by Ed O'Connor
‘All right. Make it fifty quid and I’ll sell you half a measure. I’m not gonna lose money over you.’
Bernie pulled a damp tenner from his back pocket and tossed it over. ‘That’s my dinner.’
Stark smiled as he opened his rucksack and reached inside. ‘As a connoisseur, Bernie, you’ll appreciate this.’ He withdrew a small plastic envelope containing the heroin and handed it over. ‘This stuff is vintage.’
‘It’s probably flour, knowing you.’ Bernie snatched the envelope and, coughing horribly, hurried towards the door.
‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ Stark called out after him.
‘Go fuck yourself.’ Bernie crashed the door behind him and shuffled out into the rain.
Stark flattened out the five ten-pound notes Bernie had handed over and then inserted them neatly into his wallet.
An hour passed slowly. The rain showed no signs of abating. Stark was down to his last two cigarettes. This was the shittiest part of the job: the waiting around. Dealing with junkies was miserable enough but waiting for them to appear was downright depressing. At midnight Stark decided to pack up. He called a minicab company on his mobile and arranged to be picked up at the main entrance of New Bolden station. He had fifteen minutes to get there: more than enough time. He was zipping up his rucksack and extinguishing a cigarette when a car’s headlights swung into the courtyard.
Stark froze. Not many of his clients drove. It was most likely a squad car. He knew that the New Bolden police did regular drive-bys after dark. He shrank into the shadows and watched carefully. The car stopped directly opposite to his position. It was a Porsche 911. The driver didn’t move. Stark peered out from the shelter of RT Plastics. It was odd. Perhaps the driver was looking for prostitutes. The area wasn’t the exclusive preserve of druggies. The car door opened and the driver stepped out into the rain and extended his arms upwards towards the heavens as if stretching a troublesome back. He was tall. Beyond that, Stark couldn’t determine very much.
The car door slammed. Stark heard the man’s footsteps moving around the courtyard. Perhaps he was a client: a lawyer or a young farmer seeking some jollies after a hard day’s exploitation. Business was slack – maybe it was worth the risk.
‘You looking for someone?’ he called at the figure. The footsteps stopped. There was a moment’s silence before the darkness replied in a crisp, rasping voice.
‘I was told I could buy stuff here.’
‘What stuff?’ Stark was uneasy but confident in his invisibility.
‘You know, syringes, needles, some smack.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘A bar man at The Feathers. Shaun, I think.’
Stark knew Shaun McBride. He was reliable, a believer. In any case, the man didn’t look like a copper.
Stark decided to chance it: one last punt before he hit the clubs. He climbed out of his hiding place and pushed open the fire exit, walking out into the courtyard. The figure stood before him smiling.
‘So what exactly were you after?’ asked Stark.
17
Harvey dropped Underwood at his flat just before 11p.m.
Underwood unlocked the door to the small studio he was renting and flopped into an armchair. The flat was pokey and basic: telephone, sofa, armchair, bed, table. He hadn’t unpacked his books and his record collection. It wasn’t home. He wasn’t really there.
He knew he had to occupy his mind until sleep came. The tide began to roll in when he became bored.
Busy.
Underwood looked at the small pile of envelopes on his dining table. The previous evening he had rearranged all his direct debits and bank details. That morning he had written out his shopping list for the month. He was King Canute, running out of ideas.
He decided to transcribe all the numbers saved in his mobile phone to the address pages of his diary. That would fill some time. As he began the task, he realized that there were significantly less numbers than there had been twelve months previously. The completion of his divorce from Julia had revealed the true allegiances of their ‘mutual’ friends.
Wankers.
Julia hadn’t called him for some time now. He knew she was alone, living in Hertfordshire, that she had bought a little cottage, that she had a job in an office. He tried not to let the situation anger him. Julia had left him for a man called Paul Heyer, then promptly left Heyer to be on her own. He still wasn’t sure whether he should feel insulted or complimented. He decided to return to his task and fill his mind with numbers. Words were pissing him off. Numbers were inert. Numbers didn’t hurt.
