Four Below (13 page)

On the other side of the car, DI Fairfield looked on stony-faced. The dead man had been young, still in his twenties. Another set of relatives to inform. Often they took it as something they had
half expected; sometimes it came as a devastating shock. A good child. A normal child. A wasted child. Her mobile rang. She reluctantly took her gloves off to answer it. An icy wind was driving the
snow flurries through the streets, making it feel twice as cold. ‘Did he have any more visitors?’ she asked the caller. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Doctor.’ She
pocketed the mobile and pulled her gloves back on before correcting Sorbie. ‘You were wrong, it’s number four. That was the hospital. Our nameless chap didn’t make it.’

‘I thought they said he had a chance of recovery?’

‘I know. Apparently
these things are unpredictable
. He got worse overnight. No one came to see him and we still have no ID for him. Dead loss. I’d best let the super
know.’

While Fairfield made the call, she watched the coroner’s van and a tow truck arrive. Soon the street would be clear again, another body on its way to the morgue, another car on its way to
the vehicle pound. She folded the mobile again and nodded her head towards Sorbie’s Golf. ‘Drive me to my coffee machine, Jack. The super wants a word. For that I’ll need all the
drugs I can get.’

Outside the superintendent’s office, she found that her tremor had returned. She now regretted her last coffee. She also regretted having turned up five minutes early
because now she had to wait in the presence of Lynn Tiery, the superintendent’s secretary. She had no idea why, but somehow she found the impassive, steel-eyed woman more intimidating than
Denkhaus himself. It was more than five minutes after the appointed time when the super’s ‘All right, send her in’ squawked from the old-fashioned intercom on her desk.

‘What’s this new epidemic all about?’ he wanted to know even before Fairfield had managed to sit down.

‘I wouldn’t call it an epidemic yet, sir.’

‘Well it looks like one to me: five junkies dead in one week? They’re dropping at an alarming rate.’

‘Four,’ Fairfield corrected him.

‘Not according to this,’ Denkhaus said, tapping his computer monitor with a fleshy finger. ‘Drug-user found dead in Totterdown.’

‘That’s news to me; must only just have come up.’

‘Perhaps.’ Denkhaus knew it had, yet he liked to keep his team on their toes. ‘But I expect you to stay on top of developments.’

With difficulty Fairfield suppressed the urge to point out that she had just spent ten minutes sitting outside his door. And that she wasn’t psychic. ‘I’m sure Sorbie is taking
care of it as we speak.’

‘Anthrax, that’s not something I wanted to see in our city.’ He managed to make that sound like an accusation too, as though she had somehow failed to keep it out.

‘The lab says it’s contaminated heroin. The most likely source is Afghanistan or eastern Turkey. It may be the cutting agent that carries the contamination, but they haven’t
isolated it yet.’

‘Not that it matters: the result is the same and we can’t do a thing about it. Is that it?’

‘If we go with the theory that the contamination happened over there, then no.’

‘And are we? Is that the presumption?’

‘If it is the cutting agent. It normally arrives in this country already cut. About ten per cent purity is normal at the moment, but it does fluctuate. It’s usually cut with stuff
like lactose, paracetamol or caffeine.’ Fairfield felt her fingers tremble and folded her hands.

‘So the contamination is accidental?’

‘Almost certainly. Hygiene is appalling over there and anthrax in cattle is rife. According to the pathologist, this isn’t the first case. It has cropped up before, in
Europe.’

‘In Europe? This is Europe.’

‘Sorry, on the Continent, I should have said.’

‘Quite. So no one is trying to poison drug-users?’

‘They’re doing a pretty good job of that themselves, sir.’ The image of the dead woman, slumped forward on her bed, intruded on her mind. ‘It’s not impossible, but
I don’t think it’s likely that someone has deliberately infected the heroin supply. If you wanted to kill heroin users, you’d stick something fast-acting into the batch, like, I
don’t know, rat poison. That would be much easier to get hold of. And less dangerous to yourself. Just inhaling this stuff can be lethal.’

‘Granted. Right. We have a rogue batch of accidentally contaminated heroin in the city. How much of it is there likely to be?’

‘There’s no telling.’

