Strangled in Soho
Page 1
Strangled in Soho
Cassie Coburn Mystery #4
Samantha Summers
Blueberry Books Press
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Also by Samantha Summers
About the Author
Chapter 1
I woke up to the sound of the familiar, rhythmic beeping of a heart rate monitor. One beep per second. Sixty beats per minute. The person lying in that hospital bed had a completely average resting heart rate.
It took me a moment before I realized that person was me.
I kept my eyes closed, as if I could slip away into sleep once more and awaken in my one-bedroom basement apartment under Mrs. Michael’s house. It wasn’t that I disliked hospitals. In fact, I’d spent a large portion of my life thinking I’d spend my entire working life in one. It was just that I didn’t like waking up in them. I didn’t exactly have great experiences with that.
Despite my closed eyes I could still hear the regular beeps from the heart rate monitor. I supposed this was real life after all.
With a great effort, I forced my eyes open, and focused on the man sitting by the bed, concern etched on his face. As soon as he saw I was awake, he grabbed my hand.
“Cassie! Cassie, you’re awake,” he said. “Thank God!”
I was staring into brilliant blue eyes and shaggy blond hair that made Doctor Jake Edmunds look more like he belonged on a beach in Australia with a surfboard tucked under his arm than sitting by my side at a hospital in London.
“I’m not going to be one of your clients just yet,” I replied weakly, just managing to crack a smile. Damn, my throat was dry. I looked around for some water, and Jake, as if he could read my mind, grabbed a cup off the nightstand and helped me take a sip. While Jake was a doctor, he didn’t work at the hospital, he worked at the local morgue as a pathologist.
“Good,” he replied.
“What happened, anyway?” I asked.
“What happened is that somewhere along the line, your evolutionary instincts to be aware of anything unfamiliar were overridden by your apparent inability to resist putting any food you come across into your mouth,” came a reply in the form of a French accent, as Violet Despuis pulled aside the privacy curtain and stepped into the makeshift room as well.
She was a striking figure; tall with long, dark-brown hair tied back into a braid that ran down her back; today she was wearing high-waisted, galaxy-print leggings with an oversized black-and-white striped top.
Jake glared at her. “You can’t seriously blame Cassie for this.”
Violet shrugged. “Well, if she had not eaten the chocolate brownies I had left on the kitchen counter, then there would have been no problem.”
I leaned back in my bed and groaned as my memory of what had led to me coming here was slowly starting to come back.
* * *
I’d gotten a text from Violet asking me to meet her at her house at ten in the morning. When I knocked on her front door, there was no answer, so I tried the handle and found it was unlocked, which I found quite frankly kind of alarming given the nature of Violet’s work.
I called out to her and got a reply almost immediately from upstairs. “I will be down in a minute!”
Since I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, I made my way toward the kitchen, despite knowing that Violet and I had, uh, slightly different tastes in food. I figured at the very least I could find a banana or something. And yet, to my surprise, there was a plate full of brownies just sitting on the table. They’d obviously been freshly baked; the aroma of caramelized sugar and chocolate wafting toward me and making my mouth water.
I figured Violet wouldn’t miss one little brownie. In fact, they were probably a gift; I couldn’t imagine Violet cooking brownies to save her life, unless they were made with like, figs instead of chocolate or something equally high in vitamins and low in taste.
Still, even if she was my friend, it would be rude not to ask.
“Can I have a brownie?” I shouted up the stairs, but didn’t get an answer. I could hear water running through the pipes; I assumed Violet was having a shower. My hunger won out over my rudeness–it wasn’t like Violet was going to eat these brownies anyway, I knew her well enough to know she’d just scrunch her nose at them and eat an apple or something before offering them to me with a snide comment about my eating habits–and I reached over and grabbed one.
Sinking my teeth into the warm deliciousness, I quickly ate the brownie. I was pleasantly surprised to discover there were walnuts in the mix, and when I finished off the first brownie I quickly reached over and grabbed another.
Soon after finishing the second brownie, however, I began to feel dizzy. I grabbed the table to stabilize myself as I heard Violet making her way down the stairs. She came into the kitchen, still drying her long hair with a towel, which she immediately dropped as soon as she saw me.
“Cassie! Cassie! Merde, you have eaten one of the brownies, haven’t you?” she asked, glancing at the plate. “Two of them! Merde! We must get you to the hospital right now!”
Violet pulling out her phone and calling for an ambulance was the last thing I remembered before falling to the floor, unconscious.
* * *
“What was in the brownies?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“Belladonna,” Violet answered matter-of-factly. Jake shook his head in disbelief next to me, grabbing my hand.
“But… there’s no cure for that,” I said. “Why aren’t I dead?”
