Purple Death | Next Chapter

Apr 3

Apr 3 Purple Death

Book excerpt

The First Taste

Looking out at the world through his office window, Sam Gabriel had every reason to feel pleased with himself. As he took in the sight of the people enjoying the warm sunshine in the park that lay directly below his office building, he wondered if any of them could possibly feel as happy as he did at that particular moment in his life. Just forty years old and already he'd been propelled upwards towards the higher reaches of the promotion ladder. It had been less than an hour since old Lawrence Betts called Sam into his office and handed him the prize he'd been seeking for so long, a partnership! To be offered the role of partner in the firm of Betts, Cowan and Ford was something Sam had dreamed about, ever since he'd joined the city law firm just four years ago, but he'd never envisaged it would happen this soon. He'd earlier made a name for himself with a smaller firm, specialising in criminal matters and had been head-hunted by the larger, more prosperous firm for whom he now worked. He wanted so much to call Lynne, his wife of the last six years, but he knew she was en-route to Edinburgh to visit her mother and Lynne would never, ever dream of answering her phone while she was driving. She'd always been too safety conscious to take such a risk.

It was while Sam was thinking about Lynne that he first noticed the slight burning sensation, accompanied by an unexplained tingling in his mouth. Putting it down to excitement, Sam ignored the discomfort at first, but as he watched two children chasing a small Yorkshire terrier through the park he became aware of another disturbing sensation, when his mouth grew numb, as though he'd received a large dose of Novocaine. The tingling sensation increased, as did the burning which now spread from his mouth and took a firm hold of his abdomen.

Sam staggered back against his desk while the burning increased and his motor functions suddenly failed him. He wanted to move his arms and legs, but they didn't want to obey his brain's commands. What the hell was happening? Sam reached for the telephone which sat invitingly on his desk, intending to call for Maggie, his secretary. He knew he must have eaten something that obviously disagreed with his stomach. This could only be a virulent attack of food poisoning, surely. For some reason, at the same time as he reached across the desk, the telephone seemed to keep moving away from his outstretched hand; no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't make his hand connect with the inanimate but elusive plastic object that had become the absolute focus of his life in the last few seconds.

He couldn't do it. The telephone wouldn't allow him to pick it up, so he tried for the next best option. He'd walk across the floor to the door, open it and call Maggie into the office. He'd done it a thousand times before, why not now? The answer came less than two seconds later, when Sam Gabriel tried to move his legs and instead fell in a crumpled heap on his office floor. He felt more than just `ill' now and fear gripped Sam while the sweat on his brow began to run down into his eyes. He felt a constriction in his chest which made it seem as though someone had suddenly placed an iron barrel ring around him and was tightening it by the second. The life was rapidly being crushed out of his body, but with nothing and no-one there in the office to offer help. Sam Gabriel had never felt so frightened and alone.

Why didn't anyone come to his aid? He couldn't think of a reason why no-one came, until he remembered that he'd told Maggie he wasn't to be disturbed under any circumstances. Sam had wanted to enjoy his big moment, to savour it, and then make a few phone calls to friends and family to share his news. Then he'd have gone out for lunch, meeting as usual with his colleagues from inside and outside the firm at The Harrow Arms, the local watering hole for the legal and upmarket business set.

His pulse was slowing and his skin seemed to be on fire, and the sensations of heat were rapidly spreading over his whole body. He could almost feel the throbbing of his own heartbeat in his temples and he knew that along with his pulse, his heart rate was getting slower by the minute.

“What the hell's happening to me?” He managed to voice the question aloud, but they were the last words he achieved before his stomach lurched and heaved, and Sam Gabriel began to vomit uncontrollably. He lurched violently when a spasm shook his body, the cold hardness of his desk behind his back digging in to him as he slumped backwards, and then Sam began to sob as he finally realised no-one was going to come to his aid, and whatever was happening to him could have potentially lethal consequences. This was no simple case of food poisoning, he concluded. Some bastard had deliberately poisoned him. But who, and with what? He tried desperately to think of something he might have ingested that could have caused this type of reaction, but his poor tortured brain could think of nothing.

