Chapter Sixteen
Nigel was white with rage.
‘What?’
Brian shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed.
‘Well. Uh. Thing is. There was a fire alarm.’
‘And what do you do when there’s a fire alarm?’
‘But, boss, there’s four exits, and two of us.’
Nigel shook his head. He was absolutely flabbergasted. His hunch had been right: those bastards absolutely knew something. And he had absolutely genuinely believed that they would do what any scientist or mathematician would do: be delighted to be making an important new discovery. They had all been played for fools.
He hit his hand hard on the desk and swore madly. He was too late: Malik hadn’t even made it in. But it was nobody’s fault but his own. He should have done what the government had told him to do: he should have arrested them straightaway. Arrested them all on suspicion of murder and made them sweat it out in a cell.
But then, where would that have got them if they’d then refused to translate the data for him? And he still had four of them left who could do that. If he’d put them in jail, he’d have risked not finding anything else out. But now two of them had gone. One of them, presumably, the professor’s killer. Statistically he had his money on the boy.
Nigel assumed that finding out what they now knew had just sent him temporarily insane and he had snapped – but why, why would they cover up for him? Help him escape? It didn’t make any sense. Was the girl a hostage? He swore. That must be it. He must have got their cooperation for taking a hostage. Shit, this was absolutely the last thing he needed right in the middle of their investigation. That, and an outburst of people complaining they had monkeys in their back gardens. He sighed. This was a fiasco.
His phone had been ringing and ringing but he’d been ignoring it. Finally he glanced down and knew he had to pick it up. It was the PM’s office. He doubted they were going to invite him to a garden party. First things first. Thank goodness, he thought, he’d already got the policeman onside.
Nigel had ordered them all back to the SCIF, back to the original interview rooms.
Sé stared. Arnold was trying to wind up the outdoor guard by shouting rude things about his mother. Evelyn was pacing up and down. Ranjit was fast asleep.
‘Got them on the CCTV at the station, guv.’
Not for the last time, Nigel was to be relieved he’d extended a professional hand of courtesy to the local police force, as they repaid it in full.
With Malik’s team leaping into action, within minutes there were more than fifty London Transport Police at King’s Cross and Liverpool Street stations, all boarding and searching every train that arrived there; causing massive lateness, complaints, some hassle and much swearing as they moved through the carriages slowly, ignoring people’s rude muttered remarks in their wake.
Nothing and nobody: they were on the lookout for red hair and dark hair and glasses, but red hair could be dyed or cut off or hidden under a wig, and every single man on the train had dark hair and glasses, even assuming Luke hadn’t gone to the extraordinary, master-of-disguise lengths of taking off his glasses.
At Ely, they simply asked for ID at all the ticket barriers, politely. People weren’t in such a rush, didn’t mind so much.
At King’s Lynn they shut the station doors. The stationmaster there was an ex-army man and he had been waiting for a manhunt like this all his life. He flattened down his moustache, and proceeded.
At Nantwich, they had unmanned the station in the latest round of cutbacks, and the APB messages filled up an empty answerphone line.
At Ipswich, Connie gulped, took in a deep breath, checked her hair was all up again under the cap, and ran up crying to the first ticket guard she could find, announcing that a red-headed woman and a dark-haired man had stood up next to her in the carriage and stolen her wallet and got out at Aylesbury. The kindly station guard, noting her distress, and wondering rather excitedly if this was a clue and might help the capture of the two fugitives that had just flashed up on his computer screen – suspected of murder no less – that they’d been told to watch out for, and whether this would mean a raise and possibly even a commendation, led her over to the far side of the barriers saying, ‘There, there,’ and turned round to make a phone call, whereupon Connie also turned around and said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve just seen a policeman – wow, there’s lots of them, aren’t there?’
She attempted a winning smile. ‘I’ll go straight to him and save you the trouble! Thanks!’ and, her heart beating like a piston, nonetheless attempted to saunter casually out into the concourse, where she disappeared into the throng.
Luke waited till everyone had left the carriage, then wrenched the door open on the other side of the train, dropped down to the live rail and walked unnoticed across the tracks and out through the goods yard.
He had slipped her a piece of paper with, written on it, in odd, square handwriting, each letter equally spaced, none touching: QUEENSFLEET. Then a latitude and a longitude (which made her smile at the idea she might be able to use it), then, on a glowing, silvery thread, a 3-D tracing of the topography from Ipswich which moved with her as she walked across the landscape. She had not the faintest idea how he’d done it. It was exquisitely beautiful and utterly impractical as she had to hide behind a tree whenever she consulted it to keep it from others’ eyes.
She was to meet him there at nightfall. She would.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Oh man,’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t know nothing, man. Can’t we just get back to work on this thing?’
‘While you lie through your teeth at me?’ said Nigel, his fury only barely controlled.
