Mashing down on the Talk button, Andy brought the phone up to his ear. “This had better be good, mate. Otherwise, you’re in for it.”
“Interrupting something important?” Edward Telford asked, trying to make his question sound as innocent as he could but failing miserably.
“No, not really,” Andy replied, making no effort to check the disappointment he felt as he lost sight of his redhead.
“Well, if that’s the case, how about meeting me at the usual spot?” Telford shot back.
“I will, provided you pay for lunch.”
“Andy, dear boy, must I remind you I am a poor civil servant, a pathetic wage slave who labors away on what is for a prosperous entrepreneur like yourself little more than pocket change?”
“Save those crocodile tears for someone who gives a damn about your pitiful lot in life, Edward. Give me an hour.”
“An hour it is.”
With that, Telford rang off, leaving Andy standing off on the side of the jogging track looking off in the distance to where the redhead had disappeared. “Oh well,” he muttered to himself before turning away. “There’s always tomorrow.”
Despite his need to shower, change, and slog his way across London to the small pub just off of Whitehall, Andy was there at the appointed hour and well into his first pint by the time Edward Telford wandered in like he had all the time in the world. Looking up at the six-foot-four career civil servant, Andy grunted. “You do realize you’ve been on the clock for the past ten minutes.”
“Um, let’s see,” Telford mused as he averted his gaze upward while doing some math in his head. “Assuming you bother to work a full eight hours like normal human beings do, at eight hundred a day, that’s a hundred an hour, which means I owe you a tad over sixteen pounds fifty.”
Pulling back, Andy furrowed his brow. “You’re forgetting I’m not a desperate corporate flak who’s trying to make a quota you can bargain down with your slick talk and threats to go elsewhere. It’s eleven hundred a day and a favor, nonnegotiable.”
Staring across the small table, Telford sighed. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a cruel, heartless bastard?”
“Yeah, you,” Andy shot back. “Now, what’s so bloody important that compelled you to drag me all the way over here?”
“Are you familiar with the alleged mercy killings that took place over at Kirkland Hospital earlier this week?” Telford asked as he took the drink delivered to him without his needing to place an order.
“How can anyone who’s still drawing breath not know about the Home Counties’ very own Angel of Death,” Andy muttered in disgust. “You’d think there wasn’t anything else going on in the world besides that. What’s that got to do with you, and why have you called me away from something I was in the process of running to ground?”
Ignoring his friend’s comment, Telford proceeded to explain. “The chief administrator of the clinic is an old friend of mine, a retired RAMC officer I met in Ireland. You might know him — Kyle Lewis.”
“You forget, unlike you, I never had any need to bother with anyone associated with that lot. The whole bunch of them do nothing all day but hang out with sick people and look after eager young subalterns who haven’t got the sense to duck when they’re being shot at.”
“I’ll have you know I was ducking at the time.” Telford sniffed. “The bastard who shot me was behind me.”
“That’ll teach you to pay attention to what’s going on all about you.” Andy snickered.
“If you don’t mind, could we get back to the issue at hand? I’d rather like to keep the outrageous cost of your services down by avoiding any useless chatter or painful trips down memory lane.”
After sharing a chuckle with Andy, Telford continued. “As I was saying, Lewis is convinced the nurse the police are pinning the deaths on at his hospital is innocent. She claims she administered the prescribed dosages of medication called for by the schedule the pharmacist had left for her. Unfortunately, the toxicology reports for all the victims tell an entirely different story. None of the levels found in any of them even comes close to what the pharmacist had prescribed.”
“Well, that’s an easy one, Sherlock,” Andy replied dismissively. “I am assuming the clinic has a centralized computer system that records and tracks all the care each patient receives, including a schedule of medications.”
“Naturally,” Telford replied as he eased back and took a sip of his drink. “Unfortunately for Anna Morgan, the so-called Angel of Death, when the police checked the system’s audit logs, they found everything was spot on. The dosages of medications in the computer file matched those the pharmacist had prescribed.”
“Who checked out the system?” Andy asked.
Knowing his friend was going to ask this question, Telford reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile, and scrolled down to the notes he’d made. “A detective sergeant by the name of Marbury, Hannah Marbury of the Yard’s computer crimes unit.”
Upon hearing this, Andy grunted before taking a sip of his pint as he mulled something over in his head. “She’s good. I imagine if there was something to be found in the system, she would have found it.”
“Lewis thinks otherwise,” Telford countered. “He believes his nurse’s story. That’s why he asked me if I knew someone who could take a look at the system and see if the police somehow missed something.”
Without any need to give the matter a whit of thought, Andy nodded. “I have just the person who can find any glitches in a system like that, provided there is one.”
“Please tell me it’s not that odious little dwarf of yours,” Telford moaned as he set his drink down. “Lewis runs a respectable hospital that caters to an extremely exclusive clientele, who right now he’s fighting very hard to keep.”
“Not to worry, mate,” Andy replied with a cheeky grin. “Karen Spencer is as respectable and discreet as can be. She’s what the Americans call a military brat. Her father is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who works for Symantec. She used to, as well, until I poached her from them.”
Satisfied, after placing their order with a waiter without bothering to consult a menu both knew by heart, Telford gave Andy all the details he would need to get started.
Pleased to find no one in the Calico Row office she shared with Andy Webb and Tommy Tyler, Karen Spencer decided this was as good a time as any to do something she’d been itching to do for days. Snatching up the trash bin next to her desk, she carefully sneaked across the floor toward Tommy’s desk even though she was alone. Once there, she began to clear away the trash and clutter her coworker merrily accumulated all about his workstation and on the floor around it.
Doing so was no easy task, for not all the crumpled pieces of paper were rubbish. Some were notes Tommy wrote to himself in an indecipherable code and handwriting only he understood. Then there were the unidentifiable sticky bits that caused Spencer, whom Andy and Tommy called Spence, to wrinkle her nose in disgust as she was picking them up with the very tips of her fingers. How anyone could stand being surrounded by such a mess, let alone do anything productive in its midst, was beyond her. The only thing she was thankful for was her boss, a man who reminded her in so many ways of her father and who was like her when it came to neatness and organization.
She wasn’t quite finished when a voice from across the room startled her. “You know, Tommy is going to be royally pissed when he’s seen what you’ve been up to.”
Jumping even as she was spinning about to face Andy, who was standing in the open doorway, Spence scrambled to hide the nearly full rubbish bin behind her back. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she stammered in a high-pitched voice that betrayed both surprise and guilt.