Acid Lullaby (13 page)

‘He’s saying something.’ Mary’s lips moved silently, as if reciting a prayer.

Underwood remained standing a few feet away: suddenly unsure of himself.

‘What’s he saying?’

Mary seemed to relax in her chair and her eyes, previously unseeing, located Underwood.

‘He said “don’t forget the keys”.’

Underwood stared at her in horrified silence. It was one of the last things Jack Harvey had said to him.

Three miles away, Rowena Harvey sat in shock in the back of an ambulance, her face streaked with tears. Dexter watched her closely. Rowena Harvey was a beautiful woman, much younger than Jack. Was there an angle here? Dexter wondered. Was Rowena Harvey playing them? Had she been
humping some tennis coach or her aerobics instructor? Should she check Jack Harvey’s life insurance policy for any irregularities or recent amendments?

Dexter suddenly remembered the brutalizing of Jack’s body and cursed her own suspicious nature. It was too ridiculous to contemplate. Still, Rowena Harvey was an attractive woman. Dexter couldn’t help but picture her in widow’s black and for a single, surprising second imagined tasting Rowena Harvey herself.

Mad
shit.
Concentrate.

Jensen emerged from the back of the ambulance.

‘Anything?’ Dexter asked.
Back
to
business,
Alison.

‘She stayed with a friend last night. Jack called her about ten-thirty to say good night. It checks out. She showed me her mobile.’

‘Who is the friend?’

‘Petra Longley.’

‘The magistrate?’

‘The one and only.’

Dexter knew the fearsome Petra Longley well. ‘So much for my maniac boyfriend theory then.’

‘Mrs Harvey wants to go and stay with her parents in Diss. She’s in a bad way. Can we allow it?’

Dexter nodded. ‘Take her yourself. She’s not much use here. Try to get her talking in the car. Do it gently. See if she knows anything about Jack’s patients, stuff he was working on recently.’

‘Will do.’

‘Call me if you get anything.’

Dexter turned away and headed over to Marty Farrell. One of the senior SOCOs, Farrell was engaged in an earnest conversation with Steve Polk of Cambridgeshire Fire Brigade.

‘What have you got, Marty?’ Dexter asked briskly.

‘Early days, guv.’ Farrell’s restrained manner always had a calming effect. ‘The body will be removed in the next hour. No sign of the head, though.’

‘The president’s brain is missing!’ commented Steve Polk with a grin.

Dexter rounded on him. ‘Stow it. He was a mate.’

Farrell interceded diplomatically, ‘Steve and I were talking about the fire. How it was started, right, Steve?’

Polk took a deep breath and decided to be professional. ‘Fire started in the office – that’s clear from the pattern of heat damage. It’s a guess at this stage but I would say the arsonist, the murderer, used an inflammatory fluid to get things going. Lighter fuel looks likely. Lots of paper in there – woof.’ He mimicked a fire exploding to life with his hands.

‘The weird thing, though, is that there isn’t a single local source for the fire within the room,’ Farrell added.

‘I don’t understand,’ Dexter admitted.

‘Usually, an arsonist will kindle a fire in say one corner of a room,’ Polk explained. ‘You know, a pile of paper or a rag soaked in paraffin, right?’

‘Right,’ Dexter agreed.

‘Well, in this instance, it looks like the arsonist stood in the middle of the room spraying the fuel all around him. Then started chucking matches until one of them ignited the fuel.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Dexter asked.

‘The centre of the room is the least damaged,’ Farrell explained, ‘and we’ve found matches lying around the edge of the room – lots of them.’

Polk took over. ‘It’s like a normal fire but in negative. Your average arsonist localizes a flashpoint then does a runner. This guy filled a room with fuel and started chucking lighted matches about.’

Dexter was beginning to see their point. ‘You mean he wanted to be in the room when it all started to go up.’

‘Yeah. It’s like after he chopped the bloke’s head off he wanted to be surrounded by fire. It can be quite hypnotic, watching flames crawl up walls, therapeutic even.’ Polk was anxious to restore his credibility with DI Dexter who he had decided was a wriggler.

