technique not to be surprised.
‘I think it’s that he cares more about us catching Robbie’s killer than the reputation of the club, to be honest. Anyway, according to Mr Flanagan, it totally slipped his mind that the club did a routine drug sweep on Friday. Like all the rest of them, Robbie peed into a bottle. Unlike the rest of them, in his case, out came roofies.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope and proffered it to Grisha.
‘Positive for rohypnol,’ Grisha read. ‘I’ve heard of this lab, they’re supposed to be pretty thorough. But you should contact them, ask if they’ve got any of Robbie’s sample left. I’m not seeing enough detail here to get any accurate sense of how much and when.’ He handed the paper to Carol.
‘I think we know when. Thursday night in Amatis,’ Carol said sourly.
Grisha frowned. ‘Probably not, actually.’ He tapped keys, clicked his mouse. ‘That’s what I thought. The forget-me pill. It starts to take effect between twenty minutes and half an hour of being ingested. So if Robbie had been given it in the nightclub, by the time he left he’d have been acting like he was totally off his face.’
‘Nobody’s even suggested he was drunk,’ Paula said. ‘And he was moving OK on that CCTV footage.’
‘So he must have trusted whoever he was with enough to go somewhere else with him. Somewhere he was given a drink spiked with rohypnol,’ Carol said, thinking aloud.
‘Its effects are aggravated by alcohol, so given that he’d been drinking earlier, he’d likely be out of it within an hour of taking it,’ Grisha said. ‘He’d go along with whatever was happening to him. He wouldn’t resist anal penetration. He wouldn’t mind having a suppository inserted rectally. And he wouldn’t remember anything about it afterwards. It’s the perfect murder, really. By the time your victim dies, his connection to you is a long way away.’
Carol handed the paper back to Paula. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘But this is a bitch of a case. Every scrap of information we get seems to make things harder.’
Half an hour later, they were harder still. Carol sat in her office, door closed, blinds drawn to avoid distraction. Elbows on the desk, one hand held the phone to her ear, the other clutched a chunk of her hair. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ she said.
‘Actually, you did. But it’s just as well, there’s shit I need to get sorted,’ Bindie Blyth said, her voice rusty from sleep. She coughed, cleared her throat then sniffed. Carol could hear her moving.
‘There’s something I need to ask you. It’s a bit personal.’
The unmistakable snap of a lighter, then the inhalation of smoke. ‘Isn’t this where I’m supposed to say, “It’s all right, nothing’s personal in a murder investigation”?’ Bindie said in a passable American accent.
There was, Carol thought, no easy answer to that one. ‘I think it’s more that nothing’s private in a murder investigation. We need to find out everything we can about our victims, even if it turns out to be completely irrelevant. We’re not being prurient. Just prudent. She tutted at herself. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded glib. It wasn’t meant to be. I mentioned my colleague, the psychologist. He always reminds me that you can never know too much about the victim of a murder. So I hope you’ll forgive me for what might feel like prying.’
‘It’s OK, I’m kind of hiding behind flippancy. Fire away with your questions, I’m not going to take offence.’
Carol took a breath. There was no point in coyness here. ‘Did Robbie like anal sex?’ she asked.
A surprised snort of laughter exploded down the phone. ‘Robbie? Robbie take it up the arse? You have got to be joking. I tried to talk him into it, but he was totally convinced that any straight man who liked pegging was a secret gay.’
‘Pegging?’ Carol felt ancient and out of touch beside Bindie.
‘You know.
‘I’d not heard the term before.’
‘That’ll be living up North,’ Bindie said. Her tone said she was teasing, but Carol felt hopelessly provincial nonetheless. ‘My ex, the guy I was with before Robbie, he was really into it. I still have the harness and the dildos and all the gear. I tried to get Robbie to go for it, but honestly, you’d think I was suggesting we went out and found some stray dogs to shag. He didn’t even like having a finger in his arse when we were fucking.’
‘We found a butt plug in his bedside table drawer,’ Carol said neutrally.
A moment’s silence. ‘That would be mine,’ Bindie said. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want it back.’
‘Right,’ Carol said. ‘Thanks for being so frank with me.’
‘No problem. Now, what was the personal question?’ Bindie gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Sorry. I told you I was being flippant. Why do you want to know what Robbie liked to do in bed?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you details of an ongoing investigation,’ Carol said, aware she wanted to give Bindie something in return. ‘We’re pursuing several lines of inquiry. But I’ll be honest, it’s a slow process.’
Time’s not the issue, Chief Inspector,’ said Bindie, never more serious than now. The issue is catching the fucker who did this.’
Imran opened and closed the drawers in his bedroom once again. That made five times, Yousef reckoned. ‘You gotta have everything you need by now, man,’ he said. ‘You checked a million times already.’
‘Easy for you to say. I don’t want to get to the airport and bang, no iPod. Or get to Ibiza and find my number one Nikes are still under the bed here, know what I mean?’ Imran dropped to the floor and raked an arm under the bed.
‘You’re not going to get to the airport at all if you don’t get your arse in gear,’ Yousef said. That’s a clapped-out Vauxhall van you’ve got, not the Batmobile.’
‘And it’s not like you’re Jeremy Clarkson, cousin.’ Imran bounced back on his feet again. ‘OK, I’m sorted.’ He zipped up his holdall, still looking mildly uncertain, patted his pockets. ‘Passport, money, tickets. Let’s get gone.’
Yousef followed Imran downstairs and waited patiently while he said goodbye to his mother. Anyone would
