A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  “You know that’s bollocks. Someone took out Clare Abbott and then slithered over here to take care of Rory Statham. Meet me at the hospital, sir, so we can know for sure what happened to Rory. If I’m wrong, I swear to you I’ll wipe my nose and get back to Victoria Street. But in the meantime—”

  “All right. I’ll meet you there. Don’t make me regret this.”

  “You won’t. I swear it. Straight and narrow all the way.”

  “That had better be the case, Sergeant Havers.”

  It was a nightmare getting to Chelsea, the hospital’s location in Fulham Road. With the traffic and the rain providing their usual patience-taxing combination, it was only through choosing some creative alternatives through the upmarket neighbourhoods of Belgravia and upper Chelsea that he was able to make it to the hospital’s precincts in under three-quarters of an hour, a drive that would have taken ten minutes in the dead of night.

  The rain was unrelenting. Once he’d parked the Healey Elliott, he turned up the collar of his father’s ancient trench coat, and he set back up the street. He found A & E a rain-sodden disaster area, as a car-lorry-and-multi-bicycle smash-up in the vicinity of Battersea Bridge had brought seven injured people into casualty moments before he arrived. They lay on trolleys, bleeding and groaning as medical personnel in scrubs dashed round them, shouting orders at one another while an intercom belted out cries for various doctors to pick up phones, go to radiology, or proceed at once to the operating theatre.

  None of this was what Lynley had hoped to encounter, and it didn’t bode well for being able to gather any information about Rory Statham. He searched through the milling throng for Havers, hearing her before he found her when she called his name. She was crossing to him from a swinging door beyond which he could see only a corridor and a set of lifts. She looked as bedraggled as he’d ever seen her, and he could only pray that she managed to keep out of the way of Superintendent Ardery once she returned to Victoria Street. Which, he also prayed, would be very soon as he’d not put Isabelle in the picture as to what was going on.

  He said, “What happened?”

  “They’ve got her—”

  “I mean to you, Barbara. What on earth have you done to yourself?”

  She grimaced, glancing down at her clothing. She looked like someone who’d dived headfirst into a bin of garden clippings. “I fell. More or less.”

  “Which part?”

  “What?”

  “The more or the less.”

  “Less, I s’pose.” She looked round, as if for escape from what she knew was coming. “Look. I had to break in, sir. There was a wisteria vine on the front of the building and—”

  “Please Christ don’t tell me anything else. Where is she?”

  “In isolation till they know for sure. They’ve all suited up even to touch her. It’s that deadly, this stuff, and she’s lucky she didn’t drop off the twig.”

  “What are they doing for her?”

  “Don’t know for certain. It’s been dead wild here”—with a gesture round the room with its teeming hordes—“so I followed them as far as they’d let me. There’re chairs and a coffee machine near isolation and I’ve been waiting . . .” She brushed at her hair with the flat of her hand. This didn’t improve its overall appearance. She added, “Arlo’s in my car. He can’t stay there f’rever, so I was also hoping—”

  “Who’s Arlo?”

  “The dog. Her dog. I couldn’t leave him in the flat, could I? If I’m to take on this case, he’ll need to be taken care of and, see, I was thinking that you might also be willing . . . You know. Till she gets out of hospital?”

  He stared at her for a good ten seconds before replying. “Havers,” he said, “does it ever occur to you that one day you might push things too far? With me, I mean.”

  “It’s only that I know you like animals, sir.”

  “Is it indeed? May I ask how you arrived at this conclusion? As well as the conclusion that you’re going to take on this case?”

  “There’s those horses at your pile in Cornwall?” she said, going for his first question and avoiding the second. “I know you ride. You love to ride, don’t you? And your mum has those nice dogs of hers. Retrievers, aren’t they? Some sort of retrievers? Or maybe they were greyhounds?”

  He took a deep breath. “Take me to where they’ve put her.”

