by Kate Rhodes
The medic I’d spoken to before was waiting in the corridor. She had that aura of unnatural calm that comes from hauling patients back from the brink every day. She explained that Riordan was being treated with anti-viral drugs and antibiotics to increase her chances. The doctor had moved on to the next room by the time Burns and Pete Hancock appeared.
‘How is she?’ Don asked.
‘Better, but not fully conscious.’ I turned to Pete. ‘You can buy me that coffee at last.’
‘Why do you drink that filth?’ Hancock rolled his eyes. ‘I might. If you give me the diary.’
‘Much good it did me.’
Burns’s phone rang loudly as I fished it from my bag. ‘It’ll be the Mail, Alice. You’re front-page news.’
‘God help me. I should get back to Mikey.’
‘We’ll get you a coffee from somewhere.’
‘What’s wrong with a nice glass of water?’ Pete muttered.
I watched them stroll towards a drinks machine, arguing about their choice of beverage. When I turned back, Adele Novak had appeared at the other end of the corridor. For a second I wondered if she had a question about the case, although she was more likely to be seeking reassurance that her boss was recovering. I walked towards her, but the look she gave me was impatient.
‘I need to see Clare.’
‘She’s not conscious yet. You might want to come back later.’
Her gaze was trance-like. ‘Are you trying to stop me?’
‘Is something wrong, Adele?’
‘Get out of my way.’
When her hand dropped to her pocket, the scene spun into slow motion. In a split second I understood her passionate work ethic, her father affected by tainted blood, all those house calls to the dying. I screamed for help, then heard Burns’s heavy footsteps thundering down the corridor.
‘Get down!’ I shouted the words at the top of my voice.
There was a blur of movement, then Adele’s eyes held mine, charcoal dark, completely focused. I didn’t feel any pain, even though the gun’s blast echoed from the walls, blood pooling at my feet. Nurses scattered from view, then I saw Novak’s hand jerk upwards as another shot rang out. A bloodstain marked her white coat, more bullets ploughing into the ceiling. When I looked back, Hancock was leaning against Clare’s door, eyes losing focus as his legs buckled. Burns had shunted Novak against the wall, her gun clattering to the floor. I knelt beside Pete to use my jacket as a pressure pad on his chest wound, but it was a losing battle. Blood soaked through the fabric, welling between my fingers.
‘You stopped her, Pete. Pretty brave, for a scientist.’ The terror on his face was slowly turning into acceptance. ‘Don’t you dare. Come on, talk to me.’
The red circle spilling from his body kept on expanding. I was so focused on keeping him alive that the shouting and footsteps fell silent; all I could hear was the hiss of his breathing.
‘My wife,’ he murmured. ‘Lizzie.’
‘She’s coming. You’ll be okay, Pete.’
Someone pulled me away. Two doctors were jamming a line into his arm, an oxygen mask over his face. Then he was on a gurney, wheels racing into the distance. My vision blurred then cleared again. I made the mistake of glancing at the blood on my hands, and the ground rocked up to greet me. I didn’t lose consciousness completely, aware of Burns’s voice rasping out a string of swearwords. When I came round, someone had put me in the recovery position, my cheek cold against the lino; Don’s face loomed over me, his grip on my shoulder tight enough to hurt. I insisted on getting to my feet, head still spinning, desperate to check on Mikey. But when I peered through the observation window, he was in the same position as before, still clutching his mother’s hand. I wondered why he was smiling, until I saw that his voice had worked its magic. Clare had finally woken up, her eyes trained on his face as if she couldn’t bear to look away.
59
The doctors wanted me to rest in a treatment room in case of concussion, but I had to see Adele Novak. I leant against the wall of the lift, feeling worse as the floors ticked by.
‘And you call me macho,’ Burns muttered.
‘I fainted, that’s all. I’m perfectly fine.’
‘So why are you shaking?’
The image of Hancock lying at my feet was lodged in my head. He’d been rushed to theatre to have a bullet removed from his collapsed lung.
‘I need to know why,’ I insisted. ‘Then I can rest.’
Novak was in an isolation room, guarded by a couple of uniforms. She was handcuffed to the metal bedframe, bandages taped to her wounded shoulder. The manic glint had left her eyes, her short hair and thin frame making her look as vulnerable as a child. Pain throbbed at the base of my skull as I sat down, but that didn’t matter. I wondered how long her defences would hold out. Silence is always the most powerful trick in a psychologist’s book; used to good effect, it can crack even the hardest nut.
