by Andrew Lowe
Shepherd held out a hand. ‘DS Shepherd. This is DI Sawyer.’
Walker registered Sawyer and Shepherd, and leapt to his feet.
Ingram returned Shepherd’s handshake, briefly. ‘Look. I appreciate you are doing your jobs, but this is incredibly disruptive and totally over the top.’
Sawyer stepped into the room, between Ingram and the standing officer. ‘Could you sit down for a second, Mr Ingram? Please. Just give us a couple of minutes.’
Ingram fixed Sawyer with a flinty glare. Crystal blue eyes. A vein pulsed at his temple. ‘Two minutes!’ He slumped onto the sofa. ‘Then I’m gone.’
Sawyer pulled a chair from the table and sat opposite. ‘Tell me about your kidney.’
Ingram spluttered. ‘The new one? I waited nearly two years for it. Dialysis. Blood clots. They think the disease was something to do with blood pressure. A gift from my father. What is this, a GP consult?’
‘Just trying to get a full picture. And you’ve been well for a while now?’
‘I have. I take immunosuppressants, but everything is fine.’ He pointed at the certificate again. ‘I ran the Iron Man within six months of the op. Beat my previous time, too. It’ll take more than chronic kidney disease to kill me.’
‘It made you stronger,’ said Shepherd.
Ingram smiled. ‘I feel fine. What’s this got to do with the so-called “threat” against my life?’
Sawyer pulled the chair closer. ‘We’re investigating a series of murders that appear to be linked with organ donation. Did you know an individual called Roy Tyler?’
‘Haven’t heard the name, no.’
‘How about Susan Bishop? Sam Palmer? Simon Brock?’
‘Only from what I’ve seen on the news. Sam Palmer was a disgrace. He should never had received that liver. He ruined himself.’
Sawyer glanced at Shepherd. ‘He was an alcoholic. Substance addiction, not lifestyle choice.’
Ingram scoffed. ‘Willpower. Self-actualisation. We all have control over our choices, officer.’
‘Detective,’ said Sawyer.
‘I’m not saying that some people don’t struggle with impulse control, but the idea that you’re a passive slave to your urges… It’s a cop-out.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘You seem quite agitated that you’re being stopped from exercising.’
‘That’s different.’
‘So you have no personal connection to any of these people?’
Ingram shook his head. ‘No, I don’t, and I really do believe that this is all rather heavy-handed. What problem could I possibly pose for someone, just because I happen to have been treated for a kidney condition?’
‘That’s what we’re working on,’ said Shepherd. ‘But in the meantime, as you say, it’s our job to keep you safe.’
Ingram smiled and nodded his head slowly. ‘Detectives. I have a black belt in Shotokan karate, third dan. High level certifications in Judo, Taekwondo—’
Sawyer held up a hand. ‘Mr Ingram. We’re not talking about classical combat. This person is not going to pay you the courtesy of telling you what he’s going to do before he does it.’
Ingram laughed. ‘No, but he’s going to have to—’
‘Catch you first, yes. You said. This isn’t about tournament fighting or modulated endurance. We’re dealing with a dangerous, highly intelligent multiple murderer—’
‘Who, so far, has got the better of a woman, an overweight middle-aged man, and an obese—’
‘I run,’ said Walker. ‘I’ll go with you.’ He got up and made for the front door. ‘My house is five minutes’ drive away. I’ll get changed. Be back before you know it.’
Sawyer looked at Shepherd, shrugged.
Walker hurried out of the house, up the path.
Sawyer tilted his head and took Shepherd aside, into the hallway. ‘I want an observation point across the street. Plenty of options for location. Take over a house if you need to. Shed or outbuilding. Do the same for Kim Lyons and Amy Scott. Our man won’t know that we know. This has to be covert. If he comes calling, we need to be ready.’
40
Kim Lyons set down three mugs of tea and joined Sawyer and Shepherd at the kitchen table. She was slight, and strangely ageless, with fringed, auburn hair which hung limp at her shoulders, as if she had one day indulged in an expensive bob cut but hadn’t bothered to maintain it. She crept around the room slowly, touching her fingertips to the edges of tables and chairs.
