The Infirmary: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 11)

by LJ Ross

  He looked across to find both men watching him strangely. It was an occupational advantage but a personal hazard, the uncanny knack of being able to step inside the mind of a killer.

  “We never found a murder weapon after Isobel Harris, either,” he reminded them.

  Phillips grunted.

  “One thing we did have from the scene at the Harris place was trace DNA,” Faulkner said. “Once we’ve had a chance to analyse the samples we’ve taken today, we’ll see if any of them match up. We still don’t have a name but it’s better than nothing.”

  “We have John Dobbs,” Ryan put in. “We can compare his DNA and it’ll bring us one stage closer to ruling him out of the Harris murder—or not, as the case may be.”

  It was becoming increasingly unlikely that Dobbs had taken the girl’s life, but they couldn’t discount the possibility. Not yet.

  “I’ll make it a priority,” Faulkner agreed.

  They reached the sea wall and Ryan leaned forward, resting his forearms on the top to stare out to sea as the tide rolled in. The wind had picked up, buffeting against them as night drew in and he shivered, imagining what it had taken for a man to plunge himself into the water.

  Abruptly, he turned away.

  “There was one other thing we found,” Faulkner broke the silence, fiddling with the plastic bottle he still held in his hands, not looking at either of them.

  “What’s that?”

  “He left a calling card.”

  “You mean a note?”

  “No, it’s a gentleman’s calling card, like something from another era.”

  “What did it say?”

  Faulkner shook his head.

  “It was so blood-stained, I’ve sent it back to the lab to have it cleaned up, so we can read what it said.”

  “The minute you do, call me,” Ryan told him and, to their surprise, broke into a wide grin.

  “Dunno what you’ve got to smile about,” Phillips blurted out. “We’ve got two brutal murders on our hands, a pack of ravenous reporters yappin’ at our heels and the wrath of the Superintendent to contend with when we get back to HQ. And there you are, grinning like a muppet.”

  Ryan laughed richly.

  “Don’t you see, Frank? Whoever killed Cooper broke their own rules by leaving that card. They were so careful, so controlled. But leaving that card? That’s loss of control because they needed the challenge and the chase. They want us to come after them.”

  “There won’t be any DNA on the card,” Faulkner promised him.

  “There doesn’t need to be,” Ryan shot back. “It’s an insight into their mind, the type of person we’re hunting.”

  “And what kind of person is that?” Faulkner enquired. Behind his head, the priory was illuminated as night fell rapidly and cast his face into shadow.

  Ryan narrowed his eyes.

  “They want to be superhuman but they’re not,” Ryan said flatly. “Our killer’s just an average, garden-variety psychopath. They’re two a penny down on the psych ward.”

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” Phillips mumbled. “I’ll sleep better tonight, knowing that.”

  “You think he’s challenging you?” Faulkner ignored the interruption.

  Ryan’s face transformed into hard, serious lines.

  “They think they’re invincible, beyond the law. I’ll not only accept the challenge, I’ll make it my mission in life. I won’t stop until they’re behind bars and neither will you.”

  His words hung on the air like a prophecy.

  “Be careful,” Phillips cautioned him and there was concern reflected in his eyes. “These ones, they have a way of worming their way inside your head. Make sure you keep yours clear.”

  * * *

  News of DCI Cooper’s murder spread through Police Headquarters like wildfire. Too afraid to speak the words aloud, analysts and technicians, telephone operatives and kitchen staff spoke in whispers, as if that would somehow make it bearable. A late briefing had been scheduled for eight-thirty and when Ryan stepped through the doorway of Conference Room A, it seemed every member of staff employed by Northumbria CID was in attendance and awaiting instructions from their new Senior Investigating Officer. Their faces were sombre and their eyes bloodshot, whether from tears or a lack of sleep, he couldn’t tell. While he waited for them to settle themselves in the ubiquitous plastic chairs that came with any government-owned establishment, he walked over to exchange a word with Phillips, who was chatting to one of CID’s newest recruits near the front of the room.

