Authors: Mark Roberts
The constable turned into Kell Street and Rosen shouted, ‘Pull up! Pull up!’ The constable slammed the car to a standstill.
Rosen’s mouth was cloth, his tongue a dead weight. He made a call, reaching a duty sergeant he didn’t know called George Jones.
‘George, my name’s Detective Chief Inspector David Rosen. My wife Sarah should be on the first floor of St Thomas’s Hospital. I want officers there immediately. It relates to
the Herod investigation.’
‘I’m acting on it now, sir. Hold the line.’
‘Turn the car around,’ said Rosen. ‘Back to St Thomas’s!’
The constable made a 360-degree turn on a pin and went back to driving at high speed.
Down Borough Road towards the roundabout with Blackfriars, Rosen clutched the phone to his ear and willed Sergeant Jones to come back on the line.
An urgent instruction poured out of the car radio backed up by Sergeant Jones’s voice in his ear.
‘Sir, we’ve deployed all available officers in the area to the hospital.’
An ambulance, its siren silent, headed in his direction. He glanced at it as it sailed away from St Thomas’s.
‘Call the hospital, George. Tell them to close all the doors, in and out: no one enters, no one leaves.’
‘I’ll do that now.’
On either side of the road, cars hugged the pavement to allow the speeding police car through.
Rosen was visited by a memory of Phillip Caton throwing up in the gutter of Brantwood Road on the morning his wife had been abducted. Caton, a self-employed plumber, had been drawn away by a
genuine call for work, leaving his wife exposed to the terror of Herod.
Rosen, a detective of over twenty years’ experience, realised he’d been suckered into abandoning his wife.
St Thomas’s Hospital loomed large.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked the constable. ‘Sir, you want me to open a window or something, sir? Sir?’
O
n the first floor of the North Wing of St Thomas’s Hospital, Rosen ran through the area between the lifts and the main door to the
Haematology department. As he did so, he wondered whether he’d ever see his wife again.
At reception, he asked for Dr Brian Reid, who arrived within a minute.
‘Detective Rosen?’
Rosen turned and saw a short, ginger-haired man in a white coat with a standard St Thomas’s NHS badge.
‘Dr Reid, did you telephone my wife yesterday and tell her to come in today?’
The doctor frowned and shook his head. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘An unofficial appointment because of a problem with her bloods?’ Blind hope drove him on. ‘You fixed it up with Tom Dempsey from Gynaecology.’
‘I haven’t spoken to Tom in weeks.’
Rosen’s phone rang and the receptionist frowned automatically.
He wanted more than anything else for it to be Sarah.
‘David?’ It was Carol Bellwood. ‘It’s definitely a hoax. Number 19 Picardie Road. I’m standing on the pavement at the gap between number 17 and number 21 where
number 19 used to be. It was blown up in an accidental gas explosion and demolished years ago. We’ve knocked on every door in Picardie Road in case we got the number wrong. There aren’t
even any pregnant women on the street. This is not the scene of an abduction. Where are you, David?’
‘I’m at the scene of an abduction right now. St Thomas’s Hospital. First floor. North Wing. Haematology.’
‘Do we know who the victim is?’
The overhead fluorescents seemed to be blinding him, and the strength to merely put one foot in front of the other drained away.
‘David, do we know who the abducted woman is?’
‘Yes. It’s my wife, Sarah.’
S
arah Rosen was both blessed and cursed with insider knowledge. Before she had regained full consciousness, she knew she was in a dismal place.
Waking up was not a gradual journey into the light of a brand-new day, but a progression into an understanding of the confines of the place that enclosed her: a man-made darkness that defied and
overwhelmed her.
For a moment, when her fingers touched the sides of the sensory deprivation chamber, she assumed she was sick – not a sudden return from health to the jaws of depression, but that she was
sick and had never been well. That the profound blackness around her was merely the coming together of all that she was on the inside in the worst moments of her life.
She said, ‘David?’ But her voice was swallowed by the darkness. She lifted her hands and touched the lid of the chamber, recalling Rosen’s description of the rags that Alison
Todd’s fingers and nails had become. She had cried in their kitchen as she dried the dishes and listened, wishing her husband would shut up, and despising herself for wanting to bury her head
in the sand.
