by LJ Ross
“It’ll ruin me,” he said eventually. “Please. It’ll finish my career.”
“I want all your files,” Ryan said. “Without delay.”
“Yes—I…yes. What are you going to do?”
Ryan looked at the man long and hard. Undoubtedly, there had been many patients he had saved, people whose lives continued because he had been there to use his skill. But that was only one side of the story.
“How did it start?”
Draycott looked away, ashamed.
“Tell me where it began,” Ryan persisted.
“Eighteen months ago, I was the passenger in a road traffic accident. Nothing serious, except it jarred my back. In my profession, I’m constantly required to lean over patients and the pain was agonising. I went through all the usual treatment and was prescribed codeine. As you may be aware, it contains morphine, which is highly addictive.”
He let out a short, self-deprecating laugh.
“I, of all people, know its properties. I knew the dangers of becoming reliant on the pain relief but…it helped. When the prescription ended, I started topping it up with a couple of pills here and there. We keep a box of medicines available in the department to give to patients,” he explained. “Nobody noticed a box or two going missing, but I needed more.”
“So, you found more.”
Draycott nodded, resigning himself to professional ruin.
“But I didn’t realise there was already a drugs ring in operation. I swear it,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “I didn’t know it was already established and it came as quite a shock. But…addiction can change a person.”
Ryan looked at him for long seconds.
“I understand that addiction is debilitating but people are placing their lives in your hands every time they pass through the door. I can’t let that continue, much as I admire the work you may have done in the past. Your inaction has enabled unscrupulous people to peddle drugs to vulnerable people and God knows who else. It may turn out that it has enabled a murderer to access the tools of his trade.” Ryan’s face was hard as granite and just as unyielding. “I want every member of the Emergency Medicine Department to submit to a drugs test. I want every locker searched. Do we have your permission?”
Draycott nodded, feeling his life slip away like sand through his fingers.
“Good. Phillips? Get a team together and let’s make a start. Draycott? You’re with me. I want your staff to see that this is coming from their leader, such as he is.”
* * *
He stared at the front page of the broadsheet newspaper, reading and then re-reading the headline until the lettering became illegible to his addled mind.
HACKER’S KILLING SPREE CONTINUES
Very slowly, very deliberately, he set the newspaper down.
His anger was so strong it took several minutes to bring himself under control again.
Hacker?
They dared to call him The Hacker?
It was such an insult to his sensibilities, he was almost reduced to tears. After all his careful work, all his planning and skill, that was the best they could come up with? It reduced him to little more than a butcher, some bumbling moron with a meat cleaver and not a man of refined taste and judgment, a giver and taker of life.
He spent several more minutes imagining the many and varied ways in which he would punish the person responsible. There would be no pain relief; oh, no. He would take them quickly and silently to a place where nobody would hear their screams and he would kill them slowly, removing their bowels and tearing them limb from limb, like in the old days. If it was good enough for ancient kings, it was good enough for him.
Afterwards, he felt better, the red mist having dissipated enough to allow him to think clearly again.
He decided he should be flattered, really. All the best killers had a title, something designed to strike fear into the masses. Hadn’t he always longed to be feared and revered, after so long living in the shadows?
His spirits lifted immeasurably at the prospect.
CHAPTER 26
Ryan had to admit that Draycott put on a good show.
When they returned to the hospital together, there was no outward sign of his earlier remorse or any indication that he was anything other than in complete control of himself and his department. He seemed to take on a cloak of invincibility within the confines of the hospital and they watched the staff defer to him like sheep to their shepherd.
Records were seized, the pharmacist was taken in for questioning and the staff locker room was held under guard as each locker was searched for signs of unauthorised substances or material evidence. Everything was done by the book, with representatives from the Drugs Squad in attendance.
It was, to Phillips’ mind, a stroke of policing genius.
“Wouldn’t have been able to go rifling through people’s things without this drugs hoo-ha,” he said. “We’d have needed to get a search and seizure order.”
Ryan smiled wolfishly.
“There are very few times in life when you’ll hear me say that I’m glad we have a drugs problem, but this is one of them.”
“What’re we going to do about Draycott?”
Ryan lifted a shoulder.
“He hasn’t confessed to any crime except theft of prescription drugs and providing false statements to the police. It’ll be a matter for the Drugs Squad and the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether it’s in the public interest to prosecute him for it down the line but, whether or not that happens, it’s very likely he’ll be struck off anyway.”
“Still might be more to him than meets the eye,” Phillips said, watching as the search moved on to the next locker.
Ryan nodded.
“Draycott spun a sad, sorry tale of human frailty but I haven’t forgotten that he, more than anyone else here, had the means, the opportunity and the surgical skill to tear those women apart.”
“Aye, but does he have the motive, or the character?”
