The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  ‘And my inquest?’

  ‘Jenny, I’ll only say it once.’ He lowered his voice, as if that simple safeguard might allow him to avoid detection by imagined listeners. ‘Nothing I can do will help you on this one. Believe me. I am truly sorry.’

  He ended the call.

  Jenny turned to Forster. Before she could speak, he said, ‘I don’t know what she was involved with. I didn’t want to know, and she respected that.’

  ‘But you knew it was significant?’

  He drew in a breath and exhaled, exasperated. Jenny could imagine the conversations that must have taken place in this room: Sonia excitedly wanting to share the latest link in one of her convoluted conspiracies and Forster insisting he must know nothing that might damage his precious career.

  ‘If you tell me, I may not need to call you, Mr Forster. I have no wish to compromise you.’

  He gave her a calculating look, weighing the odds of getting her off his back if he gave her what she wanted. Or perhaps she was being too harsh? Perhaps there was an honest though conflicted man beneath the hard exterior. Sonia must have seen something endearing in him, after all.

  ‘This is the truth, Mrs Cooper – I know nothing about your African girl, and I only heard Sonia mention Adam Jordan after his death. She was clearly being very secretive, which frankly was quite unlike her. I know about her interest in Roman Slavsky, but I never looked at the file myself. The day after you first came here, I think she may have moved some papers from her rooms. I went in there briefly and saw boxes on the floor.’

  ‘Did she say where she took them?’

  ‘We didn’t discuss it. I can’t even tell you for certain that’s what she did.’

  ‘Where might she have taken them?’

  ‘I don’t know. She has no office as such at the faculty. Her room was always such a mess. For all I know she might just have been getting rid of stuff.’

  ‘Did she ever mention the word Ginya?’

  Forster shook his head. Jenny judged his denial genuine.

  ‘Who do I ask about these papers? Are there friends, colleagues?’

  They were interrupted a second time, on this occasion by four loud knocks on the door. Jenny and Forster traded a glance, both reacting with alarm to the knocks’ abruptness.

  ‘Mr Forster?’ It was a man’s voice, impatient and businesslike. A detective, perhaps.

  Then a second voice: ‘Are you in, sir?’

  ‘Coming.’ He hesitated, then nodded towards the bedroom.

  Jenny moved silently across the room and slipped through the internal door. She fastened the bolt securely from the inside as Forster went to admit his visitors.

  ‘Good afternoon. How may I help you?’

  She didn’t linger to listen in on their conversation. She knew who they would be. She quietly opened the connecting door and found herself in the small passageway that linked Forster’s rooms to Sonia’s. The door to Sonia’s bedroom was open. Jenny went through, locked it after her, and made her way through to the sitting room that looked to have been disturbed yet again since she had last seen it. She let herself out onto the next-door staircase.

  She had started down the stairs when an instinct told her she had taken a wrong turn. She slipped off her shoes and ran noiselessly up the two flights to the landing above. Moments later she heard the sound of a door being staved in from inside Sonia Blake’s rooms. Jenny pressed herself hard against the wall, managing to stay almost, but not quite, out of sight from the landing below. Her two pursuers emerged from the open door and clattered down the stairs without an upwards glance. As their footsteps faded, she glanced over the banister and caught a fleeting glimpse of the square-jawed man she had seen at the Diamond Light Source, the one who had tried to break Michael’s ribs.

  TWENTY-THREE

  JENNY HID AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS for a full twenty minutes before making her way cautiously down to the bottom. From here she continued down to the sub-level that she remembered led to a small courtyard and the extensive grounds beyond. It wasn’t safe to return to her car, nor did she want to risk exiting onto the street at the front of the college, so she turned left towards the modern accommodation blocks and set about finding another way out. After a prolonged search, she chanced on a gate at the side of the playing fields that opened onto a Jericho side street. Without a clear map of the city in her mind, she was as good as lost. Her only thought was to move away from the centre and in so doing shave the odds of being seen. Keeping the college at her back, she started walking. Canal Street, Mount Street, then a dogleg into Juxon Street, she tried to lose herself in their ordinariness.

