“On his backside, across his cheeks and up into the anus. A nasty little bastard, blotches turning to pustules even five hours after he died. At first I thought maybe it was thrush but it was too extreme for that. So we took a swab and tested it.”
The pause was theatrical in its duration.
“Nicotine poisoning.”
The policeman’s heart sank. For this he had allowed himself to get excited? “
Garnett grunted proudly. “Nicotine as in around eight million cigarettes smoked in the space of one drag.”
“What?”
“That was what killed him – not the heart attack, though that delivered the final blow-nicotine: one of the most lethal poisons known to man.”
“And how did he get it, if it wasn’t in the drink or in the meal, and it wasn’t injected? And assuming he didn’t smoke eight million cigarettes while he was sitting contemplating.”
Garnett cleared his throat. “He got it in the arse, Mal, though God only knows how.”
Broadhurst glanced across at the solitary toilet roll sitting on his chest of drawers. “I know, too,” he said. “But the ‘why’, that’s the puzzler.”
“And the ‘who’?”
“Yeah, that too.”
Edna Clark sat at her kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea. Sitting across from her was Betty Thorndike.
When the knock came on the front door, Betty said, “You stay put, love – I’ll get it.”
Hilda Merkinson had been in every room in the house but her sister was nowhere to be found.
Worse still, she couldn’t find her handbag.
“Harry?” She had already shouted her sister’s name a dozen times but, in the absence of a more useful course of action, she shouted it again. The silence seemed to mock her.
Hilda knew why Harriet had gone out. She had gone out to clear her head, maybe to have a weep by herself. No problem. She would get over it. It might take a bit of time, but she would get over it – of that, Hilda was convinced.
They had lived together, Hilda and Harriet Merkinson, in the same house for all of their 53 years; just the two of them since their mother had died in 1992.
They had a routine, a routine that Hilda did not want to see altered in any way. It was a safe routine, a routine of eating together, cleaning together, watching the TV together, and occasionally slipping along to The Three Pennies public house for a couple of life-affirming medicinal glasses of Guinness stout. It was a routine of going to bed and kissing each other goodnight on the upstairs landing and of waking each morning and kissing each other hello, again in the same spot; a routine broken only by Harriet’s job in Jack Wilson’s General store, and Hilda’s work at the animal testing facility on Aldershot Road, where she’d been for almost seven years. The same length of time that Harriet had worked.
During that time, the routine had persevered.
It had been all and its disappearance was unthinkable.
Not that there hadn’t been times when things looked a little shaky, namely the times when Ian Arbutt had cornered Hilda in the small back room against the photocopier and sworn his affection-despite Ian’s wife, Judith, and his two children. But basically, Ian’s affection had been for Hilda’s body and Hilda had recognized this pretty quickly into the relationship – if you could call the clumsy gropes and speedy ejaculations performed by her boss on the back room carpet a relationship.
Hilda had had to think of how to put an end to it – thus maintaining her and Harriet’s beloved routine-while not having it affect her position at the testing centre.
The solution had been simple, if a little Machiavellian. She had sent an anonymous letter to Judith Arbutt saying she should keep a tighter rein on her husband. “I’m not mentioning any names,” the carefully worded (and written) letter had continued, “but there are some folks around town who think your Ian’s affections might be being misplaced.” Hilda had liked that last bit.
A very anxious and contrite Ian had suggested to Hilda, on the next occasion that they were both alone in the centre, that he felt he wasn’t being fair to her. “Trifling with her affections” is what Hilda imagined he was wanting to say but Ian’s pharmacological expertise did not extend to the poetic. “I hope you’re not leading up to suggesting I look for other work,” Hilda had said, feigning annoyance, brow furrowed, “because that would mean something along the lines of sexual harassment, wouldn’t it?”
The answer had been emphatic and positive. “A job for life”, is how he worded it. “You’re here for as long as you want to be here, Hilda,” he said. And he had been true to his word, at least Hilda could give him that.
No, Hilda would have nothing come between her and her sister. They were all either of them had and their separation was something she could not contemplate. She had thought that Harriet felt the same way.
And then came the fateful day, almost a week ago – was it really only a week? it seemed so much longer – that had threatened to change all that.
Every Thursday, without fail, Harriet always walked along to the fish-and-chip shop on the green-Thursday being Jack Wilson’s early closing day – and had the tea all ready for Hilda when she got in. But on this particular Thursday, following four days of solid rain, when Hilda – a little earlier than usual because Ian also had flooding and wanted to get off – had gone past the General Store, she had seen Harriet helping Jack with moving boxes around due to the leakage through the front windows. He had asked her to stay back and give him a hand, and Harriet couldn’t refuse, despite her other “commitments”.
“We’ll just have some sandwiches,” Harriet had shouted through the locked door of Jack’s shop, looking terribly flustered. “You just put your feet up and I’ll make them when I get in,” she added.
Hilda had nodded. Then she had gone home, put the kettle on and, at the usual time Harriet always left the house en route for the fish and chips, Hilda had embarked into the darkness on the very same journey. Imagine her surprise when, from behind the big oak tree on the green, a shadowy figure leapt out, grabbed her by the shoulders and planted a big kiss on her mouth.
It was Arthur Clark.
“Thought you weren’t coming,” Arthur had announced to a bewildered Hilda. “Been here bloody ages,” he had added. “Edna’ll be getting ideas – mind you,” Arthur had confided, “it won’t matter soon. Must dash.” Then he had given her another kiss and had scurried across the green bound for home, calling over his shoulder, “See you on Saturday anyway, at the Christmas do.”
Hilda had stood and watched the figure disappear into the darkness, and she was so flabbergasted that she almost forgot all about the fish and chips and went home empty-handed. But already she was thinking that that would not do. That would not do at all.
The “meeting” had given her advance knowledge of a potential threat to the beloved routine. And by the time she was leaving the fat-smelling warmth of the shop, Hilda had hatched a plan.
She knew all about poisons from Ian’s explanations, long-drawn-out monologues that, despite their monotony, had registered in Hilda’s mind. Which was fortunate. She knew about nicotine, and about the way it was lethal and produced symptoms not unlike heart failure.
Getting a small supply would not be a problem. There were constant threats against the centre – notably from animal rights groups based out in the wilderness of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden-so a small break-in, during which most of the contents of the centre could be strewn around and trashed, was an easy thing to arrange… particularly after administering a small dose of sleeping tablets to her sister, who obligingly nodded off in front of the TV.
Hilda scooted along Luddersedge’s late night streets, let herself in with her own key-thanking God that he had seen fit to make Ian make her a joint key-holder with him-did what she considered to be an appropriate amount of damage, and removed a small amount of nicotine from the glass jar in Ian’s office cabinet, to which, again, she had a key. She left the cabinet untouched by “the vandals” who had destroyed the office. Then, after resetting the alarm, she had smashed in the windows with a large stick and returned home.
It wasn’t until she was almost back at the house that she heard the siren. She had smiled then – it had been
