A Fatal Cut

by Priscilla Masters

  Two days after Wilson’s death Tonya had slammed her mug of coffee down on the kitchen table. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s up? Or do I have to prise it out of you?’

  Karys had given her flatmate a weak smile. Tonya was one of the few people who knew the whole story, from chance beginning, to sorry end. Only it wasn’t the end. People’s characters don’t change. Flaws stay. We only learn, with age, to disguise them. Karys would have given anything for no one to know her flaws. But someone had to know. And like the true friend that Tonya was she had attempted to dissolve Karys’s guilt.

  Tonya had sat and watched Karys over the rim of her coffee mug. ‘You like this — Forrest — don’t you?’ she said perceptively.

  ‘He’s OK. Yes. I like him, but not like that. He’s nice. That’s all.’

  Tonya gave a knowing look. ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Nondescript. Tallish, thinnish. A nice smile.’

  Tonya pounced on this. ‘What do you mean — a nice smile?’

  ‘Sort of personal. Warm.’

  ‘Hmm. Hair colour?’

  Karys thought for a minute. ‘Nondescript,’ she said again. ‘Sort of not quite blond, not quite brown. Mousey, I suppose. Getting a bit thin on top.’

  ‘Eyes?’ her friend demanded.

  ‘Blue,’ Karys said, then added, ‘Nice.’

  Tonya made a face. ‘When are you going to learn? They’re not all like him.’

  Karys gave her a faint smile. ‘I know that, Tonya. The trouble is I don’t know how to tell the difference. Someone as poor at human judgement as I am really shouldn’t tangle too much with the opposite sex, don’t you think?’

  Tonya snorted. ‘No. I bloody well don’t. For goodness’ sake, you were young then. You just got in with the wrong bloke. He was a piece of shit, using that against you. And to be honest, Karys, I think he was clever. Bloody clever.’ She gave her friend a sly glance. ‘They’re not all like that.’ She paused. ‘But this Forrest — he’s not going to split us up, is he?’

  Karys took a long look round their kitchen, at the expensive wooden Danish units, stained bottle green with the grain showing, at the rows of herbs, spices and at the good-quality French saucepans haphazardly arrayed along the shelf. Didn’t Tonya realize? This was home. This was comfort. Not for anything would she risk losing this.

  Tonya put her hand on her arm. ‘Don’t start imagining things, Karrie. Forrest isn’t him.’ She got up to refill her coffee cup. ‘Your problem is you see him behind every bush. He’s your big bogey man.’ She came back to the table. ‘It’s guilt, you know. You’re going to have to see someone about it. And from what you’ve told me I would guess you aren’t half as guilty as you think.’

  ‘In both cases?’

  ‘In both cases,’ Tonya answered firmly. ‘So if I were you I should get on and enjoy life.’

  ‘If only.’

  Volatile as ever Tonya got angry again. ‘It’s been eight years, Karrie. Eight bloody long, self-flagellating years. And you’re still punishing yourself. For nothing. You didn’t do anything. He did.’

  ‘At my suggestion.’

  ‘You don’t even know that. Not for sure.’

  ‘I know. Just like with Sam. I make a joke, someone dies. People take me seriously, Tonya.’

  • • • •

  Forrest was having nightmares too, spliced into dreams. Half awake. Half asleep. The case was not progressing as he knew it ought. It was making him jumpy, irritable and sleepless. Instead of counting sheep, he ran through his meeting that evening with DS Shaw and DS Fielding.

  ‘The trouble is, sir,’ Shaw had said, ‘none of us knows what we’re looking for.’

  His answer lacked substance, full of cliché, OK in detective novels, hopeless in a real life case — ‘Anything out of the ordinary.’

  Shaw had spread his hands. ‘Everything seems to be out of the ordinary. I mean there’s deaths everywhere you look. People shacked up on casualty trolleys, kids still waiting to see a doctor three hours after they arrive. There’s loads of apologetic letters to parents and other relatives. The place is a disaster area.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t like that at the maternity hospital. It was all sweetness and light, and pink and blue blankets.’

