‘Can I add just a couple more numbers?’ Hoskins asked. ‘It’s just a hunch.’ He passed across one mobile and one landline number. The woman entered them on the system, and they both watched as the knot of connections reconfigured itself. ‘Anything?’
‘Hmm. Nothing on the mobile, but ah, we do have something.’ She cross-referenced the number. ‘Several calls from Deepak Tripathi to the landline. None going the other way.’ She called up the details on a separate screen. ‘Yes, several very short calls, around a week ago, possibly just leaving a message, and two much longer ones all within the last month.’ The officer looked over to the notebook from which Hoskins had the numbers scribbled down. ‘Give me the name and I’ll add it to the database,’ she said brightly.
‘Don’t worry.’ Hoskins pocketed his notebook, and thanked her for the help. ‘You can delete those numbers. I’ve got some checking to do first.’ Hoskins wasn’t about to disclose that he had been checking up on one of this woman’s newly qualified colleagues. But for all of that he couldn’t think of a single reason why Deepak Tripathi would be telephoning Kirsty Mockett.
Unless poison had something to do with it.
Chapter 24
Dr David Delahaye rang Gillard at six thirty on Saturday evening. The detective had promised Sam he would be home and stay home all evening. Now she was no longer pregnant, she could indulge herself in a glass of wine, but didn’t want to do so alone while waiting for her workaholic husband to get home.
‘Well, Craig, it’s not thallium,’ the pathologist said. ‘If that is good news. Fortunately they did some broad-spectrum testing, and it seems Mr Hodges kidney failure and cardiac arrest were brought on by a hefty dose of ethylene glycol.’
‘That’s antifreeze, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it’s also found in domestic radiator cleaners and a few other household products. It’s colourless and odourless but has a sweet taste, so it would be easily concealed in many foods.’
‘Like cake?’
‘Yes, amongst others. Although it is fairly toxic, if caught early enough there are effective treatments. While they put Mr Hodges on renal dialysis, they failed to make the additional checks which would have revealed the other symptoms. I suppose one can forgive them because there are many other reasons for a man who was bordering on obese to have kidney trouble.’
‘One of our detectives, a rather incensed fellow called Carl Hoskins, has been through the kitchen waste bin,’ Gillard said. ‘But identifying disposable paper plates from all the other rubbish has been a bit beyond him.’
After the call was finished, Sam looked up from her book. ‘Craig, wasn’t there that case years ago of some European winemakers putting antifreeze in their wine to make it sweeter?’
Gillard nodded. ‘I vaguely recall that. I suppose it must’ve been very low quantities, I don’t remember anyone being killed.’
‘It is weird,’ Sam said. ‘Mrs Roy got poisoned by one thing, and Colin Hodges by another. Who could possibly have got them both?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ Gillard said. ‘But let’s assume it was the cake, then it must’ve been Kirsty Mockett. And for some reason she was trying to kill me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes – Colin only died because he ate my slice as well as his own, after I had to leave the meeting early.’
* * *
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Kirsty Mockett was sitting in an interview room opposite DCI Gillard and DC Hoskins. ‘There is nothing wrong with my cake. There were no allergens in it, I’m always very careful.’ The young CSI trainee, casually dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and fresh back from her weekend in the New Forest, looked in a state of shock.
‘It wasn’t an allergic reaction,’ Hoskins said. ‘This was something that had no place in any food.’
Kirsty had already described the process she had gone through to make the cake and the ingredients she had used.
‘If it was the cake wouldn’t you all have been sick? And so would I. I mean, is anybody else unwell?’
‘It is possible to poison a single slice,’ Hoskins said accusingly.
‘What, you mean like the old hag with the apple in Snow White?’ she rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t believe this.’
‘Where was the cake stored after you brought it in to work?’ Gillard asked.
‘In the refrigerator in the kitchenette outside the training room.’
‘So somebody could have interfered with it,’ he continued.
‘Well, possibly. But nobody except my other trainees and Rob knew it was my birthday. And who were they intending to kill, given that they couldn’t have known who was going to get which bit? I mean it’s just ridiculous.’
