Jacob's Ladder (Stone & Randall 1)

by Ellis, Tim

  ‘Right,’ Molly said once everyone was back. ‘Frank, what about Pike’s alibi for the fourth family?’

  ‘Yvette from Blueberry Escorts,’ he said. ‘Lucy and I are going there this morning to see her.’

  ‘I could…’

  ‘Shut up, Tony,’ Molly said, ‘you’re not going. What about the list of women Pike’s supposed to have slept with in the last month, he promised us a fax this morning?’

  Frank shrugged. ‘Well, it’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll get that. Lucy, go and check the fax machine, let’s see if he’s sent it.’

  Lucy gave him a dirty look as she barged out through the door.

  ‘Don’t forget about chasing INTERPOL as well, Frank.’

  Frank nodded. ‘I’ll be on to them before I leave.’

  ‘Abby, remember you’re getting the court order for Joseph Hansen’s medical records and the search warrant for Pike’s credit card and telephone records.’

  ‘I can’t see us getting the one for Pike’s records,’ Paul said.

  ‘We haven’t been served with the restraining order yet,’ Tony said.

  Paul’s top lip curled like Elvis Presley’s used to do. ‘No, but the Magistrate will know what’s going on.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘DC Read?’ Tony said picking up the receiver. ‘Shit. Okay, I’ll come and get it.’ He put the phone down. ‘I should learn to keep my big mouth shut. The restraining order is sitting in reception like a bomb waiting to go off, I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Molly said. ‘Abby, get on the phone to the Magistrate’s clerk and request the search warrants now.’

  Abby moved to her desk.

  ‘As far as we’re concerned we have no knowledge of a restraining order,’ Molly continued. ‘We didn’t see Pike on the news, and reception didn’t ring up here until after Abby had spoken to the Magistrate’s clerk. Are we all clear on that?’

  They all resembled nodding dogs in the back windows of cars.

  ‘I have a dental appointment now,’ Molly lied, ‘but seeing as you’re batteries are fully charged, Tony, you can go up to forensics and see if they’ve finished the voice analysis of the 999 calls. Also, we want the photographs, a copy of the Tarot card, and anything else from last night’s murders, and then you can do the incident board. That should keep you out of mischief for a while.’

  Tony sighed. ‘When are you going to be back?’

  ‘Meet me at the hospital at two o’clock, Doc Firestone said he’ll have finished the post mortems by then.’

  ‘Okay, Gov.’

  ‘Paul…’

  ‘I’m finding out where all the families with two children live.’

  ‘Good. Everyone’s occupied then. If you need me I’m on my mobile.’

  Lucy came back waving a piece of paper. ‘You won’t believe this guy. Sex every night, sometimes with two or more women.’

  ‘Sounds like a guy with issues,’ Abby shouted from her desk.

  ‘Frank…’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘Some of those will be Blueberry girls.’

  Tony put on his begging face. ‘Are you sure…’

  ‘You’re not going, Tony, so forget it.’ Molly said as she opened the door. In her office she collected her jacket, but left her briefcase where it was.

  Crunching over the gravel towards her car, she realised that when she returned she wouldn’t have a parking space and valuable time would be wasted hunting for one in the local streets, but then she remembered it was Saturday and that she could park in the Chief’s space. The Chief won’t mind, she thought as she lit a cigarette and opened the side window a crack. She wanted to let the smoke out, not the weather in. A cold snap had been forecast, but the weather woman had forgotten to say how damned cold it was going to get. Molly was sure that if the temperature fell another couple of degrees the Thames would freeze over and herald in a new Ice Age.

  She closed her eyes, inhaled the nicotine and let the smoke swirl about inside her lungs before she exhaled slowly and let it escape through the crack.

