House of the Dead, page 14
“How can you be so sure?” Ram unlocked the car and they both got in.
“I think the man we’re looking for has survived some sort of tragedy. The police failed him in some way. He’s lashing out, but part of him is distraught over what happened. I think Thomas Rayburn saw that side of him that day on the cliff.”
“Shame he didn’t go to therapy instead of taking it out on innocent people.”
Tony nodded. “And now he’s spiralling.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that very soon, he’s going to lash out again.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Dani parked outside her cottage, followed closely by Ryan in his Aston Martin.
As she got out of the Land Rover, she cast a wary glance at the road and the moors. There were no unknown vehicles sitting in wait. No strangers lurking on the moors near her home.
Ryan climbed out of his sports car and made the same visual checks. Seemingly satisfied, he turned to Dani and said, “All quiet.”
Dani slid the key into the front door. Barney and Jack were going crazy inside.
“They’re not going to attack me, are they?” Ryan said eyeing the door warily.
It was the first time Dani had seen him be remotely scared of anything. “You’ll be fine. You’re with me, so they know you’re friendly.”
She opened the door and the dogs bounded out, tails wagging. They rushed around Ryan in a tight circle, sniffing his legs.
“See?” Dani said. “They like you.”
He nodded and followed her inside. The dogs remained close to him.
“What would they do if a stranger got into the house?” he asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know. They bark at the postman, and anyone who comes to the door who they don’t recognise, but I don’t think they’d attack anybody. They’re too friendly.”
“Oh.” Ryan seemed disappointed. “I was hoping they’d be a bit more vicious. It’d be an extra layer of protection.”
“Maybe they’d attack someone if they broke in,” she said. “Or if I was in danger. I’m sure they’d attack someone who was hurting me.”
He nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. The dogs were currently wheeling around him, tails thumping on the floor.
“Do you want something to eat?” She opened the fridge, suddenly aware of how little she had in it. “Ready meal?”
“Excellent.”
She inspected the labels. “Lasagne, spaghetti bolognese, or cottage pie?”
“Cottage pie sounds great. Thanks.”
She put the pie in the microwave and chose a lasagne for herself.
“I’ll make a brew,” Ryan said.
He filled the kettle at the sink and turned it on. He took two mugs from the mug tree on the counter and opened the cupboard directly above the kettle, guessing correctly where Dani kept the tea bags.
Dani watched him while she waited by the microwave. It was strange to have a man in her kitchen, and making tea, no less. The scene of shared domesticity contrasted so starkly with her usual solitary lifestyle that she felt a sudden sting of loneliness.
The microwave pinged and she took the cottage pie out, using the oven gloves to slide the hot plastic tray onto the counter before putting the lasagne in to heat up.
She squeezed past Ryan and fed the dogs.
While Barney and Jack tucked in, the microwave pinged again. Ryan opened it and used the oven gloves to place the lasagne next to the cottage pie on the counter.
Dani took two plates down from the cupboard and slid the trays onto them. She got a couple of forks from the cutlery drawer and handed one to Ryan, along with a teaspoon.
He used the spoon to take the tea bags out of the mugs and toss them into the bin.
Dani went to the fridge and got the milk. “Sugars in that cupboard there,” she said, pointing. She knew he took two sugars in his tea.
When the drinks were made and the cellophane had been removed from the meals, they sat at the small pine table in the corner of the kitchen and ate.
“How are you feeling?” Ryan asked.
“I’m still in shock, I suppose.” She felt cold and hollow, as if someone had scooped her insides out with a spoon, leaving only a shell of who she had once been.
Ryan shovelled a forkful of cottage pie into his mouth. “We won’t let him get to you, guv.”
She nodded but said nothing. They both knew the GameMaster had seemingly limitless resources. So far, he’d done everything his way. The game had played out exactly as he’d wanted it to. It would be foolish to think things were going to change now.
Everything that was happening right now had been planned by the GameMaster for years. Even though everyone had been unaware of his existence, he’d been working behind the scenes to set everything up just as he’d wanted.
He’d planned Greg’s abduction and murder two years ago. Had he been arranging a similar fate for Dani for all these years?
