Roxanne, p.10
Roxanne, page 10
Why was there nothing in Roxanne’s shoulder-bag that she could have used to end her life? There ought to have been if that’s what she did, because there was nothing found in the car, either – the SOCO’s report would make that clear, he already knew. If she died in that position in the Mini, why didn’t Roxanne’s blood behave like everyone else’s? Why hadn’t Serena reported that when the body was lifted out there was indeed a livid patch of discoloured flesh on the left side of her face where post-mortem coagulation had occurred?
Freeman was suspicious too – that’s why she was holding onto it, not letting it go to CID downstairs as a routine matter until some later development caused it to be sent back up but with other fingerprints all over it. She was in her office, keeping herself busy but with this in the back of her mind, waiting for the tox screen results. Just like me, Waters thought.
Two hours later, at 16.31, John Murray found a little phlegm and felt the need to clear his throat. Waters looked up, followed the look and saw that Tom Greene was on his mobile, speaking quietly and at the same time using that pencil to point at something on his screen. Whatever he was indicating to himself, it was the subject of the phone call. Murray was sitting closer to the detective inspector and might have heard something. Waters raised his eyebrows and got back a nod.
Greene’s face was impossible to read. He ended the call with a thank you, and then studied whatever was on his screen again, slowly, line by line. Naturally, he then made a note but at the top of a new sheet of A4 – this could be significant – before picking up his mobile and pressing just two keys. That meant he was calling someone on speed dial, someone he had to ring on a regular basis. Seventy seconds after that, the door opened and Freeman was back in the room.
Chapter Eleven
She perched herself on the end of Serena’s desk, and Tom Greene hesitated for a moment, perhaps thinking she would want a preview before he told them what the toxicology results were. She waved him on, and so Greene pressed the button and the whiteboard came to life. The page was divided into columns, and the columns contained the scientific names of substances and their quantities, as present in the blood taken from Roxanne Prescott’s body. Waters had seen enough of these to know that most of what was present was supposed to be – and almost immediately his eye found the one substance that should not.
Greene said, ‘I’m not qualified to interpret these results but I’ve given the lab a call. They stressed to me and so I’m stressing to you that we are not looking at anything which tells us definitively the cause of death. That rests solely with the pathologist.’
Other eyes were working through the page displayed. Waters glanced at Freeman and saw that her expression was fixed, her eyes almost glazed, and not quite what he had been expecting.
Greene continued, ‘Two things stand out as far as we are concerned. One, she had been drinking. Look here,’ moving the cursor, ‘and we see the number 102. That’s milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood. You all know the legal limit for driving is 80. She was well over. It’s impossible to say how many drinks she’d had but I’m told she wasn’t heavily built.’
He looked at Serena, who said, ‘Petite.’
‘So, there we are. She’d had enough alcohol to send a petite girl over the limit, but probably not enough, according to this data, to say she was seriously incapacitated. ‘
The detective inspector glanced at Freeman as if expecting some input at this point. Her expression hadn’t altered but after three or four seconds she said, ‘Go on, Tom.’ Waters saw Serena watching, and she too had been struck by something. He waited until she noticed him but she gave nothing back. Even so, he wasn’t imagining this.
Greene said, ‘However, looking here, in the second table, we see cyclohexanone, and to the right of that, ketamine hydrochloride. The number to the right again is 6.57 mg/l; six point five seven milligrams per litre of the material tested, which is actually the same as parts per million. You all know what this is.’
The quiet told Greene that indeed they did. Denise Sterling ended it with, ‘Exactly how much ket is that, sir?’
‘That’s one of the reasons I called them,’ Greene said. ‘It’s a lot. Right at the top end of what they typically find for ketamine. Fatalities, according to my source, have occurred between 0.5 and 7mg/l – which is not say that in those cases ketamine was the sole cause of death. It’s often mixed and used with other drugs, but not in this instance, according to these results. In the light of this, Dr Robinson is certain to repeat all the tests and carry out additional procedures. But whatever those find, we have to conclude that the results we have in front of us are significant.’
Freeman got off the table, looking at her phone. She said, ‘Sorry, urgent message. I need to make a call. Tom, open this up for discussion. It’s highly significant. When I get back, I want someone to tell me all the ways it is.’
And then she left the room. There were other surprised looks but Waters only watched Serena, and this time she didn’t ignore him. She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and he saw it. So did Maya Kumar, because she was watching him, and she held his gaze until he looked away.
Clive Betts said, ‘How fast-acting is this stuff? I haven’t really come across it. Anyone know?’
Denise Sterling did. She said, ‘Sorry to bang on about my time in Yarmouth but all human life is there. It used to be a standing joke that the sheer pain of existence in an east-coast seaside town can be so bad, the only sensible thing to do is to take anaesthetics on a regular basis. That’s what it is. Anyone who’s had an op has probably had a dose of it.’
She had all their attention, and there was more to come. Greene gave her the nod to continue.
