Body Heat Page 7

  Callie gritted her teeth. She was very cross, but managed to keep her voice steady, not wanting to make Mark think he was the one making her angry.

  “That’s good, Dr Lambourne’s the best person to help you, but promise me you will call the duty doctor if you need to speak to someone before then, will you? It’s a doctor from another practice on call this weekend, no one from our surgery, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mark responded although his voice was far from certain. Callie left him, still standing behind the door in his holey socks, panicking quietly about everything.

  Callie was fuming but managed to remain professional when she rang Helen to let her know what had happened. Helen wasn’t nearly so restrained in her views of Dr Lambourne.

  “It’s slanderous. You should sue him. He basically told a patient you and your colleagues would grass him up to the police.”

  “I know, Helen,” Callie placated her, “but we only have Mark’s word for what Dr Lambourne actually said, and he could have got it wrong.”

  Callie didn’t really believe that. Mark had seemed quite sure of what he had been told by his psychologist.

  “But it’s outrageous.”

  “Yes, but at least he’s done it out of a misguided idea of helping his client, and it certainly wouldn’t be in Mark’s best interest to force him to repeat what he was told in court, even if I could persuade him to appear. He’d be a wreck.”

  Helen had to concede the point and told Callie that she would visit Mark over the weekend to make sure he was okay and would decide whether or not she needed to call out the duty doctor.

  Relieved to know someone she trusted was looking after Mark’s best interests, Callie walked back up the path and made her way back to her car, watched all the way by the neighbour peering round her net curtains.

  Chapter 7

  Saturday turned out to be one of those crisp, sunny, spring days that are just made for a long walk by the sea. Kate didn’t agree, however, telling Callie she would rather hang out at the gym, and it was late morning before Callie gave up on trying to persuade her and set off for a solo trek across the cliff tops to Fairlight Lighthouse. She had packed a sandwich, an apple and a bottle of water into a light rucksack, along with a waterproof jacket, sunglasses, extra jumper, mobile phone and money. She liked to be prepared for any eventuality.

  Knowing that the path from the East Hill was still closed due to a landslip, she walked along Rocklands Lane to join the path that took her to Ecclesbourne Meadow. The path was steep in parts, both up and down along the hilly route, better than any workout on a treadmill to Callie’s mind, and the views were in a completely different league. Callie wasn’t sure what it said about her that she liked to look at rolling hills and rocky shores more than well-muscled men in tight vests. She just knew that she did. She couldn’t help a small smile of satisfaction as she walked through the meadows and took in the views. She had passed a few other walkers on her way, but for the most part, Callie had the wonderful scenery to herself. She paused to drink it in, and then, after a few deep breaths of clean fresh, sea air, she set off again.

  Walking always gave her the space and time to think through problems, sometimes helping her to find an answer, more often just allowing her to come to terms with the fact that there was no answer, and therefore, no point in worrying about the problem. She listed the lack of a partner in her life as one of the ‘no point worrying problems’. She had tried taking courses and joining clubs of various sorts, including the gym, thinking that perhaps she wasn’t meeting enough men, but the few men who were also joining courses or who hung round the gym to find a partner seemed either dense or desperate. The upside was that she could now speak conversational Italian, cook an authentic Indian meal and she had found astronomy and stargazing for beginners fascinating, but she had dropped out of the car maintenance course because she hated the dirt and oil under her fingernails, and she certainly wasn’t getting her money’s worth out of the gym.

  Once again, she stopped to look at the view and have a drink of water at the top of a particularly steep set of steps that had taken her from a densely wooded valley to a long grassy stretch of the cliffs. The sea looked calm from this height but the number of white caps on the waves told her that it wouldn’t be pleasant if she were on a small boat such as the few she could see out there. Sailing was another hobby she had tried, only to discover she suffered from terrible seasickness. Callie would never forget how ill she had felt. The poor man who had taken her out was unlikely to forget either. She moved on, both physically to the next stage of the walk and mentally and, as she tackled the final climb up to Fairlight coastguard station, moved onto the next problem, Mark Caxton.

  Except that the problem wasn’t just Mark Caxton. There was Adrian Lambourne as well. Callie would need to speak to Hugh Grantham and ask his advice about the psychologist and whether they needed to do anything about his insinuation that Callie and her colleagues might leak information to the police. The risk was that complaining would only make the situation worse. Callie reached Fairlight and the string of coastguard cottages. Feeling pleasantly tired after a good morning’s walk, she sat on a bench overlooking the sea and ate her lunch.

