by Alice Castle
She sprinted to the end of the room, fumbling with the unfamiliar catch on the large glass French windows, and Beth followed, scrabbling with the panes of glass and finally flinging the central door open. The two women rushed out into the garden just at the moment when the laughing boys raised their beakers to their lips and took hearty swigs.
***
The next hour had been out of a horror film. Beth would never forget seeing Charlie slump to the ground, moments before she and Maria thundered down the garden, the woman’s normally sleek dark hair flying around her head like Methuselah’s snakes.
For a moment, Katie was left sitting there in the kitchen, transparently wondering if this was this some new game she didn’t know about yet. Pretending to collapse in a faint? Was Charlie about to spring back up again with his usual infectious laugh? But he just lay there, prone, while the two other small boys and Beth looked on helplessly, and Maria bent over him with unmistakably business-like intent, rolling him onto his back and feeling for a pulse.
On the one hand, thank goodness she was a fully trained doctor. Even if her specialism was psychiatry, she still knew all the moves to counteract a hefty dose of poison. On the other hand, if she hadn’t been a medic, would her son ever have picked up whatever twisted idea had got into his head? All this flashed through Beth’s mind as she watched her friend finally streak up the garden towards her unconscious son.
With a trembling hand, Beth walked a few paces away, dialled three nines on her phone, and then rang Harry York for good measure. Voicemail, of course. He was never on the end of a phone when she needed him, she thought in panic. She was just about to rejoin the stricken cluster waiting on the sidelines when Maria shouted for her to bring mustard, salt, and hot water.
Though she badly wanted to stay with Ben – to protect her son from seeing whatever awful fate was befalling his best friend right in front of his eyes – she obediently ran back to the kitchen and started searching the cupboards. The trouble was, Katie had so many of them. And, behind the pristine facades of her kitchen units, there wasn’t much of a system, Beth realised with a sinking heart. While she could have laid hands on her own pot of mustard in the middle of the night, wearing a blindfold, Katie’s idea of organisation was to stuff everything wherever there was a space, then shut a sleek and beautifully designed door on it and move on with her day. A perfectly valid way of being, but not one which helped much in the current life-or-death contretemps.
After some increasingly panicky ransacking, Beth found a cache of condiments behind some breakfast cereal cartons, and immediately was confronted with a whole new worry. Was Katie just too posh to have the right kind of mustard? Yes, she had several jars of Dijon. She even had an ironic American mild hotdog mustard in a squeezy bottle, and she had wholegrain mustard cunningly flavoured with tarragon, all done up in an ornate jar with a frilly cover, the kind of thing that Dulwich residents gave each other for Christmas. But was there any real mustard, of the type that would get your tear ducts running, whether you liked it or not?
Beth was on the point of giving up when she finally found a pull-out, multi-tiered larder affair behind one of the doors. Amongst a vast cornucopia of canned goods that made her wonder if her friend was a secret prepper, she discovered a dusty and unopened jar of good old strong English mustard, the vicious colour alone guaranteed to get anyone retching.
She’d already boiled the kettle, so she loaded up a mug with a ferocious brew of pink Himalayan salt and huge dollops of yellow mustard, ran out into the garden with it, and knelt on the grass. Though some of the liquid had spilled over her top and jeans, there was plenty left for Maria to trickle into Charlie’s slack mouth.
His face was as pale as the sheets on the rotary washing line she could see several gardens along. And who on earth lived there? Beth wondered, with one corner of her mind. It really wasn’t done to air one’s laundry in public here, even if it was freshly washed.
Beth looked up to see Ben’s anxious grey eyes trained on hers. Immediately, she tried a reassuring smile, but realised the best thing was just to hold her arms out for a hug. Ben, who normally was now much too grown up to consent to being babied in public, ran to her, fell to his knees on the grass and, to her horror, started to sob into her T-shirt. It had been a long time since he’d cried so hard.
She ruffled his dark hair absently, and her worried eyes met Katie’s blue ones, brighter than she’d ever seen them before with unshed tears. They ended up in a little huddle together, the slight damp from the grass beginning to seep into their clothes, as they stayed by the still form and by Maria, who now eased her fingers into Charlie’s mouth and turned him to the side. Immediately, he convulsed and started to vomit up the bright yellow, and much else besides.
Maria, holding his head, gave Katie a tremulous smile. ‘The worst is over now,’ she said. Katie met her gaze and turned her head away.
Beth looked up and wondered where Matteo had got to while all this was going on. He seemed to have the knack for effacing himself when he felt the need.
