Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) (32 page)

‘No, this is a lie, those drugs were put there to incriminate my husband!’

‘Like the bomb was put in his locker by someone else?’

‘Yes. Why would he blow up his own locker? With his things in?’

Vi resisted the temptation to invoke the so-called ‘sacrifices’ of suicide bombers. Hatem hadn’t set a bomb in his own locker, she’d just been making a point. ‘Science doesn’t lie, Mrs el Shamy. Your husband made Sara Ibrahim pregnant. I’m telling you this now out of courtesy to you. Your husband has already been made aware of this and is being questioned by us.’

‘Hatem?’ She began to cry. ‘What did he say when you told him these lies?’

‘Nothing,’ Vi said. El Shamy had sat like a stone when she’d seen him.

‘He didn’t try to defend himself?’

‘No,’ Vi said. ‘Why? Would you have expected him to?’

‘I would expect Hatem to say when something is a lie!’

‘But if it wasn’t, what do you think he’d say, Mrs el Shamy?’

*

Mumtaz looked at her phone and then at Phil Rivers’ file. Officially the case was closed. The client’s legal representative had even paid Lee in full. Every communication from the client herself made Mumtaz wince. Her husband had just disappeared, taking all the proceeds from a jointly owned house with him. He’d also, it transpired, been homosexual. But his wife, Sandra, as was clear from her emails and letters, still loved him. And now Mumtaz had seen him. As far as she knew she was the only one who had. But the woman had a right to know that.

She phoned Sandra Rivers’ solicitor, Derek Salmon. He was on annual leave. Then she phoned the hospital to find out if she could talk to Lee. But she was told she couldn’t.

Phil Rivers’ appearance at Gallions Reach could have just been a passing coincidence but for one thing. He’d been in his pyjamas. If he didn’t live in the area then what had he been doing in his night attire? He’d been standing beside a man who had been coughing, who had also been in his pyjamas. Had Phil maybe been that man’s one-night-stand? If he had then he’d looked curiously modest in his PJs and slippers. Not that he could have come out into the street naked. But there had been something domestic between him and the other man that encouraged Mumtaz to think that maybe they were in a relationship. Or was she just projecting her own knowledge about Phil Rivers now onto something she’d seen fleetingly two nights before?

She picked her phone up and then put it down again. The case was closed and so whatever Phil Rivers had done had been
written off. Lee had been instructed to leave the whole thing alone. Then she read another one of Sandra’s letters to her solicitor and Mumtaz was lost. She called Shazia just to make sure that Cousin Aftab had been to the house. She sounded a bit off and said that when Mumtaz got back they needed to talk. Then Mumtaz phoned Sandra Rivers.

They’d moved him closer to the door. Did that mean they thought he was going to die and were planning a quick exit for his corpse? Even at his least optimistic, that seemed weird. Lee was breathing on his own now and, although he was still hooked up to loads of machines, he could just about talk. They’d hoiked some other poor bastard out just before they moved him. A big tin coffin on wheels had disappeared behind the geezer’s curtains and then a bloke with a face like a gibbon’s bum had wheeled him away.

Now the lights were dimmed and all he could hear was the sound of other people’s ventilators. He knew he was in the intensive therapy unit. He’d visited a lot of folk in places like this over the years. His dad had died in ITU, his liver liquified by the booze he’d bathed it in for over fifty years. The staff had tried to keep him comfortable but even through the diamorphine cloud they’d put him under, his dad had still felt things. Like the other people on this unit. Drugged up to their armpits, they still moaned in their sleep and sometimes they would wake up screaming.

Lee just wanted to get out. A doctor had told him that he was ‘doing well’, whatever that meant. He’d told Lee he’d been given some powerful psychiatric medication that had attacked his heart. He hadn’t said whether his heart was going to be all right.

