Chapter 9
“Right! Listen in!”
He had their attention. “Does anyone have a tame CSI who owes them a favour?” They visibly relaxed. Gandalph held his hand up and life carried on.
Thurstan waved towards his office and strode off. Gandalph followed.
“Take a seat, Stephen.” He leaned back in his chair. “Right, I need a job doing but I want to keep it off the books for the time being. You know what they’re like in these departments, too many bloody questions and I’m not ready to go public with this one at the moment. Do you think your chap can slide it under the counter, as it were?”
Gandalph smiled. There was something about his DCI and the way he operated that made him comfortable. “It’s a chapess actually, Boss, and she’s very good. I’ll speak to her and see if she has time but I don’t think it will be a problem.”
“Great, sooner rather than later but otherwise no rush. Monday would be nice.” He checked his mobile then scribbled the phone number and address onto a yellow sticky, handing it over the table.
As Gandalph wandered back, Thurstan pulled a thin file from the bottom of the pile on his desk, opened it and began to thumb through.
There was no mention of a glass or cup next to the bed or anywhere else in the bedroom. There was an empty packet of sleeping tablets from a local pharmacy on the bedside cabinet. The notes indicated it was a repeat prescription.
Forensics, as he’d thought, had been interrupted by a call to attend another serious incident and, given the flat could be secured, it was scheduled to be completed at a later date. It’d been cancelled when the post mortem, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, declared the cause of death to be ‘consistent with positional asphyxiation as a result of an unintentional overdose of the subject’s prescription sleeping tablets’. He didn’t necessarily disagree but he’d have a word with the pathologist anyway.
Elsie hadn’t been a huge help. She’d been told by Jack that he’d met an old friend and had even seen them together once but couldn’t remember any name she’d been given. She thought she’d told the Police but it wasn’t in her statement or elsewhere on the system. She did know the young man’s name though. Danny. It was a start.
He took a boiled sweet from his drawer, dropped the paper in the bin at his side and sat sucking, deep in thought. Yep, the glass and cup in the kitchen were interesting. Someone else had been there at some point. The cup could have been Jack’s but the glass, given what he’d been told, was a different matter.