The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (32 page)

"What Belinda discovered was the DNA version of the genomic material from a retrovirus."

The food was for the moment forgotten. "So it was natural? Is that what you're saying?"

He uttered a single, harsh laugh. "If ever God makes a virus like that one, then we'll know that He's run out of patience. No, Millicent Sweet's death was no more natural than if she'd had a gun barrel put in her mouth and the trigger pulled."

"This is a manufactured virus. This, I think, is Proteus."

*

"Oh, Christ, Luke … "

"Like it, Bev? Or would you prefer me to do this … ?"

He shifted his hips slightly, at the same time bringing his large, warm hands up from her vulva, along the contours of her abdomen, to rest on her breasts, nipples held gently under his palms. She was kneeling on the bed, arched back, her hands on his hips behind her. He was kissing her neck, but then without saying any more he pushed her forward and down in a position of bestial subservience. This time his back was arched while she was down and accepting each of his thrusts, eyes closed, mouth open. When he leaned forward and took her breasts in his hands while still inside her, she began to feel herself falling into the delicious abandonment of orgasm.

It didn't take him long to finish, although he stayed there for teasing minutes afterwards, slowly moving, slowly exciting. When he came free there was a genuine sense of loss inside her and she would have liked to have continued, but there was business to be done. She moved forward, twisting so that she could look at him over her shoulder. She sighed, then asked, "Food?" Luke's grin was broad as he slapped her buttock. "You bet."

And so they sat at her small kitchen table, the room lit only by the fluorescent strips under the cupboards, and he ate a huge cheese and tomato sandwich while she sipped a bottled beer. Every time she moved she could see that he watched her breasts under the silk of her gown. She enjoyed the attention, always had; the time to start worrying was when it stopped. Men were always looking at women's breasts and she figured that she'd rather they were hers than some other bitch's.

"Did you do what I asked?"

His mouth was full, his chewing, as ever, methodical and slow. When Luke ate she always felt that she was witnessing geological rather than biological processes. The mastication slowed but didn't stop while his eyes looked at her out of an expression that was curious. The swallow that eventually came was deliberate. "The fire? At the PEP laboratory?" he asked. On her nod he pursed his lips but didn't immediately say anything. He fetched a bottled beer for himself, opening it with a twist of the cap. Only after he had drained it to halfway, the fluid sinking down past a regularly oscillating Adam's apple, did he say anything more.

"Why do you need to know about that?"

Beverley knew Luke well, but here was an aspect that was strange to her. Abruptly he seemed to have become slightly distant, almost faintly hostile. It was part of the job to ask colleagues to do things, often things that were unofficial. This culture of self-help underpinned the more conventional methods, made it more efficient, so what was his problem? He had asked her for help often enough, and this certainly wasn't the first time she had wanted his assistance.

"Is there a problem?"

His denial was convincing, failing only because it didn't convince her. "Not at all."

She smiled, leaned forward, gave him a different view. "Fucking liar."

He laughed lazily and for the first time she noticed that they were whispering. She wondered why. Was it so deep, dark and secret, this thing that they were languidly dancing around? He said, "You're tainted, Bev."

She admitted to surprise and not a little hurt. She had thought better of Luke. "Do you think I don't know that? I've got a boss who looks as if he'd like to puke every time I walk in the room; I've got people working for me who are barely able to shit and blink at the same time, yet they look on me as if I'm no better than used toilet paper. Everyone treats me the same, no matter who they are and no matter how well I do. I don't need you to tell me I'm tainted, Luke."

He put his large, comforting hand out to touch her cheek. Despite herself there were tears in her eyes while in her mind there was the refrain,
I
will
not
let
them
break
me
down
. "I'm on your side, Bev," he murmured softly. "You were unlucky, I know that. There but for the grace of God, and all that."

She had clasped his hand against her cheek, enjoying, just for once, the comfort of a touch with no subsequent cost to pay. She had clamped her eyes closed, damned if she was going to weep openly. She hadn't realized how much all this had been getting her down.

"I just meant that there may be a problem," he explained.

She thought,
Oh
,
fine
.
Another
problem
. Eyes still clamped shut she asked, "What kind of a problem?"

He dropped his hand, found another beer and sat back down.

"The fire was in a small laboratory facility owned by Pel-Ebstein Pharmaceuticals on Rouna. Rouna is a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland. It has just a few hundred inhabitants, mostly fishing and sheep-farming."

"You say the laboratory was small — how small?"

He flicked a small smile across his face. "Very, very small. It employed all of six people."

Beverley was astonished. "Six? In total."

"Yeah. And this place is
remote
. We're not talking about rural; we're talking lost. It's a three-hour boat journey — if you've got access to a boat — from Ullapool. Ullapool is so far north there isn't much left of the good old UK once you go past it."

She was trying to fit this into what she knew. "Private, then," she murmured. He nodded. "Oh, yeah. Play the music as loud as you want on Rouna."

"Must have been lonely."

"I gather they roomed with locals near the laboratory. I don't suppose the natives were too inviting."

"And what were they researching?"

"Ahh," he said gravely. "That was interesting. The local police report — there's no one stationed on the island, so someone has to come in from the mainland — mentions virological research, but the insurance report talks about something called, 'Biological Model Development'."

"Whatever that is."

"Yeah." He gave her a long, serious look that she returned. "But virology, that would be viruses, wouldn't it?"

"I guess." He was covering something, saying nothing but communicating as much as he could at the same time.

