71
Yesterday had proved to be a long day and night. Quick drinks with Evie in the Pitcher and Piano, on High Pavement, Nottingham, for an hour allowed me to wind down as my brain was twisting in knots and functioning at warp speed, or at least it was attempting to.
The Pitcher and Piano was an old converted church with bare stonework, high ceilings and beautiful arches.
Evie was great for my health, making me laugh at her tales of dating escapades. Like the man who had spent an evening with food stuck between his two front teeth and try as she might she’d been unable to tell him and the entire length of time he’d sat with it, it had put her off him, even though she’d been fully capable of doing something about it. There were the men who still lived with their parents. In this day and age, with the cost of housing, that wasn’t unusual in itself, but as Evie put it, when they still looked as though they’d been dressed by their mother, she drew the line. By the time I’d pulled myself into bed I was feeling ready for sleep and more ready to take on another day.
And, now we were here. As I’d imagined, none of the shops that the victims bought their foodstuffs from matched up. We were no further forward, other than knowing one shop our killer had used and accessed and being able to deal with it forensically and the obvious one of potentially preventing further deaths from that location.
CSU were working at full pelt and we were getting complaints from other divisions and departments because their submissions were being put on the back burner. Catherine, Grey and I were fielding those calls when absolutely necessary, though the head of CSU was a fairly formidable woman and you wouldn’t want to cross her.
Having two killers out there was not making our job any easier and we’d made a decision not to disclose this to the press as of yet because we didn’t want to invoke panic or nudge another person into joining in the mayhem because they figured it would be fun and something to do for the week.
It was later that day when I went in to see Ross that the copy-cat part of the investigation lifted off. Ross was sitting, staring at the screen, his head tilted heavily to the side as though he had a weight hanging from his right ear, tugging it down.
‘Ross?’ I asked.
He jumped. Head straightening.
‘Ma’am.’
‘What is it?’
‘This guy, Ma’am. I’ve been looking at the image, rewound it a couple of times, I think he picked it up.’ He looked at me. ‘The ice cream,’ he clarified. ‘Then put it back down in the freezer again. I can’t quite make out what he’s doing with his hands though. It’s what I’m replaying it for. He’s doing something. I’m not happy with it.’
I grabbed a chair, my heart lifting in my chest. A breakthrough? We were due one. Dragging the chair over to Ross I sat with him and noticed I was pulling the same bizarre stance, as though twisting my head meant I could see around people and corners. Moving my head moved them out of the way.
Eventually I decided it was enough. I wasn’t happy with what he was doing, we were going to ID him, search his premises and interview him.
‘Take this to intelligence; see if the guy is in the system already and if so, we’ll act on this today.’
He was like a cat on hot coals, jumping up the minute I opened my mouth. ‘You think it’s him?’
‘I think you’ve done a good job going through all this, Ross.’
72
He’d taken to getting the Nottingham Today delivered. The walk to the newsagents had started to feel like a walk of shame. He didn’t want to endure that, so he’d asked them to start delivering it. Connie had been surprised even though she hadn’t said anything, but they’d been together long enough for him to be able to read her face when she was surprised or annoyed, happy or sad. Sad, that was something he had no need to practise any more. Sad was the default setting. Surprise was a glimmer, a shimmer, and a passing glimpse of someone else inhabiting his wife’s body. To be honest, it had caught him off guard to see a different emotion cross her face but he removed the look of astonishment from his face because all he felt was guilt. He didn’t want to cause her any more distress than she had already been through, and was living with, on a day by day, hour by hour, second by second basis, and the fear of losing him would be too much for her to bear on top of having already lost Em, so he wouldn’t do that to her. He wouldn’t give her that fear to live with. He would hide what he was doing, so that Connie could get through her days in the best way that she knew how.
He’d continue this alone.
73
He was sitting at the same kitchen table where Em had told them her news. Back then it had been devastating, but back then there had been some hope. He remembered the talk of treatment plans, of doctors and drug treatments.
Isaac thought his child would survive this. She was strong and today’s medicine was advanced. But it hadn’t happened that way, so now his hand had been forced. He hadn’t wanted this, but what else could he do? There was no way they would listen to him if he wrote a neat little letter and wrapped it tidily in a neat little envelope and posted it off to them to be opened by a neat little receptionist. This was the only way they would sit up and take notice.
Connie was upstairs, lying in Emma’s room. The room hadn’t been changed, touched or emptied of anything. She often walked into the room and came out several hours later, face flushed, streaked and her eyes somewhere else. Lost to him.
He straightened himself in the chair, pushed his shoulders back and felt a calm settle over him. They had to be getting anxious about things now.
He unfolded the Nottingham Today and looked at the front page.
Police Charge Man With One Count of GBH
Police have charged 24-year-old Lewis Armitage of Lenton with one count of GBH after he admitted to adding rat poison to ice cream in a store.
The 22-year-old woman has been seriously ill after buying the ice cream and ingesting the rat poison and was kept in hospital for a week.
