The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

had been ransacked. Made a hell of a mess. We called the cops round. It wasn’t you, was it? Don’t answer that, I know it wasn’t. They said there had been a spate of opportunistic burglaries in the area. Oh yeah, I’ll bet, the ransackers, whoever they were, made it look realistic by breaking in and turning over the two neighbouring gaffs for good measure, but Desi knew was MI7. That’s what she said as soon as the regular cops had gone, and I believed her. She also said the Aussie bastard had tipped them off.’

‘Why did they do that? Break in and ransack the place.’

‘Looking for evidence, of course!’

‘Evidence of what?’

‘Oh, come on, Walter, keep up, man! They were trying to find evidence that she was leaking stuff outside, taking stuff off prem. They thought she was feeding info to a third party, but the only third party was me. If we hadn’t moved everything, Desi would have been arrested. They would have thrown the book at her; thrown the key away. God knows what she would have been charged with. That night she told me if she ever had an accident, ever disappeared without warning, leaving a letter behind saying that she’d gone away, or ever died suddenly, it would be the work of MI7.’

‘Where’s the stuff now?’

Sam thought about that for a moment.

‘I still have it. There’s no harm in you knowing. The knowledge you have will be extinguished when you go,’ and he glanced at his petite, girlish wristwatch, and said, ‘I’d say, Walter, you have just entered your last hour.’

Walter needed to pee, but didn’t say. He wanted to keep talking. There were still things he didn’t understand.

‘What exactly goes on at Eden Leys?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Course not. You tell me.’

‘They are experimenting on live human beings.’

Walter laughed again.

‘Don’t laugh like that! They are! I’ve got the proof. Some of it is in my spare room, but most of it, the juicy bits, including photographs and IDs, are locked away in a solicitor’s office miles from here.’

A picture of the offices of Lambourn, Harcourt and Snapes flooded into Sam’s mind, and their luxurious suite on the sixth floor of the Royal Liver Building, Liverpool. Those fab rooms staring out across the wide and murky river, and the huge storeroom in the basement that housed the gigantic safe, a piece of kit that was too heavy to be set up anywhere but on the ground itself. In that vast safe lay the evidence, Desi’s life’s work, Desiree’s masterpiece. Proof of what was going on. Proof of why she had been murdered. Sam paused, switched off.

Walter switched him on again.

‘Tell me about the experiments on living human beings?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything you do.’

Sam pursed his lips, sorted his thoughts into some kind of order, and began again.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Karen tossed and turned. She couldn’t sleep. She slipped from the bed and went through to the kitchen. Poured another glass of ice-cold cranberry juice. Sipped and swallowed. Sipped and swallowed. Her throat felt as if a piece of barbed wire was jammed down there. Her eyes hurt and her hands shook. She expected him to return, the killer, maybe that night. He had tried and failed to murder her, and he now knew it too. He’d tried to kill her for a reason, the seventh death in his reign of terror.

Maybe there was some significance to the number seven.

Seven was a strange number. She knew that well enough. When a group of people are asked to name a number between one and ten a huge majority choose seven. Why? Some people say it is a lucky number. Racing car drivers fight to have it on their cars. Others say it is dreadfully unlucky.

Seven days in the week, the seventh day is the Sabbath, the holy day, seven deadly sins, seven sisters, seven dwarfs, seventh son of a seventh son, perhaps Sam was a seventh son of a seventh son, seven wonders of the world, seven sacraments, seven heavenly virtues, seven stations of the cross, seven years bad luck if you break a mirror, seven-year itch, seven murders, or at least six killings plus one attempted, and an old rhyme came back to her from when she was a little girl:

One means anger

Two means mirth

Three, a wedding

Four, a birth

Five is heaven

Six is hell

But seven’s the very devil himself.

A strange thing to teach a kid, she thought, and amongst it all were seven murders... but he’d only completed six. He was coming back; of course he was coming back. She went through to the spare bedroom. The door was ajar. Eased it open. Rays of light fed in from the hallway. Gibbons was asleep, lying on his back, snoring like a child. He’d said he was dog tired. He certainly looked it. The duvet cover had slipped down, revealing his chest. He was surprisingly muscular; she would never have guessed it from the grubby and worn flappy shirts he liked to wear to work. Perhaps they were a fashion statement, like ripped jeans, though she doubted it.

She wanted to wake him and talk some more, but he looked serene and peaceful. It would be wicked to wake him, a sin. Never wake a sleeping person, her mother always used to say, it’s a sin, unless it’s an emergency. Was this an emergency? Maybe, maybe not. He’d surely think her crazy, his neurotic female sergeant. She didn’t want that. She pulled the door closed and went back to bed.

SAM TOOK A DEEP BREATH, reflecting on his words, and began again.

‘Desi said she was on the cusp of a breakthrough in the quest to find a cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s, and yes, I know Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia, but some people think of them as separate diseases. She was working on producing a pill that could reverse the aging process in the human brain. The idea was it would protect the brain. It had