Babysitting duty, again. Rafferty had sat with Nicole Wheelan right through the night. She had been kept in at the Royal London, suffering from all the typical signs of shock: greyish skin that the doctors called cyanotic, rapid breathing, low blood pressure, and a clamminess that seemed at odds with the coldness of the night. The staff treating her had extended her the courtesy of a private room at Rafferty’s request, which made everything easier when colleagues and well-wishers tried to stop by. Rafferty had seen them off at the door lest they pry sensitive details from Nicole to sell to the press.
By morning, Nicole was looking tired, but she seemed responsive.
‘How are you doing?’ Rafferty asked as she brought her in a cup of black coffee.
Nicole gave a small shrug. ‘I could be better.’
‘I’m sure,’ Rafferty said. ‘It can’t have been easy to see that.’
‘See it? I did it!’
‘No,’ Rafferty said. ‘You didn’t. Whoever was behind the ball bearings did it. You were just doing your job.’
‘So, you’re not... here to arrest me?’
‘Arrest you?’ Rafferty echoed. ‘Heavens, no. I just need to ask you for a written witness statement for the record, if you’re up to it.’
Nicole pulled herself up to a seated position. ‘Now?’
‘Please.’
Rafferty fetched her a pen and the form that Mayberry had dropped off. Thirty minutes later, she held a completed, signed witness statement in her hands. She scanned through it.
Witness Statement
(CJ Act 1967, s.9, MC Act 1980, ss.5A(3)(a) and 5B, MC Rules 1981, r.70)
Statement of... Nicole Wheelan
Age if under 18... Over 18
Occupation... MRI Technician
This statement (consisting of one page and signed by me) is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.
Signed, Nicole Wheelan
I was on shift at the Royal London on Saturday evening when a patient presented with a head injury. He appeared to be woozy, but conscious, and was wheeled to the MRI machine by two orderlies. They lifted him onto the tray, and I began the standard procedure. I inspected him for any sign of metal, removed his wallet and his watch, and then headed into the control booth to turn on the MRI machine. At first it seemed normal. The tray retracted, and the machine hummed to life. I spoke to the man, who I later learned to be called Donald Bickerstaff, to reassure him everything was going to be fine.
When I turned the electromagnet on, there was an almighty noise as metal was ripped towards the magnets at a high velocity. The man seemed to scream for a moment. I hit the emergency stop button releasing all the helium gas, and the MRI machine whirred down. By then it was too late. The patient was dead, and his blood was everywhere. I screamed, and the orderlies came running. I was escorted from the room, but as I left I looked back and saw him. There were small pieces of metal stuck to the machine.
‘Is that everything you need?’ Wheelan asked when Rafferty had finished reading.
‘That’ll do,’ Rafferty said, folding the statement neatly and placing it into her handbag. ‘We may be in touch if we need anything else.’
***
There had to be some evidence. Morton headed for the morgue, where he found Chiswick eating breakfast in one of the autopsy rooms.
‘Isn’t that a bit unhygienic?’
Chiswick smiled. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t. This room is set to be cleaned this morning, so I’m not contaminating any evidence. What’re you doing down here?’
‘I need to see the body of Angela King.’
‘Okay. What are we looking for?’
O’Shaughnessy’s idea rang in his mind. ‘Evidence of a meat bullet.’
An almighty guffaw escaped Chiswick. He stopped when Morton glared. ‘Oh, you’re serious?’
‘Yep.’
They found Angela King’s corpse in the chiller, lucky that the husband hadn’t had it removed to a funeral home just yet. She was loaded onto a trolley by the diener.
‘Wheel her through to autopsy room two,’ Chiswick barked.
‘What, not had breakfast in there?’ Morton asked.
‘Not today.’
They trailed the diener, waited for him to leave, and set about examining the corpse once more.
‘You ever seen a meat bullet?’ Morton asked.
‘Only on YouTube. It should be obvious if you’re right. There’d be foreign particulates at the bullet entry site.’
