Everyone Lies (2 page)

She blushed, frowning, but he held her gaze, and finally she accepted the inevitable, took a breath and launched in. ‘You’ve shades of lemon and honey and pale amber and caramel.’ Did she know that she’d described beautifully every shade of island malt from pale oakmatured Islay to sherry-casked Jura?

‘And this?’ He selected a test tube from the end of the rack; it shone slightly pink in the artificial light.

‘That’s altogether different,’ she said. ‘It looks … Well, it looks like somebody’s been knocking back too many Sea Breezes.’ She got a laugh of recognition.

‘Excellent.’ Fennimore looked around the room; now they were beginning to wake up, he could hit them with a few more facts. ‘Vodka, like all alcohol, dehydrates – which would concentrate the pretty pink dye from cranberry juice in a Sea Breeze. So maybe this person died of acute alcoholic poisoning. Or maybe not – but it’s worth considering. Beetroot can turn urine an even more impressive shade of pink, and we might be interested in that – for instance, does this fit with accounts of what this person had for their last meal? Perhaps they’re allergic to beetroot, and died of it.’

Some were showing an interest, some had even picked up their pens as if they intended to use them.

‘You might also note quantity, turbidity, the presence of casts. So – let’s say we’ve observed what we can of appearance. Now what?’

‘Smell,’ someone said.

‘For example?’

‘Well, diabetic urine smells weird.’

‘Define weird.’

‘I dunno, like nail polish remover.’

‘Which is mainly acetone, of course. In urine, it’s ketones that cause the pear drops smell. It’s caused by ketoacidosis – a sign that they’re not taking their insulin as they should. And it’s potentially fatal.’ Pens hovered above notepads; he almost had them. Fennimore leaned forward, conspiratorially. ‘When you’re looking for a possible cause of death, a fatal disease could be significant.’

Some of them actually did him the honour of committing ink to paper. Now they could see a point to squinting at glass tubes filled with someone else’s bodily fluids.

‘You also get ketonuria in anorexia – if the body is starved, for whatever reason, it starts metabolizing fatty acids – eating itself to keep the cells alive.’

At the last count, 5 per cent of the UK population had diabetes – statistical probability said there would be two or three diabetics in this lecture hall alone – and he’d give good odds that every one of them knew someone who had an eating disorder.

‘I was going to save this till later, but since diabetes has come up …’ Fennimore reached below the demonstration bench and fetched out a neat rack of ten test tubes. ‘Diabetic urine can
smell
sweet. Have you thought how it might
taste
?’

He heard a rumble of alarm. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he told them. ‘Fresh urine is sterile, and these samples have been tested bug-free – in fact all of this urine has been passed by the management.’ He looked brightly around the room. ‘So, who wants to go first?’

They weren’t falling for it. Many of them sat back, folded their arms, shook their heads, the rest avoided his gaze. ‘You don’t trust me?’ he said, trying to look crestfallen.

‘We’d want to see a demo first,’ the goatie said. A slow roll of laughter followed: they knew Fennimore couldn’t resist a challenge.

He took out the first tube in the rack and stared at it for a few moments. ‘If I do this, you have to do exactly the same.’

He waited until he nodded and muttered agreement, then shrugged, popped the lid off the tube, closed the mouth of it with his index finger, inverted it, dabbed his finger on his tongue and smacked his lips. ‘Sweet. So that one’s diabetic.’ He scanned the room.

‘Now it’s your turn.’

A few declined, but the majority were game. Test tubes were passed along the rows; he watched closely, and identified Josh Brown as the one person who had done exactly as he had. When he was sure they had all finished, he said, ‘Josh. What does it taste like?’

‘I dunno.’

‘You didn’t taste it?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘We agreed to do the
same
as you.’

‘Would you demonstrate?’

Josh stood up and turned side-on, so the majority of the room could see him. He repeated the action exactly as Fennimore had performed it. A half-dozen students exclaimed in dismay, but the rest looked perplexed.

‘Again, more slowly, please.’

Josh closed the top of the tube with his index finger, inverted the tube, righted it, then raised his
middle
finger like he was flipping them the bird, and touched that to his tongue.

