Dead End (34 page)

‘So you thought if you had to live without him, it would be better to kill him?’

‘Everything seemed to be falling apart,’ Buster said with a dazed look. ‘We’d been so happy. And I’d been looking forward to his retirement, doing things together, a peaceful old age. Now he was sending me away and taking that – that catamite into his home. And Marcus was going to tell the press – oh, he’d do it, out of spite, you know, because Stefan would never give him any money. We’d be all over the papers, everything pawed over and sullied, his reputation ruined for ever, our lives destroyed. I couldn’t let that happen. Better a quiet, dignified end. I knew his heart was bad; all it needed was a little push over the edge.’ He shook his head. ‘I had no idea Lev was going to do what he did. But then afterwards it seemed like a godsend. It was a way to get rid of him as well, and there’d be no more questions asked.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said sympathetically. ‘You must have been afraid everything would come out – about Lady Susan and Doreen, and the others. It must have been a bad time for you.’

‘I never thought about them. And I don’t care about them now,’ he said. ‘How can you think it? It’s Stefan: I gave my whole life to him, and he’s gone. I just didn’t realise before what it would be like to be without him. But there’s nothing else I could have done. I couldn’t let him destroy himself.’

‘Why
did
you kill Lady Susan?’ Slider asked.

‘She was wearing him out. Her constant demands on him – physically, on his time, yes, but even more on his spirit. She wasted his vital forces. Music at his level takes everything a man has. I saw it every day. He was drained by her, and his music suffered. And she was jealous of me, of my influence with him. She was trying to turn him against me. He’d tired of her by then, anyway, but if they divorced he’d lose all her money, and he was terrified of poverty, after what he’d seen in Poland. So
it was obvious what I had to do. She was an unhappy woman anyway, and I rid him of the burden of her, that’s all.’

‘How did you make her swallow the pills?’

He looked contemptuous. ‘You can’t make a person swallow pills – and if you could they’d throw them up again. It was in the brandy.’

‘What was in the brandy?’

But the mood had been broken. Suddenly his focus sharpened. ‘I thought you said you knew everything?’ He remembered Atherton for the first time in ages and looked quickly at him, then back at Slider. ‘You’re trying to trick me, to make me tell you what you don’t know.’

‘No, no, not at all. I knew it all except that,’ Slider said soothingly, but Keaton wasn’t soothed. He seemed to shrink together on himself.

‘I’ll deny it,’ he said. ‘You can’t prove I said anything to you – I know the law. You can’t prove any of it.’

Slider looked at Atherton, and then stood up and walked across the room. ‘There’s a lot we can prove,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it was you who told everyone Stefan had a heart condition. But we know that wasn’t true. His heart was as healthy as yours or mine.’

‘What do you say?’ Buster said faintly.

‘Oh yes. That’s a fact. The post mortem showed his heart was very strong. So why should you have put it about that he had heart disease, if not to pave the way for your plot to kill him?’ He stood looking out of the window as he spoke, as though it were a matter so settled as to be unimportant. ‘You thought that if he collapsed while he was actually conducting, everyone would assume it was heart and not look any further for a cause. That’s why you gave him the stuff just before rehearsal, instead of letting him die at home, in bed.’

‘But he told me! He told me he had a weak heart!’ Buster seemed utterly bewildered.

‘Well he was lying, I’m afraid. Which—’ Slider stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the garden, things slotting into place with rapid, satisfying clicks. It was horrible, it was truly horrible, but it all fitted, and that was the only satisfaction one could ever have from investigating a murder – getting the answer right.

‘Which makes you the prime suspect,’ he finished. Atherton
heard the difference in his voice and looked at him sharply; and Slider nodded to him, just perceptibly. ‘Lev’s bullet, you see, didn’t do enough damage to kill a man with a sound heart. But Stefan was already dying when Lev pulled the trigger, from something that attacked the central nervous system. Something you’d given him.’

‘No-one will believe that,’ Buster said, but his voice was faint.

