20
Tom and Susan were taken to the hospital when the police arrived; Susan under guard. Polo and I were taken to the police station to give statements. We were joined by Sutton, and later by Tom, who’d been examined for concussion and discharged on condition he took it easy and didn’t drive. Afterwards, we were all taken back to my house and it seemed only polite to ask Sutton and Polo inside.
‘I knew she was going to kill us,’ Tom said, ‘which is why I risked speaking when the phone went.’ The dressing round his head made him look vaguely Arabian. ‘I was hoping you’d think of something to alert them at the other end, Jo, and you did.’
We were in the living-room. Tom and Polo were drinking tea: Tom because of his head, Polo because he had to drive. Sutton and myself had whisky.
‘It was lucky it was you, Mr Sutton,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’d have been able to make anyone else understand.’
‘Don’t undersell yourself,’ said Tom. ‘You thought pretty quickly on your feet when Polo called.’
Sutton had sent Polo round to find out what was going on. After speaking to me, he’d got into his car and driven away, then walked back to the house next door and persuaded them to ring the police while he went through the back and forced my kitchen window.
‘That’s when I heard him,’ said Tom. ‘Which is why I started blathering — to keep her attention on me while Polo got through.’
‘Climbin’ through kitchen windows without makin’ a noise ain’t so easy,’ Polo said feelingly.
‘No,’ agreed Tom. ‘Although I’d have thought you’d have had enough practice.’
‘Funny guy,’ sneered Polo. ‘Don’t push it, man.’
‘Sorry, Polo. Like I said earlier: we owe you. And that was the most beautiful piece of knife work I’ve seen in my life.’
Polo shrugged, but looked pleased.
‘Shame it wasn’t her neck,’ Sutton muttered. He’d been morose and distant from the moment he’d arrived at the police station.
Tom turned to him. ‘If it had been her neck, Miss Farewell would probably be dead. She was shooting to kill, and hitting her hand to deflect her aim was the only way of stopping her.’
I hadn’t realized that. ‘Thanks, Polo,’ I said.
‘’S aw right, Sister,’ he said awkwardly.
‘Sorry, Sister,’ said Sutton. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, just as awkwardly. Although in a sense, Sutton, too, had saved our lives, there was no way I could feel comfortable with him, not after what he’d done to me that night in ITU.
‘I still think she should be dead, though,’ he continued now.
‘It’ll be worse for her in prison,’ Tom said.
‘That’s what they always say.’ He paused. ‘’Sides, she won’t go to prison, will she? It’ll be one o’ them so-called hospitals, won’t it?’
Tom looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t even think about it, Len,’ he said. ‘It ain’t worth it. Revenge is always empty, and they’d get you for it anyway.’
He sighed heavily. ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right,’ he said. Not long after this, they both left.
‘Would you like something to eat?’ I asked as soon as they’d gone. We hadn’t eaten for hours, and I was afraid he might want to go back to his hotel now that the immediate danger had passed.
‘Might not be a bad idea,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. It was the first moment I’d been in a room, any room, by myself since Polo had broken in and rescued us and my mind started winding back …
Susan had let out the most earsplitting screams while Polo retrieved first the gun, then his knife.
‘No, Polo,’ Tom had shouted, ‘cut us free!’
He told me later he thought Polo had been on the point of killing her.
‘Would he have, really?’ I asked.
‘He might. Remember, he knew the police were on their way, so it was his only chance. And it was what Sutton would have wanted.’
‘She was going to try and take my place, wasn’t she?’ I said.
‘And she might have got away with it long enough to get abroad. If Sutton hadn’t phoned.’
It was rather ironic. He’d heard of her escape on the radio and was ostensibly phoning to offer help, although as Tom said, he was probably only looking for a chance to get his hands on her.
‘Well, he won’t be able to now, will he?’
‘If I were Anslow,’ Tom said slowly, ‘I’d keep a careful eye on friend Sutton. He may have saved us, incidentally, but that doesn’t make him a goody.’
One of the most shocking things was that as I’d tried to bind Susan’s hands, she’d bitten me, drawing blood. Polo had knocked her out at that point with a blow to the neck and she’d still been unconscious when the police arrived …
I let out a shuddering sigh. I wasn’t at all hungry myself. Some sense of irony caused me to make beans on toast for Tom, and when I put them in front of him with another mug of tea, he looked at them, then smiled wryly up at me. It was a smile that brought a lump to my throat. I sat down beside him.
Perhaps because it was the two of us again, my mind switched back to the moment Susan had pointed the gun at me, at me, not Polo, and pulled the trigger …
I began to shake again. He put his arm around me and I buried my face in his chest and bawled my eyes out. He held me, comforted me, and gradually, I became calmer again.
Then, there was this moment when comfort became something else. I looked up into his face, reached up and gently kissed his mouth. He looked down at me, swallowed. I kissed him again, softly, then harder. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but at that moment, my need was the greater. The beans grew cold. We went upstairs.
