Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  The charge hit her body and Emily surged, arms still cuffed to the bedposts. The paramedics plunged back to her body.

  ‘Nothing,’ one of them said.

  ‘Hit her again!’ Honor snapped.

  It wasn’t her place to tell them what to do, and the dirty look she got from the paramedics told her so. The defibrillator charged again, Honor watching and willing and hoping and trying not to let the black chasm of defeat swell up again within her.

  ‘Clear!’

  The charge hit Emily’s bloodied corpse and she jerked again, but this time she suddenly sucked in a surge of air that whistled through her throat as her eyes flew wide and regained ocular unity.

  ‘Christ,’ Honor uttered in relief, one hand slapping against the wall for support. Danny gripped her shoulder with one hand for a moment.

  ‘Now we’ve got you, you bastard,’ he uttered as he watched Emily recover consciousness.

  Emily’s gasps for breath were replaced with a terrific shriek of terror and pain that rose up like a demon screaming to escape the room. The paramedics swarmed over her as she began to thrash, tearing at the handcuffs still holding her in place as blood began to stream from the countless, deep wounds torn into her body.

  ‘You’re okay, it’s over, you’re safe.’

  The paramedics held her down while Honor watched, until one of them could get a needle into her. A uniformed officer produced a key to unlock the cuffs, and moments later the paramedics gently lifted Emily’s writhing form onto a gurney.

  ‘When can we talk to her?’ Honor asked. ‘She may know who did this.’

  ‘When we say so,’ the paramedic snapped. ‘She’s suffered a cardiac arrest from what just happened to her, so she’s gonna need some time, don’t you think?’

  Honor watched them carry Emily from the room, their boots crunching down on the bodies of rats that had been stomped left, right and centre, their corpses littering a carpet stained with their blood. Honor followed them out of the room and through the hall and was about to head for the stairwell when she noticed that the kitchen door was closed. She exchanged a glance with Danny, who walked across and shoved it open.

  The room was a galley kitchen, long and narrow, with a small radiator at the far end beneath a window. Handcuffed and bound to it was an unconscious man, perhaps thirty years old, blood from a headwound caking his face, his eyes swollen and bruised.

  ‘We’ve got another one in here!’

  22

  Bleach. Disinfectant. Cleaning fluids.

  Honor had always hated the scent of hospitals, and the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel was no different. Ironically, the odour of such cleanliness reminded her of nothing but sickness, the domain of the terminally ill.

  She sat with Danny in a waiting room, where they had spent the past two hours waiting for the chance to speak with Emily and Alex Wilson. With them was a digital composite artist with a laptop computer, the hope being that they would be able to construct a definitive likeness of the man responsible for the attempted murder of Emily. All three of them were munching down sandwiches bought from a deli around the corner, likewise all three of them using their mobile phones to stay in contact with the Incident Room.

  Under police instructions, Emily and Alex were being held in private wards with no members of the press allowed: the last thing that Honor wanted now was information reaching their suspect that might give him the chance to escape before he could be apprehended. Honor was certain that he intended to disappear when this was all over, that he wanted to spend the rest of his life basking in the infamy and mystery that would surround his gruesome crimes for decades to come.

  ‘They’re ready.’

  Danny, Honor and the artist stood up as a nurse beckoned them to follow her into a private ward. The private wards each had a single bed, but one of them had been refitted to contain two, Alex and his wife being treated together by two nurses. One of them, a stocky woman with a stern expression and keen eyes, saw Honor and Danny arrive and hurried to the door.

  ‘They’re both out of intensive care but they’ve endured a terrible ordeal, especially the wife,’ she reported in a soft voice, low enough that the patients behind her could not hear. ‘Emily suffered a cardiac arrest as a result of what she went through, and she was lucky the paramedics were able to revive her before she suffered permanent brain damage. Her husband, Alex, is suffering from severe concussion after a blow to the head which almost fractured his skull. They would appreciate gentle questioning.’

