It must’ve been around 7.30 and the day was fading fast. Over in the house a few lights had come on but curtains had been drawn. I heard it behind me, the single snap of a twig. I was on my feet immediately, turning to face gamekeeper, farmer, tramp, whoever.
“Sorry, Nathan, didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Bill, for Christ’s sake, what are you...?”
He shook his head prior to giving the all too obvious answer.
“Doctor Peterson .... Laura, Laura, phoned to ask if I’d, well ... help.”
She’d obviously come to consider Bill Grogan as a steadying influence, a voice of reason, an intelligent brake if ever one needed applying. Offended though I was by her interference, I was glad to see him.
He looked round and chose his particular spot, took a small groundsheet from the sports bag he was carrying and spread it out. Then he produced a kind of thermal poncho, ready for a chilly night. I watched him in silence as he settled into a gnome-like posture and looked up at me.
“I’ll see you in the morning, then,” he said. “Just tell me what I’m doing here. I mean observation, yes...”
“How many people are in there. A middle-aged couple for sure, the ones I reckon Maryan was looking for. Who else?”
“Right. Nine o’clock-ish?”
“On the dot.”
- 29 -
When I returned the next morning Grogan was sitting exactly where I’d left him 12 hours earlier.
“Morning,” he grunted.
I’d brought coffee and a selection of so-called breakfast bars. He selected one and examined it carefully as if it might suddenly explode, then peeled off the wrapper and sank his teeth in.
“Anything?” I asked, nodding over at the house.
“Five-thirty this morning, just getting light a young bloke came out the front door. I tried to get a photo but it’s well ... phones for phoning in my book and I messed up. He was bent in half, clutching his guts, zig-zagged over towards the car then threw up like a real pro.”
Grogan wasn’t able to describe him that well having only seen him in a 90 degrees position. Fair hair, was all he could give me.
“Why so sure he was young?”
“The way he hurried, even though he was doubled up. A middle-aged male and female came to the door, same people you saw, I reckon. And they just ... watched. When he’d finished they all went back inside, but the puker was in a bad way.”
I tried to read what I could into Bill’s account of the incident. They were adversaries, the boy and the middle-aged couple. Friends would’ve gone up close to the boy, offered comfort. They wouldn’t have just watched. Then there was the manner of their watching. Were they pleased, worried, or simply checking? Grogan had nothing to offer on that.
Not that it mattered, because just as we were about to bid each other farewell the front door of the house opened again and we turned our binoculars on it. The boy emerged, not so much clutching his stomach as staggering his way, in a haze of weakness, towards the car, though God knows why he didn’t throw up in the bathroom sink like the rest of us do. It occurred to me that maybe he didn’t have the strength to climb the stairs, but in that case why not just... Speculation ended when the boy collapsed onto all fours and began to crawl. A few moments later his knees gave way and he vomited where he lay.
The couple came out of the house, went over to him. They stood either side and exchanged a few words, after which the man hauled the boy to his feet and they placed an arm round each of their shoulders. And that’s when I recognised the spiky hair. I’d seen him raking up leaves at Wotton House, the day I’d visited Edith Barrowman. Just half a glance, which is why I hadn’t recognised him at Abbeville as he locked the Transit. Worse still, if he wasn’t a gardener but someone playing that role, maybe Edith Barrowman, in spite of her rounded vowels and impeccable BBC credentials, wasn’t a housekeeper...
With his feet trailing, his head lolling down in front of him, the couple dragged him back into the house.
“Christ, he looks half dead,” said Grogan.
I nodded. “You up for it?”
I didn’t need to elaborate. We bagged up our stuff and headed across the field towards the house.
We chose a point in the hedge that seemed easy to break through, climbed over the wood and wire fence and onto Jericho Road. This would be no ordinary house call, from a police point of view, no detail would be sent round to the back door to pre-empt a suspect making a run for it. We dumped our gear and I knocked on the door. A copper’s knock. Four or five raps loud enough to put those inside on edge.
The man opened the door eighteen inches and regarded us from the shadows. A handsome face, black hair greying at the sides into distinguished middle-age, eyes flicking from one to the other of us, settling on me when I spoke.
“May we come in?”
“It isn’t convenient, I’m afraid. “If you would...”
But by this time I’d pushed at the door and he’d side-stepped to avoid being hit by it. We entered and Grogan hooked the door closed with his foot, eyes firmly on the man. We found ourselves in the main, the only room of the house. The place had been pulled apart in the late eighties, early nineties, walls removed in keeping with a fashion of open plan living. The stairs to the first floor rose from the middle of the room and a kitchen was beyond. No door. The woman was standing in the archway to it, turned into stone by our entrance. Their obvious fear would help to get the answers I needed quickly.
“Mr and Mrs Kashani?”
The woman came through from the kitchen, went and stood near her husband.
“Doctor and doctor,” he said, calmly asserting their pride.
He so badly wanted to know how I’d come by his name, probably sensing that at the end of my explanation would lay news of his daughter. He was certainly right about that, but I didn’t want to change the subject so dramatically. It was changed anyway by a groan from a sofa in a darkened corner of the room as someone I recognised emerged from a comatose state and almost immediately fell back into it.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name is Jean-Pierre,” Kashani said.
