“The very one. How can I help?” I asked.
“This is Dr Bates. I’m calling you from the hospital in regard to Abigail Whelan.”
I sat up straighter, more alert. “Is there any change?” I asked.
“Not in Miss Whelan, but we believe we have isolated the drug in her system. Dr Olsen wonders if you might spare her some time in the hospital to go over her findings.”
“We’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” I answered.
“Wonderful. Thank you, Inspector.”
I hung up and swivelled my chair around to an expectant looking Mills.
“The hospital,” I told him, standing up and hauling my coat on. “They’ve got news on the drug in Abbie’s system and have invited us down to take a look.”
Mills” face brightened, and he hopped up. “Brilliant. Doesn’t take twenty minutes to get there, though,” he added with some confusion.
“No. But we need to let Sharp know, and I need to use the bog, so let’s get moving.”
Mills shook his head, smiling, but quickly pulled his coat on and walked with me to Sharp’s office. Her door was open, and she sat on the end of her desk, chatting to a constable when I knocked on the doorframe.
“Come in,” she called, nodding to the constable as she departed. “Morning, boys. You both look chipper today.”
“Hospital called. Toxicologist wants to see us. Apparently, they’ve got something on the drug in Abbie’s system.”
Sharp raised her eyebrows and smiled. “A good morning indeed, then. Off your trot, I’ll make sure everything’s cleared for you.” She walked around her desk to pick up her phone.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I answered.
“Let me know straight away,” she added darkly. “If there’s some horrible new drug going around the city, I’d like to know.”
“I imagine this is an isolated case, ma’am, but of course,” I told her. She nodded and waved her hand, dismissing us from the room.
“Bog then?” Mills asked, and I nodded, crossing the growingly busy floor to the corridor the toilets lay down.
We were out the door soon after that, climbing into Mills’s car and moving off from the station.
The hospital was a busy one, and after struggling to find a place to park for a while that made me very happy, I told the hospital twenty minutes, we headed through to reception, where we showed them our warrant cards and were directed through the labyrinth of disinfectant smelling hallways to the lifts. We went down a few floors, far away from where any of the patients really were and were met on the other side by a woman in a lab coat. Her frizzy salt and pepper hair was tied up in a bun that it rapidly tried to escape from, a pair of glasses balanced on her nose, and she blinked us from behind the thick glass, a steaming mug of tea in her hand and a clipboard in the other.
“Detective Inspector Thatcher?” she asked me as we stepped out of the lift.
“Yes. And this is Detective Sergeant Mills,” I said with a wave in his direction. She shook both of our hands.
“Dr Olson, toxicologist. You have Dr Lena Crowe as your pathologist, I believe?” she asked, walking off down the hallway.
“We do,” I confirmed.
“We were med students together,” she told me over her shoulder. “She’s brilliant, Lena.”
“She is,” I replied with a smile at the back of her head. I could see that they would get one well. Dr Olsen led us to a large room of white and steel surfaces, shelf upon shelf of glass bottles lining the far wall. The desk and the wall it sat against were covered in paper, notes, charts, newspaper clippings, the whole lot. She walked over to a long table, pushing an assortment of beakers and test tubes down to one side, slamming her clipboard down with enough force to make Mills jump. He stood almost to attention as the doctor took a long swig of tea and looked up at us.
“I’d like to point out that I am also brilliant,” she began, and I nodded. Her name was vaguely familiar, and I had no doubt that she was as useful to us as she was to the hospital. “But even I was stumped on this one. Straight away, we ruled out any of the usual suspects,” she told me, her face turning serious, her voice too as she settled into her confident, familiar role.
“It looks like a handmade sort of situation,” she told us, showing us a page of chemical compounds that I couldn’t possibly understand. “Some of the ingredients we know, but there’s not enough of them to have had the effect on the patient that we’ve seen. So, I started working on some of the unfamiliar compounds.” She ran a finger down a list. “And luckily for all of us, I recognised one of them from a study in Beijing from about ten or o years ago. These compounds,” she pointed to the top of the list, “are all found in a plant, Nerium oleander. Or just Nerium.”
“A plant?” I asked, leaning forward.
“It’s a sort of shrub,” she told me. “Rather a widespread plant, but it tends towards temperate climates; the Mediterranean, South Asia, Northwest Africa. Quite pretty, but only to look at. These,” she tapped the list again, “when ingested can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, irregular heart rhythm. It’s not hugely deadly. Very few people have ever actually died from ingesting it, but its effect on the cardiac and nervous system can affect circulation, cause seizures, and comas, often leading to death.”
“Christ,” Mills breathed. “I’ll be sure not to get any from the garden centre,” he said.
Dr Olsen smiled at him. “Good lad. The amount you’d need for that effect on the body, I’m sure about. But the fact that it’s been blended with some other chemicals, means that whoever made it knew what they were doing.”
“What about treatment?” I asked.
“Now that we know what it is, we can begin working on getting it out of her system,” Dr
