BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS

by Ian C. P. Irvine

  .

  As he quickly scanned the reports, he memorised the important and most salient points. He would, as a matter of course sometime in the next few days, distil the information further and add it to their database in the correct fashion.

  For now, a cursory glance at the findings was all that Nic had time for and actually needed.

  The information he was reading just added to the growing body of evidence which Nic was trying to assimilate.

  He was just scanning the last report, when one small detail caught his eye.

  It was concerning the case of a man, a young man, who had received a double kidney transplant, and whose blood work and recovery was off the charts. Nic noted that he would make an incredible case study for some medical journal one day.

  For now, though, there was one fact about this case that immediately rang an alarm bell in Nic's mind.

  His name, location, and personal details had all been kept secret, as was expected and was the correct procedure. However, doctors were allowed to state and provide a patient's occupation, as day-to-day activity and exposure to external stimuli could materially affect the physiology and response of a patient.

  In this case however, in the third column, where many patients details said 'teacher' or 'manager' or 'builder', the occupation noted for Patient 'X' was 'Journalist/Reporter'.

  Nic White sat back in his chair.

  A little voice in the back of his mind said two words:

  "Oh,...shit!"

  Chapter Thirty Six

  .

  .

  Knutsford

  England

  March 4th

  6.15 p.m.

  .

  .

  The young woman police officer knocked on the white door, and then stepped backwards to stand beside her colleague, her hat held respectfully between two hands across her lower abdomen.

  This was her least favourite duty.

  The door opened and a young lady stepped forward into the door, the initial look of surprise that had appeared on her face, quickly disappearing as recognition took its place.

  "Miss Evans?" The police officer asked, and then without waiting for a reply. "May we come in?"

  .

  Carolina sat by herself on a chair, the two police officers across from her on the sofa. She had literally just got back from dropping little Sam off for the evening with her friend, when she had heard the knock at the door.

  "Miss Evans, as you know in February you reported a missing person. Over the past month we have kept you up to date with our enquiries, which until yesterday had not yet yielded any results. Yesterday a new line of enquiry that we initiated a few weeks ago has resulted in some news. Unfortunately, it is our sad duty to inform you that a body was found in the Cuillins Mountains in Scotland in September. No formal identification has yet taken place of the body, although when the deceased was found, he was carrying a wallet that contained a few cards that shared the same surname as the man you have reported missing... a Mr Gary Roberts? I would stress that at this time no formal identification has taken place on the body. It was also because no formal identification has yet taken place for the gentleman, that our usual lines of enquiry did not initially connect the body with our investigation."

  "However a kidney donor card was found in the wallet of the deceased, and following usual and accepted procedures, the kidneys were removed from the body and donated to a recipient. It was through the hospital records that a response to our enquiry was generated..."

  It was all a bit too much for Carolina to take in. She slumped back into her chair and started to cry.

  "Would you like a cup of tea?" the young female police officer asked, genuine concern showing in her voice.

  "No, I'm fine," Carolina replied, immediately trying to pull herself together. She hated public shows of emotion: she would grieve later, in private.

  "I would like to emphasise," the woman police officer continued, "...that at this time, the body has not yet been formally identified, and Roberts is quite a common surname. There is every possibility that the deceased is not the gentleman that you reported missing."

  "How did he die?" Carolina asked. "Can you tell me?"

  "It would appear that the deceased died in a climbing accident. Some other climbers saw him fall, and were very quickly on the scene. He fell about fifteen meters. He broke his back in the fall and received severe blows to the head. He was still breathing when the other climbers reached him. He was airlifted by helicopter to the nearest hospital but died shortly after."

  The police officer paused.

  "Carolina, we were wondering if you would be able to help formally identify the body?"

  "What...me? How?"

  "By going to the mortuary and looking at the deceased and confirming whether or not it is the gentleman that you reported missing?"

  "Can no one else? The mother or father?"

  "Unfortunately the parents of the Mr Roberts that you have reported missing are both very elderly, and the mother is ill. They live in New Zealand, and the father is not able to leave the mother at this time. He is hoping to come over as soon as he can, but that may not be for a while, if at all. They haven't spoken to their son for over eight months, but the father said that they weren't very close."

  Carolina flinched, tears once again streaming down her cheeks.

  "Gary was a Kiwi...a New Zealander...from Christ Church on the South Island. He was travelling the world... He didn't talk much about his parents..." She sobbed.

  The female police officer offered her a paper hanky. Carolina took it.

  "How come you haven't managed to get anyone else to identify him yet?"

  "The police in Scotland who are handling the case tried to track him down, but any paper work they could find online or anywhere else was registered to another address. Somewhere in London...the police in London visited his address but he had moved on, and no one there knew him. It was a dead end...You were the first person to come forward and make enquiries, so at the moment you are the only person we know who knew the deceased."