‘Then we must get a press release done immediately, tell people that this stuff is about and to avoid it at all costs.’

‘Yes, sir, I’ll see to it.’ When Denkhaus dismissed her with a nod, Fairfield stood up, then stopped by the door. ‘I doubt it’ll make much difference, of
course.’

‘Oh?’

‘You can’t tell if your supply is contaminated from looking at it, and there’s no test a drug-user could do.’ To tell a junkie not to use heroin because it might kill him
was like telling a man who was dying of thirst not to drink pond water because it might give him a tummy upset. ‘They’ll go on using anyway, whatever is in it, whatever the
risks.’

‘I expect you’re right. Yet it would amount to a dereliction of duty not to warn them. At least we can tell them what the symptoms are so they can seek help before it’s too
late. There is a cure, isn’t there?’

‘For anthrax or heroin addiction? I think the prognosis is pretty bleak for both, sir.’

Chapter Ten

More snow was falling, making even Broadmead shopping centre look a little less bleak, less commercial. Suddenly the stalls selling hot soup and made-to-order doughnuts seemed
like essential services. Snow mellowed many things. We are all infected with Dickensian stories, thought McLusky, for ever in the clutches of Victorian Christmas cards. Inside the shoe shop, he
walked up and down along the aisle in the winter boots he had chosen, stomped his feet experimentally and decided to buy them. His mobile chimed and he dug it from the unfamiliar pockets of his
new, thickly padded winter jacket.

It was Austin. ‘Just thought I’d let you know, the forensics and accident report from the crashed Beemer have arrived.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve only just glanced at it, but it looks interesting. The bag we saw in the boot of the car was definitely used to transport heroin.’

‘So whoever got to the wreck first probably helped himself to a large amount of the stuff and could now be tooled up with a nine-millimetre semi-automatic into the bargain.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘All right, I’m on my way.’ He would have a quick look at the report himself, then pay the farmer another surprise visit.

At the door, a young shop assistant laid a hand on his arm. McLusky looked at her in surprise. ‘S’cuse me, sir, but you haven’t paid for those yet,’ she said, nodding her
head at his feet.

He turned around. The shoes he had come with stood forlorn at the back of the aisle. ‘Oh. Sorry. I got distracted.’

The girl didn’t take her eyes off him for one second while he collected his old shoes and came to the till. She had heard that excuse before. Most ran out of the shop, but some tried the
casual approach, like this one. It just showed you couldn’t trust anyone, however nice or normal they looked.

Five embarrassed minutes later, McLusky left the shop in his new boots, carrying his old shoes in a carrier bag. He was ninety-eight per cent certain he had paid for his new jacket.

‘You wouldn’t have a magnifying glass, would you?’ Philippa Warren squinted at the photograph, what there was of it. ‘I can’t make it out at
all.’

Ed, who had been at the
Herald
longer than anyone could remember, gave her a look that was probably meant to say something like ‘How did you get this far in the business without
owning a magnifying glass?’ then went back to his own workstation to fetch one. Warren dropped the photo on her desk and picked up the note that had come with it. These days, most
correspondence addressed to the
Herald
came via email. Sometimes torrents of the stuff, especially if the readership had found a contentious bone to worry. Email of course was fast and saved
the price of a stamp, which meant hardly anyone sent letters these days. Ironically, this made letter-writers immediately stand out and their contributions were read before anyone found the
fortitude to dive into the dreaded inbox.

The note was handwritten, too, in a neat hand and black biro.
The first instalment. But why not print it anyway? If not, keep this safe. It’ll make sense later.

‘I’m glad it says
later
, because it doesn’t make sense so far,’ Warren said, taking the glass from Ed’s hand and bending over the photo again. It consisted
of only a sliver of a picture, no more than a finger’s width. There was a narrow strip of golden yellow, another strip of dark grey and what could, with a bit of imagination, be the
beginnings of a person. ‘Okay, let me know if any more comes in. I’ll hang on to this.’ She swept the note into a drawer and Blu-Tacked the piece of photograph to the rim of her
computer monitor. She hoped it would make a story eventually. Readers liked a bit of a mystery, and you didn’t get many of those to the pound. Local newspapers had been dying on their feet
for ages, and even a publication as old as the
Bristol Herald
wasn’t immune to the way things had changed. If you could get the news on your phone, why buy a paper? It was the kind of
news you couldn’t get on your phone that local papers had to deliver, the double-yellow-line story and the supermarket protests and cuts in local services. But a mystery was good. And a
murder or two never hurt the circulation figures. No one cared about dead junkies, of course. After all, that was for the authorities to deal with. Warren pulled the keyboard towards her. But what
if the authorities didn’t care either? Now that might get a few readers exercised.

