The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2)

by Valerie Laws

  THE OPERATOR

  (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2)

  VALERIE LAWS

  ‘Gripping from the very first scene’ Ann Cleeves

  ‘Now, this won’t hurt...’ Someone’s giving doctors a taste of their own medicine, killing surgeons to mimic the operations they perform. Erica Bruce and DI Will Bennett lock horns once more in an action-packed, dark but witty follow-up to THE ROTTING SPOT (also on Kindle).

  Praise for THE ROTTING SPOT (A Bruce and Bennett Mystery):

  ‘A darkly intriguing debut.’ Val McDermid

  ‘Valerie Laws is a fresh and talented new voice in crime-writing. The Rotting Spot takes the established form of the rural detective novel, but brings it bang up to date. Here we have practitioners of complementary medicine and a binge-drinking pregnant young Geordie; we consider the relationship between women and food and the delights of skull collecting. And all within the framework of a well-structured plot.’ Ann Cleeves.

  ‘Opens with a bang…and interweaves a suspenseful story with graphic extracts from the Skull Hunter’s blog. As Erica crosses paths with DI Will Bennett, he of the blue, blue eyes, and skeletons rattle loudly in closets, Laws brings her locations vibrantly to life.’ Daneet Steffens, Time Out London

  For my son Robin and my daughter Lydia: and for all doctors, nurses and medical students who treat patients with kindness and consideration. It matters more than you know.

  First published as an ebook in 2013, and in paperback February 2014 by Red Squirrel Crime

  (www.redsquirrelpress.com)

  Copyright 2013 Valerie Laws

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Andrew Edwards at www.thirdfloorcreative.co.uk

  PROLOGUE

  A man and an operating table. On it a youth lay on his back, fully conscious, his whole body tense. The man standing over him felt the familiar surge of power rewarded, of anticipation which never palled however often he indulged it. He picked up the young misshapen leg, bulging and deformed where the broken bone had splintered within it. He grasped it hard with finger and thumb, pinching with the very tips as if testing an apple for the first signs of give, feeling the damaged tibia as it already laboured to heal. The youth flinched, squirmed, the conflict of trying not to in front of the man clear in his face. A gasp burst out of him, smothered but delightfully audible. The young face was white, greenish, the eyes huge and dark, and the man could read the pain in them, and it felt so good.

  And even better, the boy’s mother was there too. She had to sit still and keep quiet while the man hurt her son. If only he had two independent sets of eyes, to watch them both, so as not to miss a single taste, a single bite of pain from either of them. What a bonus! A two for one package. The physical pain of damage, injury, anatomy wrenched awry; and the emotional pain of the mother wincing at her son’s every pang, every stab of agony, feeling it in her belly, which she couldn’t help clutching behind the shield of her handbag. She would gladly, poor stupid cow, suffer it all herself if only her son was spared, but here they both were, equally helpless, in his power, where their sort belonged.

  He picked up one of the delicate, gleaming metal instruments that lay neatly ranged beside him, and began to work the end of one of the thin steel spikes that he had previously screwed into the skin, flesh and damaged bone of the boy’s leg, one of many, each one creating a fresh wound, each one fixed to metal rings bolted together, so that he could adjust the tension between them in three planes, twisting, shearing, pulling. The youth’s face was now grey-green, and his eyelids fluttered as if he was about to pass out, strange moans burst from his mouth. But he tried to hold them back. To please the man, to impress him. And the mother sat watching, unable to help, unable to stop the torment, her eyes like her son’s, wide with pain. Neither of them resisted, neither complained, they were docile, pathetic, accepting his authority. This was better than punching and kicking, the cheap thrills of easy screams and begging. Better by far the small, humiliated sounds forced out of those who strove not to express their pain out of respect for him.

