Divine Poison

by AB Morgan

  ‘What planet am I on?’

  ‘There’s no need to be so dismissive. I’ve taped together some blank flipchart paper to make our timeline with, so if we use pencil and plastic Sylvanian people we can move things around easily.’ Emma smiled, full of satisfaction at her ingenuity.

  ‘You do know there is probably a way of doing this on a computer or a spreadsheet thing?’

  ‘Yes, but they can be hacked. This can’t. End of.’

  ‘You are without doubt the best and cleverest person I know.’ She is. Her mad preparations had cheered me up so much that I had shrugged off the horrors of the day within minutes of walking through the door. Unfortunately, I still had to update her with the gory guts and blood details of Ben’s death.

  ‘Shall we start with that and work backwards or do we start with Jan’s death and work forwards?’ Emma asked.

  ‘I think we actually have to start with Jan’s death but work backwards if we can, to when she met Liam Brookes. If you think about it, she must have known at some point that he was Nick Shafer. They went abroad together, so unless he had two passports, she would have had to know his real name and therefore his real occupation.’

  Emma nodded vigorously. ‘Better than that, I’m pretty certain she was working with him. Look at this.’ Emma produced a short email from Thomas Aitken of Aitken, Brown and Partners, which read: ‘Please thank Mrs C for producing such excellent pots of honey. These have been decorated and will be on offer as planned. It’s a shame you will have to be away, however, we anticipate a successful outcome, as the honey will be irresistible. I will write to you with the results and the letter will be waiting for you on your return.’

  ‘Blimey, that’s very cryptic.’

  ‘Mmm. What if the pots of honey were your journals? Make sense now?’ Emma asked with a twinkle.

  ‘I knew they weren’t real … shall we start the timeline with that? Journals created by Mrs C, then offered for auction with other similar items at Yarlsmere’s. A trap for whom?’

  ‘We don’t know. But it backfired somehow, because both Nick Shafer and Jan are dead.’ Emma paused and took a deep breath. I could feel the heat from her brain as it worked out the variables. ‘Do you have anything to indicate that Jan should have died at the same time as Nick Shafer?’ she asked.

  Jake appeared, ducking through the door to avoid hitting his head, and having just removed his wellies, he apologised for his smelly feet. He padded across the kitchen, announcing that he would return once he had showered. His welcome arrival gave me time to marshal my thoughts.

  ‘Yes, I bloody do,’ I said and quickly apologised to Emma for swearing as she gestured to the ceiling, reminding me of the young ears upstairs.

  Emma took a small sticky label, which she wrapped around a cocktail stick to make a flag. She wrote ‘Jan’ on the label and stabbed a Sylvanian hedgehog-person in the head with it. She did the same for ‘Liam’ writing ‘Nick’ on the other side of the label for accuracy. ‘That’s the first two victims. Nick died first so he can go at the beginning of the line until we can work out when. Now then, was the attempt to kill Jan carried out at the same time Nick was killed and in the same way?’

  ‘No. Jan was lucky. The French consultant, Dr Reynaud, assessed that Jan had ACS, which can be fatal, but you would have to take a whopping dose of an anticholinergic for that to happen. If they hadn’t treated her she could have died. Nick Shafer made the mistake of putting hyoscine hydrobromide in with her other medication which he took to the hospital for her, but she’s never been prescribed it. She used to have the occasional dose of procyclidine when she was on injections, but she was taking olanzapine tablets when she was in France and her old supply of liquid procyclidine was at home. The killer didn’t do their homework very well.’

  ‘Could she have escaped from the flat and broken the laptop before running into the streets stripping off her clothes?’ Emma suggested.

  ‘It would make sense. There’s a saying to recognise ACS. “Blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, the bowels and bladder will lose their tone, and the heart runs alone”. It’s a mnemonic. You see, I did learn something.’

  ‘Is it that dangerous?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Hyoscine is the same as scopolamine, I think. It kills, basically, by shutting down the nervous system so you stop breathing before you lose consciousness. Poisoners use it on people diagnosed with mental health problems because the side effects can mimic psychosis. Hence, “Mad as a hatter”. The poison gets missed as a cause until it’s too late. So, Jan was fortunate.’