  Both Honor and Danny nodded as the nurse stood back and allowed them into the room.

  Emily and Alex were on saline drips, Emily wearing an oxygen mask, her eyes sunk into deep, bruised pits. Honor glanced at the countless injuries she had suffered and had to force herself to breathe normally. The rats had taken chunks out of thirty per cent of her body before City Police had crashed through her door, and now she was covered in a patchwork of medical dressings. The nurse was treating a particularly deep and nasty wound where it looked as though a rat, or rats, had actually started burrowing into her body as they ate.

  ‘Hi Emily,’ Honor said, forcing a gentle smile onto her lips that made her jaw ache. ‘How are you holding up?’

  Emily looked at her with eyes flat and dark, as though the life was still sucked from them, a reluctantly beating heart trapped within an unwilling body.

  ‘I’m alive,’ was all that she gasped.

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Honor McVey, this is Detective Constable Danny Green,’ Honor said as she showed Emily her warrant card. ‘We’re detectives with the City of London police. Can we ask you a few questions?’

  Emily nodded. Beside her, Alex nodded also, the movement clearly causing him great discomfort.

  ‘Did either of you see your attacker?’ Honor asked.

  For a moment neither of the Wilsons moved, but then both nodded and a surge of hope lifted Honor’s heart.

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  Alex nodded slowly, his eyes closed, presumably due to sensitivity to the light, and then Emily also nodded.

  ‘Where from?’ Danny Green asked. ‘Do you know his name?’ Emily spoke softly, her voice feeble.

  ‘No, he’s in the pub sometimes. He used to look at me a bit, I thought that he fancied me or something, but he was never any bother.’

  ‘Would you recognise him if we were to build a photo–fit of him?’ Honor asked, and was rewarded with a nod from Emily.

  ‘I’d fucking recognise him,’ Alex uttered, squeezing his eyes shut as he did so. His voice was tight with pain but also anger. ‘He came to the door, asked if we’d lost a ginger cat he’d found outside the apartments. I said no, we don’t own a cat, but then he jumped forward, got his foot behind my ankle and pushed me over. I fell onto my back, and as I came up, he whacked me with something and that was it, game over.’ Alex opened his eyes, squinting. ‘But his hood came off, I saw him clear as day.’

  Honor felt excitement rising within her.

  ‘We have a computer with a database of faces that we can use to build a likeness of your attacker,’ she said. ‘We believe that this man is the same individual responsible for a string of murders over the past few days. Can you help us to identify him, and bring this all to an end?’

  There was no hesitation – both Alex and Emily nodded, a tiny spark of light flickering angrily back into life in Emily’s eyes. Danny turned and waved their fellow officer through, who came to sit between the two patients with his laptop. As he prepared to start, Emily pulled out a couple of images of the man in the pubs that they had captured on CCTV, along with more of him emerging from manholes near the crime scenes.

  ‘Could you both take a look at these and see if anything looks familiar?’ she asked. Emily and Alex both looked at the images, and Alex nodded first.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he snarled, ‘that’s him, that’s the guy. The build, the hoody, everything fits.’

  Emily frowned uncertainly. ‘I don’t know, I only re
ally remember his face, but it does look a bit like him. He always had a hoodie on when I saw him in our local pub.’

  Honor took back the images.

  ‘We’ll be in touch with both of you, and I’m sorry that we couldn’t get to you sooner. We did our best.’

  Emily looked up at her.

  ‘This isn’t on you,’ she croaked. ‘Please just find that bastard, so I can spend the rest of my life watching him rot in prison.’

  Honor turned with Danny and walked out of the private room. As they set off down the corridor outside there was an urgent spring in her step.

  ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘If we’re lucky, he won’t have time to pull off another attack.’ Danny nodded, but was more cautious.

