A Murderous Mind

by Jane A. Adams

  She listened as Alec dialled the number and waited. ‘It’s engaged,’ he said. ‘I’ll try Harry’s mobile … later.’

  He sounded suddenly deflated, Naomi thought. ‘You OK?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s just. Well, like I said to Alfie.’ He laughed uneasily. ‘Not that I need to tell you. But you don’t forget a scene like that. You put it to the back of your mind and carry on and try not to think about it too often or too much because you know it’s still a story without a conclusion. But then someone comes along and reminds you and it’s like … Like you’re back there again. You know?’

  Naomi nodded. ‘And now someone’s done it again, and what we don’t know is if Joe Jackson and his crew screwed up the investigation first time around.’

  He broke off and Naomi could almost feel the apologetic look she knew he had cast in her direction.

  ‘Sorry,’ Alec said. ‘I know it hurts.’

  Hurts, Naomi thought. That was putting it mildly. Joe had been her mentor and her friend and not just after she had joined the police force. Before that, after her best friend, Helen, Harry’s sister had disappeared, Joe had been her support and her confidant. He had seemed perfect. Gentle, understanding, the one person able to coax Naomi out of her all-consuming grief – and then she had discovered that Joe was as guilty and as underhand as …

  ‘He was a good detective,’ she said quietly. ‘Whatever else he was. I can’t imagine him stinting on a case like that.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Alec said. ‘I really do.’

  THIRTEEN

  Gregory had called. Disturbed by their texts he had gone online and read everything he could find on the murder and then he called Harry.

  ‘It’s a bit late,’ Nathan said, watching him dial.

  ‘Harry won’t mind. Anyway, he texted me. So did Patrick.’

  ‘But you’re calling Harry,’ Nathan observed.

  Gregory paused, thinking about that, then he nodded. ‘I’m trying to consider family dynamics,’ he said. ‘I think my mother would have preferred me to call her first in similar circumstances.’

  ‘In similar circumstances, might you not have been calling her to confess rather than offer condolence?’ Nathan queried.

  ‘No.’ Gregory shook his head emphatically. ‘Believe it or not, I always did my best not to cause her more worry than I already had.’

  Nathan, uncertain as he often was, if Gregory meant that as a joke, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Instead, he settled back into his armchair and stretched his feet closer to the fire. He felt the cold, lately. Getting shot put a strain on the body, Gregory had informed him. Nearly dying had a negative effect on most people.

  In Nathan’s case it seemed to have chilled him to the core. Something deep within him had frozen and now refused to thaw even with the passing months. Nathan had been shot at before. His work, both legitimate as a medic, and his more secretive assignments on behalf of his guardian, had taken him to most of the world’s war zones but this time had been different. He had not just been shot at, the bullets had hit and Nathan had nearly died. Had it not been for Gregory carrying him away and then driving like a demon to get him to safety, Nathan would have bled out and that would have been that. Nathan was shocked, deeply shocked, at how much of an effect near death had inflicted.

  Harry must have picked up on the third or fourth ring because Gregory announced himself and then sat down in the chair across from Nathan and rested his elbow on the arm, leaning into the phone pressed against his ear. Nathan listened to the one-sided conversation, to Gregory’s questions of ‘what happened’, and ‘is the boy all right’.

  ‘Do you want us to come down?’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  Nathan let his attention drift, knowing he’d get the full briefing anyway. He liked this little room. He liked this little house, if it came to that. They’d been here for two months now and even Gregory had started to talk about it as home. It was remote and quiet and in another phase of Nathan’s life it had been used as a safe house by his guardian, Clay, a man who had made a career out of secrecy, a cold war warrior working for the British Secret Service, a career that had continued until Clay had been considered as a dinosaur by some and a grand master by others. It was a career that had also allowed Gustav Clay to create an organization of his own, initially for that work which even the SIA denied took place and later, for Clay’s own benefit.

