The Alice Murders

by James Arklie

  ‘They didn’t give their consent?’

  Nick shook his head. ‘They didn’t, but it wasn’t that, they were worried the Church wouldn’t allow her a proper burial.’

  ‘But they did?’

  ‘Of course. I went with them to the priest and he said that the Church had no objection, provided the organs or tissues are used to better human life.’

  Angie frowned at the phrase. Nick explained, ‘They don’t want them used for scientific research is how I interpret that.’

  Michaelis joined four lanes of traffic and headed across Athens for the airport. Angie called Kline and waited for it to go to voicemail. She rushed through what she’d discovered, her voice low, breathy and excited. At the airport she would organise it into a coherent report and send it by email.

  She eased back into her seat, switched on and then paused the voice recorder on her phone. She let her thoughts wander.

  Nurse Despina’s recollection was that Richard Brownlee had arrived on a one-year working and teaching sabbatical. His wife, Debs, had arrived a while later. Sadly, she was in a coma following an accident. Despina didn’t know what kind of accident. Nor could she be sure of the exact date of arrival. And, yes, she was in a coma when she arrived. And anyway, why did it matter? Angie had sensed the annoyance growing in her voice. Maybe Despina had fallen for Brownlee as well.

  Brownlee had lived in rooms in an Annex at the back of the hospital. Deborah was in a private room within the hospital because of the monitoring, support and equipment she needed day to day.

  Angie tried to dive deeper into Brownlee, but Despina just continued to speak about him as if he was a God. Her eyes would drift from focus to revisit adoring memories. ‘He spent every second he could with her, but she was non-responsive. He operated on her a couple of times. I think to relieve pressure on the brain. He loved her so deeply. It was so very special.’

  Angie tapped the record button on her phone, searched for the correct phrase, but not finding it said, ‘Boss, this is like….rubbish. What we have is Richard Brownlee leaving Southampton as a star surgeon in search of greater stardom. Nothing suspicious about that.

  ‘Following closely behind is Sam Little with Deborah Wilcox. We don’t know what state she was in when she left with him and I don’t think we’ll ever know. But all Little does is deliver Deborah to Brownlee. That makes it an abduction, not an elopement. So why and was it an abduction to order?’ She tapped the pause button, thought for a couple of seconds and tapped it back live.

  ‘Little is then found dead. Immediate question, was he killed by Brownlee? We now have to assume they knew one another.

  ‘Deborah then turns up in full view, but as Brownlee’s wife. What’s that about? It’s an open lie, except she’s conveniently in an unresponsive coma, hidden away in a private room, where Brownlee can control who will get to see her. When, where and how did she fall into a coma?’ She tapped pause.

  Shit, thought Angie. At that time, no one was looking for Deborah in Greece and back in Southampton, she just became a missing person.

  She felt emotion rise up inside her and forced it down. This was Carly, this was her daughter. Snatched, whisked away. An innocent baby given a new identity in her new destination. Back home becoming an abducted, missing person.

  Debbie Wilcox and Carly Tyler. Two statistics. Just two more women who disappeared from the face of the Earth.

  Angie breathed, refocused, tapped. ‘Then while Debbie is shut away in her coma, Brownlee commits the first murder in the ALICE sequence. Anastasia Pappas.’ She sighed without pausing the recording.

  ‘I’m not getting it, boss. Is he our man? There are some clear links here, and it all fits with the abduction of Debbie Wilcox. But Anastasia Pappas? She’s the odd one out. Why would he go and kill her? And what did he want with Deborah Wilcox and how come she’s suddenly had an ‘accident’ and is in a coma?’

  Christ, she thought, this information is just making it more confusing. She paused the recording as Michaelis leant back and told her the airport was coming up. She told him she wanted KLM for a flight to Paris and went back to finishing her recording.

  ‘But the good news is, boss. I’ve got his next stop for you. And there’s a pattern starting already. He’s keeping himself away from the mainstream hospitals. St. Bart’s Private Clinic, in the Richmond area of Sydney.’

