Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller Page 21

  It was simply impossible.

  She turned as Hawley came out of the room to join her, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Say I wanted information on a victim. Address, family history.’

  ‘It’ll all be recorded in the notes by the triage nurse.’ Hawley pointed towards a set of wall-hung files in vertical slots. Each slot labelled with pathway areas: triage, awaiting X-ray, awaiting doctor, awaiting treatment. ‘These days the notes are slimmed down as this is A and E. Basic information. Name, date of birth, address, allergies, history of the illness or trauma. It’s a pro-forma document. When I was here nine years ago it was more a free-text system. Everything written by hand. Which is also what you’re much more likely to find in the other hospital areas. Files that are an inch thick stuffed with illegible handwriting, social worker’s reports, blood results. That sort of thing.’

  ‘So, anyone who wanted information would have to have access to these files, or files like them?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Anna stood and watched the flow of paper that followed, or sometimes arrived before, the patients. All returning to the central hub. ‘Do they sometimes get lost?’

  ‘Here, no. These notes never leave the unit. If someone is transferred out, they send copies. It’s common to lose them for a few minutes, easy to put down and forget where they are, but they’re never lost because they’re kept here. Very different from other hospital areas. There, they’d be stored centrally and sent to the appropriate clinic.’

  ‘But they never leave the premises, am I right?’

  ‘Yes, I would say that.’

  ‘If your theory is correct, then it must be someone inside the unit or hospital or clinic who has access to the information. To the files. They couldn’t be stealing these notes.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And what sort of person would have access to all areas?’

  ‘Doctors, of course. And nurses. But as I said, it’s impossible to envisage any one member of medical personnel working in all these different hospitals and areas.’

  Anna nodded. Another blank wall. They’d cross-referenced all the hospitals on Hawley’s list for common personnel and come up with nothing.

  Patterns. That was what she was searching for. Some tiny thread that might link things together. There came a point when disparate, unconnected bits of information either remained dried-up fragments swept into a corner or became significant pieces of a mosaic. At that point, what appeared to be coincidences became vital intelligence loaded with damning evidence.

  As she looked out into the A and E department in front of her, for now all Anna saw were scraps floating on the wind. She wanted to reach out and grab one, pull it to her, digest it. But they were too high up and way out of reach.

  Thirty-Five

  That same Friday morning, Kevin Starkey drove around to the south, taking Brunel Way to meet the A370, out towards the Somerset Levels.

  At first there was traffic heading out towards the airport, but he soon lost that after Backwell. He drove through Congresbury, the Mendip Hills to the south, the M5 creating an artificial barrier to the west. But he didn’t need to go that far. This was the old Easton Road, a busy A road. Some enterprising people had set up off-site parking for the airport along this stretch. But it was too far out to be busy. Old farms had turned into breakers’ yards and places where people who believed a wet weekend on a bleak coastline was better than a wet weekend at home could buy caravans. But there were still some residential properties.

  Pux Cottage on Wird Lane was one such.

  He pulled onto the verge. It was dangerous; double white lines along this stretch meant he was blocking traffic. But the lane gate was tied with rope. Quickly, he got out, untied the rope and swung the gates inwards. He got back in and drove along the pitted stone road into a narrow parking space in front of a dilapidated stone bungalow.

  He’d begun the project when Brenda was still living with him. Transforming Dunroamin, she’d called it.

  Dunroamin.

  Of course, it wasn’t really called that, but she’d hated its proper name, Pux Cottage. So, she’d christened it Dunroamin in another attempt at jocularity. A failed attempt.

  He’d lived with his parents in this house for nigh on twenty years. His father had died there, the cigarettes and alcohol firmly strangling his coronaries into occlusion. His widowed mother had languished there on the edge of dementia for years afterwards until she went into a home and never came out.

  Pux Cottage had been in the family for over 150 years. Starkey didn’t think it had been decorated since the day it was built. He’d hated the place. Hated the fact that it was miles from anywhere, hated the way the school bus dropped him right outside and the sneering looks and jibes he’d endured whenever it did. The place looked like it should have been bulldozed when Britain was still at war with Hitler.