“Surname?”
“Duchemin.”
It didn’t even sound like a gardener, never mind the leaf raker I’d seen at Wotton House, though no doubt in France there are some with even grander names than Jean-Pierre Duchemin. I went over to him and looked down.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s dying,” said Kashani, with a matter-of-fact sigh.
I turned to him and quietly snapped, “What?”
“He’s dying.”
“Why? What’s wrong with him?”
“He has anthrax.”
I didn’t want to sound like a broken record and ask him to repeat it. The steady gaze was weighing me up, but behind the eyes, the controlled demeanour I thought I saw a desperate man, couple, trying to decide if I was friend or foe. I glanced over at Grogan. No change in his bearing, despite the word anthrax and all its implications having hi-jacked the conversation.
“How did he ... catch anthrax?” I asked.
Kashani shrugged and carried on trying to make his mind up about me. Always include the woman if your want the truth, some old desk sergeant had once said to me. They may tell you a lie but nine times out of ten it’s written in neon wrinkles across their foreheads that that’s what they’re doing. Maybe it called for another learned paper.
“Aren’t you at risk? Have you been inoculated?” I asked her.
“There is a vaccine, of sorts. Untested on humans. We have both had it.”
“What about us?!” I said. “Are you both fucking mad...?”
Kashani smiled, amused by my sudden panic. We’d barged our way in here, without so much as a by your leave, never mind the health risks.
“It is not contagious,” his wife assured us. “You cannot pass it one person to another. It is not the common cold.”
“So, is this ... something you
cooked up in the brand new laboratory?”
That was something else I wouldn’t have known about. I pointed to a door in the corner of the room. “Does that lead down to it?”
Kashani’s wife went up to him and they exchanged a sentences in Arabic.
“I’d rather you didn’t do that!” I said.
Kashani apologised immediately. He could see I wasn’t a good man to lie to and the last thing he wanted to do was upset me.
“My wife says you seem to know so much, but not everything. We should, as you say here, put our cards on the table?”
I had the highest card of all, the murder of their daughter, but I didn’t want them to see it just yet. Once told there’d be no return to my line of questioning, at least for a day or two. I nodded at his suggestion and sat down on a straight back chair, raffia seated, the straw fraying onto the carpet. Why a detail like that should grab my attention, I can’t explain.
The Kashanis sat side by side on a padded pew, Grogan hovered on the edge of proceedings, seated but leaning forward. He had the Glock with him. He kept checking that his anorak was loose enough for him to reach if need be.
“Your friend over there, Jean-Pierre,” he asked Kashani. “How long has he got?”
“First, he is not my friend. Second? Two days.”
I’d met some nutters in my time, most of them with an original line and Kashani’s was to be another first.
“Are you trying not to say that you killed him?” I asked.
“I am playing for time, Mr...?”
“Hawk. Did you kill him?”
“Playing for time. And to save other lives.”
That would have been a good point at which to tell him about Maryan, to bring him down to earth with a full body slam but he was anxious to justify any crime he might be accused of. I can remember the ensuing conversation word for word, just as I can most confessions I’ve heard. In telling his story he drifted down so many backwaters that by the end, an hour later, I’d been forced to condense it for my own clarity and, eventually, to cope with D.C.I. Finchum’s short attention span.
The Kashanis had been bio-chemists in Syria, in a research institute in Aleppo, but they’d refused to turn their skills to medical weaponry. They were given what amounted to a do or die choice by the regime and they left for Turkey the same night the ultimatum was given.
They weren’t sure how it had happened but within days of leaving Syria they were offered safe passage to the U.K. where surely, they believed, their refugee status would be recognised. They were taken from Abbeville to Thame, from there to an attic close by where an entirely knew proposition was put to them. A Frenchman, Monsieur Leveque, asked if they would ‘make and oversee the delivery of weapons grade chemical’ to three specific targets, executives in N.A.O.C - the North African Oil Corporation. Taken aback, to put it mildly, but grateful for having been brought to freedom, they refused. Only to be told by Leveque that their daughter, Maryan, had been kidnapped. When the Kashanis performed this one favour she would be brought to this country and re-united with them.
In a diabolical cleft stick they allowed their intellects to kick in. To play for time, as Kashani had put it. To co-operate, they would need a laboratory which he would design, most of its features unnecessary, including the triple door security. It was built, right there in the cellar of this house in Jericho Road.
“And your ... weapon of choice was anthrax?” I’d asked. “How ... how?”
I gestured down to the cellar and he could see that I was at a loss, believing perhaps that anthrax could be cooked up like crystal meth or a dozen other drugs.
Kashani assured me that no cooking was ever done. There was no need. After an attack in 2001 in the United States, a hundred or more vials of anthrax spores were gathered up and destroyed. Only not all of them. And Kashani knew where some might be found. He’d no idea they would be so readily ‘available’, even for ready cash, but a month later a Russian dolls container arrived at the house with a vial of spores deep inside and was his to work on.
