by LJ Ross
But it was not her mother calling to her now.
Fear raced across her cold skin and her eyes flew open. The first thing she saw was his face rising above her, blotting out the light from the hallway.
She shrank back against the covers of the bed that were damp with sweat and urine, shivering uncontrollably.
“There she is,” he murmured.
She wanted to scream but the terror was so acute she found she couldn’t do much more than stare limply into his eyes, half concealed beneath a paper mask and goggles.
His terrible eyes.
“I hate to tell you this, darling, but it’s getting a bit stale in here,” he said, conversationally. “Very unladylike, you know.”
She said nothing. She couldn’t speak, anyway.
“I thought you’d have more of a fighting spirit,” he said. “Why do you think I chose you?”
He leaned forward and pulled her eyelids with a gloved forefinger and thumb.
“Shock,” he told her, straightening up again. “A bit sooner than I thought but it’s different for everyone, I suppose.”
She continued to stare up at him from her inert position on the bed, wondering what he wanted from her. Perhaps she could bargain with him. If it was…if he wanted that, then she’d submit to it if he’d only let her go after he was done.
Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
“Wha— d’ you—”
She tried to formulate the words to offer a bargain, but the muscles of her mouth would not cooperate.
“What’s that?” He cocked a hand to his ear. “I didn’t quite catch it.”
She closed her eyes again, feeling her own tears run down the side of her neck.
“Now, now,” he crooned, tapping a finger against her nose with nauseating intimacy. “Don’t wear yourself out. I don’t want you passing out too quickly because there’s still a long way to go. We have plenty of time to get acquainted.”
He reached across and stuffed a scrap of material into her mouth, taping it securely in place. She was heavily sedated, and her faculties were so impaired there was little chance of her crying out for help, but you could never be too sure. Her nostrils flared widely as she struggled to draw air into her lungs, retching against the material and swallowing her own vomit.
“No, you don’t,” he said, slapping her face hard. “Pay attention.”
Her vision blurred, and her head lolled against the pillow.
“Perhaps you need something to wake you up,” he mused. “They say there’s nothing quite like pain to remind you that you’re alive.”
Her chest rose and fell rapidly. In her mind, she thrashed and kicked, struggled to escape. But when she caught sight of her left arm, she realised it was lying immobile in the same position as before.
It hadn’t moved.
She couldn’t move.
Her mind had conjured up an alternate reality, one where she was able to fight and claw, to tear away the skin of his face. But she could do none of those things, not now.
The scream bubbled up in her throat and came out as a low, keening wail against the gag as she choked against the saliva pooling in her mouth.
He watched the passing emotions on her face with a look of supreme indifference, as if she were a lab rat, something to be studied and dissected.
He leaned over again, scenting her fear and inhaling deeply.
“Cheer up, Nicola. You’re on holiday, remember? Right now, you’re enjoying the sunny climes of Fuerteventura. That’s what everybody thinks and that’s why nobody’s going to be calling around to see where you are. You don’t need to worry about a thing because I’ve taken care of everything.”
He reached for a mobile phone tucked away inside the bag he’d brought.
“Now, then, what have we here? Oh, yes. Your mum says she hopes you have a lovely time and she’s very jealous. She also says she hopes you managed to find a new bikini and with any luck you might find a bit of holiday romance. She wants to hear all about it when you get back,” he looked up at that, wriggling his eyebrows suggestively. “There’s another message from Jacqui, who wants to know if you’ll swap shifts with her when you come back to work next week. Sorry to disappoint you, Jacqui,” he laughed, chucking the phone back into his bag now the novelty had worn off.
“Not very popular, are you, Nic? It’s been hours and you’ve only received two messages. Maybe it’s best all round that I’m going to kill you,” he said, gently. “You’re hardly lighting up the world, are you?”
His eyes were black chasms and she had been so mesmerised she didn’t see the knife until it was almost touching her.
Its blade caught the light and her mind became curiously detached, numbing itself to the inevitable. She willed herself to die, willed her heart to stop beating of its own accord before he had the satisfaction of taking it for himself.
“You should be flattered,” he was saying, while he went about the business of slicing away her remaining clothes. “I’m very selective about who I choose. Only the very best will do.”
He whistled to himself, a muffled, cheerful sound as he prepared his canvas.
“There,” he declared. “Now, we can make a start.”
* * *
Ryan awoke suddenly.
It took him a moment to orientate himself after the nightmare, to realise that the shadowy room was his bedroom and that he was alone. There was no ghoulish, decapitated figure lying beside him and it was his own sweat soaking the covers, not pints of wasted blood.
“Jesus,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his eyes before reaching across to check the time.
Four-thirty.
He lay there for another minute or two, willing himself to sleep again, but it would not come. It had been a long briefing the previous evening and, by the time he’d divvied up responsibilities to key members of his task force, it had been almost midnight before he’d walked back through his own front door. Longer still until he’d been able to sleep and, even then, he owed a measly three hours’ rest to two large glasses of Rioja drunk in swift succession. That would explain the mild headache thumping around his skull, but it was better than the alternative.
