Silent as the Grave

by Paul Gitsham

  “Possible, I suppose. Maybe Liebig pissed somebody off at the club. My old man plays skittles for an over-sixties league. You wouldn’t believe the backstabbing and politics that a bunch of pensioners with nothing else to occupy them can conjure up to pass the time.”

  The two men lapsed into silence.

  “What puzzles me is why this mysterious manager was so insistent on the way that Eddleston prepared the drink. Surely a long glass of Diet Coke with ice and lime would be enough to hide the taste of half a shot of vodka? Why mix it with regular Coke as well?”

  “I’ve had a thought about that, Tony. What are your plans for this evening? Would you like to take part in a scientific experiment?”

  “I’ll get my lab coat and safety goggles.”

  * * *

  Susan answered the door to the two men, offering Sutton a peck on the cheek in greeting.

  “She never welcomes me that way, Tony,” joked Warren as he carried the carrier bag full of bottles and ice into the kitchen.

  “Seeing Tony’s a special treat. I have to put up with you every day,” retorted his wife as she led the smirking DI into the living room.

  By the time Warren reappeared the other two were sitting at the coffee table, with Sutton leafing through one of the A level Biology textbooks that Susan had piled on the coffee table.

  Carefully placing the tray of drinks on the table, Warren handed out pens and paper.

  Susan eyed the full tray. “I hope you’re doing the washing up. You must have used every glass in the kitchen. And that better not be permanent marker you’ve used to write on them.”

  “I don’t think so. Either way there’s plenty of vodka left. I’ll use it to wipe off the ink afterwards.”

  “No you won’t. I’ve seen what brand you bought and you aren’t wasting that on marker pen. You can use some of that revolting stuff we brought back from Tenerife.”

  Warren lined the glasses up on the table, using coasters to stop the condensation marking the expensive, polished wood.

  “OK, eight different drinks. I want you to tell me what’s in them. Keep it fair. Just write down on the paper what you think they are without saying anything and I’ll tell you if you’re right at the end.”

  Sitting back, he waited as Sutton and Susan carefully took a mouthful from each of the sweating glasses before recording their thoughts on the paper. Eventually they were finished.

  Warren lifted the first glass from the tray.

  “Regular Coke,” said Sutton firmly.

  “I agree. You can feel the sugar on your teeth.”

  Warren replaced the glass and pointed to the second.

  “Diet Coke. It has that slight aftertaste from the artificial sweetener.”

  “Me as well, Guv. I drink enough of the stuff to tell the difference.”

  “Number three is Diet Coke, maybe with a splash of vodka,” stated Susan.

  Sutton shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’re right about the Diet Coke but I couldn’t taste any vodka.”

  “Number four definitely had vodka in it,” said Susan confidently.

  “Yeah, I’ll give you that. Probably full-sugar Coke as well.”

  They both agreed that glass five was Diet Coke and vodka, but again disagreed about number six.

  “Diet Coke with vodka,” claimed Susan.

  “Diet Coke, but with all of that ice and lime I’m on the fence about the vodka.”

  Glasses seven and eight were both marked down as Diet Coke only.

  “Well, unless you’ve pulled a fast one, Boss, you’ve successfully hidden the Diet Coke and full-sugar Coke mixture.”

  “No fast one. The last two were a fifty-fifty mix. Number seven had half a shot of vodka in it as well. I also hid half a shot in glass three and slightly more in glass six.”

  “Well Susan spotted the vodka in those two but I was pretty fooled. Do you think the mix of Diet and regular Coke was to hide the taste better?”

  “Maybe, but I think Susan may have another explanation.”

  Susan picked up one of the textbooks and opened it at a marked page.

  “After Warren called me earlier, I dug out the textbooks and did a bit of research online. Apparently, Dr Liebig was a diabetic suffering from type II diabetes. What do you know about diabetes, Tony?”

  “Not a lot beyond what they teach us on the first aid courses and what his son said when we interviewed him. They have to control their blood sugar or they get really lethargic and pass out. Some use insulin but apparently that didn’t work with Liebig.”

