by Tim Weaver
‘Correct. In 1996.’
The soft sound of his wheezing came down the line again. I waited him out, looking off at the car park. A husband and pregnant wife were moving towards me from the direction of the main building. A blue Ford was entering the lot, a man at the wheel, a teenaged girl in the seat beside him. I watched them all the way into a space just down from me, and then returned my attention to the call.
‘Dr Poulter?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You don’t know what, sir?’
‘I don’t know if this is really …’
‘Really what?’
Another long pause. ‘Really ethical.’
It took me a moment to catch up. ‘You recognize her name?’
No response.
‘Dr Poulter?’
‘I shouldn’t be talking about these things.’
‘I understand that. But these are old cases, old crimes. All I’d appreciate knowing is, if you recognize Pamela Welland’s name, maybe an indication of why.’
Silence.
Come on.
‘Dr Poulter?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps you recognize her name?’
‘Yes.’
‘From somewhere other than the newspapers?’
‘Yes.’
My grip tightened on the pen. ‘Where from, Dr Poulter?’
‘I used to have a …’ He stopped. Come on. Come on, don’t hold out on me now. He cleared his throat. ‘I used to have a patient. This lovely girl. Troubled, but lovely. She came to the hospital in a very bad way: she’d lost her two-year-old son in an accident, and then she and the father divorced, and she just got into a spiral she couldn’t control. By the time I began treating her, she’d already tried to kill herself three times. The third time, she was in ICU for two weeks. She’d been so far gone, her vital organs had shut down.’
I wrote down what he said. ‘Who was she?’
‘You mentioned a Kay earlier.’
‘This woman was Kay?’
‘I don’t know if it’s your Kay,’ Poulter said. ‘It certainly seems too coincidental that you would mention Pamela Welland and then someone called Kay.’
‘Kay knew Pamela Welland?’ I asked.
‘She used to talk about being very affected by a murder,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘One that had taken place near to where she’d lived. Before she had her son, before her divorce, she’d been based somewhere in London. Greenwich, I think. She was originally from this part of the world, returned here after her son tragically died, but she was in London for a number of years. Anyway, when we talked about her time there, she always talked about being upset about this girl’s death. She’d never talk about the reasons why, only that it had affected her. I always assumed it was the girl’s age.’
I paused, pen hovering about my pad, not inter-rupting.
‘I think maybe she was talking about this Welland girl.’
‘Was that why you called Franks?’
He sounded confused.
‘I really need you to think hard about this, Dr Poulter. Because Franks was the lead on the Pamela Welland case. Did Kay say something to you about the case?’
‘No. No, it wasn’t that.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. I think I might have been calling him to let him know how she was. I think he might have asked me to update him. It’s so hazy, such a long time ago …’
‘Why would Franks want to know how she was?’
‘Honestly? I can’t remember.’
I looked down at my notes.
‘One thing you could do,’ Poulter said, ‘is speak to my successor at Keel Point. A man named John Garrick. I have his number here somewhere.’
‘Okay. I’ll take that. Thanks.’
He told me to give him a moment. Once he’d put the phone down, I minimized the call and went to the browser on my mobile, googling ‘Bethlehem’ and ‘Dr Poulter’. I found a picture of him, at some kind of conference. He looked old, even then. Backing up, I did the same search for the name he’d given me: John Garrick. The picture I found of him was nothing to do with the hospital. Instead he was part of a local newspaper story, fronting a campaign to prevent the destruction of south Devon’s nature trails. He was in his early fifties at the time the picture was taken, had shaved hair and a hint of grey stubble, with a sticker on his lapel that said, Hello! My name is John.
Poulter came back on the line. ‘I have it here. John came in when they were already scaling back the kind of services we offered. They weren’t hiring for full-time roles any more, they were hiring contractors. Dreadful shame. I mean, seriously, you can’t run a hospital by filling it with part-timers.’ He paused, a bitterness in his voice that echoed his comments about the media and the locals earlier. ‘But none of that was John’s fault. He was a very good psychiatrist. From what I heard, Casey liked him very much.’
‘Wait, her name was Casey?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Kay for short.’
I flicked back through my pad until I found what I wanted: something Franks had written down in his diary that I’d never been able to fully put together.
UnID’d victim + CB?
Simon Preston had been the unidentified victim.
And now I’d found his girlfriend.
‘What was her surname?’ I asked.
‘Casey’s?’
‘Yes.’
A brief pause, as if he was trying to draw the name from his past.
‘Her surname was Bullock.’
Casey
September 2011 | Two Years Ago
One Friday, towards the end of September, she drove down to Keel Point, parked up and watched from the beach as staff began transferring high-risk patients to the ferry.
Psyday, Casey thought.
Five hundred feet away from her, they marched patients off a transfer bus one by one, across a secure area, fenced in and connected to the jetty, into the ferry waiting in the water. Most of the patients were sedated and were helped in, but if they weren’t too heavily medicated, the staff shadowed them into their seats. After they were on board, nurses would secure a patient and then return for the next. A security guard from the hospital and an armed police officer remained at the transfer vehicle the entire time, watching the process unfold, their eyes never leaving the patients.