*
I woke the next morning to find him already up and staring out of the bedroom window.
‘Feeling guilty?’ I asked him lightly.
He turned. ‘A bit.’
‘I can’t believe that this is the first time you’ve cheated on your wife.’
‘As a matter of fact, it is.’
‘I’m … sorry.’
He smiled. ‘It takes two.’
We had some breakfast, then went down to the police station to see Anslow. He was looking tired, but pleased.
‘Well, she’s admitted everything,’ he told us. ‘Plus five others she killed before you spotted her, Sister.’
‘Five?’
‘Oh yes …’
She’d started some months earlier when she heard a particularly macho patient boasting of his atheism after he’d recovered from a heart attack, and then hearing the voice of God telling her that unbelievers, being the worst kind of sinners, deserved to have their wages paid in full. She also claimed that it was God who had suggested pressurizing the vacutainer bottles.
‘Although I suspect she’s plugging the God angle for all it’s worth, with an eye to a plea of diminished responsibility,’ Anslow observed.
That first killing had been so easy that she’d decided to look for more sinners. She called up the patient record system on the laboratory terminal when there was no one around and noted the names of the unbelievers, i.e. atheists, agnostics or none. She then used one of her pre-pressurized sample bottles when next she bled them.
She knew that the nurse in Thatchbury had been caught through the examination of staff rotas, so she varied the types of insulin she’d used so as to vary the times of death after administration, reasoning that that, and the comparatively large number of staff on ITU, plus the already high death rate, would cover her activities.
She’d killed Mrs Sutton with PZI after returning from leave because, as Tom had said, she was the wife of a gangster, and she’d attempted suicide.
‘I’ll tell you something funny,’ Anslow said. ‘I’m certain in my own mind that part of her knew that the trap we set up for her was a trap.’
‘You mean, she wanted to be caught?’ I asked.
&
nbsp; He took a breath. ‘Yes and no. Serial killers tend to get to a point when their killings begin to sicken even them, and yet they know they’ll never stop. So they take ever greater risks, stop being careful. In a sense, they give up.’
‘But she was still talking about the voice of God to us, wasn’t she, Tom?’
‘But did it mean anything by then?’ Tom said.
‘It sounded as though it did, to me.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you something else,’ Anslow continued. He paused a moment to gather his thoughts. ‘When I was interviewing her last night, I really did feel, more than I ever have before, that I was getting answers from two completely different people.’ He sighed. ‘Or maybe I was just tired. Anyway, it’s for the trick cyclists to sort out now.’
Just as we left, he said, ‘Oh, Sister, I think these are yours.’ He was holding out the keys I’d lost. ‘We found them in her pocket.’
*
I saw Tom off on the afternoon train. He gave me one of those kisses somehow so filled with possibility that I almost tried persuading him to stay. But it wouldn’t have been fair on him. Or his wife. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
The next day, I went back to work.
Immediately after the ward rounds, Mr Chorley called me to his office. He told me how sorry he was and that I was to come to him if I had any problems. He then ordered me to take a week off and I felt a lump grow in my throat at his kindness.
When I got back to my own office, Miss Whittington was there waiting for me. She apologized for not believing me earlier. She sounded as though she’d been kicked from above.
Some of the others, like Mary, were obviously dying to ask me all about it, but had just enough sensitivity not to. It would come later, I was sure.
Stephen caught me alone as I was on the point of leaving. ‘Jo, I can’t tell you how sorry I am; I can’t find the words to apologize sufficiently …’
There was more in the same vein, then he astounded me by saying: ‘I’d really like to make it up to you, Jo. Let me take you out for dinner. Tomorrow, perhaps?’
And the amazing thing was that he honestly seemed to think it was that easy. Words tumbled round my head, like: Where were you when I needed you? … Fair-weather friend … Go back to Jill and Debbie, but what actually came out was: ‘Stephen, go and stick it up your arse.’ Followed by: ‘And if you think there’s a double meaning there, you’re right.’
He didn’t redden or look away, just smiled faintly for a moment, then turned and left.
I spent the next couple of days with my parents, playing down what had happened and trying to put their minds at rest.
Tom phoned me on Wednesday to say that he was coming up the next day to collect his car; also to attend the magistrates’ court where Susan was due to appear, in case there were any more developments Anslow could tell him about.
I decided to go with him, partly out of morbid curiosity, I suppose, but mostly because I wanted to see him again.
It was cold and windy, no autumnal mellowness that day. Anslow couldn’t tell us any more, other than that their case was virtually complete, and that Sutton had been well and truly warned off.
The court appearance was an anticlimax. We were inside (with Sutton, who’d attached himself to us) when she was brought to the building in a police van. We could hear the relatives of some of the dead patients shouting abuse at her as she arrived. When she appeared in the court, she looked no different from the way she’d always looked. I don’t know what I’d expected.
She said ‘Yes’ twice — once to confirm her name and again to say she understood the charges. Then it was over.
