Hostile Environments

Some philosopher, Plato I think it was, said that a good decision is based on knowledge. But it’s a bit of a cop out, I reckon. I mean, you can’t know everything, and how can you know the consequences of your decision before it’s too late?

When the NGO I worked for insisted that I go on the four-day training course in working in hostile environments, I hadn’t been very keen. But here I was, eight fifteen on a chilly March morning in a meeting room at a converted stately home in the middle of the Berkshire countryside. The day loomed in front of me menacingly. I’d been on one of these things before and knew that soon we’d be doing role plays, trying to escape from a hotel attack, or worse still, arguing with stroppy border guards in a freezing cold field. My mood was just north of grumpy. I made a beeline for the coffee urn. Filthy, but hot.

‘Hi…I er…’

I turned around to see a man smiling at me. Tall, black curly hair.

‘Lou isn’t it?’ He grinned, his boyish face full of attention.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, trying to summon the name to match the face. ‘And you are…’

‘Dan. Dan Osborn.’

Brain neurons started firing.

‘Yes, of course! Niger! That was a strange trip, wasn’t it?’ I tried my best to sound jolly, though I actually didn’t remember much at that exact moment about my trip to west Africa six months before. Safe to assume it was strange, though.

‘Yes, it was. That hotel!’

I tried to summon the hotel into my mind.

He helped me out. ‘You remember- the orange carpets and the dodgy lifts.’

‘Ah yes!’ I simulated remembering more than I actually did.

‘And I did always wonder if the ministry were hiding something from me,’ he said, laughing. He looked bright and cheery and remarkably compos mentis for this hour. I envied him his alertness, his bushy tail. I envied the fact that he could obviously remember what he was talking about.

‘Well, that’s always a reasonable assumption on that kind of thing,’ I said. ‘Where are you off next?’  I continued to look for the safest route through the conversation. The line of least resistance.

‘Afghanistan. You?’

‘Yemen.’

‘Ooh... I heard that it was really hotting up there.’

‘Yes. Well, I guess that’s why we’re here…’ I laughed lamely. Never good at small talk, the hour’s drive from home and the fact that I knew I would be imprisoned here at Eastwood Park for the next four days had all but robbed me of my ability to converse.

‘You staying here?’ he asked.

‘No. I live just  an hour away, so you know, commuting.’  To keep me sane I thought. ‘You?’

‘Yeah. Staying here. Nottingham’s a bit far.’

‘Right.’

A dance ensued between the two of us, a very British dance I suspect, in which we attempted to be both reticent and polite. We moved towards the chairs, set out in rows ready for the day. There was no one else here yet. We sat down next to each other on the second row by mutual, unspoken consent.

The coffee was doing its work by now, and a few disconnected things about the Niger trip were trickling into my mind. The camels walking past the outer walls of the hotel compound, carrying matting on their backs, urged on by their masters, the faintly comical British deputy head of mission, like a character from a Graham Greene novel, the searing heat.  One memory that now came back was of Dan and me in the Business Centre of the Hotel Park on the day after last day of the mission, writing up our respective reports. We had been working on two different projects, for different NGOs. I was in education, him in something to do with the Foreign Office.  Both English, we’d gravitated towards each other in the hotel, and had a couple of drinks together in the evenings. Saturday morning and we were getting a head start on things before our departure. We spent a collegial hour or so writing and chatting.

‘I think one of the nice things about our line of business is that we often meet people we know, here and there,’ Dan rattled on. ‘I mean, I suppose that there are not really that many of us in the development community…’

‘No…’ I said, on autopilot.

‘It’s interesting really…’

‘Yes. Not a bad job.’

‘No. But I think after this tour, I’m going to do something different,’ he said. ‘Probably go and live somewhere warm. Caribbean, perhaps.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, my circumstances have changed- and I fancy a change too.’

Once you get people away from their place of work, it’s remarkable how quickly they start telling you about their lives. I’d noticed it a lot on these kinds of course.

‘Oh!’ My memory was suddenly kicking in. ‘It’s funny that I’ve met you again. You know that you dropped a USB stick you were using in the Business Centre that morning. I tried to catch you, but by the time I’d realised, you were already left for the airport.’

‘Oh.’ He tried to hide it, but I saw that Dan’s face had suddenly lost its shine. ‘I wondered where that had got to. I assumed I’d left it in my room, to be honest.’

‘I’m afraid I forgot all about it at the time. But I’ve probably still got it in my other briefcase. I can bring it tomorrow.’

‘Oh, no problem,’ said Dan, regrouping manfully. ‘There’s nothing important on it. I always send my documents to my email or dropbox anyway. Belt and braces, you know.’

‘That’s what I reckoned,’ I said. ‘I do the same myself.’

There was a brief pause. We both smiled in a what next kind of way.

‘It’s a really nice one,’ I said lightly. ‘I’ll bring it.’ It was one of those fancy sticks that you can use in both a pc and an iPad. Quite expensive.

‘Oh, OK.’