  “That’s correct. Basically, when you eat food that has sugar in it, or lots of starchy carbohydrates that are broken down into sugar, that sugar, called glucose, is absorbed into the bloodstream. This then causes the concentration of glucose in the blood to rise.”

  Picking up a pen, she sketched a graph with a curving line rising.

  “In non-diabetics, the pancreas releases the hormone insulin, which takes the excess glucose from the blood and stores it away inside the liver until it’s needed, reducing the concentration again.” The line on the graph dropped back down again to the same height it had started from.

  “The body tries to keep the concentration of glucose in the blood between four and seven millimoles per litre.” At Sutton’s questioning look, she waved her hand. “Don’t worry about what that means; it isn’t important. Anyhow, everybody knows that if a diabetic’s blood glucose concentration gets too low, they get ill. Non-diabetics tap into those stores of glucose in the liver to replace what the body has used up. Diabetics don’t have those stores so they need to eat more sugar. With me so far?”

  Sutton nodded.

  “What people don’t always realise is that too high a concentration of blood glucose is also dangerous. Really high levels can cause ketoacidosis, which can lead to coma or even death. But over time, even slightly raised levels can cause long-term complications such as blindness or nerve problems or even organ damage, with few or no immediate symptoms.”

  “Dr Liebig’s concentration was fourteen point two. What effect would that have?”

  “That’s not enough to cause him to pass out or anything but it’s still unhealthily high. His body would probably have been trying to get rid of the excess glucose from the blood as best it could.”

  “How could it do that if insulin doesn’t work?” asked Sutton.

  “Urination. The classic test for diabetes used to be sweet-tasting urine.”

  “Piss off!” choked Sutton.

  “Exactly,” remarked Susan, who’d heard pretty much every joke imaginable from her A level students over the years. “Non-diabetics don’t normally release glucose in their pee unless they’ve eaten a ridiculous amount of sugar. Diabetics can release enough that you can taste it. Of course these days there’s a blood test.”

  “Glad to hear it,” muttered Sutton. “Hang on. Didn’t Eddleston say that Liebig was thirsty? That he had five or six drinks over the evening. That’s a lot of Coke.”

  “Exactly,” said Warren. “It was a vicious circle. The more sugar he drank, especially on top of a full meal, the more he needed to pee. The more he peed, the more thirsty he felt, so he drank more.”

  “And every time he asked for a glass of Diet Coke, he got a load more sugar and half a shot of vodka.” Sutton shook his head. “Devious.”

  The three sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating what they had discovered.

  “We need to find out who owns that damn golf club and get a list of its members,” decided Warren.

  “I agree, but I think that’s a job for tomorrow, Boss. In the meantime, what are we going to do with all this Coke?”

  Warren picked up glass five. “I don’t know about you two, but I intend to conceal some evidence.”

  Tuesday 3 April

  Chapter 21

  Vinny Delmarno glanced at his watch impatiently. They’d agreed upon seven-thirty a.m.; the man was already almost ten minutes late and Delmarno hated waitin
g.

  “Relax, sweetheart, he’ll be here soon enough. He’s probably stuck in traffic.” Jocelyn kissed him lightly on the forehead. Delmarno forced himself not to say anything; he knew that if he did it would just start an argument and he wasn’t in the mood. She just didn’t understand.

  It was something that nobody had warned him about when he’d left prison—the impatience. In prison you had to be patient. Time passed slowly behind bars; locked in a cell for anything up to twenty-two hours a day, you learned to let time pass at its own pace. There were only two ways to make the time pass faster he had found; however, he’d sworn off drugs and alcohol when he got the new kidney and there were only so many hours a man could sleep each day.

  Even when you were allowed to leave your cell (and the number of hours each day varied with the prison, the number of staff and the whim of the current Home Secretary), much of that precious time was spent patiently queuing: for food, showers, even to use the library. Those who didn’t learn to be patient were the ones who broke. The ones who spiralled down and either didn’t survive or emerged from prison destroyed in soul and spirit.

  Delmarno hadn’t broken.

