Requiem for a Dealer (2 page)

Read Requiem for a Dealer Online

Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Requiem for a Dealer
3.91Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Twice the following day Daniel phoned Battle Alley, and seemed surprised to learn he wasn't the subject of a manhunt. Both times he was assured there were still no unexplained bodies in the morgue at Dimmock General Hospital, and that pending any such development there was nothing more he could or should do.
But Daniel was a born worrier and couldn't dismiss the accident as part of life's rich pageant. He blamed himself. He thought that someone who'd kept his hand in behind the wheel, who'd driven a car more than half a dozen times in the nine years since passing his test, would have reacted quicker or more appropriately and managed to avoid the girl running out of the rain at him. He knew he hadn't been speeding. He thought he'd been careful. But he ended up hitting someone, and now she'd disappeared so he couldn't even be sure she was all right.
And then there was what she said. What was that all about? Did he
look
like someone who ran people down deliberately? Why should she think such a thing? He knew – of course he did, panic was a subject he was intimately familiar with – that people say strange and stupid things in the heat of the moment, with the adrenalin flowing and the blood pounding in the temples. She could have called him all the names under the sun and he'd have understood, even agreed with her. But she'd accused him of trying to kill her. Even though she was wrong, whatever had happened in her life to make her think that? What explained the transfixing hatred in her eyes when she looked at him?
Daniel couldn't begin to understand it. But he knew someone who just might.
Brodie recognised his light step on the Shack Lane pavement and opened her office door as he went to knock. She left it locked as a matter of habit. The services she offered were confidential and often required a degree of discretion: she didn't encourage people to wander in off the street. Either they made an appointment, or they knocked and waited until it was convenient for her to see them.
This Tuesday she was alone, working on the phone and the
Internet, doing the business equivalent of housekeeping which had built up over the weekend. As a one-woman firm Brodie couldn't always manage a nine-to-six five-day week, but she kept Saturdays for the sort of expedition she and her six-year-old daughter could enjoy together. Combing the antiques markets of the south coast, perhaps, or anything that involved animals or machinery. These trips, and Paddy's Sunday morning riding lesson, were highlights of the week for both of them.
But the housekeeping didn't do itself, it waited until she got round to it. By Tuesday afternoon she was glad of a distraction. She waved Daniel to the tiny sofa. ‘Do you want coffee?'
‘Thanks.'
‘You know where the kettle is.' She waved him towards the tiny kitchen. ‘What's up?'
‘I'm worried,' he admitted.
‘What about?'
He stared at her. ‘Gee, I don't know, Brodie. It's not like anything unusual just happened!'
‘The girl? Daniel, you'd have heard by now if there were going to be repercussions. Anyway, it wasn't your fault. You didn't hit her, she hit you.'
Daniel thought that was probably true. It was no help with the other thing. ‘She thought I was trying to kill her!'
‘She was wrong.'
‘But why did she think it?'
‘Because she'd just seen her life flash in front of her eyes. Because she was in a state of shock and she wanted to blame someone. Hell, Daniel, that close a call's enough to make anyone tetchy. I'd have shouted at you too.'
Her friend considered. ‘You shout at people all the time, Brodie, me included. I'm not sure that proves much.'
‘I don't shout!' retorted Brodie indignantly. Then, because she tried not to lie – at least not to Daniel, at least not when she wasn't going to get away with it: ‘I may express my opinions forcefully from time to time. I may occasionally allow an understandable irritation to show in my voice. If the need arises, I see nothing wrong with putting my foot down with a firm hand …'
As always, being with her was helping him get things into proportion. As far as Daniel could see, nothing worried Brodie. She saved her energy for changing things that needed changing and enjoying things that were fine just as they were. Where he dwelt on the past, she lived in the present and looked to the future. Her attitude was the perfect antidote to his. He could feel the burden of anxiety lifting from his shoulders as she talked.
That didn't mean he was going to let her get away with lying. A moderate and a liberal in every other respect, he took a zealot's view of lying. He didn't do it himself, even when he really needed to, and he disapproved of it in others. ‘Brodie, you shout all the time. You can do it without raising your voice. You shout at people for stopping at traffic lights. You shout at people for being old.'
She thought for a moment. ‘Only when it makes them really slow,' she conceded then, eyes lowered. All right, Daniel, so I shout. I have no patience. That's who I am. I can't help it.' She risked a sly grin. ‘It's why you love me.'
‘No,' he said sternly, ‘it is not why I love you.' But he couldn't resist her grin. ‘I love you in spite of it.'
She ducked forward over her desk and kissed him. On the brow; breaking his heart.
He turned away, just quickly enough that someone with a quite modest degree of sensitivity would have wondered why, and busied himself with cups in the kitchen. ‘You think I'm worrying for nothing, then?'
‘I'm sure you are. But then, you always do. It's why I love you.'
A person of any sensitivity at all would have wondered at his silence. But Brodie just wished he'd hurry up with the coffee.
 
