by Carmen Reid
‘The children go to school and nursery, you know, Helinka needs something to fill her day,’ Bella reminded her, spooning creamy pale purple perfection into her mouth.
‘I know, but this is gorgeous. And she’s such a brilliant cleaner. I totally hate you. How dare you have all the things that every woman wants? My cleaner can’t be trusted not to use the toilet cloth to wipe down the cooker and last week she cleaned the bathroom with an entire bottle of £15 cashmere shampoo.’
Bella snorted at this: ‘Get a new one then.’
‘Bottle of cashmere shampoo?’
‘No, silly. Cleaner.’
‘You say that – but how do I know a new one won’t be worse? And anyway, I like Angelica as a person. She’s having a hard time. Her son’s in borstal, she’s being moved out of her flat by the council. . .’
‘Oh God. Get a new one,’ Bella interrupted. ‘Helinka might know someone. If you’re really lucky, she might know someone like herself: 48 years old, fantastic cook, wonderful house-cleaner, grandmother of fifteen, sends three-quarters of her pay home to her remaining family in Serbia every month.’
‘Is Helinka legal?’ Jo had to ask.
‘Of course she’s legal,’ Bella tried not to splutter. ‘Lived over here since the Bosnians set fire to her village in the Nineties. I pay every penny of her taxes. Out of my net income, thank you very much, chancellor of the bloody exchequer. Do you know, if she was my gamekeeper, I could put her entirely through the books as a business expense?’
‘I thought the Bosnians were the good guys,’ Jo spoke through a mouthful of stew and dumpling. It was delicious, best thing she’d tasted in weeks.
‘War is war, don’t think anyone can be a good guy,’ was Bella’s reply. She was making a start on the tiny blinis.
‘And are you pregnant?’ Jo asked. ‘Because if you are, I think I should be at least one of the first to know.’
At this, Bella began to laugh: ‘Oh my God. Oh God, no. Three children! Do you think I’m insane?! You know I did do that thing . . . that probably everyone does at least once. Where I thought to myself “oh three . . . three would be nice . . . A little baby again . . . it would be so lovely”, and I dropped the contraception for a month in this haze of “wouldn’t it be so cute and lovely”, only to AAAAAAAAArgh! Snap out of it in horror. THREE!! Three!!! What am I thinking?! Have I gone stark, raving mad? Total panic until my period finally arrived. You’ve done that too, haven’t you?’
‘No. I’ve never done that. I don’t recall having sex at all with Simon once Nettie was born. If I did, I’ve obviously blanked it out in horror,’ Jo said.
‘Poor old you.’
‘And no, two is plenty,’ Jo added, in between mouthfuls. If she did very occasionally have just the slightest of pangs when she saw some fat new baby wrapped up in a buggy, she certainly wasn’t going to admit to it.
‘Why is everything in tins, by the way?’ Jo asked.
‘I never eat or drink out of plastic. It gives you cancer, makes your breasts go lumpy or something.’ Bella turned to Jo: ‘I read it in your paper . . . in fact, you wrote it!’
‘Oh yes. But don’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ she joked.
‘I don’t. . . but I generally believe you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I dunno, maybe it’s the fact you do genuinely seem to have a conscience.’
‘Oh that. It’s such a pain, though.’
‘Look,’ Bella leaned forwards and pointed to the screen, ‘here’s our chance to make a little search. What words do you think we should look for?’
‘Er . . . well, whooping cough – or its proper name, pertussis?’
‘Any refinements on that? The word pertussis might give us the kind of archive it will take all night to download.’
‘Erm . . . pertussis outbreak. Yes. Let’s see what comes up for pertussis outbreak.’
‘Anything else? We can fit a few words in.’
‘I know, give me a sec’ Jo began to unpack the relevant file from her bag. ‘Let’s put in the name of the first whooping cough victim, because, who knows, maybe they held a meeting about it. We should also put in “Quintet trials” so we can find out what sort of data they have on that. And also, there’s this funny message I’ve never figured out anything about. . .’
