First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  He looked interested. ‘Really? Give me a for example. Or tell me what you think I’m like.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the sort,’ she said primly. ‘You tell me how she found out she was HIV positive.’

  He sighed. ‘It wasn’t easy getting this stuff out of her. She’s got a sharp lawyer who wanted her to stay shtoom, but she wasn’t having it. She wanted to tell us stuff, but only what she wanted to part with.’

  ‘If you’d let me be there when you did the interview, I bet I could have got her talking. She talked to me in her cell when I examined her there.’

  ‘Be your age, ducks! You know you’re not allowed in on police interviews. Haven’t you forgotten PACE? Police and Criminal Evidence Act?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. But I still wish I could have. You could have had me there as an observing police surgeon if you’d wanted.’

  ‘I didn’t. You’d have meddled. Asked questions.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘So I was right not to. Anyway, she did talk when she wanted to. Her lawyer couldn’t prevent her. And I know a good deal about it all now, to add to the material we’d already collected. The rest, the bits I’m not sure about, we reckon can be filled in before we get this one to trial. But we’ve got a case.’

  ‘So tell me! “More matter with less art.” ’

  ‘Hamlet. Act two, scene two.’ He grinned and again winced. ‘OK. She’s known Oxford for a long time. She was the one who got him on board to help the fundraising, it seems, and they became very friendly. It was because of this charity that her old man went to the dinner parties, by the way. He used to go to them and leave before the entertainment, it turns out. It was just – oh, a political thing. So your Castor and Pollux got it somewhat wrong, didn’t they? Anyway she knew Oxford and I mean that in the Biblical sense. She slept with him. She gets very agitated when she talks about him. I don’t think it was all it might have been for her. Anyway the test. Her old man got hold of this theory about HIV not causing AIDS and she got interested too. She’s a biologist, remember, not a doctor of medicine, but one of her specialities it seems is immune systems in animals and the epidemiology of animal infections. Did you know that? There, you see! You don’t know everything! Anyway, as I say, she got interested. Then about two, three years ago he said he’d do some research, take a lot of bloods, test ’em, and see how many people who were supposed to get AIDS didn’t. He needed controls, though.’

  She nodded, suddenly seeing it all click into place. ‘Of course he did. Whatever bloods he took from people known to be positive or thought to be, he had to have a matching set of people with no risks at all.’

  ‘And he asked his wife to be one of the controls.’

  ‘And she agreed?’

  ‘Yes. But she told Oxford she was going to, and he warned her not to, seeing he knew something she didn’t. She was – well, incandescent with fury when she told us that. She would be, wouldn’t she? He insisted she have a test done separately first; just in case, he said, and it turned out she was positive. So she was frantic.’

  ‘In case her husband found out?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I thought it was the other way about! He was the one who always let her get her own way, she was the one with the money, the hard and tough one. Everyone thought she was the controller, not him.’

  ‘She adores him,’ Gus said and shook his head. ‘It’s like you said. You never know about other people’s lives. She says he’s a great man, a very important man, and she’d do nothing to lose him or even upset him, and when I asked her why, in that case, she slept with Oxford, she got cagey. I got the impression – it’s only an impression, mind, not hard evidence – that great man though her Charlie is, brilliant though his mind may be, when it comes to more earthy matters like sex he’s not quite up to scratch. Oxford got her fuddled with cannabis one night – yes, I know it sounds all very old fashioned and Sixties, but she’s a Sixties girl, after all – and there it was. She slept with him. And when Oxford told her she might be positive she thought Charlie’d find out what she’d been up to. And she was terrified.’

  George shook her head. ‘I still don’t see it. If she knew she was positive and refused to have the test –’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ Gus said softly. ‘That’s the point. She couldn’t. Her precious Charles would have been very put out if she’d refused, and she didn’t know what to do. So she made a deal with Oxford.’

  ‘What sort of deal?’

  ‘To arrange for her blood to be taken and tested, but the records to be falsified. So that Charles would never know.’

