by Linda Moore
And now, finally, he was surfacing and he found his voice, his words blurting out into the hospital corridor. “Molly. Where’s Molly?” His mouth was dry. From a chair near the foot of his bed someone in a uniform stood up, moved towards him, and began to speak.
“The girl who found you. She took the dog. She said she’d come round to the hospital tomorrow to see how you’re faring. You took quite a crack on the head there, buddy. Do you know who it was that did this to you? Can you answer some questions? Mr. McBride?”
The Girl Who Found You. That was a nice phrase; he liked it. It made him feel warm. He began to drift down again into the dark. The Girl Who Found You. Maybe there was something redeeming about life after all. You could get beat up and lie bleeding in an icy parking lot, and a girl would find you.
Chapter Three
When Sophie and I picked our way through the storm-stayed city to the hospital the next morning we found McBride sitting up in a bed in the corridor of the over-crowded emergency ward. His head was bandaged and he looked very cranky. Though I was concerned and anxious, his appearance had me suppressing a grin.
“So why didn’t you answer your damn phone?” he griped over the general din as we walked towards him.
“I was…the power went out. It was crazy. Are you alright?”
“Dandy.”
Oh boy, if looks could kill.
“McBride, this is Sophie. You met her and some other friends of mine at that cast party shindig last spring. Anyway, she’s the one who found you last night.”
“So you’re the one who’s got Molly. Where is she?”
“McBride!” I exclaimed.
“What?”
“Rude, my god! Try ‘Thank you for saving my life Sophie.’”
“Oh no,” Sophie jumped in. “The credit goes entirely to Molly. She was making quite the ruckus—I mean, you would have frozen to death in that storm if not for her. And she’s just fine, by the way, so don’t worry. They wouldn’t have let us bring her in here I don’t think. Anyway, um—here….” Sophie reached in her bag and took out a tartan thermos. “I brought you some cowslip tea. It’ll help you sleep. Really, it’s so amazing.”
“I’m not much for the herbal tea,” he muttered. I cleared my throat and glared at him. “But yeah, thanks—that’s…thoughtful.” He took the thermos and looked back at me.
“So how on earth did this happen to you?” I asked.
“I got tricked, sad to say. I got lured.”
“Seems like someone’s trying to send you a message loud and clear.”
“No mistake.” His reply was terse. It was obvious he wasn’t interested in elaborating there in the hospital corridor. A hall speaker just above his bed was busy with pages for doctors, annoying electronic bell sounds, and various indecipherable announcements. Several teams had wheeled stretchers by in either direction, squeezing past us as we attempted to talk.
“I bet you just love hanging out here in the middle of all the action,” I said. “Were there a lot of accidents last night or is it always a zoo, I wonder.”
“All I can tell you is it’s been non-stop crazy. Anyway, I’m out of here tomorrow morning.”
“Are you sure? They told you that, did they?”
“No, I told them that. Now you get Ruby if she’s not already towed. You’ve got a set of keys don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. “So, why don’t I pick Molly up at Sophie’s and come and get you—say around ten? You can catch me up on everything then.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Can we get you some water or anything?” I asked.
“Nope.”
There wasn’t much left to talk about. I was anxious to get out of there and McBride was clearly not feeling particularly affable.
“Okay. Well. We’ll go, I guess…Take it easy, eh.”
“You bet.”
“Bye McBride.”
“Bye Sophie.”
As we walked out of the hospital, I found myself apologizing yet again for McBride’s annoying lack of social grace. But McBride had always been at his worst around my friends, and under the circumstances anybody would be in a lousy mood.
“You guys are pretty connected though, aren’t you?” Sophie asked.
“Oh yeah—we’ve been through some wild cases together,” I said.
“How did you meet, anyway?”
“Well, he was a guest at one of my criminology classes that year I was doing the sabbatical replacement gig at Saint Mary’s—I brought him in a couple of times to speak to the students. He was really great with the class, and we kind of got to be friends. So then he started hiring me to do little research projects for him. Eventually, I started doing a lot of the legwork—you know, the boring but necessary stuff. So there you go—we’ve been working together for almost five years now. I’ve learned plenty from him. He’s a smarty-pants when it comes to the criminal mind. It’s strange that he got suckered into that trap last night. I think he was behaving badly just now partly out of embarrassment.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird, Roz, that the whole time McBride was unconscious, you were too? I mean you passed out in the laundry room only a few minutes after he tried to call you—and you were probably coming to on that cold cement floor at the same time we found him in that parking lot. It’s like some kind of parallel experience or something.”
“It’s just a flukey coincidence, Sophie, that’s all.” I was attempting to dismiss it but her observation was unsettling and gave me a little chill. I had often had the sense, when we were in the scary depths of some sordid investigation, that working for McBride might be the death of me.
Before going our separate ways, I told Sophie I’d be by to get Molly in the morning and she reminded me that there was a Hamlet rehearsal the next evening. “I’ll be there this time. Promise,” I said. “What scenes are you working—do you know?”
