‘When… er… when’s the baby due?’
‘The beginning of October, according to the scan.’ Her face suddenly changed, as if she’d read Megan’s thoughts. ‘Anyway,’ she said briskly, ‘enough of me for the moment – what about you? Anything happening on the romance front?’
Megan grunted. ‘No one that you might describe as a “significant other”.’
‘Ah!’ Ronnie gave her a sideways look. ‘So there is someone, then?’
‘Well, there was. I’m not sure the present tense is still appropriate.’
‘You’ve dumped him?’
‘Kind of.’
‘What do you mean, “kind of”? You either have or you haven’t, I would have thought.’
‘I suppose I have in my head,’ Megan shrugged. ‘I think I’ve only just realised myself that there’s no future in it – it’s kind of complicated.’ She wasn’t going to tell Ronnie how complicated, or confess to her feelings for Dom Wilde. She could imagine Ronnie’s reaction if she knew she was even contemplating breaking one of the cardinal rules of prison ethics.
‘He’s married?’
‘Let’s just say he’s not available, full stop. So there you have it – my boring but tangled life,’ she said with a wry smile. She drained her glass. ‘God, that cocktail’s gone straight to my head. I’d better have a look at that stuff you brought before I get I get completely ratted.’
‘Sure.’ Ronnie glanced at her watch. ‘We’ve got another ten minutes before the table’s booked.’ From her briefcase she pulled the standard-issue buff-coloured inmate file and handed it over. ‘I’ve taken a look myself but I didn’t see anything unusual or particularly interesting. ‘You said on the phone you thought the look on his face could have been caused by strychnine but our doctor said tetanus causes that.’
Megan nodded. ‘That’s what they thought at Balsall Gate until the toxicology report came through.’
‘Hmm.’ Ronnie rubbed the stem of her glass between her finger and thumb. ‘Well, I think whoever brought the drugs in must have been a visitor – we’ve had a big clampdown in the last couple of months on screws bringing stuff in.’
‘What sort of visitors,’ Megan asked as she opened the file.
‘Quite a few, actually in the last few days before he died, but most of them were official: his solicitor, a probation officer and the chaplain. He didn’t get many personal visitors.’
Megan was confronted by an aggressive-looking face framed with a shaggy mop of red hair. The photograph of Patrick Ryan didn’t do him any favours. He had small, mean-looking eyes and a clutch of freckles spreading from the middle of a snub nose. She would have guessed that he was in his mid-to-late forties, but she was wrong about that: his date of birth was down as the third of June 1967 – which made him a couple of months short of forty-one when he died – four years older than Carl Kelly.
Her eyes moved down the page to Ryan’s conviction details. ‘Oh,’ she said suddenly, bending her head closer to the page to make certain she’d read the words correctly.
‘What?’ Ronnie peered over her shoulder.
‘Well, I might be wrong, but…’ Megan dived into her briefcase, pulling out the copy of Kelly’s file and lining it up on the table alongside Patrick Ryan’s. ‘These are the conviction details of the guy who died at Balsall Gate. Look,’ she said, jabbing her finger at the paper. ‘Same court. Same offence. Same date.’
Chapter 15
It was difficult to talk above the hubbub of the tapas bar in Deansgate. It was only when they got back to Ronnie’s house that Megan was able to properly explain about Carl Kelly’s death; about the discovery of strychnine in his body and the almost simultaneous discovery of a long-dead baby in his victim’s grave.
‘I was convinced it was some kind of revenge killing,’ Megan said, cradling the glass of whisky Ronnie’s husband had poured her before tactfully retiring to bed. ‘Then when I heard about what had happened here, my first thought was that the police were right: that it was a batch of contaminated drugs and my theory was way off beam. But now I’ve seen the file…’ She gazed at the face of Patrick Ryan as it had looked on the day he entered Strangeways. Then her eyes ranged over the photographs spread out on the coffee table; photographs that Ronnie had been unable to show her in public. They had been taken in the mortuary where Ryan’s body now lay. The close-up of the face was truly grotesque. Megan pitied whoever had had the grim task of identifying him. ‘Who was it that found him?’ she asked.
