by LJ Ross
Atop the regulation cerulean blue bedclothes, a collection of little white pills had been arranged in the shape of an inverted pentagram, which was the sign of their Circle. With an ecstatic smile, he snatched them up and began to gobble them down, content in the knowledge that whatever happened to him was all part of the Circle’s plan to free him.
* * *
While Steve Walker was choking on his own vomit on the linoleum floor of his bedroom at Rampton Hospital, his name was being written in clear black capital letters on the wall.
“We know for a fact that Walker was one of the Circle’s leaders,” Ryan was saying. “He refused to talk about it. In fact, every one of his followers has refused to talk about it, which tells us an important thing: they’re loyal. Even when faced with prison or a high security mental hospital, these people keep schtum.”
“They’re either loyal, or they’re frightened,” Anna pointed out.
Ryan met her eyes and nodded.
“You’re right. What ensures loyalty? Expectation of reward or fear of punishment. It’s basic behavioural psychology.”
“They won’t be getting much in the way of a reward, unless they count being able to watch a bit of telly for an hour at the weekend,” Phillips said, popping a stick of nicotine gum in his mouth. Eight months since he’d given up the cigs and he was still hankering for a drag.
“Unless their families are being rewarded,” Ryan argued. “We don’t know how all these people connect or who is the hand that is feeding them. There’s no chance of us being able to get a warrant to look into the financials for Walker’s wife or his son—”
“Alex Walker isn’t involved.” Anna was very clear on that. There were some things you had to believe in, your friends being one of them.
“I agree with you,” Ryan acknowledged the friendship. “When he was pushed into a corner, he did the right thing and that speaks volumes. But…”
“…You have to tick all the boxes.”
“Right.”
“If we can’t look into their families, how about re-visiting the people we already know about? There were a bunch of them convicted as accessories,” MacKenzie thought aloud.
“I think that’s a good starting point,” Ryan agreed. “We don’t want to attract too much attention, that’s my concern. Their visitors will be logged and probably leaked.”
MacKenzie shrugged.
“I’ve been in disguise before, I can do the same again. Keep things low profile.”
“Alright,” Ryan nodded. “Take Lowerson with you and don’t mention it to anybody. Let me know before you go in.”
“It won’t be until the start of next week,” MacKenzie said. “Too much happening on the Bowers case.”
“Understood. Let’s schedule a trip to see Steve Walker at the start of next week. Put it down as personal time off, no questions asked. I’ll sign it off.”
Once that was agreed, they moved onto philosophy.
“If we work on the theory that Patrick Donovan connects to the Circle in some way, looking into his background and his murders might tell us a bit more about how they operate. Since I’ve had six weeks to dwell on it, you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve researched the life and times of Doctor Paddy Donovan with a fine toothed comb.”
None of them bothered to mention that he should not have had access to confidential files while on suspension from CID, and Phillips trained his gaze on the ceiling to avoid eye contact with MacKenzie, whose accusing eyes burned into the side of his head.
“I won’t bore you with his childhood, or his adolescent years, which were predictably dire, full of the usual abusive traumas consistent with the makings of an adult psychopath,” Ryan said drily. “But I will pause to mention that he struggled to find reputable positions as a psychiatrist while he still lived in Ireland and his career only seemed to take off when he moved over to Newcastle. Suddenly, he was appointed to a senior clinical position at the hospital and a lucrative private practice followed that.”
“Not to mention his attachment to Northumbria Constabulary,” MacKenzie said. “That would have earned him a pretty penny over the years.”
“And, of course, he was on very good terms with our own DCS Gregson,” Ryan finished.
“Gregson is now trying to deny they were all that friendly,” Phillips commented. “Since Donovan popped his clogs, he’s been spinning a yarn about him being just another nut-job.”
Ryan laughed shortly.
“I don’t recall playing golf with him at the weekends or taking ski breaks to Austria, do you, Phillips?”
