The Alice Murders

by James Arklie

  Kline turned back to them. ‘Alan Bleakley told us he hit Bryony, knocked her down the stairs and put her into a coma. Then, later, he switched off her life support and her body was cremated.’

  Artie shrugged. ‘He lied.’

  Kline made a sour face. ‘That’s a crazy lie. He knows we can check everything.’ He paused, then, ‘In fact, do that. Hospital and crematorium records.’

  Kline turned away from them and pointed at Bleakley’s thin-lipped face on the whiteboard. He realised it wasn’t a face he was drawn to. ‘But Bleakley’s dead, so we can’t ask him. There has to be a reason why he was killed.’ Kline’s finger moved to the DNA profile. ‘And that reason could be linked to this.’

  Kline left Angie to be travel agent and told her to book flights and everything to his credit card. He didn’t have the time or the will to spend a day or a week writing up and justifying the request. Possibly to have it refused. He and Angie were going. They were going to start messing with the mind of their killer. End of.

  Kline went to see Andy Johnson, their SOCO specialist, who was tidying up at the end of his day. He told him the story. Andy looked at Kline as if he was stupid.

  ‘Don’t waste your time. That’s contamination.’

  ‘It can’t be. How did a dead Bryony James get to New Zealand and contaminate the scene?’

  Kline watched Andy organising scalpels in a neat row according to size. They were just below a couple of saws. Andy paused, sighed, shrugged. ‘Okay, she was still alive.’

  Kline gave him a look loaded with ‘help me out here’ and Andy said, ‘Okay, there was a photograph of Bryony, yes?’ Kline nodded and Andy shrugged into a simple answer.

  ‘Photograph was stolen from Bryony so had her DNA on it.’ He went back to arranging his scalpels. ‘There. Contamination.’

  Kline swore. Thought for a moment and snatched his mobile from his pocket and called Angie. ‘Check the report for me, Angie, Chesney Arthur, where was that DNA sample found?’

  Kline waited and watched Andy start laying out packets of syringes. On the far side of the room an assistant sprayed a steel slab with detergent and started hosing it down.

  After a minute, Angie said, ‘Swabs from the inside of the thighs.’

  Kline wanted specifics. ‘Does it say, ‘blood’.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Kline hung up. Andy was eyeing him with a half-smile. Kline said. ‘Blood from the inner thighs. No sign of an attack, no lubricants and so on.’

  Andy leant back against a slab like Kline would a desk. He slowly twirled a scalpel between two fingers like a pen. ‘Three options. Still alive. Contamination. Or, at a push, somehow some of her blood got down there. Transfusion bag….’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s your job.’

  Kline said, ‘She was a rare blood group. AB. Would they send blood all that way?’

  Andy shook his head. ‘Not unless it was a real emergency.’ He turned back to rearranging his scalpels and Kline gave him a full minute of heavy silence. Eventually, Andy swung round said, ‘You’re like a bloody Rotweiler. Okay. Okay.’

  He walked across to a desk, pulled a laptop towards him and opened Facetime.

  Kline laughed. ‘Time to call a friend?’

  Andy looked serious. ‘You want a second opinion? Yep. My old professor.’

  Kline felt guilty. ‘Andy. It’s not I don’t believe you, just…’

  ‘That you don’t believe me.’ He smiled at Kline, clearly not too pissed off with him.

  ‘Andy, this is potentially a big clue, a big moment.’

  Facetime linked them with Professor Jim Roper of Leeds University. Late sixties, bald on top, thin grey wisps on the sides, metal rimmed, small lensed spectacles over thoughtful grey eyes. He was eating a homemade sandwich from a plastic container. He was either settling in for a long night or it was left over lunch.

  They exchanged the pleasantries of pupil and mentor. Andy introduced his problem, which was Kline, then explained Kline’s ‘conundrum’. Andy also explained the answers he’d provided.

  Professor Roper nodded. ‘But Detective Kline wants more.’

  Kline leant into view. ‘We are checking again, but I’m certain Bryony James died four years before this sample was taken.’

  ‘When was this sample taken?’

  ‘Late nineties.’

