Killed in King's Cross

by Samantha Silver

  “Okay, so what are we going to do here?”

  “I want to cut your scalp open slightly,” Violet said, and I balked. That was definitely not a sentence you ever wanted to hear your best friend say to you.

  “Seriously?”

  “The more blood, the better.”

  “Then cut my inner arm or something,”

  “The head bleeds better than anywhere else in the body due to the high concentration of blood vessels, and you know it.”

  I sighed. I did know it, and I knew Violet was right. Head injuries were often not at all serious, but they bled like crazy, which was exactly what we wanted.

  “Fine,” I finally conceded. “Please make it quick, though.”

  Violet nodded and made her way into Sherlock Holmes’s kitchen, coming back with a long, serrated knife. “This should do fine,” she said, pulling a large container of disinfectant from her purse. I watched as she made her way over to the sink, putting in the plug, and poured in the disinfectant and dropped the knife in. At least I wasn’t going to die of an infection after we did this.

  “I guess we have twenty minutes to kill?” I asked, and Violet nodded.

  “Yes, by then the blade will be perfectly safe to use.”

  “What’s the rest of the plan?” I asked. “We go to the hospital, they close up my wound, and then what? We don’t even know that Doctor King is working today.”

  “You do not know that Doctor King is working today. I called the hospital earlier and asked, making sure that he was in accident and emergency all day. I would not do something so invasive to you if I was not sure. As for the rest of the plan, I think it is better if you do not know. Besides, planning things like this too carefully often leads to making mistakes. If I have the right plan that is easily modifiable to any situation, that is much better than something that has been planned too carefully. It is always good to be flexible when hunting a killer.”

  “That’s code for you have absolutely no idea, isn’t it?” I said with a small smile.

  “No, it is not. There is a difference between having a plan that is open and flexible, and having no plan at all. I would not send you as a potential victim if I had no plan at all.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Are you coming to the hospital with me when I cut myself?”

  “Of course,” Violet replied. “However, when you are discharged, I will be leaving separately from you. I would like you to mention to Doctor King that you will be going back to the Sherlock Holmes Museum to look at the crime scene as you think you may have remembered something and you want to be certain. When you are discharged, stop and get some food - I do not think finding something will be difficult for you - and then make your way to the museum.”

  I nodded. “Sounds good. Got it.”

  “Are you ready,” Violet said, taking the knife out from the disinfectant. “I cannot promise that this will not hurt, but I will do my best to find an area that will bleed without hurting too much.”

  “Well, what are friends for?” I replied with a grin. I couldn’t help but think about the absolute ridiculousness of the situation, in which my best friend was about to slice open my head so that I could get admitted to the hospital straight away.

  “Sit down over there, and hold still,” Violet ordered, directing me towards one of the chairs. I sat on the edge of it, not wanting my blood to get on any of the items in this room. After all, this was still a working museum. Closing my eyes, I focused on my breathing and did my best not to move at all while Violet carefully moved my hair aside, trying to find the spot where she wanted to make the cut.

  “Here I go,” she said, and I let out a breath slowly as the cold metal of the knife sliced my scalp.

  I instinctively let out a whine, but to be honest, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would have. Still, a moment later I could feel a warm liquid running down through my hair, and I knew it was my own blood.

  “Here,” Violet said to me, handing me a small handkerchief. “Use this to staunch the bleeding, I have a car waiting downstairs to take us straight to the hospital.”

  I jumped to my feet and instantly and felt a tiny bit dizzy; Violet had obviously managed to make a good cut if I was losing blood this quickly. I was starting to wonder if this had really been a good idea after all.

  Chapter 16

  Sure enough, as soon as we got downstairs there was a man across the street with his hazard lights on, driving a Toyota Avensis – basically a Camry with a different name, because that was what marketing people did - that was maybe five years old. Violet led me straight to the car, and I got in, holding the handkerchief tightly to my head to try and avoid dripping on the man’s upholstery. I could already feel wetness on the other side of the handkerchief; it was obviously completely soaked with blood.

  “Right, to the hospital then?” the man asked, and Violet nodded.

  “Oui, thank you, Ronald.”

  “Always happy to do you a favor, Violet,” Ronald replied. “Goodness knows you’ve done enough for me.”

  Ronald sped off, driving especially aggressively, even by central London standards. As a result, we got to the hospital only a few minutes later, and Ronald dropped us off at the entrance to accident and emergency.

  “See you later,” he said, leaving as soon as Violet and I stepped out of the car. He had never once asked who I was, or why I was bleeding profusely from my head.

  Violet and I made our way inside, and found that the nurse at reception was the same one we had spoken to the other day, who had told us about Doctor King in the first place. Her eyes sparked with recognition as soon as she saw us, but then she quickly went into nursing mode.

  “Come with me, we need to get the bleeding stopped on this wound as quickly as possible.”

  I followed after her, and Violet tapped me lightly on the arm. “If you are going to collapse, now would be a good time.”

