Angel Death

by Patricia Moyes

  “It’s no business of—”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” said Emmy grimly. “You’re looking for your daughter, aren’t you?”

  “My daughter is dead.”

  “Don’t waste time, Dr. Vanduren. You’re looking for your daughter. I was looking for my husband, and now I’ve found him. I think that they have probably been together.”

  “Together?”

  “Have you any money?”

  The doctor was by now looking at Emmy with distinct apprehension.

  “Money? I don’t quite—”

  Suddenly, Emmy grinned. “I’ve had quite an adventure in the hurricane,” she said, “with the result that I find myself here with no cash on me. However, if you can pay, we might go into that café and have some food and do some talking.”

  Dr. Lionel Vanduren gave a sigh of relief. He could hardly be said to grin, but he managed a smile. He said, “I’ve a few dollars in my pocket. I think it would cover a modest meal.”

  “Good,” said Emmy. And that was all she said. Soon they were both sitting at a table in a corner of the small café, having a jugful of maubee—the delicious local drink brewed from tree bark, yeast, and spices—waiting for their order of chicken, rice, and fungi.

  The food arrived. The small boy put it on the table and withdrew. Emmy and Dr. Vanduren looked at each other across the table, and Emmy said, “Well?”

  “Well, what? I really think, Mrs. Tibbett, that it’s up to you to explain.” Lionel Vanduren took a drink of maubee. “I confess to being entirely mystified.”

  Emmy said, “You know—or at least you suspect—that Janet is alive. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come down here looking for her.”

  The doctor speared a chicken leg and gesticulated feebly with it. “One grasps at straws—”

  “Oh, no, one doesn’t.” Suddenly Emmy was very firm. “You knew very well that Janet was alive when we came to see you. You told us all sorts of lies—and then you heard about Cheryl and Martin Ross. That made a difference, didn’t it?”

  Emmy was guessing wildly, but for the first time she knew what Henry meant—what Henry used to mean—when he talked about his “nose.” The instinct that, without pulling together all the loose ends, told you that you had to be right, that this was the only way things could have happened. Afterward, Emmy wondered what would have happened if Dr. Vanduren had simply said, “My dear lady, I am here on a vacation and got caught by the weather. I have no idea what you are talking about,” and had got up and left. But she knew he wouldn’t, and he didn’t.

  Instead, he looked at Emmy with eyes so tragic that they seemed to come from the bottom of a well of tears and said, “I never thought it would come to this. I never thought of murder.”

  “Murder, Dr. Vanduren?”

  Not taking his eyes from hers, the doctor said, “Can I trust you? I have a strange feeling that perhaps I can.”

  Emmy said, “Trust me with what?”

  “The truth. That is, the truth as far as I know it.”

  Very carefully, Emmy said, “You’ve mentioned murder. If you mean, can you trust me to cover up for a murderer, then the answer is no. I’ve been a policeman’s wife for too long—”

  Vanduren stiffened in terror. “Policeman? Your husband is a policeman?”

  “He was. Apparently he has just resigned.”

  “Resigned? Why?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Emmy, very sincerely. “Probably for the same reason that your daughter—”

  “You know nothing about my daughter!”

  “That’s true. But I have a feeling that she and my husband are both…victims. I want to help him, and you want to help her. Please tell me the truth, Dr. Vanduren.”

  There was a long silence. At last, Vanduren said, “How much do you know about phenylcyclohexylpiperidine?”

  It was Emmy’s turn to do a double take. “About what?”

  “Phenylcyclohexylpiperidine. Usually shortened to phencyclidine, or PCP. Known on the streets as the peace pill or angel dust.” Dr. Vanduren laughed raspingly. “Angel dust! Where do they find these euphemisms? I can see that you are an innocent abroad, Mrs. Tibbett. PCP is a drug derived from a veterinary anesthetic. It can cause hallucinations and, if not properly treated, coma, respiratory arrest, and death.”

  “And you mean that people take this for pleasure?” Emmy asked incredulously.

