The Devil’s Architect: Book Two of the Dark Horizon Trilogy

by Duncan Simpson

  ‘Symbols have been cut into the cheeks, two on each side,’ Sullivan continued.

  ‘What do you make of those?’ asked Blake, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘No idea,’ said Milton. ‘Two sets of upside-down Vs, it looks to me,’ he offered blankly.

  Blake gave a shrug.

  Turning the victim’s head to the side, Sullivan continued. ‘The lobe of the ear has been torn, consistent with the forced removal of an earring.’ The pathologist returned the woman’s head to its original position. ‘There is also a slight laceration to the side of the tongue. Now for the major area of trauma.’ The pathologist leaned forward. ‘The neck has been cut through twice. On the left side, about an inch below the jaw, an incision about four inches in length which runs from a point immediately below the ear. The second incision is an inch below the first and extends all the way to the right carotid artery.’ Sullivan’s gloved finger annotated his commentary.

  ‘The cuts are extremely deep. The laceration through the larynx, just above the cricoid cartilage, is down to the vertebra. The fifth and sixth vertebrae are deeply notched.’

  Blake grimaced and straightened his back.

  ‘The large vessels of the neck on both sides have been severed. The cuts must have been made by a long-bladed knife, and were obviously inflicted with a great deal of violence. Cause of death is exsanguination. The copious blood at the scene and the lack of bruising around the neck don’t suggest asphyxiation. We’ll get the toxicology results back soon.’

  Blake took a step back from the body, relieved that the narration had apparently come to an end.

  Milton shot him a serious look. ‘That’s not all,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sullivan. ‘There are distinct bruises, each the size of a man’s thumb, just below the clavicle, here.’ The pathologist put his thumb above the mark on the left side of the body. ‘This position is over a pressure point. Enough force will disable a person. Two other things: look here on the right hand.’ Sullivan raised the corpse’s hand several inches off the stainless-steel examination table. ‘There are distinct ridges in the skin of the victim’s proximal phalanges consistent with the wearing of rings. Abrasion marks around the knuckles suggest they may have been removed by force.’

  ‘The forensics team found three silver rings in the grass next to the body,’ added Milton. ‘It looks like the killer tried to take them off in a hurry and then discarded them.’

  The policeman noticed Blake’s brow pinch forward.

  ‘Sorry gentlemen, I still don’t know why I’m here? You could have told me this over the phone,’ said Blake, throwing a glance over to the policeman.

  ‘That leads us to the last observation,’ said Milton. ‘Dr Sullivan, please carry on.’

  ‘Dr Blake, look here.’

  Blake followed the pathologist’s gloved finger to a two-inch incision mark to the right side of the corpse’s navel.

  ‘A single shallow incision has been made to raise the skin and subcutaneous fat away from the muscle to form a pocket.’

  ‘A pocket? A pocket for what?’ Blake asked.

  ‘For this,’ Milton answered, handing over an evidence bag to Blake. ‘It’s okay, the forensic boys have finished their tests on it. You can take it out.’

  Hesitantly, Blake peered into the bag. A dark disc of metal was nestled in one corner. He flattened his palm and slowly tipped the coin into his hand. It felt cold and heavy against his skin. Blake lifted it to the light.

  ‘It’s a Roman coin, right?’ said Milton.

  A silence fell as Blake turned the object in his fingers.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he finally replied. ‘I know precisely what it is.’

  Chapter 11

  ‘Welcome to Broadmoor gentlemen,’ said the senior psychiatrist as he shook their hands in the security control room. Dr Boltzmann was in his early forties and had thick hair and a close goatee beard peppered with flecks of ginger. He was well presented, lean and tall, and a faint smell of expensive cologne followed him around the room.

  ‘I presume you have completed your security briefing?’ asked Boltzmann.

  The two visitors nodded.

  ‘A necessary precaution, I’m afraid.’ To underline the point, the psychiatrist pulled down on his tie, which came off in his hand. ‘All staff ties are of the anti-strangle, clip-on variety. The men here can be unpredictable and violent.’

