The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (40 page)

By their third meeting she had told him about her father’s involvement in the early years of the industry and the questions surrounding his murder. The next time they hooked up, she talked about Professor Roman Slavsky. She claimed to have information about work his company was doing which pushed way beyond all established ethical barriers and which was probably illegal in the UK and most Western jurisdictions.

‘Did she say what kind of work?’

‘Not directly. I just remember she started asking me questions about my scientific ethics. Did it matter to me whether I was working on public-domain or commercial research? Did I think it was acceptable for knowledge about the human genome to be exclusively owned by businessmen? And one strange question that always stuck in my mind: would I assist a project to create an influenza vaccine that would only work on blond people?’

‘That was her pillow talk?’

‘I know. I should have guessed she wasn’t after me for my body.’ He almost smiled. ‘The fifth time we met – the very last time – we went to a hotel. She told me she’d been in touch with someone working for a biotech company that was doing some deeply unethical research. She said this guy was too frightened to talk to her, but he was going to be at Diamond for a couple of weeks and could I get to know him, maybe drop her name into the conversation to see how he reacted.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I can give you an email, that’s all.’

‘Because . . . ?’

‘Because I have a duty of confidentiality.’ He struck the wheel with the heel of his palm in frustration at the unfairness of his predicament.

‘What about the name of the company?’

‘Confidential.’

‘No problem,’ Jenny said calmly. ‘What happened then?’

‘Nothing. I told her I wasn’t going to spy for her. It was too dangerous for me.’

‘Let me guess – she wasn’t content with that?’

‘Emails, phone calls, she wouldn’t let it go. I told her I wanted nothing more to do with her. But the next thing I knew, she turned up at Diamond. She called me in my office and said if I didn’t let her in, there was going to be trouble. I didn’t have a choice. As soon as I closed the door she started threatening me – either I handed over the company’s research data or she’d phone my girlfriend and tell her about our affair. I told her I didn’t have access to it, but she wouldn’t believe me. She was like a mad person. Obsessed.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I got a USB and saved some public-domain stuff onto it. There was no way she was going to understand it, and one protein molecule looks pretty much like any other.’

‘Did you hear from her again?’

‘No. Nothing till I read she’d died.’

Jenny said, ‘Did you get the feeling that she’d spent a whole year working up to that one moment?’

‘I slept with Sonia Blake five times and I still don’t know who or what she was. I guess that was the idea.’ Kwan slowly shook his head. The confession had exhausted him.

Jenny watched as Kwan’s tail lights disappeared around the bend. It was getting late. The traffic had all but vanished from the road. The lights on the filling-station forecourt flickered and went out, leaving her staring into darkness. All she had left was the anonymous email address Kwan had left her –
[email protected]
– and a decision to make: whether to trust him. She turned the key in the ignition and headed out onto the road, not sure where she was going or what to do next. A mile or so passed in a blur of indecision, her thoughts ricocheting between the equally forbidding prospects of appealing to Simon Moreton for help and protection, and continuing to act alone. Her courage was beginning to fail when the dim light of a phone box in a layby up ahead seemed to summon her.
Williams.
She needed to speak to Williams.

Performing the same trick she had in Oxford, Jenny took the SIM card from her phone and checked Williams’s number in the contacts file. The air had turned cold under a cloudless sky, and she stood shivering in the roadside booth as she waited for what felt like minutes for her call to connect.

Williams answered from inside a noisy pub. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Jenny. Jenny Cooper.’

‘Bloody hell! I’ve been trying to get hold of you all evening. I thought we’d lost you.’

‘Sorry to disappoint. Where are you?’

‘In sodding London – what does it sound like? Hold on . . .’

Jenny waited as he picked his way bad-temperedly across a crowded bar before making it to the relative peace of the street.

‘Thank God for that. You’d die here sooner than find a place to have a quiet pint—’

Jenny cut him short. ‘Any luck with the girl?’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We got to your Mr Thorn’s place and found the door kicked in, the whole place turned over. No sign of him or his lady friend. Same at his office – door in, papers everywhere, not a soul in sight. I’m afraid I had to call in the local Old Bill.’

‘There’s a girl who worked there. Eda. Eda Hincks – c-k-s. See if you can find her.’

‘I know—’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘Mrs Cooper! Listen!’

She fell silent. He had never shouted at her before.

‘Tell me where you are,’ Williams insisted.

‘I’d prefer not to say.’

‘You’re not to go home tonight. There was an incident at Thorn’s office – a violent incident. A woman was nearly killed. Look, how about if I arrange for someone to pick you up? . . . Mrs Cooper? Are you there?’

Jenny dropped the receiver onto the cradle and ran to her car.

S
HE HAD DRIVEN FOR AN HOUR
across country, winding through back roads heading vaguely west until, overtaken by tiredness, Jenny had pulled into a shabby hotel somewhere in the Wiltshire countryside near Marlborough. There was a shower, a bed and, most importantly, Wi-Fi. Aside from that, the room was typical of a cheap English hotel: rickety mismatched furniture and a tasteless patterned carpet no longer able to disguise several decades’ worth of stains. Hanging her jacket on the wardrobe rail, she wished she’d been brave enough to have had a stiff drink before coming up, but there was another of life’s ironies: she could take on half a dozen hostile lawyers in a crowded courtroom and play cat and mouse with military intelligence officers, but couldn’t face the embarrassment of stepping between a handful of leering men at a bar.

Kicking off her shoes, she picked up the phone – a grubby relic of the 1980s – and dialled into her voicemail. There were three messages in a row from Williams left earlier in the evening, each one a little more desperate than the last, two ring-offs from a caller too impatient to speak, then a brief and enigmatic communication from Alison: ‘
I’m trying to reach you, Mrs Cooper. Please call me immediately you receive this.
’ Jenny recognized her measured tone: it was the voice she used to break bad news to relatives. She assumed that Alison must have some of her own. More than likely she had buckled under the stress of Jenny’s neglect and decided she couldn’t cope with work any longer. She steeled herself to call her back, but chose the cowardly path of listening to the next message first.

