‘All right,’ he said again. ‘It’s just that we’ve been wondering if there’s any connection between these things. Can you think of one?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, the fact they wanted you as courier, the fact they tried to kill you – or at least, one of them did – the fact they had inside information…?’
I pushed my by now aching brain, I really did, but the answer was… No.
None of us could think of any connections.
A week later, the government announced that the smallpox emergency had been contained and was all but over. It had been started, they said, by a group of Geo-terrorists (a term I hadn’t heard before) most of whom were dead through an internal feud. Arrangements were in hand to arrest and charge the few remaining members of the conspiracy.
With an ingenious mix of prevarication, obfuscation, procrastination and lies, they managed to keep most of the truth out of the public domain.
Using the Anti-terrorism Act, Brigg and Co. arrested and grilled all BTA members and associates over an extended period of time and got absolutely nowhere. They searched for the identity of the person they called the Nameless One… and got nowhere.
Meanwhile…
Where do I begin?
The funeral, I suppose. Redd stayed with me until a few days after it was over. The funerals of all the victims were held quickly.
They were also all cremated beforehand.
Having just got over one emergency, the authorities were taking no risks whatsoever – and funerals with infected bodies definitely came in the category of risk.
Some of the funerals were held with the casket of ashes inside a coffin. I preferred honesty, as would Sarah, and hers was held with a casket.
That was the first disagreement I had with Pops (Pat was almost completely recovered, and Pops, incredibly, hadn’t even caught it). The second, much more important disagreement, was over the custody of Grace. Both Pops, and I regret to say, Pat, felt I wasn’t up to it and wanted custody themselves.
Ironic and sordid. I hoped the breach would be healed, because a child should know her grandparents. So, for me, a near vertical learning curve. I didn’t go back to work for a couple of months, what with the head injury and trauma. A nurse/nanny called Victoria came every day to help, although I had the joy of nights to myself.
When I did go back to work, I was allowed to make my own hours at first. I’d been wondering whether long-term I could stay in the job – like Sarah, I was determined that Grace should have a proper parent. So she had about half the day with me and half with Victoria.
The department had ticked along quite happily without me, Caroline doing most of the running. I think she enjoyed it and was sorry when I came back.
Tim had spent most of his time with decontamination, bombing all the buildings that had had infected people in them and collecting all the potentially contaminated articles for incineration.
He’d always been an introvert and after the emergency, became even more so. He confided in me that the whole business had got him down. He wanted to leave the area and had already put his house on the market.
I asked him what he was going to do. He shook his head.
‘I don’t know. I just know I need a change.’
Truth to tell, so did I, but I wanted to get my life into some sort of equilibrium first.
Sarah? I don’t know how to describe it.
Someone asked me if I missed her. I told them they were missing the point. They seemed quite offended.
You don’t just
miss
someone. You grieve.
You grieve for the fact that a good person has been snuffed out to no purpose. For what
she
missed. For what might have been. Because it wasn’t fair. For the fact that Grace didn’t have a mother, I didn’t have a wife and John and Pat didn’t have a daughter. And yes, I did miss her …
It was just plain bloody wrong, for her and for all the other poor saps who’d been caught up in it.
After two months, Brigg and Rebecca, who were still in the city, confided in me that the official view was now that the other man, the one who’d killed Jase and got away with the diamonds, must have been the ringleader, maybe even the Nameless One.
‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.
Brigg hesitated, then he said, ‘No, I don’t. Whoever he was –
is
– he has to be someone in the know, and I don’t think that man was.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because everything I know about him – most of which I’ve got from you – screams rentathug to me. Oh, a bit more intelligent than the late, lamented Jase, but a thug just the same.’
‘Why d’you think he killed Jase?’
He replied, ‘Even more to the point, was it part of the original plan, or was he ad-libbing? And… was he being just a bit greedy, or very greedy?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I incline toward the latter.’
I said, ‘There’s something else – d’you remember, right at the beginning, how you asked Fenella and me whether one of them knew something about viruses?’
He nodded. ‘I know what you’re going to say – none of them did, unless it was our smooth-talking rentathug. And no, I don’t think he knew anything about viruses, either.’
*
A few days after that, I was working late at the lab with Tim, tidying away loose ends. Had every potentially infected site been bombed? Had all the contaminated material been destroyed? Was there
anything
left that could restart the infection?
There had been a partial healing of the breach, and Grace was with Pops and Pat. She, Pat, had realised the futility of quarrelling and had made the first approach.
John’s misery, she said, had been compounded by the guilt of knowing he’d been a bad father, also that he’d survived while Sarah hadn’t, and he’d been lashing out at the first thing he could find. Which just happened to be me.
We were in Tim’s office. Rachel, the research assistant, looked in.
‘I’m off,’ she said. ‘Can I leave you two to lock up and set the alarm?’
Tim said, ‘Sure.’
She said, ‘Oh, I knew there was something – d’you know what happened to the jar of Potassium Cyanide that was in the cabinet? Only I thought I’d do some KCN tests since we’ve got it…’
Tim and I both gaped at her, then looked at each other.
I said to him, ‘I thought you said we didn’t have any.’
‘We don’t.’ He looked at Rachel. ‘You must have misread the label or something.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t. It had a
danger
in red capitals on the bottom.’
Tim got to his feet. ‘Show me.’
‘That’s the point – I can’t. It’s gone.’
‘Show me where you saw it.’
She shrugged. ‘Sure. Have you got the key?’