She produced a square Family Circle biscuit tin and opened the lid. Sawyer was disappointed to see it had been repurposed as a container for some kind of flapjack tray-bake, cut into strips. He took a piece, anyway. ‘How long have you owned this place, Ms Lyons?’
‘Many years now. It used to be a working farm and we took a few courses, me and Jay, my then husband. It was cheap and we thought we could pick up where the previous owners left off. It wasn’t to be.’
‘Were you both from the Peak District?’ said Shepherd.
‘Jay was. Buxton. I come from Congleton. It’s a suburb of Stoke. I met him at a student gig. We were both studying Fine Art. We married young. Twenty-two.’
The words wafted from her. Kim’s voice was dreamy, conspiratorial. Almost a whisper. She kept her eyes on the kitchen window, as if monitoring the sheep in the facing fields that sloped down to Longnor.
Shepherd sipped his tea, slurping. Sawyer glanced at him. ‘And you’re no longer together?’
A shaggy mongrel dog padded in, and Kim petted it, scrunching her slender fingers into its fur. ‘I’m afraid not. I… We couldn’t have children.’ She dipped her head, caught herself. ‘He’s rather an accomplished chef, these days. He works at Fischer’s, in Baslow. He lives there now, with someone new. We haven’t been together for many years. He left a few days after I turned forty. Turned. Like milk.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘I live in this little farmhouse and rent out the main building. Airbnb. HomeAway.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘It would be helpful if you could keep the house free of guests for the time being.’ He gestured to DC Fleming and the uniformed officer down the hall in the sitting room. ‘We may need to keep officers stationed here for a while. I hope that’s not a problem.’
She smiled. ‘I understand.’
‘We will set up an observation point nearby, and one officer will stay with you here. DC Fleming will check in daily. You have your alarm. It’s a remote signalling device. Keep it with you at all times. If you activate it, the police control room will be alerted and the officers at the observation point will respond and call in back-up units.’
Kim sighed. ‘Why on Earth would someone want to attack me, anyway?’
‘We don’t actually know that, Ms Lyons. At the moment, we’re working on the assumption that the offender is specifically targeting people who have received transplanted organs and tissue, from the same hospital. Possibly the same person.’
‘Well. If he wants the tissue back, he’ll be disappointed with my corneas. There was no explanation for why my sight started to fail. I had a strange ‘misting’ effect around everything. Distortions. It got worse and I had the transplant in April last year at Manchester. But I’m afraid I’ve suffered countless related problems and I’ve now been told that the degeneration is irreversible. This time next year, I’ll be completely blind.’ She leaned forward. ‘Are you seriously telling me that someone might want to kill me, because I’ve tried to improve my eyesight?’
‘Do these names mean anything to you?’ said Sawyer. ‘Susan Bishop. Sam Palmer. Simon Brock.’
She shook her head. ‘I think I’ve read one of Simon Brock’s novels, but I didn’t know him personally or anything. Same with the others.’
‘How about Roy Tyler?’
‘No.’ Kim stood up and moved to the window, guiding herself by the table edges. ‘Beautiful day out there. I was planning on doing some gardening.’ She turned. ‘Is that allowed?’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Your protection officer might hover a bit.
Comment on the greenness of your fingers.’
She smiled. ‘Some people see autumn as the melancholy season, but it’s actually rather magical. It’s nature taking stock, clearing the path for renewal, making a break from the past. And then winter is the repose before the rebirth of spring. Strange to think that this will be the last autumn I get to see the world like this. The green turning to gold. The dying light.’ She caught herself. ‘Sorry. It’s my frustrated inner artist. Like all artists, I’m a bit obsessed with light.’
‘Edward Hopper,’ said Sawyer.
Kim nodded, delighted. ‘Yes! He said that he wanted “to paint sunlight on the side of a house”. I suppose he was talking about the elusive nature of light. How difficult it is to recreate.’ She turned, and held out the egg-shaped attack alarm given to her by the protection officer. ‘Detectives, I would like you all to leave now, please. And take this. I don’t wish to be protected. I’m not afraid.’
41
Sawyer and Shepherd drove through the clattering rain into Buxton town centre. They parked at the police building and ran inside, heads bowed. The lift door was open as they entered reception, drenched and steaming.
