Winding Up the Serpent (19 page)

She was surprised. He used the name with such familiarity. It disturbed her. She drank some of the wine, frowning.

‘We know she blackmailed many people,' she said cautiously. ‘We don't exactly know who yet but it seems quite a few people are involved.' She looked up. ‘She knew things about people ... possibly her employer, Dr Wilson, we think Machin, the antique dealer. The next door neighbour seems absolutely terrified of her and we're curious about exactly what her connections were with Paul Haddon, the undertaker. It seems ...' she took a large swig of the wine, ‘it seems he came to see her at the surgery fairly regularly.' She looked at Matthew. ‘That's a long list of suspects, Mat.'

She drank again, frowned. ‘Her bank accounts show large deposits but apart from her wages they were all cash so, although we know there was this huge disparity between her legitimate income and her outgoings, it's a little difficult to prove. Besides, Matthew, I don't really want to dig up everyone's little secret. I simply want to find out who killed her. The why doesn't matter so much. But to find out who killed her I first have to know how she died.'

She looked him square in the face, reading some uncertainty there. ‘How well did you know her?'

‘I knew her,' he said. ‘She was a witch.'

And now she knew real, cold fear. She couldn't look at Matthew's face. All the time she had worried about his connection with the dead nurse. Now she knew she must face it to progress with the case.

‘Go on,' she prompted.

‘Jo,' he said softly, ‘can I trust you? Which comes first – the person or the job?'

Now she knew she would be compromised. And as she watched his face very carefully she felt closer to him than she had ever felt before – closer now than when they had been lovers.

She spoke very softly. ‘You can trust me, Matthew.'

‘Let me tell you about her,' he said. ‘You should know what sort of woman she was – whose murder you're investigating.'

‘Was she blackmailing you too?'

He nodded. ‘She tried.'

She was suddenly appalled. ‘About me?'

Again he nodded. ‘I told her to go to hell – do her damnedest!'

He leaned down and touched her hand. ‘Do you remember that night, at the restaurant?'

‘When Jane turned up?'

He nodded, drank a little of the wine and set it down on the coffee table. ‘It was Marilyn who told Jane where we were. It was because I refused to pay her any money. I thought she was bluffing.'

She remembered the night – an intimate evening in a tiny hotel – a meal slowly tasted, quiet, shared conversation, giggles over numerous glasses of wine, a feeling that life was good, of warmth and comfort and good food, the promise of sex.

And then, shattering the peace of the restaurant like some hellish storm on a summer's sea, Jane had burst in, screaming and furious. Appalled and embarrassed, they had sprung to their feet, their quiet anonymity shattered. The other diners had watched with shocked eyes, knowing their secret, witnessing the noisy fury, as Jane spat out insults. ‘Scarlet mistress, filthy whore.' Even now Joanna felt hot at the memory of that night, of Matthew's fumbling excuses, his face suffused with shame. He had left with Jane. She had paid the bill.

Two days later he had rung her and apologized and she had said what she knew he was thinking, that they should not meet again. A slow hatred of Marilyn Smith filled her. She closed her eyes and pictured the plump figure with her obscene greasy red lips, legs splayed ... that picture of a dirty invitation.

She looked at Matthew. ‘Her,' she said.

She refilled her glass, felt her face twist in sourness, drank it all. The good French wine tasted like vinegar.

Matthew was watching her. ‘Now do you understand?'

She shook her head. ‘It wasn't you, Matthew?' She gripped his arm. ‘Tell me it wasn't you.'

He shook his head, gave a vague smile. ‘No,' he said. ‘Of course I didn't kill her. I couldn't stand her, but I wouldn't have killed her, Jo.'

‘Then who?' she asked.

But he shook his head. ‘Jo,' he said. ‘That's for you to find out. I can tell you how. But I don't know who.'

‘How will do for now, Matthew,' she said quietly and watched him pull a pale blue magazine from his pocket. ‘
British Medical Journal,
' he said. ‘A couple of months ago.' He frowned. ‘It suddenly came to me late last night. I remembered this article.' He flicked through the thin pages until he found the article and then pushed the magazine across to her. She glanced at it, read it, and looked at him for explanation.

