Black Heart: A totally gripping serial-killer thriller Page 5

  I stare at Baxter’s face and imagine how his voice might have sounded. He is, of course, expressionless; his mouth just a grim, thin line, yet somehow I see him as having been a rather jovial sort of chap. Janet certainly described him as such. She told me, among other things, that he was the regular Father Christmas at the local children’s hospice each year for almost a decade and that the children adored him. And I can visualise him with a white beard and a red hat making all those sick kids happy with his jolly ‘ho ho hos.’ Depressing.

  ‘We found minimal alcohol in his body. 0.01ml trace in his blood, urine and tissues – he’d had a glass or two but he certainly wasn’t drunk when he died.’

  Vic pulls back the paper blanket that’s covering Baxter’s body, exposing his right wrist. There’s no longer any blood visible, just a thick black line that widens in the middle, a tear.

  ‘This was the first incision made. Ventrical,’ Vic explains, ‘a little over 5cm in length and deep enough to completely sever the radial artery. It resulted in fatal exsanguination; the invagination process of the artery stumps is controlled by the elastic structure of the vessel walls and consequently the spontaneous arterial haemostasis is obstructed.’

  I look at her, my eyebrows raised, and she smiles at me pitifully. Such a philistine, I know.

  ‘He bled out, basically,’ she says.

  ‘How fast?’

  ‘Not as fast as you might think, it might have taken up to an hour, though the depth of the cut suggests it may have been sooner, mercifully.’

  I inwardly wince.

  ‘And the same on the left side?’

  She places his arm back underneath the paper blanket, gently I note.

  ‘Identical, almost. Again, ventral cut, perhaps even deeper than the right, severing that all-important radial artery. The wounds are in keeping with the razor blade used.’

  My own wrists begin to buzz a little.

  ‘What’s interesting however, is that our Mr Baxter here was right-handed.’

  I know what she’s going to say, but I don’t say it for her. Like I said, Vic likes to show and tell.

  ‘Seems slightly curious to me that he would slit his right wrist first, don’t you think?’

  I nod. She’s building up to something, I can sense it.

  ‘So, cause of death was blood loss then?’

  I get a vague whiff of that scent again, almonds and perfume, a sweet mix, and suddenly I remember the smell of furniture polish in the penthouse, like someone had given it a spring clean even though the housekeeper had said no one had been in for twenty-four hours.

  Vic Leyton stands back from the body and looks me in the eyes. She’s got nice eyes has Vic. Big and brown. Lord only knows the horrors they’ve seen.

  ‘Well, you would think that, but actually, no,’ she says, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘I don’t think the blood loss killed him.’

  I stay silent for a second or two, let her have her crescendo moment. I can hear my heart beating inside my chest, fuelled by the influx of adrenaline that’s just dropped in my guts.

  ‘Oh?’

  She nods conspiratorially.

  ‘There’s something else,’ she says slowly, accentuating the words. ‘That smell, that almondy, marzipany scent you detected?’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘… Arsenic.’

  I literally take a step backwards away from the table. The adrenaline has risen up through my diaphragm now and is attacking my galloping heart. I feel a little lighter.

  ‘There was a little over 400mg in his urine, an exceedingly large amount, enough to shut his organs down pretty rapidly…’

  ‘But I thought you said his organs were in good shape?’

  ‘I did, and they were… but that was before he ingested a substantial amount of poison, Riley.’

  My mind races.

  ‘From the chocolates?’

  Vic looks like she’s about to give me a round of applause.

  ‘Uh-huh. Arsenic poisoning tends to be a slow affair. Like I say, a substantial amount was needed to kill him, not least for his sheer size.’

  ‘But I thought with arsenic… you’re sick, you vomit the stuff up, the body tries to get rid and you can’t breathe…?’ Hey, I’ve seen a few Agatha Christies in my time you know. ‘Indeed,’ she nods, seemingly pleased with my knowledge on such a matter, ‘which is why I wasn’t all that surprised to find traces of chloroform in his blood too, around 21mg…’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ I realise I’ve said this aloud and hold my hand up in apology.

