Everyone Lies

by D. , Garrett, A.

  ‘Before we begin, let’s get this straight, Josh,’ Simms said. ‘None of this is for general discussion, understood?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Look at me, Josh.’

  He did, but his gaze slid quickly back to his computer.

  ‘Nothing – I mean not so much as a gnat’s fart of this – gets out to your friends, your drinking buddies, e-buddies or girlfriends. If I see one word of this on the Web—’

  ‘Woah.’ The student’s awkwardness vanished; he sat up and stared into the webcam. ‘You’ve got an investigation to protect – fine, I get that – so yeah, let’s be straight. I don’t text, I don’t tweet, I’m not on Facebook – or any other social network for that matter – and I don’t have a girlfriend. I study. I eat. I sleep. But mostly I study.’

  Fennimore heard the slight harshness in the vowel sounds again, like a whiff of salt air and sea asters from the Essex marshes. He sat back and watched his friend assess this young stranger through the distorting lens of digitization and distance. After a few moments she said, ‘So, what’s the verdict?’

  ‘The first thing we had to establish was whether the data’s solid, or an artefact.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘I’ve analyzed data for the past five years of quarterlies and compared them with the figures you gave me from the Crime Pattern Analysis Unit – straight stats, based on actual numbers of overdoses – and aside from a small blip four years ago caused by a batch of particularly strong heroin, the figures are remarkably consistent, until the last three quarters, that is, when the rate goes up, and stays up.

  ‘Now, as you get more deaths over the norm, it’s less and less likely that your excess deaths are just a wee blip and you have thirteen deaths over the expected norm—’

  ‘I know this, Nick,’ she broke in. ‘I gave you the numbers – just tell me, are they real?’

  He folded his arms. ‘Any plod with a GCSE in maths could tell you the numbers seem a bit high. But you want something you can quote with confidence, and I can’t give you that without the stats.’

  She took a breath and exhaled slowly. ‘You’re right, I’m sorry, I need the stats.’ Before he could accept her apology she added smoothly, ‘Just skip the lecture, okay?’

  He smiled. ‘Okay. In simple statistical terms, I am 95 per cent certain these deaths are significantly above what you would expect.’

  ‘So the CPA Unit was right,’ she said. ‘They’re real.’

  ‘Really real,’ Fennimore said.

  She didn’t speak.

  ‘You don’t seem overjoyed.’

  ‘Did you watch the news?’

  He nodded. ‘I thought you put your case very well. All that stuff about clusters happening by chance, the function of the review process, the futility of speculation – really, it was bang on the money.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was also, almost word for word, a little lecture he’d given her when they worked together at the National Crime Faculty, but now didn’t seem a good time to mention it, and Simms went on:

  ‘Funnily enough, nobody quoted me on that. They did quote Evette Lyons extensively, though: “Police incompetence,” she said. We ignored the real threats against her daughter “while we dicked about with our computer spreadsheets”.’

  ‘Does she think you should ignore the other victims just because her daughter happens to be in the news?’ Fennimore said. ‘Come on, Kate, she’s bound to blame the police – she can’t very well blame herself, can she? She’s talking crap.’

  ‘And as a smart-arsed scientist you probably know the adhesion co-efficient. Me, I’m just a thick-headed cop, but I do know shit sticks, and Stuart G—’ She checked herself, glanced at Josh Brown. ‘My bosses won’t want to blame themselves, either.’

  ‘Stuart Gifford is a bureaucrat—’

  Another quick glance towards Josh. ‘For God’s sake, Nick.’

  ‘What? You think names should be changed to protect the stupid? Gifford might be a pillock who was born with a pencil up his arse, but even he wouldn’t be so vindictive.’

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and took a moment, then spoke slowly and clearly. ‘Gifford is interested in two things: The Rules, and Gifford. He’s been in post for a month – not even long enough to tack his family photos up on his office wall. He will not take the fall for this and, conveniently, his least favourite police officer happens to be standing on a narrow ledge hanging on by her toenails.’ She pushed her fingers through her hair, laced them on top of her head and left them there like she was trying to keep her brains from bursting right through her skull.

