Rentboy (18 page)

“Are you dense or what? I already told you. I seen you, though.”

Edward dropped his gaze, not caring to be reminded that he had been in Soho looking for a prostitute. “I’d better go.”

“Seen you a few times,” the old man persisted.

“You saw me twice picking up Fox. I admit it.” He began to walk away. The stink of the alley was becoming unbearable.

“Saw you before that. You was hanging round here a lot before you went off with Fox.”

Stopping, Edward listened but did not turn around. It was true. For several weeks he had been coming to Tisbury Court, working up the courage to pick up a man. But there seemed to be some unspoken code he could never quite work out. Other men would walk up the alleys or out on the street, see a young man or woman, and do some sort of silent transaction, then wander off with them. Whatever happened was beyond his comprehension. If Fox had not actually addressed him that night, he would have walked away unsatisfied yet again. However, since he had not spoken to anyone, he had assumed his passage had gone unnoticed.
If you keep quiet, you are invisible.
Only now he comprehended the ridiculousness of that assumption. Any number of people had seen him. Perhaps even someone he knew.

Burning with shame, he hurried out to the street and away from Soho in the gathering dusk.

The office was in darkness, and even though Fox had seen his father leave the house half an hour since, he did not dare put the light on. Instead he opened the venetian blinds enough to allow light from the driveway spotlights to enter. With a small flashlight he went through the desk drawer for William Baillie’s life insurance policy. He found two guns and several boxes of ammunition. The man was a frigging nut, so convinced of his own power he didn’t even bother to lock up his guns, believing not one of his family members would dare use the weapons on him despite his brutality. “There’s a nasty shock in store for you when I get my act together…sir.”

The life insurance policy was not there.

Across the room there was a filing cabinet. It wasn’t locked either. Baillie had ordered his family never to enter his office without permission, and they always obeyed him—until now. In the file marked
insurance
he found the policy and slipped it out, making certain to take note of its exact placement in the file. His father would know at once if it had been moved.

Cross-legged on the floor, Fox pored over the wad of papers, searching for a number. There it was. “Thank you!” he whispered. On William Baillie’s death by illness, accident, murder by a party outside of the immediate family, natural causes, or acts of God, the beneficiary, Afton Baillie, would be entitled to one million pounds. His father had not bothered to put the policy in his mum’s name, assuming she would be in no shape to take up her responsibilities in the event of his death. Fox was an adult now, and he was in a position to take care of them all when Baillie was dead.

Fox replaced the file, returned to his father’s desk, and took out the guns. A GLOCK 26 and a GLOCK 27 lay in his hands. Both guns were used by the secret service, or so Baillie had told him. Fox loaded the ten-round magazine into the 26 and the nine round into the 27, having been taught from an early age by his father. He was a decent shot when his hands were steady. Baillie had taken him to the firing range from the age of ten and stood over him while he practiced.
“This is for when you’re in Special Forces,”
he would say.

This is for killing you, sir.

“Long shot, pardon the pun,” Fox whispered. “But if I’m lucky, he’ll pick it up to fondle it”—his father had done that many a time while giving him hell. It was a great intimidation tactic—“and the gun will go off, killing him. Hopefully.” But what if it ended up killing someone else? What if the bastard was threatening the twins or his mum, and it went off?

“Shit!” Car headlights lit up the driveway. His fingers less nimble now from fear, Fox unloaded the guns and put everything away again, positioning them exactly as he had found them. There had to be another way.

Listening intently, he heard the front door open. Voices came from the hall outside the office. He flipped off the flashlight and crawled on hands and knees across the floor to a couple of big, comfortable leather chairs sitting under the window. Fox got behind the first one just as the door opened and the overhead light flooded the room.

“So what’s going on that we couldn’t talk about in the pub?” Baillie asked, but his tone did not carry the belligerence Fox was used to. It was the tone his father had used when speaking to the Ugandan man. William Baillie was afraid of him, or at least wary of him, and that was rare.