  ‘You are a worry.’ Emma was giving me a strange look. ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has had a bad influence on you, I reckon.’ She laughed. ‘Let’s do one of those police diagrams.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll write what we know about each person on a separate sheet of flipchart paper and we should be able to piece together the connections, with any luck.’

  This plan paid dividends a few minutes later. Having reviewed what I knew about Jan Collins’s medical history, I decided to make a call to the French mental health unit in the hope that someone there spoke English and could find the answer to my question.

  ‘Bonsoir, Je m’appelle Monica Morris. Je suis une infirmiere psychiatrique d’Angleterre.’ I was trembling with nerves as I spoke, fearful that I was about to commit a dreadful language cock-up again. ‘Je ne parle pas Français très bien.’

  By divine intervention a confident reply in faultless English emanated from the phone. I had the good fortune to be speaking to a university student by the name of Sam from Herefordshire who, studying French and Business, was coming to the end of a three-month placement at the Hôpital Corbet. He was enhancing his understanding of French healthcare business processes. I couldn’t shut him up.

  Sam was young and technically competent. He was able to confirm who I was, and my professional relationship to Jan Collins, via the electronic records system. I put in my request for information about Jan’s medication as delivered by Nick Shafer. The hospital had his name recorded as Liam Brookes.

  ‘Oh, I remember him, and her,’ Sam said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, it was my first shift here, that evening. I chatted with Mrs Collins quite a lot when she was here. The nurses said she was really psychotic when she came in but she was getting better within a day or so. Also, I met her other half when he dropped off her belongings one evening. Although I wouldn’t have guessed that’s who he was, he was a bit short to be her boyfriend and he didn’t seem to want to see her. Then again, I s’pose that’s understandable, he was really pissed off that she’d broken their laptop. When she first came in she was still carrying the mains adaptor in one hand and a flash drive in the other, but that was totalled.’

  ‘Sorry? Totalled?’

  ‘Yeah, smashed to bits. Useless. We tried it to see if it would work. Look, I’ll see if we have a list of your patient’s meds that the boyfriend delivered and I’ll phone you back.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s okay? It would be great if you can. Before you go, can I just clarify a small matter with you? You said that Jan’s boyfriend was shorter than her, I’ve never met him and we are trying to track him down. Can you describe him?’

  Emma had seen something in my face that indicated trouble.

  ‘Em, I need to swear. A lot.’

  She took me into her cool, dark, thick-walled larder and watched me as I put both hands up to either side of my face and whispered, ‘Fuck a doodle do, Em, Nick Shafer didn’t visit Jan in hospital. It was another man. Shorter than Jan, about your height by the sounds of it, mousy, short, neat hair, grey eyes, but no obvious features apart from missing most of his little finger on his left hand. Who the fucking hell was he?’

  When my blood pressure had finally returned to a normal range, we left the soundproofed larder, but stepping into the kitchen we both screamed, hugging each other, confronted by a man in full motorbike leathers removing his helmet.

/>   ‘Max, you bloody idiot! You scared the life out of us.’ We laughed at our own nervous response to my husband who, for once, had listened to the telephone message that I left him.

  He knew that two patient deaths in as many months would threaten to break my steadfast and strong exterior, and he was right. The cracks were beginning to show, but as things stood, only Max and Emma had noticed their appearance. My forgetfulness, unusual emotional responses to situations, doubts and uncertainties about my abilities; the signs were there.

  The evening descended into farce when Deefer, on hearing Max’s voice, thundered down the stairs, barged the door open and ran into the kitchen dressed as Little Miss Muffet. He had a lacy bonnet on his head and a frilly blue dress covering the front half of his muscular body. The rear half was wagging madly. Max was appalled.

  ‘What have they done to you? Who has turned my four-legged friend into “Transvestite Dog”?’ A giggling Jake appeared behind Deefer and took a photo, before both Max and Jake trooped upstairs to tickle the children, as a punishment for turning our dog into a girl.

