‘How are you?’ asked the doctor, unhooking the clipboard containing her notes from the end of the bed.
Erika put up her hand to wipe tears from her chin. ‘You tell me,’ she croaked. She saw there was a drip in the back of her hand. ‘Shit, why’s that there?’
‘Morphine,’ said the doctor, leafing through the notes.
Erika saw that her other arm had a plaster cast from the hand to the elbow.
‘You’ve broken your right wrist, fractured a rib, and you’ll probably start to feel the severe whiplash when the pain meds wear off. You also had a nasty gash above your left eye. I’m a dab hand with my butterfly stitches, so any scarring will be on the line of the eyebrow.’
Erika put her hand up to her neck and the brace she wore.
‘Where am I?’ she asked. Her voice sounded thick and strange, and she touched her face. She couldn’t feel where she touched but the skin was puffy and misshapen.
‘UCL Hospital, in London…’
‘I know where UCL is.’
‘I see you’re a police officer, Detective Chief Inspector Foster,’ she said, looking at her chart.
Erika remembered the wreckage of her car, and the two guys trying to take the bag of drugs.
‘I have to talk to my boss. Where’s my phone?’ she asked, sitting up.
‘Please, lie back,’ said the doctor, gently putting her hand to Erika’s shoulder. ‘You won’t be able to work for some weeks. And we need to keep you in under observation… You have a nasty concussion.’
A nurse came through the curtain and nodded to the doctor. He checked the drip; the doctor went on: ‘You haven’t put anyone down as your next of kin?’
‘My family, my sister is in Slovakia; they don’t speak English.’
‘What about in the UK. Anyone you want us to call?’
Erika briefly thought of Peterson, but shook the idea away. ‘Yeah, Kate Moss.’
The doctor and nurse exchanged looks, and the nurse moved over to consult the chart. ‘Pressure is normal, temperature slightly elevated,’ he said in a low voice.
‘We do need to monitor for any signs of hallucination. She has had a battering,’ agreed the doctor. She turned to Erika again. ‘Why do you want us to call Kate Moss?’
‘No, not Kate Moss. Detective Inspector Kate Moss, she’s a colleague on my team in the Met,’ said Erika.
The doctor took down the phone number, but still didn’t seem convinced.
‘Now, please, I just need my phone; I need to talk to my superintendent. There’s a murder case I’m working on.’
‘I’m sorry, you have to rest,’ said the nurse.
‘I want my bloody phone! I can lie here and look at a phone!’
The doctor cocked her head and stared at her.
‘I don’t want to have to sedate you.’
Erika lay back and grimaced. ‘How long am I stuck here?’
‘Another twenty-four hours, at least. We’ll be moving you to a ward when a bed is available.’
The doctor and nurse left the cubicle, swishing the curtain back round, and Erika looked up at the ceiling, her head spinning. Despite her frustration, she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Erika slept fitfully until the morphine started to wear off, and the remaining hours until she was allowed to leave hospital seemed to stretch with only the ceiling and a ward full of sedated old ladies for company.
The doctor gave her a final check-up and a stern reminder that she had to rest for at least four weeks, and then Moss appeared in the ward.
‘Jeez, boss. You look beat up,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ said Erika, wincing as she picked up her coat and the large paper bag of medication. ‘I saw my face earlier when I went to the loo.’
‘I’m not going to lie. The right side of your face does have a look of the “Bride of Wildenstein”.’
Erika smiled. ‘You’re a bitch. Ow. It hurts to move my face.’
‘Good job, cos you’re not known as a smiler,’ said Moss, helping her with the coat. She tried to put it over the hand with the plaster cast, but saw it was too thick. ‘I think we’re going to have to drop this over your shoulders.’
They moved slowly along the ward and out down the corridor. When they got to the double doors at the end, Moss held one open and Erika gingerly slipped through, and they reached the lift.
‘It’s the broken rib, isn’t it?’