She retrieved the anonymous email with the name of the London hospital pathology lab that had puzzled her so much. Although she’d phoned all the medical contacts she could think of, only one had been able to shed a little further light on it, informing her that the hospital had one of the oldest pathology departments in the country and there were samples stored there dating from as far back as the 1800s.
‘OK. So in goes . . .’ Bella began typing, ‘pertussis outbreak’, ‘Quintet trials’, ‘Katie Theroux’ and ‘London and Middlesex Hospital Pathology Department’. ‘And we’ll confine the date to the last few months or so and “search” . . .’
Bella hit the final key with a flourish as the screen on her left began to flash.
‘Oh, just a minute, something over here needs attention.’ She typed for several seconds, then the screen cleared.
‘Is this how simple your job really is?’ Jo wondered.
‘No! This is how good I am at it,’ was Bella’s retort. ‘I’m scanning the entire Wolff-Meyer house system for new viruses and making it invulnerable to everything that we have on our files at the moment.’
‘We? Who exactly is “we”?’
‘I have contractors, people I use on a regular basis.’
‘How is business going anyway?’ Jo asked.
‘Business is fantastic. I can hardly say yes to everything I’m offered.’
‘So why don’t you say no?’
‘It’s against my rules. Why do you think I’m sitting here at 10 p.m. doing this?’
‘To do me a favour?’
‘Well yes, there is that, but also, it needed to be done at some point before my big meeting in New York next month. Companies are so wonderfully gullible about computers,’ she confided, ‘You just put the call in telling them: “we’ve heard about a systems breach, we’ll have to come over and run some extra maintenance,” and the business is yours. Nice, long-running, reliable contracts is what I’m after and this one here is a beauty.’
‘So why risk it for me?’
‘The computer bugging thing really got up my nose, I want to know if they’re doing it,’ was Bella’s answer then she added, ‘Plus, I want to find out if this company is really as sinister as you think it is. Plus, it’ll really annoy Don if I help you get some amazing scoop he wishes his paper could have had. Why don’t you go and work for Don, by the way?’
‘On a daily? I’d be mad. I can barely put in the hours and keep my family together on a Sunday paper. Anyway, what’s happening in New York?’ Jo asked, watching the screen in front of her flicker, the words ‘still searching’ in a small box in the right hand corner.
‘I’m about to get offered some really good work over there, that’s what’s happening in New York,’ Bella told her, matter-of-factly.
‘But you’re not going to move, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Well. . . Don. . . his job . . . your work here . . . Your fabulous home . . . your children in school . . . all the usual reasons.’
‘And if Don had been offered the spectacular New York career? Would you be saying the same things? Or would you be saying, “how wonderful, when are you going?”’
‘You know I wouldn’t.’
‘No, I know you wouldn’t but other people would. Any woman who uproots her family for her career is seen as the world’s most selfish harridan – someone who will Stop At Nothing to have her own way.’
‘So you are going?’
‘I don’t know. We’re thinking about it – we being Don, me, and the children. But I do feel as if I’m in that ambitious woman’s dilemma: damned if I do, damned if I don’t.’
‘How so?�
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‘If I take the opportunity I’ll be working flat out and although it will be great, I’ll hardly see my family. A big part of me will hate that, and they’ll resent it. . . but if I don’t, I think I’ll always wish I had. But, you know, why do we do things? Or think we want to do things? I’m questioning my motivation all the time.’
‘Are you?’ Jo couldn’t help smiling. ‘You don’t strike me as the type of person who spends much time questioning anything.’
‘Don’t I?’ Bella seemed a little hurt at this. ‘I spend a lot of time questioning my motives. I wonder: do I want the work over there for the sake of the work alone? Or to impress people? Do I really want it? Do I really want to impress people? What makes me happy? You know what I always say: behind every successful woman is a dad who’s not that impressed.’
‘And what did you conclude?’ Jo was smiling at her.
‘I haven’t yet. It’s still all up in the air. We probably won’t do it.’
