Bloodstream: A gripping, unpredictable and shocking thriller

There was no feeling of being refreshed; no one had been revitalised by the night’s sleep. It was Saturday afternoon and everybody at the station wanted to be anywhere but there. Murphy almost had to drag himself into the station that morning, kicked out of bed by Sarah after his alarm had gone off more than three times. He had taken one look at himself in the mirror and decided when the case was over, he was going on holiday.

The image of Amy Maguire appeared in his mind and he decided a holiday may not be the best option.

‘Have we got anything on forensics?’ DCI Stephens said to him, sitting out in the incident room now. She’d moved from her quiet office into the area where the ‘magic’ happened. Of which there was none to be found at that moment.

‘Not a thing,’ Murphy replied. ‘Just who we’ve ruled out from family members and friends. There’s nothing else we can find there.’

‘Not even off the photo collages he does?’

Murphy shook his head. ‘He’s careful. Bloody television has made our lives so much more difficult. Given away all our secrets.’

‘We must have something, David?’

Murphy saw DC Harris smirk over DCI Stephens’s shoulder at the use of his first name. ‘We should have a drug report on Carly coming in soon which may hold more information.’

‘We can’t wait around for that. Damn things always take too long. Speak to Dr Houghton and see if he can shed any more light on this thing.’

‘We did speak to an anaesthetics guy in the Royal a few days ago, but he couldn’t really tell us much at all.’

‘Tell the doc I want to know the information. He’ll listen to that. CCTV of the ChloJoe apartment turn up anything?’

Even the DCI had taken to merging their names, Murphy thought. There was no hope for any of them. ‘We went through what we could get for last Friday night, but all we saw was Chloe entering and then leaving the apartment half an hour later. There’s a number of people who arrive and leave before her, but we’re still working on ruling those people out.’

‘Do we know when Joe was taken?’

‘No,’ Murphy replied, giving Rossi a nod as she left the office without saying anything. He glanced at the clock, glad to have got her out of there early enough to make it to her night out. He almost smiled. ‘He had footy training, but we don’t think he made it home.’

‘Our guy was waiting for him. Which means he’d planned this out. Makes sense, given the profile of them both. Just snatching them off the street wouldn’t have worked.’

‘I’ll ring Dr Houghton then,’ Murphy said, wanting to move past the questions focusing on everything they didn’t know. ‘See if he has anything of use to say.’

Murphy waited for DCI Stephens to walk away and speak to one of the other detectives in the office, then picked up his phone. After a few minutes of being on hold, transferred, then transferred to the right place, Houghton’s dulcet tones eventually came over the phone.

‘David.’

‘Yeah, you got a minute?’

A moist breath came over the earpiece. ‘I suppose so. What do you need?’

‘We’re talking about the drug that was given to one part of each couple as an overdose . . .’

‘The opioid? Used in anaesthetics. What about it?’

‘Well, how easy would that be to get, really? And is there any way of finding out what it actually is?’

‘Have you not had the drug report back yet on the latest pair? Buggers always take their time. I bet it’s Propofol. There’s very little else it could be really. Nothing that you could get easily in this country anyway.’

‘The report is due back any second, but DCI Stephens said she needed to know more about it and that you would help.’

‘Not sure how much help I can be. Didn’t you talk to that anaesthetist?’

‘Yes, but he wasn’t much help regarding how it could be traced . . .’

‘Really? I suppose that’s true. Unless something is left behind, like a vial of some sort. Or it’s a new type of drug used.’

Murphy sat forward in his chair, almost knocking into his desk. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, let’s for argument’s sake say it is Propofol. That isn’t something you can just find in a chemist’s, David. As I’m sure you already know, it’s a well-regulated drug, only for use during general anaesthetic procedures in this country – although in the States, they’re using it for executions now – so there are things you should know.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like how it doesn’t just disappear without anyone noticing. We’ve had a few instances in the hospital over the years of some doctors using it recreationally to get “high”, as the kids say. Although that happened more in the past than it does now.’

‘We’ve already gone over this, but the boss wants me to check again. Does every hospital keep a record of any drugs that might go missing?’

‘Of course, but it’s only if large amounts over a long period go missing that something would be done.’

Murphy rolled his eyes, knowing the answer already. ‘Only when they start actually losing money?’

‘Exactly. Look, here’s something they don’t really like to tell people . . . drugs go missing all the time. Just little things, here and there. You can’t keep track of it all. We talk about having very strict protocols over drug care, but sometimes it’s impossible to do. Something like Propofol or the like, if it was only small amounts, it could be chalked up to an administrative error, or perhaps someone dropped some and didn’t want to come clean. It happens. But that’s not the only way to trace it anyway.’

