“We’ll have to be brief. What can I do for you Detective Inspector?”
“A few things. Firstly, either River Dilettantes or Charlotte Torrence needs to be moved. We strongly suspect she attacked him tonight, and caused those injuries. Whoever comes to first, you’re going to have a problem. If she does, she might just try to finish the job. If he does, he’s liable to scream the place down when he sees her.”
“Why was I not informed of this before?”
“Search me. I told the desk.” She shook her head and tutted.
“Well, I’m sure it wouldn't have mattered, we’ll be moving Mr Dilettantes into theatre shortly. He needs an operation to repair the ligaments in his shoulder.”
“Okay, great. Well, not great, but you know what I mean. When do you think I’ll be able to speak with him?”
“Not sure, probably by mid morning tomorrow. Depends how quickly we can get him out of theatre and into recovery.”
“There’s also a matter of urgency with regards to Mrs Torrence. I strongly suspect she was under the influence of an illicit substance. We urgently need her blood testing for the presence of drugs, particularly mind altering ones. We’re specifically interested in Scopolamine, Mescaline and Ketamine … I don’t mean to tell you your business, but shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
“I have a good memory. Is there anything else?
“No, that’s it for now.”
“I’ll speak to Mrs Torrence’s consultant about the tests. I’ll also arrange for a psychiatric assessment, when she’s in a condition to receive it.”
“Thank you so much Matron.”
She said that he was welcome, and marched off down the corridor, her soles squeaking against the polished floor, as she shimmied past a porter and his oncoming trolley.
The whole case had blown open, and - just as this thought came - Aitken sent him a text message, saying that both Anthony Nixon and Leon Jackson had tested positive for Scopolamine, Mescaline and Ketamine.
He found two isolated seats along the corridor and slumped down onto the nearest. He felt dizzy and suddenly nauseous, regretting early protests at the suggestion of an MRI scan. With bowed head, he rubbed his eyelids. His mind’s eye cast an image of Charlotte growing old in prison.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The notepad on Daniel’s bedside cabinet was full of scrawls; he’d filled it tonight, trying to free his mind from a cyclone of questions and possibilities. He naturally slept on his left side but that would be impossible tonight; his arm ached as his skin pulled at the stitches. And so, by two a.m., he’d spent most of the night either lying on his right side, huffing and puffing, or sat upright with a notepad balanced on his leg. The most important noted questions: What did Charlotte remember? Was she aware she’d taken those drugs - perhaps an overdose? Did she have any recollection of the attack? Did she have any reason to assault River Dilettantes? Had she found out that River had stolen those drugs? And, most importantly, has someone who’s orchestrating these murders, moved from Chester to Blaine, and prompted another series of brutal attacks? None of those question would be answered tonight, but that didn’t stop his mind whirring.
Aitken and Cliff had agreed to return to Blaine in the morning. They were due to regroup at the hospital at nine; Aitken to interview River and Daniel to interview Charlotte. Daniel was keen that Cliff focussed on the cluster of murder-suicides near Chester.
The clear connection between Fallon’s and Hewitt’s murders, would surely hit Edwards by midday. Daniel foresaw the investigation mushrooming and hoped it didn’t get so big that he lost control. The case most likely spanned jurisdictions and involved who knew how many undiscovered victims.
And of course, there was the issue of Charlotte’s prosecution. Would Edwards give this - or perhaps the whole case - to someone else to handle? He might if he knew how Daniel and Charlotte’s relationship had developed. He couldn’t afford to worry about that. Best focus on what he could control.
As Daniel’s eyelids were finally succumbing to their heaviness, they sprung open and he sat up, turning over to a fresh page of the notepad. He wrote one word, ‘Motive?’ then stared at it a moment, running a finger over the faint indentations the pen had made in the lined paper. He placed the pad open at that page, on his bedside cabinet.