“We had a spell of it, associated with a couple of local nightclubs, and we got some input from Action On Addiction. Who are brilliant, by the way. I can remember some of it. The bloke told us that if you inject it, the effects can be virtually instantaneous, which isn’t surprising when you think what it was developed for. It can knock you over before you have time to get the needle out of your arm. Most illicit stuff is white crystals. People grind it up and snort it, or they mix it with a liquid. He told us it’s impossible to measure an accurate dose that way.’
Sterling gave them time to process. As experienced officers, not much of this was new, just some of the details, but it was still baffling – that anyone in their right minds would take anaesthetics for fun. And then Waters thought, last year, for a while, I was drinking too much. I knew I was but I did it anyway, for a few weeks. I knew the damage it was doing, the brain cells that were never being replaced, but that didn’t stop me. Is this so very different?
Ironically, Betts said then, ‘Same as booze. If you take it intravenously it’s instant…’
When he realised every eye was upon him, he said, ‘So I’ve heard. But it’s the same thing, surely. So if you drink this ketamine, it’ll take longer before it hits, right?’
Waters realised where Betts was going with it now. Robinson would examine every square centimetre of the girl’s body for the marks of a needle. If he found such a mark, and if the effects of the drug were as Sterling had described, where was the needle now? It seemed that Roxanne wouldn’t have had time to walk from the house to the car, let alone be capable of driving after such a dose intravenously. And if Robinson found no such marks and she had taken it orally, how quickly would that heavy dose have made it impossible for her to drive the car? To get to the clearing in the wood from Lake had taken Waters a little over thirty minutes, and some of that he had driven at speed.
Sterling said, ‘It would take longer, agreed. But I couldn’t say how long. We didn’t get into it at that level.’
Tom Greene had already written notes on the pad in front of him. As he wrote again, he said, ‘I’m sure our pathologist will have an opinion on the matter.’
Procedurally, DI Greene was brilliant – Waters had realised that several months ago – but there are occasions when strict adherence is a drawback. Waiting for Robinson, as the expert, to pronounce on the matter was entirely logical but it meant waiting almost a week to discover whether another party had been involved in some way in Roxanne Prescott’s death. If she hadn’t driven the Mini into the woods on the Walmsley estate, then someone else did. There had to be other detectives in the room now thinking along similar lines, because at least two more of them had worked with Smith. If the said detective sergeant had been seated here this afternoon, no one would be leaving the room until someone had worked out how to answer the question right now.
Serena said, ‘What about your contact at the lab, sir? Would he know?’
‘Melvyn? Yes. He’s a pharmacologist by training.’
Greene seemed to be weighing up the pros and cons of bothering his contact for a second time in twenty minutes, Murray seemed to be dealing with the situation by staring out of the squad’s only window, and Serena seemed oddly tense, as if fighting down the urge to utter one or two expletives was causing a degree of physical discomfort.
Greene picked up his mobile and said, ‘Petite. What weight is that exactly?’
Sterling said, ‘About two of me, sir.’
He looked at her with a frown and then Serena said, ‘I doubt if she made eight stone, sir.’
Greene wrote this down and said, ‘About one hundred and ten pounds?’
‘Sir.’
The call was answered immediately but then Greene said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and it was clear he’d been asked to hold. No one else spoke, and Freeman’s absence became noticeable again, at least to Waters. She had been missing for at least ten minutes at a critical point in an investigation. And this was an investigation – he had no doubts about it now.
Greene began talking again, outlining the situation they were in and telling the pharmacologist how much the girl had weighed. There was a long response from the other end, and Waters could imagine the list of provisos and conditions before an opinion was offered. This was, after all, a matter of life and death.
Greene made notes, asked no more questions and then ended the call with a thank you. He stared at the page once more, pencil in hand, appearing to be literally dotting i’s and crossing t’s, even though he had written most of it in shorthand; Waters made ready to get hold of Serena Butler before she could get her hands around the detective inspector’s throat.
‘So,’ Greene said at last, ‘the window is five to twenty-five minutes. That’s the time frame in which she might have begun to feel the effects and would most definitely have done so. In view of the dosage and girl’s weight, however, it is likely that she would have felt the effects much more towards the lower end of that timescale. Within a very few minutes was the suggestion. The amount of ketamine involved would then rapidly have disabled her motor functions. Obviously, he wasn’t making a joke there, about her driving a vehicle. He meant-’
The office door opened and Freeman walked in, followed by Priti Hussain with a clipboard.
It was getting dark by the time the last of them left the building. Freeman was still in there, making unconvincing noises about going home herself, and Serena had waited around, finding excuses to do so. As she and Waters walked together down the stairs towards the staff entrance at the rear of Central, he had asked her why because it had been obvious, to him at least, and she’d said she would tell him when they were out of the building and in the car park. The telling would not be straightforward but he had allowed for that.
When she had her car door open and her bag on the passenger seat, she looked up at him and said, ‘Did you notice anything?’
‘When?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘Yes. Lots of things.’
