The patient, p.31
The Patient, page 31
‘That you don’t have a sense of humour, George.’
‘I can assure you, I most certainly do. The jokes just have to fulfil one requirement,’ he said.
‘Which is?’ she asked, immediately regretting setting herself up as the straight guy to his idiosyncratic logic.
‘They need to be funny.’
*
‘Why didn’t you just look at it on your computer?’ was the first thing Catherine said.
‘Because George thought you might be offended,’ said Ottey.
‘Oh,’ said Catherine, touched.
‘I did not. It was simply a matter of procedure,’ Cross said quickly, destroying the moment.
They studied the grainy footage, spooling through to the night of Flick’s death. Nothing at all until just after 9 p.m.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Ottey quietly.
Chapter 67
Cross had no interest in making the arrest this time. He left it to Ottey, who took uniform with her. Sutton was surprised and disconcerted by the arrest, Ottey noticed. He must’ve realised they had new evidence. This was frequently the mindset of suspects on rearrest – they knew there had to be a good reason, some sort of progression in the police’s case.
Cross had obtained a search warrant for Sutton’s house and cycled over. He met a patrol car, which brought a battering ram to knock down the door – he was too impatient to wait and get keys and alarm codes. As he searched the house, uniform called the burglar alarm provider to shut off the alarm.
The house was entirely what Cross expected: an imposing Georgian property in one of Clifton’s best terraces overlooking Clifton Down. The inside was minimalist and aesthetically pleasing from an interior design point of view. It had clearly had professional input. The living room was book-lined, and the kitchen, while clutter-free, looked like it was used a lot. The garden was geometrically designed and immaculately pruned. Cross was interested to see a number of framed pictures of Sutton and his late wife – at their wedding, on holiday, with friends.
Cross had already known from his online research that Sutton had no children, and now the presence and number of these elegantly framed photographs underlined that there was only one important relationship in Sutton’s life.
There was no evidence of anyone else living in the house – in any of the bathrooms or bedrooms. There were no women’s clothes in the wardrobes of the master bedroom or any other bedroom, but Cross noticed a clothes cover hanging up in one bedroom. He opened it and discovered a wedding dress. He got it out to have a proper look and saw that it was the same one as in Sutton’s wedding photograph. He had kept her wedding dress.
Miss Havisham came into Cross’s mind – the dress representing something that no longer existed in Sutton’s life. His wife’s passing had obviously had a profound effect on him, and was possibly something he hadn’t been able to put behind him or recover from. Cross wondered how this all fitted in with what he was sure had happened – that Sutton had killed Flick.
*
‘You clearly loved your wife, Dr Sutton,’ said Cross. ‘I’ve seen the photographs in your house. Her death must’ve hit you hard – particularly in those circumstances. I, for one, believe your letting her die, in the way you did, was a genuine act of compassion. Self-sacrifice. Have you had many relationships since her death?’
‘No,’ Sutton replied.
They were back in the interview room. Sutton’s aura of confidence and superiority didn’t seem to be much in evidence.
‘Any?’ Cross went on.
‘Nothing significant.’
‘I also understand how your mother’s and wife’s deaths informed your views and your campaigning for assisted dying,’ said Cross.
Sutton looked at him, wondering where this was going. As was Ottey.
‘So here’s my question. When did everything change? Why did it change? When did the compassion you showed your wife turn into a total lack of feeling, remorse or humanity, when it came to Flick?’
‘No comment,’ Sutton replied.
‘Was Flick happy with your relationship?’ asked Cross.
‘I’ve already answered that question.’
‘Was she completely happy with her sessions?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she ever talk about ending her therapy with you? Bringing it to an end?’ There was no answer so Cross looked up from his file to see Sutton staring at him. He was fairly sure he was trying to calculate how much the police knew and thereby know how to answer the question.
‘Had we discussed her stopping? Yes,’ he replied carefully. ‘But that’s quite common with patients. It happens. They believe the sessions have achieved what they set out to do.’
‘But that wasn’t why Flick told you she wanted to stop, was it?’
‘As far as I recall it was, yes.’
‘She was unhappy about your dealings with another patient, wasn’t she?’
Sutton didn’t answer.
‘Specifically Leah Sommers.’ Cross looked up for a reaction. There was none. So he continued.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ he asked.
Sutton thought for a second and then appeared to make a decision.
‘Are you on the spectrum, Sergeant?’ he asked. Cross didn’t react in any way to this question.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ he asked.
‘I’m thinking Asperger’s, probably,’ Sutton went on.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross asked again.
‘Although the view these days is to say Autistic Spectrum Disorder rather than Asperger’s. Hans Asperger has been cancelled,’ Sutton informed his lawyer.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross asked.
‘Are you autistic, Sergeant?’ Sutton asked.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross asked, as if for the first time.
‘Here’s my question for you. Does the fact that you are autistic affect the way your findings are perceived in court?’ Sutton persisted.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross repeated.
