The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(63)

“Her body is a road map of what he planned to do next,” Pinter said. “He’s marked her body with knife wounds in the same way I’d expect to see a surgeon marking up a person’s body before theatre.”

“He has a ritual, then,” Phillips observed. “That confirms what we thought about the bloke’s character. He’s ordered.”

Ryan was looking at the puncture wound on her neck.

“Pressure syringe, again?”

Pinter nodded.

“I’d say so. You see, there was enough time for the skin to bruise,” he remarked, using a retractable pointer to indicate the greenish-grey bruise around the point of entry. “And, if you look here, we found a canula still embedded in the skin of her left wrist. He must have done that to enable him to inject the sedative or adrenaline more quickly.”

“A&E set up an IV line,” Phillips said, but Pinter shook his head.

“That’s over here, on her right wrist,” he said, pointing to a small red dot on the other side.

There were so many questions to ask, Ryan thought. So many important things he needed to know. But only one answer mattered to him at that moment.

“Jeff, how much of this would she have been aware of?”

Phillips glanced across at him and thought that the man’s emotions bubbled so close to the surface, it could be a double-edged sword. Caring for the dead they strived to avenge was admirable, but without detachment, it left the door wide open to heartbreak.

“Impossible to say, for sure,” Pinter replied. “We can only hope, for her sake, that she was unconscious for most of it. However, given the killer’s track record, that hope may be optimistic.”

There was an uncomfortable pause and then Ryan passed a weary hand over his face, blinking several times to refresh his tired eyes.

“What else?”

Pinter shrugged his bony shoulders.

“It’s possible—and I only say possible—Faulkner can retrieve something from the tissue we found beneath her nails.” He directed their attention back to the plastic bags covering her hands. “He’s testing it for DNA now. Let’s hope for her sake that he comes up trumps.”

“For all our sakes,” Phillips muttered.

*

Half an hour later, they returned to find chaos breaking out in the Emergency Medicine Department.

“Sir, please stand back. We’re under instructions to search your office, too!”

“I told Ryan he could have my files. I didn’t say you could go rifling through any bloody thing you like!”

“Problem here?” Ryan asked.

The beleaguered constable turned to him with no small measure of relief.

“Sir, I’ve been explaining to Mr Draycott—”

“Look,” Draycott cut across him in a sharp undertone. “I’ve given my permission for this search to go ahead in the interests of…well, in the interests of safety.”

In your own interest, Ryan amended, silently. The man hoped that, by co-operating with the police, those who considered his case at a later stage might be disposed towards a more lenient punishment.

“Yes, you did,” Ryan said, flatly. “And I presume safety is your first and only concern. That being the case, kindly stand aside and let us do our jobs.”

They were interrupted by the sound of one of Ryan’s officers calling out to him, sharply.

“Sir!”

Phillips placed a none-too-gentle hand on Draycott’s elbow to prevent him following Ryan as he stepped inside the man’s office. Like his home, it was ordered to within an inch of its life.

“Yes, Constable?”

“We found these, hidden up here,” the woman said excitedly, indicating the architrave above the folds of a plain blue PVC roller blind decorating the only window in the room. In the palm of her gloved hand, she held a set of house keys hanging from a key chain emblazoned with the words, ‘IBIZA ROCKS’.

Ryan pulled on a pair of gloves and took them from her, studying the little keys with mounting anger.

He walked back outside, to where Phillips was holding the man captive by the strength of his personality alone.

“Are these your keys, Mr Draycott?”

The surgeon glanced at the keys in Ryan’s hand and shook his head.

“No. Do I look like the kind of person who holidays in Ibiza?”

“I don’t know what kind of person holidays in Ibiza,” Ryan shot back. “Would you care to enlighten me? Perhaps the young student doctor who died on your table yesterday afternoon?”

Draycott shook his head.

“I have no idea whose keys they are Chief Inspector. All I can tell you is, they’re certainly not mine. Now, I think I’ve had quite enough of this—”

“Do you know how they came to be in your office, hidden above the window frame there?”

Draycott glanced through the open doorway, up at the window.

“I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe one of your people planted them there, since you haven’t been able to find the real man you’re after. You think this is your chance to make a name for yourself, don’t you? Well, I won’t let it happen. I know people, Chief Inspector, and my name still stands for a lot—”

Ryan looked over Draycott’s shoulder at the gathering crowd of consultants and nurses, then made a split-second judgment. He had to.