  ‘But how could Oxford arrange that? I mean –’

  Gus shook his head sadly. ‘The people in that hospital of yours – Oxford really had as tight a hold on some of them as you could – well, it was Royle.’

  She stared, blankly, unable to place the name for a moment and he said gently, ‘Your predecessor.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘He was being blackmailed by Oxford too. So he did what he was told.’

  George got to her feet and began to wander around the office. Gus stayed sitting at his desk and watched her happily, enjoying the way she moved but enjoying her puzzlement even more. ‘I never found a hint of that,’ she said. ‘No one ever said anything about Royle that …’ She shook her head. ‘Have you talked to him? Or haven’t you had time?’

  ‘Not yet. But Roop’ll be on his way to Spain to interview him tomorrow. He retired to one of those awful seaside places, poor bugger, like Eldorado.’ He shook his head. ‘Imagine having to live somewhere like that when you’ve lived in Shadwell so long.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and looked at him sideways, and they both laughed. ‘But you think it’s true?’

  ‘Oh, it’s true all right. And when you said that you had the blood test results in the lab she went spare, she said. Well, not in so many words, you understand, but upset enough. She’d gone to all the trouble to get rid of Oxford and Formby Mitchell and then you go and ruin it all!’

  ‘She admitted to killing them?’ George said with some awe and he nodded.

  ‘Just like we worked it out. Knew about Oxford’s rearend problems – they were close, after all! – and decided to use digitalis to deal with him. Got it from the pharmacy, filled her own tube of cream there too. I have to check with them, but it seems a couple of years back, which was when all this business started, she’d arranged via Charles to use the pharmacy to make up some tubes of cream for some of her animal testing at the University. No one remembered when I questioned ’em at the pharmacy; all new staff since then. They’ve got a bloody fast turnover.’

  ‘Not unusual in hospital departments,’ George said.

  ‘Right. So that was it. Easy as pickin’ blackberries for her, it was.’

  ‘But why should she kill Formby?’ George said. ‘It seems over the top, to put it at its lowest.’

  ‘She had to. He knew all about her involvement with Oxford. She told me. I tell you, once she started telling there was no way I could stop her. She dotted every T and crossed every I. And drew fancy scroll-lines round ’em. He and Oxford were oddly close, it seems. When a man pays as much blackmail as Formby did, he gets to be a favoured pet of his bloodsucker. Well, that didn’t surprise me. It’s a bit of criminal psychology, that is.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘I learned all about that yonks ago. Anyway, there wasn’t much Formby didn’t know about Beatrice, or so she said. And even if he hadn’t, she couldn’t take any risks, could she? So when she saw him after the committee’s outing on the building site, on their own, and he told her he thought it was she who’d done for Oxford, she did, she said, the only thing she could. She pushed him off the walkway.’ He shook his head in some wonderment. ‘She was amazingly cool, giving us all this. You’d have been fascinated.’

  ‘I’m sure I should. Chance would have been a fine thing,’ George said. ‘I’d have loved seeing her in full flood.’

  ‘I know. Bu
t you’ll have to take my word for it. Amazin’ wasn’t the word. She’d got it all worked out, you know. That’s why she wasn’t too worried about telling us all there was to tell. She’s got no fears about how it’ll all turn out for her. Told me as cool as you please that once they get her to prison she’ll have time to write her book. It’s going to be the greatest book ever, she said, full of scholarship, that will finally prove everything Charles says about HIV and AIDS is true, and he’ll be so pleased and happy when she gets out. It won’t be long, she said, because of course she’ll get time off for good behaviour, and naturally she’ll be paroled early, an intelligent woman like her, so taking it all round things could be worse. It was an incredible performance.’ He shook his head reminiscently. ‘Like I told you. Mad.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she really does believe – Well, never mind. Listen, Gus, what about May?’

  ‘May?’

  ‘Formby’s secretary. I told you all the stuff he told me about her when I found out the scam he was using via the microscope thefts.’