‘
Jenny, it’s David. I need to speak to you urgently. I’m at a weekend conference in Glasgow. Call me on the mobile.
’

It was left just before nine. He had called again thirty minutes later:

‘
Jenny, I really need to speak to you. Ross is down with some sort of fever with headache and chest pains. He argued with Sally, she’s gone home to York, and Debbie’s climbing the walls thinking it’s something infectious. I told her to call an ambulance. I can’t get home tonight – there’s no plane. Where the hell are you? No one knows where you are!
’

Jenny struggled to recall David’s number and wasted precious seconds retrieving it from the contact list on her SIM-less mobile. She punched it into the room phone. David answered at the first ring.

‘Jenny? Where are you? Didn’t you get my messages?’ His panic was making him shout.

‘Wiltshire. I just got them—’

‘He’s at the Vale, in the isolation unit. They don’t know what it is.’

‘It’s not meningitis?’ Jenny struggled to push the word past her lips, which along with her hands had become numb. Paraesthesia – one of the first symptoms of acute anxiety.

‘Doesn’t seem so, but culture tests take a while. They’ve pumped him full of antibiotics, but as far as I can tell . . .’ He struggled to remain calm. ‘I don’t even know why I’m asking this, but I don’t suppose you have any idea what it might be? It’s not just him I’m concerned for – he was with Debbie and the baby all day, all week in fact.’

‘Q fever.’

‘
What? I can’t hear you!
’

The numbness had become tingling, sharp pins and needles spreading through her limbs and deep into her viscera. Her diaphragm tightened, every breath an effort.

‘Tell them to test for Q fever.’

David lapsed into astonished silence. ‘Q fever? That’s an animal disease.’

‘I’ll call you back in ten minutes.’

As she put down the phone she heard him yell, ‘Jenny! What’s your number? Where the bloody hell are you?’

Grabbing her smartphone, Jenny fumbled to log on to the hotel Wi-Fi and ran a search:
Q fever symptoms.
A slew of results appeared. She chose the most respectable source she could find – the HPA’s Centre for Infection – and was confronted with a list: sudden onset, high fever, nausea, fatigue, myalgia, sweats, chest pains and, further down, endocarditis.

She stared at the screen. All she could hear was David’s unfinished sentence: ‘They’ve pumped him full of antibiotics, but . . .’
They were doing nothin
g, is what he hadn’t been able to bring himself to say.

She needed to speak to Henry Blake, but only had the hospital number. She stabbed at the phone with clumsy fingers and got through to the John Radcliffe switchboard, but just as she had feared, the home numbers of staff were strictly off-limits, even for coroners. Changing tack she tried the Radcliffe’s pathology department, roused a technician, and finally extracted a mobile number for Chris Randall, the pathologist who had carried out the autopsy on Sonia Blake.

Dr Randall was at a dinner party and in no mood to be disturbed by a coroner. Only when Jenny had raised her voice loud enough for the whole floor of the hotel to hear that Sonia Blake died from a recombinant strain of Q fever did he offer a bemused apology and let her have Blake’s personal number.

Waiting for Blake to pick up his phone, Jenny was aware that she had broken through to a sudden clarity. The sensation of panic had given way to anger and a ferocious desire to act. She was no longer
feeling
anything. Her only thoughts were of what she might
do.
Her world had become binary: her son’s life or death.

‘Hello,’ Blake answered groggily. He was in a room with a television playing.

‘It’s Jenny Cooper. I think my son may have Q fever.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t believe her. ‘You know how late it is?’ It felt like a routine he had acted out before with Sonia.

‘He’s in the isolation unit at the Severn Vale District Hospital, Bristol. His name is Ross Tarlton – I keep my maiden name. His father is a consultant cardiac surgeon there. Please do not question what I’m telling you.’ She heard her voice as if it were a stranger’s: clipped and mechanical. ‘I am calling you because frankly I could think of no one else who might have a clue what to do with an antibiotic-resistant strain that has been engineered to kill. Can you help me?’

‘Jesus . . .’ was all he could say.

‘I’m not interested in bringing your name into this, Dr Blake, I just need some insight. I need to
do
something.’

Jenny heard a woman’s voice from another room, demanding to know who was calling this late.

He gave an evasive answer, but the woman grew more insistent as she drew closer.

‘Please,’ Jenny insisted.

‘All I can tell you is that ideally any agent used as a BW would be developed alongside an effective antidote, especially if there was any risk of infection to the administering party.’

The woman’s voice was in the room now: ‘For Christ’s sake. It’s not about
her
, is it? I thought we’d agreed.’

Blake ended the call.

BW
. Biological Weapon. An image of Ross in a plastic tent passed before her eyes. Medical staff in biohazard suits; drips, wires, monitors and the crushing sense of life slipping away through delirium into darkness.

Jenny forced her mind back to the problem. She needed to know who had killed Sonia Blake. Without that knowledge she had nothing. She could call Ruth Webley and pray that she wasn’t complicit in murdering innocent civilians, or she could hold that option in reserve until she had exhausted all others. She had very few left.

A list formed in her mind. Three steps. She worked through them.

Step one. She would check the Public Register of Genetically Modified Organisms. There was an outside chance it would list any application to alter the genetic make-up of Q fever. Her search engine brought up the government website on which the register was hosted. Her fingers worked the screen at lightning speed, adrenalin pumping now, but within seconds she had the answer she feared:
Your search returned 0 results.