Fourth Attempt

by Claire Rayner

  ‘And for some reason didn’t,’ Gus finished. ‘I did wonder if it were that. In which case she did have an overdose of insulin.’

  ‘If you’re right, and this is her uneaten supper… I suppose it’s possible. How can we be sure?’

  ‘We can’t. Not till we have more concrete evidence.’ He became businesslike. ‘I suppose we could take the plastic sandwich wrappers and see if there are any latent prints there, but it is a very long shot. I wish she’d bought them at Marks & Spencer’s or Boots. Then they’d be labelled with a date. As it is there is no information here.’ He turned the packs with fastidious care. ‘So latent prints are the only hope. But not much, as I say. What would we use to match them? I don’t suppose Lally’s notes had her fingerprints on them?’

  ‘Of course not,’ George said. ‘But if we find her locker, won’t we be able to check her prints from that? The things inside, I mean? People don’t usually let strangers into their lockers, so any prints on objects in there have to be hers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to count on evidence like that,’ he said. ‘Would you? But let’s look. This is getting more and more interesting.’

  He seemed to have forgotten his doubts about breaking and entering; he had pulled from his pocket a small bunch of slender copper-coloured rods, his skeleton keys. ‘Old-fashioned, these,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but these look like old-fashioned lockers. Come on.’

  He moved systematically from one to the next, peering at them closely. None had labels on the doors bearing names; clearly the users knew their own lockers. But Gus was looking with beady concentration at each lock as he went and, at last, stopped and grunted happily.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘See? That lock’s full o’ dust. The others have been opened recently, so this is probably hers. But I’d better check the others first to see if there are any other unused ones.’

  There were. Of the thirty-two lockers the room possessed, five had dusty locks. Gus grunted and looked over his shoulder at George. ‘They’ve got spare capacity, dammit. Settle down, kid. This could take a while.’

  He moved with great delicacy, inserting one after the other of his skeleton keys into the first lock he’d found filled with dust, and twirling it gently, and after a few minutes (which seemed interminable to George, watching) he produced a soft satisfied snort and the door swung open.

  The locker was empty, the upper shelf veiled in dust and only a couple of torn pieces of paper screwed into small balls left on its floor.

  ‘Not to fret,’ Gus said, seeing her disappointed expression. ‘At least I know what sort of locks these buggers have. The chances are the lockers are a job lot and there’d only be half a dozen key designs between ’em, if that. I’ll find it soon.’

  He did. It was the third locker he opened. The door swung wide and George, staring, felt her throat constrict a little as some of the personality of its owner seemed to emerge from it. It was tidy in a way that was in startling contrast to the room in which it stood. A brown cloth coat set on a neat folding hanger depended crossways from the central rod, and had clearly been arranged carefully, for the collar and shoulders were precisely set in the wooden arms of the hanger. Beneath it, there was a pair of well-patched street shoes in worn brown leather, severe in cut rather than stylish in design, and alongside them a pair of old-fashioned plimsolls. There was also a pair of Wellington-style boots in startlingly bright red plastic. Clearly the owner of the locker tried to be prepared for all eventualities. On the top shelf, George could see bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner and tubes of body cream, and she thought; I ought to keep my locker as tidy as this. It’d save so much time looking for things.

  Gus was wasting no time. He had at some point pulled a pair of cotton gloves from his pocket — George hadn’t seen him do it — and now, with his hands carefully shrouded, he picked amongst the things on the shelf ‘Nothing here that appears to be an insulin pen,’ he said. ‘You say they look like fountain pens?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. She came and crouched beside the locker, close to his side so that she could look at the lower part of it. ‘Maybe it’s down here — if, of course, this is her locker. We can’t be sure yet, can we?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It seems likely, though. What living person would leave good clothes in a locker for so long — several days at the very least, I’d say from the dust — do you think? Has to be her.’

  ‘Probably,’ George said. ‘Look, there’s a sort of extra shelf down there, at the back, in my locker. I think it’s meant to be used to increase shoe-storage space so that they don’t get piled up. Yes, see?’