“Can’t say we ever ate fondue together, now you mention it,” Phillips grinned.
“Whereas Gregson did.”
“If Donovan links to Gregson, this could be huge,” Anna said slowly, as the full implications set in. Fear made her stomach jitter. Desperate men with a legion of armed police at their fingertips? Accidents could happen, and she didn’t want Ryan to be one of them.
“Potentially, this is enormous,” he agreed, with a spark in his eye. “But Gregson has wound up in intensive care. That could mean he’s fallen out of favour.”
“We might be able to use that,” Phillips popped his gum. “He’s vulnerable and he’s alone, so he might be willing to do a deal.”
“No deals,” Ryan said firmly. “He’ll get everything that’s coming to him, nothing less and nothing more. There’s a PC guarding him around the clock, but I don’t know him. Lowerson?”
He turned to Jack.
“Who would you trust in the junior ranks? A lot of them are new and a bit green.”
Lowerson sat up a bit straighter at the thought of no longer being lumped with the newbies. Here, his opinion mattered.
“Yates is good,” he said, choosing to ignore the fact that she had turned down an offer of dinner and the movies. He was still working on it. “She’s professional and calm under fire. She’s looking to get ahead.”
Ryan frowned.
“Ambitious in a good way, or in a ‘I’m going to convert to the Circle’ kind of way?”
“Oh, the first one,” Lowerson said quickly.
“Right.” Ryan reached over to the desk phone and made a call, barked out some instructions to PC Yates’ superior, softened it with promises of tickets to the match next weekend, then replaced the receiver with a satisfied expression. “Yates’ll be standing guard over Gregson as of thirty minutes from now.”
“We’ve got possible connections,” MacKenzie picked up the thread of the conversation, “but we don’t have any idea what their credo is. Is it like Freemasonry, only murderous?”
“Donovan had a thing for Milton,” Ryan answered. “Quotes were threaded through the notes he kept on the women he killed and he kept mementos everywhere.”
He thought of the little copy he had found on Bowers’ bookshelf and caught Anna’s eye. There were shadows from lack of sleep and he felt an outpouring of love for her. He moderated his next comments because, if Bowers was involved—and that was a certainty in his opinion—it would mean more heartache for her. He couldn’t put it off forever but he might be able to give her another day or two so that she could regain her strength.
“I’ve never read any Milton,” Lowerson admitted, feeling like a philistine.
“Who has?” MacKenzie laughed, pulling up short when Phillips began to recite a passage.
“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven,” he pondered, tugging artistically at his lower lip while MacKenzie looked on in fascination.
“Frank? When in the blue blazes have you ever found the time to read Milton? The most I see from you is the Sunday Telegraph,” she blurted out.
“There was many a long and lonely year before I met you, my flower.”
“There was many a long and lonely pint down at the Blue Bamboozle,” Ryan corrected, with a grin. “But he’s right. Donovan concentrated his notes on the first part of Milton’s poem, which concerns Satan. Obviously, that ties in with what we already know abou
t the Circle’s satanic leanings.”
Anna nodded, thinking of her own brief and terrifying experience at the hands of men and women in animal masks. Memories drifted in, flashing images of Steve Walker looming above her with a knife in his hand, his face half animal, half human in her drugged vision. The Circle had watched from their knees, chanting in botched Latin.
“Initially, we thought that they were a pagan group,” she spoke up. “Some of the practices we saw on Holy Island leaned more in that direction.”
Ryan remembered.
“Yes, there were elements, such as burial practice, dousing the body in camphor, the fact that the solstice is an important date in the Neo-Pagan calendar. All of that made us think about some sort of rogue paganism which had moved away from its roots.”
“ ‘Pagan’ first started out as a derogatory word,” Anna clarified. “Used by other major religions to describe those who did not subscribe to the norm. Nowadays, some modern pagans use the word to describe themselves, but there’s no real consensus on a unified religion. There are disparate divisions.”
