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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Requiem for a Dealer
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‘It shouldn't be,' said Voss, shaking his ginger head. ‘It's supposed to be strictly controlled. The trouble is, it's designed for large animal work. What would be a reasonable dose for a bull would provide the active ingredient in hundreds of tabs of Scram. There won't be vast quantities of the stuff missing from the records, just a few litres written off as a dropped bottle or a book-keeping error.'
‘Fine. But why is it our problem, not Dusseldorf's?'
‘Maybe it's their problem too and they just haven't realised yet. We don't know the Hanson boys were the first victims in this country, just that they were the first to be identified. Where the cause of death didn't fit the usual parameters and the agent was recognised as something new. Dusseldorf may have a morgue full of similar cases just waiting to be identified.'
He was saying that a lake was filling up and the Hanson brothers were the first crack in the dam. Tomorrow there could be a flood of dead and comatose teenagers whose condition could now be attributed to Scram. In Dusseldorf, and also in Dover and Brighton and Bognor Regis. ‘How's it coming in?'
Voss was beginning to feel he was doing all the work here.
‘The same way anything else is smuggled in, but easier because you're talking about small quantities. If Customs & Excise can miss whole truck-loads of human beings, how are they going to pick up a few bottles of clear liquid?'
Deacon blew out his cheeks in a gesture of acceptance. ‘They can't, can they? We have to find the factory. Nail whoever is introducing this storm-trooper German tranquillizer to our nicely-brought-up English pharmaceuticals and producing the drug from hell.
‘Well, if Dimmock is the first place it's been identified, maybe it's the first place it's been sold. If so, the probability is that the factory putting the stuff together is within ten miles of this spot.'
Voss nodded slowly. ‘In that case, the casualties from Woodgreen were the tip of an iceberg. If they're getting their catalyst in from Germany and they've got the facilities to produce the stuff locally, we're going to start seeing more of it. Much more of it.'
‘Shut your mouth, Charlie Voss,' growled Deacon, ‘God may be listening. You're right, of course. We have to get on top of this, quickly. If this is still essentially a local problem we have a chance to contain it before it spreads. Before there are Scram factories up and down the country. Once it's endemic we'll never get the genie back in the bottle. Imagine cheap heroin: it'll be everywhere. We'll never again have the opportunity to stop it in its tracks.'
‘Like fire,' mused Voss, ‘or a disease. Once it gets through the pinch-point it grows exponentially. You have to stop it while it's small. Or you may never stop it at all.'
‘Throw everything we've got at it while everything we've got might be enough,' agreed Deacon. ‘Starting with friendly visits to everyone in the area that we know is dealing in drugs. Less with the expectation of shaming one of them into a confession, more in the hope that someone who's losing business to a cheap new wonder drug might be sufficiently pissed off to point us in the right direction.'
‘It's worth a try. They wouldn't normally talk to us,' said Voss, ‘but this could be different. This could put some of them out of business.'
Deacon gave his sergeant a wolfish grin. ‘So now we have a decision to make. Which of us goes to see Joe Loomis?'
‘Me,' said Voss quickly.
‘Last time you went to see Joe he left you in a pool of blood.'
‘Last time
you
went to see him you broke his fingers with a monkey wrench!'
Deacon gave a negligent shrug. ‘I thought he was reaching for a gun. Besides, it's too late for him to complain now. Joe and I have a sort of understanding. If he has a problem with me he doesn't take it out on my officers.'
Voss wasn't sure how to word this. ‘What does he get in return?'
‘When I go to interview him I leave the monkey wrench in the car.'
Overnight there was another admission to Dimmock General that rang all the same alarm bells. It was a girl this time, a little older than the Hanson brothers and their friends, and if she'd been at the party in the Woodgreen Estate she mustn't have taken what she bought there immediately because after three days she would either have died or recovered.
But everyone in A&E was now atuned to the possibility of Scram overdose. Although the initial call-out was to a suspected RTA, her age and the lack of any witness to a road accident were enough to make a canny registrar have her blood screened for narcotics. It came back positive for Scram. A lot of Scram: four or five tablets.
She wasn't dead only because, instead of staggering off to bed and sleeping undisturbed for ten hours, she'd stumbled out onto Fisher Hill and either fallen down or been knocked down, with the result that she was in an ambulance within an hour of taking the things. A stomach-pump removed some of the substance undigested, then it was a matter of cleaning her blood and hoping that what had reached her brain hadn't reached the concentration necessary to fry it. That wouldn't be known until she woke up.
Charlie Voss heard about it before Deacon did because his fiancée worked in the hospital. She woke him up when she got home because she thought he'd want to know. While Voss was putting together a sort of hybrid meal that would do Helen as a late supper and himself as an early breakfast, she told him what she'd heard.
