20/20

by Carl Goodman

  Eva didn’t feel the need to disagree. ‘I’m just staggered by how commonplace he made it all seem. Expensive, but completely run of the mill. Apparently, the woman would have left within an hour or so and the wound would have healed by the following day. I’d assumed you’d be out of action for days after an operation like that. Chatham made it seem like a trip to the dentist.’

  Raj curled his lip. ‘So they just slice your eyes open, scoop out the natural lens and stick a bit of glass in?’

  ‘Plastic. He was particular about the type of plastic too.’ She frowned and thought back over the explanation. ‘He said it was like hard and soft contact lenses. Hard lenses have much better optical properties.’

  ‘But better than your actual eye?’

  ‘What can I tell you?’ Eva grumbled. ‘That’s what he said. I was busy concentrating on not throwing up.’ She had lost Raj’s attention, she could see that.

  ‘My grannie had cataract surgery on the NHS,’ Flynn said. ‘She reckons it was brilliant.’

  ‘Does she need reading glasses?’

  Flynn frowned. ‘She uses them for really close-up stuff. She does a lot of embroidery, but then she’s almost ninety now. She doesn’t use them for the newspaper. I know that for a fact. She sits reading it and swears at it like a fucking trooper.’

  Eva laughed. Raj didn’t. ‘Something up, DS Chakrabati?’

  He tilted his head to one side slightly and stared at his screen. ‘Not sure.’ She raised an eyebrow at that. So did Flynn. ‘Do you think it’s a coincidence that Stepanov, Swain and Markham were all operated on within a few days of one another?’

  * * *

  Corrine Sutton looked shattered. ‘I had no idea how much muscle I’d lost in the leg,’ she confided to Eva. ‘And I can’t start building it up again until this bastard thing is off my foot. So if I seem like more of an irascible bitch than normal…’

  ‘No disrespect, ma’am,’ Eva said, ‘but I don’t know what constitutes normal.’

  Sutton snapped. ‘Well, clearly not you. Do you know why the news websites seem more interested in a DI with a moderately interesting medical history as opposed to a psychopathic killer with an absolutely bloody fascinating obsession with carving out people’s eyes?’

  Eva ignored the question. There were three local news websites, two of which were spin-offs from old print media and a third that had started as online-only. They were all advertising-based, and they all looked as though they were hanging on by their teeth. Most of the patchy journalism came from other online sources, and two of them had refused to say where they were getting their information about her. The third had been more cooperative, though. When Eva picked up the phone and asked the question, the editor had admitted it was an anonymous source substantiated with links, PDFs and the occasional JPEG image. When they sent her the report on Colin Lynch, Eva’s cropped hair had all but stood on end. Nobody but a police officer could have had access to it, and a senior police officer at that. She had forwarded it to Hadley. She had not heard back, but she could imagine his reaction.

  ‘There’s another angle,’ she said to Sutton. Sutton’s eyebrows arced when Eva told her about the coincidence of timings of Stepanov’s, Swain’s and Markham’s deaths.

  ‘You’re following up on that I take it?’

  ‘Raj is, as we speak. Flynn and Newton are still going through the other records and I’m planning to tie down the last few threads on the previous murders. We’re still collating information on Alicia Khan but we’ll have forensics and background up to date later today.’ Eva paused. There was something else she wanted to discuss with Sutton, but she had to be cautious.

  She had overheard the news as she walked through the front of the station. Two uniforms had been grumbling about it. The fact that nobody had bothered to tell her yet could have meant three things. Either that the news was new, or that everybody was so pissed off about it that they didn’t want to discuss it, or that they didn’t want to bother her with what now seemed like a trivial case. It wasn’t trivial, though. Again it struck to the very heart of what she had actually been sent to Kingston to do, although she could not reveal that to Sutton. ‘How did Martin Ward get bail?’

  Sutton slumped down in her chair. ‘By being extremely bloody clever. You do realise what he was flogging?’

  Eva frowned. ‘I was under the impression we caught him with a boot full of drugs?’

