‘Do you have patients staying overnight here?’
‘We have a small number of beds, yes,’ said Bloom.
‘Then I’d like to see one of your sheets, please.’ But as Mariner had already guessed, the Gannow Clinic sheets were made from nothing so coarse as pure cotton and bore no laundry marks. He didn’t even bother to take one. Mariner’s final request before leaving the clinic was for a copy of the photograph from Hayden’s personnel record, which could now be circulated nationally.
* * *
When Mariner eventually made it home that evening he found everything quiet. Mercy and Jamie sat watching TV companionably together, Mercy apparently content to watch endless reruns of Pointless all over again.
‘Thanks for stepping in this afternoon,’ said Mariner. ‘I really do appreciate it.’
‘Oh, it’s no problem — you know that.’ Mercy waved away his thanks. ‘I’m always happy to help.’
‘Actually,’ said Mariner, seizing the opportunity, ‘it shouldn’t happen again. Jamie’s been offered a full-time place at Manor Park, starting next week.’
‘Oh,’ said Mercy. Her face fell momentarily before she rearranged it into a smile. ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Jamie likes it there, don’t you, Jamie?’
‘He does,’ said Mariner. ‘And it means you won’t have to be running around after us anymore.’ He was shamelessly putting a spin on it and felt guilty for doing so. ‘You’ll have more time to take care of Carlton.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t need me,’ said Mercy. ‘He’s his own man.’ She didn’t say anything further, but as they waited for her taxi to arrive, she was unusually pensive.
Chapter Twenty-Four
On Thursday morning, Charlie was applying himself once more to the CCTV footage, this time with one eye on the headshot of Leo Hayden pinned above the monitor. He was continuing to review the particular days when Rosa and Grace had been visiting the QE. But so far he’d been unable to identify anyone who resembled the doctor. ‘If Hayden goes to the cafeteria a lot, he’d know where the CCTV cameras are and could easily have been making a deliberate effort to avoid them,’ he said to Jesson.
‘You’d think, given his attitude towards the Gannow patients, that he might have selected one of them as a victim,’ she said.
Mariner spoke up from where he was adding Hayden’s details to the incident board. ‘That job is his main source of income,’ he pointed out. ‘He wouldn’t want to foul his own nest. Besides, he likes the women he’s taken and respects them. They’re specially selected for their physical attributes and after he’s finished with them he cleans them and wraps them carefully before burying them, then he launders their clothes and polishes their shoes.’
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ said Jesson, her freckled nose wrinkling. ‘There’s no sign of sexual activity, so what does he do with them? What does he get out of it? And why go to all that trouble afterwards?’
‘Maybe it’s about protecting them,’ Mariner said. ‘He’s seen women subjected to some atrocious treatment. In his twisted mind, maybe this is his way of trying to make amends.’
‘By killing them?’ Jesson wasn’t buying it. ‘And ironing their clothes? I don’t know many blokes who even know how to use an iron.’
‘But you saw how tidy his house is,’ said Mariner. ‘He’s obsessive. We’re hardly talking about Mr Normal here, remember?’
‘So where do you think he is?’
‘Well, he could have phoned in sick on Thursday morning from anywhere,’ said Mariner. ‘The neighbour saw him leave the house, but we don’t know where he went.’
‘And if Dee’s with him, is she still alive?’
‘The last positive sighting of both of them is in critical care on Wednesday evening. The question is, was Hayden alone when he left, or did Dee leave with him?’
The company responsible for parking security at the hospital monitored vehicles arriving and leaving each car park from a central control room. Mariner went back over to the QE to watch the CCTV footage for himself from a tiny office, whose only view of the outside world was via the extensive bank of monitors. This was not a job for claustrophobics. But Anwar, the younger of the two men on duty this morning, seemed cheerful enough in his work. Hayden’s Audi had been recorded arriving in one of the designated multi-storey staff car parks at 3:09 on Wednesday afternoon, soon after Dee had summoned him. He’d helpfully parked close to one of the internal CCTV cameras, which enabled them to watch him get out of his car, retrieve something that looked like a briefcase from the back seat, and walk to the nearest exit with a long, confident stride. A little after eight o’clock the same evening he was seen returning alone and leaving the car park. Cameras on the main hospital site followed the car’s progress as he left, turning out onto Metchley Lane. It meant that Hayden must have picked up Dee Henderson sometime after that. ‘Thanks,’ said Mariner. I’ll need to take a copy . . .’
