Careless Love

by Robinson, Peter

  Through the tall sash windows she could look down on the Circus in all its glory, the crowds massing by crossings, traffic nudging and edging for advantage, horns blaring, the lumbering buses disgorging their hordes, and at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, the huge HARRY POTTER poster had been outside the Palace Theatre for as long as she had been working there. It always gave her a thrill to look out, not least because it was the Circus, and it was indelibly associated with John le Carré, one of her favourite writers, and George Smiley, one of her favourite fictional characters.

  Nobody really knew what anyone else was working on. It wasn’t the kind of office where one shared confidences. Perhaps Hawkins, the supervisor, knew, but sometimes Zelda wasn’t even too sure about him; Hawkins had his own agenda as well his own office, glassed off and soundproofed, in a corner of the room. He liked to give the impression that he was an ordinary bloke, despite the public-school education (a very minor public school, he always stressed) and a first in Medieval History at Cambridge. He wore M&S suits rather than Hugo Boss or Paul Smith, and his glasses were always slipping down over his nose, giving the impression that his mind was on some abstruse problem of Byzantine military history, but he didn’t miss a trick. He wouldn’t have survived in his job as long as he had if he did.

  Of course, Zelda’s job wasn’t entirely the way she had described it to Raymond or Banks, though recognising people from photos and surveillance was certainly a large part of it. The rest she couldn’t talk about, partly for reasons of secrecy and partly because it would change their ideas about her. But she had been honest in offering to help as regards Phil Keane, and she thought she could do it with minimum trouble.

  ‘Just going to check something in the archives,’ she said to the man she knew only as Teddy at the next desk. He nodded without looking up. She picked up a batch of photographs from her desk to carry with her. There was nothing unusual in visiting the archives. Quite often a new image recalled an old one, and it helped create a new juxtaposition that had to be checked and verified.

  If one of Hawkins’s beady eyes followed her as she walked past his office, Zelda was aware of it only in passing and never gave it a second thought.

  Banks marched through the double doors that linked the police station to the scientific support department and made his way down the corridor to Jazz Singh’s office. The department was mostly open plan, and such ‘offices’ as there were consisted of rows of glassed-in cubicles along the walls. Jazz’s was no exception. Banks tapped on the glass and Jazz beckoned him inside. There was hardly enough space for the two of them, but he managed to shoehorn himself into the second chair opposite her. He had to leave the door open in order to do so.

  Jazz sat behind a pile of papers, which threatened to obscure her diminutive form if she slouched down in her seat in the slightest. The bookcases that lined three walls were full to overflowing with scientific texts. All around them was a sense of urgent activity, people coming and going, yet a strange hush presided over it all. Voices were muffled, footsteps inaudible.

  ‘One luxury I have managed to acquire since I’ve been here,’ said Jazz with a smile, ‘is an electric kettle and a teapot. Fancy a cup of lapsang?’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Banks.

  The kettle boiled in no time and Jazz poured the water on the leaves and set the pot aside to let it steep. ‘I suppose you’ll be anxious to know the results?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve compared the hair samples for DNA?’

  Jazz shook her head. ‘One thing at time. I’m on it. Tomorrow? OK?’

  ‘OK. But you’re not going to disappoint me on the sleeping pills, are you?’

  ‘I do hope not. And I must say, it’s a rather interesting and unexpected result.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Ever heard of methaqualone?’

  Banks cast his mind back and found the word caused little reverberations in his memory, but he couldn’t quite grasp them. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘but please enlighten me.’

  ‘Someone of your generation might remember it better as Mandrax,’ said Jazz.

  ‘Enough of that my generation stuff,’ Banks protested. ‘As a matter of fact, I do remember Mandrax. It was very popular in the sixties and seventies.’

  Jazz nodded. ‘It was patented in the US in 1962 and produced in tablet form. Over there it was sold under the brand name Quaalude.’

  Banks nodded. ‘Ludes,’ he said. ‘Bowie mentioned them in a song on Aladdin Sane. We called them “mandies”. There were mandies and moggies, if I remember correctly.’

  Jazz raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. Mogadon. A nitrazepam. I see you do know all about sixties drugs, then?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Well, Mandrax were marketed primarily as sleeping tablets, but also as sedatives and muscle relaxants. For a time, they were thought to be a sort of wonder drug – controlled anxiety, high-blood pressure and so on. In the early days they were believed to be purely beneficial and non-addictive.’

  ‘They were popular with the hippies,’ Banks said.

  ‘Yes. Mandrax soon became a recreational drug and was found to be extremely addictive and dangerous, especially when consumed with alcohol and other drugs. It builds up quite a physical tolerance. You end up needing more for the same effect.’

  ‘People said it enhanced sex.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jazz mischievously. ‘And did it?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘You never even tried it?’

  ‘Once.’ Banks sighed. ‘I fell asleep.’

  Jazz laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that proves it did what it said on the bottle.’

