Daisy Chains

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Tracy watched him settle and snore. The first time she had seen him lying on the grass, battered and bleeding, she had assumed he was dying. She had already been waiting at the tent within the cottage where she had long known he had returned, when he phoned her. He explained where to come. First she had to steal a car. It took some time to find him and then even longer to get him staggering into the car’s boot unseen. On the way back to the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, she had silently decided that if he died on the journey, she’d leave him in the stolen car, park in some ditch, and escape on foot herself, back to London if she could get to a station, or back to Sylvia and Harry if she was near enough to walk to their village.

  He hadn’t died, which she thought was a shame. Yet he was too badly mutilated to go on without proper medical treatment. His head might surely fall apart. She felt sick.

  She’d done sickening things before but they were with strangers, and she’d made her dad happy. What she’d done with him had been friendly, if admittedly a bit sordid. And she’d never minded sordid. Having been introduced to sordid at such an early age, it seemed natural ever afterwards. Losing her virginity at the age of seven had not been pleasant, but her father had kissed her, and that was very pleasant. Working the streets had been the worst, but she got used to it. While pretending to enjoy what she actually found repulsive,, she had passed the time dreaming of a better life to come. She’d win the lottery and go to live in Spain where a millionaire with a yacht would fall in love with her.

  Once she’d decided on all the details including her wedding dress, the bloke had usually finished, paid, and buggered off.

  And then, as she lay on her makeshift bed wondering if she was as loony as her father, she heard a squeak and realised that someone was opening the door. Not the wind since the door to the cottage and its thick stone walls was too solid for that, and the whole house was swathed in greenery. Someone had presumably found the house, seen her rusty old car, and was about to walk in on her.

  Harry poked his nose around the door frame. “Well, well,” he said. “Better than I expected.”

  Half unconscious, Lionel slept on. Harry, only whispering, beckoned. Sylvia’s outside. Come on, out of there, Tracy. Or do you want to be caught with him?”

  For one moment she thought about it, then tiptoed from the tent’s inner sanctum and hurried out under the trees. Harry let the leafy curtain fall back. He pointed to Arthur’s car. Sylvia sat in the front passenger seat. She stared at Tracy. “I wondered,” she sighed. “I wasn’t sure. Are you coming with us? The police are on their way.”

  Tracy nodded. “I’ve got no choice,” she mumbled. “I come – or you send the law, and I get arrested.” Then she grabbed the back of Sylvia’s seat. “You won’t tell the cops I was with my dad, will you?”

  “I admit to being somewhat pissed about all the lies you’ve been telling me,” Sylvia answered her. “Ever since I met you – talking about how you’ve not seen this man for years and how you hate him. Then we tramp these woods and hills over and over again, while you’ve known exactly where the cottage was right from the beginning. So I presume you carefully led us away – instead of towards?”

  “Well – that’s mostly true. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s pretty bloody clear that you love him too,’ said Harry, not turning as he stared out of the windscreen, following the lie of the land as it twisted, curved and ran into bushes and potholes.” I suppose I can’t complain about love. But I’ve already called the police. They’ll be here any minute now since we left a trail, following you.”

  “And you really do love him?”

  Tracy leaned back. “Yes and no. When you spend a childhood being kicked out the way by everyone except your sister, and then she disappears, and you work as a whore from age eight and your mum spits in your face – well all you dream of is cuddles and someone telling you they love you. I got some of that from dad. Never from mum. It was a shit life. I’m not asking for fucking pity, but Dad was the kind one. Yeh, only because he wanted this obedient little kid in his bed, but it still cheered me up.”

  They hadn’t seen the state of his injuries as he’d been partially hidden in bed. Now Sylvia asked. “He’s not dying then?”

  The car stopped. There was a faint echo of a police siren from way below. Tracy shook her head. “No. Well, I don’t really know. Nor I don’t really care. He’d be better off dead, wouldn’t he? He hates prison and the other guys in there, and he hates being free too, cos he has to hide. His whole face is smashed in. He asked me to kill him off if he’s not a bit better in a week. Actually, I reckon he really is half dead.”