  She had reached forwards and lifted the skirts of the coat and pointed.

  Gus crouched beside her and peered in. ‘A handy little hiding place.’

  ‘Not really. All the lockers have them, so everyone knows they’re there, I use mine to store changes of underwear in plastic bags, because there’s no room for the things up top. I imagine other people have their own special uses too.’ She reached her hand forwards and at once his clamped down over her wrist.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ he murmured. ‘Gloves.’

  ‘I can’t imagine prints’ll come into this,’ she protested. ‘You can’t even be sure of identifying her own prints anyway, you said, so what’s the point?’

  ‘Sometime we might be looking for other people’s prints.’ He reached in himself and pulled out the soft leather handbag George had spotted. ‘And they could be very important. Not that this would matter, after all.’ He looked at it ruefully. ‘I never saw this sort of material show prints worth looking at. Oh, well, let’s have a dekko.’

  He straightened up and carried the bag over to the table. Pushing aside the plastic bags and stale food, he looked around for a moment and then reached for one of the old newspapers. ‘This’ll have to do,’ he muttered and opened it, a little awkwardly as he was one-handed, and then spread it on the table. ‘I’d rather have something a little more suitable like a sheet of plastic but needs must when the devil drives. Here we go.’

  He moved carefully and neatly, and one by one removed the contents of the bag. Again George felt the constriction in her throat. The woman who had owned these things was dead; and the poignancy of her small possessions spread out by another’s hands was intense.

  A change purse containing around five pounds’ worth of coins. A wallet, containing twenty pounds in banknotes and the usual range of credit cards which clinched their diagnosis, since the name L. Lamark was clear on all of them. A small make-up bag with eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, and mascara and lipstick. A separate powder compact of the old-fashioned sort, rather a nice one, George thought, with an Art Deco design. A comb, a small hairbrush and a small can of hair spray. A set of keys. A little pseudo-leather case, oblong, measuring around seven by two inches, with a zip fastening, a side pocket and, sticking out of the top of the pocket, a plastic clip like those on a fountain pen, marked in black letters against a grey background: ‘BD PEN’.

  They actually argued over it, standing there with the pen in its case, staring at each other mulishly. Gus wanted to take it back to the nick and have it examined under official conditions with properly accredited witnesses, so that the chain of evidence, if it should turn out to be a piece of material evidence, was ensured. George wanted to examine it right away, pointing out that it’d be a very strange thing if a court refused to acknowledge the sworn assurances of a superintendent of police and a police pathologist regarding the finding of the object, and telling him that he was being unbelievably fussy for a man who had just used his own private skeleton key to get hold of the damned thing in the first place.

  She won. ‘It’s the old business of in for a penny in for a pound, I reckon,’ he complained, but suddenly grinned. ‘And I have to say I’m as eager as you are to have my curiosity satisfied. OK …’ He reached forwards.

  ‘Not this time,’ she said firmly. She pulled the cotton glove off his hand, then imperiously demanded its mate. �
��My turn.’

  He made a face but didn’t argue. ‘Since you’re more used to this sort of syringe than I am, it makes sense, I suppose.’ He took a step back and let her get on with it. She didn’t mention that she had had very little to do with this sort of insulin syringe, but bent her head and carefully withdrew the pen from its little compartment. Then she unzipped the side of the case and took out the contents.

  Beneath the zip there were three further little pockets, and in two of them were conical plastic containers, each surmounted by a printed paper cover, complete with a tear-off tab.

  ‘Needles,’ George said and picked one out of its holder. ‘See?’

  He squinted at the printing. ‘BD Microfine’ he read. ‘296 × 12.7mm. Sterile, and on the tab, Needle. Yup. It’s a needle. No need to open it. It’s obviously not been opened before.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘But this is different.’ Carefully she withdrew a slender glass tube from the other pocket. It had a brassy-coloured cap with a tiny pink cushion of rubber in the centre and black printing on its opaque side. Again she showed it to him and he read it aloud.

  ‘Humulin. Human insulin.’

