by Janet Neel
He was looking hostile as well as miserable, and she sought to distract him. ‘I’m throwing away the paracetamol – I’ll find something else to fix a headache.’
‘Because of Richard?’
‘Because of Richard. He never would use it, or let Selina. And even though I don’t have his liver I think I’ll find something else.’ She looked at him. ‘What is it?’
He was staring at her incredulously. ‘I didn’t know he didn’t – normally – use paracetamol.’ He looked past her unseeingly, then spread his hands. ‘Well, that clinches it, doesn’t it? He meant to do it. Thank God.’
‘Darling?’
‘I’ve been feeling terrible. I thought he just blundered out of bed, still pissed, after I’d gone and took a handful, and it was all a ghastly accident which I could have stopped. But if he knew about paracetamol, then he did it deliberately. He killed Selina, and he meant to kill himself. Christ, what a relief.’ He pulled himself out of the chair and enveloped her in a bear hug. ‘Home. Quick. I could even fancy something to eat. Afterwards, I mean.’
Francesca crept silently out of Will’s room, holding her breath. He had been tired and fretful when she got back from a long day at Gladstone, worn out by attendance at the birthday party of a fellow toddler. He had practically slept in his bath and managed half a cup of milk before being rolled into his cot. He turned on his back and complained briefly, but then his eyes had closed and he had disappeared into the utterly silent sleep of childhood. She remembered, wryly, as she slipped away that the first night they had brought him home from hospital, aged six days, she had sat outside his bedroom listening to his quiet breathing, tense with anxiety. John had finally had to take her firmly downstairs, pointing out that there was no reason for Will to stop breathing, once he had started, and in any case she could not spend the rest of her nights on the stairs, it was impracticable.
She would not be so tense and so anxious with a second whatever it was, she assured herself, it would all be much easier. She found she had sat down on the stairs at the very thought of a second sleeping baby, and got hastily to her feet again. She had something on her conscience and if the information had not already reached John by another route, she would have to tell him, even if he was angry. Alcohol would help, she hoped; one of Perry’s Christmas presents had been a case of really good Beaujolais, and a bottle was sitting near the warmth of the stove.
He was home on time, but looking tired and harassed, and she gave him a glass with the soup while the griddle heated, ready for steak au poivre. She asked after his day generally and more particularly, about progress in the Café de la Paix case. She busied herself with the steaks – the sauce needed careful timing – and put them on the table with green beans and courgettes. He ate, ravenously; he must have missed lunch again, but she was not going to nag. She waited for her moment, which she had calculated would come just before the raspberries and cream.
‘There’s something I’m not sure you will have picked up. At Café de la Paix. Judith told me that Richard Marsh-Hayden knew all about the risks of paracetamol on a duff liver. He never bought it, or let Selina do so either. So he must have meant to do himself in.’ She looked at him. ‘I thought that was helpful in case you were in doubt.’
‘He never used it? Or bought it?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Had he been told not to use it? Did Judith Delves say? Was this medical advice?’
‘No, no.’ She told him about the awful story of the repentant teenager; it made her feel queasy even in the retelling, but she knew that her policeman husband had seen most horrors in the course of his career and he would not be put off his dinner. He was sitting very still, eyes narrowed, and she looked at him enquiringly.
‘So he chose the most frightening way to die he could think of,’ he said, slowly, and she sat down, slowly.
‘Put like that …’ she said, hesitantly.
She passed him his raspberries, understanding he was still preoccupied, which he started to eat. She watched, with love, as he suddenly tasted what he was eating and looked at them to check. ‘Raspberries.’
‘And cream and sugar; I put them on for you.’
‘Very good.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m not that cross with you for pointing out something we’d missed. And I’d have got there tomorrow, I hope.’
‘Of course you would.’ This was not simply support for male ego, which she as sister to four brothers knew was much more frail than was generally understood. It was not luck that had propelled her husband to his present eminence, nor intuition, although his was highly developed, but sheer hard work and patience and never neglecting the obvious, even though his well-trained team hadn’t seen it. He stretched out a hand.
