The Scent of Death

Chapter 32

‘Has his girlfriend been informed?’ Whelan asked.

Ward shifted in the chair, trying to find a more comfortable position for her stomach. ‘Not yet. We know she’s out of the country but haven’t been able to contact her.’

They sat in front of the window. Both looked tired, the strain of recent events evident. Of the two, Whelan looked the worse, the light from the window and the fluorescent fitting overhead combining to expose every hour of lost sleep. Ward looked marginally more rested, but the freshly scabbed grazes and a purpling bruise on one cheek told their own story.

‘Better if she hears it from us rather than see it on the news.’ Whelan blew out his cheeks. ‘What the hell did he think he was doing, going back to the Lennox house?’

‘I expect he felt sorry for her. And responsible, probably. Bear in mind he was the one who told us about Lola and her son in the first place. If not for that, we might still be—’

She broke off, looking towards the bed.

‘Back with us, are you?’

I tried to speak. My mouth was dry and didn’t work at first. ‘What are you doing here?’

My voice came out a croak. Ward smiled. ‘Good to see you, too.’

‘I meant…’ I swallowed, trying to moisten my mouth. ‘… Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘Tried it, got bored.’ She said it lightly, but a shadow crossed her face. Then it was gone. She gave a tired grin. ‘I’m fine. Besides, there’s too much to do, trying to keep you out of trouble.’

I started to push myself up in the bed, then abandoned the attempt. ‘What day is it?’

‘Friday.’

That was right: I’d forgotten that I’d already asked the nurse when I’d first come round that morning. My thoughts were still a little fuzzy, but I knew I’d gone to Lola’s on Wednesday. I’d lost a whole day.

‘How do you feel?’ Ward asked.

Strange was the first word that came to mind. The light hurt my eyes and colours seemed too vivid. Moving took conscious effort, as though my body no longer fitted properly. On top of that, I felt as weak as a kitten and ached all over. There were burn dressings on my upper biceps and torso where the pain was more focused, and ECG sensors were taped to my chest. Thin wires ran from them to a monitor by the bed.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘How much do you remember?’

It was coming back to me now. Lola. The black tube. ‘Enough.’

‘Do you feel up to telling us what happened?’ Ward asked, pouring me a glass of water.

I wasn’t sure, but I did my best. I broke off to take a drink from time to time, and at one point a nurse came in to check my stats, but I managed to tell them as much as I could remember. Which ended when I’d lost consciousness on Lola’s floor.

‘It might not feel like it, but you were lucky,’ Ward told me, refilling my water glass. ‘That thing she used was called a picana. Like a beefed-up cattle prod but a lot nastier. This one had been customized so it could be recharged rather than run off a mains supply. It was running low by the time she used it on you.’

It hadn’t felt like that to me. ‘She told me her husband brought it back from South America.’

‘We know. Apparently, various regimes used them to torture prisoners in the 1970s, but I’d not heard of one here before. She kept it under a floorboard in her bedroom. We missed it when we first searched the house, but in fairness we weren’t looking for anything like that then.’

‘How did you find me?’ I asked, managing this time to push myself up in the bed. I was only wearing a hospital gown, but I was past caring.

‘You can thank Jack for that. After he got your text and then couldn’t get hold of you he called round to Lennox’s house. One of her neighbours said she was definitely home, so when she didn’t answer the door he forced an entry and found you on the floor.’

‘Thought you were dead,’ Whelan said, matter-of-factly.

So did I. ‘What made you think I was there?’

But Ward was climbing to her feet. ‘I think we’ve tired you enough. Get some rest. We can talk again tomorrow.’

There were still questions I wanted to ask, like why Whelan had wanted to meet at St Jude’s in the first place, and what Ward had meant when she’d said We know. But even as I started to protest, a wave of fatigue washed over me. Suddenly, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I sank back down on the bed as the two of them left, talking in low voices to themselves.

