Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  Gabrielle Lord is widely acknowledged as one of Australia’s foremost writers. Her popular psychological thrillers are informed by a detailed knowledge of forensic procedures, combined with an unrivalled gift for story-telling. She is the author of twelve novels—Bones, Tooth and Claw, Salt, Jumbo, The Sharp End, Feeding the Demons, Whipping Boy, Fortress, Death Delights, Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, Lethal Factor and most recently Spiking the Girl. Her stories and articles have appeared widely in the national press and been published in anthologies. Winner of the 2002 Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel for Death Delights and joint winner of the 2003 Davitt crime fiction prize for Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, Gabrielle has also written for film and TV and is currently completing her next novel. She lives in Sydney.

  Praise for Lethal Factor

  ‘Her books continue to stand out from the pack for their meticulous attention to detail and authentic understanding of the processes involved in crime solving.’

  Sunday Mail

  ‘Lethal Factor was written at a time when the world suddenly realised it was vulnerable. The gripping page-turner is all the more frightening because it moves beyond the realms of fantasy … Lord consisently turns out well-written and enthralling psychological thrillers. With Lethal Factor, she has done it again.’

  Herald Sun

  ‘Gabrielle Lord manages to combine anthrax and a dead nun in another forceful and perceptive novel of criminality’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Gabrielle Lord is always up-to-the-minute topical and encyclopedically instructive’

  Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘A great read and one of Lord’s best so far … Lord has shown her versatility and strength as a writer by creating totally believable characters of either sex.’

  Good Reading

  ‘A fast and furious read, as Lord just keeps getting better with each book.’

  Ballarat Courier

  Lethal Factor

  Gabrielle Lord

  First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2003

  by Hodder Headline Australia Pty Limited

  (An imprint of Hachette Australia Pty Limited)

  Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

  Website: www.hachette.com.au

  This edition published in 2004

  Copyright © Gabrielle Lord 2003

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for

  the purposes of private study, research, criticism or

  review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968,

  no part may be stored or reproduced by any process

  without prior written permission. Enquiries should

  be made to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Lord, Gabrielle, 1946- .

  Lethal factor.

  ISBN 978 0 7336 1721 8 (pbk.).

  ISBN 978 0 7336 2561 9 (ebook edition)

  1. Forensic scientists - Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Ellie Exarchos

  Cover photography by Getty Images and Russell Kightley

  eBook by Bookhouse, Sydney

  To Jean and Peter

  With thanks to Mark Aarons, John Howell and other generous people . . .

  Prologue

  Two by two the black figures stepped down from the wooden stalls lining each side of the chapel, joining in a pair to bow to the altar, nod to their Superior, before gliding away, twin black shapes, veils lifting as they turned, followed by the next pair, then the next until the chapel was emptied. Only the Superior stayed bowed in prayer. One by one the sacristan extinguished the candles on the altar, and the Superior rose up from her stall, genuflected, then followed her community, leaving the chapel to the gloomy shadows and the flickering red sanctuary light.

  The silent ranks of veiled women flowed along the cloister, turning each corner, swarming up the staircase, soundless except for the rattle of rosaries, along the first floor northern corridor, each one entering her own cell, closing the door behind her until finally, the last nun opened the door of the last room, and silently entered.

  The Superior, following them, put out the overhead lights, leaving only the dim floor lamps and the garish green ‘exit’ sign at the end of the hallway over the entrance to the fire stairs. The grandfather clock whirred and clicked before striking eleven times. Outside, a night bird screamed, a fearful sound, like a woman shrieking for her life.

  St Benedict’s ‘Great Silence’ descended on the convent where it brooded in the winter countryside, miles away from the lights of the city. No one would speak or even whisper until after Mass tomorrow, and then only if the Superior rang the tiny silver bell at breakfast. Often she did not, and the silence continued until morning tea.

  The nun in the last room before the fire stairs sank to her knees. She knew it wouldn’t be long before he came again. She prayed the prayer of Gesthemane—if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Not mine, but your will be done. It was a hard prayer. The hardest she had ever prayed. After all these years, the past had returned. In the first weeks after he’d appeared, she’d worried about how he’d tracked her down. For nearly thirty years, she’d borne nothing but the anonymous religious name, no surname, no indication of her earlier origin. In the convent, the world no longer mattered. Now, she had to accept that the past had found her again.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought, that I have devoted my life to atonement and forgiveness. Some things are unforgivable—some things are so terrible they are beyond the reach of heaven. The black thought arose unbidden in her mind. No, she thought, I must not, dare not think that. That is to sin against the Holy Spirit, the most deadly sin of all. There must always be mercy, even for the worst, the very worst of evil. Even for—but she dared not think of that. The Black Legion reminded her that she was its daughter and she had to move quickly to distract herself from that knowledge.

