George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (35 page)

‘Maybe this is, then,’ Jerry said mildly. ‘Seeing it’s been spiked to within an inch of its life.’

This time she heard him. ‘What?’

‘The vodka,’ Jerry said with obvious patience. ‘It’s been spiked with absolute alcohol. The sort of trick crazy medical students used to get up to. Only, much, much worse. Anyone drinking even a mouthful of this would have been knocked for six in a matter of minutes. The question is, where did Gus get it from?’

‘Where did I get it from?’ Gus echoed. ‘The obvious place. Tony Mendez’s hidey-hole. His locker. I thought, seeing what we’d found in Lally’s, it was the obvious place to start.’

He had come back to the flat at shortly after eight, by which time George had had a chance to write up a brief account of her work on the insulin pen and the sandwiches, to attach to the report that Jerry had given her on the vodka. He was barely in the door before she jumped on him with a flurry of questions.

‘His locker? Do you mean — Gus, that vodka, according to Jerry’s assays, had enough absolute alcohol in it to kill an ox.’

‘Ah!’ He sounded deeply satisfied as he dumped the three plastic bags he was carrying on to the kitchen table. ‘Had it, by God! Look, I’ve brought some Chinese to save time over supper. Noodles and the lotus fried rice, some prawns, some chili beef and —’

‘Oh, Gus, forget your stomach for once, please!’ She was in a fever of impatience. ‘Tell me all about it. Every word. All you can think of.’

He sighed a little theatrically. ‘I tell you what, you go and make a pot of tea — jasmine’ll be best — and I’ll set this stuff out and we’ll eat it while it’s hot. You know how yuk it is if you have to reheat it. And when I’ve got my chopsticks in my
hand I’ll tell you every last detail. I promise. But I need some supper to loosen my tongue.’

In this mood there was no arguing with him, she knew, so she scurried around the kitchen making the tea and collecting the little porcelain bowls and matching cups Gus had bought for her last year and insisted on using when he brought in a Chinese takeaway, and the ivory chopsticks he’d stolen years ago from a Soho restaurant that had served him indifferent egg foo yong for which he had reckoned he was entitled to a discount, even if he had to help himself to it. And once they were settled at the kitchen table, perching on high stools, he beamed at her, and with his mouth full of bean sprouts, began to talk at last.

‘I went to the operating theatres this morning, complete with a warrant and young Hagerty. Oh, you should have seen his face! The smell of the place put him right off for a start, and when they made us dress up in all the gear before they’d let us in, well, he was one miserable copper. Not that it’s surprising. He looked a real guy in all that green stuff. Me, I looked rather dashing, I thought. Maybe I should have been a surgeon instead of a copper, come to think of it. I’d have pulled a better class of bird then.’

He ogled her, expertly filling his mouth with another load of noodles, and then added a large prawn, after which he closed his eyes in ecstasy. ‘This is what I call heaven. You can’t beat a nice bit o’ Chinese when you’re in the mood for it, can you?’

‘I swear I’ll stick you with one of your own goddamned chopsticks!’ she cried. ‘Tell me!’

‘I am telling you! OK, we tog up and start looking. It seems there’s this big special changing room in the middle of the unit where they all get into their gear — outdoor clothes have to be plague spots the way they carry on. Everyone has a sort of share of a locker there. Not their very own, you understand. Just enough to put their street clothes in. Then if they need them, there’s a second lot of lockers in an adjoining room,
and people can put
stuff
there that they want to leave all the time. OK, so Tony Mendez is one of the geezers that has a locker all to himself in this other section.’ He shook his head and speared another prawn. ‘It’s really amazing to me. The man’s been dead for weeks and no one, but no one, has done anything about emptying his locker and putting it back into use again for someone else. And they’ve got a shortage of’em!’

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ George said. ‘It’s typical of Old East. Unless someone somewhere has a chitty to instruct ’em, nothing gets done. It’s my guess no one thought to ask for a chitty’

‘Well, I’m delighted they didn’t.’ Gus put down his chopsticks, picked up his little cup of jasmine tea and plonked his elbows on the table with the delicate piece of porcelain held between both hands. It looked absurdly fragile, framed by his big knuckles. ‘He wasn’t a very nice man, this Mendez.’

‘Oh?’ She too picked up her cup and adopted the same posture so that they sat very close together. She could see the flecks of green in the depths of his dark eyes that she so liked, but for once she was more interested in what he had to say than anything else about him. ‘How come?’

