We assembled in the mortuary, final tasks today, Jane’s and John Doe’s, cutting them up and finding out what they died from.

My name is Mark Kavanagh, I’m in the final year of my medical school stay, experience, whatever you chose to call it, my class is only eight strong now, it was over twenty but those who could not stand the pace, or simply weren’t the cut above just felt that this was not for them.

This exam should be easy, the majority of the corpses had been brought in when they were found in the street, dead. There was nothing sinister about it, they usually died from drinking too much without eating, or the cold got a few of them, and some died of drug overdose. If you’d prefer not to do much it was simple, you just cut the body open poke around for a half an hour, then scribble your findings on the clipboard paper, you had a one in three chance of making the right assessment and Dr. Mukergy, our dim-witted professor, would never check up.

Dr. Mukergy was working his way through to retirement, in fact every class that he took with us, and probably everyone else, was started with the statement ‘In my day we didn’t have all this technological help, it was all hard work, that is why I’m grateful to be at the end of my career rather than the beginning.’

Anyway, we all went along, I had been given the only corpse whose name was known, Constance Noble, I think that it is better to be working on one of the John Doe’s than someone that you can put a name too. The cut from the coroners knife was still fresh, I looked at the chart, female, 32, brown hair, blue eyes, cause of death: drug overdose.

I checked her body, a simple once over to make everything clear. The normal post mortuum marks on the body, there is still the smell of sick from were they tried to pump her stomach. I reach her neck, her brown hair has to be moved out of the way, tow thumb marks on her neck, the bruise’s seem very vicious, not left over from where they tried for a pulse, I slip my hand over her throat, a one handed strangling effect. It fits.

There was no need for me to cut her open, I’d seen crushed throats before a coroner came into the class once with pictures, graphic pictures, Jenny McDonnell, who left shortly after, ran out of the class and spewed all over the corridor, the smell was there for weeks. I look at the chart again, the coroners name was blurred. I look to my left, Tracy Kelly is working hard at taking apart a Jane Doe’s stomach, I wasn’t going to ask her advice, she was smiling, doing that sort of operation there’s only two ways in which you should be smiling, the first is if you hated the person and the second is if you’re getting paid, unfortunately neither was the case here.

The Vietnamese student, Hugo Wong was to my right, I’d ask him but he probably would keep me talking about his homeland for an hour, Kieran Tipper was across the aisle, Dr. Mukergy was asleep by now and Kieran was looking bored, he had done his test the easy way, cut the body open and poked around, then concurred with the coroners verdict, exposure to extreme cold, the poor bugger had fallen asleep outside, soaking wet and in the middle of the coldest night of the year.

I brought the chart over, Kieran was stitching his name into the corpse, he never did know what to do with his time. “Can you make out that signature ?” showing him the chart.

He looked at it for a moment and then turned it upside down, he was confused. Finally he handed it back to me. “It looks like Hugo might understand it. Can’t be English anyway’s” he throws the clipboard back at my direction but misses, Mukergy starts to wake, I make it back to Constance before his mind starts to function properly and he can figure out that I was somewhere where I shouldn’t have been.

Mukergy gets up from his desk, walking past all of us and looking in, he looks closer at mine, Constance looks the same as when we first uncovered her, Mukergy looks at the clock, and then at his watch. Mentioning the discovery that I’ve made to him would be good at this moment.

“emmm, Sir, I know what you’re thinking....” I try to place the sentence together in my mind before I speak it. Though Mukergy isn’t bothered, “Is your overall scores good enough that you can waste a good half an hour before starting this examination ?” his crinkled voice is wondrous, like those old English actors who star in Charles Dickens adaptations. “Sir, this woman did not die from what is written on this report, and the coroners signature is blurred, I think it’s false!” Mukergy takes the board from me, he looks it over once, his mouth closed and I can hear mumbles from inside the mouth, whatever he thought, he wasn’t happy to be thinking about it.

