The Most Unkindest Cut

By TONY NASH

Maya Curtis, a Philippino with a long history of sexual abuse, kisses her new husband as she leaves for work in Oncology Wing of St Margaret's Hospital, blissfully unaware that she is destined to be the first mutilated member of the cast in a series of theatrically staged murders, her death at first appearing to be natural. That opinion is rapidly revised when the pathologist sees that Maya's clitoris has been surgically removed just after death.
DI John Hunter regards the case as an obvious no-hoper. There is no scene of crime evidence, no obvious motive, and literally hundreds of possible killers. He and Jane go through the motions, interviewing staff, but the case stagnates.
Exactly five weeks later another Philippino nurse is killed in exactly the same way and in the same place. Her clitoris is also removed. Both women have histories where sex was a major part of their lives. Now there are too many possible motives: racial, sexual, revenge against the Department or a member of staff. John still faces the same problems.
The list of victims grows longer, with both nurses and doctors victims, always with body parts removed.
At last John thinks he knows who and where, unaware that Jane is in mortal danger...

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Mar 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631737657

TONY NASH

Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

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The Most Unkindest Cut

Tony Nash

Copyright © Tony Nash 2014

ISBN 9781631737657

Published by Tony Nash

Other works by this author:

The DCI Tony Dyce Thrillers:

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Murder on Tiptoes

The other John Hunter Thrillers:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Harry Page Thrillers:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

The Devil Deals Death – (A Black Magic Thriller)

The Makepeace Manifesto

The Last Laugh

The World’s Worst Joke Book

Panic

A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Salt

Hell and High Water

This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionally.

This was the most unkindest cut of all

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar Act 3. Sc 2

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part"

T.S. Eliot ‘Four quartets.

CHAPTER ONE

Mike Curtis waved goodbye to his best friend Joe, his lift home from the night shift at the factory, and ran through the light drizzle to the front door of his two-up, two-down terraced house in Fulham. He opened the Yale lock with his key and walked in, just in time for Maya to give her husband a long lingering kiss in the hall before leaving to start the morning slog in St Margaret’s oncology wing. As she kissed him her hand fondled his crotch, noting with pleasure that, even as tired as he was, there was an instant response.

‘Keep it warm for me, Mike.’ She whispered in his ear.

He grinned like a two year old kid given a second helping of ice cream, ‘You bet your boots, sweetheart.’

She pulled away reluctantly and gave a little wave as she went out of the door, pulling up the hood of her rainproof jacket with the other hand, smiling happily at her good fortune and blissfully unaware that she would never pass that way again.

Mike was smiling too as he watched her go, thanking his lucky stars for the ten thousandth time that he’d answered the advertisement:

"Philippino lady, pretty twenty-seven year old, seeks English husband, any age. Your every desire fulfilled."

That advert seemed like an open invitation to Heaven after thirty-two years of marriage to a frigid misery of a woman, whose idea of marital relations extended to once a month if he was lucky, and if he had done every little thing she asked during the whole of that time, and then in the missionary position only, while she lay back and thought of England, with no effort to join in, her face stuck in a vicious scowl, punctuated by repeated tightening of the lips and eyelids with each thrust, as she pretended that every one was hurting her.

Even with a spermicidal cream that she hated him using she was always dry, and nine times out of ten he gave it up as a bad job before ejaculating. In his mind he likened it to screwing a dry sponge, and found no joy in the act.

Afterwards she always said the same thing, as if the record was stuck, ‘I hope that you’re grateful. You’ll have to be especially nice to me from now on.’

His life was a bore; he’d felt dead inside, and had to make up spectacular stories to compete with the guys at work when they discussed their love lives.

It seemed that it would be his lot for the rest of his life, until the eve of his fifty-seventh birthday, when she gave him the most magnificent present possible by stepping off the pavement in front of a fast moving bus. He was so grateful he bought shares in the company, thinking that any firm that could work miracles must be good value. He’d been on the ball: the bus company had been taken over two days after he’d bought them, and the shares had almost trebled in value.

For a month he was in a daze, unable to believe his good luck, going almost every day to the cemetery to look at the grave, not in mourning, but to make sure she was still there and he wasn’t dreaming. Work aside, he felt at a loose end, wandering from room to room round the empty house, with an urgent desire to shout, ‘Whoopee!’ every few seconds. When Joe picked him up one evening for the trip to work he gave Mike the opportunity to put the icing on the cake, when he thrust the magazine in front of him, open at the adverts page, urging, ‘Get in there, Nobby – it’s your birthday!’ It wasn’t, but Mike got the message.

There were more than two dozen ads for British husbands, but somehow the one he wrote to appealed to him, almost as if he knew there was a hidden story. Quite apart from that, the ‘every desire’ bit had his imagination turning somersaults.

