Slider looked at Atherton, and then stood up and walked across the room. ‘There’s a lot we can prove,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it was you who told everyone Stefan had a heart condition. But we know that wasn’t true. His heart was as healthy as yours or mine.’
‘What do you say?’ Buster said faintly.
‘Oh yes. That’s a fact. The post mortem showed his heart was very strong. So why should you have put it about that he had heart disease, if not to pave the way for your plot to kill him?’ He stood looking out of the window as he spoke, as though it were a matter so settled as to be unimportant. ‘You thought that if he collapsed while he was actually conducting, everyone would assume it was heart and not look any further for a cause. That’s why you gave him the stuff just before rehearsal, instead of letting him die at home, in bed.’
‘But he told me! He told me he had a weak heart!’ Buster seemed utterly bewildered.
‘Well he was lying, I’m afraid. Which—’ Slider stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the garden, things slotting into place with rapid, satisfying clicks. It was horrible, it was truly horrible, but it all fitted, and that was the only satisfaction one could ever have from investigating a murder – getting the answer right.
‘Which makes you the prime suspect,’ he finished. Atherton heard the difference in his voice and looked at him sharply; and Slider nodded to him, just perceptibly. ‘Lev’s bullet, you see, didn’t do enough damage to kill a man with a sound heart. But Stefan was already dying when Lev pulled the trigger, from something that attacked the central nervous system. Something you’d given him.’
‘No-one will believe that,’ Buster said, but his voice was faint.
‘All poisons are detectable, if you know what to look for,’ Slider said. ‘The pathologist told me that only this morning. Things have advanced no end since 1959 – they didn’t have gas chromatography or atomic absorption spectroscopy then, did they? And of course, no-one was looking for poison in Lady Susan’s case anyway. No-one thought of testing the brandy, or looking in your little shed at the bottom of the garden where you do your botanical research.’
Buster jerked in his seat at the last words, and Atherton began slowly to smile as he began to follow Slider’s path.
‘One is nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth,’ Slider quoted softly. ‘You made sure of that, didn’t you, Mr Keaton? A very short route to God your pretty garden turned out to be. Tobacco plant, foxglove, deadly nightshade, henbane, laburnum – nature’s a wonderfully deadly thing, if you know where to look. And you’re a botanist. You’d know all about it.’
‘I think,’ Keaton said faintly but politely, ‘I think I must ask you to excuse me for a moment. I have to go to the lavatory.’
He seemed hardly able to get out of the chair, but when Atherton made to help him, he shrank away. ‘No, I can manage. Please – please don’t touch me.’
Slider watched him walk to the door, and then flicked a nod at Atherton, who followed him out but came straight back in and said, ‘It’s just across the hall. We’ll hear him come out.’ Slider nodded and walked to the window again. ‘At least it will get Lev Polowski off the hook,’ Atherton said after a moment. ‘Or will it? He’ll have to be charged with something, I suppose. Attempted murder? Malicious wounding? But can you maliciously wound a dying man? And how close to dying was Radek, I wonder, when the bullet struck him? If it played any part in his death, if it only hastened it, Lev’s guilty of something.’
‘There’s still Buster’s little shed to examine,’ Slider said, off on his own track. ‘He may not have thought to clear it out yet, and even if he has, there might be enough traces to—’ He stopped, frowning. ‘What was that?’ He listened, and then looked at Atherton.
‘You don’t think—?’ Atherton said, and then they both ran.
The door was locked and there was no reply from within, but the hall was narrow there. Atherton hitched himself up onto the radiator, lifted both feet up against the door, and slammed it open. Buster was on the floor, his left sleeve pushed up. There was a medicine cabinet on the wall with its door open, and a hypodermic syringe on the floor by his right hand.
Slider crouched by the body. He wasn’t dead yet. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said.
Atherton hesitated. ‘But they might save him.’ Slider looked up. ‘Just a little delay, guv,’ he said urgently. ‘He’s killed five people, and they’ll probably let him off.’
‘Do it,’ said Slider.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
God wot?