Only in the sense that this was when he worked was Detective Superintendent Deacon a twenty-first century policeman. Now in his late forties, many of the developments which had turned criminal investigation from an art into a science had come too late for him to learn with the job. He'd had to study them, to ponder their implications, to work out how to use them and how far he could trust them and when to trust instinct instead.
 
 
The problem with that, of course, was that even his instincts were resolutely twentieth century ones, involving intimidation and the occasional haymaker.
Now he was looking at a piece of paper – and it was only a piece of paper because he'd insisted on having a printout rather than peering at a computer screen – covered with a lot of letters that formed no words he could recognise. He turned his heavy head slowly and fixed his sergeant with a jaundiced eye. ‘This is it?'
DS Voss nodded. ‘That's it. The full chemical breakdown. Like we thought, it's a new compound – so new Forensics are still putting together a profile on it. But it's what killed the Hanson brothers and put three other kids in Intensive Care, so it's likely we'll be seeing more of it.'
Deacon didn't doubt it. In a world of few certainties, one thing you could count on was that a new designer drug would always have teenagers queuing up to try it. There would be more weeks like this one, going from one pleasant middle-class home to the next, searching children's rooms and reading their diaries and asking their parents about their friends and social activities; and waiting patiently and asking again when the disabling tears had passed, although the bottom line was that whatever they knew hadn't been enough to keep their children from harm.
Deacon had done a lot of these interviews in his career. He'd asked grief-stricken parents where their sons and daughters might have got hold of heroin, cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy. Even in his experience, this week had been difficult. The Hansons had produced an heir and one to spare, and lost them both during the longest two days of their lives. The fifteen-year-old went gentle into the good night in the early hours of Monday morning, the seventeen-year-old fighting a rearguard action for another ten hours before he too finally succumbed.
At that point no one could even tell the Hansons what had killed their sons, except that it was pretty obviously a drug overdose, apparently taken at a party in the Woodgreen Estate on Saturday night. Their parents found them collapsed in their
rooms the following morning.
Deacon tapped the sheet of paper with a blunt fingertip. ‘These letters and numbers. Chemicals. If the doctors had had these on Sunday – had known what they were dealing with – would it have made a difference?'
‘Probably not,' said Voss. ‘The biggest problem with this is not that it's different from anything else on the market, but that it's so powerful. The biggest difference between the boys who died and their friends who're still holding their own seems to be the number of tablets they took. A lot of kids tried them out on Saturday night – they were new, they wanted to give them a test-drive. I talked to some of the Hanson boys' friends. Those who took one tablet experienced visual disturbances, euphoria then hallucinations before losing consciousness. Some came round before the party was over and got themselves home, some were taken home by friends. Sick and hung over, but none of them needed detoxing.
‘Judging from the blood-work, the kids in Intensive Care took two apiece. The Hanson boys apparently took three each. Even if the toxicology had been available then, it's likely that Sunday morning was already too late to save them.'
So even picking it apart and nailing its components to a printed page wasn't enough to stop it killing people. Deacon's jaw clenched till his teeth ached. Which made it his job. Wasn't it always? Defending the general populace from sudden death was always the job of some tired and frustrated policeman. Even when they were asking for it. Even when, God help their stupid souls, they were paying for it.