‘You didn’t tell him about her,’ I heard Whelan say, and Ward respond, ‘Later,’ but by then I was too far gone to worry about it.

I spent most of the next forty-eight hours drifting in and out of a sleep so deep it felt like unconsciousness. Often I’d wake to find someone by the bed, and then a moment later they were gone and I’d realize hours had passed. Rachel arrived on Friday evening after Ward’s and Whelan’s visit. She’d tried to call me back after our argument, but my phone wasn’t working after Lola had dropped it into the sink. Growing increasingly worried, Rachel had called Jason and Anja to see if they knew where I was. They didn’t.

Checking hospitals, Jason had been told I’d been admitted as an emergency, and then used his sway as a senior consultant to find out why. It had taken Rachel most of a day to get to an airport and make connecting flights back to London. She’d hugged me so hard she’d dislodged some of the sensors taped to my chest, before turning on me, furious.

‘Jesus, David, look at you! I can’t turn my back for five minutes, can I?’

Then she’d hugged me again.

Jason had been even more direct when he and Anja visited. ‘You’re a trouble magnet, that’s your trouble. It’s uncanny.’

I’d undergone a variety of tests, X-rays and scans to determine if Lola’s treatment had caused any lasting complications. The chief worry was my heart, which had been dangerously arrhythmic by the time I’d been found. There was some concern about damage to its muscles, and whether the electrical current had permanently disrupted their normal rhythm. I’d been seen by a cardiologist who explained that, while there was no immediate crisis, he wanted to see me again in a few weeks.

‘All in all, you were very lucky,’ he said.

People kept telling me that.

Piece by piece, I was able to form a clearer picture of what had happened. The first surprise was hearing that Lola was still alive. I’d assumed the fall down the cellar steps would have been fatal for someone her age, but she’d survived with contusions, a broken hip and minor fractures.

‘She looked better than you did,’ Whelan told me during his and Ward’s second visit. ‘What the hell were you thinking, going there?’

Not that an old woman would try to kill me, that was for sure. But even before I’d texted Whelan to check Gary Lennox’s dental records, the DI was already forming his own suspicions about Lola and her son. After Ward’s rescue from the tunnel, he began to think how the morgue would have made a convenient back door for anyone wanting to come and go from St Jude’s without being seen.

‘The CCTV cameras at the main entrance around the front were dummies, but most people wouldn’t know that,’ he said. ‘There weren’t any by the morgue, so until it was demolished anyone who knew about the tunnel could get into the hospital that way. I remembered you saying you’d seen Lennox’s mother in the woods, so then I got to thinking how that was the quickest route from their house to the morgue.’

That was why he’d originally wanted to meet me, Whelan explained, so I could show him whereabouts in the woods I’d seen Lola. Then he’d received my text and realized we might have been approaching this from completely the wrong angle. And that the remains in the boiler might not be another victim’s after all.

‘There had to be a reason you wanted me to check Gary Lennox’s dental records, and since I’d just told you the denture couldn’t be Wayne Booth’s it didn’t take a genius to guess why,’ Whelan said. ‘When you didn’t answer your phone I’d a nasty feeling you might have gone back to Lola’s, playing the Good Samaritan again.’

‘It’s a good job he did,’ Ward told me, pointedly. ‘You wouldn’t be here if he’d waited to check the dental records first.’

I was uncomfortably aware of that already. ‘I’m glad he didn’t.’

Whelan tried to shrug it off. ‘I just didn’t want you to balls things up before we’d had a chance to question her. I was already starting to think the man in the bed wasn’t her son, and by then I had a pretty good idea who he might be.’

‘Wayne Booth,’ I said.

‘Wayne Booth,’ Ward agreed.

Lola had found out where Booth lived from Darren Crossly and Maria de Souza, Ward explained. She’d intended to torture and entomb him at St Jude’s as well, but when Gary died she’d had to change her plans.