  She headed back to the swinging doors and from there to the lift. On the second floor, he followed her down one corridor and then another till they were at a corner of the hospital, and it was here, behind closed doors accessed only through a release operated from within, that Rory Statham apparently occupied a hospital bed while procedures were set in place to save her life.

  Mercifully, Havers said nothing more for the moment. In an evident attempt to wriggle back into his good graces, she went to the coffee machine and brought them both a cup of that beverage. They were drinking this in silence when a woman in the process of removing official protective garb came out of the isolation area. Next to him, Barbara said, “This is who . . .” and got to her feet. He did likewise.

  Wisely, considering her appearance, Havers did not produce her warrant card. She let him do those honours, perhaps knowing that the doctor’s credulity would be too far stretched should Havers have declared herself an officer of the Metropolitan Police.

  The doctor’s name tag identified her as Mary Kay Bigelow. She was tall, thin, and she looked exhausted. Lynley wondered how long she’d been on duty. He explained that his companion Barbara Havers had been the one to come upon Rory Statham as she’d had an appointment with her that morning. Because Barbara had been aware of the cause of the recent death of Rory’s friend Clare Abbott, she’d concluded that Rory had somehow come into contact with the same substance, sodium azide. He did not use the word murder at all, but he knew that his presence suggested it.

  Bigelow said that they were certain of nothing yet, but that all precautions were being taken. They were treating the patient as they would for cyanide poisoning, which was the only protocol available when it came to sodium azide, if that was what they were actually dealing with. So at present, the patient was receiving sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulphate intravenously. The doctor also spoke of horizontal nystagmus, flapping tremor, and high blood concentration of lactates as well as lower potassium than was normal. Shortly after admission to hospital, Bigelow revealed, the patient had gone into cardiac arrest, but she’d been brought back and, at the moment, she was stable but critical and comatose.

  To Havers’ question about when Rory Statham might be available for a brief conversation, the doctor shot her a withering look. “If she lives through the next twenty-four hours, we can talk about miracles. As to conversations, that’s not going to happen.”

  “But it is sodium azide,” Havers said. “What poisoned her, I mean.”

  “It presents as sodium azide,” Bigelow admitted.

  Havers’ expression replied that was good enough. She turned to Lynley the moment that the doctor walked in the direction of the coffee machine. She said tersely, “I knew the second I saw her on the floor . . . She’s bloody lucky I showed up at her flat, Inspector. Someone was depending on her being alone long enough to bite it like Clare. These two women were connected in life and now they’re connected in poisoning as well. We’ve got a death in Cambridge and a near death in Fulham, and you know what that means. Or what it could mean if you take my part.”

  He did indeed, but Lynley wasn’t about to head in that direction. He said, “Barbara, I can’t ask Isabelle—”

  “Isabelle,” she said pointedly. “And you bloody well can.”

  It was his own damn fault, Lynley thought. A strange form of madness had caused him to become involved with their guv, and despite the fact that this madness had arisen from his grief over Helen’s murder, he couldn’t use that to excuse himself. He’d never admitted
openly to having been the superintendent’s lover and God knew Isabelle would never speak of it, but Havers was no fool. She’d drawn a conclusion that was not incorrect. But what was incorrect was where she was allowing it to lead her.

  Havers thought that their entanglement would prompt Isabelle Ardery to grant his wishes, either as a form of submitting to blackmail or perhaps from some kind of sentimental attachment to the time they’d spent in her bed. Lynley knew otherwise.

  He said to Havers, “The superintendent goes her own way, Sergeant.”

  “Fine. Then we can work around her. You can work around her. Cambridge is going to need to know about this. You’re going to need to tell them. You’re going to need to supply them with the second autopsy on Clare—”

  “Which I’ve already sent along to Sheehan. I’ve spoken to him about it as well. And I see where you’re heading. But it’s just not on. This”—he nodded to the isolation ward’s door—“must be handed to the locals and handled by the locals, and Clare Abbott’s death must be handled by Cambridge. If they want help in coordinating, they can—”

  “Shaftesbury,” Havers said. “You’re forgetting Shaftesbury.”

