The patient, p.28
The Patient, page 28
Cross looked at Sutton, who suddenly smiled, an appalling victory smirk, as if he knew that Cross had just worked it out and he’d enjoyed watching it.
‘We need to take a break,’ said Cross calmly.
‘How long?’ asked the lawyer.
‘I’m not sure,’ replied Cross, getting up to leave.
‘You won’t find her at the office, Sergeant,’ said Sutton, who suddenly appeared confident again.
‘No? And why is that?’
‘She’s doing a blood test at four,’ replied Sutton.
Cross looked at his watch. That was in just under an hour.
‘For Angie. You remember Angie – you brought her to me.’ Sutton stared right at Cross as if he savoured the moment.
Chapter 60
Ottey called Sutton’s office; it went straight through to voicemail. Cross called Karen. She was at work but picked up.
‘It’s DS Cross,’ he said.
‘Hi, is everything okay?’ she replied.
‘Do you know where Angie is?’
‘I thought you said you got her into rehab,’ said Karen.
‘I did. Do you know where it is?’
‘No.’ She sounded a little puzzled.
‘If she was out, do you know where she’d go?’ asked Cross.
‘No, sorry. I doubt she went back to her old flat. The landlord threw her out. That’s why she was on the streets.’
‘Are you sure, Karen? This is really urgent,’ Cross insisted.
‘I’m sorry. I haven’t got a clue,’ she replied.
Mackenzie had called Billie Williams, who gave her the numbers of other recovery centres she knew Sutton used if she was full.
‘If Diana is going to give her a blood test it has to mean she’s no longer in a recovery centre,’ Cross reasoned.
‘She might actually just be doing a blood test,’ said Ottey, hopefully.
‘Possibly, but it’s more likely to be her last hurrah, because she saw Sutton arrested. She knows the net is drawing in. Let’s go to the office anyway,’ Cross suggested.
*
The office manager let them into Sutton’s suite of offices, which was locked.
‘What are we looking for?’ asked Ottey.
‘Her desk diary. She wrote everything down compulsively. Absolutely everything,’ Cross replied.
It wasn’t on her immaculately tidy desk. Ottey noticed that biros and pencils were all organised according to colour. But the desk diary wasn’t there and the drawers were locked. It was now 3.35. It took them five minutes to force open the drawers. The desk diary was in the left-hand top drawer. Cross leafed through the pages, which were filled to the margins with neat, tidy writing. Deliveries, calls, appointments – everything was written down with additional notes. They came to that day’s date, and there it was at four: Angie’s blood test, together with an address. Cross put the diary back in the desk.
‘We should get a warrant for the diary. We don’t want the defence to claim it was part of an illegal search,’ he said, thinking ahead in his usual methodical way to the court case and the admissibility of crucial evidence.
‘It isn’t an illegal search, don’t be pedantic. We’re here to arrest her.’
He thought for a second then took the diary back out of the desk. ‘You are, of course, correct.’
Then as they were leaving he noticed something about the box files that were neatly organised on the shelves behind her desk. One of them was upside down and protruded further out from the shelf than the others. It was the kind of thing that would annoy him and he knew it was something that Diana Coogan would not be able to tolerate.
‘George, we need to go, now,’ Ottey said with some urgency as he walked over to the bookshelf and carefully took out the upside down box file. He searched behind it with his free hand till he found what he was looking for. Then he carefully brought out an A5 book.
It was Flick’s journal.
*
The address was in Bedminster, not too far away from Hopewell. It was approaching rush hour and navigating the city traffic wasn’t going to be easy. Cross hated it when they used the blues and twos and Ottey drove out of her skin. It was obviously completely necessary when she did, as on this occasion, but it really upset him. He’d tried closing his eyes, but that just made him car sick. So he just stared fixedly out of the windscreen, terrified, as they drove, at times on the wrong side of the road and through red lights.
Ottey was actually a great driver, as she’d taken pains to point out to him on several occasions. She had passed the advanced police driving test with flying colours. This, and the fact that she’d never had an accident while driving in this manner, seemed to be of little comfort to him. He sat there, pale, gripping onto the sides of his seat with white knuckles, barely breathing. But this time it wasn’t so much to do with her driving as the nauseating realisation that he himself had inadvertently put Angie straight into the clutches of the killer.
They arrived at a large terraced house that looked like it had once been offices, and ran in. They knocked on the caretaker’s door, but there was no response. It was now 4.10. Finally a resident opened their door and told them what room the ‘new girl’ was in.
They burst through the door. Angie leaped out of the armchair she was sitting in, absolutely terrified. Diana was sitting opposite her.
‘What the fuck?’ Angie yelled, a tourniquet hanging down from her arm.
‘Has she done anything to you, Angie?’ said Cross.
‘No, she’s a giving me a blood test. What’s going on?’
Diana had sat there motionless, but Cross noticed her dropping something into her handbag. On the table was a needle and a blood-taking kit.
‘Just stay where you are, Angie,’ said Cross.
‘What is going on, Detectives? This is most alarming. I was about to take a blood test,’ said Diana, pointing to the kit on the table.
