Thorne walked across to the bed. It smelled clean but there was a yellow-brown stain on the pillow. He wondered if anyone had slept in it since Amin Akhtar. ‘Well, if it was any nicer you’d only get stick from the “prisons are holiday camps” brigade,’ he said. ‘You’d have the Daily Mail complaining that your patients were too comfortable.’
McCarthy nodded, gave a small laugh. ‘A few months back, our head of PE ordered a pitch-and-putt set for the boys and a week later one of the papers claimed that we were building an eighteen-hole golf course.’
‘So what kind of dosage was Amin on?’ Thorne asked. He walked across to the far wall. Just a few steps. ‘The Tramadol.’
‘Two fifty-milligram tablets, four times a day. It’s a medium-strength painkiller.’
‘And nothing else?’
‘Only a low-dose antibiotic. A drip, you know?’
‘And how many tablets would he have needed to OD? Just roughly.’
‘I don’t know, thirty or more at least.’
Thorne thought for a few seconds. ‘Plus the few you said got spilled on the floor, right? So that’s thirty- something tablets he somehow managed to avoid taking during his routine medication and stashed away. Does that sound about right?’
McCarthy nodded, said, ‘More or less.’
‘Right, and he’d been in here four days, so in order to get enough to do the job properly, he would have had to be palming virtually all his pills almost every time he was given them. Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud here… but the staff are supposed to watch and make sure medication gets taken, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, they’re supposed to.’
‘Well, someone screwed up rather badly by the sound of it.’
‘I gave him several doses of the tablets myself,’ McCarthy said, ‘and I certainly didn’t screw up.’
‘I wasn’t trying to say you had, but can you think of any other explanation?’ Thorne walked slowly back across the room, turned and leaned against the door.
‘Perhaps someone brought them in for him,’ McCarthy suggested.
‘From the outside?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because that would mean Amin had suicidal feelings even before he got attacked.’ Thorne shook his head. ‘It would have to have been after he was admitted to the hospital wing. Was he allowed visits from other boys while he was in here?’
‘Yes, at least one lad came in, I think. I can get you the name.’
‘That would be helpful,’ Thorne said. ‘But we’ve still got the same question to answer. Where did whoever gave Amin enough tablets to kill himself get them from?’ Thorne had already figured out the most likely answer, but waited for McCarthy to catch him up. It only took a few seconds.
‘What about the thefts from the dispensary?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Thorne said.
The doctor nodded, looking highly delighted with himself and his powers of deduction. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to find out if and when any Tramadol tablets were taken. Everything is noted down in the DDA book, so-’ He stopped at the noise from Thorne’s pocket. ‘Is that yours?’
Thorne was unsurprised at McCarthy’s shocked expression when his mobile rang. They were strictly forbidden inside the prison and that applied to members of staff every bit as much as to prisoners themselves. It was another protocol Thorne had been obliged to ignore, and dispensation had been granted after a senior officer at the Yard had spoken to the governor by phone and made it clear that they were dealing with a serious live-time incident.
Thorne took the phone from his jacket and saw who was calling. ‘I need to take this,’ he said.
McCarthy stayed where he was, then seeing that Thorne was not about to answer while anyone was around to listen, indicated that he would wait outside and stepped into the hall.
Thorne pushed the door shut after him and answered the phone.
‘Helen?’
‘He wants to know what’s happening.’
Thorne pressed the handset to his chest and swore quietly. He could still hear the radio that was playing on the ward across the corridor. ‘Tell him I’m doing what he asked me to do,’ he said. ‘I’m working as quickly as I can, all right?’
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘That this might take some time.’
There was a pause. ‘I’ll tell him… ’
‘I’m talking to all the people I need to talk to.’ He looked down at the bed in which Amin Akhtar had died. He reached out and touched the metal bedstead. ‘I’m in the right place. Tell him we’re taking everything he said very seriously, OK?’
‘The truth, that’s what he wants.’
‘I know… I know it is, and I’m going to find out what happened, one way or the other.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You make sure he knows that.’
‘I will.’
‘Helen…?’
‘That’s good.’
She was breathless and he could hear the tightness in her voice, the effort to sound upbeat. He guessed that Akhtar was listening. ‘How are you and Mitchell doing, Helen? How’s Akhtar doing?’
There was another pause, longer this time. Thorne could hear Helen Weeks breathing, imagined he could also hear the breathing of the man who was probably pointing a gun at her.
‘None of us are doing very well,’ she said.
TWELVE
Once he had finished in the hospital wing, Thorne decided that he should spend half an hour going through Amin Akhtar’s paperwork. In his experience, the library was rarely the busiest part of any prison, so it seemed as good a place as any to get some peace and quiet.
He called Donnelly on his way there to see what was happening in Tulse Hill. He told him about the meetings with Bracewell and McCarthy and then about the call he had received from Helen Weeks.
‘Thank God for that,’ Donnelly said. ‘Pascoe’s been desperate to get a line of communication open.’ He asked Thorne how Helen Weeks had sounded on the phone.
‘She’s holding up, but she doesn’t sound great.’
‘I think Akhtar had a bit of a wobble,’ Donnelly said. ‘He seems to have calmed down now.’
‘What do you mean, a wobble?’
‘Smashing the shop up, shouting and screaming. We’ve got no idea what set him off, so everyone’s still a bit jumpy.’
‘Chivers?’
‘Inspector Chivers is responding… appropriately.’
‘You need to keep on top of him.’
‘I don’t need anyone to tell me how to run this operation, thank you very much.’
Thorne took a few seconds. Donnelly was a detective superintendent, but he was not Thorne’s detective superintendent. That said, it would not be doing anyone any favours, least of all Helen Weeks, to alienate the man running the operation. He would need to observe at least a few of the niceties.
‘That’s what I’m trying to say, sir.’ Thorne dug deep to find a reasonable tone of voice. ‘You know what some of these ex-army types are like. Once there’s any kind of weapon involved, they tend to think they’re calling the shots. Sir.’
That seemed to do the trick.