  She raised her eyes to the miraculous figure on the wall above her pre-Dieu and prayed again. Father Oswald had loaned it to her, to comfort her in this time. If it be possible, she prayed, let this chalice pass from me. The figure on the wall seemed to turn his face away from hers. And she knew it was not possible. He would come back. He would keep coming back until he had done what he’d set out to do. There is no one I can turn to for help, she thought. Father Oswald is too old and frail to protect me and I dare not risk telling anyone else. There is only the power of heaven, and heaven seemed very far away tonight. She could feel her heart beating in fear and she jumped as the night bird shrieked again. Perhaps he is already out there now, she thought, shivering, and the night bird has seen him coming. Even now, is he standing in the darkness, waiting for the last light in the last cell to go out? Waiting for the blackness of a moonless countryside night, where no light from town can penetrate, a blackness as encompassing as the Great Silence.

  She stood up and went to her window, securing the lock, making sure the blind completely covered the glass. She dared not look outside for fear that she might see the face of hatred and vengeance pressed up against the glass, obscenely squashed, only inches away. The thought made her jump back in fright. She couldn’t sleep. Except for fits and snatches, she had barely slept for weeks, since his appearance. She had thought that this place, with its clean, fresh air, its soothing, plain routines, the round of praying, its patterned carpets and polished floors would be a safe haven. But there is no safe haven, she knew now. There hadn’t been a safe haven for him and his when it had been her people’s turn to act. She stood again, irresolute. Every night of late, it had been so hard to take of
f the wimple and the veil, the rosary beads, the leather belt, the bib and scapular, the undergarments. She felt exposed and vulnerable in her long nightdress and too-short hair, bristly and greying now, no longer the glossy black it had been thirty years ago when she’d first made the decision to spend her life praying for forgiveness and her tresses had fallen around her bridal dress as the Mistress of Novices cut it off.

  Was that a sound outside? She froze, willing her ears to pick up the slightest movement of sole on grass, or the merest crushing of a violet. Only the Great Silence filled her ears, making her head feel huge and light with its depth and weight. She knelt again. There is nothing I can do, she thought. Wherever I go, he’ll find me. And where could I go? I have no money, no friends. Not anymore. The Black Legion is everywhere. She bowed her head over the kneeler. Perhaps she dozed, despite herself.

  She awoke with a start; heard the grandfather clock chime twelve times, willing it to be silent in case he used the throbbing sound as cover to creep closer, closer. He had skills. He knew how to get in, get out of places. He knew how to kill. And she knew why he knew and how he knew. It was her knowledge, too.

  She picked up the pretty pearl-covered prayer book that had been her father’s gift to her all those years ago. My father, she thought, shuddering, and my brother. Will I meet them when I die? Or are they in the hell they made for themselves and other people while they lived? She opened the prayer book at the place she read all the time lately, over and over. She heard a sound. She put her finger between the leaves of the prayer book to keep her place. Yes, definitely, there was someone outside her window. Hatred like his could melt metal. She knew that hatred as if it were her own. His eyes would stare at the window lock and the steel would soften and fall away like wax. She looked towards the window, but it was worse watching. She averted her gaze.

  Even those in front of firing squads are offered a blindfold, she thought. I don’t want to see what’s coming.

  One

  I could hear my own breathing, sounding like the surf against the rocks at Malabar, as the cartridge respirator kept me safe from any external contamination. Behind the clear mask that protected my eyes and face, and a little awkward in the spacesuit, I manoeuvred as delicately as I could. It’s something like dry-land diving, and in my world, there are just as many reefs and sharks to outmanoeuvre.

  Outside the house I was searching, the HAZCHEM boys from the Fire Brigade were champing at the bit, wanting to get in here with their solvents and their powerful sterilising equipment. But the Fire Brigade would just have to wait a little longer while I searched and recorded everything in the dead man’s house. As a senior analyst with Criminalistics at Forensic Services of the Australian Federal Police, and a one-time New South Wales police crime scene examiner, I take precedence. Especially with this sort of death.

  I’d been called out early this morning, away from a couple of days of hard-earned leave and I knew my daughter Jacinta would take a dim view of this if she woke up while I was away. We’d been planning a walk around the coast and brunch at Maroubra. Instead, I was searching a dead man’s house.

  Dr Tony Bonning’s analytical laboratory had been similarly searched and found to be completely clean. Accident had been ruled out and suicide was most unlikely, given that Dr Bonning had just been promoted and was looking forward to a working holiday in Scotland. And who, except the floridly insane, would use such a means to end his life? I even knew the man slightly.

  Tony Bonning wasn’t a friend, but he was a colleague, because in our game eventually you get to know the names and faces of just about everyone in similar and related fields. His special area had been in the chemistry of toxins and he had sometimes given evidence as an expert witness. Over the years, I’d bumped into everyone connected with forensic science at various functions and conferences. Tony Bonning was a nice fellow with whom I’d chatted on those sorts of occasions, but nothing more. Until now. It felt odd, to be searching his house now.