  *

  Artie collected the search warrant from the desk sergeant on reception. It gave him full access to the hospital records of Bryony James. He’d dressed himself in smarter jeans, green polo shirt and brown shoes and used his mountain bike to get to the Blood Donor Centre on Coxford Road. He couldn’t drive and because of his strong feelings about global pollution, had already decided that he’d never learn.

  Inside the Centre, he showed his warrant card at reception and was led to a small interview room. He sat there, nervous at his first ever interview outing as a police officer, and desperate not to screw up.

  Five minutes later, he was joined by a male in his fifties who introduced himself as John Symonds. He blinked at Artie’s face, smiled pleasantly, held out a hand, ignored the cuts, the black eye and the split lip and said, ‘So it’s true what my wife tells me, I am getting older because you’re definitely too young.’

  Artie placed the search warrant on the table and John glanced through it, handed it back and opened a laptop he’d brought into the room. ‘You’ll have heard this before, but back then the records were on a different system. But before they transferred them across they did data dump as backup, so somewhere in this little beauty…..’

  Artie waited while John tapped and scrolled, then asked for the spelling of Bryony’s name for his search. Ten seconds later Artie watched John’s eyes work their way to and fro on the screen.

  ‘Yep, there you go, young man.’ He swivelled the laptop. ‘You can see she gave blood regularly in the early nineties. Good job too. AB is rare. We need all we can get.’

  Artie was scanning the screen. ‘But she stopped coming in ninety-four?’ He looked up.

  ‘Am I reading that correctly?’

  John dragged the laptop back round to him. Squinted. ‘Yep. Shame.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  John shook his head. ‘No. Being a blood donor is totally voluntary. If you don’t want to donate, we can’t force you.’

  Artie asked. ‘You test all the blood, don’t you? HIV and so on?’

  ‘Every time.’

  ‘Anything unusual with Bryony’s?’

  John looked at the screen again. ‘Nothing recorded but makes no difference. Every donation is tested.’

  Artie jotted a note, then asked. ‘How long does blood keep? Will you still have any of Bryony’s?’

  John let out a small laugh and shook his head. ‘Bit more complicated than that. The red cells can be stored in the fridge for forty-two days max. The platelets we keep at room temperature in a machine called an agitator for up to four, maybe five days. While the plasma and the cryo are frozen and stored in freezers for up to a year.’

  Artie frowned. ‘Cryo?’

  John apologised. ‘Sorry, terminology. Short for cryoprecipate. Put simply it’s part of the blood plasma that is rich in blood clotting factors. Invaluable for haemophiliacs.’

  Artie scratched the end of his pen against his scalp. This was all new to him and he didn’t want miss asking the important question. ‘So, twenty-six years on, no blood?’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘What about four maybe five years, can you store it that long?’

  ‘Not to use, but you can if you add some glycerol and put it into a sealed container and store that in liquid nitrogen.’

  ‘Liquid…

  ‘Nitrogen. Minus 196 degrees C. Over that amount of time critical elements denature, so it can’t be used for transfusions. But I’ve read research papers that do store it and thaw it.’

  Artie sought clarification. ‘If someone took blood for research, they would store i
t that way?’

  John nodded. ‘Yep. Say you were looking for the changes in the levels of a hormone over time in response to some treatment. A researcher can take the samples and keep them for future analysis.’

  ‘What if you were monitoring the levels of a drug in someone’s system?’

  ‘Yep. Same.’

  Artie thought of Bryony James lying in a coma in a hospital bed and the two men who had easy access to her.

  Artie took printed copies of Bryony’s details with him and scribbled his name and number on a sheet from his notepad. He handed it to John Symond’s. ‘In case anything else comes to mind.’

  Artie retrieved his bike and headed for the main hospital and the administration department where he was told he couldn’t see Bryony’s records. The woman was mid-twenties, flustered, with a stack of brown folders under one arm and clearly wanted and needed to be somewhere else. Her name was Natallie, ‘and that’s with two ‘l’s’.

