He turned up his collar and prepared to make a dash for it.
At first he thought it was a parking ticket and he pulled it roughly from beneath the wiper blade. As soon as he removed the single sheet of A4 from the polythene wrapper and unfolded it, he saw it was something else. He carefully inserted it back into its protective wrapping, wiped off the rain and peered at the neatly typed message. After the first four words he was no longer aware of the rainwater running down the back of his neck.
dear detective inspector thorne. what can i say? practice makes perfect. and don’t you just envy her that perfect . . . distance? i invite you to consider the concept of freedom. true freedom. have you ever really considered it? i’m sorry about the others. truly. i shall not insult your intelligence with platitudes about ends and means but offer in mitigation the thought that a massive undertaking often has an appropriate margin of error. it’s all about pressure, detective inspector thorne, but then you’d know all about that. seriously, though, tom, maybe i’ll call you sometime.
Pressure . . .
Thorne looked around, his heart thumping. Whoever left the note must be close – the car hadn’t been there long. All he could see were grim-set, rain-soaked faces, and Holland dodging the puddles as he loped across the road towards him.
‘Sir, the boyfriend’s just arrived. You must’ve passed him on your way out.’
The look on Thorne’s face stopped him dead in his tracks.
‘Alison is not a fuck-up, Holland.’
‘Of course not, sir. All I meant was—’
‘Listen. This is what he wants.’ He pointed back towards the hospital. ‘Do you understand?’ His shirt was plastered to his back. Rain and sweat. He could barely understand it himself. He could hardly believe what was struggling to come out of his mouth. Holland stared at Thorne open-mouthed as he spoke the words that would cost him so much. Words which even as they formed on his lips, told him he should never have agreed to become part of this.
‘Alison Willetts is not his first mistake. She’s the first one he’s got right.’
Tim’s not handling this very well. He had that funny choke in his voice when he was talking to Anne. Anne? First-name terms and we’ve never met. She sounds nice, though. I like our chats in the evening. Obviously a bit one-sided but at least somebody knows there’s something going on in here. There’s still somebody going on in here.
Did I mention the tests by the way? Absolutely fucking excellent. Well, some of them. Basically there’s some sort of kit, literally a kit, in a special case, which tests if you’re a complete veggie or not. To see if you’re in Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Which I keep mixing up with VPL but PVS is a bit more serious. They just test all your senses. Banging bits of wood together to see if you can hear, to see if you react. Not quite sure what I did, really, but they seemed pleased. I could have done without the pinpricks and that stuff they waft under your nose that’s like the stuff you inhale if you’ve got a really bad cold. But the taste test makes up for it. They give you whisky. Drops of whisky on your tongue. This is my kind of hospital.
Anne did the tests. She looks dead attractive for somebody quite old. I can’t see her very well but that’s the image I get of her. I’m not even seeing shapes, really. More like the shadows of shapes. And some of those shadow-shapes are definitely policemen. Tim sounded really nervous when he was talking to one of them. He was pretty young, I reckon.
The man outside the house with the bottle of champagne did . . . what? Turned me into a pretty dull conversationalist but what else? Hurt me somewhere but nothing feels like a wound.
Everything feels like a scar.
Did he touch me? Will he be the last one ever to touch me?
Come on, Tim. I’m alive. It’s still me. More or less. You’re cracking up and I’m the one singing ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ to myself . . .
It was nice that Carol and Paul came in. Christ, I hope all this business didn’t bugger up the wedding.
TWO
‘Are we looking at a doctor?’
As soon as he had asked the question, Thorne knew what Holland would be thinking. It was undeniable that Anne Coburn was the sort of doctor most men would look at. About whom most men would contrive painful jokes about cold hands and bedside manners. She was tall and slim. Elegant, he thought, like that actress who was in The Avengers and plays the old slapper in that sitcom. Thorne put her in her early forties, maybe a year or two older than he was. Although the blue eyes suggested that her hair might once have been blonde, he liked it the way it was now – short and silver. Perched on the edge of a small, cluttered desk, drinking a cup of coffee, she seemed almost relaxed. By comparison with the day before at any rate.