  “Phillips.” He accepted a polystyrene cup filled with brown sludge and raised a single black eyebrow. “What the hell is this?”

  “Vending machine calls it a double macchiato,” Phillips told him. “Tastes more like paint stripper.”

  Ryan took a dubious sip, decided it wasn’t going to kill him, then turned to the younger man.

  “You did good work on the Khan case.”

  It was hardly glowing praise, but Detective Constable Jack Lowerson couldn’t quite hold back the grin. He’d spent every one of his formative years as a lowly police constable looking up to the tall man who was now, miraculously, his boss. Ryan had plucked him from obscurity and given him a chance to shine. He was doing his best each day never to make him regret it.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Ryan was momentarily distracted by the glare bouncing off Lowerson’s freshly-whitened teeth and found himself wondering whether that amount of bleach was even legal.

  “You’ve got the right attitude, Jack. Just carry on doing what you’re doing.”

  With that, he raised his cup and walked across to the long whiteboard covering the entire length of one wall, flanked by a flip-board and a desk set up with a laptop and projector. Ryan ignored the computer and dropped a heavy cardboard folder he had tucked under his arm onto the cheap Formica desk. While the room slowly fell silent, he retrieved four large photographs from inside its folds and began sticking them onto the whiteboard.

  Over his shoulder, he heard gasps from around the room.

  “I can’t believe it,” they said.

  He tacked up the last image and stepped away again.

  “Believe it,” he said, not bothering with any of the usual pleasantries. “Most of you will have heard the news about DCI Sharon Cooper but, for those who haven’t, allow me to bring you up to speed. Her dismembered body was discovered by DS Phillips and myself at approximately two o’clock this afternoon. Her team reported her as uncommunicative after eleven o’clock this morning.”

  The room was silent.

  “I see some of you looking at the floor.” He watched their heads snap up again. “I want you to look at her,” he ground out, demanding their attention. “I want you to feel outrage, disgust, all the normal things you should feel. I want you to remember the woman we all knew and admired, who gave her life to the pursuit of justice and public service. And then I want you to feel angry. Really angry that somebody snatched it away from her.”

  He pointed at the images on the wall showing Isobel Harris and Sharon Cooper in life beside blown-up images of them in death.

  “Remember these women when you’re tired and hungry and begging for sleep. Remember that they’ll never feel anything ever again, but their families will. Their loved ones will feel that loss every day for the rest of their lives while we carry on. Never forget we’re the lucky ones.”

  This time, when Ryan looked across the sea of faces, he found every one of them riveted on the wall.

  He leaned back against the edge of the desk and crossed his ankles.

  “I know most of you were assigned to the Harris investigation over the past two weeks and I want to thank you for your diligence and hard work. I know that DCI Cooper would have wanted to thank you, too.” He paused to let that sink in. “But what I need from you now is honesty.”

  They looked at each other in surprise.

  “I want you to ask yourselves whether you can come back tomorrow morning and gi
ve me everything you’ve got. Nobody will think any less of you for taking the time you need to grieve and recover. In fact, it’s a direct order. I need strong, healthy people working on my task force because we’ve got a mountain to climb. If you can’t take the pace, go home now and come back when you’re ready.”

  There was a two-thirds split of those who sat up a little straighter in their chairs and those who slumped, defeated.

  But nobody left the room, which gave him hope.

  Just then, the doors opened to admit a latecomer. DCS Gregson entered and moved to stand on the sidelines, causing a mass rustling of chairs.

  Ryan spared him a glance, then clapped his hands to regain their attention.

  “Alright, listen up! Before she was murdered, Cooper believed that circumstantial evidence pointed towards one man. That man was John Edward Dobbs, a forty-six-year-old hospital technician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary who committed suicide at around noon today.”