  Starkey hadn’t had the money to start with and there’d been no enthusiasm on his part. Only duty, and the germ of an idea that had grown like Japanese knotweed in his heart. He’d made himself do some work – the plan was to renovate as and when money came in. He’d done exactly that for three months last summer until mid-October when the poor light made it hardly worth his while. The long-term goal was to make it something to post on Airbnb. Something to generate a little income.

  And this summer he’d been back to do some maintenance. Essential stuff. Preparatory work.

  His father’s job as a driver for a produce manufacturer took him all over the south-west in a liveried lorry, and his mother worked for a local farmer preparing meals and cleaning. They hadn’t had a telephone until he was seventeen.

  When his father finally bought a van to use to sell some produce of his own, they would often wait ten minutes before a gap appeared in traffic allowing them to leave the property. Starkey learned to cycle early, but he chose back ways, around the fields, across to Yatton or Congresbury for a bus to get into the city. And, more importantly, the other direction, to where he’d first seen the Turner girls playing in their garden.

  The day that changed his life.

  The memory, the humiliation, it all came flooding back as he looked around at the familiar lane and the fields beyond. His mind slid back to a warm summer’s evening when the twins brother, Mathew, emerged out of the woods behind him, sixteen years old and bigger than him by a long way. The place the Turner family rented was large, with a big garden bordered by the trees where Starkey hid and watched the girls. He was only a year older than they were and what he longed for then was nothing more than innocent companionship. Someone to play with.

  But Mathew Turner had seen him, caught him.

  ‘Sit on the floor, oik,’ Mathew had said, spitting with hate, tying Kevin’s hands behind his back and binding his feet.

  ‘What are you doing here, you little perve?’ he’d demanded.

  ‘Nothing. I-I live—’

  ‘Hear that, girls? He lives.’

  ‘I lu-live near the road. Pux Cottage.’

  Kevin heard giggles. The girls, he realised, must have walked down behind him. When he tried to turn, Mathew slapped his face, hard.

  ‘Keep your eyes front, peeper. You’re trespassing, do you know that?’

  ‘There’s a path in the woods—’

  ‘Shut up.’ Mathew poked him with a stick. ‘This is our house for the summer and we say it’s trespass, got it?’

  The stick was hard against Kevin’s chest. It hurt.

  ‘What’s your name, oik?

  ‘Ku-Kevin.’

  Mathew laughed, circling. ‘You look like a Ku-Kevin. Hey Kevin, I don’t want you wandering around our property ogling my sisters. That’s bad. I think I need to teach you a lesson, right girls?’

  He hoped they’d say no. But they didn’t. They both answered in unison. Spiteful and loud. ‘Yes, teach him a lesson.’

  ‘Let’s do what we do to little perverts at school. Bag and snag. What do you
say?’

  ‘Bag and snag,’ the girls again, not so confident this time.

  ‘What’s—’ Kevin began, but never finished as Mathew’s foot thumped into his back and sent him sprawling face first into the grass. The larger boy straddled him, yanking his waistband, pulling down his trousers and pants to below his knees, revealing his bare bottom. They were all laughing, the girls loud and unsure. Laughing at him half-naked in the grass while his face burned with shame. Across the fields, through his tears, he could see the church and the cemetery surrounding it. The dead would be his only witnesses to this assault. And his God, the one his mother made him worship, stayed dumb and blind to his predicament, heedless of his silent prayers for help.

  ‘Shall I turn him over, girls?’

  ‘No,’ they squealed.

  ‘Oh, but we have to. We need to snag a look at his jewels, don’t we, oik?’

  Kevin, face to the ground, hands tied behind his back, unable to resist as Mathew rolled him over. Kevin tried to bend his body, but Mathew had one knee on his chest and one on his thighs, exposing the younger boy to the world. He looked up through tear-stained eyes at the girls, who were looking down, laughing at him.