‘All poisons are detectable, if you know what to look for,’ Slider said. ‘The pathologist told me that only this morning. Things have advanced no end since 1959 – they didn’t have gas chromatography or atomic absorption spectroscopy then, did they? And of course, no-one was looking for poison in Lady Susan’s case anyway. No-one thought of testing the brandy, or looking in your little shed at the bottom of the garden where you do your botanical research.’

Buster jerked in his seat at the last words, and Atherton began slowly to smile as he began to follow Slider’s path.

‘One is nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth,’ Slider quoted softly. ‘You made sure of that, didn’t you, Mr Keaton? A very short route to God your pretty garden turned out to be. Tobacco plant, foxglove, deadly nightshade, henbane, laburnum – nature’s a wonderfully deadly thing, if you know where to look. And you’re a botanist. You’d know all about it.’

‘I think,’ Keaton said faintly but politely, ‘I think I must ask you to excuse me for a moment. I have to go to the lavatory.’

He seemed hardly able to get out of the chair, but when Atherton made to help him, he shrank away. ‘No, I can manage. Please – please don’t touch me.’

Slider watched him walk to the door, and then flicked a nod at Atherton, who followed him out but came straight back in and said, ‘It’s just across the hall. We’ll hear him come out.’ Slider nodded and walked to the window again. ‘At least it will get Lev Polowski off the hook,’ Atherton said after a moment. ‘Or will it? He’ll have to be charged with something, I suppose. Attempted murder? Malicious wounding? But can you maliciously wound a dying man? And how close to dying was Radek, I wonder, when the bullet struck him? If it played any part in his death, if it only hastened it, Lev’s guilty of something.’

‘There’s still Buster’s little shed to examine,’ Slider said, off
on his own track. ‘He may not have thought to clear it out yet, and even if he has, there might be enough traces to—’ He stopped, frowning. ‘What was that?’ He listened, and then looked at Atherton.

‘You don’t think—?’ Atherton said, and then they both ran.

The door was locked and there was no reply from within, but the hall was narrow there. Atherton hitched himself up onto the radiator, lifted both feet up against the door, and slammed it open. Buster was on the floor, his left sleeve pushed up. There was a medicine cabinet on the wall with its door open, and a hypodermic syringe on the floor by his right hand.

Slider crouched by the body. He wasn’t dead yet. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said.

Atherton hesitated. ‘But they might save him.’ Slider looked up. ‘Just a little delay, guv,’ he said urgently. ‘He’s killed five people, and they’ll probably let him off.’

‘Do it,’ said Slider.

The ambulance had been and gone, and the forensic team was taking the house and garden shed to pieces, and Slider and Atherton were standing in the drawing-room, waiting to go.

‘I still think we should have let him die,’ Atherton grumbled, but he didn’t mean it now.

‘You know we can’t do that,’ Slider said. ‘And besides, we’ll need his confession if we’re going to get this one home.’

‘It’s going to be the devil to prove any of it.’

‘I know. There’s the trail of bodies following Keaton’s career, and a few suspicious coincidences, but an awful lot of it’s pure speculation. But Radek’s still above ground, and Freddie said he’d find the poison if I could just tell him what to look for.’

‘And can you?’

Slider grimaced. ‘I think so. I think I know how he did it. It was the last thing left to work out, and I looked down from the window at his lovely border all full of blue flowers – including blue rocket, such a pretty, prolific plant. Also known as monkshood or wolfsbane.’

‘Is it poisonous, then?’ Atherton asked.

Slider rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t you know anything about plants?’

‘I’m not a hayseed like you, guv,’ Atherton protested. ‘We didn’t go about sucking hedges in Weybridge. None of this eye of newt business in the commuter belt.’

‘The Latin name for blue rocket is aconite.’

‘Oh, well, why didn’t you say so?’ Atherton said. ‘Aconite is what Medea tried to poison Theseus with. The ancients called it the Queen of Poisons. So it comes from rocket, does it?’

‘Aconitum to you. All parts of the plant are poisonous, and
you can make a stiff brew from stewing the root as well. It attacks the CNS and paralyses the heart muscle—’

‘Et voilà,
syncope!’