Ryan considered the question carefully, watching the man himself stride down the hallway as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
“We all put on a mask to face the world each day,” he murmured. “The question is, what lies beneath it?” He shook his head. “I don’t know what drives men to kill like that and I don’t much care. We’ve heard it all before. Mummy didn’t love me, so I became a killer. A girl once rejected me, so now I hate all women. I’m sure whoever killed these women has his own pathetic reasons for taking life but, underneath it all? It’s not about any of that. They kill because they like killing. They like the sense of power, the feeling of omnipotence. So, I couldn’t care less if their mum loved them or not, Frank. Plenty of people have a rough start in life and they don’t all become serial killers.”
“And if he hurt one of your loved ones, if it cut too close to home…would the reasons matter then?”
Ryan gave an irritable shrug.
“I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, Frank. I know the law draws a distinction between what counts as sane and insane but, let’s face it, whether they were in control of their actions or not, whether they knew their own minds or not…you still need to have a screw loose to be cutting people up like that. I’ll be satisfied if we can get them off the streets, by fair means or foul.”
“Amen to that.”
* * *
While the search team continued their task, Ryan and Phillips took another trip down to the hospital mortuary to visit its resident pathologist. There had been a day’s grace since their last confrontation, and they judged it was time to mend the breach.
But when they walked into the open-plan room, the welcome they received was even frostier than the air temperature.
“Pinter.”
The pathologist looked across and then returned to his task, barely giving them the time of day.
“Jeff,” Ryan said. “We came to get an update on Nicola Cassidy’s post-mortem.”
Pinter sent them a wintry smile.
Phillips pursed his lips.
“Howay, man, Jeff. You know it’s not just a case of doing things above board, it’s about being seen to do things above board.”
Pinter continued to look down at the inanimate mound of flesh in front of him but found himself softening a bit. If he’d only been straight from the beginning, none of this mess would have come about.
“We had some time to start the post-mortem yesterday evening,” he said grudgingly. “Give me a minute and I’ll take you through.”
Phillips opened his mouth to protest but one quiet look from Ryan had his jaw snapping shut again.
“We had another two come in this morning,” Pinter said. “I’ve put them on the back burner—figuratively speaking, of course.”
The other two exchanged a pained look. The jokes never got any better with time.
“She’s through here.”
They followed him through to one of the private examination rooms—the same one that had housed Sharon Cooper’s body only a few days before—and huddled around Nicola Cassidy’s remains.
“I think you’re going to find a lot of similarities between the injuries on this woman’s body and the finished product with Sharon and Isobel. In their case, our killer had time to finish his work.”
Pinter peeled back the paper covering to reveal Nicola’s face, oddly serene in death.
“With the other two, he only had time to sever their major joints,” Pinter said, with as much sensitivity as he could muster. “With this poor girl, he was drawing it out for as long as he could, and she suffered numerous smaller amputations. Here, you can see she lost several fingers. Same goes for her toes, although there doesn’t appear to be any particular pattern to it.”
Ryan looked at her hands and feet, saying nothing.
“Her body is a road map of what he planned to do next,” Pinter said. “He’s marked her body with knife wounds in the same way I’d expect to see a surgeon marking up a person’s body before theatre.”
“He has a ritual, then,” Phillips observed. “That confirms what we thought about the bloke’s character. He’s ordered.”
Ryan was looking at the puncture wound on her neck.
“Pressure syringe, again?”
Pinter nodded.
“I’d say so. You see, there was enough time for the skin to bruise,” he remarked, using a retractable pointer to indicate the greenish-grey bruise around the point of entry. “And, if you look here, we found a canula still embedded in the skin of her left wrist. He must have done that to enable him to inject the sedative or adrenaline more quickly.”
“A&E set up an IV line,” Phillips said, but Pinter shook his head.
“That’s over here, on her right wrist,” he said, pointing to a small red dot on the other side.
There were so many questions to ask, Ryan thought. So many important things he needed to know. But only one answer mattered to him at that moment.
“Jeff, how much of this would she have been aware of?”
Phillips glanced across at him and thought that the man’s emotions bubbled so close to the surface, it could be a double-edged sword. Caring for the dead they strived to avenge was admirable, but without detachment, it left the door wide open to heartbreak.
“Impossible to say, for sure,” Pinter replied. “We can only hope, for her sake, that she was unconscious for most of it. However, given the killer’s track record, that hope may be optimistic.”
There was an uncomfortable pause and then Ryan passed a weary hand over his face, blinking several times to refresh his tired eyes.
“What else?”
Pinter shrugged his bony shoulders.
“It’s possible—and I only say possible—Faulkner can retrieve something from the tissue we found beneath her nails.” He directed their attention back to the plastic bags covering her hands. “He’s testing it for DNA now. Let’s hope for her sake that he comes up trumps.”
