Beneath the Bleeding (16 page)

The clue came halfway through the third hour of excruciating assertions of love and analyses of music. He almost missed it, so casually was it buried among the other stuff. Robbie had written,
‘Maybe u shd report this fuckwit. U say he means u no harm, bt wot abt me? Peple like him do al kinds of shit with guns & stuff. Let’s talk about it l8r.’

It didn’t make much sense on its own. Sam went back to the email filing cabinet and called up the saved incoming mail folder. When he clicked to open it, the message read, ‘You have 9743 messages in this folder. It may take some time to sort these messages. Do you want to go ahead?’ He clicked and while he waited, checked the date on Robbie’s outgoing message.

It took only a few seconds to find the message from Bindie that had prompted Robbie’s reply. ‘I’m starting to get a bit weirded out by this geezer who keeps turning up at gigs,’ Sam read.

Sam drew his breath in slowly. He’d been sure there was something to be found on Robbie’s computer. Something that would finally give them a solid lead. And here it was. Twenty-four carat freak. Just the sort who would come up with some complicated plot involving a rare poison and a slow, horrible death.

He smiled at the screen. A couple of phone calls to nail it down, then he’d show Carol Jordan how wrong she was to sideline Sam Evans.

Tony refined the search parameters again and set his metacrawler to work once more. Google was fine for broad-brush searches, but when it came to fine-tooth comb work, it was hard to beat the search engine an FBI profiler colleague had given him with a nod and a wink. ‘It takes a little longer, but you can see the hair in their ears and nostrils,’ he’d said. Tony suspected a lot of what it did was in breach of European data protection laws, but he didn’t think the cops would be coming after him any time soon.

The big advantage he had over his American counterparts was that the sample he was looking at was much smaller than theirs. If an FBI profiler wanted to look at suspicious deaths of white males between the ages of twenty and thirty over the previous two years, he’d have something like 11,000 cases to consider. But in the UK, the total number of murders committed over two years scarcely reached 1600. When suspicious deaths were added, the numbers rose a little, but not by much. The difficulty Tony faced was actually to identify the target group he was interested in. With relatively few murders committed, there was less impetus to break them down into neat categories of age, gender and race. He’d wasted much of the day acquiring information that had turned out to be completely irrelevant. The process was slowed even further because his concentration span had been temporarily shrunk by drugs and anaesthesia. Tony was embarrassed at the number
of times he’d started into consciousness, laptop in hibernation and drool running down his chin.

He had, however, narrowed his search to nine cases by the time Carol arrived in the early evening. He’d wanted to do better, to have something to show her, to prove he was still in the game. But clearly he wasn’t, not yet. So he decided to say nothing about his trawl.

She looked frayed round the edges, he thought, watching her slip out of her coat and pull the chair up to the bedside. Eyes heavy-lidded, recent lines showing the strain at the corners. Mouth a despondent line. He knew her well enough to read the process as she pulled herself together and smiled for him. ‘So, how did it go today?’ she asked. ‘Looks pretty different from here.’ She nodded at the shape under the covers.

‘It’s been quite a day. I got my drains out, which was frankly the most painful experience of my life to date. After that, getting the splint off was a piece of piss.’ He gave a wry little smile. ‘Actually, I’m exaggerating. The splint coming off was no picnic either. But it’s all relative. And now I have a leg brace that holds the joint in place.’ He gestured at the lump under the covers. ‘Apparently the wound is healing well. They took me down for an X-ray, and the bone is also looking in pretty good shape. So tomorrow the sadists from physiotherapy are let loose on me to see if I can get out of bed.’

‘That’s great,’ Carol said. ‘Who knew you’d be back on your feet so soon?’

‘Hey, let’s not get carried away here. Out of bed means a short stagger on a walking frame, not the
Great North Run. It’s going to be a long road back to anything like I was before.’

Carol snorted. ‘You make it sound like you were Paula Radcliffe. Come on, Tony, you were hardly the Rambling Boy of Bradfield.’

‘Maybe not. But I had a great action,’ he said, his upper body miming an athletic movement.

‘And you will have again,’ Carol said indulgently. ‘Pretty good day, then.’

‘More or less. My mother stopped by, which does take the shine off any given twenty-four hour period. Apparently, I own half of my grandmother’s house.’