  As a result of the disruption, it was some time, a cuppa and a portion of lasagne later, before we resumed our investigations into the possible reasons behind the deaths of Jan, Nick, Father Joseph, and Ben. We had originally agreed to meet to resolve our concerns over the break-ins at our homes so there were unspoken fears that matters had taken a more sinister turn.

  Emma had already done a considerable amount of background research into Nick Shafer, based on the contents of his office, and she was desperate to share this.

  ‘I have really vital info I need us to think about and we need our combined brains. Then we should split up the work depending on the questions we have at the end. Does that make sense?’

  Emma had the floor. She paused to let Jake’s mother take a cup of tea into the lounge. Grandma Frost had settled the girls for bed and was desperate to put her feet up and watch her favourite soaps on the telly. ‘Goodnight, young people.’

  ‘Goodnight, Grandma Frost,’ we chorused like a scene from The Waltons.

  Emma began.

  ‘Facts: Nick Shafer was a journalist and he was being paid through Aitken, Brown and Partners with instructions coming directly from a Thomas Aitken. I have also uncovered that Nick had email correspondence with a man called Mike Rezendes, an investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, who works for the Boston Globe in the US. Bear with me on this. Mike Rezendes is part of a team on a magazine called Spotlight. They investigated and exposed systemic organisational child abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic Church. They published a couple of years ago and the earth-shattering ripples are still rolling outwards. The Spotlight team identified that the Catholic Church were aware of abuse and covered it up for decades. This does not relate to one wayward sick priest. It involves hundreds of them.’

  There was silence for a while before I spoke.

  ‘Is that what we have stumbled into? It’s possible. We know there are connections between Father Raymond and Jan, Nick and the Tierney family. There is also a link to Father Joseph, who Ben has publicly accused of abuse. Most people believe that Father Joseph has only been in Lensham for four years, but this is his second stint as priest at St Francis’ Church, I heard him say so myself.

  ‘Em, if your proposition turns out to be correct, then Benito Tierney has not been paranoid. He was telling the truth about Father Joseph. I know other people didn’t believe him, but I did. Could he have been telling the truth about the other conspiracy claptrap he came out with?’ I asked, incredulous at the enormity of the suggestion.

  ‘Let’s put it as our hypothesis and work it through.’ Emma reached for the Sylvanian hedgehog-people that she had labelled earlier, and placed them on the centre of the table.

  ‘Jan and Nick here, were working together. We must assume they both reported to Thomas Aitken. There is question number one. Who is Thomas Aitken? Max and Jake, how about you follow up on that one? I’ll give you the emails, letters, and anything relating to Nick’s life as a journalist that we salvaged from his desk. Max, you know about the contents of the journals, but we think that these were deliberately created by Jan and Nick as some sort of trap that backfired. Here’s the info on that.’

  Jake, Max, and I stared at Emma in disbelief. She was behaving like a detective inspector. A woman on a personal mission, she had copied information, collated it, and placed the relevant paperwork into large envelopes. She was in charge of operations.

  ‘Who are the goodies and who are the baddies?’

  Emma was irritated by Max’s flippancy. ‘Look, Max, this is serious. We have four deaths. We don’t know if the police can be trusted, we don’t know if the likes of Father Raymond or the church groups can be trusted. We have no idea who stole the journals or why. Monica and I have strong suspicions that deliberate poisoning has been the cause of three out of the four deaths.’

  Max held his hands up. ‘Whoa there, Emma, I was being serious. Are we to assume that Thomas Aitken is someone on the right side of the law, or do we consider him to present a risk to us? If he is a goodie then who are the baddies?’

  Emma gave Max a squeeze of apology. ‘You lovely big bear. I’m sorry. Jake and I have been awake for hours each night puzzling over this. Is our family at risk? If so, who from and why?’

  20

  ‘Can I say something?’ I asked, stirring my cup of tea to help focus my thoughts. ‘We have drifted miles away from our timeline plan. Can we please stick to that and work through the basics?’

  We laid the Sylvanian hedgehog-people out in order of death. Next to hedgehog-Nick we placed a Sylvanian mouse-person labelled with a question mark.

