Foul Deeds: A Rosalind Mystery (3 page)

“Do you want me to put it on my Visa too?” I said, leaning in through the window.

“Great, thanks Roz.”

“I was joking McBride. Hand over your credit card. I'll bring the receipt out for you to sign so you don't have to move. And by the way, it's time for you to give me a paycheque, so you'd better get to it before you get knocked off. ”

“Are you good to go?” I asked as he slowly moved from my car into the rescued Subaru. Molly was already sitting at attention in the passenger seat. She looked as though she could drive if she had to.

“Never better,” he replied. “Fax me your poison research and let's meet later.” McBride inconveniently refused to get a computer—I was his link to the net, and was forever faxing information off to him.

“I have rehearsal at six,” I said. “So we'll have to meet either before or after—or how about tomorrow morning, when you'll have had time to sleep on it?”

“Six is a ridiculous time for a rehearsal. Why don't they have it in the day?”

“Most of them have jobs,” I said, “to try and make ends meet.”

“Does Sophie have a job?”

“No—not a straight job anyway. She does television and film stuff and charts for people—you know, astrological charts. But her heart is in the theatre, so she's happy to do this gig and split whatever they make at the gate.”

“Crazy.”

“Yeah. So tomorrow morning, then?”

“Come over.”

As I was walking back towards the gate where Old Solid was parked, I heard him yell: “Bring breakfast!”

Bac
k at my desk, I organized all the material I had gathered on the poisons, faxed it off to McBride, and started into
Hamlet
. I was pretty sure that the rehearsal would get beyond Ophelia's frightened description of Hamlet's visit to her sewing closet, and into the oily arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the court. Polonius would by this time be convinced he had found the reason for Hamlet's unruly behaviour and would be zealously preening while presenting Ophelia's private correspondence with Hamlet to the King
and Queen. It was a zesty bit of evidence that would justify their heartless set-up of Ophelia for her next humiliation—the nunnery scene. But as I opened the script, my eye caught the ghost's description of the poisoning:

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

and in the porches of mine ear did pour

The leperous distilment, whose effect

Holds such an enmity with blood of man

That swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body—

Such treachery, I thought. It had been given out that the old King had been poisoned by a serpent during his afternoon nap in the orchard. Meanwhile, the real serpent—his brother Claudius—had slithered into the garden with the deadly vial and poured the poison into the King's ear. What exactly is “hebenon,” I wondered. Looking it up in one dictionary, I found it defined as a nonce word, created for this occasion by Shakespeare. But the OED connects the word “hebenon” with “Eibenbaum,” the German word for yew. I sat up straight. That rang a bell. I grabbed the pile of paper I had faxed to McBride and started flipping through it. On the list of lethal plants was the popular landscaping shrub or tree the yew, “widely available in Nova Scotia. The pulp of the arils—the red berry-like fruit that is found only on the female plant—is harmless, but the seeds inside can be fatal, causing trembling and breathing difficulty with suppression of heart action, and in some cases, death can occur suddenly without any prior symptoms at all”!

I felt electrified. I had the eerie sensation of being guided towards the truth. I dialed McBride.

“Did you get the fax?” I asked as soon as he picked up.

“It's here,” he said.

“Okay. I'm coming over now.”

“But I thought you said…”

“It's okay—it's not even two o'clock.”

“You've got something for me?”

“I think I've got a lead,” I replied.

“I've got something for you too.”

“I'll be there in a few minutes.”

“Bring lunch,” he said and hung up.

Lunch? Oh brother. I had nothing but some ancient sliced ham and half a loaf of bread. I didn't want to poison McBride—that would be just too ironic. Besides, all the evidence would point to me. I had a can of tuna I could take over. With any luck he'd have a bit of cheddar or something. I tripped over the cat while taking the bread out of the freezer. I hadn't seen her for hours, but suddenly there she was, looking distinctly offended by my hasty manner.

“Well,” I said, “you can finish your favourite, but it'll be the dreaded crunchies tonight. I don't have time to go to the store.” She swished her fluffy tail and sat down by her dish. “You've had fair warning,” I said, scraping the last of the fancy “chicken in gravy” out of the tin for her.

“S
o, in your opinion what makes this form of poisoning more likely than any of the others?” McBride asked as he scarfed down the last of the tuna melt sandwich I had made for him.

“Well,” I said, “it's widely available here, and all parts of the yew tree contain significant concentrations of taxine. While taxine is now being extracted to make a drug called Taxol, which is effective in fighting breast cancer, the actual substance is a complex mixture of alkaloids that are highly toxic and can bring about death in less than an hour—a death that looks like heart failure. And, even if the poisoner didn't have access to the deadly seeds from the female plants, the toxin in the actual foliage increases in the winter to a dangerous level. I have a strong feeling about it—intuition or something. And it's an age-old method.”

I was reluctant to let him know I had been led to my conclusion by a somewhat dubious connection to an obscure poison mentioned in a play written over four hundred years ago. He was already cranky enough about my time-consuming obsession with
Hamlet
.

“I mean the least we could do, McBride, is check out the landscaping. Maybe the Kings have yews growing on their property. Peter King died on a Sunday, didn't he? So we should find out if there's a possibility he was poisoned right in his own home on the weekend. And since the yews are evergreen, it will be fairly easy to spot them in this weather. Besides—you're the one who wanted us to look into poisoning in the first place!”

“No stone unturned,” he conceded. Enough of my hunches had yielded results that McBride knew better than to dismiss the yew tree idea out of hand, but he looked skeptical.

“So what do you have for me?” I asked him.