Chiswick swung a large light over the body and pulled it close to the bullet hole.
‘I can’t see any trace of meat,’ Chiswick said as he peered through a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate. ‘Hmm...’
‘Hmm?’ Morton said.
‘Look there.’
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Right there,’ Chiswick said, jabbing his finger at the cadaver. ‘Oh, sod it.’
He pulled a camera down from its ceiling mount, flipped on the television screen, and magnified the area he was pointing at.
Morton stared at the screen. ‘Is that... glitter?’
There were miniscule flecks that looked golden and metallic.
‘Sintered copper,’ Chiswick said knowingly.
‘You mean...’
‘I’ll have to pull a sample to be one hundred per cent sure,’ the pathologist cautioned, ‘but it looks like she was shot with a bullet designed to disintegrate upon impact.’
Rafferty had been right all along. She hadn’t missed a bullet. There was never a bullet to be found.
***
On Sunday afternoon, the whole team assembled around the large conference table in the Incident Room. Chiswick and Silverman joined them, both keen to be seen to do everything in their power to prevent a serial killer rampaging through London. Stuart Purcell, the scene of crime officer, lurked in the corner, observing but not contributing; he never seemed to feel that he was a part of the team.
Even Brodie was involved, though only joining them via a video link to Mayberry’s laptop.
Morton was convinced they were dealing with a true psychopath. He or she appeared to have no personal connection to the victims. Whoever it was simply didn’t care who they killed.
‘Then, what are they trying to gain?’ Silverman asked.
‘Good question,’ Morton said, trying to be polite.
‘That would be why I asked it.’
Morton debated giving her a non-committal shrug, but the rest of his team deserved an answer too. ‘I think they’re trying to prove they’re smarter than me.’
‘Well, that would be a pretty trivial task,’ Silverman said nastily. ‘But, why?’
‘Because of the first class Ayala and I taught. We set the students the task of plotting their idea of the perfect murder–’
‘You did what?’ Silverman thundered, jumping to her feet. ‘I never told you to teach someone how to get away with murder!’
‘If you want to catch a killer, you have to be able to think like one.’
She stared at him, seemingly unable to formulate a response.
Rafferty breached the awkwardness by leaning past her to talk to Morton. ‘What are we going to do? You’re supposed to be teaching tomorrow. If you don’t go, the killer will know something is up, and they might change their modus operandi.’
‘And if I do go and pretend everything is normal, we have until Saturday to work out which student is our killer, lest they blow up a building full of people on Saturday night,’ Morton finished for her.
‘Or worse,’ Ayala volunteered a little too cheerfully. ‘All the kills so far have been improved versions of the murders discussed in class. We could be looking at any kind of mass murder incident.’
The thought had crossed Morton’s mind. He had explicitly warned his students of how such a killer
might get caught. His own words from the lecture floated back to him:
Three problems. Number one, you’d need the right expertise. Not many people know how to make a bomb and how to fly a drone... number two, you’d need access to the right materials to make a bomb... number three, you’d need to get around the no-fly zone around this building. Any drone on approach would be shot down long before it got through the window.
What if they didn’t use a drone? What if they didn’t use an explosive? What if, as Ayala had suggested, they looked for a way to cause a mass casualty event without being seen or heard?
‘We need to call in Counter Terrorism Command,’ Morton said. ‘Silverman, I assume you’ll make the call.’
She was still looking slack-jawed from Morton’s earlier comments, but she nodded meekly without even protesting that her subordinate had just given her an order. The prospect of presiding over a mass murder that she knew about before it happened was enough to quash her ego.
‘And while you’re doing that, we need a profile. What sort of person commits these murders? What’s their background like?’ Morton said.
‘David,’ Rafferty said quietly. ‘We need more manpower.’
‘True, but every new body is a red flag for our serial killer,’ Morton said. ‘If they guess that we know, they could accelerate their plans, escalate their plans, or pause them long enough for us to hope it’s over. We have to find justice for our victims, but our main priority must be to keep London safe.’
