Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Yes. So what do you think killed her?’

  ‘At a guess, and it’s just a guess until we get toxicology results, I’d say it was strychnine poisoning.’

  ‘It crossed my mind, too, though I’m far from being an expert. I’ve never actually seen a case before. I’ve only read about it in textbooks,’ said Banks.

  ‘Me, too. It’s really quite rare these days. But that would cause the convulsions. She’d have been thrashing herself about the tiny stall quite enough to cause the bruises and contusions you saw on her body. Her back was also arched in a way indicative of final strychnine spasms – it’s called opisthotonos – and you must have noticed the way the facial muscles were twisted in a sort of extreme grimace, or grin – risus sardonicus – and the darkness of the face, the wild, staring eyes?’

  The images were impossible to forget, and Banks knew he would have nightmares about them for years, the way he still had about the disembowelled Soho prostitute, Dawn Wadley.

  ‘I’m hesitant to commit myself without a full tox check, but that won’t take long. It’s one of the easiest poisonous substances to test for. I’ve never investigated a death by strychnine before, but that’s what it looks like to me. Only my immediate impressions, mind you. I also touched a little of the powder to my tongue. Along with the numbness caused by the cocaine, there’s a bitter taste, associated with strychnine.’

  ‘What killed her? Heart?’

  ‘She’d have died of asphyxiation, most likely, or maybe just sheer exhaustion from the convulsions. Her neck may be broken too, but you’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to confirm that. Not pretty, whichever way you look at it.’

  ‘No. Deliberate, though?’

  ‘Oh, I would think so, wouldn’t you? And I’d pretty much rule out suicide, for a start. Even if she did want to kill herself, strychnine is hardly the drug of choice. I’ve never heard of a case. Besides, from what I can tell, it was mixed with cocaine. That means she was looking for a good time, not for death.’

  ‘Any chance it could just be a bad batch?’

  ‘There’s always a chance of that. Dealers use all kinds of weird substances to step on the drugs they sell, including strychnine. But not usually enough to kill a person.’

  ‘How much would that be?’

  ‘It varies. Doses as low as five milligrams can kill, especially if they’re absorbed directly into the bloodstream and bypass the digestive system. We’ll soon find out if it was a bad batch, anyway.’

  ‘You mean we’ll have a whole spate of them?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Banks.

  ‘It depends on a number of factors. As I said, a fatal dose can vary widely. What killed this girl might not kill just anyone. She was pretty thin, and it doesn’t look as if she ate much. Somebody with more body weight, someone more solid, more robust . . . who can say? But we’ll hear about it if it happens.’

  Banks remembered how Emily hadn’t eaten lunch. Darren said she hadn’t eaten dinner, either. ‘But if she inhaled it, the stomach contents wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Not as much as if she’d ingested it, no. But general health and stomach contents are all factors we have to take into account.’

  ‘And if it’s not a bad batch, then someone had it in for her specifically.’

  ‘That just about sums it up. Either way you look at it, somebody killed her. But that’s your realm, isn’t it? Ah, here come the cosmonauts.’

  Banks looked up and saw the SOCOs entering in their white boiler suits.

  ‘I’ll arrange for the mortuary wagon,’ said Dr Burns. ‘I’d better tell them they’ll probably need a crowbar to prise her out of there. And I’ll get in touch with Dr Glendenning first thing in the morning. Knowing him, he’ll have her opened up by lunchtime.’ He stood, but paused a moment before leaving. ‘Did you know her, Alan? You seem to be taking this very much to heart.’

  ‘I knew her slightly,’ said Banks. ‘I might as well tell you now. You’ll find out soon enough. She’s the chief constable’s daughter.’

  Dr Burns’s reaction was exactly the same as Annie’s.

  ‘And, Doc?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let’s keep this under our hats for the time being, shall we? The strychnine.’

  ‘My lips are sealed.’ Dr Burns turned and left.