  Professor Roper raised an eyebrow. ‘Specifically, Detective.’

  Kline thought, it was the year before Evie. ‘Ninety-eight.’

  Kline watched him sifting thoughts behind the glasses. There was an intrigued smile on his face, as if this was a nice little challenge at the end of the day. ‘Well, the lack of evidence of sexual attack, but the fact the blood was there, suggests it was put there.’ He pushed his glasses to the top of his head. ‘Which would be unusual and a bit of a strange thing to do.’

  Cogs click in Kline’s head. No, it wouldn’t he thought, not if it was a message. Another clue for the idiot Detectives.

  But Professor Roper hadn’t finished. ‘However, one other thought occurs to me.’

  Beside Kline, Andy took a deep breath and muttered, ‘No way.’

  The Professor made them wait while he thought it through. He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes with knuckles, smoothed his eyebrows with the side of his thumb, made a face which was like someone wincing with pain, polished his glasses, put them back on, refocused on Kline and then shocked Kline to the core with two words.

  ‘Vaginal extraction.’

  Kline rocked back on his heels. Stared at Andy and back to the screen. What on Earth…?

  Professor Roper explained it to Kline slowly and patiently. Kline listened intently and with growing amazement. As he did so, in a calm, yet eerie way, somewhere, deep down inside Kline’s cerebral cortex, he thought he heard some neurons crackle and sparkle excitedly into life. While in the train station, gears engaged and an engine starts to move.

  Because it was always there.

  The one clue they could follow to the end.

  They just had to look hard enough.

  They had just found their killers first mistake.

  *

  Kline left Andy at a speed which left him open mouthed and wanting to know more. Kline promised a beer, ‘sometime soon’. He got to his car, called Southampton General and got through to the consultant surgeon by using threats. The consultant complained that he was just about to leave. Kline told him to stay put, forcefully. He didn’t quite say, ‘or else’, but it was right there in his voice.

  Angie met Kline at the front entrance. Kline rushed her through busy corridors to the consulting rooms, giving her a breathless overview as they dodged nurses, doctors, patients in wheelchairs and some stretched out on trolleys. She only made one comment, her voice disbelieving.

  ‘You serious. Surgeons do that?’

  ‘They do. I don’t know what it means, Angie, but if we assume the blood was planted as a clue which we’ve now solved. It gives a lead to the technique. Now we have to see where this leads us.’

  This is the game the killer plays and until now, they’d discovered a clue, opened it up, got to the next level, but then hit another wall they couldn’t get over or round. This time they had a chance.

  The consultant sat opposite them. Badge on a lapel labelled him as Mr William Evans. He was about forty, grey suit, white shirt, blue tie, matching blue eyes, brown hair and looking knackered.

  ‘Happy to help, but I’ve been here since five am and…’

  Kline went straight at it. ‘Vaginal extraction.’

  He gave Kline a half-laugh of shocked amazement and looked between them. ‘Now that, I wasn’t expecting.’ Neither smiled back. He got the message and loosened his tie and sat back.

  ‘Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery. NOTES for short. Developed back in the late nineties and now commonplace. Routine. Sounds gruesome to the layman, but it’s a technique for extracting tissue and organs, whole or part, through the natural orific
es of the body. Mouth, anus, vagina, penis.’

  They both stared, he shrugged as if it was nothing. Angie stirred uncomfortably on her chair and Kline tried not to think about someone pulling part of him out of his backside. Thank God for anaesthetics.

  Mr Evans spread his hands to them as if they were students on a ward round with him. ‘It’s quicker, no scarring because there is no external surgery, less risk of infection and the patient can leave same day or next. Even go straight back to work.’

  Kline swallowed and asked. ‘When is it used?’

  ‘Anytime it’s feasible. Removing a gall bladder, appendix, prostate, part of the colon, suspicious growth for analysis...’ They continued to look at him, wanting more. He shook his head like it was all nothing.

  ‘Organs and tissues for transplant, especially if the donor is a living relative because they can get on with their lives immediately…’

  Kline asked, ‘You do it here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Back in the 90’s, what about then?’

