The Elizabeth West Mysteries, Page 3

  ***

  Three: The Seeds of Death

  Next to the body was a small, innocent looking bottle. The box, the bottle had obviously only recently been purchased, lay nearby along with a leaflet of instructions. Temple of Heaven Balm was how the leaflet described the contents of the bottle. The leaflet suggested it could cure influenza, cold, heatstroke, dizziness, drunkenness, seasickness, toothache, abdominal pain, swelling, itching, mosquito bites, insect stings, rheumatism, muscular aches and pains, scalds and finally burns. Quite a list and added to that, it may have caused the untimely demise of Mr Charles William Friendship, not a name I had ever come upon previously. One thing about the body was strange and that was the eyes. When I first walked into the room where Mr Friendship had died, I noticed his eyes staring straight at me. I felt that the ghost of Mr Friendship still inhabited his body and was beseeching me for help. The explanation however was quite simple and straight forward, the pupils of Mr Friendship's eyes were unnaturally dilated.

  The body was sent to the morgue for an autopsy, and the balm to forensic to discover if it had been the cause of death. Mr Friendship's passport was uncovered, hidden behind a drawer, there was some money as well, rather a lot of money and a photograph. The photograph was of Mr Friendship and another man. The other man was Chinese and the photograph, I guessed, was taken quite a few years ago in Hong Kong. Amongst the horde of money there were Thai Bhat, Hong Kong dollars and Peoples Money from communist China. The money was sent to the lab as was the photograph. I wanted the photograph blown up and the Chinese man in it identified.

  The room in which Mr Friendship had lived and died was sparsely furnished. There was a bed, a cupboard, a wardrobe and an old musty chair together with a rented television and video. Several cassettes lay scattered on the floor, all martial arts films. There were a few clothes, a novel - Tai Pan, an electric jug, some tea bags and powdered milk. I sent the tea bags and powdered milk along to the lab for analysis, just in case. There was also a bin in the room. The sum total of its contents however were empty lager cans and sodden tea bags. Mr Friendship had lived in one room of an old Victorian town house, once it had been owned by a wealthy Victorian cloth merchant, but now it was little better than a slum. On the floor above Mr Friendship's flat lived a girl and her boyfriend, both students. They had only seen Mr Friendship once or twice they told me, he passed them in the corridor and said hello but nothing more. On one occasion they said, a Chinese man was thumping on Mr Friendship's door but when he had seen them he left. This was approximately two weeks before. Later I showed them the photograph of the Chinese man who had been standing next to Mr Friendship in Hong Kong. No, they said, they couldn't be sure, but they did seem to recognise him from somewhere, however they could not be precise as to where. There was a dirty communal kitchen with paint peeling from the ceiling and a filthy oven. Out in the backyard, the dustbin overflowed. I tipped the contents of the dustbin out and all I found were empty tins and aluminium packs that had once contained takeaway dinners. From the cellar an orange haired punk and his witch like girlfriend emerged. No he'd never seen Mr Friendship.

  'We keep ourselves to ourselves, know what I mean?'

  I took his name, just as I took everyone's name in the house, for routine checks.

  The first real fact in the case was that the bottle of Temple of Heaven Balm contained poison distilled from the berries of the plant Deadly Nightshade.

  'That accounts for the dilation of the pupils,' Antonette from forensic said to us over a cup of coffee. 'Italian ladies, during the Renaissance, used the juice of the berries to dilate their pupils and that is the reason for its other name, Belladonna.'

  'Women do the strangest things,' said Detective Flatfoot, 'present company excepted of course.'

  'Men do the most inane things,' said Antonette, 'present company excepted, of course.'

  The man in the photograph was an importer/exporter who had been wanted by Interpol. But we also learnt that he had died five years ago in Hong Kong. He had been working from Bangkok and was suspected of masterminding an opium ring. So now we were on to something, perhaps and only perhaps, it was a drugs ring killing. The city in the photograph proved to be, as I had guessed, Hong Kong, but according to Mr Friendship's current passport, he had never been there. When the passport was checked it proved to be a forgery.

