The Kate Fletcher Series

by Heleyne Hammersley

  ‘Meaning?’ Kate asked, her brain trying to keep up.

  ‘It is possible that somebody mixed the drink, forced the deceased to drink it, wiped the bottle and then realised their mistake. The bottle and glass would be checked for prints. They held Mr Lambert’s hand to the glass but didn’t consider the weight or the pouring position. Too much pressure could have caused the smudging.’

  Kate tried to picture it. Caroline forcing the glass up against her father’s mouth. Wiping the bottle and then panicking as she realised her error. She could have easily placed his fingers against the glass when he became unconscious. Was it enough? And would it make a difference? Did this make it murder or was Caroline Lambert still only guilty of aiding the suicide of a terminally ill man?

  ‘I know you won’t want to answer this,’ she began. Kailisa gave her a tight smile. ‘But do you think Caroline Lambert murdered her father rather than just left him with the means to take his own life?’

  Kailisa sighed and looked down at the corpse. ‘I just can’t imagine a man with so much Diazepam in his system being able to walk to the bathroom and get water simply to make his final drink more palatable. I also can’t imagine him being able to pour the whisky by holding the bottle in such a delicate grip. He would have dropped it. The Oramorph bottle doesn’t help us, however, as it is smaller and the label is paper which is difficult to recover fingerprints from.’

  Kate looked at Hollis who seemed lost in thought. ‘What do you think?’ she asked him.

  He turned to Kailisa. ‘Wouldn’t there have been whisky and drugs on his pyjama top? If he’d choked, surely some of it would have dribbled out of his mouth?’

  Kailisa walked over to a workbench and turned on his laptop. He tapped a few keys and then turned the screen so that Kate and Hollis could see it. It showed an image of a pyjama top laid on a white surface. Scattered around the neck area were a series of red dots.

  ‘The cotton tested positive for alcohol and opiates. Some areas look like droplets, perhaps from his lips or chin; others are tiny and could have been emitted as Mr Lambert coughed to clear his throat and lungs.’

  ‘But, again, that could have happened if he’d done this himself and taken too big a swig?’

  Kailisa nodded slowly. ‘It is possible but the pattern of droplets suggest that he was lying with his head propped up rather than sitting. If he’d been sitting we’d have expected the drops to be further down the pyjama top as they fell towards his lap.’

  ‘And who tries to drink when they’re lying down? Hollis said, excitement evident in his voice. ‘She must’ve tried to pour it down his throat.’

  It did all point in that direction, Kate had to admit, but getting a jury to believe it was a different matter. A good defence lawyer would probably come up with five or six different scenarios to explain Kailisa’s findings. More than enough to instil reasonable doubt. Was it enough to re-arrest Caroline Lambert? Kate wasn’t sure. She’d seen Kailisa in court, he was quiet and methodical and explained his findings carefully and thoroughly, but he refused to be drawn into speculation and that might go against them.

  She rolled off her gloves and started pulling at her gown. Time to think. That’s what she needed. Time to process and to come up with a strategy to take them forward.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor Kailisa,’ she said, almost as formally polite as the pathologist himself. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about.’

  She threw her gown into a hamper next to the door and pushed open the glass doors which led her away from death and disease.

  ‘Well?’ Hollis asked, trotting after her like an eager puppy. ‘Do we arrest her again? It’s not looking good for her.’

  Kate was just about to explain her uncertainties to the DC when her phone rang.

  ‘Barratt? What have you got?’ Kate continued her brisk pace down the corridor.

  ‘Maddie Cox definitely attended the GA group that I went to last night. Everybody there knew her and the woman described fits the description from the son.’

  ‘Anything useful. Had her demeanour changed over the last few weeks? Did she seem especially stressed or worried?’

  ‘Nobody seemed to think so. They didn’t know much about her personal life. Apparently that’s not something she talked about. One member of the group thought that she was single and somebody else remembered that she had a son. It doesn’t look like she was especially close to any of them. She usually arrived and left on her own.’

  ‘Usually?’

