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“Tim?” Adam says, moving on quickly. “Anything back on the fly-tippers?”
The detective checks his notes. “One interview with a construction company called Bob’s Builders.” Adam gives him a disbelieving look. “I know, I know. I didn’t name them.” Lee continues: “Debris checked back there, but it’s been taken over in the last six months, and the new owners deny all knowledge. Nothing useful.”
“Great,” Adam mutters sarcastically.
The whole room is silent. Adam stares unhappily at the whiteboard, at the progress they’re not making. And he has one dominant thought. He needs to go. To see him.
“Boss?” Quinn says tentatively. Adam turns. Quinn takes a long breath in before she speaks again. “We don’t honestly think that this guy is trying to kill twenty people, do we? I mean …” She glances to the other detectives in the room. “He couldn’t possibly …”
Adam presses his lips together. His mouth feels dry. “I don’t know,” he replies. “But he seems clear on his goal. I don’t think he’ll stop of his own accord.”
He looks around the room. Takes in his detectives, the dark rings under their eyes, their skin sallow from not enough sunlight. Too many long days under the harsh fluorescent lights of the incident room. He’s aware of his own lack of cleanliness, his need for a shower and clean clothes after yesterday. But there’s no time to waste.
The detectives are all quiet. They wait.
“And one thing I’ll put money on?” Adam finishes grimly. “He knows who his next victim is. He knows that already.”
Extract from The Good Doctor: The True Story of Dr. Elijah Cole, by Lucas Richards, 1998
Elijah Cole’s childhood was far from idyllic. Like many serial killers before him, his early years were dominated by abuse and violence. His father was a wife beater and a drunk; his mother a quiet, unassuming housewife. Perhaps it should have been possible to predict what happened next, but nobody intervened when, on Thursday, June 20, 1968, Lucy Cole stabbed Maurice Cole to death with a kitchen knife. She had been beaten and strangled, left for dead when she took her revenge. Elijah Cole watched the whole thing. He was 11.
But, contrary to so many of these stories, Elijah Cole didn’t go on to be a wife beater himself. Exactly the opposite. Elijah says, of that day: “Knowing what he had put my mother through, I resolved to be the best husband and father I could possibly be. To never lay a hand on my wife. To be gentle and kind with my children.”
Some speculate his wife’s death drove him mad with grief. Others claim the murderous instincts were always there but pushed under when nourished by his wife’s adoration.
Whatever the reason, reports at this time agree with Elijah’s resolve. Despite what he did to the bodies found in his outhouse, to the women he raped and tortured and murdered, he never laid a hand on his wife. Neighbors describe Elijah and Joanna Cole as a devoted couple, deeply in love. Their daughter, Romilly, was cherished and cared for. While some describe Elijah Cole as a sadistic psychopath, one thing seems true: he was a good husband and father.
CHAPTER
46
ADAM STANDS MOTIONLESS in front of the man he knows only from news reports, from breathless gossip around the police station, from legend and lore. He is not what Adam expected.
Elijah Cole is clean-shaven, smelling of soap and laundry powder. Hair neatly combed away from his forehead, thinning on top, but holding up better than most men his age. He looks just how he was described, all those years ago: the man next door. The friendly GP nobody suspected.
“DCI Bishop,” he begins. “How nice to meet you for the first time. Although the basic courtesy of a shower and a shave wouldn’t have gone amiss.”
He holds out his hand, friendly and polite. Adam stares at it, then sits down opposite, his arms folded across his chest.
“Now, now,” Cole says in a mocking tone. “No need to be like that. I didn’t have to see you.”
A visitation request agreed on at short notice. Second time lucky. Adam had been surprised.
“No, you didn’t. So why did you agree?”
The doctor tilts his head to one side. “Curiosity,” he replies. Adam feels his appraisal run across his face, down his chest, to his hands, then back up. He has impossibly dark eyes, a smile playing on his thin lips. “The man my daughter married. Seems a strange decision, seeing you here now. But still,” he finishes with a chuckle, “you haven’t had your best week, have you, Detective?”
Adam refuses to rise to the bait. “And what do you know about that?” he replies calmly.
“About poor old Pippa Hoxton? Dead and drained? Nothing.” He gestures around the room with a smile. “I’ve been here all week. The perfect alibi.”
Adam glances toward the one guard, standing, bored, at the side of the room. Shaved head, a once muscled torso grown soft from lack of care. His face betrays nothing, certainly no allegiance to the fellow law enforcement officer sitting in the room with him.
Adam turns back to Cole. “Who have you spoken to? Who’s visited you?”
“Isn’t that your job to find out?”
“Information has been slow. Deliberately obstructed, one might say.”