‘I’ve nothing against a bit of honest porn,’ Gus said. ‘I’ll read a
Playboy
as cheerfully as the next man —’

‘I’ll bet you will.’

‘— but cutting out some of the raunchier pictures and keeping them in an envelope underneath smelly old shoes, that’s sick, ’n’t it?’

‘Is that all you found?’ She was disappointed. ‘I imagine you’d find that, or some variation of it, in nearly all the male lockers in the place.’

‘No,’ he said disgustedly. ‘Do me a favour! I’m just telling you, because it’s a sort of indicator, know what I mean? Like litmus paper. A man who cuts out and hides stuff like that, like some sort of smutty schoolboy, instead of being upfront and honest and just enjoying it — well, there’s something about him I don’t warm to.’

She wouldn’t be deflected, much as she’d like to point out to him just how prejudiced he was being. ‘So what did you find?’

‘He was cannier than Lally was.’ He put down his cup and started again on the noodles. ‘She sort of hid her stuff on that rear shelf, but she didn’t go out of her way to make sure people who knew the design of the things wouldn’t find them. Matey Mendez was another piece of fish. He’d rigged up a contraption that hung from the back of his top shelf, down the other side of the back of the locker — there was room, because it was in a corner, and had a box thing tied to it. You never saw such a Heath Robinson affair. The thing about it was, though, that unless someone really searched, and pulled out all the stuff he had hanging in front of the string, you wouldn’t spot it. Very ingenious. It could hold a fair bit of weight, and was adjustable too. When he had a lot of gear in it he could sling it high; when it wasn’t full, down it went.’

‘And that was where you found the
Playboy
cuttings?’

‘If it had only been
Playboy
! These were really nasty, believe me. Yeah, they were there. And a couple of envelopes of photographs which were almost as bad as the professional stuff, only uglier if that’s possible, and the bottle.’

‘The vodka.’

‘Yup. That’s what the label said.’

‘The label was right. Up to a point’ She jumped up to bring him Jerry’s preliminary report. ‘He’ll get all that properly typed up tomorrow. Mine too. But we thought you’d like to see these as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks.’ He was reading the report with his brows a little tight. ‘I take it this means that —’

‘I’ll explain.’ She took it from him. ‘The amount of alcohol you’d find in a vodka with a label like the one on the bottle is fairly easy to assay. When Jerry tried to he got this way-out reading. It was much higher than it should be. So he started to do an analysis and came to the conclusion it had been spiked with absolute alcohol.’

‘Absolute?’

‘Officially, in the
British Pharmacopoeia
, alcohol is defined as ethyl alcohol, or ethanol BP, if you like the name better, and it’s —’

‘I know that. Every copper does. It’s ninety-five per cent ethyl alcohol and five per cent water.’

‘Right. Absolute alcohol, which we use in the labs, is much stronger. It contains no more than one per cent weight of water.’

‘So its proof is —’

‘No, the proof is double the alcohol per cent. So one hundred proof whisky is fifty per cent alcohol. Absolute alcohol is damn near two hundred proof. And exceedingly toxic at that level.’

‘I’ve always known more about the effects of the stuff than how it was measured,’ he said, concentrating hard. ‘Remind me how he died. Was it consistent with alcohol poisoning?’

‘Oh, yes. Especially in a man who had a history of heavy alcohol abuse. I said as much in my report on his PM. What happened to him was textbook. He collapsed. He wasn’t too big so the amount needed to knock him out was smaller than it might have been for a huskier guy. Anyway, in the middle of a case in theatre, he began to stagger severely, lost his balance, fell and went into a convulsion. By the time he’d been pulled out of the theatre — they were in the middle of operating, remember — he was in a coma. And he just never came out of it.’

‘How come no one thought of alcohol then? He must have smelled of it.’

‘Actually they did, even though alcohol of itself hardly smells at all. It’s the flavourings and congeners and suchlike put in it so people can take it that give it fragrance. Vodka is popular with secret drinkers because it doesn’t smell and absolute alcohol smells even less. But for all that they did think it could be alcohol — someone remembered his history — but no one mentioned that fact when they sent him down to
A & E. So no one there tested for alcohol at the time, before he died. Not that it would have mattered if they had. He was gone in under an hour. It wasn’t till I got him that alcohol was looked for and found.’