  'So Mr Friendship was perhaps not Mr Friendship at all and it is quite likely that we will never be able to discover who he was,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  Mr Friendship's fingerprints were checked, but nothing. The poison was checked against similar cases but again we found ourselves in a blind alley.

  'So far,' I said, 'all we have to go on is that Mr Friendship is dead. He has been poisoned by the juice distilled from the plant Deadly Nightshade. He has been to Hong Kong. He knew an opium dealer who is also dead. His passport is forged and he had in his possession a considerable amount of money in several currencies. Full stop.'

  'I think perhaps it's a simple cut and dry case of suicide,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  I smiled.

  I got into contact with the landlord of the bedsit where Mr Friendship had lived. I learned that Mr Friendship had paid his rent regularly, had lived in the bedsit for about two years and was no trouble at all. Dead end. The students in the flat above Mr Friendship's were students with no criminal record, one was studying to be an accountant and the other to be a social worker. The punk living in the cellar was a punk, on the dole and the neighbours complained that he beat up his girlfriend. He had one conviction for smoking marijuana. Red herring, dead end. I knew I had to come up with something or we would be taken off the case. So I put on my coat, rounded up Detective Flatfoot who was drinking coffee, it was thundering and lightning outside, and we went to Manchester's China Town.

  China Town consists of about three or four streets of Chinese restaurants, shops, supermarkets, finance agents and casinos. A Chinese gateway stands in the centre of China Town, we stood for a moment examining it. It was rather beautiful and just like our case, an enigma.

  'It must be opium,' I said, 'a drugs ring.'

  We spent that afternoon and evening making enquiries but we came up with yet another blank.

  'It must be suicide,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  I went home and switched on the television. I was tired and sleepy, I made myself a sandwich and was happy to watch anything. The programme was the story of a body that had been discovered in a bog. The body, Pete Marsh they called it, had been discovered in a peat bog near Manchester Airport. The police did not get involved as the body was over one thousand years old. The person, Pete Marsh, had been hit over the head with an axe, his throat had been cut and he had been garrotted. The scientists studying the body were even able to decided what he had eaten for his last supper. I was impressed, early the next day I got into contact with Antonette at forensic. I wanted to know what Mr Friendship had eaten for his last supper.

  'A Chinese takeaway,' she said.

  I also discovered that the fake passport had come from Bangkok and I was at a dead end again. But no, I grabbed my coat, and Detective Flatfoot, and we went to the street where Mr Friendship had lived. I went to the closest Chinese takeaway, it was in the same street.

  1 studied the menu, went in and ordered beef in black bean sauce and boiled rice. I studied the young Chinese woman behind the counter and was just about to question her about Mr Friendship: Did she know him? Did she know the other man in the picture? Did either of them frequent her shop? when the cook walked in with my order. I gave nothing away but I recognised him immediately. Later we discovered the man's name, or the name he was using, was Mr Tou, he ran a small import export business and had a warehouse in China Town.

  'When a man has been dead for five years and he turns up running a Chinese takeaway in Manchester in the same street in which a murder has taken place, of course we are going to do something about it. We will get a search warrant and in the meantime we will have Mr Tou watch
ed,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  He seemed to be taking over the case.'

  'But we have got nothing to pin on him,' I said.

  'Now Elizabeth,' he said, 'strike while the iron's hot.'

  Detective Flatfoot is not so much an anti-drug enthusiast as, in newspaper jargon, a scoop enthusiast. He smelt promotion in the air and it was not my promotion he was thinking of. We had spent hours and hours banging our heads against brick walls trying to unravel this case and now when it had all started to fall in to place, wrongheadedness stepped in.

  'We will never be able to pin a murder charge on this Mr Tou if we move now,' I said.

  'Well no, maybe not, but we will get him on drug dealing, it's about time I got my hands on one of the big boys,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  I felt I was being relegated from one of the team to the typist and from the typist to the tea lady.