‘Now come on, you’re a good useful girl and a credit to the Force, but I got home early so we could have an evening together.’
13
‘Mary, what are you doing?’
Mary Cameron, on her knees on the floor of the inner office, looked up at her, pink and flushed. ‘I can’t stand it any more.’
Judith felt the blood go from her face. ‘But Mary …’
‘Oh, Judith. No, I didn’t mean here, I only meant the mess in the office. Oh dear. Sit down, I’ll make us some coffee.’
She rose clumsily to her feet, and Judith let herself be pressed into a chair. ‘It’s just depressing, being in this office,’ Mary said, firmly, finding the kettle. ‘I thought I would tidy up and pile all the menus and the paper napkins and so on in the inner office so that we aren’t falling over them all the time. We’ll both feel better.’
‘Miss Delves? Inspector Davidson here.’
He was looking through the door, the bright eyes interested.
‘Just having coffee,’ Mary said.
‘Someone been in?’ He glanced round the office, small objects on every surface.
‘I’m afraid it just looks like that, Inspector,’ Judith said, grimly. ‘What can we do for you?’
‘My guvnor’s here. Chief Superintendent McLeish. Be up in a moment.
Judith, tired to the bone, managed not to say that this was a rare pleasure, keenly awaited. Mary, who had a soft spot for goodlooking Scots, was organising coffee for Bruce Davidson, sniffing at half-empty cartons of milk and fussing about getting some fresh from the men working downstairs, or going out to the corner café. Judith was listening for the lift and was taken aback when the latch on the office door clicked and John McLeish was in the room, carrying something small in a plastic bag.
‘Good morning, Miss Delves, Mrs Cameron. Bruce.’ He held up the bag. ‘There’s a sergeant downstairs somewhere. Find him, would you? I wanted to ask Miss Delves and Mrs Cameron about it first. Ah.’ His attention had been caught by something and Davidson checked on his way to the door. ‘Is that bottle kept up here all the time?’
Judith looked blankly at the crowded desk. ‘Bottle? Oh. The paracetamol, you mean? No. I turned it out of my handbag.’
‘When?’
‘When I heard about Richard.’
He considered her, and she felt small and stupid, like a child. ‘Right. After he died. Yesterday.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you had it in your handbag?’
‘Yes. It is my drug of choice for a headache. And I’ve had a few of those.’ She had one now, suddenly, but she could not, of course, take a pill for it. Or not until there was a moment when Mary could be asked to get some aspirin.
‘That’s what I take as well,’ Mary volunteered, and for a moment John McLeish’s attention shifted, then returned like a searchlight. He held up the plastic bag.
‘There were two packets in the kitchen.’
‘What, still?’ She had surprised him, she saw, and was momentarily cheered. ‘With all the workmen, I mean. There is – was – always some there on a shelf to the right of the second hob. Next to the omelette pans. Usually the soluble sort. I know because I used to get them there if I couldn’t be bothered to go up to the off
ice.’ She hesitated. ‘There are normally a couple of packets at the reception desk too, but I don’t know if they’re still there.’
Nothing seemed to pass between John McLeish and his sidekick, but Davidson was gone, his footsteps audible on the stairs. In the background the kettle had boiled, and Mary was hovering, trying to decide whether she should make coffee.
‘I need coffee. Will you have some, Chief Superintendent?’ She looked up to where he was standing like something carved from a tree trunk.
‘Yes, please. Two sugars,’ he said to her relief, and moved to perch on the edge of a desk.
‘You think Richard took paracetamol from here?’ she ventured.
‘Not necessarily.’
The phone rang and she picked up, then handed it to him.
‘Three packets and two bottles.’ His eyebrows moved. ‘Right. Yes, take them all, give them to the DC down there, tell him to get them off.’
‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘Tests.’
She thought about it. ‘Fingerprints. But everybody’s will be on them. I mean, they’re communal. The ones at reception are in case a customer comes in with a headache.’
‘We have most of yours on file, I believe.’
