Power Games (11 page)

‘In the hands of the Path. Lab. and Nigel Crowther,' she said.

‘I gather you found someone to ID the woman.'

‘Kate's buttons man,' Graham put in.

‘Buttons?' It was clear the question was directed at Kate.

She explained about her find and about Stephen Abbott's connection with the Lodge and with Rosemary Parsons.

‘You've been busy.' Rod nodded his approval.

‘She always is: too busy to—'

‘And Sarbut says he may have an ID for the guy who died in the warehouse fire,' she put in quickly. ‘Not that he is Sarbut, of course.'

As she'd known he would, he ignored the dig. ‘“Sarbut says”. You've got the lingo at least. It's a sort of shibboleth. Rookies tend to say, “My sarbut tells me …” – quite wrong!' Rod said. He stopped short, staring at his empty hand.

At last Graham took the hint. ‘Gaffer?'

‘Half of bitter, please.'

‘Kate?'

‘The same, please.'

They watched Graham push his way to the bar.

Neville leaned closer to her. ‘You're really convinced that Rosemary Parsons' death was unnatural, aren't you?'

‘I've been wrong before.'

‘We've all been wrong at one time or another. And got results at other times. Like you did last December. A couple of fine pieces of work, Kate. You'll make a good cop.'

At least the pub lighting wouldn't show how deeply she blushed, less at the words than at the tone. But she was afraid that as she bobbed her head in a smile, her dimples emerged.

Neville laughed. And then, his face quite serious, added, ‘Which is why I want you on this new MIT.'

‘What!' She gaped. Would she be pleased or horrified? No, she didn't want to leave her mates, but she'd love to get her teeth into major cases.

‘The MIT,' he repeated. ‘There's a certain amount of opposition, of course, but I take it you'd have no objection? Personnel are very keen – after all, they want to build up your CV.'

‘I was thinking about pulling out of the fast track scheme, Rod.'

‘I know you were. Maybe this assignment will help convince you you shouldn't.'

‘What about the warehouse fires?'

Graham, juggling three glasses, reappeared. ‘She's making progress with those. Which is why she shouldn't be pulled out tomorrow.'

Neville grabbed a glass hastily – his suit was too expensive for him to welcome a slosh of beer.

‘Tomorrow!' Kate repeated. She looked straight at Rod, ignoring the glass in Graham's outstretched hand. ‘It's all fixed, then?'

‘All bar the shouting, as they say round here. You've been here long enough to understand the natives, Graham? No, you were born here, weren't you?'

‘Solihull, actually,' he said, stiff at his sudden exclusion. ‘So what's fixed?'

Kate took the glass. He didn't seem to notice.

‘That business we were discussing earlier, Graham,' Neville said, so easily Kate suspected their discussions had been rancorous. ‘Kate's move to my MIT.'

Graham's mouth was so compressed the skin around it was white. ‘My comments are on the Procedure File,' he said, slamming his glass down on a table. With no more than a nod, he turned and was gone.

She turned to follow him. But Neville was shaking his head, and had stretched a lazy arm between her and the door. ‘He'll be over it by the morning,' he said. ‘Now, come and meet the team—'

‘Just a moment, Gaffer. I'm not clear about this. What will the MIT be looking at first?'

‘Itself. A day's training. Getting to know one another. And then, back to normal until we have a major incident. Then, just like Superman, we'll don our underpants over our trousers and zip to the rescue.'

‘You don't think we've got a bit of a major incident in this fire business? All that property up in smoke, to say nothing of an old woman? To be blunt with you, I think it's more important to sort that out than to sit round bonding. That's probably why Graham—' She jerked her head in the direction of the door.

‘Bless you, Kate,' he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, ‘you're a woman after my own heart. But I don't think that that's what got up Graham's nose.'

She stared: was the man always so indiscreet?

He was smiling again. ‘Maybe the fires will be the MIT's first case? Come on, this is a booze-up, not a policy meeting!' He lifted his glass. ‘Here's to our very close association.'

