Remember Me

by A K Lakelett

  ‘Well maybe Estelle didn’t meet with Eric at all – maybe she met with Harris and gave her the poison. Harris could then have met with Warner in the woods and poisoned him. Since Harris had Warner’s credit cards, she must at least have been there.’ Ford is whipping up new ideas.

  ‘Could be, but we would have to find out if and how Estelle and Selena Harris knew each other. Besides, even if they did, why would Harris want to help Estelle poison her husband? Bit drastic just because he had had vasectomy. Surely she could have divorced him for money?’

  ‘Wouldn’t Estelle get more money if Eric was dead? And what about the ex, Lizzie claimed her mother killed him for sure. And Maggie did admit knowing about herbs, didn’t she sir? Couldn’t she have made a concoction?’

  ‘But she couldn’t have killed him. She was in Edinburgh; we just got that cleared up, didn’t we? I think there’s something else going on here. We’ll find out as soon as the fingerprint guys are done. So let’s hold judgement on all of this and get on with all those other cases we have – what about that alleged assault on Market Street? Do you have anything more on that?’

  Dr. Percy Slater

  Since Dr. Slater has now been told what sort of poison or substance to possibly look for, he can order additional toxicology tests for it.

  Unfortunately, the test for aconite requires more specialized knowledge and equipment than he has access to in the local hospital lab. He has to send the blood samples to London. Based on a hunch, he sends the samples for both Eric Warner and Selena Harris as well as a sample of her stomach contents.

  When he gets home, he looks at his lovely border, planted by his late wife, where monkshood spikes are growing tall. His wife was a keen gardener; he just did the heavy lifting part. Now on his own, he’s started to learn the difference between flowering plants and weeds. The monkshood will likely bloom in a week or two. He shakes his head. Even after all the years he has spent working with the police, it still amazes him by how people are able to find new ways to do away with each other. Sad, that’s what it is, sad.

  Monday 16th of June

  DI Peter Greene and DC Terry Ford

  Ford and Greene go to visit Ms. Harris’ flat. Since she is now a confessed murderer, Greene insists on going there to find out more about her and why would she kill Eric Warner.

  They comb through her flat methodically. It’s a small flat; there’s the lounge where she was found, a small bedroom, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. Nothing much to be found. The entire flat is very tidy and uncluttered. Her bookshelf has three photographs in bronze frames, one with three young girls, taken by the look of it in the fifties, and two others with one smiling girl, around ten or twelve years old, in each. All the closets, kitchen cupboards and dressers are well organized; her bed had been made up, and there are no dirty dishes. Ford opens the refrigerator door and discovers something smelling very bad in there. He wrinkles his nose, closes the door quickly, and gets out of the kitchen. In a desk drawer, bills are all filed and in order. Nothing that would explain why Selena Harris killed Warner.

  No alternative or homeopathic medicines nor pouches with Chinese herbs are found. An unopened bottle of scotch and a lot of books in a bookshelf but nothing about medicine or poisons. There is a book about cancer by her bedside containing handwritten notes. No plants of any kind, no flowers. Greene even checks the spice shelf, which has a few dried herbs: thyme, oregano and dill. All smell like they usually do, nothing strange there, but he takes them anyway. The rubbish bin contains plastic wrappers and containers for a few frozen meals along with an empty container of orange juice. They also find some shopping lists and handwritten notes in the desk drawer. They take those to compare with the confession note. Even though the solicitor had confirmed the handwriting to be that of Ms. Harris, it’s always good to be sure.

  Ford bags the kitchen herbs and her laptop which is password protected. Greene bags the notes and shopping lists.

  ‘She lived a very ordinary life, didn’t she sir?’

  ‘Indeed she did, but so do most murderers.’

  The detectives drive back to the office.

