Cold, Cold Heart

by Christine Poulson

  Daniel was working his way through two sets of lab books, one belonging to Flora Mitchell and the other to Sara McKee. The two scientists had very different styles and there were one or two points where their lab books didn’t quite dovetail. Not significant, but he would need to cross the “t”s and dot the “i”s when he saw Flora and that would need to be soon. He also had to talk to her about the new work, before he could settle down to drafting patent specifications.

  Daniel continued: “Nothing I can’t iron out, when I see Flora Mitchell.”

  “You won’t do that.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Daniel stared at him, wondering if he were being sacked. “Is there a problem?”

  “I’ll say there’s a problem. Flora Mitchell has disappeared.”

  “What? Lyle, stop looming over me.” Daniel got up from his desk. “Sit down. Have a cup of coffee and tell me what’s happened.”

  “I blame myself,” Lyle grumbled, as he did what Daniel had suggested. “My instinct told me something was wrong and I took my eye off the ball. I’ve been in the States talking to investors and only got back to the UK yesterday; I was in London this morning. Flora didn’t show. I rang the lab. Emily, she’s the administrator, hadn’t seen or heard from her either. At first she didn’t think anything of it, because she knew Flora had a lot of paperwork to catch up with – a big grant application for one thing – you know how time-consuming they are. So she wasn’t surprised at Flora wanting to hole up for a while and get her head down – and she’s done that before. But Flora should have surfaced by now and she was worried.”

  “Maybe Flora lost track of time?” It was a feeble suggestion and Daniel knew it. An ambitious young scientist miss a meeting that was vital to her career? Hardly!

  “Emily doesn’t think so and neither do I. Not now. I’ve been sending messages to say that she must contact me with the utmost urgency – and nothing: nada, zilch.” Lyle flung himself back in his chair. “No answer at her Cambridge flat, until I got her husband who’s just got back from a lecture tour of Australia. He drove out to their house in Norfolk. She’s not there either and he says that she must have been gone for weeks. Her bed’s not been slept in and the cat was starving. He’s called the police. Her car’s not there. And he says he hasn’t been able to find her laptop either.”

  “Maybe she’s had some kind of breakdown?”

  “Nah, not Flora.”

  “We don’t know for sure that something serious has happened to her,” Daniel pointed out.

  “I do,” Lyle said. “Someone as ambitious and driven as she is doesn’t just drop out of sight for weeks on end.”

  Lyle threw himself back in his chair.

  “Maybe that’s why,” Daniel said. “Sometimes these high-powered types just … burn out.” He spread his hands.

  “Not Flora. I tell you – she’s the last person to have a breakdown. She wasn’t stressed, far from it, she was thrilled at the prospect of more investment, more research. That’s why the alarm bells started ringing when she didn’t show at that meeting and didn’t call in.”

  “Maybe she’s run off with another man – or woman.”

  “I just can’t see it. Flora’s too level-headed. That marriage was all part of it for Flora. I’m not saying that there wasn’t love, but you know, that sort of marriage – it’s kind of like a strategy. All part of the game plan, marrying a successful older man, who can help her in her field.”

  “That’s a bit cynical,” Daniel protested.

  “No, no, it’s not – well, maybe just a little – I guess he started off as her mentor and it grew from there. It was the perfect setup for both of them. And then – he won’t want children, he’s already got them from a previous marriage, so that won’t get in the way of her career. I’ve seen it time and again. She gets support and the connections she needs, he gets an attractive younger wife. Everyone’s a winner.”

  Daniel was surprised. He hadn’t had Lyle pegged as being so alive to the nuances of relationships.

  “Except for the first wife,” he pointed out.

  Lyle grinned. “There is that.”

  “So what’s the next move?”

  He sat up in his chair. “Well…”

  Daniel didn’t like the speculative way that Lyle was looking at him. It suggested that what Lyle was going to ask was a bit of a stretch by anyone’s standards.