‘Oh yeah, like the way you’ve been totally straight up with us this entire time,’ said Arnold.
Nigel opened his arms.
‘It’s a matter of national security. Me, someone who works for national security. I’m sorry, Julian Assange, if my chitchat doesn’t fulfil your every requirement for Wikipedia-editing purposes.’
Arnold shrugged.
‘Well, where’s my lawyer?’
‘You went past the lawyer bit about three hundred infractions ago,’ said Nigel, looking round the windowless room.
‘Oh, it’s Jack Bauer time,’ mused Arnold. ‘I have always wondered how well I would stand up to torture.’
He thought about it.
‘That time I got my dick caught in my zipper probably indicates not very well. But I’m ready to try. Have you got the plastic floor sheets?’ He looked around. ‘Can I have the water one? Rather than the screwdriver one? I am totally scared of water, I promise. Definitely put me under water rather than gouge out my eye with a screwdriver. Terrified. Of. Water.’
‘We’re not going to do torture,’ said Nigel, heaving a sigh. ‘We’re the British Government.’
‘Ah, satire,’ said Arnold knowingly. ‘Like it.’
‘Just tell us what you know.’
‘I told you,’ said Arnold. ‘Not a darn thing until that guinea-pig bit me.’
Nigel rolled his eyes.
‘So why did you keep messing with the mikes?’
‘Because you’re a bunch of spying bastards, and because we couldn’t talk about what we were looking at if we didn’t know who was listening. We care about security too, which you may or may not believe.’
‘Was Luke Beith… was he aggressive in any way towards Connie MacAdair? Intimidating?’
‘Ha, Luke?’ said Arnold smiling. ‘No. Not at all. Just… I mean, he was a bit strange, but I think that’s all right. Or maybe it isn’t these days.’
‘Strange enough to abduct someone? Strange enough to kill someone?’
Arnold considered what he was about to say, then decided it couldn’t do much harm. The smaller truth would hide the greater lie.
‘I don’t think he’d have needed to abduct Connie,’ he said. ‘I think she’d have gone pretty much anywhere with him.’
‘Seriously?
’ said Nigel. He never understood what women saw in men. ‘They were an item?’
‘It was a surprise to us too, man,’ said Arnold, picking up his baseball cap and scratching his head. ‘We all thought she’d get back with Sé. Including Sé. Can I have some coffee?’
‘No.’
‘Only I’ve got slightly addicted over the last few months, doing your dirty work.’
Nigel rolled his eyes.
‘Sue us,’ he said.
He sat down in the chair.
‘So they’re in a relationship?’
This added a new dimension to it.
‘They ran off together?’
Arnold shrugged. ‘Can I get my wound dressed?’ he said, revealing some tiny tooth marks on his stout, pale calf . ‘You don’t know what they’ve been pumping into those animals up there. Probably got anthrax. It’s really sore. Torture.’
They both looked at the tiny scratch together. Arnold had the grace to look slightly shamefaced about it.
‘Maybe he confessed to the murder and she persuaded him to go on the run,’ said Malik in the hastily assembled incident room at the police station.
‘She doesn’t exactly seem like the Bonnie and Clyde type,’ said Nigel.
‘People do crazy things for love all the time,’ said Malik, who did not look a crazy-things-for-love sort. He looked a going-to-the-garden-centre-on-a-Sunday sort.
‘You’ve seen what comes in here on a Monday morning.’
Nigel shrugged.
‘Where are we?’
Malik pulled up the CCTV footage of the vivisection lab. It was grainy, and both Connie and Luke had their backs to the camera. Luke was doing something to the lock, but it was impossible to make out what it was.
‘Did he have a master key?’ wondered Nigel. ‘Or did he steal it from somewhere?’
‘Nobody’s mentioned it,’ said Malik. ‘Every one of the biologists showed up with their own key, and they’re sitting polygraphs right now to see if any of them could have helped these guys, but no luck so far. It’s a six-inch bolt, and it looks destroyed. Must have been a tool of some sort.’
Nigel blinked.
‘So it was planned.’
‘His rooms are empty,’ said Malik.
‘We know,’ said Nigel.
‘Hers aren’t. Looks spur of the moment.’
Malik looked knowledgeable.
‘She left behind her Ladyshave.’
‘That’s a sign?’
‘Women running away of their own free will with men they genuinely like,’ said Malik, ‘always take their hair removal products.’
Nigel looked around the nearly empty room. It was almost six o’clock. ‘Where is everyone?’
Malik raised an eyebrow at one of the few young police officers there.
‘Still out with animal control, sir,’ said one of the younger recruits. ‘Children are… they’re not over the moon about giving the rabbits back if you want to know the truth, sir.’
Nigel put his head in his hands.