If so, he’d probably accounted for a police security detail. He had a way around it.
“He doesn’t care that you’re watching me,” she said to Ryan. “If he did, he wouldn’t have made it obvious that I’m a target by calling me.”
“Maybe he slipped up by doing that. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. He might have scuppered his own plans by putting us on high alert.”
She shook her head and took a bite of the lasagne. “I don’t think so. I think he doesn’t care that there’s a security detail watching me because he has a way around it.”
“Now that’s just paranoid.”
“I don’t think so. You can’t watch me forever. Maybe he’ll wait until the security is called off, and come for me then. He’s been planning this for years, so a few extra weeks is nothing to him.”
“I don’t think he’s going to wait weeks. He struck fast and has been building up momentum. He doesn’t want to lose that.”
“You sound like Tony. Getting into the mind of the killer. It’s a useful technique.”
He shrugged. “Until it isn’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, look what happened to the doc. He delved too far into the criminal mind and almost didn’t make it back.”
“He seems okay now.”
“Yeah.” He concentrated on eating his meal.
She watched him, trying to figure him out. Was he saying he didn’t approve of Tony’s methods, or was there more to this?
“Tony told me you helped him when he was having a panic attack.”
“Panic attack? I don’t remember that.”
“Maybe not panic. But he was having an anxiety attack.”
“Lots of people don’t like hospitals.”
“So, you do know what I’m talking about.”
Ryan shrugged. “He was having problems going inside the hospital in Whitby, so I talked to him. Distracted him. That’s all.”
“Tony told me it was as if you knew about his problem, even though he hadn’t told anyone.”
He didn’t answer.
“Ryan, did you know?”
He finished the cottage pie and looked at her earnestly. “How could I know that?”
“That’s what I’m asking. Have you read files on us? Does the government have a file on me? Are you reporting back to them to add more details?”
He looked shocked. “No, not at all. That really is paranoia. The government doesn’t have secret files on everyone. If they do, I certainly haven’t seen them.”
“But you knew about Tony’s issue with hospitals.”
He sighed. “Yes, I knew.”
“How?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he said, attempting to lighten the atmosphere.
“Ryan, you’re not spying on us, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I swear.”
“That’s the only way you could know about Tony, as far as I can see.”
He paused for a few seconds, seemingly mulling over something. Finally, he said, “All right. I’ll tell you. But it stays between us, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, intrigued.
“A few years ago, the Canadian and British governments jointly ran a survival training exercise for military personnel in the Canadian wilderness. I was one of the staff, teaching survival techniques and making sure none of the recruits got lost in the wilds.
“Two weeks in, I got a call on the satellite phone from my superiors at Thames House. They wanted me to check on a British national who was in Canada helping the police with a serial killer case.”
“Tony,” Dani guessed.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Tony. I didn’t know who he was at the time, of course. Just that he was a British psychologist helping the Canadian police and the powers-that-be in London were interested in him and his work.”
“MI5 was interested in Tony? Why?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” he said. “I did as I was asked. I came out of the wilderness, bought some civvy clothes and hired a car. I drove down to Lakeshore, a small town in the area where Tony and the Canadian police were working, and I watched them while they tried to solve the case.”
“I still don’t understand why MI5 was so interested in Tony.”
“Neither did I, at first. Then I found out from a friend in Thames House that it was because they were considering Tony for a case they were working on. A serial killer case.”
“So, they wanted to see how well he did with the Lake Erie Ripper before they hired him.”
“Yeah. They used the Lake Erie case as a kind of audition. What better way to see if Tony was up to the job than watch him in action?”
“And you were the one watching him and reporting back to your superiors.”
Ryan nodded. “At first, it looked like Tony and the police were getting nowhere fast. Girls were still vanishing. Bodies were still turning up. It didn’t look like the Ripper would ever be caught. The guys back in London were swiftly coming to the conclusion that Tony wasn’t up to the job. They were about to pull me off the case when Tony broke the case.”
“He recognised the Ripper, right?” She’d read about the case in the papers at the time, and had revisited the articles after meeting Tony.
“Yeah. All that time when nothing seemed to be happening and the police were getting nowhere, Tony was building up a psychological profile of the Ripper in his head. He was slowly gathering clues about who this guy was. And when he happened to bump into Solomon Gantz, he recognised him immediately.”
