Friend of the Devil ib-17

by Peter Robinson

  Dr. Wallace was actually in the postmortem theater, sitting at the long lab table mixing some chemicals over a Bunsen burner when Annie entered. There was a body on the table. The Y incision had already F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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  been made and the internal organs were all on display. The raw-lamb smell of dead human f lesh hung in the air, mixed with disinfectant and formaldehyde. Annie felt slightly nauseated.

  “Sorry,” said Dr. Wallace, with a weak smile. “I was just finishing up when I got sidetracked by this test. Wendy had to leave early—

  boyfriend trouble—or she’d have done it for me.”

  Annie glanced at the body. She could relate to boyfriend trouble.

  “Right,” she said. “Just a few questions, as I mentioned.”

  “I’ll get him closed up while we talk, if that’s all right. Does it bother you? You seem a bit pale.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Dr. Wallace gave her an amused glance. “So what burning questions bring you all the way down to my little lair?”

  “It’s what we were talking about last night. Lucy Payne and Kevin Templeton.”

  “I don’t see how I can help you. Lucy Payne wasn’t my case. We agreed there were similarities, but that’s all.”

  “It’s not so much that,” Annie said, settling on a high swivel stool by the lab bench. “Not specifically, at any rate.”

  “Oh? What, then? I’m curious.” Dr. Wallace unceremoniously dumped the organs back into the chest cavity and prepared the large needle and heavy thread.

  “You went to university with the lawyer, Julia Ford. You’re still friends. Right?”

  “That’s true,” said Dr. Wallace. “Julia and I have known each other a long time. We’re practically neighbors, and we play the occasional round of golf together.”

  “What did you do before then?” Annie asked.

  “Before playing golf ?”

  Annie laughed. “No, before going to medical school. You were a mature student, weren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say I was all that mature, but I’d lived an interesting life.”

  “Did you travel?”

  “For a few years.”

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  P E T E R R O B I N S O N

  “Where to?”

  “All over. The Far East. America. South Africa. I’d get some low-paying job and support myself for a while, then move on.”

  “And before that?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I don’t suppose it does. Not if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t.” Dr. Wallace looked at Annie. “I had a disturbing phone call from an old friend of mine at university just an hour or two ago,”

  she said. “She wanted to let me know that there had been a Detective Constable Helen Baker ringing up and asking questions about me.

  Is that true?”

  “Quite the grapevine,” said Annie.

  “Is it true?”

  “Okay. Look, this is a bit delicate,” Annie said, “but Julia Ford was one of the few people who knew the true identity of the woman in Mapston Hall. Lucy Payne. Her firm made the arrangements to place her there, took care of all her affairs. As I just said, we know the two of you went to university together, that you’re neighbors and friends.

  Did you know anything about this arrangement?”

  Dr. Wallace turned back to her corpse. “No,” she said. “Why should I?”

  Annie felt that she could sense a lie, or at least an evasion. There was something about the pitch of Dr. Wallace’s voice that wasn’t quite right. “I was just wondering if, you know, during the course of an evening, she might have let something slip, and that you might have done the same.”

  Dr. Wallace paused in her sewing and turned to Annie. “Are you suggesting,” she said, “that Julia would break a professional confidence? Or that I would?”

  “These things happen,” said Annie. “A couple of drinks. No big deal. Not the end of the world.”

  “ ‘Not the end of the world.’ What an odd phrase to use. No, I don’t suppose it would be the end of the world.” She went back to sewing dead f lesh. Annie could feel the tension rising in the room, as if the very air itself were thinning and stretching. She also felt even more nauseated by the smell.

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  “Well, did she?” she pressed on.

  Dr. Wallace didn’t look up. “Did she what?”

  “Tell you about the arrangements her firm had made for Lucy Payne?”

  “What does it matter if she did?”

  “Well,” said Annie. “It means . . . I mean . . . that someone else knew.”

  “So?”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “She might have done.”

  “And did you tell Maggie Forrest, for example? Or Dr. Susan Simms?”

  Dr. Wallace seemed surprised. “No. Of course not. I vaguely know Susan Simms as a fellow professional, and from the occasional court appearance, but we’re hardly in the same field. I don’t know any Maggie Forrest.”

  “She was the neighbor who befriended Lucy Payne and almost died at her hand.”

  “More fool her. But wasn’t that a long time ago?”

  “Six years. But Maggie’s disturbed. She had a strong motive for wanting Lucy dead, and no alibi. All we’re trying to find out now is whether she—”

  “Knew that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne. Yes, I know where you’re going with this.”

  “Karen Drew?”

  “What?”

  “You said Karen Drew. How did you know that?”

  “I suppose I read it in the paper after the body was found, like everyone else.”