‘Sure,’ said Anwar. ‘But don’t you want to see the next day too?’
‘He came back?’ said Mariner.
‘Eight forty-five last Thursday morning. He was here for about half an hour. He parked at the far end, so you can’t see him get out of the car this time, but you can see him leaving.’ Anwar scrolled to the relevant clip, and they watched as Hayden’s car drew up alongside the barrier once again and the window slid down as he reached out to swipe his security card. ‘That’s the last we’ve got of him on our system,’ said Anwar. ‘Nice watch,’ he added. ‘TAG Heuer, by the look of it.’
Mariner had no idea what that meant, or how Anwar could possibly tell from that distance, but he got the footage downloaded, along with the rest, to a memory stick, which he was able to take away with him.
* * *
It was with some reluctance that Mariner returned to the critical care ward to see Ellen Kingsley — this was all getting a bit too close for comfort. Today she was able to leave the ward and they went to her office to talk.
‘You’re looking for Leo in connection with this enquiry,’ she said straight away. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘We had a tip-off to go to his home,’ Mariner told her. ‘We found his cleaner there. She had been strangled.’
‘What? Oh my God.’
‘Ellen, we need to talk to him urgently. If you or any of your staff have the slightest idea about where he could be, you must tell us.’
‘But I can’t see how that is even possible. He’s such a lovely guy. And I haven’t a clue where he might be. I’ve been thinking about him a lot and it’s made me realise how little I know about him. He’s one of those people who seems quite chatty but manages to give away very little about himself.’
‘Did he come here last Thursday morning, first thing?’ Mariner asked.
‘No. It’s not one of his regular times and we didn’t call him in for anything. The last time he was here was Wednesday afternoon. I’m sure of that.’
‘I have to ask you again,’ said Mariner. ‘Are you absolutely sure there’s been nothing going on between him and Dee?’
‘I’m as certain as I can be, working alongside them both,’ she said. He could see her trying to make sense of it.
‘Is it possible that Hayden could have developed an infatuation with her?’
‘Not that I noticed.’ She blushed.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, God. It’s nothing.’ She looked away. ‘Leo and I, we had a bit of a fling when he first started here. It was very brief. Over before it started really.’
‘Why?’
‘It was a bad idea — with the two of us working so closely together.’
‘Was there anything unusual about his behaviour, did he have any particular tastes?’
‘Like what?’
‘Was he into tying you up, for example?’
She shot him a look. ‘The relationship didn’t really last long enough for that.’
* * *
Mariner took the car park footage back to Granville
Lane. Following the nationwide alert, there had been a couple of possible sightings of Hayden’s car. ‘It’s hardly a distinctive model,’ said Charlie. ‘But one of them is on the Wednesday evening, quite close to the hospital.’
‘We need to revise our parameters,’ said Mariner. ‘Hayden was back there again for half an hour on the Thursday morning, leaving at nine fifteen. It’s after that he disappears, so that’s when we need to get him on CCTV to see which direction he took from there.’
‘The postmark on Rosa Batista’s parcel was generated by the machine in the main hospital post room,’ said Charlie. ‘If Hayden is our killer, maybe that’s where he went?’
‘So why haven’t we had a parcel of Dee’s clothes?’
‘Perhaps it’s got lost in the post, or he was thwarted that morning in some way?’ said Glover. ‘Shame we can’t actually see him get out of the car.’
‘Where’s Vicky?’ Mariner asked.
‘One of Hayden’s ex-girlfriends got in touch. She’s gone out to talk to her.’
Jesson returned a couple of hours later. ‘Anything useful?’ Mariner asked her.
