by Ken McClure
‘Oh, dear God.’ Mary Lyons put both her hands to her head and massaged her temples. ‘A man telephoned me yesterday morning, saying he was from Sci-Med. He wanted to check that all the samples Dr Motram had in his possession had been returned to London. I said yes, apart of course from the ones that Louise was currently analysing. I pointed out that you were due here this morning to pick up her report.’
Steven felt strangely helpless. ‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said there had been a development in the case and wondered if it might be possible for him to come a day early for the results. I asked Louise and she told me she could be finished by late afternoon: he could come any time after four thirty. He came around ten to five and Louise handed over her report and what was left of the samples. We thought that that was the end of it… but apparently not. I’m so sorry.’
‘Is Louise here today?’ asked Steven. His initial alarm at what had happened was being diluted by his failure to see what the opposition had to gain from making such a move. They’d got their hands on the samples, but Sci-Med had the other half and they knew that. And the Sci-Med lab had already come up with a report.
‘No,’ said Mary Lyons. ‘She had to work so hard yesterday to get the report ready I told her to take the day off. I knew she was planning to go up to her parents’ holiday cottage in Dumfries and Galloway this weekend so I told her to make it a long one…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I’ve done something awful, haven’t I? I didn’t even think to ask the man for his ID after the telephone call. It all seemed so… plausible.’
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Steven. ‘You couldn’t have foreseen this happening.’ The anger he felt was at himself for not having foreseen it either. The opposition knew about the existence of the samples at Newcastle University from the bug on Cassie Motram’s phone line when he and Cassie had discussed it. They were just being thorough and checking that there were no more lying around and they had come up trumps. ‘Did you see this man?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes. I thought it was only right that I be there. I waited with Louise until he arrived and then sat in on the discussion. Morris, he said his name was, Dr Simon Morris, a tall, well-built man
…’
‘With a wart on his left cheek,’ said Steven. It came out as more of a statement than a question.
‘Then you do know him? He is connected with your organisation?’
Steven shook his head. ‘No, it’s a long story,’ he said. ‘What did he and Louise have to say about the report?’
Mary Lyons shrugged. ‘I think the general conclusion was that the donor was a near perfect match for the patient in question.’
The expected reply left Steven wondering again why on earth Monk had rushed up here to recover samples ahead of him or see a report Sci-Med already had — particularly as there was damn all interesting in it, was the frustrated rider he added to his own question.
‘Actually, there was one thing Louise remarked on.’
‘Really, what?’ asked Steven, ready to clutch at any kind of straw.
Mary Lyons looked apologetic. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘Louise pointed out something in her report to Morris that she thought was rather unusual: she did it with the end of her pen so I couldn’t see what it was from where I was sitting. Dr Morris dismissed it as having no relevance at all to the transplant and Louise seemed to agree, so I didn’t ask.’
Steven nodded, feeling that the world was against him but finding consolation in the thought that Louise could tell him personally what she thought was ‘unusual’ when she got back from her weekend. He was on the point of getting up to go when he suddenly realised with a hollow feeling in his stomach that, if the unusual thing Louise had spotted in the report did have a significance, James Monk knew that she’d noticed it. That kind of knowledge could be fatal: Louise could be in great danger. ‘Did Louise’s weekend plans come up in the conversation at all?’ he asked, trying to sound casual.
‘You know, I believe they did,’ said Mary Lyons. ‘Yes, I’m sure they did. I remember Louise saying that she hoped the weather would be good enough to let her walk by the sea and maybe even have a paddle… A bit early for that, I thought.’
Steven felt things go from bad to worse. Only the close proximity of a distinguished female academic stopped him letting go a foul-mouthed tirade against the malevolence of fate. ‘Can you tell me exactly where Louise was going this weekend?’ he asked. ‘I remember her saying it was somewhere near Southerness.’ His tone betrayed the urgency he felt.
‘Not the precise address… I’ve never needed that… but I do seem to remember the cottage is in a village called… let me think…’ Steven reined in his impatience as the seconds ticked by. ‘Leeford. Yes, that’s it, Leeford, and you’re right, it is near Southerness. We talked about the lighthouse there.’
Steven keyed the village into the satnav in the Porsche and roared off, heading west across the country to Dumfries and Galloway. He was stopped by traffic police when doing in excess of eighty-five mph on a straight stretch of road between Annan and Dumfries after being held up for some minutes by a JCB bumping along at twenty. One officer walked round the Porsche while the other asked the usual question. Steven assured the officer that he knew perfectly well what speed he was doing and, as he was a Sci-Med investigator, fully operational and with Home Office authority, he would like to continue doing it at their earliest convenience. He showed his ID and pointed out the number to call for verification.
The reply brought about a sudden change in the officer’s attitude and that of his colleague after a warning glance. Both men now seemed anxious to help in any way they could, and asked if Steven would like an escort to his destination. Steven looked at his Porsche and then at the police Volvo. ‘Maybe not,’ he replied. ‘Just let your colleagues know I’ll be on your territory for the next day or so.’