“Correction,” Violet said. “There was no cure for it. You, Cassie Coburn, are the first person to ever overdose on Belladonna and survive.”
“You left those brownies out for Cassie as a trap?” Jake asked, his face reddening as he got up from his chair.
“Of course not, do not be ridiculous,” Violet replied, leaning casually back as she sat down in another chair herself. “I did not expect Cassie to eat brownies that were left out on my kitchen counter. I had made them in order to test both the antidote that I had developed, and in order to solve a case that I was working on.”
“So, who was supposed to eat the brownies?” I asked.
“I was going to suffer through eating one myself, with you on hand as the doctor to supervise and to administer the antidote. That was why I had texted you to come to my house.”
I grinned. “Really? You were going to eat something made with real sugar and butter? There were probably trans fats in those brownies!”
“You can mock my eating habits all you want, but you are the one sitting in a hospital bed because the allure of empty calories was so great you could not wait until I had finished my shower to ask if they were for you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave poisoned brownies just sitting around in your kitchen, like a normal person!”
“Normal people do not single-handedly develop an antidote for the poison that murdered the Emperor Augustus of Rome and countless others since,” Violet sniffed, evidently taking offense at my implication that she was anything remotely resembling normal. She did have a point, I was pretty sure there wasn’t a single thing about Violet Despuis that could
be considered normal. “Not to mention, I have now solved my case, and as we speak DCI Williams should be on his way to arrest a certain man who murdered his ex-girlfriend.”
“I’m glad I was able to help,” I said dryly. “Now, I’m starving, did you bother to make any brownies that you didn’t lace with a deadly poison?”
Violet threw her hands up in the air. “You are impossible! How can you want more brownies after nearly dying?”
“I did ask for some without the poison,” I replied.
Jake grinned and stood up. “I’ll go get you some food. That pub you and Brianne like to hang out at is near here, right?”
“We’re at the Royal London?”
“Yes,” Jake nodded. “Violet decided it was going to take too long to get to Charring Cross Hospital during morning rush hour, so she called a friend and had him fly a helicopter over. He landed at that junction by the church at the end of the road, and they flew you straight here.”
I smiled at my friend; despite the fact that she could be completely oblivious to the fact that normal people didn’t leave poisoned brownies out on the kitchen table, I knew that calling in a favor and having a helicopter land at the end of the street to take me to the hospital was her way of showing she cared.
“The neighbors must have loved that,” I grinned.
Violet shrugged. “It would not be the first time that they have grumbled about my actions. Mortimer Barlow came running after us when you were being loaded into the helicopter, shouting about how I was a nuisance and that my presence was ruining the reputation of the neighborhood, but luckily Mrs. Michaels came out–still in her dressing gown and curlers—and threatened to beat him to death with her rolling pin if he didn’t go back into his home and let me get you to the hospital.”
I burst out laughing at the thought of my octogenarian landlady chasing down Mortimer Barlow, an advertising executive who always looked like he’d spent the day sucking on a lemon. I had no doubt she would do it, too.
“What would you like from The White Hart then?” Jake asked.
“Oooh, I’d love a burger and fries,” I said happily. “I’m not sure they do take-out though.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Jake said to me with a wink. “I find most places are happy enough to do take-away if you ask nicely enough.”
“As long as there is a woman working, I would bet,” Violet said, making Jake blush and me burst into laughter.
“Anyway,” Jake said, “I’ll be back soon. If they don’t do take-away for me I’ll get you Nando’s. Sound good?”
“Sounds wonderful, thanks,” I gushed, my mouth watering at the thought of food. I’d already been hungry when I ate the brownies, and I didn’t know how much time had passed since, but I knew my stomach was growling.
Jake left and I looked at Violet.
“So tell me about this case that I’ve decided I was instrumental in helping solve.” Violet smiled before leaning back in her chair and telling me the whole story.
Chapter 2
About ten minutes later Violet had finished telling me her story, and I was shaking my head in awe at the absolutely incredible deducing she had had to do to nail the ex-boyfriend. The brownies being poisoned with a specific amount of belladonna had in fact proven that he was the guilty party.
Suddenly, there was a commotion on the other side of the privacy curtain, to my right. I looked over to see the bottom of a bed being brought in next to mine, a couple pairs of legs in scrubs and crocs next to it.
“I want her monitored for cardiac arrhythmia,” I heard a woman say, probably a doctor. Suddenly, a heart rate monitoring machine went nuts, emitting three quick loud beeps in a row. I knew that sound all too well; the patient was going into cardiac arrest.