“Mark, could you go and wait outside the Dean’s office ? I’ll be with you shortly.” Mukergy suddenly changed, I could never remembered him like this, not in all the years that I have known him.

My main concern was that my test might suffer for my discovery, that was unacceptable. Though my fears were laid to rest, Mukergy explained that he could rearrange the test for me, at a later date, this worked for me, I’ve been having a head cold and the cold tempetures of this room isn’t helping, and another reason was that I could use the time to get my skills homed better.

I waited for an hour, though it seemed like longer, counting seconds isn’t a good way to pass time. Mukergy and the Dean had attended med. school together, and they drank regularly at the local, but I hoped that they weren’t talking about old times now and I could get out of this place quickly.

Mukergy came out and motioned me down to his office.

A cold room, he kept it this way, some of the professors were obsessed by death, he figured that if he died his body would be placed into cold storage anyway, so he would be able to help this if he went in his office.

No one ever knew that he was married, we all thought that no one could ever marry him, and if someone did they had died years ago. But him and his wife seemed to live to die together.

But now it happens, all the outside novelty has been whisked off to a storage facility where it can come out again only after it stops raining.

The truth that has been hidden from me, and from you and everyone who is not privy to the high level of security of the police’s Violent Crimes Unit. But suddenly my importance had grown, few would have heard that which I’ll be hearing. Mukergy lays the story out, and this is what I hear.

Constance Noble, the sixth victim of a serial killer. Now, with a name like Constance Noble, you would think that there may be about two three people with this name, no, no, no, no. It seems that my pal on the slab is the 6th victim named Constance Noble. And now, the truth is, well, there should be a lot of parents out there hanging their heads in shame. There are another 3 people out there with the name Constance Noble.

I leave in shock, I know that my life will not be the same, things change all the time. But not normally this quickly.

Home at last, back to the normality of my home, I’ve lived here for the last six month’s and soon will be moving on, the hospital where I shall do my residency will be in another county and this means that I shall have to find somewhere near the hospital, I could commute but with the time that it takes I would never get any rest what-so-ever. And we all know how higher management in these hospitals like to give their residents a great deal of experience, by working them to the bone, at least 80 hours a week.

The door is harder to open than usual, something is blocking it from allowing me complete access, being away from my mother makes it easier for me to fit through the gap that the door did open. I’m no great cook, and my grant does not allow me the luxury to afford takeout all the time. But sometimes. Once inside I hit the lights, the door pushes back easier than it was to open it. A brown A4 flat envelope, is lying on the floor, my name is thickly marked with a wide brushed marker. Being a student, and always dreading things that come in envelopes, in case its exam results, or dreaded job offers to hospitals that spawn more deaths through the lack of hygiene than cancer, and after the days events I was in no humour for any such offers to be made.

But I’m the type of person that reads the last page of a thriller first, just to find out how it turns out, and to see whether the story that leads to this ending would be worthwhile for me, though our professors in the college had made it known that the books we chose to read shall be the bearing on how good of doctors we shall become, so does reading Stephen King and Clive Baker mean that I shall not be winning any of the Noble prizes for break through surgery techniques, well we’ll have to wait and see.

But the envelope contained no such offers, and after reading it I wished that I was being sent to a bad hospital.

Instead, I had received instructions that I should be outside my apartment building in less than one hour. Firstly how would they, the Violent Crimes Unit, know when I got home and what made them think that I would be interested in taking the bait, so to speak.

Let me first explain, who are the Violent Crimes Unit ?, well this is a secretive government body originally set up to investigate repetitive crimes against citizens, but the investigation methods used by the agents of the Unit were so effective that their case load was reduced by half in their first month in operation. Now they are used on special occasions, such as this, and their agents never give their names, never give detail about their past. Agents for the unit are brought in from normal government agencies, police, army, special forces and other armed bodies, recruitment happens rarely and the majority of agents have no ties, friends are few, and responsibility is never mentioned.

That’s your questions that are answered, well those that I can answer now, but there is one question that I need answering now, Why would they need me ?

