Chimera (5 page)

*

“Well, well, well,” said Anderton, pacing the floor as was his habit. “We finally have a crime scene, ladies and gentlemen. Typical that it has to be the most high-profile celebrity that we’ve ever had to deal with. The press will be trying to get everything they can on this one, so I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that you speak to nobody without my say-so, and you don’t discuss anything – anything at all – with your nearest and dearest.”

“Trust nobody,” said Olbeck, with a grin.

Anderton looked at him without smiling. “That’s right, Mark. And if I find anyone leaking anything to anyone, they’ll be out the door so fast their arse won’t touch the ground. Do I make myself clear?”

Everyone nodded, grim-faced. Kate, momentarily distracted, thought that Anderton was looking particularly handsome today. His thick grey hair had obviously recently been trimmed and he was wearing a well-cut new suit. She blinked, bringing herself back to listen to what he was saying.

“Now I’ll recap quickly for those of you who weren’t at the scene. Trixie Arlen, former TV presenter and ‘It’ girl of the nineties – most of you younglings will only know her from her cookbooks and kitchen products range – was found dead at her home yesterday. No sign of forced entry, no sign of violence, no sign of foul play. The doctor at the scene thought it was a non-suspicious death and the PM seemed to confirm that. We’re still waiting for results from the labs for the toxicology tests, but it seems likely that Trixie died of a heroin overdose. That’s not yet been made public.” Anderton reached the wall and pivoted on his heel. “Now, the problem with that is that we found nothing with the body that indicated that she’d been injecting. No syringes, no actual drugs, no paraphernalia, nothing. Can anyone tell me what that might mean?”

Kate raised her hand. She’d spent most of the night going over one scenario after another and Anderton could have them all if he wanted. “She might have been shooting up with somebody else. When she overdosed, they panicked, cleared everything away and fled.”

Anderton nodded. “That’s a very likely possibility. Anyone else?”

Kate opened her mouth to go on but Theo got there first, as he often did. Kate gritted her teeth. “She could have been alone when she died but someone found her and took the stuff away. Her husband, probably,” said Theo.

Anderton had paused in his pacing and was scribbling frantically on a whiteboard. “Right, another good possibility. So we’ve got X, the unknown who might have been with Trixie when she died. We’ve got Y, the unknown who found the body and cleared away the stuff. Anything else?”

Kate raised her hand hurriedly before Theo could speak. “Someone could have been with her and left her
before
she overdosed.”

Anderton was still scribbling. “So, this Z might be innocent of clearing any drugs, etc. away but could have still been with Trixie that night?”

Kate nodded. “Say that’s how it happened and then, in the morning, her husband comes home, finds her dead and for whatever reason clears away the evidence of what killed her.”

“Right,” said Anderton. “Could be, could be. Anything else?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Kate said slowly, “Trixie could have been with someone who left before she died, as I said before. That person or someone else could have come back later, or even earlier in the morning than her husband, and cleared everything away. So her husband might not be implicated.”

“Phew,” said Anderton. “The plot most definitely thickens. Right, well, all of this gives us a firm starting point.” He began to tick points off on his fingers. “We need a thorough search of the farmhouse. We need forensics on who’s been in that bedroom and whether anyone can be eliminated. We need to know how quickly after injecting Trixie died and whether she could have moved to her bedroom from somewhere else in the house. Sod it, we need forensics from all over the house. And we need to start digging at alibis. I want Jacob Arlen re-interviewed as a matter of urgency.”

People were standing up, preparing to move. The room began to hum with that slight sense of urgency and bustle that the beginning of a case could induce. Kate adjusted her shirt sleeve, which was slightly twisted, and recalled that something else that needed to be mentioned.

“Sir?” She had interrupted Anderton mid-flow and he frowned.

“What is it, Kate?”

Kate reiterated what Doctor Telling had said about the bruising on Trixie’s arm. “She said it looked quite distinctly as if someone had grabbed her there.”

