by Val McDermid
Rachel pushed her hair back from her face, looking suddenly weary. ‘Nothing like that, no. If anything, we were happy to do more business with them. Because of the way we’d set it up, there was a better profit margin for us. Detective, there was no possible business reason for this person to attack Benjamin. As I said before, it can only be some horrible coincidence.’
Before either of them could press further, the door opened and a small boy came in. Slender and dark, he looked as if he still had to grow into his features. He shuffled from foot to foot, fiddling with the fringe on a throw. ‘Mum, I need you to come and help me with my Lego,’ he said, ignoring the strangers in his house.
‘In a minute, darling.’ She turned back to Tony. ‘This is our son, Lev.’ She stood up. ‘I think we’re finished here. There’s truly nothing more I can help you with. Please, let me show you out.’
They followed her to the door, Tony struggling to keep up. Lev walked with them. ‘Do you know my dad?’ he said abruptly to Tony.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you look like him?’
Lev eyed him curiously. ‘I will one day,’ he said. ‘But I’m still too little. I just look like me now.’
‘And a very handsome me you are too,’ Tony said.
‘What did you do to your leg? Did somebody blow you up too? Somebody blew up my dad.’
‘No, nobody blew me up,’ Tony said. ‘A man hit me with an axe.’
‘Wow,’ Lev said. ‘That’s pretty cool. Did it hurt?’
‘It still does.’ He’d almost caught up with Paula and Rachel. ‘But it’s getting better.’
Lev reached up and grabbed his hand. ‘Then will you kill the man who hit you with the axe?’
Tony shook his head. ‘No. What I’ll do is try to help him not to do it again. I’m a kind of doctor, Lev. I try to make people feel better inside. If you feel bad inside, there are people like me you can talk to. Don’t be afraid to ask. Your mum will help you find the right one, won’t you, Rachel?’
Rachel swallowed hard, her eyes brimming. ‘Of course I will. Say goodbye now, Lev.’
Somehow, they got out without anybody cracking up. ‘Fuck,’ Paula said as they walked back to the car. ‘That was no fun at all. And no use at all either. She’s got a point, you know. Why would Aziz have any idea that Diamond was in that precise part of the stand? And even if he did, according to what Mrs Diamond said, there’s not a shred of motive.’
‘So it seems,’ Tony said. ‘And I could be totally wrong.’ He dragged himself a few steps nearer the car. ‘On the other hand, I might just be right. And I’d have thought you lot would have been gagging to take my side on this one.’
‘Why?’ Paula stopped and waited for him.
‘Because, if I am right, then CTC will have to piss off home with their tails between their legs.’
Paula grinned, her eyes dancing. ‘When you put it like that…Let’s see if we can find some evidence, Dr Hill.’
Kevin smiled at the phone. ‘That’s right. Aziz. Yousef Aziz. The rental would probably start from the beginning of this week…Yes, I’ll hold.’ He twiddled his pen between his fingers, trying to move it from one side of his hand to the other without dropping it. The voice on the other end spoke to him. ‘OK, fine, thanks for trying.’ He crossed another name off the list and prepared to dial another holiday home rental in Northern Ontario. Of the sites Yousef Aziz had visited, he’d now managed to contact eight out of seventeen. None of them had rented a property to Yousef Aziz. None of them remembered speaking to him or receiving an email from him.
Just as he was about to dial the next number, Carol stopped at his desk. She held out a box of cakes. ‘There you go, Kevin, help yourself. I thought we all needed a bit of sugar to get us through the afternoon.’
He looked at the cakes, wondering. ‘Can I ask where you got them from?’ he asked.
‘The baker’s shop in the precinct,’ Carol said. ‘The one we usually get our cakes from. Why?’
Kevin looked embarrassed. ‘It’s just that…Well, Tony left me a voicemail and told me not to eat anything that could have been tampered with.’
‘He did what?’ Carol’s annoyance was unmistakable beneath the incredulity. ‘Did he say why he thought that?’
