The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (4 page)

Erica had a sudden memory of asking her for the
clothes, telling her she’d arranged an interview with ‘a hard man to pin down’.
Somebody had managed it now. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 She headed home, where she pounded out and sent a
full report to the paper, giving all the details she could remember, hoping
that Gary Thomas had been kept at bay. She rarely switched her phone off but
she’d kept it off since her police interview; it was acting like it had
Tourette’s as emails, tweets, facebook messages, missed calls and texts flooded
in as the day progressed into evening. Not many people had known she was
interviewing Kingston, but Stacey Reed made up for them with a digital bombardment
like some kind of Stalky McPsycho ex-boyfriend from hell. No way was Erica
going to reply, she was too wrecked. Luckily it wouldn’t occur to Stacey to
actually come to the flat. She would be furious to have missed being at
Kingston’s today. The thing she was most passionate about, even more than sex
or alcohol or food, was the media, being in or on it. She’d had a taste of it
at Stonehead through Erica, which was why, rather than ‘work experience’ to
keep the Job Seekers lot happy, she was sticking close to Erica as her best
chance to get more.

The
Evening Guardian
had printed Erica’s
name (‘our very own fearless health reporter’) in their write-up, so Erica had
to deal with a worried call from her mother using her landline, and a few other
friends who had that number, though she didn’t want to talk about dead bodies
any more. At least until tomorrow.

All communication with the outside world off or
silent, she settled down with a glass of claret and her current Patrick O’Brian
novel, where doctors used leather-covered chains to hold down their fully
conscious patients while sawing off their mutilated limbs. How did a person
stand that much pain? Had Kingston really been unconscious, or just badly
injured enough to be helpless? It was no good, her thoughts would not stay in
the Napoleonic Wars.

Surgeons thinking they were Jesus Christ. She’d
used those words. Now they stuck in her mind. She had certainly met some
arrogant doctors... and many patients came to her after being fobbed off and
patronised by some doctor who thought any ailment not curable by a prescription
must be imaginary. But she knew a lot of good doctors too, and worked in
cooperation with a few. And this one was now a victim. There was something at
the back of her mind, something to do with Jesus Christ. Later in the night,
she had strange dreams.

‘Pulsatilla!’ she said aloud, waking up for the
third time. This time, she had had one of her homeopathic dreams, about
Pulsatilla, the Pasque Flower, which was a common homeopathic remedy. Jesus was
standing in front of her, and he was holding a sprig of the purple flower in
his hand. It grew and blossomed around the nail sticking out of his palm.

At the morning briefing
Wydsand Police Station was humming with excitement sporadically suppressed every
time officers remembered somebody was horribly dead. This being north east
England in a seaside town, he might well be somebody their mams knew. In fact
being spotted at a crucial moment by someone your mam knew had largely been the
reason for the traditional shortage of serious crime in the area.

Soon they’d be getting all the latest information,
and there might be some surprises. Photographs of Kingston before and after his
illegal operation were on display: a headshot of the handsome, confident
doctor, the thick dark brown hair, dark strongly-marked brows, the healthy
colour of the keen world-wide golfer and the white teeth courtesy of an
expensive dentist friend. The ‘after’ pictures, of his bizarrely crowned, pale,
bloodstreaked, uninhabited face made a sobering contrast.

Despite the carefully custom-made coffee handed to
him by Sally Banner, Will Bennett was looking grim too, but Hassan knew this
was not so much about sorrow for the dead as a haunting fear that the case
would be given to someone else further up the food chain. And speaking of
food... Superintendent Russ ‘Golden Boy’ George hove into view like an oil
tanker headed for scrap. Large, bedecked with stains and slow moving, he
descended onto a chair like a local government planning committee on an
unauthorised gazebo.

‘Coffee!’ he barked at Paul Lozinski, who jumped
and dithered, but as no female officer rescued him he scuttled off to get some
with all the courage of despair, as the Super added, ‘Three sugars, milk, not
that skimmed crap though, and any biscuits?’

‘Er no sir.’ Paul rushed over, slopping coffee
over the rim, to the Super who grunted, gave him a look that promised career
blight, and balanced the dripping mug on his belly adding further to the
detritus already there.

