by LJ Ross
“Natalie, I can’t talk now.”
“Okay, so when are you heading back?”
“For God’s sake—haven’t you seen the news?” he bit out, and immediately wished he could claw the words back. It wasn’t in his nature to strike out in anger. “Sorry. It’s just that there’s a lot going on. There was another victim today.”
Natalie made a sympathetic noise.
“That’s awful. You still have to eat and sleep though, don’t you?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve the sudden tension.
“Look, I can’t say when I’ll be home tonight. I may have to work into the early hours.” He would. “Once this is all over, we can have that catch up you’re talking about, I promise.”
“Okay,” she said, dejectedly. “Look after yourself.”
“You too. Remember what I told you about locking up properly.”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember. Love you.”
“You too.”
Ryan ended the call and set the phone carefully on the desktop within easy reach. Despite himself, Natalie’s personality was infectious, and a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He remembered the day she had been born, remembered visiting her in the hospital and stroking her soft dark curls.
“Mummy, what are you going to call her?”
“Why don’t you help us choose a name, Max?”
Twenty-five years later and the thought still brought a smile to his face.
CHAPTER 23
He would rather have been sitting in the front row.
It wasn’t his habit to settle for second best and he was unaccustomed to anything other than the orchestra stalls or—depending on the theatre—the dress circle.
Unfortunately, needs must.
The music soared, filling the Theatre Royal with sound as she moved across the stage. He’d seen her before, of course, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. That’s when he’d first discovered her talent and, he had to admit, felt the urge to crush it. However, the opportunity hadn’t presented itself.
Until now.
It had been serendipity that had brought them together and he had a very limited window of opportunity in which to take advantage of it.
He closed his eyes briefly to savour the creamy sound of her voice, felt himself shiver as it touched him somewhere he hadn’t thought existed. Somewhere others might have called his soul.
O mio babbino caro,
Mi piace, e bello, bello,
Vo’andare in Porta Rossa…
Of course, Gianni Schicchi was his least favourite of Puccini’s operas, and that particular aria had been sung to death.
No pun intended.
He chuckled at his own joke, drawing an irritated glare from the woman seated beside him. He turned to look at her in the semi-darkness and something in his eyes must have frightened her because she looked away quickly and reached for her husband’s hand, clutching it for the remainder of the performance.
Mi struggo e mi tormento!
O Dio, vorrei morir!
He turned back to watch his prima donna, noting the line of her arms and the length of her neck. She was so much younger and more vibrant than the usual ageing monstrosities and, to him, she was Christine Daaé, Lolita and Juliet, all rolled into one.
He watched her eyes light up as she sang to the audience; a glorious beacon in a barren landscape.
She looked so much like her, the woman he would never, could never kill. The woman he longed to dissect as if she were an insect in a laboratory, an inhuman thing that deserved nothing less.
Hatred flowed like lava through his veins, scalding his skin until the pain was almost unbearable. He cradled himself, rocking slightly at the end of the row, drawing more nervous glances from the woman seated beside him.
When the song ended, he stood up and applauded along with the rest of them.
* * *
He left just before the end, slipping out of the fire doors and into the side alley that ran perpendicular to the main entrance. It was a wrench to leave so soon without being able to enjoy the remainder of the show, but sacrifices had to be made if he was to create his own finale.
It was risky to stand around, especially as it was still light, but he knew where the cameras were and had already chosen the perfect spot to wait; it was the same one he’d used the previous evening when he’d first begun his preparations.
He was taking far more risks for this woman than with any of the others. He knew he should never return to the same place, he knew that. Just standing here, he doubled the chance that somebody would notice him, especially two nights in a row. Some nosy bitch from one of the restaurants or bars would see him and decide he was worth talking to, then she’d veer towards him and start crawling all over him. It happened all the time.
And how could he blame them, really?
He was quite a catch.
Then, it’d be, Oh, my goodness, Chief Inspector, I remember that man! I was talking to him on the corner of High Bridge Road at eleven o’clock.
His brow furrowed as he thought of the man who was, at this very moment, out there somewhere searching for him. Ryan was close; much too close for comfort. It was remarkable how similar they were, when you stripped away all the trappings of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Beneath the suits they both wore, they were both hunters. Ryan hunted him with the same intensity as he hunted each of his victims and with the same goal: to make the final kill.
Victims.
That was a joke. ‘Victim’ was a term coined by a society that refused to accept that some people were born to be winners while others were born to be losers. Ryan should be thanking him for his public service, not to mention the restraint he exercised every single day.
How tempting it was, each time they wheeled in a new one. The power was so rich, so potent, he could almost taste it on his tongue. With every drunk vagrant, every drug addict, and every other worthless person who ended up in his hands, he was tempted to put them down. As he felt their wounds, felt the blood run over his hands, he longed to feel it against his skin as he had all those years ago.
But he couldn’t afford the luxury.