  ‘Why? This warrant gives me the authority.’

  Natallie tried to move passed him to the door. Raised her eyebrows when Artie wouldn’t move. Sighed when he still didn’t move and said, ‘Because we only keep patient records for a maximum of ten years. Data protection and all that.’

  She tilted her head to one side to say, ‘now will you let me through?’. Artie stood his ground. ‘That’s paper. What about digitally?’ He thought of the comment John Symond’s made about changing systems.

  ‘I’m going back twenty-six years. I bet your computer system has changed in that time?’

  He got a nod and she theatrically dropped her head to one side and filled her face with a pained expression. ‘Tell me about it. Ten years ago and it was one of the first jobs I had here. All the data was corrupted during the transfer, so we had to go to the back up and correct and check everything manually. Shit job. Nearly left. Now can I…’

  ‘What happened to the back up? If the transfer failed once, I bet the back up was kept on a ‘just in case’ basis.’

  Natallie looked at him accusingly for being smart, dropped the files to a desk beside her and went and retrieved a telephone directory. She flicked through the yellow pages, picked up a pen and circled an entry. ‘There. Arcadia IT Solutions. NHS outsourced to them. If anyone’s got it, they have.’

  She retrieved her files, raised her eyebrows again and said. ‘Now, can I…?

  Artie stepped to one side, checked the address, which was out near the Mount Pleasant Industrial Estate, went and retrieved his bike and pedalled off. Somewhere along the way, he decided he was really quite enjoying himself.

  One hour later, he was sitting at the back of an office full of technical geeks plugging wires in and out of grey boxes, writing programs on screens that were vertical rather than horizontal and looking at lines of script on other screens that made no sense at all.

  A senior manager passed Artie on to Jamie. He was the same age as Artie and had spent his entire youth in his bedroom playing on his laptop and learning how it all worked. He waved an arm round the room. ‘Same as all the guys and girls in here. It’s an addiction.’

  His fingers flew across the keyboard. He put on a mock, deep voice. ‘Down, down, deeper and down into the dark belly of the archives.’ Then he sat back as something started loading and said in a lighter voice. ‘This will take a minute while it retrieves the data. Is this a nice juicy murder or something?’

  Artie nodded. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘How long you been a cop?’

  ‘Three months.’

  Jamie nodded at Artie’s face. ‘That’s some introduction. Hope you got the guy in the back of police van and gave him a couple in return.’

  Artie smiled, wondering at the lingering perception of the way the police worked.

  ‘Couldn’t say.’ Then pointed at the screen as something changed.

  Jamie looked. ‘That’s our baby. The eagle has landed.’

  His fingers started flying again. Then he asked, ‘Which year and who are you looking for?

  ‘Ninety-four. Bryony James.’

  It took thirty seconds of pencil tapping and chair swivelling until the front cover of her records appeared.

  Jamie peered at the details. ‘Oh look, shit, she died. Young too.’ He sensed Artie’s annoyance, stood and raised his hands defensively. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Just use the arrows to scroll through. Don’t worry, it’s read only. You can’t delete anything.’

  Artie started reading from the day of Bryony’s arrival, trying to pull key words he understood from the medical terminology. Coma. Doctors who attended to her. Daily reports of progress. Artie got to the third month and was starting to wonder if they’d got this right, when he spotted the first mention of Robert Brownlee. It was an entry made by a nurse. She’d made a note that when she went to check on Bryony, Mr Brownlee had been in attendance.

  A few weeks later there was another note that he had been there. Artie guessed that the nurses assumed that a consultant in attendance meant he was monitoring the progress of the patient and his presence needed to be recorded. Artie wondered if Brownlee knew. Probably, because he would have been looking at the notes clipped to her bed.

  Then Artie got excited. Month five and a nurse had recorded that Mr Brownlee had requested a sample of blood be taken every morning. It was to be sent to the pathology lab for general analysis of iron and vitamin levels. It suggested Brownlee had some concerns about them. Or did he just want to collect some of her blood?