  ‘There was one incident before Christmas. A new member arrived and Maddie appeared to know her. She spoke to her after the meeting and they left together.’

  Kate’s pulse accelerated. She stopped walking. Could this be it? The connection between Maddie and Caroline Lambert?

  ‘Did you get a description of this woman?’ Kate asked, uttering a silent prayer to a God that she didn’t believe in. Barratt was thorough, he loved details. She really hoped that this wasn’t the one time where he overlooked something.

  ‘Of course,’ he said and she could hear from his tone that he was slightly offended that she might have doubted his competence. ‘Late thirties, early forties. Well dressed. Minimal make-up but good bone structure. I’m quoting here. Short, fair hair. Tallish. I got the feeling that she made quite an impression on one of the group, he gave a detailed description.’

  ‘Did he get a name?’

  ‘It was a couple of months ago, and she hasn’t been back since but he was fairly sure it was either Carol, Caroline or Karen. Typical bloke eh? Remembers what she looked like but not quite sure about the name.’

  ‘Excellent work, Barratt. I need you to talk to Ethan Cox and show him a photograph of Caroline Lambert, see if she was a friend of his mum. Show the same photo to this man from GA – I assume you took his contact details.’

  ‘You think there’s a link?’ Barratt sounded incredulous.

  ‘It’s either one hell of a coincidence or there’s a link between the two women that might help us find out what happened to Maddie.’

  She hung up and turned to Hollis who was looking as stunned as she felt.

  ‘There’s another connection?’

  She quickly filled him in on her conversation with Barratt, excited to see the sceptical frown replaced by a hopeful smile.

  ‘We need to talk to Caroline Lambert,’ he said. ‘See what she can tell us about Maddie. We can test Kailisa’s evidence on her as well, see what she has to say.’

  ‘You get onto it. She was bailed to her own home in Sheffield. Don’t ring in advance – just turn up. I don’t want her prepared. Drop me off back at base on your way; I’m going to see what Sam’s been digging up.’

  Chapter 22

  Cooper was at her desk when Kate got back to Doncaster Central, scowling at something on the screen. Rather than interrupt her, Kate went up to the top-floor cafeteria and grabbed coffee for them both. She tore the plastic lids from the tops of the takeaway cups and added sugar for herself and milk for Sam before cramming the lids back on and wandering over to the window.

  Kate loved this view. When she was involved in a complicated case she sometimes felt like it was the only chance she got to notice the weather and the changing of the seasons. Now, deep in winter, the trees were skeletal and she could clearly see the buildings around her, including the museum – the site of many happy family outings when she’d been younger. The sky was iron grey and flat and the streets were streaked with red-brown dashes of salt to stop black ice from forming. She hadn’t noticed the temperature when she’d been out earlier but she could see that it was set to fall again later and the sky was threatening more snow.

  As she trudged back down to the second floor, she pondered the connection between Caroline Lambert and Maddie Cox. What was the link? Were they just both GA members who happened to have met at the hospital? Did GA members have sponsors – was that it? But wouldn’t it have been unethical for Maddie to treat Dennis Lambert if she had some sort of personal relationshi
p with his daughter? None of it made much sense when she considered that Caroline lived in Sheffield and had only been back in Doncaster for a couple of months. How could she have struck up a friendship with the nurse in such a short time? Unless there was something more sinister behind it – which is exactly what she needed Sam to investigate.

  ‘Thought this might help,’ Kate said, plonking the coffee on Cooper’s desk, next to her keyboard. ‘You looked like you were engrossed when I came in earlier so I didn’t want to bother you.’ Kate pulled up a chair and positioned herself so that she could see Sam’s computer screen.

  Cooper looked up, her eyes struggling to focus as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. She looked at the coffee then back at Kate. ‘Oh, er… thanks. Must’ve lost track of time a bit.’ She removed the lid from the coffee cup and took a sip. ‘I’ve been checking Maddie Cox’s phone records. Got them sent over earlier. Got her bank stuff as well.’

