‘Maybe she only had one client,’ Kathy offered.
‘Yeah, that’s a possibility, I suppose.’
‘So you think there were two women living here?’
‘Well no, that’s the thing. According to Gerry the fingerprints in both rooms are the same. He’s only found one person’s prints in the entire house so far. There’s a hairbrush in each bedroom and the hair looks identical in each-long, deep red.’
There were no men’s clothes or toiletries. The whole place, they noted, was immaculately clean and tidy. ‘In fact,’ one of the SOCOs said, eyeing the other, ‘we think it’s a bit suss.’
‘In what way?’
‘Like someone’s gone over it all, every square inch.’
‘A cleaner?’
The woman shook her head. ‘A searcher. A pro, so careful we can’t really be sure.’
‘How do you mean?’
The woman took her to a chest of drawers against the wall and kneeled, pointing to compression marks on the carpet, not quite aligning with the corner of the furniture. ‘Looks as if it’s been moved recently and the carpet lifted. And in the dust on top of the wardrobe, finger marks of someone feeling, but no prints-they were wearing gloves.’
After she was dead? Kathy thought about it. Yet they hadn’t touched the stuff on the kitchen benches. ‘She only moved in a few months ago. She would have shifted stuff around.’
‘Hm, maybe.’
Kathy went to the window of the back bedroom, and looked down on the small courtyard and the gate to a secluded car park to the rear. Another discreet entry.
Sundeep arrived and was shown through to the kitchen. Kathy stood in the doorway with him and pointed at the saucer of white powder, feeling uncertain.
‘It’s probably bicarbonate of soda or something, but I thought we’d better be careful.’
‘Quite right.’
‘Though it wouldn’t make any sense…’
Sundeep put on a mask, then opened his bag and very carefully began taking samples from the saucer, glass and opened bottle. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘That’s all really. They haven’t been through this room yet.’
Together, she and Sundeep opened drawers and cupboards. In a corner of one they came across a screw-top jar, unlabelled, containing traces of what looked like more of the white powder. Sundeep took a sample then said, ‘I’ve got enough. They can move in here now.’
‘How long will it take?’
He gave her a grim smile. ‘Hardly any time. The lab’s too slow, so I set up my own apparatus. Care to take a look?’
She wanted to spend a lot more time in the house, but later, when the forensic team was finished. She left, telling them to phone her if they came up with anything interesting.
•
Sundeep had set up a small laboratory in what had once been a darkroom along the corridor from his pathology suite in the basement. Despite a powerful fan that he switched on as soon as they went inside, the smell of chemicals had permeated the benches, on one of which was rigged an assembly of glass tubes and vessels held in clamps.
‘All right.’ Sundeep rubbed his hands in anticipation and handed Kathy goggles, mask and gloves. He put on the same and began to open jars from a shelf above the bench. From one he took a piece of metallic zinc, and dropped it into a fat test tube, then added a few drops of blue fluid from another flask with a pipette.
‘Copper sulphate,’ he muttered. Again, with a little tug of nostalgia, Kathy was taken back to her schooldays. The chemistry mistress had been stern and grey-haired, she remembered, formidable in her attempts to stop the boys from blowing themselves up or gassing themselves. What had become of her?
Sundeep was adding a small amount of his first sample, of the white powder they’d found in the saucer.
‘Now, hydrochloric acid…’ He took the glass stopper out of a bottle and poured the acid into the test tube, the mixture foaming up as he sealed it. After a few more adjustments, he held a cigarette lighter to the end of a thin glass tube connected to the test tube, and a flame leapt out. ‘Hydrogen gas,’ he said, voice muffled by his mask. ‘And, if there’s any arsenic present, arsine gas too.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Watch.’ He took a pair of pincers and lifted a glazed porcelain dish to the flame. As they watched, a silvery black mirror was formed on its surface. Sundeep’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! There it is. That’s arsenic, Kathy.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘This is my version of the Marsh test. It’s very sensitive. It’s what eventually put a stop to arsenic poisoning in Victorian England. Before this you could never really tell. There’s your culprit: arsenic trioxide.’
Kathy stared at the dark mirror, seeing a blurred image of herself in its depths.
Sundeep repeated the experiment with each of his samples. They all contained arsenic.
Kathy rang the Crime Scene Manager at Rosslyn Court to let him know.
‘Yes, we took precautions. Funny thing though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We’ve lifted clear prints from the dish, the spoon, the juice bottle, the scales and the screw-top jar, and they match the ones we’ve found all over the house. I had them email Marion Summers’ prints from the path lab to my laptop here. They match. They’re all Marion’s.’
•
‘No sign of a forced entry?’ Brock was standing in Marion’s work room, taking it in.
‘No.’ Kathy had just arrived back from Sundeep’s laboratory. ‘Everything looks completely undisturbed.’ But the word jarred a little. Was that really the impression it gave? More that it was frozen, the house holding its breath as if waiting to see whether they would discover its secrets. She told Brock about the SOCOs’ notion about a careful searcher.
He shrugged. ‘They get bored, the repetition. Sometimes their imaginations run wild.’
The Crime Scene Manager put his head around the door. ‘We’re on our way out. I’ll try to get them to hurry up with the DNA results.’
‘Thanks, I’d really appreciate that.’ But Kathy was already resigned to what they’d find. ‘You’re quite sure about the fingerprints on the stuff in the kitchen though, are you?’
‘Yeah, they’re all hers. No sign of anyone else’s.’ He saw her disappointment and added, ‘Sorry, luv.’
‘It just wasn’t what I expected.’
‘How could you?’ Brock said at her side, studying the notes on the pinboard. There was a china ornament on the mantelpiece below that looked oddly out of place, a figurine of an old woman selling balloons, and he picked it up and turned it over, examining the name, running his finger around the hollow interior. ‘A young, attractive, intelligent woman, apparently doing well, carefully measures out a heavy dose of arsenic trioxide into a bottle of juice and goes off to the library. After working through the morning she goes out into the square where she eats her sandwich and washes it down with the poisoned drink in full public view. Then collapses and dies an excruciating death. It’s hard to fathom.’ But Kathy could recall other public suicides she’d encountered, histrionic and manipulative, extravagant acts of self-destruction that had filled her with a mixture of despair and disgust.
Kathy unfolded the list of key words that Tina had given her and showed it to Brock, pointing out Suicide/suicide pact. ‘I spoke to a science student at the university who’d met Marion at a party. When she discovered that he was doing chemistry, she told him that she was interested in arsenic, and when he asked why, she said she wanted to poison someone. He thought she was joking. So did I.’
‘Yes.’
‘I had developed this picture of her in my mind. I felt I was coming to understand her.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Her early home life was a mess, no father and a promiscuous drunk for a mother, things looking bad until her aunt took her in. She settled down, won a scholarship, escaped to London, worked hard, did well. Very organised, independent.’
Brock turned and looked pointedly at Kathy. ‘Sounds like someone else I know.’
She coloured slightly. ‘Oh… no. Not at all. No, I was just so sure she was the innocent victim of some creep like Keith Rafferty or Nigel Ogilvie. It seemed so tragic, so unfair-but now this. The SOCOs thought she might be on the game, or at least was being kept by a rich lover. Well, you saw the mirror on the bedroom ceiling, and then there’s this house. The rent must be pretty steep. It just wasn’t how I imagined her.’