  This little cottage might have come into his possession because of either or both of Clay’s parallel careers. Nathan didn’t know and really didn’t care. It did not appear on any inventory of property the authorities would ever have seen. At the land registry the owner was a Sonia Tindle and deeds to that effect were lodged with a local solicitor. Nathan had no idea whether or not Sonia Tindle had ever existed but Clay’s paper trails were generally impeccable. The house had been, Gregory reckoned, a gamekeeper’s cottage for a local estate now long ago broken up. Living room, kitchen sparse but functional, bathroom and a couple of bedrooms surrounded by a garden with a veg patch and a lot of brambles … and a concealed basement equipped with more security cameras and surveillance equipment and weaponry than the average rogue state. Food and supplies too. Nathan figured they could retreat and withstand anything from siege to nuclear attack. Gregory loved his ‘toy room’ as Nathan had taken to calling it. Nathan preferred the comfort of the living room with its civilized if shabby furnishings, its warm fire and bookshelves stacked with tatty paperbacks.

  ‘So, what did he say?’

  ‘That the girl was a friend, but not a close friend, of Patrick’s. That everyone is upset, of course, and the police are releasing few details, but Patrick tells him that her flatmates were home when she was killed. One of them found her the following morning.’

  ‘Cool customer then.’ Nathan frowned. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘That,’ Gregory said, ‘seems to be a bit of mystery. The news reports I read say she was stabbed but Patrick’s friends seem to think there was more to it. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do. Harry says there are police everywhere on campus and no, he doesn’t want us to go down. I think he and Patrick just wanted to touch base, you know?’

  ‘We being the go-to guys where violence is involved,’ Nathan said, a small, sour smile curving his lips.

  Gregory looked curiously at his friend. Nathan was some twenty years his junior but there were times when pain and weariness etched much deeper lines on his face than Gregory had earned. But then, Nathan felt things in ways that Gregory did not. His dark hair was wavy and he wore it longer that Gregory ever had. And he had green-grey eyes that seemed to look straight into the hearts of others.

  Clay had trained this young man well. He had killed, he had broken most of the laws known to god and man, but he was not a ‘killer’. Nathan had trained as a doctor, worked for relief agencies all over the world and Clay had encouraged this career choice, seeing it as perfect cover for the jobs he had instructed his young protégé to carry out. But Clay had never realized – or never wanted to understand – that Nathan actually believed in what he was doing. That he put his heart and soul into it. Gregory was not convinced that Gustav Clay had been possessed either of a heart or a soul.

  Gregory got up and wandered restlessly around the cosy little room. ‘You want a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘No, I think I’ve had enough.’

  ‘You fancy a walk?’

  Nathan laughed. ‘If I thought you actually meant a ‘walk’ then I might say yes. If you mean a Gregory-style yomp across the moors, then no. I don’t think I’m up for that. Not tonight. You go. I’ll make some calls, see if I can find out what really went on with the girl.’

  Gregory nodded and, minutes later, Nathan heard the back door close.

  He needs a job, Nathan thought. He needs a project. The restlessness had been growing since New Year and Nathan could tell it had now become acute. Nathan, on the other hand, still did not feel re
ady to rejoin the fray. He still felt … slow, behind the game. Nathan had been injured before, twice seriously, but this time had seemed somehow different. Gregory, sometimes strangely wise, had suggested that this was because his injuries coincided so closely with the destruction of so much of Nathan’s world. The death of Clay, the undermining of the organization he had run. The exclusion of Nathan albeit by his own choice from the reconstruction of that organization; others moving to fill the vacuum on both the legitimate, legal and the decidedly not legitimate or legal side of things. Nathan had made it clear that he wanted no part in any of it and had walked away, claiming only a little of Clay’s estate as his own and protected because, like Clay, his mentor and guardian, Nathan knew where all the bodies had been buried and, because of Gustav Clay’s careful training, how to ensure that those secrets would not be betrayed should Nathan meet a sticky end.

