Her Last Breath: The new crime thriller from the international bestseller (Sullivan and Mullins)

by Alison Belsham

  Father William prayed over the body, but Francis couldn’t. The verger held Robin’s hand and gave her his handkerchief. An unnatural quiet blanketed the room, as if his mother was simply asleep and everyone feared to wake her.

  Finally, the priest and the verger took their leave, and brother and sister were left alone with her. Robin cried noisily. Francis chewed on his lower lip, unwilling to let the floodgates open, wondering what he could do for his sister.

  ‘Shall I call Dad?’ he said.

  Robin snorted. ‘Do you even have a number for him in Thailand?’

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Well, don’t expect him to come back for the funeral. He’s moved on now, hasn’t he? Living with someone new.’

  ‘I thought they were married.’

  ‘Living with? Married? What difference does it make? He’s given up on us.’

  Robin had always been far more bitter about their father’s desertion.

  ‘I’ll call him,’ said Francis. ‘He has a right to know.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Robin. Her nonchalant shrug turned into a racking sob.

  Francis’s phone buzzed insistently in his pocket again.

  ‘Go on, answer it,’ said Robin, a string of mucus trailing down her chin. ‘Your work’s more important than this.’

  Francis put his hand into his pocket, but only to switch the phone off. Robin’s comment hit him hard and the guilt about being out of the room when his mother died hit him like a tsunami. How could he tell her what had happened?

  He couldn’t tell anybody. Ever.

  ‘Robin . . .’ He took a step towards her, open-armed for an embrace.

  She came to him and cried on his shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, sniffing, then gasping. ‘It’s just that I’m scared. It’s been so hard with Mum . . .’ She sobbed again, clinging to him. He hugged her closer. ‘Now that Mum’s gone, Fran, I’m going to need you more than ever. I feel so alone . . .’

  ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘By being more available. By being more present in my life.’

  Francis knew his expression had betrayed his feelings when she backtracked immediately after saying it.

  ‘No. Sorry. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’

  She gathered together her coat and bag.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Robin. I don’t want us to fall out at a time like this.’

  She shrugged. ‘You seem to be drifting further and further away.’

  Francis felt his cheeks infuse with colour. ‘I promise, Robin, I’ll be here for you. Whenever you need me.’

  But would he? His phone was burning a hole in his pocket and in the morgue was a dead girl who had just as much of a call on his time. His sergeant was railroading a suspect. His boss was driven by statistics. He still didn’t know what had killed Tash Brady, let alone who.

  He’d failed his mother and now he was making promises he couldn’t keep. To Robin. And to Tash Brady.

  Where could he turn for reassurance?

  iii

  19 July 1988

  Aimée, sweet little Aimée, you’re eleven years old today. You lie in your bed and think about what it will be like to be a grown woman. You’re not sure you like the idea of it very much at all. The women you know – your mother, your aunt, your teachers – aren’t joyous creatures. Where do they find their pleasures?

  You get out of bed and go to the window. A gull whirls and screeches overhead but it’s too early for people. You look through the trees to the end of the garden, trying to see the Maria tied up at its mooring on the river. You imagine running away – taking a small bag of your favourite things, climbing into the motorboat and untying the rope that holds her. How far would you get? Along the coast to Brighton or Chichester? Or could its tiny motor chug you across the Channel to France?

  It’s just a dream, isn’t it? You’re old enough to know now that little girls can’t make their way in the world on their own. Not without bad things happening to them.

  Because your mother is ill – she’s been ill for soooo long – your father has prepared your birthday breakfast. There’s a basket of croissants and pastries on the table, along with the expectation that you’ll gorge yourself on them. Only you don’t want to. The thought of the buttery, flaky patisserie makes you feel sick. You don’t want breakfast at all. Maybe just some coffee but your father has made you hot chocolate. He disapproves of children drinking coffee. He seems to forget that you won’t be a child for very much longer.

  Oh no, Aimée, you know that’s not true, as much as you wish it were. That’s not something he’ll forget.

  Jay grabs up two of the croissants and eats them greedily, crumbs flaking down his front and onto the floor. Your father looks over his newspaper disapprovingly but Jay doesn’t care. He’s perfectly happy to provoke. He takes a pain au raisin from the basket and starts unwinding the pastry directly into his mouth.

  ‘Jay!’ Your father’s voice takes on a sharp tone that he never uses with you.

  You use the distraction to give your pain au chocolat to your father’s dog under the table. She wolfs it down as greedily as Jay.

  Your father goes back to his paper.

  He looks hurt when, a minute later, you leave the table, two thirds of a croissant left on your plate, the other third strategically crumbled into your napkin. You ignore his look of disappointment. You ignore the hunger pangs in your stomach. You don’t eat any more, do you? It’s your way of never growing up, never having to enter the adult world. If you do eat, you vomit it back up in secret.

  But the problem with never growing up, Aimée, is that you’ll stay daddy’s little princess for ever. That might be even worse.

  You wrap your arms around your ribs, practically cutting yourself on the sharp, protruding bones. You rub your forearms. They’re covered in thick, downy hair that never used to be there. You’re stiff and exhausted, bones aching as you climb the stairs.