  Artie read to the date of her death and the decision to remove life support. He waved Jamie back over.

  ‘I need the records from the pathology lab from this date onwards.’ Artie gave him the date of Bryony’s death.

  This took longer and Artie went and bought himself coffee and a sandwich from a van across the road. When he got back the results were on the screen. Jamie was intrigued, but Artie’s stare had him backing away with a smile and said, ‘Maybe I should go and work in IT for the police. It looks far more interesting.’

  Artie sipped at the remains of his coffee. The cryogenic storage unit had a number, two-eight-seven. Entries showed vials that had been entered for storage, with a date, a name, the contents, the doctors name and a number. Thirty vials had been stored for Bryony James, one each day for a month. The doctor was named as Brownlee.

  Artie could feel his excitement rising. Brownlee had taken her blood, but using the cover of the hospital system. Also, it should still be there. Except…

  Artie put his coffee down and scrolled right on the screen. There was another column headed, ‘Withdrawls’. All of Bryony’s vials had been withdrawn by Brownlee on December 5th 1994.

  Artie sat back, frowning at the screen, seeing the pattern, seeing the clear link between Richard Brownlee and Bryony James. He visited her regularly; instructed that bloods be taken for analysis; then leaves the Hospital and takes the blood with him. Effectively, stealing it.

  Why would Brownlee do that? And surely, it would only last forty-odd days and that was if it was kept in a fridge. They needed this blood to be kept for five years so that they could link Brownlee to Chesney Arthur.

  Artie called John Symonds. ‘If I wanted to keep sample vials of blood for five years and take it abroad somewhere, how would I do that?’

  John’s answer was simple. ‘Easy, young man, small travel container filled with liquid nitrogen. Pop them in there and at your destination, either keep that topped up or transfer them across to a larger storage unit.’

  Artie let a smile cross his face, tugging at his wounds. This is what it’s like to be a detective, he thought. What a great feeling.

  *

  Kline landed in Sydney at nine am local time and took the baton seamlessly from Angie like a runner in a four by four hundred relay. It was a twelve-hour flip of his body clock and he felt tired, but not tired. The timing of his flight meant he was running with the natural biorhythms of his body, but he assumed there would be a hit somewhere down the line.

&n
bsp; He got himself into a taxi and on the road to the Private Clinic. Before leaving the UK Kline had called Jared Jarvis, the Sydney detective who’d handled the investigation. Kline wanted to be in and out of Sydney as fast as he could. It was part of his plan to keep the killer off-balance, stay one step ahead and maintain the advantage. Jared agreed to arrange everything as soon as Kline gave him the details of what he required. Contact on arrival was agreed, so on landing Kline sent a text with details of the Clinic and they arranged to meet there sometime after ten am.

  Kline settled in the back of the taxi. First, he replayed Angie’s voicemail, then listened again to her voice recording and, finally, re-read her email. The first meeting had struck gold. Brownlee had been the lead that had changed the direction of the investigation. Now they had some impetus. Now they could use a name and not the generic, ‘killer’.

  He smiled to himself, there was a satisfaction in hearing the excitement in Angie’s voice. He felt it inside as well. This was the first time in a couple of years they had their teeth into a real case.

  Next, Kline read the text from Artie. The report was on its way, it said, but confirmed Brownlee had collected Bryony’s blood and could easily have taken it with him. This boy, has a future in the force, thought Kline.

  Kline sent Angie a text – ‘The puffa train is starting to puff’. He copied in Artie as well. Crack this case, he thought, and one day, when those two are DI’s, they’ll be telling the same story to their juniors.

  The impetus had created openings and but also complexity. Suddenly, there was a lot to unpick and the question remained; was it still too soon to consider Richard Brownlee as their killer? Angie was correct, Anastasia Pappas didn’t fit in with all of Brownlee’s other actions

  Kline decided the best thing was to run with it. He was about to start dictating some thoughts and ideas when Angie called.

  ‘Like it. Puffa train. Going for the last laugh are we, boss? Choo-choo.’