Sally and Hassan exchanged looks, then dared to
glance at Will whose face was carefully blank. His contempt for his ‘superior’
was as legendary as the Super’s passion for food and his garden, in that order.
It was Will who had originated the nickname of ‘Golden Boy’, by saying, ‘George
could make masterly inactivity an Olympic event and win gold medals.’ It took
all the will power he could round up not to show his utter disdain for the
Super, to whom he had to kowtow. Erica had had no sympathy, pointing out ‘If
you choose to work in a hierarchy...’

Sally might blame Erica but Will himself blamed
Golden Boy for his lack of promotion. He should be a DCI by now, he’d worked
hard for it, he was bright, efficient, and he had a good team.
He’d brought the Stonehead
case to a conclusion, made arrests, what happened after was not his fault. But
mud had stuck. And so had
George’s liking for keeping his budget
down and getting Will to do a DCI’s work, ably backed up by Massum, who should
have been at least a DI by now but determinedly put family first, as did his
equally efficient teacher wife. They had an agreement to reach a certain level
of promotion and then stop there. For the present anyway, while the children
still needed so much of their time and energy.

After some audible slurping, George asked Will to
lead the briefing. Will darted him a gimlet look under his long black lashes.
Did this mean the case was his?

Will began by giving a summing up of the crime
scene from the day before.

‘Surely some kind of sadist?’ suggested a PC, Kev
Hodges.

‘Was Kingston into some kind of kinky stuff?’ put
in Paul. ‘Anything dodgy on his computers?’

‘Pretty hardcore kinky, those nails, Paul,
whatever
you
like doing on your nights off,’ remarked Hassan to general
laughter and nudging of Paul. ‘And no, nothing of significance as yet reported
by the geek squad, though they’ve got more to do yet of course. So far, no
kiddy porn, no death threats, no organised crime connections, nothing you wouldn’t
expect from a well to do, well-respected surgeon with a successful career. So
far.’

‘Dr Johnstone’s doing the PM later this morning,
and of course some tests will take a while to come back after that. But he was
able to come up with some provisional info from a preliminary examination of
the body.’ Will was all brisk business. ‘Major depressed fracture to the back
of the skull, causing unconsciousness, in fact probably would have been fatal if
left at that.’

‘Not really a lot of blood from that though Guv,’
Hassan put in.

‘No well I’ll come to that. Looks like that stone
was the culprit.’

‘So Erica Bruce was right!’ Paul said, deadpan.
Sally gave him a furious look, and Will’s face, beginning to be animated,
closed again. ‘She said he was unconscious or dying when it was done.’

‘The nails,’ Will tried to carry on regardless,
looking at the initial results of Johnstone’s examination, ‘were driven in with
the stone, almost certainly after the injury at the back, and each of the seven
pierced the skull and entered the brain. Death will have occurred during this
process. There were also the two in the hands which may have been driven in
before the skull spikes. Hassan, you’ve got info about the nails.’

‘Er yes. The seven spikes, or nails, or whatever
you want to call them, are in fact surgical pins. They were used until
relatively recently in external fixators, that is, used for fixing broken bones
instead of plaster. Pins were screwed into the bones and bolted to bars which
held the site still while healing got under way.’

Hassan put up on the screen a picture grabbed from
Google Images of a patient bristling with spikes in left lower leg and arm. ‘Frequently
needed for sports or road traffic injuries like tibia fractures.’ He looked
meaningfully at the football-mad PCs who’d been miming vomiting at the
description. ‘Nowadays orthopaedic surgeons tend to use Ilizarov Frames, with
multiple thin wires instead of groups of two or four large pins, and a system
of concentric rings as a frame. These can be used for leg lengthening as well
as healing fractures.’

‘So how did the killer get hold of these old-fashioned
thingies?’ asked PC Kev Hodges, trying to recover his credibility.

‘No help to us there, I’m afraid. Kingston had
some on his desk, in the murder room, loose in a dish, as well as some of the
newest kind. Perhaps to show patients, perhaps a souvenir. So ironically he was
killed by his own instruments.’

‘Maybe a personal motive there then sir,’ said
Paul.

‘Maybe.’

‘But did the killer know they were there in
advance, or just notice them at the time, Guv?’

‘We don’t know, Sally. But good point to consider.
Any more, Hassan?’

