by Jane Shemilt
Jake returns the smile; he puts his hands into his pockets, seeming to relax. For the first time he looks almost friendly. ‘You might have got away with it if only you hadn’t contacted Mary.’
Who the hell is Mary? He stares at Jake as his mind scrabbles at his memories.
‘About a month ago at your request, Mary Mackay took her cleaners into the house,’ Jake continues conversationally. ‘They were confronted with a pool of stinking water.’
So she went in after all, odd she hasn’t sent a bill. He sees sodden carpets and ruined furniture, a small thud of worry lost inside the greater one. ‘I’m not quite sure how burst pipes constitute evidence.’
‘Don’t worry about the pipes, they were fine. The issue was the fridge-freezer which had stopped working, the power had been cut. There wasn’t much water, a couple of buckets at most. The problem was the contents. The smell of rotting food was terrible; Mary had to clear it up herself, her staff refused.’
Has Jake come to lecture him about the electricity bill? ‘I paid what was owed weeks ago, the power has been restored now—’
‘It must have been restored following her visit – just as well, or these might have been frozen in again and missed.’ Jake pulls his fist out of his pocket. ‘She found them when she emptied the bottom shelf.’ He uncurls his fingers: two small vials clink together on his palm, like the faintest echo of some long-ago music.
‘They were in a plastic bag behind some packets of bacon which were putrid.’ He holds a full vial up to the light. ‘Varicella vaccine extract for immunisation. Batch 82297X. From the batch used in the trial. Only they don’t contain vaccine, do they, Albie?’
Albie waits for him to finish while his thoughts run to the corners of his mind like rats in a cage.
‘The full one almost certainly contains saline; we know this because the contents of the other have already been sent for analysis. Pre-injected with saline, no rat would have reacted badly to subsequent injections. The results would have implied the treatment was safe, though as we all know it turned out to be deadly. Yes,’ Jake says quietly, ‘I know my immunology now.’
‘Ah. So that’s where they were.’
Jake has been very thorough, he’d have wanted to avenge his son’s death as well as Ted’s, but if Albie can only keep his head, there is nothing to link him to the vials. ‘Ted told us he had found some vials; he was worried someone had sabotaged the trial. It seems he might have been right. He died before he told us where he’d put them. This is good news, Jake. If you’re right, it will mean Ted can be exonerated. His family will be thrilled. I’ll make you some more coffee, this one’s gone cold.’
‘Beth gave the game away in the end.’
‘Beth?’ He’s brought up short, outraged.
‘Let’s go back to Mary; she was worried when she found the vials,’ Jake continues. ‘She knew medicines need to be disposed of properly, so she gave them to the island medic, one Dr McAleer.’
The bearded man who sought him out after Beth’s inquest to murmur about the balance of her mind. Visual and auditory hallucinations. A depressive psychosis unveiled by stress. Albie had been scoured by guilt, it had been a struggle to hear him out.
‘Beth fell, got glass in her hand. You probably know that part. Once he sewed her up, the doctor drove her home. She was rambling about some vials. He thought she was referring to your research but it made no real sense to him at the time.’
‘She wasn’t well.’ He wants Jake to stop talking about Beth, stop using her name. He walks away but Jake follows him, moving around so he faces him again, always standing too close.
‘The doctor’s thoughts entirely. He was so concerned about her mental state he went back to see her. When he couldn’t find her, he wrote everything she’d said in her file. He felt she might need intervention; he called again the next day but gave up after that, assuming you’d taken her home, just as she’d told him you would. She was found on the beach the following day. When Mary showed him the vials months later and told him that she found them in your house, it rang a bell. He looked at his notes again and Beth’s words began to make sense. Ed’s name was in her notes so he was contacted; he’s passed everything to the police now.’
He should have been there, she was frightened. He would have held her and calmed her and brought her home. ‘She wasn’t herself. Nothing she said can be taken as the truth.’
‘Poor Albie. I should really feel sorry for you. It seems that the woman you married turned out to be mad as well as vengeful.’
This will be over soon if he keeps his nerve, there is no real proof. Jake’s voice acquires a taunting lilt.
‘She obviously wanted retribution. Ed told me how his father used her, then went back to Jenny. Beth was a woman scorned, Albie. A cliché. She used you to bring Ted down.’
‘I understand you are grieving, Jake—’
‘Ed’s worked it out. You doctored the vials, didn’t you?’ He comes closer still. ‘Ted guessed they would prove his innocence, which means we don’t believe he committed suicide.’ His face is almost touching Albie’s; Albie can see the pores in his nose, the dry flakes of skin at his hairline. ‘Which means we think you murdered him.’ Jake smiles, a bitter expression with no joy. ‘That would have fitted in nicely with Beth’s plan for revenge. Clever girl, your wife, patient too. She must have planned this for years.’ Jake’s mouth is still smiling, though his eyes are bleak. ‘The things people do for love,’ he says.
Love. Beth’s soft face in the moonlight, her hand in his. The children they tried to make, the child she miscarried. Beth, floating in the waves, helpless. His mind crashes with grief.
‘Iona filled me in when I went up with Ed to look for the vials. We stayed in the hotel. She gave us the back story.’ Jake’s voice has acquired a vicious edge. ‘They say your father was a tyrant, your mother away with the fairies. Your brother’s a wastrel. You were the ambitious one. Beth must have seen that, twisted it.’ He laughs, a thin, yelping noise more like a howl than a laugh. ‘She’d been waiting for someone just like you to happen along, so blind with ambition you couldn’t see the facts. You’ve been had, Albie. Used.’