There was no one else watching, just her. She sat alone on the shingle beach in the warmth of early autumn, sun peaking through the clouds, the sea blue and still.
Most of the patients moved quietly between the two vehicles, without much fuss, heads down, legs dragging. A couple more looked across the water, their eyes distant and drugged, but didn’t react. One began crying as he saw what awaited on the other side of the causeway, great howls of pain, as if the hospital scared him. And then the last patient emerged, a man in his forties, with a ponytail and a black goatee, handcuffed at his wrists and ankles. Two hospital staff flanked him, one hand on either elbow, pushing him forward. As he came down the ramp from the transfer vehicle everyone tensed: the security guard seemed to fill out, the police officer’s hand gripped his gun even harder.
‘You know who that is?’
Casey turned, startled.
Behind her, at the sea wall that separated the shingle beach from the empty car park beyond, stood a man in his late thirties, thickset, chest and arms knotted with muscle. Physically, he looked like a bodybuilder, and yet he was pale and bloodless. He had a pair of sunglasses on, making it hard to tell exactly where he was looking, and was dressed in black, his boots dirty and mud-specked, the hood of his top up over his head.
Inside, she could see his scalp was shaved.
Casey didn’t reply, and the man turned further in her direction, letting her know that he was waiting for a response. When he still got nothing, he removed his sunglasses and came forward a step, an odd, unsettling sensation gathering in her. She brought her bag in closer to her, like a defence mechani
sm. The man watched every inch of movement, his eyes tracking the journey of the bag, the flow of the muscles in her hand, the change in her breathing. She swallowed, shifted on the pebbles and got to her feet.
‘You going somewhere?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I hope it wasn’t me.’
She studied him. ‘I prefer to be alone.’
A smirk bloomed on his face, then he pointed over her shoulder, back towards the ponytailed patient they were loading on to the ferry. ‘So do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you know who that guy is?’
She didn’t want to turn her back now, not to watch a patient being taken from one place to another. But when he got no response, when she didn’t look at the patient, the man’s eyes snapped back to her.
‘Cat got your tongue?’
She felt a flutter of panic. Simon had always been aggressive, cruel, had called her names to try to suppress her. He’d grab her and shake her when she refused to back down. But Simon had never scared her. Simon had been heartless, but he’d been dumb.
This man was different.
‘Take a look at him,’ he said, stepping away from the sea wall, and she felt as if she had to, even though turning her back on him went against every instinct she had.
On the other side of the beach, inside the secure fenced area, the patient with the ponytail and goatee was almost at the door of the ferry.
‘That’s Gary Corrigan.’
At the sound of his voice, she turned in his direction again. He’d stepped closer without making a single sound on the shingle. He was four, maybe five, inches taller than her and well built. In his smooth, pale hands, he held the sunglasses he’d been wearing. As he looked down at her, he moved them between his fingers, manipulating them, passing them back and forth between his thumb and ring finger.
Back, forward. Back, forward.
‘The Richmond Park Rapist,’ he said.
She found herself turning back to Corrigan without even thinking, recognizing the name from the news. By the time she realized what she’d done, she could feel him almost brush against her, disturbing the air between them. She turned slowly, heart hammering against the inside of her chest. He’d dropped to his haunches, his gaze moving from her feet, past her legs, and then above his eyeline, to her breasts and her face.
‘What a waste of fucking time,’ he said, his attention returning to Corrigan. ‘Bring him all the way down here from London, stick him on the psych ward for six weeks, then take him all the way back to London again.’ He looked at her, saw her confusion, and a smile cracked across his face. ‘Oh, didn’t you know? In two months’ time, they’re closing your little madhouse across the water there. It’s too expensive.’
She looked away, off across the causeway to the hospital, back to the patients, now all loaded on to the ferry, then back at him. ‘I never …’ She stopped. ‘No, that can’t –’
‘It can.’
He stood again, the height difference between them more marked than ever. He looked from her, to the ferry, then leaned in so close she could feel his breath on her face. She could smell his odour too: the stench of mildew, of unwashed clothes.
‘That tedious little doctor you see, he’ll be gone. This place, it’ll be left to decay. And then what are you going to do? Crawl back to London?’
‘Who are you?’
He shrugged. ‘People used to call me Milk.’
Her gaze returned to the hospital. Could it really be true? Was it really closing? She remembered Garrick telling her a few months back that there were things happening at the hospital, but she didn’t think he meant this. Why hadn’t he told her? Maybe he thought she wouldn’t be able to handle the news. Maybe he didn’t even know himself.
And then she realized something.
She’d turned her back.
Suddenly, she felt his hands on the nape of her neck.
She froze, goosebumps scattering along her spine. When he felt her reaction, her repulsion, he pressed either side of her throat, digging the hard knots of his fingertips into the cartilage. ‘Did you ever hear about what happened to your boyfriend?’
She felt his breath on her ear.
