Varcy rested his coffee cup back on the table and leaned into his chair. The others waited. ‘If I killed 206
someone, particularly if I killed them in an unusual way – hydrochloric acid injection, for example – I would not hide the gloves in my garage ready for someone to find. He’s being set up.’
‘First,’ said Kendrick, ‘you’d need to be pretty damn crazy to kill some poor bastard with an acid injection. Secondly, if you were that crazy, there’s no telling what you’d do with the evidence.’
‘I feel I know Stichell,’ Varcy replied. ‘I don’t think he’s crazy.’
‘Oh, come on, Varcy,’ said Kendrick. ‘None of them ever are. Isn’t that the truth? I’ve given up chasing mad murderers because they just don’t exist. Most of them are saner than I am.’
‘It’s all pretty convincing,’ said Johnson.
‘There is something else,’ said Varcy. ‘Stichell’s place was under surveillance. There are bugging devices in his home.’
Kendrick shrugged. ‘What difference does it make? He probably set them up himself and got off on it. Who knows what’s going on in his head?’
‘It just doesn’t fit,’ said Varcy. ‘It’s not neat enough.’
Kendrick threw his arms in the air. ‘You and neat, Varcy. It drives me nuts.’
Johnson cleared his throat. ‘Do we know where Stichell is now?’
‘He was in Cambridge,’ said Varcy.
‘You’ve had him followed?’
‘No. I got a call from a Professor Berry, a pathologist up there. Said Stichell was in his office a few hours ago. Had been quite threatening in fact.
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He called me after hearing the news bulletins.’
‘What was he doing up there?’ asked Johnson.
‘Wanted to know if the prof had analysed some tumour biopsies.’
‘What?’
‘Tumour biopsies,’ shrugged Varcy.
‘I take it all back,’ said Kendrick, ‘he is mad.’
Johnson looked thoughtful. ‘Strange behaviour.
Cambridge, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘And now?’
‘He could be anywhere.’
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40
Stich hurried past the tube station at Holborn, and then into Theodore Street towards Lion Square. If the meeting with Gately had shocked him, the one with Elizabeth almost destroyed him. Susan knew everything.
The Tower Arms was a drinking man’s pub, a dying breed in this part of town. Once inside, Stich did a circuit and looked around for Maxi.
‘He’s in one of the function rooms,’ said the barman.
Stich stared at him unknowingly.
‘Go up.’ He gestured to the far corner where there was a stairwell. ‘Do you want to take a drink up with you?’
Stich hesitated. ‘No, thanks.’
The timber staircase led to a narrow corridor with a couple of chipped paint doors at the end. Stich made for the one that was ajar. He pushed it.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
‘Hello?’ he repeated. There was the squeak of a floorboard from the corner. ‘Maxi?’
A figure appeared from the shadows. ‘You on your own, Stich?’ The voice was husky, nothing like the clipped tones Stich was used to.
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‘Yeah, I think so.’
A rheumy eye caught a glint of light from the open door as Maxi emerged to see for himself. He checked the corridor, the landing and stairwell. As if satisfied, he ushered Stich in.
A cheap Formica table at the centre, and a small kitchenette in the corner dominated the inside of the room. A couple of armchairs were arranged under the window at the far side. Office buildings directly beyond the pub allowed little light into the room.
But Maxi didn’t seem to mind. He had pulled what curtain there was across the window. It flapped with each breath of wind.
They stood awkwardly for a second before Maxi disappeared into the kitchen. He reappeared with a plastic tumbler in his hand, took a large gulp and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Stich could smell drink on his breath.
‘God, what happened to you?’
His appearance was unkempt, his face a sickly yellow.
Maxi gestured towards the floor. ‘Lie face down, Stich. I want to check you over.’
‘You what?’
‘Just do it.’ He went to a drawer in the dresser.
The gun he pulled from it looked old. The long, narrow shaft reminded Stich of something he’d seen in war museums.
‘Tell me that’s not loaded.’
Maxi motioned with his hand. ‘Are you getting on the floor or not?’
‘Madness, absolute madness,’ said Stich getting 210
down and spreading himself out to allow Maxi to pat him down. In different circumstances this might have been a funny moment. Humouring a nutty uncle who thinks its still 1945. Today, though, it was not funny at all. Maxi went from head to legs and then, eventually satisfied, said, ‘Get up.’
He had the tumbler back in his hand and took another swallow. ‘I had to be sure you weren’t armed,’ he said.
‘What planet are you on? Of course I’m not armed. Jesus Christ, you invited me, remember?’
He nodded. ‘But if they had got to you … I had to be sure, that’s all.’
Up close, Stich had the chance to study Maxi in more detail. The deterioration was marked, his skin cracked and flaky. He was stooping as well. Still, he looked better than a dead man, which is what Stich thought he had become. He had survived somehow.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Maxi said.
‘No, you don’t.’
He inspected the bottom of the tumbler and shook his head. ‘I wish it had been me, Stich, that’s all.’
‘Well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t either of us, it was Susan.’
‘I know. That’s why I called you. I think I can help.’
‘Start by telling me how this happened.’
‘It wasn’t me at the house,’ he said softly.
