The Alex King Series by A BATEMAN (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📕

officer was bound to a chair, her mouth gagged. A single, ragged hole permeated her otherwise faultless features. The bullet would have entered the back of her head and exited through her forehead. There was a lot of blood. That was the nature of headshots. The blood would pump around the body for as long as the heart received messages from the brain. The hole was sizable. It would have been like turning on a tap. King could see it had pooled on the floor and congealed.

King turned to the male police officer. He had faired better. He had been shot through the back of the neck and by the look of the absence of all but a few blood splatters, it would seem the spinal cord had been severed by the bullet. In both cases, a medium calibre pistol round. King would have guessed one of the missing 9mm Glock’s from their holsters. Likely to be the Glock Lena’s Russian imposter had been carrying, and that had been taken by one of the men at the clearing. The woman had admitted she hadn’t killed anybody, so had she been present? From the way she had behaved when she had seen Fitzpatrick’s body at the morgue in the medical centre, he suspected not. But he guessed the two people on the snowmobiles had.

King looked around the room. He could see a CCTV camera, but it would be useless; the wires pulled out and hanging limp. He glanced at his watch. He had spent enough time here. He needed to report this to somebody. But he would call Thames House first. He walked back out into the office. He had missed it earlier, but he could see wires stripped out of the wall above a CCTV receiver and recorder unit. There were no lights displayed on the unit. They had covered their tracks.

King zipped up his jacket and put the Walther back in his pocket. He put his gloves back on, hesitated as he decided whether to take the SUV or the snowmobile. He settled on the SUV, but circled the vehicle a few times, slowly looking for footprints around it. The vehicle had been parked there all day; it would have made a nice target for a boobytrap or IED. He couldn’t see any footprints or tell-tale markings in the crust of ice. Nobody had swept the area clean. He took his chances and opened the door. The inside felt like a freezer inside. King started the engine. The heaters were already set to full from earlier. The air that rushed out was super-chilled. King decided to get the vehicle moving. He pulled out of the parking lot, the headlights cutting swathes of light across the snow, eerie shadows created by the many pine trees lining the road. He couldn’t get his head around the fact it was not yet four-PM. He neared the medical centre, saw a light within. The vehicle hadn’t even warmed to -10°C on the inside, so King wasn’t reluctant to switch off the engine. He stepped outside, turned as he heard the high revs of a snowmobile roar off from behind the medical centre. He could see the headlights light up the forest, and within a few seconds, it was already out of view, the lights fading as it tore away and became a faint hum in the distance.

King frowned. It seemed erratic behaviour in the darkness. The forest may well be sparse this far north, but there would have been all manner of obstacles, not least the trees themselves.

The door to the medical centre was open, but there was nobody inside. Where a receptionist and assistant had sat earlier in the day, an empty swivel chair was all there was behind the desk. King took off the gloves, pulled down the zipper and tucked the gloves inside his jacket. He took out the Walther and felt that dream-like experience of déjà vu. The building was utterly silent and the feeling of anticipation in King’s chest was becoming overwhelmed by a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach. He turned down the corridor and headed to the door he had been through with two Russian insurgents only seven hours before.

Doctor Engelmann was seated behind his desk, his head lolled to one side. His thick hair and copious facial hair gave the impression his head was twice the size of most men. The thick, over-sized spectacles seemed to close off the only part of his face without hair. King studied the way the man slumped. There was a great deal of blood and an empty vodka bottle on the desk in front of him. The man’s wrists had been slashed and King could see a surgical knife on the floor beside him. King stepped closer, looked at the man’s wrists and studied the depth of the gashes. Tendons had been severed and King could see at once that the man had not inflicted the wounds himself. One perhaps. But not both. He would not have been able to hold the instrument for the second cut. The man’s murder had been made to look like suicide. Another resident, new to the area and unable to cope with the loneliness, the darkness and the cold. It happened in many places near the Arctic circle. The long hours of darkness in the winter, the midnight sun throughout the summer. It messed with sleep and eating patterns, occasionally turned people insane. It was the flip side to the happiest population medians on the planet.

King searched, but he did not find the receptionist. He made his way back outside and replaced his gloves, zipped up his jacket. And then he noticed the footprints around the SUV.

15

 

King found a torch in the desk behind reception. He was tiring of undoing clothing and removing gloves. The effort in simply moving around in a set of thermal snow clothes