The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2)

VALERIE
LAWS

‘Gripping
from the very first scene’ Ann Cleeves

‘Now, this won’t hurt...’ Someone’s giving doctors
a taste of their own medicine, killing surgeons to mimic the operations they
perform. Erica Bruce and DI Will Bennett lock horns once more in an action-packed,
dark but witty follow-up to THE ROTTING SPOT (also on Kindle).

Praise for THE ROTTING SPOT (A Bruce and Bennett
Mystery):

‘A darkly intriguing debut.’ Val McDermid

‘Valerie Laws is a fresh and talented new voice in
crime-writing. The Rotting Spot takes the established form of the rural
detective novel, but brings it bang up to date. Here we have practitioners of
complementary medicine and a binge-drinking pregnant young Geordie; we consider
the relationship between women and food and the delights of skull collecting.
And all within the framework of a well-structured plot.’ Ann Cleeves.

‘Opens with a bang…and interweaves a suspenseful
story with graphic extracts from the Skull Hunter’s blog. As Erica crosses
paths with DI Will Bennett, he of the blue, blue eyes, and skeletons rattle
loudly in closets, Laws brings her locations vibrantly to life.’ Daneet
Steffens,
Time Out London

For my son Robin and my
daughter Lydia: and for all doctors, nurses and medical students who treat
patients with kindness and consideration. It matters more than you know.

First published as an
ebook in 2013, and in paperback February 2014 by Red Squirrel Crime

(www.redsquirrelpress.com)

Copyright 2013 Valerie
Laws

The moral right of the
author has been asserted

All characters and
events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Andrew
Edwards at www.thirdfloorcreative.co.uk

A man and an operating table.
On it a youth lay on his back, fully conscious, his whole body tense. The man
standing over him felt the familiar surge of power rewarded, of anticipation
which never palled however often he indulged it. He picked up the young
misshapen leg, bulging and deformed where the broken bone had splintered within
it. He grasped it hard with finger and thumb, pinching with the very tips as if
testing an apple for the first signs of give, feeling the damaged tibia as it
already laboured to heal. The youth flinched, squirmed, the conflict of trying
not to in front of the man clear in his face. A gasp burst out of him, smothered
but delightfully audible. The young face was white, greenish, the eyes huge and
dark, and the man could read the pain in them, and it felt so good.

And even better, the boy’s mother was there too.
She had to sit still and keep quiet while the man hurt her son. If only he had
two independent sets of eyes, to watch them both, so as not to miss a single
taste, a single bite of pain from either of them. What a bonus! A two for one
package. The physical pain of damage, injury, anatomy wrenched awry; and the
emotional pain of the mother wincing at her son’s every pang, every stab of
agony, feeling it in her belly, which she couldn’t help clutching behind the
shield of her handbag. She would gladly, poor stupid cow, suffer it all herself
if only her son was spared, but here they both were, equally helpless, in his
power, where their sort belonged.

He picked up one of the delicate, gleaming metal
instruments that lay neatly ranged beside him, and began to work the end of one
of the thin steel spikes that he had previously screwed into the skin, flesh
and damaged bone of the boy’s leg, one of many, each one creating a fresh
wound, each one fixed to metal rings bolted together, so that he could adjust
the tension between them in three planes, twisting, shearing, pulling. The
youth’s face was now grey-green, and his eyelids fluttered as if he was about
to pass out, strange moans burst from his mouth. But he tried to hold them
back. To please the man, to impress him. And the mother sat watching, unable to
help, unable to stop the torment, her eyes like her son’s, wide with pain.
Neither of them resisted, neither complained, they were docile, pathetic,
accepting his authority. This was better than punching and kicking, the cheap
thrills of easy screams and begging. Better by far the small, humiliated sounds
forced out of those who strove not to express their pain out of respect for
him.