  Forrest had been glad to turn to Fielding. ‘Nothing there then?’

  ‘No, sir. The Wilsons’ baby was born without problems. A normal delivery. Father present.’

  ‘Right.’ Forrest tried to convince himself he had sounded decisive. ‘Then I want both of you to comb through everything at Queen’s. I don’t know what we’re looking for, Shaw. Maybe nothing. But you’ve got as many men as you need. Take the bloody place apart. Layer on layer. I want Wilson’s killer caught.’

  He repeated the phrase in his mind: I want him caught...before he does it again.

  It was this barely formed thought which had brought in its wake a return of the depression that had felled him when Maggie had confessed to loving another man. A few days later she had left him. But that was personal. This was not. Then he had been able to escape to work, now he could not. It was work that was the problem. A long tunnel with no light at the end. He had prided himself on being immune from involvement with his cases, it was just a job. But he knew he was not, it was all he had — now. Maybe he was getting too old and vulnerable. But he was not old — he was only thirty-five. Physically and mentally fit. He had thirty more years of hard work left in him. Maybe it was just the divorce that had made him lose confidence. Temporarily.

  If only they could have just one, firm lead which took them somewhere. Anywhere would do as long as it was somewhere.

  Forrest tried to console himself by blaming the hospital site. So big, so many people, so many comings and goings. And, of course, no one had seen or heard anything.

  Even quite promising leads had turned up nothing. The address to which Colin Wilson had been sent to repair the leak had again turned up nothing. Wilson might have been lured and killed there. The surgeon’s slash might have been made and sutured there. But there was no evidence.

  Wilson’s van had been another potentially promising lead. A ten-year-old Vauxhall Nova. Lewisham had been right: Wilson’s mobile phone number had advertised his plumbing services on the vehicle’s back door. It would have been easy for anyone to copy it down. The van, like Wilson’s body, had soon been found four bus stops away from the house he had been lured to, on the same number one bus route, just through Moseley village, the Greenwich village of Birmingham where all the chic types and artists hung out. None of them had seen anything either. ‘Too bloody stoned if you ask me,’ DC Murray Lowen had reported. The van had been picked up and stripped by forensics to find — again — nothing. No blood, no hairs belonging to anyone but Wilson, his wife and his baby daughter. Yet the killer must have driven the van to have dumped it. He had probably sat on the number one bus for his ride home. But no one had seen him.

  The street of flats which had housed the van overnight should have borne some fruit. Surely someone should have spotted the van being dumped. They had made extensive house-to-house enquiries. Of course the good citizens offered various helpful explanations as to why they had seen nothing: if it had been after dark, their curtains would have been drawn; they might have been in bed; they didn’t go out much in the day when the weather was cold or miserable; they had been watching television, or asleep. The only fact that had surfaced was that the van had not been there in the afternoon when darkness fell and had been there when they had drawn their curtains back in the morning.

  Forrest went over and over the statements searching for answers to even the most basic questions. Where had the ‘surgeon’ performed his operation? Where did he get his materials? Even at home, through the hours he was supposed to be sleeping, Forrest forced himself to work on, trying to understand. Oh, for Poirot’s ‘little grey cells,’ Holmes’s sudden inspiration. Even his cocaine.

  Waterman believed the solution would come from analysing the p
syche. So Forrest sat alone, in darkness and in silence and forced himself to consider the murderer’s mind. What could conceivably have made a human being act in this way? In his small, bare sitting room stripped of furniture for his wife’s new love-nest he almost smiled because the answer to that question was nothing. Murder — yes, in a fit of temper, red hot hatred, to protect a loved one. He had thought of killing when his wife had glowingly described her love for another man. He had wanted to punch, kick, hammer the hell out of the man and strangle her. But they had just been thoughts, a lava flow of hatred which had cooled down before any action — except legal action — had taken place. The civilized man’s resort.

  So, Forrest reasoned, if there was no experience in this world that would make him commit cold-blooded murder before maiming his corpse, what did it tell him about the killer? That he was unbalanced? So, we search for a madman.