‘—sometimes before any other symptoms have had a chance to develop. It’s extremely toxic, and it can act very, very quickly – in as little as eight minutes.’

‘Well, that sounds promising from our point of view,’ Atherton conceded generously, ‘except that we have to prove Buster gave it to the old man, and I still can’t see how. If he gave him something to eat or drink, he obviously took the evidence away with him, and it will have been destroyed by now.’

‘No, he wouldn’t have given it that way, because if there was any suspicion, that’s the first place we would have looked. If he was going to do it, he’d work out a way that gave him a chance of getting away with it.’ Slider turned away and looked out of the window again. ‘The other thing about aconite,’ he said slowly, ‘is that it can be absorbed through the skin. They used to use it externally to treat rheumatic pain – it sets up a sort of tingling numbness. I came across it years ago, when I was a rookie – a case of accidental death, where an ointment containing aconite had been used on broken skin.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Atherton said. ‘Am I missing something?’

‘You made a list of everything in the dressing-room,’ Slider said, ‘and in the bathroom. I looked at it this morning, and I realised that there was something missing, but I assumed Keaton must have taken it away in his pocket, and it didn’t seem important.’

‘Taken what away?’

‘A tube of ointment. I just didn’t make the connection until I looked out of the window here.’

‘A tube of ointment? Did Radek suffer from rheumatism?’ Atherton said, still puzzled.

Slider turned to him with unwilling eyes. ‘Not rheumatism, you clunk.’

Atherton stared, and then enlightenment came. ‘Ouch,’ he said, screwing up his eyes in genuine sympathy. ‘What a way to go. The poor old bastard!’

‘At least it was a quick death,’ Slider said.

Slider was not looking forward to having to explain the new
developments to Barrington, even in his lately acquired pussycat mood. The shooting had at least been plain and unequivocal, a confession plus a gun plus a large assortment of witnesses, even if there had been unexplained and confusing shadows in the background. But this! As Atherton said on the way back to the station, in spite of anything Slider could do to stop him, this was just going to mean piles of work for everyone.

Barrington was still not in, however, when they got back, which meant a pleasant respite. Slider put the team to work on assembling the evidence of Keaton’s past life, put Freddie on alert, and then went with one of the uniform boys to the hospital to see whether they were going to be able to drag Buster back from the brink. When at last it looked as though he was going to live, Slider left the constable there beside him and went back to the station. Barrington had not come in, nor called in, and was not answering the telephone at home. He was not responding to his bleep either.

‘Gone out to play a nice round of golf and left it behind, I suppose,’ McLaren grumbled. ‘Bloody bosses. I know what kind of a row we’d get if we did something like that.’

The awkward thing as far as Slider was concerned was that he couldn’t get Freddie onto the new autopsy until he had Barrington’s cross on the dotted line.

‘Necropsy, old thing,’ Freddie said when he told him. ‘Autopsy is an examination of oneself. Never mind, Radek isn’t going anywhere. And Barrington will phone in before long feeling awfully silly about having left his bleep behind.’

‘Well, if he’s not back by close of play today, I’ll have to get onto the Commander. We’ll have to stop them taking the body away. You know they were going to bury him tomorrow.’

‘Whoops,’ said Cameron. ‘I don’t envy you that one. Grassing up your guv’nor to his guv’nor? Not very nice.’

‘It’s a bugger,’ Slider said. ‘And Wetherspoon thinks the sun shines out of Barrington’s eyes, so the shower will be bound to fall on me.’

‘From both directions,’ Freddie agreed, with the relish even nice people usually display at the prospect of someone else facing an explosion.

‘I wonder if there’s anything wrong?’ Slider said. ‘It isn’t like
Barrington to be so vague. Weird, yes, but always punctual. Maybe he’s ill.’

‘He’d have phoned in,’ Cameron said comfortably. ‘Or his wife would.’

At half past five Slider and Atherton went upstairs to the canteen for lunch, which they’d had no chance to have before. While they were there, Joanna came in, sporting a plastic visitor’s badge.