  His stiff face moved into a painful grin again. ‘She should be so lucky!’

  ‘Eh?’ ‘She’d have loved all that to be true, I imagine, but it wasn’t. Airy-fairy persiflage on Formby’s part, that was, designed to fool you.’

  ‘It didn’t.’ She tried to sound indignant, but then had to be honest. ‘Well, perhaps a bit.’ She sighed at her own stupidity in letting Formby fool her so successfully and sat down again on the chair in front of his desk. ‘So we’ve got all the answers? Beatrice was responsible for everything?’

  ‘No, Oxford was.’ He was silent then, staring out of his window at the grey April sky pressing against the grimy panes. ‘It’s not for me to make decisions about how evil people should be dealt with, but that man was as foul as they come. He was blackmailing people left right and centre. He deserved what happened to him. If I had my way I’d let her off what she did to him. What she did to Mitchell Formby was different. He was a nasty bit of work, but not horrible with it, know what I mean? He was just a stupid bugger who thought he was clever and got caught. So she can do time for him and welcome. But not for Oxford. Christ, but I hate blackmailers!’ There was a fire in him that startled her. And then warmed her. It was a sentiment she could admire.

  There was a short silence as they both sat thinking and then she said suddenly, ‘I’d almost forgotten. The code. We didn’t need it after all.’

  He looked at her blankly for a moment and then laughed. ‘Oh, yes, the code. It was like you said. Like I said too, of course. Very simple. She knew it. There wasn’t much that wicked old besom didn’t know. Oxford used to tell her a lot, I gather, she was sort of a confidante as well as someone to play games with under his fancy mirrored ceiling.’ He laughed again. ‘I have to say imagining what those two looked like when they were fooling around ain’t easy.’

  ‘I’d rather not try,’ George said. ‘The code. How simple? I swear I tried everything I could, and most of my ideas were very simple indeed.’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ He leaned forward. ‘Give me that file there – the one on top of the tray – yes, that’s it.’ He riffled in the file for a moment or two and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘Here it is. Now look. Y.J. £2,000; S.P. £3,000; K.K. £1,000; G.J. £5,000; R.H.A. £2,500; U.H.R. £500; G.I. £5,000. Looks impossible, doesn’t it? But just look at the sums rather than the initials. Look especially at the ones that include a half-thousand – five hundred. See what I mean?’

  She looked and then said, ‘They’re the ones with the H in the middle.’

  ‘Got it. Try H for half.’

  ‘Oh, no! It can’t be that easy. Can it?’

  ‘It can and it is. Look, all you do is look at the number of thousands owed and move that number in the alphabet. So Y.J. owes £2,000? Fine. The real initials are two letters back. Which gives you, um, W.H. Then you look at the ones that are less than a thousand, OK? This one – U.H.R. £500. For people who owed less than a thousand, he went the other way in the alphabet. So we have to go forwards to read it, which gives us V.S. as the proper initials – leaving out the H of course because that means just a half, five hundred.’

  ‘Well, it sounds all right,’ she said dubiously. ‘But how will you prove it?’

  ‘We already have. It’s been three days, remember, since we arrested her. Lots of time to get ourselves together. We’ve interviewed all the people on the hospital staff who have these initials. Several of them are here – like the one who appears as K.K. She’s Jo Jennson in the accounts department. She’d been up to a bit of naughtiness on her own behalf, squeezing cash out of the system, and Oxford found out. Don’t ask me how – I don’t know yet. But she had a boyfriend and he liked to talk a lot, and he was one of Oxford’s dinner party crowd, so – anyway, however he did it he was having a great time with her, getting her to go on with her tricks to his benefit. And he milked her hard. She was relieved, really, to pour it all out. She’d been scared witless when he was killed, thought whoever did it could have started a bit of blackmailing on his own account and was going almost potty waiting for the axe to fall, as it were. We – ah – I’m not sure we’ll follow this up too hard. Like I said, I hate blackmailers, and Jennson’s had a nasty fright. She will go and sin no more, take it from me.’