‘Her name's Alison Barker. She doesn't live in Dimmock – she was house-sitting for some friends. She rides horses for a living.'
Voss's sandy eyebrows climbed. ‘She's a jockey?'
‘Not racehorses, show-jumpers. One of the nurses says she's quite well known. She was short-listed for some team or other.'
‘I don't imagine she fell off a horse on Fisher Hill!'
‘I don't think so either,' said Helen Choi calmly, ‘I'm just giving you all the background so you don't accuse me of withholding information later. But if you're going to be silly I won't tell you the
other really interesting thing I know about her.'
When it comes to gathering intelligence, a bit of bribery is often efficacious. ‘You can have my bacon butty.'
The Chinese nurse thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Done deal. She was found lying in the road about two o'clock this morning, yes? But the accident was reported earlier.'
‘How much earlier?'
‘Monday evening.'
Voss frowned. ‘You're telling me she was lying there for thirty hours?'
Helen shook her dark smooth head. ‘If she'd been lying there for six hours she'd be dead now. Whatever happened to her had only just happened.'
‘Then how …?'
‘You tell me,' shrugged the woman. ‘But check your incident book: it'll be there. Your Sergeant McKinney phoned the hospital on Monday evening, looking for the missing victim of an RTA. Then, we had no one fitting the description. But Alison Barker fits it exactly, down to what she was wearing. Now ask me who reported the accident.'
Voss was still trying to get his head around what he'd been told already. ‘How the hell am I supposed to guess that?' But something in her expression pulled him up short. The mere fact that she asked the question meant he should know the answer. And when it came to the bizarre and inexplicable, one name was always worth an each-way bet. ‘Daniel?' His voice soared.
‘Daniel.'
 
It had been dark, it had been wet, both of them had been shaken and the girl had quickly turned angry. Even allowing for that, and the fact that the photograph Voss produced showed a white unconscious face hung about by tubes against a white sheet, Daniel had no doubt it was the same girl. He nodded. His voice was low. ‘I thought we'd got away with it. She ran off: she seemed fine. I checked the hospital. They couldn't find an admission that fitted.'
‘That's because they only got her early this morning.'
Daniel flinched. ‘What was the problem – internal bleeding?
Instead of getting better she was getting worse?'
‘She's got a few bruises that probably date back to Monday, but that isn't what knocked her out. It was a drug overdose.'
For perhaps half a minute Daniel just went on staring at him, with no idea how to react. His instinctive response was relief, because whether or not he was to blame for the accident he certainly didn't give her drugs. Then he felt guilty for considering his own position when she was fighting for her life in hospital. Finally he decided that she'd still be in hospital if it
had
been his fault, so it was better that it wasn't. He swallowed. ‘By drug overdose you mean illegal drugs?'
‘Indeed I do,' nodded Voss. ‘Scram.'
‘Scram?'
‘I hadn't heard of it a week ago either,' admitted Voss. ‘It's new, and potent. Three or four tablets seem to be a lethal dose.'
Daniel was reassessing the accident in the light of this information. ‘Is that why it happened? Was she high on Monday as well? Is that why she ran out into the road, and why she jumped up and ran off afterwards as if colliding with a car was nothing special?' Behind the thick lenses his mild grey eyes sharpened. ‘Is that why she was saying those crazy things? She wasn't lucid?'
Voss shrugged. ‘It seems quite likely, doesn't it? Maybe she'll be able to tell us when she comes round. If she comes round.'
Daniel winced. ‘There's some doubt about it?'
‘Oh yes. She took a lethal dose. What we don't know yet is whether they got the treatment started in time.'
Daniel shook his head in disbelief. He'd worried, at the time and since, that he might have cracked her ribs. It never occurred to him that two days later she could be dying. It seemed it wasn't his fault; but simply being Daniel was enough to make him feel guilty. ‘Who is she?'
Voss told him what he knew. ‘She doesn't actually live in Dimmock. She was staying at a friend's house.'
‘What does the friend have to say about all this?'
‘Not a lot. She's in Australia – Alison was house-sitting for her. So far as the friend or the neighbours know she was staying there alone. She wasn't dressed for partying – the same dark riding
mac she was wearing when you knocked her down, jeans and a sweatshirt underneath. She wasn't a habitual drug user so she must have had something special in mind last night. It's hard to be sure but it could have been a suicide attempt.'
Daniel let out a long, soft sigh. ‘Her whole damn family's suicidal.'
Voss blinked. ‘What makes you say that? Do you know her?'
‘No. It's what she said to me. When she thought I was trying to kill her. She said I should blame her for the accident – the police would believe me because you thought her whole damn family was suicidal.'
‘It sounds like there's a family history,' said Voss. To him it was sounding more like suicide all the time.
