The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (31 page)

"You mentioned that he had been involved in some sort of work that might have had a security rating. I think it would be as well to check on the details."

"Why? What's going on?"

Seeing suspicion solidifying like wall between them, Beverley risked a morsel of precious truth. "Millicent died of cancer When your husband died, he was also found to have early cancer. I want to exclude the fire as a cause of those tumours."

She stared at Beverley for a moment, then shrugged. "His papers are still in his office. I haven't touched them."

"May I see?"

The office was on the ground floor, surprisingly small and tidy. "He kept the old stuff in those files." She indicated a shelf high up above the desk.

"May I take them?"

"Why not?"

There were six of them, all old and yellowed, the cardboard dusty and torn. Outside, in the hall, Beverley said, "Thank you."

For perhaps the first time something she said, something innocuous and produced merely out of politeness, pierced the armour against grief. Robin Turner's widow forgot to be composed, looked as she really was — lonely, desolate and without hope once more.

"Oh, my God," she whispered. Her cigarette, which had never left her fingers, became another corpse and, as she hurried Beverley from the house, she could say only, "Please, I'm feeling rather tired."

As the door closed behind her, Beverley saw the last of a lonely woman and saw also that the glue holding her together was water-soluble. She shifted the weight of the files, wondering if this was going to lead anywhere other than a long, sleepless night.

*

Hartmann didn't know how he was feeling and hadn't known for a few days. He tried to tell himself that things were looking brighter, that possibly the dread was lightening and that, for the first since Alan Rosenthal had first made his unbidden appearance in his life, he could see a future. Having done what Eisenmenger had suggested — returned the blocks to their original condition and written to the coroner offering profuse apologies over his "mistake" — such optimism did not seem undue. It was true that Patricia Bowman had taken it upon herself to conduct a long and rather confrontational interview with him when she learned what had happened, and the telephone call from the Coroner had also caused a distinct rise in his anal sphincter tone, but he thought that he was over the worst. The important thing was to avoid any more being said in public and the Coroner's decision not to hold an inquest (Hartmann had assured him that the death was still natural, just slightly more peculiar than previously disclosed) would help.

But this was insufficient to make him an undeniably happy soul.

What
if
Rosenthal
finds
out
?

He had a deep, well-rooted fear that Rosenthal had ways and means of finding things out. It would take just a careless phrase, or perhaps it would be another bribe, another act of blackmail.

That he would act on such information, and act in exactly the way that he described, was not a source of uncertainty for Hartmann.

And even if Rosenthal did not immediately learn of what had happened, there was still Eisenmenger. Clearly he believed the death extremely odd, and he was being employed to find out more. If he discovered that it had in fact been unnatural, then nothing in the whole of God's stinking creation would stop that becoming public.

In some ways he felt more than ever like an ant scurrying for cover under the trampling laughter of a murderous child.

"Hello, Mark."

He had been completely absorbed by his endlessly reiterated terrors and grievances so that the smooth, almost chummy voice that he knew so well and feared so much made him visibly recoil.

"Bit jumpy, aren't you?" The question was smeared out of unruffled concern, as if Rosenthal really did care about his state of mind. "Something wrong?"

Hartmann rushed, hurried, to reassure him.

They were standing just outside the Medical School entrance, its featureless red-brick walls climbing above them. The evening air was cooling rapidly from cold dampness to icy frost.

"I thought I'd make sure you were still happy, "continued Rosenthal. He had on a black, woollen overcoat and his breath was easily visible in the lamplight around them, but Hartmann thought he didn't actually look cold. The impression was almost one of a bad actor who didn't know how to play the part of being chilled despite all the special effects. "As far as you know, there are no problems, are there?"

Hartmann looked nervously at Rosenthal, trying to hear suspiciousness or see hidden knowledge, but there was nothing. "None at all," he said and to his delight the tone sounded genuine. Rosenthal at once smiled and straightened, his whole body language changing. "Good! Good!" Then, "You had me rather anxious."

It was Hartmann's turn to smile. He risked some addition to his positive reports. "Everything's going fine. No comebacks at all."

"Excellent!"

Then Rosenthal hesitated and the smile went. For two seconds — two seconds in which Hartmann felt hysterical certainty that Rosenthal knew — he stared at the pathologist from eyes that were pale and blue and death-soaked. The gaze brought with it stasis for Hartmann; isolation from the external, passing world. He saw his doom …

The moment broke as shockingly as glass. Rosenthal put the smile back in place, the world re-intruded and Hartmann breathed again. "I think it's over," opined Rosenthal. "I really do."

Rushing to catch up, still confused and not completely sure, Hartmann said quickly, "Yes, yes."

"In which case, I have something for you." From the left-hand pocket of his overcoat, Rosenthal produced a package, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with parcel tape. He held it out.

Hartmann took the gift, staring at it in the kind of wonder that the front row at the Sermon on the Mount had probably felt. "Is this it?" he asked. Then, just in case it was a joke, "Is this the tape?"

Still smiling and staring and looking at him from glacial eyes, Rosenthal nodded and confirmed.

"But … but why?" Hartmann was clutching it tightly. Disbelief and still-nagging suspicion made him wary.

"Oh, let's just say that I have no further use for it."

He almost felt like crying. He brought the package to his chest, then remembered something. "But you said there were copies. What about those?"