Erika nodded. The lift doors opened, and they squeezed in next to a bed carrying a small old lady propped up on pillows who stared at them. They travelled down two floors in silence until the lift stopped and the orderly wheeled out the bed.
‘Tell me what’s happening,’ said Erika. ‘I was too out of it when the first responders arrived at the scene. How long was I in for?’
‘Two days. It’s Monday morning. Superintendent Hudson is sending someone to get a statement from you tomorrow. You’ll have to account for handling the two firearms belonging to your attackers, and why you removed the ammunition. You also have to give clear reasons why you fired your taser.’
Erika gingerly turned her head in her neck brace to look at Moss. ‘Are you kidding me? The firearms were being pointed at me, and they targeted me, I think, because I was carrying thirty grand worth of narcotics.’
‘I think it’s because you deviated from the rule book, and tasered one of them in the balls. It was apparently quite a dicey procedure, removing the barbs from his ball sack.’
‘You didn’t have to do it, did you?’ grinned Erika, wincing.
‘I’m not the best person to navigate a ball sack.’
The lift came to a halt and they got out, making their way slowly across the gloomy car park. Moss helped Erika inside the car, and she yelled out in pain when her seatbelt was strapped across her. She drove out very slowly, but she could see Erika grimace when they went over the speed bumps. When they were out on Warren Street and heading back to Lewisham, Moss started to fill her in.
‘The two men you arrested are Eduardo Lee and Simon Dvorak. They are a couple of middlemen in one of the central London drug networks. They were tipped off that you’d be delivering the narcotics.’
‘Who tipped them off?’
Moss paused, a pained look on her face.
‘Kate. Who?’
‘Nils Åkerman,’ she said.
‘What? No. Nils?’
Moss nodded. ‘Sorry, yes. Melanie has been on it like a dog with a bone. She was looking at everyone who knew you were going to forensics in Vauxhall. Nils made a call to two people ninety minutes before you left for Vauxhall. One was to a Jack Owen, a student whose flat in Camberwell was raided this afternoon, and a large quantity of cocaine, cannabis resin and ecstasy was seized. He in turn had called Simon Dvorak, who you tasered in the balls. Simon is further up the chain of supply, well, was, before he lost his liberty, and narrowly lost his right…’
‘Okay, Moss, I get the idea.’
‘Sorry, they are all now in custody and being questioned.’
‘How was Nils mixed up in all that?’
‘There’s still a lot we don’t know, but he was screened positive for opiates, cocaine and alcohol when he was arrested. One of his colleagues came forward about an incident in one of the labs when he bled onto a forensic face mask and he switched it for a clean one. Obviously, it would have been screened to rule out contamination and his drug taking would have shown up. Nils is deep in debt. The bank is about to repossess his flat. He owed two thousand pounds to Jack Owen. Jack has been his drug dealer for the past two years…’
Erika was glad that they hit the Blackwall Tunnel. The dim light allowed her a moment to wipe away her tears.
‘I’m sorry this happened,’ said Moss.
Erika shook her head. ‘Nils has worked with us on so many cases: the disappearance of Jessica Collins, the Darryl Bradley case… He was someone I trusted, someone who had been a big part of our team.’
‘I know,’ said Mos
s. ‘And I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the Met is freaking out. He was responsible for key testimony and evidence in so many cases.’
‘It was his testimony that put away Simone Matthews, for fuck’s sake!’ cried Erika, wincing as she put her head back against her seat.
Simone Matthews was a case Erika and her team had worked on two years previously. Matthews had been an unassuming geriatric nurse who had gone on a revenge killing spree in London, breaking into the homes of four men and suffocating them with a plastic bag. Despite confessing to all the killings, her defence ruled that she was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Nils and his forensics team had pulled off an extraordinary forensic examination so they could link Simone Matthews to every crime scene. Simone was currently being held indefinitely at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.