  ‘OK. So far so good.’ George was brisk. ‘This is all clearly normal. The tube’s empty though, so she was going to need to get a farther supply soon. Let’s look at the pen.’

  She showed him the garish decoration on the body of the plastic with her brows quirked. It showed elephants drawn in rather a childish stylized fashion in bright primary colours, with, in case the point was missed, the word Elephants! in cheerful script.

  ‘Not what you’d have expected of someone as sober as that locker suggests she was. Still, maybe she had no choice in the matter. Let’s get down to the really important part.’ She unscrewed the cap gently. Another glass tube appeared, this time tipped with a long plastic cap. George slid this cap off and there was the needle, glinting in the bright overhead light. She unscrewed the needle and showed Gus how the insulin phial fitted into the glass tube, the red rubber cap uppermost so that it met the entry to the needle.

  ‘Now, look here.’ She pulled pack the plunger from the other half of the pen. ‘If I twist this, so, there’s a little indicator section here at the side, graduated with numbers. The user of the pen just sets the dial for the dose she has to give herself, and then reassembles the whole thing. When she puts the needle into her own body’ — she mimed the action against the back of her gloved hand — ’and pushes the plunger home, the device delivers exactly the measured quantity. See?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gus, and he was grim. ‘I can also see that it would not be at all difficult to rearrange that central screw so that the wrong size dose would be delivered.’

  ‘Exactly.’ George was examining the device even more closely. ‘It’s hard to tell just by looking. I’d need to do some experimenting, but I suspect that’s precisely what happened here. Yes! Look!’ She became excited. ‘Look closely, can you see? One of the ridges of the screw has been broken off. I can just see the area where it used to be. That means that when the screw turned, it would take a double turn when it reached the broken area. So, the device was mis-set.’

  ‘She used it expecting it to be as efficient as usual —’

  ‘And it delivered a massive dose — massive in the sense that it sent her into a reaction before she could get to her food and overcome the insulin that way. This is human insulin, too, and it’s faster acting than the older form. My God, what a nasty thing to do.’

  ‘Killing people usually is nasty,’ Gus said. George shook her head. ‘I know that, but this is particularly awful, isn’t it? Using a device that normally keeps the woman alive, making it into a trap and then calmly going away and leaving it as his weapon against her.’ She grimaced. ‘Horrible!’

  ‘I know what you mean. And I also know that we have to start an investigation into a murder.’

  There was a little silence and then she said, ‘It’s not even as though it would be hard for someone to get in here to do this.’

  ‘No,’ Gus said. ‘Not hard at all. We’re here, after all.’

  ‘Surely, though, normally, she’d have her bag with her?’ George was thinking hard, trying out her ideas as she spoke. ‘If she was working out there, and a stranger came and went into this changing room, she and whoever else was at work would want to know why. The interloper couldn’t count on having the chance to get at the pen. I imagine he’d have to search for it, the way we did, and that would have taken time. When she went home she’d take her bag with her, wouldn’t she? We’ve only got hold of it because it looks like nobody has made any effort to clear her locker. Maybe they didn’t like to; people are funny about possessions when someone dies, as well I know. So not only do we have to worry about who did it, but how? And when?’

  ‘That’ll take some hard police work,’ Gus said. ‘Right now, I’m going to put all this stuff back in the bag.’ He reached out, took the gloves from her hands and put his words into action. ‘Repack the bag, put it back in the locker, close and lock it. Tomorrow I’ll get a warrant and come here, open and above board, and clear it. I’ll also get my fellas to work, asking questions, doing the necessary. We’ll find out who and how as well as when, now we know what happened.’

  ‘Think we know,’ George said. ‘I have to take that thing apart to make absolutely sure it was fiddled with.’

  ‘Do you doubt it was? Surely that broken spiral didn’t happen by accident?’

