The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (42 page)

"The crash that it made was unbelievable. It went through the glass front of the fume cupboard, smashing all the glassware inside, water splashing everywhere. At the same time, some of the water got into the electrical points. There was a lot of sparking and hissing, steam or smoke began to fill up the cupboard, and then there was a gentle 'pop.' That's when the fire started.

"He looked around and I saw him freeze — but only for a second, as if the signal from reality central was momentarily interrupted — and then he screamed. He didn't scream anything coherent, he just made a noise. When he looked back at me, I saw something I'd never seen before, not on anyone's face. It was someone drowning in total fear."

He stopped. Stein took up the story. "The fire spread incredibly rapidly. Because of the fabric of the building; it was nearly falling down before. There were fire extinguishers, but most of them didn't work, and those that did had no noticeable effect. We were forced to evacuate almost at once."

He sighed. "It was the next day when Turner told me. He was, as Carlos has said, terrified. I didn't really understand why. True, we were all depressed, but he was scared." He looked across at Carlos. "Do you remember?"

The young man was nodding slowly, a look of vague recollection frowning on his face. "He was, wasn't he?"

Stein said to Helena and Eisenmenger, "He had been working on a parallel project. He had taken Proteus and subverted it beautifully … "

"Beautifully?" Carlos was incensed.

Bochdalek spoke, much as a film buff might enquire about a particularly tricky point in the plot. "What is this Proteus?"

Suddenly Rosenthal wanted to join in as well. "Careful. You may not want to know." At which Bochdalek raised his eyebrows, "Really?" he asked.

"No more than you need to know. Remember?"

Bochdalek grinned broadly, waving the gun around carelessly. "I think the fact that I know that four people die here tonight is perhaps already too much for my safety."

Rosenthal said nothing more.
Your
decision
. Bochdalek turned to Stein and whispered loudly, "He loves me."

Helena asked, "And you really had no idea?"

"No. The tasks were split. I was concentrating on the culture system, leaving Turner to perfect Proteus itself. The results he reported were clearly … fabricated."

Carlos said irritably, "Whatever. What he had to tell us was that Proteus was more than just a little model for cancer and he told us it was likely that, because of the fire, we were all carrying Proteus, and that Proteus was a very, very efficient killing machine."

Bochdalek found this snippet fascinating. He was becoming more and more engrossed in what was being said. Helena, who was nearest to him, began to wonder.

Stein said, "He showed me his notes, his sequence data. It was incredible … " he paused to eye Carlos, then went on, "He'd done an amazing job. He'd packed in an amazing number of oncogenes, promoters and recessive gene blockers; he'd used all three reading frames. It was a work of art." He cast his eyes downward, perhaps ashamed at his enthusiasm. "It was the perfect weapon."

Carlos took up the story. He sounded tired, cynical. "So suddenly, not only had we all been working on the biological equivalent of the nuclear bomb, but we discovered there was a high probability that we'd been infected with it."

Bochdalek whistled quietly. Talk of weapons excited him.

Stein sounded tired. "I had called Starling as soon as it happened. He responded quickly." He looked up at Rosenthal who was still surveying the window's view. Rosenthal said lazily, "The start of my romance with Proteus."

Eisenmenger suggested, "Let me guess what happens next." Bochdalek nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, yes," he implored, apparently unheeding of Rosenthal's previous advice, so taken up in the drama of the situation was he.

"Mr Rosenthal arrives complete with one or two colleagues to find out what happened, together with one or two people to take blood tests on you all."

Bochdalek looked across at his colleague, then said to Stein. "Is that right?"

Stein's nod brought forth admiration for Eisenmenger. "Go on," Bochdalek urged.

"I guess the police were fairly interested, too, and they began to ask awkward questions, but Rosenthal took command. The story of some sort of electrical fire was concocted — not too far from the truth, so credible — and any mention of the nature of the research was suppressed." Of Carlos, he asked, "Was there some sort of bribe?"

"Relocation to wherever we wanted, within reason, plus a lump sum of a hundred thousand each, tax free, provided we stayed absolutely quiet about the research. We were also reminded that we had signed strict confidentiality clauses that, should we break them, would have had fairly heavy consequences."

Eisenmenger smiled at Rosenthal. "The carrot and stick approach? You're quite practised in that, aren't you?" Rosenthal acknowledged this by cocking his head slightly, expression unchanged. To Stein, Eisenmenger said, "And what about you?"

"I was outraged. I felt betrayed, both by PEP and by Turner. I was going to go public, but then … " He paused before, in a slightly lower voice, "The confidentiality clause was brought to my attention, and … "

He stopped, clearly ashamed. Surprisingly, it was Rosenthal who explained. "The good Professor has a son who has a fondness for heroin. We were able to help."

He didn't explain what form the help had taken and Stein obviously wasn't inclined to elaborate, saying only, "When my wife died, we drifted apart. He was lost. It was my fault."

Eisenmenger turned back to Rosenthal. "But what about Turner? You stopped work on Proteus — wasn't he upset?"

Rosenthal shrugged. "He was more concerned about whether or not he was infected. I think the possibility that he might die from his own little bug rather put him off that line of research."

Bochdalek's eyes were flicking from speaker to speaker and Helena saw that his gun was no longer horizontal. She began to wonder if she might get the chance to grab it, or at least kick it. But what about Rosenthal?

"So the project was terminated, and everyone was taken off Rouna. Except you, Professor," Eisenmenger said.

"I elected to stay."

"Why?"

He took a deep breath. "I was by far the eldest of the group, and I had no one to return to. I decided to retire here. Also, I thought to try to rectify some of the wrong I had unwittingly done."