The road leading from the city of Dumfries to the Solway coast imposed further restrictions on Steven’s progress. Apart from its twists and turns, it was busy with the Friday rush hour: Dumfries’ commuters were heading home.
The traffic thinned as he neared the Solway and he was able to pick up speed on the switchback road that skirted the coast. Now that he was by the sea, he found himself wishing he had more time to enjoy his surroundings. The early clouds had cleared away and the evening sun was shining on the Solway Firth, reminding him of the happy times he and Lisa had spent on weekends in the area, exploring the sites or just enjoying each other’s company on wild and lonely beaches. Steven had always loved the beaches here. The tide seemed to go out for miles, leaving huge expanses of flat sand that ran out to meet the sky, encouraging a sense of proportion when contemplating the problems of life. It was always good to be reminded how small one was in the great scheme of things.
Ten minutes later Steven turned off the main road and onto a single-lane loop on the coast side to enter the village of Leeford. The Porsche’s engine settled down to an irregular and unhappy burble as it was reined in to almost walking pace to allow Steven to look for somewhere he could enquire about the location of the Averys’ cottage.
For this purpose, Leeford proved to be inconveniently small: it comprised, as far as he could see, little more than a few cottages huddling together on a cliff top. It boasted no pub or garage, no shops and very few houses with lights on. A number had wooden shutters on the windows. Holiday homes, thought Steven: it was still very early in the season. Like many such places, Leeford would remain a ghost village until summer sun beckoned its absent owners from the cities. He recalled Louise saying that this would be her first visit of the year.
He passed a sign pointing to a cliff-top path leading to The Harbour and saw there was a light on in the second cottage down from the road. He stopped the car and walked back. He could smell the sea far below on the evening breeze and noted that the cottage he was approaching had seashells rendered into its front wall. A small tricycle lay on its side in the front gard
en beneath a swing with frayed ropes. Steven knocked on the door and apologised to the woman in her early thirties who answered.
‘Gosh, you’re the second person to ask about the Averys’ cottage today,’ she said with a smile and an accent that suggested she was not from around these parts. ‘Is Louise having a party or something? I thought we were going to be the first of the outsiders to open up this year. Apparently not.’
The news stunned Steven into silence: it seemed that his fears had been proved horribly right. If the earlier enquiry had come from Monk, he had seen Louise as a potential threat and had come to… deal with the problem. Hoping against hope all the way here had come to nothing. He should have known better. Monk’s background and reputation said he wasn’t the sort to leave loose ends lying around.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman, obviously feeling slightly uneasy in a situation she was finding difficult to read. Her young daughter had joined her at the door and was clinging to her leg. ‘Go back inside, please, Zoe,’ she said.
‘Yes, sorry,’ said Steven, snapping out of his preoccupation. ‘If you could just tell me where the Averys’ cottage is?’
‘Three doors along on the main street on the same side as us,’ said the woman. She pointed briefly with one hand while closing the door with the other. ‘The one with blue shutters.’
THIRTY-FOUR
The door closed and snuffed out the pool of yellow light, making Steven realise that daylight was rapidly becoming a reddish memory in the western sky. He walked back to the main street. The small size of the village meant that it didn’t merit street lighting, something that made it difficult to tell if the east-facing cottage he picked out as Louise’s had blue shutters or not, especially as there were no lights on in the windows. There was no space for a car; three were parked on waste ground on the other side of the road but he didn’t know what Louise drove. He walked up the gravel path and knocked loudly on the front door.
The lack of lights predicted no response and that was what he got. He didn’t bother with a second attempt but walked round to the back where there was more light. The rear of the cottage was high above the beach and faced west so that the red glow in the sky bathed the building in what Steven thought resembled the safe-light of a photographic darkroom.
He rapped on the stable-style split back door and called out Louise’s name but again without response. His mind insisted he start imagining scenes of what might be lying inside but he tried to counter it by hoping that Louise might have changed her mind about coming here this weekend. An open window to the left of the back door, however, caught his attention and the hope died.
After a moment’s hesitation, he tried the latch on the door and found it unlocked. He stepped inside onto the cracked linoleum floor of a small, whitewashed utility room containing a fridge and a washing machine. The washing machine was old, its front showing signs of rust where the enamel had been chipped. He called out Louise’s name again but knew he was using it as a mantra to inject normality into a situation that was threatening to unfold into a nightmare. He ran the flat of his hand up the wall as he moved into the house proper and clicked on the light to reveal that everything seemed to be in order in the sitting room. There were no signs of a struggle, and a cardboard box full of groceries which presumably Louise had brought in from the car was lying in the middle of the floor, waiting to be taken through to the kitchen and unpacked. He moved on through the house but every door he opened was preceded by a vision of what he might find inside.
After drawing three blanks, he came to the last room, the bathroom, where he paused, preparing to find a corpse staring up at him through a tub full of water. The fear disappeared instantly when he found the room empty and smelling pleasantly of bathroom cleaner. Louise was not at home… but she had been.
