by Jo Bannister
As always, being with her was helping him get things into proportion. As far as Daniel could see, nothing worried Brodie. She saved her energy for changing things that needed changing and enjoying things that were fine just as they were. Where he dwelt on the past, she lived in the present and looked to the future. Her attitude was the perfect antidote to his. He could feel the burden of anxiety lifting from his shoulders as she talked.
That didn’t mean he was going to let her get away with lying. A moderate and a liberal in every other respect, he took a zealot’s view of lying. He didn’t do it himself, even when he really needed to, and he disapproved of it in others. ‘Brodie, you shout all the time. You can do it without raising your voice. You shout at people for stopping at traffic lights. You shout at people for being old.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Only when it makes them really slow,’ she conceded then, eyes lowered. All right, Daniel, so I shout. I have no patience. That’s who I am. I can’t help it.’ She risked a sly grin. ‘It’s why you love me.’
‘No,’ he said sternly, ‘it is not why I love you.’ But he couldn’t resist her grin. ‘I love you in spite of it.’
She ducked forward over her desk and kissed him. On the brow; breaking his heart.
He turned away, just quickly enough that someone with a quite modest degree of sensitivity would have wondered why, and busied himself with cups in the kitchen. ‘You think I’m worrying for nothing, then?’
‘I’m sure you are. But then, you always do. It’s why I love you.’
A person of any sensitivity at all would have wondered at his silence. But Brodie just wished he’d hurry up with the coffee.
Only in the sense that this was when he worked was Detective Superintendent Deacon a twenty-first century policeman. Now in his late forties, many of the developments which had turned criminal investigation from an art into a science had come too late for him to learn with the job. He’d had to study them, to ponder their implications, to work out how to use them and how far he could trust them and when to trust instinct instead.
The problem with that, of course, was that even his instincts were resolutely twentieth century ones, involving intimidation and the occasional haymaker.
Now he was looking at a piece of paper – and it was only a piece of paper because he’d insisted on having a printout rather than peering at a computer screen – covered with a lot of letters that formed no words he could recognise. He turned his heavy head slowly and fixed his sergeant with a jaundiced eye. ‘This is it?’
DS Voss nodded. ‘That’s it. The full chemical breakdown. Like we thought, it’s a new compound – so new Forensics are still putting together a profile on it. But it’s what killed the Hanson brothers and put three other kids in Intensive Care, so it’s likely we’ll be seeing more of it.’
Deacon didn’t doubt it. In a world of few certainties, one thing you could count on was that a new designer drug would always have teenagers queuing up to try it. There would be more weeks like this one, going from one pleasant middle-class home to the next, searching children’s rooms and reading their diaries and asking their parents about their friends and social activities; and waiting patiently and asking again when the disabling tears had passed, although the bottom line was that whatever they knew hadn’t been enough to keep their children from harm.
Deacon had done a lot of these interviews in his career. He’d asked grief-stricken parents where their sons and daughters might have got hold of heroin, cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy. Even in his experience, this week had been difficult. The Hansons had produced an heir and one to spare, and lost them both during the longest two days of their lives. The fifteen-year-old went gentle into the good night in the early hours of Monday morning, the seventeen-year-old fighting a rearguard action for another ten hours before he too finally succumbed.
At that point no one could even tell the Hansons what had killed their sons, except that it was pretty obviously a drug overdose, apparently taken at a party in the Woodgreen Estate on Saturday night. Their parents found them collapsed in their rooms the following morning.
Deacon tapped the sheet of paper with a blunt fingertip. ‘These letters and numbers. Chemicals. If the doctors had had these on Sunday – had known what they were dealing with – would it have made a difference?’
‘Probably not,’ said Voss. ‘The biggest problem with this is not that it’s different from anything else on the market, but that it’s so powerful. The biggest difference between the boys who died and their friends who’re still holding their own seems to be the number of tablets they took. A lot of kids tried them out on Saturday night – they were new, they wanted to give them a test-drive. I talked to some of the Hanson boys’ friends. Those who took one tablet experienced visual disturbances, euphoria then hallucinations before losing consciousness. Some came round before the party was over and got themselves home, some were taken home by friends. Sick and hung over, but none of them needed detoxing.
