Beneath the Bleeding (34 page)

‘You can’t argue with the facts.’

‘We don’t know hardly any of the facts,’ Chris pointed out. ‘But if you think you’re on the right track, you’d better watch your back,’ she added, a tease in her voice.

‘What do you mean? I’m skint, me,’ Kevin said.

‘Yeah, but you drive a rich man’s car, she said, slowing for the final turn before their destination.

‘It’s not a rich man’s car. You could have it for sixteen grand,’ Kevin said. ‘Anyway, it’s not me I’m worried about. There’s other rich bastards around who went to the Double Aitch. Maybe we should be warning them.’

Chris shook her head, amused. ‘Do me a favour? Make sure I’m in the room when you run it past Jordan.’ She pulled up on double yellow lines outside their target address. ‘OK, here we are.’ She got out of the car but Kevin didn’t move. Chris leaned back into the car. ‘Come on, Kev. Brood on your own time. We’ve got Imperial Storm Troopers to piss off.’

He scratched his head and opened the door. ‘For once, I wish Tony Hill was around,’ he said as he followed Chris up the drive. ‘Poison, the Double Aitch and money. Times three. He’d make a case.’

It didn’t take long to find out which bedsit had belonged to Yousef Aziz. Two knocked doors and they had the answer. For form’s sake, Carol knocked and shouted, ‘Police, open up,’ before Sam and Kevin shoulder-charged the door. Checking that they were all gloved up, Carol led the way into the comfortless room. The bitter tang of chemicals hung in the air, making her eyes water and her sinuses prickle.

There wasn’t much to occupy the four of them. A fridge that contained nothing but labelled containers of chemicals; a draining board with rinsed glass apparatus; a torn packet of rocket engines with two still inside the clear plastic; and a small sports holdall.

‘Should we get the bomb guys up here to check out the holdall?’ Kevin asked, his face tight with nerves.

Her first instinct was to say,
No, to hell with it.
But when she examined that gut reaction, she couldn’t find a rationale for it. And without a rationale, she couldn’t take that level of risk with their lives. For a moment, she dithered, hating herself for it. She wanted to inspire her team, not give them grounds for worry. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said, stepping out on to the landing. She pulled out her phone and called Tony’s hospital room. He answered on the first ring. ‘Carol,’ he said before she spoke. It surprised her because the hospital phones had no called ID feature. Then she understood that he didn’t expect calls from anyone else.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. But I need your help. Imagine we’re in the bedsit the bomber used to build his device. There’s no evidence of anybody else being involved. There’s a holdall sitting by the door. Is it likely to be booby-trapped?’

‘No,’ he said decisively.

‘Why? I mean, that was my gut reaction, but why?’

‘It’s another gesture of contempt. Look, here we are, right in the midst of you. This is how we work, this is who we are. We want to show you just how easy this is. Go ahead, Carol. Open the bag.’

She let out a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks.’

‘And if I’m wrong, and you do get blown to kingdom come, I’ll buy you dinner.’

She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Come round when you’re done. It doesn’t matter how late it is, just come.’

‘I will She closed the phone and walked back in. The other three were clustered round the draining board reading a list of instructions on the wall.

‘Organized little shit,’ Chris said.

‘But still no sign of any accomplices,’ Sam noted.

‘We’re opening the bag,’ Carol said. ‘Well, I’m opening it. Out on the landing, you three.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Chris said. ‘If it’s safe enough for you, it’s safe enough for all of us, right, guys?’ Both men looked uncertain, but they made no move for the door. ‘Come on, the Al-Quaeda lot don’t booby-trap their bomb factories, they want us to see how clever they are.’ So saying, she grabbed the bag, swung it on to the narrow bed and unzipped it.

It was a moment of profound bathos. Nothing could have been further from what they expected. A pair of jeans, a pair of chinos. A pair of blue Converse shoes. Five T-shirts. Two striped Ralph Lauren shirts. A lightweight fleece hoodie. Four pairs of boxers, four pairs of black sports socks. ‘Looks as if he was planning on coming back here,’ Carol said, puzzled. ‘What kind of suicide bomber packs for his trip to paradise?’

Chris had her hand inside the bag, fumbling with a zip. ‘There’s more,’ she said, reaching in. A state-of-the-art mobile WAP phone, a digital camera, an EU passport, a driving licence and a folded sheet of paper. Chris handed the paper to Carol who unfolded it.

