We were quiet all the way to Thomas King’s surgery. It was on one of the roads out of Blackley, on the ground floor of a redbrick Victorian semi, the road choked by traffic all around it as rush hour started to take hold. A collection of brass nameplates on the wall gave it away, and the colourful Family Health posters in the window.
As we made our way to the door, I saw Sam straighten his tie.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked him. I cursed myself silently. Silly question.
He looked at me, his reactions slow, and then he shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said.
I saw Thomas King’s name on one of the brass name-plates before I opened the door into the reception area. It was quiet. The only person in there was an old woman perched on a chair in the corner, with a shopping basket, black PVC on wheels, rested against her knees. She wore a patterned woollen hat and her glasses were thick, which made her eyes look large.
I smiled at her, and her eyes glowed with pleasure as she smiled back.
The receptionist sat behind a high wooden counter, so that she couldn’t been seen, invisible to me until I got right up to her. She looked irritated when I knocked on the counter.
‘I need to see Doctor King,’ I said. ‘I’m a reporter and I would like to ask him some questions.’
Her eyes fluttered nervously and then she gestured towards a seat. ‘Doctor Newby will be out in a couple of minutes.’
‘No, Doctor King,’ I said.
‘Doctor King isn’t here,’ she said, but before I could ask why, she walked quickly into another room. The old woman leaned forwards and said, ‘Doctor King was lovely,’ her smile sweet, painted pink lips hiding the worn yellow of her teeth.
I smiled politely, but Sam turned round and asked, ‘Was?’
The old woman nodded, still smiling. ‘He left. Such a nice man.’ She wiggled her finger playfully. ‘Healing hands, he used to say.’
She chuckled louder this time, her hat bobbing as she shuffled in her seat, but I could tell from Sam’s expression that he and I were both thinking the same thing.
Then a door opened, and a man with a short grey beard and a chisel parting appeared. Doctor Newby, I presumed.
Bruce Newby looked nervous behind his desk. His hands fidgeted as he straightened his tie and brushed his legs. From his purple cheeks and the redness in his eyes, I got the feeling that being a doctor in a small Lancashire town came with more pressures than I expected.
‘Why do you want to speak to Doctor King?’ he asked. He tried to sound confident, but I heard the nervousness.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but our questions are for him. Why did he leave?’ I smiled politely.
Doctor Newby looked to his right, as if some help might miraculously appear on the wall.
‘I don’t think I can assist you,’ he said quietly, his voice trembling.
‘That’s fine, Doctor,’ I said, and stood up to go. ‘Sorry to have bothered you,’ and I smiled and turned towards the door. Sam looked confused, but then he realised what I was doing when I said, ‘It was only Doctor King we wanted, but the police are on their way, and they’ll be more insistent than me. They’ll want to go through your drug stocks. You do keep drugs here, don’t you?’
‘They can’t do that,’ he spluttered.
‘Do you want to test the theory?’
I saw Doctor Newby waver and lick his lips. I went to walk through the door when he blurted out, ‘We caught him stealing drugs.’
When I turned round, I saw that his eyes were filled with regret. ‘He was a good doctor. The old dears around here loved him. Whenever they were near the end, they asked for him. He did more than most doctors. He spent time with them, he listened to them, made them feel better in the last days of their life.’
‘What did he steal?’ I asked.
‘Diamorphine. Pethidine.’
‘Seems like he was hot on painkillers,’ I said.
‘Diamorphine,’ said Sam. ‘That’s heroin.’
Doctor Newby nodded. ‘In its street form, yes. But this was medicinal stuff, used as painkiller.’
‘What was he doing with it?’
The doctor shuffled in his seat and swallowed. He looked like he was trying to find a way of avoiding the question, but he realised that there wasn’t one. ‘He told me that he had become addicted to it,’ he said quietly.
‘So what did you do?’ I asked. ‘Send him to rehab?’
Doctor Newby didn’t answer straightaway. He looked around the room once more, straightened his tie again. We sat there and let the silence grow. After a minute, he said, ‘We had to let him go.’
‘Why?’ I pressed. ‘What else was there?’
His eyelids flickered. ‘Nothing.’
I cocked my head, gave a wry smile. ‘C’mon, Doctor Newby. You don’t let young doctors leave just because they have a drug problem. That can be cured. You are the caring profession, after all.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Would the GMC like to look at his patients’ files?’
The doctor looked down at that, and I thought I could see tears in his eyes. I glanced at Sam, and I saw that he looked worried. There was something more going on than we’d thought.
Sam intervened. ‘I’m a lawyer. Would you like some legal advice? Free of charge?’
‘Do I need it?’
‘Ask me and find out. You’ll be my client, and everything will be confidential.’