“Were you there the night Tony went into the Ripper’s house?”
“No. I’d been told to stop my surveillance and get ready to head north again. I was in my hotel room when I heard what had happened. I got over there as quickly as I could, posing as a reporter. Tony wasn’t in a good way. He’d been physically injured. While I watched him being driven away in an ambulance, I called Thames House and asked them what I should do next.”
“I bet they couldn’t wait to get their hands on him.”
“At first, yeah. Then it became obvious that Tony’s wounds weren’t only physical. He had mental scars, as well. As soon as my bosses became aware that he’d been taken to a mental health facility, they wanted nothing more to do with him. They told me to return to the wilderness survival course and forget all about the side mission to Lakeshore.”
“That’s terrible,” Dani said. “They abandoned him because he was no longer useful to them.”
“That’s how they work. Anyway, I went back to the wilderness but I couldn’t stop thinking about Tony. He’d come all the way to this country to help the police catch a murderer and now, he’d been abandoned. Lost in the system. It didn’t sit right with me.”
“Did you do anything about it?”
“When the course was finished, I took some leave and tracked him down. He was in a psychiatric unit near Toronto. I pretended to be his brother so I could get inside and see him. Talk to the doctors.”
“You visited him? Didn’t they check who you were?”
“I’ve worked under aliases before. Pretending to be a relative to get inside a hospital was child’s play.”
“So, you saw Tony?”
Ryan nodded. “He was heavily sedated, so the doctors didn’t think it was strange that he didn’t recognise me. I just wanted to check that he was okay. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being forgotten by everyone, so far away from home.”
Dani scrutinised Ryan’s face closely. He was staring down at the tabletop, but she could tell his thoughts were a million miles away.
“Is that because of something that happened to you?” she guessed out loud.
“Not me. My little brother Dave. He joined the army when he was eighteen. Following in my footsteps. He was on a mission in Kandahar when his squad was captured. We all thought he was dead until an American Navy Seal team broke him and some other soldiers out of a prison compound a year later. He was never the same after that. He told me that the only thing that kept him going was knowing that I was looking for him.”
He looked up at Dani with despair in his eyes. “But I wasn’t. I’d been told he was dead. Our mum and dad buried an empty coffin and tried to move on. We abandoned him. He needed us, but we didn’t even know it.”
“And that’s why you wanted to make sure Tony was okay?” She’d never seen this side of Ryan before—hadn’t even known he had a brother.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t abandon him the way I’d abandoned Dave.”
“So, that’s how you knew about his fear of hospitals. The doctors at the psychiatric unit told you.”
He nodded. “He had a bad time in those places. The drugs he was on, combined with the mental trauma he’d suffered, didn’t do him any favours. He was having hallucinations, paranoid delusions, you name it. During one of his more lucid moments, he told the staff that being in a hospital was making him worse. So they moved him to a place called Mackenzie House, where patients had their own chalets in the grounds of a Victorian house. That’s where he completed his recovery.”
“And he had no idea that you’d visited him?”
“No. When they weaned him off the drugs and he became aware of his surroundings, I couldn’t visit anymore. He would have blown my cover. I kept in contact with the doctors by email, telling them I was back in England, but I stopped that, as well, when it became obvious Tony was going to make a full recovery.”
Dani thought about what she’d just been told and said, “So, it isn’t a coincidence that you were sent to join Murder Force. They sent you because you had previous dealings with Tony.”
“I don’t know how the high-ups at Thames House think, but it’s likely, yeah.”
“And what’s this case they wanted Tony to work on?”
He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “They think there’s a serial killer who’s been active in Britain for the past two decades. Doing his dirty work in the shadows. No signature. No tell-tale signs that the murders were committed by the same person. No connection between the victims. He’s working entirely behind the scenes unnoticed.”
“Except MI5 has noticed him.”
“Even they’re not sure. This guy—if he exists—is like a ghost.”
“Doesn’t sound like much to go on.”
“It isn’t, which is why they wanted Tony’s help.”
“Until he was injured by the Ripper.”
“Yeah.”