  The boy’s skin was damp with sweat, he breathed fast and shallow, the sharp odour of fear and adrenal arousal rose from him. His mother’s hands were clenched on the thin arms of the plastic chair, knuckles white as a cadaver’s, as if forcing herself not to spring uselessly to the boy’s aid. But the man was finished with them for now, their intimate exchange one of so many locked in his excellent memory for later recall and enjoyment over a glass of burgundy, but there was one final refinement he waited for, and it came, total submission implicit.

  ‘Thank the doctor,’ she prompted her son. As the nurse indifferently aided him to rise and handed him his crutches, pain and endorphins still zinging through his veins, he said it. ‘Thank you, Mr Kingston.’ He limped off back into the crowded Orthopaedic Outpatients, where so many still waited. Slowly and painfully, the next patient began to stand up as the nurse announced, ‘The doctor will see you now.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Erica Bruce rang the doorbell again. She was expected. Surely he’d not have gone out. She shifted her feet, jogging up and down on her toes as she looked at the expensively landscaped and tended front garden, the well-clipped constrained conifers and the ornamental pond. Too clean for frogs or newts to live in, she noted with disapproval, but with a few polished-looking koi sluggishly rotating in it. Such a retro, sixties kind of expensiveness about the house, those tacky bits of white cladding on the brickwork, those ludicrous white pillars flanking the door, too heavy and bulbous.

  Was Kingston never going to let her in? Perhaps some kind of alpha male power-play? Keep her standing out here, so she’d know her place. Perhaps he had forgotten their appointment. Though she’d emailed him a confirmation just last night, belting and bracing as usual. He must be in there.

  A man, on an operating table. His eyes were open, looking at the ceiling with an opaque stare. The thick thatch of black hair on the back of his head was glued to the examination table by a puddle of dark thick blood. Right between his eyes on the midline between them but centred on his brow, where the third eye is said to be, a shiny metal spike protruded like a big bright new six-inch nail. It was blunt-topped with no head, strong but slender, slightly aslant from the vertical. Another such spike stuck out centrally above each strongly-marked dark eyebrow, roughly orthogonal to the skin they pierced. In the shallow bowl of each temple was another nail, at about 45 degrees to the horizontal, and another just above each ear, more or less parallel to the surface of the table. Seven spikes symmetrically placed like a crown, clean and gleaming, though there were none at the back. Small dribbles of blood had leaked out of the wounds and dried to streaks on the pale skin, trickling obedient to gravity until slowed and stopped by clotting and drying.

  His mouth sagged partly open, all muscle tone gone from his face, leaving it unlined and unconcerned, but the vacant gape spoiled the otherwise handsome looks he’d had in life. His legs were together to the knee in their stone-coloured expensively casual chinos, his ankles crossed so that the left foot lay across the right. His arms were spread as far as the width of the examination table allowed, his hands palm upwards. In the centre of each palm was another nail, impaling it to the table. The fingers and thumbs, with beautifully kept very clean nails, curled inwards towards the metal spikes as if in a defensive gesture.

  On the table to the left of his crossed ankles was a chunk of stained and weathered stone, about the size of an
irregular, flattened honeydew melon. Small clean chips of newly exposed sandstone showed through the grubby surface of soil and green algae. Sandstone which had felt the fire of volcanoes to forge each glass-like grain, then the weathering of countless ages of ice, rain, sun, then the weight of primeval seas on its layers, eventually planted in the soil of a garden rockery or hedgerow: longer than it took for the man beside it to evolve from a single cell, millions of years just to become a crude hammer. The chippings which had been loosened from the stone were nowhere to be seen on the floor which was clean apart from a few drops of blood.

  He lay on the table, alone, and indifferent. The room had been hot with fear and rage, the air embittered by the adrenaline-charged sweat of extreme emotion, of someone as full of murder as the stone was full of years, but now it was cool.

  There was a smell of blood in the room. It was an unfamiliar smell, though the room had often known pain.

