Want You Dead (11 page)

The psychologist shot a discreet glance at her watch. ‘I’m aware of the time, Red. We have just a few minutes left and certainly not enough time to unpack all that you have just told me. Can we bracket it and put it on the agenda for our next session?’

‘ Sure.’

Dr Biddlestone spent the last couple of minutes of the session making sure Red felt sufficiently well grounded to cycle home, then she said, ‘I’ll see you on Monday, Red.’

‘8.30 a.m.?’

‘8.30 a.m.’

Bryce, who had listened to every word, transmitted from her bugged phone, made a note in his electronic diary to be sure to be listening in then.

25

Friday, 25 October

Today was going to be a busy shopping day, and did he have a long list to get through! He needed supplies for all his plans. Quite a bit of the stuff he could buy online, but that could be traced easily. Better, he knew, to buy all the gear from shops, paying cash. He had plenty of that thanks to his dear, sweet mummy obligingly dying much earlier than she, or he, had expected.

Loads of the stuff! Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds of it, net, after the thieving estate agents had taken their commission and the thieving solicitor had had his sticky paws in the jar. He had plans for them both, but they could wait.

His first stop was the hardware store, Dockerills, on Church Street in the centre of Brighton. He had selected it because it was always busy, and no one was likely to remember a man in a baseball cap buying pliers, bolt cutters, a blade cutter, duct tape and a small hammer.

Next, he drove in his rented van to an electrical supplies warehouse just off Davigdor Road in Hove, where he bought an assortment of timers, mostly ones with a range of one thousand metres and more, four digital relays and one thousand metres of nichrome wire. Next stop was RF Solutions on the Cliffe Industrial Estate, outside Lewes, where he bought a selection of relays and switching units. Then he drove across to Lancing Business Park and bought three car batteries, from which he could obtain sulphuric acid, and some specialist adhesive tapes. And from a newsagent on the way back, he bought an assortment of AA and AAA batteries.

He also bought a burger from a mobile roadside stall on the main road back to Brighton, where he was unlikely to be remembered. All this shopping had given him an appetite.

After lunch he bought, from a garden centre a couple of miles away, several sacks of sodium chlorate weedkiller.

Then, tugging a baseball cap low over his face, he drove out to Gatwick Airport and entered the long-stay car park, collecting a ticket from the automatic gate. He followed the signs for today’s vehicles, winding around the rows and rows of parked cars. A bus passed him, stopped a short distance way, and several people, lugging suitcases, boarded.

Happy holiday
, he thought, with a twinge of sadness, looking at one couple, who exchanged a kiss before climbing up the steps. That could have been him and Red, jetting off to some sunny paradise. Maybe the Maldives.

A suited businessman, carrying one of those overnight bags with a built-in suit holder, boarded also.

Have a good trip! Come back with that deal!

He reversed into an empty bay, switched off the engine, and waited, looking around for any CCTV cameras. He saw one some distance away, but there were no others. Then he waited as dusk slowly fell. The weather was closing in. Drizzle falling from a darkening, rain-laden sky. Perfect! Someone drove a brand-new Jaguar XF in, which was of no interest to him. Then came a one-year-old Mazda MX-5. Again of no interest. Then a Porsche Cayman. No good. A Ford Focus. Too recent a model. Followed by a small Lexus saloon. Too recent also.

Then bingo!

A ten-year-old BMW 5 Series. And, almost unbelievably, it reversed into the bay directly opposite him.

Meant to be!

He watched the middle-aged couple get out, dressed in summer clothing in which they looked ridiculous in this weather. The man was wearing a panama hat, and the obese woman was wearing what looked like a floral wigwam. The man removed a briefcase from the rear seat, and his wife a large handbag. Then the man popped the boot lid and removed two enormous wheeled suitcases, locked the car, and they headed off towards the nearest bus pick-up point.

Maybe they had both been beautiful young things once, he thought. Like him and Red.

Ten minutes later they boarded a bus.

Happy holiday!
he thought.
You ugly fuckwits.

As soon as it was as dark as it was going to get, he left his car, pulled the hood of his raincoat over his baseball cap until it almost totally obscured his vision, then grabbed the tools he thought he might need from the rear of his van. With their stupid clothes, and all their luggage, that couple were going away for a while for sure. He had all the time in the world.

With a single blow of his hammer he smashed the side window of the BMW, reached inside and yanked the door handle. The alarm parppp-parppped. He ducked inside, yanked the bonnet release handle, raised the bonnet and rapidly cut the alarm wires, silencing it. Then he looked around, warily, his nerves jangling. But no security guard came running. Apart from an empty bus making its rounds like a forlorn robot searching for a soulmate, the car park was deserted.

He clamped a protective locking disc, which he had stolen from a fire engine’s equipment at the airport, over the BMW’s steering wheel. It was designed for firefighters to cut people out of crashed cars when the airbag had not deployed to prevent it doing so accidentally. Then he ducked under the wheel, and with his blade cut away the protective outer shield of the airbag. Next, being careful to avoid the trigger sensors, he sliced into the airbag itself, and allowed the salt-white sodium azide crystals to fall into the plastic beaker he had taken from a filling station on the way here.

Sodium azide was one of the most toxic chemicals in the world. It was far more rapid acting than cyanide and, unlike cyanide, where the poison could be neutralized with amyl nitrate, there was no antidote. It was tasteless, and would bond with the haemoglobin in the blood causing death within minutes. And it had the bonus of being virtually undetectable, unless you were specifically looking for it.

He wasn’t sure he would need it, but it gave him another option. You could never have enough options!