Her eyes widened and she felt something like electric shock running down her spine, a power that galvanized each nerve in her being.
She was floating. It was dark. There was an abominable silence. Her hands rolled up her thighs and across her hips to her stomach. But there was no gaping wound in her middle; her skin, her
womb, her baby were all there and intact. She kept her hands in place across her womb, but the blessed moment of relief subsided.
It hadn’t happened yet. But it was coming. Soon. The only way she would be removed from this chamber was so that her baby could be removed from her.
She pressed a hand to her mouth. Primal knowledge. She was safer in silence than in the scream that built up inside her. She became aware of the stuff on which she was floating, her heels
pressing down against the heavy resistance of the fluid, and she was visited by a grim notion. She was floating on the blood of other women.
Sarah seized a handful of the stuff and, as she felt it slide through her fingers, a wave of panic crashed over her. It was bigger than her intelligence, stronger than her memory, better than
her imagination at shaping the future. There was no hope. The others might have hoped for the sudden arrival of the police, the broken-down door and the eleventh-hour rescue, but that was the
prerogative of civilian wives. She was privy to the depth of Rosen’s knowledge, the weight of his frustrations.
Sarah brought the liquid to her face.
As she smelled the liquid on her finger, a single drop fell between her lips and onto her tongue: the unmistakable taste of salt and the undeniable presence once in this enclosed space of
another person.
With the taste came the aroma of Julia.
With taste and aroma came the realization that she was in a place designed to block out the senses. The utter dark and total silence had not been provided merely in order to disorientate. She
began to shake. With each passing second it felt colder and colder. Her teeth banged together, setting off the nerves deep inside the enamel. Pain traced down her jaw.
She knew that she had three days to live, at the outside. But she guessed she had considerably less time, that she and her child were the last souls and that, in closure, his actions would
accelerate.
She clasped her hands together for a moment to stop them shaking, laid them over her womb and clutched her elbows into her ribs. She took the longest, slowest breath of her life through her
nostrils and held it in her lungs as deeply as she could.
She hung on to the breath until the shaking subsided a little as she felt the blood rising in her face and head, imagined the darkening of her skin as the pressure within her rose.
She hung on until she couldn’t hold on any longer, then allowed the air out through a paper-thin gap between her lips. She realized that this was how he incapacitated his victims before
the kill. The deprivation of sensory stimulation over three days and nights was not enough on its own to render the flesh unresistant. But there was another factor in the equation.
Oxygen.
He starved them of air.
She touched the lid of the chamber and estimated the distance between the surface of the water and the lid, the length and width of the tank, finding a bleak calm but no comfort in the act of
mathematical calculation that told her just how few cubic centimetres of air were available to her.
She raised both hands to the lid. It was bound to be locked, but she pressed her palms upwards and pushed hard.
The lid gave slightly, opening on her left-hand side, a tiny crack, a sliver of red light in the room outside the chamber. And a wisp of air. She pushed. But it was as far as the lid would go.
She breathed, blinked and focussed on the dull light.
And then she heard a sound. Feet descending a ladder. She lowered the lid so that it would allow sound through if not light. And she waited. But nothing happened.
He was in the room. He was outside the chamber. But nothing happened.
She just waited in the dark.
Suddenly, there was a noise like thunder inside the tank as a sudden, angry weight slammed down on the lid above her face.
Sarah froze.
To scream is to die, to be silent is to survive.
She waited, afloat on the saline water, wondering whether he was standing over her, unable to detect any other sign of his presence beyond the darkness in which she was suspended.
She waited. The air was thinning and she needed to make a decision. If he was still there, to raise the lid was to alert him; to leave it closed was to run out of air.
S
arah hadn’t returned home. The phone in the house remained unanswered, and two local beat constables confirmed that there was no one in the
Rosen residence.
She wasn’t at St Philomena’s School. A complete search of the building and grounds showed no sign of Sarah Rosen being on the premises; the day’s CCTV footage showed no record
of her entering the building.