  But now he was out and he was impatient all the time. Twenty-two years he’d wasted. Twenty-two years waiting as the world spun on oblivious to him. He’d been reduced to a spectator in his own life, fed titbits of information from the outside world by his lawyer, his family and the few friends who’d remained in contact. He’d watched impotently as the empire he’d created—and he did think of it as his empire—was dismantled, piece by piece. Some of the parts were broken by the police, others swallowed up by rivals and former allies alike. Other bits just ground to a halt from a lack of leadership and energy; like a steam engine without its engineer, there was no one to stoke the fires and keep the boilers going and eventually it lost its momentum.

  He supposed he should be fortunate that his accountant knew what he was doing, otherwise he’d have nothing. They’d known each other since their school days, remaining friends even as Delmarno was forced to leave the school at fifteen. Paul Rubens had stayed on at school, excelling at maths and heading off to university to study accountancy. By the time Rubens had qualified, Delmarno was already making serious money and wondering what the hell to do with it.

  It had been Rubens who had suggested that he go legitimate. The 1970s were turning into the 1980s and Delmarno was a very wealthy man. The problem was that he couldn’t spend it. The police weren’t stupid and neither was the taxman. “Living beyond his means” was the phrase they used. Everybody knew that they got Al Capone on tax evasion and Delmarno wanted to avoid that fate.

  So up sprung Vinny Delmarno the businessman. He moved south, leaving the Midlands behind, and opened a string of cafés, bought himself a fleet of second-hand minicabs from an old boy looking to retire and started “legitimising his cash flow”. The excess cash that he was unable to launder—his income from drugs and prostitution alone still outgrossed his legitimate businesses by a factor of three to one and even the best accountant in the world can’t bury that discrepancy—was salted away into numbered bank accounts; Switzerland mainly but the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands also provided a home for his ill-gotten gains. He also stepped back from the “hands-on” side of the business, leaving others to collect money from the willing, change the minds of the unwilling and bury the no-longer willing.

  Everything was going wonderfully, right up until the beginning of 1987. Shortly after his thirty-third birthday he’d started to notice the first annoying symptoms—fatigue and constant peeing. After ignoring it for some months, he’d finally visited his GP. The diagnosis of kidney failure was delivered less than twenty-four hours before the police arrived, warrants in hand, to start turning his comfortable existence inside out.

  Where had it all gone wrong?

  He’d been stitched up. There was no way that his handgun could have found its way from the safe at the back of his wardrobe in Hertfordshire to a squalid bedsit in Hillfields, Coventry.

  That he’d actually used the gun to kill Frankie Cruise was a technicality in Delmarno’s mind; the fact was somebody had taken his gun and planted it for the police to find in a part of Coventry that Delmarno had thought he’d never set foot in again.

  His lawyers had challenged the legality of the search warrant raised, but by that time the evidence collected was connecting Delmarno to a case meticulously prepared from years of investigation by two police forces. It was a complete ambush and no judge was ever going to throw all of that out on a technicality.

  And so Delmarno went down—a life sentence for the killing of Frankie Cruise with a minimum tariff of twenty-two years and eight months. Given everything, he supposed he could have been looking at thirty years plus, but his lawyers had used his declining health in mitigation.

  Big deal. By sentencing him to twenty-two years instead of thirty, the judge knew he was still sentencing him to death in prison. Even with the renal experts who cared for him in jail, the odds were against him surviving even half that time.

  The doorbell rang, interrupting his thoughts. Finally. Plastering a smile on his face, he greeted his old friend Rubens with a hug, shaking off the other man’s apologies for his tardiness and escorting him into the kitchen with the offer of a drink.

  The two men had been meeting each other once a month since Delmarno had been released. The accountant was technically retired—his copper-toned skin and open-necked shirt evidence of that, but he’d been more than willing to clamber back into the saddle when Delmarno had come calling.

