Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 2)

by LJ Ross

  “Rough night?”

  “You’re telling me. That woman is an animal.”

  Ryan held off a shudder. Much as he liked his sergeant and DI MacKenzie, much as he was happy for them, he didn’t want to know any details. Especially not any details.

  Uncaring, Phillips ploughed on.

  “I’m telling you, she’s just got so much energy. If I wasn’t half the man I am,” Frank adopted what he thought was a manly stance, “I would be worried for my health.”

  “Frank, for pity’s sake …” Would it be childish to stick his fingers in his ears?

  “I loved my wife, God rest her soul,” Phillips tapped a hand to his heart as he thought of his first wife who had died years earlier. “But this is a whole new kettle of fish.”

  “I get the picture,” Ryan drawled. “You’re a Studly Stud from Studsville. You’re the Man of the Moment. You’re Mister Lover-Lover. Anything else?”

  Phillips pursed his lips, thought about it and then shook his head.

  “That covers it.”

  “Thank God. Now, do you mind if we get down to business?”

  Phillips plopped down in his desk chair and flipped open his notepad.

  “I spent some time last night going over what we know about Amy Llewellyn,” he began.

  “Was that before, or after?” Ryan queried, then waved a hand. “Forget I asked.”

  “Before. I managed to speak to Amy’s old housemate on the phone, which is the only way we’re likely to get hold of her, since she’s now living in Australia. She remembers things pretty well,” Phillips continued. “They went to school together and they were both studying medicine at Newcastle, same year, same course.”

  “She should have some decent observations, then?”

  “In terms of Amy’s movements, there isn’t much that she could add. Amy went missing on Friday 21st June 2005, when this housemate was at her boyfriend’s house. The last time she saw Amy was on the Friday morning, when they both had a lecture at the university. As far as she knows, Amy was planning to have a quiet night at home.”

  “What else?”

  “She agrees that Amy wasn’t herself for a good while before she disappeared. She thinks that she perked up a bit, just before she went missing, but she still reckons Amy wasn’t just down in the dumps, she was keeping secrets.”

  Ryan’s focus sharpened.

  “What kind of secrets?”

  Phillips glugged down more coffee before answering.

  “She reckons there was a man involved, somehow, which tallies with what her father told me yesterday. One night around the Christmas before she disappeared, Amy came home late and looked like she’d been crying. Apparently said she didn’t want to talk about it and clammed up, which was unusual because Amy was usually the ‘open’ sort.”

  “The housemate didn’t mention any names?”

  “She thinks he was a bit older, but she never met him and can’t remember his name. She thought he might have been married and that’s why Amy didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Recent events concerning Keir Edwards didn’t jog any memories for her?”

  “Nope, she’d never heard of Edwards until she saw it all reported on the BBC World News, last year and never associated him with Amy.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” Phillips agreed, scratching his chin. “She reckons it could have been this bloke to set her off along the wrong track, then Amy turned private and apparently their friendship was on the rocks.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yeah,” Phillips flicked his finger against the notes of his conversation with Amy’s housemate, from the night before. “She says that living with Amy had become difficult. She was withdrawn, a bit selfish, a bit of a slob. She was thinking about moving out and leaving her to it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the same ‘Amy’, does it?” Ryan commented, considering the girl staring back at him from a picture on the wall.

  “Tends to happen when people are depressed though, doesn’t it?” Phillips said knowledgeably and then tried to think of something to change the subject. It wasn’t so long ago that Ryan had gone through a rough patch.

  Thankfully, he was saved by the timely interruption of Ryan’s mobile phone, which pealed out the tinny theme tune from Indiana Jones.

  Phillips regarded Ryan with an indulgent look.

  “Not one word,” Ryan warned him, before hitting the green button on his touchscreen.

  After a few moments, he returned the phone to his pocket, all humour gone.

  “We need to take a trip to the mortuary. That was Pinter – apparently he’s finished Claire Burns’ autopsy and there’s something we should see.”

  “Do we have to?” There was nothing Phillips hated more.

  “He said it was for our eyes only.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  * * *

  The Bee Gees soared over the chilly air of the mortuary at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, their falsetto lyrics encouraging the listener to shake the white suit out of mothballs and give in to the fever of the night. Phillips had some fond memories of such a suit, and the corresponding platform heels he had worn on many fun nights out on the Tuxedo Princess, the boat-cum-nightclub that had laid anchor on the River Tyne, many moons ago.

  He sighed, thinking of the good old days. There was none of that now. It was all American-style diners straight off the set of Pulp Fiction.

  They found Jeff Pinter in his laboratory scrubs, his hair and face masked to protect the body of Claire Burns from further contamination. Ryan and Phillips kept a respectful distance, with Phillips in particular keeping his eye line a good few inches above where the body rested on a metal gurney, covered by a long white sheet.

  “Afternoon, fellas,” Pinter greeted them in his usual jovial manner. “You’re in luck; I’ve just finished the post-mortem.”

  “What can you tell us?”