Underwood was disappointed that the transcriptions only took him ten minutes. He reassured himself that it was important to keep hard copies of mobile phone numbers; that he had been livid when he had lost his old mobile. Still, he felt pathetic. Particularly so when he noticed that he had entered Dexter’s number twice: once under ‘Alison’ and once under ‘Dex.’
Pathetic.
It didn’t make it any likelier she would call.
The starkness of the room was getting to him. His life had been cleared of ornamentation and elaboration. These were the bare bones of existence. They were rattling. He was frightened.
Keep busy.
He picked up a copy of the New Bolden Gazette and began to flick through the personal ads.
18
Detective Inspector Alison Dexter covered the scars on her wrist with her shirt cuff and stepped out of her Ford Mondeo into the hospital car park. It was late, long after midnight. But Dexter liked to keep busy. Sleep had become an uncomfortable, intermittent experience. Besides, if she was awake, she wasn’t dreaming.
DC Jensen was waiting for her at the entrance to Accident & Emergency, her irritating prettiness illuminated by the blue light above the doorway.
‘Evening, Guv. Sorry to drag you out.’
‘What have we got?’ asked Dexter sharply. She didn’t like Jensen and had to work hard to disguise the fact, usually unsuccessfully.
‘An old friend.’ Jensen flipped open her notebook. ‘Ian Stark.’
Dexter laughed an empty laugh. ‘If I’d known that I’d have stayed in bed.’
‘Doctors think he might have taken an overdose.’
‘Good,’ snarled Dexter. ‘Poetic bleeding justice.’
Stark was notorious around New Bolden and well known to Alison Dexter. She had wanted to put Stark away for a long time. She had seen plenty of kids lying in the same A & E ward because of the drugs Ian Stark had sold them. Many of them hadn’t come out again.
‘What goes around comes around, I suppose,’ Jensen added with a tired grin. Dexter noticed that Jensen had heels on. She decided to let the indiscretion go.
For now.
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t make it,’ she said.
They walked through the ward. Dexter looked at the usual collection of bloody noses and beer glass stitch-ups. She could hear some drunk shouting gibberish in one of the recovery rooms. She pitied the doctors and nurses. Nights in provincial towns always depressed her: the lager and piss, blood and vomit. The ‘wannabe’ alpha-males that got absurdly territorial about grotty birds in grotty pubs. It reminded her of tomcats spraying musk to protect their private patch of wasteland.
‘So if it’s an open and shut,’ Dexter questioned her junior officer, ‘why am I here?’
‘You should probably speak to the doctor,’ Jensen replied. ‘This one might be a little complicated.’
The shouting was getting louder. It came from the last cubicle, curtained off at the end of the corridor. Dexter looked behind the curtain. Ian Stark lay writhing and screaming in apparent agony on a hospital bed. There were two nurses and a doctor trying to hold him down to prevent injuries. Dexter tried to make sense of Stark’s words. It was nonsense; half-sentences and meaningless phrases. It was the product of a scrambled brain. Dexter also noticed there was blood all over Stark’s t-shirt and a severe wound to his neck.
An exhau
sted looking young registrar saw the two police officers and nodded. He turned to the nurses who had finally managed to place Stark’s arms in restraints. ‘Take him off the Narcan. It’s not helping. Keep his arms and legs secure. I’ll be back in a second.’ He turned and crossed the short distance to Dexter and Jensen. ‘Thanks for coming. I’m the registrar – Nicholas Wells.’
‘DI Alison Dexter. Tough night?’
Wells nodded. ‘He came in about an hour ago. He seemed to be showing symptoms of heroin overdose. We know Ian Stark here. He was one of our regulars until six months ago. I have treated him on previous occasions when he has OD’d.’
‘So what’s the punchline?’ Dexter asked. He was screaming. She no longer found Stark’s plight gratifying – the noise was beginning to disturb her.
‘The punchline is that I goofed. I gave him a dose of Naxolone. That’s the standard procedure.’
‘And he started freaking out?’ Dexter looked at Stark again. It didn’t look like a heroin overdose to her.
‘Yep. It’s made him worse. His heart will give way unless we can figure out what’s going on. I still think he’s OD’d but I’m buggered if I know on what. He’s in agony and we’re not helping.’
