Deadly Motive

by DS Butler

  “Gus? But I did it for him. It was all for him.”

  “Tell me how you know about Sarah.”

  She took a few moments, obviously uncomfortable under Mackinnon’s glare as he stared down at her. She watched students form a line as a man at the back of the hall took down their names. But Mackinnon’s eyes didn’t leave her face.

  “I know you sent the letter, and I know you poisoned John Weston,” Mackinnon said.

  She kept her gaze fixed on the ground, but gave a small shake of her head.

  “And unless you talk, I am going to tell Greg and Gus exactly what kind of person their mother is,” Mackinnon said. “I’ll make sure they never want to see you again.”

  He left the words hanging there and clenched his fists in his pockets to stop himself reaching over and shaking it out of her.

  She looked up, her dark eyes narrowed. “Exactly, what kind of person their mother is? I would do anything for them.” She leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “I thought you would understand that.”

  Mackinnon walked over to an overturned chair and righted it before pulling it over towards Linda. He leaned on the back of it. “You don’t want to play games with me.”

  She moved forward then. “But you... You should understand what a parent would do for their child. To finally be in control. To be able to do something to help him. When over the years, all I could do was watch my family be ripped apart, destroyed.”

  Mackinnon sat down on the chair. “Why did you send the letter? Why did you make us think Sarah had been abducted? Can you imagine what her mother went through when she saw that letter?”

  She looked up at him with wet eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Mackinnon felt something tighten in his chest.

  She swallowed and looked around her as if she were searching for the right words. “I’m sorry, I do regret using your daughter like that. But I knew, as a parent, you would respond.”

  “How did you know she was missing?”

  “I have a friend in the English department, who I sometimes meet for lunch. When I was there,” Linda shrugged, “I overheard a conversation. Your wife was telling someone that Sarah was missing, and when I realised she was your daughter...”

  “She isn’t my wife.” Mackinnon sat, looking down at the floor and some moments passed before he realised she was speaking again.

  “I am sorry, but you must understand, I needed to know what evidence you had against Gus,” she said. “I needed to know what I had to do to get him free. I decided to use the fact your daughter had run away to get information.”

  Mackinnon bit down on the side of his mouth. “Well, it didn’t work.”

  He knew how close he had come to sending the email, but she would never know.

  A frown settled on Linda’s face. “Did you email false information?” She nodded to herself, distracted. “I did consider that. But I thought, in the end, you would put your daughter before anything else.”

  False information?

  As soon as the words left her mouth, Mackinnon understood.

  Chloe.

  She must have seen the letter long enough to memorize the email address. Chloe would have sent an email regardless.

  Linda must have seen the confusion on his face.

  “Ah, I see. Her mother sent the email, not you. I did think you would put your daughter first. I was wrong. I wonder, does that make you a worse parent than me?”

  Mackinnon stood, knocking the chair over. He took a step towards her. Linda scrambled to her feet and held her bag up to her chest, as if it might protect her.

  “DS Mackinnon?” A voice to his left made Mackinnon turn. It was one of the uniformed PCs Thames Valley had assigned to monitor the symposium. “I’ll take over, shall I, sir?”

  As the PC led her away, Linda said, over her shoulder, “Perhaps, it would have been different if she had been your biological daughter?”

  “You haven’t done anything noble. You’ve nothing to be proud of,” Mackinnon said. “You put the lives of everyone in here at risk to get your son out of prison, but you put him there in the first place. He’ll be ashamed of you.”

  She gave an unnatural laugh. “Check my bag. It was talcum powder. No one was at risk.”

  Mackinnon watched as they led her away and then sat down and put his head in his hands for a moment before reaching for his mobile to call Charlotte.

  97

  In the contamination lab, Dr. O’Connor paced the room. Charlotte sat on a stool, trying to control her shivering. She was watching the argument unfold between Dr. O’Connor and Ruby.

  Ruby prodded and needled him, demanding an explanation, while O’Connor raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if he might find the words he needed there.

  O’Connor opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it and continued to pace the room.

  Ruby stood up, shaky on her feet, with the lab coat wrapped tightly around her.

  “You need to tell me what happened to that sample. Did you take it?” Ruby asked, watching him.

