George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (32 page)

‘
Humulin.
Human insulin.’

‘OK. So far so good.’ George was brisk. ‘This is all clearly normal. The tube’s empty though, so she was going to need to get a farther supply soon. Let’s look at the pen.’

She showed him the garish decoration on the body of the plastic with her brows quirked. It showed elephants drawn in rather a childish stylized fashion in bright primary colours, with, in case the point was missed, the word
Elephants!
in cheerful script.

‘Not what you’d have expected of someone as sober as that locker suggests she was. Still, maybe she had no choice in the matter. Let’s get down to the really important part.’ She unscrewed the cap gently. Another glass tube appeared, this time tipped with a long plastic cap. George slid this cap off and there was the needle, glinting in the bright overhead light. She unscrewed the needle and showed Gus how the insulin phial fitted into the glass tube, the red rubber cap uppermost so that it met the entry to the needle.

‘Now, look here.’ She pulled pack the plunger from the other half of the pen. ‘If I twist this, so, there’s a little indicator section here at the side, graduated with numbers. The user of the pen just sets the dial for the dose she has to give herself, and then reassembles the whole thing. When she puts the needle into her own body’ — she mimed the action against
the back of her gloved hand — ’and pushes the plunger home, the device delivers exactly the measured quantity. See?’

‘Yes,’ said Gus, and he was grim. ‘I can also see that it would not be at all difficult to rearrange that central screw so that the wrong size dose would be delivered.’

‘Exactly.’ George was examining the device even more closely. ‘It’s hard to tell just by looking. I’d need to do some experimenting, but I suspect that’s precisely what happened here. Yes! Look!’ She became excited. ‘Look closely, can you see? One of the ridges of the screw has been broken off. I can just see the area where it used to be. That means that when the screw turned, it would take a double turn when it reached the broken area. So, the device
was
mis-set.’

‘She used it expecting it to be as efficient as usual —’

‘And it delivered a massive dose — massive in the sense that it sent her into a reaction before she could get to her food and overcome the insulin that way. This is human insulin, too, and it’s faster acting than the older form. My God, what a nasty thing to do.’

‘Killing people usually is nasty,’ Gus said. George shook her head. ‘I know that, but this is particularly awful, isn’t it? Using a device that normally keeps the woman alive, making it into a trap and then calmly going away and leaving it as his weapon against her.’ She grimaced. ‘Horrible!’

‘I know what you mean. And I also know that we have to start an investigation into a murder.’

There was a little silence and then she said, ‘It’s not even as though it would be hard for someone to get in here to do this.’

‘No,’ Gus said. ‘Not hard at all. We’re here, after all.’

‘Surely, though, normally, she’d have her bag with her?’ George was thinking hard, trying out her ideas as she spoke. ‘If she was working out there, and a stranger came and went into this changing room, she and whoever else was at work would want to know why. The interloper couldn’t count on having the chance to get at the pen. I imagine he’d have to
search for it, the way we did, and that would have taken time. When she went home she’d take her bag with her, wouldn’t she? We’ve only got hold of it because it looks like nobody has made any effort to clear her locker. Maybe they didn’t like to; people are funny about possessions when someone dies, as well I know. So not only do we have to worry about who did it, but how? And when?’

‘That’ll take some hard police work,’ Gus said. ‘Right now, I’m going to put all this stuff back in the bag.’ He reached out, took the gloves from her hands and put his words into action. ‘Repack the bag, put it back in the locker, close and lock it. Tomorrow I’ll get a warrant and come here, open and above board, and clear it. I’ll also get my fellas to work, asking questions, doing the necessary. We’ll find out who and how as well as when, now we know what happened.’

‘Think
we know,’ George said. ‘I have to take that thing apart to make absolutely sure it was fiddled with.’

‘Do you doubt it was? Surely that broken spiral didn’t happen by accident?’

‘No,’ she said soberly. ‘You can see just by looking at it that it was an artefact — a deliberate piece of damage. Get the thing to me as soon as possible tomorrow, will you? After it’s been fingerprinted and so forth. Then I’ll let you know what I find. Meanwhile —’

‘Meanwhile,’ he said firmly, pulling off his gloves and looking round the room to make sure he’d left it as they’d found it. ‘We go and get some supper. And tomorrow —’

‘Tomorrow we do some checking on what happened to Tony Mendez, right?’