Rosenthal shook his head and, putting his hand on Hartmann's arm, said, "I've disposed of those. I thought you might like to receive just the one copy. A gesture, if you like."

Rosenthal dropped his hand and began to turn away.

Hartmann asked, "And you don't want me to do anything more?"

Without turning back, Rosenthal said, "Everything's taken care of. Everything."

They went to bed, but did not make love, a decision that was made silently and with total consent from them both. Just holding Helena, feeling her soft, firm warmth beside him was enough for Eisenmenger.

She said into the darkness, "What really hurt was the fact that I thought I was always in control and Alasdair, whoever he was, proved how wrong I was. In the space of a few days he showed me up for what I am."

Eisenmenger muttered something.

"What?"

"'Human'. I said, 'Human'. That's all it showed you up to be."

She thought about that. "A fool would be nearer the mark."

He laughed. "Same thing." And he was pleased to hear her laugh with him.

"John?" she asked after what seemed like a lifetime, as if they were drifting together not into sleep but into old age.

"Yes?"

"What's going on?"

"Ah."

"Do you know, or don't you?"

"I'll tell you tomorrow when we have the sequence on Belinda's little oddity."

"So it's not an artefact?"

"I fear," he said with what almost amounted to sadness, "it is very far from being an artefact."

She didn't like the tone of his voice. "What is it then?"

He paused a long time before saying, "I think it might be our killer."

*

They had arranged that Eisenmenger should come round to her flat at six and the hours until then were filled with the mundanities of a parole violation and Mr Codman's embezzlement. She felt — she
knew
— that she wasn't giving of her best, not with Eisenmenger's final, enigmatic and frightening remark replaying itself as a sort of soundtrack to her work, but she tried as hard as she could. Eisenmenger's attitude also recurred ceaselessly. She had seen that shift into deep contemplation before; it was contemplation laced with epiphany. In such a mood he knew already where he was going, he was merely finding the right stages to get there, the right flecks of evidence to add to the picture that he was painting. A portrait of the truth.

She decided to cook, although she wasn't particularly hungry; it seemed more of an anthropological gesture than a need to ingest sustenance. She hadn't long started before Eisenmenger arrived, bearing wine. His attitude was one of exhausted satisfaction, but she saw also something else, something that she could not define.

"Well?" she demanded, to which he at first he didn't reply. Then he smiled and said, "Some wine, I think."

While she thought,
Jesus
Christ
!
Why
does
he
have
to
be
so
bloody
irritating
? she said, "Have you made any progress?"

"Oh, yes. Things are clearer now." He paused as if suddenly considering what he had just said. "Clearer. Definitely clearer."

It was then that she realized what was wrong with him.

He was afraid. She had never seen fear in him before and it was unsettling for her. Before she could say anything he suddenly perked up. "Are you cooking? Good."

He moved past her into the kitchen and she was left with nothing other than to follow him. "John?" Her hand was on his arm and he turned as she asked, "What's wrong?"

About to deny, he opened his mouth, paused, then said, "I'm hungry. You cook and I'll tell you." He kissed her lightly on the cheek.

She resumed her preparation of the meal and Eisenmenger poured wine while watching her. For some reason he was surprised that she was expert; why, he wondered, should that be unexpected? She had never married, had always lived on her own, so of course she had acquired expertise in the preparation of food. He, in contrast, was a relative ingénue when it came to solitary existence. First married then, after the divorce, living with Marie, he had always had someone else to take at least a share of culinary duties and consequently he had tended to specialize in those dishes that were easy, quick and high in flavour.

The wine was good, and he could find himself wanting to drink a lot of it, but he was acutely aware that time was short, that up to that moment they had meandered in this investigation, but that now things were changing. It was almost an effort to concentrate on the problem; part of him was aware that he was prevaricating, that he didn't want to face what he suspected.

"Okay," he began. "To return to the beginning. We have a young girl who died from multiple cancers. She died apparently within a week, maybe much more quickly."

Helena was measuring spices into the bowl of a food processor. "You say that that's impossible."

"Well, they say that nothing's impossible in medicine, but this is equivalent to predicting the winning lottery numbers every week for a year."

"So the questions that follow are firstly — from a biological point of view, how can this have happened? — and secondly — is this connected to her time at PEP? Specifically with the accident in the Laboratory."

"The first answers the second," he remarked as he wrote down notes. It came across almost as a spoken thought.

"What does that mean?"

He finished writing and then looked up, his face unreadable. Helena had taken some pork fillet from the refrigerator but she just put it down on the chopping board, looking across at Eisenmenger.

"For most of today Belinda and I have been showing the sequences in the 'artefact' that she hadn't been able to identify to various people in the Medical School. It took a bit of work, but eventually, with a lot of luck and guesswork, I think we can now say what they are."

"And?"

"Do you know what a retrovirus is?"

She shook her head.

"Viruses are relatively small lengths of nucleic acid — genetic material — within protein packets. Like us all, they're interested in only one thing — reproduction. Because they haven't got many genes, they use our genes to do it. They get into our cells and subvert our intracellular machinery to make copies of themselves. The genes they carry within them are merely the tools with which they achieve this.

"In most viruses the genes, like ours, are made of DNA, but retroviruses have opted for RNA, which means that they have to convert their nucleic acid into DNA, using something called 'reverse transcriptase,' before they get to work in the cell.