  Dr. O’Connor stopped pacing to look at her. He sighed. “I know the samples were harmless, because they didn’t contain any toxin.” He turned to look at Charlotte. “The samples contained nothing but water.”

  Ruby was slowly moving from one foot to the other in a gentle swaying motion. She frowned and looked down at her feet and repeated, “The samples contained nothing but water?”

  O’Connor ran a hand through his hair.

  Ruby took a deep breath, then exhaled, walking toward him. She stopped when she was directly in front of him and looked up into his face. “You had me doing those experiments, wasting all those cells, with water?”

  O’Connor took a step back and shrugged. “I didn’t know it was only water until later. Alex told me he swapped the samples with water.”

  “Alex?”

  “Yes, he wanted the post-doc position and decided to sabotage your experiments in order to get it. Of course, what he did was wrong, but it did show a tremendous amount of ambition…”

  Ruby nodded and finished his sentence: “That’s why you gave the job to Alex.”

  “As soon as he admitted to me what he had done, I offered you another job. Like I said before, there is still a job for you next year. You and Alex.” He finished the sentence with a shrug.

  “And the missing sample?”

  “I imagine that was taken to make it look as if animal rights activists had broken into the lab, to steal aconite. If they had used that sample, they would have been disappointed. The aconite used to poison John Weston must have been acquired in another way.”

  Ruby shook her head.

  “Did Professor Clarkson know about this?”

  O’Connor shook his head. “No, he didn’t know.”

  Ruby hugged her arms around her body and walked away from O’Connor.

  98

  The tedious work of wrapping up the investigation followed: paperwork, forms, endless meetings. Not that Mackinnon had a role to play.

  DCI Brookbank told him, in no uncertain terms, he was to stay away from anything related to Operation Rubix, and banned him from talking about the case to anyone on the team.

  Despite Brookbank’s warning, Collins and Charlotte still kept in touch during the two weeks Mackinnon was away. From them, he found out the powder that caused mass panic at the symposium had been talcum powder. Linda Gilmore had told the truth. It had been a crazy attempt to get Gus exonerated.

  During her interviews, Linda admitted to killing John Weston. She added aconite to homemade biscuits and made sure they were delivered to Weston’s office. Luckily for her, the secretary did not have as much of a sweet tooth as John Weston. Otherwise, she could have been on trial for two murders.

  As Linda was in charge of submitting the chemical orders for the department, she found it easy to get hold of the aconite. She informed the chemical company that Ruby’s original order had not been filled. So they sent another bottle, which she k
ept and used to poison John Weston.

  She had sabotaged the lab twice, hoping to direct the police’s attention to the animal rights activists. She admitted hitting Professor Clarkson when he came back to his office late at night and almost caught her smearing the laboratory walls with paint.

  Two weeks after the biohazard incident, Mackinnon returned to work. It had been a shaky two weeks, but now Mackinnon was ready for answers.

  Collins managed to get him a taped copy of one of Linda Gilmore’s first interviews. Mackinnon took the tape into one of the empty interview rooms and locked the door to make sure he wasn’t disturbed.

  He pressed “play” on the video and sat back to watch the interview.

  Linda Gilmore’s image appeared on the screen. She wore a plain, white t-shirt, her hair was scraped back from her face, rather than curled around it and she looked tired. Mackinnon could see she was wearing no makeup. A small gold cross hung around her neck, and she fiddled with it as the interviewing officers introduced themselves.

  “For my boys,” she said when DI Tyler asked why she had killed John Weston. Her hands fluttered to her chest, and she smiled in a way that twisted Mackinnon’s gut.

  “John wanted to tell police about the emails Gus had sent. I did my best to persuade him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. He said Gus needed to learn that life wasn’t easy, that he couldn’t get everything his own way all the time. Can you believe it? As if Gus didn’t have his fair share of lessons proving life wasn’t fair.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I couldn’t let it happen. There was nothing I could do to stop that bloody disease hurting him.” Linda looked up at the camera. It felt like she was looking straight into Mackinnon’s eyes. “But I could stop John hurting him. So I did.

  “I gave him one last chance. I tried to convince him not to go to the police and I didn’t give him the biscuits until I knew I had failed to persuade him. I didn’t expect him to share them with his secretary. That was unfortunate.”