She immediately began speaking Ophelia’s lines to Polonius, “My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet/With his doublet all unbraced—”
I chimed in, “—No hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d/Ungartered and down gyved to his ankles.”
“That’s the one,” she said. “What’s ‘gyved’ anyway, Roz?”
“Gyve is a fetter or a shackle, so ‘down-gyved’ means undone—unfettered down to his ankles. Bare and exposed.”
“Well no wonder she’s distraught,” Sophie twinkled. “His doublet’s unbraced too; he’s practically naked. I could handle it, but apparently Ophelia can’t, or she would never make the mistake of telling her father.”
“Yep,” I said. “And it’s a big mistake because after that, things get a whole lot worse.”
I decided to head home before going to get Ruby out of the parking lot. I needed a little time to get my bearings. As I pushed my way through the snow on the porch and entered the house, I could see the cat sitting on the hall table just inside the door. If she’d had a watch on, she would have been looking at it.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “You had a cold and lonely night, but here I am at last—you’ll be eating before you know it.”
She jumped down and headed straight for the kitchen, her ears flattened to make sure I was in step behind her.
The house was chilly. I reluctantly turned up the thermostat in the kitchen, imagining the old furnace voraciously gobbling litre after litre of expensive oil. There’s got to be a better way to heat this behemoth of a house, I thought, cursing my father for the increasingly cumbersome inheritance.
“You know, Dad,” I said aloud, in case his spirit happened to be hanging around, “I could take a tropical vacation on what I spend on fuel. A long tropical vacation!”
Living alone was for the birds anyway. I should have tried to find a housemate. But past experiences of neurotic, messy, noisy students had made me gun-shy. The cat was enough to contend with. I loaded her dish with her favourite soft food, and she practically knocked me over purring and rubbing up against my legs. “Ther
e,” I said, holding her back so I could actually set the dish down, “life’s not so bad after all, is it?”
She gave the food a brief inspection and then casually strolled away, sitting under the kitchen table long enough to let me know it had all been a set-up—she didn’t really need me. But she went back and attacked it as I put the kettle on for a blessed cup of tea. While the tea steeped in the little blue pot, I could hear the heating pipes banging as the hot water moved through them and warmed the kitchen.
Okay Roz, I said to myself, make a list: shovel out the car, clean the snow off the porch and the front sidewalk, go downtown and get McBride’s car, carry on with the Shakespeare work, and, oh yeah, The Case. McBride would really want that research done by the time I picked him up in the morning. Besides, I needed the money.
Chapter Four
“Okay, I’m worried,” McBride said as he lowered himself painfully into the passenger seat of my Peugeot sedan, Old Solid. You’re the only person I know, he once said to me, who names your car but not your cat. His car, Ruby Sube (which I also named) had in fact been towed away, and now we had to go and pay a lot of money to get her out of hock. Molly had finally stopped leaping around him and we coaxed her into the back seat, but her nose was between us and she was panting eagerly, her eyes riveted to McBride.
“Molly, down!” I commanded. “Sit! Back!” All to no avail—selective hearing isn’t confined to humans. McBride was no help. Oh well, I supposed she should be allowed this display of unabashed worship after the trauma. She probably thought she’d never see him again.
“Why?” I asked after we were finally settled.
“Why what?”
“Are you worried.”
“Well, whoever it was who took my cellphone, they’ve got a good record of my contacts, not to mention your number.”
“Okay. Start from the beginning,” I said. “What were you doing in that parking lot in the first place?”
“I got an anonymous call regarding some confidential skinny on the Harbour Cleanup deal. You know—the $350 million that was contracted to go to the Europa Conglomerate. Apparently, our client’s father, the deceased Peter King, may have been instrumental in helping to put the kibosh on that deal, and diverting the funds back to local interests. From what I could gather, King seemed to be making it a personal mission to hamper their activities not only here but around the world. So anyway, this telephone contact wouldn’t give me his name but did say he was a part-time clerk in Planning, that over the past few months he had collected some very intriguing information, and that he was concerned there had been a vendetta against our victim. He sounded legit, Roz, and this call felt like the break I was waiting for.”
“So you set up a meet to get the poop on the poop,” I said, “and instead you got a whack across the back of the head. But why would anyone risk a pre-emptive strike unless you were a real threat? And why just rough you up if they’ve already done a murder? Why not just get it over with?”
“Good questions but don’t forget: As far as the police are concerned no murder was committed, so if they’ve been lucky enough to get away with that one they wouldn’t necessarily want to commit another. But I do believe these thugs were out to scare me off, hoping to just bully me out of the way.”
“Well that’s foolish! Obviously they don’t know what makes you tick.”
“That’s right.” McBride smiled for the first time. “Bring it on.”
“At least it makes one thing clear,” I said. “We do have a case here.”
“Right. So, how are you doing on those poisons?”
“I’ve got a list for you. It’s interesting in light of the Yushenko case in the Ukraine with dioxin. I mean, maybe poisoning’s back in vogue. The problem is, in order to prove anything we’d have to get enough evidence together to insist on an exhumation and an autopsy. Not popular—especially at this time of year.”
“Popularity’s not my thing.”