  * * *

  The intricate preparations he made were part of the thrill. He had spent weeks checking streets and car parks for cameras, both public and private, and logging where they were so that he could avoid them, not just when he took the cars, but also as he drove around after he had stolen them. Making fake number plates for the cars had also proved easier than expected, the flimsy plastic replicas wouldn’t fool anyone close up, but they were good enough to confuse any cameras, either CCTV or the automatic number plate recognition cameras located around the town. For the latter, he always made sure the numbers he used were cloned from cars similar or identical to the cars he stole. Hastings was well-endowed with CCTV throughout the town and he needed to make it as difficult as possible for the police to track him through the streets. He didn’t want to get caught for something stupid like car theft or speeding, before he had finished, before he had killed enough to ensure that when he told them why he had done it, they would listen. That was why he had spent months in preparation, to make sure he killed enough to make an impact, and now he was ready for her, for victim number two. He had taken the car earlier, a fifteen-year old Ford, new cars being harder to steal and hot wire. He had fitted the fake plates, and put a full can of petrol in the boot with his fold-up bicycle and a can of drink. With a final check that he had the book of matches in his pocket, he smiled and set off for his rendezvous.

  Chapter 8

  “Another Sunday morning, another crispy critter,” Jeffries said cheerfully as he suited up ready to inspect the burnt-out car and its gruesome contents.

  Callie, who was just taking her suit off having pronounced the victim dead, resolutely refused to respond, but was unable to stop an angry flush spreading up her neck and betraying her feelings. Hoping that no one, and in particular neither Jeffries nor Miller would notice that he had got to her, she kept her head high and her back straight as she silently walked to her car.

  She had parked a short distance along the track that led to the cliff top car park, but as she opened the driver’s door to get in, she couldn’t help but glance back. Even from that distance, she could see Jeffries watching her and smirking as he pulled the suit hood over his once ginger hair, so he had presumably noticed, but at least there was a chance Miller, already suited and with his back to her, taking a closer look at the car with a corpse in the passenger seat, might not have done.

  A thin, grey dawn had finally arrived whilst Callie was inspecting the body and pronouncing death, so once she was sitting safely in her car to write up her notes, she took the opportunity to look around her and take in the crime scene. It was similar to the previous one a week earlier, although there were fewer trees around and none between the car park and the coastguard cottages further along the lane towards the cliffs – just a few scru
bby bushes shaped by the wind. There would have been nothing to shield the view of the fire if any of the cottage windows had pointed in that direction, which they didn’t. As it was, the initial alert had only come from the houses on the edge of Fairlight village after there had been an explosion, presumably when the petrol tank blew up, taking most of the visitor centre with it.

  From Callie’s memory of her walk just the day before, the visitor centre had been little more than a wooden shack anyway, but now it was just a pile of burnt planks and broken glass, with leaflets scattered around it. As in the first case, the burnt-out car was parked against a line of wooden posts delineating the parking area. No one would have envisaged anyone using them to stop a passenger from getting out. From Callie’s brief examination of the body, the victim did not appear to have been trying to escape from the blazing car at all this time as she was sitting upright in the passenger seat with her seat belt still clasped. It was possible she had had a few drinks and was slower to react. Maybe that was a good thing, not knowing that she was about to die, not having time to be terrified. Callie certainly hoped so.

  With only these minor differences from the first scene, she felt sure this was the hand of the same killer and with wooden posts or similar being used in many country carparks, the killer would have a big choice of venues for future killings. The two murders were only a week apart and Callie now had no doubt that there would be more if the police didn’t catch the killer soon. She looked across the crime scene, now thronged with crime scene examiners and police, and on to the coastguard cottages beyond. To think that she was only up here yesterday, happily admiring the view, and now, well, she would never be able to think of it the same way again. This was no longer a place of peace and beauty, in her mind it would forever be associated with a horrific crime, and the smell of burnt flesh.

  * * *

  Once home, Callie tried to go back to sleep, but the sight and smell of the body, so awfully contorted in death, made sleep impossible. She couldn’t help thinking about the poor woman and how she had died, and of the friends and family left behind to hear the dreadful news of her death. Who was doing this? What sort of a person was capable of setting people on fire? Of watching them die?

  She finally gave up on sleep and took a leisurely, scented bath whilst trying to think of ways of distracting herself throughout the day in the hope that if she had fresher, happier things to think about, she would be able to sleep better that night.

  She was just thinking of going to the gym for some mindless jogging on the treadmill or seeking out Kate for a comforting chat over coffee or wine when her mobile rang. Picking up her phone, she saw that it was Helen.

  “Hi Helen, what’s up? Is Mark okay?”

  “No. Not really. He’s been taken in for questioning again.”

  It was to be expected, Callie thought. Perhaps she ought to have warned Helen first thing this morning.

  “They’ll need to check his alibi for last night. There was another car fire.”

  “So I heard on the news. Was it another woman? They didn’t have any details.”

  “Probably. We’ll know for sure after the PM.” She checked her watch. “Do you need me to go in as appropriate adult?”

  “No, no. The duty social worker is doing that,” Helen answered quickly, and Callie understood. She hadn’t called until she was sure she had it covered.

  “Probably for the best as I’m no longer his GP.”