  He made a so-so face. ‘It was still being developed. The tools to do it were still being designed.’

  Kline forced the question again. ‘Possible though?’

  He nodded. ‘In skilled hands, yes.’

  Kline could sense Mr Evans was getting cagey, concerned about where this was going.

  ‘Can I ask….?’

  Kline shook his head, gave him the polite, non-committal policeman smile he’d learnt over the years. ‘No. You can’t.’

  Mr Evans absorbed that then volunteered the information Kline wanted before he asked. Kline thought it was probably to get rid of him.

  ‘You should go and talk to Johnny Batten. He was the consultant surgeon here throughout the nineties.’

  *

  So, they did. Disturbing his six pm gin and tonic and making his wife delay cooking his evening meal.

  He sat in a huge, brown-leather, lazy boy wide enough for two. Sharp nose, sharp eyes and a shock of white hair that was curling at the collar and needed a trim round the ears.

  ‘No. We didn’t use that procedure until the mid-2000s. Needed training. Good procedure, but complex and the thinking of our Board, under my advice to be honest, was let someone else develop it as a routine procedure first.’

  Kline pressed. ‘Make the mistakes, you mean?’

  ‘Precisely. Death on the table is a mess of paperwork and leads to crap statistics which affects funding. I do remember that Richard Brownlee was keen on it. He practiced on more than a few cadavers with a nod and a wink and bottle of whisky to the morgue. I heard he also did a bit on road-kill. Dogs.’

  Kline frowned and stuttered into, ‘Was that…is that, ethical?’

  It was like something from Burke and Hare, murdering and selling their cadavers to Robert Knox for dissection in his lectures.

  ‘What, the dogs or the cadavers?’

  Kline shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Either. Both.’

  Johnny Batten laughed. ‘We’re surgeons, Detective Kline. Every day, for forty years, I took a scalpel to a body and sliced it open. I had my hands inside its warmth, moving the intestines round, taking out part of a colon, a stomach, a kidney. Or stitching something in.’ He smiled and took a sip from his drink. Kline said thanks to God it wasn’t a Bloody Mary.

  ‘It’s what we do, Detective. And it takes a lot of skill.’

  ‘Why did you let him practice in that way?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just knew of it.’ He looked at his drink and swirled the ice. It tinkled against the crystal tumbler.

  ‘What you also have to understand is that surgery is constantly evolving, experimenting, trying to find better, faster, easier ways to operate and save lives. Get them in, patch them up, move them out. That’s the pressure on the NHS. And that was Brownlee to a tee. He was always pushing the boundaries. Submitting papers to the Royal College for publication.’

  ‘He was good then?’

  Johnny Batten’s wife brought him some more ice and dropped it into his drink. She added glug from a bottle of Gordons. It was as though the tinkling in the glass had been the ringing of a drinks bell.

  Batten gave his wife a wink and smile of thanks that tore through Kline. ‘He was very good, but he was also an arrogant so and so. Always had to be the best and to be right to the point of being annoying.’ He took a sip of his refreshed drink. ‘Never made a mistake though. I’ll give him that. Not in the five years I worked with him.’

  Kline glanced at Angie, then back. ‘I have to ask this. Going back to ninety-eight, do you think it’s possible for one man to have carried out this operation on the floor of an apartment, with limited time, space, assistance and equipment.’

  Johnny Batten frowned at Kline, making a link between the question and Brownlee and wondering what was going on. ‘What’s this all about?’

  Kline shook his head. ‘Please answer the question.’

  Johnny Batten tilted his head, shaking it emphatically. ‘No, impossible. It would have been butchery. Like I said, it was in its infancy.’ He was about to carry on, then stopped.

  Kline encouraged him. ‘Anything you have to say could really help us in a very nasty investigation.’

  Johnny Batten took a larger mouthful of his gin and tonic and swallowed. ‘You’re asking about removing organs or tissue?’ Kline nodded. ‘Well, if I was on my own, in the field and it didn’t matter if the person lived or died, I would just dive straight in.’

  Kline raised his eyebrows. ‘Dive….?’