The ambulance had been and gone, and the forensic team was taking the house and garden shed to pieces, and Slider and Atherton were standing in the drawing-room, waiting to go.
‘I still think we should have let him die,’ Atherton grumbled, but he didn’t mean it now.
‘You know we can’t do that,’ Slider said. ‘And besides, we’ll need his confession if we’re going to get this one home.’
‘It’s going to be the devil to prove any of it.’
‘I know. There’s the trail of bodies following Keaton’s career, and a few suspicious coincidences, but an awful lot of it’s pure speculation. But Radek’s still above ground, and Freddie said he’d find the poison if I could just tell him what to look for.’
‘And can you?’
Slider grimaced. ‘I think so. I think I know how he did it. It was the last thing left to work out, and I looked down from the window at his lovely border all full of blue flowers – including blue rocket, such a pretty, prolific plant. Also known as monkshood or wolfsbane.’
‘Is it poisonous, then?’ Atherton asked.
Slider rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t you know anything about plants?’
‘I’m not a hayseed like you, guv,’ Atherton protested. ‘We didn’t go about sucking hedges in Weybridge. None of this eye of newt business in the commuter belt.’
‘The Latin name for blue rocket is aconite.’
‘Oh, well, why didn’t you say so?’ Atherton said. ‘Aconite is what Medea tried to poison Theseus with. The ancients called it the Queen of Poisons. So it comes from rocket, does it?’
‘Aconitum to you. All parts of the plant are poisonous, and you can make a stiff brew from stewing the root as well. It attacks the CNS and paralyses the heart muscle—’
‘Et voilà, syncope!’
‘—sometimes before any other symptoms have had a chance to develop. It’s extremely toxic, and it can act very, very quickly – in as little as eight minutes.’
‘Well, that sounds promising from our point of view,’ Atherton conceded generously, ‘except that we have to prove Buster gave it to the old man, and I still can’t see how. If he gave him something to eat or drink, he obviously took the evidence away with him, and it will have been destroyed by now.’
‘No, he wouldn’t have given it that way, because if there was any suspicion, that’s the first place we would have looked. If he was going to do it, he’d work out a way that gave him a chance of getting away with it.’ Slider turned away and looked out of the window again. ‘The other thing about aconite,’ he said slowly, ‘is that it can be absorbed through the skin. They used to use it externally to treat rheumatic pain – it sets up a sort of tingling numbness. I came across it years ago, when I was a rookie – a case of accidental death, where an ointment containing aconite had been used on broken skin.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Atherton said. ‘Am I missing something?’
‘You made a list of everything in the dressing-room,’ Slider said, ‘and in the bathroom. I looked at it this morning, and I realised that there was something missing, but I assumed Keaton must have taken it away in his pocket, and it didn’t seem important.’
‘Taken what away?’
‘A tube of ointment. I just didn’t make the connection until I looked out of the window here.’
‘A tube of ointment? Did Radek suffer from rheumatism?’ Atherton said, still puzzled.
Slider turned to him with
unwilling eyes. ‘Not rheumatism, you clunk.’
Atherton stared, and then enlightenment came. ‘Ouch,’ he said, screwing up his eyes in genuine sympathy. ‘What a way to go. The poor old bastard!’
‘At least it was a quick death,’ Slider said.
Slider was not looking forward to having to explain the new developments to Barrington, even in his lately acquired pussycat mood. The shooting had at least been plain and unequivocal, a confession plus a gun plus a large assortment of witnesses, even if there had been unexplained and confusing shadows in the background. But this! As Atherton said on the way back to the station, in spite of anything Slider could do to stop him, this was just going to mean piles of work for everyone.
Barrington was still not in, however, when they got back, which meant a pleasant respite. Slider put the team to work on assembling the evidence of Keaton’s past life, put Freddie on alert, and then went with one of the uniform boys to the hospital to see whether they were going to be able to drag Buster back from the brink. When at last it looked as though he was going to live, Slider left the constable there beside him and went back to the station. Barrington had not come in, nor called in, and was not answering the telephone at home. He was not responding to his bleep either.