Daniel reached the hospital car park early, yet Aitken and Cliff were already there. With Cliff’s eyepatch the pair were unmistakeable, even from a hundred yards away, where Daniel had parked up. They sat on a smoking bench, near the hospital’s main entrance. Cliff was wafting his cigarette smoke away from Aitken’s face. She must have realised she was sitting downwind of him, because she got up and sat the other side of him. Her happiness at seeing Daniel, as he approached, was mixed with a look of parental concern.
Cliff prematurely extinguished his cigarette on a grate atop a silver cigarette bin, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Aitken. “How you doing boss?”
“Didn’t sleep much, if I’m honest. But I’m okay. I’ll be better when I’ve spoken to Charlotte.”
Daniel suggested how they should carve up the work. Cliff seemed okay with it, but Aitken said, “I don’t mean to question you-”
“Question all you like.”
“Are you really the best person to interview Charlotte?”
“Meaning?”
“You’re looking for a reason not to blame her for what she did, for some sign of diminished responsibility. It’s dangerous going in there, with the end in mind. It’s going to make it hard for you to be open.”
“Look, the crux of this is not just what she says, but whether those same drugs were found in her system. I don't need her statement to know she wasn’t of sound mind; the blood tests will confirm that. I recognise your concern but do you think she’ll open up to you?”
“Maybe, maybe not. We could get Cliff to do it?”
“I’m sorry, my mind’s set.” He looked to Cliff for acceptance and Cliff shrugged. “No skin off my nose.”
“Aitken, tell you what. You focus on River. I’ll report back on what Charlotte says, and - if you’re unsatisfied with any aspect of it - I’ll let you interview her yourself.”
“Fair enough.” She didn’t look pacified though.
Before an explosion of information left them reeling, a catalogue of frustration met them that morning at the hospital. River’s surgeon, who had operated on him the previous evening, was late in and permission to interview wasn’t going to be given until he arrived. Matron Boothroy was being as helpful as she could, but explained that Charlotte had woken in distress in the night and they’d given her a strong sedative. She would come round by eleven if they were lucky. Even then, there was no guarantee she’d be lucid enough to talk.
Cliff spent most of the morning pacing the smoking area outside. With the collars turned up on his beige trench coat, his eyepatch, smoke rising above him and a phone to his ear, he looked like an old school Chicago PI. He was having a better morning than Aitken and Daniel. He’d discovered that the incidents in and around Chester were seemingly unconnected, with little similarity, bar the murder-suicide classification itself. The area was highly populated, and crime was - comparable to Blaine - commonplace. As a result, three different detective sergeants had worked across the five investigations.
The first incident was thought to be a domestic dispute turned ugly. A young woman - expecting her first baby - stabbed her husband in the back, before removing his genitals with the same knife. She’d sat in his blood on the kitchen floor for perhaps an hour before swallowing an entire bottle of codeine.
The second and third murder-suicides were similar, in a sense; public transport had played a part in both. A mature student - male 36 - had grabbed a teenaged girl, and threw both of them in front of a speeding tram. They were killed outright. Eyewitnesses heard the tram’s brakes screech on, but it was too late. The student’s khaki rucksack had caught the tram’s windscreen wiper and had hung there - the only sign of the incide
nt. The scattered remains of the dead couple - apparently strangers - were mercifully hidden beneath the stationary tram.
The third incident was similar. Two middle-aged women, with no apparent knowledge of each other, had fallen to their deaths from a railway bridge. It was only one eyewitness, a boy who’d seen them struggling before the fall, which stopped the coroner concluding it was a suicide pact.
The fourth incident took place in Chester zoo, of all places, and made the national press because of it. A memory of the incident came flooding back to Cliff as DS Fenton of Cheshire CID, relayed the scene over the phone. He was quite graphic about it, seeming to enjoy the story on some level. A woman in her twenties, an up and coming executive from HSBC, had acquired a Magnum handgun from a source no one ever established, and took an elderly lady (who’d been escorting her grandson around the zoo) at gun-point. She forced her victim to climb and walk along a concrete platform above the rhino enclosure, before shoving her. She’d fallen to the ground below, landing on a sleeping baby rhino. Its understandably protective mother had trampled the intruder. They thought she was probably already dead when its horn pierced her stomach. Zoo visitors had scattered as the rhino paraded the woman around the enclosure, clearly struggling to untangle her rag-doll body from its horn. If that hadn’t dispersed the crowd, the quivering hand of the gun-toting executive, spinning on the spot, would have done the job. One witness recalled placing her hands over her toddler's ears as the Magnum discharged in a similar manner to Leon Jackson’s gun; the bullet exiting through the top of the young woman’s head.