I am not pushed to be outside in the hour deadline stated in the neatly typed letter, I sit, watch the news and then fix myself something to eat, I try to clear my mind but it ain’t working, too many thoughts are coming through, too many conclusions to a scenario that I know nothing about.

This is getting on my nerves.

I grab my coat, the letter and an apple. The stairs back down is my route, I never trusted the elevator, the superintendent was not mechanically gifted, and there was no intention in my mind to spend any amount of time inside a closed down space like space like that poky elevator.

A car waiting outside with its passengers doors open, two men in neat, clean, expensive suits wait for me to climb inside, I do and close the door, I know that being here is filling me with dread, and also that being a student, there was an amount to be learned by this experience.

The drive is peaceful and quiet, really quiet, I know that I should be asking questions, but the feeling is that my opinion on what I should be doing, asking anything about the situation and where it is that we are actually going is not really on the agenda of conversation for this evening.

Remembering that special on the Violent Crimes Unit a few months back, an ex-member was clouded by a dismal special effect to hide is identity and a choking sound cloaking his voice, his interview was brief, and the answers to the questions were subdued, but I remember that he stated that agents rarely talked to non-agents, this was one of the ways in which the Violent Crimes Unit promoted team work and it seemed to be working. Annoying but working.

A house in the country, the rain is starting to fall, I couldn’t really see in which direction we had travelled, all that I know is that I missed the smoggy streets of the city.

We leave the car, the two agents cold in their unspoken orders to get me into the house, a bungalow, whose attic has been converted into another room. A electric numeric keypad is fixed to the door, totally contrast to the rustic setting, before entering, I took one, another, a final look around, still I couldn’t place myself, couldn’t see any landmark that would innocently give away where the hell I am.

A fire burns inside, I look around, there are three others here, after looking at the decor for a few moments we are introduced, though simply by occupation, the Violent Crimes Unit stated that we were not to relinquish our real identities to each other, for security reason’s. A rookie cop, fresh out of the academy, she is gorgeous, red hair, and eyes that would stop a freight train. A priest in training, he was not like other Priest that I had met, he had a darkside that was silent, or that his studies was keeping subdued. And finally, the most interesting of my new friend, another girl, simply called Shrink, she seemed uncomfortable about being called a shrink, though I could not feel anything from her, anything solid.

The briefing, we were all in the dark about why we were brought here, though we knew that they, the Violent Crimes Unit had their reasons and they must have been, well, for lack of a better term, ‘desperate’ to use us, it was made clear that we are all infants in our respective fields, the rookie cop, didn’t seem bothered by the briefing’s patronising tone, fresh out and wanting to make a name for herself, who could blame her, though the others and myself were miffed. We had, afterall, been brought out, and speaking for myself, had had a pretty tiring day. When I had gotten home earlier I had just wanted to flake out and watch some late night T.V.

They stated that we had all stumbled on the killings, and as such we were to be given the job that the Violent Crimes Unit couldn’t do. It was the only time that whole evening that the agents from the V.C.U. actually showed a facial expression.

Each of our involvement’s was made clear to the other members of this flawed society of professionals that I had been introduced to. My story went first, all that Briefing man had left out of my history was that I never called Judith Banks back after sleeping with her. A decision that I regarded as my one failure in adult life.

The Rookie was next. She had found the third victim, and as she was trying to make the name for herself, later revealing that she wanted into the V.C.U., went ahead and started to dig into the other two killings.

Oh, if you’re wondering, all the killings were strangulation’s, there is another term, more technical, but I’d be buggered if I could remember it now.

Apparently the Priest had met the fourth and fifth victim prior to their murders and the shrink, well, all that was revealed about her was that there was a possibility that she had met the killer.

Finally the guy with the information threw the floor open to any questions that we may want to be asked.

Rookie was silent, she didn’t seem to want to question anything in case she was seen to be a trouble maker. Priest was lost in thought, the shrink, man she is cute, well she just asked what they wanted us to do ?