  She dismisses my blasphemy with a faint smile.

  ‘So basically, to sum up, Nigel Baxter was given chloroform to render him incapacitated, he’d already ingested arsenic, which was shutting him down, and then his wrists were slit open?’

  Vic sighs at my reductive statement. ‘I’d say, in my experience,’ she flashes me a look that translates as ‘which is extensive’, ‘the arsenic in his system caused his vital organs to shut down internally while he simultaneously bled out. One perhaps happened before the other, my guess is his organs. You’re right about the vomiting though; had he been conscious he would’ve been violently sick, short of breath, heavily perspiring, but he wasn’t… conscious, that is.’

  I’m speechless for a moment as I stare at Baxter’s body, his poisoned, incapacitated, slit-open, murdered body, and I envisage Janet Baxter’s reaction as I inform her, duty-bound, of Vic’s findings.

  So, the good news, Mrs Baxter, is that your husband didn’t take his own life after all! The bad news however, is that someone else did. Every cloud, eh?

  I look at Vic and she shrugs.

  ‘I’m sorry’, she apologises in her clipped Home Counties accent, ‘looks like I’ve made quite a lot more work for you, Dan.’

  Her use of my Christian name, a first in all the years I’ve worked with her, jolts me out of the thousand-yard stare I’m fixed in, breaking through the plethora of questions that have begun marching through my brain like a platoon of Marines as I stare at Baxter’s corpse.

  ‘Yeah,’ I flash her a sarcastic smile as I look up, ‘Thanks, I appreciate that… Vic.’

  There’s a hint of a smile on her face as she begins the process of washing up, scrubbing the scent of death from her skin. I wonder, given her daily exposure to it, if she ever manages to get it off completely.

  ‘Well, whoever killed him,’ she says with her back to me at the sink, ‘they certainly wanted to make sure there was absolutely no room for error. They clearly made sure they finished the job.’

  I turn to leave then, taking one last look at the greying face of Nigel Baxter, aka Father Christmas.

  ‘Didn’t they just,’ I say.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Murdered!’ Janet Baxter is thankfully sitting down on the couch in her home when I break the news to her, because I’m guessing if she wasn’t, then she’d collapse right about now.

  ‘No… no, that’s not possible…’ She says this with the conviction of a woman in deep denial, like I’m playing some perverse practical joke on her. She’s shaking her head, like it’s on a spring. Her face is pallid, almost translucent it’s so white, and she has serious bags underneath her watery red eyes. Her skin looks angry from all the crying she’s been doing and her short curly brown hair is unkempt, probably more so than usual judging by the family photos dotted about all over the large living room; she even looks quite attractive in some, in a mumsy sort of way.

  I realise it’s little consolation for her knowing that her husband didn’t actually commit suicide, but was murdered instead. Talk about the lesser of two evils. I think she’d been hoping for an ‘accidental death’ verdict from the outcome of the post-mortem, though let’s face it, opening up one’s own wrists could hardly be described as accidental. But I sense that somehow it would have been easier to deal with if she’d heard her husband’s demise was just one great big misadventure. Less of a stigma to live with, I suppose. And now muggins here has
to go and ruin it all.

  She’s crying again but I don’t think she even realises anymore. I sit down next to her on her expensive-looking leather couch. It’s one of those 1920s style ones that you see in those gaudy overpriced shops on Edgware Road; the shops that have those life-sized porcelain tigers that all the rich Arabs seem to love in the window. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the room somehow, which is understated and even quite tasteful.

  ‘Can you think of anyone, anyone at all, who might want to harm your husband in any way, Janet? A disgruntled neighbour, a feud with someone at work that he may have mentioned, a builder he didn’t pay on time? Anyone he mixed with you didn’t like the look of? Any altercation, however small or insignificant it seemed… anyone at all?’

  Janet looks at me with her round, tear-stained face and brings her stubby hands up to it. Her fingernails have been bitten to the quick and look bulbous and sore. That gets to me a bit. She shakes her head again, her lank curls wobbling – even her hair looks sad.