  Malachi Pike giving a press interview was an inevitable consequence of questioning him. The media already knew he’d been brought in, and had jumped to the obvious conclusion – that he was the Butcher. He didn’t really have a choice but to try to clear his name. She should have seen it coming. By denying any involvement in the murders and slapping a restraining order on her, Pike had shifted attention back to police incompetence and worse still – back to her. For every action there was a reaction. She was sure it wouldn’t be too long before she would be reading her life story in one of the papers. It would be entitled: Who is DI Molly Stone? She would read the painful details of her forceps birth at Hammersmith Hospital on 14th January 1982, about her time at the Little Acorns Playschool and then at St Mary’s Primary School. Teachers, who she’d forgotten long ago, would be quoted saying how she’d had the attention span of a gnat, and describe – in graphic detail – how she had teased the ugly children mercilessly. Then the reporter would go on to recount her time at Lady Margaret’s Secondary School. How she had fallen in with a bad crowd in the Sixth Form; started drinking and smoking, tried Cannabis and lost her virginity in the boys’ toilets. She wondered if old Mrs Battleaxe was still Head of the Sixth Form. They would ferret out old friends, boyfriends, and enemies… Embarrass her in front of the whole world. Eventually, they would get to her father, put two and two together and conclude that DI Molly Stone was a schizophrenic waiting to happen and shouldn’t even be in charge of the rubbish recycling never mind a murder investigation. By the time they’d finished with her, she would be wrapped up in a straightjacket in Springfield Asylum, full up with anti-psychotic drugs, and banging her head against the walls in the rubber room.

  Dr Lytton’s surgery was on Wyatt Lane in Castelnau. As she crawled over the bridge her mobile activated. She should have pulled over, but there was nowhere to stop on the bridge.

  ‘Stone?’

  ‘Hello, Princess.’

  ‘Hello, Andrew.’ When she heard his voice, she felt as though the sun had peeked through the clouds.

  ‘We’ve had Italian and Indian, what about Vietnamese tonight?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Don’t say, "I…" like that. I won’t take no for an answer. I know another family was murdered last night, and you’ve probably had three minutes sleep, then you were savaged by the press and that bastard Malachi Pike, but people need to eat, Molly, especially beautiful people.’

  Andrew Harvey made her happy, how could she refuse? She wished she could drop everything and walk away, get on a plane to somewhere exotic with her bikini and sarong rolled up in a beach towel, and live a simple life swimming with dolphins and diving for pearls. What the hell was she doing putting herself in the firing line? She had been happy working for Cole Randall because he had been the pop-up target, but she had replaced him, and now everyone seemed to be firing at her.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t sound enamoured by Vietnamese. What about Chinese, Polish, Spanish, Austrian, Mexican, Japanese, North African, Greek…’

  ‘I expect Vietnamese will be fine. The Vietnamese eat rice, don’t they?’

  She heard him laughing. ‘They also do marvellous things with chickens and quails.’

  ‘If you say so, Andrew.’

  ‘What time will we meet?’

  She was seeing Randall after work, but it wouldn’t take forever. ‘Eight o’clock?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where’s the restaurant?’

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush Road.’

  ‘Outside Hammersmith tube station at eight o’clock, and we can walk to it from there.’

  ‘I’ll be counting the seconds, Princess.’

  Was she falling in love? She had only known Andrew two days and already she couldn’t wait to hear his voice, feel his lips on hers, and his arms wrapped around her. She had no right to have these feelings. Maybe she should break it o
ff before she went too deep into the forest and lost her way.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The surgery seemed to be locked up tight for the weekend. She knocked on the door but no one came. With a hand shading her eyes, she squashed her face against the glass to peer inside, but it was empty and dark.

  ‘There’s no one inside,’ Dr Lytton said from behind her.

  She jumped and banged her head against the door. ‘It should be a criminal offence to sneak up behind people and scare them half to death, Doctor,’ she said. ‘And if it were, you’d be sitting in the back of a police car by now with handcuffs on.’

  Dr Lytton grinned. ‘Sorry. Maybe we should check your hearing while you’re here.’

  She wondered why doctors always said "we" instead of "I". It wasn’t as if she was going to help him check her own hearing like a doctor’s assistant, was it? ‘There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, Doctor, it’s those brothel creepers you’re wearing.’

