Hawley went to the bathroom. Sweat had beaded on his clean-shaven top lip. He splashed water over his face and let it run over his wrists before sucking up a mouthful in his scooped hands. He glared at his reflection in response to what had just happened, and his own eyes looked back at him accusingly. There were easier ways to earn a living, but the crisis in recruitment in emergency medicine and the government’s targets of four-hour waits ensured that he, with his qualifications, could pick and choose his shifts in almost any unit in the country. But that still didn’t explain why he worked the worst of them: the Friday and Saturday nights, the bank holidays. What did explain it was the fact that they were the worst. He gobbled them up, relishing the constant mayhem. Alcohol-related injuries made up four out of every five emergency episodes during the weekends. That meant lots of fights. Lots of blood. Hardly any kids. No one in their right mind who wanted any semblance of work–life balance would ever choose to do the job.
He let out a wry exhalation on hearing his thoughts form the words ‘right mind’. What did that make him? Not right? Not normal?
He dried his face and hands and tried to clear his mind before pulling open the bathroom door. There was work to be done.
Three
Friday, Avon and Somerset Police’s HQ, Bristol
It was DI Anna Gwynne’s second week back at work and at last, at long last, she was beginning to feel normal again. It had taken a while. She’d made the most of it though, especially the last few weeks. She’d eaten well, thrown herself around the gym, swum lengths in the pool, made sure she was as fit as she could be. The dark circles under her hazel eyes had finally faded, though it had taken four of the six months she’d been off work before they disappeared completely. The pain from the stab wounds and the bruising around her windpipe had long gone, too, but there were other scars that would take far longer to heal.
Her attacker, a serial killer and rapist called Charles Willis, had been sentenced, but he’d only been caught after he’d killed four people and very nearly killed her on a chilly November day just over six months ago. In the slow weeks of recovery Anna decided she’d no one else to blame for him almost succeeding but herself. She’d finally seen through Willis’s clever subterfuge and had exposed his years of sexual assaults, tying him to several murders. For that she’d been lauded. But her procrastination, her self-doubt, had almost got her killed. There was a lesson to be learned there.
She gave evidence at his trial before her return to work. Willis was charged with four counts of murder, one of attempted murder and eighteen counts of rape or attempted rape. Anna described how Willis tracked her on one of her fitness runs, shot her with a veterinary dart laced with a powerful opiate and tried to kill her. She’d sat as Willis’s barrister, on the question of premeditation, cross-examined her. How could she be certain murder had been his client’s intent?
Anna fixed him with a cold stare and said, ‘I can’t be certain. But unlike his other victims, I was aware of what he was capable of. Perhaps he’d only make that final decision once he’d finished stabbing me.’
She’d found it an interesting position to be in, trying to be as professionally objective as possible to bring Willis to book while having a very personal need for justice and closure. The Crown Prosecution Service’s barrister was anticipating an indefinite term with no option of parole at sentencing. Anna would drink to that.
Anna got up from her desk and went to the window. The way she held herself made her look taller than the five seven that she was. Her dark suit jacket was draped on the chair back, and her shirt – one of several of the white or light blue she usually wore to work – was new and still had crease lines from how it had been packaged. She’d cut her hair back-to-work short and her skin was a healthy colour from the hours of running she’d done over the last month.
Outside the office in Avon and Somerset Police’s HQ, the summer sun was already warming the morning air, trying to make life just a little more tolerable on the western side of Britain. A blue-sky day with the promise of long light, tanned limbs and long drinks outside in the streets. Not the sort of day for contemplating mistakes or regret.
Though it was now possible for her to go a day or two without dwelling on the attack, still a shadow lurked. A reptilian skin of memory that she thought she’d shed. And there was the paradox. Anna dealt with the sins of others like a butcher deals with cuts of meat. And, just as a butcher would, inevitably, get blood on his hands, she was tainted by the mental stains left by dealing with criminality. Yet they were nothing a good glass of Riesling and half an hour’s dreamy Pink Floyd, or pastoral folk ballads from Zeppelin, could not ease away. A trick taught to her by her dad.
But since Willis had put his hands upon her, his shadow was always there in the background, like spilled port on a white carpet, resisting all her efforts at scrubbing him out.
Because of him and what he’d done, for a while Anna had doubted the wisdom of the road she walked. Perhaps not quite an existential crisis, it had still involved a stepping back, a sensible weighing up of her options. She’d chosen her job because it challenged her and she was good at it. The possibility of closing a case, of helping a victim, of relieving a family of the pain of not knowing drove her on in some way that was difficult to deny. And what other job was there that allowed her to be her stubborn, driven, analytical self and encourage her to use those traits? She couldn’t think of one. Slowly, as the weeks of recovery passed, her doubts had faded until, at last, she’d got the all-clear from the medics and here she was.
In early as always, she turned from the window in the open-plan office of the south-west Major Crimes Review Task Force, and sat, hip on a desk, looking at the whiteboard and the pinned photographs from the reactivated cold cases the team had been pursuing while she was away. Set up, as with many forces, in response to advancements in DNA techniques, the team was tasked with seeing if fresh eyes and technology could solve some of the region’s unsolved cases. Murder and rape were high on the agenda; and these had become Anna’s bitter bread and butter.
One such case was the rape of a young woman in 1983 near the racecourse on the outskirts of Bath. Lucy Bright survived, but her life had been blighted ever since. She’d never married and was not in a steady relationship. The attacker’s violations had left, as so often happened, the kind of deep and irreparable psychological damage that some victims were simply unable to overcome. Justice meant a lot to these people – offering a chance for them to draw a line in the sand from where they might start again – and its absence festered like an open wound.
At the time of the attack on Lucy Bright a significant amount of evidence and samples had been collected, including the attacker’s semen, but little had been made of those at the time. Analysis of these samples would not have included DNA. But with the establishment of the National DNA database in the early 1990s, samples in historically unsolved cases could be reanalysed and compared with newly acquired data. The samples from Lucy Bright’s case were logged but yielded no results initially because the perpetrator’s DNA was not in that database for a match to be made. For years, her attacker remained at large, dodging justice’s bullet.
But bullets could ricochet.
In March 2017, a DNA sample from a drink-driving offence was loaded onto the system and threw up a partial match of sixteen alleles out of a possible twenty-four tested. Callum Morton, aged nineteen, had not been alive at the time of the rape in 1983, but the match was close enough to suggest that a relative of his could have been involved. Anna’s team was alerted, the cold case their responsibility, and two men were now suspects: Morton’s father, Peter, a fifty-three-year-old paramedic, and his fifty-five-year-old uncle Dominick, a businessman with several properties abroad. Neither man was aware that familial tracing was slowly closing a ring around them.
Justin Holder and Ryia Khosa, the squad’s DCs, had worked up the case in exemplary fashion in Anna’s absence. They had enough evidence to question both men, but Superintendent Rainsford, Anna’s commander, was wary. If they interviewed the wrong man, there was a chance he might alert his brother. Rainsford did not want this to turn into a messy international manhunt involving Europol.