‘You’ve got a granny as well as a mother that I don’t know about?’

‘No, no. My grandmother died twenty-three years ago. When I was still at university. Half a house would have come in quite handy then. I was always skint,’ he said vaguely.

‘I’m not sure I’m following this,’ Carol said.

‘I’m not sure I did either, not entirely. I think I’m still a little less than morphine-free. But what I understood my mother to say is that her mother left me half of her house when she died. It seems to have slipped my mother’s mind. It’s been rented out for the last twenty-three years, but my mother thinks it’s time to sell it and she needs my signature on the documents. Of course, whether I’ll ever see a penny of the proceeds is another matter.’

Carol stared at him in disbelief. ‘That’s theft, you know. Technically speaking.’

‘Oh, I know. But she is my mother.’ Tony wriggled himself more comfortable. ‘And she’s right. What do I need money for? I have everything I need.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ She dumped a carrier bag on the bed-table. ‘All the same, I can’t say I approve.’

‘My mother is a force of nature. Approval’s irrelevant, really.’

‘I thought your mother was dead. You’ve never spoken about her, you know.’

Tony looked away. ‘We never had what you’d call a close relationship. My gran did most of the hands-on child rearing.’

That must have been strange. How was it for you?’

He squeezed out a dry little laugh. The Yorkshire translation of
The Gulag Archipelago.
Without the snow.’
Please God, let the flippancy divert her.

Carol harrumphed. ‘You men are such wimps. I bet you never went to bed cold or hungry.’ Tony said nothing, unwilling to invite either anger or pity. Carol pulled a wooden box from the bag, opening it up to reveal a chess set. Tony frowned, bemused. ‘Why are you setting up a chess board?’ he said.

‘It’s what intelligent people are supposed to do when one of them is in hospital.’ Carol’s tone was firm.

‘Have you been secretly watching Ingmar Bergman films, or what?’

‘How hard can it be? I know the moves, I’m sure you do too. We’re both smart. It’s a way of exercising our brains without working.’ Carol continued to lay out the pieces without pause.

‘How long have we known each other?’ Tony was laughing now.

‘Six, seven years?’

‘And how often have we played any kind of game, never mind chess?’

Now Carol paused. ‘Didn’t we once…No, that was John and Maggie Brandon.’ She shrugged. ‘Never, I guess. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.’

‘You’re wrong, Carol. There are very good reasons why we shouldn’t.’

She leaned back. ‘You’re afraid I’ll beat you.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘We both like winning too much. That’s just one of the reasons.’ He pulled his notepad and pen towards him and started scribbling.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to humour you,’ he said absently as he wrote. ‘I’m going to play a game of chess with you. But first, I’m going to write down why it will be a disaster.’ He carried on writing for a couple of minutes, tore off the page and folded it in half. ‘Let’s do it, then.’

Now it was Carol’s turn to laugh. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘Never more serious.’ He picked up a white and a black pawn, muddled them in his hands and offered her his fists. Carol chose white, and they were off.

Twenty minutes later, they were down to three pieces each and a long tedium of strategy beckoned. Carol let out a huge breath. ‘I can’t take it. I resign.’ Tony smiled and handed her the piece of paper. She opened it and read aloud. ‘I take far too long to make a move because I’m exploring all the possibilities four moves ahead. Carol plays kamikaze, trying to get as many pieces off the board as possible. When there are hardly any pieces left and it’s clear it’s going to take for ever, Carol gets bored and cross and resigns.’ She dropped the paper and gently punched his arm. ‘You bastard.’

‘Chess is a very clear mirror of how individuals think,’ Tony said.

‘But I’m not a quitter,’ Carol protested.

‘Not in real life, no. Not when there’s something meaningful at stake. But when it’s just a game, you can’t see the point of expending all that energy with no guarantee of a result.’

Ruefully, Carol scrambled the pieces together and closed the box on them. ‘You know me too well.’

‘It’s mutual. So, given you’ve studiously avoided it so far tonight, dare I ask how the Robbie Bishop investigation’s going?’

Carol snapped the chess set open again. ‘How about another game?’

Tony gave her a sympathetic look. ‘That bad, eh?’