  ‘He’ll be pissed if you’re right about him,’ he warned. ‘That’s another failure, one that will end with him being identified. He’s going to want to flee, to hide.’

  Honor didn’t give a damn where he ran to.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, once we know who he is, he could go and live on the other side of the world and we’d find him eventually. This is where it ends, Danny. He’s running out of time.’

  There was nothing that he could say.

  He sat in front of the television, watching as the news channels reported on the last– second City Police rescue of Emily Wilson from her home on Newark Street, Whitechapel. News crews were all over the property, held at bay by police cordons as forensics teams swarmed the home, seeking evidence with which to track him down.

  They had contaminated the moment. He had seen her die, seen her gasp her last as rats swarmed over and into her defenceless body. She had writhed in agony as the famished rats began to devour her, and then she had gone into a rictus of a kind he had never seen before; eyes wide, mouth agape, features twisted with a new, fascinating kind of pain, just before the light in her eyes had dwindled out like a dying star. The moment had been beautiful, precious, but it had been stained with the sudden appearance of the police and the paramedics, who had rushed in and revived Emily less than a minute later, as he had lain, sated and sweating, on his bed.

  And there was the blood. He could not get the blood out of his head. The rats’ feeding frenzy had been shockingly gory and the moment had been contaminated by it, spoilt, ruined. It just wasn’t the same. His hand had been forced and now his campaign was being derailed, his grand design mutated by the police, by Detective Sergeant Honor bloody McVey.

  Now, he sat naked and watched the news for a moment longer. He had killed the live feed the moment the police had appeared on the footage of Emily’s room, denying them the chance to identify his location, but that was not what he now feared the most. Emily Wilson was alive. He had seen her, and she had seen him. She could describe him, perhaps even identify him. It wasn’t impossible. The police would put together an identikit or whatever they were called these days, and that would jog the memories of bar staff and other people who would have seen him moving around the city. The husband had also seen him when his hood had slipped free. He had hit him hard with the bat, thought that he would be dead, but he too had somehow survived.

  His image would be on every television channel within hours, which left him with very little time to complete his task. Five canonical victims: Sebastian Dukas, Amber Carson and Jayden Nixx were all deceased by his hand. That still left two more to go, with both Emily Wilson and her husband now recovering from their wounds. There would have been five by now, if they’d had the decency to just die and be done with it. He could have stopped, could have finished, could have melted away into history and revelled in the legend that he had created. Now, he was facing exposure and perhaps, though he could not bear to contemplate it, arrest. The only saving–grace was that the use of Emily Wilson’s ordeal had given him the distraction he needed to move freely through the city: the police were undermanned, overworked and their resources always stretched to breaking point. All he had needed was to dangle the right kind of carrot in front of them, and then make his move.

  He looked at the news feeds replaying the recent footage of the rescue, watched Detective Sergeant Honor McVey arrive at the crime scene in dramatic style, an un– marked police vehicle screeching to a halt and detectives tumbling out. He had heard their sirens from his own living room, and had briefly rejoiced in the knowledge that they were surely too late.

  He sat in catatonic silence for a few moments more, contemplating his next move. He had made plans, of course, quite extensive plans both to cover his escape and to obscure his guilt of any crime. But now he still had two more kills to make.

  He stood, cleaned himself up and dressed, then walked downstairs and opened the basement door. A waft of putrefaction from his father’s rotting remains stained the air. He made his way down the steps and looked at the bed, whereupon lay his next victims, bound and naked next to each other, terror in their eyes. For them, the best would be saved to last. These two had to count, for if everything worked out as he had planned, he would vanish into obscurity and nobody would ever know quite how he had done it.

  ‘Your time has come,’ he said to them with a smile.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  DI Harper sat behind her desk and watched DS Colin Hansen closely.

  ‘I don’t like it, and I didn’t want to bring it up, but it seems obvious. The suspect could have been right under our noses the entire time.’ Hansen sighed theatrically. ‘Samir Raaya has not been seen for over twelve hours. He’s been privy to every inch of the investigation. He’s not answering his mobile phone and he’s not answering his front door.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’ Harper asked.