  Ford gets to work on the laptop, with the help of the police IT technician. Once they crack the password, Ford goes through all the files in it. He finds nothing out of ordinary, no searches for aconite, or poisons in the browser history, no files about poisons. The only slightly interesting thing is an email exchange between Selena Harris and someone named Evie who had been abused as a child, but all the emails are from more than six months ago. They also find a few other emails with similar content, but nothing about Eric Warner, or any of the other Warners for that matter. The only recent email exchanges they find are between Harris and a cancer help group and her doctor.

  Ford searches the entire drive, and finds nothing of interest. He gives the laptop to the IT technician and asks him to do another search and see if he can find something which would connect Selena Harris and Eric Warner.

  Tuesday 17th of June

  DC Terry Ford

  Ford barely has time to sit down at his desk in the morning before he gets a call from Jenna Baker reporting on her meeting with Joyce Lane on Monday afternoon. Joyce Lane had returned home from a two-week holiday in Greece on Sunday evening, and hadn’t been surprised to hear of her aunt’s death. She had visited her aunt at Easter in Faukon Abbey. Her aunt had told Joyce about the cancer and how it was spreading. Ms. Harris had also told her how she didn’t want to end her days laying in a hospital bed in pain and getting pumped high on morphine. So hearing that Aunt Selena had taken her own way out was not exactly a surprise to Ms. Lane. She was a bit surprised about the timing, however – she thought Ms. Harris would have at least called her or something, but she had not talked with her since early May.

  Ms. Lane had been at Canterbury Teeny Tots kindergarten, where she worked as a teacher, on the twelfth of May. Jenna Baker had confirmed with Ms. Lane’s supervisor that she had indeed worked all that day.

  Joyce did know that her aunt had left her the flat and that the rest of the money would go to the school - Aunt Selena had told her that during her visit at Easter. She had no idea of the value of it. Her aunt had told her to sell the flat.

  Joyce had asked Jenna when she could arrange the funeral, and promised to contact DC Ford or DI Greene when she came to Faukon Abbey on Thursday. And if they had more questions, they were welcome to call her. Terry thanks Jenna and wishes her success on her upcoming sergeant’s exams.

  Thursday 20th of June

  Dr. Percy Slater

  Dr. Slater calls Greene in the morning, ‘I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that I now have results concerning all of the meds, including the one labelled “Aconite”, the ones you had taken from Warner’s flat in Exeter. None of them contained any aconite. I also tested the medicines from Selena Harris’ flat. All of those were exactly what the label said; all were used for cancer treatment or were off-the-shelf pain killers and vitamins, so no aconite there. And her spice jars contained exactly what the labels said, nothing there either. And she hadn’t taken an overdose of any of those.’

  ‘Guess that would have been too easy,’ Greene says.

  ‘However, the good news is that I just received a phone call from the forensic lab in London. According to their preliminary test results, both Eric Warner and Selena Harris were most likely poisoned with aconite. They’ll send a full report with the test results later this week but I assumed you would want to know as soon as possible. What still is not clear is how either of them ingested the aconite; a theory is that it was in something they ate, but the stomach contents didn’t contain any leafy or green substances. There was a thermal coffee mug found next to Eric Warner’s body, but the remaining liquid, coffee, didn’t contain any poison either. The same applies to Ms. Harris. She’d had coffee but the liquid found in the bottom of the cup next to the chair contained nothing but coffee and a bit of sugar.’

  ‘Is there no other way?
’ asks Greene. ‘Could someone have injected them with it?’

  ‘It is possible, but Warner didn’t have any injection marks on his body. I looked specifically for those. Ms. Harris is a bit harder to tell for sure, as the body had started to decompose. Also she’d had multiple injections as part of her cancer treatment so in her case one more injection site wouldn’t be noticeable anyway.’

  ‘So how did they get it?’ asks Greene.

  ‘I do not know – one possibility is something rubbed into the skin. And remember, this poison doesn’t work instantaneously; it takes ten to twenty minutes until the victim’s heartrate drops drastically until it stops altogether. The symptoms are very similar to those of a heart attack, so however they got poisoned, it must have been done then and there, no other way.’