‘Diana Coogan, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Felicity Wilson,’ said Ottey, who then proceeded to read Diana her rights.
Cross noticed that Diana was expressionless. He wondered whether she was expecting this. Had she been resigned to it after Sutton’s arrest? But why hadn’t she run?
Ottey cuffed her and told Cross to take her out to the car.
‘My handbag,’ said Diana, as Cross was moving her out of the room.
‘Your handbag is now evidence,’ Cross informed her, and they left.
Ottey now wanted to do something that would never occur to Cross. She wanted to sit down with Angie and explain to her what had just happened. Talk her down. The events had been very dramatic and probably frightening – two police officers suddenly bursting noisily through a closed door in that way. Angie was in a vulnerable state anyway, and Ottey didn’t want this to have an adverse effect on her recovery. She managed to get hold of the duty manager and explain to her what was going on, leaving Angie in her care. Ottey then bagged up Diana’s handbag and the blood-taking kit.
Diana said nothing in the car. She sat there as if in a very secure Uber. Cross was reflecting on how close Angie had come to a probable death.
Chapter 61
The interview with Diana was oddly straightforward. She seemed at times to be indifferent, and at others relieved. She initially denied everything, insisting that she had visited Angie to give her a blood test. But the denial struck Cross as almost half-hearted, as if she was just going through the motions. That she knew the truth would inevitably come out at some point. Interestingly, Sutton’s solicitor had declined to act for Diana, and she was provided with a duty solicitor, whose eyes almost went out on stalks when he saw the scale of the charges they were talking about.
Mackenzie was desperate to observe the interview, but Cross had her checking Diana’s phone records for all the days on which the murders occurred together with the day prior to them all. He also wanted them cross-checked with the appointments logged into her desk diary. Diana’s attention to detail and obsessive recording of absolutely everything was going to be an absolute gift for the prosecution.
‘What was the purpose of your visit to Angie Wright this afternoon?’ Cross asked.
‘I told you, it was an outpatient call,’ Diana said.
‘Yes, but to what purpose?’ Cross insisted.
‘To carry out a random blood test.’
‘Do you do a lot of blood tests for Dr Sutton?’ he asked.
She laughed quietly at this question.
‘I do them all. I’m a qualified nurse. Dr Sutton is far too busy to do something so mundane. It wouldn’t be a good use of his precious time.’
‘Have you always done them?’ Cross asked.
She nodded. ‘I have. In fact they were my idea. He was always insistent that his patients were clean, and thought he could just tell if they were using again. Which of course he could have, being an expert in his field, but I argued that random drug tests wouldn’t just mean that he could be sure, but would give them an incentive to stay clean.’
‘It sounds like more of a threat,’ said Ottey.
‘I suppose you could look at it like that,’ she replied neutrally.
‘Was it always your intention to kill Sutton’s patients?’ Cross asked.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Did the idea of killing them occur to you after you started the blood tests, or was it the very reason for them?’ Cross asked.
Diana just smiled politely as if she hadn’t heard the question.
‘You were about to administer a fatal dose of diamorphine to Angie, were you not?’ he asked.
‘I was going to do no such thing,’ she replied.
‘We found a syringe in your handbag containing enough morphine to kill anyone, together with an empty phial,’ Cross said. Again, Diana just smiled.
‘That’s what you’ve been doing for years. Killing patients. All recovering drug addicts. On the pretext of doing a blood test. It was the one thing I couldn’t work out. Why would they let you inject them? It’s quite ingenious,’ said Cross thoughtfully.
Diana couldn’t help but smile at this.
She’s taking it as a compliment, thought Cross.
‘Why was this hidden in your office?’ asked Ottey, pushing Flick’s journal across the desk. Cross noted there was a slight hesitation in Diana. She was taken by surprise and didn’t know how to react. She looked up without saying anything.
‘It’s Flick Wilson’s journal,’ Ottey volunteered, a little too quickly, thought Cross.
‘No comment,’ Diana replied.
It was her first ‘no comment’ of the interview. She’d been confident and completely open up until that point. Cross wondered why this had taken her by surprise.
*
‘Her reaction to the journal was interesting,’ Cross said in Carson’s office.
‘She knew it was the final nail in her coffin,’ Carson said crassly.
‘I don’t think she knew it was there,’ Cross continued as if nothing had been said.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Like I said; her reaction. She was surprised and didn’t know what to say.’
‘Why wouldn’t she just say she didn’t know it was there?’ said Ottey, following Cross’s line of thought.
‘What makes you so sure she didn’t know?’ persisted Carson.
‘The box file it was concealed behind was upside down. That is something she absolutely would never have done. She was meticulously organised to the point of compulsion.’
Carson looked at Ottey. She begged him mentally not to say what he was obviously thinking – that it took someone obsessively ordered to notice it. He must’ve read the signals, as he said nothing. Ottey spoke to take any further opportunity away from him.
‘We’re going to leave her on ice for a couple of hours, while we gather more evidence, before we charge.’
‘It’s creepy,’ was all Carson could offer. ‘Gives me shivers.’
