Phobia Page 7

  She headed up to her office on the second floor, switched on her computer and began to think about updating the CRIS database. Danny and Samir would almost certainly have new information to add. She didn’t know until what time their evening gathering had lasted, but she was sure that they were professional enough to know not to get drunk when there was a major investigation in the offing.

  Both men arrived within ten minutes of her, and to her satisfaction both were looking fresh as a daisy.

  ‘Morning, boss,’ Danny said as he sauntered in, a coffee in his hand. ‘Any news?’ Honor asked.

  ‘The beef steak was good, and they serve a great pint of London Pride,’ he grinned. ‘I just called the pathologist, and she’s asked us to pop over.’

  Honor felt a pulse of excitement flutter through her as she picked up her bag again and headed out of the office. The pathologist would normally just call with information, even important information, but a visit meant that there was more to the case than just the final report from the autopsy. Samir walked at her side as Danny led the way, and they were intercepted by DCI Mitchell as he barrelled his way through the corridors with a fat wad of court papers under one arm and a mug of coffee grasped in his bear– like hand.

  ‘You’ve got your incident room,’ he said to her as he passed them by. ‘Pathologist has something for you that confirms homicide.’

  Honor nodded. ‘We’re heading down there now.’

  ‘Fill me in as soon as you get back, I want it in the morning briefing.’

  Danny drove, Honor alongside him in the front and Samir in the back as they headed south over the water at London Bridge, then turned left for St Thomas Street and Guy’s Hospital. The building, famous across the world for its pioneering work with sick children, was located right opposite the Shard, a towering icon of metal and glass that soared a thousand feet into the turbulent London sky.

  Dr Willow Coulter was a brunette in her late thirties, who seemed too softly– spoken to have spent a career carving up over ten thousand dead bodies. The forensic pathologist had worked first at St George’s in Tooting before running her own department at Guy’s, which was registered specifically to work with homicide detectives.

  ‘Honor,’ Michelle greeted her with a smile. ‘Good to see you back.’

  It was somewhat ironic that Honor’s warmest welcome would come from coldest of environments. Michelle’s office was alongside the morgue, an entire department supposedly devoted to the study of the cause of death. Despite what people saw on television, most pathologists rarely saw a cadaver or even body organs, their work instead involving the study of life, not death: toxicology, cytology, clinical embryology and countless other fields within nineteen separate disciplines.

  ‘You have something for us on the Sebastian Dukas case?’ Danny asked as they gathered in Michelle’s tiny office.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, picking up a slim folder and opening it to a toxicology report. ‘You struck lucky, or rather, we did. As you know, wide–spectrum toxicology will take longer to come back, but we went in with the usual suspects and added a few randoms, given the unusual nature of the case. I wondered whether the victim was under the influence of anything when they apparently chose to take their life in such a way. What came up was somewhat unexpected.’

  Michelle handed Honor a list of contaminants found in Sebastian’s blood toxicology. In truth, the pathologist might just as well have handed Honor a sushi recipe written in Japanese, as most of the report meant little to her, but as Samir and Danny gathered to peer at the page, Michelle explained its contents.

  ‘Minimal alcohol, no common drugs, nothing out of the ordinary at all except for one: Gamma–hydroxybutyrate.’

  The name was familiar to Honor from previous cases. ‘The date–rape drug,’ she identified the chemical.

  ‘The same,’ Dr Coulter agreed. ‘It must have been in his body in volumes sufficient to floor a grown man for maybe a few hours. Much of it was processed out by the time of death, so I’m pretty certain he was conscious when he was murdered. Tracking back from that time, it’s hard to tell just how much might have been there, but it’s of no doubt that Sebastian was unable to defend himself.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ Samir asked. ‘Asphyxiation,’ Michelle replied. ‘So, he was hanged?’

  ‘He was hanged,’ she agreed, ‘but that wasn’t what killed him. The bruising around the victim’s neck was consistent with being strangled, but inconsistent with being hanged. The rope marks distorted the flesh and helped to conceal the proximal cause of

  death. Sebastian Dukas was murdered, and then hanged in an attempt to conceal the original crime as a suicide.’