‘It’s still early days,’ said Moss. ‘On a positive note, we have Jack Owen, Simon Dvorak, and Eduardo Lee all in custody. We have their vehicle, mobile phones, and we’re hoping that some kind of deal can be done to implicate people higher up.’
‘What about Nils?’
‘He’s in custody too, at Belmarsh. Looking at ten to twelve years, and of course he’ll never work again in forensics.’
Erika stared out of the window as the Olympic Park slid past, and then the O2 Arena, all lit up in the darkness.
‘Nils must have known what they would do to me. He knew that they might kill me for those drugs,’ she said.
‘You think you know people,’ said Moss. ‘People are mostly put on this earth to disappoint us.’
‘But he must have been desperate. Drug addiction, it changes people. Their personality gets lost. What about the case?’
‘It’s being assigned to one of the larger teams in Murder Investigation in West End Central, and DCI Harper is also now pursuing the drug angle with Thomas Hoffman’s death.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m off the case too, along with the rest of the team…’ She looked over at Erika. ‘How long are you signed off for?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been told I can’t work for a couple of weeks.’
‘Seeing how you look, boss, no offence, but you’ll need longer than a couple of weeks to get better.’
Erika looked at her face in the small mirror. One side was puffed up, as well as her bottom lip, and a large black bruise was starting to form. The gash above her eye was covered with a blood-spotted bandage, and her eye was red with burst blood vessels. ‘You need to take it easy. I bet you’re gonna be signed off for at least a few weeks. Enjoy some much needed time off.’
‘Time off,’ said Erika with a shudder. The words were alien to her.
‘Yeah, take it easy, acquaint yourself with morning telly… I also let Peterson know, I hope that’s okay?’
Erika looked at her reflection in the mirror again.
‘Fine.’
‘He wanted to come with me, but I thought that you could do with some space.’
Erika felt an overwhelming tiredness flood over her, and she tipped her head back and closed her eyes.
‘I just need to go home. I just need to sleep, and I need more painkillers,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
FRIDAY, 11th AUGUST 2017
Me and Max are living together. Cohabiting, my mother would call it. If me and Mum were speaking.
We’ve got a council flat on the ground floor of a tower block in Kennington. I’ve never lived this side of the river. It’s dodgy. Loads of lads hang around, selling drugs, but I feel safe when I’m with Max. I don’t know if he’s had words with them, or if they know him, but they give us a wide berth. There’s black iron bars on all the windows, all the ground floor flats have bars, but ours has been re-done inside. The sofa and chairs in the living room are new, so is the kitchen and the bathroom suite. The front door opens out over the car park, and when I’m washing up at the window, people walk right past in the corridor. The bedroom window looks out over a main road, but there’s a little bit of the London skyline; I can see Big Ben. Our mattress isn’t new, though. I don’t understand why the council made the effort to redecorate the place but give us someone else’s mattress? There was a brown stain on it. I hope it’s tea, but Max turned it over and the other side was pristine.
After everything that’s happened, it’s a big step to properly live together. I’m happy. I have to be. We haven’t had any visitors as I’m not talking to Mum, or Kath, or anyone else. I used to think I saw Max all the time and knew him, but living together is different. Most days he’s out from early until late. ‘Doing business’, he says. I’ve never asked him what he does. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Even as I’ve written it down, and I’m looking at the words, it’s… it’s naive of me not to have asked him. When we worked at the chip shop, I assumed that was his job. But it was part-time, and he always seems to have cash, like the big wedge of cash he had to buy the car in Blackpool. It’s drugs, I’m sure of it. He’s involved with drugs, but he doesn’t take them. He’s proud of the fact he doesn’t take them. He doesn’t really drink, either. His only vice is his books. It took five car loads to get all his books into the flat, and he wouldn’t let me unpack them from the boxes. They are all stacked around the walls of our bedroom, right up to the ceiling.
