The Death of Marco Styles by J.J. Campbell Read Free Book Online

he’d had one night and couldn’t even remember the next day. She tried to get in touch with him time and again, but the only time she got close enough to talk he just called her a crazy bitch, and laughed at her. I was holding her hand at the time. I was five. Are you surprised I killed him?’
    â€˜Not entirely, no,’ de Lacy answered, taken aback by the sheer vehemence of her words. ‘I know he could be a bit of a bastard, but was he married when you were born?’
    â€˜No,’ she went on, ‘that came later. But that incident was the last straw. My mother had been doing her best, coping on almost nothing, but after that she gave up hope. She went into a downward spiral; depression, alcoholism, drugs. I was taken away from her, into care, then to live with my grandparents. Two years later my mother died in a squalid bedsit off the Fulham Road. She was thirty-two years old.’
    â€˜I’m sorry.’
    â€˜We’d watched his career, seen him grow rich and successful, read the envious articles about his lifestyle and his glamorous wife. My mother felt she should have been in Irene Styles’ place, but I didn’t want anything to do with that. I just wanted to kill him.’
    â€˜I see,’ de Lacy replied, then made a somewhat awkward gesture to the picnic. ‘Um … do help yourself. There’s a very good Champagne, partridge breasts in Sauternes jelly, foie gras, or a little salad, perhaps?’
    She nodded, took a moment to wipe the tears from her face, poured a glass of Champagne, and swallowed it in one gulp. De Lacy waited until she was ready to speak again, now calmer.
    â€˜My grandparents did their best for me, and I suppose I was in no worse a situation than many other children, but my determination never wavered. I don’t know – maybe there is a psychopathic element in my genes, but when other girls were talking about make-up or the latest styles I’d been off on my own, thinking about death. Sometimes they’d play a Marco Lawless track on the radio and I’d feel a raw fury, so strong it was if I was on fire inside, but I hid it well. I studied hard too, always fuelled by vague fantasies of revenge, but as time went by they grew less vague. In my entire school only three girls did science A-levels, and I was always first. I studied Chemistry at Oxford …’
    â€˜Oh, which college?’
    â€˜Summerfield.’
    â€˜I’m a Magdalen man, myself. Do go on.’
    â€˜I did my PhD at Imperial and took a job as a research assistant with Vulcan. By then I knew what I was going to do, more or less, and I must have hatched a hundred different plans over the years, only to reject each one. I was scared, deep down, but then I was promoted to head of research within my department and there were no more excuses.’
    â€˜I see. And presumably you were lucky enough to on the team who were working with the neurotoxin?’
    â€˜Lucky?’ she echoed. ‘I designed that drug, Mr de Lacy, almost from scratch. I needed a lethal neurotoxin that could be administered by ingestion but would break down of its own accord even after death had occurred. You can’t just make something like that. It takes research, and funds, a lot of funds. So I proposed a product that would act like Botox, only temporarily, allowing the user to give themselves a simple injection to keep the wrinkles away for the duration of an event. It reacts with proteins in the blood, slowly, so that it breaks down into harmless by-products in a matter of hours. It would have been immensely popular. It will be immensely popular, once it’s released onto the market, but I needed to use it while it was still under trial, making it even less likely that it would be detected, although the chances were already vanishingly small, or so I thought. Administered in the pure, crystalline form, it would be undetectable maybe four or five