  Greene thanks Dr. Slater and hangs up.

  DI Peter Greene and DC Terry Ford

  ‘It was aconite that killed both Eric Warner and Selena Harris,’ Greene tells Ford. ’Slater can’t figure out how they got poisoned.’

  ‘So how about this, could be that she was in the woods, met him there, gave him the poison in the coffee, and then left her own coffee cup next to him and took the poisoned one with her. Then she goes home and drinks the rest of it?’ Terry says.

  ‘Very good Terry, that could very well be it, but we do not know.’

  A few moments later the lab tech comes by. The envelopes they had received from the solicitor had been dusted for fingerprints. They found the fingerprints on the small envelope and its content belong only to Selena Harris.

  ‘So I guess we’ll have to accept her confession then?’ Greene says, ‘but why did she do it, and where did she get the poison? And how did she do it?’

  The front desk calls Peter Greene and informs him that he has a visitor, one Joyce Lane to see him. Greene asks her to be sent up and dispatches Ford to get them some tea and biscuits.

  Joyce Lane, an attractive thirty-year-old with shoulder-length brown wavy unruly hair and intelligent brown eyes behind heavy green-rimmed glasses, comes in. She’s on the short side, and wears dark green pants and a white t-shirt beneath a beige cardigan. She brought a large green and beige shoulder bag with her to collect her aunt’s things. Greene asks her to sit down.

  ‘Tell me about your aunt. Why did Selena Harris move to Faukon Abbey?’ Greene asks.

  ‘Aunt Selena had grown up in Devon, so she wanted to return to her roots, or so she told me’ Joyce says, ‘It certainly is a cheaper place to live than London. Also, Exeter hospital is apparently one of the best in the country in terms of cancer care.’

  Joyce also explains about the mobile phone. Aunt Selena had had a mobile for years but it had been provided to her by the school. When she retired, she bought a simple one, said she didn’t need anything complex. She only gave the phone number to very few people, her closest friends and relatives. Because of the cancer, she didn’t want to burden people – she said, ‘Elephants go to a certain place to die,’ and that was what she was doing too. Joyce lets out a sob and takes out a handkerchief from her pocket. She blows her nose. Aunt Selena wasn’t into dwelling on dying, she says, and she wasn’t in much pain, or at least that’s what she had said at Easter. Aunt Selena had claimed she had led a good and long life, and that when her time came, she was ready to go.

  Terry shows up with some tea and biscuits. Greene lets Joyce take a few sips and blow her nose again. Joyce digs for a clean handkerchief from her bag.

  ‘Any idea why your aunt would have wanted to kill Eric Warner?’ Greene asks her.

  ‘Wait, what, who, what? What do you mean kill? Kill who? My aunt wouldn’t kill a fly!’ Joyce sits up and stares at Greene and then Ford. She asks again, ‘What on Earth are you talking about?’

  Greene shows Joyce the letter they had received from the solicitor. Joyce reads it, her hands shaking. Her eyes widen.

  ‘Oh my God, this is crazy! This can’t be right!’ she says and shakes her head.

  ‘Is it your aunt’s handwriting?’

  ‘I wouldn’t really know; I don’t think I’ve seen much of it. Nobody writes letters any more. I think the only thing in handwriting I’ve seen in the last few years are birthday and Christmas cards. Besides, we weren’t that close, we only talked a couple of times a year on the phone. I saw more of her growing up.’

  ‘What about the signature? Do you recognize that one? Is that hers?’

  ‘It looks like it, I think it could be hers. But I can’t believe this! There’s no way she could have done anything of the sort! Why would she do it? She always talked about how she was against war, and killing people in general and how much she disapproved of capital punishment. And now you’re telling me she has killed someone? I can’t believe it. This is absolutely crazy; it must be some sort of a mix up? Are you really sure she did it? That it’s her writing? Why would she do anything like that?’ Joyce cannot stop shaking her head.

  ‘That’s what we would like to find out too,’ Greene says. ‘Is there anything you could tell us to help us figure out why she would do this?’