"The common cold, that kind of thing?"

He said nothing and she was left unsure what that meant. "And how did the fire start?"

He was finishing off his sandwich now. "Another slight discrepancy. The insurance report talked about an electrical fault — this laboratory was
old
— but the witness statements that the police took fairly consistently talk about a fight."

"A fight?"

"Between Turner, and a laboratory technician, Carlos Arias-Stella."

Familiar names.

"Cabin fever?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. There were four males and two females in the group. Perhaps the maths was wrong."

"Have you got their names? The people in the research group?"

He didn't respond at once. He picked up his plate and put it in the sink, the domesticated species of male. From there he said, "You know someone tried to censor the witness statements?"

She was astounded by this news. "What do you mean?"

"What I say. Names were struck through. Words like virology, also."

"But how did you find out?"

He smiled. "I went to source. Ullapool has one police house and one policeman — Sergeant MacCallum, who's God's gift to bureaucracy. He makes copies of everything, probably even of his nose pickings. They forgot to censor his versions."

If this were so, then the conclusion had to be that Robin Turner hadn't lied to his wife in hinting at national security.

"There's some bad news, I'm afraid." His voice was sad, almost one of melancholy.

"What?"

"These files must have been marked. Alarms rang somewhere."

The pulling of records was not done without an audit trail in place. It was possible to find out who asked for what and when. Normally the system was dormant, except for files that were considered "sensitive," or when someone was the subject of an internal investigation.

"Oh."

"I got a visit. They were keen to know why I was interested in the laboratory fire on Rouna."

"You didn't tell them … ?" She was sure of Luke, but she couldn't help wondering. He shook his head and she tried to convince herself that he wasn't lying. "I didn't need to, Bev. Your name came up quite early in the conversation."

Shit
. Whether he was lying — it was not inconceivable that he had dropped her in the dung to save his own career — or not was irrelevant. She was no longer working unseen. Doubtless Lambert would soon know all about it; just the excuse he needed.

She had reached the pivot on the seesaw; time to decide. She could drop it at once, opt for damage limitation (after all, her only crime thus far had been unauthorized use of resources), or she could continue. This was huge, but she still didn't have evidence of anything, merely an instinct that she was poking a stick into something very nasty. Effectively she was relying on her experience as a police officer and on the intuition of John Eisenmenger. If he were wrong, or if she failed, there would be no hope of survival for her. Say goodbye to the pension, hello to the murky, crappy world of the "security business."

She asked, "But you've got the names?"

He sighed, as if she were a persistent child who wouldn't stop pestering. He left the room, went to the bedroom where his jacket lay in a disorganized heap on the floor. What he gave Beverley was just a scrap of paper on which were six names:

Robin
Turner

Millicent
Sweet

Maurice
Stein

Jean-Jacques
Renvier

Carlos
Arias
-
Stella

Justine
Nielsen

"Thanks."

He pulled two more beers from the refrigerator. "I wouldn't be too hopeful about getting anywhere with that list."

"Why not?"

"I checked them out. Turner and Sweet you know about, but Nielsen's also dead. Her flat in New York exploded a few days ago, while she was in it." While Beverley was digesting this, he went on, "Also, Renvier's gone missing from his home in Paris, a few days ago."

She was so stunned by this news, she was temporarily dumb and, into this absence, Luke said, "Stein's missing too, but he has been for a long time. Vanished just after the fire and the winding up of the Research project."

She knew then that she wasn't going to stop just yet.

*

By mutual, unspoken consent, they waited until the food was prepared and they were sitting at the rounded dark wood of the dining table. Eisenmenger had sunk into his habitual mood of deep contemplation. Helena served the food and sat opposite him, pouring more wine for both of them. He began to eat but if he enjoyed it, the evidence eluded her. She had the premonition that here, essentially, was life with John Eisenmenger in miniature.

After perhaps five minutes, he began talking quite spontaneously. "To understand what they did, you've got to understand cancer." She was left to assume that "They" were Turner and Millicent Sweet. "Every cell in your body, bar a few, has thirty thousand genes. Each gene codes for a protein; some of the proteins are structural, making the shape and 'skeleton' of the cell, but most are enzymes. People think of enzymes as things in washing powders that dissolve dirt, but actually they're catalysts. They make chemical reactions work that won't ordinarily work. Enzymes drive the biochemistry that makes life.

"Enzymes work in complex networks and hierarchies. One switches on a reaction that in turn switches on eight more that not only switch on another fifteen but also switch off six of the original eight and another eleven besides. We haven't got anywhere near discovering one per cent of the network of interactions yet. But it's clear that there are some enzymes that are fundamental — they're the master controls. They initiate and control major things like cell division, cell death, and so on. If they go wrong, then you have a problem with that cell, because it won't be doing what it's supposed to do. It becomes a rogue cell. You are a multi celled organism — that means that, although you feel like a single entity, you are in fact a composite, billions of cells working together, and for that to work, each and every cell talks to its neighbours. Every cell gives orders and, most importantly, obeys orders.

"In cancer, one of the important genes — 'oncogenes' — goes wrong in one cell. It might be caused by a cosmic ray, too much booze, smoking, not enough tomatoes, it doesn't matter. If that malfunction results in a growth advantage for the cell, if it starts to divide when it shouldn't, or doesn't die when it should, then all the daughters will have the same mistake. You get a growing subpopulation of cells with that error.