  He stared for a long time at the blank wall, recalling the picture that had sat there, before his wife had removed it, leaving nothing to look at but a picture hook. It had been a strange choice of picture for a sitting room, even for his wife. A print by someone called Magritte. He had always called it ‘Raining Men’. That’s what it looked like to him, men in bowler hats raining on a terrace of uniform mustard-coloured houses. His wife had told him the title on many occasions, but now, for the life of him, he could not remember what it was. He recognized it sometimes when he passed shops that sold avant-garde posters, shops that reminded him very much of his wife, always trying to appear ‘arty’, a woman of taste. Forrest smiled ruefully. Maybe she had been a woman of taste. Maybe that was why she had finally left him for someone else, someone who had recognized qualities in his wife that he had failed to appreciate. Although how the chinless French teacher she had taken up with could possibly be described as...’

  He stood up, suddenly angry. This was no good. No bloody good at all. He glared at the nail. He must get a new picture or pull the nail out of the wall. He just stopped himself from banging his head against it and deliberately turned his mind to Karys, using her to blot out the painful anger that shot right through him.

  He immediately felt calmed by the memory of her thoughtful grey eyes, her soothing voice. Dammit. She was as good as a tranquillizer.

  But almost as quickly as he had conjured up the image he dismissed it. He was being unfair to her. He really knew nothing about her. Most of his impressions had been dreamt, imagined, filled in by a wishful, lonely, embittered mind. Forrest picked up a bottle of whisky from the mantelpiece and poured a stiff tot into the stained glass at its side. He lit a small cigar and felt terribly alone. More lonely than at any time since Maggie had gone. He needed to talk. He had been wrong; he had thought the loneliness would lessen and finally abandon him, but it hadn’t. It had become more and more intense until now it was unbearable. The quiet semi gave him too much time alone to ponder — even at such a busy time as this when he spent most of his waking moments on the investigation. The truth was he was glad of the overtime. Not for the money. He had no real need for much now. A clean break of a divorce had left him financially solvent. But being alone gave him too much time to think. And thinking, right now, was unpleasant.

  Even with the help of the whisky he tossed and turned through the night. Maybe there had been no point in him going to bed at all. In the early hours Forrest finally gave up any attempt at sleep. He did not dare take the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed because he had to be alert the next day. So instead he brewed some tea and peered through the window as though by divine revelation he would see who was to be the surgeon’s next victim.

  • • • •

  The ‘surgeon’ knew very well who his next victim would be. She had been selected with all the care and precision that marked his entire campaign. Like a theatre list things had their proper order. There must be nothing haphazard about his operations and he chuckled as his mouth formed the word, operations.

  But he had had a problem! Rosemary had married and cunningly changed her name. So Student Nurse Rosemary Shearer was now Staff Nurse Rosemary Baring. She had moved hospitals. Subtle questioning in the right quarter revealed that she had not done well. She had managed to qualify before marrying but, with a subsequent divorce, her career had taken a nose dive and she was now to be found working on the other side of Edgbaston in a private nursing home that specialized in cosmetic surgery. The ‘surgeon’ took a recce one afternoon and was initially impressed. It was a swish place, neat red brick, with clean white window frames and a hand-painted sign advertising proudly, The Cater Clinic. The ‘surgeon’ clapped a hand to his mouth and giggled. He could picture the work that went on in their theatre: varicose veins, face lifts, breast, ear and nose jobs. He giggled again. He had an idea. He flexed his fingers, excitement making them tingle. Maybe he would have a go at some cosmetic surgery too, perhaps a breast reduction. He was tempted to laugh out loud. Did she need a breast reduction? He must take a look at her. He pulled up in the far corner of the car park, wedging himself between a Mercedes and a BMW, noting other cars that were in reserved spaces, the manager’s Jaguar, the doctors’ Audis, a Rolls-Royce pulled up right outside the door in the space grandly marked, Consultant Surgeon. That was what they liked about private practice. Treated surgeons the way they should be treated. He looked round him. Maybe they should have a parking space for him too. Like war memorials honouring ‘The Unknown Soldier’, they should paint a sign, ‘The Unknown Surgeon’. Looking along the row he wondered whether Rosemary had a car. At the bottom end of the car park were a couple of clapped out vehicles. Maybe one of them would be hers. He wondered why she had left the National Health Service. Money? Or some other reason?