  Blake and Milton had completed their security briefing in the facility’s red-brick reception centre. The same security briefing was given to every visitor about the required safety protocols when in close proximity with some of Britain’s most notorious criminals; people who represented a grave and immediate risk to the public. One such person was Enoch Hart, a man too dangerous to be managed anywhere else in the penal system.

  During the security briefing, Blake and Milton were starkly warned about leaving objects of any kind within the areas used by the inmates. In the wrong hands, anything could be made into a weapon: the handle of a plastic spoon could be fashioned with sandpaper into a highly effective dagger; the shards from a splintered compact disc could inflict catastrophic injuries. As a result, all personal items were left at the front door.

  Inmates at Broadmoor had time on their hands. Unlike a prison sentence, a stint at Broadmoor had no release date. There’s doing time and there’s doing Broadmoor time was an oft-quoted phrase within the institution. Without the hope of a release, idle hands often got up to abhorrent purposes. The threat of violence was never too far away.

  Waving his hand up to the bank of screens in the control room, Boltzmann continued. ‘Patients can only move at certain times of the day and in certain configurations. Flare-ups between patients and staff are commonplace. Patient movements are closely monitored via CCTV.’

  Boltzmann smiled at his two visitors and then steered them out of the control room.

  ‘My office is in the Cranfield suite at the other end of the hospital. We’ll take the causeway,’ said Boltzmann. ‘After all, the sun appears to be shining today.’

  An open-air walkway cutting through the centre of the facility; the causeway was essentially a rectangular tunnel made of heavy-duty steel mesh. The structure was used to transport staff and hospital supplies across the hospital grounds.

  The psychiatrist nodded up to the CCTV camera above the heavy security door at the far end of the corridor. A buzzer sounded, and the door’s internal locks snapped open. Boltzmann pulled open the door and waited for Milton and Blake to step into the fresh air before closing it. A buzzer sounded again to confirm that the door had locked successfully behind them. The psychiatrist took the lead along the causeway.

  ‘Tell me DCI Milton, how is Chief Constable Lewis? I’ve played a couple of rounds with Peter from time to time, but I haven’t caught up with him in ages.’

  As Milton and Boltzmann chatted, Blake trailed a couple of steps behind, taking in the grounds. From the reception centre, the causeway ran through several hundred feet of well-maintained lawns before joining a block of red-brick buildings housing the Cranfield suite and Boltzmann’s office. The deceptively quiet grounds gave the impression of a residential business college rather than a maximum-security hospital. The sound of bird song warbled behind Blake’s shoulder. He turned and peered through the metal mesh to the ground to locate the trill notes. A small blue tit jumped out from behind a clump of grass and flew up into the faded denim sky. Blake’s eyes, however, didn’t follow the arc of the bird skywards but instead remained fixed on the small patches of purple flowers dotting the grass. He tugged at his ear as he squinted through the mesh to catalogue what he was seeing.

  The sound of other voices drew him back into the moment. Three men had exited a door at one end of the Cranfield suite and were now walking outside the confines of the causeway on the lawn in their direction. The leading man’s hands were bound behind his back whilst the other two, dressed in white hospital tunics, escorted him across the grass. The prisoner was a small man
with spiked bottle-blond hair and incongruous dark eyebrows. As they walked towards him, Blake became aware that the man’s gaze had locked on to him. Looking down the length of the causeway, it suddenly dawned on Blake that he was now some way behind Milton and Boltzmann.

  Suddenly, a rapid movement shifted in Blake’s peripheral vision. In the blink of an eye, the prisoner sidestepped his escorts and was running directly towards him. Even though his hands were tied, the prisoner’s progress was rapid across the grass and easily outpaced his guards’ lumbering pursuit. Blake took a couple of steps backwards until his shoulders rested on the back meshing of the walkway.

  Like a missile smashing into its target, the prisoner clattered his shoulder into the meshing. His eyes flashed with fury at Blake. They were the blackest eyes he had ever seen, like circles of obsidian. Sending white flecks of spit through his clenched teeth, the man hissed something as his head lashed from side to side. Alerted by the guards, Boltzmann was already running back towards Blake, demanding that he keep his distance.

