Cold, Cold Heart

by Christine Poulson

“No.” Justin shook his head. “He’d walk up behind her so she didn’t see the knife.”

  “So like this then?” Graeme positioned himself behind Katie’s chair.

  “She’d wonder what he was doing,” Katie said. “She’d start to turn round…”

  “The chair swivels,” Justin said. “He could’ve just put an arm round her and pinned her back and brought the knife round to stab her with an upward motion.”

  “Does that fit with what you saw of the wound?” Graeme asked Katie.

  Katie saw it in her mind’s eye. Sara puzzled, wondering what was going on, and then the arm across her chest, and the blow. It would all have been over so quickly.

  “It could have been that way. It probably was that way. And once she’d been stabbed, she probably didn’t live more than a minute or two.”

  “Maybe five minutes for the whole thing?” Graeme said.

  Katie nodded. “If that. Less, I’d think.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then he bolts the door in case someone else happens to come along,” Justin said.

  “No,” said Katie. “First he goes and gets her coat and mukluks from the kit room. Then he comes back and dresses her.”

  They were all silent. Katie seemed almost to see a shadowy fourth figure there in the room with them. Whose was the face that belonged to that figure? Could there really be someone on the base who would do something like this?

  “So how long?” Graeme asked.

  “It wouldn’t have been easy,” she said. “Ten minutes? And don’t forget he has to get all his outdoor gear on too. So I’d add another five minutes to that.”

  “It would take hardly any time at all to get from the surgery to the exit,” Justin said.

  They went out into the corridor. “We’ll time it,” Graeme said. “He’s carrying her either in his arms or in a fireman’s lift over his shoulders. That’ll slow him down.”

  They walked to the exit.

  “Thirty seconds,” Graeme said. “He has to put her down to open the door. That’d be awkward. And then he has to pick her up again. Then he’s out of the door and out of sight. No one’s seen him and the dangerous bit is over.”

  “I’d say a couple of minutes, tops,” said Justin.

  “But it wasn’t just a question of getting the body outside,” Katie objected. “He had to hide it. That must have taken a while.”

  “Let’s give him fifteen minutes to do that,” Justin said. “Allow a few minutes for him to get to the surgery from the living quarters in the first place. Then after he’d disposed of the body he’d have to get his outdoor gear off and get back to the living quarters. I’d say we’re looking at not less than forty or forty-five minutes for the whole thing.”

  Graeme said, “Let’s not hang about here in the corridor. We’ll go back to the surgery.”

  When they were back there and had pulled up chairs, Katie said, “We are looking for someone physically strong and highly organized.”

  “As for being physically strong, essentially, that’s everyone on base,” Graeme said. “There’s no one here – except you, Katie – who isn’t capable of slinging a body over their shoulder. Isn’t that the case, Katie?”

  She considered. It was true that they were all young, healthy, well-nourished males with good musculature: the weeks of shovelling meltwater had seen to that. Ernesto was the shortest, only an inch or two taller than Katie. But he had a well-developed upper body. Adam had been in pretty good shape before the appendicitis. Alex was both tall and well-built and with his Mountain Rescue experience heaving a body around would presumably be no problem. But Craig was perhaps the fittest of them all and spent a lot of his spare time in the gym. And then there was Nick who was used to going out to the observatory twice a day, which would have built up his stamina. What about Rhys? He was the most sedentary, preferring reading to working out in the gym, but that was only relative. And anyway, how strong did you have to be to employ a fireman’s lift, especially if you were fuelled by adrenaline?

  Katie reluctantly agreed. “No one can be ruled out on physical grounds. But why would anyone want to hurt Sara? It’s just crazy.”

  “Maybe that’s what it is. Crazy,” Justin said.

  Graeme said, “What do you think he used? I mean, what was the weapon?”

  Justin shrugged. “Look around you. The surgery is full of sharp instruments.”

  “That scalpel,” Graeme said. “The one that went missing!”

  Katie felt queasy. “That would do it.”

  “You know what that means,” Graeme said. “It must have been premeditated. The scalpel went missing long before Sara disappeared.”