  Watching her, frowning hard, looking inward, fighting to keep it together, Fennimore felt a tidal wave of shame. ‘Kate—’

  She raised a finger. ‘No. Do not do that. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.’

  Josh busied himself with his laptop, pretending he couldn’t hear them.

  ‘I don’t,’ Fennimore said, keeping his gaze on her. ‘But I do want to help.’

  ‘I got a call from the Mirror twenty minutes ago,’ Simms said. ‘Tomorrow, they’re running the front-page headline “STAYC MURDERED?”. They wanted a reaction quote. Now, I could remind them that StayC died in her own bed in her mother’s house, while her mother was downstairs watching Hollyoaks on TV. But they’d only say that where she died is irrelevant, because someone might have put something in her heroin before she bought it. I’m in a real bind here, Nick.’

  ‘Well … StayC’s death does look like it’s part of a pattern, rather than a one-off, and as one of thirteen drugs deaths above the norm, it’s far less likely she was murdered.’

  ‘Less likely, but you can’t rule it out. Look at it from the other end of the telescope – it’s probable her death is linked to twelve others.’ She peered at him. ‘And that makes a much more interesting article.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Kate, I can’t do any better than that until we’ve re-examined the evidence, and that means going back to the beginning, looking at it all over again. I can do that with you if it helps?’

  She hesitated, but he could see her thinking it through, and after a few seconds she gave a nod of acceptance.

  ‘Who’ve you got working with you?’ he asked.

  She gave him a cynical smile. ‘According to the press release, “a dedicated team of officers”. In reality, there’s me, two Crime Pattern Analysts and a Scientific Advisor – and it’s just me working on it full time.’

  ‘We’d better get started then, hadn’t we?’ He turned to Josh. ‘For context, the import of illicit drugs to the UK is estimated at between four and six billion pounds per annum.’ The student’s fingers rustled over the keyboard, typing as Fennimore spoke. ‘Factor in the fifteen billion spent on crime and health costs every year, and you have an industry worth twenty-one billion – which is 25 per cent more than legitimate pharmaceutical companies made in exports last year.’

  Nick Fennimore knew all of this because it was his job to know, and because some numbers just stuck. There were some he couldn’t budge, like how many children are abducted every year – between six hundred and a thousand; like the average age of an abducted child – ten; like the number still missing and unaccounted for – around two hundred. His daughter was ten at the time she disappeared, and, five years on, she remained one of the two hundred who stayed missing. It made him weak to think of Suzie among those two hundred children, frightened and alone – or worse – in the hands of monsters. Nick Fennimore, scientist, logician, did believe in monsters. Not the fairy-tale kind that were easy to spot, so you could point them out and keep your children from harm – the monsters of his nightmares walked on two legs, and spoke like you and me, and called themselves men.

  He drove those thoughts from his mind, or at least squeezed them into a corner where they would stay quiet for a while. After years of trying, he had learned that he could keep them at bay working fourteen-hour days dealing with statistics of a more endu
rable nature.

  He reached into his laptop bag and fished out a sheet of A4 paper and some whiteboard markers; Fennimore disliked linear note-taking, preferring instead to work through complex ideas using mindmaps, a visual tool that used a tree branch format combining key words, symbols and colour. He wrote ‘EXCESS DRUGS DEATHS’ in block capitals in black ink at the centre of the sheet, and with an artistic flourish he drew a rough gravestone around it. Swapping from black to orange, he added a side branch to the right of the gravestone and wrote ‘CHARACTERISTICS’ along the line.

  ‘We have twenty ODs in all,’ he said. ‘Thirteen extra deaths above what you would expect in the last eight months. If something in the deals is killing them, it’s likely to be in all the deals.’ Josh furrowed his brow ready to ask why, and Fennimore added, ‘It’s more efficient to make up the deals in bulk – think industry, production lines.’

  ‘If it’s in all of the deals, it can’t be very toxic, or we’d have more deaths,’ Simms said.

  He wrote ‘LOW TOXICITY’ on a side branch.

  ‘Unless it’s only poisonous to some people,’ Josh said.