They thought he didn’t care.
He hadn’t shouted, hadn’t made false promises or given a tearful speech about fallen soldiers, so they assumed that he didn’t feel, that none of it mattered to him. He’d heard them muttering about it as they left the conference room, heartsore and world-weary.
“He’s been waiting for a chance like this. Sharon’s murdered and instead of choosing one of us, Gregson picks his little Southern pet to be SIO. Bloody stinks!”
Ryan watched the shadows shifting against the ceiling.
It was only one or two of them, he thought. Not enough to cause any real dissent. He’d taken over their investigation and shaken things up, told them that Cooper had been wrong. That rubbed some of them up the wrong way, those who were resistant to change.
And he didn’t care, so long as they got the job done the way he wanted it done.
He rolled off the bed and padded barefoot to stand beside the long, floor-to-ceiling window of his apartment, leaning his long body against the edge of the frame. It had panoramic views of the river and the quayside where John Dobbs had fled the day before. The arches of the bridge were just visible against the awakening sky and Ryan watched its colour change from deep mauve to palest lilac while his mind wandered back to murder.
He reached for his mobile again, considered the time, then dialled.
“Mfffh?”
“Phillips?”
There was a scuffle as Phillips dropped his phone and found it again.
“Ryan? For the love of God. It’s—what time is it?”
“Morning.”
“Only just. Has there been another one?”
“No,” Ryan said, hoping it was true. “But I think there will be, very soon.”
There was a short pause while Phillips decided whether there was any poi
nt in trying to bargain for another hour’s sleep.
Curiosity won out.
“How d’ you mean?”
“If it’s the same person, I have to ask myself why he’d target the DCI in charge of the investigation. What criminal in his right mind would draw attention to himself in such an obvious way?”
“Aye, but you’re forgetting, he’s not in his right mind.”
“But if he’d left things well alone, Isobel Harris’s murder would have been attributed to John Dobbs,” Ryan argued. “Now, we can’t be sure about Dobbs and we know for certain somebody else killed Cooper, so the investigation is ongoing.”
Phillips sat up straighter in bed and scratched the stubble on his chin.
“Who knows what drives these lunatics? Maybe he just couldn’t help himself.”
Ryan rolled the idea around his mind and then frowned.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s a lunatic at all. These murders weren’t frenzied; they were highly organised. With killers like that, there’s usually a reason behind it, a motivator that drives them other than base need, although there’ll be that too.”
“Maybe he thought killing Cooper would end the investigation?”
“By killing her in the same way as Harris, causing us to draw direct comparisons? No. I think he killed her because he’s proud, Frank, and he didn’t want Dobbs taking the credit for his handiwork.”
“If that’s the case, killing Cooper wasn’t personal, was it?”
Ryan shook his head grimly and watched the action reflected in the window in front of him.
“With Harris, he killed her slowly and thoroughly, sating himself on the act. But with Cooper, it’s more than that. It isn’t just killing the woman, it’s trying to kill everything she stood for, everything we still stand for. He’s attacking the law itself.”
Phillips considered the implications of that.
“If he didn’t baulk at killing a murder detective, that makes him fearless.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “He’s not afraid of us and he wanted us to know it. He even left us a card to prove it. What’s his next move, Frank? That’s what I can’t figure out. We need to stay ahead but we haven’t got a hope in hell, at this rate.”
There was another rustle as Phillips threw back the covers.
“I’ll see you at the office in twenty minutes.”
CHAPTER 7
Monday 7th July
The mortuary in the basement of the Royal Victoria Infirmary was the province of Doctor Jeffrey Pinter, the Chief Pathologist attached to Northumbria CID and the man whose unfortunate job it was to pore over the remains of Isobel Harris and Sharon Cooper. Never one to volunteer for overtime, he had nonetheless foregone his regular Sunday afternoon listening to Radio 4 from the comfort of his living room, and had streamed it through the in-built mortuary speakers instead. Thanks to an omnibus edition of The Archers, he was able to provide the police with his preliminary observations in record time.
As soon as they received his call, Ryan and Phillips left the clear, crisp air of a late northern summer and descended into the bowels of the hospital. They made their way through a network of stuffy, white-washed corridors lined with powerful air conditioning vents until they came to a set of wide double doors.
“Stifling in here,” Phillips complained.
“Not for long,” Ryan replied, keying in the security code.
As he had predicted, an ice-cold blast awaited them when the doors buzzed open and they stepped inside. The mortuary was just as they remembered; a bank of metal drawers covered one side of the room and a row of gurneys stood in the centre, one of which was occupied and receiving the ministrations of a couple of mortuary technicians. They looked up from behind surgical masks and their hair, hands and bodies were covered in protective clothing, so they became impersonal, asexual, just like the body they tended.
Ryan reached for one of the lab coats hanging on a peg beside the door and scribbled their names in the log book.