The pain in his gut increased exponentially and Sam assumed a foetal position, his arms gripping his belly tightly in an effort to dull the agony and control the retching that now wracked his weary body every few minutes. It became harder to breathe. Little did he know at that stage, but Sam was slowly being starved of air, his lungs beginning to fail due to asphyxiation. Lucid to the end, Sam Gabriel lived out the last minutes of his life on the floor of his office, recognising the approach of imminent death, but unable to summon help, unable even to call out to his secretary in the next office. Sam thought of Lynne and the child she was carrying, the son or daughter he'd never know, and then, as the pain in his abdomen reached a crescendo and his lungs felt as though they were being crushed in a vice, Sam closed his eyes for the last time, and the children in the park chased the little terrier, and the lunchtime crowd gathered on the park benches to enjoy their sandwiches and pre-packaged drinks.

Knowing that he'd want to be on time to celebrate the good news of his promotion with the lunchtime crowd, Maggie Lucas dared to knock and enter Sam Gabriel's office less than ten minutes after he'd drawn his last, agonizing breath. The screams accompanying her discovery of Sam’s painfully contorted body brought the staff and senior partners of the firm of Betts, Cowan and Ford running to the office of their newly-promoted and recently deceased junior partner. Sam Gabriel had lived less than two hours to enjoy his promotion.

Second Helpings

An hour after Sam Gabriel expired, David Arnold, thirty-eight-year-old father of two and a driver for Great Eastern Railways, applied the brakes and brought the Penzance to Glasgow Express to rest at Platform Two of New Street Station in Birmingham. The journey from the south coast resort of Penzance had been uneventful and David had coasted to a halt in Birmingham dead on time. The burning sensation in his stomach had started about ten miles from the city, but he'd put it down to having eaten his breakfast in a hurry that morning. Now he was paying the price.

It wasn't until he experienced the burning and tingling sensations in his mouth and began to suffer a cramping feeling in his gut that David realised there might be something more seriously wrong. He knew he couldn't continue to drive for the rest of his shift, which would take the train as far as his home town of Liverpool. It was there that he'd hand over to a new driver for the rest of the train's journey to Glasgow. In his current condition, he'd be a liability to himself and his passengers, so he decided to exit his cab and get help, and hand over the train to a relief driver if one could be found.

When he tried to rise from his seat and move to the door of the cab, he realised just how bad things were. Though his brain continued to function perfectly well, David Arnold found himself rooted to the driver’s seat. He wanted to move, but couldn't. All his motor functions seemed to have deserted him. Hell, he couldn't even reach his arm out to lean through the window and call for help. Waves of nausea overwhelmed him and a heavy tightness began to form in his chest; his breathing becoming difficult. David knew he was in trouble.

Carriage doors slammed, the guard's whistle blew, and the one hundred and forty passengers aboard the train waited for the mighty diesel-electric locomotive to begin its slow glide, as it pulled the snake of carriages away from the station before gradually picking up speed and moving out of the city.

When the train failed to move, the guard tried the whistle once more, thinking that perhaps the driver had failed to hear the shrill piercing sound intended to send him on his way. When the second whistle produced the same abortive effect, the guard walked briskly down the platform to the front of the train. He was joined as he neared the locomotive by a platform supervisor, whose job it was to ensure that the train's carriages were in a safe condition with all doors closed before it moved off. The two men arrived at the door to the driver's cab simultaneously and the guard, a veteran of twenty years working on the railway network reached out to open the door. Normally, the door to the cab would be automatically locked while the train was in motion, but the guard was able to depress the latch and open it to reveal the interior of the cab.

The floor of the cab was awash, stained with the vomit David Arnold had spewed in his final moments. He'd remained conscious and clear-minded to the end, and had been horrified by the massive constrictions in his chest and lungs, and his body being gradually strangled as if by an invisible assailant. His need for air was met by nothing but more pain, more burning and numbness while his body closed down cell by cell, and the tears ran down his face. David Arnold thought of Vicky and Tracy, his two young daughters, and Angela, his wife, waiting at home for him to finish his shift and return to them as he always did. He could see their faces in his mind when that final awful constriction hit him and the struggle to breathe became superseded by the need to give in, to let the inevitable consequences of this sudden painful attack take their course. David Arnold died just ten seconds before Ray Fellows the guard opened his cab.