The two of them had sparred together many times, and there was a ritual element to it, as there is in any mature relationship. But she also appeared concerned. She was addressing him as her sergeant neither officially nor ironically; invariably it was one or the other – but not on this occasion. Waters knew that when all the nonsense was stripped away, they would both have described the other as a friend.
She said, ‘So what did you notice? When did it get a little weird?’
He thought of and dismissed all the potentially flippant responses.
‘When the tox screen results appeared on the whiteboard.’
Serena nodded and said, ‘Agreed. Usually she’d have led the questions on that. What did she do instead?’
She wanted to be sure he’d seen what she had seen.
Waters said, ‘She handed it back to the DI.’
‘Correct. Did she ask a single question on it herself? No. That’s exhibit one. Exhibit two – did you see the look on her face?’
Yes, of course. But a complication was that Freeman had a face difficult to read, whatever the situation. She didn’t smile very often, and the unwary were often misled by this into believing that every word she said was serious. But neither did she show alarm or fear or confusion. She dealt with situations through actions rather than expressions.
Serena went on, ‘The screen only had one interesting thing on it, one thing that someone might react weirdly to, didn’t it?’
She was following his own thoughts exactly. Waters said, ‘The ketamine.’
Serena looked back across the darkening car park, as if to make certain the subject of this conversation wasn’t making a stealthy approach. Then she said, ‘And exhibit three. I was sitting closest to her, and I’ve worked with her longer than anyone else in the room. I know how she has her mobile set up.’
This was something new. Waters said nothing, he simply looked directly at Serena and waited. She seemed then almost reluctant to complete her case, but there was no way she could have driven away from here without telling him. So she said, eventually, ‘I could see her phone before she looked at it. She didn’t get a call or a message. She just wanted to get out of the room.’
Freeman received texts on a regular basis. If there was work going on, it was her habit to glance at and then ignore them, unless they were pertinent to a case. Waters had assumed this was what had happened – that there had been a message but on this occasion the detective chief inspector had decided to use it to leave the room. He did not doubt Serena’s conclusion that something on the screen had made Freeman uncomfortable. But if she had invented a text in order to leave the room, that was a different matter altogether. So different, in fact, it seemed hardly credible.
He said, ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Totally. The boss’s phone is no different to yours and mine. When she gets a text, it lights up. I could see it, and it didn’t. When she said she had an urgent message, she was… It wasn’t true.’
There were footsteps approaching. Sergeant Holt passed them and said goodnight, and neither began the conversation again until he’d driven away in his blue Nissan.
‘So,’ she said, ‘explain that away. You must have a list of logical possibilities at the ready.’
Waters had learned not to be hurried, especially by junior officers. When he did his usual thing, looking away to the left at something in the middle distance that wasn’t there, Serena said, ‘Or maybe not. Because it’s really strange. I’ve never known her to lie, except to frighten the truth out of a toe-rag. To us? Never.’
He had come to the same conclusion about Freeman. After a moment, he said, ‘Could be an old case. We all have things that give us a chill when they crop up again. When we had to listen to the details of Neville Murfitt’s stab wound to the heart? I was back in Lake General hearing the surgeon talking about DC. We know the DCI was involved in the Ipswich cases, all those dead girls. Maybe it was that. Maybe ketamine was a part of that.’
It was conceivable. Those who investigate the worst of crimes, who confront in their working lives events the public can barely imagine, are changed forever by their experiences. Sometimes the changes take the form of scars.
Serena said, ‘OK. But there’s another possibility. Ketamine is the date-rape drug.’
Waters looked at her and said, ‘Seriously?’
No one bridled quite like Serena.
‘Yes! Seriously! There are some things I don’t make jokes about…’
Before he knew her better, he would have apologised at that point, but she had spoken the truth. She wouldn’t idly speculate about anything involving violence towards women.
After a breath or two, she went on, ‘It’s not uncommon, men spiking drinks, not as uncommon as you think. Anyone who’s spent time in clubs has probably come across it. Ketamine is the drug of choice. It wipes out short-term memories.’
He allowed her to see he was not dismissing it now, and perhaps this encouraged her. She said, ‘Another thing. I’ve never heard her talk about a bloke. Have you? I mean, I know she wouldn’t chat to someone like you about that but…’
‘Someone like me?’
‘Another bloke. A subordinate as well-’
‘That’s how you see me? A subordinate bloke?’
She lightened up, but only a little and only for a moment. Once Serena had decided to share, she was going to share it all. She said, ‘I am being serious. There’s never been any mention of a man, not a hint of one. Is that why? Has she had some awful experience? When I had a look at her house, there was only a little Toyota Aygo on the drive. I’m sure that was the carer’s. No sign of a man’s car. I-’
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to stake out your DCI’s place.’
It was almost fully dark now. The rear door of the station opened again, and this time it was Freeman herself. She turned left immediately towards her regular parking spot, moving at her usual quick, purposeful pace, and she hadn’t seen them. It seemed wrong to talk about her while she was in view, and nothing more was said until their boss had driven away, and only the two of them remained once more.