Not to Daniel. ‘No, that's not what she was saying. She was saying – I
think
she was saying – you'd written something off as suicide when it wasn't. Something had happened to someone in her family, the police had thought it was suicide but she didn't. And now something else has happened, and she's in hospital and maybe she's never going to wake up. That can't be a coincidence.'
He had Voss's full attention. ‘You think someone fed her those tablets? Knowing what the result would be?'
‘How would I know?' shrugged Daniel. ‘But if I was the investigating officer I'd want to rule out the possibility before I did anything else. If she took them herself, that's stupidity. If they were forced on her, that's attempted murder.'
‘It's not impossible.' Every detective is aware that a proportion of drug deaths are not the result of self-administration: what no one can judge is how high a proportion. The other thing every detective knows is that, usually, what appears to have happened
is
what happened. ‘But she thought you were trying to kill her and you weren't. Maybe she's just a disturbed young woman suffering from paranoid fantasies who'd finally had enough of the chaos inside her head.'
It made sense: almost enough for Daniel to stop beating himself up over it. If she was out of control when she ran in front of the car it wouldn't have mattered who was behind the wheel. In fact, a better driver would have been going faster and
probably killed her outright. ‘She just seemed so angry.'
‘People who're suicidal often are.'
Daniel nodded sombrely. ‘Thanks for coming round, Charlie. I don't know if all this makes it better or worse, but at least I don't have to wonder what happened to her any more.'
Voss nodded. ‘The accident was nothing to do with you. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
‘I'm having that engraved on my tombstone,' said Daniel glumly.
 
‘They think my whole damn family's suicidal.'
‘Sorry?' Brodie closed the door of Paddy's room to a crack and went on standing there, listening for any sound of bedclothes being tented, torches lit and books opened. Now the child could read she thought bed-times applied to other people.
‘That's what she said. Alison Barker – the girl I ran down. She said the police would believe it was an accident because they thought her entire family was suicidal.'
‘I wish you wouldn't say that,' Brodie said irritably. ‘You didn't run anybody down. She ran into us. Then she got up again and ran off, and the following night she took enough rocket-fuel to put herself into orbit. Why is that anything to do with us?'
‘I'm not saying it is,' said Daniel. ‘It's just – why would she say that?'
Brodie's attention was still on the darkened room beyond the cracked-open door. ‘What?'
‘It makes no sense. Not if she thought it was my fault, and not if she was trying to top herself.' Daniel wasn't very good at slang. He was always out of date. ‘She thought I tried to run her down. And she thought the police wouldn't take it seriously because of something else that had happened. Something they'd decided was suicide. But she didn't. She thought it was …' He heard where he was going with this and stopped.
Brodie gave up listening at the door and came and sat on the sofa, facing him. ‘Murder,' she said quietly.
‘What?'
‘If she thinks the police wrote it off as suicide and she thought it was more serious than that, there's really only one thing that
qualifies. Murder.'
‘That's what I came up with too,' he admitted.
‘Thinking it doesn't mean she was right.'
‘But thinking it means she's in trouble.'
Brodie was troubled too: she knew what he was doing. ‘Half the world's in one sort of trouble or another. It doesn't all have to be your problem. Let it go.'
‘She could be in danger.'
‘She's in hospital, with healthcare professionals clustered round her like flies. When she wakes up the police will ask her what happened. If she has anything to tell them, that's her chance.'
Brodie made some coffee. She offered to run him home but Daniel preferred to walk. As she saw him out he hesitated on the front step. ‘You didn't.'
He'd lost her again. ‘Didn't what?'
‘Let it go. When I was in hospital surrounded by professionals. What happened to me was nothing to do with you, but you didn't leave me to deal with it alone.'
These days they hardly talked about how they'd met. But neither had forgotten. It was like a volcano in the background: on a nice day it was just part of the scenery, but its mere existence cast a long shadow. Brodie said softly, ‘What happened to you
was
something to do with me.'
He shook his yellow head stubbornly. ‘It wasn't your fault I got hurt. You were doing your job: you had no way of knowing what it would lead to.'
‘I took money to find you for a man who was prepared to kill you and almost did,' Brodie said plainly. ‘I believed the story I was told. I didn't know I was being used. But I should have.'
‘That's hindsight talking. Maybe you made a mistake, but it was an honest one. I never blamed you for what happened. Not then and not since.' He looked at her with wrenching honesty. ‘What I remember is that when I woke up, with no idea what had happened to me or why, you were there. And you stayed with me until I got some sort of a grip on reality. I know it wasn't easy, that it would have been less painful to leave it to the professionals. But you were my lifeline, Brodie. You kept me
sane. That's what I remember.'
Tears pricked her eyes. His generosity flayed her, no less now than two years ago, and more rather than less because it was absolutely sincere. That was how he felt. That what he'd gained from knowing her was worth more than what he'd lost: several days, a lot of skin, a lot of blood, and the chance of ever feeling entirely safe again.

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