  'Get me a coffee,' he said as he organised the raid.

  The raids were synchronised, the warehouse in China Town was raided, and sniffer dogs were used, nothing was found. Mr Tou was arrested and his house was searched, again nothing was found. Interpol had nothing concrete on him, he was released and by the next day he had disappeared.

  'Sorry,' said Detective Flatfoot, 'got a bit over enthusiastic.'

  'Don't worry,' I said, 'Mr Tou has not got away from us yet. It's like the body in the bog, it had to wait two thousand years for justice, I don't think I will take that long.'

  We received a telephone call later that day, a body had been found. It had been found in the Chinese takeaway where I had first recognised Mr Tou. I put on my coat, found Detective Flatfoot, and we went straight there. The shop front was very run down, old blue paint peeled off in great arms full and the shop window was excessively dusty. Inside the shop the atmosphere hardly improved, old and tarnished tiles, many of them cracked, decorated the outer room along with a huge fake marble laminex counter. Lying behind the counter was the body. The deceased was a rather pretty Chinese girl. I had seen her, I had even spoken to her on my first visit to the shop. If only I had known then. The cause of death was not apparent. Her eyes were closed. She looked as if she were sleeping. I knelt down and carefully lifted her eyelids, no, her eyes were not dilated. There was nothing suspicious near the body and there were no obvious marks on the body. On the counter was a can of lychees. We sent the lychees along to forensic as a routine measure.

  We went into the kitchen, if a health inspector had seen that kitchen it would have been closed without further ado. It was strange that it had never been inspected. Greasy woks lay about the floor, the paint on the ceiling had blistered from heat, the walls were streaked in grease, there was a tiny window stopped up with newspaper and the only dim forty watt light bulb was caked in a greasy brown film. There were sacks of rice and cans of Chinese mushrooms but no fresh ingredients. From that I postulated that the murder had taken place after the shop had closed the previous night. The girl had no identification on her and it seemed she was known locally simply as Lee. Nothing strange about that really but it wasn't very helpful.

  Above the shop was a flat. Again it was a dismal room, the window didn't open, the window sill had been eaten through with damp. The wallpaper had once been of big purple flowers but damp and the yellowing of time had changed the colour to a filthy grey. The single bed looked like it would have been happy in a maximum security prison and there was a wardrobe with a broken door. The clothes in the wardrobe were roughly the same size as the deceased but there were not very many of them. There was an outdated calendar on the wall with a picture of a Chinese landscape and a collection of romantic novels, all in Chinese. The only other object of any interest in the room was a wooden canary cage shaped like a pagoda, but no canary. Detective Flatfoot picked up one of the novels and it fell open revealing a letter addressed to Lee Wuhu of that address.

  We questioned the old man from the newsagents across the road, he had found the body. He told me that he realised something was amiss when his dog wouldn't stop barking outside the Chinese takeaway and when the shop failed to open he'd gone around the back and found the door unlocked. He insisted the girl's name was Lee, so far so good, but that was all he knew. I showed him Mr Friendship's photograph, he recognised Mr Friendship, he even mentioned that Mr Friendship was not local. When I told him that Mr Friendship had lived in the street he said he knew that, but that Mr Friendship was a southerner, that's what he meant by not local. I showed him Mr Tou's photo and he recognised Mr Tou as the cook in the Chinese takeaway. The old man from the newsagents said that Mr Tou kept himself to himself.

  'Suicide perhaps,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  I smiled once again.

  There was no record of a Lee Wuhu being born in or ever entering into the United Kingdom. She was nobody. Perhaps she was a boat person from Vietnam and had been smuggled in by Mr Tou. I contacted the relief agencies involved with the Vietnamese refugees but got no response. We did a door knock up and down the street and got one interesting piece of information. One old lady said to me that she thought Mr Friendship had come from New Zealand. I got in contact with the New Zealand and Australian police but got no response.

  The post mortem and the analysis of the can of lychees turned up another interesting fact. The cause of death had been a poisonous substance extracted from the berries of the plant Woody Nightshade.

