by Carl Goodman
‘So why is he on the list?’
‘One of the investigating officers got a bee in their bonnet about a church, out towards Virginia Water. Harred works out of there. Somebody thought there might be a connection between the girls and the church. The files are a bit thin, though. There was some more circumstantial stuff, but to be honest it didn’t seem very convincing.’
Just a line of investigation, Eva decided. She looked at the next picture. ‘Robert Poole?’
‘A low-life scumbag who badly needs his head kicking in,’ Flynn growled. She had clenched one hand into a fist but covered it with her other. Flynn wore a grey shirt and dark trousers, flat shoes and just enough make-up to soften her face a little. Scraped-back hair and cold-blue eyes, everything about Flynn said: copper. ‘A nasty, violent piss-head who isn’t that smart and likes hurting women. And men for that matter,’ she added with a shrug.
Eva grinned. ‘Friend of yours, then?’ Flynn did not smile in return. ‘David Mills?’ Eva asked, quickly.
‘A bit of a slimeball,’ Raj said, ‘but he’s not in the same league as Poole. He works as an odd job man, just him and his van. Worth taking another look at I think.’
She walked up and down the line of photos, looking at each one in turn. ‘Do you feel up to making a list?’
‘Already have,’ Raj said. Flynn actually stuck her tongue out at him, Eva noticed. ‘Mine would be Ward, Poole and Mills.’
‘Yeah,’ Jamie Newton agreed. ‘The others look less bad with age.’
Eva glanced at Flynn, who only nodded in return. She turned her back on them and raised three of the seven photos somewhat higher than the others on the whiteboard. She was about to turn back to face them when she stopped. ‘What sort of church?’ She had her finger on the forehead of Mathew Harred.
Raj scanned through his notes. ‘Transcendentalist,’ he said after a moment.
Eva raised the photo. ‘Let’s find out a little bit more about Mathew Harred.’
Flynn guffawed. ‘Why?’
Eva spread her hands. ‘Just a hunch,’ she admitted. ‘And anyway, wouldn’t you like to know what a transcendentalist church is when it’s at home?’
* * *
Eva left Raj and Newton going through the process of locating suspects. ‘We should give forensics a chase,’ she told them.
‘Judy Wren won’t be dragging her heels,’ Flynn said. The look on her face told Eva the idea seemed dubious to her.
‘I know,’ Eva said, ‘which is why I’m not going to bother emailing. Let’s just stick our head around the door and see what she’s got so far.’
The hospital lay on the far side of the one-way system. Eva drove. Flynn seemed uncomfortable to be alone in the car with her. Eva maintained a pleasant silence and waited for Flynn to feel compelled to fill it. Flynn resisted for a few minutes, but then the lack of communication became too awkward and so she gave in. ‘How’s Kingston comparing to Southampton, ma’am?’
‘Honestly, at this point it’s hard to say. We were so preoccupied with drugs coming in through the port that everything else seemed to take a back seat. DCI Sutton said you have your own drugs problems?’
‘Yeah.’ Flynn’s characteristic grumble. Dirty-blonde hair, obviously dyed, and scraped back in a ponytail, Flynn was close to Eva’s height and she too clearly spent time at the gym. Hard, there was no two ways about it, Eva thought as she surreptitiously studied Flynn again, but not unrelentingly so, she suspected. ‘It’s soft though, in the town centre anyway. Lots of kids, lots of uni students and lots of party drugs on a Saturday night. If you want hard-core you have to go a bit further in towards London, which is still our turf. There are a couple of estates between here and New Malden that can get pretty damn rough. I’ll point them out to you later. Not a good place for female officers to be out on their own, if you know what I mean.’
Eva did. She pulled into one of the hospital car parks and found the handful of bays that were reserved for police cars. Flynn led the way to the mortuary building.
When they found Judy Wren she was sitting at a desk that stood against a partition wall, prodding at the keyboard of her computer. The window in the small room faced west, Eva noticed. She imagined the sun would creep around in the afternoon and flood it with warm light, making it a place of respite from the cold reflective surfaces and sharp instruments of the autopsy theatre. ‘I’m hurrying,’ Wren told them when they walked in.