  You want to go to your mother’s room, but she’ll be asleep at this time. You never see her now in the mornings – she needs her rest is what your father says. She’s always tired. Even her skin looks tired. She has no energy to mother you any more. Cancer does that to a person. It poisons them and takes away their spirit.

  Your father’s study has always fascinated you. The huge desk used to belong to his father, and his father’s father. It has hidden drawers – Jay showed you once but you’ve never been able to work out the mechanism to open them yourself. What secrets do you think your father keeps in those drawers, Aimée? You know your father keeps secrets.

  You’re not supposed to go in there on your own. But you do. When he’s at work and Mummy’s resting and Jay’s outside, sometimes you creep down the hallway and silently open the door. You’ve never been caught. You don’t like to think what your father would say if he found you alone in his study. More disappointment. A punishment, perhaps. One of his secret punishments that you’re not allowed to tell anyone else about.

  Who the hell would you tell?

  Once you tried to tell Jay. He wouldn’t listen. He blocked his ears with his hands and said, ‘Shut up!’ over and over again. After that he avoided you and you heard him asking if he could go to your cousins’ house. Then he was gone for almost a week. When he came back, you didn’t dare say anything more about it. You couldn’t bear for Jay to look at you that way he did before, with pity and with revulsion, all mixed together.

  You can’t turn to him for help.

  Today your father calls for you after breakfast. He wants to give you a gift. Your heart thunders. In your father’s world, gifts carry obligations. He’ll want something in exchange. You try not to think about it as you pull down on the door handle.

  ‘Happy Birthday, princess,’ he says with a smile. He’s sitting at his desk. On the blotter in front of h
im there’s a small blue box tied with a white ribbon. You’ve seen boxes like that before. You know what’s inside them.

  You stand in the doorway.

  ‘Come here,’ he says. He pats his lap, for so long a favourite place of yours.

  But now you understand. You don’t want to sit on his lap.

  Your reluctance causes him to tighten his jaw.

  ‘Come here, Aimée.’

  There’s tension in his voice, so you go to him.

  You climb onto his lap and he engulfs you in his arms. He smells your hair and exhales with satisfaction. His hands are warm, but you feel cold inside.

  Whatever precious, precious gift is in the blue box, it can’t be worth this.

  18

  Wednesday, 16 August 2017

  Rory

  If Rose Lewis summoned you to the mortuary, it meant she had news to impart. Rory thought she could just as well tell them things over the phone, but it was a power play – she liked to hold court. Frankly, Rory could do without it, but he didn’t have any choice.

  He parked his car next to hers, then looked round for Francis’s wheels. The boss hadn’t arrived, so Rory took advantage and lit up, wanting to put off the moment when he’d have to take a lungful of foul mortuary air. He leaned back against the bonnet of his car and though it wasn’t yet eleven, he could feel the heat of the metal through his suit trousers.

  It wasn’t like the boss to be late for anything. Was his rather perfect facade beginning to slip?

  He stubbed out his cigarette and went inside, peering through the glass windows in the doors to the morgue to see if Rose was at work on a body. Thankfully, she wasn’t there, so he made his way up to her office on the floor above.

  Rose was on the phone. She looked serious, but silently waved him inside when he stuck his head round the door.

  Rory sat down in the chair opposite her desk, wondering how she kept it so neat with the number of cases she usually had going through.

  ‘So sorry . . . Yes, I’ll keep you posted, but take your time.’ She listened for a few seconds. ‘Bye.’

  Instead of talking to him, she stared out of the window for a moment after dropping her phone onto her desk.

  ‘Everything all right?’ said Rory.

  Rose looked round at him. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That was Francis. His mother died yesterday afternoon.’

  Shit. That explained a lot. The missed calls. The fact that he wasn’t here now.

  ‘I told him he should take a few days off, but I doubt he will,’ she continued.

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  If only he would, then Rory could get this case wrapped up and Alex Mullins charged. It was bloody obvious the boy had done it, but the boss seemed to be lacking that gut instinct for the job.

  ‘What have you got for us, Rose?’

  She looked at him sharply, as if he hadn’t expressed adequate sympathy.

  ‘I’m worried about him, Rory. Bradshaw still riding him hard?’

  Rory shrugged. ‘He’s still got a lot to learn – and the lad needs to grow a thicker skin.’

  ‘He will. He’s the brightest in the department. By a long chalk.’

  She gave him a meaningful look that he didn’t like – but he somehow managed to bite back the profanities that sprang to mind.

  ‘You didn’t ask me here to discuss the boss, did you?’ If Francis was going to be absent for a day or two, he might as well try and take advantage of it. ‘Got anything on the cause of death yet?’

  Rose nodded and shuffled through a stack of papers on her desk. ‘The ink used to tattoo her almost certainly caused her death.’

  ‘An allergic reaction?’

  ‘Not at all. The ink had been adulterated.’

  ‘Deliberately? How can you be sure?’

  ‘If it had shown an excess of one or other of the constituent ingredients of black tattoo ink, I would say it could be accidental. But not this. When we tested it, we found traces of a chemical called taxine in the tattooed flesh, in her blood and in her liver tissue.’

