Authors: Lindsay Ashford
The police didn’t seem interested in attending Carl Kelly’s post-mortem. It was obvious from the questions Detective Sergeant Les Willis asked that he regarded the investigation as a waste of his time. As far as he was concerned a convicted drug dealer had died by his own hand – and good riddance. Whether it was suicide or an accident really didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that the drug Kelly had injected had been smuggled into the prison. Megan got the message loud and clear: to DS Willis, that was the governor’s problem, not theirs.
So she was the only person, other than the pathologist, to be in on the examination carried out in the hospital wing of the prison. Alistair Hodge was an old acquaintance of hers. She had watched him dissect the bodies of several murder victims, all female, but she had never seen him perform a post-mortem on a man.
‘I’m surprised to find you here.’ He glanced at her across the shrouded body, his broad Scots voice echoing round the bare walls.
Megan gave him the official line about her research. There was no reason to suspect that Hodge would go telling tales to Malcolm Meredith but there was no point taking any risks: for all she knew they could be golfing pals. ‘I certainly never expected to find myself at a scene of death while I was here,’ she added. That was enough to justify her presence, if that was what he was after.
‘Well,’ he chuckled, pulling on a pair of thin latex gloves,
‘I’ve done so many post-mortems here in the past six months I’m thinking of renting myself a cell. Hell of a place, isn’t it? Not surprising the poor bastards keep topping themselves.’ His silver-rimmed spectacles caught the light as he pulled back the sheet covering the body. ‘This one looks like a happy chappy, though, doesn’t he?’
Once again, Megan found herself staring at the evil, open-mouthed grin on Carl Kelly’s face. She looked away. The only way to take a dispassionate look at the dead man was to hold her hand up in front of her, allowing a view from just the nose up. His eyes were large and blue and the cheeks were plump. The hair was dark brown and short-cropped, slightly spiky. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Robbie Williams. She dropped her hand and immediately her eyes were drawn back to the mouth. It seemed to exert a horrible fascination. It was impossible
not
to look.
‘Tetanic spasm,’ the pathologist said as he moved around the head, inspecting it from various angles. ‘Not uncommon in heroin addicts.’ There was a pause as he ran his eyes over the rest of the body. There were tattoos on each arm, one in blue of an oriental dragon and another in green of a
bare-breasted
mermaid. ‘This is interesting.’ Hodge was staring at a small purple bruise on the dead man’s left thigh. It was the mark left by the syringe that had still been in the vein when Megan, Dom and Fergus had found the body.
‘What?’ Megan moved closer, bending her head to inspect the bruise. The smell of tobacco smoke and rancid sweat seemed to have followed Carl Kelly from the cell.
‘There are no other bruises. No other evidence of injecting.’ Alistair Hodge’s eyes met hers for a second before scanning the body again.
‘So he wasn’t a regular user?’
The pathologist shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Bit of bad luck, that, overdosing on your first time.’
‘And unlikely,’ Megan said, ‘because one of the other inmates told me he’d been a regular user in the past. He must have known what he was doing.’
‘Also unlikely that he’d have developed tetanus.’ He raised his head and pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘It takes time to kick in. Even if the needle he used was dirty, if this was the first time he’d injected in a long while…’ He tailed off, the corners of his mouth turning down as he glanced at Megan.
‘Could he have got the tetanus some other way?’ she asked. ‘From a cut or something? I mean, the conditions in this place are not exactly hygienic, are they?’
Alistair shook his head. ‘I’m sure you could catch a lot worse than tetanus. We’ll know more when we’ve done the tests.’
‘What’s your gut reaction to this, though?’ Megan held his gaze. ‘Do you think it could have been suicide?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘We may never know. What I can say is that if it
is
suicide, it’s the first one I’ve seen in this place that’s involved drugs.’
‘Could the heroin have been cut with something?’ Megan asked. ‘Something that could have killed him where the heroin alone wouldn’t have?’
‘Quite possible.’ He nodded. ‘Dealers are cutting drugs with all kinds of rubbish these days. The toxicology report’s going to show that up, anyway.’ He rubbed the skin between his lower lip and his chin, staring vacantly at the body as if he was weighing something up. ‘You say you’ve spoken to one of the other inmates about him?’
