The Patient Killer (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 4) (24 page)

She followed Ebstein for about ten minutes. At one point he seemed to slow down as if sensing that he was being followed. She ducked into a convenience store to avoid being seen.

‘Can I help you?’ the store owner asked.

‘I’m a police officer. I just need to stand here for a moment,’ Rafferty said.

‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen, love. You can buy something or get the hell out.’

Rafferty looked around the counter before grabbing a pack of Wrigley’s Extra Fresh.

‘65p, please.’

‘That’s extortionate.’ But she pulled out her purse nonetheless. She had no change, and proffered up a debit card.

The shopkeeper pointed to a shoddily-printed sign by the till:
Credit Cards £5 minimum spend.

‘Fine. And a pack of Benson & Hedges, then. Quick.’

By the time the shopkeeper had rung her up (adding another five pence for a plastic bag in the process), Ebstein was out of sight.

‘Damn.’

***

A
ll was not lost. A quick call to Morton to stammer an apology turned out to be a great decision. Not only did he seem to respect her honesty in calling, but he pointed out that one of Ebstein’s colleagues lived a few hundred feet away, and Ebstein might well be visiting Doctor Carruthers.

The building opposite the Carruthers home belonged to the NHS. From the front windows there was a clear view across the street, giving Rafferty the perfect vantage point to watch out for Ebstein.

The only problem was that the centre was a community access point for the elderly and the mentally impaired. Rafferty let the reception staff know why she was loitering on their premises (and showed them her identification when they thought she was a customer), and then she was free to sit and wait for Ebstein to emerge.

Still, the real customers kept coming up to her – whether out of loneliness or the simple need to connect, she didn’t know – and it was only by chance that she was glancing out of the window at the moment that Ebstein left.

Morton had been right. Doctor Ebstein had gone to visit the anaesthetist. It could be an innocent visit; there was nothing wrong with visiting a sick friend, after all, and the two men must surely be friends if one had donated a kidney to the other, but somehow Rafferty’s gut said there was more to it than that. Ebstein had emerged guilty and red-eyed, as if he had been crying.

He slunk off into the darkness with Rafferty still in tow.

M
onday April 27th 09:00

‘I swear we spend our lives in this room,’ Ayala said. ‘Can we make it a bit more fun, take a bit of inspiration from the Kennard twins? Maybe we could buy a pool table? If we took the conference room table out, then we could just pull the chairs up around the pool table instead.’

‘This is the Metropolitan Police, not a bloody start-up,’ Morton said. He could see Ayala was about to say something cheeky, and quickly added, ‘But thank you for being here on time this week.’ Then he asked, ‘How did it go this weekend?’

‘We split up the job. I tailed him on Saturday,’ Rafferty said.

‘And I tailed him on Sunday,’ Ayala added.

‘What did you find out?’ Morton asked.

‘He didn’t go anywhere unexpected. He left his house on Saturday, visited Carruthers, and then did an eight-hour shift at The Royal London,’ Rafferty said.

‘And on Sunday?’

‘On Sunday,’ Ayala said with hint of amusement, ‘he visited an address in Soho. He went there on foot, knocked on the door of a flat in Greek Street, and disappeared for about ten minutes.’

Rafferty sniggered. ‘Not much staying power, then.’

‘Am I missing something?’ Morton said. He looked from Rafferty to Ayala, who broke down into hysterics.

‘Boss,’ he wheezed as he fought to control his laughter, ‘it’s
Soho
.’

‘Soho. So what?’

‘Greek Street is... famous...’ Ayala said.

‘Infamous,’ Rafferty corrected him. ‘For male prostitutes.’

‘Ah.’ Morton let that information sink in, and then wondered why Rafferty would have known where to find gigolos. ‘Ten minutes? Not bad at his age.’

‘There’s more,’ Ayala said.

‘Do I need to know this?’

‘Eww. Boss. Nothing like that. He’s a southpaw. He knocked on the door at the flat with his left hand.’

‘And our killer is right-handed,’ Morton said. ‘But we already knew that it was unlikely he murdered anyone personally. Nice to have it confirmed.’

‘So, what is he guilty of?’

‘Smuggling and using human body parts, conspiracy to commit murder, perverting the course of justice.’

