The Invisible Code (28 page)

‘No, but that’s because you can’t see anything,’ said Giles. ‘You need to put your glasses on. Trust me, it’s an entry mark. Something entering the body here would have taken longer to feed into the main circulatory system, so by timing it back—’

‘The mosque,’ said Bryant. ‘She took her shoes off to enter it and left them by the door.’

Giles removed a bag from beneath the table and carried it over to his desk. Opening it, he lifted out Sabira’s shoes. ‘Take a look at this.’ He slipped on plastic gloves and carefully removed the inner sole of the left shoe. ‘Don’t touch, but if you look very closely you should be able to see it.’

They could make out a tiny indentation in the rear of the inner sole. ‘This is what caused the mark,’ said Kershaw, tweezering a crystalline sliver of glass from a microscope plate. ‘She tried to kick off the left shoe because by the time the toxin started to take effect her foot would have been itching.’

‘So Sabira was right,’ said May. ‘Someone was watching her at the clinic. They followed her to the mosque. She put her shoes in the rack, and while she was inside, they inserted a sliver of glass into the inner sole. She came out, put the shoe on—’

‘Probably didn’t notice anything beyond a faint irritation, because there are very few nerve endings there,’ Kershaw added, ‘and she continued to the museum, where she would have started to feel sick and disoriented, collapsing in the room upstairs.’

‘Do you have any idea about the kind of poison that could do such a thing?’ asked May.

‘It was obvious to me that we weren’t dealing with some
street amateur,’ Kershaw explained, ‘so I started thinking about professional toxins, and immediately came up with TTX. Tetrodotoxin. It’s an incredibly lethal neurotoxin that blocks the nerves by binding to the sodium channels in the cell membranes. There’s currently no known antidote and, more interestingly, there are no biological markers to indicate that a sufferer has been exposed to it, which is why it proved so difficult to diagnose a cause of death. It occurs naturally in nature, and can be found in newts, octopi and those Japanese puffer fish people insist on trying to eat. Fugu.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Bryant.

‘It means “river pig”. The poisonous fish.’

‘How much would you need?’

‘If it’s injected, you’d only have to use half a milligram to kill a normal-sized person.’

‘What are the symptoms?’

‘The victims experience numbness, shortness of breath, then complete respiratory collapse.’

‘And how long would that take?’

‘Could be anything between fifteen minutes and three hours, depending on various health factors and conditions. It’s diagnosable in blood and urine, but that would involve mass spectrometric detection after liquid or gas chromatographic separation. In other words, not your average high-street cause of death. It’s not easy to get hold of, but it’s very much the sort of trick the Russians pull on foreign agents these days, using toxins that go undetected or remain misdiagnosed. In the last few years they’ve pioneered this method of assassination.’

‘But if the same murder method was used on Amy O’Connor, why weren’t there any puncture marks on her body?’ asked Bryant.

‘Are you sure there weren’t?’

‘I’ll go back and talk to Ben Fenchurch again.’

‘Toxins,’ May repeated. ‘Sabira Kasavian’s mood swings
had an irregular pattern, but it was a pattern all the same. She seemed perfectly fine some days, confused and angry on others. You think she was being slowly poisoned? Is there something that could have made her display symptoms commonly associated with mental imbalance?’

‘You’re talking about the administration of a drug cocktail on different days,’ said Kershaw. ‘She was in a variety of locations, at home, in restaurants, in the clinic …’

‘Any number of people could have got close enough to her to do it, but for one person to administer a toxin on a regular basis – wouldn’t she have noticed?’ asked May.

‘That depends on the method of administration,’ said Kershaw. ‘There are some highly sophisticated ways to deliver drugs to the system.’

Bryant was following the thought. ‘Jeff Waters was killed by someone dressed as a motorcycle courier. If his killer was hired to do the job, why couldn’t others have been bribed or blackmailed into giving Sabira medication?’

‘That would imply a sizeable conspiracy,’ said May.

‘But that’s exactly what she told us she was afraid of, isn’t it? Something so big that she couldn’t trust anyone, least of all us because we were connected to the Home Office.’

‘Well, you said you wanted to go up against the government,’ said May. ‘It looks like you’ve got your wish. What do we do now?’

‘Giles, perform whatever tests you have to do to find out if Sabira Kasavian was being slowly poisoned. John, can you get Janice to try Tom Penry, the boy who was with the little girl at St Bride’s Church? He should be back from his holiday shortly. I’m going to find out why Fenchurch failed to find a cause of death for O’Connor.’

As the trio set off on their tasks, Rosa Lysandrou looked at them and shook her head sadly, wondering why they couldn’t leave the dead in peace.

30

THE WITCH TEST

JENNIFER PENRY KNELT
beside her son and smoothed his sun-blond hair in place. ‘I don’t see why you can’t ask his friend about this,’ she said. ‘Lucy is older, and seems to have led him on.’

‘Lucy won’t tell us the truth,’ Longbright explained. ‘It’s difficult with children.’