The answer was less than desirable.

There was nothing that could have prepared us to the answer. Briefing man, in his late forties, he is was surprisingly calm. The Violent Crimes Unit had had contact with the murderer, though the conversation was top secret.

It was suggested, by the Briefing man, that we all spend the night in the bungalow, in order to get better adjusted to working within the team, frankly all I wanted to do was to go to sleep, which I found myself begging to do as Rookie was telling a story about her first day on the job, a fish and a nine volt battery, as I said I was tired, there would have been more details about the story, if it was tomorrow and I have had twelve hours sleep then you’d hear all the graphic details.

One by one we all went to sleep. But not for long, at three A.M. we were shaken awake by Briefing man, who then informed us that the killer had struck again.

Although my heart went out for the poor Victim I have to say there was a certain amount of relief that the murder occurred whilst we were all cooped up, the thought that one of the women was the killer. I should’ve thought ahead.

We arrived at the apartment building, there must be about forty to fifty apartments in the building, though I’ve seen kennels that are more spacious. I’m not bitter about the fact that I could not afford one of them, it’s just, that, who could afford one hundred and seventy five pounds a week for a shoe box. Shrink and Rookies started poking around the room, blood was everywhere. Priest stayed at the door and just poked his head around the door to take a quick look. Briefing man entered after making sure that the sickly priest was alright.

“The call came in at two thirty A.M., a neighbour heard screaming and then silence, she came to investigate, then found the body.” Briefing man wasn’t reading off any note book but his manner was consistent with that notion. I noticed a few rare vinyl recordings of Bryan Adams to one side and I knew that this woman was someone with little or no taste, and who lived in the past, vinyl, in this day and age.

I stopped looking at the vinyl collection and noticed that everyone was looking at me, why ? Then something hit me, the body was removed. Briefing man suggested that I go along with him and attend the autopsy, Shrink chose to come along, Rookie and Priest said that they would stay in the crime scene to check for anything that could be helpful.

This was the sixth victim, Constance the sixth. After the autopsy, I sat down in the hospital cafe, it was nearly six o’clock in the morning, being a student, I always challenged those that told me that there was such a time. The coffee was from a vending machine and there was no heat in the drink, but heat wasn’t the issue, it was the caffeine that I needed, Dr. Mukergy’s sarcastic words about junior doc’s best friend came to mind, as he put it, ‘In the middle of a thirty-six hour shift, the best friend you’ll ever have is either caffeine or speed, and I can only recommend that one that Maxwell house sell in those jars.’ I never saw the point in coffee, but then I never saw the point in helping the police with their inquires before, I mean, what if someone with my name went around killing people with the same name. My death would be a tragedy.

Briefing man came and placed the coroners reports from the other five Constance Noble’s beside me, then walked off, removing his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and punching in numbers as he left.

I flicked through the pages of the reports, remembering the ‘Silence of the Lambs’, though this memory only brought about the regret that none of the V.C.U. agents looked as good as Jodie Foster, or even Anthony Hopkins for that matter. There was nothing unusual about the reports, at most the only difference between the women was the fact that some were blond, red headed, taller and smaller, nothing else seemed important.

Needing a walk I left the folder behind and started to walk around, I knew that if something happened I had to remain awake. It would have helped if the hospital was busy, but the sane people were in bed.

Shrink came in and went to the vending machine to get herself a coffee, she was not as obliging with the fact that the coffee was cold and once tasting it and becoming annoyed at the ice coffee she had received she proceeded to kick the machine. I guess she wasn’t the A typical shrink, controlled and level-headed.

Briefing man stood outside the cafe, his mobile phone seemed to be stuck permanently to his ear, though the conversation he was having was hard to get a grip on the expression on his face showed that it was a conversation that he didn’t want to be having.

The star-tac phone clapped shut, Briefing man didn’t even bother to give the obligatory ‘goodbye’ to the person on the other side of the phone. He walked into the cafe, and by this time Shrink had sat at a table beside me, though not my table, very rude.