  A strange rattling noise came from somewhere deep in the prisoner’s throat, and his eyeballs began to flicker erratically. His bared teeth were biting at the air.

  ‘Eve can’t blink,’ he growled in a strange, guttural voice that seemed alien to the prisoner’s slight frame. For a moment, Blake felt a blackness creep over him.

  ‘What?’ said Blake without thinking.

  ‘Eve can’t blink,’ the prisoner hissed a second time, just as the first of the two guards arrived and pinned him to the fence. He was quickly followed by the second guard.

  Moments later, within the relative safety of the causeway, Dr Boltzmann approached half running and scraping a hand through his hair.

  ‘You okay, Dr Blake?’ asked the psychiatrist in a concerned tone. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that.’ Boltzmann shot a glance to the guards, who were already manhandling the prisoner away from the fence.

  ‘Can you please get the duty nurse to check his medication?’ instructed the psychiatrist. ‘I also want an incident report to be filed.’

  Blake wasn’t looking at Boltzmann; his eyes were firmly fixed on the prisoner, who was now completely compliant to the guard’s directions. All the fierceness had disappeared from his face. No longer rigid with hysteria, the prisoner’s head hung down in quiet submission.

  ‘Let’s get to my office,’ Boltzmann suggested, embarrassed by the incident. Blake nodded, and the two men walked over to Milton, whose lips showed the hint of a playful grin.

  ‘Can’t leave you alone for a second without you finding trouble,’ said Milton.

  Blake returned the smile and brushed off the wasp resting on Milton’s shoulder.

  Chapter 12

  Two things were different about the surroundings of the Cranfield suite. Firstly, the rooms and corridors were all in muted pastel colours, apart from the bright-red panic buttons that stippled the walls like some sort of infectious disease. The second was the proliferation of signs warning staff that they must wear personal attack alarms at all times. We’ve entered a war zone, Blake thought as they approached Boltzmann’s office door. It was a heavy secure door like the others in the suite and was equipped with an observation hole. Boltzmann unlocked it with a swipe of a card and beckoned his guests to sit down as they entered the room.

  The psychiatrist dropped into his leather chair and wheeled himself closer to his desk. He gave a cursory look at the single open manila file lying on its top and then cleared his throat.

  ‘Medically speaking, Enoch Hart is a classic paranoid schizophrenic,’ said Boltzmann. ‘Delusions of persecution, chaotic thinking, auditory hallucinations. He is also very dangerous. He was on a four-person unlock protocol.’

  ‘A what?’ asked Blake.

  ‘His cell could only be opened with four people present,’ explained Boltzmann. ‘Even the most routine tasks ran the risk of violence. He’s the real deal. He admitted stabbing the vicar at St George’s church in cold blood, and at his trial he showed no contrition for her murder. He crossed the line and he didn’t even flinch. At one of our first interviews together, he told me that she had been possessed and had to be stopped.’

  ‘And what about the other patients?’ asked Milton.

  ‘They didn’t want anything to do with him. He’s the kind of man that when he stares at you, you want to look away. He used to get into their heads.’ He paused a beat and stared down his nose. ‘Monsters don’t live under your bed gentlemen, they live in your head.’

  ‘Did his psychosis come out of the blue?’ asked Blake.

  ‘As far as we can tell, he experienced some kind of breakdown and religious conversion during his last tour of duty with the army. He was discharged and then started working for the church.’ Boltzmann checked the file. ‘He was working under the supervision of Angelo Ricard, that’s right,’ he said, tapping the entry in the file. ‘Have you interviewed him yet?’

  Milton shook his head and wrote the name in his notebook.

  ‘Through medication and psychological treatment, we can make significant progress with our patients. Those who are receptive to our interventions often end up moving forward with their lives, heading for the light, so to speak.’ Boltzmann repositioned himself in his chair. ‘Hart was unreceptive to everything we tried,’ he said coldly.