  “Some people find hallucinations pleasant,” said the doctor dryly. “And in small doses certain individuals report feelings of well-being and agreeable sensations. However, PCP is most often used by pushers as a cheap substitute for other hallucinogens such as LSD and STP. It is also used as a weapon.”

  “A weapon?”

  “In large quantities,” said the doctor, “this drug is a killer. In smaller doses, it is a personality changer.”

  “Go on,” said Emmy quietly.

  “Not everybody,” said Vanduren, “welcomes having his personality changed. But it can be very useful for an enemy to use such a drug on an unsuspecting adversary. Tetrahydrocannabinol—THC, the main active ingredient of marijuana—will not affect the personality. That is to say, moral values remain intact, even under the influence of the drug. The same is not true of PCP. It is available—to those who know where to buy it or how to make it—in the form of a tasteless white powder or liquid, which can either be mixed with marijuana or introduced into almost any food or drink. Under its influence, people will behave in a completely uncharacteristic manner. To give you an example, it has been said that the Manson family used it to obtain the lease of a property from the owner, who imagined he was getting a simple dose of LSD.” The doctor paused. “Did I say ‘simple’?”

  He passed a hand over his brow, and Emmy thought he was going to burst into tears. She dared not speak for fear of interrupting the flow.

  After a moment, Vanduren said, “Why am I telling you all this?”

  Emmy said, “You’ve told me nothing yet, except the properties of certain drugs. How does Janet come into it?”

  An endless pause, Then Vanduren said, “Janet is a beautiful girl, Mrs. Tibbett. A beautiful, kind, lovely girl. It’s not her fault—what she has become.”

  “A murderess?” said Emmy.

  Vanduren recoiled physically. “Don’t say that! You don’t know. I don’t know. All I do know is that I have been living in hell for six months, and now… ”

  “Now?”

  Vanduren sighed and shrugged his big shoulders. “I shall kill myself, of course,” he said quietly. “But I must find Janet first!”

  As a tentative nudge, Emmy said, “The Isabella was your boat, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, she certainly was. A thoroughbred, a sturdy sea boat yet sweet to handle. A little bit of me died with the Isabella, Mrs. Tibbett!”

  Without saying anything, Emmy refilled the doctor’s glass from the jug of maubee. She felt she was getting somewhere at last. Vanduren drank and then said, “I can see them now, setting off from the East Harbour. Jan was at the helm—she’s always been a fine helmswoman, even when she was a teen-ager. I waved to them and they waved back—Jan so fair and Ed so dark, what a couple they made! The all-American dream.” Nostalgia was giving way to cynicism again. “Well, so much for dreams. You know what happened next. Lost at sea. Missing, presumed drowned. Wreckage picked up in Exuma Sound. Oh, that was part of the Isabella’s dinghy, I don’t doubt it. That was that.”

  Softly, Emmy said, “But that wasn’t that, was it, Dr. Vanduren? What happened next?”

  Again the shifty, pleading look. Then Vanduren said, making a decision, “What does it matter? Someone will have to know someday. We—Celia and I—we’d gotten over the worst. We’d accepted what had happened. And then these men turned up!”

  “What men?”

  “How should I know? D’you think they told me their names? Organized crime, no doubt about that. Mafia. First, they made me send Celia away to England.”

  Surprised, Emmy said, “Made you? How could the
y make you?”

  The doctor looked down into his glass, which he was holding in both hands, swirling the light brown liquid. He said, “Most people have a skeleton in the cupboard somewhere, Mrs. Tibbett. Something that they would prefer not to be known. In the case of a doctor, it can mean total ruin—one’s livelihood lost forever. It wasn’t a big thing—a youthful indiscretion. Illegal overprescription of drugs. I had even forgotten about it myself. But these men had documentary proof. They could have crucified me…me, with my middle-class practice and my beautiful family…pillar of society, valued member of the community… Jesus! Besides, they told me that Janet was still alive.”

  Emmy nodded sympathetically. “I understand,” she said. “So you persuaded your wife to go to England. Then—?”