  “I’ve told her husband that I urgently need to get hold of any papers Flora was working on – her current lab book in particular – and he said to send someone to Norfolk to pick them up.”

  “Fine. Good. Who are you sending?”

  “Well, I thought… you.”

  “Me?”

  “I can’t go myself – got to meet a big investor in London – and it can’t just be anybody. I need someone who, well, someone who’ll find out what’s going on.”

  “I’m a patent lawyer, Lyle, not a private detective!”

  Lyle leaned forward, clasped hands dangling between his long legs. “It’s a matter of making sure you’ve got the right documentation as well.”

  Daniel looked at him quizzically. “So you’re expecting me to make a round trip of several hours?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Lyle admitted.

  Daniel thought about it. A cross-country drive on a fine spring day would be no hardship.

  “If you want to use a highly qualified patent lawyer as a courier, and are willing to pay, who am I to complain?”

  “Good man.”

  “And after that I’ll have to get hold of Flora’s assistant on the earlier research. What’s her name? Yes, Sara McKee. I’ll need to set up a meeting with her.”

  Lyle grimaced. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Daniel stared at him. “There isn’t another problem, is there? Don’t tell me she’s missing too?”

  “Well, no. Not that, exactly. But she’s not doing research any more. She’s working as a medic on an Antarctic research base. It’s satellite phone or email contact only, I’m afraid.”

  “Which one? Which base?”

  “Wilson.”

  “But that’s where Katie is! What a coincidence!”

  Lyle looked shifty. “Weeell.” He drew the word out.

  So it wasn’t a coincidence.

  Lyle continued: “It was Sara going out there that put the idea in my head and I suggested it to Katie. The atmosphere in the UK’s been pretty toxic for her since she blew the whistle about what had been going on in Honor’s lab – and I felt some responsibility for that. It was thanks to me that she got involved. I thought it might do her good to get away. And then when she did decide to apply to BAS, I gave her a storming reference – she deserved it.”

  CHAPTER 14

  ANTARCTICA

  “Katie? Katie?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here!”

  “Oh, wow, you could be in the next room!” Rachel said.

  “Reception varies quite a lot. How are you?” Katie asked. “How did you get on with the consultant?”

  The tiny pause told Katie all she needed to know.

  Rachel said, “It’s bad news, I’m afraid. They’ve had to stop the new therapy. The blood test showed that it’s affecting her liver.”

  Katie had been afraid of this. Some patients did develop problems with liver toxicity. No one knew why exactly. It might be some kind of allergic reaction.

  “So you’re back on the old regime of infusions five nights a week?” Katie said.

  “It was so wonderful not to have to do that. And now of course it’s all the harder, going back to it. Before, we just accepted it and Chloe’d never known anything else. It wasn’t easy, but it was as much part of her everyday life as brushing her teeth.”

  “How has she taken it?”

  “Badly. Just how badly I only realized today, when Miss Marley, Chloe’s class teacher, asked to see me. Actually I’d been planning to see her anyway. Chloe had burst into tears a couple of times and when I tried to find out what
had upset her, she said that one of her friends had been mean to her. Something about being called ‘a big fat bum’ and a drawing being torn up.”

  “Oh, poor Chloe!”

  “No, wait. So I went in at lunchtime today. I like Miss Marley. She’s tiny – it’s as if she’s the right size for teaching little ones. But she’s got an air of authority about her. I had to squeeze myself into one of those little chairs. I do wonder how larger parents manage when they come to talk about their children.”

  Katie could tell that she was reluctant to come to the point. “So what did she say?”

  “She said that Chloe’s a lovely little girl, bright as a button, but she was well aware that she had a lot to cope with… I could see that she was choosing her words carefully. And then she said there’d been one or two incidents… I asked if this was to do with what Chloe had told me about her friend being mean to her. Miss Marley looked thoughtful and she said, ‘Is that what Chloe told you? I’m afraid it was the other way round. It was Chloe that called a Harriet “a big fat bum” and she tore up her drawing, too.’ I couldn’t believe it. My Chloe!”

