A Banquet of Consequences (25 page)

Lynley demurred. He followed St. James into the room to the left
of the house’s entry. Here St. James combined his study with a sitting room, but it wasn’t a place for social gatherings as it was crammed floor to ceiling with books, a collection interrupted only by a small Victorian fireplace taking up a bit of space on part of one wall and a display of his wife’s black-and-white photographs taking all the space on the other.

He’d been catching up on some reading, St. James told Lynley, indicating his desk, where his coffee cup and his plate of toast rested among piles of what looked like scientific monographs. What brought Lynley to Chelsea, he enquired, since it was apparently not in search of toast? St. James took one of the two old leather wingback chairs that stood perpendicular to the fireplace and faced a sofa of antique vintage where, with no toast forthcoming, Peach had deposited herself and was currently creating dog circles upon, prefatory to settling in for a snooze. St. James indicated the other chair and asked once again if Lynley was absolutely certain that he didn’t want a coffee.

“Completely,” Lynley told him. “I’ve only just indulged at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was Barbara’s peace offering. Not entirely undrinkable, which was something of a surprise. It put me in mind of that café in Windsor we used to haunt.”

St. James laughed. “Powdered coffee, powdered milk, hot water from the tap, and sugar cubes that would not melt. May I assume that their coffee wasn’t what took you to hospital?”

Lynley told his old friend about Rory Statham and Havers’ discovery of the poor woman. St. James set his coffee cup on the table between their chairs. He turned on the lamp to dispel the gloom brought on by the wet day outside. He said, “You’re assuming sodium azide again?”

“Havers is. But the fact that she’s still alive . . . ? Is that even possible, Simon? When you and I spoke earlier, I had the impression that virtually any dose would be fatal.”

St. James scrubbed his hands through his hair, always too long and mostly untamed, with curls falling well below his shirt collar. He yawned, said sorry, explained that it was the soporific nature of the bloody monographs, and answered Lynley’s question. It would depend on the amount of sodium azide used, he said, and on the method of
exposure to it. Mixed with water or an acid, for example, the compound would change to a toxic gas. Breathing the gas would quickly lead to a perilous drop in blood pressure, followed by respiratory failure and death. Ingesting it in some food source—once again depending on the amount—would sicken someone, inducing coughing, dizziness, headache, nausea, et cetera, but would not necessarily kill her should she get to treatment soon enough. The tricky bit here, though, St. James said, was that, ingested, sodium azide mixed with stomach acids, rendering the person who ingested it consequently both toxic and explosive. “Hydrazoic acid gets formed,” St. James told him. “Which would be why they’re being so careful with this woman Barbara discovered. They’ve no idea how it got into her system, but the fact that she was still alive indicates she wasn’t exposed to the gas it forms but rather through some other means, and ingesting it with food or drink is the most likely, I expect.”

Lynley thought about the likelihood of someone’s being able to get into Rory Statham’s flat and mix sodium azide with something she would eventually eat or drink. There could, of course, be an extra key to the place floating about, but it was more probable that she had unknowingly invited her poisoner into her home. It would, after all, only take a moment while she was out of the room for someone to put the chemical into . . . what? The sugar bowl? A container of milk? Her breakfast cereal?

“Of course,” St. James said, his tone indicating he was thinking aloud, “this stuff is so toxic that it could merely have been on the dead woman’s clothing if she killed herself up in Cambridge. And if this second woman—what was her name, Tommy?”

“Rory Statham.”

“If Rory Statham came into contact with the sodium azide by touching her clothes—”

“Why would it be on her clothes?”

“If she poisoned herself. If she hadn’t taken care when she mixed it with whatever she was going to down herself: water, tea, coffee, wine, a soft drink.”

“Barbara says no a thousand times to the idea that Clare Abbott killed herself, Simon. She was in the midst of quite a professional success.” He
explained it all: Clare Abbott, her book, its sales, and the author’s notoriety, which St. James—an inveterate reader of newspapers—was already aware of. “Barbara declares it improbable.”