  He pulled a bunch of keys from the pocket of his Barbour jacket and jangled them before opening the door. Then he moved to one side to let her enter. ‘Of course, blame the doctor. It’s always easier to offload one’s shortcomings onto others.’

  She waited while he locked the door from the inside. Dr Lytton had always been her doctor. He was in his early sixties – close to retirement she supposed – a couple of inches taller than her with a white goatee beard, glasses and bat ears, and except in his surgery, he always wore his checked flat cap. She didn’t like to think of him growing old. Now that her parents were gone, Dr Lytton was the only person who had always been in her life. Once he was gone, she would have no one, she would be on her own.

  He led the way through the waiting room, stuck his arm into the Reception to switch on the lights, and then carried on to his office.

  ‘Come in, Molly, and sit down.’

  ‘What does a "one in ten chance" mean, Doctor?’ she blurted out as she slid into the chair in front of his desk.

  ‘In the general population it is one in a hundred,’ he said taking off his cap and Barbour jacket and hanging them on the back of the door. He then slipped on his white coat and sat down behind the desk. ‘Because your father had schizophrenia the chances of you becoming a schizophrenic are greater than someone in the general population.’

  ‘More chance than a normal person, you mean?’

  He gave her a wry smile. ‘I can see this has been dwelling on your mind. You should have come to see me a long time ago, Molly.’

  She burst into tears. ‘I wouldn’t be able to do my job, Doctor. God, I’m a detective. What if I kill people like my dad did? What if I kill the people I care about? What if they lock me up and throw away the key? What if…?’

  Dr Lytton stood up, perched on the front of his desk, and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Whatever happened to your objectivity we might ask, Molly? Yes, you are a detective, and you know very well not to jump to conclusions without prima facie evidence, and all we have now is general statistical conjecture. There is already good news, Molly.’

  She looked up at him, her cheeks damp with tears, willing to grasp at any straw offered. ‘There is?’

  ‘The onset of the disease usually occurs between the ages of 15 and 34, but specifically between 16 and 25, so you’re already outside the primary age range. How old are you now, Molly?’

  ‘Twenty-eight, Doctor, twenty-nine in January.’

  ‘There you are then, you’re through the worst of it. It’s unlikely you’ll be affected now, but I want to do some tests and then we’ll be ninety-five percent sure.’

  ‘Why not a hundred percent, Doctor?’

  ‘Unfortunately, there is no direct test for schizophrenia. We are detectives as well. We gather together the different pieces of evidence, and then produce an informed decision based on the weight of evidence.’

  ‘What if the evidence points to me being a schizophrenic, Doctor, will you lock me up?’

  ‘Let’s not consider that possibility at the moment, Molly. And no, I won’t lock you up. Instead, let’s do the tests and then we’ll see what we have.’

  She wiped her eyes. ‘Okay, Doctor.’

  ‘First, I’d like to take some blood, then I’m going to do a lumbar puncture, and finally I’d like you to answer a short questionnaire. Take your jacket off and roll up one of your sleeves. I’m taking blood because there is a school of thought, which suggests that an increase in dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain can cause schizophrenia. I’m also going to compare your DNA profile against your fathers, which we have on file.’ He went to a stainless steel trolley where he took a syringe out of a wrapper, and put it on a cardboard tray with a mediswab, a plaster, and a rubber tourniquet. He came back, put the tray down and took her arm by the wrist.

  She hated the sight of her own blood, and turned away. Didn’t she see enough blood in her job without looking at her own? Dr Lytton pulled the rubber tight around her upper arm to form a tourniquet, tapped the veins in the crook, and she could smell the alcohol as he wiped the cool mediswab over her skin.

  ‘A little prick,’ he said.

  She felt the needle puncture her skin and wondered if she should have eaten something before coming here.