At Albany Road station, McLusky stopped just long enough to skim the accident and forensics report. It mentioned that a motorcycle track had been found, made after the
accident. So someone else had come past, apart from the farmer. He’d read it properly later. For now he dropped the report on the growing pile on his desk.

It was forty minutes later when he let the Mazda crawl slowly along the lane where the BMW had crashed. There had been several opportunities to add his own car to the RTA statistics, since these
narrow lanes had been neither cleared nor gritted. Apparently no one had foreseen the arrival of winter, which meant salt was in short supply and only main routes were being kept open. At the next
crossroads he turned right, skidded sideways, caught the car before it hit the bank and drove slowly on. He could make out Gooseford Farm on the far right, beyond what had to be the field he and
Austin had walked across, though it took him a moment to get his bearings. The landscape here had changed beyond recognition. Details were lost under the snow, colour had vanished, contours were
eliminated, landmarks buried. There were no animals to be seen.

At the turn-off to the farm, he slowed and stopped. The track was covered in compacted snow, deeply grooved by tractor tyres. He switched off the engine. The last bit he would walk, not wanting
to push his luck. Perhaps this way he’d be able to approach the farm without giving advance warning of his visit. Then he remembered what he was wearing; he’d stand out crow-black
against the brilliance of the snow. Not that it mattered. Surprise was not the important thing here, but persistent nuisance was. He walked beside the tractor tracks, taking pleasure in crunching
down on untouched snow. Nothing else brought back childhood memories so readily as the creaking of virgin snow underfoot. When he reached the farm gate, he briefly stopped and reminded himself that
the farmer might now be in possession of a Beretta 9mm. But then most farmers had shotguns anyway. Both the Volvo estate and the Land Rover were in the yard, and he could see the back of the
tractor sheltered in one of the large sheds. It proved that a tractor could easily cost as much as a Land Rover and was worth giving preferential treatment to, since much of the farm depended on
it. There was no sign of the dog, but the barking started as soon as he knocked on the door of the farmhouse.

It was Mrs Murry who opened the door to him. She looked unsurprised, even unmoved. She showed no sign of recognition, so McLusky held up his warrant card. ‘Is your husband in, Mrs
Murry?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Could I speak to him?’

‘Is it about the car crash again?’

He ignored the question. ‘I won’t take up much of his time.’

Mrs Murry left him standing, leaving the door half-open. He strained to hear what was being said inside, but couldn’t distinguish any words.

When the farmer appeared, he stood solidly composed in the door. ‘More questions?’ he asked.

McLusky pretended to leaf through his notebook. ‘Yes, just a couple of things that seem to be missing in my notes. Did you tell us what time you discovered the wreck?’

‘A lot of questions about this accident, I must say.’

‘A man died. We like to be as thorough as we can. What time was it?’

‘About seven.’

McLusky paused, as though thinking about it. ‘Right, seven. It would of course have been quite dark, that time in the morning.’

‘That’s right. I was riding the quad bike.’

‘Along the lane …’

‘In the lower field, I told you that. I wasn’t in the actual lane.’

‘Quite foggy, too, that morning, I imagine. Out here. What were you doing in the field? Sorry if I asked you this before; I can’t seem to find any notes to that effect.’

‘Moving the sheep. To a place where there’s more shelter. I knew snow was coming.’

‘O … kay.’ McLusky pretended to scribble furiously in his notebook with a dried-up biro. ‘I knew … snow … was … coming.’ He delivered the full
stop with a satisfying punch, looked up at Murry and smiled. And smiled. And smiled. The farmer broke eye contact and looked past him, squinting at the snow.

McLusky snapped his notebook shut. ‘Thank you, Mr Murry. That’s all I need for now.’