Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery(93)

Drawing himself tall, he brushed self-doubt aside. Doctor Jeffrey M. Pinter had a lot to recommend himself and she was sure to realise that. Women appreciated a man of experience, or so the women’s magazines told him.

‘Is your man a dish, or a dud?’ That was how one such rag had posed the question.

Jeffrey regarded himself in the elevator mirrors as it transported him from the basement mortuary of the hospital and out into the world once more.

Dish, he decided.

Emerging from the automatic doors at the entrance to the imposing building, impervious to the people who swarmed around him, he felt like a butterfly. A big, beautiful creature, ready to capture the attention of the world and one person in particular.



Anna watched Ryan leave with a gaggle of police staff in tow. He had another cloak on now, she thought. He was not only seeking out a man, he was seeking to avenge, which was something far greater. Watching him from the side line, she could not help but feel like a spare part, although she did not envy him his job, nor the faces of the dead who haunted him.

Thinking herself alone, she huffed out a breath and plonked down into Ryan’s desk chair, jiggling her knees and wondering whether it would be worth trying to do some work. The soft ‘tap’ of a keyboard sounded from across the room and with a start of surprise, she realised that Faulkner was still seated at his desk on the far side of the Incident Room. She wasn’t the only one who remained on the outskirts, while the cool kids went to play cops and robbers.

“Tom? Sorry, I didn’t realise you were still here,” she said in friendly tones. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Faulkner looked up slowly, his unremarkable brown eyes squinting at her from behind thick glasses. His fingers halted on the keyboard and he rubbed at them to clear his vision.

“Hi, Anna,” he said, a bit tiredly. “No, I don’t think there’s anything I can let you do without proper authorisation, much as I’d appreciate the help.”

Anna nodded her understanding and swung the desk chair from side-to-side.

“You look a bit worse for wear, hope you don’t mind me saying.”

Faulkner had to laugh.

“Believe me, I feel it.”

“It’s been a strenuous few days.”

“It’s been a strenuous few years,” he corrected her, giving up on the computer to rest his head in his hands for a moment.

Anna frowned and rose to walk across to him.

“At the risk of sounding like a broken record … anything I can do?”

Faulkner knew that she wasn’t talking about paperwork now. Still, he shook his head. It was too late, he thought, much too late for anything to be done.



Keir Edwards couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It ate away at him, roaming in obsessive circles through his conscious mind until he could do nothing except try to understand what had escaped him.

The feeling had begun after Ruth’s departure, he knew that much. That narrowed the window quite a bit. Initially, he put the wild, compulsive fantasies down to the fact that he had not seen a live woman in far too long. Even longer yet since he had seen a dead one, and Ruth had been very much to his taste, with her pale skin, rosy cheeks, bright green eyes and dark hair that rippled over one shoulder to tease him. She might have been a little older than his usual, but hey, he couldn’t afford to be picky. As soon as he had seen her, sitting there in the poky conference room, he had begun to calculate the ways in which he could tempt her to visit again. After that, how he could begin to use her as a contraband mule, bringing him all those little extra luxuries he missed in his daily life. All the while, he had allowed himself the freedom to imagine all the ways he could kill her.

Freedom of thought was a marvellous thing.

Yet, these thoughts did not cheer him. Why? What was different?

Rising, he moved to the single drawer in the small wooden wardrobe and retrieved a stack of envelopes. He leafed through them until he found the one he was looking for.

Ruth Grant.

He re-read the letters he had received from her, the last one having arrived over three months ago. That was unusual. Normally, his adoring fans contacted him on a more regular basis. As he read the untidy, child-like writing, he could not help but notice the sloppy grammar and poor sentence structure.

It didn’t fit the woman he had met earlier that day. She had been polished and seemingly well educated.

A slow feeling began to spread in his gut and his lips trembled. Roused, he grabbed at the papers and began to tear through them, searching for the newspaper cuttings he kept in a large brown A4 envelope.

His breathing was harsh in the quiet cell as he scanned the black and white images, his dark eyes passing over Ryan’s image more than once, often set against his own on a full page spread with the faces of the women he had killed lined up below, in chronological order.