The classification of the fifth and final incident had been disputed. The bodies of a husband and wife had been recovered from a house fire. The woman had died from smoke inhalation, but the man’s post-mortem was inconclusive. Traces of chemicals in his system indicated that he’d consumed (or been fed) bleach, and that this had most likely killed him. There was evidence of smoke inhalation, accompanying significant burns, but even the combined effect of these was insufficient to conclude the cause of death. The coroner had registered an open verdict but, as far as national police statistics were concerned, it was a murder-suicide. Fenton had pushed for that classification. It was, after all, a judgement made out of sight of the public who only got to see the macro picture of crime statistics.
All this had been pieced together from downloads from Fenton and colleagues by exactly eleven minutes passed eleven.
It was also precisely eleven eleven when everything took off inside the hospital. Daniel, sitting on the reception’s padded seats amongst the walking wounded, had been just about to nod off, feeling himself leaning towards Aitken’s shoulder, when she asked, “Is it just me, or does the time 11:11 appear disproportionately often?”
“Huh?” Daniel wiped moisture from the corner of his mouth, swallowed and sat upright.
“Don’t you get that? When you look at the clock, more often than not, it says 11:11. It’s weird.”
“Oh … your mind’s just drawn to the symmetry I guess.”
“DI Sheppard?” The voice came from matron Boothroy who was stridently walking towards them. “You can speak with Mrs Torrence if you wish. She’s groggy, but she’s managed some toast and orange juice. She seems a little distant, but she’s coherent enough.”
“Thank you.” As Daniel left his seat to follow the matron to the ward, a round-faced, green-eyed, handsome consultant with checked shirt (it struggled to contain his biceps), walked up to them. “Who’s Aitken?” he said.
“That will be me.” She stood up, and Daniel threw a glance over his shoulder as he left, noticing the fresh smile Aitken had for the consultant. A tinge of jealousy surprised, and slightly amused him. “I’ll meet you back here. Wait for me if you’re done first,” he shouted after her.
“Likewise,” she yelled back.
On the ward, Daniel knew which bay was Charlotte’s without being able to see her. Hers was the one in the far right corner, the only one with the curtain pulled around. He stood for a moment, looking at the steel rings atop the curtain, then down at the folds of paper-thin material. His hesitation was caused by a lapse of mind; one of those moments in life when the next event is impossible to predict and prepare for. The permutations of how this could go were endless and Daniel didn’t like that one bit. He was just going to have to tread as carefully as he could. He spoke in soft tones from outside the curtain, “Charlotte, its me, Daniel. I hope its okay for me to come in. You let me know if it’s not but, in a moment, I’m going to move the curtain a little, to let myself in. I’ll shut it behind me straight away.”
He heard nothing and pulled the curtain away from the wall to his right, just enough to squeeze through. She was lying down with her back to him. Her shoulder blades cast shadows down her spine, the harsh strip lights accentuating her slenderness, transforming it into something unattractive and skeletal. That bruise he’d seen as she’d walked zombie-like down the driveway, was even more prominent now. It was as though a purple palm on the back of her neck was reaching around her throat to needle its fingers into her windpipe. There were no machines, no tables, no cards, no flowers, just Charlotte in her gown with its tiny transparent buttons down the back. There was a tie at the top, but this was loose and goose bumps stood their fine hairs to attention on her shoulders.
“Charlotte. Are you awake? It’s Daniel, can you hear me?”