  “Would you do it?” Harry asked.

  “No,” said Tracy. “Don’t reckon I could.”

  The sirens were growing louder – two, three. Then four. The police weren’t taking any risks. Five police cars and probably fifteen armed detectives too. Harry left the car, helped Sylvia out as she grabbed hold of the crutch, and Tracy hopped out the other side. They walked back up to the cottage where the first car to arrive was already parked. Three men got out as Harry pulled back the cottage’s heavy curtain of leaf and vine. Morrison nodded and pushed open the door. Harry and Sylvia stood aside. Tracy tried to walk in, but Morrison held her back.

  Ready and waiting, Lionel stood in the middle of the floor, trousers around his hips where Tracy had dressed his bullet wound, and the gun loose in his hand, pointing to the floor.

  “Took you long enough,” Lionel said, his voice blurred and distorted by his broken face.

  Several of the men gasped when they saw him. Morrison turned aside, and telephoned straight to emergency, ordering an ambulance. Dropping the gun on the ground, Lionel held out both hands. Rita cuffed him, but patted his arm. “You must be in a lot of pain, mate.”

  “Got strong pain killers from my friend Harry,’ Lionel said, blowing bloody bubbles through the gaping wound of his nose. Morrison looked at Harry, frowning. Harry tried to smile. Sylvia shrugged. It was pointless being angry with a creature looking so violently maimed and so clearly half dead with pain and injury.

  It was a little while before the ambulance found the place and managed the downhill path, but eventually Lionel Sullivan was bundled in, three police with him. Tracy asked but was refused permission to accompany her father. With a sigh of relief, the prisoner lay on the comfortable stretcher and closed his eyes.

  Morrison watched the ambulance drive off with the whine of its siren screaming through the tree,, and two of the police cars followed closely. “At last,” he said. “After all these weeks, he’ll be back in prison, and once again I have you two to thank for it.” He smiled at Harry and Sylvia. “Magic,” he added. “Plain unexpected bloody beautiful magic.”

  “Tracy found him,” Sylvia said, unsure as to how far Tracy had been implicated, “and she came to get pain killers when we met up with her. We didn’t know who they were for, of course. But later she told us and brought us here.”

  Rita frowned. “We’ll work that lot out later,” she said patiently, looking from Tracy to Sylvia. “But you’ve done us a huge favour.”

  “Now,” sighed Morrison, “we just have to find two teenage boys, both evidently living in this area or nearby, who show signs of becoming just as vile and dangerous as Sullivan was.”

  Nodding towards Sylvia. Rita said, “We’ll need the three of you down the station for questioning.” She pointed towards one of the cars. “Would you mind,” smiling at Harry, “if we go ahead, and perhaps you’ll join me, Tracy. Then our miraculous Mr and Mrs Joyce can come along in their own car and their own time. Not too slow, if you wouldn’t mind. This is going to be one hell of a hectic time. And enormously important for everyone.”

  “I’m afraid,” Morrison nodded, “we’ll all be busy for weeks. It’ll certainly be a highlight.”

  “You’ll be promoted,” grinned Rita.

  “Not until I trace the puzzle of the two boys,” Morrison said.

  Since his own attic bedro
om had its own little attached bathroom, and another attic room next to it where nothing usually went on unless someone needed a spare bedroom, Dean Curzon had space enough to experiment as he wished. The strange smells were easily explained, since he told his mother they were projects set during his chemistry classes at school.

  The funny old woman he’d played with lately on visits south – when telling his mother he was staying up the road with a friend – had been useful for testing firstly the slow effects of Arsenic in repeated tiny doses, and then in one large dose mixed with a little bleach and formaldehyde. The bleach might have caused too much vomiting, which could, in turn, have simply wasted his carefully mixed poison, but by sharing out his doses between glasses of liquor and a box of small, expensive chocolates, rich enough to hide the taste of anything else, the results had been interesting and promised success. He presumed she was already dead and decided he would check one day.