  “Oh Rachel!”

  “I know,” Rachel wailed. “I was mortified, Katie, just mortified. My child, a bully!”

  “Oh, hardly that. It was probably just a one-off thing.”

  “Miss Marley said that it wasn’t an isolated incident. There was a pattern emerging of Chloe getting frustrated and upset and taking it out on Harriet. And that’s even though she likes Harriet, Harriet’s her best friend. She’s moved Chloe so that they’re not sitting together. And the lunchtime supervisors are keeping an eye on the pair of them in the playground.”

  Katie sighed. “Poor little soul. It must be hard. What a pity the new drug didn’t work. One day there’ll be a cure for DBA.”

  “Yes, but when?”

  That was the question. Would it come before Chloe was a teenager and the day came when she would have to manage those overnight infusions herself? It was a tough regime for a young person. Those who couldn’t cope risked dying of cardiac failure.

  Katie knew better than to hold out false hope. Her own research had only shown that a potential therapy might work in vitro, outside a human body. What worked in a Petri dish might not work in a human being. There’d have to be more experiments using mice and then primates and then human trials. A cure was still a long way off.

  The best chance remained a bone marrow transplant from a suitable donor and the best way of producing a suitable donor was for Rachel and Dan to have another baby. Rachel had once mentioned that she had been very ill after Chloe’s birth and another baby wasn’t on the cards, but she hadn’t gone into details and Katie hadn’t asked. But now, somehow the distance seemed to help and the intimacy of talking on the phone, and Katie heard herself say, “What a pity you couldn’t have another baby.”

  She heard Rachel sigh. “It was a fluke that I even had Chloe. I had endometriosis and I didn’t think I could get pregnant.”

  “You have still got your ovaries – and your uterus?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Well, have you thought of IVF?”

  “Even if I did get pregnant – well, it wouldn’t be straightforward. After Chloe was born I had a post-partum haemorrhage and nearly died. They say it could happen again.”

  “Wow, that must have been scary!” Katie thought back to her medical training and her time on the obstetrics unit. Yes, the chances of post-partum haemorrhage recurring in a subsequent pregnancy were high, but forewarned was forearmed and the risks could be managed.

  She said, “It wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous the next time round. There’s so much they can do.”

  There was a silence. “That’s enough about me,” Rachel said, closing down the discussion. “We’ll get back into the old routine and hopefully things will settle down with Chloe. How are things going with you?”

  Now it was Katie’s turn to hesitate. “Do you know, I’m not entirely sure.”

  She told Rachel about the wrecked game of Monopoly. “We haven’t played it since.”

  “Perhaps it was an accident?”

  “Maybe, but no one’s owned up. And it doesn’t explain why the token, the little penguin, went missing. We really looked hard for it. Swept the floor and everything. And then there was the fish.”

  “The fish?”

  “Ernesto missed some from the fridge. Then a couple of days ago, Sara noticed a bad smell in the surgery. It got worse and worse and finally we did a thorough search and we found the fish hidden in a filing cabinet. It’s not very nice, knowing that someone’s sneaking around the base doing things like that and not knowing who it is.”

  They chatted for a while, then Rachel had to go and collect Chloe from after-school club.

  Katie pondered what Rachel had said. There was something she didn’t quite understand here. The haemorrhage must have been a terrifying experience, but was it one that would put Rachel off permanently, when the stakes – the chance of a cure for Chloe – were so very high? This didn’t fit with what she knew of Rachel. Surely she was the kind of woman who could get over something like this for the sake of her child. She was sure there was something Rachel wasn’t telling her.