  Nathan, like Gregory, found himself on the outside when only a few months before he had been right at the heart.

  He picked up his phone and called Annie knowing she never minded a late night conversation. Annie, married to Bob Taylor, Patrick’s artist mentor, had seemed to take the changes in her stride. Slipping into her new, semi-domesticated role peacefully and gratefully relieved, Nathan thought, not to be at Clay’s beck and call, not to have to leave the man she loved at a moment’s notice never knowing if or when she would return. Nathan wondered if the relief would last for her, carry her through into middle-aged, and then elderly, contentment. He hoped so. Annie was probably the only person Nathan had ever truly loved.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I thought you might call. You heard about Patrick’s friend?’

  ‘Yes, Harry contacted us.’ Nathan laughed. ‘I think Harry sees Gregory as some dark guardian angel.’

  ‘What a thought. Gregory with big black wings. Cormorant wings, like some of the depictions of St Michael. Patrick’s due to come over tomorrow to do some work for Bob, if he does I’ll have a chat, see how he’s doing.’

  The conversation drifted to other things, to an exhibition Annie was organizing for a group of students she’d been working with, to the blossom in the orchard. Finally to Nathan.

  ‘How are you,’ Annie said.

  Nathan considered. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘But still kind of hollow, you know. Annie, I’ve not felt like this since … since I was fourteen and Clay found me. After my parents died. After …’

  He didn’t need to explain. Annie had been there. Clay had rescued her too only a day or so after he had pulled Nathan from the wreckage of his family’s assassination and the two lost children had been thrown together, clung to one another, been, Nathan thought, the only point of sanity in a world gone to hell and in which Clay had been both saviour and manipulator. In the end they had loved and hated him in equal measure. In the end the hatred had won.

  ‘It will ease,’ Annie told him softly. She wasn’t crass enough to tell him it would go, they both knew better than that. You made an accommodation with pain but it never fully went away.

  ‘Goodnight, Annie. My best to Bob.’

  ‘Goodnight, Nathan.’

  He stared at the phone for a while after he’d rung off remembering the scruffy, frightened girl he had first met, with the black hair and massive violet eyes sitting on the narrow bunk opposite and wondering whether or not it was OK to cry.

  Annie Raven and Nathan Crow. Clay had named them both, created an identity and, somehow it had amused him to name them both as birds.

  Hair dark as a raven, Clay had said of Annie. And you, my Nathan, my storm crow.

  Nathan could remember his amusement at that. Annie had taken her name and revelled in it, somehow. World renowned photographer and now wife of an internationally respected artist. Nathan had continued to be the storm crow, camouflaged against the darkness of the clouds.

  FOURTEEN

  The lecture theatre was strangely empty that Thursday morning. Patrick estimated that about half the students were missing. Some had gone home, some just stayed away. He had met up with Hank on the way in.

  ‘I got a text from Ginny,’ Hank said. ‘She said Sam was texting you?’

  Patrick nodded. ‘You going?’

  ‘Course I am.’

  Ginny and Sam’s parents had both been put up at the same hotel and their offspring had joined them. Now they wanted to see their friends. They wanted, Patrick sensed, something normal in the midst of all the pain and chaos. From the texts the boys had received it seemed that the police liaison officer had been against it, but the parents had intervened and overruled. Patrick and Hank were to go to the hotel after their lecture.

  In the lecture theatre, other students looked their way, whispered to one another, looked anxiously in their direction. Everyone knew by now just who had died, who had found her, who their associates were.

  Contagion, Patrick thought. They’re scared of catching it.

  He concentrated on digging out his pen and notepad and his laptop, laying them on the bench in front of him, impatient for the lecturer to arrive and the class to begin.

  ‘Dad wanted me to stay home,’ Hank said. ‘Is Daniel going to the hotel? Did he say?’

  ‘He said he’d meet us there.’ Daniel didn’t do the module this lecture related to. He should, if Patrick remembered right, be in a seminar just now. ‘Emmie’s mum is coming for her this morning. Evie is already gone.’