  Vanduren swallowed painfully. “They told me that Ed was dead, but that they had Jan alive. That she had, in fact, joined them. They brought a letter from Jan that was—well, it was obscene. But in her writing and composed by her, no doubt about that. She referred to family matters that nobody else could possibly have known.” Vanduren paused. “I am a doctor. I also, alas, know all too much about drug abuse. My patients are wealthy, professional people, and their children… ”

  Emmy said, “Janet had been on drugs before, had she?”

  “Nothing serious. Only pot, like all the rest of them—an occasional joint at a party. It distressed Celia very much, but my feeling was that it was less harmful than alcohol. I’m on several committees advocating the legalization of marijuana.”

  “Like Betsy Sprague,” Emmy said.

  “That old imbecile? No, I’m not that nutty, thank you. Legalizing is one thing, but giving it away on street corners… ”

  “I’m sorry,” Emmy said. “I interrupted. Do go on about Janet and the letter from her that these men brought you.”

  “Yes. Well, as soon as I read the letter, I suspected that they had my daughter on some kind of mind-bending drug. PCP was the obvious one. They wouldn’t admit or deny it. They simply said that if I didn’t do as they said, they would expose my youthful peccadillo, and they would ‘deal with’ Janet.”

  “Kill her?” Emmy asked.

  The doctor shook his head. “Nothing so simple,” he said. “With Janet dead, I’d have nothing to lose. I could go after them. I knew all along that ‘dealing with’ Janet meant something worse than murdering her. To gain time, I said I’d go along with them and do as they asked.”

  “Which was?”

  “Can’t you guess? I was to be a distribution point for drugs in Florida. As a doctor, I was of great value to them. I could actually get the stuff legally—some of it. Drugs found in my office could be legal. And I could distribute the rest from the same foolproof location. No street corners for these boys. You can see why I’ve been living in hell.”

  Emmy said, “When did you decide not to go on with it?”

  The doctor shook his head slowly. “I didn’t really decide,” he said. “I just realized that I was getting in deeper and deeper and not helping Jan at all. Celia wanted to come home, and I didn’t know how the hell I was going to handle that. Then you and your husband came to see me and told me about Cheryl and Martin Ross, and that Jan had been recognized. That did it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Up till then,” said Dr. Vanduren, “I thought they’d just gotten Jan into drugs and drug-pushing. But after I spoke to you people, I realized that it was far worse than that. They’d carried out their threat to deal with her. They’d turned my daughter into a murderer. I knew then the only thing for me to do was to come down here and find Jan and get her away from them somehow, and into treatment. And when I’ve done that, I’m going to blow the whole racket sky-high. I’ll go with it, of course, but it’ll be worth it.” The doctor looked at Emmy and almost smiled. He said, “Well, I’ve come clean with you, Mrs. Tibbett. Now, how about your angle? Just where do you come in? And what’s a British policeman doing investigating U.S. citizens in the Caribbean?”

  “It didn’t start as an investigation,” Emmy said. “We were just here on holiday.” As she spoke, it seemed a whole time-dimension ago that she and Henry had arrived so happily at the Anchorage.

  “So—what happened?”

  Emmy explained. She told the doctor about Betsy Sprague, about her supposed sighting of Janet, and her subsequent disappearance. About Henry’s suspicions and his appointment from London to take over the case. She mentioned the theories of the local police on the role that the Seaward Islands were probably playing in drug-running. For some reason that she herself could not define, she did not mention Starfish or Ocean Rover or the Montgomerys, Blackstones, or Carstairs. She did, however, tell Dr. Vanduren about Windflower, about the theory that the Rosses had been chosen as victims because of their British passports, and how she and Henry had been putting out feelers in the hopes of being selected by the smugglers.

  Vanduren said, “Well, what happened? Were you approached?”

  Tentatively, Emmy said, “It’s hard to say. We met a few people—apparently innocent people. And then, quite suddenly, my husband went off his head.”

  “Off his head?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were the symptoms?” Vanduren was intensely interested.

  “Euphoria. Frenetic energy. No desire to sleep or rest. Crazy plans and schemes—absolutely unlike his usual character.”