‘I have an idea,’ Ayala said. ‘Let’s change the lesson plan. We can make the students profile each other.’
‘That just might work.’
***
They worked through lunch and then dinner. Even Silverman stayed in the room, apparently beset by a sudden rush of guilt that she had not believed Morton’s warnings. The boys from Counter Terrorism sent a representative who sat quietly in the corner taking notes but saying little. Morton had ascertained that his name was Mikhail Antonoff, but beyond that knew little about the man. He rarely had cause to interact with the Counter Terrorism Command. When Antonoff wasn’t looking, Morton pinged a message over to Xander Thompson at the Serious Organised Crime Agency to see if he had heard of him. The reply came back quickly: He’s sharp, honest, but he’s not you. Don’t rely on him to bust this case wide open.
As if Morton would ever delegate his responsibilities to four murder victims and their families. Morton resolved to keep Antonoff in the loop, but to explore every option available to him for preventing another murder. The Met could not afford to let a mass casualty incident happen right under the nose of the new chief. The possibility that Silverman might be fired was scant consolation, given that it would take the deaths of many innocent civilians to get her removed.
At some point in the evening, Ayala disappeared to the Chinese restaurant around the corner and returned laden down with enough food for twenty. Boxes of noodles and plastic cutlery piled up among the files on the conference cable, and the team wolfed down their food as they worked.
The names of the students had been written up on a trio of brand new whiteboards that Silverman had ordered to be brought up from Procurement.
On the left-hand board were the women: Almira el-Mirza and Maisie Pincent. The centre board had three of the men: Danny Hulme-Whitmore, Eric O’Shaughnessy, and Sulaiman Haadi al-Djani. The third and final board had the remaining suspects: the Goody Two-Shoes Crispin Babbage, Kane Villiers and the gender non-binary detective Sam Rudd.
‘Who do you like, boss?’ Ayala had asked.
‘Nobody,’ Morton said flatly. ‘We have precious little to go on, and I’m not going to impugn an innocent student without good reason.’
‘Okay, but who’s the most likely?’ Ayala said again.
‘Statistically, we’re looking for a man in his late twenties, early thirties.’
Ayala put a big red X under the names of Danny, Eric, Sully, and Crispin.
‘And we’re looking for someone who is egotistical, charming, and has an affinity for power,’ Rafferty chipped in. ‘But isn’t that all of them?’
Morton gave her a wan smile. It was true that anyone seeking a position of authority, such as by training to become a police detective, could possess many of the same character traits as a serial killer.
Mayberry tentatively raised a hand up above his laptop screen. He seemed nervous to speak in front of Silverman. ‘D-did anyone f-fail the b-background check?’
‘Nope,’ Ayala said quickly. ‘They’re all clean on that front.’
‘I think,’ Morton said, ‘we’re unlikely to find our killer hiding in the personnel files. We need something tangible, something definitive. We need to work out what they’re going to do next and stop it before it happens.’
‘What if we just arrest them all?’ Silverman said. ‘We can hold them for a month if we use the terrorism laws to keep them in custody?’
‘And then what? We tail them all indefinitely?’ Morton said dubiously. ‘Sooner or later, we’ll have to give up the surveillance, and all we’ll have done is scare the killer into hiding. We’ll never catch them. Letting this play out according to the killer’s schedule – and winning at their silly game – is the only way to save lives here. The same logic means that any surveillance efforts, if noticed, could force the killer’s hand.’
Silverman shot Morton a scathing look. ‘Isn’t that enough? If we can buy enough time, we don’t have to worry about people dying.’
‘Unless,’ Morton objected, ‘the killer has already put their plans for next weekend into motion. For all we know, there could be a bomb out there somewhere, just ticking down towards zero.’