Armitage is still being held by police and will appear at Nottingham magistrates’ court today for a remand application hearing.
A neighbour of Armitage said, ‘I’m surprised by this news, Lewis is a quiet neighbour. We rarely see him. He spends so much time in his flat.’
Nottingham has recently suffered with a spate of poisonings, which has resulted in the deaths of three Nottinghamshire residents, including a sixteen-year-old boy. As of this date the murders are undetected.
Progress of the multiple murder case appears slow and police are not offering much. Two businesses have been closed down, creating a further two victims. The authorities have refused to disclose what poison is being used, for investigative reasons, but are warning the public to be cautious when buying food goods and to check all seals and packaging carefully. They advise shoppers to only buy goods that are properly packaged and not damaged in any way.
Isaac put the paper onto the table at the side of him and clenched his teeth until his jaw hurt. Why were the police refusing to name the digoxin? How could he get his message out there if they wouldn’t work with him? This was stupidity. What ‘investigative reason’ was there that prevented the basics of the case from being disclosed? Someone somewhere was not doing their job and they were now going to end up killing more people because he now had to up the stakes. He couldn’t have done all this for nothing. People had lost their lives. That was an awful thought. He wouldn’t allow them to have lost them for nothing, in vain. Isaac couldn’t just give in, so he had to push harder. It was the only way.
He’d done his homework; he knew that if the medicine were given to someone who didn’t need it and in too high a dose, they would die from it. He wasn’t doing it for any other reason than for those in power to sit up and take notice, so that someone listened to how Em could have and should have been saved. He needed them to realise that the drug wasn’t working properly, that they had work to do before more people died. At their hand, not at his. He was doing it for a purpose, to stop any
more victims like his daughter. The pharmaceutical companies were doing it out of sheer negligence and the need for higher profit margins rather than wanting to help anyone. They had to notice.
Whoever was responsible for the decision to not name or report the digoxin was now going to regret it – because they had just sealed the fate of several more people.
74
Damerae Rabasca loved noise. The sound of people talking. Shouting. Bad-tempered people. Happy people. Traffic. Car horns.
He loved the exhaust fumes that made the city streets all the more grey. Flat-fronted buildings. Local markets, spilling out onto the street with their wares. The oppressive heat that seared them all together. This was his home. And it was his. All of it. No one sneezed without his say so.
It had been his ever since the house fire that had killed Odane last year. Not so much a house fire, as a firebombing. O hadn’t seen it coming. His closest friend. But Damerae took what he deserved. It wasn’t going to be given to him on a silver platter and no matter how close they were, O was a selfish cunt. Treated him like one of the guys on the street. And Damerae deserved better than that. So he took it.
They’d just finished breaking Dean’s right leg that night and Damerae had driven Odane home, as usual. O was laughing about how, when they’d taken Dean to the rear of The Happy Tyre Man, he’d pissed himself, because he’d known what was coming. After all, you didn’t get Odane Hajric and Damerae Rabasca dealing with you themselves – unless you’ve royally fucked up. And you couldn’t fuck up more than by stealing from them. Did Dean think they wouldn’t notice he’d been skimming off the top of the coke and taking their profits? O had laughed. And he’d laughed. And he’d laughed. It was his crazy high-pitched, I-want-to-break-some-bones laugh. And Damerae had sat at the side of him and forced himself to laugh along.
The snivelly little cokehead, he’d managed to gasp while shrieking with laughter. His face was a picture. And did you hear that crack, man? Oh Damerae had heard the bone crack all right. He had no problems with the breaking of bones. Dean deserved every painful second of it, and more. If he Damerae had his way, both his legs would have been gone. No, what Damerae was silently seething about was how O asked the question about it being ‘their’ profits. O was the man – everyone below him was below him and he made sure they knew it. Damerae didn’t see a share of the profits. He was paid the same way as everyone else, by selling and enforcing for Odane. Long-time friendship and loyalty didn’t count for anything and Damerae had had enough. So he watched O walk into the house and pulled away as usual. Not half an hour later, the house had been razed to the ground and a new chain of command was already in place.
Now Damerae stood here, feeling it and loving it. He watched as his baby-mama came waddling towards him, skinny white arms swinging wildly at her sides as she huffed her way up Ilkeston Road, flip-flops slapping at the soles of her feet. She was hot, her face was red, but it wasn’t surprising, she was huge. Due any day now.
‘Damerae, what’d I say to you?’ she bellowed as she walked.
Damerae didn’t hear what was said next as a weight pushed down on his chest, crushing and squeezing, forcing him down to the floor. The sun-warmed pavement rushing up to meet him was the last thing he saw.
75
This was a man whose dead body I had fully expected to be standing over one day – but with blood slipping from bullet or stab wounds, a violent end to a violent man. Not this, not him face down in the middle of the pavement with not an injury on him.
The rustle of the paper Tyvek suit told me Aaron was now standing at the side of me as I looked down at Damerae Rabasca. Doug Howell, the CSI, was taking photographs of the body. I was aware of eyes watching us from above as residents in the flats peered out. We’d kept a wide crime scene cordoned off but those people in their homes could look out as much as they wanted.