  The doctor was nodding vigorously. “Typical,” he said. “PCP, being administered in small, regular doses. Your husband doesn’t smoke marijuana habitually?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then it would have been administered in food or drinks. What did you do?”

  “I tried to reason with him,” Emmy said.

  Vanduren frowned. “Worst thing you could have done.”

  “Well, how was I to know—?”

  “Oh, I’m not blaming you, but still you couldn’t have done worse. I suppose he turned against you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you say he resigned his job.”

  “He sent an extraordinary telegram to Scotland Yard.” Emmy grinned ruefully. “They’re inclined to think he’s creating an elaborate cover for some great investigative coup, and they’re trying to break the code of the telegram.”

  “That’s the trouble,” said Vanduren. “When something like this happens, people simply can’t grasp the fact that a personality can be changed. They flail around trying to find a logical explanation—and when all else fails, they fall back on lunacy. But they’ll learn. Personalities can be changed chemically.”

  In a small voice, Emmy said, “Is the change permanent?”

  “Not permanent, no. Unless the drug is used persistently—in which case it will probably cause death in quite a short period, as I told you. Once a person stops taking the drug, his personality will return to normal. There’s a snag, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “PCP is a drug that remains in the body. Anytime up to several months after the last dose, the patient may revert to atypical behavior for a while. The important thing for him and his family is to know that, so they can deal with it if it happens.”

  “My God,” said Emmy. “To think that there are people who’d deliberately do that to somebody—”

  “That and worse, my dear. Far worse. Well, I must say it sounds as though Janet and your husband have been given the same treatment. In her case, to turn her into a tool through which they could use me. But in your husband’s case—?”

  Enlightenment dawned on Emmy. “Of course,” she said. “They found out who he was. Who we were. We must have been pretty close behind them because they didn’t just kill Henry. That would have caused quite a stir, since he’s a senior police officer. Much better from their point of view was to destroy him—destroy his personality and his credibility. After the way he’s been behaving, nobody is going to believe a word he says. Very clever,” she added bitterly.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Vanduren sadly. “Do
n’t underestimate them. They are very clever, and they have a lot of money.” After a pause, he added, “You say that you have found your husband.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s at the Golf Club, under sedation and waiting to be flown to the hospital on St. Mark’s. He was alone on Windflower when she was caught in the hurricane, and it’s a miracle she was washed up on a beach before she broke up or went on the rocks.”

  “Is he rational?”

  “He was only conscious for a few minutes while I was there,” Emmy said. “He didn’t sound exactly normal, but who would? He seems to be trying desperately to tell something to the Governor.”

  Vanduren said, “Either he’s still under the influence of the drug, in which case he’s probably talking nonsense. Or he’s not, in which case nobody will believe him.” He suddenly became brisk. “Well, Mrs. Tibbett, what are you going to do now?”

  “I…I don’t know,” said Emmy. “There’s a warrant out for Henry’s arrest. Scotland Yard doesn’t trust me any longer, nor do the Governor and the local police. I feel—”

  Quite sharply, Vanduren said, “You’d better stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mrs. Tibbett. And so had I. You know, I feel remarkably better for having met you.”

  “Thank you,” said Emmy. “Well, what do you suggest?”

  “For myself,” the doctor said, “I shall find myself a room on St. Mark’s, as soon as I can get over there. That big hotel would be best—most anonymous. The Harbour Prospect, isn’t it?”

  Emmy said, “You seem good at anonymity, Doctor. Immigration swears you’re not in the Seawards.”

  Vanduren smiled grimly. “My masters had the foresight to provide me with a new set of U.S. documents, in case I had to disappear. I had the elementary good sense to use them when I came down here. As far as the Seawards are concerned, I am Leonard Venables, import-export agent of Seattle, Washington.” Then, suddenly, “What do you mean—Immigration denies I am here? What on earth gave them the idea that I might be?”

  Embarrassed, Emmy said, “I’m afraid that was my fault. I told the Inspector I thought I had seen you, and I asked him to trace you.”