Dani drank her tea, mulling over this new information. When she put the mug down, she said, “Sounds like MI5 want to keep an eye on Murder Force in case we stumble across this serial killer.”
“Most likely.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m not. I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
She got up and cleared the table, throwing the ready meal containers in the bin and placing the empty mugs in the sink.
Politics and shady goings-on weren’t her thing. She preferred straightforward police work. The fact that Murder Force’s work was being scrutinised by a government agency left a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Battle has set up a rota,” Ryan said, looking at his phone. “There should be someone here in half an hour. Looks like I’ve got the 3:00 am shift.”
“You should get home. Get some sleep.”
“Not until the first shift starts. I’m not leaving you alone.”
She nodded and washed the mugs. Was this how her life was going to be until the GameMaster was stopped? Never being alone? Always being watched?
Perhaps sensing her unease, Ryan said, “I’m going to check around outside. Do you think you’ll be leaving the house at all?”
“I have to walk the dogs.”
“Okay. Just tell whichever officer is outside at the time. They’ll make sure you’re okay.”
“You mean they’ll follow me over the moors.” She couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice.
“We want to keep you safe, guv.” He went outside, closing the door behind him.
Barney sniffed at the door, as if he wanted to go with Ryan, and Jack whined.
“Don’t worry,” she told them. “We’ll go for a walk in a bit.”
She sat in the window seat and watched as Ryan made an inspection of the cottage before returning to his car. He saw her at the window and waved.
Dani waved back. Then she put the telly on and tried to forget about the threat hanging over her life.
A threat so serious that she had to be watched day and night.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Tony stared at the notebook on the desk in front of him. Despite Battle telling him he must have enough to make a profile by now, the notes offered scant information.
He closed his eyes and tried to put himself in the GameMaster’s shoes.
“I’m undoing the good deeds of the past,” he mumbled to himself. “I’m killing everyone whose life was saved by Hughes and Summers.”
“Is that a confession?” a voice said.
Tony opened his eyes to see Ian Radcliffe sitting at the desk opposite, a grin on his face.
“I’m just trying to get inside this guy’s head,” Tony explained.
“I think the man we’re looking for has survived some sort of tragedy. The police failed him in some way. He’s lashing out, but part of him is distraught over what happened. I think Thomas Rayburn saw that side of him that day on the cliff.”
“Shame he didn’t go to therapy instead of taking it out on innocent people.”
Tony nodded. “And now he’s spiralling.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that very soon, he’s going to lash out again.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Dani parked outside her cottage, followed closely by Ryan in his Aston Martin.
As she got out of the Land Rover, she cast a wary glance at the road and the moors. There were no unknown vehicles sitting in wait. No strangers lurking on the moors near her home.
Ryan climbed out of his sports car and made the same visual checks. Seemingly satisfied, he turned to Dani and said, “All quiet.”
Dani slid the key into the front door. Barney and Jack were going crazy inside.
“They’re not going to attack me, are they?” Ryan said eyeing the door warily.
It was the first time Dani had seen him be remotely scared of anything. “You’ll be fine. You’re with me, so they know you’re friendly.”
She opened the door and the dogs bounded out, tails wagging. They rushed around Ryan in a tight circle, sniffing his legs.
“See?” Dani said. “They like you.”
He nodded and followed her inside. The dogs remained close to him.
“What would they do if a stranger got into the house?” he asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know. They bark at the postman, and anyone who comes to the door who they don’t recognise, but I don’t think they’d attack anybody. They’re too friendly.”
“Oh.” Ryan seemed disappointed. “I was hoping they’d be a bit more vicious. It’d be an extra layer of protection.”
“Maybe they’d attack someone if they broke in,” she said. “Or if I was in danger. I’m sure they’d attack someone who was hurting me.”
He nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. The dogs were currently wheeling around him, tails thumping on the floor.
“Do you want something to eat?” She opened the fridge, suddenly aware of how little she had in it. “Ready meal?”
“Excellent.”
She inspected the labels. “Lasagne, spaghetti bolognese, or cottage pie?”
“Cottage pie sounds great. Thanks.”
She put the pie in the microwave and chose a lasagne for herself.
