Page 58 of Dead Fall

‘And that was when exactly?’ Streaky asked.

‘Uh, the last time I saw her, yeah.’

‘“Five or six days before she died”, according to your last interview?’

‘Yeah, must have been.’

Picking up the book, Flyte pulled a face. ‘It’s a bit of a weird gift, isn’t it? A book about troubled rock stars who died at the age of twenty-seven? When Bronte was the exact same age and pretty vulnerable herself?’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ he said, with a flash of aggression. Momentary but revealing?

Holding his gaze, Flyte set the receipt in its separate evidence bag in front of him. ‘For the benefit of the tape would you kindly read out the date and time on the receipt for the book, Ethan?’

Frowning down at it, he bit his lip.

‘It’s for 6.20 p.m. on the fourth of March, isn’t it, Ethan?’ she went on. ‘In other words, just a few hours before Bronte went over the balcony of her flat. Which means that you lied to us about the time you last saw her.’

He opened his mouth to speak before thinking better of it.

Flyte was enjoying herself now. ‘Were you trying to get back with her? Did she turn you down?’

A headshake.

Streaky leaned forward, hands steepled like a priest-confessor. ‘This is your chance to give us your side of what happened, Ethan. You were with Bronte when she died, weren’t you?’

Ethan crossed his arms and stared at them. He didn’t look so cool anymore. ‘I’m not saying anything else until I speak to a lawyer.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

Althea Knowles came back re Bronte’s school medical notes the next morning while Cassie was making her morning coffee.

‘There’s nothing on file about a serious allergy, or any allergy come to that. I always made a note of her stomach issues and kept her parents informed but I don’t know what, if any, action they took: the notes say they used a private doctor for everything, even vaccinations.’ Mrs K hesitated. ‘There was something in there I’d completely forgotten though. But you really can’t share this.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Cassie assured her.

‘The previous nurse made a note right at the start of her Year 7 when she arrived here. She had a sibling, a twin brother who died at the age of three.’

Cassie remembered Bronte’s father George telling her about Alexander. ‘Did it say what of?’

‘Beta thalassemia. It causes a haemoglobin deficiency that can be fatal in the early years.’

After hanging up Cassie went straight to her medical textbooks. An inherited genetic abnormality, beta thalassemia major was indeed a life-threatening condition requiring lifelong blood transfusions, and some children, like Alexander, didn’t survive to their fifth birthday. But it wasn’t much help in getting to the bottom of Bronte’s death. Bronte had been a female, non-identical twin and clearly hadn’t inherited the condition, and anyway there was no association between beta thalassemia and severe allergy.

*

An hour later, at work, she got an email from the tox lab at Imperial. They’d run the tests on the sample of Bronte’s femoral blood stored in their fridge. The normal range of mast cell tryptase was between 3 and 5 nanograms per millilitre; Bronte’s was off the scale at 41.4.

Cassie forwarded it to Flyte and less than two minutes later her phone rang.

‘Is it reliable?’ asked Flyte without preamble.

Cassie grinned. ‘I’m fine, thanks, Phyllida, how are you?’

‘Yes, OK, fine, how are you, etc. So, would it stand up in court as proof that she suffered anaphylactic shock?’

‘I’m no expert, but it should do. Tryptase levels can increase post-mortem but this is so high it looks conclusive.’

‘OK, good .?.?. Of course, proving she had an anaphylactic reaction doesn’t help unless we can prove someone fed it to her and then tipped her over the balcony when she started choking.’ She paused. ‘But how would the killer get Bronte to eat or drink something to which she was allergic?’

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