by Peter James
'Just clean living.'
'Bollocks to that.'
They sat down. Even though they were berthed in harbour, Ross could feel a slight sensation of motion.
'So, how are you, Captain?'
'I'm drinking a Sea Breeze. You like one?'
Ross frowned.
'Vodka and cranberry. Healthy, you know. Cranberries. Good for the cholesterol.'
Milward shouted, and a leggy red-headed woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a chiffon shirt-waister and too many baubles, appeared through a door.
'Mandy, this is Ross Ransome, most famous plastic surgeon in England.'
Ross stood up. She gave him a vacuous smile and a limp, moist handshake. 'Nice to meet you.'
'When your tits start drooping, this is the man's going to do 'em.'
'Really?' she said.
'He could make 'em bigger. I'd like 'em a bit bigger.'
'Great,' she said, with a giggle, as if she had just won a minor prize in a game show.
'Get us two Sea Breezes, darlin', and some cashews.'
As she walked away, Ross looked hard at the parts of Ronnie Milward's face that weren't obscured by his ridiculous sunglasses. 'You're wearing well.'
'I'm clapping out on the inside,' he said. 'Diabetes. Prostate. Blood pressure. Cholesterol. The joys of ageing.'
At least you're ageing in style, Ross thought. At least you're ageing on a fifteen-million-pound yacht, free to spend your ill-gotten loot, free to come and go as you please, instead of being locked up in a prison cell and butt-fucked twice a day, which is probably the kind of old age you deserve.
Ronnie Milward was not his real name, nor was the Aristotle Onassis face the one he had been born with. Ross had changed it for him in a clinic in Switzerland more discreet than any bank. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds had changed hands, out of sight of the British tax man. But seeing this boat now, Ross regretted not having charged him even more.
Holding the flame of his gold Dupont to the smouldering tip of the cigar and puffing hard, Milward said, 'You got to be away by three for your flight?'
'Yes.'
'I been back a couple of times in the past year.'
'That's taking a risk.'
'Me own mother din't recognise me.' He grinned. 'You gimme skin grafts on me fingers. No dabs are going to give me away. Shame you can't gimme new DNA as well.'
Mandy brought them their drinks and was about to sit down with them when Milward brushed her away. 'Fuck off and leave us in peace. Mr Ransome din't come all this way to talk about your tits.'
As she sauntered off, he turned to Ross with a quizzical smile. 'So, you want to see me, but you din't want to talk over the phone.' He stirred his drink with the plastic swizzle stick, then grabbed a handful of nuts. 'What's on your mind?'
'You told me five years ago that you owed me a favour, Captain. I've come to call it in.'
Laying his cigar in the ashtray Milward said, 'I done owe no favours Ross. You did a job, I paid you. We're all square.' He chucked the nuts into his mouth and washed them down with a swig of his drink.
Without being able to see the man's eyes, Ross found it hard to tell whether he was joking or not.
'Don't come to me talking about favours, Ross. You want something, I'll see what I can do, that's how I work, everything's business with Ronnie Milward. I don't do no favours, I do business. You want to do business, tell me what you want.'
'I want to know if you can arrange something, or put me in touch with someone who can.'
From his briefcase, Ross removed a brown envelope. He shook two photographs out of the envelope and handed them to him.
Milward glanced at the first photograph, a face-on close-up of a man. The second was a longer shot, showing the same man in profile. A tall man in his mid-forties, with a lean face and a tangle of silver curls.
He laid them down on the table and looked back at Ross. 'Am I meant to know him or what? Looks to me like that French singer geezer, wozzisname?'
'No, you don't know him. He's American, lives in London. His name is Oliver Cabot. Dr Oliver Cabot. He's screwing my wife.'
'You want someone to teach him a lesson? Give him a good hiding?'
Ross's mouth felt dry suddenly. Picking up his glass, he drank some of the icy vodka. Then leaning forward and staring hard into those dark, impenetrable glasses, he lowered his voice and said, 'I want him dead.'