Now
they understood. There were exclamations of disgust; someone even retched. ‘Before you all stampede for the toilets …’ Fennimore raised his test tube and tipped the liquid down his throat to further exclamations and outraged laughter. ‘Lucozade,’ he explained.

Fennimore wrapped up a few minutes before the hour and the lecture ended with the muted applause of flip-up seats, as his students gathered their belongings and made way for the next group, already gathering outside. In the final half-hour, they had begun to look at toxicology and metabolism, and Fennimore had handed out more samples for them to identify, among other things, signs of infection (musty odour); medication for infection (the slightly sulphurous whiff of penicillin); drug habits, including ephedrine (cat pee); amphetamine (brut wine); and amytriptyline (Chanel No.5).

He turned his phone on as the last few stragglers shuffled out, and it rang immediately. He answered the call, shutting down his laptop and gathering his notes with his free hand, making way for the next lecturer.

‘Yep?’

‘Nick? It’s Kate.’

The sound of her voice blew through him like a blast of air off the North Sea. His heart thudded and he felt the tug of the past like a dangerous undercurrent.

‘Simms,’ she added, as if he didn’t know her voice as well as he knew his own. ‘Can we talk?’

You got the wrong number,
he wanted to tell her
. You made a mistake.
Instead, he heard himself say, ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Four years.’ The inevitable pause, awkward, painful to them both.

He cleared his throat. ‘Are you still in London?’

‘Greater Manchester Police. The Met was a bit of a dead end for me, after the Crime Faculty.’

‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for that.’

‘I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.’

He felt something shift in his chest. A burden he’d been carrying around for five years.

She started to speak, but he talked over her.

‘Look, Kate, I’m in a lecture room, and I’m kind of in the way. Can I call you back?’

‘No. Nick, listen to me, don’t hang up.’

He heard a sharp edge of desperation in her voice, and couldn’t harden himself enough to close the phone. So he bundled his belongings together and stood in the corridor with his laptop at his feet among the surge of incoming students, while Kate Simms explained.

The police authority’s six-monthly crime review had turned up an excess of overdoses, and she had been assigned to look into it as part of their public protection remit.

‘As jobs go, it was routine, low level, something simple and undemanding for my first try-out.’

First try-out?
When he worked with Kate Simms at the National Crime Faculty, she was a young Detective Sergeant with a career path carved out of pure gold. Her placement there should have put her on accelerated promotion from Detective Sergeant to Detective Chief Inspector within a couple of years.

‘Kate,’ he said, ‘it’s been
five years
since the Crime Faculty.’

‘You don’t need to tell me – they kept me on the naughty step for four of them.’

He imagined her, a half-smile on her face, reaching for cynical from the top shelf of cop attitude. He felt a thud of guilt.

‘It was a straightforward paper review,’ Simms said. ‘A box-ticking exercise. I was expected to read through the coroner’s verdicts, report that it was just a bit of a spike in the numbers of deaths, nothing to worry about – it happens occasionally.’

‘What changed?’

‘I hardly had time to divvy up the paperwork before we had another death. Except this one’s got media potential and suddenly the top brass are asking for updates and demanding to be kept in the loop.’

‘Define “media potential”,’ Fennimore said.

‘You’ve heard of Stacey?’

‘Stacey who?’

‘Not Stacey – Stay
C
, with a capital C.’

‘Not ringing any bells,’ he said.

‘She reached the quarter-finals of
Stars!
Got kicked out when she was caught in one of the toilet cubicles at the venue snorting cocaine. A week later, she’s found dead in her mother’s back bedroom, a hypodermic stuck in her arm. Heroin. She was written up as a suspected overdose, but the pathologist wasn’t convinced – she wasn’t a regular user. I’d already been in touch about the excess cases so he knew I’d be interested. He expedited the toxicology, suspended the post-mortem, and called me.’

‘And?’ The question was out before he could bite it back.

‘The tox results show lowish levels of heroin, and some methylecgonine, as well.’

‘The methylecgonine just indicates she’s a cocaine user, which you knew already – it’s not necessarily suspicious.’

