CHAPTER TEN
Protecting Persephone
The obvious way to do this was to make it a surfing accident. Craig had already announced to her that his plans were to spend his retirement in the surf up the coast, so she just had to work out a way of getting him into the surf so she could deliver the final blow. It needed to be something she could arrange on short notice and had to be fool proof, as she was not going to get another chance. Poison was the clear winner in the method stakes, so she did some research on how to get the right poison and how to administer it. She was acutely aware that her computer systems at home were like an open book to Isaac, so she decided to only research this part of the mission on an anonymous system away from home. Luckily Surry Hills had plenty of Internet cafés that she could use, and it was to one of those she went, first dressing up in grubby old jeans, a huge sweatshirt and beanie, so she was fairly unrecognisable. She looked in the mirror at her front door and caught herself – this is a bit over the top, she thought. Pausing and feeling ridiculous, she decided to stay with the disguise – she rationalised that it was better to look like an idiot than be caught later by being traceable.
After only a short time, she came across an article on Tetrodotoxin, the famous poison from the puffer fish. What she hadn’t known before reading this though, was that this is the same poison secreted by the blue ringed octopus. This looked like a winner. This deadly little creature was found up and down the Australian coast, and is certainly a credible candidate for the accidental death of a surfer, assuming that the poison is even found in the body at a post-mortem. Persephone was also a fairly competent surfer, having learned on the beaches of North Devon when she was a child and updating her skills in far warmer waters once she came to live in Australia. Her simple plan was to ‘bump into’ Craig on the beach and invite him to show her the best break at that location. She would then paddle out the back with him and engage him in conversation, flirting with him a bit in order to get him close. She would then inject him with the poison using a pen syringe that she had secreted inside her steamer and stay with him for the 2-3 minutes it would take for the poison to work. At first Craig would feel nauseous, then he would lose his sight, touch, speech and the ability to swallow. After this his nervous system would stop working, paralysis would then set in and he would no longer be able to breathe. Persephone was confident that she could surf in, leaving Craig’s body to be found later, by which time she would be long gone. The only thing to do was buy the pen device, which was readily available, although she had to be a bit careful not to be identifiable. She could set this up well in advance and be ready to go on short notice, assuming she had Craig under surveillance so that she knew where he was surfing on any day. Getting her hands on the tetrodotoxin without any trace was going to be harder, but with a bit of thought, not an insurmountable issue. It just needed a bit of creative problem-solving.
The final piece was the money. Persephone was confident that Isaac had this under control and that all she had to do is get him to set up the alarms once he traced the money that Craig had hidden and wait. She would set up some accounts overseas to receive the money and work out how to launder it back into Australia with no fuss and not too much tax. She was sure she could find some relative in the UK who would leave her a substantial inheritance or something similar. In any case, Isaac was a master at this and she could rely on him for help.
The next day, Persephone went around to Isaac’s home, bringing coffee and a box of Mai’s delicious baklava. Isaac was pleased to see her and keen to show her the results of his work tracing money and people.
Isaac then presented the results of his analysis about Craig’s potential targets for murder. For each one he gave her a potted biography including age, current job, marital status including dependants, financial position, health summary, home address, major life goals (mostly from social sites) and covering the risk factors that Persephone had previously outlined to him. Four of the ten were under financial stress; one was in the final stages of cancer; two had applications in for divorce; and one was about to return from a two year sabbatical in Africa. After a bit of filtering and re-ordering, Isaac and Persephone settled on the ‘top three’ that they felt were the highest risk for early elimination by Craig. They were, in order: Max Forrest – the African trip person, who was an artist and sculptor with a wife who was in and out of rehab for alcohol addiction. He was also one of the two with an application for divorce and his financial position was pretty perilous, having spent all his money on care for the wife in institutions for the past three years. He was ranked number one due to the frightening similarities to Brad Jones and would certainly look high risk to Craig.
Next was Alison Burridge. Alison was a married mother of three children who had recently resurrected her career as a systems engineer, going back to work once her youngest child started full time school. She had been very successful with one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies, had won a couple of awards and had just received a promotion to a senior engineering role that required her to move to Adelaide. Given her personal circumstances, and also because her new employer routinely insured its senior people with Élan, there was a real risk she would pop up on the system and cause all sorts of problems as she was already ‘dead’.
The final person was Tony Adolfo. Tony was a self-employed builder. His income had varied wildly over the years as he landed work and then had long periods where he earned very little. He was married to Isabella and they had no children. Isabella was undergoing her third attempt at IVF, and at this stage, it looked as though she was finally pregnant. This was very expensive treatment, but their whole world looked like it was about to change, and there was a real chance that they would look to sort out their finances, especially considering life insurance now that they were about to have their first child.
None of the rest of them looked anything like as risky for Craig, as although there were a couple that on first look might have been good candidates, as soon as Isaac had dug into them a bit more, the terminally ill person turned out to be in remission; and one of the others, who had actually applied for a job at Élan, had just been offered a promotion at his current employer and had decided to stay.
Isaac agreed to put all three under close surveillance and work out the best holiday prize option for each one. Isaac also organised for the latest generation of tracking devices to be placed on Craig’s phone, his car and even got a geeky surveillance mate of his to drill a hole in a couple of his surfboards, insert a GPS tracker and seal them up again. He sent Isaac ‘before and after’ pictures and they both agreed it was a very professional looking job with no trace of his surgery showing. This way, if Craig showed up in the vicinity of any of their top three, they would be instantly notified by some software that Isaac set up with proximity sensors on the trackers. They were confident that Craig would not attempt to eliminate any of them without serious planning and would have to visit their homes or places of work to check them out.
Isaac was having the time of his life working closely with Persephone tracking down a bad guy and relieving him of all his money. He still had no information about Persephone’s real plans for Craig but would not have been surprised had he known.