  ‘Abdomen. Just open it up, expose all the organs. You have a smorgasbord of choice.’

  Christ, thought Kline, just as the killer had done for Audrey Waters. He wondered if surgeons ever had a light-hearted conversation, then he realised he’d just had one.

  Batten added, ‘The heart’s a different matter because of the ribs, but what you do there is…’

  Kline heard Angie exhale loudly beside him and changed tack. Surgeons love cutting people open. ‘Do you know where I can find Richard Brownlee?”

  Johnny Batten shook his head. ‘No idea. He took off to pursue fame. Christmas ’94, I think. Check with HR.’

  Kline glanced at Angie, sensing they could be on the edge of the breakthrough they needed. He cleared his throat to take the tension out of his voice. ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Abroad. Somewhere he could get away with more experimentation. Show off and be adored. His parting phrase was, ‘Where he could get a live one on the table and practice’.’

  Kline felt Angie move beside him, she sensed it. Kline leant forward, elbows on knees.

  ‘Abroad where? Australia? New Zealand?’ He held his breath.

  ‘No. No. Not that far. Europe. Athens. New hospital. Private.’

  Five minutes later, Kline pulled out of Johnny Batten’s drive. Angie’s voice carried an edge of excitement.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Kline calmed himself. This was just the start but admitted, ‘I think we’re getting closer. Call Artie and tell him to stay in the office. I want a meeting.’

  Then Kline turned and glanced at Charlie on the back seat. He looked straight ahead at the road but saw an image of Jenny and said silently. ‘Really close.’

  *

  They had their chairs in a triangle beneath the white board. It was seven pm and the office was half-empty, but Kline still kept his voice low.

  ‘We have to go through our options here. First, are we agreed this is not contamination? Blood was taken from the inner thigh, analysed and it belonged to Bryony.’ Kline looked at each in turn and they nodded.

  ‘Good. Second, could Bryony still be alive or, at least, have been alive then?’

  Kline looked at Artie, who shook his head. ‘No. I have seen the death certificate properly signed off. Not by Bleakley or Brownlee, in case you’re wondering. I was also emailed a copy of the records at the crematorium certifying her cremation. All good.’

  Kline was nodding. ‘Okay, discounting a consp
iracy theory, such as it was never Bryony in a coma in the bed, we move on to the next question; did Brownlee kill Chesney Arthur deliberately so that he could use her for some kind of experimental surgery? Take that a step further and we can ask, is that the reason for all the ALICE murders?’

  Angie shifted uncomfortably. ‘You’re suggesting they were killed and then practiced on and because it was internal and no proper autopsy carried out, it was missed?’

  Kline shrugged. ‘I’m just throwing it out there. Johnny Batten said Brownlee liked to practice.’ He paused. ‘Personally, I don’t think so. Batten said it would be butchery. The signs would be obvious.’

  Artie added. ‘And anyway, it doesn’t make sense because that’s Bryony’s blood, not Chesney’s.’

  Kline agreed. ‘Correct and that takes us to what I think this is.’ He sat back, hands on knees. ‘Another message.’

  Angie gave a tiny shake of her head. ‘But it’s a second message. There was already a photograph of Bryony covering Chesney’s pubic region. Why put a second message there giving us the same information?’

  Kline was smiling. ‘It’s either intentional, or it’s his first mistake. All his clues take us down a path, but we keep getting blocked by…’ He shook his head, searching for the right word, then said, ‘Gates. If we can open the gate we get to move on. This is part of his game.’

  Angie interrupted. ‘Like the album covers. Alice Cooper was the first gate, Bowie was on the other side.’

  Kline nodded. ‘Exactly, but on others we’ve got so far and then can’t find the latch to open the gate.’

  Kline leant forward. ‘But look where this clue is taking us. Back in ninety-eight just getting a DNA profile was a result. Problem was, there was no international cross-pollination. The New Zealand police had a DNA profile, they knew it was a woman from the profile, but she could have come from somewhere in New Zealand or any other country in the world. Jane Doe, unknown.’

  Artie was nodding his battered head. ‘And no one’s looking for Bryony anyway. She’s dead and cremated. All above board.’