The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(18)

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 twenty-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?”