‘I know,’ Eva said as she pulled up a chair and sat down beside the desk. Flynn did the same. ‘I just wondered if there were any edited highlights you might be able to give us?’
Wren shrugged and angled the screen of her computer towards them. ‘I sent the blood sample, such as it was, to Eurofins Forensics Services in Teddington. They’re a private contractor, a good one, and they’ve got kit there we just couldn’t afford. EFS have done a preliminary analysis but it’s going to take a few days longer before it’s finally confirmed. I spoke with the principal investigator though,’ Wren said. ‘She’s quietly confident.’
‘About what?’ Flynn asked.
‘That the victim was sedated before being murdered,’ Eva said.
‘The analysis is being confirmed,’ Wren told them, ‘but the traces are consistent with the presence of Propofol.’
Eva shook her head. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what that one is.’
‘It’s a common-enough intravenous sedative usually sold under the brand name Diprivan. It’s made by AstraZeneca.’ Wren checked her notes on the screen. ‘The commercial preparation is 1% propofol, 10% soybean oil and 1.2% purified egg phospholipid as an emulsifier with 2.25% glycerol as a tonicity-adjusting agent, and sodium hydroxide to adjust the pH.’
Eva tried to link the chain of events back together again. ‘So she was stunned by an electric stun gun, we know that. That would have put her out for how long?’
‘It’s hard to predict. A lot of the time that depends on things like general fitness, muscle mass and so on, but the reality is it’s quite difficult to say how any given subject will react to electrical stunning. It’s a bit like altitude sickness in that sense. Let’s put it in the five-to-ten-minute range as an approximation, though. That’s the period during which she might not necessarily have been unconscious, but she would certainly have been incapable of movement or resistance.’
‘So she’s down,’ Eva said, ‘paralysed, but he feels the need to sedate her anyway. Why? Why not just gouge out her eyes and be done with it?’
‘Because there was no gouging involved. This was a careful removal, enucleation to be precise.’ Wren flicked at windows on her screen for a moment then found a diagram to show them. ‘There are six extraocular muscles that control the eye. The medial rectus and lateral rectus control horizontal movement, the superior rectus produces eye elevation, the superior oblique produces eye depression, medial rotation and abduction. The inferior rectus produces minor movements like lateral rotation and adduction, as does the inferior oblique, but elevating as opposed to depressing. The muscle pairs work in tandem. One stretches as the other contracts. It’s called an antagonistic process.’
‘Why cut the eyelids off?’
‘Because without doing so it would be harder to cut cleanly through the extraocular muscles,’ Wren told Eva, ‘at least in what you might think of as a “field” operation as opposed to at a clinic.’
‘Nice,’ Flynn said. ‘Did I really need to know that?’
‘Our killer knew. They carefully pared those muscles, twice, removed the eyes and then severed the optic nerve at its base.’
Eva folded her face into a frown. ‘But why?’
‘My assumption would be because they wanted the eyes intact.’
‘For what?’ She waved her hands, searching for some idea. ‘Retinal scans? For security of some sort?’
Wren guffawed. ‘You can’t get a retinal scan from a dead, disembodied eye. There are so many things that would go wrong. The cells at the back of the eye would start to die
as soon as the blood flow was interrupted, which would screw up the scan. And anyway, can you think of any reason why a suburban housewife, no matter how well off, would need a retinal scan?’
She could not. She was just straining to find a motive that fitted the crime. ‘So it’s some kind of trophy?’
Judy Wren shrugged. ‘I’m damned if I can think of any other reason, twisted as it might seem.’
Eva felt her shoulders slump then. ‘Fuck,’ she said.
Flynn scowled. ‘What’s up now?’
‘I’d pretty much convinced myself that we were dealing with two separate cases,’ Eva admitted. ‘The difference in styles between the original eye-slicer and this character seemed too extreme. But if the only motive we can think of is some sort of perverted trophy hunting…’ She let her voice trail off.
