They had reached the main road, the traffic circulating around London Bridge station roaring past. ‘I thought, listening to Russell last night making her confession to Ollie Kovacs and Professor Kite, that we had really nailed it, that I would be able to open up the whole can of worms—DiSTaF, Pewsey and, ultimately Harvest. But today I see it all melting away. The stakes are too high, the people involved too senior, the potential embarrassment too great. In the end, the best I may be able to do is bring a private malpractice suit against Pewsey for putting a microchip inside me without permission, which will turn out to be . . . what? A regrettable medical error?’
They flagged down a cab, and as she stared out of the window Kathy didn’t mention the thing that bothered her most. She’d lain awake the previous night thinking about the two thugs, O’Hearn and Ryan, arranging Gudrun Kite’s ‘accident’. She had tried to imagine them, two big clumsy men, one of them—the boxer Ryan—unsteady on his feet, clambering on board Grace without alerting the neighbours, the restless Stapletons and the vigilant Anne Downey; then opening the stern door without leaving any sign of forced entry; then making their way, shoulders stooped, in the dark, down the length of the boat to Gudrun’s bedroom to fix her heater flue without waking her; and finally, some time later when she was dead, returning and slicing her hand to remove the chip, without gassing themselves in the process. She just couldn’t see it. And if that was the case, might not Gudrun’s death have been an accident after all, and her own and Brock’s persistence just obstinacy, out of misguided sympathy for Kite? Or more than that, a perverse need to prove to Lynch and the whole new regime that old-fashioned professional instinct was better than managerial rationalism?
Brock was asking if she wanted to take the taxi to her flat, and she shook herself and said no, she’d check her mail at Queen Anne’s Gate first. She could see that he was worried about her, hear the concern in his voice.
‘You’ll let me know as soon as the doctor gets back to you?’
‘Yes, don’t worry.’
‘Lynch was right, you know, Kathy. The most important thing you can do is get completely fit again. Until then, forget about work.’
‘Okay. What about you?’
‘Oh, I’ll get down to interviewing the Pewsey mob with Bren, and looking for Kovacs.’
But when they arrived at Queen Anne’s Gate they found D.K. Payne waiting for them. The team was being reassigned to other cases, a heavy workload in the offing.
Kathy went to her desk and flicked through her in-tray. Anything of importance had been diverted elsewhere. Her internal emails were mostly get-well wishes or management circulars that she didn’t bother reading. Her phone rang.
‘Kolla.’
‘Kathy, it’s Anne Downey.’ She was speaking in an agitated whisper, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. ‘They’ve let me out on bail. The police opposed it, but my solicitor persuaded the magistrate. I’ve come back to the canal basin and there are police everywhere. They wouldn’t let me go to my boat at first. I was wondering, could we meet? I still don’t understand what happened last night and I haven’t been able to contact Ollie.’
Kathy hesitated, then said, dropping her voice too, ‘Yes, of course, Anne. But not at the canal.’
‘No. And I’m worried that they may be following me.’
‘You’re a doctor, Anne. Is there somewhere you know, a hospital perhaps, where you could lose them, leave by a different exit?’
Downey thought about that, then said, ‘Yes, I know every way in and out of the children’s hospital at Great Ormond Street.’
Holborn, Kathy was thinking. ‘Good. There’s a pub not far from there, the Bountiful Cow in Eagle Street. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’
As she rang off she looked up and saw Mickey Schaeffer coming into the room. He gave her a big grin and came over and sat on the edge of her desk. ‘Kathy, hi. How are you?’
‘I’m okay. How’s life on the dark side?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, pretty evil. No, actually it’s great, I’m enjoying the different slant on things. Still trying to find my way around, the new boy. I heard about what happened last night. You really have a talent for being in the thick of things, Kathy.’
‘Yes, well, I’m going to put my feet up for a while. Of course, I’ll be interested to learn how things turn out.’