Five minutes later, having listened to Carol’s thorough resumé of what had happened since last they’d met, he was forced to agree. It was indeed that bad. Later, when she tiptoed out as his eyes were closing, the faintest of smiles lifted one corner of his mouth. Maybe tomorrow he would have something better than a game of bad chess for her.

The sequence of events that had practically buried Paula McIntyre had also reintroduced her to the balm of nicotine. She hated the smell of stale smoke in the house; it reminded her too much of when Don Merrick had been camping out in her spare room. He’d been her mentor, teaching her so many of the skills she now took for granted. And then he’d become her friend. She’d been the one he turned to when his marriage had imploded and, after his death, she’d been the one who’d had to pack up his personal possessions and return them to the wife who’d pushed him into feeling he had something to prove. Now Paula missed his friendship enough without creating occasions for memory. So she’d spent time, money and energy building a deck on the back of her house with a covered area where she could huddle in the morning with her coffee and cigarettes, trying to pull enough of herself together to make it into the shower and then the office. She was under no illusions about her relationship with the job. She still loved it enough almost to forgive it for what it had done to her. And the time she had spent talking to Tony Hill had helped her to understand that
only by staying with Bradfield Police would she ever come anywhere near healing the scars. Some people recovered from trauma by putting as much distance between themselves and their past as was humanly possible. She wasn’t one of those.

She dragged on her Marlboro Red, loving the feeling but hating the need. Every morning she berated herself for starting again. And every morning, she reached for the packet before her first mouthful of coffee had made it as far as her stomach. To begin with, she’d told herself it was only a temporary crutch. First case she helped to crack, she’d be able to walk away from it. She’d never been more wrong. Cases had come and gone, but the fags were still with her.

Today was a typically brutal Bradfield morning; low sky, air bitter with pollution, a swirl of damp wind that cheated its way through clothes to the very bones. Paula shivered and smoked and started out of her seat when her phone rang. She grabbed it from her pocket and frowned. Nobody but work would dare call at this time of the morning. But she didn’t recognize the number. She froze for a moment, swore out loud at herself and pressed a key. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

‘Is that DC McIntyre?’ Ulster accent, dark growl of a voice.

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Martin Flanagan. From Bradfield Victoria.’

Recognition dawned a split second ahead of the name. ‘Mr Flanagan, of course. I’m sorry, there’s no…’

‘No, no, it’s me that’s got something for you. With all the worry about Robbie, like, it completely slipped my mind. Until I came in this morning and there it was.’

Paula sucked smoke and tried to stay calm. She hadn’t got to be the queen of the interrogation suite by letting her impatience show. ‘Totally understandable,’ she said. ‘Just take your time, Martin.’

An audible breath. ‘Sorry, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Sorry. One of the things we do at the Vics, we do random drug testing on the lads. It’s in our interests to keep them clean. Any road, I totally forgot that we tested on Friday morning. And of course, that meant Robbie.’

Paula dropped her cigarette and ground it out with her heel. ‘And you got the results this morning?’ she said, trying to keep the excitement from her voice.

‘That’s right. That’s why I’m calling you. Ah Jesus…’ Flanagan’s voice cracked and he coughed to cover it. ‘I don’t even know if I should be telling you this. I mean, it was days before he died.’

‘There was something on Robbie’s test?’

‘You could say that. According to the lab…Christ, I can’t bring myself to say it.’ Flanagan sounded close to tears.

Paula was already through the kitchen door and moving towards the stairs. ‘I’m coming round right now, Martin,’ she said. ‘Just sit tight. Don’t say anything to anyone. I’ll be with you inside the half hour. OK?’

That sounds fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in my office. I’ll tell them you’re coming.’

To her surprise, Paula felt tears pricking her eyes. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, knowing it was a lie and knowing it didn’t matter.

The pathology suite at Bradfield Cross Hospital was the home ground for Carol Jordan’s specialist team.
This was where the bodies that interested them ended up, under the careful knife and watchful eyes of Dr Grisha Shatalov. Shatalov’s great-grandparents had emigrated from Russia to Vancouver eighty-five years before; Grisha had been born in Toronto and liked to claim his move to the UK was part of the family’s slow migration back east. Carol liked his soft accent and his self-deprecating humour. She also liked the way he treated the dead with the same respect she felt he’d give his own family. For Carol, the morgue helped to reaffirm her personal commitment to finding justice. Faced with the victims, the desire to bring the villains to justice always burned that little bit brighter inside her. Grisha’s consideration for those victims had resonated with her and built a bridge between them.