She finally saw him, a couple of yards away, on the swing which dangled from the big copper beech at the side of the garden. Their eyes locked for a second, then he turned those limpid brown eyes away and concentrated on his swinging. Soon all they could hear was the to and fro swish of the ropes, Ben’s slight sniffing and, in the distance, the beginnings of the wail of sirens.
Chapter Fifteen
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Beth, as she peered into the depths of a particularly fluffy cappuccino at a table at Wyatt’s Picture Gallery’s outdoor cafe. She and Katie had just been round the gallery for the first time since the tragedy. For Beth, it had been like greeting old friends. The canvases might have their secrets, but they were far less deadly than those locked in people’s hearts.
‘What’s that?’ said Katie.
‘Last time, I got quite a sense of satisfaction when the whole mystery was wrapped up. This time, it all seems like fragments.’
‘Maybe it’s more like real life,’ said Katie.
Outwardly, she was still the smiling, happy woman Beth had always known. But Katie was a little guarded now, and a little more cautious. Before, she’d chided Beth for her over-protective ways. Now, she was the one who insisted on knee pads and a helmet when Charlie and Ben went skateboarding in the park. And Charlie, who before would have protested all the way there and back, now meekly wore the padding and just got on with it. One thing was for sure. He’d never be slathering mustard on a hotdog again, even the ironic American mild kind.
Beth knew Katie’s hyper-vigilance wouldn’t last forever. People recovered from the worst that life could throw at you. Jo Osborne, for example, was back at work now and, while she’d bear the scars of sorrow forever, she was getting up every morning for Lewis, which was all that anyone could ask of someone who’d lost a daughter so horribly. Beth, when she’d last had coffee with her, had thought her the bravest woman she’d ever known, and one of the nicest.
Lulu Cox had been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health, and a resolve never to drink anything ever in a public place again, after Matteo had laced her drink with drugs in the hospital canteen.
Sophia Jones-Creedy, whose bright idea it had been to pose Simone on the tomb in Wyatt’s Picture Gallery, declared to anyone who’d listen that she was beyond sorry. The story she told was that she’d lent Simone her outfit in the loos when they’d finished waitressing, as the girl was desperate to try on such a pricey dress, then been furious to find the girl slumped unconscious in it minutes later. She’d manhandled the girl onto the tomb ‘for a laugh,’ and to pay her back for passing out. Taking a jokey picture of her, and circulating it to her class had all been entirely in fun too, she assured anyone who’d listen.
And as for the crossing of the girl’s hands over her chest, the gothic element of the whole business which had given Beth so many sleepless nights? Well, Sophia had said casually, her arms were just dangling, weren’t t
hey? She’d shoved them there, into that symbolic and time-hallowed position, just because she thought they’d look good in the photo.
How could she have known that the girl had been given drugs by her friend’s little brother? she’d railed, when questioned by Harry York. It was nothing to do with her. She and all her friends had been drinking, and the rest of them were fine. She’d just thought Simone was ‘tired’ and ‘lazy’. And yes, she’d taken her clothes and phone away with her, dumped them in a bin on the street, and left her there all alone without a backward glance. But she’d had no idea that the girl was ill.
And, of course, she had had nothing to do with the drugs, despite her connection to a notorious petty thief and dealer. This low-life, who she now insisted was a mere acquaintance, and not the boyfriend she’d boasted to friends about, had taken off, leaving his squalid flat empty. Rumour had it he was now to be found hanging around a rather good girls’ school in north London.
It was Sophia’s guilt and sorrow that had led her to ‘overdose’ – though it turned out that she’d taken fifty cod liver oil tablets, which should enable her to do the splits with the greatest of ease, but not to meet her maker any time soon.
For a while, it looked as though there’d be no official action taken against the girl. There was no direct criminal evidence against her, said the CPS, and Jo Osborne certainly didn’t have the funds for a private prosecution, even if Sophia’s lawyer mother hadn’t been so vociferous in her daughter’s defence. Her surgeon father, meanwhile, made all sorts of promises about future good behaviour.
But in the end, to Beth’s relief, Angela Douglas had simply announced that the girl’s place at the College School had disappeared. So, Sophia Jones-Creedy was last heard of at a maximum-security boarding school in Scotland, craning out of an upstairs window, desperately trying to get a solitary bar of signal on her mobile phone. It was, thought Beth, a fitting punishment for a social media junkie. If she’d had her way, the girl would have been signed up for compulsory art history classes, too, so that her histrionic flare for drama was at least allied to some depth of knowledge in future.
