by Louise Voss
This time the doctor audibly snorted. ‘I already told you I can’t give out confidential information.’
Patrick decided to appeal simultaneously to the doctor’s better nature and baser instincts. In his experience, most people loved the idea of being involved in some way in an investigation into a high-profile crime. Murders and child abductions were exciting – he imagined Koppler meeting his wife at the theatre and saying, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me as I was leaving the office …’
‘This is confidential, sir. But I’m sure you’ve heard about the Child Catcher abductions.’
Koppler finally turned back to look at Patrick. ‘You think Sharon – Miss Fredericks – has something to do with that? Ridiculous.’
‘She does have a history of trying to abduct children.’
Koppler shook his head vehemently. ‘No. Not Sharon.’
Patrick waited a beat. ‘Sharon? Were the two of you close?’
The psychiatrist was flustered now. This was interesting.
Koppler stood up. ‘I really do need to go.’
He came around the desk, ushering Patrick towards the door. Patrick stood his ground. ‘Listen, Doctor Koppler, what makes you so sure Sharon Fredericks wouldn’t do it again?’
Koppler had gone pink and sweat patches were spreading on his shirt beneath his arms. This was very interesting.
‘Anything you can tell me about Sharon—’
Koppler swept his hands forward in a shooing motion. ‘Please, I must ask you to leave. I have to get going right now.’
‘When did you last see Sharon Fredericks?’
Koppler pulled open the door and waited. Patrick paused. There wasn’t much he could do right now without arresting the psychiatrist and he had no grounds for that. He would leave now and think about what to do.
Once out of the office he turned around. ‘I’d like to talk to you in more—’
Koppler shut the door in his face.
Patrick counted to five in his head, then jogged down the stairs. You haven’t seen the last of me, Doctor Koppler, he thought. He was about to exit onto the street, keen to get home to see Bonnie, when he remembered where he knew the strange smell in Koppler’s office from.
It was the same smell that had clung to Isabel’s clothes.
He turned around and raced straight back up the stairs, determined to ask the psychiatrist some more probing questions. He knew he ought to call for back-up but he wanted to talk to Koppler right now, and get another whiff of that smell, just to make sure.
He reached the top of the stairwell and knocked on the office door.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s DI Lennon. Please open the door, sir.’
The door swung open and Koppler filled the doorway. The smoky smell was even stronger now. Patrick was about to start talking when he noticed that Koppler had one arm outstretched above his head, an object glinting in his hand. It was the paperweight from the desk. Before he could raise his own arm to protect himself, everything went white, as pain exploded inside his head, and then black.
Chapter 23
Patrick – Day 4
Patrick didn’t want to open his eyes. The screaming pain in his head and the taste on his tongue – a mix of sand and metal shavings – told him he must have had too many snakebite-and-blacks last night. He remembered dancing to Nine Inch Nails around the tiny dance floor at The Crypt, slime dripping from the ceiling onto his backcombed hair, the heat in the club making him sweat the white foundation from his face, and he’d met this girl called Lucretia, which definitely wasn’t her real name, who had black hair with a white stripe running through it. Through his pulsating headache he tried to remember what she looked like. He couldn’t remember, but he could definitely recall going back to her friend’s bedsit in a taxi and spending a long time trying to unbuckle her enormous boots and peeling his off his own jet black drainpipes before having disappointing sex with her on the sofa. His piercing had alarmed her but she had wanted to take a photo of it. Would she still be asleep? Could he get his clothes back on, remove the film from her camera and escape before she stirred?
He opened his eyes, and was shocked to find he wasn’t in a bedsit in 1999. It was fifteen years later, he hadn’t listened to Nine Inch Nails for years and he was lying on the floor of an office.
He sat up, clutching his head as the pain bloomed inside his skull. He gingerly felt his cranium – a lump the size of a baby’s fist had sprung up on his forehead. Then, in a whoosh, everything came back to him. Doctor Koppler. The paperweight. Sharon Fredericks. He checked the time. He’d been out for thirty minutes. Not good.