As they rode up to the first floor, Sawyer checked his phone. No messages from Eva. He sighed and glanced at Shepherd, crammed into the corner between two uniforms. ‘I should have seen it earlier.’
‘Seen what?’
‘The organ donation thing. We would have moved quicker if I’d called it.’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘Doesn’t sound like a Stoic talking to me. Regret. Looking back.’
‘I saw it, but I couldn’t see past it, couldn’t make the connections. It’s like my brain was fogged over.’
‘Lot on your mind?’
Sawyer didn’t answer. The uniforms exchanged a look.
The lift opened. Sawyer and Shepherd strode out across the MIT floor, brushing water from their jackets.
‘The boss in on a Sunday?’ said Shepherd, nodding at Keating’s office. Their DCI was at his desk, in discussion with Stephen Bloom.
‘Press conference prep. Call a briefing when he’s done.’
Sawyer ducked into his office and closed the door. He hitched off his soggy jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Outside, the rain had already given way to a mid-morning blush of sunshine. A different-coloured traffic light on the way from Longnor, and they wouldn’t have got wet. He sat down, and tuned in to his drifting thoughts. Tiny margins. Choices. Consequences. Chaos theory. Micro decisions, reaching out and shaping the future.
He opened his laptop and logged in to the Police National Database. He typed ‘REBECCA MORTON’ into the search box and filtered out the hits by age and location. He cross-referenced the results with the address given by Walker.
Keating took up a spot by the whiteboard. ‘Press conference at 1pm. We’ll be focusing on the vans, looking for sightings around the victims’ homes and where the bodies were found. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of the blackout on the knowledge gleaned from the nurse, Amy Scott. She’s under protection, but I’d rather keep the odds in our favour. And on top of the risks, if he is targeting the two remaining recipients of Tyler’s organs, then it’s obviously better that he doesn’t know we have them under observation.’
Shepherd tapped the victim photos. ‘We know that he isn’t shy about approaching their homes. With a bit of luck, we’ll spot him staking out or watching. Then we can arrest and it will all unravel without any more bodies.’
‘Kim Lyons and Jamie Ingram are both refusing close protection,’ said Sawyer. ‘But we have OPs outside their homes. They’re both aware. Ingram won’t accept anything, but I convinced Kim Lyons to at least keep her attack alarm. I’m concerned about Ingram, as he’s a runner. He’s shared his regime with us, though, and he knows to vary his routine and route. DCs overseeing both observation points. Fleming with Lyons, Walker with Ingram.’
Shepherd looked around the room and found Sally O’Callaghan. ‘Where are we with forensics?’
She sighed. ‘Nothing yet from the fibres at the Brock scene. We have a DNA match from the gum but no match on NDNAD.’
‘Moran? Any CCTV from the Amy Scott document drop site, or her home? Kid’s school?’
‘No cameras at the drop site or around her road. Plenty by the school but nobody standing out.’
Myers cleared his throat. ‘Did some work on Tyler and the lorry crash. No connections with Maureen Warren. As I said, her husband died ten years ago, no kids. The couple who died are a bit more interesting, though. Faye and Tony Hansen. Faye’s sister, Sophie, and her partner Andrew. In their fifties now. Got back from a holiday yesterday. I was going to speak to them this morning.’
‘Why interesting?’ said Sawyer.
‘Looks like they married four years before the crash that killed Faye. Census data shows they’ve lived in the same house near Leek since then. Twenty-nine years.’
‘This is the interesting bit coming up, right?’ said Sawyer.
Myers gave a wry smile. ‘They registered two births. One in 1988, one in 1986. Girls. Nicola and Grace. And then, in 1991, five days after the crash that killed Sophie’s sister, they registered a boy at Leek Registration Office. Joseph.
‘Adds up,’ said Keating. ‘But I’m still not interested.’
‘You checked the hospitals,’ said Sawyer. ‘A week or so before the registration.’ Myers nodded. ‘Sophie Dawson wasn’t admitted to any of them.’
Shepherd squinted, working it out. ‘The baby wasn’t hers?’
‘It was her sister’s,’ said Sawyer. ‘Joseph Dawson was delivered on the day of the crash. He survived his mother’s death.’