Kevin shook his head. ‘He said he’d talk to me later. But I’ve not heard from him since.’
‘I sent Paula out with him. Have you seen her?’
‘She said she was going to hit the bricks in Temple Fields this afternoon with our pictures of Jack Anderson, see if she could get any leads. I’ve not spoken to her since she went out this morning.’
Carol took a deep breath. He could see she was simmering. ‘And what are you doing?’
‘Following up on the rental places that Aziz looked at on his computer.’
‘OK. You stick with that.’ Carol walked back to her own office and closed the door behind her. She called Paula’s mobile. When the call connected, she said, ‘Paula, were you with Tony when he called Kevin this morning?’
‘Yes, I was.’ Paula sounded cautious.
‘Can you tell me why he took it upon himself to warn one of my officers about being poisoned without telling me?’
A short pause, then Paula said, ‘He knew you were in a meeting and he thought it was urgent.’
‘And why does he think someone might want to poison Kevin?’
The short answer is, because Kevin went to Harriestown High and he drives a Ferrari.’
Carol gently massaged her closed eyelids and wished the newborn pain in her head would go as quickly as it had arrived. ‘And does the long answer make any more sense than that?’ she said.
‘When I interviewed Steve Mottishead yesterday, he said Anderson had made a wish list when he was at school. Like Michael Heseltine wanting to be Prime Minister?’
‘Go on.’
‘He remembered a few things off the list. Having a house on Dunelm Drive. Making a million by thirty. Driving a Ferrari. When I told Tony about the list, he reckoned that was what connected the victims, as well as being former pupils of Harriestown High. And then he remembered Kevin’s car. So he made the call.’
‘And you didn’t think that was a little sudden? A little quick off the mark?’
A long silence. ‘We both thought, better safe than sorry, Chief.’
Don Merrick’s name hung in the silence between them. ‘Thanks, Paula. I’ll speak to Tony. Do you happen to know where he is?’
‘I dropped him back at the hospital. He was pretty knackered.’
‘Did you get anything from Mrs Diamond?’ Carol asked.
‘Nothing that takes us any further forward. She made the point that Aziz couldn’t have known her husband was going to be at the match, so it must have been coincidence.’
‘Not necessarily. As I understand it, that was a season ticket box, hired by the same bunch of guys for years now. It’s possible Benjamin Diamond mentioned it in passing in one of their meetings. In my experience of men and football, it’s exactly the kind of thing they like to drop in passing. I think we need to talk to Diamond’s secretary.’
‘He doesn’t have one. According to Rachel, the two of them ran the whole operation between them. She mostly did the office stuff, he mostly did the customer contact.’
‘OK. Good luck with your photo trawl. I’ll speak to you later.’ She put the phone down and pressed her fists against her temples. What was he playing at? She was used to Tony flying off at tangents, but he generally ran things past her. After his last encounter with a killer, she thought he’d finally learned the lesson of thinking before he acted. Obviously, she’d been mistaken. She reached for the phone, girding her loins for the usual complicated encounter. Why couldn’t her life be simple for once?
She was cursed with the granting of her wish. No fractious conversation with Tony. His mobile was switched off and he wasn’t answering the phone in his hospital room. Bloody man. Bloody, bloody man.
The bloody man in question had been roused from a deep sleep by
the phone next to his bed. Tony didn’t care who it was, he wasn’t ready for speech yet. That was one of the few joys of being stuck in hospital with a fucked-up knee. In the usual run of things, he had to answer his phone. He had patients who might have urgent needs. He had contracts with several police forces across Europe who might also have pressing requirements. But for now, he was officially out of action and he could ignore the phone. Someone else could take responsibility.
Except of course that he was bound to Carol and her team. Bound in a way that went far beyond the contractual. He probably should have answered the phone. But the meeting with Rachel Diamond had left him drained. He’d come back and taken his drugs, eaten his lunch and fallen straight into a thick, heavy sleep that had left him feeling stupid and inarticulate. Not the best time to talk to police officers if you wanted to convince them you were right about something.