Hoskins leaned forward and stabbed a finger towards her. ‘Ms Mockett, a serving police officer, my friend, has died shortly after eating a slice of your cake. I wouldn’t say anything about that is ridiculous. I’m not getting any sense of contrition here.’
‘I’m horrified that the man is dead, of course I am. But contrition is for those who are responsible. And I’m not responsible.’
Gillard felt quite uncomfortable about the belligerency of Hoskins’ questioning. ‘Kirsty, we are just struggling to find out how a lethal dose of poison came to find its way into his system.’
‘But what poison? Not thallium again?’
‘As you are a suspect we are not at liberty to tell you,’ Hoskins said, with a triumphant curl of his lip. Kirsty looked like she was about to burst into tears.
‘I made the cake as a way of saying thank you, to you,’ she said to Gillard, her voice choked.
Gillard rested a restraining hand on Hoskins arm. ‘I am grateful, and we are sorry to upset you with this news,’ Gillard said. ‘But there is another element here which we feel needs explaining.’
‘What element?’
‘Do you know Deepak Tripathi?’
Kirsty looked down at her hands and said nothing.
Gillard repeated the question, and as she looked up at him he could see tears in her eyes. She nodded. ‘Yes, I know him.’
‘How?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you. I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement.’
‘You are going to bloody tell us,’ Hoskins said. ‘Now start talking!’
‘I used to be Deepak Tripathi’s PA at a property company in the City of London. I worked for him and all the other non-executive directors. I was only nineteen, and had just qualified from a secretarial course. He’s very charming and handsome, but of course I didn’t know then what a slippery character he was.’
‘Did you know he was also a director of Empire of Spice?’ Gillard asked.
‘Not at the time. I didn’t even know what a non-executive director was, and how they do sometimes just one day a week for a variety of different companies. I assumed that I only saw him occasionally because he worked in a different location. I didn’t know about the other jobs.’
‘So how come you ended up being trussed up in a non-disclosure agreement?’ Hoskins asked.
‘I’m sure you can guess. He invited me out to lunch, then out to dinner another time, told me he was divorced and unhappy, then invited me to dinner at some posh London hotel where he also had a room. In the morning—’
‘So to be clear, you did have sex with him?’ Hoskins asked, with what to Gillard seemed like predictable and voyeuristic eagerness.
‘What do you think?’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I rather fell for him, foolish me. I thought we were going out together and he was just very busy. He lavished money on me, something that had never happened to me before. But then of course a few months later I discovered I was just one on a fairly large roster of available women. I confronted him about it, and cried at the office, and told one of the older secretaries. He got me sacked, somehow, some trumped-up nonsense about mixed up letters. The company paid me off, on condition that I sign a non-disclosure contract.’
‘How much mon
ey?’ Hoskins asked.
‘It seemed like quite a lot at the time, £10,000, but I realised afterwards that I probably could have got a lot more. There was also the guarantee of sparkling references. I got the impression from the HR woman that I wasn’t the first.’ She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘There, I’ve spilled the beans, haven’t I? If he ever finds out about it, I have to repay the cash with interest of 25 per cent a year, and cover all his legal fees. It would bankrupt me, and he knows it.’
‘He’d never be able to enforce that agreement,’ Gillard said. ‘Especially not now.’
‘I read that he is accused of some fraud, something connected to Empire of Spice. Is that right?’ Kirsty asked.
Gillard nodded. ‘That’s right.’ He looked down at his papers, and then asked probably the most important question. ‘So you haven’t spoken to him since you left the property company?’
‘No.’ She didn’t meet his gaze.
‘Ms Mockett, take a look at this. I know you’ll recognise it because you’ve been on the training course.’ He passed across a sheet of paper.
‘Oh, shit.’ She rolled her eyes, and sat back heavily in the chair, groaning.
‘It’s a call log extracted from Deepak’s mobile phone,’ Gillard said. ‘You will notice your landline—’
‘I refused! He offered me money and I said no. I don’t know what he’s told you.’
Hoskins smiled. ‘He hasn’t told us anything, we didn’t even know about this connection until we got the phone analysis.’
‘So why did Deepak contact you after all those years?’ Gillard asked.