‘Sure.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Listen, we’re trying to find Oliver Kovacs before he causes any more trouble. You tracked him down yesterday, didn’t you? Any ideas where we should be looking now?’
‘Anne Downey had a contact number for him.’
‘He’s not answering that any more. She says she doesn’t know where he might be.’
‘Nor me, I’m afraid.’
He nodded. ‘Well, I’ve been drafted on to the new task force to tidy up after last night, so if you do think of anything you might give me a bell. And vice versa if you want an update any time, just let me know.’
‘Thanks, Mickey, I’ll do that.’
‘Take care.’
The Bountiful Cow was a sixties pub in Holborn that had been given a stylish makeover with bright colours and cowboy movie posters. Its specialities were Bountyburgers and steaks of every variety.
‘I’m a vegan,’ Anne Downey said.
‘Sorry. Do you want to go somewhere else?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter.’ She looked pale and troubled.
‘Let me get you something.’ Kathy went to the bar and ordered two glasses of wine, observing Downey in the mirror, restlessly fiddling with her phone.
‘Here we are.’
‘Thanks.’ Anne Downey’s hand shook a little as she raised the glass to her lips. ‘I feel so shocked about what happened last night. I haven’t been able to sleep.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did he do it, Kathy? Did Superintendent Russell say something?’
‘She gave him the names of two men who she believed were responsible for the deaths of Freyja and Gudrun. It’s what he wanted.’
‘But then, why kill himself?’
‘It’s possible it was an accident. The dynamite that Ollie gave him was old and unstable.’
‘Oh God.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Who were the men?’
‘Their names are O’Hearn and Ryan. They work for the Pewsey Clinic.’
‘I remember them. They appeared on the scene when I was there.’
A waitress passed their table carrying a wooden platter on which a large steak lay bleeding. Downey looked as if she might be sick, but Kathy didn’t think it was the sight of the meat.
‘Anne, ever since I first met you, I’ve had the impression that you badly wanted to tell me something, but couldn’t quite decide to do it. Am I wrong?’
Downey blinked as if Kathy had struck her. Then she lowered her eyes and said, ‘Do you have any children, Kathy?’
‘No.’
‘I had a little boy. His name was Aaron.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew about that? It wasn’t a really big story, like the McCann case, although Aaron was three, the same age as Madeleine McCann when he was taken. But Aaron was found within four days and the man who took him, Colin Frewin, was arrested and charged. He’d done it before, apparently, and was well known to police. We thought at first that Aaron would recover from the terrible things Frewin had done to him, but he died three months later, of pneumonia. A charge of murder against Frewin was dropped to manslaughter, then grievous bodily harm, although everyone knew that Frewin was responsible for Aaron’s death. That’s how I know my way around Great Ormond Street. Aaron was there for those three months.’
‘It was a shocking case, Anne. I’m really sorry.’
Downey shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s relevant. Afterwards, someone who had been following the case got in touch with me. She said she’d been working as a nurse at Pewsey, and had heard rumours there that they were working on a research program into new ways of restraining repeat offenders like Frewin. So I ph
oned them up and said I’d love to work on something like that, and they offered me a job.
‘I assumed it was a drug they were working on, some kind of chemical castration, but when they eventually revealed the fact that it was a microchip implant for tracking people who posed a serious risk, I thought it was a brilliant idea. If Frewin had been chipped the police would have known immediately that he was in the vicinity when Aaron was abducted, and they could have found him within minutes, before he did any harm.