It was Maria Luyten for whom Beth felt a sneaking pity. The woman had been trying to combine a career and a family, and had come a deadly cropper – especially as far as all the right-wing newspapers that had followed the unfolding story had been concerned. Because she’d been out, easing the problems of other troubled children, her own son had been allowed to become a monster, so the narrative went. Certainly, there was something horrifying about the little boy, who’d decided to dose up the girls who came to his sister’s house before the Picture Gallery event with a tiny bit of everything in his mother’s doctor’s bag.
There was no method in his madness, no dosage control; he’d just put a tablet of this, a vial of that, and a pinch of the other into one of the girls’ drinks when they weren’t looking. It had been Russian roulette. There was no malice against Simone personally, which was something that Jo Osborne said had eased her mind a little. Simone had been fine for the few minutes until she got to the drinks party, when her increasing clumsiness had caused her to become the brunt of Sophia Jones-Creedy’s little digs and the group’s teasing. She had then collapsed in the anteroom to the mausoleum – unseen by anyone except Sophia Jones-Creedy – once the hefty amount of diamorphine had kicked in.
The cocktail of strong antidepressants, huge quantities of paracetamol and temazepam, plus pinches of a random collection of street drugs that Maria had confiscated from her other patients, had then worked to destroy Simone’s liver and put her in a coma.
Lulu Cox had been luckier; there hadn’t been so much of the stuff left by the time Matteo poured his concoction into her drink at the hospital, and Charlie, getting the dregs of the batch, was the least badly affected of all.
Beth didn’t know whether doctors usually locked up their pill supplies when at home, or whether Maria Luyten was unusually lax because she was stressed at work and having a hard time adapting to a new country, or because her children had various problems fitting in. All anyone really knew was that her eye was off the ball, and Simone Osborne had paid the price.
Matteo, at nine, was under the age of criminal responsibility, so he’d been made the subject of a Child Safety Order and was being supervised by a youth offending team from the council – at least, until the family moved. Because, call it coincidence, but the bank who employed Theo Luyten suddenly had urgent need of his expertise at head office. What Maria and Chiara would make of life back in the Middle East again was anyone’s guess, but at least it would save Maria from the ignominy of being sent on a parenting course by the British courts.
Beth sighed, and stirred her cappuccino again.
Katie looked at her. ‘What did your inspector say to you, you know, after we went to the hospital that, that day?’
‘He’s not my inspector,’ Beth corrected automatically, then turned her memory back. They’d all been a bit out of their minds, with the worry over Charlie, and the creeping realisation of Matteo’s guilt, and the horror-struck collapse of Maria. Tempers had been running high. She wasn’t sure, though, that that excused York’s latest tirade.
‘Why do you have to be involved? Why are you even here?’ he’d shouted on the doorstep of Katie’s house, as the ambulance carted Charlie, Katie, and an ashen Michael away.
‘Look, if I wasn’t here, then it would still be going on. I’ve told you what happened, and I’ve worked out how the Picture Gallery fits in. You could at least be a bit grateful that I’ve solved the whole thing for you,’ she protested, her face red, her fringe pushed up her forehead, her top splattered with the yellow mustard, and her jeans grassy and damp.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d be grateful for, I’d be grateful if you stayed out of police business,’ he’d yelled, his face puce now.
Ben, who’d been gathering his things in a shell-shocked kind of way, ran over to Beth and flung a protective arm around her waist. Over his dark head, she glared at York. ‘Now you’ve upset my son,’ she’d snapped, and turned on her heel.
It had been the last she’d seen of him. Oh well, she thought. It was for the best. They seemed to wind each other up the wrong way all the time. She yearned, as usual, for the easy relationship she’d had with James. He’d never shouted. Had he? She realised, with a stab of sadness, that she could hardly remember. She shook her head.
‘He was pretty cross, let’s put it that way,’ she said to Katie.
‘Just worried about you. You’ve developed a sudden habit of getting yourself into danger,’ Katie said, looking ruefully at her friend.
‘Well, one thing’s for sure – never again,’ said Beth. ‘I’m going to be much too busy. I’ve got that whole slavery exhibition outline to finish off and present to the board – I’m so behind – and I’m getting going on redecorating my hall as well. All that’s going to keep me out of trouble.’
She lifted her coffee cup with both hands, and tried to blow her fringe out of her eyes. It flopped back. Beth gave up, shrugged and smiled, head on one side. ‘And anyway, seriously, what else could possibly happen in Dulwich?’
THE END
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