“Ryan, Phillips?”
Pinter covered the room at speed, his lanky frame calling to mind visions of a giraffe ambling over the plains of Africa.
He extended a hand in greeting and, after a moment’s inspection, Ryan took it.
“Jeff,” he said. “Thanks for getting around to this so quickly.”
Pinter waved it away.
“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “Sharon was a good police officer. I’d known her for years, so I won’t pretend it was an easy task. Terrible, what happened to her. Just terrible.”
Ryan nodded. He would have liked to assign her post-mortem to somebody unconnected to the department, but over the course of her twenty-year career, Cooper had worked with every decent pathologist within a three-hundred-mile radius. That precluded the possibility of finding someone without a measure of personal bias, but he had to trust that Pinter could set his emotions aside and focus on the facts.
“What can you tell us?”
Pinter sucked in a long breath and then puffed it out again in the slightly pompous manner they had come to expect.
“Best if I show you, really.”
Phillips made a show of straightening the lab coat that had been designed for a much taller, slimmer man than himself.
“No need for that, Jeff. You could just give us a summary—”
Ryan rolled his eyes inwardly. It was no secret that Phillips couldn’t stand the sight of a cadaver.
“We need to see whether the MO is the same,” he said decisively.
Pinter nodded and led the way through the main workspace to a smaller corridor with a series of anterooms leading off it. The lemony stench of chemicals used to pickle the bodies accompanied the three men and, beneath it, a subtle scent of decay that permeated their clothes and clung inside their nostrils.
“This way.”
Pinter unlocked the door to one of the examination rooms and turned on the main light. A life spent mainly indoors had reduced Pinter’s skin to a chalky pallor that was accentuated by the unflattering fluorescent lighting, giving the unfortunate impression he was one of the dead he cared for.
“Do you want to view the images on the computer first? That might be easier.”
Phillips cast a wary eye over the shrunken, silent figure lying in state atop a central gurney and opened his mouth to agree.
“We can handle it,” Ryan said, and nodded towards the gurney. “We need to understand what happened to her, Jeff.”
Pinter nodded gravely.
“Are you ready?”
They could never be ready, but Ryan and Phillips steeled themselves as best they could before the pathologist whipped away the papery shroud.
Anger mingled with grief all over again. Somewhere over his shoulder, he heard Phillips’ sharp intake of breath.
“When did she die?” Ryan asked.
“My initial estimate as to post-mortem interval when I attended the scene was no more than five to seven hours and I’ll stand by that,” Pinter said. “Taking into account her core temperature and other environmental factors, it’s highly unlikely she’d been dead any longer.”
“What about defensive injuries?” Phillips asked, keeping his eyes fixed to the clock on the far wall.
“None whatsoever,” Pinter replied. “And I suspect this is the reason why.”
He produced a retractable pointer and indicated an ugly bruise on the skin of Sharon’s neck. In its centre was a puncture mark.
Both detectives leaned forward to get a better look.
“Pressure syringe?” Ryan looked up for confirmation and Pinter gave a short nod.
“Aye, that’d do it,” Phillips said, clearing his throat loudly. “Same bloke as before, then?”
“It’s looking a lot like it,” Pinter replied.
“Not exactly the same,” Ryan argued. “In the case of Isobel Harris, there were multiple puncture marks found on her body, not just one.”
“Maybe he ran out of time,” Phillips
suggested.
“It’s possible,” Ryan agreed. “Or maybe she served a different purpose, a different kind of motivation.”
“I’ll leave the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ to you,” Pinter told them. “But I can tell you Sharon was blood type A positive and she enjoyed a bowl of porridge for breakfast after a liquid diet on Saturday night. Bruising and blood loss would indicate she was alive while the less serious injuries were incurred—removal of the ears and so forth—but once the major arteries in her legs and arms were severed, she would have died very quickly. The official cause of death is major cardiac arrest.”
They thought back to the river of blood they’d seen in Sharon’s bedroom.
“He didn’t stop then,” Pinter continued. “The hands and feet were removed post mortem, as was the upper part of her sternum and, of course, her head.”
This last observation was delivered with a degree of clinical detachment that took their breath away.
“He would have needed the right tools,” Ryan murmured. “What kind of implement would you say?”
“Undoubtedly, he used a series of different knives and a small saw. It’s the only way to get through the bone, you see.”
“The CSIs bagged up the kitchen knives and any other sharp tools in Cooper’s home,” Phillips said. “We still haven’t found a murder weapon for Isobel Harris either.”
Pinter shrugged his bony shoulders.
“It would make sense to remove the evidence and sterilise off-site.”
Ryan looked up from his inspection of Sharon’s hands, which had been bagged separately to preserve evidence.
“Has the tox report come back yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Pinter said. “Neither has the histology report but they’re doing an express service and I’ve told them to ring you as soon as the results come through.”
Ryan paced a couple of steps around to the other side of the gurney, looking at the body from all angles.
