Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) Read Online Free PDF

themselves, then all anyone – patients and staff alike – would do was sit. The patients because they were drugged up to help them deal with whatever had gone on, the staff because they were knackered.
    Shirley sat down at her desk and switched her computer on. She was down to just two reliable volunteers and doing it all almost on her own was as much fun as toothache. But she couldn’t let her service users down. It wasn’t their fault if most people who chose to volunteer to help them were either ill themselves, suddenly decided they couldn’t stand the mentally unwell or wanted to bring Jesus, by force if necessary, into their lives.
    Booted up, the computer let Shirley into her email. Her heart sank. There were the usual ‘To all staff’ bulletins from the hospital management. These told her what term was correct to use when talking about patients this week, how well the Trust wasdoing financially and included numerous invitations to team-building events with staff on acute wards one and two, the forensic unit or the chronic ward. Every one of them redefined the word ‘tedious’ and so Shirley deleted them all. However one email did catch her eye: ‘Possible New Volunteer’. When she opened it, Shirley felt a vague glimmer of hope.

3
     
    Lee had his head in the gas cooker when the doorbell rang. It was only seven o’clock in the fucking morning and he was up to his rubber-gloved elbows in oven cleaner. He swore out loud, took the gloves off, threw them in the kitchen bin and walked to the front door. In the living room, Chronus, his mynah bird, shouted, ‘West Ham till we die!’
    Lee ignored him. He’d indoctrinated the poor thing with West Ham United songs and chants, which he yelled out whenever anything happened in the flat. Lee only had himself to blame. He opened the door and saw a fifty-something woman in a cheap but stylish purple skirt-suit smoking in his porch.
    ‘Hi, Vi,’ he said. ‘It’s seven o’clock. What’s the emergency?’
    ‘No emergency,’ Detective Inspector Violet Collins said as she pushed her way past him into his hall. ‘What you up to?’
    ‘Cleaning the oven,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t you have a woman to do it for you?’ She walked into the living room and blew a kiss at the mynah bird, who squawked in response. She took a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and looked at Lee. ‘Fag?’
    He shrugged. She threw a cigarette at him, he caught it and they both sat down.
    ‘I’d’ve thought that your bird would’ve done that cooker for you,’ Vi said.
    ‘What? Chronus? He don’t have opposable thumbs.’
    ‘Not the fucking parrot,’ Vi said. ‘Your woman. You know, what’s-er-name from Sarfend …’
    Lee lit his cigarette and said, ‘Don’t be jealous, Vi, it doesn’t suit you.’
    ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ But she looked away from him when she spoke.
    The night he’d met Susan at the casino he’d been with Vi, her DS, Tony Bracci, and a bunch of other colleagues from his old nick in Forest Gate. Coppers on a night out with booze and gambling included wasn’t a pretty sight by anyone’s standards, but one croupier, Susan, hadn’t minded. Well, she hadn’t minded Lee. If he recalled that night correctly, she’d not exactly taken a shine to Vi Collins. But then Vi had been arse’oled and she had said some less than complimentary things to Susan once she’d realized she had her cap tipped at Lee. He might have expected something like that. Although Lee had occasionally slept with Vi over the years since his divorce, it wasn’t a serious relationship, not on his part. Vi, on the other hand, in spite of her liking for the young lads she had sex with on her holidays, had wanted more from Lee Arnold for a long time.
    ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’ Lee asked. Vi’s eyes were wet with what could be tears. That wasn’t her at all.
    ‘Gotta have a bit of time off,’ she said. ‘Thought I’d better let you know.’
    The wet eyes, as