‘Then who was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, swirling the tumbler.
‘Stich, you could be next.’
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‘I sort of worked that out for myself, Maxi.’
Maxi took a couple more gulps. ‘How did they do it?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Do what?’
‘Susan.’
‘Shot,’ Stich said.
‘Did she suffer?’
He felt the familiar charring at his throat, rising and nipping behind his eyes, stinging. That look on her face when she realised her uncle had been murdered. What was that? Acceptance? Stich used his palm to wipe the tears. ‘No, she didn’t suffer.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘You going to tell me what’s going on?’
‘I’ll give you what I know, yes,’ he said.
‘You can start by explaining why you got the Cambridge professor to stop his analysis on the tumour samples Susan had given him.’
‘You know about that?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘She should have left and walked away. I told her to just back out of it.’
‘Back out of what?’
‘Immteck,’ he said.
Stich remembered the letter he found under her cardigan in the locker at Immteck. ‘It seems she was about to take your advice,’ he said. ‘I found an invitation from Glaxo offering her a job in their research facility.’
‘I still have a few contacts there,’ said Maxi. ‘I wanted her departure to look as plausible as possible. Having a job to go to made her leaving 212
normal.’
‘So, why didn’t she tell me any of this?’
‘She wanted to protect you. The less you knew about it all the better for your safety. She was going to go, we both agreed on it.’
‘Then, why didn’t she?’
‘That’s the part I don’t know. She stalled, I imagine.’
‘You haven’t told me why she had to get away from Immteck.’
‘Because I knew if Immteck suspected what she had discovered, she would be killed.’
Stich zipped his jacket as a breeze came through the window.
‘That surprise you?’ asked Maxi.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because … I don’t know, it’s Immteck, for Christ’s sake.’
Maxi leaned backwards and studied the ceiling.
‘I’m afraid you don’t know the half of it, Stich.’
‘Then, tell me. Tell me why Sue’s dead.’
‘Because she discovered that the Krenthol trials are a sham. The results of the trials are false and the samples Susan gave to Professor Berry are the proof.
Have you any idea what it will do to Immteck’s market value if this gets out?’
‘I can guess.’
Maxi suddenly jerked his head to the door and leapt from his chair. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘No.’
‘Shh.’
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Then Stich heard it too, a voice somewhere outside.
Maxi grabbed the gun from the dresser and moved to the door. He prized it open slowly and squinted into the light. ‘Who is it?’
Stich was on his feet now and at Maxi’s side.
‘Immteck are coming for you too, aren’t they?’ he whispered.
‘Almost certainly,’ said Maxi over his shoulder.
‘Because Susan told you what she knew?’
He scoffed. ‘I knew about Krenthol long before Susan told me.’
‘Before?’
‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘it’s Kelvin.’ He opened the door and a man entered the room. They shook hands. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Maxi said hurriedly.
He introduced Stich. Kelvin had a face full of freckles. He wore a pinstripe and carried a streamline document case. To Stich he looked like an insurance broker. Maxi ushered him to one of the armchairs. Stich sat in the other, whilst Maxi pulled up a chair opposite both of them. ‘Kelvin’s here to help us.’
Stich turned to Maxi. ‘You said you knew about Krenthol before Susan told you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why haven’t Immteck come for you sooner?’
‘They have me where they want me – or at least, had me where they wanted me.’
‘So what’s changed?’
‘Susan’s death,’ he said before looking away.
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‘They know what I’ll try and do now. I’ll expose Immteck. It’s something I should have had the courage to do a long time ago.’
‘Expose the sham?’
‘That and more.’ He got up and walked out to the kitchen to refill his tumbler, then came back in.
‘How?’
‘A newspaper editor called Alan Frazier. You know him, I think.’
‘You’ve told him?’
‘Not yet. I’ve got the story and the proof to back it up. The story has everything – your friend’s going to bite my hand off for the details. I just need to survive long enough to get it out. When I do, Laurence Tench and Immteck are ruined.’
Stich looked about the room. The ten quid a night shitholes he stayed in as a student were better. ‘I’m assuming they know nothing about this place.’
‘I can’t be sure of anything, but, no, I don’t think so.’ Maxi tapped his fingers on the side of the beaker.
‘We’ll never find Susan’s body,’ he said suddenly. ‘I know the way Tench operates. No trace, no comeback.’
‘Maxi, I want to know exactly what happened with Susan. How did she get involved?’
Maxi stared into the tumbler and swirled the liquid. ‘Two years ago I took a call in my office from a young man I mentored at LSE. A graduate of economics who had transferred onto a molecular science degree at UCL the year I left. His name was Mike Venton.’
Stich shot up. ‘He hanged himself.’
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‘That’s not true. He was murdered for the same reason as Susan was. You see, he had discovered certain inconsistencies in the Krenthol data and didn’t know what to do with the information. He was afraid and wanted to confide in someone he could trust.’
‘Afraid of Immteck finding out?’
‘Absolutely. We set up a meeting – he was obsessed with privacy. At the time I thought he was paranoid. I realise now he was right to be. We met and he told me what he’d discovered. You know what a retrovirus is?’
