The Surgeon, page 27
He opens the kitchen door. An eight-year-old boy. The noises woke him. He is scared. But his anxiety overcomes his fear. He knows something bad has happened. He has crept downstairs, on his toes, quiet as a breath. He saw the man leaving from his bedroom window, and wonders what it means. Nothing good, he thinks, and his dread is like a claw, squeezing his heart.
He opens the kitchen door…
Jonathan Stark awakened, to discover he hadn’t died. Or if he had, then the “afterlife” experience seemed awfully similar to a bed in a hospital room, and an angel looked awfully similar to a hospital nurse.
“You’re here, sleepyhead,” she said, smiling, one eye on him, one eye on a chart on a wall. “Welcome back.”
“Where am I?”
“The Queen Elizabeth.”
His head was groggy. He tried to grasp the details, but it took effort. “How long?”
“Two days.”
He tried to think. “Am I dead?”
She laughed, a light breezy sound, which was the most joyful noise he thought he had ever heard.
“I hope not,” she replied. “But if you are, then God help us all.”
He smiled back, and was glad he hadn’t died. He drifted back into the darkness of his dreams. But then he remembered his sister, but was asleep before he could ask the question.
Detective Chief Inspector Harry McGuigan had been sitting on a rather comfortable chair in a corner of the hospital room. He had been there an hour. He had brought a book, to pass the time. But he had read only a page or two. His thoughts were elsewhere, as the recent events rolled and twisted in his mind. Try as he might, rational explanation eluded him. If that were the case, if the situation defied logic, what was left? This was the dilemma. One to which he had no answer. Perhaps there wasn’t one. Perhaps it was another mystery, he thought. Like life itself. Perhaps that was the idea – that certain things had to remain a mystery, to remind us we were human.
Jonathan Stark stirred.
McGuigan got up, stood at the side of the bed. Stark’s eyes opened.
“Welcome back,” said McGuigan softly.
Stark blinked, took several seconds to respond as he adjusted his thoughts. Then he spoke.
“One thing I would like to say.”
“Yes?” said McGuigan.
“The hospital food is not as bad as they say.”
“That’s reassuring.”
Stark looked round. McGuigan handed him a plastic drinking vessel containing juice.
“It’s vodka-free, I’m afraid,” said McGuigan.
“That’s a shame.” Stark sipped from the little mouthpiece, handed it back.
McGuigan pulled up the chair, sat.
“Where do we start?” said Stark. He gave a wintry grin. “Do I need a lawyer, Chief Inspector?”
Dawson grinned back. “Bloody lawyers. The bane of my life. Where do we start? I think, rather, where do we end?”
“I can’t remember much,” said Stark. “Fragments. We were in his house. Jenny… had a gun. He – Gabriel… was at the bedroom door, shots were fired…” the memory left a bitter taste in his mouth, “…then blood. Lots.”
“Not yours,” said McGuigan. “At least not all of it. Nor your sister’s. Jenny Flynn – or Lamont, whichever you prefer – shot her brother. The Surgeon is dead.”
“And Jenny?”
McGuigan shook his head. “She turned the gun on herself.”
Stark said nothing. His colleague at work, the woman who smoked and swore worse than anyone he knew, the woman he had made love to in his stupid broken little flat, was the sister and accomplice to a serial killer. It was too bizarre and heartbreaking to contemplate.
“When you went back to the office to find information on Apollo,” said McGuigan, “it became clear to Jenny her world was unravelling. She telephoned her mother, presumably to warn her. To tell her it was at an end. Their great quest had failed. Winnifred knew I was coming. She was prepared. Never would she wish to go to prison. Nor her children. Such a notion was unimaginable. I suspect a pact was made. She swallowed a bottle of paracetamol. Jenny, rather than phone her brother to warn him you were coming, made the decision to go herself. To fulfil the promise. Kill her brother, kill herself. Mother, son, daughter. An unholy trinity.”