Maya had come on a visit and had given him the most exciting day and night of his life, doing things he had only dreamt of, bringing him to a climax three times in less than eighteen hours, which he guessed for a guy of his age must be some kind of record. He had not expected her to be pretty, knowing how exaggerated most dating adverts were, but she was just that - in fact verging on beautiful – five feet six, just one inch shorter than he was, with silky, long blond hair, which he now knew was dyed, beautiful hazel eyes with green flecks, and a nicely rounded but well kept slim figure. Her musical Philippino accent entranced him and he just couldn’t get enough of her breasts – so unlike his wife’s sagging dugs. Maya’s were taut, each one just a nice handful, with dark brown aureoles and uptilted nipples a man could die happy suckling.

Over breakfast the next day she told him her life story, leaving nothing out: sexually molested almost from birth and repeatedly raped from the age of seven, she had grown up in a hellhole where the only ways of getting enough money to live on were thieving, murder or prostitution. She had gone for the latter. She told him truthfully of the hundreds of dirty old men she had had to service, and how much she hated it. She showed him photos of her six-year-old son, Pete, and his one year older sister, Jeannie, looked after back home by her mother, to whom she wanted to send money, and she told him how much she wanted just one good man that she could love and cherish, and do so much for that he would never leave her. She promised utter faithfulness, and he told her he believed her, hoping desperately that she was sincere.

Mike was horrified by her story, but so impressed by her honesty that he asked her to stay. Two months later they married, and he’d never regretted it for one instant. Before she came the most exotic thing he’d ever eaten was a chicken tikka marsala from the takeaway, but Maya was a terrific cook and introduced him to new and exotic, wonderfully spicy recipes from her home country that he’d come to love. She made him sit down so that she could put his slippers on, cuddled and made a fuss of him all day long and told him he could do anything he liked with her.

After days of worry following the devastating typhoon, whose worst area of destruction had been Tacloban, where her mother lived, they’d heard word that the woman and Maya’s two children had evacuated the area in time and were alive and well, although living in a tent. Mike had immediately instigated arrangements for the children to come to Britain, and they were awaiting approval from Immigration.

Maya just made the eight-sixteen train and signed in early at her workstation at fourteen minutes to nine.

Her first job, as always, was to check that Theatre Number Two – the one used by Oncology - was stocked up with all the disposables required during operations.

She entered the theatre, which at that time, as always when not in use, had only suppressed back-lighting, and she was surprised to see a gowned and masked doctor standing by the stainless steel wall cabinet, looking down at something. Though unusual it was not without precedent, and she said, ‘Good morning’.

As she passed close behind the figure an arm was thrust quickly round her neck and a hand clamped over her mouth. She was pulled into the other body tightly.

She felt the prick of the hypodermic as it entered the artery just below her right ear and her body went into spasm.

What she did not feel was her scrubs trousers and panties pulled down and her clitoris, held firmly between a finger and thumb, quickly, neatly and surgically removed, before a gauze pad was applied over the wound and the garments were pulled up again.

It was thirty-eight minutes later when Carla Smith, the scrubs nurse entered to check the trolleys.

She thought Maya must have fainted, and turned her onto her back before feeling for a pulse. She couldn’t find one and tried again, frantically, one wrist, then the other, the neck arteries and inside the elbow, finally realising the woman was dead. She rushed out into the corridor, shouting for a doctor, and almost knocked over Doctor Elliot Cardin, who happened to be passing, although he worked in the Ophthalmic Department on the next floor up. He followed Carla in and after checking carefully agreed that Maya was dead.

The sister in charge of Oncology, Sheron Kramer, had heard the shouting and come running, followed by three other members of staff. They watched as the doctor pronounced death, and then Kramer arranged for the body to be taken down to the morgue in the basement. She and everyone else in the department at the time assumed Maya had had a heart attack and were stunned – the woman had seemed so healthy, and looked perfectly well when she arrived for work.

Her records were checked and a telephone call made to Mike, who, crawling out of bed from a deep sleep, felt as if he had been hit by an express train. He threw on the clothes he’d worn during his night shift and rushed out of the door.

After almost two hours of form filling and interminable waits, he was allowed down into the morgue and identified the body, weeping copious tears the whole time – devastated that she had been taken from him.

There being no urgency about checking on a heart attack, with many more serious cases to be autopsied, Maya’s body was pushed into one of the coolers, awaiting a slack time in the department.

It was not until five twenty the next morning, near the end of a long, harrowing nightshift, that Sarah Grady, the duty pathologist, had the body pulled out and placed on the stainless steel autopsy table for what was expected to be a routine post mortem to check that she had, indeed, died from an infarction.

One of Sarah’s dieners, Peter Flanner, removed the clothes from the body, wondering for the ten thousandth time how he could still get it up with a live woman, after seeing so many dead ones stripped naked. He saw the gauze strip between Maya’s legs and assumed she must have placed it there herself, after being caught out without a sanitary towel at the start of a period. He removed the gauze, noticing the blood, and, thinking it confirmed his first thought, threw it into the contaminated waste bin. With the legs of the corpse closed, he did not notice the wound.

Since the death was not seen as suspicious, the usual X-rays had not been taken and no samples saved before the washing began.

It was only when Peter opened the deceased’s legs to wash between them that he noticed the damage and jumped back, astonished, exclaiming, ‘Fuck me!’

Sarah, tired and not in the best of moods, groaned, ‘Not in a million years, Peter.’

