Requiem (33 page)

The next note was from Peasedale’s assistant, saying that the latest blood samples from the Lincolnshire farmer’s wife suffering suspected Aldeb contamination still hadn’t arrived. Daisy read the note with disbelief. This was the third time the arrangements had gone wrong, despite the most thorough preparations. When the farmer had replied to her advertisement in the farming magazine, Daisy had persuaded him to agree to a monthly monitoring programme for his wife’s blood, whereby Peasedale would measure the samples for enzyme, hormone and liver-function levels. But with the samples continually getting held up, it was making a nonsense of the whole programme. The farmer’s wife was called Ruth and she answered the phone in her habitually subdued manner, with a soft almost apologetic greeting.

‘What happened to the blood sample, Ruth?’

There was a pause and she heard Ruth inhale a couple of times as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak. ‘I think you should talk to my husband,’ she whispered finally.

‘But why? What’s happened, Ruth? Is there something wrong?’

Another pause, longer this time. ‘Well … it’s … I can’t say.’

‘
Ruth
– ’

She gave a small sigh. ‘He thinks it would be best not to go on.’

‘Why, Ruth? Just tell me why.’

‘They said it would …’ Then she exclaimed, ‘No – sorry! I can’t – sorry!’ and hung up.

Daisy slumped back in her chair. What had Ruth meant by ‘they said’? Who was they – a doctor? An advisor? And what was it they’d said? What could have put Ruth and her husband off a straightforward medical investigation? Daisy couldn’t begin to imagine – not just now anyway – and for the moment she gave up trying.

The advertisement stirred memories of another reply, and she called out to Jenny in the outer office: ‘Jen, that funny man, Maynard, he hasn’t been back, has he?’

Jenny appeared in the doorway. ‘Not since the last time, when was it …’ She pursed up her deep-purple mouth. ‘Ooh, November, wasn’t it?’

‘No phone calls?’

‘Nah – I’d ’ave told yer.’ Jenny had a habit of lapsing into a Cockney accent: something to do with her new boyfriend. ‘No, ’e seemed quite ’appy with all the bumph.’

‘And he didn’t ask any odd questions?’

‘Nope, not a dicky bird.’

‘Not especially nosy?’

Jenny squawked: ‘You think he’s a spy, don’t you!’ In her delight, her Cockney had momentarily disappeared.

‘No, no. I just thought he was – odd.’

‘Well, he didn’t do anyfing exciting. I checked – remember? No secret mikes under me desk.’

‘That’s right.’ Daisy clasped her fingers to her temples and shook her head. ‘Just going nuts, Jen. Just getting paranoid.’

‘Go home. Go on. You look half dead.’

She finally left the office at seven, glad to have the car for once, but not so glad at the realization that she’d forgotten to feed the meter. A parking ticket fluttered triumphantly from the wiper. Another sixteen quid up the spout, and little hope of getting it back on expenses.

Simon’s bathroom was sparkling white with down-lights in the ceiling and a scorching hot towel rail and pukka tiles and a bath with a sloping back so you could fall asleep in it without getting a sudden snort of water up your nostrils. She poured the water so hot that it took her five minutes to get in but only two minutes to fall asleep. She woke when the flat door slammed and Simon called her name.

‘I found some bread,’ he called through. ‘It’s only granary, I’m afraid. Oh, and some mangy old bananas.’

‘Sounds okay to me.’

‘Didn’t bother with curry though. Thought we could cook Sunday’s chicken a bit early. You’ll approve – it’s organic – though what that means nowadays is anybody’s guess.’

‘Corn-fed, antibiotic-free?’ she suggested.

‘You’ll be lucky.’

‘Colonically irrigated perhaps?’ She climbed out of the bath and reached for a towel.

He appeared at the door wearing a disparaging smile. ‘Wrong,’ he corrected her. ‘Only free of continuously fed antibiotics. As the law stands at present there’s nothing to stop the breeders feeding the birds the odd dose of antibiotics on a curative basis. And no guarantee that the birds are even free-range. It’s a big con.’

‘Why bother to buy it then?’

He regarded her carefully. ‘You look washed out,’ he remarked.

Maybe it was the sympathy, maybe it was a psychosomatic response, but she shivered violently. She wrapped the towel tighter round herself. ‘I think I’m getting flu.’

She might as well have announced a case of yellow fever. Simon stepped smartly backwards, looking alarmed. ‘God, I’m due to go to Madrid on Monday. The EEC conference.’ Reading her expression, he rearranged his response and put on a solicitous face. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘Food’ll do fine.’