‘One of his cell mates,’ Ronnie replied. ‘They were all on association, but he’d stayed behind. He’d told them he didn’t feel well and wanted a lie down. They came back an hour later and found him dead on the bed with the syringe on the floor beside him. So they knew straight away it was drugs and they assumed it was an overdose.’
‘That’s pretty much what happened with Carl Kelly, except he still had the syringe in his leg.’
Ronnie’s mouth turned down at the edges as she pictured the scene. ‘So if our guy was poisoned as well, it could be some kind of vendetta, couldn’t it? Maybe some drug baron that Patrick Ryan and Carl Kelly rubbed up the wrong way?’
‘Well, it certainly looks as if they could have been members of the same gang,’ Megan agreed. ‘I’ll need to check the court records; find out if they were both involved in the same case. It could be that they happened to be in court on the same day for completely unrelated offences.’
‘Unlikely, though, isn’t it?’
Megan nodded. ‘There is another possibility, although there’s no hard evidence to back it up so far.’ She told Ronnie about the sliver of newspaper stuck to the body of the baby in the mortuary; about Delva’s idea of a link between Carl Kelly’s victim and the Birmingham Six .
‘Well, Patrick Ryan’s an Irish-sounding name,’ Ronnie said, ‘but he was in here for a drugs offence, so that seems to back up what your contact at Balsall Gate said, doesn’t it? We don’t know if Patrick Ryan was in on that murder, do we? All we know is that he and Carl Kelly got banged up on the same day more than a decade later. If someone’s killed them both, the Moses Smith thing could be completely coincidental. Their deaths could be revenge killings, but for something else; something related to drug trafficking, I mean.’
‘But what about the baby?’ Megan asked. ‘How do you explain that happening within a matter of weeks of Carl Kelly’s death? It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ Ronnie shook her head. ‘Poor little thing – it makes me shudder to think about it. It must have been a horrible thing to find.’
Megan nodded. She didn’t want to dwell on how it had made her feel, especially with Ronnie being pregnant. ‘I think what I really need to see is the list of visitors Ryan had over the past month or so,’ she said briskly. ‘Any chance of nipping into the prison tomorrow?’
‘Yes, of course we can. The office won’t be open but I’ve got keys’
‘And we need to get that toxicology report as soon as possible – make certain that it actually was strychnine. When do you think you’ll get it?’
‘Well,’ Ronnie said, taking a sip from her steaming mug of cocoa, ‘he said Monday, but I could try phoning him in the morning – he’s often in the lab at the weekend.’ She began to yawn and clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry Meg – I’m totally knackered. I didn’t realise you could get this tired so early on in a pregnancy.’
‘It’s okay. Don’t apologise. I’m a bit wiped out myself.’ She didn’t feel like explaining why: that she’d been up till God knows what time having sex with the man she’d just told Ronnie she was finished with. She shooed her friend up the stairs with her cocoa and sat for a while on the sofa, finishing her whisky. When the noises from the bathroom had ceased, she tiptoed up to the spare room.
She stood looking at the bed for a few moments before getting under the covers. Although she was glad to be away for the night, it felt strange, climbing into a bed she had shared so many times with
Tony during the years they were married. Tony had got on well with Ronnie’s husband; one of those rare situations when the partners of friends become really good friends themselves. Part of the reason she hadn’t been to visit Ronnie for so long was that she felt such a gooseberry without Tony there as well. And now there was a baby on the way… Megan sighed as she switched off the light. It would probably feel even weirder next time she paid them a visit. But she was just going to have to come to terms with that. If she started crossing people off her Christmas list just because they’d sprogged, she’d end up with no friends left at all. Funny how she’d never felt like that with Ceri, though: when her sister had had the first baby she’d accepted it quite calmly, because at that point she’d just been promoted to head of department. It seemed fair. Ceri was having children and giving up full-time work while she was powering up the career ladder. But in the past couple of years it hadn’t felt quite the same. Somehow the career was no longer enough.
