The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (27 page)

Lucas was an old friend. An old, old friend.

"Yes?"

"Lucas? It's Beverley."

She hadn't seen or spoken to him for a long time. The sound of his voice was deliciously nostalgic.

"Beverley! How are you?"

His voice had always had a deep, rhythmic lilt, as if with every word he was trying to caress and seduce her, and it brought back wonderful memories, wonderful feelings. She knew that he would have heard of her recent misfortunes, but she also knew that he would have been one of the few who had felt genuine sorrow. Lucas was the nearest she had ever come to love.

"Not too bad, Luke. Considering."

He said at once, his voice steeped in sympathy, "Yeah, I heard. I'm sorry about all the shit, Beverley."

"And you, Luke?" she asked, not wanting to dwell on the subject.

"Fine, fine."

"Still in Fraud?" She wondered if he was still married, if he still loved his beautiful baby daughter as much, if he still liked to raid the fridge after making love.

"Nowhere else to go." He sounded content.

"Can you do me a favour?"

The question elicited the first touch of caution in his voice. "Such as?"

"I've come across a company — Wiskott-Aldrich — l was wondering if you could poke around for me. Find out who, what and where."

The voice was still lazy and easy-going as he asked, "This official?"

"Not exactly."

He hesitated, the first tangible sign that he was aware of how radioactive she had become. "It'll take a day or two, but I don't see why not."

"Good," she said, relieved. "I'm really grateful, Luke."

He laughed quietly into the phone. "Really? Like, how much?"

An image of his firm, smooth, ebony flesh whipped through her head and she smiled. "How much would you like?"

*

Helena came away from the firm's business meeting more than usually bored and depressed. The agenda of such meetings was invariable in construction and invariable in its execution — monotony, pedancy and orthodoxy in equal proportions, spiced with a few drops of spite — and it therefore left her invariably low, but today the emotion was magnified. She sat in her office, with the papers on a charge of embezzlement brought against Cedric Godfrey Codman spread before her, crying mutely but ineffectually for her attention. She felt a physical malaise, almost nausea, that was persistently trying to force tears from her. Tears that she hadn't until now thought were within her.

Alasdair had gone. Gone suddenly and gone, she knew, irrevocably. No note, no call of departure, just absence. Its peculiarity of manner and complete unexpectedness leaving her stunned. She felt herself falling back into the time following her parents' death, back when Jeremy, her stepbrother, had been her only hope, and when that hope had been extinguished by Beverley Wharton.

What had happened?

She looked through the events of the previous night, trying to find something that might indicate why she should have returned from the bathroom to find him vanished, only the warmth of the bed and murmur of his cologne remaining. Yet there was nothing, she was sure. She had not upset him, nor had she heard or seen anything that could have suggested this was coming. He had been happy, of that she was convinced.

So why had he gone?

It was the first opportunity she had had to phone him and she was dreading it. Ignorance was bad, but perhaps it would prove better than the acquisition of knowledge. She hesitated, eyeing the matt black plastic of the phone almost as an enemy, then breathed out fiercely as she picked up the receiver and dialled.

"Could l speak to Alasdair, please? Alasdair Riley-Day?"

But there was, it seemed, a problem. The Personnel Department of Cronkhite-Canada had never heard of Alasdair Riley-Day. "What do you mean?" she demanded. "He's your departmental director! Of course you've heard of him!"

The gentleman was apologetic but stupidly intransigent. Unbelievably he insisted that there was no such person working there, certainly not as his superior.

Helena didn't know which emotion to allow. Incredulity? Panic? Fear? Sorrow?

"Who is the Director of Personnel?"

Samantha Carpus.

"Could I please speak to her, please?"

She got to speak to her secretary, but it didn't matter. The refrain was the same. There was no one in the Personnel Department at Cronkhite-Canada — no one in the whole of Cronkhite-Canada — by the name of Alasdair Riley-Day.

There never had been.

*

Belinda's phonecall had been full of excitement as well as full of perplexity. She had some results from her analysis of Millicent Sweet's tissues to show Eisenmenger.

"And?" he asked.

"Well, they're a bit complicated," she began, then continued after a brief pause, "In fact, they're really odd … "

He felt interest prick him; a slight and pleasurable pain.

"Can I meet you? You could explain what you've found."

"It'll have to be tomorrow lunchtime. I've got so much to do … "

They arranged to meet in the Hospital Restaurant.

*

Justine Nielsen had worked hard on her thesis all night and felt that, tired as she was, the world was good. She shut down the laptop, just as the eastern sky above the New York skyline was starting to turn into a hazy salmon pink. The sounds of irate traffic were growing louder, changing from occasional horns and squeals into a more generalized rumble of sound. From her cramped space in the laboratory on the seventeenth floor of Columbia University she felt above it all. Columbia wasn't in the best part of the city, but it was still imbued with the sense of place, and Justine, relatively newly arrived, was thoroughly enjoying herself.

She picked up her bag, hefted the laptop carrying-case over her shoulder and made her way to the lifts. Few people were around and most of those she met were not keen to engage in meaningless chatter, a disinclination that she cherished. She had got into the habit of working at night — especially when she was writing up — some years ago when she had been an undergraduate, and she found that it suited her. Counter-intuitively, she found that it didn't interfere with her social life, since now she would go home, sleep, meet Rico for a drink and meal that evening, then return to the University for another go at her thesis.