‘It’s an e-ticket. For this evening’s flight to Toronto,’ she said. ‘Booked through hopefully.co.uk.’

Chris reached for her phone. ‘Christ, I hope Stacey’s
still got his machine.’ She dialled and said, ‘Stace? It’s Chris. You still got Aziz’s laptop?…Great. He’s got a flight booked through hopefully.co.uk. I need you to…yeah, that’s it. Call me back.’ She ended the call. ‘She’s going to see whether he saved his ID and password on the computer. If he did, then she can access his booking history, see what else comes up.’

Kevin was studying the passport and the driving licence. This is very odd,’ he said. ‘Not only does it look like he was planning to come back, it also looks like he didn’t expect to be a suspect. He’s using his own passport and his own driving licence, as if he doesn’t expect anybody in Canada to be looking for him. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe it was his own little fantasy,’ Sam said. ‘What got him through it.’

Carol picked up the mobile phone and bagged it. This goes to Stacey. The rest of it, put it back together again the way you found it, Chris. Time to come clean.’ She took out her phone and the card she’d been given earlier and keyed in the unfamiliar number. When it was answered, she said, ‘David? This is Carol Jordan. I think we’ve found your bomb factory.’ She tossed the bagged phone to Sam and made the ‘shoo’ gesture with her free hand. ‘An anonymous tip. Didn’t want to bother you with it until we were sure it panned out.’ She winked at Chris and Kevin. ‘No, we haven’t touched a thing. You never know what might be booby-trapped…No, I’ll have my officers wait here for you.’ She gave him the address and ended the call. ‘When the CTC get here, you’re free to go.’ She looked at her watch.
‘It’s been a long day. We’ll reconvene at eight tomorrow.’

Walking across the cracked tarmac to her car, Carol felt every minute of that long day. Her muscles ached and her body craved a drink. There were plenty of bottles at home, stacked in the rack, waiting for her. But she had one more call to make before she could choose one of those. Maybe she could stop at an off-licence, pick out a decent red, something good to share. He’d like that. And it gave her all the excuse she needed to slip into the comforting embrace of alcohol. Anything to take her mind away from those twisted and torn bodies. When she closed her eyes, she did not want to revisit the injured, the dying and the dead.

The waiting area of A&E at Bradfield Cross had nothing to recommend it as a place to spend a Saturday night. People wandered around with plastic cups of tea, bottles of water and cans of fizzy drinks, looking dazed and miserable. The chairs were full of bewildered and exhausted relatives of the injured, their children sleeping or grizzling. Journalists kept sneaking in and drifted from person to person, trying to get some quotes before they were spotted and ordered out. The department had been closed to routine casualties, which provoked frequent loud arguments with the security guards, battles which threatened to spill over from the verbal to the physical at any moment. When Paula arrived, a pair of drunks with bloody faces had been remonstrating with the security guards. She had walked straight up to them, face to face and toe to toe with the noisier one. ‘Fuck off now or spend the night in
the cells,’ she snarled. ‘Don’t you know what happened here today? Take your scratches somewhere else.’

The drunk thought about it for a millisecond then, seeing something implacable in her face, he backed off. ‘Fucking dyke pig bitch,’ he shouted once he was far enough away.

The security guards looked almost impressed. ‘If we could threaten them like that, we’d have no trouble of a night,’ one said, holding the door open for her.

‘You obviously need more dyke pig bitches to teach you how to do it, she muttered as she waded through the sea of miserable humanity to the desk. She looked up at the clock. Ten past ten. Her interview with Jana Jankowicz felt like half a lifetime away. A receptionist with cornrows and nails that could have been stripped off and used as luges for small children gave her a cool, weary look. ‘I’m looking for Dr Blessing,’ she said, producing her ID.

The receptionist sniffed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Take seat,’ she added automatically.

Paula wanted to laugh and to cry simultaneously. ‘I’ll just wait here, if it’s all right with you.’ She leaned against the counter and closed her eyes, trying to shut out the discordant background noises.

A touch on her arm made her start back to full consciousness. Elinor Blessing was looking at her with a faint smile. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought only junior doctors could actually sleep standing up.’

Paula cracked a smile. ‘Welcome to my world,’ she said. ‘Thanks for seeing me. I know you’re run off your feet today.’