  There were a couple of unsympathetic snorts. Ryan made a mental note of their names then pushed away from the desk to add another face to the board, set apart from the others. Looking into Dobbs’ myopic brown eyes in blurry Technicolour, he felt a tug somewhere low in his belly he recognised as guilt. He hadn’t known the man, nor worked on building the case against him, but there was no denying the possibility that his department had driven Dobbs to take his own life.

  It was more than possible, he amended swiftly. It was downright probable.

  He stepped away, putting a physical and emotional distance between himself and the sad, milky-faced man whose bloated body now lay on an impersonal gurney down at the mortuary.

  “Reading through DCI Cooper’s notes, I can see there were several good reasons why Dobbs was her prime suspect. First”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“the injuries sustained by Isobel Harris displayed a level of clinical precision and anatomical knowledge suggestive of a healthcare professional or someone working within that field. The investigation ran to veterinary surgeons and local butchers but, ultimately, came to focus on hospitals and GP surgeries after other facts came to light. John Dobbs worked as a hospital technician at the RVI, which isn’t the same as being a world-leading surgeon but it’s a start. Secondly,” he said, tapping his middle finger, “Isobel Harris was a member of an online dating community known as LoveLife. Data released by the company included a list of men she had dated over the course of her membership, which ran to four months in total. John Dobbs was one of them.”

  He paused to check they were still paying attention before continuing.

  “Finally, and perhaps most damning, CCTV footage from Fenwick department store showed an altercation between John Dobbs and Isobel Harris at the perfume counter where she worked, two days after their date on 17th June. Messages retrieved from her mobile phone provider and other social media sites tell us the date did not go well and she left early, apparently because Dobbs had not been honest in his online dating profile and because he was, in her own words, ‘old and weird’. She was twenty-two, he was a man in his late forties but passed himself off as being ten years younger and a senior consultant. Taken together with the criminal profile created by our forensic psychologist, the working theory was that Dobbs couldn’t stand to be rejected by Harris and so tortured and killed her in retribution.”

  His eyes fell on the pretty, smiling face of Isobel Harris and he was silent for a long moment.

  “But?”

  Phillips’ voice interrupted his reverie.

  “But what?”

  “You were about to tell us why that theory was all wrong,” Phillips supplied, reaching for the emergency Kit Kat he had stowed in one of his pockets. “Unless you think Dobbs killed Harris after all?”

  Ryan resisted the terrible urge to laugh.

  “Until we hear from the pathologist and the CSI team, we only have initial observations to rely on. But,” he enunciated the word for Phillips’ benefit, “there’s a striking resemblance in the manner we found both women, and not just physically. Look at the behaviour leading up to their deaths: each time, their killer did his research to make sure they lived alone. The last thing he would have wanted is an interruption. That must have involved days or weeks of surveillance ahead of killing them, which suggests very high levels of control. That’s mirrored in the way each woman was killed. He took his time, he was methodical, he planned ahead and, unless we find a murder weapon, it looks like he brought his own tools and cleaned up after himself on both occasions.”

  “But with Harris, the process was much longer,” MacKenzie said. “He kept her alive for almost fifteen hours before finishing her. It was a marathon.”

  Ryan heard the wobble in her voice and chose to ignore it, not because he deemed it unworthy but because he knew MacKenzie was strong enough to handle herself.

  “That’s true, which suggests Cooper didn’t interest him except as a vessel. At this point, it’s still possible that Dobbs murdered Harris, if not Cooper. Why else did he have such an extreme reaction? Why run like he did? If there was nothing to hide, he could have come in for questioning without any fuss.”

  “Dobbs had a history of depression and anxiety,” Phillips put in. “That may explain the overreaction.”

  “Maybe,” Ryan conceded, but was not convinced. “In light of what we discovered today, we can’t ignore the possibility that Dobbs didn’t kill either woman and that some other reason exists to explain why he ran.”

  “Sir?”

  Ryan searched the room for the source of the interruption and found Lowerson’s eager face.

  “If Dobbs wasn’t responsible, does that mean we’ve got a serial on our hands?”