  'It's not as poisonous as Deadly Nightshade,' said Antonette, 'but she had one hell of a dose.'

  'Why did the murderer use a poison that he, no doubt, knew was not as potent?' I said. 'Why poison at all? Why? Why? Why? All we have is questions, no answers, just questions.'

  'Perhaps poison,' said Antonette, 'because it is so freely available. You can find these plants on hedgerows and waste ground all over the country.'

  'So it's very hard to trace.'

  'Precisely,' said Antonette.

  'He's very clever,' said Detective Flatfoot smiling.

  'Not much to go on,' I said. 'But we also have Mr Tou's photo, we know something of his history and we know that he was deceptive enough to have engineered his own apparent death on at least one occasion.'

  'However, he has slipped through our fingers. All we can do now is sit and wait for his next victim to turn up,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  Then I remembered the letter Detective Flatfoot had found in the novel. The letter was signed Frank and was brief and to the point. The handwriting was elegant and formal but the signature was scribbled.

  Dear Lee,

  I must see you tonight. I can't stand to be without you, please come.

  Frank.

  'Who is Frank?' said Detective Flatfoot.

  'From the letter,' I said, 'I gather Frank and Lee had some kind of attachment but that they saw rather little of each other and that Frank, whoever he was, found this situation intolerable. Was Lee's death a crime of passion? Was it linked to the death of Mr Friendship? It seems that they both died at the hands of the same master poisoner. Every new lead is a blind alley. Somehow we have to find our way clear of the trees, so that we can see the forest.'

  I checked the date of the letter, it had been posted two days before Mr Friendship had died. Immediately I telephone Mr Friendship's old landlord. Had he a copy of Mr Friendship's signature on a deed or a contract? Had Mr Friendship ever used the name Frank? Both questions received an answer in the negative. I put on my coat, found Detective Flatfoot drinking coffee once again, and we paid a return visit to Mr Friendship's flat. Sitting outside his door, as if returned by an acquaintance he had loaned it to, was a martial arts picture book. Detective Flatfoot flicked through the book and then I noticed a note taped to the door.

  Frank. Thanks for the loan of book. I called but you were out.

  'There is no signature on the note and the book gives away no clues,' I said.

  'But Mr Charles Friendship was also Frank Friendship,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  'And he had been having an affair with Lee and they are both dead,
end of story,' I said.

  'Perhaps it's not suicide,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  I smiled.

  I drove to Manchester's China Town and found Mr Tou's warehouse, it was now leased to a Mr Smiles. I tried to arrange to meet Mr Smiles but nobody knew of him. He wasn't even a face, just a signature on a cheque. I tracked down that cheque. I had a handwriting expert compare the signature to that of Mr Tou which was on a statement he had made. Yes, the expert finally decided, there were distinct similarities.

  That afternoon the Superintendent called us into his office, he addressed me not as Elizabeth but as Officer West and I knew something was up. He said that enough was enough and that we had more important work to do. I said that I believed we had found Mr Tou once again. The Superintendent pulled a face. Detective Flatfoot and myself were off the case, he announced. I left the Superintendent's office with a bad taste in my mouth. Something was wrong, but I felt more determined than ever to get my man.