Anderton was still frowning. “Which arm?”

For a moment, Kate groped to remember. “The right one,” she said, thankfully.

“And she injected into her left arm?”

“I think so. I’d have to re-read the report to be certain.”

Anderton had stopped writing. He let his gaze sweep over the room. “Could you find out, Kate? Quickly?”

“Yes, of course,” said Kate, slightly confused by the seriousness of his tone.

“Because,” he went on, as if reading her mind. “If someone had hold of her by the arm which she was using to inject herself, could it be that she was actually forced to do it?”

The buzz of activity in the room stilled. Kate felt a small chill at the thought. If someone had forced Trixie Arlen to inject herself with a lethal dose of heroin then that would make her death…murder.

She could see by the expressions on the others’ faces that the same thing had just occurred to them. Anderton cleared his throat. “Now, I’m not saying that that’s what
did
happen. It’s another possibility, that’s all. But we mustn’t discount it.”

He began allocating various tasks to various people. Kate half listened, distracted by an image in her head; a large hand on Trixie’s arm, strong fingers clamping a full syringe into her hand, forcing the needle into her skin, making her depress the plunger. Then nothing; oblivion. Could it have happened like that? Did that make more sense than thinking that a respectable, middle-aged,
famous
woman would actually voluntarily inject herself with a lethal street drug while her young children slept in the next room?

Kate came to with a start, realising that the room had emptied of everyone but Theo. He was busy pulling on his coat and fiddling with his phone.

“Am I with you?” asked Kate, walking over.

“Ha, ha,” said Theo. “You almost had me there.”

“No, seriously,” said Kate with a shamefaced grin. “I was away with the fairies for a moment. What am I supposed to be doing?”

Theo rolled his eyes. “Of course you’re with me, you dozy mare. We’re doing the farmhouse search. Come on.”

“Oh, right,” said Kate. She tried to hide her disappointment. She knew Anderton and Olbeck would probably be doing the interview with Jacob Arlen and she would have much rather sat in on that. She thought she had a talent for interviews, for sniffing out when a suspect was lying or, at the very least, concealing something. Searching was all very well but… She let her train of thought trail away as she followed Theo out to his car. A secondary thought occurred to her - that she really
must
get some studying done. Her exams were coming up in less than a fortnight. Pass those, and she wouldn’t be relegated to digging through farmhouse bedrooms, that was for sure.

The crowd of paparazzi at the gate of the Arlen farmhouse was so  dense that Theo had to slow to a crawl and eventually sound his horn several times to make any kind of progress. The two uniformed officers who were guarding the gate opened it for them to pass through and, looking back as they drove through, Kate saw them physically repel a particularly bold photographer trying to sneak in after them. She didn’t envy them their job – she could just imagine the kind of remarks they were being subjected to as they stood there guarding the gate.

The house was empty. Arlen and his children were clearly staying elsewhere and Kate didn’t blame them. It had only been three days since Trixie Arlen died but already a kind of grimness was settling on the house, along with a fine film of dust. The colours of the furniture and the pictures and ornaments seemed dulled, the gleam of glass and metal muted, and as Kate and Theo walked towards the stairs, their footfalls seemed more muffled than the carpets warranted.

They began in the bedroom. Kate took the bedside table first, a little delicate white-painted thing. On the top of it lay the latest issue of Vogue, a magazine that Kate had never seen the point of. Fashion bored her rigid, although she was clearly in a minority. Shaking it out, she laid it on top of the bedclothes, which still bore the imprint of Trixie Arlen’s body. Kate felt a moment of nausea that was unusual. She turned back to the bedside cabinet, opening the drawers and unearthing a set of high-end sex toys that made her raise her eyebrows.

“Blimey. Theo, look at this.” She held up a vibrator that could almost have been a work of art, a modern sculpture, perhaps.

Theo laughed. “Well, you never know, do you? I always thought that sort of shit stopped when you got married.”