‘But you’re going for a meeting there next week.’
‘Ye-e-e-s,’ Bella paused, then confided, ‘And Don’s coming too and we’re going to see some schools, but . . . who knows.’
Jo’s smile broadened: ‘You’re going, you total liar. You’re even lying to yourself.’
Bella seemed to be trying not to grin.
Jo was trying to bat away the sudden sadness that even thinking about Bella moving to New York was bringing on. ‘Couldn’t you train Don up to work for you?’ she asked her.
‘I’m thinking about that. We might murder each other, though, that’s the risk. I mean living together is one thing, working together is quite another.’
‘Well, yes. I suppose. How long is this thing going to take?’ Jo looked over to the screen again: it was still showing the ‘searching’ box.
‘Depends how much it finds. If there’s a lot of info on those subjects, it will take a while. Have your wine, tell me how it’s going with you.’
‘It’s OK, life continues. The girls are really well, I spoke to them on the way over here. It’s turning into a quite an interesting week at work.’
‘Ah ah . . . about to get more interesting, hopefully. Now, remember, we’re on closed circuit TV, so don’t do anything too attention grabbing.’
Bella’s eyes were on the screen behind Jo, where a small box announced:
Pertussis outbreak: 164 items
Theroux: 26 items
London and Middlesex Pathology Dept: 77 items
Quintet trials: 467 items
‘You’re going to be very busy looking through all that,’ Bella said.
‘So how do I do this?’ Jo asked. ‘Just click on the ones I’m interested in and see what comes up?’
‘Yeah, pretty much. If a restricted access notice flashes up, tell me and I’ll see what I can do to circumnavigate.’ Bella’s voice had dropped low although they were certain the camera was visually spying on them only.
After trawling for a long time through the ‘Quintet trials’ files and not finding one single shred of anything she could even make sense of, Jo decided to try a different tack. She would scan through the smallest group of files, the Theroux ones. A list of 26 headings appeared before her.
They mainly seemed to concern the employment of a Joan Theroux. She scrolled on down. This didn’t relate to the first case of whooping cough at all. None of this.
‘Instruction of solicitors in employment tribunal brought against Ms J. Theroux.’
Hmm . . . obviously Joan had not had a happy time working for Wolff-Meyer. Sheer journalistic nosiness caused Jo to drag the mouse to the heading and click.
Immediately the words ‘restricted access file . Password please’ flashed across the screen.
Jo wouldn’t have bothered asking for help, she would have dropped this and moved on down the list of results, except that Bella glanced over and told her: ‘Here, let me on for a few moments, I’ll try and open that one up for you.’
And Jo’s curiosity to watch how Bella did it took over.
Bella moved her chair in front of the screen and began working. It seemed to be a long and tortuous process.
‘What are you doing, exactly?’ Jo wanted to know.
‘Temporarily dismantling the restricted access program across as much of the network as I can.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Of course, and it’s something I’d legitimately need to do if I was checking the spread of a virus.’
It occurred to Jo that there was something a little unsettling about using a computer virus as an excuse to find out about a human virus.
‘Right.’
‘Here we go . . . should open up for us now.’
And Jo was back in front of the screen scanning down the page. Illness leave . . . blah blah blah . . . Joan was obviously fighting them for the way they’d treated her when she was off. But this was so recent. Why were solicitors involved already? Blah, blah . . . counter-claim . . . she was accusing them of negligence . . . they were accusing her of negligence . . . Jo’s eyes hit on the words: ‘contamination with a laboratory-modified virus’. She scrolled the paragraph up slowly to the top of the page.
‘Hazardous working conditions . . . unsafe working practices.’ A few more moments’ reading and Jo realized what this was all about. Joan Theroux seemed to have become infected with one of the viruses she was working on in the company’s research lab in Bedford.
But Wolff-Meyer was threatening her with legal proceedings, claiming that she breached their health and safety guidelines. Her lawyer was arguing that she had complied with all the guidelines but that lab practices weren’t safe and had caused her to become infected.