They did, she remembered; on the day after Selina’s body had been discovered they had all had their fingerprints taken. It had been just another not quite real event of that awful day. She was suddenly overcome with exhaustion; this had all been going on for ever. ‘Why does it matter where he got the paracetamol? Is it worse if he picked it up here than if he bought it?’ She was sounding shrill, she could hear, but it provoked no reaction at all. He was listening to something, she realised, and heard voices on the stairs.
‘I didn’t fucking know he shouldn’t take the stuff, did I?’ The door opened to reveal Tony Gallagher in a grubby tunic with ‘Chef’ on the pocket, with Davidson and another big man in the inevitable grey suit and white shirt; they really might as well wear a uniform jacket and helmet, she thought.
‘Mr Gallagher says he gave Mr Marsh-Hayden four paracetamols dissolved in water on the Monday around 8 p.m.’
‘He’d passed himself out, then he came round with a thick head. We wanted to get him out of here, so I gave him something I take when I’ve got a head. Soluble, see, they work quicker.’ He looked across at Judith in appeal. ‘Oh Christ! I only meant …’
‘He’d had more than four,’ John McLeish said, matter-of-factly.
‘Tony, did he know they were paracetamol?’ Judith asked.
John McLeish’s head lifted, sharply, but he did not intervene.
‘He wouldn’t have known if they was fucking arsenic, Judy. He had a bad head, he needed to shift the pain, he just drank it down without asking questions.’
‘Did anyone else give him anything? Or did he take anything else while he was here?’ John McLeish was somehow managing to sound only casually interested.
‘I dunno, mate. Look, he was here, pissed, and in the way. I wanted him gone, Michael wanted him gone, so did Brian Rubin, so they could have a little get-together. If he’d wanted some more, they’d have given him some. Why don’t you ask them?’
‘We shall. Did you leave the packet with them?’
‘Didn’t take the packet. I mixed the stuff in the kitchen, put the packet back next to the Bandaid. Can’t operate a shift without that stuff; or the Alka Seltzer.’
Yes, Judith thought, and if you looked at anyone’s workplace you would find, along with the materials for doing their job, the particular medicaments they favoured. Along with Chef’s favourite knife and his best omelette pan went the headache pills and the barley sugar sweets he sucked. And no one in Tony’s kitchen would take even one without his consent, and it was quite inconceivable that anyone would remove a whole package. She cleared her throat.
‘You’ll find another bottle in my top drawer, Chief Superintendent. Along with other necessities.’ She watched as Bruce Davidson and the other policeman, wearing thin plastic gloves, went through all the desks, hers and Mary’s, ignoring sanitary towels, packets of raisins, wine gums, old combs, and producing, finally, five bottles of paracetamol, varying from full to half empty, two packets of the same, soluble, and three packets of Anadin. ‘Selina didn’t take paracetamol,’ she said, wearily. ‘Richard wouldn’t let her. I kept aspirin and the Anadin for her.’
‘We all went in the car to get him home, Michael and Brian Rubin and me. That night.’ Tony Gallagher was pale and sweating around the hair-line.
John McLeish nodded; he’d known that, she understood.
‘I’d like to get a statement from you, Mr Gallagher, now. Just about the events of Monday evening.’
‘I’d like my solicitor here.’
‘Matthew Sutherland? Certainly, if you wish. Ring him now.’ He looked round the crowded office. ‘Get him to meet you at New Scotland Yard, will you? As soon as he can. Can you use another phone? I want another word with Miss Delves. No, not you, Mrs Cameron, thank you, you weren’t here on Monday as I understand it. You could come to New Scotland Yard, Miss Delves, if that suits you better?’
‘No,’ she said, through a tight throat. If Mary would not mind going and perhaps getting in some more supplies, tea, coffee and milk, if she would? The big sergeant helpfully offered to escort her, and Davidson held the door open so Mary had no choice but to leave, making only two forays back, first for her bag then for her coat. Bruce Davidson, in answer to an invisible signal from McLeish, followed the party out.
‘This doesn’t need to be formal, yet,’ McLeish said, surprising her. ‘And I’ve understood about the paracetamol. Tell me about the safe. Mrs Cameron found it open; she told one of my people.’