She’d sent him away from the Royal Free with a flea in his ear. Thorne could still hear the laughter of thirty-odd medical students as he’d trudged away up the corridor. It was evidently a treat to take a short break from brain scans to watch the teacher give a high-ranking police officer a thorough bollocking. Anne Coburn did not like to be interrupted. She’d apologised for the incident over the phone when Thorne rang to rearrange their appointment back at Queen Square where she worked. Where she treated Alison Willetts.
She took another swig of coffee and repeated Thorne’s question. Her speech was crisp, efficient and easy on the ear. It was a voice that could certainly wow impressionable medical students or frighten middle-aged policemen. ‘Are we looking at a doctor? Well, certainly someone with a degree of medical expertise. To block off the basilar artery and cause a stroke would take medical know-how. To cause the kind of stroke that would induce locked-in syndrome is way beyond that . . . Even if someone knew what they were doing, the odds are against it. You might try it a dozen times and not succeed. We’re talking about fractions of an inch.’
Those fractions had cost three women their lives. Thorne flashed on a mental image of Alison Willetts. Make that four women. Perhaps they should count their blessings and thank God for this lunatic’s expertise. Or, more likely, worry that now he thought he’d perfected his technique he’d be eager to try again. Dr Coburn hadn’t finished. ‘Plus of course, there’s the journey to consider.’
Thorne nodded. He’d already started to consider it. Holland looked confused.
‘From what I can gather, you’re presuming that Alison had her stroke at home in south-east London,’ said Coburn. ‘He would have had to keep her alive until he could get her to the Royal London, which is at least . . .’
‘Five miles away.’
‘Right. He’d have passed any number of hospitals on the way. Why did he drive all the way to the Royal London?’
Thorne had no idea, but he’d done some checking. ‘Camberwell to Whitechapel, he’d have passed three major hospitals, even on the most direct route. How would he have kept her alive?’
‘Bag and mask’s the most obvious way. He might have had to pull over every ten minutes or so for half a dozen good squeezes on the bag but it’s fairly straightforward.’
‘So, a doctor, then?’
‘I think so, yes. A failed medical student possibly – chiropractor, perhaps . . . a well-read physiotherapist at a hell of a stretch. I’ve no idea where you’d even begin.’
Holland stopped scribbling in his notebook. ‘A hypodermic needle in a haystack?’
Coburn’s expression told Thorne that she’d found it about as funny as he had.
‘You’d better start looking for it then, Holland,’ Thorne told him. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Get a cab back.’
Every step that he and Dr Coburn took towards Alison’s room filled Thorne with something approaching dread. It was a terrible thought but he would have found it easier had Alison been one of Hendricks’s ‘patients’. He couldn’t help but wonder if it might not have been easier for Alison too. They walked through to the Chandler Wing then took the lift to th
e second floor and Medical ITU.
‘You don’t like hospitals, do you, Detective Inspector?’
An odd question. Thorne couldn’t believe that anybody liked hospitals. ‘I’ve spent too much time in them.’
‘Professionally or . . .?’ She didn’t finish the question because she couldn’t. What were the right words? ‘On an amateur basis?’
Thorne looked straight at her. ‘I had a small operation last year.’ But that wasn’t it. ‘And my mother was in hospital a long time before she died.’
Coburn nodded. ‘Stroke.’
‘Three of them. Eighteen months ago. You really do know how brains work, don’t you?’
She smiled. He smiled back. They stepped out of the lift.
‘By the way, it was a hernia.’
The signs on the walls fascinated Thorne: Movement and Balance; Senility; Dementia. There was even a Headache Clinic. The place was busy but the people they passed as they moved through the building were not the usual walking wounded. He saw no blood, no bandages or plaster casts. The corridors and waiting areas seemed full of people moving slowly and deliberately. They looked lost or bewildered. Thorne wondered what he looked like to them.