‘Not sure,’ said Jesson. ‘The relationship didn’t last long. They met through an internet dating site. They emailed a bit, then spoke on the phone and went out a handful of times. According to her, he was the perfect gent: kind, courteous and attentive. Pretty ordinary, in fact.’
‘So why did it end?’
‘That’s where it gets a bit more interesting,’ Jesson said. ‘She ended the relationship, partly because he spent a bit too much time going on about his ex — whose name she thinks was Priya, with a P. Hayden took it quite well, she said, but she left him in a city centre bar. It was the same night that Grace went missing.’
* * *
By late Thursday afternoon Charlie Glover, working alongside a couple of bleary-eyed uniforms, had done his best to scour the available CCTV footage from around the QE, but it was of limited use. ‘It’s fragmented,’ Charlie explained. ‘We can see Hayden leaving the hospital site and just about piece together his journey to the Five Ways roundabout from GATSO footage, but that’s where we lose him. If he’s used any motorways in the vicinity, we can hope that he’ll be picked up by the cameras along those roads, but if he hasn’t, there’s no way of knowing where he went from there. It’s too late to set up ANPR and we wouldn’t have a clue where to target anyway.’
‘And on the footage we have, you’re certain he has no passengers with him in the car?’ asked Mariner.
‘Definitely only him driving,’ said Glover.
‘Not looking very promising, is it?’ said Jesson.
‘He’s had a long time to get away,’ Mariner agreed.
* * *
Winter came on suddenly the next day, with an icy front from the Arctic bringing a hard frost and an early morning fog. With it, in the middle of Friday morning, came a call from much closer to home than Mariner was expecting. West Mercia Police at Cleobury Mortimer had been contacted by a farmer. ‘He went up to bring his sheep down from the hill, and noticed a car parked behind one of the walls of the old quarry,’ the station inspector told Mariner. ‘He didn’t see it until he drove right up there on a quad bike. We sent a couple of uniforms up to have a look and they’ve confirmed that it’s the Audi you’re looking for, belonging to Dr Leo Hayden. From a distance they thought it had been abandoned, but now it looks as if there’s definitely at least one person in it, presumably Dr Hayden. The SOCOs are making a start, but I’ve asked them not to move anything until you can get out here and take a look for yourself. He’s not going anywhere.’
Titterstone, the larger of the Shropshire Clee Hills, was, like its neighbour, Brown Clee, visible, now that the fog had cleared, from the Stourbridge Road going out of Birmingham.
‘The only hill named on the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral,’ Mariner told Jesson as, an hour later, they arrived at its foot. ‘The high reared head of Clee.’
‘Great,’ murmured Jesson. ‘He’s going all Adam Dalgliesh on me.’
‘A. E. Housman,’ Mariner corrected her. ‘And don’t get too excited. It’s about the only bit of poetry I know.’ They’d left the main road now and were winding their way along a narrow lane and up the hill, passing a row of what must once have been miners’ cottages.
‘Must be lonely up here,’ said Jesson.
‘Now perhaps, but it didn’t used to be,’ said Mariner. ‘All they quarry now is the dhustone used for road building, but years ago it was a whole mining community, digging for basalt and limestone, and there was a fully operational iron-smelting mill. There was a great little pub up here too, the Dhustone Inn. Good Banks’s beer, a roaring fire and a game of dominoes. Nothing like it.’
‘I can’t imagine why you’ve never married,’ said Jesson in reply. She shivered. ‘Too bleak for my liking. And what the hell are they?’ she added, as the two enormous white dice came into view. ‘There’s a Civil Aviation Authority navigational relay station just at the top of the hill,’ said Mariner. ‘I’m pretty sure this is a favourite spot for army winter manoeuvres too,’ he went on. ‘So lonely isn’t really the word.’ Branching off to the left, he steered the car carefully around some lethal potholes and into the gorge of the disused quarry, between scree slopes that banked away from them on either side. He drew to a halt beside the disordered collection of West Mercia response vehicles.
‘All right,’ Jesson conceded, as they got out of the car to suit up. ‘Perhaps there is something in this hill-walking malarkey.’ From this height and now that the mists had cleared, the counties of Shropshire and Worcestershire were spread out below them like a chequered quilt, stretching all the way to the Welsh borders and the Black Mountains beyond.