  “Quite a lot,” Pinter began. “As I mentioned before, Claire Burns suffered no head wounds, as Amy Llewellyn did. Instead, I found a small puncture site in the tissue of her neck. Toxicology indicates that she was injected with a large dosage of Lorazepam.”

  “What’s that, when it’s at home?” Phillips asked.

  Ryan could have told him. It was precisely what the medics had found swimming around his system when they’d peeled him off the floor of his apartment, with Natalie dead beside him.

  Stop it, he told himself. Stop it.

  “Lorazepam is part of a group of benzodiazepines, which in high doses can induce sleep and certainly a sedative effect at the very least.”

  “Ideal to immobilise a victim, then?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “How accessible?”

  Pinter shrugged.

  “You would need a prescription, usually, but I would be lying if I said that hospital pharmacies didn’t suffer from their fair share of drugs theft.”

  “Anything else in her blood?”

  “We were able to isolate the presence of above-average levels of adrenaline, but aside from that, nothing out of the ordinary.”

  So far, the modus operandi was in keeping with Keir Edwards and they all knew it.

  “What about the amputation sites?”

  “I know what you’re wondering,” Pinter said excitedly. “You want to know if the wounds are consistent with those inflicted by The Hacker, during his heyday.”

  “And are they?”

  “They are,” Pinter confirmed. “In fact, we can draw further conclusions from Claire’s body, since we have more of it to look at. You remember that with his previous victims, we could see that the bones had been separated cleanly, beneath the major joints, which is a manner consistent with the approach taken by a surgical professional.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, it’s the same here, except only more so. Not only has her body been dissected beneath the major joints, even the nerves have been cut high up. The myoplastic flaps –”


  “Jeff, speak English, for God’s sake,” Phillips muttered.

  An unkind expression seemed to pass over Pinter’s face for a moment and then it was replaced by his usual cheery expression.

  “The incisions have been made from the anterior … from the front and the back of each juncture, working around the limb in a circular fashion. Again, in keeping with a professional standard of amputation.”

  “Was she alive, during this?”

  “Um, well.” Pinter blew out a breath. “For some of it, we can say that the blood was still circulating around her body. There is some clotting around both knees, which would suggest that she was alive during that process. There’s clotting around the elbows, also. For all other sites, there is no evidence to suggest circulation.”

  Compassion laced Phillips next question.

  “How did she die, in the end?”

  “Major cardiac arrest,” Pinter replied, without inflection. “Her system would have been severely weakened owing to the blood loss, added to which there was a cocktail of sedative and adrenaline running through her veins which would have messed about with her heart rate. Factoring in medical shock … you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Ryan said, “But you gave me the impression over the telephone that it was vitally important that we rush down here.”

  “Wait until you see the killer’s pièce de résistance.”

  With a bit of a flourish, Pinter whisked the white sheet away.

  Ryan and Phillips looked upon the remains of Claire Burns with a combination of disbelief and recognition. It was a sad, sorry end to a life that had only really just begun, Ryan thought. He grieved for them, for the dead that he championed. It may not have shown on his face, which was hard as marble, but his heart and his soul went out to her family. Yet, that wasn’t what sent a shiver across his shoulder blades. Now that her body had been pieced back together, they could clearly see that the front of her torso had been marked with deep, slashing cuts to form the shape of an inverted pentagram. It was something they had seen before.

  Ryan raised his eyes to the pathologist.

  “This goes no further than this room,” he told Pinter. “I want a list of everyone who has worked on Claire’s body.”

  Jeff nodded and then drew the sheet back over Claire’s serene face.

  * * *

  Outside, Ryan turned to Phillips.

  “Frank, give me a cigarette.”

  “What? You know fine well that I gave up those tar-infested killing sticks. Besides, you don’t smoke.”

  Ryan simply held out a hand.

  With a grumble, Phillips reached inside the breast pocket of his blazer and drew out the single cigarette he kept there, as a daily test of his willpower.

  Ryan bummed a light off a passer-by outside the hospital entrance and inhaled the smoke as his mind tried to process the latest development.

  “We have no way of knowing whether there were once similar markings on Amy’s body,” he said after the first few puffs.

  “Her body was too far gone,” Phillips agreed.

  “So what the hell is going on? First of all, Pinter tells us that the dissection was done in the same way as Edwards – in fact, the style was so similar as to be nearly identical. That suggests a copycat, or at least someone wanting to keep Edwards on the radar. Then, there’s the markings, and that doesn’t point to Edwards at all.”

  Phillips tugged at his ear while he thought.

  “You’re right there, lad. There was no ritual stuff in any of his previous victims, more just a certain method of killing, which isn’t the same thing. I don’t see Edwards dancing around naked calling to the Forces of Darkness.”

  “Neither do I,” Ryan was forced to agree. “He might be bat shit crazy but, as far as I know, he never believed he could conjure up Hell’s fury by howling around a campfire.”

  “What about if there’s more of them?”