‘Yes – why?’
‘Did you get the impression that Mr Kelly here had any enemies?’
‘No one specific, but in a prison it’s next to impossible not to rub someone up the wrong way.’ She frowned. ‘Why?
You don’t think someone…’ She allowed herself to look at the head again, at that awful, grinning face.
‘Someone could have given him dodgy heroin on purpose, yes,’ he said. ‘How the hell you’d prove it, though, I’ve no idea.’
Megan stayed away from the prison the next day. Her teaching workload at the university had been lightened this term to allow time for the research she was doing but she felt unable to carry on with it until she was clear about exactly how Carl Kelly had died. If someone had deliberately set out to kill him and that someone was one of the prison officers, she needed to know. It would throw a whole new light on what was going on inside Balsall Gate, hinting at a level of organised crime and intimidation that went way beyond anything she had anticipated.
She wondered how much Dom Wilde knew that he wasn’t telling her. He had hinted at things but she had the impression he was holding something back. His reaction to Carl’s death had been a revelation. Was he more afraid than he appeared to be?
She spent the next day and a half organising the notes she had already taken. Despite the fact that she wasn’t officially meant to be in her office, there were constant interruptions from various members of staff who had obviously been waiting to grab her the moment she reappeared. When she heard a fifth person knock her door in the space of an hour she groaned under her breath. This time it wasn’t one of the departmental lecturers. It was an undergraduate called Nathan MacNamara.
‘Dr Rhys?’ He stood on the threshold, six foot two of skin and bone, his blond-streaked brown hair sticking out from his head like a tarnished halo.
‘Nathan.’ She tried to inject some warmth into her voice but her heart had sunk at the sight of him. She wondered what excuse he’d cooked up this time.
‘I brought you something.’ He ambled into the room, covering the space between the door and her desk in three long strides. Reaching into the pocket of his baggy, ripped parka he pulled out a brown paper bag with something bulky inside. Whatever it was had exuded grease while inside his coat, leaving translucent blobs on the paper.
‘Er…thank you Nathan. What is it?’ She took the bag between the nails of her thumb and forefinger, trying to avoid contact with her skin.
‘It’s a piece of birthday cake. As you couldn’t come to the party I thought I’d bring you some.’ He gave her a sheepish smile. ‘It’s fudge cake. With chocolate orange segments on top.’
She peered inside the bag, searching for something to say. He was leaning across her desk, so close now she could smell him: it was the kind of smell given off by so many male students, a mixture of beer slops and rancid trainers. It was so difficult. He was one of the brightest students in his year but he was becoming a complete pain. What did he see when he looked at her, she wondered? She was twice his age and probably about two stone heavier. But those moonstruck eyes made it quite obvious that he fancied her. Perhaps what he was really looking for was a substitute mother. But if he was, she absolutely was not going to be it.
‘That’s very kind of you – I think I’ll save it for this evening.’ She fixed her eyes on his. ‘You probably won’t be seeing much of me for the rest of this term and next – I’m off on sabbatical to the University of Ulan Bator.’ She gave him the very faintest of smiles, hoping that a little levity might get the message across without letting him down too hard.
‘Wow! That’s like, really cool.’
Bugger
, she thought.
Why are some bright kids so thick?
‘I was joking, Nathan,’ she said. ‘But I meant what I said about not being around much in the next couple of months, so if you need any help you will go and talk to Doctor Walker, won’t you?’
He nodded and backed towards the door. The expression on his face said it all. Doctor Walker was his tutor. He was also a martial arts expert who didn’t suffer fools gladly. ‘I’ll see you, then.’ There was a definite tremor in his lower lip. She heard his huge feet shuffling off down the corridor. Guiltily, she deposited the brown paper bag in the bin.
When the phone rang she was staring out of the window at the distant walls of Balsall Gate, thinking about Carl Kelly. By now his body must have been transported to the city morgue. Free at last, she thought.
‘Megan?’ There was something in the tone of the pathologist’s voice that warned her something unexpected was on its way.
‘What is it?’
He gave a short cough before answering, as if he found the news faintly embarrassing. ‘There wasn’t enough heroin in the system to kill him. He died of strychnine poisoning, would you believe?’