“Well, what would
you
know about that?” said Kate, suddenly annoyed at his tone. She laid the toys on the bed next to the magazine. She suppressed the little voice inside her that told her
she
didn’t know anything about being married, either.

The cabinet didn’t yield anything else of interest. Kate knee-shuffled over to the chest of drawers that stood against the far-side wall. That too was clearly expensive, a lovely mahogany antique. Kate began to work methodically from the top down. She could hear Theo open the wardrobe door behind her and the clank of hangers as he began to sort through the clothes inside.

The drawers held a lot of underwear, most of it surprisingly functional, given the discovery in the bedside table; Kate had expected to find scraps of black lace and little silk nothings, but most of what emerged was sturdy white cotton. The brassieres were mostly the type that enabled breastfeeding. She pulled each drawer fully out, searching right to the corners. She made sure to check underneath each one – sometimes people taped things to the bottom, a surprisingly effective hiding place for something thin enough to be concealed there – but her efforts yielded no results. Kate worked her way through the rest of the drawers, finding nothing more exciting than cashmere jumpers, multiple pairs of black and grey leggings and skinny jeans.

She and Theo rolled back the rug beside the bed, looking for trap doors or secret hiding places beneath the floor boards. Kate moved backwards slowly, on her hands and knees, scanning the boards for barely visible openings. She found none. They stripped the bed of its coverings and checked the mattress, and then the springs of the bedframe. It was a bed made of black wrought iron, sham-vintage, made to look old.

“There’s nothing here,” said Theo, eventually. “Let’s move to the en-suite.”

Kate had been tapping her fingers against the black bars of the footboard. “Wait,” she said, suddenly aware of the hollow sound emanating from beneath her hands. “Wait a minute.”

She looked carefully at the top of the footboard, which was actually a long rail which ended in the two posts which held up the foot of the bed. Each post was topped in a kind of curling iron flourish. Biting her lip, Kate tested one of them, twisting it gently left. It resisted for a moment and then yielded, unscrewing smoothly. Once it had come off in her hand, Kate held her breath and looked down into the hollow space that was revealed.

It was right there, near the top of the bed leg, stuck to the inside of the tube with sellotape. She reached it with her gloved fingers and drew out a small plastic bag, half full of brownish powder. She and Theo looked at each other.

“Well, well,” said Theo. “So she was a junkie after all.”

Something about his tone flicked Kate on the raw. “You don’t know that,” she said crossly. “We don’t even know what’s in it yet.”

“Oh, come on.”

Kate held the plastic packet pinched between two gloved fingers. She dropped it into an evidence bag and sealed it. That brief moment of anger flickered and died. She felt sad. “Well, you’re probably right,” she said quietly. “Let’s check the other one.”

Theo did that while Kate fetched a torch to look further down the exposed pipe of the bed leg. She didn’t find anything else there. Theo also found nothing in the other leg. They renewed their search of the room with more enthusiasm but found nothing else suspicious.

They scoured the en-suite bathroom next, Kate starting with the mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet on the wall over the sink. She found several bottles of prescribed anti-depressants with Trixie’s name on the pharmacist’s label. There was an enormous quantity of luxury skincare and makeup – literally boxes of it – in the only other cupboard in the room. Perhaps Trixie had been given some of it for free? Kate couldn’t imagine how anyone would manage to get through this amount of makeup in a lifetime. She caught sight of the own face in the mirror and rubbed at her cheeks, frowning. She looked pale and tired. There were a pile of glossy fashion magazines in a rack by the toilet and topmost was one that made Kate stare and then extend a hand to pick it up. Trixie Arlen – yes, she hadn’t been mistaken –was the cover star. Kate looked at her picture; the bouncing glossy curls, the glowing skin, the flash of white teeth. A memory of Trixie’s body on the pathology table popped into Kate’s head and there was something obscene in the juxtaposition. How could someone who looked this vital, this healthy, actually be a heroin addict? Was it possible?