‘Which we can prove exactly none of,’ Rafferty said. ‘Ebstein matches the description we got from that old bird...’

‘Ethel Tewson,’ Morton supplied.

‘Good memory, boss.’

‘Are you also forgetting that she was off her bloody rocker? She thought it was the 1960s.’

‘I know that. The rest of the time she seemed eerily lucid. She was absolutely certain about seeing a man, six feet tall, white, grey hair.’

‘That could be anyone,’ Morton said, though he didn’t add ‘including me’.

‘His shoe size fits,’ Ayala said. ‘Size ten.’

‘An averagely tall, middle-aged white guy with average feet. Brilliant.’

‘Then, what do you want to do, boss?’

‘We need to find the person who carried out the kills. If we find them, we get Ebstein. He might be the mastermind, but he’s not doing the dirty work,’ Morton said.

‘So, who is it?’

‘Someone with medical training fits. The cuts to each victim took medical knowledge.’

‘But they weren’t exactly neat, boss.’

‘Well, let’s start from the beginning. We think the killer is medically trained. How many doctors are there in England?’ Morton said.

Rafferty brought up her laptop and began to search online. ‘Two hundred and seventy-three thousand.’

‘And how many of them are men?’

Rafferty clicked again. ‘A hundred and fifty thousand.’

‘How many of them are over fifty?’

‘They don’t list the exact number. The List of Registered Medical Practitioners only shows age by percentage, and not by both sex and age.’

‘So, ballpark it for me. What percentage are that age?’

‘Seventeen percent, give or take. Not all records have an age listed,’ Rafferty said.

‘So, about twenty-five thousand left, then. How many are white?’ Morton again relied on Mrs Tewson’s recollection.

‘39.5%.’

‘Down to ten thousand. What other data do we have?’

‘They list the medical specialty of each doctor on here.’

‘Then we’ll use that. We think the killer used sodium thiopental, and he had the ability to cut reasonably neatly,’ Morton said.

‘Was it that neat? I mean, it’s not lay-person messy, but I wouldn’t want a surgeon who messed up operating on me.’

‘Then we’ll exclude surgeons. We don’t think it was Ebstein, anyway, so which other groups are most likely?’

‘Emergency medicine, anaesthetics, and potentially anyone who lists themselves as a generalist. That’s about a quarter of the list, taking us down to two thousand five hundred.’

Morton cursed. ‘That’s still too bloody many.’

‘And it relies on an old dingbat knowing what’s going on, and assumes we’re talking about a doctor rather than a nurse or med student,’ Ayala said.

‘Well, aren’t you a cheerful pair?’ Rafferty teased. ‘We know someone who fits those criteria. Doctor Carruthers.’

‘No chance,’ Ayala said. He turned to Morton. ‘You said he looked like he was on his death bed.’

‘He does fit,’ Morton conceded. ‘He was in the operating room with Primrose Kennard. He would be able to cut someone open–’

‘But he’d be much neater than that, wouldn’t he?’

Morton stroked his chin. ‘Maybe. It’s got to be hard to knock someone out. You’d have to be able to eyeball their height and weight accurately, and then dose them accordingly. Kennard and Hogge were expertly knocked out with sodium thiopental.’

‘Is he right-handed?’ Rafferty asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Morton said. We’ll have to find out. Any other ideas on how we narrow in on our killer?’

‘I liked the data-driven approach,’ Rafferty said. ‘So, what about asking how our killer got to the crime scenes? We used ANPR to track Mayberry’s kidnappers. What about looking for a car that was in the area of all four crime scenes on the occasion of each murder?’

‘The records won’t go back far enough for Amoy Yacobi.’

‘The other three, then. They’re all recent enough.’

‘Try it. Go and look. Ayala, you do the same with Oyster cards. Look for anyone who touched out at the stations nearest to each of the crime scenes. If that turns up no travellers, then look at the second nearest.’

‘Got it, boss.’

***

T
hey reconvened after lunch, having spent hours tapping away online. The searches had turned up nothing. No one car had gone past ANPR cameras at all three crime scenes.

‘He could have avoided the cameras. We know this is a smart killer,’ Rafferty said.

‘Or he walked. Or parked up and then took a taxi. Did you look up whether Carruthers or Ebstein own a car?’ Morton asked.

‘Neither do.’