Oh baby, oh Red, you should never have driven me to this, really you shouldn’t!

I’d hate to think of you swallowing sodium azide. Really I would. But I guess, if the truth be known, I would prefer that to seeing you screw Dr Karl Murphy.

But sodium azide. It’s not a nice death. Not nice at all.

Mercifully quick, that’s the upside.

But after what you did to me, would I really want it to be quick?

If you want to know the truth, Red, I would really like to see you suffer. To hear you scream out how much you love me. How desperately badly you want me back. That you would do anything to get me back.

That you would swallow sodium azide, if that’s what it took.

Then I could look into your eyes and say to you, ‘Sorry, Red. There is no antidote. If you’d stayed with me, you would be looking forward to a whole long future. Kids. Grandchildren. Family Christmases. Happy old age. All that stuff.

Now all you have is less than a minute.

Moments to contemplate your regrets.

Moments to think about how sorry you are.

Moments to think how good it could all have been for you and me.

People often say that’s how it goes in life. Shit happens. But you know, that’s a cop-out. You know what the reality is? Shit falls from its own weight.

Think about that.

He flipped back through the early texts from Red on his phone. Stopped at one.

God, I so love what you do to me
))) I’m so full of sweetness and love when I think of you, and I like that! Actually I LOVE that! These feelings are awesome. Wish you were here right now, holding me naked in your arms and deep inside me.

Shielding the cup against the falling rain, he hurried back to his van, and eased himself back into the driving seat, put the cup into a plastic bag, and carefully knotted the top, sealing it.

Sodium azide would kill someone, agonizingly, within sixty seconds. It was only found in older car airbags, and when they deployed in collisions, the other chemicals in there neutralized it.

By the time the ugly couple returned from their holiday, and found their BMW had been broken into and the airbag tampered with, he would be long gone.

And maybe the sodium azide would be long gone, too.

God, Red, I can’t live without you. And I can’t watch you with another man. Really, the pain would be too much for me to bear.

Blame it on your parents. That poet Philip Larkin got it right, didn’t he, when he wrote:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

Oh boy, Red, yours really did. Royally.

26

Friday, 25 October

Roy Grace sat at home, on the sofa, with the initial post-mortem report on Dr Karl Murphy lying beside him and Humphrey asleep on his back, paws up, at his feet. He was watching Cleo giving Noah his supper, and making another check on the list of wedding acceptances. Noah, in a red and white striped top, had a mush of food in front of him on the white plastic tray.

‘Noah having supper!’ she said, breezily, as she spooned some sweet potato purée into the baby’s mouth. ‘Hello Noah, what are you eating today? Yum!’

It reminded Grace he needed to fill Marlon’s food hopper. The goldfish was eleven, still forever circumnavigating his bowl. Every morning when he came downstairs, he half expected to see the fish floating lifeless and was always relieved to see it was still active, still as mournful-looking as ever. But it was a link with Sandy, the only living link he had. He’d won it at a fairground with her. And he was heartened to find, on an internet trawl, that the current record for longevity for a goldfish was thirty-four years.

Using two of his fingers and his thumb, Noah tried cramming some mashed banana into his mouth. As he sucked, bits dropped down, some bouncing off the tray and falling onto the mat below him, and a thin stream of dribble slid down his chin.

‘Mmm, yum yum, Noah!’ Cleo encouraged him, dabbing away the dribble.

There were times when Roy Grace found himself unable to take his eyes off his son. Scarcely able to believe this was his child, his and Cleo’s creation. The emotions he felt for him were completely overwhelming. And he felt moved almost to tears by the love and happiness he could see in Cleo’s face.

He reached down and rubbed Humphrey’s belly for some moments. The black Labrador-Border Collie cross made a happy grunting sound, his right hind leg jigging. Then Grace picked up the post-mortem report and looked at one section which he had ringed in red ink. Traces of the anti-depressant Paxil were present in Murphy’s blood, on which there had been a fast-track analysis. The pathologist had made an annotation that there was a possible, but unproven, link between this drug and suicides.

Suddenly turning to him, Cleo said, ‘Any joy, darling, with that clue?’

The Times
, open on the crossword page, lay on the sofa beside the wedding list, along with a book of sudoku. Cleo was struggling with her studies for an Open University degree, at times unable to concentrate during these first months of Noah’s life but determined to continue. So to help keep her brain active, she had taken to doing crossword puzzles and sudoku.

Grace looked down at the clue in
The Times
, for 4 across, eight letters, which had been marked in red by Cleo. It was three words.
Percussionist be calm!

Grace tried to think. ‘Doldrums?’ he suggested.

‘Doldrums?’ she repeated, frowning.

‘That’s an area of ocean around the tropics where sailboats often get becalmed for days.’

‘It can also mean down in the dumps, can’t it?’ Cleo said. Then she gave Noah a chiding as he spat mashed banana onto the floor beneath him. ‘Tut, tut, tut, naughty Noah!’ She turned back to Roy. ‘Yes, doldrums, I like it. I think you’re right, and it fits!’ She wrote it in.

As he watched her, he remembered how when he was a child his mother had been keen on crossword puzzles, but he never cared for them much, especially now, with his work on major crimes – they tended to be puzzles enough. His thoughts returned to the suicide of Karl Murphy, which he was continuing to fret over as he read through the pathologist’s report again very carefully. Karl Murphy’s sister had been interviewed earlier in the day and she had stated that the doctor had talked of killing himself several times after the death of his wife, although just recently he had seemed more cheerful.

So far the evidence for suicide was stacking up convincingly.