Kith and Kill (3 page)

Luke was, however, some considerable time. That did not bother Amos, though he wondered about the propriety of spending the evening at a bookmakers after a day in which he had buried his father and heard that his brother had died suddenly. He was likely to learn more from an unsuspecting Beth, who would be less reserved about discussing the family, of which she was only an in-law.

“Big family you married into,” Amos remarked casual. “Did you get together much?”

“Not really, these days,” Beth replied. She looked uncomfortable despite Amos’s efforts to put her at ease. “We used to see more of each other but none of us could stand Agnes, Mark’s wife. And Mary – she’s the youngest – got increasingly bitter. But I don’t think I should be discussing them. We should wait for Luke. He won’t be long.”

The last remark was said without conviction.

Amos decided to wait in silence, letting Beth Wilson become increasingly uncomfortable.

“I can’t think what’s happened to him,” she finally said. “He’s not usually this long.”

“Perhaps he just needed a bit of space,” Amos said. “After all, it’s been a tough day, burying his father and then losing his elder brother so suddenly and unexpectedly. Was he particularly close to Matthew?”

“Yes, they were really close. It was a tightly-knit family really, despite them all being different individuals and not getting together as much as they use to. They did talk to each other on the phone quite a lot.”

“Tell me about Matthew at the wake. Did he talk to everybody else there or did he spend more time with anyone in particular?”

Beth Wilson looked at Amos suspiciously but, as the inspector hoped, she decided that answering his intrusive question was better than going back to the embarrassed silence.

“He talked to most of us, I think,” she said. “He always has done when members of the Wilson family got together. I think he was conscious of his role as eldest son.”

“Conscious of it?” the hitherto silent Enid suddenly burst in. “He revelled in it. He always played the head-of-the-family-in-waiting. It’s ironic that he was in charge for such a short time.”

“Enid!” her mother exclaimed in horror. “Please. Don’t talk about Uncle Matthew like that.”

“You know it’s true,” Enid said quietly but firmly. “I loved Uncle Matthew to bits but you know he liked to do it. And yes,” she added, addressing Amos, “he was going round everyone at the wake. That is, until he started to get a bit wobbly. I was surprised because I didn’t think he’d drunk all that much. In fact, he put his glass down on the end of the table with the food on it at one time and was talking to Uncle Mark’s daughters for a while.”

“Was that before or after he started to get wobbly?” Amos asked, leaning forward intently.

“It was about half way through. He seemed all right at that stage, I must say. It was about 20 minutes later that he looked a bit unsteady.”

“Did you see him eat anything?”

“I don’t think so. But of course, I wasn’t watching him all the time. I mingled a bit as well but I stuck mainly to my generation. I didn’t want to hear all about the menopause again. I’ve heard about it so often I feel as if I’ve already been through it myself.”

“I wonder whether you should go and fetch your dad, Enid,” Mrs Wilson butted in. Enid showed no inclination to do so, however.

“What does your husband do for a living?” Amos asked politely. He rightly surmised that Mrs Wilson would be only too happy to go down a route that she would regard as a diversion.

“He’s an accountant,” Beth Wilson replied easily. “They all did well – all except Mary, that is. Please don’t tell her I said so but she was sadly the dullard. That’s how she ended up staying at home looking after their parents. She was the only one who didn’t get to grammar school.”

“So what did the others do?” Amos asked, trying to sound genuinely interested rather than being an interrogator.

“Matthew was an estate agent, as you probably know,” Beth went on eagerly taking the conversation away from her errant husband. In fact, Amos had not wanted to question Matthew’s wife too closely while she was still in a state of shock.

“Mark’s a business adviser, Esther a vet and Ruth is head of languages in a grammar school.”

“Very impressive indeed,” Amos concurred. “I tell you what, Mrs Wilson, why don’t we leave you in peace for now. I’m sure it’s been a trying day and we can talk to your husband another time.”

Beth Wilson looked startled at this sudden change of events but she was too relieved at the prospect of getting rid of the two detectives to argue. Besides, she did not know that her brother-in-law might have died of ketamine poisoning, so she was unaware of the link between his death and what she had just said.