‘No.’
‘Nor did I then. That’s one reason why I asked Kelvin to join us. Kelvin specializes in patent law for the biotech industries.’
Kelvin shifted in his seat and cleared his throat.
‘Essentially, it’s a virus that can integrate its own DNA into the DNA of whatever cell it infects. That has advantages for the scientist. He can insert a gene sequence into the retrovirus knowing that when it infects a cell, that same sequence will be transcribed.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning,’ said Maxi, ‘that a cancer causing gene can be inserted into the retrovirus. When it infects, it starts to cause cancer.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, a few months before his call to me, Mike had begun experimenting with tissues infected with retrovirus and found something very odd. His controls were infected too.’
‘What?’
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‘Imagine you discovered something profound,’
said Kelvin, ‘let’s say that feeding sugar cubes to penguins caused them to grow two heads. To prove it, you would need a similar group of penguins – the controls – kept in similar conditions to your sugar eating ones, except that they don’t get any sugar.
Then you can compare one against the other. You see?’
‘I think so.’
‘Now, Mike gets really curious about why his controls are also infected,’ said Maxi. ‘He does a bit of investigation and discovers they are from a batch of biopsies taken from subjects in the original Immteck Krenthol drug trial conducted two years before. There were fifty individual tumour biopsies removed from as many patients on that trial. Mike examined each one of them and they all contained retrovirus. Not just any retrovirus, but a virus known as 3f7. It’s a vector used by Immteck for research purposes. While it is not unknown for certain retroviruses to cause cancer, to have found 3f7 in every sample by chance is impossible. Given that the trial was supposed to be a random selection of cancer patients, Mike concluded that the subjects must have been deliberately infected with it. In other words, the tumours in those patients had been put there.’
‘By Immteck?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
‘Indeed,’ Maxi said. ‘Mike told Susan and that’s why they were both killed.’
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Stich thought of the data sheet Elizabeth had, then his conversation with Mike Venton’s widow and the itemised phone bill. ‘Mike Venton and Susan were calling each other a whole lot before he died.’
‘So there’s your answer. You can bet your life his phone was tapped.’
‘What did you do with Mike Venton’s information?’ Stich asked.
‘I told Mike to hold on to give me time to think about what to do. I thought about leaking the information in a way that it couldn’t be traced back to Mike, or about confronting Tench, himself. The next day settled it.’ He eyed Stich carefully. ‘I got a visit from a good friend of Laurence Tench. He wanted me to take a look at some pretty pictures he had. Just to see what I made of them.’
Stich leaned in. ‘And?’
Maxi looked uncomfortable, got up and went towards the kitchenette once again. ‘Show him.’
Kelvin opened the document case and produced a large brown envelope. He tossed it over to Stich.
Stich opened the seal and a dozen or so high quality A4 colour photographs fell out. They were taken in a bedroom. Nothing fancy, the background showed a side table, a lamp and a sink. But it was the foreground that made Stich’s
eyeballs start to bulge.
A bed, a mattress, and on it, a fat, bearded man with Maxi. They were both naked and, well, it wasn’t for the family album. Stich winced. Maxi bobbed back into the kitchen while Stich skimmed through the rest. They were all similar, taken from the same camera. Sweaty, red faced, eyes scrunched shut.
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‘I won’t bore you with explanation,’ said Maxi, returning to his seat. ‘It hardly matters anyway.
Suffice to say, Tench would begin to distribute the photos unless I agreed to help him. They knew about the information Mike had given me and wanted it buried. So, tell me, what would you have done in my position? An old, broke university lecturer, a role model for young people, pictures like that appearing … God knows where?’ He dropped his head, went back to his chair and slumped down.
‘On second thoughts, don’t answer that. I’m sure you would have done exactly what I didn’t do. I phoned Mike back and told him that I was dealing with it. I made up something about taking the information to a good friend of mine who had connections in the media. Mike seemed happy about that, but I was just buying some time.’ He searched the ceiling with his eyes. ‘And now Mike is dead.’
‘So that’s why you called Berry and asked him to stop work on those tumour samples,’ Stich said.
‘I produced authentic-looking documentation, told him I was acting for Immteck. Berry was only too pleased to be rid of them.’
Stich thought of Susan doggedly pursuing the truth when she must have known the danger she was in; the scientist in her, searching, sifting through for the answer. God knows what went through her head when she first realised how close to home the truth was.
‘What happened to you the night we came to your house?’
‘I got a call from an Immteck contact asking me to 219
go to a meeting at a hotel in Oxford. They didn’t say what it was about, but they didn’t need to. Susan had a key so I left you both a note, stocked the fridge and drove out there. But it was a no-show. When I drove back and neared the house, I saw the police cordon and realised that something had happened.
My mind went immediately to Susan – I just knew then that it was all a set up. That’s when I panicked.
Had something bad happened to her in my house?
My head was spinning. And then it made sense. I thought about going to the police, but what would I tell them? Immteck don’t leave clues, and even if they did, they have influence in places the rest of us don’t even know exist. No, I wasn’t going down that route. I drove straight here. Then I heard the radio report about Susan.’
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