Dexter was only half-listening. She had remembered the knife wounds on Ian Stark’s neck as he lay screaming in
Accident and Emergency two nights previously. Finding a quiet place, away from the fire trucks and the hubbub of the investigation, she called Roger Leach.

DC Jensen hammered the squad car out of New Bolden and quickly picked up the A11. The drive to Diss would take her no more than half an hour: A11 to Thetford then the A1066 to Diss.

Doddle.

She watched Rowena Harvey in the driver’s mirror. The tears had stopped and she was staring, in stunned silence, at nothing in particular. Jensen remembered Dexter’s instructions and decided to ask some questions.

‘Mrs Harvey, I have to ask you something.’

Rowena Harvey stared blankly at her.

‘Was your husband in any trouble? You know, did he have any financial problems?’

No response.

Jensen battled on. ‘Had he been under any pressure recently? Any strange phone calls or visitors to the house? Anything unusual at all?’

Rowena Harvey was staring at her wedding ring as if trying to remember what it was. Jensen decided to lay off. It was a waste of energy.

‘He was sad,’ said Rowena quietly and suddenly.

‘Sad?’ Jensen resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. ‘Do you know why?’

Rowena Harvey shook her head slowly. Jensen tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

Behind them, the incarnate Soma kept a watchful distance from inside the light show. He increased the intensity of his masturbation as the squad car turned left out of Thetford onto the A1066 and ejaculated into the empty crisp packet he
had kept handy. He wiped himself and dropped it onto the already litter-covered floor of his Land Cruiser.

Jensen accelerated as the A1066 opened up between Thetford and Diss. Rowena Harvey had drawn her tanned knees up in front of her and sat huddled on the back seat. The car flashed past a couple of stud farms and then out into open countryside. A red triangular traffic sign warned of a sharp right turn ahead and Jensen began to decelerate. Suddenly she noticed the Land Cruiser that had filled her back window.

‘What is this guy’s problem?’ she asked herself.

The Land Cruiser swung out to the right of the squad car and drew alongside. The bend loomed thirty yards ahead of them. Jensen slammed on her brakes as the two vehicles ran two abreast. Then, in a sudden and brutal movement the Land Cruiser swung into the driver’s side of the squad car. Taken off guard, Jensen lost control. The steering wheel slipped through her hands and the car careened off the road, smashing with sickening force into a stone wall. Rowena Harvey was flung between the two front seats, hitting the dashboard in front of the gear stick. Jensen was thrown forward into the driver’s side airbag then felt her neck whiplash as it was wrenched forward then back, smashing against the headrest.

Jensen was nauseous, struggling to retain consciousness. She was dimly aware of Rowena Harvey lying across the gear stick, her head wedged against the dashboard. She was also dimly aware of the green lights of the Land Cruiser reversing back towards her.

Ten minutes later a coach driver called Suffolk police and reported the wrecked squad car. It was empty.

At 9p.m. that evening, Underwood crept into the back of a packed incident room at New Bolden police station. A couple of heads turned at the sound of the closing door and
registered their surprise. Underwood had not been inside the station for over a year. It felt strange to him: like the first day of school. Alison Dexter and Roger Leach nodded their acknowledgement: nobody else did.

‘Let’s get started,’ Dexter announced loudly and crisply. The conversation ended abruptly. ‘Most of you know what happened to Jack Harvey. You should also know that DC Jensen and Mrs Harvey are missing. Their car was wrecked outside Diss. No trace of them was found at the crash site.’

Underwood started. He hadn’t known about the car crash. Clearly he wasn’t fully back in the loop. Suddenly, he remembered what had been troubling him about Jack Harvey’s office.

Dexter continued briskly, ‘Jensen’s car was found on the A1066. Uniform are sweeping the area, doing house to house enquiries, stopping traffic. So far we’ve got nothing. I don’t believe in coincidence. It’s fair to assume that whoever killed Jack Harvey has got Jensen and Mrs Harvey.’

There was a ripple of anxious conversation. Dexter didn’t mind. She wanted them anxious. Anxious got results. Dexter shot a quick look at Harrison. His face was expressionless.

‘Bearing in mind what happened to Jack,’ Dexter announced, ‘that makes it pretty bloody urgent we turn up something here quickly.’