Chapter 5

Esther Bell, as she was now known, had not been Amos’s intended next port of call but she was now. One member of the family had access to ketamine. It seemed too much of a coincidence, he told DC Susan Smith as they drove to her home to the west of Lincoln, yet as a vet she surely must have known that ketamine would be detected in post mortem tests and that suspicion would immediately fall on her.

“You might think that someone intelligent enough to qualify as a vet would not be so stupid,” he told Smith, “but criminals often do remarkably stupid things, especially if a crime is committed on the spur of the moment, as this may have been. Sometimes they act first and the consequences dawn on them later.”

If Esther Bell was indeed the culprit and the consequences had dawned on her, she showed no signs of it. She coolly ushered them into her substantial detached home, through the wide open hallway and into a comfortable lounge with a very large television set in the corner, one of the expensive high quality ones where the casing went back more than a couple of feet.

A man whom she introduced as her husband was actually watching it but he immediately clicked the remote control to switch it off as they entered the room.

He got up and politely offered to brew some tea. Amos accepted immediately, as this would provide the opportunity of speaking to his wife for a minute or two alone.

“I take it this is about Matthew,” Esther said easily. “We’ve heard. That was certainly quite a shock even if he did look a bit peaky after Dad’s funeral. I can’t quite believe it.”

“Was he OK at the funeral itself?” Amos asked, preferring to go through matters that he had already heard from others rather than alert Mrs Bell by plunging straight into the crucial issue of ketamine.

“Yes, he seemed fine. We were all upset, naturally. It doesn’t seem all that long since we lost Mum. I don’t think Dad ever got over it. He was never himself afterwards.”

“I suppose Matthew assumed the role of head of the family.”

“Yes, I suppose he did, in a way, but we didn’t get together so much after Mum died. She was the one who went big over families.”

It appeared that Esther was not so bothered about Matthew having “revelled in it” as her niece Enid had been.

“So did you notice anything at the wake?” Amos asked. “Did Matthew seem all right? Did you see him eat or drink anything that might have upset him?”

“I don’t think he ate or drank all that much and the food was the same for everyone. He did have a pint but he’d put it down when he spoke to me. I remember that he suddenly realised he hadn’t got it and picked it up.

“It was quite full – beer in a pint glass – so he probably hadn’t drunk much at that stage. I’m not sure if he actually finished it. He wasn’t a big drinker.”

“How did he seem?”

“Well, a bit edgy, to tell the truth. He kept glancing over at the door. It was almost as if he couldn’t accept that Dad had gone and was half expecting him to walk in at any moment.”

At this point Esther’s husband entered with a tea tray. Amos started to regret not getting on with his line of questioning a little more quickly but he generally got best results from patience, if necessary grinding suspects down, than charging in like a bull in a china shop.

“Didn’t he, George?” Esther said to her baffled husband. “We remarked on it on the way home, didn’t we?”

“On what?” George replied.

“On Matthew keeping looking over his shoulder as if a ghost was about to appear. It seemed a bit comical at the time. I’m ashamed to say we laughed about it.”

“Well, we weren’t to know he was unwell,” George replied. “I mean, we saw he was a bit unsteady towards the end but we didn’t realise how serious it was. We just thought he must have drunk more than we saw him knocking back. I said at the time I didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink. I’m afraid I did wonder if, when he sneaked out of the room, he had gone to the bar for a stiff drink rather than to the toilet.”

“You’re a vet, Mrs Bell, I believe,” Amos said probing gently for reactions. “You go through basically the same training as GPs and a bit more besides, I understand. You didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong with Matthew at the time, I take it.”

“Not really,” she replied. “Of course, I didn’t give him a medical examination so it’s not really surprising I didn’t diagnose anything more serious than mild intoxication. I would obviously have taken a closer look at him if I had had the slightest inkling that there was something more serious. Do you know what killed him? Matthew’s son James said something about food poisoning but he was a bit vague. Shock, I suppose.”