  He was now interested in a more plant based poison. A green poison, all natural. He laughed to himself with a snort of derision. He’d like to be at someone’s bedside as they died in agony, and then he could say, “But don’t complain – it was organic. You should be pleased. Perfectly natural. It wasn’t a chemical poison, it was a totally green one.”

  Damned interesting of course, mixing up the noxious leaves and boiling something, just as though he was making scrambled eggs and baked beans for his own supper. But the less natural stuff could be more reliable.

  The several doses with which he had killed his father had been similar, but more subtle, and until the actual death, Dean had been nervous about the hospital discovering the truth. Admitting nerves, almost admitting being scared, was something Dean had rarely done, so his father’s passing, with no one demanding an autopsy, had been a considerable relief.

  And important. It had proved his expertise in the face of risk, and he thanked his father for that. The death had seemed a natural progression, even to trained hospital staff. So after the nerves came the relief and after the relief came one huge balloon of plain pride.

  Experimenting with the old crone Ruby had been a joke more than anything else. A working joke. The disguise had worked equally well. Not only the idiot woman but everyone else in Cheltenham had accepted him as a boy with a once bleached mohawk. Successful. He now expected success.

  Other killings had been more fun. The stupid girl Chelsea had been his first Sullivan copy, and he’d enjoyed it. After all, he’d hated the girl. He’d fancied her at first, the only bitch he’d ever fancied in his life, but she’d laughed and turned him down over and over. So lust had turned to loathing, and he’d enjoyed the raping and then the chopping. The rape was the most enjoyable, and he’d experimented with that too, using other implements and various entrances. He’d let her squeal too because he’d used a back alley filled with empty warehouses and had loved the begging and the screaming. But copying the Sullivan modus operandi had been time-consuming and ended messy. Yes, alright, a bit of chopping was good, but he didn’t like too much blood. It stank and made him cringe. So doing the Sullivan copy-stuff was a nuisance. He didn’t want to try out too many of them.

  Poison was the real fascination, but once Sullivan was back in the clink, he’d have to be careful not to start getting the blame himself.

  The boy who had endlessly teased him at school had been an easier job. A few spoonful’s of formaldehyde from his mother’s supply of air fresheners, ammonia and bleach from the kitchen cupboard under the sink, and voila – a vengeful death and a good night’s sleep for both of them afterwards.

  The small bombs thrown at the train with that silly old couple who had come to interfere – it hadn’t killed them off and hadn’t even deterred them from coming again, but it had been an interesting experiment. The bombs had worked well. Someone or other had died but not the right ones. But he hadn’t cared.

  The plain-clothes policeman down in the shed was a lucky whack, he’d been bloody dangerous, realising that a good many of the deaths weren’t applicable to Lionel Sullivan. But then he’d died easily, so – no problems.

  Having discovered a useful place online to buy poisons, Dean had hope for a deal more pleasure in the future. He might even get hold of some cyanide.Ready-made arsenic would be helpful too. He’d tried pounding apricot and apple seeds, but they were hard to sift and to clean up afterwards, and too many were needed. Buying the stuff readymade online would be a whole lot easier, but in truth doing his own mixing and experimenting was far more enjoyable.

  So now he’d start making use of technology. Arsenic, cyanide, formaldehyde, everything available online. And his mother could pay for it as usual. The old story. “Mum, sorry I have to buy some chemicals. Can I use your credit card number?” She always said yes. He wished he could get hold of the best of all, such as polonium. But this was highly unlikely.

  He didn’t want to kill his mother. She was too useful. Cooking – quite well too – doing his washing and supplying the funds. One day she might be useful as an alibi. Besides, she was his safety chain, the one who kept the days rolling by, suggested the occasional evening at the cinema, who took him out to the zoo on his birthday, who chatted to him about how much she cared for him. He needed that sanity in the background. She was a lot more than useful. There had been moments, waking in the middle of those witching hours, or when lying half boiled in the bath, when he had wondered whether dear old Mum was his safety chain to sanity as well.