He stepped out into the back garden and looked out over the Solway, trying to put himself inside Monk’s head. He didn’t like what he came up with. Monk was a professional; he wouldn’t have murdered the girl and left her body lying on the floor or in the bath at the cottage where it would precipitate an immediate police murder hunt and press outrage. He would have faked her death, made it look like an accident, just as he’d disguised the attack on John Motram and probably engineered Jim Leslie’s road traffic accident. Steven felt the chances were awfully high that Louise had had an ‘accident’ too and, standing in the back garden of a cliff-top cottage, he didn’t have to be a member of MENSA to figure out what the likely kind would be.
He walked down the sloping garden to the picket fence which marked the boundary between the Averys’ garden and a steep slope of rough grass leading down to the cliff-top path which zigzagged below. His heart sank when he noticed that a swathe of the grass had recently been flattened: something heavy had been dragged across it.
Taking care in the dying light, he scissored his legs over the fence and slid on all fours down the flattened grass trail to where it met the cinder path. Less than five metres to his right, where the path changed the course of its zigzag, he could see that the wooden guard rail between the path and a one-hundred-foot drop had been broken. It had given way… or someone had made it look that way. He felt sure he was looking at the site of Louise’s ‘accident’.
With a heavy heart, he made his way down the winding path and out on to the beach to discover the inevitable: Louise Avery, her neck broken and lower limbs at an impossible angle, lay spread-eagled on the sand, her eyes open but her life very definitely over. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, feeling almost overwhelmed by guilt. If only he hadn’t asked her to analyse those damned samples. ‘You bastard, Monk,’ he raged, slamming his fist into the sand once, twice, three times. When his breathing finally subsided, he brought out his mobile phone and called the police.
An hour later, when Steven had finished with the police, he called John Macmillan and told him what had happened, starting with his request to Louise Avery that she carry out a duplicate analysis on the Michael Kelly samples and ending with the circumstances of her death.
‘Ye gods, this is getting out of hand,’ said Macmillan, quickly assimilating all the facts and asking the right questions. ‘How much do the local police know?’
‘I only gave them the bare facts when they turned up,’ said Steven. ‘With nothing else to go on, I think they might see it as a tragic accident — a fall from a cliff-top path after the guard rail gave way…’
‘Whereas we know it was anything but,’ said Macmillan.
Steven grunted, his anger still smouldering inside.
‘So why did he kill her?’
‘According to Louise’s boss who was present when Monk came to pick up the report, Louise saw something unusual in her analysis and pointed it out to Monk. I think that may have been her undoing.’
‘But we’ve seen a report on the samples,’ protested Macmillan. ‘There was nothing unusual about them at all.’
‘I know,’ sighed Steven. ‘I don’t understand it either.’
‘I’m assuming Miss Avery’s findings were the same as our lab’s?’
Steven screwed up his face at the question. ‘I didn’t see Louise’s report,’ he said. ‘She gave it to Monk.’
‘And there’s no other copy?’ asked Macmillan, sounding astonished.
‘I doubt it — most universities’ policy on contract work is to hand over everything to the client when the job’s finished. Contract work is always regarded as confidential so they don’t keep copies — that’s normal practice. Christ, I should have realised Monk would check there were no more samples lying around at the university. What a fool…’
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Macmillan. ‘None of us can think of absolutely everything. Apart from that, they were quick enough to give us our samples back after their “mistake” at the airport, so why should it matter if there were still some up north?’
‘Another question I can’t answer.’
‘Are you still intending to stay over with your daughter this we
ekend?’
Steven sighed. ‘No, I think I’m going to have to call off. I’ll come back to London as soon as I’ve told Louise Avery’s head of department what’s happened. I don’t want her finding out from the papers. The police will be telling Louise’s parents.‘
‘Let me know when you get back. There’s something else we need to discuss: the lab report on the MRSA cultures has come in. It’s the same strain.’
Steven let out his breath in another long, slow sigh. There were times when he could turn off the day job and switch into family mode to spend time with Jenny but this definitely wasn’t one of them. The cocktail of anger, frustration and guilt that simmered inside him was best not shared with anyone. He didn’t want the dark world of his job to come anywhere near Glenvane. He called Sue and apologised for crying off.
As always, she was understanding. ‘Don’t beat yourself up over it, Steven,’ she said. ‘If you can’t come, you can’t; we all know there must be a good reason — probably one it’s best we don’t know anything about,’ she added.
‘Thanks, Sue. I’ll call Jenny when… things get better…’
‘Take care, Steven. I’ll give her your love.’
Steven gave silent thanks for having a sister-in-law like Sue and reflected on how often he’d had to call on her in the past when the job became just too incompatible with normal life. This, in turn, forced him to acknowledge that Tally had been right. His attempts to minimise the dangers of the job had been ridiculous. Danger and death were always lurking on the horizon. That being the case, he couldn’t expect any woman to share anything more than a fleeting romance with him. That conclusion was just about all he needed to make an awful day even worse.
It was now a little after nine in the evening and Steven sat in the car, pondering how he was going to tell Mary Lyons. He had a number for her at the university but she wouldn’t be there at this time and she probably wouldn’t be there in the morning because it was Saturday. He knew that many people these days chose to be ex-directory but he decided to check out directory enquiries anyway, asking for Professor Mary Lyons in the Newcastle area.