“Sometimes suicides are,” St. James said. “All of that—this book business and Clare Abbott’s success—constitutes the outer trappings. As to the inner woman . . . ? It could have been quite different.”

“Assuming for the moment that it was, that she did indeed take a dose of sodium azide to kill herself, where on God’s earth would she have got her hands on it?”

St. James said, “Laboratories, hospitals, clinics. Any location where they’d have reagents.”

“As to handling the stuff once it was in one’s hands . . . ?”

“If someone killed her, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Whoever managed to get it would have known in advance, I assume, that exposure to it is absolutely deadly, especially if breathed as a gas or dust. But the risk of exposure could be minimised: a surgical mask or a painter’s mask, latex gloves, a thorough scrub-down and the laundering—or, better yet, the disposal of whatever one was wearing at the time of mixing the compound into whatever was going to be its carrier. That would probably take care of the risk.”

“And then afterwards? Assuming that all of the sodium azide wasn’t used? Where would one dispose of it?”

“It’s white, crystalline.” St. James shrugged. “One wouldn’t need to dispose of it at all but merely to disguise it as something else never intended for use. Or one could put it—fully sealed—into the rubbish and allow it to be carted off to a landfill somewhere. The world’s run amok with terrorists, but I suspect the government haven’t yet begun requiring the dustmen to employ dogs to sniff the rubbish for sodium azide.”

Lynley nodded. It was a reasonable conclusion. Still, he said, “It seems to me, though, that there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to poison someone without resorting to something so potentially dangerous to the person using it.”

“Of course. But consider that this substance had the forensic pathologist concluding the first woman had a seizure triggered by cardiac arrhythmia, Tommy. Had her friend not insisted otherwise, had she
not had a passing acquaintance with Barbara, had you not asked me to look over the first autopsy, had I not strongly recommended a second, what was a murder would have gone down as natural if unexpected causes, and that would have been an end to it. That being the case, it was a brilliant choice of weapon. You merely have to find the person with a combination of native intelligence, wiliness, and the capacity to hate enough to do away with your victim.”

“And Rory Statham as well.”

“Indeed. Rory Statham as well. So you have your work cut out for you.”

“No, it’ll be Barbara’s work, if things go my way,” Lynley said.

VICTORIA

LONDON

“How many different ways do I have to say no, Tommy?” Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery set her cutlery at the appropriate I’ve-finished-my-meal angle. She’d had the plaice. He’d had the beef. She’d pronounced her fish perfectly cooked, and he’d wished he could have said the same.

He’d talked her into a late lunch at Peeler’s instead of her usual, which was a sandwich either at her desk or taken on the run. She’d accepted and they’d had their meal à deux without being interrupted by anyone as there was no one else there at this hour. This allowed Lynley ample time to broach the subjects of one death, one poisoning, two investigations, and the completely sensible need for someone to see to it that the flow of information between the disparate investigations was well maintained. Since Shaftesbury was also part of the mix, there were many complications that could result in something vital to the uncovering of the truth being cast aside, ignored, or deliberately swept under the carpet. That could result in an internal investigation of the sort that went on for months, produced ill will everywhere, and cost a fortune. They didn’t want that to happen, did they?

“None of that is our concern.” Ardery had spoken pleasantly enough, but Lynley could see the glint of warning in her eyes.

He’d continued, undaunted. As a case in point, he stressed, the detective superintendent needed to consider the source of the sodium azide. It had to have come from somewhere, and it had to have been carefully placed in a substance that had been ingested, breathed, or cutaneously applied. Thus, both victims’ belongings were meant to be forensically studied. She would agree to that, wouldn’t she?

“Of course, but it’s not within our purview to orchestrate a forensic examination of anything, I’m afraid. Shall I ask for the bill? Let’s make this dutch as I’ve obviously not gone the route you’d hoped and the guilt ensuing from allowing you to pay will doubtless give me indigestion.”

“Hear me out,” he said.

“When it will make no difference?” She sighed. She nodded at the waiter and ordered a coffee. She then said to him, “All right. You’ve ten more minutes. Do go ahead.”