  It was his only chance of getting his hands on the man’s money. Along with everyone else, Rubens had expected Delmarno to die in prison and had made plans accordingly. Despite his natural cunning and streetwise business acumen, Delmarno had never fully understood the technicalities of accountancy and it had been easy for Rubens to set up his old friend’s business affairs so that he would be the beneficiary when he eventually died. Of course he didn’t die and now he was back out and demanding access to the cash that Rubens had so carefully hidden away.

  Rubens was nothing if not a pragmatist and a patient one at that. The odds that Delmarno would keep himself out of trouble and out of harm’s way for long on the outside weren’t in his favour and Rubens was confident that he’d eventually have unimpeded access to those prudently invested stockpiles. In the meantime he’d just bide his time and enjoy the generous retainer that Delmarno passed his way.

  Rubens’ leather briefcase was the same one that he’d bought with his first pay packet in his first job and for that reason alone he’d never bought a new one. After manipulating the stiff, metal hasp, he took out his little notebook computer and a stack of legal documents. Placing a pair of small, rimless glasses on his nose he squinted at the device’s tiny ten-inch screen. At home he used a larger, seventeen-inch machine, much kinder on his aging eyes, but there was no way he could fit it into his beloved briefcase. Delmarno watched on with amusement.

  “First I’ll give you the financial report for this quarter.” Rubens pointed to the spreadsheet displaying a summary of all of Delmarno’s holdings. “We’re still losing cash from pretty much everything. It’s not that your businesses aren’t turning a profit day to day—they are—it’s that their overheads are increasing.” He highlighted a column in the table. “Take the minicab firm in Hitchen. Two of the cars have been in the garage this month with major repairs needed to get them back on the road. At least two others are heading that way. They should have been sold and replaced eighteen months ago, but there wasn’t enough money. The banks aren’t lending at the moment to small businesses, so they’ve been run into the ground. When they finally give up the ghost you’ll be lucky to get scrappage, let alone part exchange against new ones.”

  The story was the same across his portfolio; the truth was that Delmarno’s legitimate chain of companies—signed over to his wife Jocelyn on the day he divorced her—were running on empty.
Lack of investment over the past few years, exacerbated by the economy’s woes, had left them in a parlous state. Like the minicab firm, some of them were one stroke of bad luck away from insolvency.

  Outwardly they were keeping up appearances. The cash kept flowing in. The house still looked like a show home; Jocelyn was still a member of all the right gyms and spas and remained a “lady-wot-lunched” with her vacuous friends three times a week. But the wheels were coming off.

  “My biggest concern is the apartment block in Hertford.” Rubens face was serious. “The shell is built, the lifts are working but the electricians and plumbers and decorators are refusing to do the interior work without cash up front. And with investors still wary after the house price crash you can’t even sell them off to a developer willing to finish them without losing money. They need to be completed and either sold off as ready to live in or rented out to recoup your capital.” He smiled humourlessly. “I don’t think I can blame Jocelyn and that idiot firm of advisors she employed for the housing market collapse, but they can certainly take responsibility for a lack of forward planning and investment in the rest of your businesses.”

  “Can I make them pay for their negligence?” Delmarno fought to remain calm; losing his cool wouldn’t help matters.

  “I doubt it. They’ll have a top-drawer legal team and they can afford to drag the case out until we go bust.”

  Delmarno hadn’t been suggesting that he took them to court to air his grievances, but he didn’t bother to correct Rubens, deciding instead to let the matter drop. For the time being at least.

  “So we need capital?” It wasn’t really a question.

  To her credit, Jocelyn had woken up to the problem some time ago and after greeting her ex—soon-to-be-current again—husband on his release from prison had tearfully laid out the problems that they were facing. Delmarno had been angry, naturally, but in the end he’d known who to call. And today their problems would be solved.

  “About half a million will do it.”

  Delmarno nodded his agreement. The sum would barely make a dent in his vast reserves hidden around the world. Unfortunately, they were beyond his grasp. Simply transferring that money from a numbered account overseas would trip alarms across the globe. September 11 had a lot to answer for, he mused. In the past such a transaction may have incurred scrutiny from the tax authorities. These days the security services would also be interested—and he really didn’t want MI5 breathing down his neck.