There was a blue tinge to everything. The white sheets, the nurses’ plastic aprons, the shiny floor. It was like being underwater and oddly there was a comfort in it. Just lately some memories had surfaced about his admission to hospital. He’d been put on a trolley in a noisy place. Had that been Accident and Emergency or an operating theatre? He didn’t even know whether he’d had surgery. What he could remember were bits of what had happened just before he’d come into hospital. Mumtaz had fallen asleep in that tunnel that led from Gallions Hotel to the Albert Dock. He’d been holding that doctor on the ground, while a load of coppers went off to search for some other medic. He’d thought about Derek Salmon for some reason. And then there’d been nothing.

Then the fear returned.

A hand, large but smooth, pressed itself against his mouth. Two fingers pinched his nose shut. Lee saw a pair of dark eyes in a face that, weirdly, looked terrified. The hand pressed down and Lee’s heart began to hammer in his ears. Then his head filled with cotton wool.

His eyes rolled up and he couldn’t see anything until, with a tiny moment of euphoria, he could breathe again. In spite of all the wires and leads that went into and came out of every part of his body, he reared up and gasped thick, hot air. It was the most incredible thing he could imagine. He saw those eyes again and for a moment he flinched away. But then he saw another pair of dark eyes too. Vi Collins smiled at him and said, ‘You look like shit, Arnold.’

He saw a man being cuffed by a constable. The man was crying. Vi said to him, ‘I knew you’d try and silence him. Prat.’

*

Salwa threw what she could see of the boys’ clothes into a suitcase.

Asim said, ‘Where are we going? I want to sleep.’

She’d just pulled them out of bed and both boys were dazed.

‘Get up and get dressed,’ Salwa said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I ask you to.’

She’d lain awake for hours before she’d made her decision, but now all Salwa wanted to do was get on with it. Again and again she’d interrogated herself about Hatem. Had he been lying to her? Salwa had used the standard anti-Western narrative to herself when she’d first left Forest Gate police station, that DI Collins must have been lying. But then when she thought about the DNA results on that girl’s baby she wondered how the police could fix that if they had to take that evidence to court. Why should they? Unless they had planted the drugs in the lock-up too. They could have. But Hatem was already in custody and so why would they do that? In her heart she knew the truth.

Salwa felt more rage towards Rashida than anyone else. How could she take the police to her father’s lock-up? The girl must have suspected that her father was making a bomb when she saw the bags of fertilizer in there. She had betrayed him even though she would have to have known he was only doing it for the good of Islam. That was what she’d tell everyone when she got back to Cairo. Only Salwa herself would remember those long shifts that Hatem worked when he came home not so much exhausted as satisfied.

‘Come on!’ she said to the boys. ‘I’ve called a taxi and if you’re not ready I’ll have to leave you behind.’

‘But where are we going?’ Asim said.

Salwa put a heap of scarves in her suitcase. ‘To Egypt.’

‘So will we meet Rashida and Zizi at the airport then?’ Gamal asked.

Still her favourite, she took his face between her hands and said, ‘No, my soul. I am sorry but we won’t.’

‘We don’t have tickets for tonight,’ Asim yelled.

‘We’re going to buy other tickets at the airport,’ Salwa snapped. Then she turned back to Gamal again and said, ‘I’m so sorry, my little prince, your sisters are dead.’

Asim again butted in. ‘No they’re not, they’ve gone into care.’

Salwa slapped him.

‘No, they didn’t,’ she said. ‘They are dead and gone and now we must go back to Egypt and forget them!’

But she cried as she spoke and when they all finally piled into the taxi she was still crying.

*

Vi sat in the chair next to Cotton’s bed and looked at him. His skin, which had been sallow anyway, was jaundiced, his eyes were bloodshot. Periodically he pressed a button on a small tube that hung around his neck dispensing diamorphine.

The side room Cotton had been put in was brightly lit in spite of the lateness of the hour. It helped to keep Vi awake.

‘Your mate Dr Golding tried to kill PI Lee Arnold tonight,’ she said. ‘Silly kid thought he could do a Royal Shakespeare number called “I’ve Lost Me Memory” on me.’

Cotton smiled. His face was so thin it looked as if it might split in two.