“Really? Could have fooled me, McBride.”
We swung into the police compound and McBride handed me his driver’s licence and registration and persuaded me to go in and do all the talking while he held a love-in with Molly.
“Do you want me to put it on my Visa too?” I said, leaning in through the window.
“Great, thanks Roz.”
“I was joking McBride. Hand over your credit card. I’ll bring the receipt out for you to sign so you don’t have to move. And by the way, it’s time for you to give me a paycheque, so you’d better get to it before you get knocked off. ”
“Are you good to go?” I asked as he slowly moved from my car into the rescued Subaru. Molly was already sitting at attention in the passenger seat. She looked as though she could drive if she had to.
“Never better,” he replied. “Fax me your poison research and let’s meet later.” McBride inconveniently refused to get a computer—I was his link to the net, and was forever faxing information off to him.
“I have rehearsal at six,” I said. “So we’ll have to meet either before or after—or how about tomorrow morning, when you’ll have had time to sleep on it?”
“Six is a ridiculous time for a rehearsal. Why don’t they have it in the day?”
“Most of them have jobs,” I said, “to try and make ends meet.”
“Does Sophie have a job?”
“No—not a straight job anyway. She does television and film stuff and charts for people—you know, astrological charts. But her heart is in the theatre, so she’s happy to do this gig and split whatever they make at the gate.”
“Crazy.”
“Yeah. So tomorrow morning, then?”
“Come over.”
As I was walking back towards the gate where Old Solid was parked, I heard him yell: “Bring breakfast!”
Back at my desk, I organized all the material I had gathered on the poisons, faxed it off to McBride, and started into Hamlet. I was pretty sure that the rehearsal would get beyond Ophelia’s frightened description of Hamlet’s visit to her sewing closet, and into the oily arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the court. Polonius would by this time be convinced he had found the reason for Hamlet’s unruly behaviour and would be zealously preening while presenting Ophelia’s private correspondence with Hamlet to the King and Queen. It was a zesty bit of evidence that would justify their heartless set-up of Ophelia for her next humiliation—the nunnery scene. But as I opened the script, my eye caught the ghost’s description of the poisoning:
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
and in the porches of mine ear did pour
The leperous distilment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body—
Such treachery, I thought. It had been given out that the old King had been poisoned by a serpent during his afternoon nap in the orchard. Meanwhile, the real serpent—his brother Claudius—had slithered into the garden with the deadly vial and poured the poison into the King’s ear. What exactly is “hebenon,” I wondered. Looking it up in one dictionary, I found it defined as a nonce word, created for this occasion by Shakespeare. But the OED connects the word “hebenon” with “Eibenbaum,” the German word for yew. I sat up straight. That rang a bell. I grabbed the pile of paper I had faxed to McBride and started flipping through it. On the list of lethal plants was the popular landscaping shrub or tree the yew, “widely available in Nova Scotia. The pulp of the arils—the red berry-like fruit that is found only on the female plant—is harmless, but the seeds inside can be fatal, causing trembling and breathing difficulty with suppression of heart action, and in some cases, death can occur suddenly without any prior symptoms at all”!
I felt electrified. I had the eerie sensation of being guided towards the truth. I dialed McBride.
“Did you get the fax?” I asked as soon as he picked up.
“It’s here,” he said.
“Okay. I’m coming over now.”
“But I thought you said…”
“It’s okay—it’s not even two o’clock.”
“You’ve got something for me?”
“I think I’ve got a lead,” I replied.
“I’ve got something for you too.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Bring lunch,” he said and hung up.
Lunch? Oh brother. I had nothing but some ancient sliced ham and half a loaf of bread. I didn’t want to poison McBride—that would be just too ironic. Besides, all the evidence would point to me. I had a can of tuna I could take over. With any luck he’d have a bit of cheddar or something. I tripped over the cat while taking the bread out of the freezer. I hadn’t seen her for hours, but suddenly there she was, looking distinctly offended by my hasty manner.
“Well,” I said, “you can finish your favourite, but it’ll be the dreaded crunchies tonight. I don’t have time to go to the store.” She swished her fluffy tail and sat down by her dish. “You’ve had fair warning,” I said, scraping the last of the fancy “chicken in gravy” out of the tin for her.
“So, in your opinion what makes this form of poisoning more likely than any of the others?” McBride asked as he scarfed down the last of the tuna melt sandwich I had made for him.
“Well,” I said, “it’s widely available here, and all parts of the yew tree contain significant concentrations of taxine. While taxine is now being extracted to make a drug called Taxol, which is effective in fighting breast cancer, the actual substance is a complex mixture of alkaloids that are highly toxic and can bring about death in less than an hour—a death that looks like heart failure. And, even if the poisoner didn’t have access to the deadly seeds from the female plants, the toxin in the actual foliage increases in the winter to a dangerous level. I have a strong feeling about it—intuition or something. And it’s an age-old method.”
I was reluctant to let him know I had been led to my conclusion by a somewhat dubious connection to an obscure poison mentioned in a play written over four hundred years ago. He was already cranky enough about my time-consuming obsession with Hamlet.