‘Gone out to play a nice round of golf and left it behind, I suppose,’ McLaren grumbled. ‘Bloody bosses. I know what kind of a row we’d get if we did something like that.’
The awkward thing as far as Slider was concerned was that he couldn’t get Freddie onto the new autopsy until he had Barrington’s cross on the dotted line.
‘Necropsy, old thing,’ Freddie said when he told him. ‘Autopsy is an examination of oneself. Never mind, Radek isn’t going anywhere. And Barrington will phone in before long feeling awfully silly about having left his bleep behind.’
‘Well, if he’s not back by close of play today, I’ll have to get onto the Commander. We’ll have to stop them taking the body away. You know they were going to bury him tomorrow.’
‘Whoops,’ said Cameron. ‘I don’t envy you that one. Grassing up your guv’nor to his guv’nor? Not very nice.’
‘It’s a bugger,’ Slider said. ‘And Wetherspoon thinks the sun shines out of Barrington’s eyes, so the shower will be bound to fall on me.’
‘From both directions,’ Freddie agreed, with the relish even nice people usually display at the prospect of someone else facing an explosion.
‘I wonder if there’s anything wrong?’ Slider said. ‘It isn’t like Barrington to be so vague. Weird, yes, but always punctual. Maybe he’s ill.’
‘He’d have phoned in,’ Cameron said comfortably. ‘Or his wife would.’
At half past five Slider and Atherton went upstairs to the canteen for lunch, which they’d had no chance to have before. While they were there, Joanna came in, sporting a plastic visitor’s badge.
‘So this is where you’re skulking,’ she said.
‘Oh God, I forgot,’ Slider said. ‘I was supposed to phone you, wasn’t I?’
‘When you had something to tell me. Apparently you’ve nothing to tell me.’
‘You know,’ he said examining her closely. ‘Who told you?’
‘Norma. I rang asking to speak to you and she spilled the beans. So I thought I’d pop round, since I hadn’t anything better to do.’
‘You don’t fool me. You were just longing to see me.’
‘Dream on, sonny,’ she rebuked him firmly. ‘So your funny feelings were right after all?’
‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s going to mean a lot of work, just when we thought we were nearly finished.’
‘Never mind, at least you’ll be able to feel satisfied at the end of it. How is Mad Ivan taking the disappointment?’
‘Mr Barrington,’ Slider corrected sternly, ‘has disappeared.’
‘God, the excitement of your job! What do you mean, disappeared?’ Slider told her. ‘That doesn’t sound too good,’ she said. ‘Has someone been round there?’
‘That would be the police equivalent of poking a stick with an ’orse’s ’ead ’andle in his ear,’ Atherton said. ‘Who’s going to volunteer for that?’
‘But he might have fallen down the stairs or something, and be lying helpless,’ she said indignantly.
Slider sighed. ‘I was just giving him a chance to turn up or phone in, that’s all, in case he’d accidentally taken the day off. I was on the point of ringing his local nick and asking them to send someone round to see.’
‘So I should think. Are you going to get off this evening? Because we’ve a lot to talk about and we still haven’t got round to it yet.’
‘I don’t know when I’ll be finished,’ he said. ‘Not until late, anyway.’
She smiled suddenly. Indeed, she positively grinned. ‘Got anywhere else to sleep?’
He smiled slowly. ‘Well, as it happens, I sort of haven’t.’
As it happened, he didn’t get to bed anywhere that night, because the local police, going round to Barrington’s house and finding his car outside and no response from within, broke a pane in the front door and let themselves in. They found Barrington in the kitchen, sitting at the table, with the muzzle of his rifle in his mouth and his head – or quite a lot of it, anyway – on the wall behind him.
Joanna, in a brown furry sort of dressing-gown which made her look as if she ought to have a Stieff label sewn to the back of her neck, leaned her elbows to either side of her teacup and watched Slider eating a rather shapeless cheese omelette of her own hasty devising. It was a very late late breakfast and he felt as if he hadn’t slept for years. Perhaps sleep was only a habit after all, and you could actually get out of it with practice.
