by LJ Ross
“Is there nothing else you can tell us?”
Pinter bristled.
“I’m going as quickly as I can,” he said. “There was no blood or other secretions found on her person, other than her own, of course. That makes things harder for the forensic team…and for you, of course. The only thing we can say with any level of certainty is that the method of execution is the same.”
“With Isobel Harris, you said whoever did it had an exceptional level of skill,” Phillips said. “Would you say the same about whoever did this?”
Pinter raised a hand to smooth his crop of thinning hair and stopped himself just in time.
“Yes, I would. Look at the incision here,” he remarked, pointing towards the clean separation of Sharon’s right knee from the rest of her leg. “And here,” he pointed towards the neat separation of each of her finger joints. “It takes knowledge and skill to produce such a result and he consistently works from anterior to posterior, above the joint. With an everyday, run-of-the-mill job, you’d expect somebody to have hacked away willy-nilly but that’s not the case here at all.”
“Sharon Cooper has still been hacked apart,” Ryan said coldly. “However it was achieved, her killer is an animal and needs to be put down.”
Pinter flushed.
“I’m simply telling you that an amateur couldn’t have done this,” he argued. “And, while we’re at it, I might as well tell you I never believed John Dobbs could have killed Isobel Harris. There might have been slightly less finesse in her case, but the facts remain that a healthcare assistant couldn’t hope to emulate the mastery of an experienced clinician.”
There was a long, pregnant silence broken only by the sound of the clock ticking loudly on the wall.
“Mastery?” Ryan queried, softly.
“Well, you know what I mean,” Pinter said.
Ryan smiled but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Here I’ve been searching for a psychopath whereas I should have appreciated the kind of superior intellect I’m dealing with. Is that about it?”
Pinter nodded.
“I’d have thought that was obvious.”
Ryan gave him a long, level look.
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
* * *
They stayed for another hour discussing the intricacies of Cooper’s death, then Ryan and Phillips retraced their steps, exiting the mortuary via the service entrance that led them back out into the late morning sunshine. They raised their faces to the wind, breathing in the exhaust fumes from the car park and the dual carriageway just over the perimeter wall but still finding the atmosphere preferable to the noxious fumes circulating around the mortuary.
“Bit tense in there,” Phillips remarked, reaching for his cigarettes to clear the tension riding on his own shoulders. “This one’s getting on top of everyone. You can feel it.”
Ryan didn’t answer at first but turned as one of the junior doctors stepped outside to join them beneath the plastic canopy. She moved off to the far end where she slid down to the floor in one exhausted motion, leaning back against the outer wall while she retrieved her own packet of cigarettes. There was hypocrisy in there somewhere, Ryan thought, but he couldn’t blame her for not practising what she preached. Her fixed, glazed expression spoke of interminable double shifts dealing with emergencies and the general public. If nicotine helped, who was he to judge?
“Need a light, love?” Phillips called out.
She shook her head and waggled her lighter, sending them both a small smile of thanks before slumping back against the wall to stare off into the distance, puffing rhythmically.
Ryan picked up the thread of their conversation but kept his voice low.
“Did you hear the way Pinter was talking in there, Frank? It was…” He paused, searching for the right word. “Reverent.”
“That’s just Jeff. The bloke’s a nerd when it comes to anatomy and bodies and all that. He doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s the same reason he can’t get a girlfriend. He scares them off with all his shop talk.”
“Does he have an alibi for yesterday morning?” Ryan wondered aloud, ignoring Phillips’ attempt at levity. “I told you, Frank, I’m looking at everybody. Nine times out of ten, a victim’s killer is already known to them.”
“By God, you’re a cold bastard, sometimes.”
Ryan turned to him with fierce eyes.
“If that’s what it takes,” he snapped. “Whoever’s out there killing those women doesn’t give a damn about the sanctity of life, doesn’t care about shattering families. I don’t have time to worry about whether I’ve offended Pinter’s sensibilities—or yours, for that matter. I only care about finding this scumbag before he takes another one.”
Even now, the clock was ticking.
“Aye, but you can’t go around suspecting everyone who wears a white coat.”
“Why not?” Ryan demanded, jabbing a finger towards the hospital. “Everyone inside there is a suspect until proven otherwise and the same applies to everybody who can wield a scalpel from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Until we narrow the field, we need to stay vigilant.”
He paused, watching the junior doctor re-enter the hospital building, sending him a quiet smile as she went.
“You know what they say about high-functioning psychopaths, Frank? They tend to work in professions like the police, or as doctors and nurses. What if they could combine both and stay ahead of the game? They’d be unstoppable. We can’t let our loyalties get in the way of basic facts.”
Phillips thought of the pathologist, the CSIs, the various counsellors and psychologists attached to their constabulary and felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
CHAPTER 8
On his return to Police Headquarters, Ryan had barely entered the foyer when he was accosted by the Duty Sergeant, who told him that Eileen Spruce and her grandson, Will, were waiting for him in the family room and had refused to budge for the past forty minutes.
