“But what about the other woman you mentioned? Maggie Forrest?”
“She’s not out of the picture yet. There could even be some connection between her and Kirsten Farrow. There are a number of odd links in this case, strange tangents, and I won’t rest until I get them sorted.”
“So you’ll be wanting the pathologist’s reports?”
“That’s right. Dr. Mackenzie, I believe it was.”
The coffee and KitKat arrived while they were digging through the boxes. Blackstone thanked the PC who brought it and got back to helping Banks. At last they unearthed the pathology reports, and Banks started reading through them while Blackstone left the office for a while.
It was as he had thought. Many of the bodies were badly decomposed, as they had been buried in the dirt of the cellar or the back garden. But Dr. Mackenzie had been able to identify slash marks to the areas of the victims’ breasts and genitalia in all cases, probably made with the same machete Terence Payne used to attack and kill Janet Taylor’s partner. They were similar to the wounds Kirsten Farrow had suffered, though the weapon was different, and they were wounds, unfortunately, not uncommon to vicious sexual assaults. They showed a deep hatred of the women men felt had betrayed, humiliated and rejected them all their lives, or so the profilers said. Of course, not all men who had been betrayed, humiliated or rejected by women became rapists and murderers, or the female population would be a lot smaller and the jails would be even more full of men than they already were, Banks thought.
Twenty minutes or more must have passed as Banks read the grisly details, most of which he remembered firsthand, then Blackstone returned.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“It’s as I thought,” Banks said. “Now I just need to find out how much of this was reported in the press at the time.”
“Quite a lot, as I remember,” said Blackstone. “Alan, what is it? Have you found something?”
Banks had let the last file slip out of his hand to the floor, not because the details were more gruesome than any of the others, but because of a sheet of paper he had seen clipped to the end of the pile. It was simply a record of all those involved in the preparation of the reports and postmortems, including the men who had transported the bodies to the mortuary and the cleaners who had cleaned up afterward, initialed beside each name, partly kept to ensure a continuous chain of custody. “I can’t believe it,” said Banks. “It’s been staring me in the bloody face all along, and I never knew.”
Blackstone moved closer. “What has? What is it?”
Banks picked the papers up off the floor and pointed with his index finger to what he had read. On the list of those involved with the Chameleon victims’ postmortems were several lab assistants, trainees and assistant pathologists, and one of them was a Dr. Elizabeth Wallace.
“I should have known,” said Banks. “When Kev Templeton went on about patrolling the Maze for a would-be serial killer, Elizabeth Wallace was the only one who was as adamant as he was that we were dealing with a killer who would strike again. And she tried to convince us that the weapon was a razor, not a scalpel.”
“So? I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you see it? She was there, too. Elizabeth Wallace was keeping an eye on the Maze, and she had easy access to sharp scalpels. Much better to have us believe the weapon was a razor that anyone could have got hold of. They were at cross-purposes, her and Kev. They didn’t talk to each other. Neither knew the other was going to be there. Elizabeth Wallace thought Kev Templeton was going to rape and kill Chelsea Pilton. She couldn’t have recognized him from behind. It was too dark. And there can be only one reason why she was there.”
“Which is?”
“To kill the killer. She’s Kirsten Farrow. The one we’re looking for. She was a trainee on the Chameleon victims’ postmortems. That means she knew at first hand about the wounds. They brought back her own memories. She knows Julia Ford, and Julia must have let slip about Lucy Payne being at Mapston Hall under a false name. It fits, Ken. It all fits.”
“She killed Templeton, too?”
“Almost certainly,” said Banks. “By mistake, of course, the same way she killed Jack Grimley eighteen years ago. But she did kill him. Her MO is different now, but she trained as a doctor since then, so that makes sense. And do you know what?”
Blackstone shook his head.
“Annie’s going to see her today to push about her past and her friendship with Julia Ford. Alone.” Banks took out his mobile and pressed the button for Annie’s number. No signal. “Shit,” he said. “She wouldn’t have turned it off, surely?”
“Why don’t you try the station?”
“I’ll ring Winsome on the way to Eastvale,” said Banks, heading for the door. He knew he could get there in three quarters of an hour, maybe less if he put his foot down. He hoped that would be fast enough.
“Liz, what are you doing?” said Annie, getting up from her stool and edging toward the door.
“Don’t move. Keep still.” Dr. Wallace waved the scalpel in her hand. It glinted under the light. “Sit down again.”
“Don’t do anything foolish,” Annie said, returning to the stool. “We can work this out.”
“You do speak in clichés and platitudes, don’t you? Don’t you realize it’s too late for any of that now?”
“It’s never too late.”
“It was too late eighteen years ago,” said Dr. Wallace.
“So you’re Kirsten,” Annie whispered. Somehow, she had known it, at least in some part of her mind, since she had talked to Dr. Wallace in the Queen’s Arms the previous evening, but that knowledge didn’t do her a lot of good now.
“Yes. Elizabeth is my middle name. Wallace is from an ill-advised marriage that I should never have entered into. A marriage of convenience. An American student. At least I got the name from him, and he got his British citizenship from me. Needless to say, the marriage was never consummated. If you’d have dug deeper, you’d have uncovered it all. It’s a matter of public record. All you really had to do was check the registry of marriages. I didn’t even try very hard to hide it, really. When I went to medical school, I simply enrolled as Elizabeth Wallace. A new life. A new name. It caused one or two problems with my old records, but the university was patient, and we managed to get it all sorted out. I told them I was trying to avoid an abusive husband and would appreciate their discretion. But they would have told you in the end.”
“So you moved on, changed your name, became a doctor.”
“I didn’t know what would become of me. I had no plans. I’d done what I set out to do. A terrible thing, really. A murder. No matter that the victim didn’t deserve to live, was the worst kind of excuse for a human being you could imagine. And it wasn’t my first. I’d also killed an innocent man and harmed a silly boy.”
“I’ve talked to Keith McLaren,” Annie said. “He’s all right. He recovered. But why him?”
Dr. Wallace managed a tiny, tight smile. “I’m glad,” she said. “Why? The Australian recognized me in Staithes, even though I was in disguise. I had to think fast. He’d been with me in the Lucky Fisherman, where I saw Jack Grimley. If they ever questioned him…”
“I’ve been there,” said Annie. “The Lucky Fisherman. Why Grimley, too?”
“A mistake. Pure and simple. When I remembered what my attacker looked like, I found I had an even stronger memory of his voice, his accent, what he said. That was what led me to Whitby. Once I was there, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d find him. Nothing else mattered. Grimley sounded like the man who attacked me. I led him to the beach. That part was easy. Then I hit him on the head with a heavy glass paperweight. That was hard. I had to hit him again. He wouldn’t die. When he did, I dragged his body into a cave and left it for the sea to lick out. The tide was due in. Oh, I can justify it all to myself, of course. I was on a mission, and there were bound to be mistakes. Casualties. It’s the cost of war. But I got there in the end. I got the one I was after. The right one. And when it was over, everything felt different. Do you know Saint Mary’s Church, in Whitby?”