  Emerging onto Walton Street, she turned left, and found herself approaching the Victoria pub. Drinkers sat at outside tables soaking up the milky afternoon sun. She made her way inside and ordered a glass of Chardonnay and some mineral water. Finding a seat in an unoccupied corner facing the door, she sipped her wine and tried to decide what to do next. It wouldn’t be safe to return to her car, nor could she switch on her phone without the risk of it being tracked. She had turned it off after escaping through Sonia Blake’s rooms and felt strangely helpless without it, as if she had suddenly lost a limb.

  Carless, phoneless and with only the flimsiest of leads, she was nearly out of options. Alison was in no state to help, Moreton had abandoned her and Michael had made his feelings more than plain. The only two allies she had left were Detective Superintendent Williams and Andy Kerr. She had already pushed Williams beyond reasonable limits, which left her the pathologist. Andy was bending under pressure from his bosses, but four years of working with him told her she could trust him, at least just for a little while longer.

  There was no payphone that she could see, but with a well-aimed smile Jenny persuaded the young Greek working behind the bar to lend her his phone.

  Andy answered her from inside the autopsy room – she could tell from the high-pitched whine of a rotary saw carving through bone.

  He sounded relieved to hear her voice. ‘Hold on, I’m going to take this in my office.’

  She waited while he hurried the length of the mortuary to resume their conversation in private.

  ‘Hi.’ He was short of breath when he came on the line again. ‘What happened? I was told I wasn’t required to give evidence.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Some guy called Moreton. He said he was your superior. I didn’t know you had one.’

  ‘Arguably I don’t. Look, I have to be quick. There’s more to tell than I can manage now. I just need you to think about this: Adam Jordan brought a girl back from South Sudan. I’m trying to trace her, but if what she told her housemates is right, she was the only survivor in a village that was wiped out by disease. The place was called Ginya.’ She spelled it out: ‘G-I-N-Y-A.’

  She heard him tap the letters into his computer.

  ‘Can’t see anything,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s the meningitis belt, right? That could wipe a village out.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He was unconvinced. ‘You’d expect more than one to survive. But listen, I’ve found something. I took some more samples from Jordan’s body – the full range – and had them analysed. I was looking for any sign that he’d been the vector for the meningitis bacteria. We found some—’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘I got the results this morning. The lab cultured bacteria – the identical strain to the one that killed Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan – from his stomach contents.’

  Jenny floated the barman an even sweeter smile, indicating that she wouldn’t be long now. ‘That’s not where you’d expect to find it, I presume?’

  ‘It’s about the last place. Bacteria wouldn’t arrive in the gut until the final stages of infection. And it wasn’t in the culture taken from his bowel, just the one from his stomach.’

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘He must have swallowed something. My guess is that it was shortly before he died. There was very little in his stomach
– perhaps a light meal a couple of hours beforehand.’

  ‘He bought sandwiches earlier in the evening.’

  ‘That makes sense. But unless they happened to be laced with hybrid bacteria, my guess is he swallowed the bacteria in liquid suspension.’

  Jenny thought back to the events of Jordan’s last day: the trip to Great Shefford with Ayen Deng, a meeting with a man at the back of the petrol station, and then the detour to visit his father’s grave.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking he might have been some sort of courier, after all. He must have had this stuff with him.’

  ‘Unless he didn’t drink it voluntarily.’

  ‘We can’t judge that. His body was too badly damaged.’

  ‘I have to go now,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m on someone else’s phone. Keep this to yourself – we’re on to something.’

  ‘Sure—’

  He wanted more, but Jenny couldn’t give it to him. It was better that he didn’t know. Just in case.