Shit.
“Tell them I’ll be there in a minute.”
He jogged down to the staff locker room where he kept an emergency jacket and tie reserved for occasions such as these. After a quick change, he took another minute to splash a handful of tepid water on his face, to finger-comb his black hair into some semblance of order and decided that would have to do. Rehearsed speeches and training ran through his mind and, by the time he reached the door marked, ‘OCCUPIED’, he was already congratulating himself on the calm and collected way in which he would handle a grieving family.
But when he entered the room, thoughts of planned speeches flew out of his mind as he came face to face with Sharon Cooper’s mother, who seemed to have aged overnight. He happened to know that Eileen Spruce had recently seen her eighty-fifth birthday and, until hearing the news of her daughter’s death, had been an active woman who walked at least two miles a day and attended a Zumba class with a group of chatty fifty-somethings on Friday afternoons. But now, she looked every one of her years. She was seated on one of the cheap foam loungers arranged around a low coffee table littered with leaflets and pamphlets advertising grief counselling and victim support. Her eyes were red-rimmed, ravaged by a night spent contemplating the unthinkable.
Her daughter was dead.
It wasn’t the natural course of things for a mother to outlive her child. Despite all the years spent worrying about Sharon and the inherent dangers in her chosen career, Eileen had imagined that longevity and good fortune meant the danger had passed. Willingly, she had believed the rhetoric that maniacs didn’t attack older, divorced women with children; only young, beautiful ones the papers preferred to write about.
How wrong she had been.
Across the room, Will Cooper stood at the window dressed in a smart suit that made him look years older. Had he not made it his business to research Sharon’s personal history, Ryan might have believed her son to be over thirty and not a tender twent
y-four-year-old dentistry student. It was more than the clothes; he had a conservative, standoffish quality that was so unlike his mother. He didn’t sit beside his grandmother or hold her hand, preferring to keep his distance from the raw grief that she made no effort to hide. He didn’t even bother to turn around when Ryan entered the room.
“Mrs Spruce?”
Eileen watched a tall, good-looking man in his mid-thirties enter and close the door softly behind him.
“Are you the detective—are you looking after Sharon?”
Such simple words to convey the enormity of his task, Ryan thought.
“Yes, Mrs Spruce. I’m the Senior Investigating Officer in charge of your daughter’s case. My name is Detective Chief Inspector Ryan.” He paused to seek out the third member of their party. “Mr Cooper? Would you like to come and join us, please?”
Saying nothing, Will walked to the coffee table and selected a chair as far away from the other two as possible. He was a slight man and moved with an unhurried gait, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Ryan gave him a level look.
“Can I offer you some coffee or tea?”
“She’s really gone, isn’t she?” Eileen whispered, ignoring his question while tears fell silently down her face.
“Yes. I’m so sorry.”
She began to sob, a deep, gut-wrenching sound that tore at the insides.
“Gran…” Will started to speak and then fell silent again, his only concession being to push a box of tissues across the coffee table in her direction.
Ryan held them out to her.
“They told me, the people who came to the house, they told me Sharon had been murdered,” Eileen said, the words falling out of her mouth in a sudden rush. “They told me somebody had killed her, but they didn’t tell me how, or why. I need to know what happened. How did this happen?”
Tears began to fall again but Ryan continued to meet her eyes, fighting the urge to look away.
“Mrs Spruce—”
“Was it one of those awful gangsters?” she asked, and leaned forward to clamp a thin hand around Ryan’s wrist, her eyes almost wild. “Sharon told me about some of them. I know about the kind of things they do to the police who put their family away. Was it one of them? Was that it?”
Ryan looked down at the woman’s hand and covered it with his own in a gesture of solidarity.
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss, Mrs Spruce, Mr Cooper,” he said quietly. “I admired Sharon very much and she will be missed by everyone here at the Constabulary.”
They were trite words, but that didn’t make them any less true. As he held her fragile hand, he felt it tremble as she fought to remain lucid, to face a reality that was every mother’s nightmare.
In contrast, her grandson hadn’t uttered a word and remained outwardly unmoved by the gravity of the situation.
“I can’t tell you who killed your daughter, or why, but I will seek out the answers, Mrs Spruce, I promise you that. I won’t rest until whoever killed your daughter is behind bars.”
Eileen searched his face and whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of Mr Cooper,” Ryan began. It was always awkward, contacting a former spouse but, more often than not, they grieved just the same for the person they had once loved. No matter the reason for their marital breakdown, rarely does a person genuinely wish the other to be brutally murdered, regardless of what might be said in the heat of anger.
“He’s with wife number three,” Will said bluntly. “They’re cruising around the Med and won’t be back for another few days.”
“Do you have the details of the cruise line? We can contact the ship directly.”
“Haven’t got a clue.”
“I’ll—I’ll see if I can find out,” Eileen said, overriding her grandson.
“That would be very helpful. You can contact me on this number at any time,” Ryan said, fishing out one of his business cards.