He scowled at the jumble of letters in front of him. ‘Why are we getting bodies? Whoever's selling this stuff, it's not in his interests to wipe out his customer-base. Is the stuff contaminated? Or is that the compound itself is intrinsically lethal?' He heard himself and shuddered inwardly. He was spending way too much time with Charlie Voss. Two years ago he'd never have said
intrinsically.
‘Not dirty, just very strong,' said Voss. He was almost twenty years Deacon's junior, a different type of policeman and a different type of man. It was a constant source of surprise to
those they shared Battle Alley Police Station with that they could work together at all, let alone well. ‘I don't think either the supplier or the buyers have figured out yet how little it takes to produce the desired effect. And then, this isn't an expensive drug. It's not in the dealer's interests to tell customers they can get out of their skulls on a few quid's worth.'
‘What are they calling it?'
Voss pursed his lips, pointed at the printout with his freckled nose. ‘Er – that. I can't pronounce it.'
Deacon sniffed at him. ‘Well, if you can't, sober, on a Tuesday afternoon, how do you suppose drunk kids in clubs on a Saturday night are going to manage? What are they calling it on the street?'
That was easier. ‘Scram.'
‘All right. Scram. Now get back onto Forensics and ask if Scram …'
Voss hated having to do this. He thought it would get him shouted at. ‘Forensics don't call it Scram. They call it Horsefeathers.'
When Deacon went still like this it was as if the big man had turned to stone where he sat. Voss felt he was being watched by a mountain. Or rather a volcano, which when it had done watching would blow its top.
‘Horsefeathers.' When the need arose the superintendent could filter all the emotion out of his gruff voice. This was more a statement than a question. But Voss knew it required an answer.
‘That's what the letters are about. They represent the constituent parts. Most of them are common or garden chemicals you can obtain in this country with little or no paperwork. The exception, the catalyst that turns the whole thing into pixie-dust, is a heavy-duty veterinary tranquilliser currently being trialled in Germany. Hence Horsefeathers. It's Forensics' idea of a joke.'
Deacon nodded ponderously. ‘Remind me to laugh sometime when I haven't got three teenagers on life support and two in the morgue.'
This was hypocrisy. In a business that dealt with horror as a
commonplace, sometimes all that kept people sane was a bad-taste joke. Deacon had made enough of them in his time that he shouldn't have taken exception to this one. But self-awareness was not one of Jack Deacon's strengths.
‘Being trialled?' he said then. ‘It isn't in general use even in Germany?'
‘Apparently not. They're doing clinical trials: it won't be widely available until next year.'
‘Then why the hell is it killing kids in Dimmock now?'
If you asked him about the town where he'd lived and worked for ten years, Deacon would say he despised the place. That it represented all that was worst about Middle England. That it was grey and repressive and self-satisfied and faded, lacking in either style or grace. A late Victorian dowager still giving orders though the servants had all left and the ceilings were falling in. Yet when the old lady faced a threat of some kind, Jack Deacon was first on the barricade. Dimmock might be an old baggage but it was his job to protect her.

Other books

Death of a Stranger by Eileen Dewhurst
Eternity by Heather Terrell
The Catching Kind by Caitie Quinn
Lifting the Sky by Mackie d'Arge
Baba Dunja's Last Love by Alina Bronsky, Tim Mohr
72 Hours till Doomsday by Schweder, Melani
Banana Muffins & Mayhem by Janel Gradowski
Ashes to Ashes-Blood Ties 3 by Jennifer Armintrout