Before she was moved from the lift he wanted every bit of the room and the body photographed and videoed.
The cause of death hadn’t been determined yet, but Greg had lifted her hair and seen the scalpel embedded in the right side of her throat. He was pretty sure from the massive amount of blood loss that she’d had a main artery severed. She was twenty-eight, unmarried with no children. She was an incredibly talented nurse, and someone had ended her life.
His day out with Alex was still fresh in his mind, her laughter, when Seb Morrisey picked her up off the ground and swung her around, still sounding in his ears. He remembered her kindness and patience with Joe as he sat screaming and bleeding while she attended him, and the small, uncertain smile on her face when she invited him and Joe on the helicopter flight. He liked Alex Taylor. He wished he could be certain she was innocent.
*
Slowing down to a walking pace, Alex stared up at the black clouds above. They were heavy and low with a promise of more rain. The barges moored along the river were closed up, their owners inside in the warm. The bright colours – reds, blues and greens – were dulled and the wood on a few of them looked sodden and spongy. Bicycles and plastic chairs and small tables lay abandoned on the decks, and large sheets of brown tarpaulin covered the roofs of some of the barges.
She normally saw a dog or two sprawled out on the decks or standing with stiff fur, barking at her as she walked or ran by, but today the owners were taking pity on them and had let them into the dry.
Unclipping her water bottle, she took a long drink and then looked at her watch to check the time. She had four more hours before she met with him. The meeting place and time was set, and all she had to do was wait. She had decided the best way to spend the time was out running, the exercise distracting her from the evening ahead. It wasn’t working. Her mind could only focus on one thing. Of how she would be when she met him. Would she have the courage to face him? Sweat had wet the waistband of her running shorts and she was beginning to shiver as her skin cooled in the cold air.
She had parked her car at Weston Lock on the western outskirts of Bath and had run as far as Saltford and back, an eight-mile route of grassy banks and shady trees that in the summer sheltered you from the sun and in winter, the rain. She was familiar with this route and had used it often to run when she lived onsite at the hospital. She didn’t want to be near home today and use the running path on her doorstep, otherwise she might bottle out. In a short while she would head back to Maggie’s and start preparing for the evening. She had no intention of going near her own home until after the job was done.
By the time she returned there later tonight, he would have been dealt with and her home would be a place where she no longer thought of him. She would find the courage to face him somehow, and if she had to call the police and get him arrested she would do so. She intended that her life from now on would be positive and free of him. Even if she wasn’t believed she would be satisfied that she had done her best to bring this man to justice.
She wished for the umpteenth time that she had her mobile with her. She couldn’t find it this morning and was beginning to think she must have left it at work. She wanted to hear Nathan’s voice. She wanted to tell him she couldn’t see him tonight and hoped he would understand. They had made love again before he left for work and she had never felt more adored than she did in his arms.
Alex had seen the anguish in his eyes as he told her of his painful experience, and knew there and then that she would always love his face. Nathan, she believed, was a man who wanted to be loved for who he was, not for what he looked like.
She would hate for him to think she was rejecting him by not being in contact.
It was probably a good thing that she didn’t have her phone. She couldn’t call him. Today was something she had to deal with alone – a grubby, dirty situation which she didn’t want anywhere near her new life. She would tell Nathan about it at a later date, when there was no chance of it tarnishing what they had just begun.
Filling her mind with only him – his voice, his image and his touch – she began the half-mile walk back to her car.
*
Greg stared at the tall, thin man and tried to keep his eyes from fixing on the birthmark covering the left side of his face. A part of his forehead, an eyelid, the side of the nose and cheek and a corner of his mouth was a deep purple. This was the man Alex had slept with last night. He was not the boyfriend. Laura had taken a statement from a man named Patrick Ford.
Nathan Bell was a rare man; there was a humility and dignity in his manner. Greg sensed the challenges the man faced each day. His eyes were filled with a quiet despair at the thought of Alex being in trouble. Greg could give him no words of comfort.
Officers found clear evidence that a man had spent the night at Dr Taylor’s flat, and Greg believed it was him. He also believed the times he said he arrived and left. None of it helped Alex Taylor, though. Fiona Woods’s death occurred before the time he had spent with Alex Taylor; the nurse was captured on CCTV on a corridor leaving A & E at 18.05 and the glass on her wristwatch had been broken at 18.35.
Peter Spencer and the pathologist had worked out a theory that it got broken when the lift door was shut on her wrist. The tissue damage on her arm showed two parallel lines, which suggested the inner plate of the door had hit flesh as well as the watch. The killer then probably raised the lift door again and pushed her arm in properly.
Nathan Bell could offer no alibi for Alex Taylor.
What perplexed Greg was the time of the death. The theatres would still have been busy, and that lift could have been used at any time. Someone very confident had killed the woman. The pathologist thought that the nurse was still alive when she was bundled into the lift. The blood pattern on the lift’s ceiling and walls showed spurting. She would not have been alive for long, but she may have been conscious and aware that she was dying as she sat imprisoned in the steel box. Someone very confident had walked away from the murder scene, someone who perhaps knew it didn’t matter if they were seen, he reasoned, wearing theatre clothing, paper cap and mask.
‘She didn’t do this,’ Nathan Bell said for the second time since Greg had entered the office. ‘She isn’t a killer.’
‘Has she been in touch with you today?’
‘No, not since I left her this morning.’
‘And have you tried to contact her since you found out?’
‘Yes. I wanted to warn her, but her mobile is switched off, so I just left a message asking her to contact me. I want to be with her when she hears about Fiona.’
‘What did she say to you this morning?’
‘Nothing. We kissed goodbye. I expected to see her this evening.’
‘Did you make plans?’
‘No. I thought we’d talk later.’
‘When you went to her flat yesterday, you said she still had her coat on.’