49
'A year?' Faith said. 'A year?'
'For eighty per cent of people diagnosed.'
It was taking time to sink in. And Faith didn't want it to sink in, she wanted to keep talking, as if somehow if she talked for long enough they might arrive at some new way of looking at this thing, this Lendt's disease, this savage pack of micro-organisms that invaded human bodies and killed two out of every three of their victims.
Oliver was showing her a picture of one now on his iMac screen. A blow-up of a photograph taken through an electron microscope. It was hard to make out at first exactly what she was meant to be looking at in the uneven, swirling mass of green and red hues. Then Oliver pointed to a white area, the shape of a kidney bean.
'That?'
'Uh-huh.'
'How — how big is it?'
"Bout a hundred of them could sit on a pinhead.'
She stood up, feeling as if she had been abandoned by the entire world. Her eyes were moist but she wasn't about to cry: she was too shocked for that, too numb, too bewildered. Thoughts were unravelling around her.
Eighty per cent.
Four out of five dead within twelve months.
143
She stared out of the window. A hundred or so yards away was a pretty roof garden, lush with leaves and hanging plants, many in bloom. May had ended; this might be the last spring she would see. Her last summer. The last Christmas. She was never going to see Alec grow up.
I'm only going to be here for one more birthday for Alec.
Did Ross know? Was that why he'd been so sweet to her this weekend? Was he lying to her about the capsules — lying about what they really were?
* * *
Oliver stared at the iMac screen. There wasn't any easy way to break bad news, and to break it to Faith, of all people, was a really tough call.
He wished there was room for doubt, but the results of the tests were coldly unambiguous, and that Faith was being given a Moliou-Orelan clinical-trials drug was all the confirmation he need. They were the only company so far developing a drug to treat Lendt's disease.
And neither her GP nor her bastard husband had told her the truth — or even part of it.
Sixty-five per cent of people with this disease died within a year. There was no proof that the other thirty five per cent, those on the Moliou-Orelan drugs trial who were still alive at the end of a year, were cured. All that was known so far was that the drug seemed to offer some hope.
But he suspected — although he could not prove — from his own research in the past that Moliou-Orelan manipulated drugs trials. They were scrupulously careful not to be caught out, but their ethics were dubious. He wasn't prepared to trust any results published by that firm, and even less so in a life-threatening disease — life-threatening to the one woman he had met in the past decade with whom he could fall in love.
Oliver also knew that the reality was that twenty per cent of people would survive almost any disease for a longer period than the rest, simply because of their genetic makeup or immune system, or sheer willpower. It wasn't about drugs. It was about luck and determination, and Faith was going to need both of these.
He watched her standing silently, staring out of the window, face ashen, trying to understand what it must feel like to a person to be given a death sentence. They'd never told Jake — he'd been too young for such news, and besides, neither he nor Marcy had ever wanted to acknowledge to themselves that Jake was going to die. It was as if by denying it to themselves they could somehow save him.
Was Faith's husband doing the same thing?<
br />
The thought occurred to him that he was meddling in someone else's life here, telling Faith something that her husband had deliberately not told her, maybe with the best intentions.
But then he thought about the sticking plaster above her right eye. He did not know what Ross Ransome's intentions had been; all he knew was that a man who hit a woman was not a man he would ever trust.
I'm going to make you better, Faith. Whatever it takes, you and I, we're going to beat this thing. I've lost one battle in my life and I determined then I'd never lose another.
She was walking back towards him, looking utterly lost. He held out his arms and she sank into them, her arms wrapping tightly around him, as if he were a piece of driftwood in a raging ocean. 'I'm scared,' she said. 'I'd like to be brave but I'm not. I'm sorry.'
'You are brave — and there's nothing you need to be sorry about, OK?'
In a whisper she said, 'Is there any chance you could have made a mistake?'