  Simms said, ‘We’ve got fifteen female victims out of twenty.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Fennimore wrote ‘SELECTIVE?’ on the diagram, then added a sub-branch and wrote ‘GENDER BIAS?’

  ‘It’s not something we’d see on routine toxicology, or it would have turned up on normal post-mortem,’ Simms said.

  Fennimore nodded. ‘It’s also fast acting, because a lot of these deaths happened within an hour of injection.’

  ‘How could they tell that?’ Josh asked.

  ‘The body treats heroin like any other toxin,’ Fennimore said. ‘As soon as it’s injected, the liver gets to work on breaking it down into something safer. At the post-mortem the pathologist will prepare tissue and fluid samples from different parts of the body. Urine is taken direct from the bladder, blood is usually syringed out of the femoral artery. You can estimate how long the heroin was in the body by comparing the drugs found in wraps or syringes recovered at the scene with the concentration of metabolites in the decedent’s blood and urine.’

  ‘Plus, there were witnesses to some of the deaths,’ Kate added, ‘and they all say the victims died fast.’

  ‘We need to re-interview those witnesses,’ Fennimore said.

  ‘I’m in the process of tracking them down,’ Simms said. ‘But addicts aren’t the easiest people to keep tabs on.’

  Josh was frowning at his laptop screen. ‘Heroin’s usually cut with all kinds of crap to bulk it up, isn’t it?’

  Fennimore nodded. ‘More heroin, bigger profits.’

  ‘So, if they injected purer stuff than they were used to, they’d overdose and die before the heroin is metabolized, so you’d get low metabolites – like we’ve got here.’

  ‘Good reasoning,’ Fennimore said. ‘But we would also expect to see high morphine levels in the blood, and that’s not showing in the lab results we have so far.’ He looked pointedly at Kate. ‘On the other hand, we haven’t seen all of the reports yet.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘These weren’t suspicious deaths, Nick – they were routine drugs overdoses, done as standard hospital post-mortems by hospital pathologists. It’s not like a nice tidy Forensic Post Mortem – I can’t just go to one Home Office pathologist and come back with a bundle of files under my arm. I’m dealing with four pathologists on different shifts in two different hospitals.’

  ‘I understand that,’ he said, ‘but I do hate to theorize with so little data.’

  ‘You’ll have the rest by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘But if we can narrow the field today, I can direct my efforts, waste less energy and stay within budget.’

  He nodded. Since the government squeeze on public finances, budgets had been slashed. Politicians called it ‘making difficult choices’ and urged ‘prioritization’ – an ugly word for abandoning the disenfranchised. Simms was telling him that she had to justify and cost every investigative decision she made, because management priorities said these were only addicts and not regular human beings. It was number two on his list of reasons for quitting police work.

  ‘So far, we know that they didn’t die of a genuine overdose,’ Simms said. ‘What else could have killed them?’

  ‘What about the death threats against StayC?’ Josh said. ‘You said whatever killed them must be in all the deals – maybe it was poison.’

  Fennimore thought about it. ‘Strychnine is out – that would show up on a regular PM tox screen. Arsenic and antimony would be the obvious choice. But they’re too slow-acting – you’re talking hours, weeks, even months, depending on the quantities in the deals. Cyanide must be a possibility,’ he said, half to himself, adding it to the list.

  ‘Come on,’ Kate said, breaking into his reverie. ‘Addicts are desperate, not suicidal – cyanide smells of bitter almonds, and one of the top ten rules of safe injection is if it smells funny, don’t inject it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘And although most men can’t smell it, all women can – so you would expect more men than women among your victims.’ He placed a cross next to cyanide.

  ‘What about an interaction?’ Josh asked, pausing briefly from his typing. ‘You know – there’s not enough morphine in the deals to kill them, but something they used to cut the deals increases the effect?’

  Fennimore added ‘CUTTING AGENTS’ to the diagram.

  ‘Other opiates like papaverine and codeine would be the usual suspects,’ Fennimore said, ‘but they’re both on the regular PM tox screen, and they don’t show up in our deaths.’ He tapped the pen on the tabletop, feeling mildly intoxicated by the whiff of solvent from the tip. ‘It might be a side effect, of course …’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it must be cheap,’ Simms said.