  “Exactly. I knew you’d understand. I didn’t want to make things more awkward than they are, but I also didn’t want you hearing about it on the grapevine.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once she had put the receiver down, Callie felt like kicking something and swearing but decided to vent her frustration with a bit of cleaning instead. Armed with rubber gloves and bleach she set to on the bathroom. She knew that it was only natural for the police to want to question Mark given that it seemed likely that the same method of starting the fire had been used, but there really wasn’t anything she could do to help him given Adrian Lambourne’s interference. She had no right to go and see him at the police station as a police doctor unless they asked her to, and she couldn’t go as Mark’s own doctor because he had effectively dismissed her. After an hour scrubbing the already pristine bathroom, still unable to banish her concern for Mark and imagining him being railroaded into confessing to a crime he might or might not have committed, Callie decided to give up and go into the surgery to review his notes.

  * * *

  Once Callie had got over the initial, and wholly unreasonable, irritation she felt when she saw that Gerry Brown had left his car in the car park again, and her subsequent relief on finding out that it really was just his car and that he wasn’t hiding anywhere in the surgery, Callie made herself a pot of Dr Grantham’s personal, and very expensive, coffee and raided Linda’s stash of chocolate digestives. There were definite perks to coming into the surgery when it was closed, and not just that she would get far more work done with no interruptions.

  She took her drink and a couple of biscuits into the office, cleared herself some space at the main desk and opened Mark Caxton’s personal electronic record. Having read through her own notes from over the years, she then went into the scanned document section which included the records of his psychology assessments and letters from Adrian Lambourne and Helen’s case notes as well.

  Callie made notes as she reviewed Mark’s files. She hadn’t really been involved in any of his court cases, so the detail in some of Helen’s case notes in particular was helpful, but if she had hoped that Adrian Lambourne’s records of the sessions with his patient would be revealing, she was sadly disappointed. He probably had more comprehensive records at his office but simply sent summaries to her. At least she hoped he had more comprehensive records somewhere, because what she had from him told her little, if anything, useful.

  What interested Callie most were the notes that Helen had made regarding one particular incident in which the initial fire from the car had spread to a house. The old lady living there had had to be evacuated by the fire brigade, and although she was unhurt, she had lost everything.

  Mark had been sent to a young offenders institution for a while after that fire, and, close as he was to his own grandmother, had apparently shown profound remorse and anxiety that he had caused the old woman to lose all her belongings and, indeed, that he had so nearly killed her.

  Once released, he returned to stealing and torching cars, but he never again set fire to them in residential areas, always taking them to remote locations before setting them alight. Whilst this change of location fitted with the new crimes, it also seemed to suggest that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. So why would he suddenly change? Why would he suddenly want not just to hurt them, but kill them in such a terrible way? There was nothing in his notes to suggest what might have triggered such a dramatic escalation, but Callie knew that the lack of an obvious trigger didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  Going onto the internet, Callie searched the local and national news sites and discovered that the second body had been identified. There was a photograph of a smiling Carol Johnson – thirty-four, accountant, married, no children. The photo and personal details looked like they had been lifted straight from her Facebook page and Callie thought that she recognised her as a patient. A quick check of patient records confirmed it and also that the Dunsmore family were not, which was a relief, at least the women weren’t being targeted because of their doctors. Callie wondered what else they might have in common, apart from being young women in their thirties, but she couldn’t think of anything.

  The sound of a car starting up in the car park distracted her and she looked out of the office window to see who was there. Gerry Brown was collecting his car. It was almost lunchtime so perhaps he had finally decided to go home, she thought. Seeing him reminded her of her patient with thyroid problems, Jill Hollingsworth, and that she couldn’t remember seeing a blood test result for the thyroid
function tests she had asked Jill to have done. She checked Jill’s electronic record, there were no results recorded there, and then Callie went through the office pending baskets. Nothing there either. Knowing that there was nothing she could do on a Sunday, Callie left herself a note to remind her to follow up with a phone call the next morning and a note for Linda to check as well, and decided to call it a day. She suddenly realised that she was starving, perhaps Kate would be free for a late lunch and a drink in the Stag. It was supposed to be her day off, after all.

  Chapter 9

  There was a persistent wail coming from the waiting room and Callie sincerely hoped that the child making the noise wasn’t waiting to see her. As a woman she had more than her fair share of families on her list, with mums thinking, quite erroneously, that she would be good with children. She was a single woman, with no children, no siblings and therefore no nephews or nieces, and it was a sad fact that most of her male colleagues were better with children, simply because they had experience dealing with their own offspring.

  Taking a break from seeing patients, Callie popped up to the office to check her basket and to see if Jill’s blood test result had come in overnight.

  “I count my biscuits, you know,” Linda said as soon as Callie walked into the room.

  Deciding that honesty was the best policy, Callie smiled and held her hand up in apology.

  “Sorry, I’ll buy you a new packet.”

  “Make sure you do that,” Linda said. “And before you ask, no, we haven’t had any results for Jill Hollingsworth, and I phoned pathology, but they have no record of her attending for the test.”

  “Thanks, Linda, I’ll give her a call then.” Callie was puzzled. Jill had always been a very compliant patient and this behaviour wasn’t like her.

  “Oh, and a patient of yours was admitted to hospital Saturday.” Linda checked the fax sheet in her hand for the name. “Mark Caxton. Acute anxiety attack.”