  “Should we do a search?” Justin asked.

  “Even if we did find it, it probably wouldn’t do much good,” Katie said. “If he had any sense, he’d have put it through the autoclave. That would destroy any traces of DNA. He’d have plenty of opportunity to do that. There’s no lock on the surgery door. People can come and go as they please.”

  Graeme frowned. “That’s something that’s going to have to change. And we’ll also have to put bolts on the pit-room doors.”

  Bolts on the pit-room doors… That really brought it home: the trust that was such an essential part of wintering over had gone.

  Graeme went on, “Katie, I don’t think you should see any patients alone. In fact, I don’t think you should be alone at all, except when you’re in your pit-room with the door bolted.”

  “But how’s that going to work?” Katie protested.

  “One of us will be with you all the time. Me or Justin.”

  “But we’ve got months to go…”

  “I can’t let this go on for months. I was sworn in as a magistrate, remember, when I was appointed base leader. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  CHAPTER 31

  ELY

  “Whatever possessed me to choose red for my cast?” Daniel grumbled. “I must have been spaced out on painkillers. I’ll never hear the last of it in the office.”

  “I like it, Daddy.” Chloe was playing with her Lego on the floor of the sitting room. “You look like Father Christmas.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Daniel was sitting by the window, with his leg up on a stool, his laptop wedged awkwardly on his lap, as he typed one-handed. His left hand looked as if it had been pumped up, like an inflated rubber glove. It was strangely smooth, the knuckles submerged, a fat person’s hand. There were puncture wounds where the car door had locked onto it. He still couldn’t figure out how that could have happened: it was one of those freak accidents, something to do with the force with which the door swung shut and his hand being in exactly the right – or wrong – place. He’d been told that the bruising wouldn’t come until the swelling went down.

  His leg and hand ached, but nothing that ibuprofen and paracetamol couldn’t deal with. He felt exhausted and was sleeping a lot. His thought processes had slowed down. He kept forgetting what he had been about to say and leaving things half done. They had warned him at the hospital that it would take a while for the effects of shock to wear off.

  It was Saturday now and he planned to go back into the office on Monday.

  He and Rachel hadn’t talked about their argument, but they had been gentle with each other. They both knew that Daniel was lucky not to be more badly injured or dead, and other things paled into insignificance beside that. His thoughts kept returning to what had happened – he felt again the horror, the helplessness, as the car, like some monstrous predatory creature, dragged him along. So quickly life could change utterly, could “turn on a dime” as he’d heard Lyle once say. What scared him most was his own lack of judgment…

  “Dan?” Rachel broke into his thoughts. “What shall I do with this suit? There are grass stains on the trousers, but there’s not much wrong with the jacket.”

  “Throw the trousers away,” Daniel said with a shudder.

  “That seems a shame,” said his p
ractical wife, “considering what the suit cost. We’ll have it dry-cleaned and then we’ll see.”

  She started turning out the pockets.

  “Why have you got some of Chloe’s Lego here? Did you put this in Daddy’s pocket, Chloe?”

  Chloe got up and came over to look. “No. Oh look, it’s a little man. Can I have him, Daddy?”

  Daniel stared at the Lego figure, then remembered. Kieran had given it to him. “Of course you can, sweetie.”

  That reminded him. He still hadn’t managed to track down Alistair Johnson-Marsh. It was strange that he didn’t seem to have any presence on social media, no Twitter or Facebook account.

  Chloe began to chortle. “Silly Daddy! This isn’t Lego. Well, it is Lego,” she amended. “But it isn’t as well.”

  “What are you talking about?” Daniel asked.

  She came over with the little man. She pulled him apart and held up a piece of red Lego. Daniel saw a sliding catch underneath. Chloe pushed it with her thumb and a piece of plastic shot out of the end.

  “It’s a memory stick. I know, because Nathan’s daddy has one and Nathan got it mixed up with his real Lego.” Chloe could hardly control her mirth. “Nathan’s got loads and loads and loads of Lego, a ginormous lot of Lego, and it took them ages and ages to find it. Look, it’s got this little curved thing on the end. That’s how you know. Nathan got into trouble,” she added more soberly.

