I asked Rebecca if she wanted me to come and wait with her, but we agreed that we were probably better staying where we were, just in case Katie was able to try and get in touch with either of us. There was no way that I was going to be able to sleep, so I kept my station beside the phone.
It was three hours until the phone rang again. Rebecca’s voice was cracking and full of tears.
“Jack, it’s Rebecca. I’m at the hospital. They’ve found Katie. Please come.”
The dull tone of the line as she hung up was nothing compared to the deadness that had settled on my heart.
Chapter Thirty Six
The drive to the hospital was a total blur. Fortunately the fact that it was the middle of the night meant the hospital car park was virtually empty because I suspect that in the state I was, I would have just dumped the car in an ambulance bay.
I burst through the door of the Accident and Emergency area at a run. Rebecca was sitting just inside the entrance, her head in her hands. She stood up, and rushed into my arms before breaking down completely.
“How is she?” I asked, once she had quietened a little.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “They said she was alive but in a critical condition when she got here, but apparently she’s been in the emergency room ever since.”
Next to where we were waiting was a small office, labelled “triage nurse”. The door was closed but after a few minutes it opened and a teenage couple came out, the girl’s right ankle heavily bandaged. Once they’d gone through the doors leading into the main department, I looked into the room at the nurse who was writing up some notes.
“Can you give us any information on how Katie Dixon is?” I asked him.
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said looking up. “I assess people as they come in, but she went straight into the ER. I’ll go and see if I can find anything out for you.”
He disappeared through another door. Within five minutes, a doctor wearing surgical green scrubs came out to us. His name badge identified him as Doctor Grant.
“You were asking about the condition of Miss Dixon,” he said. “Are you her next of kin?”
Rebecca and I exchanged glances. “Not quite,” she answered. “I’m her flatmate and this is her partner. I’m in contact with her parents, but they won’t be able to get here until later on in the day.”
“Surely you can tell us something, doctor.” I blurted out. “At least whether she’s alive or not?”
He stared at me gravely for a moment, as if deciding what to say to us.
“She’s alive,” he said finally, and my spirits soared. “But she remains in a very critical condition.”
“Can you tell us what’s happened to her?” Rebecca asked, her voice still trembling.
“She’s been attacked,” he said bluntly. “She’s received a severe blow to the back of her head which has resulted in a fracture to her skull. The scans suggest that there hasn’t been any damage to her brain, but we won’t really be certain until she regains consciousness. She has also a number of knife wounds to her body, and has lost a great deal of blood as a result. Less seriously, but still affecting her ability to recover, she is suffering from hypothermia through being left out in the street.”
“Do you think she’ll live?” I asked directly.
“We won’t know for sure for a few hours,” he answered. “If she hadn’t been found when she was, I suspect she would have lost too much blood to survive. As it is, on balance, I think that she probably will. But the next few hours are critical. Her body has suffered a massive trauma and there may yet be an adverse reaction to that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get back to her.”
He turned and walked back through the swing doors. Rebecca and I hugged each other silently, out of a combination of sadness and relief.
“She’ll be OK,” she told me. “Katie’s a real fighter you know.”
I started to answer her, but was stopped by the swing doors opening again. This time they revealed Laura Smith and Michael Palmer. A hot rage rose unexpectedly. I marched towards Michael Palmer, finger pointing.
“You’d better not make any comments about me being responsible for this,” I yelled at him. “Because I’d love an excuse to thump you just at the moment.”
To my surprise, he didn’t react at all, but just kept staring calmly at me. It was Laura Smith who spoke.
“I understand that you’re very upset at the moment, Mr. Bailey,” she said in a firm voice. “But I don’t think that Miss Dixon is going to be helped by a brawl out here, is she?”
I took a step back from them, and she continued, “We will need to speak to both of you, but it can wait until it’s properly morning. I’m sure you both want to stay here for the rest of the night, to make sure that Miss. Dixon is beginning to recover.”
“Did she see who did it?” Rebecca asked suddenly.
“We won’t really know the answer to that until she regains consciousness,” Michael Palmer answered. “The blow to the back of the head was a very severe one, and the doctor thinks that it’s most likely that it happened before the other wounds were inflicted. The probability is that she didn’t see anything. But, as I say, we’d like to have that confirmed by her.”
“Are you both going to stay here for the foreseeable future?” Laura Smith quizzed. “If you are, we could come back and interview you in about three or four hours time.”
We both nodded. “We’ll see you later then,” she added as they prepared to leave. “Oh, and in case you start wondering about it later, we are leaving a police guard by her bedside.”
With that, they were gone. The next few hours were awful – constant terror of bad news every time the swing doors were opened punctuating long swathes of nothingness. For part of the time, Rebecca dozed on my shoulder.
Finally, the doors opening signalled the return of Doctor Grant. As he walked towards us, I tried desperately to read his face. Was that a mask of enforced sympathy? Or just the face of an exhausted man? My life seemed to hang in the balance as we waited for his first words.
