Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [39]
‘Cocaine,’ he said simply.
‘How can you tell?’
‘There are signs – some physical, most behavioural. I knew as soon as I met him.’
My mind raced, sorting out connections, relationships, causes and effects. An addict, living in the same house as a physician… Was it too much to suspect that George Wallace had been supplying his friend with cocaine? And did that give me enough grounds for suspecting that Richard Harries’s death was more than just an accident? The use of stimulant drugs, although not illegal, accreted crime around it as the mental state of the user became warped. I had never worked on a case involving drugs without also finding blackmail, theft… or murder.
‘Was Harries murdered?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said, and nodded sadly. ‘Yes, I think he was.’
‘How was it done?’
He crossed the room to the bed.
‘You remember the equipment in the study?’ I had not examined it yet, but I remembered the burnt objects on the table. I nodded. ‘It’s always difficult to tell, when dealing with people who don’t quite understand what they are doing, but looking at the equipment now I think two of the wires have been swapped over. To put it simply, instead of stepping the voltage down to a safe level I think it was boosted to a very unsafe one.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I was in the audience of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers when Tesla allowed half a million volts to pass through his body and walked away unscathed. I once did something similar with a charge of distronic radiation on a Zygon ship in Scotland. It’s not the voltage that kills you, of course: it’s the amperage. But what Richard Harries was doing was far, far more dangerous. When you mix electricity and the power of the mind you’re in danger of unleashing uncontrollable amounts of Artron energy, and that, I suspect, is where Harries was unwittingly heading.’
‘Artron energy?’ I said, as sarcastically as I could. His words smacked of fakery, of ‘mesmeric powers’, ‘ectoplasm’ and ‘the aether’.
He smiled at me boyishly, as if he knew what I was thinking. ‘Artron energy is to normal energy what movements within the deeps of the sea are to the waves on the surface. Very slight in humans, but in some other –’
‘This is all very interesting,’ I interrupted heavily, ‘but my primary concern at the moment is to determine who, if anyone, could have killed Richard Harries, and why they did it. The “how" can come later.’
‘As far as I can see,’ the Doctor said, ‘anyone could have tampered with the equipment. They could have got in either through the conservatory doors or through the French windows. But it would have had to be someone who understood what they were doing.’
‘Which would include… ?’ I prompted.
He smiled dazzlingly. ‘Me, of course. Fitz possibly – let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Fitz?’
‘My associate – Herr Kreiner. Mr Hopkinson I will have to reserve judgement on, as I’ve only just met him. Sir George Wallace has been living in the same house as Richard Harries for some time, so we should assume that he’s picked something up along the way, and the same applies to his sister Catherine.’
‘And what about Miss Seymour?’ I asked.
The Doctor was immediately watchful. ‘Yes… ’ he said cautiously, ‘she would certainly have the knowledge. Perhaps more so than the rest of us put together.’
I made a mental note to follow up on that intriguing comment later, but for the moment there was something else about Miss Seymour that I wanted his opinion on. ‘It strikes