Today, she was here for Robbie Bishop. The post mortem should have been done the day before, but Grisha had been in Reykjavik at a conference and Carol hadn’t wanted anyone else working on this particular body. Grisha had started work early and by the time Carol arrived, he was almost finished. He looked up as she walked in, acknowledging her presence with a curt nod. ‘Ten minutes and we’ll be done, DCI Jordan.’ His formality was for the benefit of the digital recording which might one day be produced in court. Off-mike, she was Carol to him.

She leaned against the wall. Impossible not to feel sadness seeping through her at the thought of what Robbie had been. Lover, son, friend, athlete. Someone whose grace had been beamed round the world, whose talent had made people happy. All that gone now, gone because some bastard’s need not to have
him in the world outweighed all the positives. It was her job to find who that bastard was and to make sure they never got the chance to repeat their act of destruction. She’d never relished the job nor hated its difficulties more than she did that day.

At last, Grisha was done. The body approximated wholeness again; the samples were taken, the organs weighed and the incision stitched. Grisha peeled off gloves and mask, stripped off his apron and stepped out of his lab boots. In stocking soles, he padded down the corridor to his office, Carol in his wake.

The office was a defiant gesture against the concept of the paperless workplace. Crammed folders, loose sheets, bound stacks of paper covered every surface except for the chair behind the desk and a lab stool against the wall. Carol took up her customary perch and said, ‘So what have you got for me?’

Grisha dropped into his chair like a stone. His perfectly oval face was grey from lack of sleep and daylight, a combination of the job and a baby who had yet to discover the delight of unbroken sleep. His grey eyes, shaped like long, low pyramids, had matching shadows underneath them and his full lips seemed to have become bloodless. He looked more like a prisoner than a pathologist. He scratched a stubbled cheek and said, ‘Not much that you don’t know already. Cause of death, multiple organ failure as a result of ricin poisoning.’ He held up one finger. ‘I should qualify that by saying my conclusion is based on the information supplied by the doctors treating him at the time of his death. We’ll have to wait for our own tox screening before we can confirm that officially, let’s be clear about that, eh?’

‘Nothing else?’

Grisha smiled. ‘I could tell you all about his physical condition, but I don’t think that would take you any further. There is one thing that may or may not have some bearing on how he died. There’s some ano-rectal trauma-nothing much, just some internal bruising in the anal area. And also some faint irritation of the tissue just above the anal sphincter.’

‘Provoked by what?’ Carol asked.

‘The bruising is consistent with sexual activity. I’d say the rough side of consensual. Not rape. Well, not rape in the sense of him being held down and forcibly penetrated. But quite forceful. No semen traces, so I couldn’t hazard an opinion as to whether he was penetrated by a penis or something else. A dildo, a bottle, a carrot. Could have been anything of a reasonable size, really.’ He smiled. ‘As we both know from this line of work, it takes all sorts.’

‘Does it look like this sort of sexual activity was something he did regularly?’

Grisha stroked his chin, a hangover from a recently departed goatee. ‘I’d say not. There’s no evidence of Robbie indulging in regular anal sex. He might have gone for a neat little butt plug, but nothing the size of a penis.’

‘And the tissue irritation? What about that? What does that tell us?’

Grisha shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Given where it is, whatever caused it, any trace is going to be long gone. It’s the sort of thing you might get if some foreign substance was inserted into the anus.’

‘Like ricin? Would that produce a reaction like this?’

Grisha leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
‘Theoretically, I suppose.’ He returned to the vertical abruptly. ‘I thought he was presumed to have inhaled it?’

Carol shook her head. ‘We assumed his drink or food had been spiked.’

‘No way. Not if Dr Blessing’s account of the process of his dying is correct. What it is, Carol…the symptoms manifest in a different way if you ingest ricin rather than inhale it. But if you absorbed it through a sensitive mucous membrane like the rectum, then your symptoms would be more like inhalation than ingestion. Now, until I did the PM, I would have gone for the inhalation theory.’

Carol shook her head. ‘Everybody we’ve spoken to is adamant he didn’t do drugs. I don’t think they’re trying to protect his memory. I think they’re telling the truth. Besides, the hospital labs tested their samples and found no traces of recreational drugs.’