He found his phone in his inside pocket. Carmella picked up on the third ring.
‘Carmella, I need a car to pick me up now. And get me the DCI. We’re going to need a lot of back-up – a PSU, commissioner’s reserve, all the bells and whistles, OK?’
‘I’m on it, boss.’
‘Did you bring the painkillers?’ were Patrick’s first words fifteen minutes later when Carmella arrived. She had volunteered to pick him up herself. She handed him a packet of ibuprofen and a bottle of water. He took three, thought about it, then added a fourth.
‘I ought to take you to the hospital, get you checked out.’
‘I’m fine. Please don’t fuss.’
‘I’m not fussing. I just don’t want you passing out on me. I make a terrible nurse.’
He took a swig of water, wincing again at the throbbing in his head. ‘You’ve got Koppler’s home address?’
‘Of course. The PSU should be there already. He lives a mile away, in Parsons Road.’
On the way there, Patrick filled Carmella in on what had happened in the office. ‘This is my guess. Koppler must have formed a bond with Fredericks when he was treating her. A romantic bond, most likely. She could very well be living with him. And somewhere along the line they became desperate for a child but, I’m guessing, couldn’t conceive. With Fredericks’ record she would never be able to adopt, so …’
His phone rang. It was DS Mike Staunton. ‘Sir, I’m at the Hollisters’ place. I’ve shown Sharon Fredericks’ photo to Bowie and he says he’s pretty sure it’s her that he saw taking Liam out of the car.’
‘Good work, Mike.’
‘One more thing, sir. We also showed her photo to Liam’s parents. Mrs McConnell recognises Sharon too. Sharon used to work as a waitress at Viva Pizza in Teddington. They used to go there every Friday with the kids. I’ve just checked with the Hartleys and they go to Viva Pizza a lot too. I haven’t asked Mr and Mrs Philips yet …’
Patrick ended the call. Viva Pizza hadn’t been on their list, but he had been right. A place that connected the children. That was why Liam hadn’t protested when Sharon had got him out of the car. He probably thought she was going to feed him. Viva Pizza was a local business, cheap and child-friendly, the kind of place that didn’t bother CRB-checking their employees, most of whom were probably paid cash in hand.
‘We’re almost there,’ he said to Carmella.
‘Yeah, it’s just round this corner.’
He smiled. It was too soon for the painkillers to kick in but the adrenalin was doing the job for him. ‘No, I mean we’re almost there. Let’s just pray Koppler and Fredericks haven’t done anything even more stupid.’
Parsons Road had been cordoned off at both ends, the hostage negotiator’s articulated lorry and trailer already in situ – colloquially known as DB1, thus named by the Head of Negotiation Unit at the time the first one was brought into service: ‘That’s the dog’s bollocks, that is.’ They’d been known as DB1s ever since.
Crowds of the curious added a triple layer to the barrier. As Carmella eased the car through the melee, they saw the DPA press officer, a skinny woman whose name Patrick never remembered, frantically shouting into a digital Dictaphone. He was relieved to see that there didn’t seem to be too many journalists there. Major incidents were often on Twitter before even the police knew about the
m – the moment the officers turned up to tape off the road, it would have been all over the social networks – but storm-chasing hacks these days knew better than to run around with cameras and mikes, aware if they did that they wouldn’t get a sniff next time anything went down. The biggest risks of leaks to the press often came in the form of some muppet Community Support officer on the cordon, freely doling out his opinions on the proceedings to anyone who’d listen. It drove Patrick potty. He glanced at the cordon, but the two CSA guys there were standing impassively, arms folded, keeping the small crowd at bay.
They pulled up behind DB1 and a white van outside Koppler’s house that Patrick knew would contain those of the PSU not immediately visible on the scene; one inspector, three sergeants, and twenty-one constables, all with multi-roled experience of surveillance, hostage situations, riot policing. It would be a solid team.
