“You tried.” Gethsemane looked down at Reston. Blood puddled under the young woman’s arm. Eamon was right. It did look like a lot to be from a single wound in her arm. Reston needed help. Soon. She turned back to the ghost. “I’ve got an idea. Bunny hop the phone.”
“Talk sense.”
“You have to see an object to move it. Go to the cottage, find my phone, and send it as far as you can. Follow it to where ever it lands, send it a little farther. And so on and so on until you get it to me. It may take a while but,” she gestured toward the waves breaking over the base of the cliffs, “like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Darlin’—”
Gethsemane braced for a litany of objections to her plan.
“That might work. Be back soon.” Eamon vanished.
Gethsemane called down to the unconscious woman. “Reston, can you hear me? I’m trying to get you some help. Hang in there. Reston?”
No response. She sat against the wall. Nothing to do but wait. And think. Who’d shot at them? Eamon saw someone running. Male or female? Hard to imagine Ellen Jacobi doing her own dirty work. But if she was desperate…Reston saw men’s pants and shoes. She hadn’t seen who wore them. What if Ellen borrowed them from her lover? Or her soon-to-be-late husband’s closet? Or—
“Your phone, madam.” Eamon reappeared, interrupting her thoughts. Her phone floated down from the top of the cliff. She snatched it from the air and dialed 999.
The operator’s voice came on the line. “What’s your emergency?”
“RoderickJacobi’sandMurdochCollins’smurderershotatusandwefelloffacliffandRestonisn’tmovingandweneedanambulanceandthegardai,” tumbled out in an unintelligible torrent.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. You’ve fallen off a cliff and you need the gardaí?”
Gethsemane repeated the story at an understandable speed. “Send an ambulance and the guards. And tell Inspectors Sutton and O’Reilly their stake out at Our Lady’s a bust.”
Assured of imminent rescue, she sank onto the ledge and rested her head against the cool rock of the cliff wall. “They’re coming, Reston,” she called down to the young woman. “Help’s coming.” She closed her eyes.
Nineteen
“Please open your eyes.”
Gethsemane squeezed them tighter. “Only if you promise to stop shining that light in them.” A long-suffering sigh prompted her to open one eye for a peek at the doctor making a valiant effort to examine her. “I’m fine.”
He set his pen light on the tray next to the bed on which she sat. Beeps and bells from other areas of the Accident and Emergency ward filtered through the yellow curtain surrounding them. “You fell off a cliff.”
Not exactly. “I, um, jumped. To get away from bullets.”
The doctor massaged the bridge of his nose. “I remember you. Your head’s healed nicely, by the way.”
Gethsemane touched the small scar above her eyebrow. It had been an ugly wound the last time she’d been in A and E, the result of having her head slammed into a metal shelf. This doctor had stitched it up. Just before she’d eloped from the hospital with Frankie’s help.
“You were about as cooperative then as you are now,” the doctor said.
“I’m fine, honest.” She held up a bandaged hand. “Scrapes, nothing. Reston Flynn is the one you should be worried about.”
“Miss Flynn is being attended to.”
“Is she bad? How many times was she shot? Will she make it?”
Puzzlement registered on the doctor’s face. “Miss Flynn suffered a single, superficial gunshot wound to her arm. The fall banged her up a bit. She broke her wrist. Nothing life-threatening. She’ll ‘make it,’ as you say. You worried otherwise?”
“All that blood? From a superficial wound? I saw her lying in a pool—” The doctor’s eye roll toned down her hyperbole. “Well, a good-sized puddle. More than you’d expect from a flesh wound.” She added in response to the same you’re-not-a-doctor look her brother often gave her when she weighed in on medical matters, “It was a lot of blood even by a layman’s assessment.”
“Ah.” The doctor’s skepticism dissolved into understanding. “Her bleeding disorder.”
“What bleeding disorder?”
“Herbin Disease.” He frowned. “You know Miss Flynn suffers from Herbin Disease?”