‘Have you requested blood tests?’ Jensen asked.
‘Of course,’ Wells looked irritated by the question. He brushed sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his white coat, ‘but results take time to get in. He might not make it.’
‘What about the blood on his shirt?’ asked Dexter. ‘It looks like he’s been stabbed in the neck.’
‘That’s the other thing,’ Wells coughed wearily. ‘Someone, possibly Stark himself, has tried to cut his throat.’
Ian Stark was screaming again, burbling something through the waves of pain. Dexter listened to what he was saying. This time she understood the words but they made no sense.
19
He lay back naked on the cold roof. The dried blood on his hands and face was starting to itch. Fallon felt a profound sense of frustration. His attempt to rip order from chaos had been thwarted. His work had been interrupted by drunken voices emanating from the desolate factory buildings. He had not been able to remove the man’s head. He tried not to allow his disappointment to translate into anger. The demons came at him mostly when he was angry. The lights were at their most disconcerting when his mind was burning with fury. Instead, Fallon concentrated on the distant lights in the night sky; trying to distinguish stars from planets and trying to draw those planets into the plane of his consciousness.
The moment was approaching. He would bring forth his progeny on earth. The ordered heavens would bear witness.
Relaxing at last, he scratched the black blood from his skin.
20
30th April
The following lunchtime, Alison Dexter sat in her office listening to pathologist Roger Leach’s preliminary postmortem report on Ian Stark. DS Harrison and DC Jensen leaned up against the glass wall of the office. Leach sat in the chair opposite Dexter, flicking through his own notes and the hospital registrar’s report on Stark.
‘Ian Daniel Stark,’ he said. ‘Male. Thirty-five years old. Known heroin addict. Admitted to New Bolden Infirmary last night after collapsing outside New Bolden railway station. Suspected overdose. Registrar Dr Nicholas Wells gave him small initial dose of Naxolone at ten-fifty p.m. then repeated the process after patient failed to respond. Naxolone wears off faster than heroin so Wells was probably right to repeat the dosage. He obviously made the assumption Stark was OD-ing.’
‘A reasonable assumption given Stark’s previous,’ muttered Harrison.
‘Patient deteriorated,’ Leach continued, reading the words without expression, ‘screaming, swearing, apparently hallucinating. The hospital started to suspect Stark had been poisoned. They received the results of their initial blood tests at about two a.m. The liver function tests – Prothrombin Time, Aminotransferases and Bilirubin – revealed extremely high levels of amatoxins. The patient finally lost consciousness at two-seventeen a.m.’
‘The Accident and Emergency staff injected Stark with four doses of Penicillin G and Silibinin. Both these drugs are designed to inhibit the amatoxins from penetrating the liver cells. Too little too late. Stark died at four a.m. this morning. Cause of death was massive and total liver failure.’
‘Goodbye and good riddance,’ Harrison added.
‘That does seem to be the consensus,’ Leach agreed. ‘However, there are two problems here.’ Leach was getting uncomfortable, aware that Dexter’s hard green eyes had been focussed intently on him since he had started speaking. She was like a lion watching from the undergrowth. ‘Problem One. The levels of amatoxins in his system were extremely high. Normally, after a severe amatoxin ingestion, liver failure is unlikely to occur within the first twenty hours. This was no ordinary overdose.’
‘Evidently,’ she replied.
‘We are working on a full toxicology report now. Initial findings show very high levels of various toxins: mostly cyclic octapeptides.’
‘Come again?’ asked Harrison, uncomfortably aware that Dexter was very quiet.
Leach pushed his gold-rimmed glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and squinted at his notes. ‘Organic poisons. Amatoxins occur naturally.’
‘Where?’ Dexter asked sharply, always seeking the angle.
‘Most commonly, in poisonous mushrooms.’
‘Mushrooms?’ Dexter couldn’t help smiling faintly, ‘you’re telling me that Stark died from eating magic mushrooms?’
‘No. I’m not really. I need to do some checking but the levels of amatoxin found in Stark’s system were extraordinarily high. Once I have the full toxicology analysis I’ll be able to be more specific.’