What the hell was the virus? Jo scrolled on through the paragraphs and paragraphs of information but it didn’t seem to be listed.
She brought out a notebook, to jot down some of the most important information: Joan’s name, address, all the dates she could find. Joan Theroux lived in the village of Lower Stenton in Bedfordshire. Jo knew with conviction she’d seen that address before, not so long ago. With her heart thumping, she delved in her bag for her file of anonymous emails. She took out the printout of the first email, the one about the first whooping cough case. Katie Theroux – of Lower Stenton, Bedfordshire. The house and the street name were different. But this wasn’t a coincidence, was it?
It didn’t look like Joan was the girl’s mother . . . but she surely had to be a relative. What if Joan had been infected with a laboratory-modified strain of whooping cough, and had then gone on to infect Katie? Obviously the strain was different enough to infect children even if they had been vaccinated.
‘That must be it,’ she said in a quiet voice.
‘Oh good,’ Bella commented, but Jo didn’t even hear her.
The anonymous emailer who had sent her the first name, who had told her to look into that first case, who had warned her not all whooping coughs were the same, had also given the hospital as a clue. And here, right in front of her face were files on that hospital. Obviously, she had to look there next.
All 77 headings on the hospital were in front of her now. She might as well start at the top and read her way down.
There was just a slight problem: ‘It’s still saying restricted access, Bella.’
‘Really? Must be under a different program.’
Bella battled for some time with drop-downs, settings, attachments and files.
‘Maybe I’ll have to go round there,’ Jo wondered out loud.
‘To the hospital? Jo, it’s coming up to midnight.’
‘Is it?’ This was something of a surprise to both of them.
‘Well . . . it’s a hospital, there’s always someone about in a hospital,’ Jo said hopefully.
‘Yeah, but it probably won’t be someone who knows anything about anything at all. Just hang on, there must be a way in here somewhere. We could see if something’s been copied on to someone and stored in files that aren’t so high security. That happens a
lot. People copy stuff, paste it, send it on . . . someone else files it. . . Let’s try that.’
Jo could see this was a game Bella didn’t want to lose.
‘I didn’t really think your hi-tech computer business was all about you sitting in offices late at night, surrounded by your supper, grappling with megabytes, or whatever they are.’
‘Not sure I thought it was going to be about this either . . . but then your glamorous journalism job is about sitting outside people’s houses waiting for them to let you in, isn’t it?’
‘Well, not so much these days.’
‘I’m going to train up lots of minions,’ Bella added. ‘Have an empire . . . but of course I’ll be brought in for the really tough cases, just like Red Adair. He ran an oil well fire-fighting business, but still fought some of the fires personally, even in his sixties. Now shut up and let me concentrate on this. And by the way, can you go and pretend to check those screens over there, just so we don’t look too suspicious for the cameras.’
Long minutes went past. Jo watched the seconds at the corner of the screen stack up to midnight. It was already Saturday. She still had two potentially front page exclusives to write. Well, make that, she had one to write and one to bloody well find.
Why wasn’t she getting this? It was probably obvious, she just wasn’t making a simple connection.
OK, work backwards. Katie Theroux has had Quintet, but nevertheless, she catches this different strain of whooping cough from Joan Theroux – her aunt maybe – who caught it in the lab. So it’s something being investigated in the lab – maybe for vaccination development?
And this somehow relates to a pathology department in London that has been given a large donation by Wolff-Meyer.
Pathology . . . post-mortems, tissue samples . . . the hospital couldn’t have given old samples to Wolff-Meyer, could they? Wouldn’t it have needed consent from parents? Relatives? But then, the samples were really old, weren’t they? Some from the nineteenth century. They were out of copyright, as it were.
Jo did not like the thought taking root in her mind that if some old diseases could be revived, wouldn’t that be an exciting new market for vaccinations? Or maybe it wasn’t so sinister, maybe old diseases were simply being studied and used to help formulate new vaccinations?