He opened a drawer and took it out. Saw me looking and said shamefacedly, ‘Yeah, I know, it should be in a more secure place. But there’s nothing really dangerous in it…’ he tailed off.
We followed Rachel to the drug cabinet, which was a large, old fashioned stainless steel locker tucked away at the back of the store. Tim opened it and stood back –
‘Where was it?’
She pushed aside some of the containers at the front and pointed. ‘There, behind the Nitric Acid.’
He eased it aside. ‘Well, there’s nothing there now.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘How long ago was it you saw it?’ I asked.
‘Three months? No, more like four.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure?’
‘
Yes
!’
We took every single container out and put them carefully on the floor. Examined the label of each one.
‘When did you do the inventory?’ I asked Tim.
‘About four years ago, not long after I started here.’
‘Could you have missed it?’
He took a breath and let it out. ‘I don’t think so, but… I suppose it’s just about possible. I was more interested in going through George’s inventories, to see if there was anything really dangerous we should get rid of.’ George had been the last Safety Officer. ‘I took his word for it that his inventories were accurate.’
‘Have you still got them – George’s original inventories?’
‘In my office…’
‘Tim,’ Rachel said, ‘Sorry, but d’you mind if I go? Only I told my boyfriend I’d meet him at seven, and it’s past that now…’
‘Yeah, you go on,’ he said. Then to me, ‘Let’s go through them, shall we?’
‘Shouldn’t we put this lot away first?’
‘We’ve got to get this sorted, we can do that later.’
We went back to his office. He pulled out a file and went through it…
‘Here –’ He handed me a couple of crisp white sheets.
They were headed,
Chemical
Inventory
. I went through them. No mention of Potassium Cyanide. But there wouldn’t be, would there?
I looked at Tim, found him looking intently at me. I said,
‘I suppose we ought to ask around and check that no one else has seen it. If they haven’t, I think we can put it down to Rachel’s imagination.’
He nodded slowly, his eyes still on me. ‘OK,’ he said. Then, ‘I suppose we ought to get all that stuff back into the cabinet.’
‘Want a hand?’
‘Please.’
I gave him back the sheets and he put them away. We stood. He waited for me to go out before him.
I walked quickly down the corridor, then stopped at my office door.
‘I just want to check something, I’ll be along in a sec.’
‘Sure.’
I went in and shut the door. I pulled out my phone, unlocked it and had got two digits in before the door burst open and he cannoned into me. I shot across the room into the table, staggered against a chair, grabbed at it, held it up …
He advanced towards me, not a vole now, more like the snarling mask of a fox I’d seen once in a pub …
‘You just had to be so fucking clever, didn’t you?’ he said –
He feinted, then made a dart at me… I jabbed the chair at him… he moved to the left, then, as I followed with the chair, he made a grab for the leg, got it, yanked it, and me, towards him…
I stopped resisting and rushed him instead, trying to get him off balance… he saw it coming, dodged and smashed me in the face as I went past him… I dropped the chair…
Then he grabbed my shoulder, slewed me round and punched… and I went down…
*
I was getting sick of all these headaches…
My eyes opened slowly. White ceiling, shiny white tiles and formaldehyde. And Tim.
He said, ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t wake up yet.’ He was holding a brown bottle in one hand and some lint gauze in the other.
I was lying on my back strapped to a metal gurney. Trussed. I realised we were in the mortuary...
What do you say in a situation like this?
I said, ‘
Why
…?’
He came over and looked down at me. He was back to being a vole again now, a neat, clean vole.
‘You’ve got no idea, have you?’ A neat, clean vole with fathomless contempt.
I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘No, you haven’t.’ He put the bottle and gauze on a bench beside me, found a chair and brought it over.
‘You’ve been feeling pretty sorry for yourself, haven’t you? A man who’s just lost his wife. Tragic. Everyone’s sorry for you, and you’re sorry for yourself.’
He pushed his head closer to mine. ‘Every day in Africa, someone loses their wife, husband, children, their entire family. Of disease, starvation, maybe even violence. And you know what? They have to just get on with it. Pick up the pieces, go on living and trying to look after whoever’s left.’
He leaned back. ‘Who feels sorry for them? You? Have you ever felt sorry for them?’
‘I –’
‘Oh sure, you give to Oxfam.’ He mimed a clap. ‘A tenth of your salary? A hundredth?’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Nothing like it, eh? But they’re Africans, aren’t they? They’re used to it. They expect it – so of course, we needn’t feel so sorry for them. Whereas
you
, poor lamb, you’re
not
used to it, are you? So we all have to feel sorry for you.’
Although I knew it was pointless, I said, ‘Those people you killed with smallpox, they had nothing to do with any of this.’
‘But that’s just it, they
did
. They had food, clothing and shelter –
and
yet
they
wanted
more
…’ He shouted those last words and spit drizzled down onto my face … ‘If it came down to a choice between their holiday in Tenerife and food for starving Africans, what do you think they’d have chosen?’
He smiled down at me. ‘I rest my case.’
I said, ‘So what are you going to do with all the money from the diamonds?’
A shadow crossed his face, then he said, ‘That’s not your concern.’ He leaned forward again. ‘You are going to disappear, Herry – completely, as though you’d never been.’
He glanced over at the organ mincing machine, and then back at me.
‘That’s right, I’m going to flush you down the drain.’ He smiled and pushed his head forward again. ‘And when a search is made of your house, among other things found will be a jar of Potassium Cyanide.’