Or was it love? wondered Stark. Did Jenny have any feelings for him? Did she kill her brother to save him? He would never know. Perhaps he was being naïve and vain. After all, he mused, in her own way, she was as guilty for the murders of all those young women as her brother.
“We went to her house,” continued McGuigan. “It’s quite something. She has a room converted into an art studio. Portraits were her thing. But portraits of only one person. Her dead sister. I counted ten. All of them slightly different. All of them unfinished.”
“Mags would have been the eleventh,” said Stark. “She said she painted. She was looking for perfection.”
“Which doesn’t exist, I have decided. Give me imperfection any day. Conclusion – The Surgeon is dead. We have balance and contentment in the world. For a while. And for that, I have to thank Jonathan Stark, and his affinity for dreaming strange dreams.”
“Does it matter? Really? How we came to the end isn’t as important as the end itself. As you said. The Surgeon is dead. The killing stops.”
“The killing stops,” echoed McGuigan. “Until it starts. I won’t ask again. But I will continue going to church, and my wife will continue striving to make me a believer.”
“And will she succeed?”
“She just might.”
McGuigan shook Stark’s hand. “Thank you, Jonathan. And I have a gift.”
He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a packet of Bazooka bubblegum, and placed it on the bedside cabinet.
“Good luck. I dare say we’ll meet again.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Later that morning, Mags came to visit. She saw him, and burst into tears. They embraced, as tight and close as when he untied her from a bed in a cottage in the Eaglesham moors.
“We made it,” she said.
“Yes, we did. I reckon you owe me big style.”
“I reckon I do.”
“Free cappuccino for a year.”
She laughed. “Deal. But you’re still buying the pastries.”
They talked, and didn’t stop talking. But not once about what had happened. That would come later, he knew. When the need was real, and the nightmares came, and the trauma surfaced, and talking it through was the only antidote.
“It’s over,” she said.
But it wasn’t over. He had lied to her from the beginning. He hadn’t written to a million law firms looking for a job. He had only applied to one. To SJPS. And not to train as a lawyer.
To find the truth.
It wasn’t over.
The worst, perhaps, was still to come.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
FULL CIRCLE
The fallout was far reaching, and possibly – probably – fatal for the firm of SJPS. It was now a matter of damage limitation. But the damage ran deep.
The death of The Surgeon had taken place a fortnight ago. The news was a nationwide sensation. It was like something from a true crime drama, perhaps a Netflix production, an unbelievable series of events, gripping the media and all those who watched, read or listened. The story unfolded, slice by juicy slice. First – the audacious attempt at blackmail by Bronson Chapel. Then, his murder at the boat house by the loch. And then The Surgeon, one of the worst serial killers to live and breathe on the British Isles, shot by his sister. And then another incredible layer – a family involved, a mother protecting her son, the son killing for his sister, to resurrect in his weird fashion his other sister, murdered by Archie Willow five years previously. The mother’s suicide. Sister killing brother, then putting a bullet through her head. Sensational and gripping.
Lawyers, then more lawyers. The firm of SJPS in the middle. One of the senior partners, and the other – her daughter – an assistant, complicit in the murders of ten women. Using the firm’s resources to protect their murderous activities.
The ship was sinking. Staff leapt off and swam for the life rafts, but the problem was, there were no life rafts. Having worked for SJPS was the kiss of death. Lawyers resigned, to begin the angst-ridden process of applying for new jobs. Clients chose to move their business elsewhere. The firm had been knifed and gutted. Police had swarmed on them like a cloud of locusts, examining everything and everyone, leaving nothing untouched. Boxes of files, computer hard drives, laptops, all were removed in a slow steady procession.
SJPS was toxic.
Stark had no intention of leaving. Not yet.
He went back to work two weeks after the shooting of Gabriel Lamont. His arm was stiff and still ached under the bandages. He would bear a six-inch scar for the rest of his days. A constant reminder of his tussle with a psychopath, he thought grimly.
