Free Beneath the Bleeding by Val McDermid Page A

longer. Then he was back on his feet, quartering the room. Paula simply sat, the still point of his whirling world.
    ‘I can’t believe it,’ Flanagan said. He’d been saying it ever since Paula had arrived, the short sentence a punctuation between everything else he said. ‘He’s been like a son to me, you know. I can’t believe it. This is not what happens to footballers. They break bones, they strain muscles, they snap ligaments, you know. They don’t get poisoned. I can’t believe it.’
    Paula let him wind himself up, waiting till he began to wind down before starting with her questions. She was used to waiting. She had become very good at it. Nobody was better at the art of the interview than Paula, and that was due in no small part to her knack of knowing when to dive in and when to hold back. So she waited till Martin Flanagan ran out of steamand fell silent, his forehead leaning against the cool glass of the window, his hands on the wall on either side of the frame. She could see the reflection of his face, haggard with pain.
    ‘When did Robbie first show signs of being ill?’ she asked.
    ‘Saturday breakfast. We always stay at the Victoria Grand the night before home games.’ Flanagan shrugged one shoulder upwards. ‘It’s a way of keeping tabs on them, you know. Most of them, they’re young and stupid. They’d be out on the town till all hours if we didn’t keep them on a tight leash. I sometimes think we should have them electronically tagged, like they do with cats and dogs and paedophiles.’
    ‘And Robbie said he was feeling ill?’
    Flanagan sniffed. ‘He came over to my table. I was with Jason Graham, my assistant, and Dave Kermode, the physio, and Robbie said he was feeling out of sorts. Tight chest, sweaty, feverish. And his joints were aching, like he was coming down with the flu, you know. I told him to finish his breakfast and go to his room. I said I’d get the team doctor to come and take a look at him. He said he wasn’t hungry, so he’d just go upstairs and get his head down for a bit.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it, so I can’t.’
    ‘So Friday night, he definitely wasn’t out on the town?’
    ‘No way. He shares with Pavel Aljinovic.’ He turned to face Paula and slid down the wall into a crouch. The goalkeeper, you know. They’ve shared since Pavel came to Bradfield two seasons back. Robbie always says Pavel’s a boring bastard, keeps him honest.’ A sad smile tugged at his mouth. ‘There’s some I wouldn’t trust asfar as I could throw them, you know, but Pavel’s not one of them. Robbie’s right, Pavel is a boring bastard. He’d never have tried to sneak out for a night on the randan. And he wouldn’t have let Robbie do it either.’
    ‘I’m a bit at sea here,’ Paula said. ‘I don’t really have much of a sense of what Robbie’s typical routine was. Maybe you could run me through it? Say, from Thursday morning?’ Paula wasn’t sure how long the symptoms of ricin poisoning took to develop, but she reckoned going back to Thursday would cover the moment of its administration.
    ‘We had a UEFA cup match on Wednesday night, so they had Thursday morning off, you know. Robbie came in to see the physio, he’d taken a knock on the ankle and it was a bit swollen. Nothing serious, but they all take their physical condition seriously. It’s their living, you know. Anyway, he was done by half past ten. I assume he went home. He’s got a flat down in the Millennium Quarter, just off Bellwether Square. He turned up for training on Thursday afternoon. We just did a light session, you know. Concentrating on skills more than tactics. We were done by half past four. And I’ve no idea what he did after that.’
    ‘You don’t have any sense of how he spent his free time?’ Just like a son to you, Paula thought ironically. Robbie Bishop might be twenty-six years old, but if he was anything like most footballers she’d read about in the tabloids, he