  “What about Shaftesbury?”

  “That’s where Clare Abbott lived. That’s also where Caroline Goldacre lives.”

  “Who?”

  “She was with Clare Abbott the night she died. And Rory Statham was recently in Shaftesbury, where she would have had contact with her as well.”

  “Are you suggesting she murdered Clare Abbott? And then tried to murder this woman Rory?”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting, but I want to find out, and you can make that happen.” She shifted her feet. “You want me back, yes?” she demanded shrewdly. “You all want me back, don’t you? So let me come back. But let me come back on my own terms. Let me get that transfer paperwork torn up by proving myself to her because that’s the only way she’s ever going to tear it up. I swear to you, sir. I’m begging you here. Please don’t make me do it on my knees.”

  God, she was the most infuriating woman, he thought. But what was the point of her keeping her job if she couldn’t do the job as it was meant to be done?

  CHELSEA

  LONDON

  Lynley did not return at once to Victoria Street, although he insisted Havers swear that she herself would do so. Instead, he dropped down to the King’s Road, joined the eternal tailback of cars, taxis, and buses heading in the direction of Sloane Square, and ultimately zigzagged towards the river. On the corner of Cheyne Row and Lordship Place stood the tall umber brick home of his longtime friend Simon St. James. If, he decided, he was going to attempt battle with Isabelle Ardery, he might as well have all the necessary facts.

  St. James himself answered the door, accompanied by the household dog, a long-haired dachshund with the unlikely name of Peach. She inspected Lynley’s shoe soles and ankles and deemed them acceptable before returning to her previous employment, which appeared to be begging morsels of toast from her master. This toast St. James was at the moment munching. A very late elevenses, he revealed. Did Lynley wish to join him? They’d have to make do on their own with the toaster and the coffee press as he was alone in the house with neither his wife nor his father-in-law to call upon for assistance in matters culinary.

  Lynley demurred. He followed St. James into the room to the left of the house’s entry. Here St. James combined his study with a sitting room, but it wasn’t a place for social gatherings as it was crammed floor to ceiling with books, a collection interrupted only by a small Victorian fireplace taking up a bit of space on part of one wall and a display of his wife’s black-and-white photographs taking all the space on the other.

  He’d been catching up on some reading, St. James told Lynley, indicating his desk, where his coffee cup and his plate of toast rested among piles of what looked like scientific monographs. What brought Lynley to Chelsea, he enquired, since it was apparently not in search of toast? St. James took one of the two old leather wingback chairs that stood perpendicular to the fireplace and faced a sofa of antique vintage where, with no toast forthcoming, Peach had deposited herself and was currently creating dog circles upon, prefatory to settling in for a snooze. St. James indicated the other chair and asked once again if Lynley was absolutely certain that he didn’t want a coffee.

  “Completely,” Lynley told him. “I’ve only just indulged at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was Barbara’s peace offering. Not entirely undrinkable, which was something of a surprise. It put me in mind of that café in Windsor we used to haunt.”

  St. James laughed. “Powdered coffee, powdered milk, hot water from the tap, and sugar cubes that would not melt. May I assume that their coffee wasn’t what took you to hospital?”

  Lynley told his old friend about Rory Statham and Havers’ discovery of the poor woman. St. James set his coffee cup on the table between their chairs. He turned on the lamp to dispel the gloom brought on by the wet day outside. He said, “You’re assuming sodium azide again?”

  “Havers is. But the fact that she’s still alive . . . ? Is that even possible, Simon? When you and I spoke earlier, I had the impression that virtually any dose would be fatal.”