We were outside by the time she was brought back to the van. I was expecting her to have a blanket or something over her head, but she didn’t. More abuse was shouted. A ring of police surrounded her.
The wind was gusting more than ever, plucking at her hair and coat — no, they were bullet holes, followed immediately by the reports of the gunshots …
21
As the echoes died away, there was a moment of absolute silence and stillness, then, like a film starting up again, people began to move …
Police running in the direction of the shots …
Tom turning to Sutton and saying, ‘You bloody fool …’ Then me, pushing my way through the crowd — ‘Excuse me, please, I’m a nurse …’
She was lying on her back, the blood flowing from beneath her. I felt for her pulse, and to my amazement, there was one, although very weak. I made pads from the lining of my jacket and manoeuvred them underneath her back where I thought the exit wounds would be, moving her as little as possible. Then I covered her with coats from the bystanders …
Her face remained completely still. The crowd around me gobbled like a turkey farm.
Then, the wail of the ambulance and the crowd parting to let the paramedics through. I offered to go with them, but they said it wasn’t necessary. Tom joined me as they drove away.
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Yes, but I wouldn’t give much for her chances. Have they caught them?’
‘They’ve arrested Sutton.’
‘But why? It couldn’t have been him, he was with us the whole time.’
‘They think he hired whoever did it.’
‘And then came here to watch? How revolting.’
‘He said he hadn’t, just before Anslow arrested him.’
‘Did you believe him?’
He shook his head slightly. ‘I don’t think so. No.’ He looked up. ‘I asked Anslow if I could sit in, but he said no.’
I smiled wryly and told him how my offer of help had been spurned too.
He said, ‘There was something else I wanted to talk to you about. Is there anywhere we can go?’
‘Only my place.’
By the time we got to his car, reaction had set in and neither of us spoke on the way back. When we arrived, I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I must have a coffee. D’you want one?’
‘Please.’
‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ I asked when I’d made it.
‘It’s probably not important.’ He took a mouthful. ‘The thing is, I’ve never been happy about the numbers of atheists and agnostics that suddenly descended on your ITU.’
I shrugged. ‘We just happened to have a lot of them in that period.’
‘If you hadn’t, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the killings.’
‘Why not?’ I wasn’t really concentrating.
‘Because they wouldn’t have been killed.’
‘Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Well, while I was back in London, I contacted three local ITUs and asked them how many non-believers they had.’ He smiled. ‘They made the same observation as I: that patients coming into an ITU, and their relatives, tend to rediscover their religious faith, not lose it. Anyway, the rate came out as one in nineteen, near enough. In your case, the rate over that period was one in seven.’
‘Is that so very different?’ I asked.
‘It certainly is. It means your ITU had nearly three times as many as the others I’ve looked at, and that’s statistically significant. In other words, it didn’t happen by chance.’
‘Tom, what are you saying?’
‘I’m not really sure.’ He hesitated. ‘Anslow suggested that Susan has a split personality. Could one part of her have changed the patient records for the other part of her to find? That was another reason I came up here, to find out whether that could have happened.’
I thought about it. ‘But as a phlebotomist, she didn’t have a password.’
‘We already know she was using someone else’s password to look at the files.’
I drank the rest of my coffee.
‘It all depends on whether you’re right about the number of unbelievers,’ I said. ‘I’m not convinced you are.’
‘Well, there’s one way to find out.’
‘How?’
‘By going back to ITU a
nd checking how many non-believing patients you had outside the period Susan was killing them.’
We picked at some lunch before going back at half-past one, when I hoped there wouldn’t be so many people about.
The first person we saw was Mary.
‘Jo! What are you doing here? Aren’t you on leave?’
‘Just something I had to sort out.’
‘You know Susan’s in theatre?’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Were you there? Did you see it happen?’
‘Yes.’ I briefly told her about it. ‘Are we expecting her here?’
‘Yes. One of the side rooms has been prepared.’
‘OK. I’ll be staying for a little while, so let me know when she arrives, please.’
Tom and I went into my office, where it didn’t take us long to work out that our usual rate of ‘non-believers’ was one in twenty-one.
‘It could still be a fluke, a coincidence,’ I said.
‘It isn’t, Jo, and you know it. And there’s a way we can prove it.’
‘How?’
‘By asking the relatives.’
‘Oh, no.’ I shook my head. ‘No. That would be a completely unjustifiable intrusion.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you can’t —’
There was a tap on the door. Mary.
‘She’s come out of theatre, and Inspector Anslow is here,’ she said. We could see him behind her.
‘How is she?’
‘Alive. That’s all I know.’
‘Thanks, Mary. Inspector,’ I called, ‘would you like to come in?’
His large presence seemed to make the office even smaller.
‘She’s still alive, then. What’re the chances, Sister?’
‘I won’t know that until I’ve spoken to one of the doctors. I’ll do that once she’s here.’
He nodded, then said feelingly, ‘I hope to God she does survive.’
Sisters of Mercy Page 15