  ‘This is a manhunt, pure and simple,’ said Milton with conviction. ‘Hart stabs the vicar of St George’s in cold blood, admits the crime, gets sectioned and ends up in Broadmoor. Less than a year later, he escapes and then kills again in the grounds of the same church.’ The DCI shut his notebook. ‘We’ve just got to catch the bastard now.’

  ‘You mentioned that Hart suffered from delusions of persecution?’ asked Blake, hunching forward in his seat.

  ‘Indeed.’ Boltzmann rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Probably the best way to answer your question is to show you his cell.’

  ‘Lead the way,’ said Milton.

  The three men rose to their feet, and Blake and Milton followed the psychiatrist out of the door.

  Chapter 13

  Boltzmann led them along a windowless corridor to a guard station next to a security door. After waving to the guard sitting behind the reinforced glass screen, the door opened and the three men stepped through, only to be confronted by yet another door some ten feet further ahead. Boltzmann gave a half-smile to each of his visitors in turn as they waited for the first door to close before walking over to the next one. An alarm sounded overhead and, after the clicking of magnetic locks, the second door opened.

  ‘Welcome to the front line,’ said Boltzmann, as the three men stepped into the foyer. The space was brightly lit from overhead, with four patient cells leading off a corridor. The psychiatrist waved a credit-card-sized key over the reader on the closest door and gestured his visitors to enter.

  ‘You’ll understand better when you see this,’ he said as he took a step back to let Milton pass.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Milton said as his eyes travelled over the walls of the cell. He turned with a troubled frown as Blake entered after him. Hart’s secure living quarters were about the size of a small hotel room and had a bed, sink, simple bookcase, upright locker and small writing desk.

  Blake tried to take in the sight that had just met his eyes. Pinching his lips tight, his gaze darted over the scene. The walls of Hart’s cell were covered with sheets of paper of all sizes: pages of books, handwritten notes, sketches all stuck closely together, like the scales of a fish.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he muttered in a voice almost too quiet to be heard.

  As Blake continued to systematically examine the walls, Milton took Boltzmann aside. ‘All this needs to be photographed by the forensics team.’

  The psychiatrist nodded.

  ‘So he was transferred out of here to a local hospital the day before his escape?’ asked Milton.

  Boltzmann nodded again and then shifted on his feet.

  ‘He was rushed out of here, as a medical
emergency. Minutes after he had raised the alarm, he was convulsing and unconscious. His face was swollen and red. According to the medical team, his vital signs were critical.’

  ‘And yet less than twenty-four hours later he sawed through the side of a hospital bed and escaped, under the noses of a pair of police officers,’ said Milton.

  The psychiatrist blew out air from the side of his mouth. ‘Yes, but you need to understand who you are dealing with. Hart is a very capable, and treatment-resistant, paranoid schizophrenic. With a psychotic disorder, the patient’s sense of reality is different from yours and mine. He believed he was engaged in some kind of holy war. When I first started to work with him, he told me that the vicar he murdered was possessed by a demon. He was totally unrepentant, saying that the woman’s soul had already passed into hell.’

  Milton glanced over Boltzmann’s face as he continued, his lips feeling unnaturally dry.

  ‘In those early days, Hart would at least talk to the other patients. He took a job in the workshop. Carpentry, that kind of thing. But soon after our rehabilitation work started, he withdrew into his own world. He spent less time in the workshop and more of the day alone in this cell—’ Boltzmann paused, shuffling the words in his head, ‘—preparing.’

  ‘Preparing for what?’ asked Milton.

  ‘For holy war. He had the delusion that a great battle was coming and that he would be called upon to carry out an important mission. Hart is a highly trained soldier. Damn it, he was in the bloody SAS for two years. He spent his days in here like some kind of warrior monk: praying, doing power yoga and reading. He often refused to eat more than one meal a day, preparing his body for whatever was to come.’ Boltzmann’s face stiffened with conviction. ‘Be very careful when you track him down. He’s a one-man army.’