  CHAPTER 15

  NORTH NORFOLK

  The drive to Norfolk gave Daniel a chance to think about what Rachel had told him about the incident at school. They had decided to talk to Chloe about it that evening. The pain of knowing that there is nothing you can do to heal your sick child… If only they could have had another baby. He reminded himself that even then there would have been only a one in four chance of a match. Unless they had IVF and embryo selection. And he knew that Rachel had a problem with the idea of discarding healthy embryos because they weren’t a match. That was all academic anyway, because no way could they risk another pregnancy. But there was another possibility, something he had kept at a distance and not allowed himself to think too much about. Now it came sidling into view. Surrogacy. It was much more common now than when Chloe had been born. In fact you read about it in the papers all the time. Perhaps now was the time to consider it. At any rate there could be no harm in doing some research into the possibilities. He silenced the little voice that said, “Just because something is being done all the time doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  The satnav told him he had arrived at his destination. As he turned into the drive he saw a little Georgian cottage – a gem of a place – with a sweep of lawn leading down to a stream under a brilliant blue sky. Gold and white and purple crocuses were scattered under the trees that lined the bank. A plum tree bore stars of white blossom.

  They certainly weren’t short of money. But of course Michael Cameron must be in his late fifties at least, at the height of a distinguished career, and besides he’d probably bought this before the property boom.

  He parked by the front door with its original cobweb fanlight, got out, and rang the doorbell.

  It was some moments before the door was opened by a craggy-faced man wearing a tracksuit. He had a couple of days’ worth of stubble and the hair that ringed the dome of his bald head was tousled. The man looked haggard, there was no other word for it.

  He said, “You’ll be… Sorry… Lyle did say…” He had a deep, rather actorly voice.

  Daniel put out his hand. “Daniel Marchmont.”

  The man took the proffered hand, but hesitantly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with it. “Michael Cameron. Come in, do.”

  His hand was clammy and Daniel resisted an urge to get out a handkerchief and wipe his own hand. Daniel caught a whiff of something – whisky? – on his breath.

  “Let’s have some coffee, shall we?” Cameron said. “I need something.”

  Daniel followed Cameron through a hall that led to the back of the house and into a cast-iron conservatory that looked out over the garden. Cameron left him there and went off to make the coffee. Daniel sat down in one of the Lloyd Loom chairs and looked around. Ther
e were terracotta pots – empty at the moment, because this was the summer house. A vine had been trained up the outside and sunlight filtered through to make shifting patterns on the flagstoned floor.

  Cameron came back with a tray bearing mugs and a cafetière. There was even a jug of milk and a sugar bowl. He put the tray down on a glass-topped table and sat down opposite Daniel. He pressed the plunger and poured out the coffee.

  Perhaps the act of making it had steadied him, allowed him to get a grip on himself. His manner had changed. The hesitancy had gone. “I rang the police before you came. They didn’t have any news.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “I’m worried sick,” Cameron admitted.

  “When was the last time you saw Flora?”

  “It was the day I flew to Melbourne. She planned to come out here the next day and I know she did because she rang me when she got here.”

  “And then you didn’t hear from her for…”

  “I didn’t hear from her at all after that. But I didn’t expect to. We don’t have a landline here or Wi-Fi and mobile coverage is terrible.” He rubbed his hand over his chin. “And then there was the time difference. We agreed to meet up back in Cambridge.”

  Daniel tried to imagine having the sort of arrangement with Rachel where they’d be out of touch for several weeks. He always rang home once if not twice a day, when he was away. Of course, Flora and Cameron didn’t have children and that made a difference, but still…

  Cameron guessed what he was thinking. “Look, no point in beating about the bush. Flora’s twenty years younger than me. Didn’t want to be breathing down her neck all the time. But now – God, I wish I’d got her to check in with me –”

  Daniel didn’t know what to say. He realized that Cameron was probably a bit drunk.

  There was a chirruping sound and a cat emerged from the house. Cameron patted his knee and it jumped up. It was a strange-looking beast. Great hunks of hair seemed to be missing, as if someone had attacked it with a pair of shears.

  Cameron saw Daniel looking and explained. “Had to get the vet to cut out burrs and knotted fur. He was in a terrible state. He must have been here on his own for weeks, poor old boy.” He stroked the cat’s head. “That’s how I know something must have happened to Flora. She’d never have left him to fend for himself.”