  Linda blinked, then took a sip of water. “I gave the biscuits and the note to a young man who was handing out fliers in the area, and told him to deliver the biscuits the following morning and put the note on the windscreen. I thought that way I would be at work and have an alibi on the day John ate the biscuits. It was a risk. But I was desperate.”

  Mackinnon heard DI Tyler ask the question he had been waiting for: “Why did you send the letter to DS Mackinnon?”

  She gave a twisted half smile. “I wanted to know what evidence the police had. I needed to make sure Gus was in the clear. My logic was simple. I thought what motivated me were my children, and I expected DS Mackinnon would be the same. I found out that his daughter had run away and I tried to use that to get the information from him. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know she wasn’t his biological child.”

  Mackinnon reached over and switched the video off.

  He had seen enough.

  99

  Three weeks after the incident, Ruby sat outside Professor Clarkson’s office with her hands folded in her lap. Her hands were sweaty and she tried to wipe away the moisture on her matriculation gown.

  Professor Chown and an external examiner were inside the office, dreaming up all sorts of horrible questions to ask her for her DPhil viva exam.

  What would she do if she couldn’t answer a question? Could she pass? Probably not. They probably just kept rephrasing the same question over and over until finally she answered it, or she ran crying from the room.

  She didn’t have a job lined up for next year yet. She told Dr. O’Connor in no uncertain terms where he could stick his job after he confessed how Alex had tampered with the aconite samples and set her up for failure.

  No wonder Dr. O’Connor hadn’t been afraid of the toxin. He knew there was nothing in those samples except distilled water. He’d also seen Linda Gilmore helping Sir Jim with the prize envelopes and put two and two together.

  Ruby hadn’t shown as much ambition as Alex, but Dr. O’Connor said he was willing to overlook that and employ her anyway. The satisfaction in turning him down was enormous, even though she hadn’t got a replacement job lined up yet.

  Ruby caught her breath as she heard the office door open. Professor Chown walked out and asked her to enter the examination room.

  *

  Two months after their mother’s arrest, Gus drove to the John Radcliffe Hospital with Greg in the passenger seat. It was early summer, Gus’ favourite time of year. Everywhere he looked life thrived.

  He parked in the Radcliffe car park near the maternity wing, turned off the engine and just sat there for a minute.

  Greg didn’t bother him. It was good that way, having a brother who understood. No need for explanations. Greg just sat in the passenger seat, waiting until Gus was ready. There was no hurry, they had plenty of time.

  They had visited their mother a few times and discussed which way they thought the trial might go. The jury might take pity on her when the full story came out. It might not be so bad.

  They were due to visit her again next week. His Huntington’s test results might be back by then. But he wouldn’t tell her if they were bad. It wouldn’t be the right time.

  Gus had stayed in the family home and Greg had moved back in. It was going well for the two of them, at least for now.

  Gus realised he was still gripping the steering wheel. He forced his fingers to relax and uncurl and laid his hands on his lap. He watched through the windscreen as a mother and her toddler walked past.

  He was ready.

  He took a deep breath and got out of the car. He leaned against the car door until Greg had got out and walked around the back of the car.

  “Okay?” Greg asked.

  Gus nodded. He looked up at the sky, a soft blue with hardly a cloud to be seen. He blinked. “Sun’s bright today, isn’t it?”

  He looked at Greg. The sunlight was making Greg’s eyes water, too.

  Acknowledgements

  Many people helped to provide ideas and background for this book. My thanks and gratitude to DI Dave Carter and Richard Searle for generously sharing their time and wealth of experience.

  My thanks, too, to all the people who read the story and gave helpful suggestions - in particular Joan, Therese, Maureen and Rhona. And to Chris, who, as always, supported me despite the odds.

  About D. S. Butler

  D. S. Butler writes crime fiction with an edge. She has worked as a research scientist and as a scientific officer in a hospital pathology laboratory. She draws on her scientific background to give her books a unique twist.

  After obtaining a PhD in biochemistry, she worked at the University of Oxford for four years before moving to the Middle East and living in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

  Currently based in the UK, she is excited to be publishing DEADLY MOTIVE, the first in a series of books featuring Detective Sergeant Jack Mackinnon of the City of London Police.

  Coming Soon

  DEADLY REVENGE, the second book in the DS Jack Mackinnon series, will be released summer 2012.