She kept her eyes on the window when she finally spoke. ‘I did it for the victims.’
‘Of tainted blood?’
‘Many of them are already dead.’ Her voice was a low monotone.
‘You father was a victim, wasn’t he? You must have been young when you lost him.’
‘Ten years old. He was a haemophiliac, like all the rest. My mother fell apart after he died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
A burst of hatred crossed her face. ‘Your kind are the worst. You apologise, but do nothing.’
‘Why did you become a doctor?’
‘To help the victims, of course. No one else cares.’
‘But you killed people, Adele.’
‘Just the ones who deserved to die. People with blood illnesses have been experimented on all their lives; the scales are balanced now.’ She seemed calm again, satisfied by her actions.
‘How did you meet Simon?’
‘I went to him for counselling. The grief never goes away.’ She shut her eyes.
‘That’s how you found out he’d received infected blood too?’
She kept her gaze fixed to the wall. ‘Only a liver transplant could save him now.’
‘You fell in love?’
‘He’s too gentle. He lost faith in the end.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I wanted them all. We should have taken the health minister too.’
‘Do you feel any regret?’
There was no hesitation before she shook her head. ‘Simon helped me plan each stage, but he didn’t hurt any of them. It took me days to force the names out of Riordan.’
Her expression was chilling: pride mixed with elation. She would have tortured her victims all over again, given the chance. The shrink in me was fascinated to find out the exact factors that had made her ill, but Burns brought the interview to a close then escorted me from the room. He bullied me into getting a CAT scan, which revealed nothing more than a soft tissue swelling above my left temple.
We were leaving the hospital when the news came about Hancock. Burns’s expression changed as he listened to the phone message.
‘He’s out of theatre,’ he said. ‘The operation went well.’
‘Want to see him?’
‘Tomorrow. His family’s with him now.’
We didn’t say much on the drive back to his flat, mute with tiredness and relief. I was still piecing together the reasons for so much human damage. Adele Novak’s affair with Simon Thorpe had begun a chain reaction a year ago, but I wanted to know why violence had ignited between them like a struck match. I had suspected so many innocent bystanders; people like Roger Fenton and Emma Selby, who had only been offering me help. I made a mental note to call Emma as I’d promised, and give Fenton his in-depth interview. One more piece of the puzzle clicked into place. ‘Another’ in Thorpe’s diary must have been shorthand for A. Novak, the first letters of her name buried in the word, in case his wife happened to look inside. The car eased through traffic on Southwark Bridge Road, autumn leaves turning to paste in the gutter. It would be a relief to get
back to the FPU and give my job the attention it deserved. I pulled out my phone to call Christine, listened to the relief in her voice when she heard that the case was solved.
I felt a pang of homesickness for my clean white rooms when we got back to Burns’s flat, but maybe it would always be like that: the loner in me fighting the part that longed for his company.
‘She won’t even go to jail,’ he said. ‘She’ll end up at Broadmoor.’
‘Not necessarily – she may be perfectly sane. Adele thinks the murders were justified revenge. Falling for someone in the same position as her father triggered all that childhood grief. I’ll assess her tomorrow, then write my recommendation for the court.’
Don raised his hands. ‘Right now I don’t care how sick she is. I want her banged up permanently.’
‘That’s a balanced view, DCI Burns.’
‘Maybe I should quit my job. We could run a pub instead.’
‘You’d be bored senseless.’
‘Not at all. I’d choose a quiet inn, close to the sea.’
I looked at him steadily. ‘I love you, by the way.’
His eyes blinked wider. ‘Run that by me again?’
‘You heard.’
‘At long last. How do you feel?’
‘Shocked, but relieved.’
The smile on his face expanded by another centimetre. When I returned with two glasses of Merlot, he raised a toast. ‘To Morocco. If Pete’s okay, we’re going there before another case hits my desk.’
I kissed him, then headed for the shower. My outfit would have to be thrown away, dark brown blood staining my trousers and the cuffs of my cotton shirt. I scoured myself clean until my skin felt polished. Once I was dressed in fresh jeans and a silk jumper I felt human again. Burns was asleep on his outsized sofa, phone buzzing on the coffee table. I covered it with a cushion to silence the noise. He’d drained his glass of wine, but mine was untouched. The sight of it suddenly made me feel nauseous. It reminded me of the garnet-coloured blood pooling on the floor that afternoon, far too much of the precious substance spilled in the last few weeks. I watched it swirl down the plughole in the kitchen sink, then drank a glass of water slowly, feeling my stomach settle.