‘Then there’s a good chance Sutton was right.’ Flynn finished the thought off for her. ‘This could be the same nut-job. It’s just he’s learned a whole new set of skills.’
Eva stood. ‘We’d better get back to the station,’ she told Flynn. ‘If there is any chance it’s the same guy that makes going back through the old suspects a lot more urgent.’
* * *
Despite the investigation, Alastair Hadley’s threat had not gone away. Eva knew she would not be able to excuse herself with the bastard a second time. While her team went about locating the previous suspects, she slipped out for an hour. She hated doing it, but she knew she had no choice.
The address Hadley had given her was halfway up Kingston Hill, on a road that eventually merged with the A3. Like St Jude’s, the houses were quite grand, but most of them were considerably older than those in the verdant estate. Eva parked on the gravel drive of one that, she guessed, dated from around the 1890s. High sash windows and mellow colours; it looked as if it had been restored fairly recently. A red sports car sat on the drive. An MG, she noted, and quite old, but it too had been restored. There was no bell on the front door, only a heavy brass knocker. Eva took a breath and used it.
After a minute a thin, patrician-faced man with neatly cut silver-grey hair opened the door. He looked as though he was in his early sixties, but Eva knew that detail already. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Cowan,’ she said, as demurely as she could manage. ‘I’m—’
Unexpectedly, the man smiled. ‘I know who you are. Do come in.’
On the inside the house was light and comfortable. As she walked through the hallway she saw photos and a few paintings, almost all of them landscapes and all of them set in bright sunlight. ‘A drink,’ Cowan suggested as he led her to his living room. They seemed to be alone in the house. ‘Coffee?’
She did not really want any, but she nodded her head anyway. Cowan left her in a spacious room filled with tasteful memorabilia and two large red leather chesterfield sofas that faced each other, separated only by a low mahogany coffee table. The room had the look of an interior designer’s work. After a moment she heard what sounded like a coffee machine grinding, presumably in the kitchen. Cowan returned with two cups shortly afterwards.
‘Hadley told me you would come by,’ Cowan said as they sat facing each other on the two sofas. ‘I know him of old. I worked with SCO15 on asymmetric threats a number of years ago, everything from economic warfare to weaponisation of social media. Hadley was there, making deals and pulling strings. How in God’s name did that bastard get his claws into you?’
For a moment she did not know what to say. ‘Do you know Superintendent Hadley well?’
Cowan snorted. ‘Superintendent now, is he? Pretending to be a real copper? Hadley is a spook and a pretty damned unpleasant one. I doubt if anyone knows him well; he’s an operator and, to be blunt, as ruthless as they get. Then again, he gets results. He also accumulates favours along the way.’ He stared at her with cold blue eyes. ‘But I expect you know that much already.’
She knew about the unpleasant part. ‘What did he tell you about me?’
‘Personally? Nothing at all. He did however mention that the real reason for putting you in Kingston was to continue my investigation into which officers have been passing information to Semion Razin’s organisation.’
Eva could not help but sigh. ‘The situation has become complicated, sir. We appear to have a serial killer on the loose again. To be honest I feel like a complete fraud. I’m leading a team and investigating them at the same time.’
He frowned. ‘Isn’t that what you expected when you signed up?’
‘I didn’t exactly sign up, sir.’
Cowan put his coffee down. ‘I’m retired. My name is Jeffrey and I’m damned if I’m going to call you Detective Inspector. What’s it to be?’
‘Eva,’ she told him after a moment’s hesitation. Then she added: ‘Thank you, Jeffrey.’
She did not know Cowan at all. She did not know if she could trust him or whether the gentle bonhomie he exuded was real or just another test, but she was fed up to her back teeth with lying. Hadley had instructed her to visit Cowan because he was Hadley’s contact. He must know something, Eva thought. He certainly seemed to know Hadley.
‘I sympathise with your predicament,’ Cowan grunted. ‘I was aware somebody had to be feeding Razin information before I retired, but I never tracked them down. Like you I was too busy getting on with my day job.’ Cowan was clearly familiar with the name Razin too.
