High Force: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 5)

by LJ Ross

  But then Ryan noticed DC Lowerson standing beside a team of CSIs, already suited and ready to enter the building, and he knew that history was repeating itself.

  * * *

  Ryan parked in his allocated space in the residents’ car park at Wharf Square and switched off the engine. He looked up at the apartment building with bewildered eyes and wondered how it was that he felt so much a stranger here, when he had lived on the top floor apartment for nearly three years, not counting the last two he had spent with Anna at her cottage.

  Then he remembered that was gone too.

  “I can take care of things,” Phillips said, urgently. “It doesn’t take three murder detectives to go over a scene—”

  “If that girl is lying dead in my apartment, I have to ask myself how she got there,” Ryan said, in a voice so quiet that Phillips struggled to hear him.

  “If—and only if—we find Beth Finnegan upstairs, it’s because that maniac killed her. You had nothing to do with it,” he replied.

  Ryan continued to stare out of the window.

  “Edwards must have found the spare set of keys,” he said to himself. “I left them in the drawer at the cottage. He must have found them before he set the place on fire.”

  “So what if you did? It wasn’t an invitation for him to drive up here and help himself.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Ryan demanded. “He brought that girl here so that I would find her, so that I would see how fucking brilliant he is. Why did he do it? To prove that he’s better, stronger.”

  “And killing some helpless young lass proves that, does it? The man’s a raging nutter. There’s no reason behind his actions.”

  “I disagree,” Ryan said, blinking a couple of times to shake off the hazy feeling clouding his head. “What Edwards really wants is another shot at finishing what he started the last time we were inside that apartment,” Ryan continued. “This time, he doesn’t want to lose—he wants to win. He wants to see me beaten and preferably dead on the floor at his feet. But he doesn’t want to make it easy. Oh no,” he laughed shortly. “He wants to draw it out, to drag me down inch-by-inch until we’re on a level.”

  Phillips swallowed a hard lump in his throat, wishing he could wipe away the hurt and the grief.

  “If he’s killed that girl, you don’t have to be the one to see it,” he tried one last time to persuade him, but Ryan shook his head.

  “I made a promise to her mother.”

  With that, Ryan summoned the strength to step out of the car and face his demons.

  * * *

  Dressed head-to-toe in polypropylene suits, they moved in a silent procession through the gleaming entrance foyer, past the wall of post boxes and polished steel doors of the lifts, which Ryan bypassed in favour of taking the stairs. It was a desperate attempt to delay their arrival, to give himself more time to…he didn’t know what. To prepare, he supposed.

  But nothing could have prepared Ryan for what he saw beyond the bland white-painted front door leading to his penthouse apartment. His hand shook as he tried to insert a brass key into the lock and it took several attempts before the door swung open.

  Ryan simply froze, staring at the scene which awaited him. His back was ramrod straight and his face was utterly expressionless as he forced himself to look at the remains of what had once been a girl. Behind him, Lowerson paled and looked away to allow his system time to adjust to the sight and smell of violent death. Faulkner turned 180 degrees and braced his hands against his knees, taking deep breaths in and out until the urge to vomit subsided.

  “Dear God,” Phillips whispered, throat working. He was not a religious man, but he sent up a silent prayer all the same.

  “Faulkner,” Ryan said, in a queer, flat tone. “Are you ready?”

  The man was breathing hard and had to swallow his own bile, but he pulled himself together and nodded queasily.

  “Phillips,” Ryan turned to his sergeant and seemed to look straight through him. “Contact Pinter down at the mortuary and tell him to expect a delivery within the hour. Lowerson?” He turned the same vacant gaze onto the young man whose pallor now matched his white polypropylene suit. “Stay here.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Stay here,” Ryan repeated, with finality. “You don’t need to see this.”

  With that, he took the first step inside.

  Immediately, the stench of death assaulted him, penetrating his nostrils with its sickly-sweet odour. The line between past and present blurred again and he saw the living room as it had been two years ago, before he’d called in a team of decorators to re-paint and replace every scrap of furniture, even down to the kitchen units. He saw himself injured on the floor, crawling towards his sister who was seated in a chair in the centre of the room, bound and gagged.

  He saw Edwards sitting beside her, brandishing a scalpel.

  Ryan shook himself, breathing hard through his teeth as memories swarmed his mind.

  Blood was everywhere. It coated the floor and spattered the walls, concentrated in the centre of the room. But the body of the decapitated girl lying in an overturned chair was not his sister. He would not have to make another phone call to his mother, for it was somebody else’s daughter he had failed to save this time.

  In a daze, Ryan scanned the room and found the girl’s head sitting grotesquely on the countertop of his open-plan kitchen. Blood pooled in a wide circle around it and had dripped into a congealed puddle on the floor, leaving the flesh on her face an ashen grey.

  His breathing was becoming erratic, shuddering in and out as he began to hyperventilate, but Ryan wasn’t aware of it. He took another shaking step into the room and looked back at the girl’s body.

