‘No…’ I said. Something was nagging at me. ‘We still don’t know what the toxin was in. But it seems to me that maybe no one was meant to die; they were all just meant to get sick—’
‘To make it look like another accident, something else caused by the curse,’ said Nathan. ‘Yes, that makes sense. But until we know how the toxin was consumed…’ He took out the sheet of paper Matt Turner had given him. ‘Tetrodotoxin comes in pill form, so the murderer would have had to crush it and sprinkle it onto the food.’
‘Which everyone would see, unless it was cooked into it, which we know it wasn’t.’ I groaned in frustration.
‘And if you crushed it up and put it in a drink, it would make it go cloudy and they’d notice that too,’ said Nathan. Cloudy, I thought, and something lurking in the recesses of my brain stood up and waved at me.
‘Not if the drink was already cloudy,’ I said. I grabbed his hand. ‘We need to go back and check on the crime scene.’
Nathan had called the Scene of Crime officers back to Zack’s trailer earlier that day, and they were there now taking samples of every single food item that was left – not that there was much. Jeremy’s plate had already been taken, but they now bagged up all of the crockery and the cutlery and chopsticks to test for any trace of tetrodotoxin.
Nathan nodded to the lead officer as we entered, and I made my way to the table.
‘These glasses,’ I said, pointing to the small sake cups that sat empty among the remains of the meal. ‘Were they all empty when you got here? I didn’t look before.’
The SOCO nodded. ‘Yes, there was no drink in any of them.’
‘Where’s the bottle?’ asked Nathan. The SOCO looked around, then at the list of evidence being bagged up.
‘We haven’t found one,’ he said. Nathan raised his eyebrows and looked at me.
‘The sake?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Aiko told me that Mike Mancuso had made a point of buying a bottle of sake, so they could toast their birthdays in proper Japanese style. Only, she wasn’t impressed because it was nigori sake, which is filtered differently. It’s less refined and, more to the point, cloudy.’
‘So you could slip a crushed-up pill into it and nobody would notice?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it sounds likely. Kimi wouldn’t have drunk it because it’s made of fermented rice and she has a rice allergy, and we both just heard Faith say she hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in years after her relationship with Jeremy.’
‘So that explains why they weren’t ill.’
‘One of the things that’s been niggling me,’ I said, ‘is why Mike Mancuso poured a glass of rice wine, with its extremely high alcohol content, to a recovering alcoholic who had signed a sobriety clause, presumably on Mike’s own insistence. I mean, he might just be an absolute git…’
‘He is,’ said Nathan firmly.
‘I won’t argue with you there,’ I said. ‘But think about it: he encouraged Jeremy to have a drink. Not only that, he allowed Zack to go ahead with serving the pufferfish, even though as far as everyone but Gino knew, it was risky. I know he said Gino had reassured him, but the fact is, if you’re serving something that’s toxic it’s always going to have the potential to be a disaster, innit? He didn’t know it wasn’t toxic.’
‘Okay…’ said Nathan, and I could see him working it out in his own mind. ‘So say the intention was just to make everyone sick. Why did Jeremy die?’
‘Because all the glasses were empty. Faith and Kimi definitely did not drink their sake. An alcoholic, about to fall off the wagon for the first time in a while, is not going to leave two glasses of rice wine undrunk. He probably finished them off for them.’
‘That makes sense… But Mancuso poured himself a drink. I know he claims he was sick as well, but he surely wouldn’t actually drink it, would he?’
‘No…’ I said, but then Nathan did a mini fist-pump.
‘I’ve got it! He spiked the bottle with tetrodotoxin from … somewhere, and then poured everyone a glass.’ Nathan mimed picking up a glass. ‘‘A toast to the birthday girls!’ And then his phone goes off at some pre-arranged time – either he’s set an alarm to sound like a ringtone, or he’s genuinely got his daughter or whoever it was to call him, so he says, ‘Sorry, everyone, got to take this, start without me’, and goes outside—’
‘Still carrying his glass of sake—’
‘Which he tips out onto the grass while he’s on the phone, then goes back in looking like he’s drunk it, and then pretends to be ill overnight.’ Nathan looked at me. ‘You are bloody brilliant, Parker.’
I beamed at him. ‘Why thank you, DCI Withers.’
‘Ahem…’ We were interrupted by the SOCO, who we’d both completely forgotten about. ‘That’s a great theory, as long as we can get a trace off the glasses. It would be nice if you could find us the bottle…’
‘Guv! Guv!’ Matt Turner burst into the trailer like an overexcited puppy. He stopped, embarrassed, as he spotted the SOC team watching him.
‘Matt, what is it?’
‘I’ve been doing some poking around, talking to the crew, and you’ll never guess who has a teenage daughter who just came out of heroin rehab in a poncey Swiss drug clinic!’
‘Mike Mancuso,’ Nathan and I said together. Matt’s face fell and his whole body deflated – funnily enough, just like a pufferfish.
‘Yeah,’ he said. Nathan patted him on the back.
‘Nice work, Matt,’ he said. ‘You may have just stitched up the whole case.’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘We might know the who and the how, but we still don’t know the why.’ And then my phone pinged, and we knew that too.