The scale of the MIT organisation amazed her. It wasn't just experienced officers and SOCOs, it was even computer in-putters. And there they were this Thursday morning, in a room usually set aside as an incident room, not just on the diagram projected by Neville's OHP, but in the flesh. And they were all, every one of them, looking at Kate, as she made an excruciatingly late entrance.

‘Sorry, Gaffer,' she said. ‘But I thought you'd all want to know. We've got another murder on our hands.'

She'd have liked to register accurately all the changes on Neville's face. Certainly they ranged from extreme disapproval, possibly even disappointment, to what now seemed to be comradely amusement.

‘Well?' He put down the pointer and nodded to someone to raise the lights.

‘This fax from Patrick Duncan.' She held it up. ‘Rosemary Parsons – the woman who died at Brayfield Tennis Centre – had in her bloodstream a cocktail of fluconazole and terfenadine, washed down, it seems, with grapefruit juice.'

There was a gratifying silence. The men looked totally blank. But a middle-aged woman – Janet, a computer in-putter according to the name in plastic tiles in front of her – gasped.

The eyes of the room left Kate, swivelling to Janet.

‘Is fluconazole the same as Diflucan? The big capsule?'

‘Yes. According to Patrick, it is.'

‘But you should never take Diflucan with terfenadine—'

‘Nor terfenadine with grapefruit juice,' Kate agreed. ‘At least according to Patrick. The combination – or in this case combinations – lead to extreme heart arrhythmia. In other words, a heart attack. Particularly if you take twice the recommended dose of each.'

‘Someone should bollock her doctor,' said a thin-faced ginger-haired man in his thirties.

‘But she didn't get them from her doctor. Not according to her medical records. And the post mortem showed no evidence that she had vaginal thrush, for which, according to Duncan, the Diflucan would have been an appropriate treatment.'

‘Pharmacist, then,' said Ginger-hair.

‘Terfenadine's prescription only these days,' Janet said. ‘I used to have it for my hayfever, only my doctor said it was too much of a risk. I suffer from' – she blushed but continued – ‘from thrush. And I sometimes have to use Diflucan to kill that. So I'm on the latest generation of anti-histamine now. And I don't take even that with grapefruit juice.'

‘So when did she take it?' Ginger-hair asked. ‘Presumably she didn't just pop a couple of pills while she was playing—'

‘No, but someone could have popped them to her. In a drink, for instance,' Janet put in. An in-putter!

‘But when did she drink it? Wouldn't she notice?'

‘Depends what she was doing.'

‘Isn't poison a woman's weapon?'

‘Quite a sophisticated way of poisoning someone.'

‘Not if you're a woman who has hayfever and thrush.'

The whole group was joining in. Rod Neville leaned back against a wall and folded his arms. ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,' he said at last, ‘I think we're a team already. Maybe it's time we moved to Kings Heath and put into practice some of the things we've been talking about …'

 

The Victorian house where Rosemary Parsons had lived for the last twenty years was now sealed by the police. There was still no sign of Mr Parsons.
Dr
Parsons, according to an envelope lying on the hall table.

‘So maybe we've gone to all this trouble for a simple domestic,' said Ginger-hair sadly, looking round the big square hall. A grandfather clock was clearing its throat to announce that it would soon be three-thirty. Ginger-hair was in fact a detective constable called Mark Wright. What he lacked in colour in his hair and eye-lashes – these were almost white – he made up for in colour in his clothes. He was sporting under his leather jacket a brilliant red shirt, with a highly patterned tie. He also wore several impressive rings, two of which included diamonds amidst all the gold. Whether it was ever wise to draw attention to such an abundance of ginger hair on your hands, Kate wasn't at all sure.

She felt, in her dark suit, like a pea-hen beside a peacock. And then realised she'd made a more precise analogy than she'd liked: Wright proved to have a nasty scream of a laugh, which he emitted from time to inappropriate time. This was not going to be her most pleasant pairing, was it?

She caught up with him in the kitchen.

‘Maybe I was wrong,' he said, pointing to a list of numbers pinned by the phone. ‘See – dates – first one, yesterday; hotel names. And those are the overseas dialling codes, aren't they?'