‘So it turns out he wasn’t married?’ she said.
‘Never had been. It showed how little anyone knew about him. I feel so bad about him. He asked me to go and have dinner with him on Monday night. Think how lonely he must have been to unbend that far, and I turned him down.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. People don’t commit suicide because of what other people do or don’t do, but because of what they are to themselves.’
‘I didn’t say I felt guilty, I said I felt bad. You should have seen that place! Men have no talent for home-making.’
‘Some men. Look at Jim’s little bijou nest.’
‘True. But Barrington’s house was so comfortless. Lots of dark, depressing wood and leather – did you ever see Lawrence of Arabia’s house in Dorset? You could tell the man was mentally ill. He had a whole room lined with grey aluminium – walls and ceiling, the whole thing.’
‘What, Barrington?’
‘No, Lawrence. What Barrington had was a great ugly shelving unit taking up half his sitting-room, that looked as if he’d made it up himself out of old wardrobes. And all his shooting trophies were displayed on it. He was quite a crackshot in the army, and afterwards in his shooting club. Rows and rows of silver cups and shields and framed certificates, and he ends up with his brains all over the washable vinyl.’ He looked up at her. ‘It was a horrible kitchen, too. The wallpaper had a pattern of red tomatoes and green peppers in squares all over it, and the units were old and painted bright yellow. It must have been like that when he bought it. He’d never done anything to it. What a place to die.’
‘Oh don’t,’ she said.
‘And do you know what was in the fridge? Two steaks and a bag of ready-mixed salad. That’s what he was going to give me if I went to dinner with him. And a frozen blackcurrant cheesecake in the ice compartment. That was the dinner I didn’t join him for. What a lonely man.’
He saw Barrington’s rock-like, acne-scarred face in his mind’s eye, and the feral eyes looking out from the impassive façade. Year by year the granite must have built up, layer upon layer, separating him more absolutely from any contact, beyond hope of reversal. It must have been like being walled up alive, watching the last bright seed of daylight grow smaller, knowing that when it was gone all that w
ould be left was the darkness and the cold.
Seeing he needed to go on talking about it, Joanna said, ‘Why do you think he did it? He didn’t leave a note, did he?’
Slider thought of Freddie saying ‘They like to tell the tale, old boy.’ Not Barrington, though. Too proud. And no-one, in any case, to tell. ‘I don’t know. I suppose everything just got too much for him. The toughest on the outside are often the most fragile inside.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the job. We all go through it – but he had no-one’s shoulder to cry on. Maybe that made the difference.’
She touched his hand. ‘You couldn’t have helped, if he’d gone that far.’
‘I know. But I could have given him a few moments of human contact, even if it didn’t make any difference afterwards.’ He sighed and reached for his tea. ‘Then I had to go and tell the Coleraines they couldn’t bury their dead after all.’
‘God, yes, old Radek. I’d almost forgotten him in all the excitement. He’s made a hole in our schedules, you know. I’ve got dates into next year that were with him. I suppose we’ll keep the concerts and get a new conductor for them, but we’ll lose all the recording sessions. That’s a lot of money, and even for us work isn’t that thick on the ground.’
‘That’s a good enough reason to go to his memorial service, then. They’re going to hold it next week, whatever happens about the burial.’
‘Will you be going?’
‘Yes. I’ll be the official presence. Want to come with me?’
‘If you like.’
‘She cried, you know,’ he said, remembering. ‘Mrs Coleraine. Whatever she said, she did care for her father. She cried on her husband’s shoulder, and he patted her and looked as if he wanted to cry himself. He looked as if someone had shoved a stick in his head and given his brains a good stir. He’d been suspecting Marcus, we’d been suspecting him, then it turned out to be Lev. Now he just couldn’t grasp the idea that it was Buster who did it after all; and sooner or later Mrs Coleraine is going to put two and two together about her mother. It’ll come out at the trial, if not before.’
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