Eisenmenger looked at him for rather longer than necessary before continuing, "And they waited for the blood test results to come back." Turning back to Rosenthal he added, "Which you faked."

Bochdalek cheered under his breath, as if pleased by this particular example of perfidy, but the reaction of Carlos and Stein was very, very different. Carlos went grey, his face slack, his head bowing to his chest. He said softly, "So it's true."

Stein looked at Rosenthal, the movement sudden. He clearly had trouble accepting what he had heard, its significance. He turned to Eisenmenger, who nodded sadly. "I'm afraid it's true. Proteus did get out in the accident, and you were all infected. Presumably the fire sterilized the area afterwards, but by then it was too late for you."

Stein continued to stare, then dropped his gaze. "I sometimes wondered. I suppose I was too scared to check."

Rosenthal continued as if nothing had been said. "When all the tests came out positive, we knew we had a problem. There is no cure for Proteus, so they were effectively dead; the problem became how to handle the situation to the best advantage for Pel-Ebstein."

Helena said quite distinctly, "You bastard."

He bowed, a mocking acknowledgement. "Whatever you think, I had been given a job to do. Really there was no choice, if you look at things in purely pragmatic terms. If we had told the subjects of the true results, the prediction was that security would be breached extremely quickly — after all, they would have nothing to lose by running to the papers, and plenty to blame us for.

"So we decided to turn the situation to our advantage. Turner had been close to the endpoint, and it seemed logical to see how effective Proteus really was. We told everyone that they were negative, then watched and waited. Sooner or later one of them would get ill with a fever of sufficient severity to trigger Proteus — what happened then would give us a huge amount of data on Proteus."

"Was no one suspicious?" asked Helena. "Did they all just take what you said at face value?"

"Turner asked to see the actual read-outs. Then he even demanded that he be allowed to repeat the tests himself, but we had predicted such a possibility. The samples were switched by sleight of hand when the blood was taken. He analysed my blood."

Carlos said, "When Turner said that he was happy, we all took the results as accurate. I think we all decided that we might as well take their offer and forget about it. After all, Proteus was over, or so we thought."

Eisenmenger found himself wondering about that, and he searched Rosenthal's face for a clue as to the accuracy of that assumption. He saw nothing. He said, "And then, eventually, Millicent Sweet died. She died so rapidly, you didn't have a chance to control matters."

"She died rapidly and she died of a huge number and variety of tumours. Proteus proved how effective it was — too effective, as far as keeping things quiet went. It was obviously an unnatural death, and we couldn't afford that conclusion to be drawn, so we had to manipulate matters."

"Mark Hartmann."

"Yes. Dr Hartmann. His participation proved to be one of the easier matters to arrange."

Helena's eyes flicked over Bochdalek's gun. His finger was near the trigger, but not actually touching it.

Rosenthal yawned. "Anyway, fascinating as this is, night is coming, and I think that we should get on with matters."

Outside the wind and rain were picking up again. Although still day, the light was so gloomy as to be all but without purpose.

Stein asked, "What are you going to do?" It probably wasn't the most perceptive question he had ever asked and it received little consideration from Rosenthal as he replied briefly, "Kill you."

Bochdalek rushed to elaborate. "Phosphor bombs. Very hot, burning without residue. Perfect for disposing of bodies."

Carlos asked, "Is that how you got rid of Jean-Jacques?"

Rosenthal said only, "I'm afraid I don't have the precise details with regard to M. Renvier's demise. Needless to say, it was achieved so that no useful earthly remains survived."

Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door. It seemed to crack along the hallway and rumble into the room. At once Rosenthal was at the window, carefully peering from behind a curtain. He backed away. To Bochdalek, he said, "Police."

Bochdalek said, "I thought you'd been watching." This possessed more than a suggestion of mockery.

"There was nothing on the track for miles."

The knock came again.

Rosenthal said to Stein, "Come on. Answer it."

The old man hesitated, but eventually stood up. Bochdalek's finger returned to the trigger and the gun straightened up. Rosenthal took Stein by the upper arm and walked him out to the hallway. Bochdalek said through a smile, "Suggest you all keep nice and quiet, like sleeping babies."

*

Rosenthal whispered to Stein. "You put the chain on, you open it and you make sure that whoever it is goes away happy. Understand?"

"But … "

"Understand?" This time Rosenthal dug the barrel into his ribs and he nodded. The chain went up and he opened the door, letting in coldness and damp.

"Professor Stein?"

Through the crack in the door, the old man nodded.

"My name's Sergeant MacCallum, from the mainland. I think we met a couple of years ago, following the fire."

The old man nodded, but didn't seem inclined to reminisce. In fact, MacCallum thought that he looked under great strain. He thought it odd, too, that the old man should have his door on a chain — after all, this was Rouna, not Glasgow.

"Could I come in and have a word?"

At once the old man was shaking his head. "No. No, you can't."

MacCallum was wet and he was cold. It was gloomy with night, this far north, soon to be upon them and he didn't want to be there. He felt it unreasonable not to be allowed to move two metres into the relative warmth and dryness. Stein was an incomer, but that didn't mean he had the right to be inhospitable.

He glanced to his right, where Beverley, shivering with so much cold and rain she hardly had bladder control, was crouched down. She nodded for him to continue.

"Are you sure, sir? It really is most uncomfortable out here."

"No! It's not convenient. I'm … I'm not well. You might catch something. You can say what you've got to say from there."

*

In the front sitting room they could feel the draught coming from under the door and hear Stein's replies to silent queries from outside. Bochdalek, in particular, was most intrigued by this play for voices and, although he kept his eyes turned towards his prisoners, his attention was clearly outside.