Kirsty sighed. ‘He’d read about me being a witness to the murder of Mrs Roy. He tracked me down by ringing my old flatmate and getting her to give him my up-to-date number. I didn’t want to speak to him, but he turned on the old charm and explained that he worked for the same company as his friend Mrs Roy, which I hadn’t realised. He said he was approaching me on behalf of the family, because they felt that the police were withholding information about who the murderer was. He laid it on pretty heavily about the grief they were all feeling, and said he wanted me to feed him all the information from the investigation that I could, just to put their minds at rest.’
‘How much did he offer you?’ Hoskins asked.
‘I don’t even know. I hung up before he had said. He didn’t believe me when I told him that I couldn’t actually get access anyway, that I wasn’t involved in the investigation.’
‘But you were involved,’ Hoskins said. ‘You had access to the forensic evidence found in Mrs Roy’s flat. You could have planted evidence or removed it.’
‘But I didn’t, I promise you, I didn’t. I told him to leave me alone.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Gillard said, thanking Kirsty for her time and allowing her to leave.
Hoskins watched her depart, his jaw jutting with an irascible frustration.
‘Carl, I think she was telling the truth,’ Gillard said, once they were alone.
‘Okay, boss, then tell me who poisoned Hodges? His missus told me that after coming home on Friday he had a Sainsbury’s steak and kidney pie with her and the kids. He told her that after having breakfast in the canteen with us, he only had the cake. Nothing else. He didn’t have anything that no one else had, just coffee from the machine like we all do. The only thing he had to drink in the evening was a couple of cans in front of the TV.’
Gillard shrugged. ‘It’s baffling. I suppose we will have to wait for the post-mortem to see if there’s anything else we can find out.’ He stroked his chin. ‘I do hope it wasn’t Deepak who killed Mrs Roy. We’d have to disclose Kirsty’s connection to him to the defence lawyers, and we’d never get a conviction because the forensic evidence for the source of thallium becomes unreliable.’
‘Best hope it was Lal then, sir.’
* * *
Gillard was back at Mount Browne first thing on Monday morning, dressed in his best dark suit and wearing a black tie. He wanted to have an incident room meeting at nine a.m. The atmosphere in the CID department was very subdued. Some wag had put blue crime scene tape around Colin’s grubby chair and desk. It seemed to be in pretty poor taste.
Hoskins didn’t arrive until 7.45 a.m. and Gillard suggested they go down to the canteen for an early breakfast. It looked to be bright and sunny day as they crossed from the CID block and through the main entrance. The refectory was at its busiest, but Mrs Iris was there like the captain of the ship.
‘Hello Mr Craig, and Mr Carl,’ she boomed out from behind the counter. ‘What can I be getting you?’
‘Bacon and sausage sandwich for me,’ Carl said.
‘The usual please, Iris,’ Gillard said.
She turned behind her and called out the two orders. ‘Poached egg on toast and a milky coffee for Mr Gillard.’
They took their seats to wait, and then looked at each other. ‘Carl, when I left on Friday morning for my meeting with Alison Rigby, what happened to my breakfast?
Hoskins began to laugh, and then stopped himself. ‘Me and Hodges shared it. I had thought about that.’
‘What about the coffee?’
‘Hodges drank it, but it can’t be that. It’s machine coffee.’
‘But the hot milk isn’t from the machine, because as everyone knows, the latte option on that machine is crap. There’s no froth. Every day I hear the ping, which tells me my coffee is ready.’
Hoskins stared towards Mrs Iris, bustling about behind the counter, then turned back to his boss. ‘With all due respect, sir, you’re fucking joking, aren’t you?’
‘It’s not her, Carl. She doesn’t make the coffee.’ He stood up. ‘Wait here a moment.’ Gillard made his way up to the counter, and beckoned Mrs Iris closer.
‘What, now you want a kiss?’ she asked, puckering up as she leaned towards him.
‘Tempting, but no,’ he smiled. ‘You’re all outsourced here, aren’t you?’
‘Hm-hm, we’re part of the giggle economy.’ She laughed. ‘But it’s okay.’