'After I got the first results back, I had two more labs do the tests. Their results were identical. And the fact that you're on a Moliou-Orelan trials programme suggests that your own doctor has come to the same result.'
'Why didn't he tell me? Why did Ross lie to me?'
'I can't tell you. I guess maybe he was trying to be kind, not wanting you to know the truth.'
He felt Faith's body jig, then heard a tiny, half-hearted laugh. She looked up at him and he stared into those bright blue eyes, open so wide, so filled with fear and at the same time with trust.
Then she said, 'Make love to me.'
50
The white Renault van had 'REILLY & sons builders, est. 1951', in small letters on the side, and two ladders on the roof. It was parked fifty yards down the street from Oliver Cabot's apartment, facing away from the front entrance, which provided a clear view through the rear windows of anyone entering or leaving the place.
Seated in the back of the van, in an old armchair bought from a junk shop, Hugh Caven listened to a Schubert concert on Classic FM, and read his way through a collection of poems written by his late fellow countryman, William Butler Yeats.
Mounted above his head was a bank of television monitors. The kettle, plugged into the van's electrics, was taking its time to boil, and a busted spring from the chair was digging into his backside.
The van smelt as if a wet dog had slept in it. Barry Gatt, who'd done the night shift in here, was badly overweight and had a few hygiene problems. Then again, it was hard to expect someone to spend twelve hours in the back of a van and to come out smelling like they'd just spent a night at the Savoy.
His cellphone rang. 'Yup?' he answered.
'I've fixed the booster on the roof. You should have a picture now,' the voice the other end said. 'Five channels.'
'What about Sky?'
'Very witty, I like that.'
Caven reluctantly put down the book, reduced the volume of the concert, stood up and pressed a button on the control panel. All eight monitors flickered into life, and simultaneously a row of red lights began to wink.
Three monitor screens remained blank, but images appeared on the other five. All were of the interior of a large, elegant apartment: one showed the reception area beside the front door, another, part of what looked like the main living area, a third, the kitchen, the fourth an empty bedroom. But all Caven's attention was on the fifth. He saw two people he recognised instantly: Faith Ransome and Dr Oliver Cabot. They were standing next to a massive sofa, holding each other tight. The volume was too low and he turned it up in time to hear Faith Ransome's voice. 'Make love to me.'
Caven stayed rooted to his spot in front of the screen. He had been afraid that this was going to happen. He'd selected the photographs that he had given to his client Ross Ransome carefully, and he had given him a less than accurate account of his observations of the behaviour of his wife and Dr Oliver Cabot.
He watched Dr Cabot ease himself away from her. 'Faith — I don't think that's a good idea. Not right now.'
Good man. Be strong! Caven urged, silently. Be really strong!
'I'm dangerously close to falling in love with you, Faith. I can't get you out of my mind when we're apart. There's something very special that…' Cabot raised his shoulders in a shrug '… I guess, that you have that I…' His voice tailed off.
'That you what?' Faith prompted.
'Crave, I guess.' He smiled. 'I have this craving to see you all the time we're apart.'
'That's how I feel about you too,' she said.
He took her in his arms again. 'What I'm going to do is make you better, OK? I want to be your doctor. I can't be your doctor if I'm your lover — I need to keep an emotional distance for my healing to work. First I'm going to make you better and then —' He fell silent, just watching her.
'And then?'
'Then we'll see how you feel, about your life, about your husband, about your marriage.'
'And if you don't make me better?'
'We're going to. You and me together, as a team. You'd better believe it.'
Smiling she said, 'It doesn't sound as if I have much option.'
'You don't have any option.'
Their faces were close now, nose to nose, lip to lip. Oliver Cabot cupped her cheeks in his hands. Then he said, 'I wasn't telling you the truth just now, when I said I was dangerously close to falling in love with you, Faith. I am in love with you. I wish I wasn't, but I am.'