‘That figures.’ There wasn’t much point having a car if you lived and worked in central London.

‘He had to travel around London somehow,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Our killer has travelled all over London. If he didn’t drive or take the tube, then what about buses or taxis?’

‘How are you going to trace that?’

‘Bank records? He might have paid by card.’

‘That would be pretty daft,’ Morton said. ‘We can try. But we’ll hit the same warrant brick wall that we hit with the NHS Records. I think our best bet is DNA. We found a man’s blood in Olivia Hogge’s bathtub, and it could belong to our killer. With the right DNA, we can bypass all this messy business trying to see who might have bought a bus ticket in the area.’

‘Then we need that warrant,’ Rafferty said.

T
uesday April 28th 09:30

Rafferty was right. The only way they could legally obtain the evidence they needed was to convince a magistrate. The trouble with magistrates was that many had no legal background, and yet were responsible for making legal decisions. Sure, they had a court clerk, but it wasn’t the same as dealing with an actual judge.

Morton arrived at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for the first session of the day. The difficulty in the application was the subject of the search. They had Ebstein’s DNA. They were allowed to take non-intimate DNA samples like oral swabs simply because someone had been arrested.

But, as of yet, Carruthers was virtually an unknown. He fit the profile. Just like two thousand other doctors.

He had worked on one of the deceased. Just like dozens of other NHS staff.

He was a man. Like half of London.

He was old enough, and his shoes looked about the right size.

Even as Morton mentally rehearsed it, it began to sound lame. Yesterday he had been cocksure, convinced that because Carruthers was the only other doctor that they had come across in the course of the investigation so far, it had to be him.

Morton had a nasty feeling that the hearing wasn’t going to go well.

‘All rise!’

Morton stood. He was alone in the court but for the sole magistrate and her clerk. She waved for him to approach the bench.

‘Madam, I am investigating–’

‘I’ve read the papers. Tell me why this isn’t a fishing expedition.’

‘We have a ruthless, meticulous and medically trained serial killer on the loose.’

‘How do you know he or she is medically trained?’ the magistrate asked.

‘The cuts are precise, and the treatment of the bodies shows an intimate familiarity with human anatomy. We believe it is likely the killer had has medical training.’

‘Likely. Not definite. Go on.’

‘During the course of the investigation, we revealed commonality in the victims’ medical history,’ Morton said. He was hamstrung by the inability to introduce the twins’ off-the-record statements into evidence. ‘We believe that two medical professionals connected to the victims–’

‘Connected how?’

‘They were all–’

‘All? I don’t have any supporting papers in front of me to show that Mr Yacobi was treated by either of the men named in your application. Do you have such documentation?’

‘Not with me, madam, but–’

‘Then, perhaps you should fetch it and come back when you have.’

If I had the paperwork, I would.
‘Madam, this is an urgent matter. It needs to be dealt with today.’

‘This Doctor Ebstein. You released him without charge.’

It was a statement, not a question. ‘That’s correct, madam.’

‘And Doctor Carruthers is only implicated by way of his association with Doctor Ebstein, who has not yet been charged with any crimes.’

‘That’s also correct, but–’

‘But nothing, Mr Morton. If you want a search warrant, then you show me some evidence.’

‘The evidence of Mrs Ethel Tewson is highly compelling. She saw a middle-aged white male approximately six feet tall with the first victim.’

She pushed her glasses to the end of her nose and looked down at Morton from the bench. ‘Then I assume you’ll be testing your own DNA. Or my clerk’s.’

The clerk did bear an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Carruthers.

‘Is this Mrs Tewson available to come before this court in person?’ the magistrate asked.

God, no.
‘I’m afraid not. She’s rather elderly, you see.’

‘And how is Mrs Tewson’s state of wellbeing? Is she a competent witness?’

Morton paused for a second too long.

‘And may I remind you, Mr Morton, that you’re under oath.’

‘No, madam, she is not wholly competent. I believe her recollection in this matter to be accurate, but in the interests of justice I must disclose that she had a slip of memory while I was in her presence.’

‘And what slip of memory was that?’

‘She thought it was 1967.’

The magistrate looked aghast. ‘The obtaining of a search warrant is never to be treated as a formality. It authorizes the invasion of a person’s privacy. I do not take that duty lightly. Therefore, your application is hereby denied.’