Burns was still out for the count. I slipped off his shoes then studied him again, heavy and immovable as a carthorse. Even in sleep, the set of his jaw made him look incapable of backing down, but for once I was too tired to worry about the future. I settled myself beside him, my back cradled against his chest. My last thought was for Mikey, sprinting away to find his mother, the tie between us loosening until he became a speck in the distance. When I fell asleep, no bad dreams disturbed me, my mind wiped clean.
the tainted blood scandal
In the late 1970s, a revolutionary new medicine was developed to treat haemophilia. Made from human blood, Factor Eight seemed like a miracle product, and pharmaceutical companies raced to mass-produce it. They bought donor blood from anyone in the USA prepared to sell it, including habitual drug users and prisoners with infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. The methods used to acquire blood were exposed in Kelly Duda’s powerful film, Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. Contaminated Factor Eight was shipped around the world and given to haemophiliacs, thousands of whom became fatally ill.
Over 4,800 British haemophiliacs were infected with hepatitis C through tainted blood products administered by the NHS. More than 1,200 of this group were also infected with the HIV virus. Since the early 1980s, more than 800 people have died from AIDS, and hundreds more from hepatitis C.
In 1991, under threat of court action for allowing contaminated blood products into the country, the British Government made small ex-gratia payments to the survivors through the Skipton and Macfarlane Trusts on condition that they signed an undertaking never to take further legal action. By this time, many victims had already died of their illnesses. No fault has ever been admitted by either the government or the pharmaceutical companies who supplied the contaminated blood products. In 2009, the government published its response to Lord Archer’s report into the scandal. After a long and bitter battle, the sickest patients now receive annual compensation, far below the national average wage, even though the majority are too ill to work.
The victims’ story is an intensely personal one for me. My husband was given hepatitis C in the early 1980s, and lived with the illness for twenty-five years before undertaking a gruelling six-month course of interferon and ribavirin. It took twenty years for his small compensation to arrive, yet he was one of the lucky ones, finally regaining his health.
I have taken a few small liberties with history to simplify my story. There was no panel of medics and specialists advising the minister for health on compensation, and the campaign group Pure does not exist.
Kate Rhodes, 2016
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my agent Teresa Chris for being such a good friend and excellent shopping companion. My editor Ruth Tross always manages to see far below the surface of my stories, with an unerring eye for accuracy and structure. I remain a huge fan of Nick Sayers, who took me to a lovely pub in Harrogate last year simply to cheer me up, and continues to be the kindest man in publishing. Rebecca Mundy manages to be clever, funny and ridiculously glamorous, all at the same time; thanks for being such a great advocate. Many thanks are also due to Dave Pescod, Miranda Landgraf, Penny Hancock, Sophie Hannah, Killer Women, and the 134 club for their readings and sound advice. Thank you to the staff of the Wellcome Institute for excellent information about the history of blood transfusion. I am also indebted to the staff of the Old Operating Theatre for allowing me to make a night time visit via the fire exit, to check out the terrain by torchlight. This book could not have been written without the help I received from the Haemophilia Society, who gave me clear and detailed information about the tainted blood scandal. Thanks as ever to DC Laura Shaw for her excellent guidance on police matters. DS Dan Miller, I salute you, and after so many phone calls, definitely owe you a pint. Grateful thanks too to Twitter pals Julie Boon, Claire Brown, Peggy Breckin for making my day on a regular basis. Emma Selby, thanks so much for allowing yourself to appear in my book.
Note: Some of the locations in this book are real, but many are imaginary. Apologies for changing some of London’s geography and street names; my motive is always to tell the best possible story.
About the Author
KATE RHODES is the author of the Alice Quentin novels. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Reversal and The Alice Trap. She writes full-time now, and lives in Cambridge with her husband, a writer and film-maker.
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Also by Kate Rhodes
The Girl in the River
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A version of this book was published in the UK by Mullholland Books, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton in 2016.
BLOOD SYMMETRY. Copyright © 2016 by Kate Rhodes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition July 2016 ISBN: 9780062444073
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062444080
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