‘Judging from the blood-work, the kids in Intensive Care took two apiece. The Hanson boys apparently took three each. Even if the toxicology had been available then, it’s likely that Sunday morning was already too late to save them.’
So even picking it apart and nailing its components to a printed page wasn’t enough to stop it killing people. Deacon’s jaw clenched till his teeth ached. Which made it his job. Wasn’t it always? Defending the general populace from sudden death was always the job of some tired and frustrated policeman. Even when they were asking for it. Even when, God help their stupid souls, they were paying for it.
He scowled at the jumble of letters in front of him. ‘Why are we getting bodies? Whoever’s selling this stuff, it’s not in his interests to wipe out his customer-base. Is the stuff contaminated? Or is that the compound itself is intrinsically lethal?’ He heard himself and shuddered inwardly. He was spending way too much time with Charlie Voss. Two years ago he’d never have said intrinsically.
‘Not dirty, just very strong,’ said Voss. He was almost twenty years Deacon’s junior, a different type of policeman and a different type of man. It was a constant source of surprise to those they shared Battle Alley Police Station with that they could work together at all, let alone well. ‘I don’t think either the supplier or the buyers have figured out yet how little it takes to produce the desired effect. And then, this isn’t an expensive drug. It’s not in the dealer’s interests to tell customers they can get out of their skulls on a few quid’s worth.’
‘What are they calling it?’
Voss pursed his lips, pointed at the printout with his freckled nose. ‘Er – that. I can’t pronounce it.’
Deacon sniffed at him. ‘Well, if you can’t, sober, on a Tuesday afternoon, how do you suppose drunk kids in clubs on a Saturday night are going to manage? What are they calling it on the street?’
That was easier. ‘Scram.’
‘All right. Scram. Now get back onto Forensics and ask if Scram …’
Voss hated having to do this. He thought it would get him shouted at. ‘Forensics don’t call it Scram. They call it Horsefeathers.’
When Deacon went still like this it was as if the big man had turned to stone where he sat. Voss felt he was being watched by a mountain. Or rather a volcano, which when it had done watching would blow its top.
‘Horsefeathers.’ When the need arose the superintendent could filter all the emotion out of his gruff voice. This was more a statement than a question. But Voss knew it required an answer.
‘That’s what the letters are about. They represent the constituent parts. Most of them are common or garden chemicals you can obtain in this country with little or no paperwork. The exception, the catalyst that turns the whole thing into pixie-dust, is a heavy-duty veterinary tranquilliser currently being trialled in Germany. Hence Horsefeathers. It’s Forensics’ idea of a joke.’
Deacon nodded ponderously. ‘Remind me to laugh sometime when I haven’t got three teenagers on life support and two in the morgue.’
This was hypocrisy. In a business that dealt with horror as a commonplace, sometimes all that kept people sane was a bad-taste joke. Deacon had made enough of them in his time that he shouldn’t have taken exception to this one. But self-awareness was not one of Jack Deacon’s strengths.
‘Being trialled?’ he said then. ‘It isn’t in general use even in Germany?’
‘Apparently not. They’re doing clinical trials: it won’t be widely available until next year.’
‘Then why the hell is it killing kids in Dimmock now?’
If you asked him about the town where he’d lived and worked for ten years, Deacon would say he despised the place. That it represented all that was worst about Middle England. That it was grey and repressive and self-satisfied and faded, lacking in either style or grace. A late Victorian dowager still giving orders though the servants had all left and the ceilings were falling in. Yet when the old lady faced a threat of some kind, Jack Deacon was first on the barricade. Dimmock might be an old baggage but it was his job to protect her.
‘It shouldn’t be,’ said Voss, shaking his ginger head. ‘It’s supposed to be strictly controlled. The trouble is, it’s designed for large animal work. What would be a reasonable dose for a bull would provide the active ingredient in hundreds of tabs of Scram. There won’t be vast quantities of the stuff missing from the records, just a few litres written off as a dropped bottle or a book-keeping error.’