“She seems to have stabilized,” he said.
Both Rebecca and I sagged with relief. “What does that mean exactly?” Rebecca asked. “Is she out of danger?”
“Barring any unexpected setbacks, yes,” he said with a smile. “It may be some time before she actually regains consciousness, but all her readings are strong and stable now. It looks as if she’s going to pull through.”
“How long before she does come around?” I asked.
“That’s hard to say at the moment,” he said. “The blow was a very hard one, in that it actually fractured her skull. At the moment her body is concentrating upon healing itself. It may only be a few hours, or it could be a bit longer than that.”
“Are you saying she might stay in a coma?” Rebecca’s voice had a new note of alarm in it.
“Not in the way that you mean,” he replied calmly. “Her brain scan seems to show that there hasn’t been any damage, so there’s no reason to think that she won’t wake up perfectly normally. But as I said earlier, her body has suffered a massive trauma, and may need a good period of rest before she recovers consciousness.”
“Can we see her?” I enquired.
“We’re going to move her into intensive care to keep a close eye on her. If all goes well, then by the end of the day we should be in a position to move her out of there and up to a ward. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t sit with her while she’s being observed. If you could just wait until we’ve sorted her out I’ll get a nurse to come and get you.”
Once he’d gone, Rebecca began to cry softly. “Hey,” I said gently. “You were the one who told me she was going to be fine.”
“It’s just such a relief,” she sniffled. We held onto each other with the emotional release of the moment. Before too long, a nurse came to lead us to Katie’s bedside.
I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, but it was still a shock. Katie lo
oked so pale, so fragile, lying in bed surrounded by a mass of electronics, and flashing computer displays. A hardness set in my heart as I resolved that I was going to make whoever had done this pay. Rebecca and I stood at opposite sides of the bed, each of us holding tightly onto one of her hands. Her skin had the icy smoothness of marble, and for a moment it was like touching a corpse.
We both stood, as if frozen in a tableau, for a long time. One of the computer screens showed that Katie’s pulse was relatively steady, but it was about the only measurement that I could make any sense of.
Time was measured in each beat of her heart displayed on the screen, and seemed to stretch on. The moment was broken when we were joined by Laura Smith and Michael Palmer.
“Still unconscious?” Laura asked in the muted whisper which everyone seems to use automatically beside a hospital bed. Rebecca and I nodded.
“Would it be alright to interview you both now?” she continued. “The hospital are letting us use a doctor’s office just down the corridor, so you won’t be away for long.”
They took Rebecca off first, leaving me alone with Katie. I leaned across and softly kissed her lips, but this was no fairy tale and she didn’t wake up. In the back of my mind, the question “why” was nagging at me. Why had Guignol left her alive when he’d so savagely destroyed his other victims? Had he just made his first mistake?
Lost in these thoughts, it was a surprise to realise that Rebecca was back.
“No change?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “How was the interview?”
“It was fine really. There wasn’t that much I could tell them. They wanted to know if Katie had any enemies, what I thought of you, who knew the two of you were seeing each other, stuff like that.”
“So they’re still concentrating on me?”
“They seem to be,” a note of worry crept into her voice. “Jack, I mentioned that the two of you had split up briefly this week. I hope that doesn’t put you in a difficult position. I told them that there was no way you could be responsible for this, or for the killings.”
“Don’t worry,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “I’d have had to have told them about it anyway.” Before we could continue the conversation, Laura Smith and Michael Palmer returned.
“You next, Mr. Bailey,” Michael Palmer said with what seemed like a challenging smile. “I think that I’ll handle your interview by myself.”
I looked to Laura Smith for some support, but to my dismay, she just nodded at me. Seeing no way out, I followed him down the corridor and into a small office.
He pushed the door closed behind us, and turned with a smile like that of a wolf about to devour its prey.
“You and I have quite a few things to sort out.”
Chapter Thirty Seven
I steeled myself for the coming confrontation, noting with alarm that the blinds over the windows were closed. Michael Palmer’s first words took me completely by surprise.
“It seems that I owe you an apology.”
“What?” I said in bemusement.
“An apology,” he repeated. “You are no longer on our list of suspects.”
“How come?”
He actually looked a little hesitant. “Have you been told the exact details of the attack on Miss. Dixon?”
“Just that she was hit on the head, and then wounded with a knife,” I told him, with a sudden sense of dread.
“I think that to understand the whole picture, you need to know the details,” he said. “But you may well find it quite upsetting. We believe that yesterday afternoon Miss Dixon was attacked outside the Domestic Crisis centre. She received a hard blow to the head, which would have knocked her instantly unconscious. She was then carried into a narrow alley which runs beside a nearby warehouse.”
“Is that the same..?” I interrupted.
He nodded. “Yes, it’s the same alley in which you claimed that you were attacked. Once there, it looks as if her attacker stripped Miss Dixon and then used a knife to mutilate her body.”