‘Strychnine?’ She blinked at the distant, grey outline of the prison, wondering if she’d heard right.
‘I know – bizarre, isn’t it?’
‘Sounds like something out of an Agatha Christie novel.’
‘Well, it certainly explains the evil grin.’ She heard a sort of grunty chuckle at the other end of the phone. ‘I have to admit I’ve never come across a strychnine death before, which is why I went for the tetanus line. I thought it was a straightforward case of lockjaw, but it wasn’t. You can
also get
risus sardonicus
from the muscle spasms caused by strychnine entering the bloodstream.’ The pathologist cleared his throat again. This time he sounded as if he was about to deliver a lecture: ‘A fatal dose may be as little as 30-60mg. It’s one of the cruellest poisons in existence because it causes excruciating agony whilst not affecting consciousness. The convulsions are sometimes so severe that muscles are torn away from ligaments and tendons…’ He tailed off, leaving her with a vivid picture of Carl Kelly, locked up alone in his cell, writhing as if being tortured as the poison took hold.
‘They used to use it on rats,’ he went on. ‘But now the only mammal you can use it on in this country is moles. It’s strictly controlled, though, and quite hard to get hold of.’
‘So where did it come from?’
‘Well, the only people who are supposed to have access to it are licensed pest controllers. But there’s a black market for it like any other restricted drug.’
‘But why would any drug dealer
want
to cut heroin with a substance that kills?’ Megan persisted. ‘I mean, it’s not exactly good for business, is it? Bumping your clients off.’
‘God knows,’ Hodge replied. ‘It could’ve been a mistake. I’ve seen plenty of those in my time. All the dealers care about is diluting the drug to make a bigger profit. Washing powder, talc, you name it. If it looks like a mixer they’ll use it.’
‘Hmm.’ Megan frowned at her reflection in the window pane. ‘If it was a dodgy batch of heroin you’d expect a whole spate of deaths like this, wouldn’t you?’
‘You would,’ he said, ‘and your next question is going to be have I seen any more corpses with gruesome grins on their faces? Well, as I said before, this is the first strychnine case I’ve ever come across. Doesn’t mean to say I won’t be seeing more in the near future, though. It’s going to be a waiting game, isn’t it?’
* * *
Five minutes later Megan was on the phone to Detective Sergeant Les Willis of West Midlands police.
As she waited to be connected she reached for the stash of prunes in her desk drawer.
Investigate
, that’s a joke, she thought, popping a couple into her mouth. She swallowed them without chewing them. Would the toxicology report have any impact on Sergeant Willis’ indifferent attitude, she wondered? It didn’t.
‘As far as I’m aware,’ Willis said in his slow, rather ponderous voice, ‘there have been no recent cases of that nature in the West Midlands force area. Of course, it’s not the kind of information we have to hand – it’d take time to check the statistics of drug-related deaths…’
Megan listened as he explained exactly what this would entail. By the time he had finished she had covered the whole of a page of her notebook with doodles.
‘Yes, well, if you could let me know if you do come across anything,’ she said. ‘Because if you don’t, we could be looking at a murder.’
‘Oh, I think that’s a bit of a leap of the imagination, don’t you, Dr Rhys?’
‘Why?’ She didn’t feel like being polite. In the past two years she’d spent more time helping the police solve major crimes than she had on academic research. She had been asked by officers far higher up the pecking order than Willis to profile serial killers and rapists. The majority of the detectives she had worked with had valued her opinions. She didn’t appreciate being dismissed like some busybody with an overactive imagination.
‘Well,’ he persisted, ‘deaths like this – we see them all the time.’
‘I thought you just said that you hadn’t?’
‘Not exactly like this, but, you know…’
‘What?’ She felt heat rising from her neck to her face. ‘What do I know, Sergeant?’
He hesitated a moment before replying. She knew she was being bolshy but she didn’t care.
‘Er…well, the dealers, you know.’ She detected the effort in his voice. He was trying not to lose his rag with her. ‘They’re always cutting the drugs with new stuff and…’
‘I just want you to keep an open mind,’ she interrupted. ‘Carl Kelly may have been a low-life smackhead, but I’m not going to stand by and watch this case being brushed under the carpet just because he was in prison when he died. He’s entitled to the same justice as anyone else.’