‘Fine. But why is it our problem, not Dusseldorf’s?’
‘Maybe it’s their problem too and they just haven’t realised yet. We don’t know the Hanson boys were the first victims in this country, just that they were the first to be identified. Where the cause of death didn’t fit the usual parameters and the agent was recognised as something new. Dusseldorf may have a morgue full of similar cases just waiting to be identified.’
He was saying that a lake was filling up and the Hanson brothers were the first crack in the dam. Tomorrow there could be a flood of dead and comatose teenagers whose condition could now be attributed to Scram. In Dusseldorf, and also in Dover and Brighton and Bognor Regis. ‘How’s it coming in?’
Voss was beginning to feel he was doing all the work here. ‘The same way anything else is smuggled in, but easier because you’re talking about small quantities. If Customs & Excise can miss whole truck-loads of human beings, how are they going to pick up a few bottles of clear liquid?’
Deacon blew out his cheeks in a gesture of acceptance. ‘They can’t, can they? We have to find the factory. Nail whoever is introducing this storm-trooper German tranquillizer to our nicely-brought-up English pharmaceuticals and producing the drug from hell.
‘Well, if Dimmock is the first place it’s been identified, maybe it’s the first place it’s been sold. If so, the probability is that the factory putting the stuff together is within ten miles of this spot.’
Voss nodded slowly. ‘In that case, the casualties from Woodgreen were the tip of an iceberg. If they’re getting their catalyst in from Germany and they’ve got the facilities to produce the stuff locally, we’re going to start seeing more of it. Much more of it.’
‘Shut your mouth, Charlie Voss,’ growled Deacon, ‘God may be listening. You’re right, of course. We have to get on top of this, quickly. If this is still essentially a local problem we have a chance to contain it before it spreads. Before there are Scram factories up and down the country. Once it’s endemic we’ll never get the genie back in the bottle. Imagine cheap heroin: it’ll be everywhere. We’ll never again have the opportunity to stop it in its tracks.’
‘Like fire,’ mused Voss, ‘or a disease. Once it gets through the pinch-point it grows exponentially. You have to stop it while it’s small. Or you may never stop it at all.’
‘Throw everything we’ve got at it while everything we’ve got might be enough,’ agreed Deacon. ‘Starting with friendly visits to everyone in the area that we know is dealing in drugs. Less with the expectation of shaming one of them into a confession, more in the hope that someone who’s losing business to a cheap new wonder drug might be sufficiently pissed off to point us in the right direction.’
‘It’s worth a try. They wouldn’t normally talk to us,’ said Voss, ‘but this could be different. This could put some of them out of business.’
Deacon gave his sergeant a wolfish grin. ‘So now we have a decision to make. Which of us goes to see Joe Loomis?’
‘Me,’ said Voss quickly.
‘Last time you went to see Joe he left you in a pool of blood.’
‘Last time you went to see him you broke his fingers with a monkey wrench!’
Deacon gave a negligent shrug. ‘I thought he was reaching for a gun. Besides, it’s too late for him to complain now. Joe and I have a sort of understanding. If he has a problem with me he doesn’t take it out on my officers.’
Voss wasn’t sure how to word this. ‘What does he get in return?’
‘When I go to interview him I leave the monkey wrench in the car.’
Chapter Three
Overnight there was another admission to Dimmock General that rang all the same alarm bells. It was a girl this time, a little older than the Hanson brothers and their friends, and if she’d been at the party in the Woodgreen Estate she mustn’t have taken what she bought there immediately because after three days she would either have died or recovered.
But everyone in A&E was now atuned to the possibility of Scram overdose. Although the initial call-out was to a suspected RTA, her age and the lack of any witness to a road accident were enough to make a canny registrar have her blood screened for narcotics. It came back positive for Scram. A lot of Scram: four or five tablets.