  Cooper’s typically terse conversation style had reduced to being virtually monosyllabic, and Kate wondered how much of that was fallout from the previous night. It must have been a shock to get home and find her girlfriend gone. She opened her mouth to offer some reassurance but, as though she could read Kate’s thoughts, Sam launched into a detailed account of what she’d found, preventing Kate from saying anything further about the previous afternoon.

  ‘Not many phone calls on her account. Mostly to Ethan. Same with texts. Some work stuff probably. Two calls on the day she went missing.’

  ‘Made or received?’

  ‘Made,’ Cooper said. ‘I’ve run them through a search engine. One’s a pizza place near the market, Fabrio’s, but I can’t find the other.’

  Kate leaned over in her chair and grabbed a thin sheaf of papers from her own desk. She shuffled through them until she found Caroline Lambert’s contact details.

  ‘Does this match?’ she said, passing Sam the piece of paper and indicating the mobile number.

  Cooper peered at her screen. ‘Yep. Who is it?’

  ‘Caroline Lambert.’

  ‘The mercy killing woman?’

  ‘The same.’

  Sam shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. What’s the connection?’

  ‘That’s what Dan’s gone to find out. He’s on his way to Sheffield to pick Lambert up so we can ask her a few questions. We need to get somebody over to Fabrio’s and find out if Maddie was there on the night that she died. Kailisa said that her stomach contents were consistent with pizza. Maybe she met somebody there.’

  Sam grimaced at the mention of stomach contents, and Kate wondered if she was hungover. She looked tired and her eyes were slightly glazed. Her hands were steady on the keyboard though and she didn’t smell of stale booze. Probably just tired.

  ‘You okay?’ Kate asked. Sam nodded, keeping her eyes fixed on the screen. ‘You sure? Dan and I met Abbie yesterday. It looked like she was moving out.’

  Cooper’s face froze and Kate could see that her concern was unwanted. The DC had always been reluctant to discuss her personal life and never brought anybody to work events.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she continued. ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No. It’s not,’ Cooper snapped, then blushed as she realised who she was talking to. ‘It has nothing to do with my ability to do my job so can we please move on? I just don’t want to talk about it.’

  She tapped a couple of keys and her screen changed to what looked like bank account details. ‘I’ve not had a thorough look at Maddie’s bank details but there’s one thing that stands out a mile. She was in debt. Most of her salary went on credit cards and she made a withdrawal of five hundred pounds every month at the same time.’

  ‘That ties in with her GA attendance,’ Kate said. ‘Might be gambling debts. Was she close to paying off her cards?’

  ‘Looks like it. But then, in early December, there’s a payment of fifteen grand.’

  ‘In or out?’

  ‘In. And then it’s taken out the next day. Looks like she took it out in cash as there’s no recipient for the amount.’

  Kate leaned closer, following the columns of figures until she found the amount that Sam was referring to; fifteen thousand pounds. Next to it was a bank sort code and an account number.

  ‘Can we find out where it came from?’

  ‘Should be able to. Finding the bank’s easy enough from the sort code but we’ll have to see how co-operative they are. They should give us a name but we might need to get a magistrate involved if we want access to the account.’

  ‘A name might be enough,’ Kate said. It was a considerable amount of money to pass through an account in a week. It smacked of fraud or money laundering but that made no sense. Why would a nurse be involved in anything like that? Perhaps somebody lent her the money to pay off another gambling debt.

  ‘Find out the bank and branch,’ she said to Sam. ‘I think we might have found the link between Maddie Cox and Caroline Lambert.’

  She watched as Cooper typed the numbers into a search site which promised to find any bank by its sort code. There it was. An HSBC branch local to where Caroline Lambert lived.

  ‘What’s the betting that Caroline gave her the money?’ Kate asked. ‘But what did she want in exchange?’

