Chapter 20
The next day started promisingly enough. I’d slept well, with no further call-outs from Mears to disturb my night. I’d gone to bed in a better frame of mind anyway, after receiving an unexpected call from Rachel. The research boat had made an unscheduled stop at an island due to bad weather. The mobile coverage was non-existent so she was calling from a public landline.
My mood had instantly brightened at hearing her voice. There was a hollowness to the line and a slight delay.
‘How is it over there?’ I asked.
‘Well, yesterday we were tagging a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins and spent the night anchored off an uninhabited island. Then this afternoon there was a terrific thunderstorm, so we’ve been in a taverna most of the evening.’
‘Sounds awful.’
‘It’s a nightmare. How about you?’
‘Oh, the usual.’
‘The usual,’ she echoed. ‘There’s no internet out here, but Dimitri picked up a two-day old Times this afternoon. I read they’d found more bodies in that old hospital. That’s the case you’re working on, isn’t it?’
‘We’re coming to the end of it.’ I didn’t want to talk about St Jude’s. Dimitri? ‘Do you know how much longer you’ll be out for?’
‘Another three weeks at least before we’re due back at the mainland. But we’ll be making stops at a couple of bigger islands, so I won’t be out of touch all the time. Honestly, we have to come out here sometime. I can’t tell you how blue the sea is…’
She tried, all the same. I was content to listen, enjoying hearing her. All too soon I heard someone calling her in the background. ‘Yeah, coming,’ she said to whoever it was. ‘Got to go. I’ll call you in a day or two. Just be careful, OK?’
‘You’re the one in the middle of the Aegean. I’m stuck in London.’
‘I know, but… Let someone else take the risks this time, OK?’
I knew she was thinking back to what had happened earlier that year, when her sister had been murdered and Rachel and her surviving family had almost lost their lives. That sort of trauma didn’t just disappear, regardless of how blue the sea was.
‘I’m surrounded by police. The only risk is catching cold from standing around all day,’ I told her.
There was a pause. I could almost see the pensive ‘v’ between her eyes. ‘OK, but—’
The same voice as before called something in the background. I couldn’t make out what, but it was male, deep and richly accented.
‘If that’s Dimitri, tell him to wait,’ I said.
Rachel laughed, the mood of a moment ago apparently lifted. ‘No, that’s Alain.’
‘There’s an Alain and a Dimitri?’
‘What can I say? It’s a multinational crew,’ she said, still laughing. ‘And some of them are waiting to use the phone, so I really have to go. I’ll speak to you soon.’
Buoyed up by talking to her, I’d celebrated with a glass of bourbon to make up for the one I’d missed the night before. Warmed by the phone call and the drink, I could have believed that what I’d told Rachel was true, that the St Jude investigation was coming to an end. The fingertip search hadn’t uncovered evidence of any more victims, and there wasn’t much more of the basement left to check. While the warren of narrow passages and ducting would take the cadaver dog longer to work through, another couple of days should see us finished as well. When I went to bed that night, I was already letting myself think that there was nothing else to find, that the old hospital had relinquished the last of its secrets.
As though encouraging that view, the sun was back out next morning. It had the thin, hard-edged quality of autumn rather than the summer heat of little more than a week before, but it was a welcome change after the recent grey clouds and rain. I actually felt optimistic as I drove to St Jude’s. Pulling up at the cordon by the gates, I saw that the bus stop across the road was empty. It seemed a sign that things were going to run more smoothly from now on, and as I parked outside the hospital even the sight of the bleak walls and boarded-up windows failed to dim my mood.
It didn’t last.
Whelan was waiting as I pulled up. ‘Don’t bother getting changed. The SIO wants to see you.’
What have I done now? ‘Why, has something happened?’
‘I’ll let her tell you herself.’
He still hadn’t forgiven me for catching him out with the mannequin’s arm. The hospital cast long shadows across the tarmac as I went to the same trailer where I’d had the conversation with Ward the previous day. A briefing had just finished. Officers were filing out, along with people in casual clothes who clearly weren’t police. I stopped outside and waited for Ward to emerge. She did, business-like in her flapping mackintosh and shoulder-strapped briefcase. Seeing me, she motioned for me to walk with her.
‘Glad you made it in time. You can ride with me.’
‘Ride where?’ Now I really was confused.
She didn’t slow, keeping up a brisk pace towards the parked police vehicles. ‘Didn’t Jack tell you? We’re going to arrest Gary Lennox.’
Ward gave me the details in the car. After our conversation, she’d had her team dig into Lola’s son’s background.
‘You were right about Lennox,’ she told me, as we pulled away from the kerb. ‘He worked as a porter at St Jude’s from when he was eighteen. He was sacked the year before it closed, but he’d know the hospital layout like the back of his hand. Before that he took a City and Guilds in Construction. He struggled with the classroom side of things so he didn’t finish, but he scored high marks on the practical aspects. He’d certainly have the skills to build and plaster a breezeblock wall.’
I remembered Lola proudly telling me how her son could turn his hand to anything. Perhaps more than she knew. ‘Why was he sacked?’
‘The details are pretty sketchy, but it was some sort of trouble over drugs disappearing from the hospital pharmacy. Painkillers, tranquillizers, steroids, all the sort of stuff there’s a ready market for. No criminal complaint was made, but it caused enough of a stink for him to be fired. Which ties in with the theory that the murders might be drug-related. Maybe he had some sort of scam going selling pilfered drugs from St Jude’s and set up shop in his old stomping ground when the hospital closed. It’s only circumstantial at his stage, but however you look at it Lennox is starting to tick a lot of boxes.’
He did, but I still felt uncomfortable about this. ‘How are you going to question him if he can’t talk?’
‘We’ll have to get him medically assessed and take it from there. If we find enough evidence to charge him, we can see if his fingerprints match the ones from the paint tins and mortar. If they do, then it won’t matter whether he can talk or not. We can tie him to two of the murders, and his building background potentially connects him to the tarpaulin Christine Gorski’s body was wrapped in. If his DNA matches the hair we found on that, we’ve got him for her murder as well.’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘What’s wrong? You don’t seem very happy about it.’
I didn’t know how I felt. Even though I’d been the one to bring Gary Lennox to Ward’s attention, I hadn’t really believed there was anything to it. While I wanted whoever was responsible for the atrocities at the abandoned hospital to be caught, I was uncomfortable with the idea of bringing yet more trouble into the lives of Lola and her son.
‘I wasn’t expecting things to happen so fast,’ I admitted.
‘Neither was I, but I’ll take it. And I’ve not told you the best part yet.’ Ward tried not to show it, but I could hear her excitement. ‘We got a positive ID on the fingerprints Mears took from the male victim. His name’s Darren Crossly. Thirty-six years old, had a conviction for possession of cannabis when he was eighteen, otherwise a clean record. But he used to be a porter at St Jude’s as well, right until it shut. He’d have known Gary Lennox.’