Eva had seen both photos and videos, obtained from a wide variety of sources. A Ukrainian by birth, Semion Razin was reputedly the most significant player in illegal narcotics on the European side of the Atlantic. A tall, lean man, in his fifties and with a shock of grey hair, Razin seemed to affect ankle-length coats and a style she would have more readily associated with an intellectual from pre-revolution days. He wore a goatee beard and a curled, waxed moustache, and small round glasses with frames so thin they seemed to be made from gold wire. His hands were large; he had unusually long fingers that made her think of a violinist, or a concert pianist, or a strangler. He seemed to be a precise man. She could imagine him pedantically lecturing some enemy or competitor before instructing his people to cut their throat. His eyes were black, she had noticed, or perhaps it had only seemed that way because of the overhang of his extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. When he stared, he angled his head down to look slightly upwards, like a butcher examining a piece of hanging meat. He did indeed think of himself as an intellectual, the psych reports had told her, a Chekov or a Tolstoy, or perhaps a Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, ahead of his time and misunderstood. Even though the photos of him were in colour, the image Eva held in her mind was in greyscale. A man out of time, she thought. Perhaps that was why he had become so powerful.
Eva had also read the briefing papers Hadley had forced upon her and memorised what seemed to be the significant operational details. Razin had probably never even set foot in the UK and probably never would. Regardless of that, his minions had set up an efficient and predictably ruthless local organisation for dealing in whatever products Razin found most profitable. He sat at the very top of the supply chain, controlling swathes of production from South East Asia through the Middle East, as well as running both delivery channels and distribution networks from Bucharest to Birmingham.
It came as no particular surprise to Eva that Razin had interests in Surrey. Why that had seemed so important to Hadley was something that escaped her, though. ‘I didn’t think Surrey had a particularly bad drugs problem?’ she said to Cowan.
He sipped his coffee. ‘It depends what you mean by bad. The rate of consumption here isn’t especially high compared to the national average. The value of the transactions is what makes it an appealing business for overseas traffickers like Razin. His trade here is in supplying top-quality merchandise at elevated prices. It’s a surprisingly lucrative market and one that’s very well protected. Quietly and discreetly to be sure, but protected none the less. Surrey is far too profitable to have gang wars on the streets like in East London or Greater Manchester, and anyway it’s too close to home fo
r that as far as the big hitters are concerned.’
‘What sort of value?’
‘Across the whole of Surrey? Our estimates are that it’s close to two hundred million a year.’ Cowan saw her jaw drop. ‘That’s including the wholesale market and the money that passes through the county as a consequence of a number of influential individuals having made their home here,’ he added. ‘They’ve not simply industrialised the drugs industry. Through sophisticated money laundering they’ve damn near legitimised it.’
‘But that’s massive,’ Eva told him. As if he didn’t know, she thought.
‘It is,’ Cowan agreed. He set his coffee down on the mahogany table. ‘Which is why Hadley and his playmates are so keen on finding out who keeps sending restricted information to Razin’s local office, or whatever it is he actually has here. It’s messed up five operations and stopped three major convictions that I’m aware of.’
‘Did you have any suspects? When you were at Kingston, I mean?’
‘Oh plenty, but very little evidence. I don’t think Hadley has thought this through. No disrespect, but if a senior police officer with decades of experience can’t track down the mole, or moles, what chance does a young officer brand new to the patch have?’ Another question that did not need an answer. Eva set her coffee down too. ‘I did have someone take a look at your personnel file,’ Cowan said after a moment’s hesitation. Then he added: ‘You’re not exactly what I’d call a regular police officer.’
‘I’m trying to be,’ Eva told him. That subject again. Suddenly, she felt awkward.
Cowan grunted once more. ‘I like my colleagues, most of them anyway. I can’t think of many of them that have Mensa IQs. And you’ve seen some fairly active service.’
‘Only for a short while,’ she said quietly. He had read her file. He had not concealed the fact, quite the opposite.
