Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

you leave me a bit of cash, maybe. I’d rather you just sorted one of them armoured cars or something to come and collect me.’

‘We’re all out of armoured cars,’ Zara glared. ‘They’re hard to come by at this time of the month.’

‘You’ll be safe once you’re in the building,’ I said. ‘There’s no safer place in the whole country.’

‘Do they know I’m going to be there? E10.’

‘They might do,’ I said.

‘In that case I’ll probably never make it to the building.’

25

It was another hour before Lydia got in touch, and she insisted that we meet at the Dog and Duck to discuss what had been happening at the station. After the week I’d had, I wasn’t in the mood for another social, but I had to hear about Charli. A drink would surely help me stomach the news.

I turned up to the pub shortly after six o’clock and found Lydia sitting at the same table as before. This week she was dressed in her work attire, a fitted blazer and pencil skirt, presumably having come straight from the station. She looked exhausted, but still got up and greeted me with a kiss on both cheeks, which caught me off guard.

‘What a couple of days,’ she said, returning to her seat. ‘I’ve never known anything like it.’

‘Are you having the usual?’ I asked.

‘Make it two. I’m going to need both for this.’

With four drinks between us, I invited Lydia to start filling me in on everything that had happened.

‘It was a neighbour that reported it,’ she said. ‘An elderly Indian lady. Anjali something or other.’

‘Sharma,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She frowned slightly, adjusting her glasses. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Charli must’ve mentioned her,’ I replied quickly. ‘Sorry, go on.’

‘Well, this neighbour had apparently called the council to complain about a burial in the allotments across the road. That ties back to Charli’s dog story. The council sent a couple of diggers to check over the site on Wednesday, for fear of a dead animal being down there with the vegetables. Instead of finding a dog, however –’

‘They found Deacon Walker,’ I finished. ‘So, where was the dog?’

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Not down in that hole, that’s for sure.’

‘Do they know how Deacon died? The cause of death?’

‘That’s where the fun really starts,’ she said, and took a huge mouthful through her straw. ‘So, first we have to go back to the thirteen inmates at the Scrubs. Hold on, I’ll need to get this right …’ From her packed work bag on the chair beside her, she produced her laptop and opened it up on the table. ‘Right.’ She leaned closer to the screen. ‘The coroner’s original verdict was that every one of those inmates had smoked synthetic cannabinoids, which caused a severe reduction in respiratory function, bleeding in the lungs and vomiting, a soaring heart rate that initiated cardiac arrest, ending with total respiratory paralysis and multiple organ failure.’

‘And Deacon Walker?’

‘The findings were identical,’ she said solemnly. ‘Cardiac arrest, respiratory paralysis, multiple organ failure.’

‘So he smoked the same bad batch of Spice.’ I said. ‘It’s a blend of dodgy chemicals, for God’s sake, how can that be classed as intent to kill?’

Lydia shook her head. ‘He didn’t smoke anything, and therein lies the twist. It was never the Spice that killed them. Any of them. Not exactly.’

‘So, what did kill them?’

‘Nothing very technical, as it turns out.’ She turned back to her screen. ‘An aconitine, an alkaloid toxin produced by the aconitum plant. More common names of the perennial aconite variants are wolfsbane, monkshood and the queen of poisons.’

‘Wolfsbane,’ I repeated. ‘Sounds like something out of a Harry Potter novel.’

‘Don’t you ever listen to Gardeners’ Question Time?’

‘No, I can’t say that I do.’

‘All of these poisonous plants still grow wild throughout the UK, Elliot. They’re astoundingly common. It was the purple flowering Aconitum napellus, the wolfsbane, that officers found growing freely to the rear of the allotments in which Deacon Walker was buried. The roots of these plants are the most poisonous parts and, if ingested, a single tablespoon of aconitine tincture is likely to be fatal. They think that Walker had swallowed close to half a pint’s worth of this tincture, which had been disguised in a lethal cocktail of various alcoholic drinks including whiskey and gin.’

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘But the inmates of the prison, they hadn’t swallowed poison.’

‘Which is precisely what I said down at the station. Apparently, these toxins are notoriously difficult to detect through conventional methods. The original findings came down to the fact that there are no existing reports on the effects of smoking the aconite plant.’

‘Nobody has ever been stupid enough to try, I suppose.’

‘Exactly. It was only through symptomatic similarities between the prison deaths and that of Deacon Walker that they’ve been able to retroactively classify the toxin hidden within the synthetic cannabinoids. The thirteen inmates didn’t die as a result of misadventure. They were poisoned.’ She took another huge drink, and I did the same. ‘Do you remember me telling you before that Spice is often sprayed onto plants like oregano?’

‘The Spice was sprayed onto this poisonous plant?’

‘That’s the theory,’ she said, eyes bright behind her lenses. ‘It looks like our client might be bang to rights, Elliot, unless you can come up with any brilliant ideas.’

I shook my head, momentarily closing my eyes. ‘Nothing jumps to mind. As all criminal defendants are innocent until proven guilty, I always start my consideration of the evidence from that premise. However, it has to be said that the evidence against Charli Meadows is strong, relentless and, most worryingly, all one-way traffic. The drugs were found in her car. They were the same basic type that had killed thirteen inmates only days beforehand. Those men were poisoned in the same way that her boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer who ran the line with children, was poisoned. And the poison was found growing on her allotment.’

Lydia closed the laptop. ‘Children? What makes you think he used