then reality reasserted itself. The other boy.
“Crispin Radstock. He’s changed his name, by the way. Calls himself Simon Halpern. Doing very well for himself. He’s an entrepreneur.” She pronounced the word syllable by syllable, curling her lip and wrinkling her nose, as if she’d said “sewage worker” or “abattoir cleaner.” “Rather a successful one. Pots of money. More even than his parents, apparently. Engaged, too. She’s ever so pretty. Blonde, naturally. Thin. Good skin, no, great skin.”
“Lynne, have you been following him on Facebook?”
“Facebook? No, darling. In Leeds. I take the day off now and again and get the train. It’s only two hours and ten minutes from King’s Cross. He doesn’t know. I’m very careful. Very discreet.”
Collier was struggling to make sense of what she was telling him. He’d imagined that since her mental state had settled down she’d got back into her job and that was that. Now he’d found out she was stalking their son’s killer. Although the name change and move north would explain why he’d had no success tracking him in his early days as a member of PPM.
“He could lodge a complaint. The police could get involved. Stalking’s a crime now. You need to stop doing that.”
She shook her head.
“No, what I need is to see him in a hospital bed hooked
up to those bloody machines, pipes and tubes going in and out of him, a ventilator pumping air into his poor lungs until those bloody doctors tell his parents that he’s brain dead on account of all the blood that poured out of him through the hole in his chest and it would be kindest to turn off his life support. That’s what I need!”
Collier gathered her into his arms and slid down until they were lying horizontally. How he wanted to tell her about the dinner he’d had with Leonard Ramage a few weeks after they’d buried Theo. And the one after that where Ramage had introduced him to “a few friends.” The proposition that he join Pro Patria Mori. The initial horror. Then the dawning realisation that this would be his way of getting justice for Theo and all the other victims failed by the legal system. Finally, the full-throated acceptance. But then, that would mean telling her how he and the other members had conspired to silence Richard Drinkwater, Stella Cole’s nosy human-rights-lawyer husband. How Ramage had messed up the hit and run, killing the baby as well as the husband. And how, in an increasingly bloody fight, Stella had fought off and killed everyone he’d sent against her and was systematically wiping out PPM, one member at a time. No. Maybe there’d be a time one day. But this wasn’t that day.
He glanced over at the digital clock: 2.43 a.m. – Stella should be on the receiving end of a serious dose of sedative any time now. And now he knew Radstock’s new identity, he wondered whether he could finally draw a line under Theo’s murder.
18
Under Sedation
Dan Hockley put down the psychiatric journal he’d been reading in the harsh light of his desk lamp. The clock said 2.45 a.m. – the perfect time for catching someone unawares. The screamers had shut up for the night, and the drugs dispensed in miniature paper cups from the steel trolley were doing their jobs. Inducing or maintaining sleep. Reducing the symptoms of anxiety to the point those experiencing them could relax enough for their sleeping medication to work. Suppressing the hallucinations that could have patients hammering at their doors begging to be freed from the ghosts of their dead mothers and fathers, werewolves and vampires. Or just the unnamed horrors that festered inside the mind in the daylight hours and then clamoured, clawed and scratched their way free during the hours of darkness. He pulled open his desk drawer and looked down at the white cardboard carton lying on top of the notebooks he stored there.
The lid bore a few lines of plain black text in unadorned typography. On the top line it read:
Suxamethonium – 1 mg/kg solution
Suxamethonium, or Sux for short, was a drug used in anaesthesia. As such, it was not a substance Dan Hockley ever employed himself. There were other, easier ways to knock out patients on the psychiatric ward. Ketamine and haloperidol being just two. They were just as effective at inducing unconsciousness as Sux and didn’t carry the additional risk that the patient would stop breathing. Not a problem in an operating theatre with an intubated patient on a ventilator, and anaesthesiologists ready to tweak dosages and blend in other drugs to maintain life signs, but definitely a problem in a thinly staffed psych unit.
He unwrapped a syringe and picked up the vial of Sux. Strange how little of the drug you needed to knock a fully grown woman unconscious. The glass phial was so small. Less than half the size of his little finger. A sleek, glass cylinder topped with a circle of foil-backed plastic film. Printed on its side, the long, scientific name of the drug within. The drug that would sedate instantly when injected into the muscle, dropping the recipient like poor old Elsie in A&E earlier that day.
In went the slant-tipped needle, penetrating the foil-backed film with a tiny squeak. A bubble of air wobbled from one end of the vial to the other as it was upended and its contents drawn down into the barrel of the syringe.
Wanting to avoid the psych ward’s communal area, Hockley turned right out of his office, and took a long, tortuous route through a couple of the general wards and back corridors, using staff-only doors and disused staircases, before arriving at the landing from which Monica Zerafa had taken her one-handed dive into the unknown. In front of him was the locked door to the corridor of bedrooms.
Arriving at Stella’s room, Hockley slid his master key into the lock. Earlier that day, he’d taken the precaution of squirting a little WD-40 into the barrel, and the tumblers lined up silently. He took a breath, leaned down on the handle and was inside with the door shut behind him seconds later, heart pounding.
