“I was thinking perhaps he had knocked back a bottle and thrown it aside somewhere in the station, but Dan didn’t turn up anything. Still, the thought was planted, you know? So I made a list of other kinds of poisons that could have had the same effect.”
“I can’t wait to hear how I fit into this,” muttered Bryant.
“Simple. I could smell something else on the boy apart from alcohol, and remembered your horrible old pipe. Tobacco. Nicotiana tabacum. Simple, but incredibly effective. Hillingdon has all the signs: excess saliva, muscular paralysis, diaphoresis – ”
“What’s that?” asked May.
“Excessive sweating. His shirt was creased across his back as if it had been ironed into place.”
“Only one thing wrong with your diagnosis. Hillingdon wasn’t a smoker.”
“He didn’t need to be. The stuff used to be readily available as an insecticide until its lethal properties were recognised. It’s easy to make a tea out of rolling tobacco. There are plenty of recipes for it on the Internet because dope growers use it to kill mites on marijuana plants. He’d have suffered dizzy spells, confusion, tachycardia, low blood pressure, with worsening symptoms leading to coma and death. The stuff’s all over his face and the collar of his shirt. I think it’s possible that somebody sprayed him with it. You could empty out a perfume sampler, like the ones they give you in department stores, and fill it up.”
“Gloria Taylor sprayed perfume samples on customers at Selfridges.”
“Then I’d say you might have found your link.”
“Are you definite about the cause of death?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Well, you reached a solution without having to show me the inside of his colon, for which I thank you,” said Bryant. “Although I’m not sure this brings us any closer to finding a culprit. How easy is it to transfer?”
“Liquid tobacco? Pretty easy, but it also washes off. The smell’s harder to get rid of. Do you have any suspects in mind?”
“That’s the trouble,” said Bryant glumly. “We have half a dozen of ‘em. Nikos Nicolau is apparently studying biochemistry, but he also suffers from claustrophobia. Every suspect also has a reason not to be a suspect. I think this time I might need to employ modern crime detection techniques.”
“A victory for the scientific community,” Kershaw said with a laugh. “John, you should be pleased.”
“I’m relieved,” May replied. “I’ve banned Arthur from trying to wrap up the investigation by using esoteric means.”
“Did you mean that?” asked Bryant after they had thanked Kershaw and taken their leave. “You really want me to play it by the book this time?”
“Yes, I do,” said May with determination. “And I don’t mean the book of witchcraft, or the ancient myths of England, I mean the Police Operational Handbook, 784 pages of sound, solid common sense. You want the Unit to survive, don’t you? Well, that’s how we’ll do it.”
It was time to return to the house in Mecklenburgh Square, where they could break the news of Matthew Hillingdon’s death and commence the property search. That was when Banbury’s call came in.
“The partial from the sticker,” he said, “we’ve got a match. It’s Toby Brooke.”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me no. I’ve got the results on the screen in front of me. As I said, it’s a partial, but enough to bring him in.”
♦
All the housemates were advised of their rights, and were ordered to be present on the premises. If they hadn’t taken the detectives seriously before, they would have to now.
Bryant was thinking about the tobacco in the ashtray, and Ruby Cates admitting that she was the only smoker.
“You know those old Agatha Christie whodunnits where you get the butler, the chorus girl, the aunt and the lord into the library, then Poirot goes through their motives before accusing one of them?” he said to May as they walked. “I feel like him, except for one small detail. I’m certain it’s not Toby.”
“You just don’t want to believe it’s him because you feel a kinship with working-class kids,” said May.
“It probably is his thumbprint; I just don’t think he’s the type to commit murder. He seems scared of his own shadow. If the sticker was on one of the bags or had been picked up from the bar and left lying about the house, any of the others could have touched it. The trouble is, I haven’t the faintest idea how they could have murdered Hillingdon. Out of the five, only Theo Fontvieille has an alibi that clearly checks out. Meera found at least eight witnesses who saw him at the Buddha Bar, and at the end of the evening his Porsche was still outside the club with the keys locked inside it. Of course, Ruby Cates has her leg in a cast, which pretty much rules her out. There’s no way she could have fled from the scene of a crime. Have you seen how long it takes her to get up a flight of stairs?”
“What about the others?”
“Renfield tracked down the callers who spoke to Nikos Nicolau via video link, and they’re willing to swear that it looked as if he was calling from his bedroom. They could see his bed and posters in the background. Plus, we have the log showing the exact time he made the calls. The waitress at Wagamama doesn’t remember serving Rajan Sangeeta, so his movements remain unsubstantiated, and Toby Brooke’s account of his whereabouts is particularly dubious, but that sort of rules in his favour. He’s a bright lad; I’m sure he could come up with a decent alibi if he wanted to.”
“Why shouldn’t it be a woman?” May wondered. “Neither of the deaths required any strength or dexterity – just a shove and a spray. Suppose Ruby Cates’s leg has healed and she can take her cast off? We know that she’s strong.”
“I was thinking more about visibility. She could have kept the thing on, but someone would have recalled a pretty girl with her leg in a cast.”
“And perhaps it’s time to add Cassie Field to our list of suspects.”
“Why? Good heavens, we’ve enough already.”
“It turns out that Ms Field has a history of secret anarchy. She’s the girl who threw yellow paint over the Minister for Agriculture last year. Janice received a call from Leslie Faraday at the Home Office. He knows we interviewed her. Cassie’s got a very impressive arrest file. That’s why she came up with the anarchists’ symbol for the bar. She used to meet there with her urban warrior pals.”
“But you’re forgetting – she has an alibi. She was seen at the Buddha Bar, then half an hour later she arrived at the Karma Bar and spent the rest of the evening there, with the exception of a ten-minute break a little after midnight when she went out for a cigarette. The station’s not far from the bar, but to get there and back she’d have to be a marathon runner.”
“So we have to bring in Toby Brooke.”
“Do we? I’d rather keep an eye on him for a while. Can we do that?”
“If he makes a run for it we’ll be blamed.”
“I’ll make sure he stays put,” Bryant promised.
“I spoke to Renfield a few minutes ago. He blew his cover and was forced to have a very strange conversation with Brooke. It seems the lad started to admit his guilt about something, then ran off.”
“Sounds like he’s close to confessing.”
“Perhaps, but I want to do this the traditional way, with a formal interview. Go into Brooke’s background and wear him down by sheer persistence. We have to interview them all again anyway, so we’ll make it part of that process. The others shouldn’t know what we have on him. Meanwhile we take the house apart, try to establish a link between Taylor and Hillingdon.”
“I’m going to leave this to you, then,” said Bryant. “You’ve always said I have no understanding of the young. I remember interviewing those horrible schoolchildren who saw the Highwayman committing murder* and I still get chills down my spine when I think of them.