“Oh, that,” she bluffed, afraid he’d stop talking if he thought he violated confidentiality rules by divulging information she didn’t already know. “Of course I know Reston has Herbin Disease. I didn’t realize it was a bleeding disorder. Not being a doctor.”
“It is fairly rare. I’ve only seen one other case, back when I was an intern.”
Gethsemane leaned forward on the exam table and lowered her voice, a tactic that always worked with her brother when she wanted him to tell her more about someone’s medical condition than he’d intended to. “What causes it?”
Apparently, this doctor shared her brother’s eagerness to explain medicine to an eager audience. He leaned in. “It’s caused by a genetic defect that leads to the production of abnormally functioning clotting factors. Unlike von Willebrand’s Disease, which affects about one percent of the population…”
A two-minute lecture on bleeding disorders followed. When the doctor finished, Gethsemane asked, “Is Herbin Disease treatable? Will Reston be okay?”
“Her wound is small. She bled a lot relative to the size of the wound but not a life-threatening amount. As I said, she’ll recover. Too bad we’re out of Achillervum. We’d have stopped her bleeding sooner if our pharmacy stocked it. Closest supply is at City General in Cork.”
“Achillervum?”
“The drug used to treat Herbin Disease. To specifically treat it, I mean. Other treatments, blood transfusions and whatnot, are supportive, but Achillervum normalizes the functioning of the clotting factors. It’s the only drug currently available that does, although rumor has it, some gene therapies are in the pipeline. Achillervum is hard to get these days, though. The only company that produced it, Avar Pharmaceuticals, stopped about six months ago.”
Jacobi’s company. “You know Avar’s CEO and Chief Operating Officer were murdered here in Dunmullach this week.”
“That Jacobi fella and, what’s his name, Collins?” The doctor looked surprised. “I thought they were connected to the flower show.”
“They were. But roses were an expensive hobby. Pharma was their main line of work.”
“You’d think I’d recognize their names. Guess I don’t get out of the hospital enough. Truth is, I don’t pay much attention to the business side of pharmaceuticals—who owns which company, which companies are merging, which one is taking over another, that sort of thing. I only pay attention to manufacturers’ names when I have trouble getting one of their drugs. If Avar hadn’t stopped producing Achillervum, I wouldn’t have known it was theirs.” He held one of her hands and squeezed one of her fingertips until it turned pale.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.” He released the pressure on her finger and counted seconds until it flushed red again. “Two seconds. Normal capillary refill. Do you feel me touching your fingers?” He brushed the tips of each with his own. “Can you wiggle them? Make a fist?”
She performed the actions and repeated them with the other hand. “See? Fine. Why did Avar stop manufacturing Achillervum?”
“Single-minded, I remember.” He scribbled in her chart before answering. “Achillervum is an orphan drug, a drug used to treat a rare condition so it’s not likely to be prescribed often. It’s derived from a plant that only grows in the rainforest so it’s expensive to produce.”
“Expensive to make, not likely to sell much. That translates to not profitable. No return on investment. But if it’s the only drug that treats Achillervum and Avar’s not making it anymore, what will people with Herbin Disease do when
the current supply runs out?”
The doctor shrugged. “Too many late night shifts in A and E have turned me into a cynic but I don’t believe the pharmaceutical companies are overly concerned with the fate of such a small number of people. Despite their claims of trying to improve lives, I think they’re more concerned with improving their bank balances. At least, Avar cares more about money than patients.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I had trouble getting several medications recently, so I called a druggist friend to look into it. Seems Avar’s decided gene therapy is the future of pharma. They’re abandoning a lot of their old medicines and selling their licenses and patents on others. They’re using the profits to ramp up their gene therapy research and development.”
“That sounds forward thinking, not greedy and uncaring.”
“Until you find out they’re selling the licenses and patents below market value to pharmaceutical companies who then quintuple the retail price of the meds. And you find out that Avar made deals for a share of the profits for the newly exorbitantly priced products. And you find out that Avar is firing a lot of their old scientists, the ones who developed these drugs, and weaseling them out of any financial stake they thought they had in the patents on drugs they developed.”