‘Have there been any new members of staff in the last couple of weeks?’ he murmured.
‘Darling, ain’t never a week without one or two. They keep changing. I can’t get all the names straight, you know?’
‘Where are the rotas kept?’
‘They tape them to de wall.’ She pointed to the tiles behind her. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Asian guy, fit looking, sharp hairdo.’
‘Not sure, maybe out the back. The nightshift people are just going.’
Gillard slipped through into the service area. He recognised three of the five women working there. There were no men. He moved past into the kitchen. The main chef, a Cypriot called Miko, was up to his elbows in flour.
‘Can I help you, Craig?’ he asked. The detective lifted a finger to his lips and nodded beyond where Miko was standing, to a sink at which two young Asian men were tackling a stack of saucepans. As Gillard approached, one turned and saw him.
It was him.
Despite the kitchen uniform and hairnet, the new red-framed spectacles, the buzz-cut hair, and the clean-shaven look, Gillard had no doubt that this was Zayan Lal. And the fugitive exploded into action, heaving the pressure cooker he was washing straight at the detective. Gillard’s reflex duck saved him from the impact of the heavy metal saucepan, but not the scalding lash of the hot water within it. Blinded for a moment, he then saw Lal grab a huge knife from the drying rack and come for him. Gillard, constrained in the galley layout, backed along the central island. Hooks above him held various kitchen implements, and the detective flung in rapid and noisy succession a ladle, a colander, and a milk saucepan. A large wok he kept as a shield, while yelling for assistance.
Lal threw the knife, which clanged off the wok, and raced away out of the rear kitchen door. Gillard went in pursuit, only to be tripped by a kitchen bin that his fugitive had tipped behind him as he ran. The detective skidded out through the fire exit and into a narr
ow piece of waste ground which ran between the refectory and the forensic unit. Through the ground floor window Gillard could see Townsend’s research intelligence team, working away trying to trace Zayan Lal’s movements, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the suspect himself was sprinting just two feet away past the window. A couple of puzzled-looking heads came up as Gillard went in pursuit. The strip of land ran out thirty yards on, against a disused, single-storey, brick lean-to. Lal didn’t slow at all, but leaped onto the ledge of the bricked-in window, then vaulted onto the corrugated sheeting roof.
Gillard managed to get onto the window ledge, but hauling himself onto the roof looked a bit tricky. He looked to his left, and saw half a dozen of his forensic colleagues staring out at him as he clung on to the rickety plastic guttering. Someone opened the window and yelled at him. ‘Put too many sugars in your coffee, did he?’
There followed a gale of laughter.
Bested, the detective dropped off, onto the ground, managing to land reasonably neatly. He did an elaborate bow to his audience, and then shouted: ‘The murderer of Mrs Roy is on the roof. Can someone call the dog team? Thank you.’
* * *
Gillard sprinted back towards the main building, and just outside reception almost collided with the very officer he wanted. PC Tiana Clore – a tough Barbadian, built like Serena Williams – had represented Barbados in the heptathlon in the London Olympics and could run the 200 metres in twenty-one seconds. He explained who they were looking for and said that he was going up to the roof. He asked her to cover the grounds until the dog team arrived. The female receptionist, overhearing him, said she would see if the drone team was nearby. Two other PCs volunteered to help. One, a fresh-faced male recruit called Davies, headed up to the roof with Gillard while the other joined Tiana Clore.
Four flights of stairs later, the detective chief inspector burst out onto the flat roof. He felt this would have been too high for Zayan Lal to have reached from the refectory block, but it gave a perfect view down onto all the other buildings in the police campus. Gillard made his way past the twelve rows of angled solar panels to look down into the partially enclosed rear gardens while Davies peered across to the front over the car park and into the wooded grounds. For a moment, neither of them saw anything unusual. Then Gillard, looking south at the original Mount Browne house, spotted a figure huddled in a shadow between two gables. Lal had ditched the white kitchen apron, leaving dark shirt and trousers. He was crouching like a gargoyle, focusing below on officers assembling with dogs in the car park. He showed no signs of having spotted Gillard on the higher roof.
The Body in the Snow Page 31