by LJ Ross
From the very first day, he had been extended a warm and personal welcome from his fellow inmates. They had followed the press reports of his trial to the letter, it seemed, and were not shy to make their disapproval known.
Once, between stints on the medical ward, Mathieson had made the foolish mistake of pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of violent criminals pronouncing judgment upon him, given the extremity of their own crimes. At least he had loved his daughter, he’d told them with dignity.
They begged to differ, and that particular episode had cost him four cracked ribs and a broken jaw.
He had tried to harden himself, he really had. It simply was not in his nature. He had never been an alpha male; he could not conceive of spending hours in the gym to beef himself up into a grotesque, tattooed monstrosity in order to turn the tables on his attackers. He was a softly-spoken former schoolteacher and there was little he could do to change that.
The prison officers eventually moved him into solitary confinement for his own protection. There had been no further attacks but there had also been very little contact with another living soul. He exercised alone, he ate alone and he watched television alone. He refused to play video games on principle. He wanted to sign up to a continuing education course so that he might see other people—even if it meant repeating basic mathematics—but it was deemed too risky given his widespread unpopularity.
Slowly, he could feel himself slipping away.
Often, he caught himself muttering, carrying on conversations as if two or three people shared his cell.
But there was only him and the four walls.
Then, there were the memories. They came to him day and night, images of Lucy lying dead, her lifeless blue eyes staring back at him. He would cry out in terror, imagining that he had seen her watching him from the reinforced window on the door to his cell.
Every few weeks, his lawyer contacted him. She told him that the police were still interested in any information he could provide about the Circle. Each time, he knocked her back and rejected the small bribes that were offered.
It was not because he remained loyal to the Circle. He was starting to move past his basic fear of what might happen if he broke his silence. Perhaps the revelatory moment had occurred while he had lain naked, in the foetal position on the shower room floor, as four of the inmates kicked him repeatedly in the crotch. He had screamed like a baby, the pain indescribable, but nobody had broken it up until he had passed out. There, on the wet tiles, he had truly wished for death. He had welcomed it with open arms and, in doing so, forgot to be afraid.
The reason he did not speak was simple: once he had given up his remaining secrets, there would be nobody to call him. Nobody would visit and nobody would seek him out or care about what he had to say. The years would stretch before him with the minimum of human interaction, which was a dreadful prospect.
He could end it all, just switch off the light and solve the problem himself.
Sadly, he was too much the coward even to do that.
* * *
Arthur Gregson did not even know which day of the week it was. His perception of the world extended only to his understanding that it consisted exclusively of pain. Hard, stabbing pain that sang through the complex web of nerves in his spinal cord, up into his brain. It spread through the optic nerves into his eyes so that the act of opening them became an enormous effort. Blurred voices told him that his morphine drip had been reduced to allow the medics an opportunity to assess his recovery but he would have handed over his entire fortune for an extra drop of the good stuff.
He mumbled something unintelligible through chapped lips. His voice scraped over the parched skin of his throat and he wished for water, cool and clean to wash away the sensation of burning.
He tried opening his eyes again and winced against the immediate discomfort. Everything seemed hideously bright.
“Lllifght,” he rasped. “Lllifght!”
Mercifully, he was understood and the overhead light was switched off. He screwed up his eyes so that they were nothing more than slits in his face as he tried to bring the hospital room into focus.
Greying ceiling tiles were the first things he saw. The same, cheap kind of suspended ceiling they had back in CID, with brown stains denoting old water leaks.
A young female nurse was the next to grace his line of vision. Like soldiers might have felt during the Crimean War, he looked upon her as Florence Nightingale.
“Pfank yoof,” he managed, when she offered him a sip of water from a plastic cup with a colourful straw. He sucked greedily, spluttering a bit as the first taste flushed through his oesophagus after the drip was removed.
The nurse made him as comfortable as possible and then turned to the two men standing out of his line of sight beside the doorway.
“Two minutes only,” she said, sternly. “He’s still very unwell.”
Ryan nodded and stepped out of the shadows. Like a panther, he moved to stand a foot or so from the bed where Gregson lay, his face almost the same colour as the sheets. He looked haggard and frail, Ryan thought, remembering suddenly that the superintendent was nearly sixty. His usual vivacity spoke of a man at the top of his game, not someone who was only a few years off retirement.
“Gregson.”
Arthur might have shrunk away from him, but his body was strapped into position to prevent further damage to the wound to his head, so he was trapped.
He closed his eyes, the only form of escape he had left.
“What happened, Gregson?”
Ryan did not raise his voice and nothing in his demeanour could be described as threatening, but nonetheless Gregson felt it.
Ryan waited a beat, then another, before stepping closer to the bed.
“You want us to find out who did this, don’t you?”
Gregson’s eyelids flickered, remembering the shock of that first blow on the back of his head. Ludo’s heavy feet stamping against his skull.
“Where’s Cathy?”