“You think the Circle could be a division?”
“It’s possible,” she mulled over the idea. “Perhaps it started out that way. Maybe the Circle started out as a group of people who believed in the Old Gods, who believed in praying for a good harvest, and it was never intended to become violent. But the markings we found etched into the bodies weren’t pagan. They’re commonly associated with satanic practices.”
Ryan reached inside his folder and found the images of those who had died on the island.
“The inverted pentagram wasn’t always viewed as an evil symbol,” Anna explained, getting into her subject. “Once again, it’s a case of pagan beliefs being associated with evil ones. Unfortunately for all the harmless followers and sun-worshippers, what we seem to have stumbled across is a group of people who are fusing it all together into something malevolent.”
Ryan slapped the folder shut again, suddenly frustrated by it all.
“I’m not getting drawn into it any more than necessary. Whoever or whatever they worship, they’re men and women at the end of the day. Flesh and blood, which means they’ll fit a pair of handcuffs.”
Phillips’ laughter rumbled across the room.
“It’s useful if we can get inside their heads, because it might help us to track them and stop them,” Ryan elaborated. “But even if we don’t understand their voodoo shit, we’ll still stop them.”
“How?” Lowerson asked, innocently.
Ryan smiled wolfishly.
“Because, Jack, killers make mistakes. When they do, we’ll be waiting with a big fat net to catch them.”
* * *
They agreed to a three-pronged approach. During ‘daylight’ hours, MacKenzie and Lowerson would continue to work on Bowers’ murder, while Ryan and Phillips shed light on Gregson’s attack and his wife’s disappearance. When she wasn’t teaching, Anna would research everything she could about cult practices in Northumberland, under the guise of her next academic project. When they had a spare hour or two, they agreed to meet at Anna’s house to discuss developments. At all times, they needed to be careful. Not knowing how far the Circle reached, not knowing which members of CID were affiliated, or whether the barman at the pub, the man who ran the Pie Van or even their next door neighbours were involved created a creeping sense of paranoia.
Ryan suffered from this the least. He was already a man in the habit of looking behind the eyes of a person to study what made them tick and was no longer surprised by the depths that humanity could plumb.
“You scare me, sometimes,” Anna confessed, while they were preparing to go about the rest of their day. “There’s a coldness, a detachment you have which I don’t think I could emulate, even if I tried.”
Ryan’s hands stilled on the buttons of his coat and his eyes were remote when he turned to face her.
“I wasn’t always this way,” he said quietly. “I used to be hot-headed, with everything swimming on the surface.”
Anna wanted to tell him that his emotions were still swimming there, if one knew where to look.
“Then she died, and everything changed.” He spoke of his sister. Beautiful, bright Natalie whose life had been taken for no other reason than to teach him never to interfere in the work of a serial killer on a spree.
“When she died, something inside me died as well. I know that sounds clichéd,” he added. “I hear myself say it and I want to laugh but it’s true. Something just snapped, Anna, and I don’t know how to get it back, the feeling. I’m cold inside.”
Anna reached out and folded her willowy body against him.
“You’re getting warmer, every day,” she murmured, rubbing soothing circles across the taut muscles of his back.
CHAPTER 17
“Gregson’s awake.”
Ryan glanced briefly across at Phillips, then back at the road ahead as they drove from Durham to Newcastle.
“We’ll head there first, see if there’s anything he’d like to tell us.”
The road dipped into the valley where Newcastle and Gateshead nestled on the banks of the River Tyne. They passed the Angel of the North, the enormous rust-coloured industrial monument towering over the city with wide, aeroplane wings. It was no faerie, no classical folly, but an impressive structure that was both jarring and compelling in its engineered beauty.
“You think Gregson’s killed her, don’t you?” Phillips asked, watching the sun break through the grey clouds to illuminate the proud city of his birth.
Ryan slowed the car while they edged past some road works and drummed his fingers against the top of the steering wheel.