‘Did you?’
‘Let go of me.’
He pressed harder. ‘Did you hear about Simon?’
She stopped moving; tried to look at him.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ he said.
‘What about Simon?’
‘He had his throat cut back in March.’
‘What?’
‘Ear to ear. That’s what happens when you stray on to someone else’s turf. He had a big mouth too, which didn’t really help. Down here, he might have been someone. Up in London, he was rat shit. Nothing. A gnat.’ He dug his nails into her neck and the words vanished instantly, carried off into the grey of the morning. ‘Let me ask you something else, Casey.’
He even knew her name.
‘Do you know how many women Gary Corrigan raped?’
She tried to fight him, tried to wriggle free.
His nails punctured her skin.
She flinched as he gradually drew her back to him, paralysing her movement, a spider cocooning its prey. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘Corrigan raped ten women. And do you know whose watch that took place on?’ He paused, but he wasn’t waiting for a response this time. ‘An arsehole called Jim Paige. You know what’s interesting about Jim Paige, Casey? He was best friends with Leonard Franks, and there was this …’ A pause for effect. ‘Wait, I hope I’m not getting ahead of myself here. You’ve heard of Leonard Franks, right?’
She shook her head for a second time.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘That’s weird. Because your dead boyfriend seemed to know Leonard quite well. And you know what else he was crowing about in the days before his throat got cut? You know what he was saying, Casey?’ He pulled her in so close to him, she felt his lips brush her ear. ‘Simon was saying that everything he learned about Leonard Franks, he actually learned from you.’
57
I headed into Plymouth, left the BMW at a long-stay car park, then paid for a hire car at a Hertz half a mile down the road. It was a small, black Vauxhall, but it would be better for now. The BMW was dying a slow, painful death, made worse by my not having the time to get it seen to. The more problems that I ignored and let develop on the car, the more conspicuous I made myself – and the more likely I was to get stranded somewhere. The added advantage was that no one I knew would be looking for me in a Vauxhall.
Not Reynolds.
Not Craw.
Before setting off, I transferred my wetsuit, torch and backpack across from the BMW. My plans to cross the causeway had been put on hold – but only temporarily. Low tide the next morning was six-seventeen. I wasn’t going to miss the chance this time.
Next, I checked in with Tasker. The girls were fine, he said. When he was about to tell me where he was keeping them, I stopped him. ‘I don’t want to know for now,’ I said. ‘That way, I can’t give up the information.’
‘What the hell have you got yourself into now, Raker?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me. It matters to the girls.’
‘I’m okay, Task – that’s the main thing.’
I told him I was going off grid for a while and that I’d call again in a couple of hours. Next, I tried phoning Murray. I wanted to ask her whether she recognized the name Casey Bullock. Poulter reckoned Bullock felt an attachment to the Pamela Welland case – or, at the very least, knew about it.
But the call went unanswered.
For a moment, as I listened to it ring, an alarming thought entered my head: I’d somehow compromised Murray. But then reality kicked in: I’d never mentioned to Craw that it had been Murray on the phone. Hanging up without leaving a message, I turned off my
mobile and removed the SIM. I’d been surprised once by Reynolds when he’d tracked me through my handset.
It wasn’t going to happen again.
I picked up the A38 back out of the city and followed it west for sixteen miles. It was slow going, like all roads were in this part of the world, and by the time I’d found the turning I needed – a B-road south that would take me all the way down to Keel Point – it was starting to darken again: evening took a grip, patches of sky fading, clouds disappearing, everything replaced by the ashen gloom of another winter night.
Halfway down, I took a quick detour east, towards Kingsbridge. On the edges of the town, I found the house that had once belonged to Simon Preston and Casey Bullock. It was a tiny semi-detached at the end of a scruffy cul-de-sac. The view was the best bit, the rear of the house backing on to rolling fields. The rest was plain but tidy: cut lawns, a freshly painted front door, an orderly driveway with a mid-range Ford parked on it. I paused there, engine running, studying the exterior, wondering how it might have looked when it had belonged to Preston. I guessed something less than this: something shabbier, more carious.
More reflective of the man who’d once owned it.
Living in the house next door was Andrew Stricker, the neighbour that Murray had chatted to on the phone. There were no cars on the drive, and no lights on inside. I wondered if it might be worth coming back, to take a run at him myself. But it would have to wait. I didn’t want to stand still. Not now.
Continuing into town, lights circling the mouth of the Kingsbridge estuary, I parked up and headed down to the quay. A coffee shop was still open, a man wiping down tables out front that I didn’t imagine had been filled at any point in the last month. Through the glass I could see it was virtually empty, which suited me fine, and – lined up, adjacent to the counter – were three iMacs. A sign above said, FREE WIFI with every food purchase. I could have used my phone to get on the web, but the less I used it, the more difficult I made it for Craw and Reynolds to find me. Plus I was hungry.
‘What time are you open until tonight?’ I asked the guy.
‘Seven o’clock, mate.’
I looked at my watch. Six-fifteen. That gave me enough time.