Roots of Evil(13)

The truth about Ashwood’s past must never surface, no matter the cost.



Tea and scones were set out for Edmund with the slightly slapdash generosity that had always characterized Aunt Deborah’s hospitality.

Edmund, accepting the cup of tea, said, ‘What I think I’d better say to this woman is that…Oh, keep still a moment, Aunt Deborah – there’s a spider crawling on your neck—’ He set down the cup and went over to her chair.

‘Ugh, how horrid – flick it off for me, Edmund, you know how I loathe spiders—’

There was no spider, of course; what there was, brought into the house in Edmund’s pocket and now carefully concealed in his hand, was a hypodermic syringe, unobtrusively taken from a medicine cabinet years earlier, when Deborah Fane’s husband had had to be given intravenous injections of heparin and nitroglycerin for his failing heart by a nurse who came in every day. Edmund had taken the syringe after William Fane died, and had kept it at the back of a drawer in his own house. You never knew what might come in useful; Crispin had instilled that in Edmund shortly after that last university term, and it was a good maxim.

Carefully kept, as well, had been the memory of a conversation with the nurse, who had still been called a district nurse because people were old-fashioned in this part of the world. You had to be very careful with intravenous injections, she had said, that was why she had to come in each morning. The syringe had to be correctly filled, so that you did not inject air into a main vein and risk causing an embolism.

Embolism?

Air bubble in the system, said the nurse, rather flattered to be sought out and talked to by Mr and Mrs Fane’s attractive nephew, pleased at being able to impart information. Mostly the body could adjust to a small air bubble and absorb it, but if you introduced a big enough pocket of air into one of the large veins – the femoral vein, say, or the jugular – that pocket of air could travel to the heart inside of a couple of minutes, and the heart would stop. The nurse had noticed that it was a murder method sometimes utilized by writers of whodunnits. It was probably not quite as cut-and-dried as the books made out, but the principle was perfectly sound. Hadn’t Dorothy L. Sayers used it in a book?

Edmund had said, with polite regret, that he did not read detective books – ‘Too busy studying, you know’ – and the nurse went off thinking what a charming young man he was, so obviously grateful to the relatives who had been so kind to him. She wondered if he had a girlfriend at university. Or he might be gay, of course; the really nice-looking ones often were. Ah, well.

Edmund did not read detective books, but he could and did read the encyclopaedia, and he had looked up embolism at the next opportunity. Sure enough, there it was.

‘Embolism, from the Greek, embolos, meaning stopper or plug. Obstruction of a blood vessel by material which has been carried along in the bloodstream. Commonest cause is detachment of a blood-clot, portions of growths on heart valve, pieces of tumours, fat, masses of bacteria, and in some instances, air bubbles…’

Air bubbles. Airlock in the system, just as the nurse had described it. The same thing you sometimes got in a car or a central heating system, bringing the car or the heating system to a full stop. Bringing the human body to a full stop? That was how it sounded. Introduce a big enough bubble of air into one of the large veins – for instance by jabbing in an empty hypodermic syringe and pressing the plunger – and the chances were that death, swift, painless, silent, undetectable death, would result within minutes. That was interesting. It was something to tuck into your mind and remember. One day it might be necessary to find out if it really did work.

It had worked that afternoon all right. As Edmund pressed the hypodermic’s plunger, Deborah Fane had given a little gasp, as if of surprise, and then her head had fallen forward. Edmund stared down at her, and after a moment felt for a pulse at the base of her throat, and then beneath her ear. Nothing. But let’s be absolutely sure: this was not a time to take risks or make assumptions. He felt for a heartbeat. Nothing. She was dead, the embolism thing had happened, and presently Edmund would phone the local GP, slightly panic-stricken at coming in to find dear Aunt Deborah apparently dead in her armchair.



The tiny pinprick on Deborah Fane’s neck had not even been noticed, because no one had thought there was anything that needed noticing. Aunt Deb’s angina, a known and existing condition, had already taken the pathologist three-quarters of the way to a verdict of heart failure caused by a severe angina attack. In reality, it had been murther – the Old English morthor – but no one had realized this. Edmund had not really expected that anyone would, but it was still gratifying to know that he had not overlooked anything, and that he had foreseen everything.

He had not, it was true, foreseen that the house would be willed to Michael Sallis’s absurd charity, and he did find it sad that Aunt Deborah had not told him about this. Edmund had thought there had been better trust between them – it just went to show you could not rely on anyone. But losing the house was not disastrous, and it would take a few weeks for probate to be granted so there was plenty of time for Edmund to make a thorough and orderly search of the house – several thorough and orderly searches in fact – to assure himself that there was nothing incriminating anywhere.

Still, as he moved about the empty rooms after the mourners had left, he realized that he was constantly glancing over his shoulder as if he expected to see Aunt Deborah watching him from a doorway, her head twisted a little to one side where he had jabbed the hypodermic in…