‘Problem two?’ Dexter asked.
‘Problem two,’ Leach continued, ‘the damage to the neck. There is a twelve-centimetre incision on the front, left side of Stark’s neck leading from under his left ear to his larynx. Some serious muscular damage. Amazingly none of the major blood vessels was severed.’
‘Could the wound have been self-inflicted?’ asked Dexter suddenly. ‘If he was spaced out on some drug or other might he have tried to top himself?’
‘I wondered about that too,’ Leach replied, ‘but the difficulty is that I think Stark was left-handed.’
‘How do you figure that?’ Dexter was trying to remember her previous encounters with Stark.
‘He was a former addict. Most of the needle track marks – the scars from old puncture wounds – were on the inside of his right arm. That is consistent with a left-handed addict who regularly injected himself.’
Jensen was thinking about the significance of Leach’s comments.
‘So if he was left-handed,’ she raised her own left arm to replicate the necessary movement across her own throat, ‘he couldn’t have cut himself from left to right.’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Leach concluded.
Dexter sat back in her chair and crushed a yawn. ‘Anything else?’
Jensen handed Dexter and Harrison a photocopied sheet. Leach shifted on his plastic seat as Jensen leaned across him.
‘I’m sorry, Doc,’ said Jensen, ‘I only have three copies so you’ll have to share with me.’
‘No problem,’ Leach replied, catching a faint waft of perfume. Perfume was against regulations. Dexter smelled it too. It made the thin line of mascara under Jensen’s eyes doubly unforgivable.
Oblivious, Jensen read from the sheet she now shared. ‘Items recovered from personal effects of Ian Daniel Stark. Officers present DC Jensen and PC Evans. One wallet (black leather) containing five hundred and sixty pounds; one Nokia 3330e mobile phone (blue). Phone battery appears to be dead. There was thirty pence in change in his jacket pocket and a packet of chewing gum. That’s it.’
‘Any drugs?’ Dexter asked.
‘Nothing,’ Jensen answered.
‘OK,’ Dexter had heard enough. ‘You’ll get us the tox report by tonigh
t, doc?’
‘Absolutely.’
Dexter stood and stared out of the window at the blue and white line of parked squad cars and the little square of grass behind New Bolden police station.
‘Frankly, Ian Stark was a shit-eel and we are well rid of him. If he died because of his own drugs then so much the better. However, the neck wound makes this our problem. I’m going to check out Stark’s flat this afternoon. Jensen, you can drive me.’
Jensen shot a cloudy look across the room at Harrison.
‘Harrison. Take a SOCO team and check out some of Stark’s old haunts. Start around the station. That’s where he turned up bleeding. Aren’t there some old factories nearby where all the junkies hang out?’
Harrison nodded. ‘The Car Wash. Behind the station. We’ve picked dealers up there before.’
‘Take Marty Farrell,’ said Leach. ‘He’s the most thorough.’
‘I know Marty,’ Harrison said, ‘he’s a top man.’
‘That’s it, then,’ Dexter concluded. ‘Jensen, can you wait a moment?’ The DC took a deep breath and turned to face Dexter as the others left the room. Harrison closed the door softly behind him.
‘We keep having this conversation, don’t we?’ Dexter asked acidly.
‘Guv?’
‘Perfume. Make-up. Heels. Not here. Not on my team. Not ever.’
‘Guv, I’ve hardly …’
‘You look like a panda. Wash it off.’
Jensen bit her lip.
‘Understood.’
‘Go and get the motor. I’ll meet you out front in ten minutes.’
Jensen passed Harrison on the way out. He had been hovering by the door. He winked at her. She ignored him.
‘You don’t need to be so hard on her, guv,’ Harrison said as Dexter emerged from her office pulling on a waterproof jacket.
‘Who asked you?’ she shot back.
Harrison was tap-dancing on dangerous ground. He chose his words carefully.
‘She’s good at what she does.’
‘And you’d know all about that,’ Dexter snarled. Harrison’s relationship with Jensen was common knowledge. No one at the station really cared about it anymore – except Dexter.