‘We were doing experiments on how the chip would work inside the body, using pigs and dogs and chimps. I’d have preferred not to be doing that with animals, but it seemed to me that the work was important enough to justify it. One of the designers of the chip, Freyja Kite, used to visit the clinic, and I got to know her. She was very intelligent and passionate about her work and I was tremendously impressed by her. But after a while I began to get the feeling that she was becoming uneasy about what we were doing. She gave hints that she didn’t like the way the program was being run, and was doubtful about the ethics of some of those involved, especially the people who were financing it, the Harvest Group. Apparently the project began when they acquired an electronics company in Texas which had developed a fairly sophisticated chip for human implanting, and then stopped work on it when they came up against problems of security and privacy. Harvest decided to set up a new team to solve those problems and create something that could work in any number of commercial applications, and that’s what worried Freyja. There had already been stories of some companies in the US making it obligatory for employees to be chipped for identification or for their own safety. There was talk of people in hazardous occupations—firemen, police, coal miners, soldiers—being chipped so that they could always be traced in an emergency situation. Where would it end? I think she began to believe that we were creating a monster we wouldn’t be able to control.
‘I didn’t necessarily agree with her, but I had to admit that the whole atmosphere at Pewsey was driven by profit. I remember we had a long discussion about it the last time she came to the clinic. She was there to have herself implanted with the latest version of the chip, because she said she wanted to use herself as a guinea pig. Just two weeks later she was killed.’
Downey was talking faster now, as if she were afraid she might not have time to say everything she wanted.
‘About a month after that Ned Tisdell got in touch with me, saying he had been a good friend of Freyja, who had told him about me working at the clinic, and he wanted to meet me and talk to me about the work we were doing there. I thought he sounded slightly mad, said I’d think about it and reported it to the clinic director, Mr Montague. He passed it on to Superintendent Russell, who was responsible for the police security at the clinic. She came to see me and said she knew about what had happened to my son and appreciated my commitment to the Raven project—that’s what we were calling it. She went on at some length about how important it was, and how it would make the world so much safer for children like Aaron. But she was worried that there were people like Ned Tisdell who, often with the best of intentions, were trying to sabotage it. They were people with a mistaken sense of idealism, who didn’t understand the harsh reality that people like me have to live through. So she wanted my help. She said that Ned and his friends were trying to get information about the project, to leak it on the web and to the press in order to get it stopped before it was properly developed. She warned me that he was known to be a violent and disturbed man with a prison record, but if I was willing she wanted me to meet him and see what I could find out.
‘So I became a spy. I met Ned and he told me that Freyja had first approached him because she’d read a blog of his about Big Brother surveillance, and had wanted to help him make public some of the things that she knew were going on in secret. I pretended to show an interest in this and we began to meet regularly and I gave him information about Pewsey that Superintendent Russell fed me.
‘I grew to like Ned. He was certainly manic and obsessive, but he struck me as scrupulously honest and sincere. For instance, he insisted on telling me about his prison sentence and how he’d seriously hurt a researcher at a laboratory where they were experimenting on animals. He said he felt desperately guilty about that, especially since the man was now confined to a wheelchair and had lost his job, and when Ned had money he would secretly put small amounts into the man’s bank account. I asked him how he could do that, and he told me he had friends who were hackers, and had helped him.
‘Superintendent Russell was keen to find out who these people were, and wanted me to get closer to Ned. He told me he was living on a narrowboat, so I bought one too, and moved near him, keeping an eye on him. Then one day he told me about another friend of his who had bought a boat and was coming to join us. Her name was Vicky Hawke. We became friends, and I helped her with some medical issues—a persistent rash, panic attacks, insomnia—and eventually she confided in me that she was really Freyja Kite’s sister Gudrun, and she was trying to find out what had happened to her sister. At first I dismissed her belief that Freyja had been murdered, but both she and Ned were utterly convinced, and I began to wonder, especially when Ned told me that Freyja had planned to steal one of the new chips by having herself implanted. Now Gudrun wanted to do the same. She had got into the computer system at Paddington Security Services and created an authorisation for herself as an employee to be implanted at Pewsey. When that was done she wanted me to operate on her hand and remove the chip so that Ned could pass it on to his friends. She had also copied hundreds of documents from Paddington Security Services onto a disc which was hidden behind a print of a raven hanging in her boat.