“You’ll never find him,” Will said softly.
Ryan frowned at him.
“Your father?”
Will’s lips twisted.
“No, you can find him sniffing around the cabaret girls somewhere between Cyprus and Rhodes,” he said nastily. “I’m talking about whoever killed my mother. You’ll never find him.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They’re saying on the news that it’s the same guy who killed that woman a few weeks ago. It’s the one my mother was looking for,” he said, with a slight shrug. “It was all she could talk about, last time I saw her.”
“And when was that?” Ryan asked, smooth as you like.
“A couple of weeks ago, maybe?” He shrugged again. “I can’t remember.”
“Will,” his grandmother chided him. “You need to remember. We need to do everything we can to help this young man find out who…” She took a shuddering breath and swiped a hand over her eyes. “We need to help him find who killed your mother.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Gran. Mum thought it was the bloke who fell off the bridge yesterday, but it couldn’t have been him who killed her, could it?”
Ryan watched the old woman’s face begin to crumple and cut in quickly.
“We don’t know anything for certain, Will. As soon as we do, we’ll be in touch.”
The young man actually laughed at that, his lip curling in contempt.
“My mother was the same as you, remember? I’ve heard all the standard lines, but the fact is, you don’t have a bloody clue who killed her. Do you?”
There was an arrogance beneath the outburst that Ryan didn’t like but he reminded himself that those who were left behind didn’t always cry. Sometimes they grew angry and lashed out, the last bastion of denial before reality set in.
“Killers always leave a trace,” he said. “Even the ones who plan everything down to the finest detail overlook something small, some factor they couldn’t control. I’m doing everything in my power to find it, Will, but it takes time.”
“What if this one thought of everything? What if there’s nothing to find?”
This time, it was Ryan’s turn to smile.
“It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.”
* * *
Will Cooper took off without a thought for his grandmother, so Ryan commandeered a squad car to transport Eileen Spruce safely back to her sheltered housing bungalow. It had been an eye-opening experience meeting the man of whom Sharon had spoken so often and so proudly, her loving son and star pupil who was fast becoming the best dental surgeon in his graduating class.
After a moment’s thought, Ryan went in search of DC Lowerson and found him bent over a stack of papers at his desk. As reader-receiver, he had been entrusted with the dubious responsibility of sifting through all the telephone calls and statements compiled during their investigation and sorting the wheat from the chaff. It was critical, important work.
It was also mind-numbingly boring.
“Jack?”
He looked up in surprise.
“Yes, guv?”
“You ready to chew your own arm off, yet?”
Lowerson made a strangled sound and gestured vaguely to the mountain of different accounts from eyewitnesses on the Tyne Bridge the previous day.
“You could say that. We’ve had a hundred and forty people ringing the emergency number, all of them claiming responsibility for Sharon’s murder.”
“Any of them sound legit?”
“Not unless you count the one who claims to have killed Cooper from his cell in HMP Frankland through the power of the mind alone.”
“Mind over matter,” Ryan huffed out a laugh. “I’ve got another task for you, if you can manage it.”
“’Course. What d’ you need?”
“I need you to do a thorough background check on William Andrew Cooper, aged twenty-four, DOB first of March 1990.”
He waited for the penny to drop, which it did.
And quickly.
“Will Cooper?” Lowerson said, in a ridiculous stage whisper. “You don’t think her own son could have done it?”
To a man like Lowerson, the very thought was abhorrent. He was devoted to his mother and never missed one of their regular Wednesday night dinners if he could possibly help it.
“Matricide is pretty common, Jack, and we know next to nothing about Sharon’s relationship with her son. We only know what she chose to tell us; the rose-tinted version she was willing to share. That could’ve been all wrong, especially after meeting him today.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“Let’s just say he didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”
“Yeah, but even if he wasn’t close to his mum, how could he have known how Isobel Harris—”
Lowerson broke off as the penny dropped again.
“How Isobel Harris died?” Ryan finished for him. “Intimate details weren’t reported but Sharon wouldn’t be the first police officer to break the rules and share details of an investigation with her nearest and dearest,” he said. “Added to which, he’s a dental student. It’s enough for him to have a decent knowledge of anatomy and rudimentary skill with the scalpel.”
There was a short silence while Lowerson fiddled with a chewed biro.
“I’ll get onto it straight away.”
“You do that. And Jack? Keep it under your hat for now.”
CHAPTER 9
“Nicola?”
“Dad?”
“Wake up, Nicola.”
“Don’t want to. Can’t.”
“Come on, sleepy-head. Time to get up.”
“I’m scared to, Daddy.”
Soft laughter and the touch of his hand caressing her face.
Except his fingers felt strange and rubbery. Not like the hand she remembered clutching when he’d slipped away, two years ago.
Her eyelids were so heavy, it was an effort to open them and, when she managed it, her first thought was that heaven looked just like her bedroom. Death was no different to life and there were no archangels, no guardians to protect her passage to the other side.