Much the same, almost certainly.
They walked on in silence past a canteen filled with the casual chatter that Thorne would have associated with a large factory or office building. He wondered if they ever got that smell out of the food.
‘What about doctors? Are we on your shit list?’
For a ridiculous second he wondered if she was coming on to him. Then he remembered the faces of those bloody medical students. This was not a woman about whom he could presume anything. ‘Well, not at the moment anyway. Too many of them responsible for putting us on to this. You for a start.’
‘I think my husband can take credit for that.’ Her tone was brisk, without an ounce of false modesty.
She caught Thorne’s fleeting glance towards where a wedding ring should have been. ‘Soon to be ex-husband, I should say. It was a chance remark, really. One of the more civilised moments in a rather bloody how-shall-we-handle-the-divorce session.’
Thorne looked straight ahead, saying nothing. Christ, he was so English!
‘What about the china? Who keeps the cat? Did you hear about the lunatic who’s stroking out women all over London? You know the sort of thing . . .’
Phobia. Death. Divorce. Thorne wondered if perhaps they should move on to the crisis in the Middle East.
‘Forty-eight hours after she was brought in we gave Alison an MRI scan. There was oedema around the neck ligaments – bright white patches on the scan. You see it in whiplash victims, but with Alison I thought it was unusual. On top of what my husband had told me—’
‘What about the Midazolam?’
‘His benzodiazepine of choice? It was a very clever choice, as a matter of fact, especially as there was every chance it would be the same drug given to Alison in A and E. How’s that for muddying the waters?’
Thorne stopped. They were outside Alison’s room. ‘Can we check that?’
‘I did. And it was. I know the anaesthetist who was on duty at the Royal London that night. The toxicology report showed Midazolam in Alison’s bloodstream but it would have done anyway – that’s what was used to sedate her in A and E. But we also take blood routinely, on admission, so I checked. Midazolam was present in that first blood sample too. That’s when I decided to contact the police.’
Thorne nodded. A doctor. He had to be. ‘Where else do they use Midazolam?’
She thought for a moment. ‘It’s pretty specialised. ITUs, A and E, Anaesthetics, that’s about it.’
‘Where’s he getting it from? Hospitals? Can’t you get this sort of stuff over the internet?’
‘Not in these quantities.’
Thorne knew that this would mean contacting every hospital in the country for recorded thefts of Midazolam. He wasn’t sure how far back to check. Six months? Two years? He’d err on the side of caution. Besides, he was sure Holland could use the overtime.
Coburn opened the door to Alison’s room.
‘Can she hear us?’ Thorne asked.
She brushed Alison’s hair off her face and smiled at him indulgently. ‘Well, if she can’t, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with her hearing.’
Thorne felt himself redden. Idiot. Why did people whisper at hospital bedsides?
‘To be honest, I’m not sure. The early signs are good. She blinks to sudden noises but there are still tests to be done. I talk to her anyway. She already knows which registrar is an alcoholic and which consultant is doing it with three of his students.’
Thorne raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Coburn sat and took Alison’s hand.
‘Sorry, Detective Inspector, girls’ talk!’
Thorne could do little but watch her among the mess of wires and machinery. Wires and machinery with a young woman attached. He listened to the hiss of Alison’s ventilated lungs and felt the throb of her computerised pulse, and he thought about the one doctor out there somewhere who was most definitely on his shit list.
He sat on the tube trying to guess how much longer the businessman opposite him had to live. It was a game he greatly enjoyed.
It had been such a wonderful moment the day before when Thorne had looked straight at him. He hadn’t really seen him: it had been no more than half a second and he was just a passer-by with his hood up, but it had been a lovely bonus. The look on the policeman’s face had told him that he’d understood the note. Now he could relax and enjoy what had to be done. He’d lie in the bath when he got home and think about it some more. He’d think about Thorne’s face. Then he’d grab a few hours’ sleep. He was working later on.