Of the two receptionists, one had quit. The one remaining regarded him with fascination. Stark’s face was now well-known. The man who rescued his sister from the clutches of The Surgeon. Stirring stuff. Stark had no desire to seek any limelight. It was his mission to forget and move on.
It was 9am. He made his way through the waiting room. There was no one there. He got himself a latte from the coffee machine. He got to the “sweat wing”, made his way along the corridor. The place was quiet. Some of the offices were vacant. Those he saw gave him a nod, but little was said. The place held a gloom. He was reminded of a dying beast, wheezing out its last breath.
He did not go to his office. There was little point. It was not his intention to do any work. Even if it was, his computer would have been seized, and all his files, along with everyone else’s, rendering the whole thing pointless.
Instead, he stopped at the door to the basement. The dungeon. As ever, it exuded a chill. He took a breath. The thought of once again entering this place brought dread to his heart. More than dread. Terror. He turned the handle, opened the door, switched the lights on, closed the door behind him, and went downstairs.
It remained as before. It seemed the police had taken little interest, if any, in this part of the building. Nothing had been touched. As before, the thick volume of recorded closures on the tabletop, containing lists of all the files sent for recording and ultimate destruction. The shelves upon shelves of boxes stood untouched, caught in time. The dust hadn’t stirred. The whiff of dampness tinged the air. The same stillness and silence, as if it had always been thus, from beginning to end.
“I’m here!” shouted Stark. “Show me what you want.”
Nothing stirred. The ground didn’t shake. No voice rumbled from above. No eerie apparition floated past. Stark, if it weren’t so crazy, would have laughed. But he wasn’t laughing.
“Tell me what you want me to do!”
Silence.
He began his walk to where he had gone the two previous occasions, for no other reason than he had been there before – to the far end, to the chair, to the particular section earmarked for destruction.
The plastic boxes he had filled with old files were gone. Presumably uplifted and away. The two files he had placed to one side – Deborah Ferry and Marie Thomson – were still there.
But now there was a third.
He gazed at it. He considered his actions. He knew he had no choice. He picked it up, sat on the single chair, opened it. The first document he saw was a death certificate.
He read it, each line. Date of birth. Place of birth. Occupation. Occupation of father. Occupation of mother. He was fascinated.
He got to the section Cause of Death. The typed entry was as sinister as it was mysterious.
Missing. Presumed Dead.
He closed the file. There was no need to read further. He had asked, and it seemed he had been shown.
He placed the file back with the other two, and sat, staring at the corridor stretching before him. A corridor, one of maybe a hundred, the walls made of shelves, each wall eight shelves high, and on each shelf, boxes containing maybe fifty files. Thousands of boxes. Thousands of names. Thousands of lives – people who had lived and died, laughed and cried, experienced joy, suffered tragedy, the law firm of SJPS having touched them, in some manner. Each file, a fragment of a person’s existence. Most now forgotten, to lie here, in this little capsule of time.
Not all forgotten, he thought. He stood and made his way back to the foot of the stairs.
A noise! He spun round. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps his imagination. He thought he knew the sound – the flap of wings?
He made his way up the stairs, turned the lights off, and closed the door.
Missing. Presumed Dead.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
The day drifted on. Stark went to his office, to discover his prediction was right. Both his computer and Jenny’s computer were gone, along with all the files, all the paperwork. Hardly surprising. The desktops were empty. The only remaining items of any worth were the law books on the shelves.
The familiar figure of Des appeared at his door. His usual exuberance was gone. Now, a subdued solemnity. The eyes belonged to a man who had given up.
“The man of the moment,” he said, without humour.
“That’s all it is,” replied Stark. “A moment. How you bearing up?”
