Settling the Score

Gideon Lawson was dead. Struck down, somehow, during the final rehearsal for the promenade concert. DI Jamie Swan got the call one rainy Thursday evening, from the paramedic who'd attended the scene. 

Nora and Jamie often attended the same accidents and crime scenes. Nora, a large, motherly woman with frizzy hair, had been a paramedic for thirty years. She knew how to calm the most agitated of accident victims. The other thing her experience had given her was an incredible eye for detail and a propensity for hunches about accidents and emergencies which equalled Jamie's for crime scenes.

'I'm at the Unicorn Theatre,' she said. 'A member of the orchestra called us. They said Mr. Lawson keeled over from an apparent heart attack in the middle of Rule Britannia. He's the conductor, you see. He was stone dead by the time we got here. It looks like a coronary on the face of it, but there's something that doesn't seem quite right to me. I think you should come and take a look.'

'Okay,' Jamie said. 'Are all the musicians still there? Good. Ask them to wait, or at least leave their contact details before they go.'

Jamie arrived at the theatre to find the orchestra sitting quietly in their places. At the front of the stage lay Gideon Lawson, stone dead, as Nora had observed. Jamie walked down the central aisle past the empty seats. Tonight had been the final rehearsal, so there'd been no audience. The saying, 'It'll be all right on the night' flashed through his mind. It wouldn't for Gideon Lawson, that was for sure. Whether it would be for the rest of them, was impossible to say right now.

Jamie bent over the body. Lawson was a well-built man, muscle beginning to turn to flab. His skin had a bluish tinge, characteristic of oxygen deprivation. That his heart had given out while conducting a rousing tune was the most obvious conclusion. However, if Nora thought there was a more sinister explanation, Jamie knew from years of experience that it was wise to listen to her.

Jamie took her aside. 'What is that intuition of yours telling you?'

'I think there's more to it. I'm not sure why, but it does seem to me the orchestra are way too calm and quiet given what just happened. When there are this many witnesses to a sudden death, I'd expect at least one of them to be freaking out. Probably more, seeing as they're all creative types - but look at them – they're just sitting there. Almost as if they were expecting it.'

'Hmm. Interesting. Although it can be a perfectly valid reaction to a shock like this to just go numb, everybody's different.'

'Exactly.'

Jamie cast his eyes around the members of the orchestra, looking for anything which might trigger his intuition for crime. It was a relatively small orchestra – a couple of violinists, a cellist and a double bass, a pianist, six people with woodwind instruments, a couple of trumpets, a trombone, a horn, a couple of recorders and a drummer. None of them seemed any more or less distressed than the rest. It was hard to know where to start. While every musician would need to be interviewed if this became a homicide investigation, it wasn't as yet, and there was no reason, beyond the nagging hunches of two people, to make it one. For now, one or two very quick interviews was all Jamie would have time for.

'Who called this in?' Jamie asked. The pianist hesitantly raised his hand. 'I hope you don't mind,' Jamie said, 'but I'd like to ask you a few quick questions. It's routine, when there's a sudden death like this.'

'You have to rule out foul play, right?' the pianist asked. He was a thin man in his forties with sandy hair and a mustache.

'We do, indeed, sir,' Jamie confirmed. 'Although on the face of it, it looks like natural causes, we still have to ask the questions. What is your name, sir?'

'Mervyn Webber.'

'All right, Mr. Webber, Please step into the admin office, so we can have a little privacy. I won't keep you long.'

'I hope not,' Webber said, as he slipped into an office chair and Jamie closed the door behind him. 'I have to get home to feed my animals.'

'What kind of animals do you have?' Jamie asked, making small talk. He found asking people about their children or pets before getting down to the more stressful questions helped to relax people.

'Quite exotic ones, actually, Inspector. Snakes, various reptiles, amphibians, tarantulas...'

Jamie raised an eyebrow. He'd taken Webber for a cat person. 'I bet that's an interesting hobby,' he said.

'Oh, it is, and as you can imagine, animals like that need to be on very specialist diets, so it's not something I can ask my neighbours to do.'

'I guess not – so I'll be as brief as I can. Tell me what happened?'