He retreated to the kitchen. ‘Then it can’t be flu,’ he called, not bothering to disguise the relief in his voice. ‘You wouldn’t be hungry if it was flu.’

‘Just starvation then.’

She dressed and found Simon stuffing the bird with a mixture of crushed garlic, herbs and mushrooms. He had a bottle of Pernod out, not her favourite beverage, and she went in search of some white wine.

‘Is the paper going to run anything more on Alusha Mackenzie?’ she asked, pulling out a bottle.

‘Not that one,’ Simon cried in horror. He reached past her and grasped another bottle. ‘This one. Nice and dry. The other one’s an ’85.’ She wasn’t sure which honoured guest he kept the special vintages for, but it didn’t seem to be her.

‘The Mackenzie story,’ she prompted.

‘Oh? Nothing, I don’t think. Someone floated an idea for an in-depth piece on pesticides, but the editor killed it.’

Someone floated an idea, but not him. ‘You didn’t push for it?’

‘Well – no.’ He looked mildly defensive. Wiping his hands, he reached for his favourite corkscrew and began to work energetically on the cork.

‘But why not? And why did the editor kill it?’

‘You know why, Daisy. Not enough to go on. I mean …’ He gave her his favourite let’s-face-the-facts look. ‘She killed herself, and while that’s a tragedy it’s not a story.’ He pulled the cork with a plop.

‘But you can’t say she killed herself!’

‘A river. A freezing night. A sick woman. It doesn’t take a lot of working out.’

‘That’s making one helluva lot of judgements, for Christ’s sake, one helluva lot of assumptions. God – how would you feel if you were sick and weak and you fell and died and the obituaries all marked you down as a suicide?’

‘Fell? Daisy, you don’t fall into rivers accidentally.’

She paced the kitchen. ‘Sure you do. Sure you do. It happens all the time. People trip, they fall …’

‘And if it’s a poky little river, they climb out again.’

She threw out her hands. ‘And what happens if people hit their heads and get knocked unconscious?’

Wiping the neck of the bottle with a professional polish, he poured a glass and thrust it into her hand as a doctor might force a palliative on a hysterical patient.

She took a long swig. ‘You’re totally pre-judging the issue,’ she said. ‘Branding someone who can’t defend herself.’

‘I’m not branding anyone with anything.’

‘Oh yes you are! You’re saying she killed herself and, whatever people say, suicide’s still the ultimate crime – selfish and cowardly and messy.’

Simon poured some cooking wine over the chicken and looked vaguely in the direction of the oven. ‘There are worse things.’

‘Like?’

He shrugged and, opening a cupboard, rummaged through a collection of herbs.

‘Like?’ she repeated harshly, feeling ugly and combative.

He selected a jar of marjoram and shook a dusting over the chicken. ‘Like, well – being dishonest. Being a drug peddler. I don’t know.’

She downed the rest of her wine and reached for a refill. ‘There’s no comparison. None at all. This woman’s dead, and most of her death can be laid at the door of the stuff that poisoned her. You can’t even begin to relate it to stealing or drugs.’

Simon gave the chicken a pat, as if the bird at least could be relied on to appreciate a sound argument. Then, waiting for Daisy to move aside, he bent over the oven and absorbed himself with the temperature control.

Daisy resumed her pacing, taking the length of the kitchen in five heartfelt strides.

Simon stood up from the oven, and said suddenly: ‘She was doped.’

Daisy stopped dead. ‘What do you mean doped?’

‘They found drugs in her body.’

Daisy stood still, trying to make sense of it. And yet the sense was clear. He could only mean one sort of drug, otherwise he would have put it differently. But, needing to hear it in cold words, she asked all the same.

‘Morphine or heroin or another derivative,’ Simon said.

‘Perhaps it was for pain. Perhaps it was prescribed.’

‘Possibly,’ he agreed. ‘But apparently the levels were very high.’

‘Then – ’ She searched his face. ‘What are you saying?’

He slid the chicken into the oven. ‘It doesn’t matter what I’m saying. Or anyone else for that matter. It’s what the coroner says.’

‘They don’t have coroners in Scotland,’ she replied mechanically.

‘What do they have then?’

‘Procurator fiscals.’

‘God, what a title.’

‘Will there be a hearing, an inquiry, do you know?’

He pulled a dead lettuce out of the fridge and looked at it accusingly. ‘An inquest, you mean?’