  ‘Sorry, no. As I said, she was totally against killing people, and I don’t believe she killed this Eric Warner. There must be some other explanation. Are you sure she did it?’

  ‘Charles Penny gave us the letter. He was told to give it to us after her death. And according to him, it is your aunt’s handwriting.’

  ‘I can’t take this in,’ Joyce says. She keeps looking at both officers.

  ‘Was your aunt into herbs and alternative medicine?’

  ‘Not that I know of, I don’t think so. She had a very – how shall I put it – scientific mind. She wasn’t religious – it wasn’t that she scoffed at it or anything; she just believed that humans had a mind, a brain, and that they should use it. She used to tell me that just because we don’t know something, there’s no reason we can’t find out. She would go on about how much we have discovered and how much there was yet to discover, whether it was about nature or medicine or how our brains worked. She was so sharp and intelligent.’ Joyce blows her nose again. ‘She had such a great sense of humor. And although she could be quite strict with her pupils, I know they all loved her, because they knew she was there for them.’ A tear rolls down Joyce’s cheek and she sighs. ‘I will miss her.’ She sips her tea.

  ‘She sounds like a great lady,’ Greene says after a while.

  ‘She was, she was.’ Joyce sighs again. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘No, thank you so much for coming here. We are very sorry for your loss. DC Ford will show you downstairs where you can sign for your aunt’s things. Are you staying for a few days?’

  ‘No, I only have a day off today. I have to meet with Charles Penny too. We talked on the phone but apparently there’s paperwork to be signed. I’ll drive to Aunt Selena’s flat and check things out. Then I’ll have to drive back home. I’ll have to get more time off approved before I can get back here again. Then I’ll clean it up and put it up for sale.’

  ‘Very well. Let us know if you find anything or can come up with any reason why your aunt would have killed Mr. Warner. As it is now, we will have to take her confession as stated.’

  Greene thanks Joyce again and shakes her hand. Ford walks Joyce downstairs.

  ‘That didn’t help us any, did it sir?’ Terry asks when he gets back upstairs.

  ‘Nope, indeed it did not. Selena Harris sounded like a really nice person. And no, before you ask, I don’t think Joyce lied to us about her.’

  ‘Didn’t think so either, sir. What do we do now?’

  Greene sighs and shakes his head.

  ‘We have to make sure we have exhausted all other possibilities. We check, double check and make sure we are 100% certain that nobody else could have possibly murdered Eric Warner. We check that we know for certain where everybody was that day, and then we check everything we know again, and then, and only then, I’ll talk to Mullan about it.’

  Monday 23rd of June

  DI
Peter Greene

  Greene again drives to Penzance to talk with Maggie about herbal medicines in general and if she knows anything about monkshood. He drives there not just because he wants to make sure beyond a reasonable doubt that she had nothing to do with her former husband’s death; he drives there because he wants to see her.

  That he is again showing up on her doorstep right after breakfast is starting to feel very familiar. While Maggie knows he’s there due to his job, Peter harbors a hope that she likes seeing him too.

  She takes him into the garden again where they eat scones and drink tea and talk about herbs and poisonous plants. Maggie has previously said she doesn’t have poisonous plants and only makes herbal tea and skin creams (with beeswax, lavender and almond oil), and when Greene looks around in her garden he doesn’t see anything that looks like monkshood plants.

  When Peter asks her about monkshood, she tells him that she knows that it is a very poisonous plant which is why she doesn’t have any growing in her own garden. Peter had previously spoken with his own neighbors to find out how many of them knew monkshood was poisonous and how many had it growing in their garden. It turned out that all them knew about it being highly poisonous, and a few of them had it growing in a background in a border, one even had small kids. As Slater had said, it’s a common plant, no law against growing it. Slater had also pointed out that many of other common garden plants are equally poisonous, which is why they were used in medicine. Take for example digitalis, one of the early heart medicines. Slater had called them beneficially poisonous.