'We were rehearsing for the Alternative Last Night of the Proms concert, which was to be on Friday. We'd got to the climax of Rule Britannia when Lawson went a funny colour and collapsed. I got my phone out immediately and called an ambulance. I thought it was probably a heart attack.'

'What made you think that?' Jamie asked, 'bearing in mind you're a professional pianist, not a doctor.'

'My father died of a coronary some years ago,' Webber said. 'I'll never forget it. He went the same shade of blue. Plus Lawson was a big chap; always angry and stressed out, he was, too. Even if it wasn't a heart attack, he was going to need an ambulance.'

'How had the rehearsal been going before this happened?' Jamie asked. 'Did Mr. Lawson seem any more stressed than usual?'

'To be honest, no – but he's usually pretty stressed. It was a typical final rehearsal. A few people made mistakes, which isn't unusual. Lawson stopped the rehearsal a few times to yell at people because they really should know the pieces by now. He'd laid into Sadie especially. He reduced her to tears and it affected her playing. He picks on her a lot, and it only makes things worse. Poor Sadie. She's been thinking of leaving the orchestra because of Lawson's bullying. Problem is, she'd never get in anywhere else without a reference from him, so she's a bit stuck.'

Jamie made a mental note to talk to Sadie next. There was a potential motive there, if Lawson's death did turn out to be suspicious.

'How well would you say Lawson got on with the orchestra in general?'

'I'm not sure I should comment. I can't speak for everyone.'

'I don't expect you to – but I'm interested to know what your impression is. Did you get on with him personally?'

'We disagreed about musical direction. I often dislike his arrangements of pieces. We argue most weeks. It's hard to believe he's gone.'

'Thank you, Mr. Webber. I'll let you go and feed your menagerie – but before you go, I'd appreciate it if you'd write down a contact number for me, in case I need any more information.'

'By all means,' Webber said with a smile which made Jamie think of a snake. Well, he thought, they do say that people come to resemble their pets.

Sadie was the flautist, a beanpole of a woman with long, mud-brown hair parted in the middle, and sallow skin. 'I understand you and Mr. Lawson didn't see eye to eye.' Jamie said, gently, remembering Webber had said Lawson's yelling had reduced her to tears on several occasions.

'He was a bully,' Sadie replied. Her voice was soft but there was a hard edge of anger lurking behind it. 'Ask anyone. Several of us have been thinking of leaving. Only we don't think Lawson would give us a decent reference.'

'So you're feeling a bit stuck.'

'Yes. A lot of us felt we should be entering national competitions – if an orchestra does well in those, it's a reference in itself, but for some reason, Lawson refused to enter us. To be honest, I don't think any of us really liked him.'

'Couldn't you fire him?' Jamie asked.

'No. It doesn't work that way. The only person who can fire him is the theatre's musical director, Imelda Kurtin.'

'Had you thought of talking to Ms. Kurtin about how you feel about Mr. Lawson?'

'It wouldn't be any use,' Sadie said, looking deflated. 'She was sleeping with him.'

'I see. So none of you liked him. Was there anyone who might have disliked him particularly for any reason?'

'Harvey Burkitt,' Sadie said, without hesitation. 'Lawson was shagging his wife, too.'

Jamie decided to talk with one more person – Burkitt. The drummer was a flamboyant man with a shock of white hair, reminding Jamie a little of a younger, smarter Einstein. Jamie asked Burkitt to describe the evening's events.

'He basically had a heart attack in the middle of Rule Britannia.'

'Were you aware of any heart condition he may have had?' Jamie asked.

'Not specifically, but he had so many irons in the fire, I'm not surprised he over-reached himself.'

'May I ask what you mean by that?'

'Well, he was having an affair with my wife. Not only that, he was also having an affair with Imelda Kurtin.'

'The theatre's musical director?'

'Yes. Not only was he sleeping with my wife, he was cheating on her! He was a despicable rat and I'm not sorry he's gone. My wife was punishing me, is my guess – because I spend so much time fishing.'

Given this wasn't a crime scene, Jamie had no reason to detain anyone any longer. Once the body had been removed, he made his way up the aisle to the exit. As he went, something caught his eye. Lodged in one of the plush seats in the circle was what appeared to be a fly-fishing lure. Why such a thing might be stuck in a theatre seat struck Jamie as odd. If this had been a crime scene, he would have flagged it; but it wasn't, and he imagined a spectator sitting in that seat come the next performance could prick themselves on it. Jamie was rarely without tweezers and evidence bags – you never knew when you'd need them; so he carefully teased the object out of the seat with the tweezers and dropped it into a bag.

