The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (14 page)

‘Why don’t we fetch your things first?’ She didn’t want to turn him down, but wanted to be sure that if Debbie appeared she could make a quick getaway without having to endure a stilted conversation.

Ross fetched his bags from her car, managing to avoid the subject of his change of heart, and told her instead about his plans to fetch Sally up from Brighton the following week. She had already managed to fall out with her father and was desperate to escape to ‘normality’. Jenny was tempted to ask in what way he considered David more normal than her – would it be normal for her to have a lover twenty years her junior? – but kept the petulant thought to herself. There was as little fairness within families as elsewhere. He’d learn that soon enough.

As Ross dumped the last of the bags in the hallway, David strode downstairs, quickly slipping his reading glasses into his shirt pocket. ‘Jenny. Come in. Glass of wine?’

‘Sure.’ She didn’t feel able to refuse.

‘Pop out to the garage and fetch a bottle of red, would you, Ross?’ David said.

Ross took his cue to give them a moment by themselves and disappeared along the hall. David steered Jenny to the spacious kitchen–diner that was fast becoming a shrine to baby Scarlett: framed photographs of her dotted the walls; finger paintings were neatly pinned to a cork board alongside Debbie’s shopping list written in a neat, girlish hand.

David fetched glasses from a cupboard. ‘Ed emailed to say you’re opening an inquest on Monday.’

‘Yes,’ Jenny answered. ‘Though I probably shouldn’t discuss it.’

David persisted. ‘I’ve heard the HPA have been sniffing around all over the hospital. Any idea what they’ve found?’

‘No. I really shouldn’t—’

‘What about the path’ lab – they must know what’s going on? Any of them breaking ranks yet? They can’t all be collaborators.’

‘It’s all about confidence, isn’t it?’ Jenny said. ‘Someone has to step forward first. If a senior consultant were to offer himself . . .’

‘Nice try.’

David leaned against the counter and folded his muscular arms. She could tell from their snaking veins that he’d been putting in the hours at the gym. When they were married, he would stand naked in front of the mirror and tell her there was nothing more pitiful than a fat middle-aged man who expected his wife to find him attractive. It was meant to be an invitation to leap on him, but she seldom did. Having sex with David had always felt like a competition she could never win: whatever she gave, he always wanted more.

‘The hospital has microbiologists employed specifically to deal with this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘You must be able to haul them over the coals.’

‘The good news is that there haven’t been any more cases.’

‘Yet.’ She could see that he was shaping up for one of his lectures. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like for those of us who live with the threat of infection every day? Frankly, every night I come home, I’m nervous of touching my own child. And that’s not to mention the implications for my private practice if the hospital gets a reputation—’

‘You’re worried about your practice?’

‘It is the reason we all have the life we do, Jenny – your home, mine, Ross’s university place.’

Jenny struggled to hold her temper and took a deep breath. She tried to change the subject. ‘Ross tells me his girlfriend’s coming next week.’

‘Listen to me, Jenny – there’ll be reports tucked away on management’s computers, briefing notes, emails from the path’ lab – a whole host of concrete information. It just needs you to dig for it.’

‘I’ve told you – it takes a witness to come forward. I can’t go on fishing trips.’

‘This is Ed Freeman’s daughter we’re talking about. One of my oldest friends.’

She looked at him open-mouthed, not quite believing what he had just said. ‘I hope you haven’t made him any promises.’

‘Of course not.’

He was a bad liar.

A door slammed at the back of the hallway. Ross was returning from the garage. Jenny answered David quietly: ‘You’ve always been very good at telling other people to be brave; maybe it’s time to take your own advice?’

Ross arrived carrying a bottle of wine, and looked from one of them to the other, sensing the atmosphere between them.

‘Who are you seeing tonight?’ Jenny asked, trying to sound breezy.

‘Just some friends.’ He set the bottle on the counter. ‘I’ve got to get ready. I’ll call you about coming over.’

He vanished again, retreating to his room at the top of the house. The sound of his hurried footsteps on the stairs brought back memories of countless nights throughout his childhood when he had fled as she and David traded insults. And even though they had known they were hurting him, they hadn’t been able to stop themselves.

David snatched a corkscrew from the drawer. ‘Well done, Jenny.’

‘Me?’

‘You hardly went out of your way to make him feel welcome. He told me you didn’t even have food in the fridge.’

‘Oh, really? What else has he been saying?’

He dodged the question. ‘I don’t think he knows where he stands with you. You seem to give him mixed messages.’

‘You mean I’m not at home tending to his every need?’

‘Don’t say it.’ David snapped the cork out of the bottle. ‘Do you still want this drink, or what?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I’ll go and talk to him.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea – Debbie’s trying to settle the baby.’ He filled his glass. ‘She likes to keep things calm.’

‘She’d rather I wasn’t here.’

David sighed. ‘Do we have
anything
useful to say to each other?’

He took a large mouthful of wine and gave her the look that said the conversation was over.

Jenny was more than happy to go. ‘Goodbye, David.’

Stepping around David’s car on the way back to her own, it was as much as she could do not to reach for her keys and scrape them along the glistening paintwork.

Hunched at her desk in her small, cluttered study tucked away at the foot of the stairs, Jenny pored over the scientific papers she had downloaded from the Internet on the subject of bacterial meningitis. Wading through the jargon, she managed to establish that the micro-organism that had killed Sophie Freeman was present in dormant form in the throats of between 5 and 15 per cent of the population. What made it particularly aggressive was the fact that it had a double skin, the outer layer of which secreted endotoxins: poisons that attacked the host’s red blood cells, causing fever, haemorrhage and toxic shock. It was also coated with a chemical – a polysaccharide – which, by devious imitation, tricked the host’s immune system into believing it was a friendly cell and not a deadly invader. It was, in short, one of the most cruelly efficient killing machines that nature had ever invented.