“Yeah, I think so. Maybe not with his own hands.”
“He hasn’t got the balls for it,” Phillips declared.
“Maybe.” Ryan leaned his arm against the edge of the window as traffic came to a standstill.
“There had to be a third person,” he frowned, imagining what might have happened in his mind’s eye. “Somebody to help him clean up the mess.”
“Aye, but they wouldn’t have cracked his skull in,” Phillips was incredulous.
“Wouldn’t they?” Ryan murmured. “I wonder.”
“Nah,” Phillips made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “We’re reaching too far with that. Might have been the wife, it could really be that simple. She’s still missing and she might have sent those text messages to Gregson, luring him home.”
Ryan released the hand brake as traffic started moving again.
“Give me five minutes in a room with him,” he growled, “and we’ll see if the superintendent feels talkative.”
Phillips sniggered and slid back in his seat as the car picked up speed.
* * *
“Gotcha!”
MacKenzie looked over at Lowerson, whose exclamation interrupted their drive back into the city.
“Jepson’s come back to us with two possibilities for the pistol we’re looking for,” Lowerson elaborated. “Two nineteenth century flintlock pistols. One recently sold at auction to a local buyer, another reported stolen from the inventory at Bamburgh Castle.”
Feeling excitement lick through her veins, MacKenzie edged the speedometer higher.
“Stolen?”
“Aye, an early nineteenth century officer’s pistol, by a manufacturer called ‘Durs Egg.’ That went missing over a month ago, apparently.”
“Could be worth a follow up,” MacKenzie said, but Lowerson’s face held the excited look of one who knew something that she didn’t.
“I think we should look into the other missing pistol first, Mac,” he shuffled in his seat, full of beans, and she huffed out a sigh.
“Go on then. Who was the buyer at auction?”
“You’re going to love this.”
MacKenzie gave him an exasperated look, which told him clearly that she wasn’t in the mood for parlour games.
“Alright, alright. It’s registered to ‘Daniel Mathies
on.’ ”
MacKenzie’s fists clamped harder on the steering wheel.
“You’re having me on.”
Lowerson put his hand on his heart.
“I swear! It’s right here, in Jepson’s e-mail. One flintlock holster pistol by Davison’s of Newcastle, circa 1830, sold at Bonhams Auction House on July 3rd.”
“Recent purchase,” MacKenzie murmured. “Find out everything you can about the buyer. There’s more than one ‘Daniel Mathieson,’ surely.”
“Yeah, but it’s another strange coincidence, you can’t deny that.”
“Oh, it’s strange, all right. Not least because the Daniel Mathieson we know is tucked up safe and warm at Her Majesty’s pleasure and in no position to be buying antique pistols,” MacKenzie said sarcastically.
The city came into view as the car descended into the valley. A feeling akin to maternal protectiveness washed over MacKenzie as she thought of the people living their everyday lives, working hard to carve out a future. They had seen enough of this, she vowed. Enough of a small minority playing their local government like sock puppets, killing off their women like flies whenever it suited them and making deals to cover up their crimes.
Maybe there was another person out there who was feeling protective. Enough to shine a light on two killers, potentially more. If they had some kind of guerrilla vigilante on their hands, intent on insurrection or payback, that would be a whole new can of worms to deal with. They had enough to worry about within the ranks of CID, without having to consider the prospect of an unknown reprobate killing off people he deemed to be wrongdoers. In MacKenzie’s world, taking an eye for an eye only meant everyone ended up blind.
“Let’s get a hustle on,” she said aloud.
* * *
Antique weaponry was the last thing on Daniel Mathieson’s mind. Unlike Steve Walker, he would gladly exchange his present living conditions for a life spent under the influence of anti-psychotic medication at Rampton Hospital. Eight months spent in confined quarters with the filth of society had not been a bed of roses. Sex offenders, particularly child sex offenders, were not popular amongst the other residents of H.M. Prison Frankland on the outskirts of Durham.