Trial by Execution

by T. M. E. Walsh

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kupa tried to keep up the pace.

  ‘We need to get this hospital on lockdown right now! No one’s to leave!’

  Kupa pulled at her shoulder. ‘Now just wait a minute! Wh-’

  ‘The killer, Mr Kupa,’ Claire said. ‘The killer’s going after Skye.’

  CHAPTER 57

  The Wolf

  I heard a nurse call him Sergeant Swanson.

  He was sitting in his chair, eyes glued to his smartphone. He looked up as I approached, gave me a cursory glance.

  Looked away again.

  How little I matter in this world and to those in it.

  I stopped in front of him.

  Swanson looked at me then, properly that time. He saw me for what I really am. His eyes lowered to the Stanley knife I clutched in my hand.

  Before he could react the blade was at his throat, pressing against stubble-rough skin.

  His eyes widened as he felt the pressure of the blade. It’s an understated weapon. Something so mundane, used so often every day that people can’t see its potential, understand the damage it can do with the right amount of pressure.

  I can still hear Swanson’s gasps as the blade nicked his skin.

  I saw the fire-alarm pad on the wall, with its break glass here instructions.

  I made a mental note of that.

  I told Swanson to get to his feet, and he did, without a moment’s hesitation. With my free hand I grabbed the door handle to Skye’s room, and when it opened I forced him back with all my strength and ran the blade across his neck – deep and with one fluid motion.

  He grasped at his throat as blood poured out from underneath his hands.

  He dropped to the floor soon after, his body twitching.

  That was the first time I looked up at her lying in the bed, saw her wide eyes staring at me.

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, but the look in her eyes told me everything I needed to know.

  She clasped at the bedding when I went closer to her, kicking the door shut behind me.

  Her heart monitor blipped that bit faster.

  And I smiled.

  It was genuine, for the first time in weeks.

  When it was done, after she… afterwards, when I let the door close softly behind me, I jabbed my elbow into the fire alarm, breaking the glass.

  CHAPTER 58

  Claire ran to the unit off from ICU, Stefan and Kupa a fraction behind her. Claire slowed down, tried to catch her breath. ‘Where’s Officer Swanson?’ she said as they pushed the door open that led to the corridor and, beyond that, Skye’s room.

  They saw the empty chair.

  She ran ahead, glanced through the window in the door. ‘No!’ She shouldered the door open.

  The room was empty, save for Skye and Swanson, who lay spreadeagled on the floor beside her bed.

  His throat cut.

  Claire squeezed her eyes tight, felt the pain deep within her. Another life they had failed to save.

  She risked a look at the hospital bed.

  Looked at Skye.

  The light in the room was low, dimmed for the sole purpose of allowing Skye to rest her feeble, broken body.

  Claire stared at Skye’s broken nails, jagged, with traces of dirt still visible deep under what was left of them. An intravenous cannula tube poked out of the top of her right hand, the skin around the point of entry looking bruised and sore. Various tubes and machines stood around the bed: the ventilator, a catheter and monitoring machine.

  She stared at the torn bandages that had been ripped from Skye’s head and face.

  Glassy-green eyes, the whites splintered with bright-red burst blood vessels, stared off to the right, away from them. Fresh blood ran down her face, her arms, her chest.

  Claire looked horrified at Skye’s face.

  Wounds had been reopened, gaping wide.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Kupa said, hand clasped to his mouth as Stefan called it in on his mobile.

  When he came off the phone, Claire had stooped to feel Swanson’s neck, checking for a pulse, praying he was still with them, that he had a chance of being saved. She looked at Stefan and shook her head.

  He was gone.

  She turned to Kupa. ‘You need to alert security. No one leaves this hospital without my say-so.’

  ‘The killer’s used the fire alarm to create a diversion,’ Stefan said when Kupa went to protest. ‘This,’ he said, gesturing to the bodies in the room, ‘has just happened in the last few minutes. The killer has got to be still on the premises somewhere.’

  Claire saw more people making their way en masse towards the fire escapes across the corridor from them.

  ‘CCTV footage,’ she said, gesturing to the cameras in the ceiling at the far end of the corridor. ‘I need to see the footage right now.’

  CHAPTER 59

  Janet Casey felt the twist of pain in her gut, as if a knife had been thrust inside her, under the ribs with a red-hot blade.

  She watched the news on the television screen in front of her. Sky News, BBC24; the news was starting to break everywhere, on every station. Skye Bradshaw had been taken to undergo life-saving surgery and news was starting to filter through that a fire had broken out at the hospital.

  She felt sick and the sense of panic gripped at her insides.

  Everything was crumbling down around her and the sense of guilt she felt weighed heavy on her shoulders.

  This was her fault.

  After all, she had become a part of it, a missing piece of a large jigsaw. Time she played her part and intervened before it was too late.

  She contemplated calling the police, but decided against it. She didn’t know if her theory was right just yet. She didn’t want to cause any more harm than she had done already. She called the number of the only person she trusted right now other than herself.

  She was in a panic, she needed him to calm her down.