  "He lived in London last year...I think...before he came here. I remember him saying that he came to try and get away from the big city...to find somewhere typically English." Carolina looked up at the male police officer.

  "Photographs? Can you not send some photographs over to the parents for them to identify?"

  "I believe that was already done, but was not conclusive. You see, the upper part of the body was quite badly damaged, and a facial recognition was not possible via photographic means. We really need someone to be there on site. Apparently the body has a few distinguishing marks that the parents did not know anything about, but our colleagues in Scotland believe a girlfriend may be aware of? I believe that you said in your initial report that you and Mr Roberts had been together for a while?"

  "Yes, we were a couple, although not for long, and we had split up a month before he went missing." She replied. "So, if I do agree to identify him, where is Gary now?"

  "The body of the deceased is in the Shetland Isles in Scotland. Actually, it's in the main hospital in the Shetlands, in the Gilbert Bain Hospital in the town of Lerwick."

  "How on earth would I get there? I have a son, and I can't leave work...in fact I have to be at work in ten minutes time!"

  "If you agree to help, then I will see what we can arrange. We could either try to arrange transport for you, there and back. Or, perhaps we can try and get an officer to film the body for you in as much detail as possible,...and we could let you view the film down at the police station. Could you help us, Miss Evans?"

  Carolina nodded. "Possibly...if I have to go to the Shetlands, it would depend on how long I would have to be away for...I'd prefer to see it on film...But what on earth was he doing in the Shetlands?" Carolina asked aloud, "Trying to get away from it all? Oh shit...I hope he didn't do anything really stupid because of me!"

  The two police officers said nothing. That was not a question
they could answer.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  .

  .

  Lochend, Edinburgh

  Tuesday Morning

  March 5th

  .

  .

  Dieter, the young German exchange student in Classifieds, had been busy. After a few nice words, a warm and gentle hand placed on his shoulder and a few smiles from Susie, the young student had spent his Monday evening on the web doing a ton of research on Room 326.

  He had typed up copious notes, and translated some of the newspaper articles word-for-word. On Tuesday morning he had handed them to Susie in the office, and in return had received a kiss on the cheek. He had turned red.

  By Tuesday lunchtime, after Susie had scanned them herself, they had been couriered over to Peter in his flat.

  Peter had read everything standing in the hallway, ripping open the large envelope the moment he had signed for it.

  After reading every word once, he made himself a cup of strong tea, moved through to his sofa, sat down and read them all again.

  The murder in Zermatt had been particularly gruesome. The young woman in room 326 had been found naked on her bed, her throat cut, and her hands tied behind her back.

  According to the 'Zermatt Abend Zeitung', a chambermaid had been first on the scene. On the day the guest was meant to check out, she went to clean and prepare the room after the departure time. The male guest to whom the room was registered had not yet checked out, and she had knocked, but when there was no reply, she had opened the door to discover a female body on the bed and a room covered in blood: the walls, the carpets, the furniture. The police in Zermatt had never seen anything like it. Some of the detectives that came down from Berne also commented that it was one of the most brutal murders they had ever seen.

  Tests showed that the woman had had sex several times before she was murdered, but no DNA was found, and the murderer had used a condom, which he had then taken with him when he left.

  The room had been registered to a man whose identity subsequently turned out to be false, with the guest travelling under a false passport.

  The body had been lying on the bed for two days before it was found, and although the police did some searches at the train and bus stations, and made all the usual enquiries, nobody was ever arrested. Most likely the murderer had left immediately, and had managed to travel from Zermatt down to Täsch by train before picking up his car and making good his escape. Tapes from surveillance cameras in the train stations in Zermatt and Täsch had not shown anyone suspicious. The trail soon went dead.

  One theory was given that the killer may even have climbed out of Zermatt, going up the Matterhorn on one side, and going down on the other, into another valley and another country, thus evading any possible police trap in Zermatt.

  Unlikely, but for a few days it had caught the public's attention, before that avenue of thought also went cold.

  The body of the woman found in Room 326 was never formally identified and the murder in Zermatt went down as one of Switzerland’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

  After reading it all, there was one r been caught.

  --------------------

  .

  Peter's dreams started again two days later. New dreams. New visions. New terrors that woke him up in a cold sweat. Scared. Shaking. Trying to interpret what he had seen.

  They made little sense. The dreams that began to disturb Peter at night time were random pictures or visions that came and went, sometimes reappearing a couple of times, but mostly popping up quickly and then disappearing. There were voices too. Sometimes a voice accompanied a picture or a sequence of moving images, like a snippet from a movie. Other times his mind's eye would be completely blank, but he could hear a voice, or voices. Like a conversation that was being played back to him in a dark, black, empty room.

  The voices were not always comprehensible. Sometimes they were gibberish, sounds or words that came from nowhere and then returned to nowhere, and conveyed no meaning.

  Some sounds reoccurred regularly, so much so that Peter began to recognise the words or sounds as they reoccurred.