  ‘Right, go on you two, go back up, I’ll get rid of Kevin here. And say nothing to Mum, yeah? Don’t need to make her worry.’

  The girls ran away, squealing with laughter. Kevin wanted the world to open up and swallow him.

  ‘Now, it’s just you and me, Kev,’ said Mathew. ‘Let’s turn you back over on to your front, shall we?’

  Kevin cooperated. Glad of covering himself. But Mathew didn’t get up. He sat on Kevin’s thighs, one hand on his back. At first, Kevin didn’t know what the metallic jangling noise was. But then he realised it was a belt being unbuckled. At first, he thought he was going to be beaten. Twice in his life his father removed his belt for the exact same purpose. But that wasn’t why Mathew Turner now loosened his trousers.

  Up until the older boy put his knee between his thighs to open them, Kevin had no idea what was happening. But a minute later, he knew. The pain was excruciating. Mathew’s breath on his neck, his teeth in his shoulder. He felt it all again now as if it had happened yesterday. The weight of the larger boy, the acceleration. When it was over, Mathew got up, undid the rope and walked away with one last sentence.

  ‘Tell anyone and I’ll tell them you took your trousers off in front of two little girls. They’ll send you away to pervert school. Don’t let me see you around here again, Kevin. You know what will happen if I do.’

  * * *

  A car horn from the road not forty yards away brought Starkey back to the present, nausea from the sickening memory making him breathe through his mouth to control it. He wiped sweat from his face and tried to slow his breathing, staring at the rutted lane, remembering the way rain would fill the deep gouges in the earth for months from October through to May. The pungent smell of sprayed manure from the farms. Remembering the years he’d spent jumping over these puddles and never quite managing to keep his shoes clean so that he’d had to clean and polish them night after long winter’s night. How many of those nights had he spent dreaming of getting away, of becoming someone other than the humiliated little boy? He’d lost count, and yet, each one had seemed an eternity.

  He’d moved out of Pux Cottage at eighteen and never moved back. Despite the proximity of traffic just yards from the front door, he’d been incredibly isolated in this place, and the incident with the Turners had made him frightened of being out in the fields alone. He’d watched the cars and buses and lorries from his bedroom longingly, wondering about them, wondered why no one ever stopped. If anyone ever bought the place, it would be to knock it down and perhaps fashion a better entrance, a safer way in and out. But Dunroamin was invisible to the hundreds and thousands of drivers and passengers who drove past and barely caught a glimpse of the grey, drab building behind the overgrown hedge.

  Years later, when he became a special constable stationed in Clevedon, he’d seen the terrible things people did to each other for the most banal of reasons, and for the most venal. But he’d been interested in the work. Preoccupied, some might say. He’d studied it. Watched the TV documentaries, read the books. Knew more about the psychology of the idiots who stole and hurt and abused other people than most of his colleagues. He knew, too, how most of the time there was no planning in any crime. Miscreants bumbled into it and the police simply stumbled around as well, depending upon the fact that the average criminal was a fool and would make mistakes they would pick up on.

  Starkey got out of the car and walked towards the building where his life had begun. Across the patch of rutted ground in front with the fields and hedgerows beyond that had shaped him into the adult that he was. Someone brighter than he appeared. Someone who knew about police work and what the review team in the Rosie Dawson case must be going through, searching for a trail that had long since died.

  He hadn’t lied to them. He had seen the vehicle that Rosie’s abductor had used on the day. Despite that, despite searches and enquiries, they hadn’t been able to find it.

  But now, on this summer’s day nine years later, Special Constable Starkey knew exactly where it was.