  ‘All of which were legal highs according to the lab reports. New psychoactive substances is the official term. It is this week anyway. Ward’s lawyer made a big play of the fact his client was providing chemicals that have not as yet been classified as proscribed. The judge saw technical grounds for doubt and so Martin Ward is currently back on the streets.’

  Eva clenched her teeth, but said nothing.

  * * *

  Flynn exploded when Eva told her. ‘Absolute fucking bullshit. I bagged that stuff myself. I saw what was in there. That sleazy son of a bitch had close to fifty thousand quid’s worth of class-A drugs in his car. LSD, ecstasy, heroin and a bunch of designer shit that’s also proscribed. How the fucking hell could the lab mistake them for legal highs? You’d have to be blind or stupid.’

  ‘Or bent,’ Jamie Newton muttered. He glanced at Eva but then looked away.

  ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ she said smoothly. ‘We know Ward is not connected with the murder cases, we know he wasn’t near any of the victims at time of death and he was still under arrest when Alicia Khan was killed, so he’s not our priority right now. If we can confirm there’s been a mix-up at the lab, then providing the evidence trail can be recovered we can pick him up again at our leisure. I just wanted to be certain we were clear on the material gathered.’

  ‘I spent two hours going through it after we busted him,’ Flynn said. ‘I know what a tab of LSD looks like. Why the fuck doesn’t a lab technician?’

  Eva caught the look on Newton’s face. ‘Leave it with me,’ she told them. ‘I’ll talk to the lab. I’m sure it’s just an administrative cock-up.’

  ‘Bloody big cock-up,’ Newton muttered.

  ‘Quite,’ Eva agreed.

  * * *

  Jeffrey Cowan sat opposite her and scowled. Afternoon sunlight streamed through high Georgian windows and glowed on the oxblood leather of his chesterfield sofas. Motes of dust drifted through its torpid beams. Apart from the ticking of a clock in another room the house was silent. Eva wondered if he lived there alone.

  When Hadley next spoke to her, when he twisted her arm and with his usual vindictive bile demanded some sort of progress report, she would at least be able to tell him she was making full use of Cowan as a contact. As a source of background information he was probably as good as she was going to get, although she felt no need to give Hadley any credit for the fact. At no point had Cowan seemed resentful that she had taken over his investigation, only sceptical when it came to her chances of success. That didn’t matter, Eva thought as she waited for him to chew over her summary of the encounter with Ward. It was her investigation now.

  Cowan gazed at dust motes. ‘It’s obviously Razin’s work.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Eva agreed. ‘Although I’m surprised he’s being so brazen. But I can’t imagine Semion Razin would actually know anything about it.’

  ‘No. It’s so far below his level he’ll probably never know. We do know he has local infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean Ward. There’s somebody organising his activities in the county but it will be a fixer, not a hands-on grunt like Ward.’

  ‘Somebody who can fix things inside the station?’

  Cowan shrugged. ‘I always suspected it. More than suspected. There were many coincidences, but there was never any conclusive evidence.’ He leaned back on the sofa. A shaft of sunlight lit the side of his face and he narrowed his eyes as he spoke. ‘The problem is we’ve got this antiquated view of organised crime. We always think about the lower and middle tiers, the hard cases that act as enforcers and implementers.
And it’s true, there are plenty of those types around. Above them though there’s a layer of sophistication that we often don’t consider because we so rarely see it. Think about any large, legitimate company. Think about its skills in marketing, market research, delivery, logistics, financial management, human resources and so on. Now think about a cartel or an organisation like Razin’s. They also have turnovers counted in billions of dollars. Do you think they can afford to be any less sophisticated? We often forget the obvious. In order for these organisations to scale, to manage their resources at the international level, they have to learn. Razin has a reputation as a ruthless thug, but even if he is it’s beside the point. Razin is clever, and he surrounds himself with people who are clever too. Ward is at the bottom of the pile. Ward is a foot soldier. He serves Razin loyally, he makes his revenue targets and in return Razin’s organisation protects him. To Ward, Razin must seem like a god. Able to reach down inside a police station and quash his arrest. Ward will be awestruck. It’ll only serve to enhance Razin’s reputation, whereas Razin will have simply protected his investment.’