  I nodded. A simple head wound was basically nothing, I knew that all too well. They bled like crazy, but they often weren’t serious, and I knew that Violet hadn’t sliced deeply at all. Any nurse would be able to tell that I just needed a few stitches and for the bleeding to stop, and that I would be fine. On the other hand, if I were to fall and find myself unconscious for a minute, that might indicate a concussion, or something worse. In that case, I was definitely going to see a doctor.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, then forced my shoe to hit the tile just a little bit wrong, sending me flying forward. I actually did a much better job of crashing than I had planned or expected to; I was going to simply slide on the floor, and catch myself, but instead my foot that caught hit my other foot, which knocked me off balance and sent me actually careening towards the floor for real.

  Like an idiot, I reached out instinctively with my arm to stop the fall, and as soon as it hit the ground, a searing pain shot through my wrist and up to my shoulder.

  Great. This was exactly what I had told Violet I didn’t want to do on purpose, and now I had just done it by accident.

  “Argh,” I cried out, grabbing at my injured arm, and the nurse stopped and looked, horrified. This was definitely feeling like a worse and worse idea by the second.

  “I need a wheelchair here, now!” the nurse called out, and a minute later someone else in scrubs came by with a wheelchair, with Violet and the two nurses helping me into it. At this point, I was in enough pain that I wasn’t paying attention to much, but I did realize I’d lost my handkerchief at some point, because blood began pooling down my face and I was too busy clutching at my injured wrist to wipe it away.

  What on earth had I been thinking in agreeing to this plan? We hadn’t even come across the serial killer yet and I already felt like I was dying.

  I was quickly wheeled over to a bed, where the nurse who brought in the wheelchair immediately set about to stop the bleeding, while the other went left, presumably to go back to reception. The nurse was male, about thirty-five, with friendly eyes.

 
“Lie down on the bed, please,” he told me as he pulled on latex gloves and pressed a large strip of gauze against the cut. “What caused this cut?”

  “A knife,” Violet said. “I was holding it near her while she was crouched down, and she stood up and inadvertently sliced her head on it.”

  “Right,” the nurse said. “Was the knife dirty at all?”

  “No, I had just cleaned it,” Violet replied. I supposed it would have sounded pretty sketchy to admit to sterilizing a knife before slicing someone’s head open with it.

  “Ok,” the nurse replied.

  “I can hold the gauze if you want,” I offered. I was well aware that it was going to have to stay in place for at least fifteen minutes.

  “Sorry, this one’s my job,” the nurse said with a smile. “I’m Khalim, by the way.”

  “Cassie,” I said with a smile. “Hey, Violet, can you go give my information at reception and get me checked in?”

  “Yes, that is a good idea,” Violet replied, and I handed her my purse, which I was sad to see had gotten a few drops of blood on it. Hopefully washing them out wouldn’t be too hard.

  “It’s going to need stitches, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “It’s possible, but I’m not sure yet,” Khalim replied. “You’re actually quite lucky. This cut is clean, and while it is long, it is quite narrow.”

  “Small mercies, I guess,” I replied with a small smile. At least Violet knew exactly how to cut me to minimize the odds of having stitches carved into my scalp later.

  The next few minutes passed in a bit of a daze. Twenty minutes later, the bleeding in my scalp had stopped, and Violet had come back as well.

  “The doctor will be here shortly,” Khalim told me as he removed the gauze from my head and confirmed that the bleeding had mostly stopped. “He wants to have a look at you, and make sure you’re not concussed, since the fall is a little bit worrying. Then, we’ll send you in for X-rays.”

  “Thank you,” I said to Khalim, and he nodded and left to take care of other patients.

  “This had better be worth it,” I hissed to Violet as he left.

  “You did not have to be so convincing with your wrist.”

  “I’m not faking it. I legitimately think I broke something.”

  Violet raised her eyebrows. “I did think the fall looked especially good for a fake. How on earth did you manage to trip over your own two feet?”

  “I don’t know,” I said glumly. “It just happened.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, it is good that it happened, as it means you are definitely going to be seen by docteur King now.”

  “Great,” I muttered. I knew that was the goal, but right now, I was just in too much pain to really care about proving he was a serial killer.

  “Well, no matter. The end goal has been achieved: you are in the hospital, and you will be seen by the doctor.”

  I nodded, my mouth suddenly going dry. It was one thing to have come up with this plan in theory, it was entirely another to know that I was about to face a man who had killed two people that we knew of, but probably a lot more.

  Still, when, about five minutes later, the privacy curtain was pulled back and Doctor King smiled at me, I immediately resisted the urge to throw up all over him and instead flashed him a smile.

  “Well, well, well. What have we here? I wasn’t expecting to see you back so soon, and certainly not as a patient rather than as an investigator,” the doctor said when he entered the room. He smiled cordially at Violet and nodded, and she replied with a sweet smile of her own that reached her eyes. She was nothing if not an excellent actress.

  I took my cue from her and tried to plaster an embarrassed smile on my face.

  “Yes, well, unfortunately things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

  “I trust you’re getting closer to finding the killer?”

  “Oh, we are quite close,” Violet said. “I suspect the police will be making an arrest soon. The killer should be very careful.”

