Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  ‘The poison?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Aluminium-based – possibly a phosphide. The chemistry here is very difficult, Shaw. I’ve sent a blood sample away, but we’ll get a better reading from the organs. Tom says there was an industrial rat poison at the Clockcase Cannery, so that could be it. But there’s no way at the moment I can be sure. Also, a phosphide is usually delivered as a gas – for fumigation. In powder form, such as our poisoner would have used, I don’t know what sort of concentration we’re dealing with.’

  ‘But it’s lethal?’ said Valentine.

  ‘Well, no, clearly it isn’t, is it?’ She glared at Valentine. ‘Because several people ingested large quantities and are still alive. But in this case it is the patient’s reaction which proved lethal, if I can put it like that. And I don’t understand that either, entirely. But as I say, he was already a dying man. So we’ll have to wait for the lab report. Clear?’

  George Valentine had an answer to that, but he kept it to himself.

  They moved to the second mortuary table and the sheet was removed to reveal Sam Venn. An identical autopsy was completed in half the time. Venn turned out to be a much healthier corpse than his one-time schoolfriend Freddie Fletcher.

  Justina took them out into Tom Hadden’s lab, to the desk she used when in the building. She sat on the edge of it and drank more of the black coffee.

  ‘Similar – but different,’ she said. ‘Different because his body has reacted violently to the ingestion of the poison, but over a longer period of time. There may be complications related to his cerebral palsy, or possibly any medication he took to relieve pain in his muscles or bones due to the disease. I’ll check. Similar because I suspect the actual cause of death was pulmonary oedema – essentially, a build-up of fluid in the lungs, like our other victim. I think death occurred not long after he got him self to bed – six hours perhaps, maybe ten. So that would make the time of death somewhere between ten last night and two this morning. I did a quick blood test and we have traces of the same poison in Venn’s blood as Fletcher’s – though at a somewhat lower concentration than many of the diners. But again we need expert toxicology, and for that we need to send away, and for that we need you to sign the forms, Peter.’

  Shaw had his head in his hands, elbows on one of the desks, trying to think.

  ‘Why didn’t he raise the alarm – call a doctor?’

  ‘Well – we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘My guess would be that he felt ill, went to bed because he thought it was just food poisoning. If he’d slept at all, or even lost consciousness, then the oedema would have accelerated. By the time he knew he was in trouble it was too late.’

  ‘But the way we found the body – the Bible – it was like he’d laid himself out,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Yes. I agree. I can’t explain that.’

  But Shaw could. He couldn’t dislodge the conviction that Sam Venn had accepted death.

  ‘Overall, then – taking the three deaths together – what can we say?’ he asked. ‘Did you do the other victim?’

  She shook her head. ‘John Blacker examined Mr Clarke’s body – but I’ve got the file. The first victim was exceptionally frail – any kind of body shock would have killed him. It did.’ She took off her hairnet. ‘We’ve got a hundred and three people exposed to the danger of poisoning by an aluminium-based toxin. Sixty-one ingest poison – in varying amounts, but at a constant concentration. It could be a batch of faulty cans – but the coroner’s officer tells me there are suspicions of foul play? Sabotage? Well. Maybe. But the three who died did so because they were susceptible to any shock to the system.’

  ‘So, a random poisoning. Three victims die due to physical weaknesses, but each weakness is different,’ said Shaw.

  The pathologist nodded. ‘If you like. But as I say – that’s a guess at this stage, and not my finding.’

  ‘There’s something we didn’t tell you,’ said Shaw. He said it quickly, unsettled by the thought that the pathologist was his friend and that he’d led her astray.

  He looked away, watching Hadden working on-screen, so that he wouldn’t catch her eye. ‘Well, several things. First, the cans didn’t fail; a toxic substance was added to each before they were sealed. We have the culprit in custody. Second, two of the three victims – the two next door – are suspects in a murder case. A third suspect should have been sitting at the same table for lunch. The chances we have two random victims who are our suspects is one in ten thousand. George worked it out – he’s good with numbers. And we know the poison was definitely the powder used to kill rats at the cannery, and that it was aluminium phosphide.’

