‘So if those days are for, essentially, drumming up business, why did you ignore the door buzzer on our previous visit?’ Jon stood up again and went to the window.
The doctor shifted in his seat. ‘Probably because I was talking with you.’
‘On our last visit I looked out of this window, like I’m doing now, and saw that your caller was a woman I recognised. She works in a motel on the A57. When she saw me looking down she couldn’t walk away quickly enough. Why do you think that was?’
The doctor raised one shoulder a fraction. ‘Perhaps she was coy about the fact she was considering aesthetic medicine. There’s still a surprising amount of stigma attached, though it’s lessening all the time, thanks to the exemplary lead provided by our celebrities.’
Jon thought he heard a cynical note in the doctor’s voice. He walked over to the doorway and pointed across the corridor to the treatment room. ‘Would you mind if I look around? Is this where you carry out your procedures?’
The doctor kept his seat but leaned forward, agitation finally showing. ‘I’m afraid that room is locked.’
‘Surely you have the key?’
‘I’ve left it at home. My nurse has the other, but she’s only here if we’re treating customers.’ He licked his lips.
Jon stared at him, sensing the man was telling lies. The blank expression was still clamped on the doctor’s face, but a faint sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. Jon’s hand was outstretched to try the door handle. Instead, he crossed the room and, like a predator closing in for the kill, leaned in towards the doctor’s face. Small beads of sweat oozed out of the shiny skin and began to run down his forehead.
‘You’re sweating, Doctor. Or can’t you feel that? Perhaps you’ve been using Botox a bit too much. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve self-administered, after all.’
The doctor angrily wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I resent that insinuation and I don’t like the direction this discussion is taking. I’m not prepared to say anything more without my solicitor present.’
‘That’s probably a good idea,’ Jon replied.
O’Connor stood up and walked to the door: they saw that he had a pronounced limp. ‘Good day, officers. You can show yourselves out.’
As they passed him, Jon smiled. ‘I’m sure we’ll be speaking to you again very soon, Doctor.’
When they emerged on to the street, the drizzle was still falling.
‘Why didn’t we just arrest him?’ asked Rick.
Jon kept walking. ‘After what happened with Pete Gray? The top of McCloughlin’s head would blow clean off.’
‘The man’s bullshitting us! It’s as clear as day.’
‘I know.’ Jon unlocked the car. ‘Let’s wait here and see what he does next. He’s rattled. My bet is he’ll be off like a shot.’
They moved further down the street and swung the car round. While they waited Jon watched the giant cranes looming out of the haze shrouding Ancoats. One was silently turning, a load of girders suspended from its end. Jon was reminded of a gentle animal, quietly grazing. But it was a harsh clanging that carried from behind the buildings in front. The noise seemed more akin to destruction, as if that part of the city was being demolished, not rebuilt.
O’Connor’s Range Rover appeared ten minutes later. He drove up to the junction with the main road and turned right. With their windscreen wipers on their fastest setting, Jon and Rick followed him as he headed along Great Ancoats Street, passing the black glass of the old Daily Express offices and as- sorted derelict industrial buildings. Soon he got to the junction with the A57, just up from the Hurlington Health Club. He turned left, away from the city centre and towards the Platinum Inn. The streetlights flickered to life as the sky darkened above them.
‘We’re right in the Butcher’s dumping ground. It’s him. It has to be him!’ Rick whispered excitedly.
Jon kept a couple of cars behind. They passed the motel and the greyhound stadium, then crawled through Gorton, failed shops and the occasional massage parlour lining the road. When they reached the roundabout for the M60, the Range Rover took the final exit, heading south, keeping in the slow lane, speed never creeping above seventy miles per hour.
‘The turn off for Didsbury is in two junctions’ time,’ Jon said, remembering Dr Heath’s report.
But O’Connor took the next exit. They dropped back and shadowed him along the A560, passing a Safeway and then a boarded-up building with the name Quaffers just visible above the entrance.
Five minutes later they were driving through the centre of Romiley, one car behind him. The high street petered out, shops replaced by terraces of housing. Soon they changed to semi-detached, then finally detached as countryside opened up on the left of the road. Farm lights dotted the dark hills in the distance. After a couple of hundred metres the Range Rover’s brake lights lit up and it swung into a driveway closed in by large fir trees.
Jon and Rick pulled up on the verge. A privet hedge shielded the house from the road and they squeezed through the soaking branches into O’Connor’s garden.
Crouching behind a rhododendron bush, they saw him hobble up the steps to a large Victorian house with wooden gables and a band of decorative brickwork running above the ground-floor mullioned windows. The exterior light came on and he set his briefcase down at his feet in order to unlock the front door.
The hallway lights went on. He came back outside and walked over to the rear of the Range Rover. After glancing down the drive, he opened the boot. He leaned in and, with some effort, straightened up. In his arms was a large object wrapped in a sheet.
‘Christ almighty!’ Rick whispered as the material slipped and a pair of feet wearing women’s shoes were revealed.
‘Oh, my fucking God,’ Jon said, straightening up.
He felt Rick pulling him down as the doctor plodded up the steps into his house and shut the door behind him. ‘Wait, Jon. We’ve got to call for back-up.’
Jon shook his head. ‘They’ll take half an hour, easily. She could be dead by then.’
Squinting at the placard beside the front door, Rick scrabbled for his phone. ‘DS Saville here. We need back-up. We have a potential hostage situation at The Briars, Compstall Lane…Yes, Armed Response Vehicle, everything. You’ll see our car parked on the side of the road. It’s a dark-blue Volvo, registration mike, alpha, zero, two, hotel, tango, foxtrot.’
He lowered the phone. ‘They’re on the way.’
A light showed in a tiny window at the base of the house, just above ground level.
‘He’s got a cellar,’ Jon whispered. ‘He’s taken her down into the cellar. He’s skinning them down there and then driving back into Belle Vue to dump their bodies.’
Keeping low, he splashed through the shallow puddles dotting the lawn, slowing when he reached the driveway. Carefully, he crossed the tarmac and crouched against the wall.
Rick emerged from the gloom and squatted down beside him.
Jon lay on his stomach and tried to look through the filthy pane of glass. A shadow moved across the room below and he was just able to hear a door open. ‘He’s down there. Taken her into a side room, I think.’
A car passed on the road. As the noise of its engine died away he heard a metallic clink. It was exactly the same sound as when the consultant at Stepping Hill hospital had dropped the long-bladed scalpel in the kidney tray. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus. Rick, we can’t wait. He’s going to start skinning her.’
‘You can’t go in! We’ve got to wait.’
Jon got to his feet and went to the front door. It was made of solid-looking wood with two panels of stained glass running down it. He pressed the bell and heard it ring deep inside the house.
He counted to thirty, then pressed the bell again and kept his finger on it. Eventually he saw movement behind the glass. There was a rattling of a chain and the door opened a few inches. The instant O’Connor saw Jon outside he tried to slam the door shut.