This one must be the last, he warned himself, at least for now. The memories and photographs would sustain him for a while, although they lacked the effect they once had. Photographs couldn’t compare with the real thing.
Across the street, crowds spilled out of the theatre. He heard them chattering and gushing about her performance, some of them attempting to sing a few bars. Apparently, an evening spent in the company of greatness had afforded them delusions of grandeur.
He kept his eyes trained on the door. Unblinking, unwavering, unmoved.
Twenty minutes passed before he spotted her. He could hardly miss her; she stood out like a rare, exotic flower amid a garden of weeds, and she was bundled into a light summer coat in a shade of scarlet designed to attract attention.
She succeeded.
He watched her spend long, tedious minutes signing programmes and chatting with the die-hard fans who stood beside the theatre door cap in hand, then one of the male ushers came forward and they headed out into the evening together.
Yesterday, that had given him some cause for concern.
What was she doing going out after work, late at night, when she should be conserving her voice and letting it rest?
But, to his relief, the usher turned out to be her chaperone. Somebody had decided the star of their show would be safe returning to her aparthotel with one of the puny, acne-scarred ushers acting as bodyguard.
What an insult.
If she had an ounce of self-esteem, she’d have demanded a chauffeur or hired security but that was just another thing to like about her, he supposed. It had never occurred to her that anybody would see her and imagine all the wonderful possibilities.
He pushed away from the wall where he had been standing and began to walk at an even pace behind them, keeping his head ducked low.
He
was nothing, if not a man of great imagination.
* * *
He watched her enter the foyer of her apartment building, pleased to note there was no doorman to be seen. The usher waved her off at the door, not even waiting until it had closed behind her before he hurried away, presumably to join his friends at the nearest watering hole.
The building itself was nothing to speak of; the fact they had not housed their star performer in anything other than a run-of-the-mill aparthotel told its own story of how difficult things were in the arts industry.
As far as he was concerned, it was another gift.
He watched her disappear out of sight, the ends of her hair swishing behind her and imagined what she would do next. Perhaps she’d pour herself a cup of camomile tea and have a warm bath to ease her aching body after her exertions on stage. Perhaps she’d call her mother, or a lover she’d left behind in London.
He hoped she made the most of it, because this night would be her last.
With a quick glance both ways, he walked across the road and made for the side alley, intending to disarm whatever camera they’d fitted outside the service entrance. He had his little hammer in one pocket and a can of spray paint in the other.
But when he found the service door—left helpfully ajar by the kitchen staff in the hotel’s dreary restaurant—somebody had already done the grunt work for him, because the camera hung limply from its holder two metres off the ground. A small mountain of cigarette butts lay on the steps beside the door.
He heard laughter coming from somewhere within and he grinned like the madman he was, eyes almost feral with anticipation of his next kill.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
CHAPTER 24
Wednesday 9th July
In the end, Ryan never made it home.
After spending hours at his desk reviewing statements and summaries, he’d allowed himself a brief nap on the foamy loungers in the staff room at CID Headquarters. By the time the new day dawned, he was back at his desk with his head bent over a stack of paperwork. Phillips found him there, noting that his hair was still wet from the staff showers and he was wearing his dress shirt, the only one left inside his locker.
He tutted.
“You need rest, lad.”
“Thanks, Dad,” came the surly rejoinder.
Phillips decided to let it go, ambling across the room to set a cup of coffee on Ryan’s desk.
“Don’t mention it,” Phillips said cheerfully, noting the sickly pallor of Ryan’s face, the shadows beneath his eyes. “You, ah, you find anything useful?”
“If he works at the hospital, he’s tied into shifts,” Ryan said. “I’ve got a copy of the shift rotas from the A&E department for the last month, courtesy of Joan Stephenson. It was easier than going through Draycott,” he added.
Phillips reached across to pick up a sheet of paper covered in multi-coloured highlighter.
“Who’s who? Or, what’s what?”
“I’ve got a key somewhere…here,” Ryan handed him another sheet of paper with coloured lines and names alongside. “Green is Draycott, Yellow is Edwards and so forth.”
Phillips took a slurp of his milky coffee and studied the dates and lines.
“You’re looking at who was off-shift when Isobel Harris went missing? There was a shift change at eight the morning after Harris died, when Draycott, Edwards, Chowdhury and others were due back at the hospital. Harris died the previous evening, which puts them all in the frame.”
Ryan nodded.
“Same goes for Cooper’s timeline,” he said. “The shift started at eight a.m. on Monday. The pathologist puts her death anytime up to seven a.m. but that’s a best estimate; there’ll be some leeway in that. Say he killed her around six-thirty, after having a couple of hours to work on her, that still gives him enough time to get back across town to start his shift if he hustled.”
“Yeah, and the same people are in the frame for that, too.”
“I know,” Ryan said. “Frank, we need that CCTV. We need to see if any of their vehicles were in the vicinity.”
