Made To Be Broken (14 page)

Thanks Ethan. Thanks very much. As if the public weren’t panicking enough, you decided to give them a big heave-ho push by quoting frightened members of the public.

We really were up against it now.

There was no need to raise my voice. The incident room was quiet. Everyone was waiting to see what I would say. Events were taking place at a pace beyond which we were ready or prepared for and we needed to stop being on the back foot. No one here was comfortable with being so far behind an investigation. I’d even managed to talk Catherine into allowing me to keep Ross on the team because we needed all hands on deck. I’d noticed he had made more of an effort with his overall appearance today. He still looked like he had been caught in the headlights of an oncoming articulated lorry, but he was a cleaner-looking roadkill.

As usual, Martin was the complete opposite of how Ross had been presenting himself recently and I loved that about him. He was always the yang for the yin and now was sitting using an old letter opener to pick bits out of his front teeth. I had no idea where he’d got the opener from, I didn’t realise people still used them. He never became flustered, was always calm and could always be relied upon. Aaron was poised over his notepad with his pen, ready to take notes as we progressed through the morning’s briefing.

Not only did I have the investigation team here, but I had Claire Betts the press officer. Between her and Evie, they kept me sane at work. Jack Kidner was here as well as the county divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Trevor Youens. Youens was a buttoned up kind of guy; not just that his appearance was immaculate, but he was obsessed about going by the book.

Youens wasn’t happy. This latest development of the shopkeeper killed on his area appeared to be linked to our investigation. The CCTV seemed to show that it was part of a group type hysteria attack and the blow to Khaleel’s head that killed him, though not directly struck by the men in the shop, was a direct result of the incident that evening making it a murder investigation.

This was going to make Youens’ life hell now. He’d be responsible for reassuring the public in his division that he could keep them safe, he would have to make plans to actually keep them safe, so for that, he needed to know what we had. He had made it clear on entering the briefing that he wanted everything. There was no brook given with that statement either. It wasn’t a request or a pleasantry before we started. He had to come up with localised community plans for the safety of residents.

We also had the briefing video linked up to his intelligence unit, so they could be in the briefing without leaving their office and be able to take what they needed and research it for their own safeguarding needs. We had our own intel officer, Dave Morgan, present.

And finally we had the four family liaison officers who were placed with each of the bereaved families.

It was a busy incident room with a lot of active minds at work. Only I wasn’t sure we all had the same goal in mind. I needed to catch the person who was randomly killing residents of our county and Youens was responsible for the safety of those residents, but in a different capacity. He had to make sure no one else was killed because of the public outcry caused by the killer we were hunting. Two goals caused by the same person.

I thanked everyone for coming and let them know we were in for the long haul and that leave passes would be authorised once we had resolved this investigation, but for now, none would be signed through.

I began the briefing on what we had so far, starting with the death of Lianne Beers and ending with the public order offences and murder of Zamaan Khaleel on the B5010 in Stapleford. Then I let Jack go through the post-mortem results of the first three murders where we knew that Lianne, Finlay and Angela were all killed with digoxin and yet none of them were taking it for medical conditions. Then Doug, from the Crime Scene Unit, talked about the lack of forensic results. There was so much evidence gathered for testing from the home addresses of the victims that they were still going through it, so we had no real idea the mode of transport into the victims but the press was leaping onto the mode as being food related after speaking to a so-called ‘professional’. I saw Youens roll his eyes at this comment and it took all my strength not to mirror the action. It was frustrating when you had people making guesses at what was happening within an investigation and even worse outside the investigation from the point of view of the offender. He knew the difficulties with investigations but at this point in time he was only concerned about his own back and how to police such a high profile issue.