The boy’s skin was damp with sweat, he breathed
fast and shallow, the sharp odour of fear and adrenal arousal rose from him.
His mother’s hands were clenched on the thin arms of the plastic chair,
knuckles white as a cadaver’s, as if forcing herself not to spring uselessly to
the boy’s aid. But the man was finished with them for now, their intimate
exchange one of so many locked in his excellent memory for later recall and
enjoyment over a glass of burgundy, but there was one final refinement he
waited for, and it came, total submission implicit.

‘Thank the doctor,’ she prompted her son. As the
nurse indifferently aided him to rise and handed him his crutches, pain and
endorphins still zinging through his veins, he said it. ‘Thank you, Mr
Kingston.’ He limped off back into the crowded Orthopaedic Outpatients, where
so many still waited. Slowly and painfully, the next patient began to stand up
as the nurse announced, ‘The doctor will see you now.’

Erica Bruce rang the
doorbell again. She was expected. Surely he’d not have gone out. She shifted
her feet, jogging up and down on her toes as she looked at the expensively
landscaped and tended front garden, the well-clipped constrained conifers and
the ornamental pond. Too clean for frogs or newts to live in, she noted with
disapproval, but with a few polished-looking koi sluggishly rotating in it. Such
a retro, sixties kind of expensiveness about the house, those tacky bits of
white cladding on the brickwork, those ludicrous white pillars flanking the
door, too heavy and bulbous.

Was Kingston never going to let her in? Perhaps
some kind of alpha male power-play? Keep her standing out here, so she’d know
her place. Perhaps he had forgotten their appointment. Though she’d emailed him
a confirmation just last night, belting and bracing as usual. He must be in
there.

A man, on an operating
table.
His eyes were open, looking at the ceiling with an opaque stare. The
thick thatch of black hair on the back of his head was glued to the examination
table by a puddle of dark thick blood. Right between his eyes on the midline
between them but centred on his brow, where the third eye is said to be, a
shiny metal spike protruded like a big bright new six-inch nail. It was
blunt-topped with no head, strong but slender, slightly aslant from the
vertical. Another such spike stuck out centrally above each strongly-marked
dark eyebrow, roughly orthogonal to the skin they pierced. In the shallow bowl
of each temple was another nail, at about 45 degrees to the horizontal, and
another just above each ear, more or less parallel to the surface of the table.
Seven spikes symmetrically placed like a crown, clean and gleaming, though there
were none at the back. Small dribbles of blood had leaked out of the wounds and
dried to streaks on the pale skin, trickling obedient to gravity until slowed
and stopped by clotting and drying.

His mouth sagged partly open, all muscle tone gone
from his face, leaving it unlined and unconcerned, but the vacant gape spoiled
the otherwise handsome looks he’d had in life. His legs were together to the
knee in their stone-coloured expensively casual chinos, his ankles crossed so
that the left foot lay across the right. His arms were spread as far as the
width of the examination table allowed, his hands palm upwards. In the centre
of each palm was another nail, impaling it to the table. The fingers and thumbs,
with beautifully kept very clean nails, curled inwards towards the metal spikes
as if in a defensive gesture.

On the table to the left of his crossed ankles was
a chunk of stained and weathered stone, about the size of an irregular,
flattened honeydew melon. Small clean chips of newly exposed sandstone showed
through the grubby surface of soil and green algae. Sandstone which had felt
the fire of volcanoes to forge each glass-like grain, then the weathering of
countless ages of ice, rain, sun, then the weight of primeval seas on its
layers, eventually planted in the soil of a garden rockery or hedgerow: longer
than it took for the man beside it to evolve from a single cell, millions of
years just to become a crude hammer. The chippings which had been loosened from
the stone were nowhere to be seen on the floor which was clean apart from a few
drops of blood.

He lay on the table, alone, and indifferent. The
room had been hot with fear and rage, the air embittered by the adrenaline-charged
sweat of extreme emotion, of someone as full of murder as the stone was full of
years, but now it was cool.

There was a smell of blood in the room. It was an
unfamiliar smell, though the room had often known pain.