She wasn’t dead only because, instead of staggering off to bed and sleeping undisturbed for ten hours, she’d stumbled out onto Fisher Hill and either fallen down or been knocked down, with the result that she was in an ambulance within an hour of taking the things. A stomach-pump removed some of the substance undigested, then it was a matter of cleaning her blood and hoping that what had reached her brain hadn’t reached the concentration necessary to fry it. That wouldn’t be known until she woke up.
Charlie Voss heard about it before Deacon did because his fiancée worked in the hospital. She woke him up when she got home because she thought he’d want to know. While Voss was putting together a sort of hybrid meal that would do Helen as a late supper and himself as an early breakfast, she told him what she’d heard.
‘Her name’s Alison Barker. She doesn’t live in Dimmock – she was house-sitting for some friends. She rides horses for a living.’
Voss’s sandy eyebrows climbed. ‘She’s a jockey?’
‘Not racehorses, show-jumpers. One of the nurses says she’s quite well known. She was short-listed for some team or other.’
‘I don’t imagine she fell off a horse on Fisher Hill!’
‘I don’t think so either,’ said Helen Choi calmly, ‘I’m just giving you all the background so you don’t accuse me of withholding information later. But if you’re going to be silly I won’t tell you the other really interesting thing I know about her.’
When it comes to gathering intelligence, a bit of bribery is often efficacious. ‘You can have my bacon butty.’
The Chinese nurse thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Done deal. She was found lying in the road about two o’clock this morning, yes? But the accident was reported earlier.’
‘How much earlier?’
‘Monday evening.’
Voss frowned. ‘You’re telling me she was lying there for thirty hours?’
Helen shook her dark smooth head. ‘If she’d been lying there for six hours she’d be dead now. Whatever happened to her had only just happened.’
‘Then how …?’
‘You tell me,’ shrugged the woman. ‘But check your incident book: it’ll be there. Your Sergeant McKinney phoned the hospital on Monday evening, looking for the missing victim of an RTA. Then, we had no one fitting
the description. But Alison Barker fits it exactly, down to what she was wearing. Now ask me who reported the accident.’
Voss was still trying to get his head around what he’d been told already. ‘How the hell am I supposed to guess that?’ But something in her expression pulled him up short. The mere fact that she asked the question meant he should know the answer. And when it came to the bizarre and inexplicable, one name was always worth an each-way bet. ‘Daniel?’ His voice soared.
‘Daniel.’
It had been dark, it had been wet, both of them had been shaken and the girl had quickly turned angry. Even allowing for that, and the fact that the photograph Voss produced showed a white unconscious face hung about by tubes against a white sheet, Daniel had no doubt it was the same girl. He nodded. His voice was low. ‘I thought we’d got away with it. She ran off: she seemed fine. I checked the hospital. They couldn’t find an admission that fitted.’
‘That’s because they only got her early this morning.’
Daniel flinched. ‘What was the problem – internal bleeding? Instead of getting better she was getting worse?’
‘She’s got a few bruises that probably date back to Monday, but that isn’t what knocked her out. It was a drug overdose.’
For perhaps half a minute Daniel just went on staring at him, with no idea how to react. His instinctive response was relief, because whether or not he was to blame for the accident he certainly didn’t give her drugs. Then he felt guilty for considering his own position when she was fighting for her life in hospital. Finally he decided that she’d still be in hospital if it had been his fault, so it was better that it wasn’t. He swallowed. ‘By drug overdose you mean illegal drugs?’
‘Indeed I do,’ nodded Voss. ‘Scram.’
‘Scram?’
‘I hadn’t heard of it a week ago either,’ admitted Voss. ‘It’s new, and potent. Three or four tablets seem to be a lethal dose.’
Daniel was reassessing the accident in the light of this information. ‘Is that why it happened? Was she high on Monday as well? Is that why she ran out into the road, and why she jumped up and ran off afterwards as if colliding with a car was nothing special?’ Behind the thick lenses his mild grey eyes sharpened. ‘Is that why she was saying those crazy things? She wasn’t lucid?’