‘Looks like they became his guardians,’ said Myers.
Sawyer beamed at him. ‘This is interesting. No need to go see them. I’ll cover it with DS Shepherd later.’ Sawyer gazed out at the others and held a few seconds of silence. ‘Lorry crash kills a young couple. The woman is pregnant. The baby survives, gets taken in by her sister. He grows up. He hunts down the man responsible for the crash, but discovers that he’s died.’
‘He’s denied his revenge,’ said Shepherd.
Sawyer nodded. ‘But he can’t bear the idea that the driver has donated his organs. In his mind, he’s still “alive” inside the recipients. In a way, he’s cheated death. And so the only way to get justice, to rebalance the universe, is to neutralise the organs, by killing the recipients. And, for extra satisfaction, he works out a pure and efficient method to deliver the killing blows directly to the offending organs. In a sense, he gets to kill the man responsible for his parents’ death multiple times. Revenge might be sweet when served cold, but it’s even sweeter if you can space it out into multiple servings.’
‘But the people with the organs…’ said Walker. ‘They’re innocent.’
Sawyer shook his head. ‘For him, that’s irrelevant. They’re just collateral. He has them cover themselves to give them a bit of dignity in death, but that’s as far as he’ll go.’
Keating perched on the edge of a desk. ‘So, how can we be so sure that this is all directly related to the lorry crash? It still might be someone else who has a different beef with Tyler.’
‘I checked with PND,’ said Sawyer. ‘About Rebecca Morton. Tyler’s girlfriend. She tried to ease the sentence by confessing she had distracted him with a hand-job. The BBC piece we found on Tyler’s organ donation is coy on that, but the details were widely reported at the time. Rebecca Morton was found dead in a garage in Wembley, four weeks ago. She was a junkie, so I imagine the Met will focus on her dealer network. She’d been tied to a chair. Bled to death.’
Shepherd winced. ‘Messy?’
‘No. Wound cauterised. Not a speck of forensics.’
‘Stabbed?’ said Keating.
Sawyer let his gaze wander to the window. ‘He cut off her hand.’
42
Sophie Dawson led Sawyer and Shepherd into the sitting room, while her husband bundled their
dog—a majestic red setter—into the kitchen.
She smiled. ‘Sorry about the fuss. He’s not normally this unsettled. Only just out of kennels.’
‘Where did you go?’ said Shepherd.
‘Had a week in Iceland! Now the girls are grown up, we have a bit more free time. So we’re going to all the places we didn’t manage when they were younger.’
She was a compact and petite woman who had held her looks well into middle age: neat blonde hair tucked over one ear; searching, sympathetic eyes. She was flustered and a little sweaty, in downtime dress: grey fleece, battered jeans.
Andrew Dawson followed them into the room. He had a similar outdoors look, but had gone for a darker fleece. He was large and rounded, with ruddy cheeks and wispy grey eyebrows. Together, they had a comical, twin-like appearance. Little and large.
‘We’ve just come back from our walk,’ said Andrew. His breath was laboured, almost a rasp. ‘Can I get you a drink of something?’
Sawyer held up a hand. ‘We’re good, thanks. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday.’
Sophie fussed with the sofa, brushing it down. ‘I’ve told him not to get up on here.’
‘You mean the dog?’ said Shepherd, smiling.
Sophie looked at him, missing the joke. ‘Yes. Hopefully he’ll stop moulting now the weather is getting chillier. Are you sure we can’t make you some tea or coffee?’
‘Absolutely fine,’ said Sawyer.
Sophie gestured to the sofa. ‘Please, sit down. Is everything okay? How can we help?’
Andrew and Sophie took to an armchair each; Sawyer and Shepherd sank into the spongey sofa.
Sawyer looked around the room. Clean and uncluttered. No chintz. Dining table with two placemats and settings; blocked fireplace; work desk and iMac. Farrow & Ball tones. The furniture looked high-end, not flatpack.
‘What do you do?’ said Shepherd.
‘Family business,’ said Andrew, taking a sip from a glass of water. ‘Property refitting and conversions. Occasional original builds.’ He mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Sawyer was worried that he was about to keel over.