“I’ll make a brew,” Ryan said.
He filled the kettle at the sink and turned it on. He took two mugs from the mug tree on the counter and opened the cupboard directly above the kettle, guessing correctly where Dani kept the tea bags.
Dani watched him while she waited by the microwave. It was strange to have a man in her kitchen, and making tea, no less. The scene of shared domesticity contrasted so starkly with her usual solitary lifestyle that she felt a sudden sting of loneliness.
The microwave pinged and she took the cottage pie out, using the oven gloves to slide the hot plastic tray onto the counter before putting the lasagne in to heat up.
She squeezed past Ryan and fed the dogs.
While Barney and Jack tucked in, the microwave pinged again. Ryan opened it and used the oven gloves to place the lasagne next to the cottage pie on the counter.
Dani took two plates down from the cupboard and slid the trays onto them. She got a couple of forks from the cutlery drawer and handed one to Ryan, along with a teaspoon.
He used the spoon to take the tea bags out of the mugs and toss them into the bin.
Dani went to the fridge and got the milk. “Sugars in that cupboard there,” she said, pointing. She knew he took two sugars in his tea.
When the drinks were made and the cellophane had been removed from the meals, they sat at the small pine table in the corner of the kitchen and ate.
“How are you feeling?” Ryan asked.
“I’m still in shock, I suppose.” She felt cold and hollow, as if someone had scooped her insides out with a spoon, leaving only a shell of who she had once been.
Ryan shovelled a forkful of cottage pie into his mouth. “We won’t let him get to you, guv.”
She nodded but said nothing. They both knew the GameMaster had seemingly limitless resources. So far, he’d done everything his way. The game had played out exactly as he’d wanted it to. It would be foolish to think things were going to change now.
Everything that was happening right now had been planned by the GameMaster for years. Even though everyone had been unaware of his existence, he’d been working behind the scenes to set everything up just as he’d wanted.
He’d planned Greg’s abduction and murder two years ago. Had he been arranging a similar fate for Dani for all these years?
If so, he’d probably accounted for a police security detail. He had a way around it.
“He doesn’t care that you’re watching me,” she said to Ryan. “If he did, he wouldn’t have made it obvious that I’m a target by calling me.”
“Maybe he slipped up by doing that. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. He might have scuppered his own plans by putting us on high alert.”
She shook her head and took a bite of the lasagne. “I don’t think so. I think he doesn’t care that there’s a security detail watching me because he has a way around it.”
“Now that’s just paranoid.”
“I don’t think so. You can’t watch me forever. Maybe he’ll wait until the security is called off, and come for me then. He’s been planning this for years, so a few extra weeks is nothing to him.”
“I don’t think he’s going to wait weeks. He struck fast and has been building up momentum. He doesn’t want to lose that.”
“You sound like Tony. Getting into the mind of the killer. It’s a useful technique.”
He shrugged. “Until it isn’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, look what happened to the doc. He delved too far into the criminal mind and almost didn’t make it back.”
“He seems okay now.”
“Yeah.” He concentrated on eating his meal.
She watched him, trying to figure him out. Was he saying he didn’t approve of Tony’s methods, or was there more to this?
“Tony told me you helped him when he was having a panic attack.”
“Panic attack? I don’t remember that.”
“Maybe not panic. But he was having an anxiety attack.”
“Lots of people don’t like hospitals.”
“So, you do know what I’m talking about.”
Ryan shrugged. “He was having problems going inside the hospital in Whitby, so I talked to him. Distracted him. That’s all.”
“Tony told me it was as if you knew about his problem, even though he hadn’t told anyone.”
He didn’t answer.
“Ryan, did you know?”
He finished the cottage pie and looked at her earnestly. “How could I know that?”
“That’s what I’m asking. Have you read files on us? Does the government have a file on me? Are you reporting back to them to add more details?”
He looked shocked. “No, not at all. That really is paranoia. The government doesn’t have secret files on everyone. If they do, I certainly haven’t seen them.”
“But you knew about Tony’s issue with hospitals.”
He sighed. “Yes, I knew.”
“How?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he said, attempting to lighten the atmosphere.
“Ryan, you’re not spying on us, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I swear.”