  Still outside, Erica felt a qualm of unease, and glanced around for a moment, wondering if Stacey Reed had come along after all. Perhaps she was lurking behind a monkey puzzle tree or something. But there was no waft of Lambert and Butler smoke drifting on the wind, and no noise. She wondered for the nth time how she’d got herself lumbered with a lass she’d first seen unconscious, going into drunken labour in a filthy back lane behind a night club at chucking-out time. As usual, Erica had got involved, making sure baby Noosh made her appearance in hospital rather than onto spilled chips and vomit. Now she ran through her conversation with Stacey the day before. Had she made it clear enough that this was a solo assignment?

  ‘Aye, he was the kind of lad who’d run his dick under the tap before a blow-job. Proper classy, like.’

  The unmistakeable strident tones of Stacey Reed on her phone had entered the room just before wisps of ciggie smoke, a waft of Lynx ‘Attract for Her’, her almost out and fully proud breasts, followed by her muffin top, then the rest of her. Ludicrously high heels swung in one hand, and her orange spray-tanned legs ended in grubby feet at one end and a tiny tight black skirt and white top at the other.

  ‘And they said romance was dead.’ Erica hastily minimised the current window on her pc, before the ever-curious Stacey clocked anything confidential. ‘He your last night’s hook-up then? Bit late for the walk of shame isn’t it, even for you.’

  ‘Walk? I get fkn taxis, me.’ Stacey noted Erica’s defensive minimising with amusement. As if she couldn’t hack into her stuff any time she liked! Honestly, Erica was a bit thick for a clever lass with degrees and shit. ‘So Aa’ll be comin with yer, tomorra. Yer know, for that interview with that Kingston, like.’

  ‘No you won’t, and stop reading my confidential stuff, and put your cig -’

  ‘Already oot man, woman. So yer can stop naggin. Aa’ve gotta smoke havn’a? Keeps me weight doon.’

  She dropped into a chair which shuddered at the assault. ‘Aa should deffo come with. Aa mean, Aa’ve got rights havn’a? Aa’m yer intern, like.’

  ‘Stacey, for the gazillionth time, you are not my intern...’

  ‘Bollocks. Yer don’t pay iz, do yer? So I’m the intern.’

  ‘You’re not any intern, let alone the definite article. And I can barely afford to pay me.’ Erica began typing up an appointment report, now that Stacey was safely out of sight of the screen.

  ‘Too right! Wodda loser! Aa spend more on a night oot than ye earn in a week! Haway, man, let iz come with.’

  ‘Let me explain again. I have two jobs. One, I’m a homeopath. You are NOT my intern. Two, I’m an alternative health journalist, freelance. You are SOOO NOT my intern. See the diff?’

  ‘Bet Kingston’s loaded... I’d love to see inside his hoose, man!’

  But mainly because it was going to be what she considered too early to get up, too late to stay up, Stacey had agreed, kind of, not to turn up. And so far, she hadn’t. Erica didn’t let herself think about why Stacey might be so keen to get inside a doctor’s house.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Still on Kingston’s doorstep, Erica rang yet again, stabbing at the bell, then knocked painfully with her knuckles on the front door, a white heavily moulded one with a big brass knob. Trust him to have a bloody great knob right there in your face... compensating for something? Next to the door there was a sign under the brass plate carved with his name and all the letters he’d collected in the Scrabble game of University and training. ‘PATIENTS WITH APPOINTMENTS PLEASE RING AND ENTER.’ Erica had not considered herself a patient. Patience had never been her strong point, and was becoming more difficult to attain as she neared thirty. Maybe she was expected to walk in. Maybe everyone he knew was classified as colleague or patient, current or potential. Maybe he was waiting to meet her in his private consulting room, the expression of his power and authority. Typical, the arrogant tosser. Now, Erica, she told herself firmly, that’s not the way to get a decent interview. Get a grip. She pulled down her shoulders, shook her wrists a few times to loosen her tension, unset her mouth from its firm line and pushed hard. The door opened. She felt foolish. All that ringing for nothing.

  ‘Hello? Mr Kingston?’ Her voice seemed to bounce off the gleaming Italian tiled hall floor, the creamy, expensively distressed walls, the lofty ceilings and swooping stairwell. ‘It’s Erica Bruce! Hello?’