He stood speechless for several seconds before he recovered and urged, ‘For God’s sake, Sarah, come over here and look at this.’

Sarah ambled over and stopped dead, suddenly fully awake. She uttered, ‘For once I agree with you, Peter. I think I might have said the same.’

He grinned, ‘You’d have got a different response from me.’

‘Not that it would ever do you any good. Now how the devil did that happen?’

‘Do you think she had it done deliberately – you know, as a religious thing?’

‘Just possible, I suppose, but I don’t think so. Not at her age, and if she had, she wouldn’t be at work like that. Was it covered in any way? Was there any blood?’

‘Just a gauze pad with a few spots on it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the bin.’

‘Well, get it out –with tweezers, and don’t handle it any more. Put it in a plastic bag and seal it.’

‘Why? You don’t think…’

‘I don’t think anything, Peter, but I’m not taking any chances. She is dead, and that wound is very, very recent. I’d say, looking at the traces of blood still around the wound, that it was done within the last twenty-four hours. I’m not touching that body until the police forensic team has checked it over.’

He laughed, ‘Oh, come on, Sarah. You aren’t suggesting she was murdered?’

Sarah had spent six months of her long training with a police pathologist and had assisted in four autopsies of victims whose deaths had been cleverly made to look like accidents or suicides. She had made a vow then that she would never overlook the slightest detail that looked out of the ordinary. ‘I’m not suggesting it, but her death is beginning to look suspicious. I’ll let the day staff deal with it. Put her back in the drawer, and be careful.’

She went over to the diary to write it up for the pathologist who would relieve her at eight.

CHAPTER TWO

Detective Inspector John Hunter, a veteran investigator with the Serious Crimes Division of the Metropolitan Police, typed the full stop at the end of the last line of a report on the murder investigation he had just completed, sighed with relief and looked lovingly across the desk at his beautiful young wife and fellow detective, ‘At last we can put our feet up for a while, Jane. Just look at that, will you? Nothing whatsoever on the white boards. That’s unheard of. Never happened before in all the years I’ve sat at this desk. All the killers must be on holiday on the Costa del Sol. We’ll be able to set up that brag school we keep talking about.’

‘I don’t think so. Angela will have something to say about that. You’d better find something to occupy your time. She’ll have you helping with the monthly stats if you look unemployed.’

Detective Chief Inspector Angela Green was the replacement for DCI Joseph Carlisle, whose mental breakdown was entirely down to John. Though he was delighted to see the back of Carlisle forever, he still felt like a heel for how he had acted. Angela was a terrific boss, unlike Carlisle, and he, and Jane for that matter, would have bent over backwards to please her.

They could see her now, in her little glass box at the end of the detectives’ office, on the phone and frowning as she wrote something down.

Jane grinned, ‘Think that might be something for us?’

John grimaced, ‘Don’t talk it up, sweetheart. I was just psyching myself up to get used to la dolce vita.’

‘In all those long years you’ve spent here detecting have you ever had the chance?’

He laughed, ‘You always have to go for the balls, don’t you?’

She reciprocated, ‘You know you would have it no other way, darling.’

Angela replaced the receiver and got up to open her door. She beckoned, and it was John she beckoned to.

He nodded, getting up, and grunted, ‘Oh-oh!’

Jane grinned at him, ‘See what I mean?’

Once in the office he asked, ‘A case?’

‘Possibly. A strange one. One of the nursing auxiliaries at St Margaret’s was found dead on the floor of one of the theatres. There were no obvious marks on her body, and they assumed it was a heart attack. When they took her clothes off, they found that her clitoris had been surgically removed, probably immediately after death. Janet Keller has collected the body, and I’m sending you to do a full investigation. It seems likely that someone in that hospital murdered her. The big problem is that because they weren’t suspicious the theatre where she was found was used all the rest of that day for operations, so it would be a waste of time for Ken Bryson and his SOCOs to go in and do a sweep.’

John groaned inside. A corpse in a hospital, no scene of crime or visual evidence, hundreds of possible killers - what a job. Where it wasn’t ‘No comment’, it would be, ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I was somewhere else.’ The wards, the corridors and the theatres were always like Piccadilly Circus at the rush hour, at all times of the day and night, and if ‘Casualty’ and ‘Holby City’ were anything to go by, any Tom, Dick or Harry could wander anywhere they liked. They had about as much chance of solving this murder, if it was a murder, as winning the lottery. Unless they could find someone with a clear motive they’d be on a hiding to nothing.

‘Was the woman married?’

‘Yes, quite recently, to a Michael Curtis. Here’s his address and telephone number.’

‘As we well know, when it comes to murder it’s more often than not down to the husband, but with this one, in a hospital operating theatre…probably not.’

‘Janet says she’ll wait until you get there before she does the autopsy.’

‘Right. I’ll get over there now.’

‘Take Jane with you.’

He wanted to object, but could think of no valid reason that Angela would accept. Janet and he went back a long way, to the time just after his divorce from his first wife, Anita. They’d had a torrid affair that ended only because she wanted more than just dalliance. She still carried a torch for him and liked to show it, particularly when Jane was with him. Oh, well, what