‘She went to his flat, stunned him and then pushed him back to her house in an old wheelchair,’ Ward said, sounding almost impressed. ‘Five miles, with the picana tucked under a blanket so she could knock him out again when she needed to. Her neighbour even saw her taking him into the house, but she was new and just assumed it was Lola’s son. Like the rest of us.’

There was a note of self-recrimination in her voice.

‘So it was the electric shocks that did the damage to Booth?’ The skin around my own burns seemed to twitch as I asked the question.

Ward nodded. ‘God knows how many the poor sod must have had by the time we took him away. The doctors don’t know how he survived all this time, so I suppose Lola’s nursing experience came in useful for something. She wanted him alive so she could keep on punishing him. Easier than blaming herself, I suppose.’

Don’t take him as well! He’s all I’ve got left! Not the plea of an overly protective mother, as we’d thought, but an embittered torturer deprived of her victim. The cabinet of photographs facing the bed hadn’t just looked like a shrine. It had been one.

‘Is Booth able to communicate at all?’ I asked.

‘He can respond to yes/no questions with nods and hand movements. The therapists are working on getting him to use a keypad, although that’s going to take time. But Lola’s told us most of it herself.’

‘She’s confessed?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a confession, exactly, I just don’t think she cares any more. She knows there’s no point denying anything now, and in between the verbal abuse I think she enjoys rubbing our faces in it.’

They’d told me that the fingerprints from the wall and the paint tins at St Jude’s had matched ones on Gary Lennox’s personal belongings. The real Gary Lennox, that was, not Wayne Booth. It was clear now why the fingerprints of the bedridden man hadn’t matched those found at the crime scene. At the time that had been taken as proof that Lola’s son was innocent. It never occurred to anyone that the man in the bed might be someone else.

‘Has she said anything about how her son died?’ I asked. From what Lola had told me, it had sounded like the shock of seeing Christine Gorski walking in on them had brought on a cardiac arrest.

Ward gave a grim smile. ‘She was less talkative about that, but it came out in the end. She killed him.’

‘She what?’

‘Not intentionally. She lost her temper when he tried to protect Christine Gorski. She’d already stunned her once, and when Gary tried to stop her doing it again she used the picana on him. We know he had a weak heart, so maybe that’s what happened to his father as well.’

A heart condition, inherited or otherwise, wouldn’t have been helped by carrying building supplies all the way up to the top floor of St Jude’s. And as a reluctant partner to his mother’s crimes, her son would have been under enormous physical and emotional stress already.

‘You were right about Christine’s waters breaking,’ Ward added, her tone studiedly neutral. ‘She came round and tried to get away while Lola was trying to revive Gary, but only made it as far as the loft. Lola followed the splashes on the floor, and when she realized where the girl had gone she just bolted the door and left her in there.’

I didn’t know which was worse, the fact that Lola had killed her own son or the callous way she’d delivered an electric shock to a pregnant young woman. And then left her to die in the loft of a derelict building.

‘Some nurse,’ Whelan said, in disgust. ‘She couldn’t carry his body, so she used an old wheelchair she’d found lying about to get him as far as the stairs. Then she tipped and dragged him the rest of the way to the basement.’

Ward took up the story again. ‘We think that’s why the ribs we found in the boiler were broken, and probably the denture as well. The plan was to take him out through the morgue, but she couldn’t get the chair up the steps at the other end. So then she hit on the idea of cremating him in the boiler.’

Christ. I thought about Lola pushing her son’s body through the darkened hospital, hearing bones and teeth snap as his dead weight thumped down every stair. I couldn’t just leave him there, could I, my lovely lad? Not in that place, not with them!

‘The only thing she won’t tell us is what she did with the remains afterwards,’ Ward continued. ‘We know she made several trips back to the boiler room for them, although I’m not convinced that wasn’t more to get rid of the evidence than sentiment. She admits she couldn’t get everything out before the morgue was demolished, but she clams up when we ask what she’s done with the bones she took away. Says we’ve taken enough from her already. We haven’t found anything at the house, so I’m going to have the cadaver dog search it.’