“There’s been another incident, another Constance Noble!” Briefing man was hard with his delivery of the news, you could be mistaken for believing that the years of this kind of work would make him more sensitive, but no, the sensitivity seems to be drained right out of the man.

Shrink wasn’t shocked, she seemed to be following in the footsteps of the Briefing man.

“I thought that you had each woman protected ?” I was tired, and definitely not in the humour for another autopsy. Briefing man took a chair and sat between myself and Shrink.

“We believed that there was one woman that was out of the country, but she wasn’t due back for another two days.” The heat in the building was starting to grow, the ‘burst’ heaters unleashed heat in the morning and then allowed that heat to subside during the day. Briefing man removed his suit coat and placed the grey piece on the table beside him.

He went on to state that the crime had been committed as the woman was leaving the Airport, but there was a difference with this woman, the killer made one serious mistake, or at least, could fulfil the usual routine. Pressure marks around the wrists of the previous victims seemed to indicate that the killer took the pulse rate on the victim. But this time the victim is stronger than those who’ve come before her, she survived. Briefing man’s tone suggested that he was annoyed, yes a crime had been committed, but the crime this time had a change, the non-victim had survived, and now there was a chance that their is a possible positive ID

In the still of the morning the sound of the approaching ambulance cut through that stillness with sharp double edged strokes.

Constance Noble the non-victim, her survival was now our goal, I checked her vital signs and although she was unconscious she would make a full recovery.

She was left alone now in her room, a suit from the V.C.U. standing outside her room, making sure that the killer did not get the opportunity to finish the job. Shrink couldn’t wait for the forty odd woman to wake so that they could make a profile from the comatose woman. Briefing man was on that mobile again, trying to track down Priest and Rookie.

Ten minutes passed and Priest entered, I was glad to see him, but the one that I would have been more content with seeing did not show. Rookie had gotten a ‘beeper’ vibration a few minutes after we had left the apartment and has not been in touch since.

A star of David was found on the survivor so Priest refrained from going in and saying a prayer over her, instead he came to the cafe where I have been using for an office and sampled the acquired taste of cold coffee.

Talking for a moment, he seemed to be very interested in the whole field of medicine, suddenly I found myself interested in religion, and lets face it, the way in which my sex life was going there was not many differences in the way in which we led our lives right now.

But tension was growing, there was something about to happen that none of us could anticipate, or maybe we could and just couldn’t justify allowing ourselves believe that it would happen. Shrink was now sitting over in the far corner away from Priest and I, reading a book on Psychology.

I could see Briefing man walking, rather staggering towards the entrance to the cafe, he was hidden from the others who had their backs to the door.

Behind him I could see Rookie walking with reason towards him. She places her right hand on his shoulder and turns him around with ease, it’s not until Briefing man falls to the floor that I see the Rambo style knife in her hand.

I’m stuck in fear, I want to scream in all the colour’s of the rainbow, want my lungs to burst with the pressure I place on them but my mouth just hangs there, limp and useless, Priest looks at me, I can see him looking at me, all I want to do is reply to the look but my eyes are transfixed on Rookie, standing over Briefing man, she does not notice me, watching her slaying. I rub my eyes, I’ve been awake for thirty-six hours now, I’m praying that I’m seeing things that are not there. But alas no, Rookie closes her eyes and crouches down to wipe the blood off the blade. As she rises, so does Shrink, who intended to get another cup of steaming cold coffee, but instead got an eyeful of the murderous scene at the door.

Shrink’s vocal abilities were not as impaired as mine, she screamed quite well, well enough to break the deadlock in my vocal cords. “Thank Christ” the priest was alarmed by my statement, though it served well, it saved me from alerting him to the situation.

Rookie glanced us over, one by one, holding the knife in her hands, which for the first time I noticed had slight burns on the back of. Priest stood and I could sense the fear growing in us all. I moved back away from the door, Rookie moved to underneath the frame, Priest stood his ground.

