Deadly Pretty Strangers: US Edition

by Max Thorn

  “What?”

  “Well, you live upstairs, you knew when the apartment’s usual resident would be arriving—flying back from Warsaw according to witnesses—and you probably know the local area and how to get rid of stuff. I’m seeing the level of work in the apartment as a two-person job at the very least.”

  “I don’t usually pay two thousand pounds to be insulted.”

  “Don’t worry, the insults are free. I’m just saying you’ve probably been of interest to the investigating team.”

  I could feel myself turning red. “I don’t know either of them and I’ve got no reason to be involved. Isn’t motive one of the key elements for a murder?”

  “Yeah,” the private detective watched me steadily, “that’s the part that’s got everyone stumped, along with the identity of this girl. But you can be sure the investigative team will have taken a good look at you. So far, it seems they’ve not found anything interesting. By the way,” he lowered his voice, “no calls or emails or messages to me about this ok?”

  “Is my apartment bugged?”

  “Could be. You’ve probably been followed at some point too.”

  “My phone, internet?”

  “Everyone’s under surveillance nowadays. There’s only one way to not get caught; don’t do anything wrong in the first place. Stay within the law and you’ve nothing to fear. My guess is that they’re fairly confident you’re not involved otherwise you’d have been arrested by now. Six months ago, right? But someone had to have helped her.”

  “How come there’s nothing in here about me then?”

  “Anything about you was taken out. Part of the deal. Don’t worry yourself. There was nothing important.”

  “You’ve seen all of this already haven’t you?”

  “I like to be honest with my clients, so let’s leave that one unanswered.” He sat impassively.

  I considered his reply for a moment. “What happened to the spider? The one I saw in a box next to Aleksy.”

  Dave leafed through one of the piles and pulled out a sheet of paper. Reading slowly he said, “Atrax robustus,” and looked at me for recognition.

  “That’s the Sydney funnel-web.”

  “Given to the zoo. Ethical and safety reasons it says here. With the police sickness rate and constant understaffing being what it is, I’m guessing the management didn’t want anyone taking months off for a spider bite. And they probably didn’t want to feed it. What do they eat?”

  “Live mice, frogs and large insects. Spiders don’t usually eat dead things.”

  “The building managers wouldn’t like people bringing vermin into the building. And they probably didn’t want to kill it. That’s the ethical part I suppose. Anyway, the zoo took it three months back.”

  “So if the spider wasn’t the cause of death, what was it doing there?”

  “Calling card maybe. Unless…” he gazed at the ceiling, as though picturing the scene, “they had a plan to put the squashed spider on the dead boy’s neck in the hope that the pathologist would misidentify the cause of death as a fatal spider bite.”

  “So why was it in the box?”

  “Given the amount of clearing up they had to do, it’s just about possible that they either forgot to let it out or were disturbed before they could arrange it. Remote possibility though, given how thorough they were everywhere else. Time will tell. Maybe we’re about to see a load of elaborate assassinations with spider calling cards.”

  He gathered the piles of paper together and put them back in the envelope. Passing it across the desk, he put out his other hand, upturned.

  I put the remaining wad of money in his palm and took the envelope.

  He said, “So now that you’ve got all that, what’re you going to say to Mrs Naumowicz?”

  “I’m going to ask her again who’d want to kill her son.”

  Out in the street I realized I was in no hurry to ask Mrs Naumowicz a question that the police must’ve asked her a hundred times already. I started thinking about the spider that had startled me when I’d seen it in Patryk’s apartment. It was definitely something out of place. I had a hunch that since the police had given it away, they might not be very interested in the spider. It was the only real piece of evidence that I could take a good look at.

  So I went to the zoo.

  SIX

  According to its website, London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo. It has about twenty thousand animals. The vast majority are either insects or fish. And two hundred and fifty-eight spiders. Plus one.

  I took the tube to Baker Street and walked through Regent’s Park to the zoo entrance at the north of the park. The admission ticket cost the price of a decent lunch. I walked briskly past the gorillas, lions and tigers, through a fragrant smog of animal dung and visitors’ ice cream, and arrived at the invertebrate house.

  They call it BUGS nowadays; a mnemonic for Biodiversity Underpinning Global Survival, showing how tiny gruesome creatures are an essential component of the food chain. Visitors walk a circuit of the building to view insect exhibits in glass-fronted habitats. A little way inside the entrance there’s a public meeting place with brightly colored pedestal seating.

  A keeper, wearing the zoo’s uniform green shirt with khaki shorts and safari boots, was seated on one of the benches, entertaining a party of hushed schoolchildren with a talk about spiders. He’d got to the part of his presentation where he persuades them to let a bright-orange and black tarantula the size of cupcake, squat on their hands. Suppressed squeals and murmured horror floated out from the group.

  He said to them, “She’s strong but also fragile. Don’t let her fall because she’ll probably bleed to death. Spider blood doesn’t clot like ours.”

