Shaun Hutson: Captives

Once identification had been made it was the task of Gregson and Finn to find out why the man had run amok.

Finn took a drag on his cigarette and swept a hand through his thinning hair. He was twenty-nine, a year younger than his superior but his bald patch (which worried him) made him look older. Gregson was greying at the temples but, he told himself, the light hairs were the result of stress and not the onset of more mature years. Both men were thick-set, Finn perhaps a little slimmer, although his belly strained unattractively against his'shirt. He'd put the weight on a few months ago when he first tried to give up smoking.

Gregson opened the door of the pathology lab. The two men walked in.

'Where's Barclay?' the DI asked a man in a lab coat who was fiddling with a microscope slide.

The man nodded in the direction of a door marked PRIVATE: NO ENTRY BY UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL.

Both policemen made for the door. Gregson knocked and walked in without waiting for an invitation.

It was cold inside the pathology lab.

The cold and the smell were two of the things that always struck him. The acrid stench of death and sometimes decay. He had seen things inside this room that others only saw in nightmares. Call it an occupational hazard.

The chief pathologist, Phillip Barclay, had his back to the men as they entered. He glanced over his shoulder and nodded a greeting. Behind him banks of cold cabinets stood like huge filing drawers. A storehouse for sightless eyes. Freezers containing bodies or awaiting them. On one of six dissecting tables lay a body covered by a sheet. It was towards this table that the two policemen walked, their footsteps echoing even more loudly in the high-ceilinged room.

'If you've come looking for answers I'm going to have to disappoint you,' said Barclay, turning to face them.

Gregson looked challengingly at him, watching as the pathologist swung himself off the stool on which he'd been sitting. He walked across to the dissection tables and pulled the sheet back.

'Shit,' murmured Finn.

The shape beneath the sheet was little more than a blackened skeleton. Flesh, crisped and blackened by the fire, still clung to the bones but it looked more like a coating of thick ash ready to fall off at the slightest touch. A few teeth gleamed whitely through the blackened mess, but much of the skull had been pulverised on initial impact. Finn could see tiny fragments of brain, also blackened, welded to the inside of the shattered skull.

'I've examined what there is of him, obviously,' said Barclay, pulling the sheet further back and stepping back, arms folded. 'But it's going to be a long job identifying him.'

'What about dental records?' Gregson wanted to know, his eyes never leaving the corpse.

'As you can see, most of the head is gone. Obliterated. He hit the window head first when he went through it. Actually, that's the strange thing. From the extent of the damage to the head and upper body I'd say he was leaning forward when he hit that window.'

'Meaning?' Gregson wanted to know.

'He intended to do it. He was making sure he killed himself.'

'Looks like he did a pretty good job,' Finn remarked, sucking on his cigarette.

Barclay looked disdainfully at him.

'Don't smoke in here, please,' he said.

Finn looked aggrieved.

'Why? It's not going to bother him,' he said, nodding towards the corpse.

'It bothers me,' the pathologist said, watching as Finn nipped out the cigarette, burning his fingers in the process. He dropped the butt into his jacket pocket.

'You could identify him from dental records, though,' said Gregson.

'Like I said, it won't be easy. It'll take time but it's not impossible.' There was a long silence broken again by Barclay. 'How many did he kill?'

'Including the baby, five. Six more are in hospital, one on the critical list. It doesn't make sense,' Gregson observed, shaking his head. 'The whole thing was clumsy. He robbed a bank, but he left with no money and in a way which almost guaranteed he'd be caught. Then, when he could have escaped, he killed himself.'

'Bit elaborate for a suicide, isn't it?' Finn mused.

'Couldn't you take any prints from the guns?' Gregson asked.

Barclay shook his head. 'He was wearing gloves.'

The DI chuckled sardonically. 'Gloves but no mask. He didn't care if we got a look at his face but he didn't want us identifying him by his fingerprints.'

Again the silence.

'Can you get a report to me as soon as possible, Phil?' Gregson asked.

'I told you, it will take time.'

'Just do it,' the DI snapped.

'If he isn't in our records it's going to take even longer,' Barclay reminded the policeman.

'You're the expert,' Gregson remarked and headed for the door, followed by Finn.

As soon as they'd left the lab, the DS lit up another Marlboro. They headed back towards the lift.

'Why did he kill himself?' Finn muttered, sucking on the cigarette.

Gregson could only shake his head.

'Perhaps when we know who he is, we might know why!'

'You don't sound too hopeful.'

Gregson jabbed the Call button on the lift.

'You saw the body. Would you be?'

***

It was probably part of the motorbike.

Perhaps even a fragment of the shop floor. The dead man had certainly hit the floor hard enough. Barclay didn't rule out the possibility that part of it had been embedded in the pulped skull upon impact.

The pathologist held in his tweezers the small piece of melted matter he had taken from the pulverised remnants of the killer's head. He gazed at the tiny melted fragment gripped between the prongs.

The intense heat had melted it, leading him to believe that part of it was some kind of plastic - incredibly hard plastic.

Barclay considered the fragment a moment longer, then dropped it into a petrie dish.

It would need closer analysis.

He reached for the phone on his desk.

SIX

14 MARCH 1977

The room was small.

Less than fifteen feet square, its full extent was slowly revealed as lights were turned on one by one. Puddles of light filled the gloom, each one scarcely strong enough to fight off the blackness that shrouded the six occupants.

Doctor Robert Dexter stroked his chin thoughtfully as the light above him came on, bathing him in its cold white glow. He scanned the faces of the others in the room, listening to the soft click as each successive spot lamp was illuminated.

He was joined a moment later by a slightly older man who cleared his throat self-consciously, aware of the silence and apparently anxious not to disturb it. He pulled a chair closer to Dexter, wincing when it scraped the wooden floor noisily. He sat down and pulled nervously at the sleeve of his jacket.

The room was windowless, the only brightness inside provided by the spotlamps set in the high ceiling. Each one was aimed at the four other occupants of the room who sat in a line facing Dexter and his companion.

He looked along the line, pausing for a moment on each face as if trying to commit it to memory. In fact he knew each one well. Like a painter trying to decide on a subject, he moved his glance carefully from face to face, met only once by eyes that held his gaze.

And it was always those eyes.

Every day during the session they would begin the same way, in darkness. Then Doctor Andrew Colston would switch the lights on one by one and Dexter would look at those same four faces.

And, always, he would be met by those eyes.

Dexter held the gaze for a moment longer, then glanced down at the clipboard on his lap. He matched each name to the four faces before him.

Colston shuffled his feet, as if anxious to begin. He too was eyeing the other occupants of the room but it wasn't their faces he was looking at.