Shaun Hutson - Captives

He'd been working in a car factory when a Japanese delegation had visited one day back in 1958.

Tom had managed to kill two of them and blind another with a soldering iron before he was stopped.

He'd been committed. He was the asylum's oldest patient.

Dexter exchanged a few words with him, then watched as he bowed ceremoniously when the two doctors left.

That left the last cell.

'I can check it if you like,' Colston said quietly.

Dexter thought a moment and shook his head. He took a step towards the final door, fumbling with his keys, his mouth dry. He didn't look through the observation slot first.

As he lifted the key to the lock, his hand was shaking.

FIFTEEN

The lift doors slid open with a muted whirr and DI Frank Gregson stepped out into the corridor.

He moved quickly but unhurriedly, his footsteps rattling out a tempo in the quiet corridor. At such a late hour every noise seemed amplified, too. Not that New Scotland Yard was run by the clock. Crime and criminals didn't hold regular hours, murderers didn't clock on and off.

By God, my dear Holmes, I should say not.

Gregson found the door to the pathology labs locked, as he'd expected, but he had a key and let himself in, walking through the outer lab into the autopsy room itself. He paused in the doorway, recoiling slightly from the pungent odour of chemicals and death that greeted him like a long-lost friend. Reaching round he slapped at the panel of switches. Seconds later, the room was bathed in cold white light as the banks of fluorescents in the ceiling cast their luminosity over the dissecting tables. The light was reflected in their polished, stainless steel surfaces and Gregson caught a glimpse of his own distorted image in one as he passed.

The tables were empty, their occupants removed and stored in the cabinets that lined the walls. So many puzzles lay within those boxes. So many unanswered questions.

Gregson stood looking at them for a moment, the silence inside the lab quite overpowering. It was like a living organism, so complete it was almost palpable. It surrounded him. He felt as if it were penetrating his very pores, seeping into his bloodstream and circulating around his body.

He could hear the thud of his own heart in the solitude and its pace quickened as he found the locker he sought. He slid it out.

The body was covered by the familiar plastic sheet and the DI pulled it back to reveal the charred corpse beneath.

He stood gazing, for what seemed like an eternity, at the crushed skull, the wisps of hair that still clung to the blackened remains of the scalp. The scorched bones still covered, in places, by burned flesh.

He reached out and touched what was left of the face.

A piece of black flesh came away on his fingertip. He looked at it for a moment then rubbed it away between his index finger and thumb. It crumbled like ash.

He looked at the body once more, his forehead deeply lined.

When he spoke, his gaze never leaving the charred body, his words echoed around the silent laboratory:

'Who are you?'

SIXTEEN

15 APRIL 1977

The new patient was due to arrive in a week.

At present he was still under guard inside Wandsworth, but according to the letters Dexter held in his hand - one from the Governor of that prison, the other rubber-stamped by the Home Secretary - he was to be receiving into his care a man by the name of Howard Townly.

Townly had, over a period of two months, kidnapped, tortured and finally murdered two men and three women, all of whom he had picked up while they were hitching lifts. He had made home movies of their deaths, replaying the videos over and over again for his enjoyment.

Townly was thirty-six.

About the right age.

Dexter checked through his notes on the man and saw that he had been unmarried. He was an only child.

This looked hopeful.

His mother had given evidence on his behalf during the trial.

Dexter shook his head.

No good.

Dexter sat back in his seat, massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He had the psychological evaluation of Townly before him, too. The police psychiatrist who had interviewed him had noted that the man had tendencies towards schizophrenia, paranoid delusions and sociopathic leanings. A hopeless case? That was probably the reason he was being sent to Bishopsgate. The institution, which Dexter had been in charge of for the past eleven years, had over three hundred patients within its antiquated walls. They ranged from those who visited on a daily basis through to the voluntarily committed, graduating to the criminally insane. In fact almost a third of the inmates were of that latter category. Prisons, unable to cope with them, shunted them off to Bishopsgate, Broadmoor or Rampton. Dexter often wondered if this was a genuine attempt to put them in the hands of those better equipped to deal with their mental instability or merely a way of relieving the pressure on an already overcrowded prison system which sometimes packed men three to a cell.

Perhaps the very fact that these men were insane had ensured they at least enjoyed a little more privacy for the period of their incarceration.

Insane.

It was a word he heard nearly every working day. One which he had been hearing for as long as he could remember in connection with the wildly aberrant behaviour and attitudes of some of his wards. What the hell was insanity? And who had the right to define it as such?

Dexter had come to see, with some individuals he'd treated, that insanity was not a disintegration of the mind but rather a re-building. Madness was sometimes displayed in a startling clarity of thought which apparently 'normal' mortals could never hope to understand. There was a relentless logicality to the way a madman thought. That madness sometimes proved to be so single-minded, so obsessively consuming, that Dexter found himself not fearing or hating these murderers he had charge of but admiring them.

Ted Bundy, an American mass-murderer convicted of killing more than twenty young women, was once quoted as saying 'What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?' When war, usually started and controlled by supposedly sane men, took the lives of millions, Dexter found it easy to subscribe to Bundy's observation. Who was madder, the solitary individual who killed a dozen for his own reasons? Or the soldier, trained to kill hundreds in the name of a cause he could not even understand?

His philosophical musings were interrupted by a knock on his office door.

'Come in,' he called.

Colston practically stumbled in, his face drained of colour.

'What's wrong?' Dexter asked, noticing his colleague's expression.

'One of the patients,' Colston said agitatedly. 'You must come now.'

'Is it that important?'

'It's in Ward 5.'

Dexter was on his feet in a second. He and Colston moved with great haste along the corridors, Dexter almost breaking into a run as they drew closer. His mind was in turmoil, ideas and visions flooding through it like a raging torrent through a broken dam. He didn't even think to ask Colston what had happened.

Ward 5.

He swallowed hard.

They turned a corner and came upon two interns standing beside a heavy steel door. It was firmly locked and secured.

The entrance to Ward 5.

The ward was in the East Wing of the institution and accessible only to half a dozen interns, Colston and Dexter himself. The two doctors watched as one of the interns, Baker, unlocked the door and stepped back to allow them through. He and another man called Bradley followed.

'Where?' Dexter said. 'Which cell?'

Colston led him past four doors, grey-painted and nondescript but for an observation slot and a small square hatch for pushing food through. Colston paused at the fifth and nodded towards Bradley, who unlocked the door and stepped back, allowing Dexter to enter the room.