Chapter 28: Learning by Doing
Morton had the entire lecture hall wired before the morning’s lecture. Directional microphones were hidden in every nook and crevice, and a number of cameras had been installed to record video too. Whatever the students said, they’d be watching.
Brodie hadn’t been too pleased with the plan. No doubt his office was now crammed with the rest of the team peering at his monitor array to try to see exactly what was going down.
For his own part, Morton had taken twenty minutes before class to sit and breathe deeply. He couldn’t let anything slip. If the killer saw his nerves, they could run, they could change their timing, or they could abort. Today’s lecture could be the last chance to observe a serial killer ignorant of the fact that they were now being hunted by an entire task force with Morton at the helm.
They began to file in at ten to nine. As was his custom, Ayala brought with him a dozen doughnuts and a tray full of coffees. It seemed almost perverse to knowingly treat a killer to breakfast, but it was necessary to keep up the illusion.
Ayala’s performance was impressive. He could easily have been an actor if he had not chosen to dedicate his life to the police.
When everyone was seated, Morton assumed the lectern.
‘Today, we’re going to put what we learned about profiling suspects into practice. Each of you will be assigned another student. Over the next three hours, I want you to identify everything about each other, note anything you might think significant given the risk factors we identified before, and then write a suspect report categorising your partner’s risk level. Any questions?’
Danny Hulme-Whitmore raised a fist. ‘Uh, yeah. Why?’
Morton shot him his best “don’t be an idiot” glare. ‘Because it’s a learning exercise. Each of you represents a demographic. Some of the things in your past will be considered risk factors. I want to see if you can identify those factors in each other. Are you not up to the challenge, Mr Hulme-Whitmore?’
‘I’m up to it,’ Danny said. ‘Who am I profiling?’
‘Ayala, the pairings, please?’ Morton said.
He stood aside from the lectern and sat down at his desk at the front. He paused to scan the faces of his students as Ayala assumed his place behind the lectern. Not one of them looked worried. El-Mirza was sitting at the
back with Pincent, smiling over an inside joke. Sully was staring intently forward, eagerly awaiting his pairing. Even Babbage looked relaxed: he had his pen poised to scribble notes and kept looking around the room as if wondering who he was about to be paired up with.
‘Right, then,’ Ayala called. ‘Sully, you’re with Maisie. Babbage, you’re with Sam Rudd. Kane Villiers, Hulme-Whitmore, and that leaves el-Mirza and O’Shaughnessy. You have three hours. You may begin.’
***
Mayberry and Rafferty settled back in their seats in Brodie’s office. Silverman had disappeared, either because her job was done or because she had to deal with coordinating with the Counter Terrorism Command. The rep from counter terrorism was in the Incident Room upstairs, and he had been joined by half a dozen of his colleagues. The students didn’t know it yet, but they were about to be subjected to the most intrusive background checks known to man.
‘We’re live,’ Brodie said. ‘Sound should be coming through to your earpieces now.’
The audio quality was crystal clear. They could hear everything Morton said.
‘Are we recording?’ Rafferty asked Brodie.
‘Aye. I’ll get everything saved, backed up, and then backed up offsite when we’re done. If you like, I can isolate each voice digitally, and then perhaps your laddie can transcribe each student’s voice as we go?’ Brodie looked over to Mayberry expectantly.
‘S-sure,’ he said.
‘Right then, laddie. Take my spare desk and that pair of noise-cancelling headphones. You type, and I’ll get the transcriptions sent to the team as they come in.’
Chapter 29: El-Mirza
Eric O’Shaughnessy tugged nervously at the sleeve of his herringbone jacket and smiled. He had been paired up with the sultry Almira el-Mirza and was at a loss where to begin.
‘So,’ he said casually. ‘Where do you want to begin?’
Almira shot him a withering glare. ‘You’re the interviewer. You tell me.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘Riyadh,’ she said flatly. ‘But I don’t remember it. I’ve lived in Peckham since I was a baby.’
The DCI Morton Box Set Page 63