‘Enlighten me, Doc.’

‘I really don’t appreciate that term. Makes me feel old, David.’

‘Would you prefer I call you Stuart?’

There was a pause over the line. Murphy smiled, knowing he’d won a point for once.

Houghton continued. ‘Never mind. Each drug is made up of different properties. If this isn’t just Propofol and something different, you may be able to work out where it came from that way. I assume you’re looking at local hospitals?’

‘It makes the most sense,’ Murphy said, making notes on the lined paper on his desk. ‘The victims are local, so if it’s a new drug, for argument’s sake, that can only be found in hospitals, it’s likely to have come from one in this area.’

‘Merseyside is a big area though,’ Houghton said. ‘I’ll do some chasing up of my own. See if I can find out if anything has been flagged up yet.’

Murphy thanked the doctor and then called over DCI Stephens.

‘I don’t care who you have to call, or what favours you need to pull in, but we need that drugs report in now.’

Murphy leaned back in his chair. There was something else, something he wasn’t considering.

He glanced at the clock, wondering if Rossi was already out with Darren’s workmates, having a good time whilst he was stuck in the office. He hoped so, otherwise he would have to have another word with her. She deserved it, he decided. Even if it was something she thought she didn’t really need, like a partner or the dreaded ‘boyfriend’ – a word she so detested. He thought back to the joke he’d made about the possibility the killer could be Darren, and Rossi’s reaction to it. There was something real there, with that relationship, he thought. He was glad of it.

He went through some messages left on his desk, discarding ones which were from days before, or just weren’t that urgent or interesting. Then he looked through his emails, doing the same thing. He pulled up the crime scene photographs, looking through them to make sure there was nothing he had missed. The images offered no clues, the only thing that stood out was how similar each scene looked.

But there was something about the picture collages that held Murphy’s attention; it was as if a life was being put back together, after being destroyed. It was not the work of someone who understood the nature of relationships. It was someone who fetishised them. Made them into something that didn’t actually exist.

‘He’s a loner,’ Murphy said, voicing his thoughts. DC Harris who was sitting at his desk near him lifted his head. ‘Or someone who has been in almost no relationships at all.’

‘What makes you say that?’ DC Harris replied.

‘He’s creating something with the photographs. Trying to portray an image of what he thinks a relationship should look like, then desecrating it with his words. He’s saying what is normal and what isn’t. Which means, to me, that he has no concept of normal relationships at all.’

‘Aren’t they always loners? Serial killers, I mean.’

‘Not always. Not even often. There’ve been loads who have had families, friends, all of whom had no idea about this other part of their loved one’s life. This guy, though, I can’t see that being the case.’

‘Unless his wife did something that led him down this path? Lied, cheated, whatever.’

‘Possibly, but I’m not so sure,’ Murphy said, tapping his pen against the desk. ‘It’s too perfect. He killed Joe Hooper based on the fact he was cheating on Chloe and that the whole relationship was a lie. He killed Will based on a stranger’s email telling him that Will had cheated on Carly. Will and Joe’s infidelities are minor compared to something like the secret Hannah Flynn kept from her partner, or the secret Stuart kept from Jane.’

‘To him they’re not minor, though. He sees them as all the same.’

‘Exactly. I don’t think it would matter what the transgression was if he couldn’t make it fit into his view of what a relationship should be. Which means any relationship he’s had wouldn’t have lasted long, surely?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ DC Harris said, wheeling his chair back and forth. ‘Are you saying we should be looking at all the loners in the city?’

‘Scour the lonely hearts column in the Echo, you mean?’

‘Something like that.’ DC Harris smiled and crunched up a piece of paper on his desk, throwing it in the bin. ‘Could take a while.’

‘I’m just thinking out loud more than anything else.’

Something else came to Murphy then.

‘Where did the first victims work?’ Murphy asked DC Harris over the desk. ‘Can’t remember seeing that information.’

‘Erm, not sure now,’ DC Harris replied, shuffling paper round his desk. ‘Here we go. He worked for a cleaning firm, some place over the water. She was a nurse in the Royal.’

Murphy sat forward. ‘The hospital?’

‘Do you know any other places we call the Royal?’

Murphy ignored the sarcasm. ‘That’s one.’ He picked up the phone whilst still scrolling through the system on his computer for the number he needed. A few minutes later he put the phone down again.

‘That’s another one.’

DC Harris came round to his side of the desk. ‘Who was that?’

‘Joe Hooper’s friend Charlie Smith who was in here the other day. Told us about Joe’s indiscretions. Turns out Charlie had surgery on his knee at the Royal.’