  That night I went back to China Town, I was off duty. The warehouse fronted onto a derelict lot used as a car park and was rather a drab, smoke blackened building thrown up under the guidance of an uninspired Victorian architect. I climbed a rusty outer stairway and found the room rented by Mr Smiles unlocked. It was a vast, cold, damp, third floor of the warehouse, totally empty apart from rubbish. All the windows were broken and a chill wind cut into me. It was a bleak sad place, the kind of place where one imagined people being murdered. I went back to my car and waited. I kept up my vigil, returning every night for a week and nothing happened. Then one night I fell asleep in my car and when I awoke a light was on inside the warehouse. I had with me a video camera and a large spanner for self-defence, I retrieved these from the boot of my car and then quietly proceeded up the rusty outer stairway. When I reached the third floor I crept along to a broken window and peeped in. I saw Mr Tou dressed in a white suit sitting inside the warehouse, obviously waiting for someone to arrive. Mr Tou was what I would describe as a rather unwholesome character, he had a big round face that matched his big round body, his eyes were sarcastic and critical and his face was a cool, calm but deadly mask. I remembered his hands when I had seen him in the Chinese takeaway, they reminded me of the hands of a strangler. Half an hour passed. It began to rain. If discovered I could never make a run for it, the old metal stairway was a death trap when wet. Then I heard footsteps inside the warehouse and Mr Tou stood up. A middle aged man in a well cut suit entered, I couldn't see his face, all the same I thought he seemed nervous. Mr Tou, I noted, was smiling. Nothing was said and the man handed Mr Tou a parcel. Blackmail! I filmed the whole scene. But when I put the film through the normal channels to have it developed, it went missing.

  I was sitting in my flat, I couldn't think of anything but Mr Tou. A lead had come through suddenly on Frank Friendship, he had been born in Australia. The girl had also been traced to a refugee camp for boat people in Hong Kong. The little we knew of Mr Friendship's story was that he had been in Vietnam with the Australian Forces during the Vietnamese War. He had become involved with some very shady characters and been quietly discharged. Something felt rather fishy, for so long nothing and then a virtual flood of information, as if someone suddenly wanted me to wrap the case up.

  I was contemplating all of this when my doorbell rang. I switched off the television, I hadn't really been watching it and I opened the door. Standing in front of me was Mr Tou. He was wearing the same white suit and his face seemed to betray the slightest feeling of panic, then he smiled.

  'Come in,' I said.

  The smile disappeared from Mr Tou's face and he began to fall forward, I caught him in my arms. The handle of a six inch butcher's knife stuck out of his back.

  Three murders and I was back to square one. I had no idea who was carrying out these fiendish crimes or why. I had no idea what Mr Tou had wanted to see me about or who had killed him. I was beginning to think that the mystery would never be solved. I spent another fruitless week searching for evidence. The deeper I dug, the less I seemed to find out.

  Finally I admitted defeat, I realised that the cards had been stacked against me from the start. Someone, I felt, at the top of the ladder, had a secret that he certainly didn't want me to dig up. I turned the facts over with Detective Flatfoot. Mr Friendship, Frank Friendship, had been born in Australia. He had joined the Australian Army and seen service in the Vietnamese War where he was discharged. In Vietnam he had met Mr Tou, perhaps. Over the years Mr Friendship had financial dealings with Mr Tou, maybe helping him in the drug smuggling business. At the end of the Vietnamese War a third character entered the story, a Lee Wuhu. Could she have been Mr Tou's mistress. When Mr Tou had been under investigation by the authorities in Hong Kong he faked his own death and went underground. Finally he resurfaced in Manchester, running a small Chinese takeaway and masterminding a crime ring. Mr Friendship and Lee had both come to England with Mr Tou and at some stage they had started to have an affair. Mr Tou poisoned, first Mr Friendship out of jealousy, and then Lee to stop her giving him away. But there was another man in the story, who was he? Whoever he was, it was apparent Mr Tou was blackmailing him, perhaps there were others. Mr Tou died due to internal haemorrhaging caused by the puncturing of the heart by a butcher's knife. Mr Tou was undoubtedly the poisoner and his death was perhaps the result of a revenge killing.

  'Everything fits together neatly but for one thing. Why did Mr Tou come to me on the evening when he was killed?' I said.

  'I don't think the suicide angle has been fully investigated yet,' said Detective Flatfoot.

  We wrote a long report and filed it under unsolved crimes. I went home and switched on the television. There was the man I had seen in Mr Smile's warehouse. On the screen the Attorney General was talking about drug abuse and the need for tighter legislation and I knew he was the man I had seen with Mr Tou. I decided that my days with the Greater Manchester Constabulary were numbered and that this would be as good a time as ever to return to the Territory Police in Australia. It would mean losing my stripes but I had a plan to get them back.