  ‘There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ He put the plaster over the wound and bent her arm. As he threw the syringe away and labelled the blood bottles he said, ‘Now, let me explain why I’m doing a lumbar puncture and the procedure.’ He sat on the edge of the desk again. ‘Your brain and spinal cord float in a clear liquid called cerebrospinal fluid or CSF, and another possible cause of schizophrenia is an infection in this fluid. I’m going to ask you to lie on the couch on your side with your knees drawn up to your chest. Then, I’ll inject a local anaesthetic into your lower back. I’ll apply iodine around the area to ensure it’s clean, and then I’ll insert a needle between your third and fourth lumbar vertebrae to collect a tiny amount of CSF.’

  ‘It sounds painful?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Molly, it won’t hurt, but the iodine will stain your back brown for a time.’

  ‘That won’t matter, Doctor, no one sees my back anyway. Do you want me to take my clothes off?’

  ‘No, just loosen your trousers and lie on the couch facing the wall.’

  She did as she was told with a feeling of trepidation, but she needn’t have worried. It didn’t hurt and the next thing he was saying was, ‘All done, Molly.’

  ‘How long before we find out, Doctor?’

  ‘It’s Saturday today. The samples won’t get to the hospital until Monday afternoon at the latest…’

  ‘I’m going to the hospital after this, I could take them if you want?’

  ‘All right. I’ll put ‘urgent’ on the request forms, but I’m sure that they take no notice of my pleas for urgency. At best, I think we’re looking at Friday, possibly Thursday.’

  ‘That long?’ Molly said as if Dr Lytton had said it would take a million years for the results to come back.

  ‘We haven’t finished yet.’ He was sitting behind his desk and began writing on a form. ‘You’ve probably guessed that we have no idea what causes schizophrenia. There are a number of hypotheses, but nothing definitive, which means that we usually wait until it becomes obvious, and then we can only treat the symptoms rather than the cause. However, in your case, we shall try our best to determine if there are any signs of the illness. So, another test we can perform is a MRI scan of the brain to identify any anomalies associated with the lateral ventricles, hippocampus, basal ganglia, and prefrontal cortex. In some schizophrenia patients, these areas of the brain have been found to be either larger or smaller when compared to patients without the illness.’

  ‘I could go and get it done today?’

  ‘You could certainly try, but hospitals share MRI scanners and the scanner at Hammersmith is the only one in the area. As a consequence, the queue is quite long, but you should get an appointment sometime next week. I won’t put ‘urgent’ on this reque
st because they’ll simply ignore it.’ He smiled and slid a brown envelope across his desk with the blood, CSF samples and request forms inside. On top of the brown envelope was an X-ray request form.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Doctor?’

  ‘Of course you can, Molly, if you stop biting the inside of your bottom lip.’

  She half-smiled. ‘I keep getting migraines and I’m sick a lot, do you think they’re connected to the schizophrenia?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Take your top off, we’ll see if you’ve contracted bubonic plague.’

  Dr Lytton gave her a full examination: Listened to her heart, her breathing, shone a light in her eyes, looked in her ears and her mouth, pressed her abdomen. ‘You examine your breasts regularly?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘Any vaginal discharge or itching?’

  ‘No, Doctor.’

  ‘Bowels regular?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘Fit as a butcher’s dog, put your top back on.’ He was sitting behind his desk and wrote out a prescription. ‘I know you’re under a lot of stress at the moment, so I’ll prescribe a drug called Domperamol that will be effective against both the migraines and the vomiting. Take one ten-milligram tablet as soon as you feel an attack coming on, and I’ll also write you up for an anti anxiety drug called Lexapro, they should sort you out.

  ‘It isn’t going to send me to sleep is it, Doctor? I can’t afford to sleep at the moment.’

  ‘I assume you’re talking about during the day, Molly? No, the side effects of Lexapro are dizziness, acidity, nausea, constipation, and a dry mouth. Drink lots of water with it, and while we’re on the subject of sleeping, what about at night?’

  ‘I won’t lie, Doctor. I have nightmares. I don’t sleep well at all.’

  ‘Well, the Lexapro should help with that, but if it doesn’t come back and see me – during the week next time – and I’ll prescribe sleeping tablets. Right, the questionnaire.’ He passed her a single sheet of paper with ten questions on it.