She told him promptly about the scene with Richard, and how she had not liked to leave the cash in the big safe.
‘But you shut the big safe then?’
‘Oh yes. And put the cash in the old safe.’
‘And you think you closed it?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you know the combination by heart?’
‘Of the big safe, yes. The old safe – the little one – happened to be open when I wanted to put the cash in. I had to look it up to open it yesterday.’
‘And where would you look it up?’
Her heart sank; she had hoped that somehow he would miss this point. ‘In the card index, on the desk there.’ She made to pick up the old red leather box.
‘Don’t touch it, please.’
Her hand checked, and he waited while she got herself back in place.
‘Under what would the number be filed?’
‘Well. Under S, I’m afraid.’
‘S for safe.’ He sounded only mildly surprised, and she looked at him with despair.
‘I know, I know. And if – when – we get back into order all that will be changed. Selina could never remember the number of the big safe and there was a panic one morning, so we put it on the card. We put the number of the old safe there as well.’
‘Who else would have known that?’
‘Well, Richard obviously did. He put the file of letters in it.’
‘Yes.’ McLeish was used to people under stress explaining the obvious, but he was also in a hurry and she blushed.
‘I imagine everyone did. Or could have, which must come to the same thing.’
‘Mr Gallagher?’
‘Yes,’ she said, reluctantly. ‘He’s in and out of the office all the time, and he and Mary work together a lot …’ Her mind was not entirely on him, she was worrying away at something, he saw, and waited. ‘Those letters. Were they …’
McLeish decided she could be helpful. ‘Those letters are still being scheduled. But some are from men, and make it clear that she was still having affairs after her marriage.’
‘Yes. I think I knew she was. She got letters here marked “Personal” which no one would have opened.’
‘If we asked you to identify handwriting, would you be able to?�
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She winced and he considered his statement. ‘On an envelope, that is. She kept them too.’
‘I would be glad to try.’ She paused for thought. ‘But, you know, unless you work with someone, or live with them, you don’t see their handwriting. So I may not be much use.’
This had not been, he saw, what she was really thinking about, and he sat on the edge of a desk to give her time to elucidate her next worry.
‘There is something I need to tell you.’
‘What?’
She went to her bag and got out a letter which had the look of having been read a dozen times already. ‘Selina and I are – were – of course insured as key men. As people of key importance to the business.’ She looked at him to see if he understood and saw that he did. ‘Originally for £30,000 each. That was four years ago, when we started.’
‘Yes?’
‘Then two months ago, I was looking at the insurance on the building and I found the policy and thought it really seemed too little. £30,000, I mean. So I put it up to £100,000 each.’ She looked at him, but he was registering nothing. ‘I’d forgotten about it. I can’t believe it, but I had. Mary sent a copy of the death certificate to our insurance broker, because we needed to get him to change the signatures. Only she didn’t know I’d increased it. So this morning my broker’s asking me to fill up a claim form and saying what a good thing we had increased it.’
‘So you will get £100,000?’
‘Not me personally. It’s the company’s money. But it means we can pay the outstanding bills and get open again.’
‘And without it?’
‘I have a meeting with the bank manager this morning. And we weren’t paying any bills and I wasn’t sure … well, what he would do. I’ll go to the meeting, but now I only have to give him this letter.’
She looked at him, in appeal, but he was remembering his conversation with Francesca. With the restaurant closed, cash poured out, bills poured in and your only hope was the bank who might well have been unreceptive to a request for a substantial loan. But surely no competent person running their own business could actually have forgotten how much insurance they had? Failed to remember to take insurance perhaps, but forgotten how much it was? He considered her; she was sitting on her big chair, defiantly drinking coffee, a big capable young woman in her workmanlike navy boiler suit. Her late partner, attention only half on the business, forever being distracted by her admirers, must have sometimes annoyed her beyond bearing. And it must have been about the time she was renewing the insurance that Judith Delves would have realised that this partner had managed so badly as to leave the business perilously short of cash and that they might be in a position where they had to sell.