  “You’re a clever girl,” Daniel said. “Do you mind if I have this back? I’ll buy you some more.”

  “Well…” Chloe narrowed her eyes as she assessed the situation, clearly gauging how much she could milk it for. Then she thought better of it. “You can have it for free, Daddy, because you’ve had an accident.”

  Rachel said, “Chloe’s saving her pocket money for a ‘Mighty Dinosaur’ kit.”

  Chloe’s face lit up. “Francesca’s got one. You can make a D. Rex. It’s cool. Scary!”

  “I think you mean T. Rex,” Daniel said. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a fiver towards it, Chloe.”

  “Yah!” Chloe was delighted. She had enjoyed knowing something that Mummy and Daddy didn’t know, but she wasn’t interested in what might be on the memory stick: it would just be boring grown-up stuff. She went back to building her tower.

  Daniel slipped the memory stick into his laptop. There was only one document on it. It was called “Virus-mediated apoptosis”. Daniel clicked on it. “Artificial Virus-Induced Apoptosis: A Paradigm Shift in Cancer Treatment,” he read, “by Kieran Langstaffe and Alistair Johnson-Marsh for submission to The European Journal of Molecular Oncology.” It was followed by an abstract that began, “Apoptosis can be caused by mitochondrial stress…” It was the second sentence that made him sit up: “We have used a self-assembled virus capsid decorated with monoclonal antibodies against the SKBR-3 human breast cancer cell line, to deliver cytochrome c-enriched buffer into the tumour cells with a resultant 100% death rate.” He read on. When he reached the end and saw the date, he leaned back in his seat and gave a long, low whistle.

  He reached for his mobile phone and called Lyle. Lyle answered on the third ring.

  “I’ve got something here that you need to see,” Daniel told him.

  * * *

  “OK, so, let’s get this out in the open,” Lyle said. “You’re thinking there’s a possibility that Flora got hold of this research and passed it off as her own?”

  Daniel had sent the contents of the Lego memory stick to Lyle and Lyle had been sufficiently concerned to drive up from London to talk it over. Rachel had made them some tea and then taken Chloe out to the playground.

  Daniel said, “Well, one team was working on breast cancer cells, the other was using lung cancer cells, but the actual therapy is remarkably similar. I don’t know what to make of it. It could just be coincidence. That does happen.”

  “Sure it does. But you’re not easy in your mind, are you?”

  “It’s what Sara said. Apparently Flora just came in one morning and said why don’t we try delivering excess cytochrome c directly into the cytoplasm and seeing if it triggers apoptosis. It wasn’t the most obvious development of what they’d been doing up to then. I noticed that when I went through the lab books. In fact I’d say it was pretty left field. Sara said so, that it was a leap of the imagination on Flora’s part, a flash of intuition.”

  “And don’t we all know instances of that?”

  Daniel knew that was true. Intuition and imagination played a far greater part in scientific research than non-scientists might imagine. You had to be able to envisage a solution before you could test it to see if it worked.

  “There’s no evidence that Flora pinched the work of these other guys,” Lyle went on. “I’d go further: I don’t see how she could have. Their work was never published and she didn’t know them.”

  Of course Lyle wanted to believe that. A charge of plagiarism was the last thing he wanted muddying the waters while he was negotiating with potential investors.

  Lyle went on. “You said, this guy, this Kieran, he’s got a screw loose? Could he have seen Flora’s paper when it was published and concocted this from what he’d read?”

  Daniel thought of what he had seen at the house in southwest London: the pages and pages of crazy diagrams; the rambling Lego constructions.

  “I can’t see him doing that,” he said. “This is all too logically constructed. I mean, it’s even fully footnoted! And then the date at the end. It fits with the dates when Kieran and this other guy, this Alistair, were actually doing their research. It does seem that this pre-dates Flora’s research.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  “I could go to see Kieran again, but I don’t know how much joy I’ll get there.”