As bald reality became inescapable fact, Rosen recalled a moment in time, some twelve years earlier, when the darkness in the barrel of a gun was inches from his face.
‘If she has been abducted—’ said Baxter.
‘If ?’
‘I have to ask you, David,’ continued Baxter over the interruption, ‘has she been well, in herself, lately?’
‘Has she gone mental and run away? Is that what you want to know?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
It was gone noon, over two hours since the hoax call to Picardie Road and since Sarah had gone missing.
‘What have your instructions been?’ asked Baxter. ‘David?’
‘Carol Bellwood’s in charge at St Thomas’s. Corrigan and Feldman are viewing CCTV footage from the hospital. I’ve got officers talking to anyone who had an appointment on
or around the first floor, North Wing.’
Baxter patted Rosen on the sleeve. He didn’t look up from the picture of Sarah on his desk.
‘We’ve got three days, tops—’ started Baxter.
‘Do you believe that?’
‘That’s the precedent; let’s go on that.’
The phone on Rosen’s desk rang. He sat up and snatched at the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Corrigan. Boss, listen, we’ve got something on CCTV from St Thomas’s. It’s a brief sequence covered by two cameras, one interior, one exterior.’
‘Get to the point, Jeff.’
Rosen got to his feet and the solemn noise level in the incident room dipped.
‘Is it my wife?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. Yes, it looks like it is.’
Rosen felt his face fall as the last of his hope ebbed away.
‘Talk me through the footage.’
Rosen walked up and down behind his desk as he listened impatiently.
‘An ambulance pulls up at the front doors, only it’s a slightly old ambulance. It’s there for ten minutes. A woman is pushed out of the front entrance in a wheelchair by what
looks like a man in a standard paramedic uniform.’
‘Is it Paul Dwyer?’
‘Yeah, it looks like Paul Dwyer.’
‘And the woman’s my wife?’
‘Yes, it’s your wife. Paramedic puts her in the back of the ambulance, closes the doors, gets in the cab, drives off. He heads off in the direction of Lambeth Palace Road.’
‘OK, Jeff,’ said Rosen. ‘Get the pictures down here straightaway.’
‘Johnny Mac’s on his way right now.’
‘Change of plan.’ He spoke to Jeff Corrigan but looked directly at Baxter. ‘We’re publishing Flint’s picture asap, and we’ll release this CCTV footage from
the hospital as well. But don’t approach either man. Corrigan, you there?’
‘Yes?’
‘How did she look? My wife?’
‘She appeared to be asleep. She looked peaceful.’
Rosen wondered whether Dwyer had used Pentothal as he had with his other victims.
‘Was there no one else around?’
‘There were dozens of people coming and going, but the scene didn’t look odd. Aside from the slightly dated ambulance, but that’s not that obvious . . . I guess no one took any
notice.’
An ambulance? Rosen felt the rush of an oncoming revelation. As he’d come away from the hospital, leaving Sarah alone for the attentions of Dwyer, he’d seen an ambulance cutting out
of Dodson Street. It had passed within metres of the bonnet of the car he’d been in, but going in a different direction.
If I’d released the picture of Dwyer sooner
, the thought mocked him,
maybe, just maybe, someone in that hospital would have noticed him . . .
O
n the morning of Julia’s abduction, Phillip Caton had turned off his mobile phone usually left on 24/7.
The last time it had rung, at seven o’clock in the morning, Phillip had picked up the call partly from instinct but mostly through raw desperation. It had been an emergency, a request for
a plumber to help with a flooded nursery school. As Phillip had faltered and stuttered through his apology for being unable to take the job, the lady on the other end of the line had persisted, in
a gentle and kindly manner. She had all those babies to think about, all those toddlers and their mums and dads, and then she had paused as she put two and two together. She apologized to Phillip.
How insensitive she was to mention babies, and she was genuinely sorry if she’d hurt his feelings but how
was
he feeling? She wanted to know. She cared, see. She realized who he was
and why he sounded so, well, devastated. Had he heard anything about Julia? From the police? From the abductor even? Had he? She didn’t know how he was coping. Did they have a name for the
baby? It was a boy. Wasn’t it?