‘You’re telling me we have a potential major criminal on the run —’ And civilisation hanging in the balance, he didn’t add. ‘— and your police force are out fighting children for guinea-pigs?’
There was an embarrassed silence. Malik cleared his throat.
‘Just… tell everyone they can keep the animals they find and get back to the police station, stat.,’ he said as the young officer got on the phone.
There was another pause.
‘Um, except the monkeys,’ said Malik. ‘We need the monkeys back.’
Nigel rolled his eyes and called Annabel to say he’d be late. Annabel got out of bed, where she had been lying, wondering if she could tempt him into ravaging her with this very slutty nightie she’d been talked into buying at an ill-advised Ann Summers evening with the girls. She looked at herself in the mirror and sighed, then shoved it to the back of the wardrobe and put her old, comfy dressing-gown back on.
‘Okay,’ said Nigel. ‘Arrest warrant. Tell Interpol. Luke Beith. For murder. Possible abduction. Possibly dangerous.’
Connie stumbled across fields under a pinkening sky. It was the oddest thing, the beautiful, shining map Luke had given her: it went as the crow flies, directly east. So once she had passed the outskirts of Ipswich, with its long streets of mattress warehouses and discount deals, she dodged under ditches and stiles, tried to follow footpaths but always went across every immaculately marked field, through the alleyways of tiny villages.
She saw almost nobody. It was a sleepy, late-spring evening in a quiet part of the country. Even as she grew closer to Queen’s Fleet, near Felixstowe, where the huge ferries made their way to the Hook of Holland, and goods rumbled in on great lorries from all across the worlds – cars, toys, steel, cheese, silk – she saw only an occasional tractor in the distance; the odd lonely rep’s car driving across the hillsides, taking the scenic route from Lowestoft to Carlisle or from Ipswich to Manchester.
Forcing herself onwards so she didn’t miss him, she thought with fluttery panic about everything they’d done. They were on the run. It seemed so strange, so unlikely on a beautiful English evening.
It didn’t happen to nice girls like her, with cycling proficiency tests. She was a member of the National Trust! Well, she wasn’t. But she’d been meaning to get round to it for absolutely ages. Also once, guiltily, she had ordered something out of the Boden catalogue, even though she didn’t have any of the cute, smocking-clad children required. The catalogues had followed her when she’d moved, though she hadn’t told anyone her new address. Maybe that’s how they’d track her down. Through Boden. Like Hogwarts letters, only more lethal.
She sighed. She couldn’t think of the craziness of what she was doing; of what her parents might think if – when– they found out. That they would find them gone, and blame them, of course, for the death of Professor Hirati which she was sure – was absolutely, definitely almost sure – that Luke had nothing to do with.
That even without that, they had committed a crime in the biology labs for sure; criminal damage would be the absolute least of it. She was, whatever happened, in serious trouble.
She couldn’t think of that now. She could only focus on one thing. And when she did, the panic didn’t seem so bad any more; the fear not so strong. She focused on the smell and the feel and the touch of him; on Luke. The whisper of salt in his hair; the strength that belied his slim frame; the way he looked into her, into all of her.
It was worth it, she told herself. It was worth it, even as she stamped on, alone and weary; lost, but following the line he had drawn for her.
If they could save him. If she could help save him. Even if they couldn’t save him. All she needed was to spend some time with him. To see him. That was all she could focus on now. It was all she wanted.
It was unusually hot. She had slipped her jacket off some time ago, but couldn’t risk taking off the hat and letting her hair show. She had tied it back as tightly as she could manage, but red-gold fronds persisted in freeing themselves and, as her forehead got damp, sticking to her head.
She stopped in a sleepy-looking village with one pub and one shop. There wouldn’t be a huge manhunt for them would there? Would it have reached that far? Would their friends have betrayed them? It wouldn’t be Arnold, she was pretty sure of that: she knew how he felt about authority. Evelyn, ditto. Plus, she was her friend. Sé – could she count on him? He was so hard to read. But if he meant what he said about protecting her… then he would. But she worried about Ranjit. It wasn’t even necessarily that he would mean it; she was just concerned that they would offer him an ice cream or something and he would spill the beans by mistake.
Anyway, she had to risk it, because otherwise she was so hot and thirsty she was going to pass out and the whole thing would have been pointless anyway.
There was a young, plump girl behind the counter of the little Spar. Connie bought two sandwiches, a large bottle of water, some bananas and nuts fo
r energy and a couple of bars of chocolate. Then, on further consideration, some more chocolate. She had planned to say something along the lines of, ‘Hot out cross-country walking today,’ but the girl was absolutely fixated on her phone – it crossed Connie’s mind how much harder it would have been to escape something before people started being obsessed with looking at their phones every single second of the day – so instead she just passed over the money in silence, grunted and quickly left. The girl barely lifted her head. That was good, Connie thought.
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