The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(7)

“No sign of a breakin,” Phillips said, bringing him back to the present. “Could be a vengeance kill. Could be somebody she’s put away over the years…could even be Dobbs.”

“No,” Ryan turned away. “It’s not Dobbs. Look at her, Frank. She can’t have been dead more than a few hours. There’s no way he could have done this whilst under surveillance.”

He let out a short, mirthless laugh and shook his head.

“Whoever killed her is still out there.”





CHAPTER 4


The remainder of the afternoon was spent overseeing the transfer of Sharon Cooper’s body to the mortuary, where the police pathologist had given up his day of rest to begin the painstaking process of understanding how she had come to die. The CSI team rustled around her house in their polypropylene overalls searching the minutiae for traces of her killer, unravelling the fabric of her life and laying it bare, while a team of local constables knocked at every door on the street and took preliminary statements from her neighbours. They were only too glad to cooperate since the threat of police caution remained uppermost in their minds but, unfortunately, none of them had seen Cooper that day nor any unusual visitors or strange vehicles parked on the road.

Whoever had killed ‘that lovely policewoman at number seven’ had managed to come and go like an apparition.

“It was always a long shot,” Phillips said, leaning back against the side of Ryan’s car. “It’s a Sunday. You can’t expect people to be peeping through their curtains jotting down registration plates at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

Ryan grunted.

“I didn’t notice any CCTV on the road,” Phillips continued, “but we’re not far from the high street. There might be something we can get hold of there.”

Ryan nodded, considering the access points.

“Plenty of local businesses nearby. Let’s check with them, too.”

They watched the CSIs carry a large, industrial film light from their inconspicuous black van towards the tent they’d erected outside Cooper’s front door. It was almost six o’clock and daylight was starting to fade.

“Check the bus routes and the metro,” Ryan said. “It’s only a five-minute walk to the station from here. Who knows? We might get lucky.”

“Consider it done,” Phillips said, and reached for his packet of cigarettes once again. The tobacco fizzed orange as he took a long drag, which should have gone some way to calming his nerves but had the opposite effect instead.

“I’ve been thinking,” he began.

“A dangerous proposition,” Ryan replied automatically.

“Aye, I know. I’ve been thinking about the style. It’s the same—isn’t it?”

Ryan didn’t need to ask what he meant. The dismemberment of their colleague bore a marked resemblance to the state in which Isobel Harris’s body had been discovered, two weeks earlier.

The implications were terrifying.

“We need the pathologist to confirm,” Ryan said eventually. “We have to be as sure as we can before we head down that path.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and thought of what led a man to hurl himself from a great height. Fear? Desperation? Perhaps there was some guilt mixed in there, too.

“Cooper threw the full force of the law at John Dobbs,” he thought aloud. “She believed with every fibre of her being that he was the one who’d killed Isobel Harris. The public still believe it. Half of them are congratulating us, while the other half vilify us for driving a man over the edge and denying a family their rightful day in court. But, most of all, they believe we got our man and they’ve started to relax again, to walk home alone again without being frightened about who might be following. We need to be one hundred per cent sure of ourselves before we come out and say that the person who killed Isobel Harris also waltzed into Sharon Cooper’s home and did that”—he bobbed his head towards the house on the other side of the road—“because, if it is the same person, that means an innocent man threw himself off the bridge today, Frank.”

Phillips took another drag of his cigarette.

“It could still be a copycat,” he said, a bit desperately. He’d known Sharon Cooper for over ten years; she’d been friendly with his wife and brought flowers to the hospital before she’d died. “It could be some opportunist, or someone holding a grudge.”

Ryan looked him squarely in the eye.

“You know as well as I do that the details of how we found Isobel Harris’s body weren’t made public. Yet somebody copied her killer’s MO almost down to the letter. Look, nobody wants to damage Cooper’s reputation, but we can’t overlook the possibility that she made a mistake. It may have been the biggest mistake of her life.”

A few seconds ticked by while Phillips took a final, long drag of his cigarette and then ground it out with the heel of his shoe.

“Howay, let’s find the bastard,” he said.

*

The city was pleasant on a summer’s evening.

There seemed to be a new energy in the air, a sense of relief that was palpable now that John Dobbs, the ‘killer on the bridge’, was gone. People strolled through the streets with less urgency than before, now that his blight had been brought to an end and the precarious balance between good and evil had been restored.