‘We have a difficult one here. I know you will give it your all. We’re a good team. We can pull together and work this.’ I had Ross’s attention. Martin relaxed further back into his chair. Arms in their usual position, clasped behind his head. Letter opener back on his desk. ‘It’s not easy. I think we can safely say we’ve ruled out suicide.’ Grey shook his head. I carried on, ignoring him, ‘It’s unlikely we have an industrial accident of any sort. Curvet has been helpful and open as much as we can tell; they are the largest producer of digoxin around here and they’re not reporting an accident of any description. Admittedly, they do have a lot to lose if this was their fault, so we can’t rule out a cover up, so we’d need to find out how that cover up would happen. The pharmaceutical companies do have oversight in the form of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which is a government agency, so we can follow that line of enquiry.

‘The other link to Curvet is that they could be being targeted by means of product contamination, so their name is muddied. If an animal liberation group is involved they usually go for harmless items such as salt in the health section products that the pharmaceutical companies make, though there has been one instance where high levels of laxative was placed in probiotic yoghurt cartons, so it’s not out of the realms of possibility that this is what is happening. They don’t seem to have lost any employees recently, so the only disgruntled employees we would find would be ones that are still working there and it’s one huge place. For their part, Curvet is doing an inventory of their products to see if any of it is missing.

‘No matter how hard we work on them, their friends and family, it appears the victims are random, which firms up the idea that Curvet is likely to be the target. I’m waiting for the results of ninhydrin testing on the hate mail to come back. We do need to keep working on the victimology though. We can’t relax and miss something. Look at each person as though they were a murder in their own right and forget they are part of a series, that way we look at family, friends and possible conflicts with people. This could be one targeted murder, with two others committed to throw us off the scent. We can’t cut any corners. We look at each one on its own merit and we look at them as a whole.

‘It’s a lot of work, I know. Overtime is authorised. You’re going to be earning it. I know we already have enquiries ongoing with the digoxin users from the list from HEAD. We still need to work through that because each name needs to have checks made against it and a visit made.’

We really did have our hands full. We needed all the analysts and detectives we could get to work the actions and make the visits. Grey was propped against a desk now, picking at his fingernails. He’d be taking all this in and would go back to his office, write it all up and stress about the situation. The level of morale in the job had changed over recent years.

‘There is one problem we’ve come up against though, boss, in relation to digoxin users.’

‘What’s that, Martin?’ We didn’t need more problems, we needed answers.

Martin leaned forward in his chair. ‘You can actually buy digoxin over the Internet, so even though we are checking out the registered users, there is a capability to go online and buy it without a prescription.’

Shit, was anything going to go our way in this investigation?

‘Okay. Work with the actions we have so far and see what comes of it but bear that in mind. It might be that we end up with a suspect and we need to seize their computer to check the Internet history to see where they got the product from.’

My head and my arm throbbed as we worked our way through the meeting. Youens was tough and unforgiving of anyone who didn’t have the information he needed at their fingertips. He had trouble on his area and not only did he not want it but he didn’t want it escalating further.

I gave him all we had, which at this time wasn’t a great deal and his face set hard like stone as he looked at me. I could play that game. I could stare him out, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to do this in a way where we both worked together. Knocking heads with another supervisor in another area wouldn’t be conducive to our investigation and I knew knocking heads with me wouldn’t help him with his community work either. In this matter we needed to work together.

His plan was to put a larger uniform presence out to reassure people. To have them around local smaller produce sellers. To have them popping in and buying anything they needed from those shops. If they had time to eat, then to do it publicly where they could be seen by the general population. How his staff felt about this when we had no idea where the poison was coming in from, I had no idea, but then again, we all had to buy our food items from somewhere. We all had to eat. His PCSOs would buoy up his small team of uniform officers as his numbers had dwindled considerably during government cuts this past five years. We discussed bringing down some extra uniforms from north of the county to help cover the task at hand and agreed it was something our unit needed to request.

The pace of this investigation was rapid and was wearing me out so I knew it would probably be doing the same to my team. It was also moving in ways we couldn’t predict. This new turn of events with the death of the shopkeeper was shocking. Shocking in his death and shocking that it was fear in ordinary members of the public that had caused it, producing a mob mentality. Because of the timing of the incident we firmly believed it wasn’t racially aggravated but that our initial killer was turning ordinary members of the public into killers. Chief Superintendent Trevor Youens was correct in that we needed to get on top of this before it spiralled out of control, only I wasn’t sure we could. I needed to know what was driving our offender. Usually in cases of product contamination, we had communication, a letter of threat or blackmail, but we’d had neither yet. We were sitting on our hands, not knowing what they wanted or why they were doing it and it was this fear of the unknown that was also gnawing away at my insides.