  ‘Nigel was loved by everyone. I mean, in the all the years I’ve known him he’s never really had a bad word for anyone, not one cross word, not an enemy anywhere… Well, not that’s ever been brought to my attention.’

  That’s just it though, not ‘brought to her attention’. I don’t want to tell her about what cyber found on his mobile phone. She looks fragile as it is and I figure that kind of bombshell might just be enough to push her over the edge. But I have to. No choice.

  ‘So, my Nige didn’t take his own life after all… but… someone else did?’

  This is more of a statement than a question, like she’s having to say it aloud to process the reality. I think she’s gone into shock again.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so Janet.’

  She gets up suddenly then, shuffles over to the sideboard and pulls out a bottle of Grouse. ‘You don’t mind if I…?’

  I shake my head and hold my palm up. Frankly I wouldn’t blame her if she downed the bottle in one hit. I’m glad she’s fixing herself a drink because she’s probably going to need it when I say what I’ve got to say. DS Willis, the family liaison officer who’s here with me, is in the kitchen talking to the Baxters’ children and at this moment I’m not sure which one of us has drawn the shorter straw.

  Her bitten fingers are shaking around the glass as she throws some of the scotch back. You can tell she’s not a drinker because she pulls her teeth over her lips and gasps. Her eyes are wide like an owl’s. In fact, Janet Baxter is quite owl-like to look at. I imagine that’s what she’d be if she was to be reincarnated as an animal.

  ‘It was made to look like a suicide,’ I explain, ‘but actually Janet, he was… poisoned.’

  ‘Poisoned?’ she takes another sip of the scotch, repeating the word as if it were somehow perfectly normal.

  It’s a sad reality that the words ‘poisoned’ and ‘murder’ will now become part of Janet Baxter’s repertoire.

  ‘Yes… then he was incapacitated with chloroform and… and his wrists were slit open.’

  She is staring past me, remarkably calm as my words hang in the air above her like poisonous gas. This is not a good sign in my experience. I’m expecting her to shout, or scream, throw the glass, collapse in hysterics. But she’s statue-still, there’s no emotion on her chubby face and it’s worrying me. Like the calm before the storm. I shift a little closer towards her on the sofa.

  ‘Janet,’ my voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper, ‘Janet were you aware that your husband was having an affair?’

  Her head spins round to face me and she widens her eyes. And it’s funny, not funny ha ha funny, but funny peculiar, that you can tell a person their loved one has been brutally destroyed in the ugliest way imaginable and they’ll somehow accept it, yet break the more common news that they’ve been getting their ‘jollies next door’, as my old man used to call it, and they act like you’re speaking Greek.

  ‘An affair! What are you talking about? Nigel wasn’t having an affair!’ Her features have changed: her brow is furrowed and her eyes have narrowed into dark slits. I am now officially the enemy.

  ‘Janet, I’m so sorry, but we’ve reason to believe he was involved with another woman. There were messages on his phone, text messages to a pay-as-you-go number. We’ve yet to trace the owner of the phone but the messages are…’ I pause. I’ve tried to say too much in one breath, the verbal equivalent of ripping a plaster off quickly. ‘Well, they suggest he may have been sexually involved with another woman.’

  Janet almost folds herself in half, her head falling into her lap. It’s always the straw and the camel, this one.

  I shuffle closer to her again, a little awkwardly. I want to comfort the poor woman but my judgement tells me not to touch her, that I’d likely be given short shrift.

  ‘Janet, I’m really so sorry, I know this is not what you want to hear. I understand, believe me… I know how it feels to lose someone you love in tragic circumstances.’

  She turns to me then and I see the pain in her eyes, the disbelief as she’s faced with the realisation that she might not have known her beloved Nige quite as well as she thought. Do we ever really know anyone? I try not to think like this myself, because it’s the sort of rhetorical question that can drive a person mad, that can make them very suspicious and miserable. And frankly, I’m more than enough of the former thanks to the job, and I don’t want it to make me the latter. Otherwise it’s a psychological mindfuck. You can overanalyse to paralysis and still get nowhere. Futile.

