The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(15)

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 point 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 technician. 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.