  ‘No,’ she said soberly. ‘You can see just by looking at it that it was an artefact — a deliberate piece of damage. Get the thing to me as soon as possible tomorrow, will you? After it’s been fingerprinted and so forth. Then I’ll let you know what I find. Meanwhile —’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he said firmly, pulling off his gloves and looking round the room to make sure he’d left it as they’d found it. ‘We go and get some supper. And tomorrow —’

  ‘Tomorrow we do some checking on what happened to Tony Mendez, right?’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  26

  The next morning Gus left early, already abstracted with thought of the day’s work ahead of him. ‘I’ve got an incident room to organize and coppers to get working,’ he said when she prodded him to speech. ‘I’ll set them on to the Lamark case first, and then, as soon as I can, I’ll start looking at what happened with Mendez.’

  ‘I’d like to come with you on that one,’ she said quickly but he shook his head.

  ‘Be reasonable, ducks. It has to be a solely police matter. You know that. If there’s evidence that there was anything the least wrong about that death then it has to be collected by us. I can’t see that taking you along with us’ll make the investigation any easier over there in the theatres.’

  ‘Hell, I should have guessed you’d do that. Whenever I get really interested you go and shut me out.’

  ‘That isn’t fair.’ He looked genuinely hurt.

  ‘Oh, I suppose not. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know you mean you’re dying to get digging, on account of you’re without doubt the most inquisitive person I know and I love you for it.’ He kissed her briefly. ‘Be patient, sweetheart. Get your own work out of the way, and I swear to you on every piece of fish I ever sold that I’ll come to the lab and report whatever we’ve managed to find out. How’s that for a deal?’

  She considered it. ‘And if you haven’t found much, you’ll let me go and do some looking on my own account?’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ he said. ‘Believe me, we’ll have those theatres and the theatre people turned inside out. That’s another reason you can’t be involved, by the way. Imagine what sort of time you’d have with your colleagues after that.’

  She had to admit he was right and said so, which made him grin. ‘Great girl. I’ll see you when I see you. So long.’ And he snapped his non-existent hat brim and went.

  In the event it was a quiet morning at the lab. Now that both Sheila and Jerry were back, the lab wor
k had caught up nicely and she actually had some time available. She could easily have gone along on the Tony Mendez searches, she thought crossly. I could have been useful, even though of course I’d have been an embarrassment. I’m ready to bet now that it will turn out to have been a deliberate killing and I missed it on the PM, dammit, dammit …

  But she knew at gut level that whatever the police found in the background to Tony Mendez’s death she had no need to be at all doubtful of the quality of the work she had done on the post-mortem. She had checked every possibility and there was no question about it; the man had died of alcohol poisoning, and as he was a known reformed drinker it had been perfectly natural she should have assumed his death to be due to accidental self-administration and had reported accordingly. Just as she had with Lally Lamark. She brooded over that too for a while. Here again her post-mortem had been as meticulously thorough as always. She had missed nothing, of that she was certain. All she had done wrong was make assumptions about the accidental nature of the overdose.

  At that point in her cogitation she sat and stared blankly at her window. Her cup of departmental coffee, which was as muddy as young Louise could make it (and since her scared conviction that there was a murderer after her personally had taken hold, no one ever dreamed of criticizing Louise about anything, in case she dissolved into helpless tears) grew cold beside her as she thought long and hard.

  After about ten minutes, she stopped thinking and jumped to her feet. She almost ran out of her office, dragging off her white coat and dropping it on her desk as she went. ‘Sheila? Jerry? I have to go out. Something urgent,’ she called across the big main lab. ‘Can you cope?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Jerry carolled back. He was quite himself again, as relaxed and cheerful as though he hadn’t choked on chlorine gas and genuinely believed he’d never breathe normally again if at all. She threw a grateful smile at him and went.

  Where to start was the problem. That she had to check the value of the assumptions she had made over the last of the deaths among the three members of Old East staff she had post-mortemed was the one thing in her mind. She had assumed she understood the motive for Pam Frean’s suicide, and had therefore reported it as suicide, but suppose she had been as wrong about that as she had been about the accidental nature of Lamark’s and possibly Mendez’s deaths? There was only one way to find out and that was to go and talk to the parents she had thought so ill of. If she’d been right about them, then her diagnosis of suicide would stand. If not … But the first problem she had was to track them down, because she had no address for them, and no immediate way she could think of for getting it.