  ‘I’m beginning to fear for his safety,’ Hansen replied. ‘The guy isn’t showing up and he hasn’t called in, and Honor’s so busy chasing the suspect that I fear she’s lost touch with the obvious – Samir Raaya is perfectly placed to be that suspect.’

  DI Harper sat for a moment longer, thinking about it. Samir Raaya was one of the new direct–entrant detectives, part of an initiative to bring new bodies onto the job. The entire MET and City Police forces had suffered terrible manpower attrition due to politicians more concerned with money than public safety. As far as she could recall, Samir had been an electrician before that, marking him out as somebody with the potential skills to have orchestrated the campaign – the CRIS database was littered with evidence of technical skills possessed by whoever was behind the murders.

  ‘He’s also perfectly placed to become a victim,’ Harper countered. ‘His face has been all over the news the past couple of days.’

  ‘Most of the victims have been female.’

  ‘Most, not all. If the killer wanted to get at Honor, it would be the perfect way to do it, abduct a colleague.’

  Hansen surprised her, thinking about that deeply for a moment.

  ‘Leverage,’ he suggested, ‘it could be enough to force Honor into doing something rash. She’s not been herself, not since she was off sick with stress. This case is getting to her, you and I can both see that. The longer this drags on, she’s going to become more of a liability than an asset, and we both saw how things went down at the press briefing. She folded right there and then. If Samir’s become a victim, or a suspect…’

  Harper didn’t let Hansen ride high for long. ‘She’s the best detective we have.’ Hansen’s skin coloured slightly, but he kept his cool.

  ‘All the better to look after her, right?’

  Harper contemplated her options, but now that Hansen’s suspicions had been raised, she could hardly ignore them. If the remote possibility came to be that Samir Raaya, a City detective, was in fact behind the killings, and she had failed to act on the suspicions of another of her detectives…

  ‘Okay, we raid on the pretence of officer safety, not that he’s a suspect.’

  ‘Understood,’ Hansen replied, getting up out of the seat and hurrying for the office door.

  ‘Hansen,’ Harper said as he reached the door, ‘this works both ways. If
Samir is in fact a victim, and we lose valuable time chasing our tails here…’

  Hansen hesitated for a moment.

  ‘If he’s a victim, he’s going to want us out there looking for him. I know I would.’

  ‘This is bullshit.’

  Honor could not conceal her contempt as she fumed alongside Danny. The call had come in a moment ago, directing them to Samir Raaya’s home.

  ‘It is what it is,’ Green said. ‘Hansen’s made his play. We’ll follow the forced entry team and see what there is to find.’

  Danny drove as they headed to Meath Road in Ilford, where Samir owned a one– bedroom flat on a street of terraced houses, most of which had long ago been converted. The forced–entry team were already waiting for them in an adjoining street when they arrived, keeping out of sight of the apartment before the strike.

  Honor got out of the car in time to see DC Hansen directing the forced–entry team assembled on the pavement.

  ‘The owner of the apartment could be the suspect or they could themselves be a victim, we just don’t know yet. The suspect, whoever they are, is cunning and may have anticipated this move, so be on your toes. We don’t know what we’ll find when we go in there, so be prepared for anything, and that includes booby traps or weapons.’

  Hansen turned as she approached, and raised a placatory hand.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, but Samir’s absence is out of character and highly suspicious.’

  Honor fumed, her fists clenched by her side, Green standing alongside her as though poised to stop her from swinging for Hansen.

  ‘This playing of games has to stop,’ she uttered. ‘We don’t have time for it.’

  ‘It’s called police work,’ Hansen snapped. ‘DI Harper signed off on it, and we’ve got uniforms backing us up. Do you want to waste any more time or shall we get on with it?’