‘It actually happened,' he said awkwardly, ‘in Canada, last year.'

She frowned. ‘I don't understand.'

He glanced again at the magazine. ‘An injection of insulin,' he said, ‘well disguised. In this case in the crease underneath the breast. As the pathologist says in this article, she was a plump woman and it was tricky to find, but look.' He jabbed his finger on the photograph at the bottom of the page. ‘He found it with a magnifying glass.' He looked at Joanna. ‘There was so little to find: a slight swelling, a tiny bit of bruising ... They could only confirm it by taking a biopsy of the surrounding tissues.' He paused. ‘They were saturated with insulin.'

He looked carefully at Joanna. ‘I bet there's a syringe mark somewhere on Marilyn Smith's body.'

‘Surely you would have seen it, Matthew?'

He shook his head. ‘Not necessarily.' He paused to think. ‘I could have missed it.' His green eyes looked straight at her. ‘Anyone could have missed it, Jo. We're talking about something very tiny – almost microscopic. Apart from obvious signs of homicide I was searching for a natural cause of death, and after that poisoning, maybe suicide. And suicide marks are easy to spot. The syringe would be there, dropped on the floor or lying on the bed with the phial. The mark would almost always be in the arm. Sometimes they use the leg – but rarely. The mark we'll be looking for will be hidden... folds of skin, between digits, even behind the hairline. It was only when I recalled the article that it all fell into place.' He looked at her. ‘Do you remember me mentioning that she was sweaty?'

She nodded. ‘Yes.'

‘Insulin could cause that.' He stopped for a minute, frowning in concentration. ‘Also the way she simply slipped into unconsciousness and died. There was no sign of a struggle, was there?'

She shook her head.

‘It would all fit so neatly,' Matthew said. ‘I should really have thought of it before. You see, the poisons lab wouldn't have found anything abnormal. Insulin is a naturally occurring substance. They wouldn't have looked for it.'

But Joanna shook her head. ‘It won't work,' she said. ‘She wouldn't have just lain there and let someone inject insulin into her.'

‘She was zonked out,' Matthew said, ‘or at the very least beautifully sleepy. Champagne, remember, a couple of sleeping tablets, new sexy underwear, lie back and think of England.'

‘Matthew ... Why would she have taken sleeping tablets if she was expecting a night of passion?' She stopped. ‘You don't think the capsules …'

‘I've always thought this,' he said. ‘Easy to split a capsule.'

He waved his hands in the air. ‘You can put rat poison in a capsule. What was actually in the capsule was a meticulously measured dose of phenobarbitone. I had the analysis back today. The lab rang up and asked if she had been epileptic. I rang Sammy Bose. No, she wasn't. But they'd found traces of phenobarbitone in her blood. Not enough to kill her, but enough to make her drowsy. A therapeutic dose, had she been an epileptic – but she wasn't.'

‘But why take it?' she said. ‘And where did that one different-coloured capsule come from?'

He sighed. ‘Far be it from me to try to tell you your job,' he said. ‘And anyway, it's only a guess. But I wondered if she was under the impression that it was an aphrodisiac.' He stopped. ‘Remember I knew her. Not well, but she was amazingly gullible. And she believed in fantasies. It would have been in character for Marilyn to trust someone who sent her a capsule saying it was an aphrodisiac.'

‘And yet she blackmailed all these people?'

‘It wouldn't have worked anywhere but in a small, isolated moorlands town,' Matthew said grimly. ‘People here care very much about their reputation. Anywhere else and they would have told her to get stuffed.'

She looked up at him. ‘So she really was waiting for a lover – or thought she was. But it was an appointment with someone quite different.'

He nodded. ‘I think so.'

‘And that lover was no lover,' she said. ‘They never had intercourse.'

He waited.

‘He killed her.' She closed her eyes and pictured the scene – suddenly vivid and cruel. ‘She lay there, zonked out, dressed up in the ... black lace ... waiting for someone. And he came and murdered her.'

‘She wouldn't have known much about it. She died happy.'

‘Did she, Matthew?'

He looked uneasy.

‘Have you had another look at the body yet?' she asked.