‘Well this is an example of the pins in Kingston’s
skull.’ He held up a slim steel spike, like a six inch nail, with no head to
speak of and a thin tracing of threading lower down where it would be screwed
into living bone. ‘It’s a biggie, so most likely it was used or designed for
tibia fractures. The tibia being roughly speaking the lower leg bone which
forms your shin. Fractures at high speeds or with a shearing action can cause
compound fractures with a lot of displacement, where the bone comes through the
skin...’

‘Oh yes,’ Kev put in, ‘a mate of a mate tripped in
a hole playing footie. You could see the bones sticking out my mate said...’

‘Yes well,’ Hassan kept going, ‘these look like
tibia fracture pins, but whether they have any deep semiotic significance we
don’t know.’

‘Semi what?’ The Super seemed to wake up suddenly.
‘Wossat?’

‘Erm semiotic sir, it means symbolic.’

Golden Boy muttered, ‘Bollix alright,’ and lapsed
back into what may have been deep thought.

‘What about time of death Guv?’ asked Paul, still
trying to mend fences.

‘Pathologist thinks during the night. Maybe he can
narrow it down later.’

‘Break-in?’ wondered Sally. ‘Burglary gone wrong?’

‘Hit man?’ Kev was getting overexcited now.

Will chose to ignore his suggestion. ‘No signs of
one. A break-in that is. No signs yet of any unexplained visitors, but there
are reasons for that which we’ll go into in a while...’

Golden Boy George reared up again with a
throat-clearing growl. ‘Release the kraken,’ whispered Paul to Sally who dug
him in the ribs to shut up.

‘Right lads and lasses,’ GB announced. ‘No sign of
break-in, objects used were at the scene, and I think we can go out on a limb
and deduce,’ he waved a large hand with soil-blackened fingernails at the death
scene photographs, ‘somebody didn’t like him.’

‘Er right sir.’ Will was wary.

‘And,’ GB went on, ‘we have a femme to cherchez.
Viz, the wife, or ex-wife, or separated wife, wossername?’

‘Tessa Kingston sir,’ put in Hassan.

‘Yes her. So Massum, forget for now all that
semolina bollix and let’s go for Occam’s Razor eh?’

‘Razor?’ Paul was confused.

Will was startled, yet again he’d been lulled into
comfortable contempt for the Super’s vestigial stegosaurus brain, yet every now
and then a flash of something, like a gold tooth in a tramp’s mouth, suggested
a glint of quality peeping through the composting manure between his ears.

‘Yes laddie, Occam’s Razor, ie, simplest
explanation is usually the right one. I have every faith in Inspector Bennett,
and I’m sure he’ll get her, erm or whoever’s responsible, in double quick time.
And I’m sure he’ll be sending some of you children off to bring her in asap. Over
to you, Will!’

Further along the coast, Erica
Bruce was doing her usual morning mile swim, swooping up and down the lengths
and playing David Guetta tracks in her head, even occasionally singing a few
lines underwater, to while away the sixty-four lengths of the seafront pool. As
often in water, stroked by infinite wet fingers, and out of it too come to
that, she felt horny, and it was annoyingly natural for her to think of Will Bennett,
as she’d been reminded yesterday that he was fit, in both senses of the word.
There’d been chemistry between them, and quite a bit of biology too, to say
nothing of physics... she pictured his dark head between her pale thighs, as
the delicious ache in her groin under the seam of her costume throbbed in time
with a Guetta choon... shame it hadn’t worked out, the sex was great and that
would have been fine by her but a whole lot of relationship crap had somehow
got in the way. Thought he had the right to input on her profession, her life. He
was so full of himself... she wouldn’t mind being full of him right now... No,
stop it Erica, time to get somebody else to train up. Anyhow, Will was too tall
for her. You can’t get your feet over a guy’s shoulders if he’s a lot taller
than you, flexible as you might be. And she was.

She tried thinking about the murder to get Will’s
rather beautiful cock out of her head (and there was another image!) Who could
have done that to Kingston? Well, of course forensics would be finding out all
sorts of stuff CSI-stylee. A single hair, a single grain of a rare chemical, a
single fag end in an alley, that sort of thing is what you saw on TV. In real
life, there’d be detritus of all kinds tracked in on shoes, blown in on the
wind, dropped from coats which had picked it up on the Metro or rubbing
shoulders with rush-hour crowds, over random periods of time. Murder was almost
as intimate as sex, and sometimes they occurred together.