*
Cross used the time to go through Diana’s diary and all the others they found chronologically filed away, year by year, in a filing cabinet in Sutton’s outer office. They had left Sutton in his cell throughout Diana’s arrest and first interview. They still had fourteen hours left before they either had to charge him or get an extension. But Cross was quietly becoming more and more convinced that they wouldn’t be able to charge him. Cross was looking for a pattern, but unusually in this case he actually knew what he was looking for and where. It wasn’t long before he found it. The dates for the scheduled blood tests for the victims were all within twenty-four hours of their deaths. This was pretty incontrovertible. He also looked at Flick’s journal. Every page was crammed with large looping handwriting characteristic of someone who enjoyed writing and took great pains with it. At times pens had been used which bled through the page onto the preceding one. She would then change pens. There were notes of her meetings with Sutton and ‘badge woman’ as she had christened Diana. But nothing seemed untoward. There were distressingly frank descriptions of Danny Stokes’s behaviour and desperate accounts of Simon’s unreliability. But towards the end of the entries Cross noticed a small triangle of paper in the bottom corner of one page. It was obvious that someone had ripped a couple of pages out of the book. Was it Flick herself? he wondered. But then he was called back down to the interview room.
The diamorphine they found in Diana’s handbag had been prescribed to a recently deceased patient in a local hospice. They searched Diana’s flat and discovered several more phials of diamorphine in her fridge. They were all prescriptions from the same hospice, and all of the patients were now deceased. Ottey went down to the hospice with some uniformed officers. As they made their enquiries as to who was in charge of the patients’ drugs, a nurse saw them and suddenly legged it through the back garden. Uniform gave chase and made the arrest.
Back at the MCU the nurse told them everything. He had no idea what Diana had been using them for. He just assumed she was rich with a drug habit. They were being thrown away, so he sold them to her for a bit of cash on the side. There was no harm done.
‘Except for the twenty-two women she killed with the diamorphine,’ said Cross.
‘What?’ exclaimed the nurse. He then threw up and they had to move to another interview room while that one was cleaned.
When they continued, he said that she paid well and they’d met when her mother had been a patient at the hospice receiving end-of-life care. The nurse knew he was going to lose his job because of all this, but he was more concerned about not being charged as an accessory to murder.
Diana had started working for Sutton just after her mother died. The first murder occurred eighteen months later. Cross decided to systematically lay out all the evidence in front of her for each of the twenty-two deaths.
‘So, Diana,’ he began. ‘The dates of the deaths we are discussing all correlate with the dates in your diary for the supposed random drug tests. You will be charged with all twenty-two murders and, on the balance of just the evidence we have so far, it’s more than likely you’ll be found guilty.’
‘I didn’t kill anyone, Sergeant,’ she replied.
‘Perhaps you could explain that to me,’ said Cross.
‘I assisted them in their deaths. They wanted to end their suffering, put a stop to it, and I helped facilitate that,’ she said quietly.
‘Is that what you believe?’ Cross asked, with no edge to it. No surprise or disbelief. Just a straight question.
‘If we lived in a more liberal society, I wouldn’t be sitting here,’ she replied.
‘Oh, I think if this was Holland or Sweden or anywhere where euthanasia is legal, you would still be sitting here,’ said Cross.
‘That’s your opinion.’
‘Not at all; you see, you were missing one vital thing – consent.’
She made no comment to this.
‘How did it start? What made you decide to do this?’ Cross sounded genuinely fascinated.
‘The first was Trisha. She was desperate to die – said so all the time. Had made a few attempts. She was in such a bad place mentally. I asked her if she really wanted to end it all. She said she did. I’d seen them disposing of my mother’s morphine at the hospice. I went back and offered Patrick money – made out it was for me. Then I asked Trisha if she was sure and we did it. She was so much better off.’ Diana spoke as if she was picturing it in her head.
‘Were they all like that in the beginning?’ Cross asked.
‘Yes. They asked, or were in such a terrible place, I offered. Then I had an instinct for those that were heading that way anyway. Don’t forget there are hundreds of Dr Sutton’s patients who just got better. I only helped the ones who had no chance. Why let them suffer so? Go through all that pain? So I began helping some of them, without actually putting them through the burden of discussing it and worrying about it. It was so peaceful. Such a tranquil, quick, humane way to go.’
‘But they hadn’t asked you. The majority had no idea what you were about to do,’ said Ottey.
‘Lucky them, don’t you think?’ she replied.
‘Was Dr Sutton aware of what you were doing?’ asked Cross.
‘Oh gosh, no. I mean, he believes assisted dying for the terminally ill and those with unending mental health issues should be available, but he would never do such a thing while it was illegal.’ She appeared shocked at the very idea of it.
‘So you are aware that what you did was illegal?’ Cross asked.
‘Of course I am. I’m not stupid. It’s the law which is stupid,’ she replied.
‘Do you expect us to believe that all the women you killed wanted to end their lives?’ Cross asked.
‘Yes, it’s just that some hadn’t reached that awful conclusion yet. I saved them that,’ she said.
Cross thought she actually believed it. But of course there was a flaw in her belief.
‘What about Flick?’ he asked.
‘What about her?’
‘She most certainly didn’t want to die. She had a life, a loving mother and a daughter,’ Cross said.
