The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(68)
She wanted to understand what made him tick and to be understood in return. She didn’t want to continue their half-relationship; she wanted theirs to be a proper family where regular phone calls and visits wouldn’t be unusual, as they were at the moment. She wanted to remind him of all the good things in life, to help him to see that there were still decent people in the world.
She truly believed that.
As she approached the apartment building, she glanced up and noticed that the little CCTV camera above the door was hanging loose from its holder.
Ryan wouldn’t like that; she must remember to tell him about it.
*
Ryan was feeling the full force of long-term sleep deprivation. Caffeine sloshed around his empty stomach and made him jittery. His eyes ached but a quick application of some eye drops had bought a little extra time before he was forced to make up some of the deficit.
Until then, he rounded up his team for the second half of their briefing.
“Let’s focus on Nicola Cassidy for a moment,” he said. “One of the key features of her death is the commitment it must have required to keep her alive for as long as he needed. She was tied up and gagged—we believe, using her own underwear—but to ensure that the risk of escape remained low, he had to dose her with a sedative. The toxicology report hasn’t come back yet but there are needle marks on her body that are consistent with his MO. What I want to know is, how frequently would our perp need to keep topping it up?”
“I had a word with Pinter about that,” Phillips said, and popped a stick of nicotine gum into his mouth, wincing at the taste. “Depends on the drug but, assuming he continued to use lorazepam, he needed to tread a very fine line not to give her a fatal overdose. Hence, the adrenaline on stand-by. Pinter thinks, to strike the balance, you’d be looking at upping the dosage little and often.”
“How little, how often?” Ryan prodded.
“Every two to four hours,” Phillips replied. “According to Pinter, at least.”
“We can ask around. If we assume he’s correct, they’d need to sneak out regularly. Let’s think about this,” he said, boosting himself up onto the edge of his desk and picking up the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a bottle of Tippex. He fiddled with it while he thought.
“If he dips in to see her before his shift, he can dip out again three or four hours later if he has a lunchtime window, or a late morning coffee break. It’s a busy department and her flat was only five minutes away; less, if he jogged part-way.”
“A lot of them say they go to the staff gym on site, or for a wander around the park,” Lowerson said. “Easy enough to make an excuse and say he’s going to do the same thing.”
“No CCTV in the gym, before you ask,” Phillips said, anticipating Ryan’s next question.
“Okay, this leads me on to the most obvious question,” Ryan said. “Nicola Cassidy was able to escape because the drugs wore off. That’s common sense. But why would he keep her alive so diligently and invest so much time in torturing her, only to let her escape before the end? The answer has to be that it was an oversight, or perhaps an unexpected delay that was out of his control.”
Phillips chewed his gum thoughtfully.
“You’re looking at the shifts,” he said, with approval.
Ryan nodded.
“We’ve got a problem, though. The rota we have doesn’t account for anybody who swapped a shift informally, or worked extra hours, or was off sick. I realised that today when I cross-checked Draycott’s story. We know he was at work when Nicola Cassidy came in because we happened to be right there, talking to him. Yet he wasn’t listed on the rota.”
“Did he swap?” MacKenzie asked.
“No, he was just working overtime, according to him,” Ryan said. “All the same, it tells us things aren’t quite as straightforward as we thought. Now, we need to go back and double-check everybody who was at work and might have been unable to go back and check Nicola at the usual time.”
There were nods around the room.
“That would narrow the field,” Faulkner said. “It’d give us a fighting chance to get through the DNA samples.”
“That’s what I’m hoping, Tom. We’re overdue a bit of good luck.”
CHAPTER 29
Stephanie Bernard was looking forward to her bed.
It had been a long run these past few months, touring the regional theatres with Gianni Schicchi, and she was ready to go home to her own little flat in Paris. She enjoyed visiting new places and spent much of her time in London, but nothing compared to the city where she had been born. Some people preferred the countryside, but she had never known anything other than the urban landscape with its ancient streets and elegant boulevards. She preferred its pace of life, its food, and its fashion.
She spread her arms wide to encompass the audience, who rose from their seats to applaud. She smiled warmly, grateful for their kind reception which made everything easier to bear.
She dipped into a low curtsy and accepted the obligatory bunch of red roses from the stage manager, stepping back as the curtain fell. She smoothed a hand over her hair and straightened her dress until the curtain rose again for an encore and she curtsied again, blowing kisses, playing the part.
Only after the final curtain fell did she hurry off stage and into her dressing room. Usually, she removed her make-up before heading back to the aparthotel the company had rented for her, but tonight she was much too tired.