  I slipped past the crowd and went to the spider exhibits in the middle of the building. The centerpiece was a walk-through spider habitat; a round room, planted with tropical vegetation. Orb-weaver spiders with the leg-span of an outspread hand sat in the middle of webs which they’d strung between the plants. Visitors could walk through the room with no barrier between themselves and the spiders.

  A keeper threw flies into the webs. Small children pushed each other at the spiders, which were mostly high up and beyond the reach of anyone under five feet. The room was filled with squeals and gibbering from over-excited kids. The spiders hung undaunted in their webs, patiently waiting for something small and edible to come their way.

  Outside the showcase exhibit, the dangerous spiders each had a glass-fronted box housing different habitats, from desert dunes to tropical rainforest floor. I went quickly from one to the other, looking for a brown and black hairy monster or the name Atrax on the exhibit label. There was no sign of the creature that I’d seen next to Aleksy’s dead body.

  Eventually the keeper with the tarantula walked by.

  “Hi,” I greeted him, “I heard you had a Sydney funnel-web here.”

  He stopped and turned. “We do. But,” he hesitated, “the habitat’s not quite ready.”

  “That’s a shame. I’ve only seen one once. Thought it was worth the admission price to see another.”

  He gave a short grimace of embarrassment and clasped his hands in front of his stomach. “Fact is, we’ve had a staff change and the person working on it has had to hand over the habitat part-finished. So it’s taking a bit longer than planned to get it ready to exhibit. It’s not advertised yet.”

  “I know. The police told me it’s here. It was my dead friend’s pet.”

  He looked past me and nodded sideways to a red-shirted volunteer, sending him to accompany the party of schoolchildren. “We’ve got it in a temporary habitat at the moment.” He looked me over briefly. “Tell you what,” he said in a low voice, “I can spare five minutes. Come through to the workshop and you can have a private view.”

  “That’s kind of you,” I said appreciatively.

  He led me to a door at the back of the main gallery and up a short flight of stairs to a mezzanine floor. We enter
ed a clean and organized room with the aroma of damp wood, furnished with two desks and benches along the walls. On the benches, plastic see-through boxes holding spiders and several boxes full of live insects were stacked up to the low ceiling.

  At the far side of the room, he waved a hand in front of a glass terrarium containing a curved piece of tree-bark, green tropical plants, and several inches of sand and clay with a covering of dead leaves. “And here we have Atrax robustus. Seems happy doesn’t she?”

  Lurking under the large lower leaf of a plant, I could see the front of the glossy, black-brown predator. “What do you feed her?”

  “She had a very small mouse last week.”

  We talked for a while about watching them capture and kill prey. I described a tiny false-widow spider living in my window frame and the mini-wildlife dramas that I’d seen played out while I was working at my desk. Like movie fans discussing a great movie, we jabbered excitedly about the speed and focus of these creatures.

  As I glanced around the workshop, I saw the box that had held the spider in Patryk’s apartment, under a pile of folders and papers. “Is that the case they gave you with the spider?” I pointed.

  “Yes, but we don’t use those. We prefer something a bit sturdier with more room for the animal.”

  “Do you mind if I take that one back?”

  “No problem. We don’t need it.”

  * * *

  At home I studied the box at my desk. A barcode label was attached to the base of the box. Beside the label a series of numbers and letters were molded into the plastic. Typing these into an online search, I found a catalogue entry for a plastic case made by a packaging manufacturer in the Midlands.

  I wondered who they’d sold this particular case to. I imagined the police had probably already looked into it. I got out the package of case file notes, leafed through it quickly, but couldn’t find anything on the plastic box.

  The packaging firm’s website had a page proudly titled Our Clients with names and logos of the manufacturer’s highest profile customers. About twenty large businesses were listed; food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, testing laboratories, research businesses. Nothing about spiders.

  I made a search for spider suppliers; specifically any supplying Atrax robustus. About six dealers in the UK were supplying large spiders commercially but none were dealing in Atrax.

  Notes on one of the sites explained that local councils require owners of animals covered by the Dangerous Wild Animal Act to buy an annual license and the funnel-web spider is one of only three spiders on the dangerous list. Apparently that limited the spiders’ attraction.

  One dealer, Araneae Farm, was exhibiting home-bred funnel-webs without offering them for sale. The business was a small family-run enterprise that specialized in supplying pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals firms. Their own Our Clients page showed fifteen large companies.

  One name seemed to literally jump off the screen. Its logo was a leaping human figure, stylized into an androgynous form with bright blue limbs, a glowing yellow abdomen and everything else bright red. The company was called HomEvo. I recognized it because the same logo appeared on the packaging company’s website; the only business to appear on both. It wasn’t a thorough matching process, but the coincidence was hard to ignore. I thought it was strange that there’d been nothing in the case file on this.

  I called DS Cattermole. After mentioning Aleksy Naumowicz and reminding him about where we’d met six months earlier, I told him that I’d been to the zoo and seen the spider.

  “And?” he said abruptly.