“For all our sakes,” Phillips muttered.
* * *
Half an hour later, they returned to find chaos breaking out in the Emergency Medicine Department.
“Sir, please stand back. We’re under instructions to search your office, too!”
“I told Ryan he could have my files. I didn’t say you could go rifling through any bloody thing you like!”
“Problem here?” Ryan asked.
The beleaguered constable turned to him with no small measure of relief.
“Sir, I’ve been explaining to Mr Draycott—”
“Look,” Draycott cut across him in a sharp undertone. “I’ve given my permission for this search to go ahead in the interests of…well, in the interests of safety.”
In your own interest, Ryan amended, silently. The man hoped that, by co-operating with the police, those who considered his case at a later stage might be disposed towards a more lenient punishment.
“Yes, you did,” Ryan said, flatly. “And I presume safety is your first and only concern. That being the case, kindly stand aside and let us do our jobs.”
They were interrupted by the sound of one of Ryan’s officers calling out to him, sharply.
“Sir!”
Phillips placed a none-too-gentle hand on Draycott’s elbow to prevent him following Ryan as he stepped inside the man’s office. Like his home, it was ordered to within an inch of its life.
“Yes, Constable?”
“We found these, hidden up here,” the woman said excitedly, indicating the architrave above the folds of a plain blue PVC roller blind decorating the only window in the room. In the palm of her gloved hand, she held a set of house keys hanging from a key chain emblazoned with the words, ‘IBIZA ROCKS’.
Ryan pulled on a pair of gloves and took them from her, studying the little keys with mounting anger.
He walked back outside, to where Phillips was holding the man captive by the strength of his personality alone.
“Are these your keys, Mr Draycott?”
The surgeon glanced at the keys in Ryan’s hand and shook his head.
“No. Do I look like the kind of person who holidays in Ibiza?”
“I don’t know what kind of person holidays in Ibiza,” Ryan shot back. “Would you care to enlighten me? Perhaps the young student doctor who died on your table yesterday afternoon?”
Draycott shook his head.
“I have no idea whose keys they are Chief Inspector. All I can tell you is, they’re certainly not mine. Now, I think I’ve had quite enough of this—”
“Do you know how they came to be in your office, hidden above the window frame there?”
Draycott glanced through the open doorway, up at the window.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe one of your people planted them there, since you haven’t been able to find the real man you’re after. You think this is your chance to make a name for yourself, don’t you? Well, I won’t let it happen. I know people, Chief Inspector, and my name still stands for a lot—”
Ryan looked over Draycott’s shoulder at the gathering crowd of consultants and nurses, then made a split-second judgment. He had to.
“Sebastien Draycott, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Isobel Harris, Sharon Cooper and Nicola Cassidy. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Draycott drained of all colour.
“I want my solicitor,” he managed.
“That’s your right,” Ryan said, and led him towards the exit.
CHAPTER 27
“Ryan? In my office.”
When he stepped inside Gregson’s office, his superintendent surveyed him with a critical eye.
“Jesus. You look even worse t
han I feel.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What’s this I hear about you arresting Draycott?”
“What about it, sir?”
“Don’t give me the run-around,” Gregson warned him. “He’s been on telly, for God’s sake. He’s known, Ryan, a Fellow of the Royal College—”
“He’s also a fraud,” Ryan ground out. “I don’t care how many times he’s been on Channel 4 giving his tuppence-worth about cardiothoracic surgery. He’s admitted to serious offences including theft of prescription drugs and I’ve referred it to the General Medical Council for investigation which was, I suspect, what Sharon Cooper intended to do before she died.”
“She knew about it?”
“Yes, sir. She had a file on him. There’s an established drugs ring in operation between the hospital and the Dental Hospital, and Draycott knew about it. A complaint was made about him operating under the influence and the hospital tried to hush it up.” Ryan lifted a shoulder. “It’ll be down to other divisions to decide whether to press charges but, at the very least, I expect him to be suspended and ultimately struck off.”
Gregson blew out a long gust of air and then his face broke out into a smile as he thought of all the positive press that could come of it. It was hard luck on the hospital but that wasn’t his problem.
“Good work,” he said. “Are you sure he’s our guy?”
Ryan looked at Gregson in surprise.
“Oh, I’m sure he isn’t, sir.”
There was a two-second delay before Gregson erupted.
“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” he roared. “There’s a man’s reputation at stake!”
“Draycott ruined that all by himself.”
Gregson leaned his hands on the desk and watched his hopes of a victorious press conference go up in smoke.
“What makes you think it isn’t him? Why arrest him if you know he’s not our man?”
“He would never have agreed to the search so readily if he knew there was something to find. I saw the shock on his face when we found those keys, sir. He had no idea they were there.”