  She called the hostel and Beckett answered the phone. He lowered his voice when he heard it was her.

  ‘You’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, remember?’ he hissed.

  ‘I need to speak to him, John. Now.’

  ‘Do you realise what time it is?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t urgent.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be calling at all.’

  Janet paused, counted to ten. ‘Devon, please.’

  ‘Calls are recorded once I put you through…’

  ‘I know.’ She breathed in hard. Her throat hurt. ‘I also know you can erase all trace of this…’

  CHAPTER 60

  ‘The hospital’s on lockdown,’ Stefan said to Claire as he came into the security office. She looked at him and his face was grey, washed-out.

  ‘We found the body of a male agency worker, too. Cleaning contractor. Throat slit and bundled into one of the lockers in the cleaners’ store room. That’s got to explain how the killer had access and was able to move about unchallenged. Must have been hiding out in the hospital waiting for his chance to get at Skye.’

  Claire looked at the screens in front of her, over a security guard’s shoulder. Then she remembered the cleaner they had seen moments after the fire alarm had gone off.

  She reached forward, obstructing the security guard’s view. ‘Let me do this,’ she said, and he only just had time to get out of his chair before she sat in it.

  She wound the footage on more, till the moment when they could see the cleaner they’d seen earlier bursting through the double-doors with a trolley.

  Claire hit play at normal speed, then slowed it down.

  Stefan frowned at the figure on the screen.

  A man pushed the trolley through the doors, black cap pulled down low, obscuring his face. The shoulders were broad, the feet looked large in shoes similar to the ones they’d found at the quarry. He was encased in a dark, all-in-one cleaner’s overall.

  Claire squinted, tried to see
what they’d been missing.

  Anything distinguishable was hidden by the cap. Claire could just make out the hint of dark hair.

  She wound through a little more of the footage from a different camera, the one outside Skye’s room, then hit pause.

  She looked at the time stamp in the corner of the screen.

  ‘That’s when we were just coming into the hospital,’ Stefan said.

  Claire focused on the man in the corridor outside Skye’s room, who now abandoned the cleaning trolley and walked towards Sergeant Swanson.

  She flinched when she saw him pull the blade on Swanson, backed him up into Skye’s room.

  Five minutes later, the man emerged from the room and hit the fire alarm panel with his elbow.

  He then appeared to wipe his hands off on the overalls.

  They followed the man’s movements up the corridor.

  ‘I think we can safely rule Crowley out of this,’ Claire said.

  ‘We still don’t know Sean Clarkson’s whereabouts.’

  Claire exchanged a look with Stefan. ‘It could be him,’ she said, looking at the man on the CCTV footage. ‘Could be bloody anybody.’

  Stefan leaned in closer to the screen. Stared at the image as people began to file into the corridors to evacuate the building. The man soon got lost in the crowd.

  The security guard tried to find the man on a different camera but couldn’t.

  ‘Do you think he got out?’ he said.

  ‘In the initial scrum for the exits, he could’ve easily slipped out. Either that or he’s hiding in plain sight.’

  Claire looked back at the screen.

  ‘Try and pick him up again,’ she said to the security guard. ‘See if you can see where he went and get a better view of him. Stefan, you go back to the station, tell Donahue we have to release Crowley,’ she said to him as she headed for the door.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but where are you going?’

  She stopped in the doorway. ‘There’s someone I’ve got to see.’

  CHAPTER 61

  24 April – 00:01 am

  When Claire drove her car up the drive, she saw the curtain in the window move a fraction, then drop back. The front door opened soon after, but Simon didn’t stay at the door to invite her in.

  She approached the front door and hesitated on the threshold.

  She heard him in the background, sounds coming from the kitchen.

  She pushed the front door back a fraction, then went inside.

  She walked into the kitchen and saw him in the process of making a cup of coffee. She noted there was only one mug on the worktop.

  She glanced at the clock on the wall, saw it was after midnight.

  She stared at the back of him. Plain black jogging bottoms hung low on his hips, an off-white, loose T-shirt was crumpled from sleep. His hair was sticking up at different angles.

  When she’d called him half an hour ago he’d said she hadn’t woken him. Clearly a lie.

  ‘I’m sorry to come here so late,’ she said, watching him make a show of putting milk back in the fridge. He glanced at her, face deadpan.

  ‘Sorry to get you out of bed, but I-’

  ‘Need my help,’ he said, cutting in. ‘First my insight on Knox, then the quarry. I have my uses still, don’t I?’

  Ouch.

  Clearly, he was still getting over the fact he’d had to provide a statement and faced a warning after his involvement at Sundon quarry. Claire was wondering if there was more to this; the fact she hadn’t been in touch with him since might have something to do with it.

  One thing she knew Simon could never stand, had always hated – not being kept in the loop.

  ‘I saw the news after you called me,’ he said. ‘All that going on at the hospital. Is that woman dead, the one found by that family?’

  Claire looked at him and nodded.

  ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath as he set down his mug. ‘Cut up like the others?’