‘That’s exactly what the NPIA Forensic Specialist Advisor said.’ When Fennimore worked with the police, the National Crime Faculty had advised police on forensic matters, but since 2007, technology and support services had come under the National Policing Improvement Agency.

‘You should listen to your FSA,’ he said.

‘I would, but the numbers are weird, Nick. We’ve got a sudden surge in ODs in the last six to eight months, most of them female. Why?’

Mostly female – now that is interesting.
He almost allowed himself to be drawn into speculating why that might be, but he pushed away the questions that began to crowd in, the possible threads of hypotheses he could see spinning into the distance, and said, ‘Let it go, Kate; addicts die all the time. Follow the FSA’s advice, do the review, write up your report and move on.’ It was brutal, but he’d made himself a promise, and he wasn’t about to go back on that, even for Simms.

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing you say that. I don’t think you even believe it yourself.’

‘Police business isn’t my business any more, Kate. I’ve been there, and we both have the scars to prove it.’ He sounded bitter, and that made him angry. ‘I work defence now. That way, the only place I have anything to do with cops is in the courtroom.’

The anger hardened his voice more than he’d intended, and she said quietly, ‘Does that include me, Nick? Is that why you changed your mobile number and moved to
Aberdeen
, for God’s sake – so you didn’t have to have anything to do with cops – like me?’

‘Kate, you know I didn’t mean—’

‘Hey, you’re the one who says the facts don’t lie.’

He said nothing.

‘You work defence now? Very noble. Except it isn’t, is it? It’s just a way to get even with the police. I was given this case because it doesn’t matter if I screw up – how about that – two hundred miles and five whole years away from the Met, and they still don’t trust me. But if I screw this one up, who cares – because “addicts die all the time”.
Right
, Nick?’

The silence that followed felt like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.

‘Sorry …’ Her voice sounded a little shaky. ‘I’ve been bottling that up for a
long
time.’

He took a breath, but she spoke before he could find the right words.

‘I don’t regret what I did. But it cost me, Nick. In ways you could never imagine.’

She was right, he couldn’t imagine. His career had burgeoned, while hers had withered. And how had he thanked her? By shutting her out, dropping out of her life, burying his guilt at what he’d done. But guilt had a way of sneaking around his defences, finding an unbolted door, an open window.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Who’s the NPIA Forensic Specialist? Maybe I could give them a call, talk through a few ideas.’

‘Just look at the reports, give me an opinion. You don’t even have to come down here – I’ll send them to you.’

‘Why so cagey?’ He wished he could see her face.

‘Look,’ she insisted, ‘I’m just asking you to read through the evidence, give me an opinion – that’s what you do, isn’t it? I mean as a forensic consultant?’

‘Ye-es, but I don’t usually work behind the backs of fellow professionals.’

She didn’t reply, and for a moment the line seemed to hum with silence. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I get it. You think my reputation will taint your investigation.’

She laughed. ‘Why the hell d’you think I’m in Manchester? I had to distance myself from the Faculty, and Bramshill – and you.’

He couldn’t argue with that; it was his actions – his single-minded obsession that he
had
to be right – that had wrecked her chances. And that didn’t exactly make him feel like a hero.

‘Let’s say I did your review,’ he said, still reluctant. ‘You know I would want all the scene details, and if these were handled as routine ODs, there wouldn’t be very much. I bet nobody would have thought it worth the effort of taking scene photos – and who
knows
what tox was done—’

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I will get you everything we have. In fact, anything
anyone
has. I know what you need to work, Nick – we did the job together for long enough.’

‘Okay,’ he said. It wasn’t that he underestimated her,he just needed all the details. ‘I’d probably make a few suggestions: tests, tox, cytology …’ He realized with a shock that he was seriously considering this as a project.

‘Uh—’ She seemed to struggle for the right words. ‘The thing is, I’d be going against FSA’s advice on this. I was hoping you could give me your assessment and even do some of the tests under the radar.’

‘What are you not telling me, Kate?’

‘I told you, StayC’s death has fired imaginations – the ACC is taking a personal interest.’