I closed my eyes. “What did he do to her?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer.
“He carved the word “JACK” into her stomach.” I felt as if all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. “Then he left her in the alley. Because the wounds were quite deep, and it was a particularly cold night, it was lucky that our search found her when it did.”
“Do you think that it was an attempt to kill her?” I said.
“We’re not sure,” he said. “She could well have died, but if her attacker had really wanted her dead, then surely he would have inflicted a more decisive wound. The pattern so far suggests that he has no qualms about making sure that his victims are dead. On the other hand, it’s possible that he intended to, but something disturbed him.”
“That still doesn’t explain why I’m in the clear,” I said after a moment’s thought. “Rebecca’s told you that Katie and I had split up, and that I was trying to get back together. How come you’re not working on the theory that she didn’t want to, so I went into a mad rage but couldn’t quite bring myself to kill her?”
He smiled broadly. “I probably would have,” he admitted. “But for one small inconvenience. You see, the thing is we’ve had you under surveillance for the last two days. We know exactly where you were every minute of Saturday.”
“What do you mean, you’ve had me under surveillance?” I demanded.
“After you rang up about the note you claimed to have received on Thursday night, the one thing that DI Smith and I were able to agree on was that you should be watched. She believed that by doing so, we might catch the killer when he tried to attack you. I thought that we’d probably get proof that you were the one responsible. Instead, the only thing we’ve learned so far is that you couldn’t possibly be the person who attacked Miss Dixon. And since it seems certain that this attack is linked to the notes you’ve received, and the murders, then I have to conclude that I made a big mistake regarding you. Hence the apology.”
I can’t say that I felt any relief, just anger at the time he had wasted. “So now you trust me,” I said, my voice raised more than I had intended. “But why should I trust you?”
“That’s a fair enough question,” he commented. “You’re wondering about my connection with Jennifer Carter. You certainly caused me a lot of trouble with that one.”
“You’ll understand if I’m not too sympathetic.”
“You were right,” he continued, ignoring my sarcasm. “I was a patient of hers. I hadn’t disclosed it to my colleagues or immediate superiors, because I knew that they wouldn’t let me investigate the case. They’re still fairly wary of letting me investigate cases that I have an emotional involvement with.”
“Because of what you did to Ray Miller?” I asked him.
He nodded in response. His eyes gazed off into the distance, as if staring into the past. “I suppose that you’re entitled to know about that as well. It might help you understand why I treated you the way I did.” A terrible expression passed across his face, and was then gone. His voice was now much calmer, almost as if telling a story to a child.
“I had a sister called Lucy, nearly six years younger than me. She could be a bit of a brat sometimes, like most kid sisters, but she was pretty special as well.” He paused, his eyes looking fixedly ahead, as if his will could conjure her up. “When she was thirteen, someone raped and killed her. I was away at university when it happened. I was studying archaeology, had these great dreams of travelling the world. Three months after her funeral I quit and joined the police.”
“And you found out that Ray Miller was the one who killed her?” I probed. His answer was a bitter laugh.
“If only it was that simple. No, Ray Miller didn’t kill my sister – he was in prison when it happened. I never found out who killed Lucy. But I did know who killed Susie Henderson and Dawn Michaels. It was Ray Miller.”
“So why didn’t you arrest him?” I asked.
; “We didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. There wasn’t a trace of him at the scenes, and no witnesses ever came forwards. But we knew he’d done it. When we searched his house we found hundreds of photographs of the pair of them. Photos of them going past his house to and from school, photos of them taken from the bushes in the park, even photos of them in the playground at school. There was no doubt he was obsessed with the pair of them. But the prosecution service said we didn’t stand a chance of getting a conviction.”
“So you decided to take things into your own hands, did you?” I asked accusingly.
He shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. When I went to his house that day I’m not really sure what I was expecting. I probably should have realised that I was far too emotionally involved in the case, because of the similarities with what happened to Lucy. I just knew that I couldn’t let him get away with it. Maybe I thought I could trick him into giving something away, or scare him enough to get the truth out of him. But he was just laughing at me, so pleased with himself. I hit him in frustration, and then found that I couldn’t stop hitting him. I’m not proud of it – it’s something I live with every day.”
“And the investigation decided to cover it up,” I commented.
“They decided that I’d been too involved in the case because of the links with Lucy, and that had pushed me to act in a way that was out of character. The conditions of my keeping my job were a transfer to York, and getting professional help. That’s how Jennifer came into it. And that’s why I got a bit carried away when I thought you were the one who’d killed her like that.”
I was silent for a moment, trying to absorb all the information that he’d given me. His rage felt rather too close to the reaction I’d had to the killings of Jill and Sophie and the attack on Katie.
“Alright,” I said. “Apology accepted. I can see how unlikely my story must have sounded.”
“Thank you.” For the first time ever, he looked rather sheepish. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Adam Sutton has disappeared.”
Shaping the Ripples Page 28