He hoped Kevin had taken him seriously. Certainly what Paula had told him about Steve Mottishead’s recollections was the most chilling thing he’d heard about Stalky the poisoner. The Harriestown High connection was already established in his head. But Jack Anderson’s list, conforming as closely as it did to two of the apparently unconnected victims, had set Tony’s antennae quivering. The mentality that drew up such a list with serious intent was ruthless. Predictably, such a person would pursue their goals relentlessly. But if they lacked empathy, if they had sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies, how they would go about dealing with the thwarting of those goals was entirely unpredictable.
He remembered one patient who had proudly told him how she had deliberately split up the marriage of her business partner. Not for any sexual or emotional reason, but because her partner’s wife was less than whole-hearted about the business. ‘I had to do it,’ his patient had explained in the most matter-of-fact way. ‘As long as he stayed married to Maria, he was never going to give the business his full commitment. And I needed that from him. So she had to go.’ If Jack Anderson had been deprived of his dreams, what would he rationalize as a reasonable response?
It seemed that he’d chosen murder. His victims were men who had come from a similar background to his own. They’d attended the same school. In theory, they’d had the same opportunities as him. And they’d demonstrated his dreams weren’t so crazy, because they’d each realized one of his goals. But for whatever reason, Anderson had decided he wasn’t going to be able to achieve the ambitious targets he’d set himself. Some people would have reconciled themselves to that, acknowledging that their adolescent dreams had only been castles in the air. Others would have grown bitter, turned to drink, taken out their frustrations in ways that were mostly self-destructive. Jack Anderson had decided to kill the achievers. That way, they could no longer reproach him for his failure.
That’s why there was no sexual element to the murders, why they were committed at arm’s length. They were about desire, it was true. But not sexual desire.
And why poison? OK, it was perfect if you got no kick out of watching your victims die, and you wanted to avoid suspicion by being a long way away when it happened. That meant you couldn’t go the route of most killers, who opted for methods that were, in essence, unskilled. Guns, knives, blunt instruments. But still, why choose something so arcane, something that felt as though it had come from an Agatha Christie novel?
He had to fathom this out. There had to be a reason. Murderers generally chose to kill using what was to hand, or what they had experience of. What if the poisons were chosen not because they were arcane but because they were close at hand? Carol had already questioned Rhys Butler, a man with access to pharmacological drugs. That had made a kind of sense.
But Anderson wasn’t using prescription drugs. These were all derived from plants. Ricin from the castor oil plant, atropine from belladonna, oleandrin from oleander. Not your everyday garden plants, but nothing wildly exotic either. Who would have a garden with plants like that, though? You’d have to be some sort of specialist. Something was tickling at the back of his mind. Something about gardens and poison. He sat up and woke the laptop. Once he was back online, he Googled ‘poison garden’. The first thing that came up was the Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, a cornucopia of deadly plants, open to the public under strict supervision.
But as Tony discovered when he explored further, this was by no means a new idea. It had been directly inspired by the Medici family, who built a garden near Padua to find better ways to poison their enemies, and by the monks of Soutra Hospital near Edinburgh, who used soporific sponges with exactly the right amount of opium, henbane and hemlock to anaesthetize a body for between two and three days-just as long as it takes to amputate a limb and for the body to come out of shock and go into a natural state of healing. There had been other, private poison gardens through the ages, and Tony found various speculative references to them in newsgroups and blogs.
What if Jack Anderson had access to one of these? What if poison was, for him, the weapon of opportunity? He glanced at the phone. Now would be a good time for it to ring.
Instead, Mrs Chakrabarti entered hot on the heels of a perfunctory knock. ‘I hear you went walkabout again,’ she said without preamble.
‘I came back,’ Tony said. ‘You all tell me I need to be up and about.’
‘ think it’s time you went home,’ she said. ‘Frankly, we can make better use of your bed, and you’re so bloody determined, you’re going to make a great recovery in spite of us. You’ll have lots of visits back here for physio. If you think it’s been tough so far, wait till you have to start moving the joint again.’ She smiled cheerily. ‘You’ll be crying for your mother.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said wryly.