Gregson’s eyes opened involuntarily and Ryan was waiting for him, ready to catch any small tell-tale sign of guilt. Gregson found himself staring into the unforgiving silvery eyes of his hunter and he began to shake.
“That’s enough!” The nurse rushed forward, fussing with the covers, checking Gregson’s pupils. “He’s not ready to answer any more questions.”
“He hasn’t answered any, so far,” Phillips pointed out, from the back of the room.
Ryan remained where he was, watching the panic pass over Gregson’s face, then leaned forward to take one of his hands in a gentle grip. Surprise frittered in Gregson’s eyes, followed swiftly by fear.
Ryan smiled slightly and then leaned in further to speak into Gregson’s ear.
“Get well soon, superintendent,” he said quietly. “You can’t hide in here forever.”
He stood up again and allowed himself to be ushered out by the nurse.
CHAPTER 18
As Jimmy Moffa had predicted with prescient accuracy, the forensic team at 17 Haslemere Gardens managed to find blood beneath the bleach. As consummate professionals, he and Ludo had succeeded in making it more difficult to distinguish, but ultimately blood didn’t lie.
If that wasn’t enough, the CSIs also happened to find tiny traces of the masking tape they had used to strap plastic sheeting over the carpet and the floor of the garage. That’s what happened when you used cheap tape; it did not peel away easily. It left behind an unmistakeably suspicious set of circumstances, factoring in the reported sightings of a medium-sized, grubby white van seen parked beside the garage doors for half an hour. The neighbour, Mrs Sisodia, claimed to have seen a large, thuggish-looking man getting in and out of the van on the passenger side, but that was it. She presumed Cathy Gregson had called out an engineer, or a plumber, to take care of some small household matter.
While Ryan awaited confirmation that the blood type they had found matched Cathy Gregson’s, alongside DNA samples taken from her clothin
g and bed sheets, he put a statement out to the press which would be plastered over the local lunchtime news:
Northumbria Police are appealing for information to help trace a missing woman who has not been seen since the morning of Tuesday 4th August. Mrs Cathy Gregson (56) went missing from her home in Haslemere Gardens, Newcastle. Following a brutal attack on her husband, prominent Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Gregson of Northumbria CID, police remain concerned for Cathy’s welfare and urge people to come forward with any information regarding her disappearance.
Technically speaking, it was ahead of schedule to order police divers to search the river, but Ryan made the call regardless. If Cathy Gregson was hiding somewhere in the city of Newcastle alive and well, he would sprout wings and fly.
* * *
Phillips spent an hour grappling with the compliance officer at the bank where Cathy and Arthur Gregson hoarded their money, during which time he called upon his many and varied skills in the art of persuasion. Eventually he slammed the desk phone back into its holder with unnecessary force, after issuing a final parting shot along the lines of the smarmy pen-pusher being hauled into jail for obstructing the course of justice if he didn’t pull his finger out of his arse and comply with the bloody warrant.
In the name of Holy Newcastle United F.C., was it too much to ask for a bit of civility these days?
Phillips took a couple of deep breaths and moved onto his next task, which was to chase up the CCTV footage overlooking Haslemere Gardens. Luckily for him, the residents tended to be overly concerned with matters of personal security, given the costliness of their possessions. Woe betide anybody who threatened their top-of-the-range barbeque or even considered nicking off with their telly or designer frocks.
Phillips sighed, thinking of his own humble beginnings. He had grown up in a poor part of the city, where many of his schoolmates still remained, on the dole or working long hours at minimum wage. His own father had been a labourer, his mother a housewife and proud of it. Hardworking and tough, they had brought their only son up to be the same. Frank Sr. had a bit of a rep around the estate but he wasn’t known to be mean; he never hit his wife or his son but he didn’t shirk at planting a fist in somebody’s face for stealing what was his, or for peddling drugs to the kids on the corner.
He had a code.
Phillips thought about the time his father had frog-marched him to the front doors of the police station and instructed him to hand over the packet of cigarettes he had taken from the corner shop. His father asked the bobby to give him a few hours’ informal community service and Frank remembered spending those hours cleaning up cigarette butts from the street outside the same shop where he had shoplifted. That was justice in action, and he had never done it again because his father’s disappointment had been too heavy a burden to bear.
“We earn our way in this life, son, and don’t you forget it. There’s them that have more, and them that have less,” he’d declared. “But you’re only a poor man if you choose to be. You just remember that, lad.”
Phillips felt a stab of yearning as he remembered his father, the kindness wrapped up in a toughened shell, the workman’s hands and gravelly voice just like his own.
Long gone, now.
He looked back at the paperwork in front of him and couldn’t blame the street kids for trying to get a taste of middle-class living, if only to shake up the people who deliberately drew a mark in the sand.
* * *
Daniel Mathieson ate his solitary lunch from a metal table in a room that was empty but for the vacant guard who waited for him to finish. He deliberately took his time, drawing out each spoonful, cutting up each bite into tiny squares that he chewed until the sloppy food was almost pulp.
“Hurry up,” the prison officer grumbled.
