“I’m not sure that ‘cool’ is how I’d—”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way, not cold or aloof or anything. That was the extraordinary thing. Why I remember her so well, I think. She smiled all the time—a cool kid who laughed and smiled. I’d never seen that combination in someone before.” She paused, her voice a little hesitant. “She must have been a hard act to compete with …?”
I didn’t know if it was nosiness or concern but decided to get to the purpose of our meeting. “Can you tell me what the report means?”
She got the report and a notebook out of her briefcase. As she did so, I saw a pacifier and a baby’s cloth book. Christina’s glasses and handwriting might not have changed, but her life clearly had. She looked down at her notebook. “James, the friend of a friend I told you about on the phone, is a senior pathologist so he knows his stuff. But he’s anxious about getting involved; pathologists are being sued all the time and minced by the media. He can’t be quoted.”
“Of course.”
“You did English, chemistry and biology didn’t you, Hemms?”
That old nickname, dusty with age; it took a moment to connect it to me. “Yes.”
“Any biochemistry since then?”
“No, I did an English degree, actually.”
“I’ll translate into layman’s terms then. Putting it very simply, Tess had three drugs in her body when she died.”
She didn’t see my reaction, looking down at her notebook. But I was stunned. “What were the drugs?”
“One was Cabergoline, which stops breast milk being produced.”
Simon had told me about that drug and again the fact of it gave me a glimpse into something so painful that I couldn’t look any further; I interrupted my own thoughts: “And the others?”
“One was a sedative. She’d taken a fairly large amount. But because it was a few days before Tess was found and a sample of her blood was taken—” She broke off, upset, and gathered herself before continuing. “What I mean is, because of the time delay it’s hard to be accurate about the actual amount of sedative. James said all he could offer was educated guesswork.”
“And …?”
“She had taken far more than would have been indicated as a normal dose. He thought that it wasn’t high enough to kill her, but it would have made her very sleepy.”
So that was why there had been no sign of a struggle: he’d doped you first. Did you realize it too late? Christina read out more of her perfect italic writing, “The third drug is phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, PCP for short. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic, developed in the fifties as an anesthetic but stopped when patients experienced psychotic reactions.”
I was startled into parrotlike repetition, “Hallucinogenic?”
Christina thought I didn’t understand, her voice patient. “It means the drug causes hallucinations, in lay terms ‘trips.’ It’s like LSD but more dangerous. Again James says it’s hard to be certain how much she’d taken, and how long before she died, because of the delay in finding her. It’s also complicated because the body stores this drug in muscle and fatty tissues at full psychoactive potential, so it can continue to have an effect even after the person has stopped taking it.”
For a moment I just heard scientific babble until it settled into something I could understand. “This drug meant she would have been having hallucinations in the days before she died?” I asked.
“Yes.”
So Dr. Nichols had been right after all, though your hallucinations weren’t because of puerperal psychosis but a hallucinogenic drug.
“He planned it all. He sent her out of her mind first.”
“Beatrice …?”
“He made her mad, made everyone think she was mad, and then he drugged her before he murdered her.”
Christina’s brown eyes looked enormous through the lenses of her pebble glasses, their sympathetic expression magnified. “When I think about how much I love my own baby, well, I can’t imagine what I’d do in Tess’s place.”
“Suicide wasn’t an option to her, even if she’d wanted to take it. She simply wouldn’t have been able to. Not after Leo. And she never touched drugs.”
There was a silence between us, and the inappropriate noise of the bar around us broke into the booth.
“You knew her best, Hemms.”
“Yes.”
She smiled at me, a gesture of capitulation to my certainty, which carried a blood-tied weight.
“I really appreciate all your help, Christina.”