“Rookie, whatever you’re feeling now, the good lord will go through it with you.” He seemed to be more feeling than Shrink. Rookie smiles. She places the dark silver blade upto her face and embraces it as a child would embrace a teddy bear.

“All my life my father told me, try harder, I’d get a ninety-nine percent in a test and he’d want to know where the other one percent went to.” You didn’t have to be a Shrink to know that behind the mask of fondness to which Rookie was describing the relationship between her and her father there was a cloaked hatred and disgust. “I mean, father only did it to make me understand, to make me be the best, that’s why he gave me my name, he said I had a unique name and therefore that would make it easier to be recognised, as the best.”

Shrink, Priest and I stood open mouthed as Rookie said her piece. “I can see that you all realise that my name is Constance Noble, and the final obstacle in my way to being the best lies here in this hospital. Now daddy will be proud of me, the country’s best Constance Noble.” Rookie, Constance or whatever you wanted to call her was caught up in her own belief that the murders could bring her the redemption that she sought with her father.

Shrink looked at the fire escape, which she and I were about to use out of job description for the door, which now I call Murder Escape. The only problem now was how we could distract Rookie long enough to get out of danger. Without too much thought Priest started to walk towards Rookie.

“My child, you are loved! Your heavenly father loves all his children, no matter what success or lack there of you have.” Rookie seemed to think over the comment of the priest, but did not take it serious, as she ran the young priest through with her blade, the poor cleric had no chance, as Rookie repeated the stabbing over and over again.

This unfortunate incident, for the Priest, gave myself and Shrink the shot of getting to freedom. But the crime rate in the city had caused the administrators in the hospital to lock the door in the hours where the flow of people in the cafe was slow. I had to think fast, being a man I was under the false illusion that it was up to me to get Shrink and myself out of this one. But while I was thinking about what to do Shrink had already belted Rookie across the head with a fire extinguisher. And then proceeded to smack me across the face with her hand, to wake me up.

We ran through the halls, and viewed the bodies of the V.C.U. agents spliced bodies that rookie had already taken out.

“Stop, I can’t run anymore!” Shrink was about three metre’s ahead of me and there was no chance of me catching up with her. “One of us has to get help, the other has to move the victim, Okay..... I’ll.....” The shrink went to the entrance shouting as she left, ‘Help’. All that I could do was curse the bitch, I wanted to go and get the help, and a couple of hours sleep.

I proceeded down the hall and up the stairs, I could hear screams coming behind me, I knew that Rookie had woken and was not happy about being belted with a safety device. I reached the room and the V.C.U. agent outside had already been killed, given a Colombian neck tie. This did not give me great hope about the state of the recovering woman inside the room.

I enter the room and there she is, hovering in and out of consciousness, I closed the door behind me, there was nothing there that I could place in front of it to stop Rookie from getting in. The door flung open with one kick from Rookie, I hid behind the door and waited. Rookie made her way towards the victim, she must have thought that both Shrink and I went for help, she held the blade to the victims throat. “Why are you waiting ?” I tried to distract her, but Rookie seemed to know that I was there. And was not bothered by it.

“You know that I never killed any of them as they were sleeping, I wanted them to know the name of their killer” She went to put the blade of the knife through the sleeping woman’s heart. I rush forward and grab her, she tosses me to one side like a piece of used up paper. “Guess I’m gong to have to sort you out first.” She moved closer to me, I’d seen too many slasher flicks to know that at this stage there was not much point of me trying to reason with her.

I back myself to the window, and try to make the window segment smash, so that I can at least fight my way out of this. Rookie charged at me, the knife outstretched with his arm like a knight’s lance. The window won’t give under the pressure from my punches. I move to one side, Rookie hits the window and her body falls from the second story window and hits a Mercedes S series car on the bonnet as it is in motion.

To wrap up, it’s now three weeks, Shrink has gone AWOL, the V.C.U. has to rebuild it’s staff and I have to repeat this year because I upheld the law. And brought a killer to justice.

But the end is now the beginning.