The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(27)

Ryan and MacKenzie exchanged a look. It was on the tip of his tongue to fob the girl off with a stock answer, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“We think so, but we can’t be sure, yet,” Ryan said, truthfully.

Amaya took a final sip of her coffee and pushed it away, seeming to draw herself up before she asked the final question that had, to her shame, been occupying her mind even more than the loss of her friend.

“Do you think he’ll come back? I mean, do you think he’d come after me too?”

Another tricky question, Ryan thought.

“It’s unlikely,” he said. “But it makes sense to be careful. Try not to go anywhere alone, if you can help it. We have no reason to believe he’d target you, Amaya, but don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

She took a deep breath and nodded.

“I’m so lucky to be alive,” she whispered. “When Isobel is—”

“It’s not your fault,” Ryan assured her. “It’s nobody’s fault, except the person who killed her. Try to remember that.”

*

Dusk had fallen when they emerged from the garish, artificial light of the beauty hall and stepped outside. Ahead of them, a tall monument to Earl Grey rose up over a hundred feet into the pearl-grey sky. It stood as an island amid the pedestrianised zone around Grainger Town, the historic heart of the city which boasted classical Georgian architecture and wide avenues leading down to the river. Ryan looked up at the column and wondered what its figurehead had seen over the past two hundred years. How many people had passed beneath Grey’s unmoving eyes, never to return?

“Ask Lowerson to check the hospital records for 7th June,” he said, as MacKenzie came to stand next to him. “It could be nothing. On the other hand—”

“It could be something,” she agreed.

“Yeah. Cooper assumed Isobel Harris met her killer via the online dating community. What if she met him on his own turf, at the hospital?”

“I’ll chase up all the CCTV we can get our hands on,” MacKenzie promised him.

Ryan nodded, and they turned towards the Metro station beside the monument and the next stop on their whistle-stop tour of Isobel Harris’s last movements.

“The staff exit is around the side of the building,” he remarked. “There’s a camera on the door and we have her leaving work on Friday 20th June at twenty past eight. She would have walked from there straight to the entrance to the metro, over here. It can’t be more than fifty feet away.”

They stood at the top of the stone steps leading down into the station, below street level. The tunnel glowed yellow and they followed the stream of people down towards the ticket hall. There were machines dotted around, a few stalls, and a small supermarket designed for commuters needing a quick fix.

“CCTV shows that she entered the supermarket at eight twenty-four and came back out again at eight twenty-nine with one bag containing a carton of milk, a packet of sliced ham and a loaf of bread. CSIs found the bag sitting on her kitchen countertop,” Ryan added.

MacKenzie felt a tightening in her chest because she recognised so much of herself in that description. How many times had she stopped by the supermarket next to Police Headquarters on her way home to pick up a carton of milk? Had she ever considered who might be watching her, following her?

“You just don’t think about it,” she murmured. “After work, you’re eager to get home, put the kettle on and kick your shoes off. You don’t even think about the danger. All you think about is home.”

Ryan nodded.

“It’s normal life,” he reminded her. “You have a right to go about your business without living in fear. Isobel Harris had that right, too.”

MacKenzie tore her eyes away from the supermarket entrance, where she’d just seen a young woman walking out with a single bag of shopping.

“She had a Metro pass,” MacKenzie continued, “so she had no need to get a ticket from the machine. Metro scanners logged her entrance at eight thirty-one.”

They showed their warrant cards to the ticket inspectors and passed through the turnstiles. Before they continued their journey, Ryan paused to look at the other entrances leading into Monument station. There was one connected to Fenwick via the lower-ground floor and another one leading up onto Grey Street.

“Why didn’t she use the internal entrance?” he wondered.

“Quicker to just step outside from the beauty hall exit,” MacKenzie replied. “It would take longer if she went down a level and walked around.”

“What about the Grey Street entrance?” Ryan left no stone unturned. “Do we have the camera footage for that entrance?”

MacKenzie frowned.

“Come to think of it, I don’t think we were able to get hold of that footage because the camera covering those stairs had blown.”

Ryan turned.

“What a coincidence,” he said. “When did it break?”

“I can find out. It’d be interesting if it happened to go around the same time Isobel Harris went to A&E.”

“Wouldn’t it just?”

They followed the escalator down to the platform level.

“Isobel took the Metro south towards South Shields. Her stop was Jarrow.”

“Cameras caught her on the way down to the platform,” MacKenzie said, watching passing advertisements on the wall for Cirque du Soleil and local solicitors’ firms. “It’s a fair bet that he followed her down here and the camera would have caught him, too.”