  It was on the tip of Ryan’s tongue to say ‘no’ and play down the possibility that a new serial killer had been born so they could deceive themselves about the level of threat they were facing.

  But that was not his way.

  “Yes, Jack. I think we should assume we’re dealing with a methodical, experienced killer who has taken more than one life.”

  “Otherwise known as a fruitcake, son,” Phillips put in, from the row behind.

  Ryan rolled his eyes.

  “The alternative definition,” he said dryly. “From Professor Frank Phillips, MD…”

  “Well, he mustn’t be a full shilling. Normal people don’t flit about like they’re Jack the Ripper.”

  “What makes you think we’re looking for a man?” DI MacKenzie queried, from her position a few chairs along.

  Phillips opened his mouth and then snapped it shut again.

  “Well, i-it fits the bill, doesn’t it?” he stuttered, much to his irritation. “Normally, it’s men who kill violently. Women don’t like to get their hands dirty, do they?”

  “Oh, believe me, Frank. Women can be just as deadly,” MacKenzie shifted in her seat to pin him with the kind of direct stare that would have terrified a lesser man. “And, as I’m sure you’re aware, the toxicology report on Isobel Harris’s body showed abnormally high levels of sedative and adrenaline in her system; enough to disable her. It creates a level playing field when physicality isn’t an issue, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Look, love,” Phillips began, and failed to see MacKenzie’s eyes flash dangerously. “There’s no way a woman could have dragged Cooper’s sedated body up a flight of stairs and along to her bedroom. She would have been a dead weight. Same goes for Isobel Harris.”

  “Look, sweetheart, it may interest you to learn that, since being liberated from the kitchen, women tend not to sit around growing fat and playing X-Box,” she hit back, touching a raw nerve. “I’ll be happy to demonstrate just how strong we can be, just name a time and place.”

  Phillips turned a dangerous shade of puce, imagining all kinds of scenarios with Denise MacKenzie proving her feminine strength.

  Ryan rubbed the side of his nose to hide a smile but decided it was time to step in before his sergeant went off the boil.

  “MacKenzie makes an excellent p
oint,” he said briskly. “The presence of lorazepam swimming around Isobel’s system was another black mark against John Dobbs. Working at the hospital makes for easy access to drugs, doesn’t it?”

  There were nods around the room.

  “But the fact remains, unless he was Houdini, Dobbs couldn’t have killed DCI Cooper because the pathologist has already confirmed that she had been dead no more than seven hours by the time we found her. That puts her death somewhere after seven this morning, during which time Dobbs was under full police surveillance at his home. It’ll be a couple of days before the tox report comes back but, once it does, we’ll know for sure whether we have a copycat or the real thing.”

  “And if it’s the same person?” Lowerson asked. “What happens then?”

  There was an infinitesimal pause.

  “Then we go back to the start, Jack. We re-interview witnesses, chase the source of the drugs, think about who had the skill and the cold-blooded inclination to kill and carve up those women like they were pieces of meat. We look at every element of Isobel Harris and Sharon Cooper’s lives to build up a picture until we find the missing piece we didn’t see before. We don’t just look at Isobel’s love life, we look at her daily routine and every person she came into contact with during her final days, then we do the same for Cooper. That includes police personnel,” he added, and almost felt their backs stiffen.

  “Nobody said this job would be easy,” he bit out. “We look at everybody. Is that understood?”

  There were reluctant nods around the room, and he reached for the cup of cold, forgotten coffee, downing it in three long gulps.

  “Alright, let’s get to work.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Did you miss me, sweetheart?”

  Confusion clouded her foggy brain. The words seemed to come from very far away, as if she was swimming underwater and a voice was calling her back to the surface. She remembered a time when she was very young, when her mother had walked into the bathroom to find her holding her breath beneath the bathwater to see how long she could stay there. She’d never forget the look of panic as she’d been snatched from the water and into her mother’s soft, loving arms.