“We don’t yet know anything for certain,” Amos said equally vaguely. “We’ll know more after the post mortem.”

“Will there have to be one?” Esther asked, showing signs of perturbation for the first time.

“Yes.”

“Can the family object?”

“No. If his wife objects we will simply get a court order. Why does it bother you so much?”

“Matthew hated the sight of blood. He couldn’t understand how I could do operations on animals. He would have been horrified to think of his own body being cut up.”

“As a vet you have access to drugs, Mrs Bell?” Amos said, half question half statement.

Esther Bell looked puzzled.

“Yes, we do have some. You’re not implying, are you, that Matthew could have been poisoned?”

“We have to consider the possibility at this stage, yes. It will show up in the tests we do.”

Esther sat back in stunned silence.

“Which veterinary surgery are you a member of, or do you practice alone?” Amos asked.

Esther named a practice that Amos had heard of. It had a good reputation.

“You deal with all sorts of animals there, I believe.”

“Yes, but we all have our specialisations.”

“And yours is …?”

“Large animals.”

“Such as horses?”

“Such as horses and cattle. Why?”

If she was the poisoner, she was a remarkably cool customer, Amos thought. There was little point in hiding something that was bound to come out sooner or later, so he asked her outright: “How often do you use ketamine? Do you normally carry some with you?”

“Ketamine?” Esther gasped. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Matthew had taken ketamine?”

“It’s possible,” Amos was forced to concede. “We have to consider it.”

“I don’t believe it,” Esther protested. “Matthew would never do drugs. He didn’t even smoke cigarettes.”

“Let’s get back to your use of ketamine,” Amos interceded.

“I didn’t use it all that much,” Esther said indignantly. “Maybe once a month if that. And no, I didn’t normally carry it around with me. It’s pretty powerful stuff. I only take it with me if I think it will be needed.”

“Did you drive to your father’s funeral? I understand you all went in your own cars.”

“Yes and yes.”

“Did you have ketamine in your car that day?”

“Of course not,” Esther blurted out in astonishment. “Are you suggesting I took ketamine to my own father’s funeral so I could poison my brother?”

It did indeed seem as preposterous as Esther Bell’s protestation made it sound. Yet someone had presumably done so, and it was almost certainly a member of the family.

“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” Amos said calmly. “I’m simply trying to establish the facts. You keep a record of all drugs you take from the vet’s and when and where they were used?”

”Of course I do,” Esther said, again with indignation. She seemed to Amos to be protesting a little too much.

“Has any of your ketamine gone missing recently?”

“No,” came the guarded response.

“You’re quite sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

In Amos’s experience any statement accompanied by the phrase “of course” was highly suspect. It was one of those self-contradictory phrases similar to “I’m not being critical but …” The words conveyed the opposite of their literal meaning.

“We’ll need to check your records but I’m sure they’re perfectly in order,” Amos said.

Another self-contradiction. He was obviously sure of no such thing, otherwise why bother checking?

“All the records are at the surgery,” Esther said defiantly. “You’ll find them all in order. I’d be obliged if you could be discreet, if you really must see them. This could cause me considerable unnecessary embarrassment in front of my colleagues.”

“No need to worry,” Amos said, raising his arms with palms outward in a conciliatory gesture. “I’ll make it a general inquiry, not specific to you. In return, I would ask you not to warn the surgery that I will be asking.”

Esther Bell nodded her consent.

Chapter 6

Ruth, the teacher, was now most convenient to visit but she was not at home. Her daughters, Jackie and Fiona, were not surprised to see the two police officers. News of Uncle Matthew had been relayed efficiently and speedily by Uncle Luke.

Neither daughter showed any inclination to invite the officers in but Amos was not too worried. He preferred to talk to the remaining five brothers and sisters first and in any case he had learnt from experience that interviewing teenage girls in the absence of their parents tended to bring wrath down on his head. A short chat on the doorstep would suffice.

There was no danger of neighbours overhearing or interfering. Ruth and her husband Ken had a secluded house with a drive, not paid for on a teacher’s salary, not even that of the head of a department, Amos surmised.