‘No,' he said. ‘I've been in London. Besides,' he added, ‘I thought it would be nice if you were there too.' He hesitated awkwardly. ‘It's your first case as an inspector. And I did withhold information. I should have said I knew her, Jo.'

She looked anxious. ‘I'm sort of hoping it isn't important.'

He bent forward and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek. ‘Put some clothes on,' he said. ‘We'll go and have a look now.'

She was upstairs getting dressed when she heard the telephone ring. She cursed as Matthew answered it – cursed even louder when she heard him say, ‘She's upstairs getting dressed.' Pulling on a sweater, she picked up the upstairs telephone.

Mike sounded even more grumpy than before. ‘I thought you ought to know, ma'am,' he said sarcastically, ‘we've found a man's overcoat buried in the garden.'

She wriggled her arms down the sleeves, the phone tucked underneath her chin. ‘Where?'

‘Near the french windows. It had been there a good few years,' he added. ‘We've bagged it up – sent it off to forensics.'

‘I don't suppose there was a name in it?'

‘No.'

‘Right.' She paused. ‘You've finished there now?'

‘I'm ringing from the station. The others have all buggered off home. I'm just about to go. Just thought I'd ring – see how you were getting on.' His voice was heavy with disapproval.

‘I'm on my way down the morgue,' she said. ‘Dr Levin thinks he may have a cause of death.'

Mike grunted.

‘I'll see you in the morning, Mike.'

Matthew was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

‘I wish you hadn't picked up the phone,' she snapped.

He looked injured. ‘We weren't doing anything.'

She flushed and he grinned, looking mischievous and quite at ease.

‘Tarzan jealous, is he?'

‘Oh, shut up,' she said, suddenly angry with the pair of them. ‘Let's get going to the bloody morgue.'

She was silent as they slipped on green gowns, gloves and masks. The porter wheeled in the trolley and she steeled herself for the ordeal.

Matthew shot her an enquiring look. ‘Are you going to be all right, Jo?'

She smiled. ‘I'll be fine, Mat,' she said. But she was dreading this. Post-mortems are not pretty and Marilyn Smith had been dead for almost a week.

He patted her shoulder. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I've rather dragged you down here, haven't I?'

‘Where else should I be?' she said stoutly. ‘I'm the investigating officer. I belong here. If it's murder I want to know who.'

He gave her a warm grin and said nothing. He pulled back the sheet on the mottled corpse and stared down for a moment. ‘She must have died,' he said, ‘thinking of promises and hopes, dreaming in perfume and champagne, clouded with phenobarbitone.'

‘I wonder,' she said, trying to suppress the feeling of nausea and revulsion.

He blinked.

‘Is it murder, Matthew? Because if it was,' she said, ‘killers can kill again. And clever killers can kill again – cleverly.'

Scarred by the pathologist's knife and hacksaw, minus viscera and hastily sewn back together, Marilyn Smith was indeed not a pretty sight.

Joanna felt both sick and faint. She leaned against the wall. ‘It doesn't get any easier,' she said.

Matthew laughed and handed her a huge magnifying glass.

‘Keep busy,' he said. ‘That's the secret. Help me look. Forget she was human and think of her as a scientific exercise. Concentrate on the less obvious places: folds of skin, between the toes, underneath the breasts. Remember the article.'

And looking at the discoloured lump of meat it was easy to believe this thing had never been alive, a thinking, doing, moving person. A spiteful person who had harmed many people's lives. Joanna glanced across at Matthew and knew Marilyn had harmed them. They had not seen each other since that night in the restaurant.

The faintness threatened to engulf her again and she felt herself falling. But his hands were on her shoulders.

‘Jo. It's a good job I'm a sympathetic pathologist.' He looked at her good humouredly. ‘What the macho members of the force would make of this strong urge to pass out I don't know.' He tutted. ‘What the hell would Tarzan say?'

She laughed. ‘Please, Matthew,' she said. ‘Leave him out of this.' Then she remembered the telephone call and started to giggle. ‘What must he have thought?' Matthew's eyes were warm as he watched her. He raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

She concentrated on the job.

‘Behind the ear,' he said, ‘in the hairline, feel for lumps and bumps ... between the fingers, in creases.'