  ‘Right.’ Banks remembered the evening in 1971 or ’72 with Emily. One of her flatmates had given her a couple of mandies to try, and she and Banks had taken the plunge. He remembered a wonderful sensation of relaxation and how his senses seemed heightened when he and Emily touched. But beyond that it was a blank. They both awoke some hours later with stiff necks and wove their way up to bed. So much for experimenting with drugs.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jazz went on. ‘It was discontinued in the eighties and is now mostly manufactured in illegal drug labs around the world. Apparently, it’s big in South Africa.’

  ‘What about here?’

  ‘Not so much. I mean, it’s not one of the ones you come across regularly. In fact, this is the first time I’ve encountered it, which is probably why it took me so long to identify it. That and the fact that it’s not the only job I have on. Anyway, it’s not something you’d normally test for.’

  ‘So would you think it unlikely that Adrienne got it from a doctor? On prescription?’

  ‘I’d think it bloody impossible,’ said Jazz. ‘As far as I know the only sources are illegal, though there may be one or two corners of the world where it’s still manufactured and sold legally, but not in very large quantities, I shouldn’t imagine. No doctor in this country would prescribe it.’

  ‘What about dosage?’

  ‘It used to come in three hundred milligram tablets, but that was when it was made legally. Who knows these days? From what Dr Glendenning and I could estimate, Adrienne Munro had around three thousand milligrams in her system.’

  ‘Enough to cause death, then?’

  ‘Not necessarily. That would take somewhere up around eight thousand milligrams. But more than enough to cause coma when mixed with alcohol, which is apparently what happened.’

  ‘The whisky?’

  ‘Yes. And that’s basically how she died. The poor girl fell into a coma, and when her system reacted to the poisoning by vomiting, she was beyond waking up, even to save her own life, and she choked.’

  Banks sat silently for a moment. Jazz poured the tea and he inhaled the smoky fragrance of the lapsang. She handed him a cup and he took a sip. ‘Nice,’ he said.

  ‘You need the occasional treat in this job.’

  ‘Any idea where Adrienne might have got hold of this Mandrax?’

  �
�You’ll have to check with your drugs squad, but I haven’t heard anything about it doing the rounds these days. It’s not the new “in” drug or anything like that. As I said, they stopped making it here years ago.’

  ‘So where and how would someone get hold of it?’

  ‘There are illegal labs all over the world – Mexico, Colombia, Belize, Peru. Even Lebanon and South Korea. Oddly enough, some of it is probably produced for fundraising purposes by combatants in the current Syrian Civil War. They do the same with heroin, opium, morphine, amphetamines, cannabis, hashish and other drugs, so why not mandies?’

  ‘That doesn’t really help us much, does it?’ said Banks. ‘Adrienne could have got it from anywhere. No doubt there are people around the campus with enough connections.’

  There was also Laurence Hadfield’s doctor friend, Anthony Randall.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jazz. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

  Banks smiled. ‘No chance. Sorry. Just thinking out loud.’

  ‘But why assume that Adrienne got her hands on it herself? Surely someone could have given it to her?’

  ‘It’s true that she wasn’t known as a drug-taker, not by anyone. Oh, she took E occasionally, but that’s all, according to everyone we’ve talked to. It seems the whole world does that.’

  ‘Yes, and in my discussions with Dr Glendenning he mentioned that there were no obvious signs of drug use in the post-mortem – other than the Mandrax, of course – and there were none of the tell-tale signs of methaqualone addiction, either – rotten teeth, yellowish hands, gaunt appearance, swollen abdomen. There are other things we couldn’t know about, like drowsiness, loss of appetite, unnatural sleeping patterns.’

  ‘Nobody we talked to mentioned any of those things in connection with Adrienne, either.’

  ‘So we can assume it was a one-off, not the result of an addiction.’

  ‘Again it comes back to suicide,’ Banks said. ‘A bright girl like Adrienne must have known the dangers of what she was doing, consuming that many pills and washing them down with Scotch.’

  ‘Well, then. Either you’re right about the suicide, or someone forced her to take the stuff.’

  ‘The doc said there were no signs of forced feeding, like bruising, or a funnel or tube or anything like that.’

  ‘There are other ways of forcing people to do something they don’t want,’ said Jazz. ‘Physical threats, or threats to her family, friends?’

  ‘I take your point. I just don’t see what happened as a reliable murder method. If you want to kill someone – especially if you dump the body in such a way that it’s found fairly quickly – would you honestly sit there and force her to take pills washed down with whisky? And why would you just happen to have enough mandies on you? Not exactly the easiest of drugs to get hold of, so you’ve given me to understand.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ Jazz said. ‘At least it’s bloodless. It’s quite possible that the killer didn’t want to have to deal with the sort of bloodstains you’d get from using a knife or a blunt object. And guns aren’t that easy to get hold of.’

  ‘But it screams of premeditation. Say it was an angry boyfriend or someone like that, done in the heat of the moment. Wouldn’t he be far more likely to just strangle her if he didn’t want to deal with bloodstains, rather than go to all that trouble? And would he even be thinking about bloodstains if he was so angry and out of control?’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t an angry boyfriend, then,’ Jazz suggested. ‘Perhaps you’re right and it was a cold, premeditated murder. I did come across something in my research that you might also find interesting.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Remember I mentioned earlier that mandies are still popular in South Africa? One of the articles talked of a massive cache of powdered methaqualone disappearing underground there during the last days of the National Party, when apartheid ended.’