  Yet Dean did not admire sanity. What people seemed to believe was essential, was simply the common and boring normality of those without genius nor imagination. Even Mum. And he was vaguely fond of her, the only person in the world who had ever inspired him to feel affection.

  But he never permitted her to clean his bedroom, bathroom, nor the spare room when he could help it. They were full of his experiments. She knew. But she thought they were all simple little homework studies set by the school. She was proud of him for being so studious.

  She had the motherly nuisance bit too, told him to go and wash his hands, “Dean dear, you smell of vinegar or something worse. You’re not eating my roast beef smelling like a ---?”

  “Bordello?”

  “Dean, that’s not funny. Wash your hands and ask God for forgiveness.”

  He was also into mercury now. Inorganic mercury, naturally. Sometimes when he woke early in the morning, he’d breathe in the perfumes of the substances he could risk inhaling. He’d roll from his bed and stand there with a wide and delighted grin, staring at the pieces of pure beauty he had collected. He had paid over a thousand pounds for the small syringe with implosion pump, and it had been worth every penny. There were eight other syringes, all simplistic but exceedingly useful. Eventually, he’d thrown away the one used on the chocolates. But it had been cheap – no problem. Ceramic hotplates, There was an aspiration kit he’d enjoyed a hundred times, plenty of small heaters, mixers, test tubes by the hundred, funnels, Bunsen burners (old fashioned stuff, but cheap) and clamps. Digital weighing machines, Lights, bottles, spatulas, jugs and a hundred better ways of measuring, along with books and papers on every type of poison ever discovered.

  He didn’t bother growing Deadly Nightshade although he’d used it once, and thought it pretty. But he didn’t want to enlarge his understanding of botany. He was fascinated only by the subtle pleasures of murder.

  The last had been another Sullivan copy, but that was the end of copying in that way. Sullivan was out - found by the two old idiots at the care-house no less, the ones he’d hoped to kill in a train crash first, and then to poison with chocolates. Evidently they hadn’t eaten any, and had handed them around to others, he supposed. and besides, the poison was too sparing to have killed anyone off with only one or two. Just showed that generosity could save your life. He’d attempted to frighten them off with that letter too, another failure, bloody old twits, probably too stupid to read properly. He didn’t like failure and would not be writing those sort of letters again. But silly Ruby would be de
ad for sure. One big success. The thought made him laugh. And a joke to laugh at again when he remembered the stupid old goat in bed, with her died hair and her false teeth. That would cheer him up over the next few months.

  He laughed a lot upstairs in his own small principality. He enjoyed his bizarre collection of different clothes too, and in particular the wigs. They were expensive and perfectly made to his directions. His own hair was boring. He happily hid it with the mohawk growing out, then the same mohawk but growing out further. A great disguise and he’d enjoyed clipping them both to the shape he wanted. There was a dark floppy wig, and a short blonde one too. He’d try that next. Some idiot man had seen him in the dark floppy wig just before his last kill. A risk. Yet he knew himself stronger than any idiot witness, silly old pensioner, or even the police. They’d taken long enough to find the Sullivan sicko, showing how ridiculous they all were.

  There was a television in Dean’s room, although he didn’t watch it much. It could occasionally be useful for the news. It was the news that had crowed with characteristic smug satisfaction about Lionel Sullivan’s discovery and arrest. The stupid monster had been badly injured, the reporter said, but was expected to survive, although with some severe facial malformation and possible loss of smell and taste.

  Mixing inorganic mercury with other interesting substances, such as formaldehyde or strychnine. Rat poison was easy enough to get hold of, and most had a good abundant supply of strychnine snuggled up within. One of the most dramatically painful and unpleasant, Dean couldn’t help feeling a touch sorry for the rats. But he had no sympathy for the people and would hope to see the final convulsions of whoever he managed to feed this enticing concoction.

  A few more kids at school deserved to die, and two teachers as well, but he’d have to be careful. Poisoning half the school could hardly remain unsuspicious. But he could start with Mr Bankham since all the kids hated him and called him Mr Botulism. They be delighted to see him disposed of.