“That’s the only way you could know about Tony, as far as I can see.”
He paused for a few seconds, seemingly mulling over something. Finally, he said, “All right. I’ll tell you. But it stays between us, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, intrigued.
“A few years ago, the Canadian and British governments jointly ran a survival training exercise for military personnel in the Canadian wilderness. I was one of the staff, teaching survival techniques and making sure none of the recruits got lost in the wilds.
“Two weeks in, I got a call on the satellite phone from my superiors at Thames House. They wanted me to check on a British national who was in Canada helping the police with a serial killer case.”
“Tony,” Dani guessed.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Tony. I didn’t know who he was at the time, of course. Just that he was a British psychologist helping the Canadian police and the powers-that-be in London were interested in him and his work.”
“MI5 was interested in Tony? Why?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” he said. “I did as I was asked. I came out of the wilderness, bought some civvy clothes and hired a car. I drove down to Lakeshore, a small town in the area where Tony and the Canadian police were working, and I watched them while they tried to solve the case.”
“I still don’t understand why MI5 was so interested in Tony.”
“Neither did I, at first. Then I found out from a friend in Thames House that it was because they were considering Tony for a case they were working on. A serial killer case.”
“So, they wanted to see how well he did with the Lake Erie Ripper before they hired him.”
“Yeah. They used the Lake Erie case as a kind of audition. What better way to see if Tony was up to the job than watch him in action?”
“And you were the one watching him and reporting back to your superiors.”
Ryan nodded. “At first, it looked like Tony and the police were getting nowhere fast. Girls were still vanishing. Bodies were still turning up. It didn’t look like the Ripper would ever be caught. The guys back in London were swiftly coming to the conclusion that Tony wasn’t up to the job. They were about to pull me off the case when Tony broke the case.”
“He recognised the Ripper, right?” She’d read about the case in the papers at the time, and had revisited the articles after meeting Tony.
“Yeah. All that time when nothing seemed to be happening and the police were getting nowhere, Tony was building up a psychological profile of the Ripper in his head. He was slowly gathering clues about who this guy was. And when he happened to bump into Solomon Gantz, he recognised him immediately.”
“Were you there the night Tony went into the Ripper’s house?”
“No. I’d been told to stop my surveillance and get ready to head north again. I was in my hotel room when I heard what had happened. I got over there as quickly as I could, posing as a reporter. Tony wasn’t in a good way. He’d been physically injured. While I watched him being driven away in an ambulance, I called Thames House and asked them what I should do next.”
“I bet they couldn’t wait to get their hands on him.”
“At first, yeah. Then it became obvious that Tony’s wounds weren’t only physical. He had mental scars, as well. As soon as my bosses became aware that he’d been taken to a mental health facility, they wanted nothing more to do with him. They told me to return to the wilderness survival course and forget all about the side mission to Lakeshore.”
“That’s terrible,” Dani said. “They abandoned him because he was no longer useful to them.”
“That’s how they work. Anyway, I went back to the wilderness but I couldn’t stop thinking about Tony. He’d come all the way to this country to help the police catch a murderer and now, he’d been abandoned. Lost in the system. It didn’t sit right with me.”
“Did you do anything about it?”
“When the course was finished, I took some leave and tracked him down. He was in a psychiatric unit near Toronto. I pretended to be his brother so I could get inside and see him. Talk to the doctors.”
“You visited him? Didn’t they check who you were?”
“I’ve worked under aliases before. Pretending to be a relative to get inside a hospital was child’s play.”
“So, you saw Tony?”
Ryan nodded. “He was heavily sedated, so the doctors didn’t think it was strange that he didn’t recognise me. I just wanted to check that he was okay. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being forgotten by everyone, so far away from home.”
Dani scrutinised Ryan’s face closely. He was staring down at the tabletop, but she could tell his thoughts were a million miles away.
“Is that because of something that happened to you?” she guessed out loud.
“Not me. My little brother Dave. He joined the army when he was eighteen. Following in my footsteps. He was on a mission in Kandahar when his squad was captured. We all thought he was dead until an American Navy Seal team broke him and some other soldiers out of a prison compound a year later. He was never the same after that. He told me that the only thing that kept him going was knowing that I was looking for him.”