  St. James scrubbed his hands through his hair, always too long and mostly untamed, with curls falling well below his shirt collar. He yawned, said sorry, explained that it was the soporific nature of the bloody monographs, and answered Lynley’s question. It would depend on the amount of sodium azide used, he said, and on the method of exposure to it. Mixed with water or an acid, for example, the compound would change to a toxic gas. Breathing the gas would quickly lead to a perilous drop in blood pressure, followed by respiratory failure and death. Ingesting it in some food source—once again depending on the amount—would sicken someone, inducing coughing, dizziness, headache, nausea, et cetera, but would not necessarily kill her should she get to treatment soon enough. The tricky bit here, though, St. James said, was that, ingested, sodium azide mixed with stomach acids, rendering the person who ingested it consequently both toxic and explosive. “Hydrazoic acid gets formed,” St. James told him. “Which would be why they’re being so careful with this woman Barbara discovered. They’ve no idea how it got into her system, but the fact that she was still alive indicates she wasn’t exposed to the gas it forms but rather through some other means, and ingesting it with food or drink is the most likely, I expect.”

  Lynley thought about the likelihood of someone’s being able to get into Rory Statham’s flat and mix sodium azide with something she would eventually eat or drink. There could, of course, be an extra key to the place floating about, but it was more probable that she had unknowingly invited her poisoner into her home. It would, after all, only take a moment while she was out of the room for someone to put the chemical into . . . what? The sugar bowl? A container of milk? Her breakfast cereal?

  “Of course,” St. James said, his tone indicating he was thinking aloud, “this stuff is so toxic that it could merely have been on the dead woman’s clothing if she killed herself up in Cambridge. And if this second woman—what was her name, Tommy?”

  “Rory Statham.”

  “If Rory Statham came into contact with the sodium azide by touching her clothes—”

  “Why would it be on her clothes?”

  “If she poisoned herself. If she hadn’t taken care when she mixed it with whatever she was going to down herself: water, tea, coffee, wine, a soft drink.”

  “Barbara says no a thousand times to the idea that Clare Abbott killed herself, Simon. She was in the midst of quite a professional success.” He explained it all: Clare Abbott, her book, its sales, and the author’s notoriety, which St. James—an inveterate reader of newspapers—was already aware of. “Barbara declares it improbable.”

  “Sometimes suicides are,” St. James said. “All of that—this book business and Clare Abbott’s success—con
stitutes the outer trappings. As to the inner woman . . . ? It could have been quite different.”

  “Assuming for the moment that it was, that she did indeed take a dose of sodium azide to kill herself, where on God’s earth would she have got her hands on it?”

  St. James said, “Laboratories, hospitals, clinics. Any location where they’d have reagents.”

  “As to handling the stuff once it was in one’s hands . . . ?”

  “If someone killed her, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whoever managed to get it would have known in advance, I assume, that exposure to it is absolutely deadly, especially if breathed as a gas or dust. But the risk of exposure could be minimised: a surgical mask or a painter’s mask, latex gloves, a thorough scrub-down and the laundering—or, better yet, the disposal of whatever one was wearing at the time of mixing the compound into whatever was going to be its carrier. That would probably take care of the risk.”

  “And then afterwards? Assuming that all of the sodium azide wasn’t used? Where would one dispose of it?”

  “It’s white, crystalline.” St. James shrugged. “One wouldn’t need to dispose of it at all but merely to disguise it as something else never intended for use. Or one could put it—fully sealed—into the rubbish and allow it to be carted off to a landfill somewhere. The world’s run amok with terrorists, but I suspect the government haven’t yet begun requiring the dustmen to employ dogs to sniff the rubbish for sodium azide.”

  Lynley nodded. It was a reasonable conclusion. Still, he said, “It seems to me, though, that there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to poison someone without resorting to something so potentially dangerous to the person using it.”

  “Of course. But consider that this substance had the forensic pathologist concluding the first woman had a seizure triggered by cardiac arrhythmia, Tommy. Had her friend not insisted otherwise, had she not had a passing acquaintance with Barbara, had you not asked me to look over the first autopsy, had I not strongly recommended a second, what was a murder would have gone down as natural if unexpected causes, and that would have been an end to it. That being the case, it was a brilliant choice of weapon. You merely have to find the person with a combination of native intelligence, wiliness, and the capacity to hate enough to do away with your victim.”