  Fennimore looked at her in question.

  ‘Like you said, it’s all about profit margins.’

  ‘Everything’s cheap if you nick it,’ Josh said without looking up.

  Fennimore stopped writing, and Kate peered at the student through the webcam. He continued scrolling through his notes, but sensing the scrutiny, he looked up. ‘What?’ he said. ‘I’m just saying maybe whatever it was could’ve come from a pharmacy break-in or a factory or something.’

  Fennimore shrugged, added ‘CHEAP/STOLEN?’ on a new branch, and leaned back from his creation.

  ‘So, some form of contaminant.’ Kate looked into the distance. ‘Wasn’t there an anthrax scare up in Scotland a few years back?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fennimore said. ‘But anthrax victims get very sick – At post-mortem, you would see swelling of the lymph glands, abscesses, ulcers at the site of injection – I can’t see all of that being missed, even on a regular PM, even across two hospitals and four pathologists. These victims looked like drugs overdoses, Kate. They injected, blissed out, didn’t wake up.’

  Kate pushed her fingers through her hair again. In their Crime Faculty days, when she wore her hair long, Kate would lift it from the nape of her neck to cool it, and more than once, as they worked through evidence, it had taken heroic self-control not to lean across and kiss the vulnerable curve of her neck.

  ‘The fact is, until we know what really killed them, we won’t even be able to separate the normal deaths from the excess ones,’ Fennimore said.

  Kate stood abruptly. ‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make myself a coffee that would blow the lid off a pressure cooker.’ She walked away, leaving a blurry image of a kitchen table, cupboards beyond. A few moments later, they heard the rumble of a kettle boiling, like a distant rock fall. Fennimore rubbed the centre of his forehead, trying to massage his frontal cortex into action. The sound of Josh’s typing continued, like the soft patter of rain against a window.

  ‘We know the deaths are real.’ Fennimore raised his voice to carry over the sound of coffee-making, wishing he’d thought to make up a flask. ‘I mean, that they’re not a random blip in the stats – so th
ere must be a common thread.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’ Simms reappeared, a steaming mug in her hand.

  Fennimore ignored the jibe. ‘If the deaths are caused by a contaminant,’ he said, thinking aloud, not sure where this stream-of-consciousness was taking him, ‘it was probably added locally, because if it got into the drugs earlier in the supply chain we’d be seeing a lot more deaths across a much wider area – maybe even nationally—’

  Kate stopped, the coffee mug halfway to her lips. ‘Say that first bit again.’

  ‘I said whatever-it-was, it was probably added locally.’

  She set her cup down and glanced at the notes beside her. ‘I’m looking at a list of names and locations.’ She pulled out a map and snatched up a pen. ‘If I mark where the victims were found …’ Her eyes darted left and right as she studied the list, found the locations on the map and marked each one off. After a few minutes, she held up the map.

  ‘Most of them are in Cheetham Hill, pushing out as far as Waterloo Road to the west, and Queens Park to the east – it’s a tiny area, Nick.’ Her gaze shifted from the map to the list. ‘Only one vic was found out of area – in Piccadilly Gardens, right in the city centre, two miles away. That’s practically the far side of the moon for some of these girls, but I happen to know there’s a drop-in centre for addicts in Piccadilly, so maybe it’s not so strange …’ She set down the list and studied the city-centre map again. ‘Okay …’

  ‘Talk to me, Kate.’

  ‘What if a new drugs refuge or rehab unit opened in Cheetham Hill,’ she said. ‘That would screw the numbers, wouldn’t it? I mean, more druggies in the area, a greater probability of drug-related deaths?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fennimore’s head began to buzz with excitement. ‘Yes, it would. But you would expect a corresponding decrease elsewhere.’

  ‘I’ll talk to the inspector at Cheetham Hill,’ she said. ‘He would know if there’s a new drop-in centre or refuge in the area. And I’ll ask the Crime Pattern Analysts to look for any unexpected drop-off of deaths anywhere else in Manchester.’ Her eyes were bright and eager, and she fidgeted on her chair as if tiny sparks jolted through her muscles.