  Honor stared at the printout in her hands, but she was no longer reading it. Now, she was staring in her mind’s eye at Sebastian’s body, hanged from the towering spire of St Magnus’ Church, veiled by the fog. The killer had intended to conceal his crime with the act of a supposed hanging, but had then simultaneously decided to place his victim in a highly–visible manner, thus both concealing and displaying the crime simultaneously.

  ‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Danny said, evidently following the same train of thought. ‘The guy tries to hide the murder, yet puts it on display at the same time? Why not hang him somewhere he might not be found?’

  If there was one thing that Honor had learned in her career, both as a police constable and as a CID detective, it was that a sane person could not begin to fathom the inner workings of the insane mind. It was analogous to a dolphin trying to figure out the ramblings of a drunk gorilla. Sure, even very disturbed people had patterns of thought, strange ebbs and flows, impulses that could be detected in the confused tides of their minds, but trying to deduce their next move was all but impossible. A deranged person could hold a perfectly normal conversation with a friend in a bar, and an hour later be standing over the corpse of a child with a bloodied knife in their hands.

  ‘Honor?’

  She blinked herself back into the moment.

  ‘We can’t make any judgements yet,’ she said finally. ‘Somebody went to great lengths to both display the body and conceal their crime, but we don’t have motive and we certainly don’t have a suspect. Is there anything new from the victim’s family?’

  ‘Nothing as of this morning,’ Samir replied. ‘We’re still looking at CCTV but nothing’s popped. How the hell they got in and out of Lower Thames Street without showing up is beyond me. I’m at four–thirty in the morning and nobody’s gone in or out of that church.’

  ‘Same for me,’ Danny admitted. ‘Nothing west of the bridge.’

  Honor’s own efforts had also been fruitless, and she was almost at dawn on her footage. The fog was thick in the videos, and she was certain that the body was already dangling out of sight somewhere above the shot.

  ‘Michelle,’ she asked the pathologist, ‘any idea of the size of the individual who strangled Sebastian Dukas?’

  Dr Coulter replied without hesitation.

  ‘Male, large hands, enough so to wrap around Sebastian’s throat almost completely. The initial bruising pattern says it all. It’s likely Sebastian would not have been able to put up much of a fight even if he were not hindered. In his drugged state, he would have been completely unable to resist.’

  Honor nodded.

  ‘Thanks for your time, Doctor,’ she said. ‘You’ll send us the rest of the reports when they come in?’

  ‘Should be with us in a couple of days.’

  Honor turned to leave the office, when her mobile phone rang in her pocket. Before she could even reach for it, Danny’s and Samir’s phones also rang. The three of them exchanged a glance, Honor’s guts plunging with the certainty that something new and terrible had happened.

  She looked at her phone screen, and saw DI Harper’s name there as she answered. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Get back here right now, as fast as you can,’ Katy Harper ordered. ‘There’s been a development.’

  DI Harper had set up the
Incident Room in one of the main conference rooms at Bishopsgate. Honor walked in with Danny and Samir to see a dry–wipe board erected at one end of the room, a wall–mounted television switched on nearby and clearly displaying a video that was on pause. A number of desks had been set up, hurriedly connected to phone lines and Internet routers by the IT team, so that calls pertaining to the investigation could be directed straight to the IR and avoid clogging up the lines on Bishopsgate’s main desk.

  The room was filled with several detectives and a number of police constables, DCI Mitchell holding court near the wipe board. Beside him was DI Harper, her small frame dwarfed by the former soldier.

  ‘Close the door,’ Mitchell said to Samir Raaya as they walked inside.

  DC Raaya obeyed, and as soon as the door was shut, DI Harper wrote with a red marker across the top of the wipe board in large capital letters.

  OPERATION BOLD FRONT

  ‘As of now,’ she said, as she put a cap back on her pen, ‘this is an official homicide investigation into the murder of Sebastian Dukas, aged thirty–two, who was found hanged from St Magnus church yesterday morning. DS McVey is running the investigation, having deduced the murder before the pathologist had completed her examination.’