  The pathologist glared at them, then turned her back, refilling her coffee cup. Shaw estimated it would take her twenty seconds to work out they’d done the right thing. Now, armed with all the facts, she could come to a scientific conclusion.

  It took her ten seconds. ‘Right. Well, my position is clear. It is entirely possible that sixty-one people given a metal-based rat poison would survive. Such a poison is not even completely effective on rats. But if we’re saying these men were targeted then there must be a secondary factor. Without the information that the victims were linked I – or any other competent pathologist – would have been happy to rest with the causes of death I’ve outlined. Clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ said Shaw. ‘But what do you mean by “secondary factor”?’

  ‘Well, it appears, doesn’t it, that someone knew these two men would be particularly susceptible to the poison. Someone knew them well – better than they knew themselves. A doctor? Family – friends? Even if they did know their medical history, however, there is no way they could have been sure the dose would be lethal. The human body isn’t that predictable.

  ‘Or maybe it was the way in which the poison was ingested. Did someone put poison in their drinks, for example – the same poison? That might mean that while they each took a similar dose it was ingested more quickly. I need to know more about the toxicology – and as I’ve said, that will take time. Tom needs to be brought up to speed – I hope we’ve got all the relevant physical evidence from the scene – cups, plates, seating plan?’

  Shaw nodded, hoping they had, too.

  ‘And the third man – the intended third victim – what happened to him?’ she asked.

  ‘John Joe Murray. He gave someone else his ticket. The man he gave it to was poisoned instead, but has recovered.’

  ‘It would be instructive to medically examine Mr Murray. Is he old, ailing, ill? In other words was he – is he – susceptible to such a poison?’

  ‘About fifty. Drinks and smokes, but otherwise fit,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Problem is, he’s missing,’ said Shaw. ‘We’re on his trail, but currently there’s no sign of him.’

  Shaw’s phone buzzed, and he heard Valentine’s ring tone – a Bakelite-telephone bell. Simultaneous calls – always a bad sign. They had the same text, from DC Jacky Lau: BODY FOUND IN WOODS AT HOLKHAM.

  34

  Holkham Drive was a grand place to die. Originally it had led from the portico of Holkham Hall down through the woods to the dunes and the beach beyond. Victorian picnic parties would have ridden down in carriages to eat out on tartan rugs. Somewhere in the pine woods it was said the royal family had had a beach hut. Now it led to a car park, a hut which sold refreshments in summer, and the notice boards outlining the birds that could be seen amongst the pines or out at the water’s edge, where seals basked. Midweek, in winter, it was a mile of deserted track, a foot deep in snow, the road barred, leading into the pines where the shadows were dark and green.

  At the top, by the main road, there was a ticket kiosk, closed up for the winter. Shaw and Valentine drove past, thudding over the sleeping policemen, through the barred gate, heading for the cluster of police and emergency-vehicle lights down by the trees. The snow clouds had gone to reveal a moonless night sky of stars. Most of the light came from the snow on the fields. As Shaw got out of the car he heard d
eer bolting from the woods. He imagined that the beach beyond the protective barrier of pines would be a landscape of white surf because he could feel, through his feet, the rhythmic thud of the breakers falling.

  Valentine got out of the Porsche while Shaw made a further request for back-up to St James’s. Behind them, on the track, they could see Tom Hadden in one of the forensic unit vans, edging through the snow. Valentine stood in the night air, leaning on the car, oddly elated that there was a chance they’d found Voyce, even if they’d found him too late. The skin on his fingers stuck to the Porsche’s roof, a sudden ice seal forming between flesh and supercooled metal. He pulled his hand back, as if from a burn, and gave up on the Silk Cut he’d been ready to light since they’d left St James’s, slipping it into his pocket.

  DC Jacky Lau walked towards them, a silhouette against the crime-scene lights. Without the sunglasses Shaw thought her face betrayed tension, the jawline set hard, the eyes catching the electric light.

  ‘You found him?’