‘Could be a coincidence?’

Murphy shook his head. ‘Think about it. Our murderer needs to get these drugs from somewhere, but not only them. Maybe he also chose his victims from the place. Maybe it’s somewhere he works?’

DC Harris didn’t answer, just wheeled himself back to his desk.

‘What are you doing?’ Murphy said, as DC Harris began going through a multitude of paperwork.

‘Something has just come to me. Hang on a minute.’

Murphy waited, as he tried to work out what the new information could mean.

‘Here we go,’ DC Harris said after a minute. ‘Another one.’

‘The sister? She said she had problems in work with someone . . .’

‘No, not her. She works in some car place on the front. No, Hannah Flynn told two people outside of her family about the fact she didn’t think the child was Greg’s.’

‘That’s right,’ Murphy said, already starting to feel the excitement wash over him, ridding him of the tiredness. ‘Friends or something?’

‘Exactly. I remembered something from Laura’s notes from their interviews. One of them was recovering from hernia surgery. She wrote down the hospital she’d just been discharged from.’

‘The Royal.’

‘In one,’ DC Harris replied, a wide smile on his face. ‘This is it, don’t you think?’

Murphy didn’t reply at first. Ignoring the emails, Murphy thought about the previous victims. Will and Carly were an aberration. A way of throwing a whole toolbox in the works. If he played six degrees of separation starting with each couple, everything came back to the same hospital. Then the drugs angle played its own role also.

‘We need more, but this could be the answer. We need the latest drugs report.’

Within an hour, they had it.

*     *     *

Murphy read the report again, his forehead creasing up as he tried to make sense of it. ‘And this is . . . what is it I’m looking at?’

‘The name of the drug,’ DC Harris said, shaking his head. ‘A heavier dose was used with Carly, so we have it now.’

Murphy wrote down the serial number next to the drug and called back Dr Houghton.

‘It was Propofol,’ Houghton said by way of greeting. ‘I’m guessing that’s why you’re calling me back.’

‘No. And no,’ Murphy said, rubbing his forehead, trying to ease a little of the tension stuck there. ‘That’s not the drug.’

‘Really? Now that’s interesting.’

‘It may not have been Propofol, but apparently it shares a lot of its make-up with it. Not a lot of this makes sense to me . . .’

‘What’s it called?’

Murphy spelled out the name of the drug, which had been found in Carly’s system.

‘Doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard of before. Let me check this out.’

Murphy listened as Houghton typed on his keyboard, imagining the pathologist leaning over his ever-expanding waistline to reach his desk. The thought made him smirk, earning a frown from a waiting DC Harris.

‘Here we go,’ Houghton said finally. ‘It’s a trial drug, created by the lovely people over at the City of Liverpool University. It’s supposed to work like Propofol, but have fewer side effects. Only three hospitals in the country have taken the trial on.’

‘The Royal is one of them, isn’t it?’

‘As much as I’m pleased to say it is, I’m also dreading what’s about to happen. The other two are further south in the country – one in Birmingham and one in Surrey. I bloody knew it. I’m telling you, the things that get overlooked in hospitals at the moment. All down to government cuts. They couldn’t give two bloody shites about what’s going on in the NHS at the moment. People getting away with murder. Quite literally, by the sounds of it. Who do you think it could be? It must be someone in a certain department, given it’s a trial drug.’

‘I was hoping you would be able to help with that. I don’t want this guy tipped off . . .’

‘How do you know it wasn’t me?’ Houghton said, the mocking tone of his voice raising Murphy’s blood pressure a few levels.

‘Because you’d be out of breath just getting into the house in the first place.’

‘Touché, David. okay, what do you need?’

Murphy pulled the sheet of paper closer to him. ‘I know you said there were drugs going missing in small quantities more than we realised, but do you think this could be different?

‘I would imagine so. It’s a trial drug, so there’ll be much tighter controls on it than others. Possibly. I’m guessing more than anything here.’

‘If there are tighter controls, do you have access to a log of dates and times, for when drugs have been reported missing?’

‘I don’t,’ Houghton replied, his voice dropping a level. ‘But I can definitely find out anything you need to know. Just give me the details and I’ll call you back.’

Murphy read Houghton the information and then put the phone down. He waited, counting down the seconds on the clock hanging on the wall. Finally the phone rang on his desk. Murphy snatched it up, dragging the base over the desk as he did so, clattering it against his coffee cup.

‘Murphy,’ he said, mopping up the resulting little spillage with the back of his tie.

‘It’s Houghton. I’ve got three names for you . . . you’re probably not going to like one of them. Is young Ms Rossi in earshot?’