“Wait until you hear this, Roz.” He got up and pushed the message button on his telephone. It was a male voice speaking in a hasty whisper:

“Hello, Mr. McBride—I hope you get this before you go to meet me as we'd arranged. I—I can't make it. I'm afraid I'm being watched. I'm sorry but I'm too nervous to go through with it. I'm really sorry.”

“Wow. This changes the water on the beans. Do you have an actual record of the time the message came in?”

“The telephone gives the time of the message as just shortly before our appointed meeting time, but I'd gone out earlier that day and didn't make it home to pick it up.”

“So it doesn't appear that you were tricked by the original caller as you thought, because if you'd gotten this message you never would have gone to meet him. That meeting was hijacked,” I said. “And whoever took it was counting on you showing up.”

“Yup,” he said. “They got lucky.”

He had nothing in the place to drink but tap water, but it was filtered and cold, and I took a long drink. Molly, thirsty from scouring the tuna tin, went to her big red bowl and followed suit.

“So now what?” I asked, putting down my glass.

“I've got more reason than ever to keep digging through all this water resource business,” McBride said. “It's hugely fraught with power struggles and corruption and will only get worse as the fresh water supply dwindles in the world. Peter King believed that communities should have control of their water rights, and he had enough smarts, wealth and clout to really rock the boat.”

“So you're saying he may have been gotten out of the way by someone who stood to gain from these privatization deals.”

“You know Roz, there are millions, probably billions of dollars involved in this stuff. I'm learning that what the multinational conglomerates like Europa do is first move in on the bottom rung—say, as experts in sewage treatment. That garners them a bundle to begin with in construction and management contracts, and then they go for control of the water supply, maintaining that if they're responsible for what comes out in sewage it only makes sense they have control of the water supply to monitor toxins and all that. And you know what? That all makes good logical sense, and is a service a lot of places really need. The problem is greed. Given all that control, many of these corporations limit people's access to the resource, charging everyone an arm and a leg for their tap water. What should be reasonably available to everyone becomes an out-of-reach commodity.”

“So our man King was a hero,” I said. “I mean it sounds as though he was instrumental in stopping Europa from getting a foothold here in Canada.”

“I think he was, and the irony is that most people simply have no idea what's going on.”

“This is giving me the willies, McBride. We need to be really careful.”

“Always,” he replied.

“No comment.” I looked pointedly at his bandaged head.

Suddenly I felt a creepy, clammy wave of fear. I picked up a pen and wrote on the paper towel he was using as a napkin, “Bugs? Maybe they got you into the hospital so they could do a number here.”

He took the pen from me and wrote: “Or before, even. Maybe that's how they knew about the meeting in the first place.”

We stared at each other. McBride got up and started to look around. I began searching carefully too. Listening devices had changed since I studied them years ago in a criminology course on surveillance. Now they were a lot smaller—tiny, in fact—and a lot more sensitive. Our chances of actually spotting them were slim. Besides, McBride's place was its usual knot of untidiness. We needed some sophisticated detection gear. Molly, who had been lying down under the kitchen table, moved to the back door and wagged her tail, signalling that, in her opinion, there were better ways to pass the afternoon.

I got to rehearsal about twenty minutes early.
Sophie was already there working on her lines. As I was taking off my coat, she interrupted herself in the midst of, “
O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown
”
to ask, “How's McBride?” I decided to leave my scarf on—it was damp and chilly in the Crypt. “You got his car and all that?” she added.

“Oh yes—all done. I spent part of the afternoon at his place. We took Molly out for a run on the Commons.”

“She's a great dog. Very special, I think.” Sophie spoke as though she knew all dogs.

“I'm fond of her. And believe me, I don't take easily to dogs. But I kind of think of Molly as a person. I've known her since McBride rescued her—must be about four years ago now.”

“Really? From what?”

“I'll let McBride tell you sometime,” I said. “How's it all going?”

“I'm working ahead a bit, looking at that pesky nunnery scene. We probably won't get that far tonight but I'm so antsy about it. If I know it really well, it'll be easier to play. I mean, she really gets messed about by Hamlet in that scene, doesn't she?”

“
Well, she's totally set up, Sophie. I mean she knows Polonius and Claudius are using her. She must feel like a complete jerk. What does Claudius say to Gertrude right in front of Ophelia?” I took the script from her and looked at the scene. “Here it is—‘
Her Father and myself, lawful espials, will so bestow ourselves that seeing, unseen, we may of their encounter frankly judge.
' God, lawful espials! Sounds like the Bush admin. And then Polonius hands her a prayer book and says—‘
Ophelia, walk you here. Read on this book that show of such an exercise may colour your loneliness.
' He's telling her how best to play her role in order to sucker Hamlet in. Ophelia's not by nature deceptive, but she's obedient to her father. That Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom—you know him?—he writes that when Ophelia says, ‘
I shall obey my Lord,
' in that very first scene with Polonius, her tragedy is already in its place. So, okay, inwardly she's compelled to obey her father, but at the same time she cares deeply for Hamlet, who realizes the second he encounters her that something's up—he can smell it. The whole situation just releases this venom in him.”

“I see what you mean,” Sophie said. “He must be horrified she's become part of the dissembling he sees all around him at the court.”

“That's right,” I said. “So then at the beginning of the scene when she starts the conversation by trying to return the things he's given her—an obvious artifice—something in him just snaps, and he rages on, completely insensitive to her fragile state. He's partly railing against his own mother and partly lashing out hard for the benefit of the listeners—those “espials”—and he gets very carried away. It's ruthless, but he's in a world of treachery and he knows it. Part of what is truly tragic in this play is the bulldozing of the sweet love between Hamlet and Ophelia. They don't stand a chance.”

I stopped ranting. The others were starting to arrive. Sophie nodded, taking the script back from me, “Okay, thanks Roz—that really helps.”