  Hank nodded, the lecturer arrived and eyed the diminished group, glancing at her watch and then at the door to check for habitual latecomers. Patrick saw her take a deep breath and then look away from them as she arranged her notes, checked the images she wanted to use on the PC. Two other students arrived, signed the register on the front desk and then slid into their seats. The room was silent now, oddly so. The hum of conversation rarely diminished fully until she began to speak. The lecturer fiddled with her notes again and then, with a determined look, surveyed the room.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘we will continue our examination of the Bauhaus movement and the changes that occurred when the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925.’

  Patrick sighed, positioned his laptop and began to make his notes.

  FIFTEEN

  There had been police and reporters all over campus when they left their lecture, but the press were kept behind cordons and reduced to shouting questions at staff and students. A couple were doing pieces to camera, Patrick assumed for the lunchtime news, and he wondered what they’d find to say about a campus that was trying hard to look normal when half the students seemed to have fled. He supposed they’d say exactly that.

  Once they’d left the campus the police presence thinned and the media all but disappeared. He spotted a couple of stray photographers drinking coffee in one of the local cafés, cameras on the table, other paraphernalia propped against the wall. They looked cold and bored. By the time Patrick and Hank reached the hotel where their friends and their families were holed up, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The bar of the hotel was open in daytime for coffee and sandwiches and Patrick and Hank were soon ensconced with Ginny and Sam. Daniel had called to say he was on his way but had to hand something in first. Sam and Ginny’s parents had fussed a bit and the police liaison officer, out of uniform and casually dressed so as not to draw attention, had come down and looked official and then departed, following Ginny’s mum. Patrick felt for the officer; Naomi had told him that it was a really hard part of the job, dealing with families and not really being able to do anything useful or particularly helpful a lot of the time. Just being on hand, in case something happened and a familiar face was required. He supposed that her job was different in this event. Ginny and Sam had found their friend, but not themselves been victims. He assumed that Leanne’s parents must be somewhere, maybe in another hotel, maybe still at home and that another liaison officer was keeping watch over them, dealing with their grief, fielding the practicalities that still had to be dealt with.

  ‘Mum and Dad want me to go
home,’ Ginny said. ‘The police said they’d rather we hang around for a bit in case …’ she didn’t seem to know in case of what. ‘I think we’re going in the morning. We just wanted to see people, you know?’

  ‘Emmie and Maeve have already left,’ Hank said.

  ‘I know, Maeve keeps texting me.’

  ‘Emmie’s phone is flat. Again,’ Hank said. ‘She needs a new battery. I keep telling her you can get them for fuck all on eBay.’

  Ginny nodded. She kept glancing over towards the doors that led into the main body of the hotel and through which she’d watched her mother depart a few minutes before. It was clear to Patrick that now they were here, despite Ginny wanting to see her friends she was now uncertain that had been the right decision. He could almost feel her wondering what they should talk about.

  ‘We’ve been told not to talk about anything to do with Leanne,’ Sam said. ‘But.’ He exchanged a glance with Ginny. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop seeing her.’

  Ginny blinked back tears. ‘I went into her room to wake her up and there was this smell. Like blood and … and stuff. Sam put the light on and we saw her.’

  The door to the bar opened and Daniel slipped through and came over to the table taking his place beside Patrick.

  Ginny continued. ‘She was just … just propped up against the pillows and her hair was all spread out like someone had combed it. Like the killer had combed her hair. And he’d cut her open. All the way down. There was blood. On everything.’

  She was staring into the distance and her hands were tightly clenched. Patrick guessed that she was seeing her friend, bloodied and laid open, her body torn and mutilated.

  Sam put his arm around her and gave her a hug. ‘We’ve had to go over it again and again,’ he said. ‘Like we’re likely to have missed anything. We told them everything we saw the first time.’ He sounded angry more than upset now and they all fell silent, not knowing what to say or what comfort they could possibly offer.