Standing behind the van, Suzanne was talking to two guys: a black man with a thin moustache and a pudgy white man whom Patrick had seen before. As he walked over with Carmella just behind him, he looked up at Koppler’s house. The curtains were closed and there were no signs of life within.
‘This is Sergeant Luke Hardy,’ Suzanne said, introducing the first man. ‘He’s leading the armed response unit. And this is Sergeant Tony Fraser, our negotiator.’
That was where he knew the pudgy man from. Fraser had become a minor celebrity for a few days last year when he had successfully negotiated with a man who had taken his estranged wife and their three children hostage. The husband had, famously, exchanged one of the children for two packs of cigarettes, before eventually giving himself up.
The hostage negotiator’s job was basically to keep Koppler talking and engaged so that the rest of the team could work out how to get the hostages out of there. ‘Have you already talked to him?’ Patrick asked.
Fraser nodded. ‘He’s demanding safe passage for himself and his family, as he calls them.’
‘Or?’
‘His exact words were, “If we can’t live together as a family, we’ll die together as a family. I’ve got a gun. I’ll do it, you know.” ’
‘Shit.’ He looked back at the house, just in time to see a curtain fall back in one of the upstairs bedroom windows of number 20, catching a glimpse of a figure that might or might not have been Koppler. The house was red brick, lovely, the garden well-kept, a thrush hopping about on the lawn. The sun was shining. The headlines, if this were all to go wrong, wrote themselves: Horror in Suburbia.
‘It’s not going to go wrong,’ he said under his breath.
‘At the moment, Koppler is refusing to talk anymore. He won’t answer his phone.’ Fraser paused. ‘We’re listening in to the phones of both Koppler and Fredericks—’
‘You’ve established she’s definitely in there?’ Patrick interrupted, glossing over the legality of what Fraser had just said. It was strictly illegal to hack into anyone’s phones without written permission from the Home Secretary, as Fraser would well know. But this was a life and death situation, and it was unlikely he’d had time.
‘Yes. Koppler named her when I first spoke to him. But they’ve both been quiet. No calls to or from their mobiles or the landline, no texts. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to call them both again, hope one of them answers.’
Suzanne said, ‘OK, let’s debrief.’
She looked tired, Patrick thought. Tense. She was the ranking officer here, and Patrick knew she would be in constant contact with ACPO. If they fucked up, if Koppler was able to go ahead with his threats, she would be the one who took the flack. It made him even more determined to get those kids out of there safely.
Suzanne ushered a group of them into DB1 where they could speak privately. She addressed them all – Patrick, Carmella, Mike, Sergeant Hardy and five of the PCs from the PSU, as Fraser stood a little way away, the phone glued to one ear, his finger jammed in the other one to block out their voices.
‘I don’t need to spell this out,’ she said, ‘but our priority is to get those children out safely. Second, we need Koppler and Fredericks out of there alive. We have no knowledge of whether Koppler would carry out his threat, or if he even does have a gun. But we know from what happened to little Isabel that they are capable of murder.’
‘Plus she tried to steal a baby from hospital, didn’t she?’ Mike said, referencing the crime for which Sharon had been put away. ‘She’s nuts.’
The look Suzanne gave him could have turned him to stone. ‘That’s not helpful, sergeant. Except, yes, we do know that she has a history of instability. And Koppler attacked one of our own officers this afternoon.’ She rubbed a hand across her face and shot a sympathetic look at Patrick, whose head throbbed in acknowledgement. ‘Sergeant Hardy, can you brief us on the situation with your unit?’
‘Yes. We’ve evacuated this whole end of the street and the houses directly behind Koppler’s. We have ten armed officers here on street level, plus four to the rear of the house, concealed in the back gardens. We also have two rifle officers upstairs in the house behind us with long-range rifles trained on number 20.’
All through this talk, Patrick felt uneasy and fidgety, his head still pounding. He didn’t like the silence, the lack of action.
‘Shouldn’t we be doing something right now? Why are we sitting around waiting? Koppler was highly agitated when I saw him. He must have thought I’d be knocked out for longer – enough time to get home and get Sharon and the children out. But we’ve got him trapped and he’s going to be panicking. They could be in there killing the kids, and themselves, right now. They might have already done it.’