  Thirty-Six

  Anna waited outside the entrance for Hawley while he said his goodbyes, trying to beat down her disappointment over not finding anything concrete in the visit. Yes, she was wiser as to the practicalities of how information was gathered and stored and the need for patient confidentiality. And of how fragile that was in such an immense organisation as the NHS. But nothing she’d seen there brought her any closer to knowing what happened to Rosie. Nor had it bought her any respite from the sleep-depriving anxiety of knowing that if she was right, then Blair Smeaton might well, at that very moment, be suffering the same fate as Rosie had suffered. Was Blair going to end up a pile of bones in a plastic bag?

  Anna squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt at banishing her thoughts but all that did was send them off in another direction.

  As a schoolgirl, she’d watched an enthusiastic science teacher set up an experiment to simulate a cockroach’s severed leg with DIY batteries made of a slice of potato between aluminium and copper sheets. The cockroach, the teacher assured the class, would grow a new leg within four months. Sure enough, the tiny voltage produced by the potato batteries caused the cockroach’s severed leg to jerk. She remembered how it had polarised her classmates. Some, the usual assembly-fainting crowd, were more concerned for the welfare of the cockroach. Others, full of blasé bravado, wondered out loud if the same thing might work with a rat’s leg, or even a human’s. Only a handful saw beyond to the incredible eighteenth-century leap in neuroscience the demonstration illustrated.

  She’d come here with Hawley to see if there was any electricity left that might jerk the cockroach’s leg. She’d hoped there’d be a spark or a bolt that might have brought Rosie’s case to life. Pointed her in the direction of what had happened to Jade and Katelyn. Some inkling as to who might still have Blair Smeaton. But there’d been nothing; it remained dead and inanimate. Still cold.

  She checked her phone. Nothing from Holder or Khosa other than to confirm Woakes was at work and wading through the paperwork Trisha had furnished. Holder didn’t comment on whether or not Woakes was happy about that and Anna surprised herself by not caring. She didn’t consider herself vindictive but knew Woakes would be seething. Try as she might, she could find no empathy for him. She had no idea what he wanted and what he was trying to achieve. What she did know was that he had no place on her team. Besides, she was too caught up in her own thoughts and they were sucking all the energy out of her.

  Hawley emerged after ten minutes and they walked back to the car together and got in. ‘So?’ he asked, cutting to the chase. ‘Any use?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Something in her tone made him frown. ‘At least you now know I was telling the truth, right?’

  She didn’t answer him directly. She pulled out
into traffic and pointed the car back towards the south, weaving through the town towards the motorway. After a while, she asked, ‘How about you? Did you find it useful?’

  ‘Cathartic, you mean?’ He nodded. ‘Yes. Surprisingly, yes. Much more than I expected it to be. Seeing Coleen helped.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘But it’s not why we came here, is it?’

  ‘No. Sometimes it’s best to see.’

  ‘Me, you mean?’

  Anna shook her head and accelerated through some traffic lights they’d been stalled at. ‘We, or at least I, look for unusual things in these cases. Something small that goes unnoticed.’

  Hawley sighed. ‘Perhaps I’ve been fooling myself. Perhaps there isn’t a link. Is it possible that what happened to Rosie could have been, I don’t know, spontaneous? Someone spotting her in the park in Clevedon and acting there and then?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t spontaneous. It was too well organised. He’d seen her and targeted her.’

  ‘How do you begin to try and find someone like that?’

  ‘You begin with the small things. Like her visit to you. Her contact with you made you a suspect. A sad reflection on today’s society maybe, but still a suspect. And it made you think all this through.’

  ‘But has it been useful, my thinking it through?’

  Anna shrugged.

  Hawley blew out air and shook his head. ‘What a mess, eh? And all because we’d used a different room.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that if we’d had our usual examination room available when Rosie walked through the door, none of this would have happened. The eye room had a different kind of desk. U-shaped. It meant the slit lamp was fixed in position. Rosie would not have been able to physically climb up on me. Sod’s Law the service engineer chose that day to come.’

  Anna threw him a glance and saw him react to whatever expression was in her own face. He looked quizzical, alarmed and genuinely ignorant. He hadn’t realised the significance of what he’d said. Hadn’t felt the earth shift on its axis.