Another advantage was that the subway was relatively deserted whenever she travelled, certainly in the direction she was going, and there was always the luxury of a seat. On odd occasions she had found that this had the disadvantage of finding herself alone with people that she found less than attractive, but she was learning that most of the danger was in her own fears; she had not yet found herself threatened.

On this day, the journey was again uneventful and she emerged onto the sidewalk near her apartment in northern Brooklyn unscathed. She had only a short walk across the street and up a single flight of stairs to her front door.

She had three locks on the door, the last being a Yale. She turned this, pushed and entered her apartment.

The explosion killed five people, including a five-year-old boy in the apartment above. The body of Justine Nielsen was never found.

*

"Inspector?"

The voice rang down the corridor, slicing through the smells of polish, sweat and disinfectant, the echoes racing off on every side to make a reinforcing chorus. Beverley recognized it immediately. Lambert. There were three constables and a female clerk between the two of them; she saw a range of looks on their faces, from sly amusement through to sympathy. Everyone knew that they weren't the finest of friends.

"Sir?"

"I'd like a word with you. Now."

Even for Lambert he sounded, she thought angry. Then she reconsidered; actually, incandescent could have been an underestimate. She had been about to set out on a tour of the local public houses, not with the idea of inebriation but because it was part of an ongoing enquiry into contraband cigarettes. It was Lambert himself who had told her to go, but she was by now used to such capriciousness. She turned and walked back past the onlookers, ignoring their attention. She had a shrewd idea what this was about.

In his office, Lambert sat in his chair, the action one of violence rather than gentility. The chair, an aged thing of tatters and tarnishes, squeaked feebly. She followed him in, shutting the door very deliberately, preparing herself for the onslaught.

"What's going on?" He sounded, she judged, like a man who thought he knew exactly what was going on, but she risked prevarication.

"Sir?"

"Don't, Inspector," he warned, his voice seeming to come from somewhere dark and dangerous. Indicating two folders in front of him he said, "Unauthorized computer searches. Unauthorized forensic tests. Those I know about; what else is there?"

Lyme
. She couldn't prove it, but then she couldn't prove that two and two were four, and that had never bothered her. She took three deep breaths and cross her fingers behind her back. "It's the Macleod case, sir."

He frowned. "What about the Macleod case?" Cars stolen to order, shipped abroad within twenty-four hours. Macleod was making tens of thousands a month out of it.

"I had information that Macleod spent a night in Glasgow, at the Pretender Hotel. I thought it worth checking out."

He didn't believe her but she didn't care about that; all that mattered was whether he could disprove it. "Why the secrecy? Where's your report?" He knew better than to ask her where the information had come from.

"It was a long shot. I didn't think it worth making a fuss about unless it panned out."

He stared at her. She wondered why he hated her quite so much, what lay behind his enmity. Then he said, "What about the watch?"

Smooth as a lover's sigh she replied at once. "It was found in Macleod's room. I thought we might pick up who he saw while he was there. Same reason I did a search on the guest list, sir."

Again the stare, then he picked up one of the folders and thrust it at her. "Maybe you struck lucky, Inspector." He sounded not so much congratulatory as in discomfort. "One of the four partials on the watch was on the file. Follow it up."

She took the folder, feeling both elated and anxious. The last thing she needed was Lambert pestering her about this particular line of enquiry. There would have to be some creative report writing. Still, hey-ho, nothing she couldn't manage.

He dismissed her with nothing more than a slight but curt movement of his head.

Outside she opened the folder. The partial fingerprint had belonged to Adam Rytand, which was fine, but then she turned to his record and things became very interesting indeed. Rytand was no ordinary criminal; far from it. Rytand was ex-special services which meant he was trained for a huge variety of dirty operations, including, no doubt, blackmail; it also probably meant that he was a killer. He was on file because of a burglary offence eleven years before, nothing stolen.

The problem was that Rytand was dead, killed abroad seven and half years before.

Beverley Wharton knew then that Eisenmenger had been right, that here was something rotten just waiting to be punctured. Here, she was certain, was an opportunity and she was damned to hell if she was going to let Lambert spoil it for her. Somehow or other this would be to her advantage, and no one else's.

Smiling, she moved down the corridor clutching the file to her chest. She decided that the first thing to do would be to find Lyme.

*

It hadn't been a good day. The gene transfer experiments had failed again and the nude mice were still not developing signs of the expected neurological deficits that would have meant that they could be used as a model for multiple sclerosis. Dr Sommer, the post-doc for whom Carlos was working and the one behind both sets of experiments, hadn't actually accused him of incompetence, but there had been a sort of hint in the air as they discussed what might have gone wrong.

Also his morning headache would not behave and dissipate with the usual remedy of rehydration, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and extra-strong mints. Nerys had shown her dissatisfaction that he had once again come in drunk and unable to contribute to her erotic pleasures by crashing two saucepan lids over his head as he dozed fitfully.

No, not a good day.

He had heard the news from a friend of an acquaintance.
Turner's
dead
. Surprised, he had asked for details. It had happened a few weeks before, apparently. Turner had fallen from the top of a car park. Possibly suicide.

Carlos had no desire to suppress his immediate response —
serves
the
bastard
right
— and for the first few hours quite enjoyed the thought that Turner was dead. Only later did his mind come to dwell on Millie.

He still held affection for Millie. She had become for him something of an innocent in the series of events that had ended their time on Rouna and he could not blame her for her part in the events. He had written to her, attempting to express that feeling, had even once visited her in that crappy flat she lived in.