  He turned round and drove home.

  It was a week later that he first sighted her, late on a bright afternoon in December. He had needed to get a description, a precise description. Plenty of nurses worked here, and he needed to be sure. It was not so difficult. People, in general, were not so suspicious they would not confirm an identity. He had half formed a picture of her in his mind, with the result that he felt a flood of recognition as she came out of the staff entrance of the clinic looking tired after, presumably, a long and busy shift. She stood in the fluorescent light of the ambulance entrance and seemed to draw in a deep breath before lighting a cigarette and dragging the smoke down into her lungs. She had not, he noted with further malice, worn well. For a woman of twenty-seven she should have looked younger, less haggard. Perhaps there was some justice in the world after all — other than his. Already her face looked old, her hair lank, thin and dull. She even stooped a little, the posture emphasized by a long black mac which reached almost to her ankles. The buttons were open, the belt trailing to the floor. She looked already defeated as, of course, she was.

  He watched her cross the road to the bus stop, ticking off the first of his questions. No car. At the edge of the road she waited and stared at the pavement with an air of pessimism, as though she believed no bus would ever come. When one did arrive she didn’t look around but vanished inside, so she failed to see him and missed her only chance of salvation. As the bus moved off the ‘surgeon’ saw her face quite clearly. White skin, heavy lidded large brown eyes, straggling shoulder-length dark brown hair. Her eyes drifted across him without recognition, not even registering his presence. The bus moved off and he was left still sitting in his car, staring at an empty pavement.

  Chapter Six

  23 December 1999

  Lewisham turned up unannounced in Forrest’s office, on Thursday, a couple of days before Christmas. Forrest had gone for a cup of coffee. When he came back to his room the psychiatrist was sitting in his chair. It gave Forrest a shock and put him at a disadvantage.

  ‘I’ve had a good chance to study the reports,’ Lewisham said, without preamble. ‘I know more about Wilson’s killer.’

  Forrest felt his hackles rise. Mumbo-jumbo, he thought. He will tell me nothing more than I already know. Politely he inclined his head. �
�Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘For a start, he’s left-handed.’

  ‘What? The pathologist said nothing about that.’

  Lewisham permitted himself a smug smile. ‘I know Doctor Harper says nothing in her report about our killer being left-handed, but he is. I’ve studied the direction of the cuts, looked at the knots, the tie, the area of bruising around the neck. And finally I’ve worked it out for myself.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Forrest hadn’t meant his voice to sound so hostile.

  ‘Positive. I’m a bit surprised she didn’t mention it.’

  Forrest frowned at the implied criticism of Karys.

  ‘He is of average stature — somewhere between five eight and five ten, physically strong and clever, but not an intellectual.’

  ‘How can you say all this?’ Forrest burst out.

  ‘I believe you would have trouble following my reasoning.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Right. The stature can be worked out by contemplating the problem of getting a body up to a certain height. Assuming, that is, that he does not have an adjustable operating table.’

  Forrest blinked.

  ‘I have decided that a body could be lifted fairly easily up to a height of three feet. Maybe three feet six. Again, the direction and depth of the cuts indicate little pressure on the scalpel.’

  Forrest could see flaws in the arguments. ‘The murderer could have kneeled,’ he objected.

  Lewisham infuriated him by giving him another supercilious glance. ‘Our “surgeon” would not kneel to conduct his operation,’ he said. ‘Authenticity, Inspector Forrest. It means a great deal to him. He must stand.’ He lifted an index finger to point straight at Forrest. It had the effect of casting a hex. ‘I tell you, Forrest. I know this man.’