Still outside, Erica felt
a qualm of unease, and glanced around for a moment, wondering if Stacey Reed had
come along after all. Perhaps she was lurking behind a monkey puzzle tree or
something. But there was no waft of Lambert and Butler smoke drifting on the
wind, and no noise. She wondered for the nth time how she’d got herself
lumbered with a lass she’d first seen unconscious, going into drunken labour in
a filthy back lane behind a night club at chucking-out time. As usual, Erica had
got involved, making sure baby Noosh made her appearance in hospital rather
than onto spilled chips and vomit. Now she ran through her conversation with
Stacey the day before. Had she made it clear enough that this was a solo
assignment?

‘Aye, he was the kind of
lad who’d run his dick under the tap before a blow-job. Proper classy, like.’

The unmistakeable strident tones of Stacey Reed on
her phone had entered the room just before wisps of ciggie smoke, a waft of
Lynx ‘Attract for Her’, her almost out and fully proud breasts, followed by her
muffin top, then the rest of her. Ludicrously high heels swung in one hand, and
her orange spray-tanned legs ended in grubby feet at one end and a tiny tight
black skirt and white top at the other.

‘And they said romance was dead.’ Erica hastily
minimised the current window on her pc, before the ever-curious Stacey clocked
anything confidential. ‘He your last night’s hook-up then? Bit late for the
walk of shame isn’t it, even for you.’

‘Walk? I get fkn taxis, me.’ Stacey noted Erica’s
defensive minimising with amusement. As if she couldn’t hack into her stuff any
time she liked! Honestly, Erica was a bit thick for a clever lass with degrees
and shit. ‘So Aa’ll be comin with yer, tomorra. Yer know, for that interview
with that Kingston, like.’

‘No you won’t, and stop reading my confidential
stuff, and put your cig -’

‘Already oot man, woman. So yer can stop naggin.
Aa’ve gotta smoke havn’a? Keeps me weight doon.’

She dropped into a chair which shuddered at the
assault. ‘Aa should deffo come with. Aa mean, Aa’ve got rights havn’a? Aa’m yer
intern, like.’

‘Stacey, for the gazillionth time, you are not my
intern...’

‘Bollocks. Yer don’t pay iz, do yer? So I’m the
intern.’

‘You’re not any intern, let alone the definite
article. And I can barely afford to pay me.’ Erica began typing up an
appointment report, now that Stacey was safely out of sight of the screen.

‘Too right! Wodda loser! Aa spend more on a night
oot than ye earn in a week! Haway, man, let iz come with.’

‘Let me explain again. I have two jobs. One, I’m a
homeopath. You are NOT my intern. Two, I’m an alternative health journalist,
freelance. You are SOOO NOT my intern. See the diff?’

‘Bet Kingston’s loaded... I’d love to see inside
his hoose, man!’

But mainly because it was going to be what she
considered too early to get up, too late to stay up, Stacey had agreed, kind
of, not to turn up. And so far, she hadn’t. Erica didn’t let herself think
about why Stacey might be so keen to get inside a doctor’s house.

Still on Kingston’s
doorstep, Erica rang yet again, stabbing at the bell, then knocked painfully
with her knuckles on the front door, a white heavily moulded one with a big
brass knob. Trust him to have a bloody great knob right there in your face...
compensating for something? Next to the door there was a sign under the brass
plate carved with his name and all the letters he’d collected in the Scrabble
game of University and training. ‘PATIENTS WITH APPOINTMENTS PLEASE RING AND
ENTER.’ Erica had not considered herself a patient. Patience had never been her
strong point, and was becoming more difficult to attain as she neared thirty. Maybe
she was expected to walk in. Maybe everyone he knew was classified as colleague
or patient, current or potential. Maybe he was waiting to meet her in his
private consulting room, the expression of his power and authority. Typical,
the arrogant tosser. Now, Erica, she told herself firmly, that’s not the way to
get a decent interview. Get a grip. She pulled down her shoulders, shook her
wrists a few times to loosen her tension, unset her mouth from its firm line
and pushed hard. The door opened. She felt foolish. All that ringing for
nothing.