  Behind me, I was aware of our young trainee, Vic Agnew, lent to me by the Federal Police for a training course. Similarly kitted out, Vic followed, filming my every move with his video camera. Occasionally I said something for the recording if I felt it was important, even though I knew the sound quality would be very poor because of the breathing apparatus. Vic also passed a rare comment, but mostly we worked quietly, focused and attentive to the surroundings.

  Part of a crime scene examiner’s job is to cover the scene of the crime so thoroughly that it can be presented to the judge and jury as if they had seen it for themselves. Usually, the police do this, but because of the nature of Tony Bonning’s death, and the possible danger lurking in his home, I was carrying out these procedures.

  The other aspect of crime scene examination involves finding, collecting and recording evidence. Already we had searched every room, a visual search first without touching or disturbing anything, recording in a methodical way, so that nothing was left unnoted, marking the door to each room as we left it, to show any following police officers what we’d covered. ‘Every contact leaves a trace,’ taught the great nineteenth-century French criminologist and scientist Edmund Locard. In the normal run of homicides, I would expect the killer’s presence to be betrayed by some sort of trace. But this killer had not needed to visit this house in person. Instead, he had sent a gift-wrapped emissary on his behalf, a silent, deadly and agonising assassin.

  Because the autopsy results were public, and I already knew what had killed scientist Dr Bonning, and how, I was concentrating my efforts on food and drink items, taking wipe samples from everywhere, sealing them in sterile containers, detailing their origin. So far, the kitchen had been most disappointing, with the refrigerator almost empty apart from a block of cheese, some shrivelled bacon and bottles of wine and beer, still sealed.

  The freezer was empty of food, almost filled by a glacier that could have been formed during the Ice Age. Nothing there excited my interest. Or suspicion. But I’d taken particular interest in the small kitchen bin, and would very thoroughly check the samples I’d taken, firstly in one of the brilliantly lit examination rooms at my workplace, then under the high-powered light microscope.

  Now there was only the dead man’s bedroom to search and I paused at the doorway a moment, letting the scene talk to me, just like I used to do in the old days, to tell me something of the individual who until a few days ago had slept there. You can tell a lot about a person from how he lives and what he has around him. This was a well-furnished bedroom, a masculine space, untidy but not dirty. Messy, but not chaotic.

  Now, at the doorway to Dr Bonning’s bedroom, I imagined him waking on the last morning of his life. Outside, the sudden laughing of kookaburras startled me, incongruous in this place. Did the kookaburras laugh for him that last morning? The unmade bed still showed where Bonning had flung the doona aside on rising. Against the wall on the left-hand side of the doorway was a tall chest of drawers with a mirror on top. Was he already feeling the first effects of the disease when he looked in the mirror? Did he feel something that he thought was just indigestion and decide to tough it out and go to work anyway? From all reports he loved his job.

  It was on the floor near the closed window that I gained a poignant insight into the dead man’s character. Over the small wastepaper bin, like a halo against the wall, was a novelty basketball goal ring, complete with net. The kookaburras’ laughter reached hysterical heights then all at once stopped and I imagined them flying away with a flash of blue.

  I went into the room and Vic came up behind me. Again we started the systematic search and recording left to right, floor to waist. Finally, I approached the wastepaper bin, noticing a couple of screwed-up balls of foil in it among the other bits and pieces. My suspicious mind immediately thought of illegal substances in foil wrappings, but closer inspection revealed them to be sweet or chocolate wrappers. I imagined Bonning lying on his bed, perhaps re
ading a journal, eating sweets, exercising his basketball skills, throwing the screwed-up wrappings into his bin from the bed. One, a half-crushed ball of red silver foil, excited my interest. It was much larger than the others and I felt a sweat of excitement, thinking of what my old partner Bob Edwards had told me.

  ‘Tony wondered when he got it, if he had a secret admirer,’ Bob had said.

  Someone was thinking of him, all right. But not an admirer. And he got it all right.

  Aware of my protective gear, I knelt down beside the bin, Vic close behind, panning slowly around the area, establishing location, shooting the bin and its surrounds. I used a pair of medical tweezers to pick up the foil wrapping and place it on a clean sheet of white paper. Again, I held my breath with excitement, teasing it open a little. My excitement increased. This could be the wrapping paper I was looking for because, squashed as it was, I could still make out the impression of a curving shape embossed along one side. I took a powerful hand glass out of my box of tricks, checking for any powdery residue.

  A human egg is about one hundred micrometres in size and can just be discerned by the naked eye. What I was searching for was no more than one or two micrometres. What I was looking for was not visible. Not even with a powerful magnifying glass—but the medium surrounding it might be.

  I moved out of the way so that Vic could record the screwed-up piece of red foil on the paper, its dimensions, colour and the fact that I was carefully transferring it to a container, then tightly sealing and labelling it.

  If I was holding death in my hands, I intended to keep it well secured. I gave Vic the thumbs up and he came in close, recording the sealed container, my signature and the date, following me as I placed it in another larger outer container, prior to transferring it to the lab. I remembered to breathe again, protected by my respirator.