  “Well, according to the internet, there’s a pharmaceutical company in Flaxbury that buys spiders from a supplier who breeds funnel-webs.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “The same pharma company also buys packaging from the manufacturer of the plastic box that contained the spider.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The packaging manufacturer lists them as a customer.”

  “So why is that relevant?”

  “I’m just putting the box and the spider together and wondering whether the pharma company is connected with Aleksy’s death.”

  “Listen Mister Fox,” he said in a tired tone of voice, “we’ve already had people looking at this and we’ve got well established ongoing lines of inquiry into Aleksy Naumowicz’s death. If we need any theories from you, we’ll be in touch. But right now, we have four people burned to death in a house in Clapham, two people killed in a drive-by shooting and a minor gang war featuring every evening on the front page of the London paper. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any other great brainwaves concerning spiders and suchlike, but we think we know what we’re doing here.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me say goodbye before he put the phone down.

  Cattermole’s quick rejection made me think that Mrs Naumowicz might have a point. Maybe Aleksy was a low priority. Perhaps the police needed a nudge. And I’d spent all of Mrs Naumowicz’s money and still didn’t have anything much to tell her. I didn’t think she’d be particularly thrilled that I’d found a plastic box. I wanted to give her a little more than that before I could say that this dog had done enough digging.

  Online, I worked my way through the HomEvo website until I found the name of someone responsible for purchasing. I called her and was surprised when she agreed to meet me the next day. I logged-in with the Great Western Railway Company and bought a round-trip train ticket for Flaxbury.

  SEVEN

  As soon as I got on the train at Paddington Station I had doubts. I was going further than I’d intended. If the police weren’t interested in the spider or the pharmaceutical company, maybe they had a good reason. The further the train went, the more the doubts grew. I guessed that no one at HomEvo was likely to confirm that they had a missing spider, and it seemed obvious they’d be even less likely to tell me how it might’ve ended up in an apartment in central London, beside a dead Polish truck driver. I began to hope that the woman who’d called me darling on the phone would suddenly find her schedule squeezed and cancel our meeting before I’d finished the ninety-minute journey to Flaxbury. With luck, I’d be able to get back on the return train without leaving the station and without embarrassing myself.

  Suburban London houses and streets speed by and the landscape turn to woodland, streams, cultivated fields and rolling pasture.

  I was seated at a table in the car, keeping my rucksack containing the spider box on the seat next to me. The opposite two seats at the table were unoccupied.

  In between feeling stupid and hoping for a message canceling the meeting, I read HomEvo’s website and online press articles about the company. According to the website, HomEvo Limited had emerged from a wartime government program to develop more effective treatments for battlefield injuries. The breezy company history described a group of dedicated scientists making a series of inspired scientific breakthroughs on skin rebuilding, muscle development and more recently, fertility treatments.

  Long biographies described the three company founders and their contributions to medical science. The most prominent was Professor Raymond Pendle, a ground-breaking genius who, according to the web-marketers, delighted in breaking conventions and bending the laws of nature to turn the impossible into the ordinary.

  A graphical timeline showed the company’s key drug patents with pictures of earnest-looking scientists holding up glass laboratory flasks, staring through microscopes or kneeling beside convalescent children.

  The train stopped at Reading and an old man joined me at the table, sitting diagonally opposite. He was spry for someone so old, perhaps eighty years I guessed from his lined face and deeply folded neck. He had a bright-eyed interest in everything that was going on around him. I’d seen him glance at my computer screen as he shuffled urgently into his seat. Taking off his flat cap and pulling the sides of his tweed jacket free so that he wasn’t sitting on them, he sat down carefully. My gaze momen
tarily met his and I nodded a greeting, expecting to leave it at that.

  “Are you working at HomEvo?” he asked loudly.

  “No. Just visiting. Do you know them?”

  “Yes. I know them well. Job interview?”

  “No. I just want to ask someone there about an item of lost property.”

  He considered this for a moment and said slowly, “Well, watch your step while you’re there. They killed my sister.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry to hear that,” I looked at him carefully to gauge whether he was being serious or whether a lunatic had decided to keep me company.

  “It was a long time ago. Sixty-five years back. The trains used to run straight past Flaxbury without stopping back then. It was two dozen houses and an unpaved road. A small stream with reeds and bulrushes ran alongside the road. Tiny place.”

  “What happened to your sister?”

  Lowering his voice he said, “The firm you’re visiting used to call themselves Hominid Evolution. They came to our village just after the war. Second World War. At first it was a military program on physical development. A small camp. Just a load of wooden huts.”

  “For fitness training?”

  “More than that. Military research. They wanted to make super soldiers. That’s what they call it nowadays. It was drugs and genetics. Before they became a big company. My sister was in one of their genetics trials.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was a surrogate mother. Carried a baby for them. The baby came out deformed. Then my sister was taken ill. She went into the hospital and never came out.” He said it dispassionately in a way that made me think he’d told the story so often the emotion had finally been drained from it.