Grisha raised his eyebrows, obviously mildly sceptical. ‘Depending on what he was given and when he took it, there might not have been traces by the time they took their samples. But if he genuinely didn’t snort drugs, I’d say this is maybe how the ricin got into his system. It would have had a vehicle-a Hard Fat NF suppository, a gel capsule, something like that. But again, we’re not going to find any traces, not this long after the event. I’ve taken samples, obviously. We might just get lucky, but don’t hold your breath.’

Carol sighed. ‘Great. This is shaping up to be the case from hell. I’ve got the brass and the media jackals all over me, looking for a quick resolution. Which frankly is about as likely as Bradfield Vics signing me as Robbie’s replacement.’

Grisha leaned forward and clicked his mouse. ‘I’ll do what I can to help, but you’re right, it’s a tough one.’ He flashed her a sympathetic smile. ‘But while I’ve got you here, it’s been too long since we had you over for dinner. I know Iris would love to see you.’ He peered at the screen. ‘How would Saturday be for you?’

Carol thought for a moment. ‘Sounds good to me.’

‘Seven?’

‘Make it eight. I have some hospital visiting to do first.’

‘Hospital visiting?’

‘Tony.’

‘Oh, of course, I heard about that. How is he?’ Before Carol could answer, there was a tap at the door. ‘Come in,’ Grisha called.

Paula stuck her head round the door. ‘Hi, Doc. I’m looking for…’

‘You found her,’ Grisha said.

Paula grinned and walked in. ‘It doesn’t hurt that you’re here too, Doc.’ She waved an envelope at them. ‘I think we’re finally cooking with gas, chief. I’ve just come from a meeting with Martin Flanagan. He really didn’t want to come clean-’

‘But you’d already worked the McIntyre charm on him,’ Carol said. She’d seen enough of Paula’s killer interview technique not to be surprised.

‘I think it’s that he cares more about us catching Robbie’s killer than the reputation of the club, to be honest. Anyway, according to Mr Flanagan, it totally slipped his mind that the club did a routine drug sweep on Friday. Like all the rest of them, Robbie peed into a bottle. Unlike the rest of them, in his case,
out came roofies.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope and proffered it to Grisha.

‘Positive for rohypnol,’ Grisha read. ‘I’ve heard of this lab, they’re supposed to be pretty thorough. But you should contact them, ask if they’ve got any of Robbie’s sample left. I’m not seeing enough detail here to get any accurate sense of how much and when.’ He handed the paper to Carol.

‘I think we know when. Thursday night in Amatis,’ Carol said sourly.

Grisha frowned. ‘Probably not, actually.’ He tapped keys, clicked his mouse. ‘That’s what I thought. The forget-me pill. It starts to take effect between twenty minutes and half an hour of being ingested. So if Robbie had been given it in the nightclub, by the time he left he’d have been acting like he was totally off his face.’

‘Nobody’s even suggested he was drunk,’ Paula said. ‘And he was moving OK on that CCTV footage.’

‘So he must have trusted whoever he was with enough to go somewhere else with him. Somewhere he was given a drink spiked with rohypnol,’ Carol said, thinking aloud.

‘Its effects are aggravated by alcohol, so given that he’d been drinking earlier, he’d likely be out of it within an hour of taking it,’ Grisha said. ‘He’d go along with whatever was happening to him. He wouldn’t resist anal penetration. He wouldn’t mind having a suppository inserted rectally. And he wouldn’t remember anything about it afterwards. It’s the perfect murder, really. By the time your victim dies, his connection to you is a long way away.’

Carol handed the paper back to Paula. ‘Well done,’
she said. ‘But this is a bitch of a case. Every scrap of information we get seems to make things harder.’

Half an hour later, they were harder still. Carol sat in her office, door closed, blinds drawn to avoid distraction. Elbows on the desk, one hand held the phone to her ear, the other clutched a chunk of her hair. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ she said.

‘Actually, you did. But it’s just as well, there’s shit I need to get sorted,’ Bindie Blyth said, her voice rusty from sleep. She coughed, cleared her throat then sniffed. Carol could hear her moving.

‘There’s something I need to ask you. It’s a bit personal.’