Underwood watched the grey skies beyond the window. He remembered Jack Harvey’s office – the little consulting room where he had laid back and opened the black box of his depression; the little consulting room with its cluttered shelves and crowded desk; the little consulting room with its large portrait photograph of Rowena Harvey hanging above the computer. The photograph hadn’t been there when Underwood and Dexter had seen Jack’s body.

The
killer
wanted
Rowena
Harvey.

‘There’s a lot of mad shit going on here,’ Dexter was saying, ‘and the murder of Harvey appears to be connected with the death of Ian Stark two nights ago.’

Underwood
had
often
stared
at
Rowena’s
photograph
during
his
sessions
with
Jack.
Fantasizing,
imagining
himself
with
her.
Had
the
killer
sat
in
the
consulting
room
too,
looking
at
the
same
picture,
indulging
his
fantasies?
Underwood
looked
sadly
at
the
back
of
DS
Harrison’s
head
two
rows
in
front
of
him.
He
knew
DC
Jensen
was
dead.

Roger Leach had risen to his feet. ‘Two corpses in forty-eight hours. Ian Stark, the local drug dealer and thug, died at the Infirmary at 4a.m. on Saturday morning.’

Underwood withdrew a notebook from his jacket pocket. It was an old habit and one that he had neglected. Still, he thought, in his new regime of stable mental structures it seemed like a worthwhile discipline to restore.

‘As DI Dexter says, the deaths are connected,’ Leach continued. ‘The details are unusual so I suggest you write them down.’

Underwood smiled. He hadn’t been ahead of the game for over a year.

‘There are three important similarities between the incidents. One. Infliction of severe damage to neck. The cuts on Stark’s neck suggest he was attacked with something like an axe or a meat cleaver. He received serious muscular tissue damage but the wound was not fatal. Jack Harvey’s head was severed completely. This time the pattern of tissue and bone damage suggests the killer used an electric saw. Something like a DIY power saw.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Harrison softly. He was finding it hard to focus. His thoughts inevitably drifted back to Jensen.
Concentrate.

‘Similarity two. This is the clincher. We have now run full toxicology profiles on Stark and Harvey. The results are extraordinary but remarkably similar.’

‘Specifics?’ Dexter asked.

‘Both victims have extremely high levels of organic toxins called amatoxins and phallotoxins in their bloodstreams. This is what caused the death of Ian Stark and would probably have killed Jack Harvey too if he hadn’t also received fatal physical injuries. These poisons interfere with protein synthesis once ingested. This means that cells with particularly high rates of protein synthesis are most vulnerable to
damage: particularly cells in the liver and kidneys. Enzyme levels increase within the liver. Glutamate oxalacetate transaminase and lactate dehydrogenase increase in concentration and lesions develop in the liver itself. This invariably leads to coma and liver failure. That’s how Ian Stark died.’

Underwood was struggling to keep up. The complex terminology had confused him.

‘The most likely sources of these toxins are poisonous fungi. Magic mushrooms for want of a better term. I have been in contact with someone called Adam Miller. He works at the University Botanical Gardens in Cambridge. According to him toxicology profiles suggest poisoning with a combination of Amanita Virosa and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms. The difficulty with this thesis is that the levels found in the victims greatly exceed those found in these particular fungi.’

‘How great is the anomaly?’ asked Underwood suddenly from the back of the room.

‘As I understand it, we are talking about toxins levels four or five times greater than occur in individual mushrooms. I’ve arranged for Inspector Dexter to meet Dr Miller tomorrow so he can give us a better picture. Also, no traces of the fungi were found in the victim’s stomachs or intestinal tracts. The poisons have been injected in some form of solution. The high concentration and the fact they were injected directly into the bloodstream explain why Stark experienced liver failure so rapidly,’ Leach concluded.

Underwood tried to build a picture in his mind: a killer who injects victims with organic poisons before decapitating them. He made a mental note to ensure that he accompanied Dexter when she visited Professor Miller.

‘Were there syringe puncture wounds in either of the victims then?’ Underwood asked.

‘Plenty in Stark. The burns to Jack Harvey’s skin made it very hard to localize any puncture wounds though,’ Leach answered.