  “And this other guy, this Alistair Johnson-Marsh?”

  “Vanished without trace, as far as I can see. I’ll go on looking for him. And I’ll do a detailed comparison of the lab books and this article.”

  Lyle was scrolling down the article on his iPad.

  “You know, something puzzles me,” he said. “If this is the real McCoy, why wasn’t it published?”

  Daniel stared at Lyle. Yes, why hadn’t it been published? “You’re onto something there. Perhaps they intended to submit it, but didn’t actually do it.”

  “That’s one possibility. But there’s another.”

  “That they tried to publish it and it was turned down.”

  They looked at each other. Scientific publications operate a system of anonymous peer review. If this paper had been submitted to a journal an editor should have sent it out to two readers, specialists in the same field.

  “You’re thinking it might have been sent out to Flora?” Daniel asked.

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “She wasn’t sufficiently senior at the time, surely?”

  Lyle thought about that. “No, no, you’re right. It’d be a different matter now, but back then… no. It wouldn’t have been her.”

  Daniel said, “But we are seriously thinking that Flora somehow got her hands on this paper?”

  “Well, if she did… it’d be a prime example of the Matthew effect.”

  “The Matthew effect?”

  “Matthew 25:29 to be precise. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ In other words the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” He noticed the look of surprise on Daniel’s face. “Oh, yeah, I know my Bible. And it’s a term used in sociology. It refers to issues of status and to cumulative advantage of economic capital. That’s exactly what’s happened to these two research teams. With her publication Flora went from strength to strength – more research grants, so more money and more status, leading to yet more money and status.”

  “I see. While the exact opposite happened to Kieran. When he didn’t manage to get his research published, his career went into a nosedive, he lost what little he had. He
ended up with nothing – less than nothing, actually.”

  Lyle said, “I think I’ll have a word with the editor of The European Journal of Molecular Oncology. I know the guy as it happens. I’ll see if I can find out if it was submitted and if it was, if I can get a clue as to who the readers were.”

  There was the ping of an incoming text on his phone. “Better get this,” he said. “It’s my assistant. What the… It just says, ‘BBC Breaking News’.”

  Daniel called up the site on his laptop in time for them to hear: “…her family have been informed. Her body was discovered close to the main platform. It is thought that she got disorientated in poor visibility. Dr Sara McKee was the base doctor…”

  Daniel and Lyle stared at each other.

  Daniel said, “We knew that there wasn’t really any hope, didn’t we? There couldn’t be.”

  “Yeah, not quite the same as knowing that her body’s actually been found, is it? What’s going on, Daniel? Everyone involved in this research – both sets of scientists – everyone is either dead, or missing, or out of their tree!”

  CHAPTER 32

  ANTARCTICA

  Everyone had gathered in the dining room, Adam included, and was waiting for Graeme. Katie was sitting off to the side, along with Justin, a little apart from the others. No one was talking – it was as if they had guessed that more bad news was about to be announced. In the meantime she tried not to meet anyone’s eye.

  But she couldn’t help stealing sideways glances. It had never occurred to her to be afraid of anyone on the base. Now, looking at Craig’s broad shoulders and huge hands, she was struck all over again by the sheer size of him. He wouldn’t have a problem overpowering a woman. But wasn’t that true of all the men on the base? None of them, except for Justin, could be ruled out on grounds of physical incapacity. And actually there wouldn’t have been a lot of strength needed to kill Sara, taken by surprise as she would have been. Katie could have done it, though lifting or dragging the body would have been beyond her.

  So it was more a question of who would be psychologically capable. Because it must have taken a lot of nerve, not only the actual killing, but removing the body and concealing it. The killer had chosen their moment: a day when the normal routine was suspended and people were full of food and drink, not keeping track of each other. All the same it couldn’t help but be risky. It was hard to believe that any of these men was capable of that. They had all been vetted and had psychological screening. But it must be one of them and she felt a chill. Whoever it was knew, too, that part of their plan had failed. He would be afraid that Katie had examined Sara’s body and could guess what Graeme was going to say.