  Memories flooded in now, engulfing him in a maelstrom of colour and sound. His head began to pound and he felt dizzy, black spots dancing in front of his eyes He groped around for something, anything to take his mind off the horror of that day, but it was too late.

  All at once, the dead girl was his sister, Natalie. He saw her looking at him with big, grey eyes the same shade as his own, full of terror.

  Ryan let out a cry and stumbled forward, arms outstretched to prevent the first cut from Edwards’ scalpel, but before he could collapse to the floor, two pairs of strong arms shot out to break his fall.

  “There, lad,” Phillips soothed. “We’ve got you.”

  * * *

  Anna had just booked a short-stay holiday rental in the pretty, rural village of Blanchland on the border of Northumberland and County Durham when she received the call from Phillips. She needed no further bidding and, after making a grab for her coat and bag, she took a taxi from CID Headquarters to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, arriving less than fifteen minutes later. She exited the cab at a run and made directly for the main entrance to Accident and Emergency, where she was directed along a long, narrow ward containing a number of small consultation cubicles separated by patterned curtains in a jarring shade of turquoise.

  Even if she had not known the cubicle number, she could have found Ryan simply by following the sound of his raised voice.

  “I don’t need an MRI scan!”

  “Ryan?” she called out, and a curtain was promptly swished back to reveal her fiancé standing next to a flustered Phillips and an equally flustered junior doctor.

  She took a quick survey, noted that he was resting a hand on the wall for support, then exchanged a meaningful look with Phillips.

  “I hope you’re not being difficult,” she said, sternly.

  Ryan scowled at her.

  “I’m merely trying to explain that it’s completely unnecessary for me to be here.”

  “Oh?” Anna affected an air of confusion. “Because I heard that you’d blacked out for five minutes and were totally unresponsive.”

  And she’d been worried sick, from the moment Phillips had told her.

  Ryan pushed a restless hand through the black hair falling across his forehead, then let it fall away again.

&nbs
p; “Probably because I haven’t eaten today,” he improvised. “We’ve been on the go for days and I forgot to eat, that’s all.”

  They all knew it was a lie and it was so out of character that it surprised all of them, especially Ryan. He decided to try a different tack and turned his considerable charm towards the young female doctor hovering beside him, making a valiant attempt at doing her job.

  “Doctor, I really appreciate your help but I feel I’m wasting your time. There must be many more serious cases—”

  “Knock it off,” Anna snapped, and Phillips held back a laugh. “You’re wasting the doctor’s time by trying to argue your way out of a check-up. Don’t think you can charm your way out of it, because I’m not budging from this spot until I know you’re alright.”

  Taking her cue, the doctor placed a none-too-gentle hand on Ryan’s arm and nudged him towards the edge of the bed where he was deposited unceremoniously.

  “Follow this light, please,” she instructed him, and Ryan had no choice but to obey or run the risk of looking like a prize moron.

  Anna was true to her word, standing guard at the entrance of the cubicle until the check-up was complete and he was pronounced fit and well. Having received a brief summary of the circumstances, the doctor gently suggested that Ryan might be suffering from post-traumatic stress and that he should consider talking therapies to help him get through it. After she left them to write up her report, Ryan pushed away from the bed and yanked the curtain back.

  “The only talking therapy I need is one where I tell Keir Edwards to burn in hell,” he gritted out, before striding down the corridor towards the exit.

  Phillips turned to Anna as they followed behind him at a slower pace.

  “Edwards killed a girl, the same way he killed Natalie Ryan. He staged the room to look similar, knowing that Ryan would look at it and remember what happened before. He walked in there and relived it all, then just blacked out.”

  He snapped his fingers, to signify a light switching off.

  “I don’t know what to do for the best,” he confessed. “What happened today pushed him to the limit, took him right back to a place he’s been trying for two years to escape. He needs time to recover.”

  “I thought he had,” Anna murmured.

  “Aye, I know. If Morrison hears about it, she’ll take him straight off the case.”

  Anna watched Ryan’s retreating back and gnawed at her inner lip.

  “Then don’t tell her,” she said, taking an enormous leap of faith. “Don’t tell her, Frank.”

  Phillips searched her face and nodded slowly.

  “If he doesn’t see the investigation through, he’ll always know that Edwards beat him. He has to carry on, for his own wellbeing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Phillips decided.

  Anna smiled and reached across to plant a kiss on his ruddy cheek.

  “Thanks. Give us a moment.”

  While Phillips lagged at a discreet distance behind, Anna found Ryan prowling around the waiting area of the A & E department, which was teeming with people considering it was a Tuesday afternoon.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Are you alright?”

  He opened his mouth to say something dismissive, but one look at her quelled the impulse. Instead, he simply pulled her into his body, wrapping his arms around her so that they were welded together.

  “I feel better now.”

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “You’re doing plenty,” he said, then let out a shaky laugh. “I needed you with me, Anna, just to remind me that there’s still some good in the world.”

  “It’s all around you,” she pointed out. “You have a good friend in Frank, and in Jack.”

  “Lowerson?”

  “Who do you think helped Phillips get you to the car?”

