Fatal Last Words

Fourteen

‘What have we got, Sammy?’ Neil McIlhenney asked as they stood in the centre of the yurt.

‘Nothing yet, sir,’ the DI replied. ‘By the time I sent the word back, the cleaners had bagged all of yesterday’s rubbish, from all the venues. . this place, the office, the two bars, the bookshop and the toilets, public and private. But at least they hadn’t taken it off site. If Glover put his capsule in a bin after he’d used it, it’ll still be there.’

‘Capsule?’

‘Yes. Glover told Ryan McCool, the journalist who was the last man to see him alive, that he used a pen device to inject himself, and that’s how you load those things.’

‘Where is it now, this pen?’

‘Ray gave his personal effects to his daughter, after she did the formal identification.’

‘Everything?’

‘Not quite. She asked us to destroy his clothing; remember, he’d puked on his suit. She took away his wallet, watch, a Mont Blanc ballpoint and a pouch that I guess was the one McCool saw him collect from the author tent. The device should be in there.’

‘What about the thing he used to send the email?’

‘I’ve still got that; I thought the fiscal might want to see the original message.’

‘Yes,’ the superintendent agreed. ‘We need to get the pouch back too. Mind you, it’s not going to tell us anything, is it? It’s that used capsule we need. Who’s doing the rummaging through the refuse?’

‘Nobody yet. Ray’s going to bring back all of Glover’s unused stock of the things. Once we’ve actually seen one we’ll know what we’re looking for. Ian McCall and young PC Knight have drawn the short straw.’

‘What are we looking at here, Sammy? The DCC’s convinced that this one’s iffy. What does your gut say?’

Pye smiled, and raised an eyebrow. ‘D’you think I’m going to disagree with Mr Skinner?’

‘It’s allowed.’

‘Maybe, but I’m not going to. One problem I’ve got relates to something else Prof Hutchinson told us. He said he was surprised that to get that amount of glucose into his bloodstream the man only had to inject himself with a single capsule.’

‘Maybe he didn’t inject himself at all. For all you know he might have taken it orally, swallowed the stuff in liquid form.’

‘The prof’s having the stomach contents analysed to check that out.

But even if you’re right, and he ingested glucose, he injected himself as well; that’s not in doubt. Old Joe found a fresh prick in his left thumb, from one of the six-millimetre disposable micro-needles that these pen things use. He’s taken some tissue from the area for analysis. Even if we never find the capsule or the needle, that should tell us about its contents, for example how concentrated the dose was. Leaving that aside, though, from McCool’s description, although he was slurring, and a bit unsteady, Glover was in high good humour, laughing and joking with him. That’s my big concern. It doesn’t square with a man who’s about to take his own life.’

‘Who knows what people think at a time like that? Maybe he was on a high because of it?’

Pye shook his head. ‘No, there’s more; from something he said to McCool, I’ve got no reason to believe that he thought he was injecting anything other than insulin.’

‘So? What are you saying?’

‘That I don’t buy this as a bizarre suicide. Plus, subject to interviewing the chemist who supplied the dead guy, I don’t see how this can have been a pharmaceutical accident. These capsules are factory-filled with insulin. If a mistake was made on the production line, or if there was sabotage, for that matter, if would surely have affected a whole batch, not just a few. We’d have had comatose diabetics all across the country by now. But the thing is, going by what I’ve been told, it’s unlikely that they’d be dead, even given a high concentration. The quantity required to kill, at least to cause death as quickly as it occurred in this case, would be more than the maximum dose of insulin that any diabetic would be likely to inject. Maybe Glover had been careless, with the drink and the snacks at the party; maybe he’d allowed his level to get critical and one dose was indeed enough to push him into ketoacidosis, but that’s not what Professor Hutchinson would have expected to find.’

‘And even the Pope’s no less fallible than he is.’

‘So they say.’

‘All of which leaves you with?’

‘Deliberate and very specific intervention by another person. I believe that we have a murder inquiry on our hands, sir, and that’s why I’ve asked the prof to go over the body again, inch by inch, to determine, if he can, the precise means by which this guy got enough glucose into his system to kill him.’

McIlhenney sucked his teeth. ‘How did I know you were going to say that?’ he muttered. ‘I only wish I could argue with you. Fuck me, the biggest book festival in the whole damn world, with two whole weeks to run, and it looks like we’ve got a homicide right in the middle of it.’