‘Yes. But why's this list still here? Why didn't Crowther take it with him the other night? Damn it, the poor bastard's probably been trying to phone her, worrying why she doesn't ring back …'

‘If they've got an answerphone, of course. Though I can't imagine an establishment like this not having one.'

‘So some poor sap has got to call up Mr – sorry,
Doctor
– Parsons in – where is he today? Berlin? – and tell the poor bastard he's a widower,' she said, feeling horribly that she was leading with her chin. ‘And has been since Tuesday,' she added.

‘Nice to know it doesn't have to be either of us breaking the news,' he said. ‘They'll bring in Family Support or whatever it's called today to do that. What do you make of the place?' He looked round at the kitchen.

‘A lot of money here. You could fit two kitchens my size into this.' Hell, she sounded like Stephen Abbott again.

‘And five of mine. And it's all good stuff, isn't it? None of your plastic and paper pretending to be wood for these cupboards. The real McCoy.' He tapped a door to prove his point.

 

The living room came complete with a huge inglenook fireplace, the oak of the overmantel too dark and heavy for Kate's taste, and an intricate plaster-work frieze and ceiling-rose. There was a baby grand in one corner, an elegant hi-fi system in another. Apart from that, there was a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a selection of easy chairs, none new. The French doors opened on to what seemed to be an original conservatory. And yes, there was a fountain, and in the furthest corner a tennis court. Some shrubs were already covered with buds or blossom, and there was an army of bulbs ready to break out.

‘Loadsa money,' Wright observed. ‘But it's not ostentatious, is it?'

‘I could live here,' Kate agreed. ‘Now, what about the rest of the rooms?'

There were some framed Victorian political cartoons in the downstairs cloakroom, and a pile of reading matter. The dining room was large enough for the table to be kept extended – it would have seated ten with ease, and a quick peer underneath established a couple more leaves could be pulled out to accommodate yet more. Again, a heavy fire surround, heavy velvet curtains, and an impressive ceiling. The pictures on the wall were genuine oils, in big gold frames.

‘Not my taste,' Kate said. ‘But I bet they'd be worth taking to the
Antiques Road Show
.'

‘You bet,' he cackled. ‘I wouldn't risk hanging them here in the front room myself – showing Burglar Bill what's on offer.'

‘Burglar Bill's more likely to go for the hi-fi, isn't he?'

Wright pulled a face: ‘There are specialist antiques thieves, remember. They even knock stuff off to order, don't they? So why didn't they have a burglar alarm, with all this lot lying around?'

Kate shrugged. ‘Like those folk who smoke? Never going to happen to you. Now, I like that vase …'

 

Upstairs was more interesting. Two of the five bedrooms had been converted to offices – his and hers, it transpired. His was much the larger, full of books, with a computer with a nineteen-inch monitor on a desk that looked as if it would be happier with quill pens. Beside it lay a couple of quotations from security firms for burglar alarm systems. Mark tapped them, raising an ironic eyebrow.

Kate nodded, before turning her attention to the books.

‘Seems as if he's an expert on the Holocaust,' Kate said. ‘Shelves and shelves of books about it. Some in German, too.'

‘Well, he is in Berlin,' Wright reminded her. ‘Hey, you don't suppose there's some anti-Semitic thing here?'

‘Why go for his wife, not him?'

‘Well, maybe she's an expert, too. Let's check out her room.'

Kate wrinkled her nose as they went in. It was a classic box-room, barely large enough for the filing cabinet and small modern desk it contained. The computer was new, but much smaller than Dr Parsons'. Where he had books, Rosemary Parsons had telephone directories. If his room was a study, hers was an office. Complete, as it happened, with an answerphone.

Kate pressed the play button. Nothing except three messages from a man believing his wife was alive to hear his affectionate greetings.

Pulling a face, she patted the filing cabinet. ‘We'd better bag up the files in these. I fancy they should repay a good read.' She opened a drawer at random. It was only half full. ‘Now, has someone taken something away, or did she buy the cabinet expecting a long hard campaign?' She checked the other drawers. All of them were practically empty.

‘So did Burglar Bill ignore the goodies and take away her files?' Wright asked.