  I studied Doctor King’s face closely as Violet said those words, and maybe I imagined it, but I could have sworn I saw his left eyebrow twitch just a tiny little bit.

  “Is that so? Well, that’s excellent news,” he replied without skipping a beat. “Now, let me have a look at that cut.”

  My body tensed up involuntarily as Doctor King made his way towards me and touched my scalp, but if he noticed, he made no mention of it. “Hmm, yes, that isn’t too bad a cut after all. They do bleed like crazy, though, those ones. Now, the nurse mentioned that you collapsed coming in. Does your head hurt at all?”

  I shook my head as I answered the rest of Doctor King’s questions as he ascertained whether or not I had a concussion. “Well, I think you’re clear when it comes to concussion,” he finally said. “Luckily for you, there’s only the cut. I’d like to give you a few stitches, because if that wound reopens on its own it’s going to be quite painful, but I’ll make them dissolvable stitches so that you won’t need to return and have them taken out.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said, trying not to freak out at the fact that a serial killer was about to go at my head with the needle.

  “Before we do that, though, I want to get that wrist x-rayed. Stay here, and one of the technicians will come to get you shortly.”

  Doctor King left, and Violet put a finger to her lips as soon as he did, waited about thirty seconds, then checked to make sure that he had actually left the area.

  “There. Now we know that he is not listening in to what we are saying,” Violet said.

  “He’s cool as a cucumber, that’s for sure,” I said with a low whistle. “I think I saw his eyebrow twitch when you said that we were close to an arrest, but that was it.”

  “So you noticed that as well,” Violet said with a nod. “Good. Good observational skills. I believe we have definitely gotten under his skin, but at the same time, I suspect he has no idea that we mean him to be the main suspect.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point of us coming here? So that he knows that we believe he’s the killer?”

  Violet shook her head. “No. The psychology of the arrogant serial killer who wants attention is that they need to get the attention. They crave recognition for what they have done, but they still want to get away with it. If we thought Doctor King was a serial killer, why would we come back here? Why would we tell him we thought we were close to an arrest? No, everything I said was to tell him that I have somebody else in mind as the killer. That, more than anything, is going to drive him to fixate on us - to fixate on you.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “He will want to get closer to me, to punish me for giving the credit for this crime to somebody else. This is the best way to get him to focus on us.”

  Before I had a chance to respond, a tall, rather chubby woman with a friendly face and a warm smile pulled aside the privacy curtain.

  “Cassie?” she asked. “I’m here to take you to get x-rays. You’re alright to walk, right?”

  “I am,” I said with a smile as I got up off the bed, carefully holding my wrist.

  “Perfect. Follow me and we’ll get that wrist looked at straight away.”

  Chapter 17

  Thirty minutes later, Violet and I were waiting in the room once more. I’d had the X-rays taken; the nurse was quite nice and asked a lot about San Francisco, telling me she wished she could go there for Christmas as the weather seemed “quite a bit nicer than this gloomy lot.”

  I had to admit, I kind of agreed. I had lived in the Bay Area my entire life, and for me, December meant cooler weather, sure, and the occasional bout of rain, but it was still primarily sunshine central.

  Here in London, however, while it had started to be sunny once more, in November and the first few days of December there had come a time when it felt like I was never going to see the sun again. I had come to love the overcast days, because at least it wasn’t raining, and it seemed like it took every effort in the world to get out
of bed on some of those days. It felt a lot more like I had when I first moved to London, until luckily, eventually Violet noticed that I wasn’t going out much and suggested I take some vitamin D tablets.

  “It is not easy, living in this climate in the winter, for someone like you who comes from the warm weather,” Violet explained.

  “How on earth do you do it?” I asked.

  “I come to appreciate the various aspects of each season individually. It is not possible to properly appreciate the warmth of the first true summer’s day if one has not suffered through the three previous months of a cold winter.”

  “Speak for yourself, I appreciate warm days all the time,” I muttered.

  “But you have not yet spent a winter here. Wait until May, when we have the first truly warm spring day. You will bask in the sun in a way that you could not imagine having enjoyed it every day of your life up until now.”

  “Ok, we’ll see,” I said skeptically. Now, however, as the weather got even colder as the clouds opened up and revealed the sun once more, I couldn’t help but wonder if Violet was right. I would give anything for a good ninety-degree day on the beach right now. Would I really appreciate the sun more now that I had gone so long without truly experiencing its warmth?

  As soon as I left the X-ray area and was brought back to my hospital bed, however, my mind turned back to the crime. Doctor King would be back again soon. Was my wrist really broken? It certainly felt like it was. How was that going to affect how I was going to solve the case? Being one arm down certainly couldn’t be an advantage when trying to catch a killer.

  Still, hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Violet was really more of a chess player than a boxer; she would always try to trap someone using her intelligence rather than her brute force.

  “Right,” Doctor Knight said when he came back in. “You have a distal radius fracture after all, but you’re lucky. It’s a simple break, which doesn’t need any resetting. There’s enough swelling that I’d like to start by putting the wrist in a splint, and then have you come back in a couple of days for a cast.”