  Shortly before his death, Adam Jordan had swallowed liquid containing meningitis bacteria of the kind which days later had killed a schoolgirl and a young woman, neither of whom, to Jenny’s knowledge, he had ever met. Making her way through more unfamiliar streets, Jenny tried to fit Andy’s bombshell into the constantly distorting picture of Adam Jordan’s final hours. The single fact that leaped out at her was that the specialist team from Porton Down who had helped themselves to body parts and tissue had more than an inkling of what they might find. They had linked Jordan’s death to those of Sophie and Elena, but how? The answer, she felt sure, would one way or another have to involve Sonia Blake. Webley had said Sonia Blake was on a ‘watch list’, which had to mean that at least some of her communications were being intercepted. Something of what she had shared with Jordan must have found its way into official hands. Sonia may well have become aware of the fact; Jordan’s death may have proved it to her beyond doubt. If that had prompted her to hide her papers, they must have held something of deep significance. Jenny considered contacting Forster again, but discounted it as too risky. It left her with one last port of call: Henry Blake.

  Unusually for a small British city, Jenny noticed, Oxford had black cabs of the kind you could hail in the street. But on a sunny afternoon in mid-tourist season they were a rare commodity. She had walked another mile and arrived on the main thoroughfare of Woodstock Road before she spotted an orange light. She tumbled into the back seat, grateful for the cool of the air conditioning and asked the driver to take her to the John Radcliffe Hospital. The backs of her heels had been rubbed to blisters by her shoes, and her shirt clung uncomfortably to her body with perspiration.

  ‘Doctor?’ The cab driver made a stab at being friendly.

  ‘No. Coroner.’

  ‘Oh. Dead people.’ He glanced at her in the mirror. ‘There can’t be many laughs in that.’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Still, I bet it makes you glad to be alive.’

  Jenny smiled, and for a few moments the simple observation made her feel stupidly happy. ‘Yes. It does.’

  The massive grey six-storey building on the southern fringes of Oxford had all the outward charm of a Soviet ministry, but was one of the UK’s handful of world-class hospitals. Even after nearly five years of weekly visits to the Vale, Jenny still felt an anxious tightening in her chest as she stepped through the sliding doors and took her first breath of antiseptic air. Along with the ill and the anxious, she joined the long queue at reception, all the while keeping a wary eye on the shifting sea of visitors and patients passing up and down the concourse. She scanned their faces in dread of seeing the square-jawed man, until she was finally granted her turn at the desk. The receptionist was a harried West Indian woman whose good nature had been stretched to breaking by a drunk in search of a casualty – his brother, he insisted – whose name he couldn’t recall.

  ‘Can you tell him it’s urgent,’ Jenny said, as the receptionist dialled Blake’s extension.

  ‘When isn’t it? Dr Blake, there’s a Mrs Cooper to see you.’ She glanced up. ‘Yes, she’s standing right in front of me. I’ve got a line a mile long here – what’s it to be? Thank you.’ She rang off with a sigh. ‘Fifth floor. He’ll be there to meet you.’

  Jenny melted into the crowd, keeping her eyes on the floor as she made her way swiftly to the elevators.

  Blake was waiting for her as the lift doors opened, dressed in a lab coat. He waited for the two other disembarking passengers to disperse before speaking in an agitated whisper.

  ‘Did you have to come here now? I’ve got colleagues—’ He glanced over his shoulder as if they might suddenly have materialized. ‘It’s not a good time, or place.’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘Five.’ He led her along the corridor to a recessed rest area: several high tables and stools and a couple of vending machines.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He punched some buttons on the machine and collected an espresso for himself. He looked as if he had already consumed far too many. His tension was palpable.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jenny said.

  He brought his coffee to the table and pushed his long fringe back over his forehead. ‘It’s Q fever,’ he said quietly. ‘Sonia had Q fever.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Coxiella burnetii. It’s an acute infection that can feel like mild flu. It can cause pneumonia and endocarditis. It comes from animals – most human cases are people who work with livestock.’ His eyes flicked left and right. ‘The thing is, it’s highly infectious. A single bacterium can be all it takes.’ He gulped his espresso. ‘Makes it a favourite for biological weapons. And guess what? This strain has immunity to tetracycline, doxycycline and erythromycin, and as far as I can see from the literature, that makes it pretty much a one-off outside the sort of labs our friend Professor Slavsky cut his teeth in.’