The man opposite looked flushed. Another tough day at the office. He had a smoker’s face, pale and blotchy. The broken veins on his cheeks were probably a sign of bad circulation and excessive drinking. The small, creamy blobs on the eyelids, the xanthelasma, almost certainly meant that his cholesterol was way too high, and that his arteries were well furred up.
The businessman gritted his teeth as he turned the pages of his newspaper.
He gave him ten years at most.
As his battle-scarred blue Mondeo moved smoothly through the early-morning traffic on the Marylebone Road, Thorne nudged the Massive Attack tape into the stereo and leaned back in his seat. If he’d wanted to relax and switch off he’d have plumped for some Johnny Cash or Gram Parsons or Hank Williams, but there was nothing like the repetitive, hypnotic thud of music he was twenty-five years too old for to concentrate his thoughts. As ever, when the mechanised beat of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ started thumping from the speakers he pictured the incredulous look on the face of the teenage assistant in Our Price. Smug little git had looked at him like he was some old saddo trying to pretend he still had his finger on the pulse.
The spotty teenage face became the infinitely more attractive one belonging to Anne Coburn. He wondered what sort of music she liked. Classical, probably, but with a Hendrix album or two stashed away behind the Mozart and Mendelssohn. What would she make of his penchant for trip-hop and speed-garage? He guessed that she’d go for the saddo theory. He stopped at the lights and rolled down the window to let the beat blast out at the snooty-looking woman in the Saab next to him. Thorne stared straight ahead. When the light hit amber, he turned, winked at her and pulled gently away.
And when he got back to HQ? There would be a convincing babble of efficient-sounding voices, a scurrying back and forth with files, and the buzzing and beeping of faxes and modems. Thorne smacked out the rhythm on his steering-wheel. And as a backdrop to this montage of proper procedure there would be the wall; a blackboard detailing names, dates and actions, and lined up above it there would be the pictures: Christine, Madeleine and Susan. Their unmarked f
aces sharing a pallid blankness, but each, to Thorne, seeming to capture a dreadful final instant of some unfamiliar emotion. Confusion. Terror. Regret. All in extremis. He turned up the music. In factories and offices across London, workers were copping furtive glances at calendar girls – Saucy Sandra, Naughty Nina, Wicked Wendy. The days, weeks and months that lay ahead for Thorne would be counted off by the reproachful faces of Dead Christine, Dead Madeleine and Dead Susan.
‘How’s it going, Tommy?’
Christine Owen. Thirty-four. Found lying at the bottom of the stairs . . .
‘Shake ’em up, will you, Tom, for fuck’s sake?’
Madeleine Vickery. Thirty-seven. Dead on her kitchen floor. A pan of spaghetti boiled dry . . .
‘Please, Tom . . .’
Susan Carlish. Twenty-six. Her body discovered in an armchair. Watching television . . .
‘Tell us what you’re going to do, Tom.’
They would make lists, no question, long lists they would cross-reference with different ones. DCs would ask hundreds of different people the same questions and type out their notes and DSs would take statements and make phone calls and type out their notes, which would be collated and indexed and, perhaps, several thousand fields full of cows’ worth of shoe leather later, they might get lucky . . .
Sorry, girls, nothing yet.
They weren’t going to catch this bloke with procedure. Thorne could feel it already. This wasn’t the convenient copper’s hunch of a thriller writer – he knew it. The killer might get himself caught. Yes, there was a chance of that. The profilers and psychological experts reckoned that, deep down, they all wanted to be caught. He’d have to ask Anne Coburn what she thought about that the next time he saw her. If that turned out to be sooner rather than later he wouldn’t be complaining.
Thorne pulled into the car park and killed the music. He stared up at the dirty brown building in which Backhand had made its home. The old station on Edgware Road had been earmarked for closure months ago and was now all but deserted, but the vacant offices above had been perfect for an operation like Backhand. Perfect for the lucky buggers who didn’t have to work there every day. An open-plan monstrosity – one enormous fishtank for the minnows with a few smaller bowls around the edges for the bigger fish.
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