‘Do you have children of your own?’ Mrs Penry asked defensively.

‘No,’ said Longbright. ‘My hours would never have suited motherhood.’

‘That’s your choice, of course.’

Longbright decided not to argue. She had never felt it was a matter of choice. Her mother had been a police sergeant, and so had her former partner. Public service was in her blood; there had never been a question of giving it up. ‘Tom, how well do you know your friend Lucy?’ she asked, kneeling down to bring herself to his level.

‘We have to wait for our dads,’ said Tom, ‘so we play.’

‘
Witch Hunter
looks like a very exciting game. Did you make up your own rules?’

‘No, course not. It’s an online game and a card game. There are rules you have to obey.’

Longbright had spent a fruitless hour attempting to play the game with other online players, but had given up after realizing that she had no enthusiasm for absorbing hundreds of arcane rules and updates. It had been like spending the afternoon with Arthur and his books.

‘Do you always follow the rules? Are you sure you didn’t make some up?’

‘Lucy makes things up ’cause she says she knows them all and I don’t. But I think she cheats.’

‘That’s not very fair, is it? Did she cheat before you went on holiday, when you were waiting for your fathers?’

‘Yes, she said the lady was a witch but I knew she wasn’t.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Because there are ways of finding out.’

‘What ways did you use to try and find out if she was a witch?’

‘One way is to tie them up and drop them in a pond and if they sink they’re not a witch and if they float they are a witch, but we didn’t have a pond.’

‘So what did you do?’ Longbright kept her tone chatty and light. It was important not to put the boy on his guard.

Thomas squirmed a little. ‘There’s another test. You can stick a pin in them and if they don’t feel anything or make any noise they’re a witch.’

‘And Lucy knew about this?’

‘Yes, but she didn’t remember it until the man said it.’

‘What man, Tom?’

‘The one who came up to us. He asked us what we were playing and we said witches, and he said you can tell who’s a witch by sticking a pin in them. And Lucy said she didn’t have a pin but the man did, and he gave it to us.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘It had a bit of red plastic over the end. He took the plastic off and handed it to her.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Lucy ran around behind the bench and crawled underneath it, and she stuck the pin in the back of the lady’s leg.’

Longbright glanced at Tom’s mother. ‘The lady must have been very angry with her.’

‘No, she was angry with the wasps. She thought it was a wasp. But she felt it so I knew she wasn’t a witch. We ran away.’

‘What happened to the man?’

‘I don’t know. He went away.’

‘And what about the pin? What happened to that?’

‘Lucy dropped it. And then the lady went off towards the church, and we waited a bit longer to see if she was a witch because Lucy still thought she was, but then I went upstairs to see my dad.’

‘This man – can you remember what he looked like?’

‘He was a motorbike man with a helmet.’

‘Can I show you a picture?’ She unfolded a printed frame from the CCTV camera that had caught Jeff Waters’s attacker at Coram’s Fields, and showed it to him.

‘Yes,’ said the boy without any shade of uncertainty. ‘There’s supposed to be a bike badge. Triumph. There.’ He tapped the courier’s right shoulder.

‘How did he give Lucy the pin? Was it in his hand?’

‘He took it from his pocket. It was in the plastic thing.’

‘What is this all about?’ asked Tom’s mother, concerned.

‘The children had a lucky escape, Mrs Penry,’ said Longbright. ‘You should be very thankful.’

On the way back to the unit, she took a detour to the courtyard of St Bride’s and searched the pavement, but a receptionist in one of the offices told her it was swept every evening, and there was no sign of the toxic needle or its plastic cover.

‘I had an idea,’ said May, seeking out Bryant at his desk. ‘The algorithm – you’ve got the means of solving the code but not the code itself, right?’

‘I don’t know where else to look,’ Bryant admitted.

‘I think Sabira posted you the Cardano grille as a precaution. Have you looked in her belongings? It would have appeared innocuous without the grille to complete it.’

‘She had a case of clothes at the clinic,’ said Bryant. ‘Dan will need to search her flat. It would help if we knew what we were looking for.’

‘Maybe she left it with someone she could trust. How about Edona Lescowitz? She might not even know she has it.’

‘I’ll call Colin and Meera and get them to check with her,’ said May. ‘They’re still keeping a watch on her flat.’

‘I feel a fool,’ said Bryant suddenly. ‘I think I was wrong. I jumped in as usual.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sabira and the Hogarth painting. She died under a depiction of a madhouse. I assumed she was trying to tell me something about her mental state, that somebody drove her to it. But it was you who figured out that the madness might have been chemically induced, which means that Sabira wasn’t aware of the cause. So that wasn’t the message she was trying to leave.’

‘Then why did she go to the museum? It makes no sense.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she really was having some kind of relapse. I’m not sure I can rely on my instincts any more.’

‘No,’ said May. ‘Arthur, if you think she was leaving you a message, then we failed to understand its meaning in time to save her. And that means we must keep looking.’

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