  ‘No, sir. One of the foot units. It’s taken a bit of time to sort it out. PC who stumbled on him, on a track, thought it was roadkill – and believe me, it’s an easy mistake to make. It’s off in the woods, no one goes there in winter, as I said, but this isn’t far from where the car freaks saw the lights. There’s an estate cottage up by the road and they sometimes see the odd car. Lovers’ lane, apparently, if you’re desperate.’

  She was walking now, leading them into the woods.

  ‘They’ve seen nothing for weeks. But on Tuesday night, when the lights were spotted, there was a storm blowing. So they wouldn’t have heard.’ Shaw recalled the sea spray at Hunstanton, washing over the front.

  Hadden walked past them with a woman Shaw didn’t recognize – both were in SOC suits, and they had a collapsible forensic tent between them. A line of crime tape led deeper into the woods. Then they were there – an open area through which ran a partly metalled track. Two uniformed PCs stood by something in the frozen mud, their boots lit by torches held down.

  They waited while Hadden put the tent up: thirty seconds of practised craft. A light went on in the tent, illuminating the neat square, and Shaw thought of the Chinese lantern he’d lit with Fran on the beach that summer when they’d camped out in front of the café. They’d watched it rise to a single point of light, then flicker and die: a vision of freedom. But here in the woods all Shaw could smell was the dampness of the rotting earth.

  This moment, when Shaw would have to lift aside the plastic sheeting to enter the tent, was one that always troubled him, because it reminded him that he did have a choice. He could walk away instead. The urge got stronger every time. He fought it.

  Roadkill was right. Jimmy Voyce’s body had been crushed diagonally across the torso, from the right shoulder to the left hip, leaving the head and legs uninjured. The corpse had been squashed down into the snow, which still dusted the remains. Valentine was struck by the lack of blood. He was always struck by the lack of blood, because his imagination always painted the most lurid crimson scene. The head was looking up, and but for the tent he’d have been staring into the canopy of pines.

  Hadden was down on his knees. ‘Looks like a hit and run.’ He straightened up. ‘Looks like. But I don’t think it is.’

  Valentine studied Hadden’s box of tricks – forensic gear in a suitcase, an ordered clinical array of brushes, jars and tapes.

  ‘Here,’ said Hadden, indicating Voyce’s left leg, just above the ankle. There was a graze, cut deep, with the blood showing in stipples.

  ‘The vehicle’s gone over him and the tyres cut down through the ribcage, crushing the vital organs, but the legs are clear of that, so this injury, on the leg, was inflicted before the impact.’

  Hadden pushed Valentine to one side and they saw that he’d been standing next to a grid in the forest road, like a gutter drain. When the wind dropped, and the trees stopped whispering, they could hear water gurgling through the iron cover.

  Hadden took out a map – Ordnance Survey, in high detail. He checked it against a hand-held GPS. ‘I think we’re actually on a bridge here,’ said Hadden. ‘A shallow bridge over the sluice which drains the marsh.’ He folded the map under his arm. ‘Notice the alignment of the leg with the pre-mortem injury – it points back to the grid. Also …’ He lifted the leg and manipulated the knee. They heard a crunch of shattered cartilage. ‘Knee’s dislocated, well – that’s an understatement. It’s pretty much severed at the joint. Know what I think?’

  He lifted the top drawer of his toolbox clear and took out a piece of nylon rope about four feet long.

  ‘Justina will give you the official version – but here’s a fact.’ He closed his eyes tightly, so that the lids vibrated. ‘You hit a human body with a vehicle – any vehicle – and it can’t inflict an injury like this. One chance in a thousand, perhaps – no more. That’s because when the body is hit, it begins to travel with the vehicle, which minimizes the trauma. That won’t save your life, but it does mean the injuries are limited. In other words, the impact is all over in a split second. After that the body’s effectively stuck to the vehicle. That has not happened here. What we have here is a vehicle hitting someone who couldn’t move. In this case, a glancing blow, otherwise the leg would have been severed.’

  He looked down at Voyce’s body. Shaw realized that in places he could see through the corpse to the roadway below.

  ‘He was tied in place?’ asked Valentine. He didn’t mean to whisper, but his throat had constricted because his body was thinking about being sick.