“Okay, yeah, that does sound pretty Martin Shkreli.”
A twitch of the curtain surrounding the exam table revealed a nurse’s face. She addressed the doctor. “Excuse me, a couple of guards out here want to speak to Dr. Brown.”
The doctor stood. “We’re finished.” He said to Gethsemane, “I know you’ll refuse to stay overnight for observation, so I won’t ask you to. Your discharge paperwork will contain instructions for changing your bandages.” He nodded at her hands. “None of the abrasions are deep, so basically, just keep them clean and dry.”
He excused himself and left with the nurse. Niall and Inspector Sutton replaced them at Gethsemane’s bedside.
“Before you say anything—” Gethsemane began.
“Are you all right?” Niall interrupted.
Sutton cut them both off. “Did you get a look at the person who shot at you?”
“No,” she said to Sutton. “I’m all right,” she said to Niall.
Niall touched a bandage. “Your hands.”
“Just scraped. And banged up. And sore. But not permanently damaged. Reston got the worst of the ordeal.”
“You’re up to giving a statement, then,” Sutton said. Not asked.
Niall flashed his colleague a look like a gathering storm. “Jaysus, Bill, can you not even wait ’til she’s released from the hospital before you grill her?”
“A murderer’s roaming the village running people down and shooting them in the street and you’re worried about what? Me hurting her feelings? Wearing out her delicate constitution? I suspect Dr. Brown’s made of stern enough stuff to forego a few niceties if it means getting a dangerous criminal off the streets.”
“Yes, she is made of stern stuff,” Gethsemane said, “and she’s sitting right here so she can hear you. And there’s nothing nice about the garda station, no offense, so I’m happy to forego it. I’d just as soon make a statement here than in that horrid interrogation room.” A raised hand cut off Niall’s protest. “But what I’d really like to do is go home, shower, and put on some clothes not covered in dirt and riddled with tears.” She pointed to a rip in her blouse. “I’d also like to check on Reston. She was still unconscious when Search and Rescue pulled us off the cliff.”
“You’ll have to wait on that last bit, checking on Miss Flynn, I mean,” Sutton said. “They just took her to surgery.”
Gethsemane gasped. “Surgery? The doctor told me she wasn’t seriously injured. A broken wrist was all.”
“Surgery’s for her wrist,” Sutton said. “Needs pins, apparently. Not serious by A and E standards.”
“Nor father of four standards,” Niall said. “How many bones have your boys had repaired, Bill?”
“I stopped counting after the plate in Liam’s collarbone.” Sutton sighed and smoothed his thinning hair. “Dr. Brown, I have to go to the station and explain to the Super why I wasted garda resources on a bust of a stakeout. If I’m still employed after my tap dance, I’ll be up to your cottage in an hour, hour-and-a-half. Then, you’ll explain to me what happened on that cliff. No excuses.”
“No excuses,” Gethsemane said.
“You’ll see she gets home?” he asked Niall.
“Yeah, of course.”
Sutton left. His grumbling about superintendents and taking advice from civilians and making a bags of a stakeout faded away with his footsteps.
“We got Miss Flynn’s version of events before they took her to surgery,” Niall said, “but they’d given her something for pain, so her story didn’t make much sense. Something about an invisible force lifting her up and carrying her over the edge of the cliff just in time to save her from a bullet.”
Niall and Sutton would never know how much sense Reston’s story made. Gethsemane looked away to hide a smile. Niall put a hand on her arm. “Are you sure you’re all right? You don’t have to put up a front. If you’re not up to talking today, I can put Bill off.”
“I appreciate the offer, Niall, but honest, I’m fine. I ache but not so much a hot shower and a couple of paracetamols won’t fix it.” She saw doubt flicker in his storm-gray eyes. “Honest. Sutton’s right, I’m made of stern stuff. I’m not going to fall apart or breakdown or melt into tears. Besides, I’m getting used to almost being killed.” His pained look prompted an added, “That was a joke.”