  Honor’s stomach tingled as she intercepted a few admiring glances from the younger PCs around her, DI Harper’s unabashed plug boosting her confidence. Honor kept her features composed though – don’t count your chickens, love, you know it could all come crashing down real fast. She just hoped that her skin was not flushing red.

  ‘The pathologist has confirmed homicide as the cause of death, via strangulation,’ Harper went on, ‘with the elaborate hanging thought to be designed to conceal the murder. We have very little to go on, as house to house enquiries have yielded no leads. This is about as fresh as a case gets and it would already be stone–cold, were it not for the video you’re all about to see.’

  Honor’s skin tingled again and she glanced at Danny. He shrugged back at her, and she wondered whether somebody had come forward with some CCTV of the hanging, or some other piece of evidence that might lead them toward new avenues of investigation.

  DCI Mitchell’s next words quashed that fervent hope like an insect between forefinger and thumb, his voice sombre.

  ‘This video footage was this morning sent to the family of one Amber Carson, a twenty–four–year old office worker from Hackney. We’ve called her place of work, and they have confirmed that she has not shown up this morning and she’s not answering her phone at home.’ Mitchell paused. ‘Some of you may find this footage quite distressing.’

  Every pair of eyes in the room locked onto the television on the wall as DI Harper pointed a remote at it.

  The screen appeared perfectly black for a moment, and then Honor heard the sound of laboured breathing. The sound was intense, amplified, and then she saw why. An image slowly faded in from the blackness, and they could all see the face of a young woman filling the screen. Her mouth was gagged, her eyes puffy and red, the skin around them and on her cheeks glistening with tears as she squirmed and fought for movement. A faint glow illuminated her, and the soft padding of some kind of bed beneath her. It also illuminated wooden walls close by on either side of her body, hemming her in, pinning her in place.

  Honor stared in silence at the footage for a moment, and then an image of Sebastian Dukas’s body hanging from the church spire flashed once more through her mind. Katarina Dukas’s words echoed through her thoughts, as though coming from the confines of Amber Carson’s horrendous prison. He couldn’t have hanged himself from up there. He was terrified of heights!

  The surrounding darkness, and the strangely amplified noise of the victim’s breathing, left Honor in absolutely no doubt about what had happened to Amber Carson.

  ‘She’s been buried alive.’

  Honor spoke the words without conscious thought. They were not loud but they carried throughout the room, accompanied by Amber’s terrified, laboured breathing.

  DI Harper paused the video and peered at her. ‘Explain.’

  Honor felt a growing pressure as she sensed the other detectives watching her, but then she saw Amber’s horrific suffering and knew that her own anxiety was as nothing compared to what that poor girl was going through.

  ‘Sebastian Dukas was terrified of heights,’ Honor said. ‘His wife, and his family, all insisted that he could never have got up on that church, let alone hang himself from eight–inch–wide scaffolding boards. He had to have been drugged to have ended up on that spire, and the pathologist’s toxicology report found traces of Gamma– hydroxybutyrate in his system, supporting the notion. The pathologist believes that he died from strangulation. This is only speculation, but if he woke up from the drugs too soon, the killer would have been forced to murder him before hanging him.’

  There was a deep silence as the officers in the room considered her words.

  ‘What do you mean before hanging him?’ DCI Mitchell demanded. ‘You think the killer wanted to murder Sebastian Dukas twice?’

  Honor shook her head as she stared at Amber’s features, twisted in a paroxysm of terror; eyes wide, pupils dilated, the sound of her breathing echoing through the lonely vaults of Honor’s mind, slipping away, doomed to die in abstract terror.

  ‘No,’ she replied, her voice almost a whisper. ‘I think that he wants them to die from their greatest fears. I think that he’s killing people based on their phobias.’

  DCI Mitchell stared at her for a long beat, and then his gaze snapped to a uniformed officer close to him.