“She’s coding, get me some paddles,” the doctor ordered, and the legs I could see rushed over toward the other side of the bed. A moment later the whirring sound of the paddles charging filled the air and the doctor cried out “clear!” a split second before the jolting sound of the paddles sending electricity shooting through the patient’s chest sounded out.
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding as the frantic beeping stopped, replaced once again with the rhythmic sound of a regular heartbeat. My new neighbor had been stabilized.
“Right. I want someone checking on her every five minutes, tops. And the instant she wakes up, if she wakes up, I want someone at her side. We’re dealing with a near-suicide here.”
“I’ll keep tabs on her, doctor,” a man volunteered.
“Good,” the doctor replied, and I heard her brisk footsteps continuing down the hall. Violet looked curiously toward the privacy curtain, and as the nurse who had offered to stay behind left, she got up from her chair and headed toward it.
“Violet,” I hissed. “You can’t go in there! You don’t know who that is!”
“I just want to have a quick look,” Violet replied.
“This isn’t a zoo, it’s a hospital.”
“I am a scientist, I study human beings. I simply want to study what effects this person’s attempt at suicide has had on them, physically.”
“If you get yourself kicked out of the hospital, I’m not coming to your defense,” I said, shaking my head. I knew there was no dissuading her.
“Fine, but do not forget that I had a man land a helicopter on Eldon Road in order to get you here faster.”
“I only needed to go to the hospital because you’re the one who poisoned me in the first place!” I exclaimed.
“I did not force you to eat the brownies.”
Before I could reply, Violet slipped behind the privacy curtain; I let out a sigh and leaned back in the bed, closing my eyes, pretending that one of my best friends wasn’t also the craziest person in the world.
About two minutes later Violet came back onto my side of the curtain, her face grim. She instantly pressed the button to call the nurse.
“What are you doing? I don’t need a nurse.”
“No, but she does,” Violet said, pointing to the curtain.
Before I had a chance to ask what was wrong, a kindly looking woman in her fifties popped her head into the curtained area. “Someone called for a nurse?”
“Yes,” Violet said. “You must call the police, immediately.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“The woman in the next bed did not attempt to kill herself. Someone tried to kill her.”
The silence that fell over the three of us as Violet’s words sunk in was suddenly interrupted by another series of beeps as the heart rate monitor’s alarm went off. The woman next door was crashing again.
“Stay here!” the nurse ordered as she rushed over to the room next door. A moment later Jake walked in with a brown bag full of food, the aroma of cooked beef and oil wafting through the room as I reached eagerly for the bag.
“You’re the best,” I said as Jake came over and gave me a kiss before I reached in and pulled out a burger wrapped in foil and a pile of fries. The sound of the paddles charging next door made me pause; I hoped the woman was going to pull through.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked, nodding his head next door.
“Someone tried to kill the woman in there, and made it look as though she hung herself,” Violet said. “She is having a heart attack. She had another one perhaps five minutes ago; I do not need to be a doctor to know that things are not looking good for her.”
I shook my head sadly, and breathed a sigh of relief when a moment later the woman’s heart rate monitor began beeping normally once more. She’d been brought back from the brink yet again.
As I eagerly unwrapped the burger, the nurse poked her head back into my makeshift room. “Now, you said I needed to phone the police?”
* * *
Twenty minutes later I was happily munching away on a fry as I slowly worked on my burger, and a nurse who came by to check on me let me know that I’d likely be discharged early the next morning, they wanted to keep me
overnight for observation. The head of the hospital wanted to speak with Violet about her development of an antidote against belladonna poisoning, and she promised to stop by when she got a chance.
A few minutes after the nurse left, a man dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting suit came into the room. He had a permanent snarl on his face, which was topped with a thin layer of greying hair, and gazed around at the three of us as if we were completely underneath him.
“Doctor Edmunds,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you here among the living.”
“DI Carlson,” Jake replied, and I noticed the discomfort on his face. “The higher-ups sent you here to look at a potential murder, did they?”
“Well, I was the one called in when they found the body.”
“She’s not dead yet, calling her a body is a bit presumptuous.”
“You doctors and your details. Point is, lady killed herself. Open and shut case. I don’t know who here told the nurse to call the coppers, but it’s a waste of time. Poor woman did this to herself.”
“I am the one who had the police called,” Violet said from her spot in the corner. Her voice was frosty; evidently she didn’t like what she’d seen so far from DI Carlson. He turned to face her.
“And you are?”
“Violet Despuis,” she replied.
“Ah, you’re the meddling Frenchie who reckons herself a bit of an investigator, aren’t you?” he asked.
“If by that you mean the woman who has uncovered the perpetrator of over two hundred and fifty crimes in London that the police were incapable of solving, then yes, that is me.”