‘What about the reporter?’ he asked, and pointed at me,
‘This is off the record,’ I said.
Doctor Newby thought for a moment, and by the
time he nodded his assent, it looked like he had aged ten years.
‘I think he might have been over-prescribing,’ he said quietly. He cleared his throat. ‘Even though some of his patients were old, a lot were in good health. Some of the deaths were a surprise.’
‘And you think he might have over-prescribed painkillers?’ I asked.
Doctor Newby swallowed and straightened his tie again. Then he nodded.
‘Wouldn’t that show up in the post mortem?’ I asked.
‘What post mortem?’ said the doctor, and he laughed ironically. ‘These were old people, with their GP saying that they had died of natural causes. The death certificate was counter-signed by a surgery near the town hall—we have a reciprocal arrangement—and they were cremated mostly.’
‘And you are suspicious?’
His lips tightened, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘We didn’t notice. It was the other surgery that commented, at a Rotary Club dinner, just as a joke. One of the doctors said that they called him Doctor Death behind his back. And there was a solicitor at the dinner. He pulled me to one side, told me that one of his clients had left a large legacy to Doctor King in a will that she had drafted herself, when the solicitor had drafted all the earlier ones. He was doing the probate, but he was worried it was a forgery.’
‘So what did you do?’ I asked.
‘I told him to leave, said that I thought he had been stealing drugs.’ He looked down.
‘Did he deny it?’
Doctor Newby shook his head. ‘He just went. Hardly said a word.’
‘How long ago was this?’
The doctor stroked his beard. ‘Earlier this year. Before the summer.’
Around the time that children started to disappear, I thought. Was this the catalyst, the event that had sent him on a more extreme mission?
‘Do you have his address?’ I asked.
The doctor nodded, and then scribbled an address on his pad, with some directions. ‘I don’t know if he still lives there,’ he said.
We stood up to go, but then something occurred to me. King was abducting children to bring them closer to their parents. If he had killed elderly patients, what would be the reason?
‘The patients who died,’ I asked. ‘What were their family lives like?’
Doctor Newby looked at me, puzzled. Then he thought back to the men and women who had just been appointment cards a few months earlier. ‘They lived in care homes. This isn’t an affluent town, and so if anyone gets a good education, they leave. Once their parents end up in a care home, the children don’t visit any more, because then someone else is there to spare them the long drive from wherever.’
‘So they weren’t people who received many visitors?’
Doctor Newby held out his hands and looked confused. ‘I don’t know, but many of our elderly patients are lonely.’
‘Because their children lived lives that were too busy to fit them into the schedule?’
The doctor nodded. ‘Something like that, I suppose, but not neglected. Just sort of forgotten.’
I glanced at Sam, and I saw that he knew why I had asked the questions. Healing hands. Sometimes you have to lose something to realise how much you needed it. But was it unsatisfying with the elderly, because you can only cause hurt, not heal? All he could do was watch the families squabble about inheritance and blame each other for allowing their parent to die forgotten. Is that why he turned to children, because he could make things better?
We turned to leave, but Doctor Newby stopped us. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, his eyes filled with worry. ‘If I had, I would have stopped it.’
‘He was a doctor, right?’ I said. ‘He helped, not harmed.’
The doctor looked down and nodded.
When we left, the old woman was still sitting there patiently. She smiled as we went.
‘I hope you find Doctor King,’ she said. ‘He is a nice man, a very good doctor.’
I smiled back. ‘We’ll find him.’
Sam was animated as we drove away from the surgery, an address and directions tucked into my pocket.
‘It is classic psychopathic behaviour,’ he said, his voice loud and tense. ‘Medicine and psychopaths. They get drawn to each other all the time, like opposite poles, one made for help, the other for harm.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘I’m a criminal solicitor,’ he said, his tone weary. ‘I’ve had to deal with psychopaths, get reports on them, to help out in trials or sentencing’
‘To try and keep them out of jail,’ I said, before I had a chance to stop myself. I cursed when I saw Sam’s face fall, a sudden acceptance of what he’d always known, that if Thomas King had kidnapped his son, someone just like him would try to make sure that he was free to do it again.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said in apology. ‘I didn’t mean anything.’
Sam raised his hand and looked away. ‘I know what people think. Don’t think I haven’t thought it myself.’
‘Why is it classic psychopathic behaviour?’ I asked, trying to retrieve the situation.
‘It’s the power. Psychopaths are arrogant, probably the most arrogant people alive. They assume that they are better than everyone else, that they have been empowered with some special gift. And what better gift is there than the power to save people, to prolong their lives?’
‘Or to end them?’ I added.