There was only one set of keys when we got the flat. I did ask Max to get another set cut, but he said he doesn’t trust handing over our key to anyone. He said he’d been on the list for a council flat for years, but he’d turned one down in the past. He loved this one because it had bars on the windows.
When he leaves the house, he takes the key. I can’t go anywhere. I have to stay in. It’s fine. I know he loves me.
He wants me here for him.
Chapter Thirty
SUNDAY, 20th AUGUST
I was loading the washing machine this morning, and I heard Max shout my name. I came through to the kitchen, and the front door was open. The little mixed-race boy who lives upstairs was standing on the step by the kitchen door with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He can’t be more than five years old.
‘This kid wants a piece of toast?’ said Max.
‘She made me some the other day,’ said the little boy, pointing at me. He had chubby cheeks and a towering mass of Afro hair which was a rich, shiny brown. He was confident and well dressed for a five-year-old, in jeans, a bright blue Adidas T-shirt, and an expensive little pair of trainers. ‘Can I have that jam?’
‘So this kid, who has nicer shoes than me, eats my food?’ said Max.
‘I can see a whole loaf of bread on the counter. You can spare a piece, man!’
Despite their age gap, Max and the little boy were squaring up to each other, chests puffed, chins up, and hands outstretched.
‘Does it look like I run a fucking canteen? Go on, piss off,’ said Max, kicking the door shut. I could see the outline of the little boy through the frosted glass, and then he moved away. Max shook his head and sat back down, picking up the newspaper.
‘It was just the once,’ I said. ‘The kids on this estate. I see them hanging around in the car park all day. Some of them can only be three or four, their mothers must chuck them out in the morning…’
He looked up from the paper with his angry eyes and my voice tailed off.
‘That’s cos their mothers are on the game, Nina. You think they should be indoors, with a Disney video playing, and the sound of Mum getting fucked in the background? And should I bust my arse all day to feed their bastard spawn?’
He took a bite of his toast and sat back, waiting for an answer. My legs started to shake.
‘It was only when I took out the bin the other day. He was waiting at the door when I got back. He asked for a drink of water, and he cried, saying he was hungry…’ I didn’t tell him that I gave a little girl and another little boy some toast too.
The outline of the little boy appeared again through the door, and his small palms slapped against the frosted glass.
/> ‘Please, I want some toast… pleeeease,’ he whined.
Max threw down the newspaper and got up. I flinched, but he moved past me to the door and yanked it open.
‘Changed your mind?’ he said, looking up at Max with a smug little grin.
Max grabbed the washing-up bowl from the sink, which was full of dirty water, and he dumped it over the little boy’s head. All his cockiness vanished and he burst into tears, tea leaves, coffee grounds and some of last night’s noodles sticking to his wet hair and T-shirt. The washing-up bowl clattered as Max chucked it in the sink, and he leaned down and hit him round the face. The boy fell back with a nasty thud on the concrete.
‘Knock on my door again, and I’ll fucking kill you. Then I’ll kill your fucking whore mother,’ said Max and he slammed the door. He wiped his hands on the dishcloth and sat down at the kitchen table with his newspaper. I could hear the little boy crying. ‘Why did you do that to me?’ he said in a voice so full of confusion that I wanted to open the door, scoop him up, and give him a cuddle. But I was frozen, too scared to do anything.
‘Don’t just stand there. Make me another cup of tea,’ said Max, his voice dangerously quiet.
I did as I was told.
The cries finally subsided outside, and I poured him some fresh tea. I wanted to put the radio on, but I knew that when Max was in one of his moods it was best not to do anything or make sudden movements. It was safer to blend into the background. Part of me felt relief that the little boy had borne the brunt of his outburst, and not me. Is that cowardice, or survival? Lately I’m wondering if they are the same thing.
There was a scrape of his chair as Max got up, and without looking at me, he picked up his keys, wallet and phone and left, slamming the door. I watched his outline through the frosted glass as he turned the key from the outside. Locking me in.
Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away (Detective Erika Foster Book 5) Page 13