  ‘Well, that’s my guess. He was certainly tied …here.’ He placed a finger in a green forensic glove on the friction burn on the leg. ‘And it’s possible the other end of the rope was looped round the grating of the drain cover.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Shaw. ‘Why tie him down – then run him over? If you can tie him down you could hit him, put him out, then finish him off with the car.’

  ‘Punishment – like an execution?’ offered Hadden.

  ‘Or interrogation,’ said Shaw. ‘You tie him to the grate. Then ask your questions. Turn the car headlights on, then ask again. Then finish it.’

  ‘Either way it’s a cool bit of work,’ said Hadden, using the rope from the toolbox to test his theory. ‘Professional. A contract killing?’

  Shaw shook his head. ‘No – that’s what he wants us to think,’ he said. He thought about Bobby Mosse’s calculated part-confession in the dunes the night before. He’d set the scene. Voyce was mixing company with the Tulleys, people who could do something like this. People who did it for a living.

  ‘This kind of impact would buckle the car bumper – do other damage?’ asked Shaw.

  Hadden was nodding. ‘Maybe. Certainly there’d be blood, bone, tissue stuck to the vehicle.’

  Shaw thought about Voyce’s car, burnt out, down the coast. They needed to double-check for structural damage. It was a hired car, they’d have a record of existing bumps and scrapes.

  Then he thought about Bobby Mosse’s black BMW. A powerful machine, a lethal weapon. Even a glancing blow would have killed Voyce if he’d been tied to the drain cover. If Mosse had used the BMW he’d have cleaned the vehicle. But Shaw knew just how tenacious trace forensic evidence could be. He jogged to the Porsche and pulled a U-turn, then made a call on his mobile while he waited for Valentine to catch up. On the coast road they hit 90 mph, the marshes a blur on the offside, Jacky Lau’s Mégane struggling to keep up, and out at sea, falling across the pin-sharp star fields, a meteor, as if the sky was falling in.

  35

  Ian Murray saw the same meteor fall. He was a hundred yards from the old coal barn, so he cut the engine and drifted, watching the night sky. It was like an omen, he thought. Here, inside the protective arc of the outer sand dunes, the sea was just choppy, slapping against the fibreglass hull of the Sandpiper. The boat had been another one of his ideas – in summer they’d hire one of the fishermen to take out guests from Morsto
n House to see the birds on the marsh. You’d be surprised what you could charge, he’d told Bea. Thirty pounds a head; forty. A minute passed and more meteors fell, this time a dozen, like stardust thrown across the sky. The coal barn was a black silhouette against the churning water. A wavelet caught the Sandpiper side-on, the spray soaking Ian, so that he decided to fire the engine back into life.

  John Joe Murray was waiting for him on the stone quay. He grabbed the line that his stepson threw. When he got ashore John Joe went to hug him but the young man looked away, letting the awkward moment pass. That should have been the first sign that something wasn’t right, but John Joe missed it; or rather he misinterpreted it, thinking it was just a fresh estrangement, another notch on the spectrum of distance as his stepson moved emotionally closer to the father he’d never known. It was a cruel moment, John Joe thought to himself, because in his life he’d done so much that was wrong, even shameful, but he’d never once tried to hurt Ian. He’d never aspired to being a good man, but in his stepson he’d invested all that was good in himself.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘I told Bea.’ He helped Ian haul out a fresh bag of provisions. ‘But thanks,’ he added.

  They stood apart, listening to the waves thudding out on the sandbank at sea. The ghost of Pat Garrison seemed to stand between them.

  ‘I made tortilla, the way you like it,’ said Ian, handing him a parcel in silver paper. It had been their last holiday together, to Galicia, as a family. Ian, just sixteen, had collected recipes for the restaurant that was his dream. And that was the thing that John Joe was proud of still – the fact that he had dreams, as he’d had a dream, and he liked to think that was something he’d given Ian, not something that had come down to him through some arid string of DNA.

  Ian lugged the provisions inside the stone barn, looking round the ground floor, clogged with flotsam and old nets.

  ‘Go up,’ said John Joe. ‘The tide comes in now – tonight, it’s a high tide, it’ll flood.’