She was lying face down on the bed, fully clothed. Good. He didn’t think he could bear to inject her while looking at her face. Something about her posture scratched against the surface of his brain like a burr. But he couldn’t place it and instead, moved closer. Close enough that he could stretch out an arm and touch her. The nurses were supposed to administer sleeping pills or mild tranquilisers at bedtime. Nothing serious, just a little something to take the edge off being locked up in a ward full of crazy people and help the patients get some sleep. He paused and listened to her breathing. Steady. Slow and steady. Actually, very slow and steady. Her short blonde hair looked ash grey in the faint bluish light from the illuminated plug pushed into a wall socket by the bed.
He held the syringe up to the plug-light and checked there were no air bubbles in the barrel, flicking it with a fingernail and ejecting a thin stream of the clear liquid into the air. A few drops landed on her cheek and he tensed, ready to jam the hypo home if she woke. Nothing happened. Not even a snort of disturbed sleep from the cold drips on her cheek. He reversed his grip on the syringe and placed his thumb over the plunger. Leaned over her. Breathed in. Another catch in his mind. He ignored whatever signal his olfactory nerves were sending him.
He extended his right hand toward her buttocks – a physician’s favoured spot for an intramuscular injection. Even a first-year medical student with Coke-bottle glasses and a severe case of the shakes couldn’t miss the gluteus maximus. He placed the needle tip against the curve of her bottom. He was just increasing the pressure on the plunger when he stopped.
The posture. Who slept in the classic recovery position? And the smell? It was perfume. Not just any perfume, either. He recognised it. La Vie Est Belle by Lancôme. As worn by Lisa, the agency nurse he’d passed the time of day with after he’d finished his evening rounds. Lisa, the slender, short-haired blonde, about the same height and build as Stella Cole. Lisa, who liked working nights because, as she’d explained to Hockley, she could pursue her studies. “I want to train as a clinical psychologist,” she’d told him, smiling shyly from under her fringe.
He shook the uppermost shoulder of the woman lying before him on the bed. No response, although her head did loll back on her neck, giving him a good view of Lisa’s face.
“Shit!” Then again, with more venom. “Shit! What the fuck have you got me into, Adam?”
Back in his office and sweating profusely, he dragged out his phone and with shaking fingers tried to compose a text that would be informative and deniable all at the same time. In his haste, he hit send earlier than he meant to and had to start a new message.
While Hockley had been making his way to the staircase behind the psych ward, Stella was stalking her own victim. Keeping to the edge of the communal area, she slid through the darkness towards the nurses’ station.
There she was. What was her name? Lina? Lisa? Bent over a book. Or was it a Sudoku? Illumination coming from a swan-necked lamp catching her short blonde hair and making it shimmer like silver. Stay like that, with your back to me. Don’t turn round. It’s a book, OK, good. Hope it’s a real page-turner. One that sucks you in until you forget you live in that fucked-up place called the real world.
Stella inched closer. She held the syringe like a dagger, thumb over the plunger, ready to depress it the moment the needle was embedded in a muscle.
Four paces …
Three …
Two …
Ah! You’ve got your earbuds in, too! Good girl.
OK, I’m sorry it had to end like this.
Stella brought her
fist up like an assassin’s. Light from the desk lamp glinted off the tip of the needle, from which a drop of the sedative hung, suspended, like rain on a blade of grass. She closed with the nurse, silently, swiftly, and jabbed the syringe down.
In we go! Fast and true. Not too hard. Don’t want to break the needle, after all. Now thumb that plunger in nice and smooth, all the way to the end.
The nurse jerked backward, but Stella’s hand over her mouth and a restraining arm across her chest gave her no chance to raise the alarm before the drug kicked in.
There, there. Sleep now.
The nurse’s eyelids fluttered, then closed. Stella held her, feeling the muscles soften, then relax completely.
Aaaand she’s out. Thank you, Big Pharma!
Dragging Lisa’s dead weight back from the communal area to Stella’s room was hard, but not impossible. Thankfully, the nurse was on the slim side. Stella took a firm grip under her armpits, fingers interlaced over her sternum, then leaned back and pulled.
Stella laid the nurse on the bed, placing her face down, one arm down by her side, the other curled above her head. Right knee lifted, left leg straight. She retrieved her boots from the wardrobe and pulled them on. Then she lifted the NHS ID badge and lanyard free of the nurse’s neck, taking care not to pull her hair or snag a rough edge on her nose. She slipped it over her own head, took the keyring off the nurse’s belt and locked the door behind her as she left.
The walk through the communal area to the reception office at the far end was no more than thirty yards. As Stella walked between the armchairs, abandoned board games and card tables, it felt more like thirty miles. A large, white-faced station clock seemed to watch her progress down the room, and she could feel her pulse accelerating way past one beat per dryly-ticked second. A scream from one of the private rooms brought her to a panicked stop. Then she remembered. The only person who might come running was currently enjoying what she hoped were pleasant, haloperidol-induced hallucinations.