‘Do tell.’
‘Ever heard of methaqualone?’
Banks cast his mind back and found the word caused little reverberations in his memory, but he couldn’t quite grasp them. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘but please enlighten me.’
‘Someone of your generation might remember it better as Mandrax,’ said Jazz.
‘Enough of that my generation stuff,’ Banks protested. ‘As a matter of fact, I do remember Mandrax. It was very popular in the sixties and seventies.’
Jazz nodded. ‘It was patented in the US in 1962 and produced in tablet form. Over there it was sold under the brand name Quaalude.’
Banks nodded. ‘Ludes,’ he said. ‘Bowie mentioned them in a song on Aladdin Sane. We called them “mandies”. There were mandies and moggies, if I remember correctly.’
Jazz raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. Mogadon. A nitrazepam. I see you do know all about sixties drugs, then?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Well, Mandrax were marketed primarily as sleeping tablets, but also as sedatives and muscle relaxants. For a time, they were thought to be a sort of wonder drug — controlled anxiety, high-blood pressure and so on. In the early days they were believed to be purely beneficial and non-addictive.’
‘They were popular with the hippies,’ Banks said.
‘Yes. Mandrax soon became a recreational drug and was found to be extremely addictive and dangerous, especially when consumed with alcohol and other drugs. It builds up quite a physical tolerance. You end up needing more for the same effect.’
‘People said it enhanced sex.’
‘Oh,’ said Jazz mischievously. ‘And did it?’
‘How would I know?’
‘You never even tried it?’
‘Once.’ Banks sighed. ‘I fell asleep.’
Jazz laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that proves it did what it said on the bottle.’
‘Right.’ Banks remembered the evening in 1971 or ’72 with Emily. One of her flatmates had given her a couple of mandies to try, and she and Banks had taken the plunge. He remembered a wonderful sensation of relaxation and how his senses seemed heightened when he and Emily touched. But beyond that it was a blank. They both awoke some hours later with stiff necks and wove their way up to bed. So much for experimenting with drugs.
‘Anyway,’ Jazz went on. ‘It was discontinued in the eighties and is now mostly manufactured in illegal drug labs around the world. Apparently, it’s big in South Africa.’
‘What about here?’
‘Not so much. I mean, it’s not one of the ones you come across regularly. In fact, this is the first time I’ve encountered it, which is probably why it took me so long to identify it. That and the fact that it’s not the only job I have on. Anyway, it’s not something you’d normally test for.’
‘So would you think it unlikely that Adrienne got it from a doctor? On prescription?’
‘I’d think it bloody impossible,’ said Jazz. ‘As far as I know the only sources are illegal, though there may be one or two corners of the world where it’s still manufactured and sold legally, but not in very large quantities, I shouldn’t imagine. No doctor in this country would prescribe it.’
‘What about dosage?’
‘It used to come in three hundred milligram tablets, but that was when it was made legally. Who knows these days? From what Dr Glendenning and I could estimate, Adrienne Munro had around three thousand milligrams in her system.’
‘Enough to cause death, then?’
‘Not necessarily. That would take somewhere up around eight thousand milligrams. But more than enough to cause coma when mixed with alcohol, which is apparently what happened.’
‘The whisky?’
‘Yes. And that’s basically how she died. The poor girl fell into a coma, and when her system reacted to the poisoning by vomiting, she was beyond waking up, even to save her own life, and she choked.’
Banks sat silently for a moment. Jazz poured the tea and he inhaled the smoky fragrance of the lapsang. She handed him a cup and he took a sip. ‘Nice,’ he said.
‘You need the occasional treat in this job.’
‘Any idea where Adrienne might have got hold of this Mandrax?’
‘You’ll have to check with your drugs squad, but I haven’t heard anything about it doing the rounds these days. It’s not the new “in” drug or anything like that. As I said, they stopped making it here years ago.’
‘So where and how would someone get hold of it?’
‘There are illegal labs all over the world — Mexico, Colombia, Belize, Peru. Even Lebanon and South Korea. Oddly enough, some of it is probably produced for fundraising purposes by combatants in the current Syrian Civil War. They do the same with heroin, opium, morphine, amphetamines, cannabis, hashish and other drugs, so why not mandies?’
‘That doesn’t really help us much, does it?’ said Banks. ‘Adrienne could have got it from anywhere. No doubt there are people around the campus with enough connections.’
There was also Laurence Hadfield’s doctor friend, Anthony Randall.
‘Sorry,’ said Jazz. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
Banks smiled. ‘No chance. Sorry. Just thinking out loud.’
‘But why assume that Adrienne got her hands on it herself? Surely someone could have given it to her?’
‘It’s true that she wasn’t known as a drug-taker, not by anyone. Oh, she took E occasionally, but that’s all, according to everyone we’ve talked to. It seems the whole world does that.’
‘Yes, and in my discussions with Dr Glendenning he mentioned that there were no obvious signs of drug use in the post-mortem — other than the Mandrax, of course — and there were none of the tell-tale signs of methaqualone addiction, either — rotten teeth, yellowish hands, gaunt appearance, swollen abdomen. There are other things we couldn’t know about, like drowsiness, loss of appetite, unnatural sleeping patterns.’
‘Nobody we talked to mentioned any of those things in connection with Adrienne, either.’
‘So we can assume it was a one-off, not the result of an addiction.’
‘Again it comes back to suicide,’ Banks said. ‘A bright girl like Adrienne must have known the dangers of what she was doing, consuming that many pills and washing them down with Scotch.’
‘Well, then. Either you’re right about the suicide, or someone forced her to take the stuff.’
‘The doc said there were no signs of forced feeding, like bruising, or a funnel or tube or anything like that.’
‘There are other ways of forcing people to do something they don’t want,’ said Jazz. ‘Physical threats, or threats to her family, friends?’
‘I take your point. I just don’t see what happened as a reliable murder method. If you want to kill someone — especially if you dump the body in such a way that it’s found fairly quickly — would you honestly sit there and force her to take pills washed down with whisky? And why would you just happen to have enough mandies on you? Not exactly the easiest of drugs to get hold of, so you’ve given me to understand.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ Jazz said. ‘At least it’s bloodless. It’s quite possible that the killer didn’t want to have to deal with the sort of bloodstains you’d get from using a knife or a blunt object. And guns aren’t that easy to get hold of.’
‘But it screams of premeditation. Say it was an angry boyfriend or someone like that, done in the heat of the moment. Wouldn’t he be far more likely to just strangle her if he didn’t want to deal with bloodstains, rather than go to all that trouble? And would he even be thinking about bloodstains if he was so angry and out of control?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t an angry boyfriend, then,’ Jazz suggested. ‘Perhaps you’re right and it was a cold, premeditated murder. I did come across something in my research that you might also find interesting.’