The Ugandan man’s distinctive voice answered. “The Lintrane. Atherton changed the pesticide compound. It is no longer lethal to human beings, only to insects. I sent the data via an encrypted file as soon as I got it. My facility outside Kampala was standing by ready to go into production. The test batch killed the stem borers on the maize and sorghum crops, but it did not kill the large test animals, so it will not kill people. They sent me word at once to say the compound must have been changed.”

“I didn’t know he had changed it.” It was the doctor who had been there last time. Howard. “He sent me the report, but I didn’t go over it. When the data was stolen by your son, Captain Baillie, I thought it was the same as when I had first looked at the study. I went over everything with Atherton the week before you ordered your son to approach him. I never gave Atherton permission to change anything.”

“Then he did it on his own!” Mr. Maputwa threw himself down in the armchair so hard that it slid backward, pinning Fox against the wall. One more inch and he would have difficulty breathing.

“When Atherton presented me with his data, it showed that the compound was killing laboratory test animals quickly, even in very small quantities. I told him to do nothing with it for now. I told him I needed further permission from Comtrex to use the grant money to keep working on the pesticide. The man is a complete idiot. It’s not like him to act on his own. I’m surprised he went ahead without my approval.”

“Then you need to change the compound back to its original, lethal state.” It was William Baillie’s voice. “I’m ready anytime to go out to Uganda.”

“I can’t do it,” Howard said. “I don’t have a copy of the data. Atherton has it, assuming he didn’t destroy it, though I doubt he did. He keeps copies of everything. We have to show a paper trail of every piece of work we do to keep the grant money.”

“Get it!” Maputwa bellowed. “I paid you a fortune, Dr. Howard, to get me a biological weapon that would get rid of the opposition in the outlying villages and the jungles. I must win the next election! I paid you, Baillie, to launch guerrilla attacks using a poison, not a pesticide. I expect my money’s worth. Now get Atherton to give you the data on the lethal version of Lintrane without alerting him as to what it will be used for. I want it manufactured as quickly as possible, and I want you, Baillie, in Uganda on the ground leading my militia.”

So the Dr. Howard Fox had served tea to was the same man Eddie worked for. The man the elder Dr. Atherton had never liked.

And now Fox knew how William Baillie was supporting his family so lavishly on his military pension. He had retired from the army and gone to work as a mercenary soldier. Even though he wanted the man out of the house and preferably out of the country, he didn’t want him killing innocent Ugandan farm families. Fox did not want to live off the spoils of war, and he knew Eddie wouldn’t be thrilled that his pesticide was being used as a bioweapon.

* * * *

It was late afternoon the following day when Fox walked through the double glass doors of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine after an hour of watching for Eddie to come out. Only when Dr. Howard trotted out of the building with his Charlie Chaplin walk did Fox feel safe to enter. It was imperative Howard did not see him since he seemed to have a hotline to William Baillie. But if Eddie was not coming out, Fox would have to find him.

In a disguise of sorts he wore no makeup, ordinary jeans, a plain gray long-sleeved T-shirt, and a loose gray woolen hat pulled low over his forehead. At the lift he read the board with the list of office numbers and labs. Dr. Edward Atherton was on the third floor. Looking around, Fox located the stairs and ran up two at a time. Eddie’s office was at the end of the corridor, but he wasn’t in there.

“Are you looking for Dr. Atherton?” The man who spoke was closer to Eddie’s age than his own and equally conservative in dress, reminding Fox that this was a postgraduate institution, unlike Wimbledon College of Art, which was hectic with blooming youth of the more happening kind.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll find him in his lab.”

“Right. Thanks, dude.”

Looking left and right in case Howard returned, Fox followed the man’s directions down to the basement level and entered the lab. With no windows and old yellow paint on the walls, it must be incredibly depressing to work in. At the far end, standing at a workbench, bent over a microscope, was Eddie, wearing a white lab coat over his usual garb. Glass cases held plants in various stages of growth. Rats and mice in cages scurried back and forth. Fox had to suppress an overwhelming urge to release them like Elliott releasing the frogs in
E.T.
He’d loved that movie when he was little, imagining having a flying bike that would take him away from his father.

Silently he walked up to Eddie until he was about two feet away and waited. He didn’t expect Eddie to be happy to see him, but he hoped he wouldn’t be hostile.