‘Stop being such a bloody misery,’ she whispered to herself in the dark. Closing her eyes, she searched her mind for something to distract her from the subject of babies; what was it the TV shrinks said? Oh yes: “Focus on something exciting; something you would really like to have. This will release endorphins, giving you an instant lift.” The only thing she could think of was Dom Wilde.
Megan was woken at just after six o’clock the next morning by the sound of Ronnie throwing up in the bathroom. She got out of bed and pulled on her jeans. They were newly washed and she had to lie back down to do them up, they were so tight. She glared at herself in the mirror, pinching the roll of fat that bulged over the top of the waistband. It seemed cruelly ironic that Ronnie was stick thin and three months’ gone while she didn’t even have the excuse of being pregnant. She was going to have to do something: snacking on prunes was obviously not enough – she needed to go on a proper diet and do some pretty serious exercise.
With a sigh she went downstairs to make a cup of tea. There was a packet of Vanilla Cream Hobnobs in the cupboard beside the teabags and she ate two to cheer herself up. No point starting the new regime while she was away, and by the sound of things, Ronnie wasn’t going to want them.
A few minutes later Ronnie appeared round the kitchen door looking like a ghost. ‘I’m sorry, Meg. Did I wake you up?’
‘It’s okay. I was awake anyway,’ she lied. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea.’
Ronnie held up her hands as if fending off anything related to food or drink. ‘No thanks,’ she mumbled. Clapping her hands over her mouth she rushed back upstairs.
It was after nine when Ronnie came down again. She had dressed and put on make-up, but the bronzer on her cheeks couldn’t disguise her pallor.
‘Are you sure you should be up?’ Megan studied her friend’s face, concerned at how drawn she looked. ‘I feel awful, hijacking your weekend like this.’
‘No, honestly, I’d rather be doing something,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ve been getting it every morning for about a week now, but it usually goes by mid-morning.’ She reached for the phone. ‘If I sat in bed thinking about it I’d feel even worse.’ She punched out a number. ‘The toxicologist,’ she mouthed at Megan as she waited for it to answer. ‘He should be in by now… Hello – Chris? It’s Ronnie. Any news?’
Megan listened intently to Ronnie’s conversation. It sounded as if the results hadn’t come through yet. After a couple of minutes Ronnie put her hand over the receiver and said: ‘They’ve ruled out tetanus but they can’t say for sure yet that it’s strychnine. He hopes to know by this afternoon. Would you like a word with him?’
Megan took the phone. There was plenty she wanted to ask this man, even without the results. She explained what had happened at Balsall Gate. ‘Do you mind if I pick your brains?’ she asked. ‘Only I need to know a bit more about the cutting of strychnine with heroin. I know it’s unusual but could someone have done this by accident? And if so, how could they make such a mistake?’
‘I doubt very much if it would be a mistake,’ he replied in broad Mancunian. ‘It’s bloody hard to get hold of and anyone who did would know that you could kill someone with a very small dose.’
‘So you think it was probably deliberate, then? Not a dodgy batch?’
‘Yes, I do. A batch like that would have the mortuaries in Brum bursting at the seams. The heroin trade these days is production line stuff. The dealers that supply prisons are doing it all across the country.
‘That’s what I suspected,’ she said, ‘but when I first heard about the Strangeways case I thought I’d somehow got it wrong.’
There was a look of triumph on her face when she put down the phone. ‘He agrees with me,’ she said, in answer to Ronnie’s questioning look. ‘So assuming it is strychnine – and I don’t really see how it could be anything else now the tetanus angle’s been ruled out – we’ve got two guys from Birmingham, probably members of the same drugs gang, who died in the same manner in separate jails within a few days of each other.’
‘It’s all starting to stack up, isn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Can we go and take a look at those visitor lists?’