Caven's finger went to the stop button on the video machinery. Normally, in his experience, people committing infidelities deserved all they had coming to them. But this woman was different: she was a decent person, and he was moved by her. He didn't want Ross Ransome, whom he disliked intensely, to see this.
Jesus, woman, how in hell did you marry a shite like him?
He could stop the tape now, rewind it, erase it, tell Ross Ransome to take a hike — or tell him anything. Tell him, as he had before, that there really was nothing between the two of them.
An honourable person would do that.
Hugh Caven had a kid son called Sean and his wife was four months pregnant with their second child. He wanted his children to look up to him. He wanted them to grow up believing he was a better person than he really was. Eight years ago he'd screwed up, big-time, in his first business, importing cheap burglar-alarm equipment from Taiwan. A wholesaler who owed him a lot of money had pleaded for more time to pay, and for Caven to keep supplying him. Caven had felt sorry for the man, who faced bankruptcy if he called in the debt. The man's kids would be taken out of private school, he would lose his house, everything.
A year later the man finally did go bust, leaving Caven with an unsecured debt of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, which threatened to take Caven's company down.
In an effort to prevent this happening, Caven attempted an insurance fraud, by setting fire to his warehouse. But he was tripped up by an eyewitness who saw him leaving, and by the forensic evidence, and spent two years in jail, during which he lost not only his business but his home as well. He lost everything except his wife.
Three years of hell followed his release, when he scraped a living first as a car-park attendant, then, falsifying his past, secured a job working nights as a security guard, before landing a more lucrative one fitting bugging equipment for a private detective agency, which gave him the inspiration to set up on his own. Now he had his life back. He had his boat, his comfortable house, and his business was going well.
His wife, Sandy, told him after he had gone bankrupt that his two big problems were that he was too soft and too picky about people. She told him what he already knew but did not want to accept, that in business, you had to be a shite at times. She had told him he needed to harden up and learn to swallow his pride, and he had promised he would.
Suddenly, the words of a Bob Dylan song began to play inside his head. It was the one about how many roads you had to walk down before you could be called a man.
Now, mouthing a wistful a
pology to the two players on the screen, he remembered his priorities.
51
'Should I stop taking the Moliou-Orelan capsules?'
Oliver Cabot said, 'I want you to think back to when your husband first gave these to you on —'
'Friday evening.'
'OK. When he first gave them to you on Friday evening, did you believe they were going to work?'
'Not really, no.'
'Why not?'
'I don't know, just a feeling. I suppose I've gone beyond trusting Ross. And there was — this may sound silly — but there was something almost shifty about the way he produced them. I felt something wasn't right.'
'A lot of doctors are convinced that a drug will only work if the patient believes it's going to work.'
'And even if I believe this, there's only a thirty-five per cent chance?'
'Seventeen and a half per cent. Fifty per cent of these capsules are placebos — that cuts the odds in half.'
'Could you get one analysed? Couldn't a lab tell if they're just chalk or sugar?'
'We don't even know what the long-term prognosis is for the thirty-five per cent. I doubt that people will actually be cured — the pharmaceutical industry is in the business of disease management, not of curing diseases. They want people taking their medicine permanently — that's the way they design their drugs. Yes, I can get one tested for you. But the thing I really want to do is make you better. Whether the odds are three to one or six to one, they are still bad odds. We're not gambling a few bucks on a roulette wheel, this is gambling with your life. And I don't want to lose you, Faith.'
In a small, scared voice, she said, 'I don't want to lose you either.'
Ross, in his office, stared at his television screen, his right hand clenched tight, his nails digging into his palm. You bastard, he mouthed. You're talking about gambling with my wife's life — what fucking odds are you offering her? Moliou-Orelan are worth a million of you creeps. They can save one in three people and they can prove it. Where's your proof? What fucking Svengali influence are you exerting over her? If you were a proper doctor, practising proper medicine, I'd have enough on this tape to get you struck off for professional misconduct.