He frowned. A lure should be a hook. He remembered that from when his grandfather used to take him fishing. This object was straight, more like a tiny dart. Perhaps that was why it had been thrown away, as it would be of little use for catching fish.

Jamie lay awake for a long time that night, mulling over what the musicians had told him. There was no official reason to believe this was a murder, but if it had been, there were plenty of people with motives. Burkitt, his wife, Imelda Kurtin, Sadie, Mervyn Webber – if not the entire company.

When he finally slept, he had a strange dream about pygmies in the jungle. There was a company of them, hunting monkeys for dinner. After a convoluted search for monkeys which took them out of the forest, through the streets of London, into Jamie's flat and finally into the theatre, they finally spotted suitable prey in the gallery of the theatre. The pygmies took out their blowpipes and felled the monkey with poison darts.

He sat bolt upright in bed. Poison darts. Was that what he'd found stuck to the seat? If so, good job he'd had the foresight to remove it, as it could have made someone very ill, if not killed them. How could it have got there? Who had put it there?

Jamie took the dart to forensics as soon as he got to work. It would probably prove to be as harmless as a darning needle, but he wanted it in writing. He left it with them and called the coroner's office to request the results of the autopsy on Gideon Lawson as soon as they were available.

He turned his attention to other cases, and went out to lunch with colleagues for someone's birthday. When he returned, there were two messages.

The forensic lab had looked closely at the dart. 'You were right to bring it to us,' the forensic director said. 'It is indeed a poison dart. I see why you thought it was a fishing lure – the fledging was made from a standard fly-fishing lure. The body of it is piano wire – which is commonly used to make darts for blowpipe contests. However, what I reckon will interest you most is that it was loaded with Batrachotoxin.'

'What's that?'

'It's a neurotoxin, used by primitive peoples in South America for hunting.'

'So getting jabbed with that dart could kill a person?'

'Relatively unlikely. It would be used to fell birds or monkeys rather than people – but a big enough dose would kill a person, yes. There's no antidote, either.'

'So how did primitive people make this stuff?'

'By torturing tree frogs. There are some pretty venomous frogs in the jungles of South America. In general, the more brightly coloured a frog is, the more lethal they are. They produce the toxin in their skin. What people would do was roast the frogs over an open fire, which, as you could imagine, would cause the poor creatures a lot of stress – so they'd exude the toxin, and the hunters would harvest it.'

'Nasty,' Jamie said.

'Very,' the scientist agreed.

Jamie had little time to puzzle over what a dart loaded with tree frog venom had been doing in a theatre before the coroner's office called him back.

'The cause of Gideon Lawson's death was cardiac arrest, but it's not as straightforward as that,' the coroner's assistant said. 'There were traces of a neurotoxin in his system as well, one which can also have the effect of causing a cardiac arrest. So we cannot rule out suspicious circumstances.'

'That toxin you found – it wasn't Batrachotoxin, by any chance, was it?'

'Why, yes, as a matter of fact, it was.'

Mervyn Webber seemed surprised to see Jamie at his door with a warrant. 'I couldn't resist coming to see those pets of yours,' Jamie said. Before coming here, Jamie had researched poison dart frogs a little. One thing he'd learned was that captive frogs didn't produce such strong toxins as a rule, since they were fed a diet lower in alkaloids. That, and the fact the frogs wouldn't survive the chilly British weather they'd been enjoying of late, seemed to rule out a venomous frog escaping and finding its way into the theatre, hopping over to the conductor and exuding the venom over one of the small wounds the coroner had mentioned on the man's ankles, hands and neck.

All the same, Jamie wanted to take a look.

Sure enough, Webber's menagerie included some bright blue frogs in an aquarium. Jamie didn't stop looking there, though. Any significant clues could well be elsewhere in the house.

He entered the music room, where a piano had pride of place. On a desk by the window, Jamie found some sheet music, and a pile of bills. On top was a bill from a piano tuner, listing the costs of labour and replacement strings.

A tangle of discarded strings spilled out of the wastepaper bin in the corner.