  For a moment, Banks stood alone watching the spinning disco lights and listening to mumbled conversations around him. Peter Darby came out of the toilet and said he’d got what he wanted. The SOCOs were in there taking the place apart, collecting samples for analysis. Banks didn’t envy them the task of working in a toilet; you never knew what you might catch. Vic Manson would soon be dusting for prints, of which he’d probably find as many as the SOCOs would pubic hairs, and before long the mortuary wagon would come and whisk Emily Riddle’s body off to the basement of Eastvale Infirmary.

  All so bloody predictable, routines Banks had been part of time and time again. But this time he wanted to cry. Cry and get rat-arsed. He couldn’t help but remember Emily’s excited talk about her future that lunchtime, about how she didn’t fancy Poughkeepsie or Bryn Mawr because of the sound of their names. He remembered the time she turned up at the hotel in London, passing herself off as his daughter, how her dress slid to the ground and he saw her white and naked. Remembered her stoned, adolescent attempt at seducing him. God, if only she knew how close she’d come. Then the way she curled up in the foetal position like a little child on the bed, her thumb in her mouth, the blanket covering her, while he sat in the armchair smoking and listening to Dawn Upshaw sing about sleep and the way the windows rattled and the winter sun rose and tried to claw its way through the grey, greasy clouds.

  Dead.

  And perhaps because of him, because he had respected his vow of discretion and done nothing, despite all his misgivings.

  Annie came over from the table where she had been talking to Emily’s friends. Banks told her what Dr Burns had said about strychnine. Annie whistled. ‘Learn anything over there?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a lot. They say she seemed a bit high when she arrived at the Cross Keys, and they’re certain she took something here the first time she went to the toilet.’

  ‘Same as Darren says. Can’t have been the same batch, though, can it?’

  ‘I suppose not. Do you believe them?’

  ‘For the most part. Maybe we’ll lean on them a bit harder tomorrow. What it looks like is that the first lot she snorted made her feel ill shortly afterwards, so she went back for more and the convulsions hit.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘We can start by searching everyone on the premises. They’re all suspects at the moment, including the bar staff. Can you get that organized?’

  ‘Of course. I very much doubt we’d have any problems arguing reasonable suspicion, do you?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ PACE rules stated that you had to have ‘reasonable suspicion’ before searching people, and if you searched them somewhere other than at a police station without first arresting them, you had to have reasonable grounds for assuming they might be a danger to themselves or others. With the chief constable’s daughter lying dead of possible strychnine poisoning only a few yards away, Banks didn’t think they’d have much trouble arguing their case. ‘Take it easy, though. If anyone kicks up a fuss, take them over to the station and have the custody officer deal with them. I want this done by the book. You’d better let Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe know, too.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘I also want all the known coke dealers in the area brought in for questioning. And we’ll need to activate the incident room over at the station.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We might not be able to get everything in order until morning – especially as far as the civilian staff are concerned – but in the meantime we’ll need an office manager.’

  ‘DC Rickerd?’

  Banks looked at Rickerd, who was taking a statement at the other side of the club.
‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Let him show his mettle.’

  While Rickerd demonstrated only minimal detective skills, he had an almost obsessive interest in details and the minutiae of organization: exactly what a good office manager needed, as it was his job to supervise the recording and tracking of all information retrieved both from a crime scene and during an investigation.

  If truth be told, you needed more than a skill for organization, but Rickerd would do. Maybe he would find his true métier. Banks always knew that having a trainspotter in the department would come in useful one day. Rickerd was just the kind to carry around that little book full of printed train numbers and draw a neat line with pen and ruler through each one he actually saw. He was too young for the steam trains, though. When Banks was a kid, there were still a few of them in service, many with exotic names like The Flying Scotsman, sleek, streamlined beauties. Many of Banks’s friends had been trainspotters, but standing on a windy station platform all day and noting down numbers to cross off later in a little book had never appealed to him. These days, with all the diesels looking like clones of one another, there didn’t seem to be much point in trainspotting any more.

  Banks called Rickerd over and explained what he wanted him to do. Rickerd went off looking pleased with himself to be given such responsibility. Then Banks lit a cigarette and leaned against a pillar. ‘I’d better go and tell her parents,’ he sighed.