A reluctant, dimpled grin softened the worry. “All right, all right. You’ve convinced me. I’ll stop fussing over you like you’re a hothouse flower. I forget how tough you are.” He gave her a hand down from the exam table. “C’mon, I’ll drive you home.”
“Where’s Frankie?”
“In the waiting area. Head nurse wouldn’t let him back. ‘Next of kin, only.’ Dug her heels in. Wouldn’t have let Bill and me back if we hadn’t shown our garda ID. Frankie wasn’t happy about it. Ate the head off the nurse. Didn’t quiet down until she showed him she knew as many swear words as he did.”
They joined a sulking Frankie in the waiting area. He gestured at her bandaged hands. “What’s all that? You all right?”
“I’m fine, my hands are fine, at least, they will be, and no one is blaming you so stop with that look.”
“I blame me. I’m the one Reston Flynn, the header, is obsessed with. I’m the one she came after. I should’ve stayed at the cottage.”
“And I should’ve stayed there with him,” Niall said.
“You should both stop,” Gethsemane said. “Planting the bogus message on the fan site was my idea. None of us guessed that Reston—who’s overly dramatic but not crazy—would see through the ruse and show up at Carraigfaire instead of Our Lady.”
“You’re sure the killer came after Reston and not you?” Niall asked.
Gethsemane nodded. “The shooter fired at her. None of the shots were aimed at me, I just happened to be standing next to her. Although, I doubt whoever it was would have cared much if I’d been hit as well.”
“So you’re a ballistics expert, now?” Niall asked.
“Not an expert, but I do have some experience being shot at.” Such as the first time she confronted a murderer.
Niall reddened. “Sorry.”
“Never mind. Look, here’s where we’re at. We know Reston didn’t kill Jacobi or Collins because the person who killed them also tried to kill her.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Frankie said. “Maybe Reston killed the two men and someone tried to avenge their deaths.”
His remark rated hands on hips and a raised eyebrow. “Frankie…”
“I know, I know. That sounded ridiculous as soon as I said it.”
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“Maybe not,” Niall said. “Why would the killer want Reston dead? What’s her connection to Jacobi and Collins? She doesn’t work for Avar Pharmaceuticals nor Jacobi and Fortnum.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“I mentioned the pain medication, didn’t I?” Niall asked.
“Reston witnessed Jacobi’s killing. Partly witnessed it. She saw the killer from the knees down. She also saw Frankie leave Erasmus Hall before the killing.”
“Which means Reston gives me an alibi and an alibi gives Sutton a reason to go sniffing after a different suspect,” Frankie said. “Which would give the real murderer a motive to kill Reston. They’d want to shut her up before she could talk to anyone about what, or who, she saw.”
“Slow down,” Niall said. “How would the killer, or anyone, know Reston witnessed anything?”
“Maybe they knew someone could put them in the garden at the moment Jacobi died but didn’t know exactly who,” Gethsemane said. “Maybe they heard someone or glimpsed—”
Frankie snapped his fingers. “The bouquets.”
Niall raised an eyebrow.
“We assumed the floral messages were threats made by a killer. We read them wrong. They weren’t threats, they were messages of encouragement. Perseverance, justice, resolve to win, hope, energy in adversity, innocence, protection, victory…”
“Messages of encouragement,” Gethsemane said, “left by the one person who could prove you had nothing to do with Jacobi’s murder. A person afraid to come forward with what she knew because she didn’t know who to trust.”
“An anonymous note written in plain English would’ve been more effective,” Niall said.
“The floral messages were meant for Frankie, a rosarian.”
“Floral messages left in a village overrun with plant experts,” Frankie said. “Including, most likely, our murderer. Since they knew I wasn’t the killer and knew Jacobi’s murder had nothing to do with the Flower Shop Killer, they must’ve picked up on the real meaning of the bouquets straight away and figured out what Reston was trying to say.”
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