‘Does his condition affect the validity of this interview?’ Sutton turned to his lawyer, who gave him a cautionary look. ‘I suppose it can’t. Interesting, though. Here we are talking about mental capacity and people’s ability to make end of life decisions and one of us is mentally… different,’ said Sutton.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross asked again.
Sutton looked at Ottey, who was giving nothing away. ‘It must be quite a challenge for you, Sergeant. On a daily basis,’ he commented.
‘Did you encourage Leah Sommers to end her life?’ Cross asked Sutton.
*
In an adjoining room, Mackenzie and Carson were watching this on a monitor. He turned to her.
‘This is exhausting. I’m not even in there and I need a break!’ he said and left.
Mackenzie was thinking how brilliant Cross was. She also knew that he could go on asking this same single question, again and again, with the same intonation, for hours, until he got an answer.
*
Sutton eventually blinked first. ‘We discussed it, yes. I also discussed Leah’s death with Flick. Did I advise Leah to end her own life? No. I never advise patients to end their lives. Even if assisted dying was legal in this country, it would be massively unethical for any medical professional to do such a thing. It would not be in the best interests of the patient. I would never encourage, persuade or advise a patient to take such a course of action.’
Cross had won the battle. The thing was that only Sutton saw it as such. To Cross, his refusal to answer the question initially was neither here nor there. He made a series of diligent notes in his file. He then produced the photocopied pages from Flick’s journal and put them on the table.
‘Do you recognise these?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘For the tape DS Cross is showing Dr Sutton photocopied pages from the victim’s journal,’ said Ottey.
‘As my colleague says, these are pages from Flick’s journal. They detail how she was intending to stop her treatment with you. But then again you know that, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Because you ripped these pages from her journal before placing it on Diana’s bookshelf behind the box files. Presumably in an attempt to implicate her in Flick’s death.’
‘Can you actually prove that?’
‘Good question. The answer is no, despite the fact that we both know it’s the truth.’ Cross turned to Ottey.
‘She’d figured Diana out. It was quite shocking but she knew you had to be involved. You had to know. Your comments on Leah’s death all but confirmed it. She was going to expose Diana. You’d be ruined. Your reputation would never recover. Twenty-two patients killed by your secretary. People you were supposed to be looking after and you hadn’t even noticed. Hard for the public to believe,’ Ottey stated.
‘And so I killed her, then attempted to frame my secretary who, according to you, I already knew was murdering my patients. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so absurd,’ Sutton practically spat this out.
‘“Doctor Death”,’ Ottey announced.
‘I beg your pardon?’ spluttered Sutton. Even Cross was taken aback.
‘I’m just visualising the front pages now. “Advocate of assisted dying goes one step too far”. Your new secretary says things are very quiet since Diana’s arrest. In fact, since she started working for you, you haven’t had a single patient consultation,’ said Ottey. There was a long pause which Cross eventually broke.
‘But it was so much more than that, wasn’t it? It wasn’t really as mundane as my colleague is suggesting, was it?’ He waited for an answer, which he knew wouldn’t come. ‘Over the years you’ve developed a taste for death. A fascination. It began with your mother’s and wife’s deaths, and then grew with your espousal of the assisted dying cause. But it wasn’t just death, was it? It was the witnessing of your mother’s and then your wife’s deaths that gave you such an inexplicable thrill. One you hadn’t experienced since. Then you discovered your secretary was furnishing you with such opportunities, again and again. Your practice was a death factory and you knew how to satisfy your voyeuristic need. If Diana had a blood test booked all you had to do was turn up after she’d left and witness your patient’s passing. She must’ve known what you were doing. It was an unspoken deadly contract between the two of you. Perfect until Flick figured it out. She became a problem you needed to solve. You talked about the power of the moment of someone dying and it was a short step from voyeur to killer. You viewed it as a necessity but the truth is you just had to try it. Maybe it would have been just the once. Thankfully we’ll never know. You knew Diana had been killing patients for years, without a whiff of suspicion, so what were the chances of your getting caught? Minimal, surely? You did it because you felt you had to, and felt you could. But above all you couldn’t resist seeing what it was like.’
Sutton made no answer.
‘For me, the most appalling thing was that you had helped a patient, a young mother, to recover from a terrible addiction. You had given her a second chance at life, only to take it away. And you were only able to do this because she trusted you. Even though she had decided to end her treatment with you, she still trusted you. I couldn’t work out how she let you do one final blood test on her. Then I read the agreement you made with your patients. Well, it’s more of a contract, in truth, in which everything is agreed, including consenting to random blood tests. You insist that, at the end of treatment, whether the termination is instigated by the patient or yourself, they have one final blood test to determine whether they are leaving your treatment clean or not. Is that what happened?’
‘No comment,’ said Sutton.
‘Trust. If only she hadn’t trusted you. If only she hadn’t let you into her flat. If only she hadn’t let you persuade her to have one final blood test. How can you live with yourself, I wonder? One thing I am sure of is that you’ve set the cause of voluntary euthanasia in this country back a good ten years. Because you’ve broken what everyone needs to have to make that legal: trust. Trust in the medical profession. Trust that if euthanasia existed it wouldn’t be abused.’
