Fatal Dose

FATAL DOSE BRIAN PRICE Contents Are you a thriller seeker? Praise for Fatal Dose Note from the Author Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 Chapter 65 Chapter 66 Chapter 67 Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Chapter 70 Chapter 71 Chapter 72 Chapter 73 Chapter 74 Chapter 75 Chapter 76 Chapter 77 Chapter 78 Chapter 79 Chapter 80 Chapter 81 Chapter 82 Chapter 83 Chapter 84 Chapter 85 Chapter 86 Chapter 87 Chapter 88 Chapter 89 Chapter 90 Chapter 91 Chapter 92 Chapter 93 Chapter 94 Chapter 95 Chapter 96 Chapter 97 Chapter 98 Chapter 99 Chapter 100 Chapter 101 Chapter 102 Chapter 103 Chapter 104 Chapter 105 Chapter 106 Chapter 107 Chapter 108 Chapter 109 Chapter 110 Chapter 111 Chapter 112 Chapter 113 Chapter 114 Chapter 115 Chapter 116 Epilogue Glossary of Police Terms Acknowledgments Hobeck Books – the home of great stories The Mel Cotton Crime Series This edition produced in Great Britain in 2023 by Hobeck Books Limited, Unit 14, Sugnall Business Centre, Sugnall, Stafford, Staffordshire, ST21 6NF www.hobeck.net Copyright © Brian Price 2023 This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in this novel are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or localities is entirely coincidental. Brian Price has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright holder. ISBN 978-1-913-817-00-6 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-913-793-99-9 (ebook) Cover design by Jayne Mapp Design Printed and bound in Great Britain Are you a thriller seeker? Hobeck Books is an independent publisher of crime, thrillers and suspense fiction and we have one aim – to bring you the books you want to read. For more details about our books, our authors and our plans, plus the chance to download free novellas, sign up for our newsletter at www.hobeck.net. You can also find us on Twitter @hobeckbooks or on Facebook www.facebook.com/hobeckbooks10. Praise for Fatal Dose ‘Brian is a master storyteller. I would say, and I read a lot, the best.’ Carole Gourlay ‘I almost read it in one sitting.’ Sarah Blackburn To our magnificent and over-worked and underpaid NHS staff, whose dedication and endurance, during Covid and at other times, is unappreciated by those who hold the purse strings. Note from the Author This novel is set around the late spring/summer of 2021. Covid is still about and there are some restrictions in place but no lockdown. People are allowed to gather in pubs and elsewhere, but masks are still required in some circumstances. Where possible, detectives and civilian support staff are encouraged to work from home and participate in online meetings using platforms such as Teams and Zoom. For the purposes of the plot, I may have described more face-to-face contact than would be ideal, but I hope you will bear with me on this. Similarly, I have telescoped some of the timescales for post mortem and forensic test results and omitted much of the paperwork which detectives have to complete – otherwise it would be a rather boring book! Just for fun, I have hidden numerous musical references in the book, plus a couple of ‘Easter Eggs.’ See how many you can find. Email [email protected] and they will let you know if you have spotted them all! Prologue Some years previously It started with You Only Live Twice, his fascination with poisons. Not the film, the book by Ian Fleming. A whole section was devoted to the poisonous plants in Blofeld’s suicide garden. He lapped it up, amazed that innocent-looking plants could wreak such havoc on the human body. Then he turned his attention to real life poisoners such as the Borgias with arsenic, Neill Cream with strychnine and Graham Young with thallium. This was power, he thought. With skill and dedication, you could poison someone and get away with it, especially if you had no previous connection to them. But you couldn’t just go into a chemist’s and buy arsenic and cyanide like in Agatha Christie’s day. The chemicals he was really interested in were tightly restricted and you needed a licence to possess them. But perhaps there were other ways. The internet was a wonderful source of information, and the local library had links to online medical and scientific journals that provided him with a wealth of details. He was fascinated to find that, although you couldn’t buy controlled poisons on the net, you could buy the seeds of poisonous plants. He studied science at A-level and began a pharmacy degree, but those unproven allegations about the theft of drugs forced him to leave. He wanted to know more about what made people tick and was fascinated by psychology experiments where some of the subjects were given power over others; power that they inevitably abused. So, he took a mixed degree with the Open University, following courses in psychology and the arts. He still thought endlessly about the power that poisons represented. In all his reading, this power had been used for