She learned that there was a lively debate over precisely how such a sophisticated bacterium had come to exist, and even why it existed at all. During the course of its evolutionary history, it had clearly developed alongside healthy and productive cells, learning to pick the locks as swiftly as the human organism fitted new ones. But it had no purpose beyond its continued existence, no positive benefit to any other life form. It seemed to exist only in order to destroy. The more Jenny read, the more obvious it became to her that anyone who believed in such a thing as a ‘life force’ had also to believe in its opposite. Every human body was, at the microscopic level, a permanent battleground in which life was winning the day only by a fraction.

She glanced up from her desk at the sound of footsteps on the path leading to the front door. It was nearly midnight and she wasn’t expecting visitors. Jenny froze as the steps stopped outside her window.

‘It’s only me,’ a voice said. Michael.

She went to the door with heart still pounding, ready to be angry with him, but opened it to find him holding flowers.

‘All the way from Cork.’

He handed her what six hours earlier would have been a stunning bouquet of summer blooms, but which hours out of water had caused to wilt beyond the point of revival.

‘Thank you.’ She hid her disappointment, touched by the gesture. ‘Any particular reason?’

‘I saw them and thought of you.’

She couldn’t recall him ever having given her flowers before. There was something different about him as he stepped inside. He was tired and unshaven, but his eyes were shining like they had in the first months they had been together, when each encounter was as fresh and thrilling as a teenage date.

‘You know what happened to me today?’ Michael said.

‘No idea.’

‘Near-miss landing at Cork. First time in years. Some clown of a businessman piloting his own helicopter nearly took my wing off. You know what picture I had in my mind all day after that?’

Jenny shook her head.

‘You,’ Michael said. ‘I kept seeing you.’

‘Was that a good or a bad thing?’

‘What do you think?’

He smiled and kissed her on the lips, and Jenny found herself responding. And as their kiss became deeper, he pulled her to him with an urgency that he couldn’t control. His hands sought out her skin, every point of contact an electric charge that shot straight to her core. Work, David, Ross, all her anxieties melted away as they abandoned themselves to the pure, delicious rush of life.

Jenny had never felt as close to him. They lay exquisitely exhausted with the smell of night-scented stocks drifting through the open window. For the first time since she had known him and for reasons completely beyond her understanding, Michael seemed truly at peace. She could feel it in the heaviness of his arm lying perfectly relaxed beneath her breasts, and in the deep, slow, steady rhythm of his breath. He had wanted her so badly, and she him, but their love-making hadn’t been rough or urgent; they had passed a threshold and found themselves in limitless space. It had been ecstatic. There was no other word.

‘Don’t worry about Ross,’ he murmured from somewhere in the hazy realm between wakefulness and sleep. ‘He’s finding his feet. I was in the Air Force at his age. He’s a good kid. He loves you.’

‘You really think so?’

‘We both do.’ His breathing grew even slower, and he sank into unconsciousness.

Jenny’s mind was buzzing. Michael had never told her that he loved her before. Why now? What had changed? Had he spoken to Ross when she left him together? Is that why he said Ross loved her too? Her excitement gave way to worry. Was whatever Michael had said the reason Ross had gone? Had he felt he was intruding on them? She needed to talk, she wanted to know everything. She gently shook Michael’s shoulder, but he was deeply and irretrievably asleep.

Restless, she slid out of bed and, wrapped in her robe, padded downstairs to her study. She needed to think, to find some words to explain to Ross that her relationship with Michael needn’t trespass on theirs; that more than anything she wanted them all to be friends. She decided to write him an old-fashioned letter.

Rummaging amidst the semi-ordered mess, she searched for something to write with amongst the heap on her desk. A word in a footnote on one of the scientific papers she’d been reading caught her eye:
Slavsky
. She found a pen and a notebook and started to write, but the name had lodged in her mind like a thorn in a finger. She glanced back at the footnote. It referred to an article authored by Professor Roman Slavsky entitled ‘Techniques in Site-Directed Muta-genesis’. Slavsky: he was the author of the book that Adam Jordan had bought in Oxford

Jenny roused her sleeping laptop and ran a search on the author’s name. There were few results: a handful of mentions as a conference delegate, several highly technical published papers, one of which had a brief accompanying biography that read simply,
Professor Roman Slavsky, born 1951, was a leading Soviet biologist who defected to the West in 1989. He continued his work in the UK until his death in 2010.
She entered the title of his book,
Warrior in White
, and found that it had been out of print for over five years. Adam Jordan had bought a used, out-of-print title written by an obscure Russian scientist. It was just the sort of thing she might have done while killing time in a city filled with bookshops. Curious to know what it contained, she searched in vain for a second-hand copy for sale online, and had to content herself with placing a request with a book-search service.

Closing her laptop, Jenny told herself it was one less thing to worry about. She put it from her mind and tried to work out how she would win back her son.

J
ENNY ARRIVED AT THE
S
MALL
S
TREET
courts on Monday morning still feeling as if she were moving in and out of the weekend’s light and shadow. Her sadness that Ross had only managed a cursory phone call, and made only the vaguest promise to introduce her to Sally the following weekend, alternated with the residual glow of a weekend spent making love with Michael. She was happy and astonished, she had felt things she thought she would never experience again, but entering the cool solemnity of the Victorian court building, she began to feel the stirrings of guilt at having let her thoughts drift so far from the families who were desperately waiting for her to give them answers. Passing through the security door, the familiar words of the funeral service slipped into her head – ‘in the midst of life, we are in death’ – and then turned themselves on their heads: in the midst of death, we are in life.