‘I don’t think they have inquests. Just inquiries. Can you find out for me? If they’re having one?’

‘Mmm? Well …’ He was losing interest. ‘If I hear anything.’

By the time a powerful aroma of wine and garlic began to emerge from the oven she had lost her appetite.

‘I think it’s flu after all,’ she said.

The wary expression came back into Simon’s face.

Daisy took her cue. ‘I think I’ll skip the chicken if you don’t mind.’

Simon put on a disappointed face, but didn’t try to argue her out of it.

The flat was dark and cold when she got in. And a mess. She’d forgotten how behind she’d got with the chores. The ironing board stood in the middle of the room beside a well-filled ironing basket, the floor supported sprinklings of newspapers and magazines and a scattering of music cassettes. Her bed, only approximately made, was strewn with clothes and work papers.

On her way to the kitchen, her eye was caught by a note propped on the mantelpiece. She recognized the neat upright hand of Anthea, her flatmate. Anthea said she was sorry but she was giving two weeks’ notice. She didn’t quite think the flat was working out, nothing personal. She’d already moved her stuff out, she said, and would send the last two weeks’ rent by post.

Despite the inconvenience, Daisy couldn’t blame her. If she’d been in Anthea’s position, she’d probably have done the same.

In need of cheer, she made herself a hot lemon drink and slid a hot-water bottle into her bed before making a superficial attack on the clutter. She threw the newspapers into a pile behind a chair, hid the ironing board behind the bathroom door and thrust her tapes onto the shelf by the tape player. Something about the shelf made her pause. Though tidiness wasn’t her strong point, she liked to keep her tapes in some kind of order, and now she had the sudden impression that something was out of place. She ran her fingers along the ranks of plastic, ticking them off in her memory until she realized that a number of work tapes had got into the wrong slot: recordings of interviews with chemical victims from which she transcribed notes in the evenings. She’d put them between Pink Floyd and Beethoven, where Bach should be. Or was it Brahms?

As she flopped into bed and clutched the blissful hot-water bottle she remembered the answering machine and, reaching out, pulled it across the floor towards her. It was off. Then she realized that it wasn’t actually off but incorrectly set. The model was a fairly ancient one; to set it properly it wasn’t enough simply to turn the machine on, you also had to flick the control switch away from ‘answer set’ and then back again before the tape whirred into the correct position. It was a sign of how brain-stormed she must have been that morning to have screwed up this simplest of tasks.

More out of habit than expectation she played back the message tape, expecting to hear a repeat of yesterday’s messages.

But she was wrong. There were no old messages, just a brand new one in the form of her mother’s voice announcing the date of her great-uncle Alf’s seventieth birthday party, and asking if there was any chance of seeing her before that, like for Sunday lunch. Daisy lay back, trying to work this out. To have recorded that message, the machine must have been properly set for at least some of the day. So what had caused it to unset? It was some minutes before it came to her. Anthea. Anthea must have unintentionally switched it off at the wall as she was moving out, and forgotten to reset it properly. That, or there had been a power cut.

She switched off the light and closed her eyes, ready to let herself lose sleep over far more important things, like what could have prompted the Lincolnshire farmer and his wife to suddenly change their minds about the blood tests.

Hamish Macdonald didn’t know what had hit him. One moment he was minding his own business, throwing up outside the back door of The Stag, peaceably wondering why he’d wasted good money on those last four pints only to review them so quickly, when in the next instant he was lifted bodily from the ground. It was a curiously weightless feeling, like flying, or being transported to heaven. Until he hit the wall, that was. Then he knew that he wasn’t flying or going to heaven or suffering a malfunction of the brain. The wall was too hard for that; through the considerable haze and uncertainty, he was aware of the brickwork meeting his head with a nasty tap.

The sensation of flying ceased; his body slid a short way down the wall then stopped with his feet still clear of the ground, his weight supported by the grip of two vice-like hands on his lapels. The hands, of course, had an owner, as Macdonald feared they might, and now the owner’s voice was hissing in his ear.

‘Right, Macdonald, time for a wee chat.’

Macdonald blinked and tried to make out his assailant’s identity, but the street lighting of Stirling, such as it was, revealed nothing but the man’s black outline. Was he a thief? A man whom Macdonald had offended perhaps? That was always a real possibility. But whoever he was, whatever his business, Macdonald was only too happy to co-operate. Indeed, if only he could get his brain to respond he would tell the fellow so. But try as he might, much as his mouth moved, no words would come.