‘Right,’ he said.

The next morning Gus left early, already abstracted with thought of the day’s work ahead of him. ‘I’ve got an incident room to organize and coppers to get working,’ he said when she prodded him to speech. ‘I’ll set them on to the Lamark case first, and then, as soon as I can, I’ll start looking at what happened with Mendez.’

‘I’d like to come with you on that one,’ she said quickly but he shook his head.

‘Be reasonable, ducks. It has to be a solely police matter. You know that. If there’s evidence that there was anything the least wrong about that death then it has to be collected by us. I can’t see that taking you along with us’ll make the investigation any easier over there in the theatres.’

‘Hell, I should have guessed you’d do that. Whenever I get really interested you go and shut me out.’

‘That isn’t fair.’ He looked genuinely hurt.

‘Oh, I suppose not. But you know what I mean.’

‘I know you mean you’re dying to get digging, on account of you’re without doubt the most inquisitive person I know and I love you for it.’ He kissed her briefly. ‘Be patient, sweetheart. Get your own work out of the way, and I swear to you on every piece of fish I ever sold that I’ll come to the lab and report whatever we’ve managed to find out. How’s that for a deal?’

She considered it. ‘And if you haven’t found much, you’ll let me go and do some looking on my own account?’

‘You won’t have to,’ he said. ‘Believe me, we’ll have those theatres and the theatre people turned inside out. That’s another reason you can’t be involved, by the way. Imagine what sort of time you’d have with your colleagues after that.’

She had to admit he was right and said so, which made him grin. ‘Great girl. I’ll see you when I see you. So long.’ And he snapped his non-existent hat brim and went.

In the event it was a quiet morning at the lab. Now that both Sheila and Jerry were back, the lab work had caught up nicely and she actually had some time available. She could easily have gone along on the Tony Mendez searches, she thought crossly. I could have been useful, even though of course I’d have been an embarrassment. I’m ready to bet now that it will turn out to have been a deliberate killing and I missed it on the PM, dammit, dammit …

But she knew at gut level that whatever the police found in the background to Tony Mendez’s death she had no need to be at all doubtful of the quality of the work she had done on the post-mortem. She had checked every possibility and there was no question about it; the man had died of alcohol poisoning, and as he was a known reformed drinker it had been perfectly natural she should have assumed his death to be due to accidental self-administration and had reported accordingly. Just as she had with Lally Lamark. She brooded over that too for a while. Here again her post-mortem had been as meticulously thorough as always. She had missed nothing, of that she was certain. All she had done wrong was make assumptions about the accidental nature of the overdose.

At that point in her cogitation she sat and stared blankly at her window. Her cup of departmental coffee, which was as muddy as young Louise could make it (and since her scared conviction that there was a murderer after her personally had taken hold, no one ever dreamed of criticizing Louise about
anything, in case she dissolved into helpless tears) grew cold beside her as she thought long and hard.

After about ten minutes, she stopped thinking and jumped to her feet. She almost ran out of her office, dragging off her white coat and dropping it on her desk as she went. ‘Sheila? Jerry? I have to go out. Something urgent,’ she called across the big main lab. ‘Can you cope?’

‘Sure thing,’ Jerry carolled back. He was quite himself again, as relaxed and cheerful as though he hadn’t choked on chlorine gas and genuinely believed he’d never breathe normally again if at all. She threw a grateful smile at him and went.

Where to start was the problem. That she had to check the value of the assumptions she had made over the last of the deaths among the three members of Old East staff she had post-mortemed was the one thing in her mind. She had assumed she understood the motive for Pam Frean’s suicide, and had therefore reported it as suicide, but suppose she had been as wrong about that as she had been about the accidental nature of Lamark’s and possibly Mendez’s deaths? There was only one way to find out and that was to go and talk to the parents she had thought so ill of. If she’d been right about them, then her diagnosis of suicide would stand. If not … But the first problem she had was to track them down, because she had no address for them, and no immediate way she could think of for getting it.