Mrs Chakrabarti laughed. ‘I see your point. Maybe not. But you’ll certainly be crying. So, tomorrow morning, provided my SHO thinks you’re safe to be let out, you can go home. Do you have someone who can help you with shopping and cooking and so forth?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so? What does that mean, Dr Hill?’
‘There is someone, but I think she’s a bit annoyed with me right now. I’ll just have to hope for pity. Failing that, takeaways that deliver.’
‘Try to behave yourself for the rest of the day, Dr Hill. It’s been an interesting experience, having you as a patient.’
Tony smiled. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Another knock at the door, another take-charge woman. Carol swept into the room, her mouth open to begin her tirade, stopped short by the sight of Mrs Chakrabarti. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said hastily.
‘I was just going,’ the surgeon said. She turned to Tony. ‘his would be the someone?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nailing his smile firmly to the mast.
‘Better devote some energy to getting on her good side, then.’ She nodded to Carol and left.
‘I suspect that might take more energy than I have right now,’ Tony said, correctly identifying Carol’s mood.
She gripped the bottom rail of his bed. He could see the knuckles whitening. What do you think you’re playing at, Tony? You have one of my best detectives running round the countryside conducting interviews that are going nowhere on something that technically isn’t even our case. You have another of my detectives frightened to eat a cream cake in case the Bradfield Poisoner knows his cake preference and has taken a job at the precinct bakery. And you can’t even keep me in the loop. I hear about the poison stuff from Kevin. I hear you got nowhere with Rachel Diamond from Paula. You know, I’ve stood up for you I don’t know how many times-’
‘That’s not been such a hardship, as it turns out,’ he interrupted, too tired and in too much pain to bear the brunt of Carol’s frustrations with the system that was oppressing her right now. ‘My track record for getting it right is pretty good. And you know it. Hitching your wagon to my star hasn’t exactly earned you the “loser” label.’
She glared at him, clearly shocked as well as angry. ‘You’re say
ing my success is down to you?’
‘That’s not what I said, Carol. Look, I know you want to take a pop at CTC, but your hands are tied. So you come round here and take it out on me. Well, I’m sorry. I haven’t got the resources to act as your punch bag right now. I’m trying to help you, but if you’d rather I cut you out of the process, fine. I’ll deal with John Brandon instead.’
She literally stepped back, as if he’d slapped her. ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ She looked on the verge of throwing something at him.
Tony screwed his face up and shook his head. ‘Neither can I. Maybe we shouldn’t be talking to each other right now. You’re wound up, and I’m fucked up.’
His words didn’t seem to have had much of a conciliatory effect. That is just so typical of you,’ she shouted. ‘You can’t even have a proper bloody row.’
‘I don’t like fighting,’ he said. ‘It makes me hurt inside. Like I’m a kid again. In the cupboard, in the dark. If the grown-ups are fighting, it must be my fault. That’s why I don’t do rows.’ He blinked hard, to keep the tears at bay. She was the only person in the world who could make him feel so exposed. It didn’t always feel like a good thing. ‘Carol, I’m going home tomorrow. I can’t manage without you. Not in any sense. So can we stop this now? I can’t do it.’
His words stopped her in her tracks. ‘Home? Tomorrow?’
He nodded. ‘I don’t need you to do much. I can get the supermarket to deliver a stack of ready meals…’
Carol tipped her head back, closed her eyes and sighed. ‘You are impossible,’ she said, all the anger dissipated.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tread on your toes. I just wanted to help and not be in your way.’ The jagged edges of the argument still filled the air, but the atmosphere between them had altered to something more like its normal state.
She sat down. ‘So now I’m here, fill me in on what you’re thinking. What can we do about Aziz now Rachel Diamond has closed down that avenue?’
‘I don’t know that it’s closed,’ he said. ‘I just need to work out another approach.’