Sam nodded grimly. ‘Being a doctor brings status, admiration, but above all else, it brings power. You heard what Doctor Newby said. He was killing pensioners, with his beautiful bedside manner, maybe even watching them die. He could end their pain, or maybe he just got off on watching old people slip away.’
‘And that’s why he abducts children.’
Sam didn’t answer, so I continued, ‘He likes the return.’ When Sam looked at me, confused, I said, ‘It’s the healing hands thing. All the kids taken were neglected.’ When I saw Sam jolt, I added quickly, ‘Not in any bad way, like abused or anything, but just left to wander the streets late at night, no supervision or care. We are talking about his perception, not what might be true. He takes them, keeps them, looks after them, and all the time the parents are worried, guilty, feeling that they have let their children down. The parents remember how much they love them and so what happens when the child is returned?’
Sam nodded, his mouth set firm. ‘Loved all over again.’
‘As far as the child is concerned,’ I said, ‘it might feel like it’s for the first time. He’s now treasured, loved.’
‘That’s a bold assessment,’ said Sam, swallowing.
‘I interviewed one of the parents,’ I said, ‘and do you know what she said? She told me that it had come as a
blessing, that she only realised how much she had when he had been taken away from her.’
‘Healing hands,’ said Sam slowly, as the truth of what I said dawned on him. ‘So he took the kids so he could keep them, relish the parents’ pain, and then enjoy the pleasure of the return?’
I nodded. ‘Then it went wrong with the last one—Kyle. The child overdosed on sedative.’
‘But why kill Eric, and blame it on him?’
‘His dreams. You remember what Eric told you, that he had dreams and they came true. He’d contacted the police, but they didn’t want to know.’ I shrugged. ‘You can hardly blame them for that, but it made Eric get in touch with the families he had been dreaming about. Maybe it worried Thomas, he was scared that Eric would discover something, would stop his good work, so perhaps he watched him to find out where he went. Once he discovered the group, all he had to do was go along, pretend to be precognitive, and he could pick people off whenever he thought they were getting too close.’
Sam thought about that, and then his mind went back to Jimmy King. ‘The family knew about him,’ he said.
‘How do you know that?’ I asked. I felt a tremor in my stomach. I knew how much it was tearing up Sam, but I also knew how big a story it would be if I could get it into print.
Sam took a deep breath. ‘When Luke told me that he had killed that girl, Jess Goldie, he was brought to see me by his father, and Harry Parsons was there. Maybe they knew the car would have been seen, so Luke confessed
to the killing, and, worse than that, he told me that he had enjoyed it, that he would do it all over again.
‘They all knew what I would do,’ Sam continued. ‘I would do my job, advise him to stay quiet. Harry probably guessed that Luke would become suspect number one.’
‘But then Eric kept interfering,’ I said.
Sam nodded. He paused to examine his nails, looked like he was thinking what to say next. ‘I suppose Eric made it even easier for them, except that he had met Thomas, and Thomas wanted to control the situation. He made it messy.’ Sam looked confused. ‘But why would Harry get involved?’
‘Do you remember that you told me about the murder of Luke King’s fiancée, when Terry McKay lied to the police?’
Sam nodded.
‘Maybe once Harry got involved, he couldn’t get out,’ I continued. ‘Perhaps he didn’t know at first; Luke King would have been a natural suspect, as he was the dead girl’s jilted fiancé. Did Jimmy persuade Harry that he was keeping Luke from being a suspect, when in fact it was much worse than that?’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter how you arrive in the plot, once you’re in, there’s no out.’
‘They go right back to their childhoods,’ said Sam. ‘They grew up in a children’s home together, and they have this special bond from then. Perhaps Harry saw it as a one-off favour, but of course Jimmy King isn’t a one-off sort of person.’
‘And now Jimmy has Harry whenever he needs him?’ I queried.
Sam nodded. ‘But Harry is retiring soon, and so he passed Luke on to me. Harry was making sure that Jimmy still had someone there for him after he’d gone.’ Sam swallowed and then exhaled heavily. ‘I acted in accordance with my client’s instructions. I did my legal duty.’ And when I didn’t respond, he added, ‘And look at where it’s taken me, looking for my lost son.’
I tried to offer some comfort. ‘You didn’t know Luke was covering for his brother.’
Sam covered his face, and I saw his nails dig into his skin. ‘Thomas is in meltdown,’ he said through his hands. ‘He’s losing control, and psychopaths are driven by control.’
I looked at Sam, and I saw that he had his jaw clenched tightly, panic in his eyes.
‘We need to get there quickly,’ he said, his voice barely audible. ‘He’s taken Henry as an act of revenge, not pleasure.’
I gritted my teeth and increased the pressure on the pedal. I knew what Sam meant: that if it was revenge, Thomas would not return Henry. Not unless we got there first.