‘This is all well and good in theory, Sergeant, but the truth is you have the perpetrator already in custody. You have no proof that I killed Flick despite all your amateur psychology. Diana was obsessed with me. I can see that now. In her misguided, mad way she was trying to protect me. She’s a serial killer, for heaven’s sake. What’s one more body?’
‘Where were you on Tuesday the seventeenth of June?’ asked Cross.
‘We’ve been through this. I worked late that day.’
‘Did you see Flick Wilson on the seventeenth of June?’
‘I did not,’ sighed Sutton.
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Completely.’
Cross turned to Ottey who produced an iPad and held it up for Sutton and his lawyer to see.
‘Then how do you explain this?’ Ottey asked as she pressed play. The screen showed footage from the shop CCTV. A man dressed in a long overcoat approached the door to Flick’s flat. His face couldn’t be seen as he waited for her to answer his knock. Eventually she did. Ottey still found the sight of her alive, opening the door to her killer just hours before her death, upsetting. They talked. There was still no clear view of his face. Then, as he was about to go in, the man turned towards the shop.
Ottey froze the frame. There was absolutely no doubt about it. Looking towards the camera, frozen in time, was Dr Benedict Sutton. Sutton was then shown walking out of the building two hours later, leaving Flick dead inside, with her two-year-old infant.
There was no response from Sutton.
Cross turned to Sutton’s lawyer.
‘I know you’re not overly familiar with the details of this case, but the video you are looking at shows Dr Sutton being let into the victim’s flat, on the night of the murder. The young woman you see there is now deceased.’
Cross turned back to Sutton. ‘What do you say, Doctor?’
‘No comment.’
‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ said the lawyer.
‘On the contrary, it puts him at the scene of the crime on the night of her murder and it proves he’s been lying to us. But I sense a need to move things on here. So why don’t we do that? As I said, I went to your house today, Dr Sutton. Beautiful home.’ He noted Sutton’s slight reaction to this. ‘Did you have an interior designer, or did your wife do it? I rather thought it was probably done some time after her death. It has a somewhat masculine, muscular angular certainty about it. Anyway, I found these.’
Cross now produced four phials of diamorphine and placed them on the table.
‘Diamorphine taken from your fridge just a few hours ago. They were prescribed to a Mrs Brenda Lodge, who it turns out was the mother of a patient of yours. The terminally ill mother. You were marvellous after her death, apparently. But no surprise there. One of the things you did was take her unused diamorphine out of her daughter’s reach, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to use again at such a testing time. Very thoughtful of you. But you didn’t destroy it, did you? You’re the second person in this case to have done this. I’m beginning to think we need to look into the disposal of unused opioids and morphine after the deaths of the “prescriptee”, as it were. But that’s another matter.’ Cross had no more to say after this, and so just left.
Chapter 68
The arrests of Diana and Sutton brought huge kudos to the Avon and Somerset police force, but along with it came a certain amount of predictable criticism, mainly along the lines of how it had been possible for Diana to get away with killing people for so long. She herself had been placed on suicide watch in prison after two unsuccessful attempts to take her own life.
Internally it also had ramifications; well, one in particular – Campbell’s complaint. His summary dismissal of Flick’s death as suicide and deaf ear to Sandra’s concerns now looked like being a major error. Ironically, he had actually drawn attention to his mistake, which might otherwise have conveniently slipped under the radar. His complaint had initially been prompted by the fact that he was irked by Cross’s insistence at looking into a case where he, Campbell, had been sure no crime had been committed. Cross, with his usual dogged approach – he had refuted Carson’s assertion that he had a ‘nose’ for crime, asserting that he simply looked for facts and anomalies – had uncovered a serial killer on their patch. It was also a fact that in all the other cases in which Campbell had cited Cross’s bad behaviour, Campbell himself had been shown to be lacking.
‘Campbell’s complaint has been thrown out,’ Carson told Cross. He had summoned Cross to his office so he could see his face when he delivered the news. Carson was, of course, disappointed.
‘I see,’ replied Cross. ‘Is that all?’
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘Um, no. Not particularly. Should I be?’
‘Are you not in the least bit interested in the outcome for Campbell?’ Carson asked.
‘“Outcome”? What do you mean by that? He’s not in any trouble, is he?’
‘Well, the complaint doesn’t reflect well on him,’ said Carson.
‘Even so, people need to know they can make reasonable complaints without the fear of repercussion. It’s essential,’ reasoned Cross.
‘Of course. No, Campbell isn’t being punished, or sanctioned in any way. He has, however, put in a request for a transfer, which will be granted.’
‘I see.’
‘Well, that must be a relief to you, surely?’ Carson went on.
‘I have no idea whether it is or not,’ Cross replied and left.
Chapter 69
Cross now only had one thing on his mind: the organ recital, which was just a few days away. He found himself surprisingly nervous when thinking about it, and constantly changed his mind about the pieces he was going to play. He was also trying to negotiate some festive music to be included. Cross had needed clarification as to what he meant by ‘festive’ music. Stephen was insisting on a decision, as he wanted to type up a programme.