He looked up at Dani with despair in his eyes. “But I wasn’t. I’d been told he was dead. Our mum and dad buried an empty coffin and tried to move on. We abandoned him. He needed us, but we didn’t even know it.”
“And that’s why you wanted to make sure Tony was okay?” She’d never seen this side of Ryan before—hadn’t even known he had a brother.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t abandon him the way I’d abandoned Dave.”
“So, that’s how you knew about his fear of hospitals. The doctors at the psychiatric unit told you.”
He nodded. “He had a bad time in those places. The drugs he was on, combined with the mental trauma he’d suffered, didn’t do him any favours. He was having hallucinations, paranoid delusions, you name it. During one of his more lucid moments, he told the staff that being in a hospital was making him worse. So they moved him to a place called Mackenzie House, where patients had their own chalets in the grounds of a Victorian house. That’s where he completed his recovery.”
“And he had no idea that you’d visited him?”
“No. When they weaned him off the drugs and he became aware of his surroundings, I couldn’t visit anymore. He would have blown my cover. I kept in contact with the doctors by email, telling them I was back in England, but I stopped that, as well, when it became obvious Tony was going to make a full recovery.”
Dani thought about what she’d just been told and said, “So, it isn’t a coincidence that you were sent to join Murder Force. They sent you because you had previous dealings with Tony.”
“I don’t know how the high-ups at Thames House think, but it’s likely, yeah.”
“And what’s this case they wanted Tony to work on?”
He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “They think there’s a serial killer who’s been active in Britain for the past two decades. Doing his dirty work in the shadows. No signature. No tell-tale signs that the murders were committed by the same person. No connection between the victims. He’s working entirely behind the scenes unnoticed.”
“Except MI5 has noticed him.”
“Even they’re not sure. This guy—if he exists—is like a ghost.”
“Doesn’t sound like much to go on.”
“It isn’t, which is why they wanted Tony’s help.”
“Until he was injured by the Ripper.”
“Yeah.”
Dani drank her tea, mulling over this new information. When she put the mug down, she said, “Sounds like MI5 want to keep an eye on Murder Force in case we stumble across this serial killer.”
“Most likely.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m not. I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
She got up and cleared the table, throwing the ready meal containers in the bin and placing the empty mugs in the sink.
Politics and shady goings-on weren’t her thing. She preferred straightforward police work. The fact that Murder Force’s work was being scrutinised by a government agency left a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Battle has set up a rota,” Ryan said, looking at his phone. “There should be someone here in half an hour. Looks like I’ve got the 3:00 am shift.”
“You should get home. Get some sleep.”
“Not until the first shift starts. I’m not leaving you alone.”
She nodded and washed the mugs. Was this how her life was going to be until the GameMaster was stopped? Never being alone? Always being watched?
Perhaps sensing her unease, Ryan said, “I’m going to check around outside. Do you think you’ll be leaving the house at all?”
“I have to walk the dogs.”
“Okay. Just tell whichever officer is outside at the time. They’ll make sure you’re okay.”
“You mean they’ll follow me over the moors.” She couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice.
“We want to keep you safe, guv.” He went outside, closing the door behind him.
Barney sniffed at the door, as if he wanted to go with Ryan, and Jack whined.
“Don’t worry,” she told them. “We’ll go for a walk in a bit.”
She sat in the window seat and watched as Ryan made an inspection of the cottage before returning to his car. He saw her at the window and waved.
Dani waved back. Then she put the telly on and tried to forget about the threat hanging over her life.
A threat so serious that she had to be watched day and night.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Tony stared at the notebook on the desk in front of him. Despite Battle telling him he must have enough to make a profile by now, the notes offered scant information.
He closed his eyes and tried to put himself in the GameMaster’s shoes.
“I’m undoing the good deeds of the past,” he mumbled to himself. “I’m killing everyone whose life was saved by Hughes and Summers.”
“Is that a confession?” a voice said.
Tony opened his eyes to see Ian Radcliffe sitting at the desk opposite, a grin on his face.
“I’m just trying to get inside this guy’s head,” Tony explained.