  ‘You understand… oh YOU understand do you?’ She stands up, her shapeless dress that’s creased like a map falling mid-calf. ‘You… you come here, to my house… with my children in the next room and tell me that my husband’s been murdered, murdered and as if that’s not enough, that he’s been… behind my back… you understand do you?’ She turns away from me in disgust, unable to repeat the accusation for fear of it becoming her reality.

  I dip my head but don’t take it personally. It’s difficult, but I’ve learned not to. I know Janet doesn’t hate me, Dan Riley, she just hates what I’m having to tell her, what she’s having to hear. She’s wrong though: I do understand.

  ‘I lost my wife two years ago,’ I suddenly blurt out, ‘she was killed in a motorbike accident.’

  Janet looks back up at me. I don’t know why I’ve said it, I never have before and I know it’s unprofessional, but somehow this case has already got to me; she’s got to me. Owl-like Janet Baxter, a nice, decent, unassuming woman whose world has been shattered. It’s not my fault, I know this: it’s the killer’s. But I still feel a sense of responsibility towards her.

  ‘She was ten weeks pregnant with our child. I didn’t know at the time…’

  Janet blinks at me. She looks apologetic almost instantly and I wish I’d kept my trap shut. It was a deliberate pity play and I hate myself for it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Janet says. Her voice has returned to normal now and I feel like a shitbag for using my own tragedy to stop her from hating me. I like to think Rach would’ve understood though. And I hope she’d be happy for me to call her my wife, because she was really. My soul-wife. We never needed a piece of paper though now, of course, I wish I had married her.

  ‘It’s okay, Janet,’ I say quickly. ‘I’m sorry I’ve had to tell you all of this, believe me. But I need to know what you know, so that we can catch whoever has done this to your husband. If Nigel was seeing another woman it makes things more… complicated, there’s more likelihood for a motive you see, a disgruntled husband or boyfriend perhaps.’

  I’m choosing my words carefully, consciously, I really don’t want to explain to Janet that this also puts her firmly on the suspects-with-possible-motives-for-murder list. I don’t think I need to. Janet Baxter seems harmless enough, but she’s not stupid. She looks like the type of woman who makes a nice casserole and is happy sitting in front of the telly every night watching Strictly, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t capable of murder. I’ve see
n the destruction affairs cause. Money and passion are the two greatest motives for taking someone out.

  ‘I was here, at home the night he died, the night of the mu—’ she can’t finish the sentence, it sticks in her throat, almost visibly. ‘You can ask the kids, oh, and our housekeeper, Chi, they will tell you.’

  I nod.

  ‘We may need to see your phone records, Janet. Please understand this is purely for elimination purposes. The sooner we sort that out, the sooner we can work out who did this to Nigel.’

  She nods, her eyes closing in resignation.

  ‘Of course, yes.’

  I smile gently, gratefully.

  There’s a moment’s pause.

  ‘So, this other woman… do you know who she is?’

  ‘We don’t know yet Janet,’ I say, ‘it seems they made contact over a singles’ website; that’s all we know at present.’

  Her mouth forms a grim line.

  ‘So he went looking for it then,’ her words sound weighty, almost as if she’s suddenly realised that her life has been too good to be true and everything she’s ever thought and believed in has been a lie. It’s shitty to witness.

  I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

  I lightly touch Janet’s arm as I stand to leave. She doesn’t flinch, that’s something at least.

  ‘If you can think of anything, Janet, anything unusual, anything about your husband’s behaviour, something he may have said… something he—’

  ‘Wait!’ Her short, stout frame bolts upright. She’s remembered something. ‘Hold on.’

  She leaves the room and is gone for a minute or so before returning.

  ‘This…’ she says, ‘Nige gave it to me a couple of weeks ago. He said a client gave it to him. I thought it was odd, you know, an odd thing for a client to have given him – a male one anyway, or at least that’s what he said…’ Her voice trails off sadly, like she’s suddenly realised her whole marriage has been a sham. ‘I don’t know why he gave it to me… he knows, he knew I don’t really like teddy bears.’