His question was ignored. “Walter Hill is calling a meeting at twelve noon in the conference room. But we all know what it means. We’re closing. After one hundred and fifty years, the doors are shutting. He’s making the announcement today. Then we’ll all go home.” His voice took a harsh tone. “And then we wonder how the fuck we pay the mortgage, and pay the car lease, and feed the kids! You got an answer, Jonathan?”
Stark had no answer to give. He had never been rich enough to afford a mortgage, or a car lease, or anything, for that matter. He had a brief memory of worrying about the price of a new suit for the job interview. Plus, he didn’t have kids.
“I don’t know…”
Des became indignant. “You brought trouble, Jonathan. You’re bad luck. They don’t bring a black cat on a boat. Well, sir, you’re our fucking black cat!”
He left, slamming the door shut. Stark sat in silence, shocked at those sentiments. Did people blame him? Perhaps. Such was the human condition. Blame was easy, regardless of how irrational.
He got up. He had no intention of listening to Walter Hill’s announcement. He took one last look around, left his office, and then left the building.
That night, he went to bed early. Sleep came surprisingly easy. He woke at 4.30 in the morning, alert, body trembling, bathed in sweat. He showered, changed into jeans, sweat top, trainers. He left his flat. He went downstairs to the ground floor. One of the owners liked to maintain the back common green, and kept a locker in the hall, containing gardening stuff, which was unlocked. Who, after all, would want to steal old picks and shovels? Who indeed, thought Stark, as he bundled the items into the back of his car.
The night was cold. The sky was clear, a black canvas, upon which, scattered, a thousand grains of light. He drove straight to the offices of SJPS.
He still had a key. He had no idea if the locks had been changed. If so, then he would resort to plan B, and break a window. The key turned, the main door opened, as did the inner door. The alarm beeped. He knew the code, switched it off, thankful it hadn’t been altered.
He had his gym bag. It was open, and balanced on it, the pick and the shovel. He entered the basement, a shadow amongst shadow. He switched the lights on. No one would know. No one would see. There were no windows in the basement, for obvious reasons.
He went down the stairs, stopped, got his bearings. But he remembered. The details were clear in his mind. He headed to a far corner. The striplights flickered, the air was heavy, despite the chill. If the point was to frighten, then it was working. He reached the place. Here, one wall was bare, devoid of shelving or boxes. The wall was mottled bluish-black with mould, the colour of an old bruise.
He put the bag down. The floor was old, consisting of planks of wood, brown and springy.
Stark grasped the pick handle. His arm was still sore, but not enough to restrict his movement. He raised it up, brought it down, and began the process of breaking the timbers, to the earth below.
Time passed. How much, Stark couldn’t tell. He was consumed in his work. The floorboards had been laid on a thin wooden sheeting, easy to penetrate. Below was rubble and random pieces of masonry, and then, below that, hard soil, which he broke up with the pick, and removed with the shovel.
He got down about four feet. He stopped, leaned back. He wiped the sweat from his eyes. He reached round, rummaged in his gym bag, got out a bottle of mineral water. He was parched. He glugged down half the contents, resumed his work.
He went down another foot, and then stopped again. Not because he was thirsty. He had found what he was looking for. He put the shovel to one side, bowed his head, and cried soft tears.
He made his way back to the foot of his stairs. He stopped. A figure he recognised stood, hunched and frail, leaning on the table.
“Hello, Jonathan,” said Edward Stoddart. He was wearing his familiar dark suit, clean white shirt, dark tie. Incongruous for this place of dirt and death, thought Stark.
Stark approached.
“I was going to your office,” continued Stoddart. “I saw the light under the door. What are you doing here?”
We’re nearing the end, thought Stark. Not quite. Almost. Full circle.
“We’ve met before,” he said. “Many years ago. Twenty, to be exact. You may not remember. I do, however.”
Stoddart said nothing, his face sunken and drawn in the amber glow of the lights. Like a cadaver, thought Stark.
“You were leaving my back garden. I watched you from my bedroom window. You looked up. I saw your face. I will never forget it.”