He explained that, upon the erroneous conclusion of the initial forensic pathologist that Clare Abbott had died of natural causes, those belongings that she’d had with her in Cambridge—previously in the possession of the Cambridge police—had been sent along to her friend and editor Rory Statham. Those belongings—wherever they were and one presumed in Shaftesbury—now needed to be returned to Cambridge for close examination. In the meantime, Rory Statham’s flat and everything in it needed to be handled by SO7. Additionally, the contents of Clare Abbott’s two homes would have to be considered, one by the Shaftesbury police and the other by the police out of the Bishopsgate station, which was nearest to her London home. The chance of all these different groups being consistently and continually willing to communicate with one another in order to share information that could be vital to sorting out exactly what happened to these two women was, they needed to face it, remote.

Isabelle had remained unmoved and she stayed unmoved as her coffee arrived along with milk and sugar, neither of which she used.

Lynley said to her, “Someone got to both of these women. With an identical means of murder and of attempted murder in front of us—”

“We don’t know the first is murder at all, Tommy. And—unless you’ve recently become prescient—we don’t know if the second situation is even identical to the first.”

“Come along, Isabelle—”

She shot him a look.

“Guv, what else could they be when the condition of the women was identical?”

“Considering one is dead and one is alive—”

“She’s in a coma. She’s clinging to life.”

“—I’d hardly call their conditions identical. Nor can you, incidentally. Nor can Sergeant Havers, Tommy. Because this
is
about Barbara Havers, isn’t it, at the end of the day? You can’t have asked me to lunch because you’re determined to talk me into handing yet another investigation over to
you
. Aren’t you occupied enough?”

He decided to sidestep. He said, in reference to her earlier remark, “I seriously doubt a rational person would choose sodium azide as a means of suicide, Isabelle.”

She looked up sharply once again at his use of her given name. She said nothing. He went on.

“Consider it: One woman in Cambridge and another in London and both of them technically alone when it happened. And both ingesting an identical deadly poison.”

“Yes, I see it’s all suspicious or whatever you’d like to call it,” Isabelle said, “
if
the second woman was poisoned using the same means at all which, let me press this point as I seem not to be getting through to you, we do not know at present. But in any case, we’re not about to go banging into someone else’s investigation. It’s just not on. As far as I can tell, an investigation into the Cambridge death will begin the moment that someone hands over the second autopsy report to the police there, which I assume is going to happen today or, pray God, has already happened. In the meantime, the locals in Fulham will handle whatever needs to be handled once they determine the situation of the second woman, who—let’s face it—might merely have been attempting suicide.”

“She’d rung Barbara Havers. She’d left a message to arrange a meeting. That hardly seems a prologue to suicide. You have to admit that her phone call to Barbara doesn’t suggest the kind of despair that leads one to make an attempt on one’s life.”

“She’s lost her friend, Tommy. Someone she loves, let’s presume. She hardly expected her to die so suddenly, so she’s grief-stricken, bereft. She feels as if the world has ended because her own life now
seems—” Isabelle clocked his expression and he saw her clock it. She said quickly, “Good God. I’m sorry. That was unforgivable.”

Lynley wasn’t about to go near the topic of Helen’s death. He said, “She wouldn’t have killed herself or even made the attempt and left her dog just to remain in her flat. She would have made some sort of arrangement for him.”

“I never would have taken you for an animal lover. Where is it?”

“What?”

“What have you done with that dog? If you’ve not already taken it to Battersea—”

“This is a dog apparently trained to help her in some way,” he said. “I’m not about to hand it over to a dog home while its owner is in hospital. Barbara took him from the flat.”

“And? Where is it then? Please don’t tell me one of you has tied the creature up next to your desk.”

“I don’t tie up dogs as a rule,” he said stiffly.

“Damn it, Tommy—”

“Underneath.”

“What?”

“The dog. He’s lying underneath my desk. Untied, as it happens.”

“You’re impossible. Do something with him at once. We’re
not
running an animal shelter, for the love of God. Although truth is I sometimes think we’re running a zoo.”