She turned over towards him and, for a moment, he thought he was in the wrong bay. Her eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks sunken, her face ashen. A fanciful notion came to him that perhaps a vampire had visited Charlotte in the night and she’d joined the ranks of the living dead.
A tremble commanded her lips, strands of saliva strung out between them as she opened her mouth to speak. She had a desperate look in her eyes which reminded Daniel of Alison; the look which had accompanied her final breath. It was a look of pleading - for the pain to stop - and buried, somewhere deep in that look, was optimism, some lingering hope that death might just be a birth into new life. Her eyes fixed on his forearm; his bandages bulging under his tight jumper sleeve.
Still on her side, she extended her arms towards him without fixing his gaze, and started to cry. For a few minutes he forgot he was a detective inspector and that Charlotte had tried to kill him. He knelt and accepted her arms, holding his breath against the smell of her. It was somewhere on the more rancid side of halitosis. The notion that this was the same woman who’d seduced him by the fireside, was entirely ridiculous.
They held each other for an unknowable time, Charlotte sobbing uncontrollably, Daniel not wanting to let go; he didn’t want to see those eyes. Not yet. Her sobbing finally reduced to hitching breaths and he gently pulled away.
“Lie back Charlotte, you need your rest.” She did, but gripped his hand. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it right now, but it’s important I know what you remember.”
She looked up at the ceiling and covered her face, burying it in the crook of her arm. Her chest was heaving, her chest-bone prominent against the material, her unsupported breasts having fallen away. They sat in silence for five minutes. Daniel became conscious of the time as the ward’s clock, two beds down, clicked relentlessly. No sounds came from the rest of the ward. Daniel guessed they were all either sleeping, or listening intently in anticipation of the conversation which was about to unfold.
“Tell me what you remember. Whisper it to me if you like.” She pulled her arm away. Her eyes were puffy, but less red than they had been. She stared upwards, seemingly unable to look at him. She spoke more in a hiss than a voice, as though her vocal chords were damaged, but - in the still of the room - he heard every word.
“I went to the pharmacy and it was shut. I remember Mrs McArthy.” Daniel freed his hand to swipe his notepad from his back pocket. She quickly took hold of his pad-holding wrist. “She was annoyed that River had shut the pharmacy. I walked off, my head a mess and I guess I must have gone to River’s, I remember knocking at his door. But it
was dark then, that’s what I don’t understand. I must have lost time somewhere. I remember this sense … this strange sense of determination, like a mother who loves her child but knows it must be punished. I had to punish him, I had no choice.”
“Punish him for what?”
“For everything. For him stealing those drugs, for his homosexuality. I know that sounds stupid. If I’d been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have cared less that he was gay. But in that moment what I was doing felt like the right thing to do … like I had no option.” She turned to him then, eyes wide desperate to be understood. “You know when you have a vivid dream and you’re doing something that seems like the right thing to do, even though it feels wrong? It was like that.”
Daniel knew exactly what she meant. It wasn’t that many years since he’d had a recurring nightmare about catching murderers and rapists, decapitating them and stashing them neatly inside taped bin-bags between beams in the loft. It had all seemed so right in his dream state and so wrong once he’d woken. He nodded, “I understand, go on.”
“I remember it all from that point.” She went on to describe her attack, pausing periodically to get her trembling under control. “The only bit I don’t remember was hitting the bottom step as he pushed me. I must have blacked out for a while. I saw the state of my leg when I came round, but somehow it didn’t hurt. It hurts like hell now.”
Daniel looked down at her right leg. It had aluminium supports down both sides secured by bolts which disappeared into her skin, just below the ankle. Her foot was mostly black, and twice the size of its partner.
“I remember getting up and the whole world was purple. Yes …” She paused as if a revelation had struck her. “Like the world was playing out in a purple haze and I was somehow part of the world, but also detached. It’s so hard to explain. Almost like a puppeteer, who’s not part of the show, but who’s making things happen. I remember feeling like a failure, certain I’d missed my chance to punish River … oh God I do hope he’s okay … can you tell me?” Her grip on his wrist tightened.
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