‘Could you tell from the tests you did whether or not he’d had this absolute alcohol?’

She shook her head. ‘The reading of the blood alcohol I got was high, but it didn’t tell me what sort of alcohol he’d swallowed. It’s very hard to judge, after death, how much was taken. There are so many factors involved in making an assessment, you see. I could tell you what his BAC — blood-alcohol concentration — was, but to deduce from that how much he’d had was impossible. The parameters of calculation, like his weight, his basic metabolic rate, his drinking history, the timing, the rate of absorption: they were much too woolly to give me hard answers. All I could be sure of was that he’d died of alcohol poisoning, and that it could have been the result of just one unguarded
ordinary
drink! That’s what my report said, anyway. I’m sure I told you all this, Gus.’

‘Probably. I’m just checking. Here was someone regarded in the place as a recovered alcoholic who dies of alcohol poisoning …’

‘Yup.’

‘And everyone just accepts that as an accident.’

‘Well, why not?’ She was defensive. ‘It was a logical conclusion.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said soothingly. ‘I was recapping, not criticizing. So how did you know he was a recovered drinker?’

She blinked. ‘It was general knowledge,’ she said a little uncertainly. ‘I had the impression he was in AA.’

‘Oh, it’s hell getting any info out of Alcoholics Anonymous! But I suppose it’s worth a try.’ He got to his feet. ‘Let’s see if he carried an AA contact number on him. Some drinkers do. I haven’t gone through all his stuff in detail yet. It was getting late, so I packed it all into my briefcase to deal with tomorrow. But hang on a bit.’

She followed him into the living room. He’d thrown his briefcase on to the sofa in his usual fashion and now he emptied it on to the cushions. ‘The fellas from prints and photo and so forth have all done their bit with this stuff so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go through it now. I’ve an odd feeling that I spotted something when I first took a look.’

He was picking up one plastic envelope after another and tipping the contents out on to his lap. There were the sleazy cuttings from magazines he’d mentioned, and the photographs, but he shoved them back into their covering quickly. She was a little amused by that: as though she hadn’t seen much nastier stuff in her time! Then she forgot the amusement as he let out a little yelp of satisfaction.

‘What is it?’ she demanded.

He had a pile of cards in his hand, the sort that clutter most people’s wallets: a cheque card from the Midland Bank, an Access card, a Union membership card; a card from a taxi firm, assuring holders of their Best Attention At All Times, Just Call This Number; a battered green and black phone-card from BT; an RAC membership card — and another, at which Gus was staring.

‘Have you ever heard of something calling itself the SDAW Club?’ he asked.

‘SDAW? I don’t think so. What does it mean?’

‘It just says it here. SDAW Club. Now, what do you suppose that’s all about?’

She reached over, holding out her hand, and he gave it to her. It was a small piece of buff card, with rather uneven lettering on it which looked slightly amateur, as though it had been designed and printed on someone’s not very good word processor. The letters ‘SDAW’ were large and slightly off centre, and beneath them was an 0836 phone number. A mobile phone. That was all. The reverse was bare of printing but carried another phone number in scribbled pencil, which was so rubbed it was virtually unreadable.

Gus took the card back. ‘I think a phone call,’ he
murmured. ‘What’s the time? Nearly ten? A good time to be ringing people, don’t you think? Especially those with poser phones. They never switch ’em off.’

‘It could be.’ She was excited suddenly and followed him eagerly to the small table on which her phone sat, and watched him dial.

The phone rang for a long time. For a moment she thought, we’ve struck a dry well, but then he lifted his chin and spoke.

‘Hello? Is that the — urn — SDAW Club? Oh, hello. Am I — er, could I speak to the — um — someone in charge? The membership secretary, perhaps?’

He listened. Slowly the expression in his eyes sharpened and became fixed and after a while he nodded. ‘I see. So there isn’t precisely a list of members,’ he said and listened again. ‘If I mentioned a name to you, would you perhaps know who — Oh, me? I’m just a friend. Another friend, you understand.’ Again there was silence as he stared blankly at the opposite wall. George felt she’d burst with curiosity but then he grinned, a small conspiratorial smile. ‘I see,’ he said softly. ‘I
see.
Very. Now, do tell me — What? — Oh. Well, that’s kind of you. OK, I’ll give it some thought.’ And he hung up and turned to George.