‘It’s eased up now,’ Elinor said, leading Paula back into the main wing of the hospital. ‘We’ve pretty much done all we can down here. It’s just that we’ve still got some patients who really need to be admitted, only we’ve not got beds for them here. You’ve saved me from having to call round to try and find somewhere for them to go.’

They ended up in a doctors’ coffee room on the third floor. It reminded Paula of every similar room she’d ever been in. The same battered chairs past their best, rickety tables marked with rings, unmatching mugs and hectoring notices about washing up, stealing biscuits and putting rubbish in bins. Elinor got a couple of mugs of coffee from a machine and plonked one in front of Paula. ‘That should keep you awake till some time next week. It’s junior-doctor strength.’

‘Thanks.’ Paula didn’t know why this woman was being so nice to her, but she wasn’t about to fight it. She took a sip of coffee and found no grounds to disagree with Elinor’s assessment of the brew. ‘So, Tom Cross. You think he was poisoned?’ Paula took out her notebook.

Elinor shook her head. ‘When I spoke to someone earlier, that’s what I thought. Now I’ve had some of the labs back, I don’t think so. I know so.’

‘OK. And what did your tests tell you?’

Elinor fiddled with her mug. ‘Most doctors, the only poisoning they’ll ever see is when people take deliberate or accidental overdoses. We’re not trained to look for it. Not really. So it’s very weird for me to see two cases of deliberate poisoning in the same week. At first, I thought I was imagining things. But
wasn’t. Tom Cross was deliberately poisoned with a cardiac glycoside.’

‘Can you spell that for me?’ Paula gave Elinor her best pathetic shrug. ‘And then can you tell me what it is?’

Elinor took the notebook from her and wrote it down. ‘A cardiac glycoside is a naturally occurring compound, generally found in plants. It acts primarily on the heart, either beneficially or not, depending on the glycoside in question and on how much you absorb. An example would be foxgloves, which are the source of digoxin. It’s used as a heart medicine, but the wrong dose will kill you.’ She handed back the notebook with a smile.

‘So is that what killed Tom Cross? Foxgloves?’

‘No. What killed him was oleander.’

‘Oleander?’

‘You’ve probably seen it on holiday abroad. It’s a bushy shrub with narrow leaves and the flowers are pink or white. It’s pretty common and it’s very poisonous. I looked it up earlier. There’s a story that some of Napoleon’s soldiers used oleander twigs to kebab their meat with and by morning they were dead. There is an antidote, but often patients die before they can absorb enough of it to make a difference. And to be honest, when you consider Tom Cross’s age and weight, his heart probably wasn’t in great shape to start with. He didn’t have much of a chance. I’m sorry. I know he used to be a police officer.’

‘I never knew him when he was in the job,’ Paula said. ‘But my boss did. So, Dr Blessing…’

‘Elinor. It’s Elinor, please.’

Was she flirting? Paula was too tired to work it out. Or, to be honest, to care. Tonight, all she wanted were the facts, so she could go home and sleep. The coffee wasn’t working, apparently. She stifled a yawn. ‘So, Elinor, have you got any idea when this poison would have been administered? And how?’

‘It acts quite quickly. He said he’d had stomach cramps and a couple of incidents of diarrhoea at the football match. While he was still lucid, he said he’d started feeling bad after lunch. He’d had lamb kebabs with rice and a sauce with herbs, he said. You’ve got two possible sources of oleandrin right there. The lamb could have been marinated with oleander leaves, or sap. Then the twigs could have been used to kebab the lamb. Like the Napoleonic story.’ She shook her head. ‘Horrible. So insidious a way to kill someone. Such a breach of trust.’

‘Did he say where he’d had lunch?’

‘He said someone had cooked it for him. So I imagine it was at their house.’ Elinor rubbed the bridge of her nose as she struggled to remember what Tom Cross had said. ‘Was it Jack…? No, not Jack. Jake. That was it. Jake.’

Suddenly Paula was awake, her mind racing with connections. ‘You’re sure it was Jake and not Jack?’

Elinor looked uncertain, catching a corner of her lower lip with her teeth. ‘I’m pretty sure it was Jake. But I could be mistaken.’

Harriestown High, Paula thought. Jack Anderson. Robbie Bishop, Danny Wade and now maybe Tom Cross. Was that the link? Was that what drew them together? They couldn’t have known each other at school, not given the disparity in ages. But maybe
there was some former pupil organization they all belonged to. Some charity event at the school that had brought them together. Some occasion where they’d all witnessed something they shouldn’t have? ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said softly.