“I’ve had them looking at it for the past two days,” Phillips said. “They won’t stop until they’ve checked every scrap of footage, you can count on it, but they’re moving as fast as they can.”
Ryan leaned back and scrubbed a weary hand over his face before tapping the spreadsheet again with the end of his pen.
“It gets complicated with Nicola Cassidy,” he said. “She left work on Sunday evening for a week’s holiday in Fuerteventura. Nobody reported her missing because everybody expected her to have caught her flight and to have been sunning herself abroad. Instead, she was taken and held in her own home.”
“What time was her flight?”
“She was due to catch the twenty-past-midnight from Newcastle International,” Ryan said. He knew the flight number thanks to a difficult conversation he’d had with Nicola’s mother the previous day. His chest tightened as he remembered her devastation, the pleading look in her eyes as she’d begged him to tell her it wasn’t true, that her daughter wasn’t dead. She’d shown him the text messages her daughter was supposed to have sent, just like the e-mails Sharon Cooper had apparently sent last Sunday.
“—had to have been the window between her leaving the hospital and catching her flight, then?”
Ryan caught the tail end of Phillips’ sentence and looked up, then away again.
“Yeah, it had to be. If he missed that window, he missed his chance. He couldn’t risk holding her captive for days without somebody reporting it. He had to use her holiday as a cover story.”
“He did his research, again.”
Ryan nodded.
“He sought out the best match. So, we ask ourselves: who was on shift between, say, eight and ten p.m.? Allowing for the fact she’d have to make her way to the airport a couple of hours early.”
Ryan already knew the answer to that, since he’d been through the steps during the early hours of the morning.
“Shifts are twelve hours for the consultants, doctors and surgeons, give or take,” Ryan said. “Nurses tend to work a bit longer, so if we focus on the clinicians then we’re looking at a mass shift change around eight. Once again, that puts the usual suspects in the frame.”
“I’ve requested the CCTV footage from the hospital,” Phillips said. “It’s good and bad news. Which do you want first?”
Ryan pulled a face.
“Give me the bad.”
“They’ve already destroyed the footage for the week when Isobel Harris went into A&E after her dizzy spell at work. It’s policy to destroy it after three weeks unless there’s some kind of incident.”
“Damn,” Ryan ran a hand across the back of his neck. “Okay, how about the good news?”
“They’re sending through the footage for the past week or two, so we can scrutinize it and see who left their shift right on time. We can look for Nicola Cassidy and see who she spoke to, who was on the wrong ward at the wrong time, that kind of thing.”
Ryan thought of all the extra hours racking up and resigned himself to it. There was no other way.
“What about the CCTV on Claremont Road? How far have we been able to track her movements?”
Phillips’ face told him all the answer he needed.
“You know as well as I do, guv. The Council only keep half the cameras working because it’s all they can afford to maintain. The rest of them act as a deterrent.”
“Which means we’ve got nothing?”
“There’s the CCTV from the hospital but…yes, we’ve got bugger all else.”
Ryan pushed away from the desk and paced a few steps, trying to shake off the frustration. Nobody knew better than a policeman about the constant balancing of cost versus benefit when providing a public service. But, God, it was hard.
If there was no convenient camera capturing the killer on screen, he had to find another way.
“I need to know what ki
nd of dosage would have kept Nicola Cassidy unconscious and how frequently she would need topping up,” he said. “That will give us some idea of how often her killer needed to slip back. Then, we can compare the timings with whoever was on shift.”
Phillips smiled.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Ryan looked out across the city and wondered when they would find another woman dead in her own bed, left like so many bits of rubbish to be thrown on the scrap heap. The man who hunted them was insatiable in his need, and arrogant to boot. It was a deadly combination.
“Let’s get there faster, Frank. If it’s the same man and we’re right about him working at the hospital, that means he killed one woman and took another on the very same day. One in the morning, before his shift, and the other after his shift ended. There are dozens of medics associated with A&E who would’ve had the opportunity to commit both murders. That doesn’t even count the ones who work the red-eye, from six p.m. to four a.m., or the ones who worked a double shift.”
“When does the shift pattern change?” Phillips asked.
Ryan turned to face him.
“Friday,” he said shortly.
* * *
At precisely nine o’clock, Will Cooper kept his pre-arranged appointment to attend CID for questioning. He had a sharky-looking solicitor in tow, one MacKenzie and Lowerson recognised from previous investigations.
“He hasn’t spared any expense, has he?” MacKenzie remarked, from their position in the viewing area overlooking Interview Room C.
Lowerson ran through the questions he planned to ask one more time, just to be sure.
“You’ll be fine,” MacKenzie reassured him. “This one’s a doddle. You’ve got to remember that we’re coming at the interview from different directions. Will Cooper probably wants to help us catch his mum’s killer, but he’s worried about implicating himself in whatever drugs offences he’s been committing on the side. We, on the other hand, don’t care so much about him dealing, so long as he tells us who and what he’s been supplying. We might hit lucky.”