‘I reported all this to Superintendent Russell, who was pleased. She said she wanted me to go ahead with the plan because they would be able to track the chip and trace the people involved. But she was worried about the disc falling into the wrong hands and said that she wanted me to help someone to go on board Grace and wipe the information from it before Gudrun passed it on.
‘I agreed, and met up with the man who was to do it. He wanted me to lend him my key to Gudrun’s boat and also arrange for her to take a heavy dose of her sleeping pills that evening. I did that. The next morning I found the key back in my letterbox and I left early for work, assuming that everything had gone as planned. It wasn’t until I got back again that evening that I discovered that Gudrun was dead.
‘Superintendent Russell tried to reassure me that it had all been a tragic accident. Her man had gone aboard as planned, but discovered the boat filled with fumes, and Gudrun dead. He’d wiped the disc and removed the microchip from her hand and then left. I tried to believe her, but I knew in my heart that she was lying. It was just too much of a coincidence after what happened to Freyja. Later I asked Ned whether he hadn’t been worried that they would track the microchip when he took it to his friends, and he said of course, that was obvious, but they had a container that would mask the signal. Russell had known all along that she couldn’t let Gudrun pass it on.’
Anne Downey fell silent at last, sagging from the effort of her confession.
‘So Superintendent Russell realised at some point that you’d changed sides,’ Kathy said gently.
Downey nodded. ‘She’s offered me a deal. Find Ollie Kovacs and give evidence against him and Ned, or she’ll make sure I go to prison for twenty years.’ She looked at Kathy hopelessly. ‘Can she really do that?’
Kathy hesitated, and Downey gave a bitter smile. ‘Yes, I thought so.’
‘This man that you met,’ Kathy said. ‘Was it O’Hearn or Ryan?’
‘Neither. I’d never seen him before. Actually he seemed very nice. I can still hardly believe that he cold-bloodedly killed Gudrun like that. He must have known when he met me that that was what he was going to do.’
‘Describe him to me.’
‘Oh, white, probably mid-thirties, six foot, medium build, short dark hair, smart casual clothes. He could have been one of t
he young doctors at Great Ormond Street. The sort of bloke I’d have fancied a few years ago. Who am I kidding? I did fancy him.’
‘Did he give you a name, a contact number to reach him?’
‘No. We met in the Rembrandt Gardens next to Little Venice. He had a carry bag full of comics and I asked him if they were for his children, and he said no, his boy preferred videos and TV.’
‘Comics?’
‘Yes, old Eagle comics. You remember, Dan Dare? Maybe you’re too young. He said he’d just found them in a second-hand bookshop. What’s the matter? Did I say something?’
Kathy felt a sudden chill. She reached for her phone and thumbed back through the photographs until she came to the ones she’d taken on Grace when Gudrun had just been found. Kathy selected one and showed it to Anne.
‘Yes! That’s him. You know him?’
‘Yes, I know him.’ Kathy looked down at the image of Mickey Schaeffer searching a bulkhead cupboard. Actually, she was feeling that she didn’t know him at all.
After Anne Downey left, Kathy waited in the bar, thinking, then rang Mickey Schaeffer’s number. He sounded rushed, people’s voices in the background.
‘Mickey, I think I may have a lead on Ollie Kovacs.’
‘Really? That’s great, Kathy.’
‘Yes. I should know more this evening, six o’clock. I’ll call you then.’
She rang off before he could reply.
33
At five forty-five Kathy made her way carefully down the steps to Ollie’s place, sensing—or perhaps it was just her imagination—a lingering smell of burning in the damp air of the canal basin. Beneath the tarpaulins she ducked under police tapes and switched on a flashlight, picking her way through the obstacles to the door into the old boat. It yielded to a shove, its lock broken from Bren’s forced entry, and she stepped inside, switching on a light. She went to the workshop in the stern where they had found the dynamite and examined the tools lying on the bench. From her pocket she took the small video camera she’d brought with her, and placed it on a shelf above the bench, its lens pointing towards the door. Then she sat down and waited.
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