She started with Hattie in A & E, or tried to; but Hattie was off duty, and there was no way George could ask for access to her computer and its records without making everyone in the department very suspicious and therefore likely to invent and spread rumours with great enthusiasm. There had to be another route.

She tried Laburnum, the neurology ward, next. That had been where Pam Frean was working. Maybe one of her colleagues there would have some idea of where the girl’s parents lived? But she’d have to be tactful in her enquiries.

It wasn’t till she reached Laburnum and smelled again that familiar odour of hopelessness and helplessness, that compound of long-ago cooked food, antiseptics and tired, out-of-order human bodies that was the essence of the place that she remembered: not once in her previous visits here had she considered the fact that Pam Frean had worked here. She made a little face at herself as the realization slipped into her mind; maybe that was really why she committed suicide. Who wouldn’t if they had to spend all day on Laburnum? But she pushed the idea away as frivolous, and went wandering in search of a nurse. And, of course, found Zack instead.

He was clearly delighted to see her. He was in one of the bays, doing something with one of the patients, a bulky old woman who was lying on her back staring blankly up at Zack as he leaned over her. She had her nightdress bunched under her chin, and seemed as oblivious to her nakedness as everyone around her. That made George feel quite dreadful, at some deep level, though for the life of her she could not have explained why. So she pushed the awareness away and refused to contemplate it. Zack had been listening to the old woman’s chest, but when he caught sight of George at the entrance to the bay he lifted his chin and almost waved his stethoscope at her, as well as beaming from ear to ear.

‘Well, hello! What can we do for you today? We’re not used to seeing such illustrious personages as yourself in our gloomy groves!’ He sounded exhilarated, and she could not prevent herself from grinning back at him. His good humour was infectious.

‘Nothing important,’ she lied. ‘I’m just sorting out a few details about some of my past cases. Just to get my files straight again, you know. They were in a bit of a mess.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said and nodded. ‘Your break-in. The bastards.’

‘Oh, doctor!’ The old woman in the bed startled them all. The words came out of her huskily as though her throat had gone rusty from years of silence. ‘Language, language!’

‘If you never hear worse than that, Mrs Elgar, then you’ll be doing very nicely’ Zack bent over her again. ‘I’ve heard you say worse with my own ears and don’t you deny it.’ As the old woman cackled delightedly Zack looked over his shoulder at George and said, ‘Can you give me a few minutes? I’ll be out as soon as I can. Don’t run away.’

‘I won’t,’ she promised, and turned gratefully away to hurry up the outer corridor to the nurses’ station where at last she could see a nurse had arrived. With a bit of luck and a tolerably fast-acting nurse, she’d get what she wanted before he came out. It was important to her that no one should know what she was up to.

The nurse looked blank and then shook her head in response to George’s succinct enquiry. ‘I only know she had a flat somewhere — well, more of a room, I think it was. She never talked much about her family or anything. Afraid I can’t help you.’

‘Damn,’ George said under her breath and hesitated, unsure what to do next.

The nurse, who had returned to her paperwork, looked up and made a face indicating sympathy. ‘You could ask ’em in HR,’ she said. ‘They might have it. Or maybe OH.’

George looked, blinked and translated. ‘HR? Oh, Human Resources. And — ?’

‘Occupational Health. Those two know most about our backgrounds. I mean, they don’t tell everyone what they want to know but if you’ve got a good reason — and she is dead, poor thing, after all …’ She returned seriously to her paperwork now and George turned to go, grateful for the ideas.

‘Thanks, nurse, and please tell Dr Zacharius I had to go off, will you? On an urgent call.’

‘Will do,’ the girl said absently, and George escaped, hurrying to make sure Zack couldn’t follow her. There was no reason why he shouldn’t know what she was after; but the one thing she didn’t want was him to offer to accompany her on her searches. She knew that once he got such a notion into
his head it would be hard to dislodge; and this was definitely something she’d have to do alone.

It was a particularly new young clerk in HR who helped her. She looked anxious when George asked cautiously to see Nurse Pamela Frean’s file.