  “Right,” said Annie. It was possible, of course. The body had been identified as Karen Drew’s, but she would have thought that subse-quent discoveries and all the publicity given to the Chameleon case and the “House of Payne” had driven that minor detail from most people’s minds. Maggie Forrest had said she didn’t recognize Karen Drew’s name, only Lucy’s. In the eyes of the world, Annie had thought, the dead woman in the wheelchair was Lucy Payne. Clearly not.

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  “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” Dr. Wallace said.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Dr. Wallace paused in her sewing and glanced over the body at Annie. “Well, it amounts to the same thing, really, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Either you don’t know anything, or you’re being willfully obstructive, which I find very odd behavior in a Home Office pathologist. You’re supposed to be on our side, you know.”

  Dr. Wallace stared at Annie. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m asking you if you gave anyone this information, for any reason.” Annie softened her tone. “Look, Liz,” she said. “You might have had good intentions. Perhaps you knew one of the victims’ families, or someone who had been damaged by the Paynes? I can understand that. But we need to know. Did you tell anyone about Lucy Payne being registered at Mapston Hall under the name Karen Drew?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know about it?”

  Dr. Wallace sighed, put her needle and thread down and leaned on the edge of the table. “Yes,” she said. “I knew.”

  In the silence that followed, Annie felt a growing tightness in her chest. “But that means . . .”

  “I know what it means,” said Dr. Wallace. “I’m not stupid.”

  She had exchanged her needle for a scalpel and was moving away from the body on the table.

  “ G O O D TO see you again, Alan,” said DI Ken Blackstone, meeting Banks at the front desk of Millgarth and escorting him through security. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “It looks as if we’ve got Hayley Daniels’s killer.” Banks explained about Jamie Murdoch’s confession and the hidden way out of The Fountain.

  “Just one more to go, then,” said
Blackstone. “I was sorry to hear about Kev Templeton.”

  “We all were,” said Banks.

  “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

  “Did you get the Chameleon files out for Annie Cabbot?”

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  “How are you two doing, by the way?”

  “Better, I think. At least we’re working together again. I’m still not sure what’s going on with her, though.”

  “You’re not . . . ?”

  “No. That’s been over for a long time.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Maybe. Ken, about those files?”

  Blackstone laughed. “Yes, of course. Getting quite nosy in my old age, aren’t I? Sorry. The files are in my office. Most of them, anyway.

  There isn’t room for everything. Not if I want to sit in there, too.

  Why?”

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  “Not at all. It was your case. Partly, at any rate. Anything I can do?”

  “A cup of coffee would go down a treat, Ken. Black, no sugar. And maybe a KitKat. I like the dark-chocolate ones.”

  “Your diet’s terrible. Anyone ever told you? I’ll send down. Want me out of the way?”

  “Not at all.”

  They went into Blackstone’s office, and Banks saw immediately that he hadn’t been exaggerating. They could hardly move for boxes.

  “Know where everything is?” Banks asked.

  “Not exactly.” Blackstone picked up his phone and called for two coffees and a dark-chocolate KitKat. After anything in particu lar?”

  “I got to thinking about the Kirsten Farrow case,” said Banks. “Anyway, I seemed to remember that the wounds were rather similar in both cases, and I wondered if that was what had set her off again after eighteen years. That and finding out where Lucy Payne was hiding out. It might have acted as a trigger.”

  “But what about the other woman you mentioned? Maggie Forrest?”

  “She’s not out of the picture yet. There could even be some connection between her and Kirsten Farrow. There are a number of odd links in this case, strange tangents, and I won’t rest until I get them sorted.”

  “So you’ll be wanting the pathologist’s reports?”

  “That’s right. Dr. Mackenzie, I believe it was.”

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  The coffee and KitKat arrived while they were digging through the boxes. Blackstone thanked the PC who brought it and got back to helping Banks. At last they unearthed the pathology reports, and Banks started reading through them while Blackstone left the office for a while.

  It was as he had thought. Many of the bodies were badly decom-posed, as they had been buried in the dirt of the cellar or the back garden. But Dr. Mackenzie had been able to identify slash marks to the areas of the victims’ breasts and genitalia in all cases, probably made with the same machete Terence Payne used to attack and kill Janet Taylor’s partner. They were similar to the wounds Kirsten Farrow had suffered, though the weapon was different, and they were wounds, unfortunately, not uncommon to vicious sexual assaults. They showed a deep hatred of the women men felt had betrayed, humiliated and rejected them all their lives, or so the profilers said. Of course, not all men who had been betrayed, humiliated or rejected by women became rapists and murderers, or the female population would be a lot smaller and the jails would be even more full of men than they already were, Banks thought.

  Twenty minutes or more must have passed as Banks read the grisly details, most of which he remembered firsthand, then Blackstone returned.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “It’s as I thought,” Banks said. “Now I just need to find out how much of this was reported in the press at the time.”

  “Quite a lot, as I remember,” said Blackstone. “Alan, what is it? Have you found something?”