‘Wrong,’ Vi said. ‘I just told him where Mr Arnold was and then we waited and he did exactly what I knew he would. Now, of course, he’s gone all silent on me again. Won’t last. But what the fuck? Eh?’

‘Indeed.’

‘What the fuck, because I’ve been told by your doctor that you’re dying,’ she said. ‘You’ve got cancer.’

‘Yes,’ Cotton said calmly. ‘Early last year I had a lump cut off my leg. But too late, the tumour had metastasised and the horrid thing was in my bones. I’ve been under palliative care for nearly a year.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He smiled again. ‘No, you’re not, but you want some sort of confession from me and you’ll use all your charm and your sympathy to get it.’

He was a clever man, there was no point trying to pull the wool over his eyes. ‘Spot on,’ Vi said. ‘Your ever-patient Mother Confessor, available for christenings and bar mitzvahs, that’s me.’

They both sat in silence. Vi had been told that if Cotton was lucky he had a month. He could just clam up and say nothing or he could unburden himself.

‘So you’ve a choice of beating the truth out of David Golding or hoping that I decide to tell you everything,’ Cotton said.

‘Mmm. The beating I don’t know about,’ Vi said. ‘But yes, if you don’t want to tell me anything, you don’t have to. You’ll leave Golding in a bit of a pickle but …’ She shrugged. ‘Do you like mysteries, Mr Cotton?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I like them very much.’

‘Then that’s me well and truly fucked, isn’t it?’ Vi said.

He laughed and then his face fell. ‘They tell me I probably won’t be leaving this hospital,’ he said.

‘I’d’ve thought they’d’ve needed the bed.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Then he said, ‘Did you instruct the consultant to tell me that to get me to talk?’

‘No. Wish I’d thought of it, actually,’ Vi said. ‘It’s a neat idea.’

‘You know I like you, DI Collins,’ Cotton said. ‘I may even talk to you when I’m ready.’

‘You’re talking to me now.’

‘Ah, but you, I am sure, need a cigarette and I am not ready to speak to you yet.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s better to get things off your chest.’

‘Afraid I’ll die before I tell you what you want to know?’

‘Yes, actually,’ Vi said. She stood up.

‘Well then, let me give you a taster to be going on with,’ Cotton said. ‘Just before I got my diagnosis I realized that I didn’t have any money. Don’t ask me where it went because I don’t know. I’m not a boozer or a gambler and I don’t take drugs. A house that was beyond my means, maybe? Two rapacious ex-wives and a child who refuses to seek gainful employment? I have all of those and I imagine their cost built up over time. Then I received my diagnosis. I looked at ways, DI Collins, whereby I might make some money in a short space of time.’

‘To pay off your—’

‘No,’ he said, ‘to have anything I wanted when I wanted it. And there was something else, too. But that’s for another time.’

*

The interview room was silent. Tony Bracci waited. His interviewee, David Golding, shook with either cold or terror or both. But he could speak. He’d spoken to Vi when she’d arrested him. He’d played mad and now he’d been found out. He had nowhere to go. Knowing this, Tony wanted to hit him. He was a bloody doctor, for God’s sake, and, at the very least, he’d hurt people. He was scum.

Golding had refused a brief and so Tony and DC Rock were on their own with him. Old muckers from training college, Tony knew that all he had to do was give Rock the nod and he’d beat the crap out of the shitbag.

‘I made a bad career choice.’

Golding’s sudden utterance made Tony sit up.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘Psychiatry. My dad’s a psychiatrist, I thought I wanted to do it,’ Golding said. ‘I didn’t. It was awful.’

‘So change career,’ Tony said. ‘What do you want me to say? What’s this got to do with you and Cotton and the dead bodies of Dr el Masri and his nephew?’

‘Everything,’ Golding said.

‘Enlighten us.’

Tony leaned back in his chair.

‘Mr Cotton decided to sell drugs when he found out he had cancer,’ Golding said.

‘Why was that?’

‘He said it was because he wanted money to pay off debts he had,’ Golding said. ‘But if he wanted to steal drugs from the hospital he had to have an accomplice. If he ordered something like methadone, which is a heroin substitute, he’d need a counter signatory.’