  Eva shook her head. ‘We still have the drugs, whatever the lab calls them.’

  Cowan laughed at her. ‘Don’t be naive. Do you really imagine they’re still there? Somebody will have substituted them. I bet they’re back in the boot of Ward’s car by now.’

  ‘So you think the drugs in the evidence bags have been swapped?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  Eva smiled. The smile did not reach her eyes. ‘That’s going to be extremely unfortunate for someone then. I took some of the packets and put them into evidence separately. There’s another case file with a bunch of drugs in it that I can get tested at a different lab. If they prove to be class-A then the discrepancy is going to be pretty damned obvious. When I find out who handled the bags I’ll have narrowed down the list of who Razin’s person in the lab could be, and that will give me grounds for a warrant. When I have that I’m going to dissect them. I’ll pick apart contacts, financial history, employment records, where each of them has been and who they’ve seen. Trust me, by the time I’ve finished with them someone is going to be begging to give me the rest.’

  Cowan stared at her as though he was not certain what he was looking at. ‘I told you. You’re playing a dangerous game. Don’t stick your neck out too far because Razin will chop it, you can be certain of that.’

  ‘I’m not letting this go.’

  ‘Is this how it was with Colin Lynch?’

  ‘Lynch is dead,’ Eva snapped. ‘Lynch was killed by a rival gang. Case closed as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cowan said, hands held up in a gesture of surrender. ‘I’m not the enemy. I’m simply saying that with the old killer raising his head you’d have three investigations on your hands. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.’

  She could see he did not want to annoy her. ‘Sorry. It’s just hard to be objective when you’ve got Hadley breathing down your neck.’

  ‘Just be careful,’ Cowan told her. ‘Mind your back.’

  I will, Eva thought as she watched him, sitting on his sofa basking in autumnal sunshine. And it’s not three cases. It’s four. She couldn’t tell Cowan that though, and so she left.

  * * *

  What did she know? She forced herself to draw the network diagrams in her head, the mesh of nodes and links representing what she now thought of as the four braided strands that occupied her every waking moment, the four cases that encompassed her world and her life.

  First was the new case, as she thought of it, the murders and dissections of Irina Stepanov, Jodie Swain and Paul Markham, as distinct from the old case, the slaughters of Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd. They had to be distinct, the ages and circumstances of the victims made that inevitable. It was only the issue of the removal of their eyes that had caused the two to be confused. Sutton didn’t see that. Despite being a rigidly disciplined officer, Sutton didn’t want to see that, because the possibility of having two eye-slicing psychopaths on her patch was actually too horrendous to contemplate. Even that prospect, Eva suspected, was a long way from the truth.

  The old killings had been gratuitous, indulgent and, from somebody’s perspective, pleasurable. The new were precise, purposeful and specific. They were done for a reason, even though she had no idea what that reason might be. They had been done to order. The old killings had been done for fun.

  Neither of which helped her with her third case, the real reason she had been despatched to Kingston by the malevolent Alastair Hadley. Hadley knew her secret. From his perspective it made her the ideal victim to go searching for the leak at Kingston station, whoever that was, who had assisted Razin in laundering vast amounts of money through the wealthy county. For now the list of possible suspects in that investigation did not seem to be getting any shorter. It would do soon though, she felt certain of it. The flip side of that certainty was the knowledge that whenever Razin’s mole, leak, accomplice, facilitator, whatever it was she chose to call them, found out she was closing in on them their reaction would not be anything less than violent.

  And then there was the last case, her case, her own private investigation. The eGPU ticked away the seconds, and with every thin slice of time performed a myriad of complex calculations, each one like a grain of sand being removed from a fortress wall. It would dig its way through, she was certain of that too, and then not only would she know the truth, the facts behind the last case that had dominated her life for two years, but she would have the power in her hands to act upon it. Her deadlier weapon, perhaps.