  Banks had let the last file slip out of his hand to the f loor, not because the details were more gruesome than any of the others, but because of a sheet of paper he had seen clipped to the end of the pile.

  It was simply a record of all those involved in the preparation of the reports and postmortems, including the men who had transported the bodies to the mortuary and the cleaners who had cleaned up afterward, initialed beside each name, partly kept to ensure a continu-ous chain of custody. “I can’t believe it,” said Banks. “It’s been staring me in the bloody face all along, and I never knew.”

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  Blackstone moved closer. “What has? What is it?”

  Banks picked the papers up off the f loor and pointed with his index finger to what he had read. On the list of those involved with the Chameleon victims’ postmortems were several lab assistants, trainees and assistant pathologists, and one of them was a Dr. Elizabeth Wallace.

  “I should have known,” said Banks. “When Kev Templeton went on about patrolling The Maze for a would-be serial killer, Elizabeth Wallace was the only one who was as adamant as he was that we were dealing with a killer who would strike again. And she tried to convince us that the weapon was a razor, not a scalpel.”

  “So? I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t you see it? She was there, too. Elizabeth Wallace was keeping an eye on The Maze, and she had easy access to sharp scalpels.

  Much better to have us believe the weapon was a razor that anyone could have got hold of. They were at cross-purposes, her and Kev.

  They didn’t talk to each other. Neither knew the other was going to be there. Elizabeth Wallace thought Kev Templeton was going to rape and kill Chelsea Pilton. She couldn’t have recognized him from behind. It was too dark. And there can be only one reason why she was there.”

  “Which is?”

  “To kill the killer. She’s Kirsten Farrow. The one we’re looking for.

  She was a trainee on the Chameleon victims’ postmortems. That means she knew at first hand about the wounds. They brought back her own memories. She knows Julia Ford, and Julia must have let slip about Lucy Payne being at Mapston Hall under a false name. It fits, Ken. It all fits.”

  “She killed Templeton, too?”

  “Almost certainly,” said Banks. “By mistake, of course, the same way she killed Jack Grimley eighteen years ago. But she did kill him.

  Her MO is different now, but she trained as a doctor since then, so that makes sense. And do you know what?”

  Blackstone shook his head.

  “Annie’s going to see her today to push about her past and her friendship with Julia Ford. Alone.” Banks took out his mobile and 3 6 6

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  pressed the button for Annie’s number. No signal. “Shit,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t have turned it off, surely?”

  “Why don’t you try the station?”

  “I’ll ring Winsome on the way to Eastvale,” said Banks, heading for the door. He knew he could get there in three quarters of an hour, maybe less if he put his foot down. He hoped that would be fast enough.

  “ L I Z , W H AT are you doing?” said Annie, getting up from her stool and edging toward the door.

  “Don’t move. Keep still.” Dr. Wallace waved the scalpel in her hand. It glinted under the light. “Sit down again.”

  “Don’t do anything foolish,” Annie said, returning to the stool.

  “We can work this out.”

  “You do speak in clichés and platitudes, don’t you? Don’t you realize it’s too late for any of that now?”

  “It’s never too late.”

  “It was too late eighteen years ago,” said Dr. Wallace.

  “So you’re Kirsten,” Annie whispered. Somehow, she had known it, at least in some part of her mind, since she had talked to Dr. Wallace in The Queen’s Arms the previous eve ning, but that knowledge didn’t do her a lot of good now.

  “Yes. Elizabeth is my middle name. Wallace is from an ill-advised marriage that I sh
ould never have entered into. A marriage of con venience. An American student. At least I got the name from him, and he got his British citizenship from me. Needless to say, the marriage was never consummated. If you’d have dug deeper, you’d have uncovered it all. It’s a matter of public record. All you really had to do was check the registry of marriages. I didn’t even try very hard to hide it, really.

  When I went to medical school, I simply enrolled as Elizabeth Wallace.

  A new life. A new name. It caused one or two problems with my old records, but the university was patient, and we managed to get it all sorted out. I told them I was trying to avoid an abusive husband and would appreciate their discretion. But they would have told you in the end.”

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  “So you moved on, changed your name, became a doctor.”

  “I didn’t know what would become of me. I had no plans. I’d done what I set out to do. A terrible thing, really. A murder. No matter that the victim didn’t deserve to live, was the worst kind of excuse for a human being you could imagine. And it wasn’t my first. I’d also killed an innocent man and harmed a silly boy.”

  “I’ve talked to Keith McLaren,” Annie said. “He’s all right. He recovered. But why him?”

  Dr. Wallace managed a tiny, tight smile. “I’m glad,” she said.

  “Why? The Australian recognized me in Staithes, even though I was in disguise. I had to think fast. He’d been with me in The Lucky Fisherman, where I saw Jack Grimley. If they ever questioned him . . .”

  “I’ve been there,” said Annie. “The Lucky Fisherman. Why Grimley, too?”