‘When?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Forget it. You’ll have to sit this one out. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know if we find anything.’

I was in no position to argue. But there was one subject that still hadn’t been mentioned. Although I could understand Ward’s reluctance, it had to be aired sooner or later.

‘What about Jessop?’ I asked.

Whelan pursed his lips and looked down at the floor. Ward folded her hands on her lap, as though to centre herself.

‘We got that wrong,’ she admitted. ‘Jessop was hiding something, but it wasn’t what we thought. One of his employees came forward after he blew up St Jude’s. Neil Wesley. Only nineteen, but he claims he found Christine Gorski’s body four months ago, when he went in the loft to do a routine check. Jessop didn’t want any more delays, so he made Wesley help him move it. They wrapped her body up in the tarpaulin and then carried it further into the loft where it would be harder to find.’

‘Didn’t do him much good,’ Whelan said harshly. ‘If he’d reported it straight away none of this would’ve happened. We’d have thought she was the only victim, and chances are St Jude’s would have been torn down months ago. We’d never have known about the others.’

I put my head back on the pillow, feeling drained. Jessop had paid a high cost for his mistake. So had a lot of other people. ‘Why didn’t this Wesley say something sooner?’

‘He was too scared,’ Ward said. ‘He thought Jessop would report it when he told him, but he threw a fit instead. Said it was only some down-and-out who nobody’d miss, and that if Wesley told anyone he’d sack him and make sure he got the blame. It’s been playing on the poor kid’s conscience ever since. You saw him yourself, hanging round the main gates, trying to pluck up courage to come forward.’

It took me a moment to realize what she meant. The young man who’d stepped out in front of my car, distracted by what was going on at St Jude’s, and who I’d later seen at the bus stop outside the entrance. ‘That was Neil Wesley?’

Ward gave a token smile, although her heart wasn’t in it. ‘PC Hendricks told us about it. She’s quite a fan of yours after you offered to swap yourself as a hostage.’

It was an attempt to move the conversation on to a lighter track. But there was still too much about this I didn’t understand.

‘Did Jessop say anything when you were with him in St Jude’s?’ I asked. ‘Any sort of explanation?’

‘He was a self-pitying drunk who’d made a mess of his life and only got himself to blame!’ Whelan snapped with sudden heat. ‘If he’d had any decency, he’d have topped himself quietly rather than making a big show of it!’

‘All right, Jack,’ Ward told him quietly. She sighed. ‘He didn’t say very much, no. But if he’d been the sadistic killer we thought, he wouldn’t have just let me go. And I’m not even certain he meant to blow up St Jude’s anyway. The state he was in at the end, I don’t think he knew what he was doing. It could have been accidental.’

‘I’d save your sympathy, ma’am. He still nearly killed you,’ Whelan said stubbornly. ‘He didn’t give you enough time to get out. If not for that tunnel… Well.’

He stopped, reddening. But for once we were in agreement. ‘Even if Jessop didn’t kill the people at St Jude’s, he deliberately drove the car at Adam Oduya,’ I said, aware my speech was starting to slur with fatigue. ‘And it won’t be much consolation for Daniel Mears to know he was just an accident.’

The atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. I looked at them, my tiredness dropping away.

‘What’s wrong?’

Ward turned to Whelan. ‘Can you give us a minute, Jack?’

‘You sure, ma’am?’

She nodded. ‘Wait for me outside.’

‘Sure about what?’ I asked her as Whelan left the hospital room. ‘What is it?’

‘I didn’t want to tell you yet, but we’ve found the car used in the hit-and-run. At the bottom of a disused quarry off the M20. It looks like it was stolen, and the driver either lost control or else deliberately drove through the fencing and over the edge. Either way, she must have died immediately.’

My mouth was dry. ‘She?’

Ward was looking at me with an odd expression.

‘It was Grace Strachan.’