Mathieson ignored him and continued to chew his food methodically.
The room had a view of the exercise yard outside and he watched the other inmates mingling in groups. He caught the eye of one of his former attackers who raised a hand and waved theatrically before providing a coarse re-enactment of lovemaking for his benefit.
Shuddering, he looked away and down at his tray.
After a painfully slow lunch, the prison officer escorted him back to his cell and Mathieson heard the door shut behind him with palpable relief. Alone again, Mathieson stood for a moment and thought of how he might end it all.
He thought of his ex-wife and the divorce papers that had come through, neatly folded in a brown paper envelope. He thought of the island and closed his eyes to block out the reality of his cell so that he could imagine the wind and sea. Like an endless reel, the memories flooded in. Lucy born, Lucy toddling across to him after taking her first steps, Lucy shivering and crying as he’d paid his first visit to her bedroom. The wallpaper had been My Little Pony, he recalled, while tears spilled down his face. All the lies he had told his wife, all the threats he had whispered into Lucy’s perfect shell-like ears, until she had turned around one day and stood up to him. She had fought back, for the first time in years, and taken him by surprise. She didn’t want any part of his perverted circle, she had screamed, she didn’t want any part of him.
His fingers trembled as he relived the sensory memory of her pulse fluttering wildly before it had died in his hands.
Behind him, the locks unbolted on his cell door and he turned, rubbing the tears from his face.
An hour later, the prison officer found Daniel Mathieson on the floor of his cell, curled up as if asleep.
Only he wasn’t asleep.
He was dead.
* * *
Jane Freeman felt marvellous. All of her ducks were lining up in a neat little row, with the exception of one or two larger ones who stubbornly refused to cooperate.
They would learn. They all would.
She walked the short distance from her car to her regular appointment at an exclusive beauty salon located on one of the premier streets in Newcastle. Long gone were the days of mousy hair and imperfect teeth. Over the years, she’d implemented a few subtle and some not-so-subtle changes and, even if she said it herself, she was very pleased with the results.
Whoever said you had to accept what your gene pool dictated?
She certainly didn’t ascribe to that philosophy. Out-dated thinking would have consigned her to a life of mediocrity, stuck inside a body she hated, begging for recognition from her peers.
Now, they deferred to her. She was the last word on all things historical in the region and she was never short of a charming escort if she wanted to go to the theatre or to the opera. She preferred them rich, with good manners and taste in clothes. It didn’t hurt if they were younger, with plenty of stamina.
Jane had grown up as Plain Jane Freeman and the concept of ‘late blooming’ didn’t begin to cover her adolescent experience. Her middle-class parents had given their daughter everything they could. An expensive education, trips abroad, big flashy parties for her birthday. Only a handful of people used to turn up but she didn’t care. They were all inferior anyway.
Now, when she held a gathering, people clamoured for an invitation. Experience had taught her the art of patience, the value of hiding the burning ambition that consumed her and motivated every action she took. People didn’t understand that kind of need, she reasoned. They feared it, feared her, she thought smugly, and her success.
People had always been jealous of her.
That stupid psychiatrist had once called her a sociopath, right to her face. Didn’t he know that she couldn’t accept that kind of insult? Did he imagine that she would forget? The years had passed but his words were as fresh as if they had been spoken that morning.
Patience and planning, that was the key, and she congratulated herself on a job well done. Hadn’t she encouraged the Circle to make sure he came to a tragic end in his cell? What if he talked? He was off the rails, she had whispered, like a rabid dog which needed to be put down for its own sake as well as those around him.
Fool.
She had obtained copies of his notes—of course she had. It was fortunate that he at least had enough good sense not to name names, but there was plenty of naval gazing nonsense in there to arouse suspicion if your name was DCI Ryan.
Which was why, she thought with a small measure of regret, he must be stopped. She paused to fluff her hair in the hallway mirror as she entered the salon and then greeted the smiling receptionist who invited her to take a seat in one of the plush chairs in the waiting area. Ryan wasn’t hard on the eyes, she thought, as she selected a magazine from the glass coffee table. Had circumstances been different, she might have made a play for him. It was a crying shame to destroy anything so downright beautiful, but she had to think of Number One.
Against that, he was no competition at all.
CHAPTER 19
Brad Pitt’s younger brother was sitting at his desk.
That was all Ryan could think as he strode into the open-plan office at CID Headquarters. There, looking comfortable and confident, was a bronzed, blonde-haired fusion of a Hollywood star and a character from Baywatch swinging back and forth on his desk chair. He was wearing the appropriate gear, too: a tightly fitting summer t-shirt displaying a slogan which warned one not to ‘Hassle the Hoff’ and faded jeans moulded to his muscular legs. A pair of wraparound sunglasses were propped in his voluminous quiff, which swayed as he spoke animatedly to a gaggle of female police support staff who had miraculously relocated from their usual workspace to congregate around the new attraction.
Ryan slung his file bag onto the desk with a thud and watched the golden-haired man turn with a broad, toothy smile.