Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery(12)

Ryan huffed out a half-laugh.

“No, you don’t.”

“You think I can’t remember?” There was a layer of anger underneath the gentle tone, an undercurrent of frustration. “I’ve got my memories. Every one of us took memories home with us and woke up with them in the morning. That last day –”

“Frank.” Ryan held up a hand, in protest.

“That last day,” Phillips persevered, “I’ll take with me ‘til I die. Seeing you there like that, dealing with all of it … and then the aftermath,” Phillips shook his head, tried to find the words. “I never told you I was proud.”

Ryan looked down at his feet, eyes burning.

“I was proud that you stopped.”

The breath shuddered out of his body, as memories flooded in. Ryan, covered in his sister’s blood and his own, using his fists on the man who had killed her.

“I wanted to end the man who ended her.”

“I know,” Phillips agreed, looking out across the car park at the people coming and going. “But you didn’t.”

“It was you who stopped me.”

Phillips shook his head.

“There isn’t a person alive who could have stopped you, unless you’d wanted to.”

Ryan looked up again.

“Never thought of that, did you? You stopped yourself. You brought him in, even though everything inside you wanted to finish him, to take your revenge or whatever you want to call it. You did the right thing.”

They were both silent for a few minutes.

“He’ll rot in prison. That has to be enough.”

Phillips nodded. Doctor Keir Edwards, the man known in the media as The Hacker of the North or Doctor Death, depending on the tabloid, would spend the rest of his life in HMP Frankland, the maximum security prison for Category A criminals in the nearby city of Durham. Last summer, after a killing spree during which five young, attractive women had been found dismembered in their own homes, he had taken his final victim: Natalie Finley-Ryan. He had stalked her, tortured her and finally killed her to punish the detective who had the temerity to try to stop him.

Ryan had been too late to save his sister and Phillips knew that would haunt him for the rest of his days.

“We don’t know for sure that Amy Llewellyn is one of his tally,” Phillips said reasonably.

“He had photographs of her in his private stash,” Ryan retorted. “We always assumed that he had killed her.”

“He never admitted to it. He was usually one for crowing loudly about the women he’d killed.”

That was true, Ryan thought.

“He never explained how he came by the photographs and he never admitted to having had a relationship with her. He clammed up.”

There had been a pile of photographs, Ryan remembered belatedly, found in a private album at Edwards’ home. He couldn’t understand how he had forgotten Amy’s name, or her face, when he could recall the detail of Keir Edwards’ police statements by rote.

Indeed, Ryan made it his business to know everything there was to know about Keir Edwards; his age, his habits, how many sheets of toilet roll he used on a weekly basis in his two-by-four cell. Edwards wouldn’t so much as fart without him knowing about it, for the rest of his miserable life.

Yet, he didn’t know the answer to whether Edwards had killed the girl who was now reduced to little more than bone matter, lying in an impersonal room upstairs being examined by men and women in white coats.

Just as his sister had been.

He closed his eyes and Natalie’s face swam to the surface. His eyelids snapped open again and he groped around for something to take his mind away from the horror of remembering that last day. He caught sight of Phillips bravely sampling the gelatinous muck which passed for vending machine coffee and mustered a smile.

“Come on,” he said. “Time to visit Amy’s family.”



The Llewellyns lived in an immaculate, semi-detached house in an upmarket cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Newcastle. The gardens were tidy and the smart car on the driveway sparkled from a fresh coat of wax.

It was always the same, Ryan thought, as he followed Mrs Llewellyn into the spacious front room. Here, all was tidy too, not a speck of dust in sight. Everything was decorated in shades of cream and unimaginative prints hung above the feature fireplace and the white leather sofa. There was always a sixth sense, a premonition which all families of the missing felt when plain-clothed police officers walked the long journey towards their front door. They watched from behind half-closed curtains, unsure whether to answer the bell.

For Rose Llewellyn, the sound of that simple chime signalled an end to the interminable purgatory of hope and despair she had occupied for ten years. Not a day had gone by without her imagining that her daughter, Amy, would suddenly return to them after a terrible incident. Until the moment that Ryan rang the doorbell, Rose had filled the long hours obsessively cleaning every surface and orifice of her home. Just recently, she had taken to trimming the lawn with kitchen scissors.