  She nodded. ‘That file you had on the women who claimed Knox had raped them before he escalated,’ she said. ‘I need to see it.’

  He looked at her, a confused expression on his face. ‘You’ve got it,’ he said, going into the living room.

  ‘Not all of it.’ Her voice had a hard edge to it now. She followed him into the living room.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You never gave me everything.’

  ‘You asked for the names of women who claimed Knox-’

  ‘Yes, and you gave me the names of the women who’d made an official statement.’ She saw the expression on his face. ‘What about the ones who didn’t?’

  She watched the realisation hit him.

  ‘Claire, I didn’t even think.’ He went to a drawer in the sideboard in the corner and retrieved a sheet of paper. ‘Here.’ He passed it to her. ‘It’s just a list of names and basics, though. Not much detail. I don’t know what you hope to find.’

  She looked at him, face serious. ‘These are all the names of women who never told the police they were raped, aren’t they?’

  He paused, then nodded. ‘Yes. They came to me unofficially. They didn’t want to go through the trauma of rape kits and the scrutiny.’

  She looked over a list of five names with their basic details and accounts of what had happened to them.

  ‘Do they have anything to do with the murders themselves?’ he said. She heard the scepticism in his voice. She looked at him. ‘We caught Adam Crowley, didn’t we?’

  Claire noted his choice of words. We caught Adam Crowley…

  ‘He is still in custody, isn’t he?’

  Claire explained what she’d seen at the hospital on the CCTV.

  ‘So it can’t be Crowley.’

  Claire held back on asking him just how acquainted he was with the journalist.

  ‘You think it’s someone to do with these women?’ Simon pressed, gesturing to the page in her hand.

  She brought her mind back to the names. ‘It has to be someone connected to what Knox did…’

  He saw her stop, attention focused on the last line on the page.

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘You knew this woman?’ she said, pointing to the last name on the list, her surname instantly familiar to Claire.

  He craned his neck to look at his own writing. ‘I vaguely remember her. She came to me a few times with Ffion Headley.’

  Claire’s eyes shot to his.

  ‘She was attacked about a year before Knox was inspired by that Dahlia snuff movie. She was raped in the regeneration reserve. She’d been out doing what teens do. Drinking with friends, but instead of going home, she stayed out. All she remembered was a man saying he’d help her home, but he took her to the lagoon. Raped her in some bushes.’

  ‘Was it definitely Knox?’

  ‘She was convinced but he hit her, making her black out. She suffered some memory loss. That, coupled with the fact she had been drinking heavily. She said no one would believe her. Said people would assume she’d consented.’

  Claire’s eyes rose to meet his. She saw the sadness there.

  ‘I tried to convince her otherwise, but her sister intervened. Said they’d get through it together, plus she never wanted me involved. Which was frustrating because if she had’ve done – gone against her sister’s wishes – her evidence might’ve led us to Knox sooner. She recognized his eyes above all else.’ He paused. ‘Who knows, we could’ve got Knox before he ever got inspired by that snuff movie.’

  ‘Before he ever set eyes on the girls who became The Three.’

  He nodded. ‘One hell of a what if, isn’t it?’

  Claire eyed the name on the paper again. ‘Her sister?’

  ‘Yes, she came here with Evie, who was only fourteen at the time.’

  Claire realised where she’d seen that surname before. ‘Casey…’

  Simon paused, looked at her. ‘You know them?’
r />   ‘Her sister is Janet?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Janet Casey was Knox’s offender manager.’

  She saw his face fall.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  Claire frowned. ‘There’s something deeper going on here. I think I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.’

  He pointed at the paper in her hand. ‘You think they know who the killer is?’

  ‘Janet knows Ffion Headley, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about her husband, Stuart? Or Sean Clarkson? He’s missing, but we’re sure he was having an affair with Skye Bradshaw. She works for the company who did the interiors for the Clarkson house. Sean’s also wanted for assaulting Raja.’

  Claire looked at the names again. The silence between them was broken by Claire’s mobile ringing.

  ‘Winters,’ she said when she answered, not recognising the number on the screen.

  ‘They gave me your number when they were last in the hostel.’

  Claire frowned, glanced at the screen again. Man’s voice, a local number. Phone back to her ear.

  ‘They said to call should I have anything for you,’ he said.

  ‘Who is this?’

  She heard a deep sigh, as if the information were reluctantly being given. ‘Devon,’ he said.

  ‘Hemmings? From the hostel?’

  ‘Yes. I kept the card your officers gave me.’

  She glanced at Simon who was watching, listening. ‘What can I do for you, Devon?’

  He waited, trying to make the words come.

  ‘Devon?’

  ‘It took a lot for me to call. It goes against everything I stand for, but if she’s in danger, if that means dropping us all in the shit – me included – then so be it,’ he said, the words coming out fast, as if he couldn’t get them out quick enough.

  Claire got up from the sofa. Simon watched her pace the room.

  ‘Who’s in danger?’ she said.

  ‘It’s Janet. My offender manager.’

  ‘I know Janet,’ Claire said, turning to stare at Simon, eyes wide.