  She thought about the PM findings. The blood tests and the fingerprint evidence didn’t quite tally with Caroline Lambert’s story and the long-term use of tranquillisers wasn’t consistent with Dennis Lambert’s condition. If Maddie had given Caroline drugs in exchange for the money, it would have been easy to have kept Dennis sedated and ultimately for Caroline to force him to drink a deadly cocktail of alcohol and morphine. But why? Was it really a mercy killing? Kailisa’s results suggested that Lambert’s cancer wasn’t advanced enough to cause him to be bedridden and the pain should have been manageable with over-the-counter pain relief or small doses of morphine. Caroline had already confessed to murder but she’d been charged with aiding and abetting suicide; was it all a cover? She could have murdered her father and made it look like she helped him to die in order to escape a custodial sentence. But why? He was going to die anyway. It made no sense.

  Kate’s phone rang. Barratt.

  ‘I’ve shown the photograph to Ethan,’ he began, dispensing with conversational pleasantries. ‘He doesn’t recognise her. But the guy from GA, Warren, is fairly sure that Caroline Lambert is the woman who attended a meeting in November or early last month and left with Maddie Cox.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Kate said. ‘Are you in Donny?’

  Barratt confirmed his location.

  ‘Right. I’m going to text you a photograph of Maddie Cox. Get down to Fabrio’s near the market and see if the two women were in there together on Tuesday evening.’

  He made a joke about bringing back pizza for tea and hung up.

  Kate scrolled through her contacts and called O’Connor. ‘Got a job for you, Steve,’ she said when he answered. ‘You know most of the loan sharks out there, see if you can find out who Maddie Cox might have been in debt to. Probably for over ten grand. Ask if she paid it back at the beginning of December. If she didn’t, then I want whoever gave her the money brought in here. I don’t think her death was about money but Raymond’ll kill me if I don’t cover all the bases.’

  O’Connor threw a few possible names at her, probably hoping to impress, and said he’d get onto them and then ended the call. Kate smiled to herself. She’d never known a police officer who was so proud of his dodgy connections. If O’Connor hadn’t followed a career in law enforcement, Kate was sure that he’d have been a small-time gangster and even more sure that his arrogance would have led to him getting caught.

  Jobs allocated, she turned back to Cooper.

  ‘I need you to brainstorm something with me,’ she said.

  Cooper looked apprehensive.

  ‘I have some ideas about the link between Caroline and Maddie but I need to bounce them off you to see if they make sense. What if they met while Dennis
was in hospital, became friends and Caroline offered to help Maddie out with money? They both went to Gamblers Anonymous as well so there’s another possible point of contact. Then Caroline wants something in return. Drugs for her dad. She gets what she wants and uses them to kill him. Okay so far?’

  Cooper looked sceptical. ‘Why would she want to kill somebody who was dying anyway unless her story’s true and it was a mercy killing?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Kailisa seems to think there are a few things about her story that don’t add up. She might have been keeping him sedated for a while and she might have forced him to drink the whisky and morphine.’

  ‘Okay. But I still don’t get why. If she wanted his house to sell then all she had to do was wait. Same for any money he might have had. Why go to the bother when he’s only got months left? Why speed it up and confess to helping him die?’

  Kate kick-wheeled her chair back to her desk and logged into the computer. She did a quick search of recent cases of so-called ‘mercy killing’, unfamiliar with the vagaries of the law. The CPS had issued guidelines in 2009 which set out reasons why prosecution should and should not be considered despite the maximum sentence for assisting suicide still standing at fourteen years in jail. Since the new guidelines, Kate could find only one case of a successful prosecution for assisted suicide and a handful more which were still pending.

  It had taken her ten minutes searching the internet to gather the information, which was easily available to anybody with an interest. Had Caroline Lambert visited the same websites? The criteria for prosecution suggested that she might escape with a fine or even have her case dismissed. She was known to the deceased, she wasn’t a medical professional helping him, she didn’t appear to have been paid by him, and there was no history of Caroline abusing her father. If Kailisa’s findings could be disproved, then it was likely that she would walk away from this, and she probably knew it – which made sense of her dramatic confession. There wasn’t even a case for her gaining financially as Dennis was going to die anyway.