  Ryan thought of the men and women who had been uncovered as belonging to a ‘circle’ on Holy Island. People who had created their own subversive moral code, to justify the killing of innocent human beings.

  “We can’t rule it out,” Ryan replied, at length. “We still don’t have all the answers. We still haven’t found Mike and Jennifer Ingles, for one thing.”

  He referred to the vicar and his wife, who had disappeared from Holy Island without a trace. There was still an active All Ports Warning and a warrant outstanding for their arrest. None of those who had been apprehended claimed to know their whereabouts and denied any knowledge of the attack on DC Jack Lowerson.

  It could be that one or two bad apples had fallen through the cracks in their investigation.

  “It feels like somebody’s playing with us.”

  He crushed the remainder of the cigarette beneath the heel of his boot and turned back to Phillips, who was looking at him with an odd expression on his mole-like face.

  “What?”

  “There’s something else to factor in here. With Claire’s murder, you’ve got shades of The Hacker and shades of Holy Island, not to mention physically similar types of victim. What do they all have in common?”

  Ryan had guessed the answer, but he let Phillips do the talking.

  “You, lad. The common denominator is you.”

  Ryan nodded once, just a quick jerk of his head.

  “I want Anna to be kept under observation at all times,” he started to reach for his phone, but Phillips put a hand on his arm to stay the action.

  “She won’t like it, if you don’t speak to her first.”

  Ryan nearly snarled.

  “She’ll have to deal with it,” he snapped, shrugging Phillips off. “You said yourself, we’re looking at victims who are young, dark-haired women, just like Anna. Whoever it is seems to be fixated on two of my previous cases. It’s obvious where they might look next.”

  “It’s guesswork –”

  “Common sense,” Ryan argued, then turned his back to put the call through.

  * * *

  Anna couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the prickle began. It started as a tingle along her spine; a shiver of sensory understanding, which told her that something in her immediate surroundings were not as they should be. Yet, when she looked around her, along the busy streets of Durham where shoppers and students mingled with young families and office-workers, she told herself she was imagining things. There were no hidden faces in the crowd, no madmen dressed in animal masks with murderous intent.

  Yet, there it was again. That tingle.

  It was a sorry state of affairs when she could no longer trust her own instinct to guide her, but Anna admitted to herself that six months had not been long enough to dispel the memories of that last day on the island. At first, the flashbacks had come frequently, replaying the horror over and over until she was almost desensitized. Gradually, they had abated, but Ryan was not the only one who still suffered from broken sleep. Her treacherous mind enjoyed nothing more than reminding her of how close she had come to death and it made her distrustful of her own psyche.

  She looked again into the crowd, searching the faces of those men and women for a clue of some kind.

  There was nothing.

  Shaking herself, she continued her brisk walk along the High Street, back towards the university. If her steps were a little quicker than usual, she put it down to the sudden chill in the air. Passers-by brushed against her as she zigzagged through the crowd and the contact made her tense. Coat tails were like fingers, clutching at her arms. Panic was rising steadily and she fought for composure, mentally counting her footsteps as they slapped against the pavement until the walls of the university came into view once more.

  She broke free of the mass and ran the rest of the way, back into the safety of those hallowed walls, which rang with the gentle din of student chatter.

  Outside, a man watched her flee the High Street, admiring the ripple of dark hair swaying from side-to-side as she ran with lon
g, limber strides. He replaced the camera inside its leather holder and slung it over one shoulder, just another tourist snapping pictures of the city.

  He considered following her. Desire was palpable; he could feel his body urging him onwards, to claim his prize. He started to shake, the force of it pumping through his veins, but the urge abated sharply when he noticed two men walk in the direction Anna had taken. Both wore dark suits hanging badly over rounded shoulders and scratched loafers, the ubiquitous signal that they were police. He congratulated himself on a cautious, careful approach. That’s what made him the best, he thought, enjoying the sensation of having made yet another narrow escape. With some regret, he told himself to be patient and turned back along the High Street with a whistle.

  Besides, it wouldn’t be long now.

  CHAPTER 12

  “It has to be someone with inside knowledge.”

  Ryan’s bald statement was met with a satisfactory level of awed hush around the Incident Room, as his team reconvened. He was plagued with doubt regarding his decision to have his girlfriend put under police observation, but told himself that it surely fell under the heading of ‘police matter’ rather than ‘relationship issue’. He was also perturbed by the immediate urge to discuss the matter with Doctor Donovan. Never before had he required anybody else’s input on how he chose to conduct his life and the intrusion into his daily thought processes was one more irritant to bear.

  He got up to pace around a bit and burn off some of the restless energy.

  “You think he’s with the police?”

  MacKenzie’s question was a loaded one. The thought of him being one of their own number was almost inconceivable. Yet Ryan remembered reading somewhere that the greatest number of functional psychopaths could be found in those professions where the individual could feel in control of others. That included the police, top-tier business and medicine. How anybody could abuse such a position of trust was a question for others to ask. CID was left with the consequences and there was little time to worry about whether the perpetrators committed their crimes by reason of nature or nurture.