Jamie glanced through the rest. Electricity. Telephone. Animal food – live locust nymphs and the like. At the bottom, he found what he reckoned he was looking for. An invoice for alkaloid chemicals. He replaced it, and returned to Webber, sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and looking anxious.

'So your pet snakes and frogs – are they poisonous?'

'The snakes are. The frogs are in the wild, but captive ones don't get fed the right stuff. Then venom comes from their diet, you see.'

'Presumably, if you released them into the wild, or fed them on whatever they eat out there, they could become venomous again?'

'Absolutely.'

'So what would it take to feed them to achieve that?'

Webber visibly paled.

'Alkaloid chemicals? That would do it, wouldn't it?'

Webber nodded, numbly.

'I'm going to have to ask you to come with me to the station,' Jamie said.

So he had a murder weapon. He had at least one suspect with a motive and an opportunity. What he didn't know was how the toxin had been delivered.

It was easy now to get warrants to search the homes of all the orchestra members, plus Imelda Kurtin, who was the only one who seemed to have any grief for Lawson at all, but that didn't rule her out. 'You're looking for a blowpipe,' Jamie told his team. 'That and anything that looks like a poison dart.'

There was no sign of a blowpipe in anyone's home. Harvey Burkitt had a huge range of fishing lures and tackle, but no darts. The theatre itself was searched – the killer hadn't disposed of the weapon there, either.

Yet Jamie was certain that someone, most likely Mervyn Webber, had killed Lawson using a poison dart.

He put his theory to Webber as part of the interview.

'I didn't kill him,' Webber insisted.

'No? I put it to you that you made poison darts using your frogs on their special diet and old piano strings; you borrowed fishing lures from Burkitt to fledge them. I've got enough to put you both away as accessories to murder, so you might as well tell me. How were the darts administered? Where is the blowpipe?'

'Blowpipes,' Webber said. 'There were several, not to mention some bow and arrow type arrangements. It's like a firing squad. You can never prove who killed the victim.'

'Fine – but we searched everyone's homes. Nobody had a blowpipe.'

'Are you sure about that, inspector? It doesn't have to be a museum piece of an Amazon blowpipe. Or a modern competition model. You only need a tube to blow through.'

Of course. Several of them had had that – flutes, piccolos, recorders, trumpets... and bows and arrows – violin and cello strings.

Webber was right. While he and Burkitt could be charged with being accessories, neither the piano nor the drum could have administered a dart. Only strings or instruments you blow into could have done it. And there was no way to prove which had killed Lawson. Enough darts had hit him to provide a fatal dose, but some had missed. The search of the theatre revealed another three darts which had ended up in the front row seats.

'They all had them,' Webber said. 'Everyone blowing and pinging at the same time was the most discordant thing I ever heard. The last thing Lawson heard. It wasn't in the middle of Rule Britannia at all. It was right after we finished, as agreed. They all trained their instruments on him and blew, or pinged. I knew some of them would miss, but enough would hit him to take him out. Some of them are innocent – they missed – but you can't prove which, can you? So nobody gets done for actual murder.'

Jamie had to admit a grudging admiration for the plan. A handful of musicians had killed Lawson, but innocent until proven guilty, they'd all walk free. Webber and Burkitt would serve short sentences for handling weapons, planning the thing – but not life. They'd be out on parole in a few months. Jamie reckoned this was about as close to the perfect crime as any he'd come across.

Check out my novel, featuring DI Jamie Swan:

Death and Faxes

Several women have been found murdered - it looks like the work of a ruthless serial killer. Psychic medium Maggie Flynn is one of the resources DI Jamie Swan has come to value in such cases - but Maggie is dead, leaving him with only the telephone number of the woman she saw as her successor, her granddaughter, Tabitha Drake.

Tabitha, grief-stricken by Maggie's death and suffering a crisis of confidence in her ability, wants nothing to do with solving murder cases. She wants to hold on to her job and find Mr Right (not necessarily in that order); so when DI Swan first contacts her, she refuses to get involved.

The ghosts of the victims have other ideas. They are anxious for the killer to be caught and for names to be cleared - and they won't leave Tabitha alone. It isn't long before Tabitha is drawn in so deeply that her own life is on the line.

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