  Eva had heard a phrase once, many years before. Tai sabaki. In Japanese martial arts it was the supreme step, used by Okinawan samurai who had been deprived of their swords by the Tokugawa shogunate and had been forced to fight against armoured enemies with their bare hands. It was the last step. When the sword descended to cut them in two, the karate-ka would shift their core with a slide and a twist, avoiding the gleaming razor-edge of the katana to throw a gyakuzuki, a reverse punch, right through wooden armour to crush the heart of the attacker. But there was a catch: it was a tactic that could only work when the blade of the sword was at its closest. It required the karate-ka to risk absolutely everything, to take the ultimate chance, to commit totally to the move and expose themselves to the likelihood of being cleaved open from clavicle to groin. Live or die in a moment, in a fragment of time far less than the flip of a coin. It had been their only way to win.

  Eva could feel it coming now. It was almost upon her. She waited, ready, for the breath of the blade upon her cheek.

  The last name on the list of what she now thought of as legacy suspects was Mathew Harred. Eva had been tempted to let one of the others deal with interviewing him because his connection with the previous murders seemed to her to border on the circumstantial, but Flynn, Chakrabati and Newton were all tied up on other lines of inquiry and it seemed counter-productive to interrupt them. So she spoke the postcode of the address she had on the file into her sat-nav, started her engine and, driving through an autumnal mist that coiled close to the ground, headed towards Virginia Water.

  * * *

  New Thought stood a mile or so down the road from Wentworth golf club, a major venue for some event or another, she noted from Wikipedia. What she knew about golf currently could be written on the back of a postage stamp in large type, and Eva had every intention of keeping it that way. The building was a converted Norman church, a medieval monolith, which like St Jude’s Hill tennis club had been even further extended. It seemed to be a common approach in the county, taking older buildings and combining them with smart modern structures made from glass and renovated materials. It looked both impressive and expensive, Eva thought as she parked.

  Fredrick Huss was not a tall man. In his early fifties, Eva estimated, with a neatly trimmed white beard and thinning white hair, he greeted her at the entrance of what she presumed New Thought still referred to as a church.


  ‘Yes,’ Huss told her as he led her to a meeting room, ‘but not in the conventional sense. We see this as a place for like-minded individuals to come together and share their thoughts and experiences. We do this at agreed times because that is a convention based on practicality, but it’s perfectly fine for our members to visit us at any time of day or night.’

  Eva looked around the building. The area in which they sat had the air of a corporate boardroom. An oval table made from grey-stained wood that could seat twenty people occupied the middle of it, but there was plenty of space left around the outside. Huss had placed two chairs so that they faced each other with no barrier in-between. His body language seemed respectfully neutral.

  ‘Your church seems well funded,’ Eva said.

  Huss smiled and nodded, quite gently. ‘We have many affluent members. It’s an interesting conundrum. Are they members because they are affluent and attracted to our ideals, or are they affluent because they adhere to our ideals and apply them in their everyday lives? It’s so hard to say.’ He steepled his fingers when he spoke. ‘As transcendentalists we believe profoundly in the power of the individual. We believe individuals should be free to follow their own paths, unencumbered by the conventions imposed by society and its institutions, which we see as having corrupted the purity of the individual.’

  ‘There have to be laws.’

  ‘And there are laws. Natural laws. Isn’t it better as a person to say: “I will do the right thing,” as opposed to saying: “I will do the thing I am simply bound to do?” We believe in encouraging people to be the best they can be. People have to be free to think. We have to have the freedom to make the right choices, not have them blindly imposed on us.’

  She had heard the argument before. ‘Where would murder fit into that philosophy?’

  Huss did not overreact. ‘On the one hand murder would seem to be a contradiction of natural law. And yet on the other is the hypothetical case of the killer with a time machine. If you could go back in time and murder Adolf Hitler, for example, before he instigated genocide, would it be wrong to do so?’