  Ryan said nothing but made a mental note to thank him later.

  “I told him to stay out of there,” he muttered. “I didn’t want him to see what was inside.”

  “You can’t protect him from the world. He chose to become a murder detective, just like you. It comes with the territory.”

  Ryan rubbed his cheek against the top of her head, then drew away to look at her.

  “I know you’re right.”

  “Sorry, I missed that. Can you write it down on parchment, for posterity?”

  He chuckled, and it was the most reassuring sound she had heard from him all day. It lit up his eyes and his face creased into a quicksilver smile that floored her, every time.

  She rested her hand against his chest, feeling his heart beating strong and sure beneath his cotton shirt.

  “Now,” she said. “Stop loafing around and get back to work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Ryan summoned a patrol car to deliver Anna safely back to CID Headquarters and then he and Phillips headed towards the service stairs leading to the basement mortuary at the Infirmary; the province of Doctor Jeffrey Pinter, Chief Pathologist.

  Their heels clicked against the concrete steps as they descended to the lower level and entered a long corridor leading to a set of secure steel doors at the end. The temperature in the corridor was suffocating, thanks to a series of fans expelling hot air in an effort to keep the mortuary consistently cold. As they neared the double doors, Ryan entered a four-digit code into the security pad on the wall and, after a few seconds, they let out a long buzz and opened automatically. The two men stepped into the large, open-plan mortuary space and shivered as the temperature dropped immediately. Banks of metal drawers lined one wall and a state-of-the-art, electronically controlled immersion tank had recently been installed next to the existing row of gurneys placed at intervals in the centre of the room. They detected the unique aroma of formalin and natural gases, which no amount of bleach could ever quite remove and they would forever associate with death. Noses wrinkled, they busied themselves with the task of shrugging into the visitors’ coats hanging on a peg beside the door. Ryan scrawled their names in the log book and they took a moment to don plastic shoe coverings and hair nets to complete their ensemble.

  “Very fetching,” Phillips said.

  With the formalities complete, they sought out the man in charge and found him in his office, annexed just off the main area. Jeffrey Pinter was tall, gangly and comfortably middle-aged. His hair was thinning around a gaunt, hollow-eyed face and when he stood up to reveal an over-large lab coat flapping around his legs, he bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the Grim Reaper.

  Then his face broke into a welcoming smile and the likeness dissolved.

  “Ryan, Phillips! Good to see you.”

  He gave them both a firm, fist-pumping handshake and didn’t seem to notice when both men rubbed their hands against the back of their lab coats immediately afterward. In a place like this, you could never be too careful.

  “Have you had an opportunity to look at the body?” Ryan asked, not bothering with any small talk.

  Pinter’s face fell back into solemn lines and he clutched the lapels of his coat.

  “Only briefly,” the pathologist replied. “It’ll take quite a while to perform a thorough post-mortem, given her condition.”

  There was something horribly prosaic about describing the decapitation of a not-quite-sixteen-year-old girl as a ‘condition’ but Phillips tried not to let it bother him. He supposed that Pinter needed to remain objective, just as they did.

  “Do you want to take a look at her?” Pinter continued, as if he were inviting them to test drive a new car. “I’ve had her body laid out in a private examination room, just next door.”

  “Tempting, Jeff, but we had a good look earlier,” Phillips said, before Ryan had time to react. “Have you been able to confirm her identity—medically, I mean?”

  “I’ve sent off the blood work for analysis, but once we cleaned her up a bit we could see a clear physical match with the profile of the missin
g girl you sent through—Bethany Finnegan.”

  It was no more than he had expected, but Ryan felt grief wash over him all the same.

  “I don’t want her mother brought in until you’ve taken care of her.” He would not budge on that. It was the least he could do for the woman who had lost the most loved and important thing in her life; the only thing that had given it meaning. “I would rather she didn’t come in at all, but I don’t think she’ll listen to our advice, so just…do what you can for her.”

  Pinter nodded judiciously.

  “I, ah, don’t know whether it will bring much comfort to her mother, or to any of us, but I don’t think the girl was alive when her killer removed the head. It’s most likely she died from major cardiac arrest brought on by the severity of her other injuries. Every major artery has been severed, as far as I can see, and blood loss on that scale would have weakened her system to such a degree that her heart failed. There is some evidence of clotting around certain sites at her knees and elbows, so it would appear he performed those incisions ante-mortem.”

  There was a short silence in the room as both detectives thought of the pints of wasted blood seeping through the floor of Ryan’s apartment. It didn’t help that the loud tick tock of an industrial white clock on the wall seemed to mimic the sound of blood hitting the floor.

  “How about the murder weapon?” Ryan asked.

  “Oh, I’d say it was almost certainly a large, serrated knife. I’ll be able to give you more specifics after the lab has examined the incision marks around the neck area, but it wasn’t a single, clean blow with an axe or anything like that. I’m afraid that, if she had been conscious at the time, it would have been excruciating because it would have taken some time to saw through—”

  “We get the picture.”

  Ryan did not allow himself time to dwell on that prospect.