He told Leveque the problem now was two-fold. First to see if what Rollo had been sold was indeed the Ames strain of anthrax, the second was to find a means of delivering it. In 2001 it had been sent by snail mail. There followed several years when all correspondence to vulnerable targets was baked to a crisp before being opened, usually by an underling, but the practise had tailed off. It was unwieldy, expensive, open to human error and heat treating suspicious packages had often proved disastrous, with a dozen recorded explosions. A convincing person to person letter was still the best way of reaching a target.
Ten days ago, Rollo came to the house and spoke privately to Kashani and made a diabolical suggestion. To prove if the anthrax was the real McCoy why not test it on Duchemin?
Rollo was apologetic. He hadn’t wanted the Kashanis to be pressured. He’d spent twenty years on this ‘project’, another year would’ve made little difference. But he was being pushed by family. His sister, his wife, other more distant relatives. And Duchemin was an aimless, worthless, replaceable, he suggested, whose disappearance wouldn’t effect anyone. Unlike Kashani’s daughter.
Using Duchemin as a guinea pig wouldn’t be easy. For a start he didn’t receive any mail and were he suddenly to receive a birthday card at the house and open it, God knows who else would be affected. However, Kashani’s wife had noticed that Jean-Pierre, whose job they supposed was to guard them in some way, left the house most evenings and drove off, probably into Oxford. To a club, to a bar, they couldn’t say, only that he came home around midnight, usually drunk. Before he set off, nine times out of ten he would spread a line of cocaine on the dashboard of his car, snort it and drive away. He kept a few ‘twists’ she called them in the glove compartment. If they could add anthrax spores to one of them, the inevitable would follow. They did so one night, in the security of the lab, and replaced the twist in the car. Three days later Duchemin revealed the first signs of having contracted the disease.
“As maybe did a dozen others?” I said. “People who drove in the car, people he met at this club or bar?”
He nodded. “It was a risk I had to take.
I then did, or more correctly didn’t do, something of which I will be ashamed for the rest of my days. I’ve consigned it to the bin marked lesser of two evils, but it doesn’t sit comfortably there. I didn’t tell them their daughter was dead. Indeed, I made it seem that she was still alive and no matter how many ways I justify it, it remains one of cruellest things imaginable to inflict on a parent. False hope.
“I saw your daughter a few weeks ago. She’s well.”
Grogan didn’t flick an eye, just kept his eyes firmly on Mrs Kashani’s reaction. She dropped her head to her hands and screwed up her eyes in relief and gratitude.
“Thank you, thank you....” she whispered.
Her husband was not so easily fobbed off. “You know where she is, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Held by these men? Where?”
“In the same attic you were.”
I stared straight at him and he stared back, each of us doubting the other. He blinked first.
“How did she get there? How did they find her?”
“She came looking for you, I believe.”
He wanted more but his wife reached out to calm him, suggesting that he be grateful for small mercies.
Kashani turned away from her, back to me.
“Looking for us?” he said. “So like her, so like her.”
“Help us to catch these men, you’ll be re-united.”
I tried to persuade myself that in some mystic sense it was the truth. It was a shameful lie and I still curl up inside whenever I think of it.
- 30 -
Grogan had thrown his absurdly small car into a field behind an unruly hedge about a mile down Jericho Road. As we walked towards it, we must have made a double-act of a sight, two middle-aged men, the one with a sports bag stepping behind the other shouldering a pin
k rucksack whenever a car passed. He’d said he would ‘drop me off’ at Beech Tree and when I questioned his lack of sleep he brushed it aside, saying he was like a carthorse. He could sleep standing up. Maybe that explained his passivity back at the house. Or maybe he was recoiling from the lie I’d told the Kashanis.
He knew why I’d done it, even if he didn’t say so. I had to give doctor and doctor Kashani a reason for putting in play what I had in mind. They’d said yes all the way when I’d outlined it to them, believing it would reunite them with their daughter. By morning would clarity have kicked in and warned them of the possibility of being tried at least for manslaughter of Jean-Pierre, maybe for murder? Would they still be there?
My other concern was anthrax. Jean-Pierre had ingested spores of it in his evening line of cocaine, and meticulous though the Kashanis had been in doctoring the ‘twist’ in the security of the lab, they’d lost control the moment Duchemin opened it and heaved it up his nose. Had anyone else been in the car with him that night, had a trace of it fallen on his jacket and been carried in to whatever bar, club, restaurant he’d visited? That was the gamble Kashani had taken and I was about to conspire with.
Grogan and I had given the car a wide berth when we’d left but we knew the situation required more than a sides-step and cautious glances. It needed reporting to the government’s Health and Safety Executive, directly or via local police. They would descend on the place, seal the car, take it away and bake it to dust. They’d spray the house with chemicals`that would take the plaster off the wall, turn carpets to powder, the furniture to ashes.
And long before they’d completed the task the Leveques would have moved on, found other ways to blackmail the NAOC. That was the purpose of the three targeted deliveries, I was certain. See how easily we killed these three? Next time the whole board, the whole workforce from Joe Bloggs to the company president. Unless we receive our billion dollar compensation. We’ve been down the legal routes and reached a score of dead ends. Now watch us do it a different way.
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 19