  ‘And Mitchell Formby? He was paying blackmail, so why wasn’t he on the coded list?’ She bent her head to look again. ‘Because he isn’t, is he?’

  ‘No, but that’s because this isn’t the only disc, remember? Oxford had several for much larger sums of money. He was lazy with this one – they were such small sums, in his estimation, that he didn’t even bother to disguise them all that carefully in his records. This was an easily breakable code, after all.’

  ‘You didn’t manage it till Beatrice told you, though, did you? So don’t be so full of yourself.’

  He grinned. ‘Nor did you, lady. Anyway, our computer chaps have been working on all the other discs. They found Mitchell Formby there. He was worth over two hundred thousand a year to Oxford, would you believe? He really was stealing wholesale.’

  ‘No wonder the hospital’s always so short of money!’ George said. ‘How could he get so much from stolen gear?’

  ‘It was more than that. He had a padded payroll, too, Beatrice said. Lots of non-existent people were paid salaries that went right into his pocket, and so on to Oxford’s. It all mounts up, I suppose.’

  ‘And Herne?’

  Gus shook his head. ‘Not a thing against him. The only complaint about the chap is that he’s got his pants on fire for a wife he’s ashamed of. Poor devil. The only sin he commits is to skive off early to get in the sack with her. No, he had nothing to do with any of this. He’s even put in to Oxford’s lawyer already for money he reckons Oxford owed the Barrie Ward Fund and had held on to. He’s the soul of virtue in every department except when it involves his personals. Poor sod.’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve got to feel sorry for a bloke who’s led by his balls the way that one is. But otherwise, good as gold.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ George said. ‘You mean that Oxford collected money for the Fund and kept it in his own account? But surely he knew he’d be caught if he did that? And anyway he was so rich already, why –’

  ‘He just loved money. For its own sake as well as for what it bought him. He hung on to every penny as long as possible, according to Beatrice, so he could earn interest on it.’

  ‘Ye gods,’ George said, awed. ‘It must be hell to like money that much.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gus said and then laughed, though it stretched his face and made him wince. ‘Maybe I ought to give all mine away to protect my soul from getting the infection.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’ She was only half joking.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, that’s all about Herne, and his Carole. She was clear too. Just a rather greedy featherhead.’

  She swallowed, not wanting to ask the next question, but knowing sh
e had to. ‘And Felicity?’

  ‘Felicity,’ he said and sat silent, brooding for a while. She watched him and waited, wishing it didn’t matter so much that he gave her the sort of answer she wanted to hear. Then he sighed. ‘There’s nothing against her. She knew what he was up to but she had no part of it. There’s no sin in that, nor any crime. She’s got what she wanted out of it all, though.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ She tried to sound light but it wasn’t easy. This was not what she had wanted to be told.

  ‘Money, ducks. A lot of it. She felt much as he did about it. Likes it lots. He’ll have left – God, I dunno, it runs into millions, according to the computer chaps. Even after they’ve taken death duties and so forth off it she’ll be comfortably settled.’

  George frowned. ‘Can a person benefit from the money left by a blackmailer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gus sounded hard suddenly. ‘Yes, she bloody well can. Don’t think I haven’t tried to find out and do something about it, but the thing is he was never caught or tried in his lifetime, she was in no way involved though she suspected his activities, and we can’t prove she knew, nor can she be tried for that. So no crime’s officially committed and she gets the lot. Sickening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and thought for a while. And then had to ask him the hardest question of all. ‘And what about – er –’ and could go no further.

  ‘Your friend Bellamy is of no interest to anyone in this case,’ Gus said. He didn’t look at her, but kept his head down as, moving carefully, he put the sheet of paper with the computer disc code on it back into his file. ‘There’s nothing but what you see with him as far as I can tell, though he was there at the lab of course. That was a bit of a facer.’

  ‘He wanted to protect me,’ she said in a small voice. ‘He heard me do that stupid thing at my party.’