  ‘Nick was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning,’ I said.

  ‘Was he? We’ve been told that he was. But was he?’ Emma asked. ‘Write that down as a question to be answered or confirmed.’ She was right, I realised. This was so complicated that we had to be sure of the facts; we couldn’t afford to make assumptions, but without taking a best guess we couldn’t begin to unravel the mystery.

  ‘Yep. Good point. We think Jan escaped being killed in France at the same time as Nick and we also think she deliberately smashed their laptop. Was this to ensure that their killer could not access the contents? This would make sense. It could be the reason why the same person, the man with half a finger, broke into our homes to steal the hardcopy items relating to Jan and Nick’s investigation.’

  ‘Then your patient, Jan Collins, was followed back to England and killed by Half-finger-man, making it look like suicide. He had cleverly led everyone to believe that Liam Brookes had been alive and had visited Jan in hospital in France, when, in fact, Nick Shafer was already dead,’ reminded Max. ‘Or was Jan killed by Half-finger-man at all? Correct me if I’m wrong, Mon, but didn’t you say that Father Raymond had access to Jan’s house, had befriended her and visited her in Pargiter Ward? And it was Father Raymond who led everyone to believe that Liam Brookes aka Nick Shafer was a cunning trickster after Jan’s money? That’s no way for a man of God to behave, now is it?’

  Jake stood. ‘Right. All agreed? We identify one possible perpetrator mice-person, as Father Raymond.’ Jake was impassive as he made a label and stabbed Raymond-mouse in the head with a cocktail stick. We looked at each other. I began to have grave doubts about where our guesses were taking us.

  ‘Stop, stop. This can’t be right. None of it. Father Raymond doesn’t have half a pinkie and he’s not shorter than me and he’s easily recognisable. What’s more, he seems so genuine.’ I’m sure it was a nervous reaction, but I couldn’t help myself. This was ludicrous. ‘Look at us! Mice-people killing hedgehog-people because the Church needs to cover up abuse. We’ve got so carried away with ourselves.’

  Max and Jake didn’t laugh. They were ignoring my odd response by reading through the information that Emma had given them in an envelope earlier, looking for reference to Father Raymond. They had copies of the photos taken at the au
ction. ‘I’m certain we are in the middle of a whole heap of trouble,’ Jake piped up. He asked us who we thought would go to the lengths of photographing people at an auction, of writing a fictional account of abuse and murder and ‘goodness knows what else.’

  ‘Shit. Look who it is. There in the background.’ Max was pointing to one of the photos at the auction. The Father was standing next to me in the foreground. We were smiling and relaxed. There, several rows back, was the head of Charlie Adams.

  What did this mean? ‘God, is Charlie a goodie or a baddie?’ asked Emma looking at Max for an answer. ‘If Father Raymond is a baddie, then is it safe to assume that Charlie is onto something and that he is a goodie?’

  ‘Could be. Maybe he was there spying on behalf of Aitken, Brown and Partners to see what happened to the journals. We could ask him,’ suggested Max.

  Emma was beginning to flag. It was getting late and we were all tired after a day at work. We needed a plan of action. Despite her weariness Emma made a stunning proposal.

  ‘Instead of asking Charlie why he was there, why don’t we pretend that we know nothing about it? We discuss the journals and the auction with him at the weekend and see if he tells us. I think we should set him up. Make him prove himself. We don’t know who to trust apart from each other and I’m not keen to disclose our investigations to him. I have the children to consider.’

  My crapometer was registering significantly high readings as a result of my friend’s concerns. Emma was usually stoical and not easily unnerved, so to hear her make a statement about fearing a risk to her family had me worried.

  ‘So, we are saying this is serious. Father Raymond and a man with half a finger may be responsible for four deaths between them. We have what they’re looking for and the police are covering up crimes.’ As I said this, I began to feel stupid for being dismissive previously. This was no laughing matter. ‘If Charlie turns out to be a goodie, then we should get a label ready for DI Lynch, Charlie’s boss. In the meantime, can we please label a mouse-person as Half-finger-man?’