At home that evening, after the expected day of role plays in the cold and wet, I searched my briefcase for the memory stick. I was about to put it in my bag, ready for the next day. Then I remembered the look on Dan’s face, a kind of fear, almost panic. I struggled with temptation, the overwhelming urge to find out exactly what was on this memory stick. Time seemed to hang in the air as I put it on my kitchen table and stared at the thing for a good ten minutes, oscillating madly between ‘Where’s the harm, he’ll never know,’ and ‘Come on, Lou. You’re better than this. ‘

It was then that I made that decision, the decision to put the memory stick into my computer and to look at its contents. 

…………….

There were folders named after projects in various parts of the world, as I’d expected.  But it was when I clicked on the folder with the name ‘Stuff’ that I became more and more intrigued. In the folder there were some twenty documents, each with a description of a drug. I started reading, and checked each name using Google, becoming more and more absorbed as it became clear that each of the drugs was a poison, and each was classified as ‘untraceable’ or ‘almost untraceable.’

My mind was racing by now, wondering why someone who worked for the Foreign Office would have collected all this information. There must be an innocent explanation. Perhaps he was a writer, an author of thrillers in his spare time? That would explain his interest in poisons.  I put Dan Osborn’s name and ‘Nottingham’ into Google and hurriedly scanned the results. There were lots of entries. He was a member of the local rugby club, had written a letter to a local newspaper about traffic in his neighbourhood, and had even once put himself up for election for Nottingham City Council. Nothing about him being a writer, though. Then, as I looked further down the page,  I saw it. An obituary notice for Anna Osborn.

Anna Osborn was a caring wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. She left this world after a short illness on July 6, 2023 at age 34.

She was born to Craig and Donna Saunders on June 23, 1989…. Married Daniel Osborn in 2013….

I hurriedly searched for more information about Anna Osborn. Apparently, she died of a heart attack, a sudden and unexpected cardiac arrest about three months after I had met Dan in Niamey, Niger I reckoned. Everyone, including her parents, was shocked. She was so young. The couple had no children. Daniel Osborn was quoted as being ‘distraught.’

Dan’s comment about the Caribbean and changed circumstances flashed into my mind.

I grabbed a glass of wine, then looked again at the folder and found an unnamed document. I opened it and there was a list of all the drugs in the folder. The drug Thallium Sulphate had been highlighted in yellow.

I googled Thallium Sulphate. There were quite a number of entries. It had been one of Agatha Christie’s favourites, I read, because it was extremely hard to trace. Then I read:

Thallium Sulphate can be absorbed topically, ingested or inhaled, is colourless and tasteless, dissolves in water, and has a slow onset of vague symptoms. The first signs are usually vomiting, then diarrhoea, followed by a range of neurological symptoms. Fatal cardiac toxicity occurs some three weeks after adequate exposure. It is uncommon enough that doctors don’t necessarily think to test for it.

Doctors don’t think to test for it. Thallium Sulphate was banned in the UK, I read, but could it be found in Iraq. It seemed far-fetched, but that was one of the countries Dan had worked in. People smuggling banned substances wasn’t exactly unheard-of, I told myself.  But surely my imagination was running away with me? Why would he have wanted to kill his wife? And why would he leave all this on a memory stick? The whole idea was preposterous. Though one did hear of people leaving compromising things on memory sticks by mistake….

I kept on searching for information about Osborn, his wife and his in-laws. Craig and Donna Saunders had been the owners of a large golf equipment company in Nottingham before selling it and retiring. They were filthy rich it seemed. Anna had been their only child and, judging by the Osborn’s massive house, she had probably been given a lot of money when she married. Which meant that Dan had more than likely become very rich with her death.

I took another gulp of wine, and phoned Jack Benson, the only member of His Majesty’s Constabulary I knew. He was a neighbour, and a helpful sort of fellow, the kind of man who would lend you a lawnmower or suggest a good company to clear your gutters. He also owed me a favour because I’d helped his daughter with some homework she’d been given about development issues in Rwanda.

‘Hello, Lou! What’s up?’

‘Listen’ I said to Jack. ‘Could you possibly come over this evening? It’s probably nothing, but I’d like you to take a look at something. Get your thoughts.’

………………………..

Well, as I said, sometimes you just can’t know the consequences of a decision.

Sergeant Jack Benson felt there was enough on the memory stick to pass on to Nottingham Police. They, in turn, decided to investigate the death of Anna Osborn. All of which resulted a few weeks later in an exhumation of the body and the discovery, via a technique known as atomic absorption spectrometry, of a level of five parts per million of Thallium Sulphate, proof that she had been poisoned with it. Which in turn made the police wonder why Dan Osborn had collected all that information about poisons. Which led to a thorough search of all of his clothes and possessions for traces of Thallium Sulphate. Which, well, eventually led to the arrest and imprisonment of Osborn for the murder of his wife.

As for me, I just had to get through these four days.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said to Dan Osborn the next morning at Eastwood Park. ‘It looks like I threw your memory stick out.’

I almost felt guilty when I saw the look of relief on his face.