Don Merrick’s name hung in the silence between them. ‘Thanks, Paula. I’ll speak to Tony. Do you happen to know where he is?’
‘I dropped him back at the hospital. He was pretty knackered.’
‘Did you get anything from Mrs Diamond?’ Carol asked.
‘Nothing that takes us any further forward. She made the point that Aziz couldn’t have known her husband was going to be at the match, so it must have been coincidence.’
‘Not necessarily. As I understand it, that was a season ticket box, hired by the same bunch of guys for years now. It’s possible Benjamin Diamond mentioned it in passing in one of their meetings. In my experience of men and football, it’s exactly the kind of thing they like to drop in passing. I think we need to talk to Diamond’s secretary.’
‘He doesn’t have one. According to Rachel, the two of them ran the whole operation between them. She mostly did the office stuff, he mostly did the customer contact.’
‘OK. Good luck with your photo trawl. I’ll speak to you later.’ She put the phone down and pressed her fists against her temples. What was he playing at? She was used to Tony flying off at tangents, but he generally ran things past her. After his last encounter with a killer, she thought he’d finally learned the lesson of thinking before he acted. Obviously, she’d been mistaken. She reached for the phone, girding her loins for the usual complicated encounter. Why couldn’t her life be simple for once?
She was cursed with the granting of her wish. No fractious conversation with Tony. His mobile was switched off and he wasn’t answering the phone in his hospital room. Bloody man. Bloody, bloody man.
The bloody man in question had been roused from a deep sleep by the phone next to his bed. Tony didn’t care who it was, he wasn’t ready for speech yet. That was one of the few joys of being stuck in hospital with a fucked-up knee. In the usual run of things, he had to answer his phone. He had patients who might have urgent needs. He had contracts with several police forces across Europe who might also have pressing requirements. But for now, he was officially out of action and he could ignore the phone. Someone else could take responsibility.
Except of course that he was bound to Carol and her team. Bound in a way that went far beyond the contractual. He probably should have answered the phone. But the meeting with Rachel Diamond had left him drained. He’d come back and taken his drugs, eaten his lunch and fallen straight into a thick, heavy sleep that had left him feeling stupid and inarticulate. Not the best time to talk to police officers if you wanted to convince them you were right about something.
He hoped Kevin had taken him seriously. Certainly what Paula had told him about Steve Mottishead’s recollections was the most chilling thing he’d heard about Stalky the poisoner. The Harriestown High connection was already established in his head. But Jack Anderson’s list, conforming as closely as it did to two of the apparently unconnected victims, had set Tony’s antennae quivering. The mentality that drew up such a list with serious intent was ruthless. Predictably, such a person would pursue their goals relentlessly. But if they lacked empathy, if they had sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies, how they would go about dealing with the thwarting of those goals was entirely unpredictable.
He remembered one patient who had proudly told him how she had deliberately split up the marriage of her business partner. Not for any sexual or emotional reason, but because her partner’s wife was less than whole- hearted about the business. ‘I had to do it,’ his patient had explained in the most matter-of-fact way. ‘As long as he stayed married to Maria, he was never going to give the business his full commitment. And I needed that from him. So she had to go.’ If Jack Anderson had been deprived of his dreams, what would he rationalize as a reasonable response?
It seemed that he’d chosen murder. His victims were men who had come from a similar background to his own. They’d attended the same school. In theory, they’d had the same opportunities as him. And they’d demonstrated his dreams weren’t so crazy, because they’d each realized one of his goals. But for whatever reason, Anderson had decided he wasn’t going to be able to achieve the ambitious targets he’d set himself. Some people would have reconciled themselves to that, acknowledging that their adolescent dreams had only been castles in the air. Others would have grown bitter, turned to drink, taken out their frustrations in ways that were mostly self-destructive. Jack Anderson had decided to kill the achievers. That way, they could no longer reproach him for his failure.
That’s why there was no sexual element to the murders, why they were committed at arm’s length. They were about desire, it was true. But not sexual desire.
And why poison? OK, it was perfect if you got no kick out of watching your victims die, and you wanted to avoid suspicion by being a long way away when it happened. That meant you couldn’t go the route of most killers, who opted for methods that were, in essence, unskilled. Guns, knives, blunt instruments. But still, why choose something so arcane, something that felt as though it had come from an Agatha Christie novel?
He had to fathom this out. There had to be a reason. Murderers generally chose to kill using what was to hand, or what they had experience of. What if the poisons were chosen not because they were arcane but because they were close at hand? Carol had already questioned Rhys Butler, a man with access to pharmacological drugs. That had made a kind of sense.
But Anderson wasn’t using prescription drugs. These were all derived from plants. Ricin from the castor oil plant, atropine from belladonna, oleandrin from oleander. Not your everyday garden plants, but nothing wildly exotic either. Who would have a garden with plants like that, though? You’d have to be some sort of specialist. Something was tickling at the back of his mind. Something about gardens and poison. He sat up and woke the laptop. Once he was back online, he Googled ‘poison garden’. The first thing that came up was the Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, a cornucopia of deadly plants, open to the public under strict supervision.
But as Tony discovered when he explored further, this was by no means a new idea. It had been directly inspired by the Medici family, who built a garden near Padua to find better ways to poison their enemies, and by the monks of Soutra Hospital near Edinburgh, who used soporific sponges with exactly the right amount of opium, henbane and hemlock to anaesthetize a body for between two and three days-just as long as it takes to amputate a limb and for the body to come out of shock and go into a natural state of healing. There had been other, private poison gardens through the ages, and Tony found various speculative references to them in newsgroups and blogs.
What if Jack Anderson had access to one of these? What if poison was, for him, the weapon of opportunity? He glanced at the phone. Now would be a good time for it to ring.
Instead, Mrs Chakrabarti entered hot on the heels of a perfunctory knock. ‘I hear you went walkabout again,’ she said without preamble.
‘I came back,’ Tony said. ‘You all tell me I need to be up and about.’