“Be right with you,” Eddie muttered. When at last he looked up, surprise registered in his expression, then annoyance. He looked Fox up and down. “What do you want? Come to steal from me again?”

In a tone that sounded a lot like begging, Fox said, “Eddie, please, don’t be like that. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Whatever we had is over. You ended it. You made a complete idiot of me. I hope you’re happy.” Anger tinged his words, but it was the wounded look on his face that ripped at Fox’s gut. He had caused all this pain, and all he wanted was to make it go away.

“I’m not happy, and I admit I did wrong, but this is more important than either of us. This is life and death.”

Casting his gaze to the ceiling, Eddie sighed. “Save the theatrics.” He took off his lab coat and tossed it on the bench. “I’m going home. I’m exhausted. And I have to lock the lab, so you’d better leave.”

“Eddie, please!” Fox followed him to the door. “We need to talk about the pesticide you developed. The Lintrane.”

With his hand on the door handle Eddie stopped short, looking into his eyes. “How do you know that name? That’s the commercial name my pesticide will be released under. No one knows it yet, except me and Howard.”

“I heard it from someone else. Can we go somewhere and talk? We could go to your place.”

For a long moment their eyes remained locked. The desire Fox saw in Eddie’s face was intense. Then it was as if he was mentally reminding himself of Fox’s betrayal, because the desire dimmed to hurt again. “No. Absolutely not. There’s nothing you have to say to me that I care to listen to.”

Spreading his hands in desperation, Fox said, “This is not about us, for crying out loud. It’s about Uganda and Lintrane and how dangerous it is.”

“What are you talking about?” Clearly confused, Eddie said, “It’s not dangerous. It was, but I fixed it.”

“Did you keep a copy of the original compound? The lethal one?”

“Yes, I have to, but it will not be used, because it kills people. Anyway, why am I explaining myself to you? How do you know all this? I know I didn’t tell you.”

Fox shoved his hands into his pockets to keep them still. He wanted so badly to touch Eddie. “Can we go somewhere else? It’s horrible in here. The animals are talking to me, asking me to release them.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Eddie looked away at last. “You will not release the animals, and I’m going nowhere with you. Every time we’re together there’s some sort of drama. We get attacked by thugs, followed by black cars. I was nearly killed by a man in camouflage whom you claimed to be your father.”

“He is my father.”

The mastery of sarcasm Eddie had displayed at the pub was reaching new heights. “How can he be, Fox? Your father is dead. He was a war hero, remember?”

Fox looked at his feet. Scuffed trainers instead of his usual black boots. “He’s not dead. I just wish he was. He hates queers. He hates everyone. But he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was decorated. He was a career soldier.”

“I don’t know what to believe and what not to believe,” Eddie said. “You tell so many whoppers.”

Fox pushed the door closed and walked over to a stool but, instead of sitting on it, dropped to the tiled floor and sat crossed-legged, looking at the dull, old 1970s linoleum tiles. “This place needs a revamp. It’s depressing as hell.” He looked up. “Even just painting the ceiling a nice fresh white would help. That ceiling is all stained and yellowed.”

“Is it. I’ve never noticed. It probably got yellowed before we got the new fume cupboards. Anyway, I’m too busy getting on with my work to notice such things.” Eddie joined him on the floor. “I have no patience left with you. I’m angry with you, and I want to go home. Now what do you want? You’ve got five minutes of my valuable time.”

“You can be a right fucking prick when you want to, can’t you?” Fox knew that when he went home, Eddie would just do more work. “Is there a Pot Noodle at home that’s just screaming your name?”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Why do you talk in riddles? Pot Noodles don’t scream. They hiss a little sometimes when you add the boiling water.”

Meeting his gaze, Fox smiled. “You’re so weird.”
That’s what I love about you.

Raising an eyebrow, Eddie tapped his fingertips on his knees. “Sorry. Can’t help it. Now what did you come here for?”

Though he would much rather bend over the workbench and let Eddie fuck him, Fox got down to business. “You changed the compound. You realized it would kill people, so you changed it to make it safe.”