Where was the poison being administered and were the victims carefully chosen or were they random victims of chance? Questions I needed answers to before we had another one on the slab.

I jotted it down on my list of things to do from this meeting. Staff was a major problem when jobs went the wrong way, ever since our budget had been cut by several million pounds per year. Superintendents fought like hell to keep every single one of their staff and I couldn’t say I blamed them because they were working down to the wire themselves. With each member of staff taken off them, the risk grew for the remaining people in their divisions. Though the officers were dedicated people and worked like hell, but with the paperwork and the immediate low-level call volumes going up, they were drowning. I felt sorry for us all as we sat there. I rubbed my head again and tuned back in as the guy on the internal briefing screen from Youens’ intel unit reported that there was no further chatter that any shops were going to be targeted. We agreed that though this was the case as it stood now, we needed to be vigilant and keep to our community safety plan – and hope to hell we got a good lead on our killer before the city really started to panic.

It was dark. Quiet. Warm. The quilt, heavy on top of me, nearly covered the top of my head and my face almost smothered itself into the pillow. The scent of vanilla with something else mixed in wafted through my half-waking, half-sleeping state. The feeling was one of comfort and relaxation. My body was a heavy weight on the mattress, as though it had decided it had given in from the grind I had been putting it through. I relaxed further into it, my arms star-fishing out from under the pillow my head was pushing down on. A breath escaped and muscles I didn’t realise I had been tensing let go. I felt myself gliding further towards a blissful slumber. I let out another breath and…

What? Where? What? Hell. Shit. What? The ringing broke through. My thoughts scrambled to collect themselves back together as my head felt like a fuzzy morning from a night before.

‘Hello.’

‘DI Robbins?’ the voice was tentative.

‘Yes. What is it?’ Damn. Not tonight.

‘There’s another one.’ Not tonight.

‘Okay. Where?’ Dammit.

‘Well,’

‘Spit it out.’ I shunted myself into a seated position. I couldn’t have this conversation lying down.

‘She’s at the QMC.’ The Queen’s Medical Centre hospital?

‘She’s been moved from the scene already?’

‘That’s just it. The victim is still alive, Ma’am.’

‘I’ll be right there.’ I took details and ended the call.

I needed to get to the hospital.

Damn. This had been such a bad idea, but I’d needed it. A couple of glasses of red wine and the need for some comfort, not just comfort, but the need for him. I missed him. It had been easier to cut him out of my life at first, but now he seemed to be everywhere I looked. His name in every situation, drilling into my mind … and this is where it had landed me.

I turned to my left, breathed in the warm scent of his aftershave, before ending what should never have started – even though I wanted nothing more than to curl up around him and stay there for the rest of the night and play hooky with him the next day. To pretend neither of us had jobs to go to. Jobs that would decimate this and stop all chances of anything happening. Jobs that had already come between us, or was I making excuses? Was I the one to blame for how it had failed to work?

Ethan stirred, turning over and pushing the quilt away from him. I watched as it slid over his hip, exposing skin I had not long ago caressed and kissed. With a couple of painkillers and a couple of glasses of red wine inside me the previous night, I’d sent an irritated text to his phone, which had brought him to my door, his body shaking with frustration and anger at my constant inability to see things his way. We’d yelled at each other for ten minutes. I wanted him to stop reporting on the poisonings to which he’d replied I was an idiot, it was a job. He wanted me to listen to him and stop taking everything as a personal slight. I’d told him
he
was an idiot, I had a career and people’s lives were at risk. We yelled in circles until he stalked into the kitchen and helped himself to a glass of red wine and seated himself on the sofa. He told me he was tired of fighting with me.

Now, I shook his shoulder to wake him. ‘Ethan, you have to go.’