The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(56)

He hoped she made the most of it, because this night would be her last.

With a quick glance both ways, he walked across the road and made for the side alley, intending to disarm whatever camera they’d fitted outside the service entrance. He had his little hammer in one pocket and a can of spray paint in the other.

But when he found the service door—left helpfully ajar by the kitchen staff in the hotel’s dreary restaurant—somebody had already done the grunt work for him, because the camera hung limply from its holder two metres off the ground. A small mountain of cigarette butts lay on the steps beside the door.

He heard laughter coming from somewhere within and he grinned like the madman he was, eyes almost feral with anticipation of his next kill.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much indeed.”





CHAPTER 24


Wednesday 9th July

In the end, Ryan never made it home.

After spending hours at his desk reviewing statements and summaries, he’d allowed himself a brief nap on the foamy loungers in the staff room at CID Headquarters. By the time the new day dawned, he was back at his desk with his head bent over a stack of paperwork. Phillips found him there, noting that his hair was still wet from the staff showers and he was wearing his dress shirt, the only one left inside his locker.

He tutted.

“You need rest, lad.”

“Thanks, Dad,” came the surly rejoinder.

Phillips decided to let it go, ambling across the room to set a cup of coffee on Ryan’s desk.

“Don’t mention it,” Phillips said cheerfully, noting the sickly pallor of Ryan’s face, the shadows beneath his eyes. “You, ah, you find anything useful?”

“If he works at the hospital, he’s tied into shifts,” Ryan said. “I’ve got a copy of the shift rotas from the A&E department for the last month, courtesy of Joan Stephenson. It was easier than going through Draycott,” he added.

Phillips reached across to pick up a sheet of paper covered in multi-coloured highlighter.

“Who’s who? Or, what’s what?”

“I’ve got a key somewhere…here,” Ryan handed him another sheet of paper with coloured lines and names alongside. “Green is Draycott, Yellow is Edwards and so forth.”

Phillips took a slurp of his milky coffee and studied the dates and lines.

“You’re looking at who was off-shift when Isobel Harris went missing? There was a shift change at eight the morning after Harris died, when Draycott, Edwards, Chowdhury and others were due back at the hospital. Harris died the previous evening, which puts them all in the frame.”

Ryan nodded.

“Same goes for Cooper’s timeline,” he said. “The shift started at eight a.m. on Monday. The pathologist puts her death anytime up to seven a.m. but that’s a best estimate; there’ll be some leeway in that. Say he killed her around six-thirty, after having a couple of hours to work on her, that still gives him enough time to get back across town to start his shift if he hustled.”

“Yeah, and the same people are in the frame for that, too.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “Frank, we need that CCTV. We need to see if any of their vehicles were in the vicinity.”

“I’ve had them looking at it for the past two days,” Phillips said. “They won’t stop until they’ve checked every scrap of footage, you can count on it, but they’re moving as fast as they can.”

Ryan leaned back and scrubbed a weary hand over his face before tapping the spreadsheet again with the end of his pen.

“It gets complicated with Nicola Cassidy,” he said. “She left work on Sunday evening for a week’s holiday in Fuerteventura. Nobody reported her missing because everybody expected her to have caught her flight and to have been sunning herself abroad. Instead, she was taken and held in her own home.”

“What time was her flight?”

“She was due to catch the twenty-past-midnight from Newcastle International,” Ryan said. He knew the flight number thanks to a difficult conversation he’d had with Nicola’s mother the previous day. His chest tightened as he remembered her devastation, the pleading look in her eyes as she’d begged him to tell him it wasn’t true, that her daughter wasn’t dead. She’d shown him the text messages her daughter was supposed to have sent, just like the e-mails Sharon Cooper had apparently sent last Sunday.

“—had to have been the window between her leaving the hospital and catching her flight, then?”

Ryan caught the tail end of Phillips’ sentence and looked up, then away again.

“Yeah, it had to be. If he missed that window, he missed his chance. He couldn’t risk holding her captive for days without somebody reporting it. He had to use her holiday as a cover story.”

“He did his research, again.”

Ryan nodded.

“He sought out the best match. So, we ask ourselves: who was on shift between, say, eight and ten p.m.? Allowing for the fact she’d have to make her way to the airport a couple of hours early.”

Ryan already knew the answer to that, since he’d been through the steps during the early hours of the morning.

“Shifts are twelve hours for the consultants, doctors and surgeons, give or take,” Ryan said. “Nurses tend to work a bit longer, so if we focus on the clinicians then we’re looking at a mass shift change around eight. Once again, that puts the usual suspects in the frame.”