When they were dressed in protective clothing, and after brief introductions, the crime scene co-ordinator led them round to Hayden’s car, tucked in the shade behind one of the remaining quarry walls. Random concrete structures rose up from the derelict smelt mill, overshadowed by the giant receivers, and now the white-suited West Mercia SOCOs moving into the area made it look like the set of a low-budget sci-fi film. A couple of uniformed officers were pacing the perimeter of the scene trying to keep warm, their breath condensing in misty puffs in the frigid air.
Up close Jesson and Mariner could see the car’s passenger window a half-inch or so open, with a hose pipe trailing from the exhaust and in through the tiny vent. Cloth of some sort, tightly wound, had been wedged in to plug the remaining gap. The driver’s door hung open to reveal Leo Hayden, slumped in the reclining driver’s seat, his eyes closed. He could have been taking a nap, but for the tell-tale purple hue of his eyelids and lips. Inside the open boot was a woman’s body, curled in the foetal position and perfectly preserved in the cold. Dee Henderson still wore her nurse’s tunic. The brown nylon scarf, tied tight around her neck, was identical to the one they’d found on Coral Norman. Mariner took out his mobile and rang Sharp to report the find.
‘So that confirms it,’ said Sharp. ‘Leo Hayden was our washerwoman.’
‘Looks like it,’ said Mariner. ‘Either his conscience got to him, or he thought the game was up.’
‘It doesn’t really matter in the end, does it?’ said Sharp. ‘The important thing is that we’ve got him and put a stop to it. Well done, both of you. We’ll celebrate when you get back.’
‘Well done?’ said Mariner to Jesson as he ended the call. ‘We didn’t do anything.’
A bitter wind blew across the hillside, and once a thorough forensic search had been conducted, the bodies were removed and the vehicle transferred to a covered loader to be transported to Birmingham for closer examination. By now it was mid-afternoon and Mariner was cold and hungry. Not far along the road he and Jesson passed another favourite pub of his, the Angel Inn, and he suggested that they stop off for refreshment and to warm up a bit. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got anything to rush back for, have we?’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jesson an
d Mariner sat in the pub in companionable silence. ‘It’s funny,’ said Jesson. ‘We should feel good, but all I’ve got is this strange sense of anti-climax.’
‘Fatigue,’ said Mariner, lifting his half pint to his lips. ‘It’ll hit home soon.’ But like Jesson, he too felt peculiarly disengaged.
‘There are so many things we’ll never know, like why he did it, or even exactly how he did it,’ she continued. ‘Pity he didn’t leave a note.’
‘We can speculate, though,’ said Mariner. ‘I think we’ve figured most of it out. Hayden strikes up a conversation with Grace and Rosa in the hospital cafeteria. He can see their names on their badges — he can even see where Grace works. We know he’s outwardly charming and they would no doubt be flattered by the attentions of such an important man. He gets enough information out of them to know where they work and what their shifts are, so that a few days later he can contrive to meet them “accidentally” in the city centre. And he talks them into going with him, at least far enough that it entails getting them into his car.’
‘Rosa, I can understand,’ said Jesson. ‘A lift home would have been helpful. And Dee is obviously different. She’d have no qualms about going with him. But Grace had arranged to meet her friends. Why would she change her mind and go with him?’
‘She was a rebel,’ Mariner reminded her. ‘Who knows what she’d told him about her frustrations with her parents and her life in general. He’s an exotic. He’s travelled the world, so she took a risk. Maybe she saw Hayden as her way out. Remember, we don’t know how many women Hayden actually approached in the first place. He chose Grace and Rosa, presumably because he thought they’d be compliant, and he was right. Once we make this public, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we get other women coming forward to say he tried it on with them too. Dee must have rumbled him, or he thought she had. He had no choice but to get her out of the way — the same way he did with Coral.’
‘But I still don’t understand why he’d leave Coral behind,’ said Jesson. ‘As soon as we found her it was obvious that he was our man. If we’d found his house empty, his disappearance would only have been circumstantial.’
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