  ‘One of the uniforms can do that.’ Annie put her hand on his arm in a curiously intimate gesture. ‘To be quite honest, Alan, you look all in. Maybe you should let me take you home.’

  Wouldn’t that be nice? Banks thought. Home. Annie. Maybe even bed. The adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez drifting up from downstairs. The clock put back so that none of this had ever happened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to tell them myself. I owe them that much.’

  Annie frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What do you owe them?’

  Banks smiled. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later.’ Then he walked up the stairs to the deserted market square.

  Banks felt sick and heavy with dread as he approached the Riddles’ house close to one thirty that morning. The Old Mill stood in almost complete darkness behind the privet hedge, but a glimmer of light showed through the curtains of one of the ground-floor rooms, and Banks wondered if it had been left on as a means of discouraging burglars. He knew it hadn’t when he saw the curtain twitch at the sound of his car on the gravel drive. He should have known Jimmy Riddle would be up working well after midnight. Hard work and long hours were what had got him where he was in the first place.

  When he turned the engine off, he could hear the old millrace running down the garden. He hardly had time to knock before a hall light came on and the door opened. Riddle stood there in an Oxford shirt and grey chinos; it was the first time Banks had seen him in casual dress.

  ‘Banks? I thought that was your car. What on earth . . .?’

  But his voice trailed off as recognition that something was seriously wrong crept into his features. Whether he’d been a good one or not, Riddle had been a copper for long enough to know that the call in the middle of night was hardly a social one; he knew enough to read the expression on Banks’s face.

  ‘Maybe we could sit down, have a drink,’ Banks said, as Riddle stood aside to let him in.

  ‘Tell me first,’ said Riddle, leaning back on the door after he closed it.

  Banks couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. The honorific sounded odd even as he spoke the word; he had never called Riddle ‘sir’ before, except in a sarcastic tone.

  ‘It’s Emily, isn’t it?’

  Banks nodded.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Sir.’ Banks took Riddle’s elbow and guided him into the living room. Riddle collapsed into an armchair and Banks found the cocktail cabinet. He poured them both a stiff whisky; he was beyond worrying about drink-driving at that point. Riddle held the glass but didn’t drink from it right away.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What happened? How?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet, sir.’

  ‘Was there an accident? A car crash?’

  ‘No. It was nothing like that.’

  ‘Out with it, man. This is my daughter we’re talking about.’

  ‘I know that, sir. That’s why I’m trying to tread softly.’

  ‘Too late for that, Banks. What was it? Drugs?’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘What do you mean, “partly”? Either it was or it wasn’t. Tell me what happened to her!’

  Banks paused. It was a terrible thing to tell a dead girl’s father how painfully she had died, but he reminded himself that Riddle was also chief constable, a professional, and he would find out soon enough, anyway. Best he find out now. ‘We’re keeping this strictly confidential for the time being, but Dr Burns thinks it might have been cocaine spiked with strychnine.’

  Riddle jerked forward and spilled some whisky on his trousers. He didn’t even bother to wipe it off. ‘Strychnine! My God, how . . .? I don’t understand.’

  ‘She was taking cocaine at a nightclub in Eastvale,’ Banks said. ‘The Bar None. You might have heard of it?’

  Riddle shook his head.

  ‘Anyway, if the doctor is right, somebody must have put strychnine in her cocaine.’

  ‘Christ, Banks, do you realize what you’re saying?’

  ‘I do, sir. I’m saying that, in all likelihood, your daughter was murdered.’

  ‘Is this some sort of sick joke?’

  ‘Believe me, I wish it were.’

  Riddle ran his hand over his shiny bald skull, a gesture Banks had often thought ridiculous in the past; now it reeked of despair. He drank some of his whisky before asking the hopeless question everyone asks in his situation: ‘You’re sure there’s no mistake?’

  ‘No mistake, sir. I saw her myself. I know it’s no consolation, but it must have been very fast,’ Banks lied. ‘She can’t have suffered very much.’

