A Sprinkle of Sabotage by Fiona Leitch (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

I pulled myself together. It wouldn’t help Zack if I mentioned my misgivings, and they turned out to be wrong.

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ I asked. ‘You don’t need to be on set, surely?’

‘I left my knives and everything here,’ he said. ‘Although I don’t think I’ll be using them again any time soon.’

‘Now that would be a waste,’ I said. ‘I was impressed with your knife skills last night. They’re better than mine, and I went to catering college.’

He smiled and pulled himself up with a bit of mock-swagger. ‘I grew up in South London, didn’t I? I’m well used to knives.’

I laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. I lived in South London for the best part of twenty years, it ain’t that bad.’

‘Did you? Whereabouts?’

I thought about making something up, but dammit, I was a good copper and I wasn’t going to lie about it. ‘I was a police officer in the Met. Based at Stockwell.’

If Zack was horrified, he managed to hide it. ‘Were you? Wow. I’m from Deptford.’ He leant in towards me. ‘Don’t tell anyone because it’s bad for the image, but I never had any real run-ins with the police. I had mates that were always in trouble, but I was more likely to be at drama club than running wild.’ His smile faded. ‘That’s all gonna change now though, ain’t it?’

‘Don’t be daft; it was an accident. The coroner will rule it as death by misadventure. You didn’t intentionally contaminate the fish, and you didn’t force it down Jeremy’s throat.’

He sighed. ‘I still don’t see how I contaminated it. I didn’t puncture any of the organs, or let the skin touch the flesh, and those are the bits that contain the poison. I just don’t understand it.’

I patted him on the back. ‘Well, let’s wait for the lab results and make sure that is what killed him, before you start writing off your cooking skills.’

He stared at me, a look of faint hope on his face. ‘Do you think there’s a chance it was something else? Like he was allergic or something?’

‘Well…’ I said, gently. ‘Maybe. But of course you and Aiko were sick as well, weren’t you? And maybe the others too.’

‘Yeah…’

Poor Zack. I had washed up his knives last night, along with the chopping boards he’d used to prepare the fish, so I handed them over and sent him on his way.

I finished washing up everything else, then picked up the two bags of rubbish I’d left by the door the night before and carried them outside, making sure not to trip on the broken stair. Like all the other ‘accidents’, I thought again. Hmm. I carried the bags over to the big rubbish dumpster in the courtyard, threw in the one of vegetable peelings and general kitchen debris, and then stopped. The other bag was full of fish waste – the internal organs and skin of the pufferfish. I turned on my heel and headed to Zack’s trailer.

The trailer was cordoned off, although the forensics team had finished their initial investigation and left; as far as anyone else was concerned it was an accident. It was just me who was beginning to think it wasn’t, but I had absolutely nothing to base that on.

Davey Trelawney had just come back on shift and was standing guard outside.

‘All right, Davey?’ I said. He nodded.

‘Aye, I’m all right. Looking for the guvnor, are you?’ he asked. I wondered if he knew Penstowan would be looking for a new DCI soon. I nodded.

‘Is he around?’

‘Just talking to the SOCO,’ he said, nodding over to where a police squad car and a couple of unmarked ones were parked. Nathan was talking to a Scene of Crime officer I didn’t recognise; Penstowan didn’t have its own forensics people, and had to use the team based at Barnstaple.

‘Thanks,’ I said, grasping my bag of rubbish tightly and striding over to them. Nathan looked up as I approached, and a smile spread over his face. He quickly wiped it off and turned back to his companion, ever the professional.

‘Hello,’ I said. The SOCO nodded at me and went to get in his car. ‘Hold on,’ I said, stopping him. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ I held up the bag of rubbish. It was starting to smell. ‘Fish guts.’

He grimaced. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

‘It didn’t look like there was much food left on the plates last night, so I thought you might want to swab this lot and make sure it matches the victim’s toxicology report,’ I said. The SOCO looked surprised, then nodded appreciatively as he took the bag.

‘Good thinking,’ he said, then he looked at me. ‘You’re Eddie Parker’s daughter, aren’t you? I didn’t know him very well – I hadn’t been in the force long when he passed away – but he was a good bloke. Very encouraging. I’ve heard all about you since you’ve been back.’

I must’ve looked as alarmed as I felt because Nathan laughed. ‘All good, I hope,’ I said.

The SOCO grinned. ‘Mostly.’ He held up the stinky rubbish bag. ‘Thanks for this. I’ll swab it for tetrodotoxin as soon as I get back to the station and we should have the results by the end of the day, along with the toxicology report on the body.’

We watched him drive away.

‘Go on, then,’ said Nathan.

‘What?’

‘Your sixth sense is tingling, isn’t it?’ He turned to look at me. ‘You’re going to do it again, aren’t you? Turn my nice, neat, cut-and-dried case into a convoluted murder mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.’

‘I thought I was Magnum PI?’ That was what he’d called me in the early days of our relationship, when we’d butted heads over the murder of Tony’s ex-wife. Everything had pointed towards Tony being the killer, but I’d been convinced that I knew better and, as it turned out, I had. But when I’d told Nathan