‘Why? He was the chief psychiatric consultant.’

‘Ilford hasn’t had an addiction unit for over a decade. Cotton needed to say he wanted methadone because he’d reinstated the clinic under the auspices of Dr el Masri.’

‘But el Masri didn’t treat addiction?’

‘No. No one did. Like Cotton, el Masri wanted money. But in his case it was for what he felt was a good cause.’

‘Which was?’

‘He was a Coptic Christian. Those people have been discriminated against in Egypt for decades. Some of the poorer members of the community are virtually destitute. He wanted to send some money home.’

‘And you?’ Tony asked. ‘What did you do and why?’

‘I wasn’t involved at first. It was just Cotton and el Masri.’ He put his head down. ‘I found delivery notes for methadone and I asked Mr Cotton why we were ordering heroin substitute. He fobbed me off with a story about an addicted patient on one of the acute wards. But even if such a patient had existed, the quantities were too big. Then I began to notice how many of the chronics were having their meds reduced, principally those on the antipsychotic tranquillizer Largactil. That, too, by the way, was being over-ordered. It had to be going somewhere. I guessed it was outside the institution.’

‘I wanted out of the hospital and psychiatry so badly I thought that if I could get in on what Cotton and el Masri were doing I could get some cash and just go. And so, because I’m a bad man, when I confronted Cotton, I asked him to cut me in on whatever he was doing with these drugs,’ Golding said. ‘He didn’t want to because he already had el Masri and a nurse who’d also twigged what was happening. But I followed and watched them all the time. I know what drugs can cost on the street. I know people who paid off their student loans selling drugs. I thought I’d go abroad.’

‘And do what?’ Rock asked.

‘I don’t know! Anything – anything except listen to mad people all day long and wade about on wards scented with piss.’ He shuddered. ‘In the end, Cotton agreed to cut me in, just like el Masri had to cut that nurse in.’

‘Hatem el Shamy?’

‘Yes,’ Golding said. ‘He and el Masri came to an arrangement.’

‘What sort of arrangement?’

‘A disgusting one.’

‘Tell us about it.’

Golding said, ‘El Shamy wouldn’t sell drugs, but he would store them. He got his cut provided el Masri covered up his sexual adventures with female patients.’

Tony looked down at his notes. ‘Like a girl called Sara Ibrahim?’

Golding cringed. ‘She killed herself. It was because Hatem el Shamy …’

‘He made her pregnant,’ Tony said. ‘But then you knew that, didn’t you, Dr Golding?’

He didn’t answer.

‘What about Dr D’Lima?’ Tony asked. ‘Your other colleague. What did he know?’

For the first time, Golding smiled. ‘Ferdinand? He’s a dear, innocent man,’ he said. ‘Totally dedicated to his patients, he hardly notices that the rest of us exist.’

‘Nice to know there’s one decent shrink up at Ilford, guv,’ Rock said.

Tony ignored him.

‘So there was Cotton, el Masri, you, el Shamy …’

‘Who started to blackmail el Masri.’

Tony frowned. ‘What do you mean? El Shamy was in on it too, how could he blackmail el Masri?’

‘Ragab – Dr el Masri – knew that Sara Ibrahim was pregnant by el Shamy. When the girl killed herself el Masri falsified her records to make it look as if he and not el Shamy had put her on fifteen-minute observations. El Shamy feared the girl would kill herself and he didn’t want her to do that with a foetus in her
belly. He feared there might be questions. But she did it anyway. El Masri had the foetus DNA-tested, which he thought he could use as insurance, if necessary, against el Shamy in the future. As Muslim and Christian they hated each other. And el Masri was proved right. El Shamy started saying he’d tell the authorities about the drugs that were being stored at his lock-up in Manor Park if el Masri told anyone about the girl. He said he was going back to Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had just won their general election, and that he didn’t care about his colleagues and their drugs any more. That was why Dr el Masri’s nephew, Butrus, came over from Egypt at that time.’