  ‘Taxine?’

  ‘It’s found in the seeds of yew berries and also in the leaves. It’s deadly.’

  Rose let her words sink in.

  ‘Deadly enough to have killed her?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s been used as a poison since Roman times. Now it’s harvested for anti-cancer drugs. It’s not exactly something a tattoo artist would have in their studio.’

  ‘So where would the attacker have got it from? If they used a particular drug, would you be able to identify it?’

  ‘You can’t get it in anything you can buy over the counter.’

  ‘So they would need to have been prescribed the drug themselves, or have some sort of medical connection?’ This could narrow the field.

  Rose grimaced. ‘I don’t think it came from a drug,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I would have found additional ingredients. Looks more likely to have been processed directly from a yew tree.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Probably by grinding the seeds or leaves of yew and then making a tincture to add to the ink.’

  Rory digested the information.

  ‘And you think that’s what caused her heart to stop?’

  ‘Yes. It’s massively poisonous and the symptoms she experienced match up with those listed for oral poisoning with taxine – I’ve been through it with Tanika Parry on the phone this morning – dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, tachycardia, respiratory arrest, cardiac arrest. We’re in agreement that, given the presence of the poison in her body, taxine accounts for most of the symptoms the medical team observed.’

  ‘And if there was taxine in the tattooing ink, someone added it on purpose? That means we’re definitely looking at murder rather than manslaughter, doesn’t it?’ said Rory.

  Rose looked at him over the rim of her glasses.

  ‘Without a doubt.’

  Rory took out his phone. ‘Angie, I need you to go back to the Mullins’s house. Check if there’s a yew tree in the garden. Aye, that’s all. Just a yew tree. I’ll explain later.’

  And when he next saw Francis – I told you so.

  19

  Thursday, 17 August 2017

  Angie

  There was no yew tree in the Mullins’s garden. Rory had made Angie double-check, unwilling to accept it when she told him over the phone. But walking to work this morning, she’d counted at least four in ten minutes – two in churchyards and two in gardens – so yew leaves and berries would hardly be difficult to come by. Still, that didn’t build the case in the way the sarge wanted to build it, so he wasn’t interested.

  He was a bit too old-school for her liking, not that she’d ever admit it to any of the rest of the team. Not even to Tony, who’d worked with Rory for years. But with the boss away on compassionate leave, the sergeant was in command, steering things the way he wanted them to go.

  Tony had been instructed to follow up on recent pharmacy robberies in the local area to see if any relevant drugs had been reported stolen. But Angie had another lead to be getting on with, one that had presented itself unexpectedly as she’d arrived at the station.

  The girl sitting opposite her in the interview room was silent and unfocused. There were dark rings around her eyes and the rims were red, probably from crying. She picked at the frayed sleeve edge of her cardigan and even when Angie said hello to her, she didn’t make eye contact.

  Her name was Sarah Collins and she was Tash Brady’s best friend. She’d come into the station with her mother because apparently she had something to disclose.

  ‘Sarah, your mum told me you were worried about something,’ Angie said. ‘Something to do with Tash?’

  Sarah didn’t answer but gave her mother an
appealing look.

  Angie wondered if she’d be able to winkle anything of any use out of the girl.

  ‘Come on, darling. Tell her what you told me,’ said her mother. Angie wasn’t wild about being referred to as ‘her’, but she kept a lid on her annoyance for the sake of getting the information. ‘Tell her about Tash and Alex.’

  Sarah sniffed. She looked close to tears, but then she had just lost her best friend.

  ‘What about Tash and Alex?’ said Angie, encouraging the girl to talk.

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Sarah, her voice a whisper, eyes downcast.

  Angie started to wonder if she was wasting her time. She’d rather be back in the incident room, where at least they had a fan stirring the sluggish air.

  Sarah’s mother looked annoyed. ‘It wasn’t nothing, Sarah. It might be something important that the police should know about.’

  Sarah continued staring at the tabletop, her face reddening.

  ‘Why don’t you want to tell me, Sarah?’ said Angie.

  Finally the girl looked up at her. ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

  ‘You mean Alex, don’t you?’

  She nodded, biting her bottom lip.

  ‘I understand,’ said Angie. ‘But really, we need to know all the facts, so we can work out what happened to Tash. No one will be in trouble unless they’ve broken the law.’

  Sarah sniffed and looked across at her mother. Then she started to talk.

  ‘You know Alex was Tash’s boyfriend, don’t you?’

  Angie nodded, not wanting to interrupt her before she’d even got going.

  ‘They’d been together for about six months. Tash liked the fact that he was a bit of a bad boy, her ‘bit of rough’, she used to call him.’

  ‘What was bad about him, Sarah?’

  ‘Not so much,’ said Sarah. Angie got the feeling she was backtracking slightly. ‘He smoked a bit of weed, got it for other people.’

  ‘You think he was dealing among his college friends?’

  Sarah looked scared. ‘Not really dealing, just getting small amounts of it, if people wanted it. Like doing them a favour.’