  ‘Harris, get on the phone to the family, find out if Amber suffers from claustrophobia or any similar affliction.’

  Constable Harris darted from the room as DCI Mitchell looked to Honor. ‘What do you make of this video?’

  ‘Play it further.’

  DI Harper complied and the video played on. Honor could see that it was only a minute and four seconds long, but that minute and four seconds seemed to last for an eternity as they watched Amber writhe and thrash. The camera vibrated a little with her movements, shuddering as her head hit the side of the box in which she was trapped.

  ‘The camera moved,’ Honor said, the footage only having a few seconds left. ‘Play that last bit back again.’

  DI Harper backed up the footage a few seconds. Honor saw the camera quiver as Amber’s head hit the side of the coffin. Honor’s mind raced as the final seconds of the footage played out and the screen faded slowly to black. The video ended and DI Harper looked at her.

  On the fringes of her awareness, Honor realised that everybody in the room was watching her now, but this time it barely had an effect. She was transfixed by her thoughts, subconsciously moving closer to the screen as she spoke, partly to herself, partly to her fellow officers.

  ‘The video faded in and out,’ she said, her eyes almost vacant, seeing the room and yet seeing in her mind’s eye their killer at work somewhere in the city. ‘He’s planned this. He’s taken care over this footage.’

  The quivering camera, shuddering at Amber’s movements.

  ‘The camera moved, so that coffin must have moved,’ Honor said, letting her mind run with her thoughts, letting it probe the impossible and allow the scene to speak to her. ‘She’s in a shallow grave, the earth not packed deeply enough to render the coffin totally stable.’

  Honor saw Amber’s face, squirming, twisting, yearning to be free.

  ‘She’s trying to escape, but her hands are out of sight and the gag’s still on, so she’s bound by the wrists and probably by the ankles.’

  Honor closed her eyes, the video playing back in her mind, momentarily oblivious to the room around her.

  ‘The video is recorded but it had to have been shot recently,’ she said out loud. ‘She’s buried alive, but the killer obviously isn’t nearby.’ Honor’s eyes jerked open and she whirled to DI Harper. ‘The footage must be remotely gathered. The killer must be using some kind of Internet or phone connecti
on to keep him separate from the scene of the crime.’

  DI Harper turned to Detective Constable Tom Cattini, a CID officer assigned to the fraud units.

  ‘You think that you can source the e–mail this was sent from, maybe back–trace it to a location?’

  Tom was moving for the door before the DI had finished her sentence. ‘I’ll get the Cyber Griffin team onto it, and get back to you as soon as I can.’

  As DC Cattini exited the room, Honor saw again an image of Sebastian Dukas flash through her mind, dangling from the heights of the church spire. He had already been dead when he had been hanged, but that must not have been the original plan. Had the killer wanted to watch Sebastian die too, suspended from great height and unable to free himself from the noose, to film his demise?

  ‘Amber could still be alive.’

  Danny Green’s statement filled the room and Honor knew that he was right. Worse, she knew that being buried alive was not enough for this killer, whoever they were. The human body could survive for a few days without food and water at most, but a few days might be enough for Amber to free her bonds, remove her gag and start screaming for help.

  ‘She won’t be for long.’

  Honor felt certain, with every fibre in her body, that there was something else that their killer had lined up for Amber Carson.

  ‘We don’t have a timeline yet,’ DI Harper said. ‘Amber Carson’s whereabouts are not known, but we have an FLO with her family right now. Once we get a timeline, we’ll have some idea of how long she might have left.’

  ‘Days, if she’s left undisturbed,’ Honor said, ‘but it’s my guess that whoever put her there won’t want to wait long to see her demise. It’s bloody awful, but I think our killer might be getting his rocks off watching people at their moment of death.’

  ‘I agree,’ Danny Green said alongside her. ‘Both crimes are too elaborate to be just coincidence. Whoever’s behind this wants people to suffer their worst nightmares, to die while doing so.’ Danny peered at the screen. ‘He’s literally scaring them to death.’