  The disturbances in Peter's mind...Peter decided not to call them dreams, because they were so different...at first started to occur only once or twice a night, each time lasting for what seemed like ages, but which was realistically only for five or ten minutes. But over the next few weeks their frequency would increase.

  When the dreams left him, he slept deeply. Perhaps more deeply than he had done before. As Peter got used to the experiences, and realised that they brought with them no harm to himself, he learned to relax, let the sequences of visions and pictures flash though his mind and take their course, and then fall instantly into a deeper sleep once they had passed. Sometimes he did not wake between the sequences and slept deeply. In the morning he would wake up feeling refreshed, but with memories from the night before.

  Twice he went to his doctor, and once he called Dr Jamieson, but each time he was told it was most likely caused by the chemical changes within his body or were an effect of the powerful immunosuppressant's that he was taking.

  "Don't worry. With time, they will go away."

  But they didn't.

  --------------------

  .

  Several weeks later, a couple of the dream sequences became longer. More graphic. More violent.

  And when Peter woke up in the morning he started to wash his hands to remove the blood that was never there.

  There was one scene in particular that started to become more defined. More identifiable. Clearer.

  It was as if Peter's subconscious was running a massive computer program that was trying to assemble a million different pieces of a jigsaw. It was trying to assemble the random pieces into some order or sequence that made sense: striving to produce some order from the chaos.

  On the 16th of April, at approximately 3.25 a.m. in the morning, it struck 'bingo'. 'Full House'. Eureka!

  For three whole minutes Peter's subconscious produced a dream sequence that he would never forget.

  At 3.27 a.m, Peter awoke, ran to the bathroom, vomited, and then fainted.

  When he came to at 4.05 a.m. he cleaned his teeth, showered, made himself a cup of tea, and then sat down at his dining table in the other room, and began to write down exactly what he had seen.

  He could remember it all.

  .

  After he had finished recording it, Peter read it back to himself, over and over again.

  At 5.30 a.m. he asked himself a question for the first time, that until then he had not yet considered.

  It was a simple question, but one which chilled him to the core.

  .

  "Is this just a dream?"

  .

  He wrote the question down on the paper, returned to his bed, and fell asleep.

  He did not wake that day until 4 p.m., and then he did not dream again for a week.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  .

  .

  The Standing Order Pub

  George Street

  Edinburgh

  7.15 p.m.

  April 17th

  .

  .

  Susie walked over to the table in the corner of the Standing Order pub in the heart of the New Town of Edinburgh. It was a Wednesday evening, it was still early, and luckily the pub was not yet very busy. Sitting in the corner of the pub in an old-fashioned enclosed cubicle they would be able to speak easily without being overheard.

  "So, describe the dream sequence to me then. I want to know all the details. And don't hold anything back because I'm a wee girlie. Gore is my thing. They don't call me 'Squeamless Susie' at the paper for nothing."

  Peter pulled out the file that he had started to make, and looked at the notes he had made about the dream a few days before. He was just killing time, because he could still recall every split second of the dream in his mind, pausing, fast-forwarding or rewinding it at any time, almost as if it was
a movie that played directly inside his head.

  "I don't know where it takes place...but I've got this constant feeling that if I think about it hard enough, the name will come to me. I think it's in a small village somewhere. I am in a bedroom. I am at a window, looking out, and I turn and watch this woman walk towards me from a bathroom, probably an en suite. I can see her face clearly. She is smiling. Short black hair in a bob. And she is very, very attractive.

  "More attractive than me?" Susie jokes.

  "Susie, don't interrupt please...not until I'm finished...Thanks. Okay, so she is very attractive, and she is wearing sexy underwear. Dressed to the nines. Suspenders, the works...if you get the picture... she comes over to me, and we start to kiss."

  "Is this a dream or a porno movie?" Susie asks.

  "Please...let me finish...," Peter said, a little annoyed.

  "Sorry..."

  "We kiss," Peter continues, and I caress her hair and head. I whisper something into her ear...I think I say her name, but it's unclear...fuck...each time I do this, each time I rerun it in my mind, the name I say is on the tip of my tongue...it's so frustrating...!"

  "I start to remove her bra, to kiss her body all over...we move to the bed...we make love..."

  "So don't spare the details now,...it's just beginning to get interesting..."

  "Susie...Please!. Anyway...up until now it's all been nice ... As I was saying, we make love. At first I am kissing her really sensitively, kissing her shoulder, kissing her breasts...she has large breasts...and I remember enjoying it...which is quite strange because you know that I don't necessarily like big breasts...never have."

  "Peter, can I interrupt and say one thing... have you realised that you keep saying 'I', as if it was you who was actually doing this?"

  "Shit,...yes...but..."

  "It's okay, I know, it's only a dream. Don't worry...Carry on..." Susie says, reaching out and putting a comforting hand on Peters. She doesn't remove it.