  Kingston’s consulting room was on the left of the hall, a brass plate on the open door. She froze. The doctor was in.

  She felt a sudden giddy flush flood over her at the sight of the man on the table, and the smell she unconsciously breathed in which was interpreted instantly by the primitive parts of her brain, launching an adrenaline response. Fight was not an option, flight was, but shock, curiosity and confusion held her still. For a moment a scream tried to erupt from somewhere inside her. She fought it down and stood with her eyes shut, until the rushing in her ears became less deafening, the banging of her heart less audible. She forced herself to go over to the body. Even now, he could be alive - there might be something she could do. Though a glance at the bizarre wounds, the blank eyes, the stilled blood told her none of the little bottles she carried would be any good in this case. She had fantasised about how cool it would be if she was able to cure this man of something, anything, even piles or warts, and make him eat humble pie. It didn’t look as if he would be worrying about piles again, if indeed he ever had.

  ‘Poor guy. I hope you didn’t feel too much of this. I’m so sorry...’ For some reason she had to speak to him, he seemed so alone. She felt tempted to touch him, offer comfort, but she didn’t.

  ‘Just stay there, and don’t touch anything,’ she murmured to herself. She knew the drill. She rummaged in her large shapeless embroidered bag for her mobile and punched in the numbers for emergency services.

  Murder, no doubt about it. That meant the police, and that probably meant Detective Inspector Will Bennett and his minions. Couldn’t be helped. ‘Well fuck him,’ she said aloud. Yeah right, been there done that, very nice too while it lasted.

  Waiting for the inevitable, she went back out into the garden and sat on the white-painted garden seat next to the front door with its Queen Anne fanlight, an elaborate great scallop shell moulding above it. She kept seeing him crucified on that table where so many patients had painfully lain, hoping his smooth pinkly clean hands would cure them with the magic knife of surgery, the magic bullet of pharmacy.

  The gibbon call of a police siren swooped louder and nearer, a car roared up the quiet street, at first hidden by the high hedges and naff topiary, and then swirled up the broad drive, stopping abruptly just before it hit an ornamental urn of geraniums. Two officers jumped out, first to respond. Their expressions were eager but stern. Chasing youths away from bus shelters and picking up drunks at chucking-out time were more usual police activities in the seaside town of Wydsand. Though more and more, violence both domestic and random, fuelled by drugs (mostly a pick’n’mix of ket, coke, E’s) complicating the proud ancient Nordic culture of binge drinking, had enlivened the
job. The PC looked absurdly young in his thick cuddly sweater which seemed so unlike a uniform. Surely I can’t be old enough yet to think police officers are too young, she thought. He ran into the house, while the WDC stood in front of Erica, to ask if she’d made the call and take her name.

  ‘You know my name, Sally.’ Erica squinted up at her.

  ‘I’m DC Sally Banner, Ms er...’ The young officer’s elfin face, dusted with freckles, and her cropped sand-gold hair, gave her a delicate appearance but her brown eyes were hard.

  ‘Oh for pity’s sake... there’s a man dead in there, let’s not play silly buggers.’

  ‘Gotta do this by the book, serious crime and all.’ She wrote down ‘Erica Bruce’ without making Erica actually say it. Barely had she finished that when the male PC ran out again, straight past the two women to a flower bed where he vomited over a begonia. Erica felt the nausea rise in her own throat and swallowed down the bitter hot liquid, as Sally Banner hurried in in her turn, and came out again, pale and shaken, reaching for the radio with trembling hands. This really was a big one. They really would have to do everything right. And trust Erica Bruce to be right here in the thick of it. In a carefully controlled voice Sally radioed for assistance, police doctor, CSI, the works. The male PC sat down next to Erica, clearly thinking here was something official he could do while parking himself next to someone more attractive than a violently slain corpse. He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again, as if afraid of what his voice might sound like.

  ‘New on the job?’ Erica fumbled in her bag. ‘Here, I might have something you can take for the shock. ‘