  ‘But that was in the early nineties,’ said Banks. ‘Over twenty years ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When you say “massive” . . .?’

  ‘About a ton.’

  ‘Bugger me! Sorry. But a ton?’

  ‘I agree. It is rather a lot.’

  ‘Enough that it might still be in use today?’

  ‘Possibly. If it’s being kept under the right conditions. Nobody ever found it.’

  ‘So we’re after a South African killer?’

  ‘Or someone who visited that part of the world recently.’

  Laurence Hadfield, again. The Pandora charm, and now the Mandrax. Banks finished his tea. ‘Thanks, Jazz,’ he said. ‘As usual, you’ve raised more questions than you’ve answered, but I’m very grateful.’

  12

  When Anthony Randall entered the interview room late that Wednesday afternoon, he was wearing a well-tailored grey suit, complete with buttoned waistcoat. He brought with him his solicitor, a hunched, shiny-domed fellow of about his own age, called Brian Liversedge. Annie had never come across him before, and had no idea why Randall should think he needed a lawyer, but she bade Liversedge courteously to sit down.

  ‘You know,’ she said to Randall, ‘you’re not under arrest or being charged with anything. You’re not even under caution. You’re merely here as a courtesy to help us with our inquiries.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Randall. ‘I’m well aware of that. All the same, I feel more comfortable with Mr Liversedge present, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Annie, giving Gerry a sideways glance. Gerry shuffled the papers on the table in front of her. ‘Do you mind if we record this interview?’ Annie asked.

  ‘I have no objection,’ said Randall. He pulled at his trousers before crossing his legs, so the creases would hold, and clasped his hands loosely in his lap.

  He seemed perfectly at ease, Annie thought, which made her feel more convinced that he knew something. He ought to be more nervous that they had asked for an official interview at the station after their last chat at his home. She decided not to offer coffee or tea.

  After the formalities for the recording, she began, ‘When we spoke on Monday, you admitted to calling Laurence Hadfield three times on the Saturday he disappeared. Am I correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Randall. ‘But your use of the term “admitted” implies that I had been somehow previously withholding this information, or that the omission is in some way blameworthy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Annie. ‘A simple matter of fact.’

  ‘Then yes. I informed you that I had telephoned Larry on Saturday. I had no way of knowing that he had disappeared. I had no reason to think anything was wrong.’

  ‘Yes, you mentioned that before. One of your reasons for calling was to confirm a round of golf for the following day, right?’

  ‘Sunday. Yes.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘Yes we did.’

  ‘Which phone call?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘There were three. Remember? 3.59 p.m. 8.02 p.m. and 11.26 p.m.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I honestly don’t remember. Probably the first one. Does it matter?’

  ‘We’re simply trying to work on the timing here.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry. I don’t know for certain, only that it was mentioned.’

  ‘And Mr Hadfield agreed to play.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he didn’t turn up.’

  ‘That right. I’ve already told you this.’

  ‘Why did you call him at eleven twenty-six, Dr Randall, if you had already arranged to play golf with him the following morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I had something to tell him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘You didn’t leave a message.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I dislike leaving messages.’

  ‘I see. You just wanted to chat?’

  ‘No. Ther
e was something I – that’s right. Now I remember! I had the time wrong earlier. I had told him we were teeing off at nine-thirty, but it was actually nine o’clock. I didn’t want him to be late.’

  ‘So you phoned him back at eleven twenty-six to tell him that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But when he failed to answer, you didn’t leave a message to give him that simple piece of information because you don’t like leaving messages?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Gerry slid her pad over so Annie could read what she had scribbled on it, though they had agreed on this strategy before the interview began. It helped unnerve a complacent interviewee sometimes. After a moment’s thought and a frown, Annie asked, ‘What was your first thought when Mr Hadfield didn’t answer your eleven o’clock call?’

  ‘Thought? Nothing really. I mean, he clearly wasn’t there so I hung up. Maybe I was a bit annoyed.’

  ‘You weren’t worried? You didn’t think something might have happened to him?’

  ‘Why would I think that?’

  ‘It was quite late. There could have been a break-in, something like that. He could have been hurt.’

  ‘That may be the way you think, but it never crossed my mind.’

  ‘Surely a few possibilities must have run through your mind?’

  ‘Well, certainly not that he was dead.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was Laurence Hadfield dead by eleven twenty-six on that Saturday night? You see, that’s one of the things we’re trying to find out. We don’t know for certain exactly when he died.’

  ‘I don’t see why you should expect me to know. You’re just playing games.’ He glanced towards the solicitor. ‘Brian, do I have to sit here and answer these stupid and insulting questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Liversedge. ‘But I’d advise you to be patient a little longer, Tony. I’m sure these ladies will be finished very soon.’

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ said Annie, smiling. Then she looked back at Randall, who didn’t seem quite so complacent. She noticed he was playing with a ring on one of his fingers. ‘Any other reason he might not have answered his phone?’