  ‘Rubbish. I’m not an idiot, Banks. I’ve studied the textbook. I know what strychnine does. She’d have gone into convulsions, bent her spine. She’d have—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Banks said. ‘There’s no sense torturing yourself.’

  ‘Who?’ Riddle asked. ‘Who would want to do something like that to Emily?’

  ‘Have you noticed anything strange while she’s been here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about today, the last few days? Any changes in her behaviour?’

  ‘No. Look, you went to London, Banks. You found her. What about the people she was hanging around with down there? This Clough character. Do you think he could have had something to do with it?’

  Banks paused. Barry Clough had been the first to come to his mind when Dr Burns had told him about the poisoned cocaine. He also remembered how Emily had told him that Clough hated to lose his prize possessions. ‘That’s a distinct possibility,’ he said.

  Riddle plucked at the creases of his trousers, then he let out a long sigh. ‘You’ll do what you have to do, Banks. I know that. Wherever it leads you.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Is there . . .?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything you want to tell me?’

  Riddle paused. He seemed to think hard for a few moments, then he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you. It’s out of my hands now.’ He knocked back the rest of the whisky. ‘I’ll go to the mortuary and identify her.’

  ‘It’ll wait till morning.’

  Riddle got up and started pacing the room. ‘But I must do something. I can’t just . . . I mean, Christ, man, you’ve just told me my daughter’s been murdered. Poisoned. What do you expect me to do! Sit down and cry? Take a bloody sleeping pill? I’m a policeman, Banks. I have to do something.’

  ‘Everything possible is being done,’ said Banks. ‘I think you’d be best off spending the time with your wife and son.’
>
  ‘Don’t soft-soap me, Banks. My God, just wait till the press gets hold of this.’

  Here we go again, thought Banks: his bloody reputation. It was only out of respect for Riddle’s bereavement that Banks said mildly, ‘They hadn’t got a whiff when I left the scene, but I don’t suppose it’ll take them long. The place will be swarming with them come morning. We want to try and keep the strychnine aspect quiet.’

  Riddle seemed to collapse in on himself, all his energy gone. He looked tired. ‘I’ll wake up Ros and tell her. I appreciate your coming, Banks. I mean personally, you know, not sending someone else. The best thing you can do is get back to the scene and stay on top of things. I’ll be depending on you, and for once I don’t care how many bloody corners you cut or whose feet you tread on.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Riddle was right; probably the best thing Banks could do right now was throw himself into the investigation. Besides, people need to be alone with their grief. ‘I’ll need to talk to you both at some point,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They heard a sound from the doorway and turned. Benjamin Riddle stood there in his pyjamas clutching a battered teddy bear. He rubbed his eyes. ‘I heard voices, Daddy. I was scared. What is it? Is something wrong?’

  9

  It was still dark when Banks drove to Eastvale the following morning, and a thin mist nuzzled in the dips and hollows of the road and clung to the buildings, the cobbles and the ancient cross in the market square. It was that time of morning when lights were coming on in the small offices above the shops, some of which were already open, and the mist diffused their light like thin gauze. The air was mild and clammy.

  Across the square, the Bar None was still taped off, and a uniformed officer stood on guard. After leaving Riddle’s house the previous night, Banks had returned to the club to find the SOCOs still at work and Annie taking statements. Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe had also driven in all the way from Lyndgarth.

  Banks had hung around for a while, talking the scene over with Gristhorpe, but there was nothing more he could do there. When the media people started pestering him for comments, he drove home and spent a couple of sleepless hours on the sofa thinking about Emily Riddle’s terrible death before heading right back to the station. He tried to keep at bay the feelings of guilt that were crowding at the edge of his mind like circling sharks. He succeeded only partially, and that was because he had a job to do, something to focus on and exclude the rest. The problem was that the bad feelings would continue to accumulate even when he wasn’t looking, and the day would come when there were so many of them he could no longer ignore them. By then, he knew from experience, it was usually too late to end up feeling good about himself. For the time being, though, he couldn’t afford the self-indulgence of guilt.