I clenched my fist in my pocket.
I’d already shouted at someone who had opened their window to lean out and over the scene, asking if they wanted to be arrested for murder because they were currently contaminating the scene with their DNA by leaning right over it. They had rapidly closed the window and now had their nose pressed to the glass.
‘So, Damerae Rabasca?’
‘Yes, I wasn’t expecting this one,’ I answered.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m suspicious. As head of The Niners I’d expected him to be killed in a gang-related incident, not to keel over in the street. We need the PM doing quickly and the tox screen results as fast as we can.’
‘Ah, young Hannah and my favourite detective sergeant.’ Jack’s voice came from behind me. ‘You enjoying keeping me busy?’
‘Hi Jack. Well, I do like to keep you out of trouble.’ I grinned at him. I thought, as a pathologist, his job was grim, but he was always so upbeat. So open to the good in life. I wasn’t sure how he did it, but his attitude was infectious.
‘So, what do we have?’ Jack asked as he snapped on his gloves, pulling them over the elasticated wrists of his own paper suit.
‘Well, here we have Damerae Rabasca, twenty-four years of age. Head of the gang known as The Niners; so called because of their penchant for 9mm automatics, though, out of interest, more recently they’ve been using the Glock semi and the odd Mac-10.’
‘Lovely, lovely.’
‘The gang marker is a tattoo of a 9mm bullet on the back of the neck – you can see his is clearly visible from this position – but to identify each other easily and quickly,’ I pointed down to his right hand, open as though waiting for someone to hand him monies owed.
‘The bandana on his wrist?’ asked Jack.
‘Exactly. Red, because no matter how bloody it gets, it’s not going to upset the gang colours.’
‘Well, he had no need of it today, did he?’ Jack hitched up his trousers, and crouched down to the body, taking Rabasca’s core body temperature.
Doug continued with his photographs.
‘Any witnesses, Hannah?’
I looked down the street to where Martin and Ross had been. ‘Yes, his heavily pregnant girlfriend, Gemma Spicer. She said she was walking towards him and he just went over. No sound, he just went down.’
Jack pushed himself back up. ‘You know what I’m going to say.’
I nodded.
‘I can’t tell you anything from this. I need to do the PM and I’ll do it as soon as we move him from the scene. I’ll supervise the removal and I’ll get the tox screen off straight away. He’s a young, fit man. Find out from Ms Spicer all the illicit drugs he was taking so we can ascertain if they played any part, but looking at him, it doesn’t look like a typical drug overdose, what with the surroundings and him looking well. Once I’ve done the PM I’ll let you know the results, but we won’t know what we’ve really got until we get the tox screen back if it’s what we’re all thinking.’
I huffed, I couldn’t help it.
‘I know it’s a slow and frustrating process, but that’s science for you. I’ve sped up the process as best I can. Everything that comes through that looks as though it’s to do with this case is marked as high priority and is moved to the top of the list and dealt with first.’
‘It’ll come, Hannah.’ Aaron backed him up.
‘Good man, Aaron.’ Jack slapped him on the shoulder and Aaron tried not to flinch.
I glared up at the flats again then turned to Aaron. ‘What if Rabasca was the intended target all along? All the previous victims may have been a smoke screen. Rabasca had more enemies than any one of our victims, though I’m not sure if any of them have the wherewithal to be able to pull something of this scale off. Not just the scale, but using such a poison and being able to administer it in such a way … but we can’t rule it out. It could also be that the previous deaths were just fortuitous to Rabasca’s killer and they decided to make it look like it was a part of the same job so we don’t look anywhere else. With someone like this guy, we need to think very carefully.’
‘I don’t know, Hannah, you’re right about the level of thought that needs to go into something like this. These guys are just point and shoot.’
‘We need to speak to Gemma Spicer,’ I said.
76
There were no tears.
She stood in the clean, sparse kitchen, stomach touching the worktop, arms stretched out in front of her, making a cup of tea. I’d offered to do it for her but she’d looked insulted. As though I’d insinuated she was incapable of doing something quite so domesticated. When she finished she spread her knees wide and pushed her bum down to the floor so she could reach the tabby cat that had been circling her feet. She rubbed the top of his head.
‘Stop fussing now, Norman, I’ve to talk to these here plods.’ She reached a skinny arm up, grabbed the worktop and pulled herself back upright before walking past me, back into the living room, carrying her tea with her.
‘I’m sorry for your loss, Gemma.’ I sat opposite her on the worn but clean sofa.
‘Why you sorry? You lot aren’t gunna miss him, is you?’
‘If someone has done this to Damerae, we have every intention of investigating it fully, but first, we need to wait for the post-mortem to find cause of death.’
‘Of course you are.’ She tried to take a drink but it was too hot, so she settled the cup on top of her expansive stomach instead, folding the material of her top over to shield her from the heat.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 38