‘Detective,’ Hardy said with a smile, ‘in my experience, that’s very rarely the way it plays out.’
‘And you’ve handled situations exactly like this one before, have you?’
The smile vanished. ‘No two situations are exactly alike.’
‘Precisely. These people are desperate. That’s why they took the children in the first place. I don’t think we should be out here waiting for them to make a move. We need to get in there. Now.’
Hardy turned to Suzanne. ‘That would be a mistake. We need to wait, re-establish contact. We’re not going to go barging straight in there. This isn’t the movies.’
‘I know it isn’t the fucking movies,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘In the movies, the kids always survive.’ It was his turn to appeal to the DCI. ‘We need to do something. I really think it’s a mistake to sit and …’
Fraser saved Suzanne from having to make a decision. He waved them over, clutching the phone to his ear with the other hand. He had the phone on speaker so they could all hear.
‘… let you tear apart my family.’ It was Koppler, his voice strained and angry.
‘Doctor,’ Fraser replied in a soothing voice. ‘No-one wants to do that. We want to make sure you’re all alright. Is there anything you need us to get for you?’
‘You know what I want.’
‘I meant any food, drinks, medical equipment?’ For a moment Patrick thought Fraser was going to offer to send in a carton of cigarettes.
‘No. All I need is to get my family out of here.’
‘We’re working on that, Dr Koppler, as hard as we can.’ He paused. ‘Would it be possible for me to talk to Sharon? I’d like to see how she’s doing.’
‘No! She’s very … fragile at the moment.’
In the man’s voice, beneath the veneer of arrogance, Patrick could detect fear. It was the voice of a man who was way out of his depth, who was probably wondering how the hell he had got himself into this situation.
There were several types of criminals. There were the career criminals, who knew exactly what they were doing. They might be street-level thugs, gang bosses or white collar fraudsters, but whatever level they were at, they were in this game and fully aware of the rules. Then there were the criminals who filled films and books and front pages: the psychopaths, the serials, the cold-blooded and the insane. They were the rarest type an
d the most slippery.
Finally, there were people like Koppler. People who, for whatever reason, be it circumstance, bad luck or love, found themselves breaking the law, doing stupid things. Whether it be the girl who stole much-needed cash from the till at work, or the guy who ruined his career by getting drunk and in a fight after a stressful day, or the professional who got drawn in to an insane plot, cooked up by two desperate people. Patrick was sure this was Koppler’s category. He had embarked on a journey with no comprehension of where it would lead, no idea that it would end in a house with two kidnapped children, surrounded by armed police. Koppler was not an idiot. He must know there was no way he and Sharon were getting safe passage out of here. He must know his career and reputation were destroyed, that he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail. The only alternative was death. And that was why Patrick was so scared about what was going to happen here.
‘Let me talk to him,’ he said to Fraser. It was hot in the trailer, and the air was becoming humid with their perspiration.
The hostage negotiator shook his head but Patrick turned to Suzanne. ‘Please, tell him to let me do it. I understand him and I’m the only person here he’s met, even if it did end with him whacking me with a paperweight. I’m the only one he’s got a rapport with, however messed up. Let me try to talk him round.’
The DCI hesitated for a moment then said to Fraser, ‘Let him.’
Fraser acquiesced, informing Koppler that he was handing over. He passed the phone to Patrick, who had to resist a brief temptation to wipe the sweat off it first.
‘Dr Koppler,’ he said. ‘This is Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon. How are you feeling?’
The psychiatrist didn’t answer straight away and Patrick thought he might have hung up. He knew this was risky. Then Koppler said, ‘I should be asking you that, detective.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me. My head is made of steel.’
‘What are you trying to do, detective? Talk me round? Try to be my friend?’
Patrick was keenly aware that everyone was watching him. Carmella, Suzanne, Fraser. Hardy, still with his arms folded, a deeply sceptical look on his face.