Megan had been to Strangeways several times before. Its architecture was very different to that of Balsall Gate: imposing, impressive, even. But if she’d closed her eyes it could have been the same place. It was the smell: that distinctive mix of sweat, cigarettes and institutional food that assaulted the nostrils the minute you got through the gates. It was a very male smell, quite intimidating to the uninitiated. Like a simmering cauldron of testosterone. Women’s prisons were different. The greasy cooking and the fags were still there, but overlaid with a suffocating mix of deodorants, perfumes and body sprays.
Ronnie led the way to the main office. It didn’t take long to locate the visitors’ record for the week leading up to Patrick Ryan’s death. Megan scanned the list, looking for names with his prison number recorded alongside them.
‘That’s his solicitor,’ Ronnie, said, pointing at one of the entries. ‘And his probation officer came later the same day.’
‘Hmm.’ Megan noted that the solicitor had a different name from the one who had been visiting Carl Kelly. She didn’t recognise the name of the probation officer, either, although she knew plenty of people from the Birmingham team. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked, pointing to a name further down the list.
‘Rebecca Jordan.’ Ronnie read it out loud. ‘Girlfriend, I think.’
‘Would she be from Birmingham, then?’
‘Probably. Hang on a second, I’ll find the form she filled in when she applied for the visiting order.’ Ronnie went across to the other side of the office and unlocked a filing cabinet. After a short search she pulled out a piece of paper with Rebecca Jordan’s details on it. ‘Yes. She is from Birmingham.’ She handed the form over. The address was near the top of the sheet of paper. Megan gasped as she read the first line.
‘What is it?’ Ronnie frowned.
‘Linden House.’ Megan scanned the rest of the address to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. ‘It’s a student hall of residence at Heartland,’ she said, blinking in disbelief. ‘The same hall of residence that Carl Kelly’s girlfriend lives in.’
Chapter 16
‘Why would a student be in a relationship with a man who’s been inside for three years?’ Ronnie was incredulous. ‘These girls would be first years, probably, wouldn’t they, if they’re in a hall of residence? So they’d be… what… about fifteen years old when these guys were sent down.’
‘I know,’ Megan said, ‘But Carl’s girlfriend only started seeing him a few weeks back. One of the other inmates told me they met through a lonely hearts column in the local paper.’
‘A lonely hearts column?’ Ronnie’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her fringe.
‘That’s what he said. He reckoned it was a prank by someone who’d just got out and thought he’d set Carl up. When he told me, it didn’t strike me as being anything malicious. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘What if these girls are acting as mules? They could be bringing the drugs in for someone else.’ Ronnie’s eyes narrowed. ‘They might not even know that it’s something deadly.’
‘That would make sense,’ Megan nodded. ‘It’s the kind of thing you could imagine a student doing for money, if they were desperate. Whoever’s behind it probably placed the lonely hearts ad as well.’
‘What, you mean they used the ad as way of getting to Carl Kelly without him realising it?’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it? Bloody clever way of hoodwinking a guy in prison: make him think some good-looking girl on the outside fancies him; a couple of visits and he’s hooked. She offers to bring him drugs as well and he thinks he’s really landed on his feet.’
‘Well, that’s one hell of a scam, if it’s true.’
‘There’s a number here,’ Megan pointed at the form Rebecca Jordan had filled out. ‘It’s a mobile.’ She looked at Ronnie. ‘Would this girl have been informed of Patrick Ryan’s death, or is it just the next of kin that know?’
‘Just next of kin,’ Ronnie nodded. ‘There’s only the brother, the one in Balsall Gate. We don’t have the names of his parents or any other relative. You get that a lot with the men in this place – you know, disjointed families; people whose relatives have either disowned them or just disappeared.’
‘It’d be interesting to find out how she’d react to the news, then, wouldn’t it?’ Megan said. ‘If it was her who brought the drugs in, and she knew what was in them, it would be no surprise. But then I’d be very surprised if that phone number was genuine, wouldn’t you? Why would she give it if she knew she was likely to be traced?’
‘You’re right.’ Ronnie frowned, thinking it through. ‘Even if she thought she was just acting as a mule you wouldn’t expect her to give her real number, would you? It’d probably be some stolen mobile she used for as long as she needed it, then chucked it away.’
The Killer Inside Page 12