  Jenny could see that he scarcely believed it himself. He was still processing the information: his pupils were dilated like those of a patient in shock.

  ‘Do you think she was given this deliberately?’

  ‘It’s notifiable. I checked with the HPA – but there haven’t been any reported cases recently. It’s easily done – a few drops of infected liquid in a drink. That’s how I’d do it.’

  Jenny thought of Sonia’s regular trips to the cafe in Oxford Castle. How easy it would have been for her killer to slip a fatal dose when she was distracted at her laptop, as simple as leaning over for the sugar bowl.

  ‘I wish I was surprised,’ Jenny said, ‘but who would have done that?’

  The question hung unanswered in the air between them.

  ‘I spoke to Forster,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s why I came here. He told me Sonia had moved several boxes of papers from her rooms in college after Jordan died, including, I suspect, her material on Slavsky. Forster doesn’t know where she would have taken them. I couldn’t really get a handle on their relationship. He seemed at one remove somehow.’

  ‘No, that was Sonia. She was an expert at that. If she wanted you to know something, you wouldn’t hear the end of it. But if she wanted to keep a secret, she could do that, too, and be devious with it.’

  ‘How do you mean, devious?’

  ‘Her research – the off-piste stuff. It’s not easy to win people’s trust in that field. I overheard her on the phone many times, weaving stories, inventing personalities for herself. I used to think that if she hadn’t been so paranoid, she would have made a good spy.’

  ‘I’d seen her as emotional, not calculating.’

  ‘She was both, but a real operator.’

  ‘Was it just the need to find out who killed her father that was driving her, or was there something else?’

  ‘That’s how it began, but I think she picked things up along the way that reinforced it all. She would tell me bits and pieces: African governments rumoured to be developing biological and chemical weapons – you can ima
gine the sort of thing – but since she met Slavsky . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I got the feeling there was something else, too.’ He tailed off, lapsing into edgy silence.

  Jenny watched Blake picking distractedly at the cuff of his lab coat. Since early in their first meeting she had felt inclined to trust him – he had a sort of innocence – but yet she felt she wasn’t hearing the whole story. He remained too nervy for a man who had revealed everything.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you something,’ Jenny said. ‘Shortly before he died, Adam Jordan had swallowed what the pathologist thinks was a liquid containing the hybrid meningitis strain that killed the two young women in Bristol. It’s shown up in cultures from his stomach contents. He had no other signs of infection.’

  ‘Hybrid?’

  ‘That’s the word he used. Like your Q fever, it’s antibiotic-resistant. I understand that’s not hard to achieve in a lab.’

  ‘It’s easy.’ He spoke as if from a long way off, swept away on the wave of thoughts her revelation had prompted. ‘Any first-year postgrad could do it these days. You could buy the kit and do it in your kitchen.’

  ‘I’ve no idea how it got there, only that your ex-wife has to be part of the story. If I knew where she’d put the papers . . .’

  ‘They won’t be anywhere you’ll ever find them. I know that much. I can’t be part of this, Mrs Cooper. I’ve got a family, a career. This isn’t my fight.’

  Jenny seized her chance on his moment of weakness. ‘If you give me what I need, you’ll never have to hear from me again.’ She touched his arm. ‘I mean it. I have no interest in involving you further.’

  He wanted to escape Sonia’s madness once and for all. She could sense his desperation for normality to reassert itself.

  Blake spoke in a rush, as if lingering on the words would give them power to do him harm. ‘She called me a few months ago. She sounded wired. She said she wanted to tell me something in confidence. I didn’t want to know, but she didn’t give me a lot of choice. She said she’d been contacted by someone in the biotech business wanting her help in exposing something. I’ve no idea what this “thing” was – I didn’t ask – but Sonia seemed overwhelmed by it, as if it was all too much responsibility.’