The horrified faces of Ray Fellows and Mike Smith the platform supervisor mirrored each other as they gawped at the horrific sight which met their eyes when they looked into the driver’s cab. Smith looked away and vomited himself, right there on the platform. Fellows, despite the shock of finding the driver in such a state, managed to gasp a call for help into his radio and requested both the police and paramedics be summoned.

The police were there first of course, since the local force maintained a strong presence on all the major stations on the rail network as part of the modern-day deterrent against the scourge of terrorism. A sergeant and a police constable arrived at the entrance to the cab within two minutes of Fellows' call and the sergeant needed no second look to determine that the driver was unlikely to be alive. The grim rictus of pain on his face, frozen at the moment of death, served to advertise his deceased state and the sergeant ordered the constable to seal off the area around the cab until the paramedics and a more senior police officer arrived to take charge.

“What about the train?” asked Fellows.

“Eh?” the sergeant responded.

“The train, sergeant! There are probably over a hundred people in these carriages, waiting to continue their journey. What are we supposed to do with the bloody train?”

Sergeant Peter Seddon thought quickly, and came to a decision.

“I'm sorry, but until we know for sure that this was an accidental death, they'll have to stay here. It will be up to a senior officer to decide to release them.”

“You're joking, surely,” the guard responded. “How do we keep them all on the train? We don't exactly have a massive security force here, you know. They could just open the doors and leave the station and we'd never know a thing would we?”

“Davies,” the sergeant spoke to his constable. “Get on the radio and get as many men as we've got on duty at the station to get over here. I want the names and addresses of every passenger and I want them quick!”

“I'm on it, sergeant,” the constable replied.

People were already opening carriage doors all along the length of the eight carriage train. It was going to take a superhuman and miraculous effort by the police to keep them all in place until the detectives arrived. Thanks to the sterling efforts of Sergeant Seddon, Constable Paul Davies, and four men from the transport police office at New Street Station, they achieved the near-impossible. As far as they knew, no-one left the train before the arrival, some thirty minutes later, of Detective Inspector Charles Carrick and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Lewis Cole.

The detectives soon set to work, though there was little that could be gleaned from either the passengers or the rail staff on Platform Two. The likelihood that anyone on board the train had anything to do with the driver's death was miniscule in the extreme in the detective's minds, and after ensuring that the constables had noted the names and addresses of all the passengers, they were released to continue their journeys as best as they could.

The paramedics were certain the driver was dead, (the policemen could have told them that) and Carrick demanded that the body remain untouched until it could be examined by the police doctor and officially pronounced as such. The whole procedure took about an hour from start to finish and eventually, paramedics removed the body of David Arnold from the cab with as much care as possible, placed it in a black body bag, and removed the deceased to the local mortuary. The body would soon be subjected to a rigorous examination and autopsy, in an effort to determine the cause of the unfortunate driver's demise. The locomotive would be treated as a potential crime scene for the time being, forcing the station master into the inconvenience of having to shut down all operations on that platform. This inevitably caused severe disruption to the whole rail network, until the police allowed the loco to be moved to a siding.

Carrick's words to Cole, as he watched the ambulance carry away the unfortunate driver, would eventually prove to be quite prophetic.

“I wouldn't like to see one like that every day, Sergeant, no sir, I wouldn't. Gives a man the creeps to see a body like that. The poor sod must have been in agony at the end, from the look on his face. No-one should die like that, no-one. I hope I never see a face like that again, as long as I live.”

“Right, sir,” Cole replied. He could think of nothing else to say at the time. He was too busy trying to hold back the bile and vomit he'd been fighting against, since he too had seen the corpse of the once strong and vibrant engine driver.

At the time, neither man could think ahead any further than the inevitable autopsy, which they hoped would prove the man had died from some awful, but natural death; food poisoning, perhaps.

That hope proved to be short-lived, as was Carrick's hope that this was the first and last time he'd see such a tortured sight as the body of David Arnold!