Rage drenches him like a wave. ‘Ted was the one who used her. He wanted to carry on using her; he never gave up. The day before he died, he put his hands on her.’
Jake shrugs, watching him, waiting.
‘Don’t shrug, you bastard,’ Albie shouts. Harris slinks whining under the table. ‘She was mine. Ted was a thief, he stole everything from me: my ideas, my work, the kids I should have had. He wanted to steal my wife.’ He is engulfed with fury, drowning in it. ‘I’m glad I killed him. He deserved to die. I’d do it again.’ He sees his spit land on Jake’s face.
Jake smiles. ‘So now it’s just a matter of time. They’re coming to get you, and time is running out. Tick-tock, you bastard.’
Albie stops listening. This has become an operation, an emergency one. He has to focus, empty his mind, attend to the detail. His anorak is behind the door; he lifts it off the peg, takes his wallet from his desk and mobile from the side. Jake’s eyes follow every move. Harris is still under the table; he picks up the dog lead from the counter and, pulling the dog to him, clips it on. He opens the door; dusk has come early; it’s still raining hard. In the distance he hears several sirens. It can’t be the police coming for him already but he begins to run down the road, picking up the pace easily. Harris gallops beside him. The fierce wind is behind them, helping him. He feels fit and powerful. He will cross the Heath where the police cars can’t follow, leave at the Highgate exit and make his way through the back streets to Victoria station, then the night coach to Glasgow. After that, an island. Not Jura, they will be waiting for him there; the Orkneys maybe. Then Iceland. There will be time to think later.
The noise of sirens echoes up Haverstock Hill. He runs down Pond Street. On the other side of the road fire engines are clustered at the entrance of the Royal Free Hospital, blue lights flashing in
the gloom. Uniformed men grapple with hosepipes, police guide lines of people out through the doors into the forecourt and car park, nurses among them pushing beds. Commands are being megaphoned. A bomb scare? Terrorists? He runs faster, scanning the building as he goes, catching black smoke behind glass on the top floor, looking again in disbelief, counting up the floors. The one that houses the animal lab is on fire. Hilary is somewhere in there, Skuld too. Any other day he would run to help, but this isn’t any other day. Passers-by stream up the road, doubtless on their way to offer aid; they glance at him in surprise as he thunders the other way, but he is running for his life and if the world is going mad, he can’t afford to stop. Hilary is resourceful, Skuld will be safe.
He turns left at the bottom; Harris keeps pace. There is a sign at the entrance of the Heath, warning of high wind and falling trees. If anyone is after him they will think he has gone into Hampstead Heath Overground station. The paths under the trees are obscured with shadow and running with water, slippery where the branches overhang. Up ahead a group of hooded women shelter under the tossing branches of a large pine tree. They are smoking, huddled close, seeming oblivious to the storm. They hold numerous dogs on leads, large mongrels, restive with restraint, who snap and growl at his approach. He moves to the edge of the path, giving them a wide berth, half tripping on the verge, glimpsing a hand on a lead. He sees stamped on the back of the plump and freckled wrist, the perfect tattoo of a small mouse.
He glances up into the rounded face of Hilary; she is talking. Skuld, Urth and Verdandi huddle close. Hilary is smiling at the girls as she talks; her eyes tilt like those of a cat. Skuld’s eyes are identical, Urth’s too, even Verdandi’s. He sees the resemblance between them all and the truth slices through him with icy force. Everything makes instant, terrible sense, everything except his own stupidity. How could he have missed it until this moment? The young women and the old one are bound together by blood as well as the little tattoos; it’s shatteringly obvious now that Hilary’s little girls with their shining oval gaze grew up to become the sloe-eyed women who led him on with the half-truths that Jake has just laid bare. Hilary, his old adversary, is their mother. She gave them all her eyes.
The facts spiral though his mind like lightning; differently lit, everything is revealed. The attacks on the animal labs at Glasgow, Oxford, the Institute and now the Royal Free were all the places where Hilary or her children worked; all were set on fire in their turn. Bruce told him the police thought the Oxford and the Institute attacks were connected and still he hadn’t guessed the link: Hilary and her girls.
The women are absorbed in conversation with each other and barely give him a glance. There is no flash of recognition from any of them; he is, after all, simply a mud-splashed figure running past, one of many every day. He finds his feet and picks up speed again, breath coming hard, running through the sheets of rain as the layers of his life dissolve.
What exactly has Hilary done? What has she done to him? Why?
It must have been the work of years, training her daughters up as she began to burn her way towards him, placing them to work their mischief in the name of animal rights. Mischief that was, for a while at least, aimed precisely at him. He claws at the facts that spin in his mind. Lined up like dominoes they begin to fall one after another in perfect order; he can almost hear the little clicking noise as they tip over: Hilary the scientist who helped with the family’s catering business. She had been behind the scenes all the time, directing, coordinating her daughters and his downfall. Sixties, jolly-ish, Hilary had delivered the anniversary cake. Another domino falls: the anniversary – the day Beth last saw his notebook. Skuld would have told her mother what to look for; it would have taken a mere second to slip his book into her satchel on the way out; an invaluable guide to the appropriate equipment for burning, the appropriate rats to release. There’s no proof, there never will be. She’s far too clever for that.
Albie pushes on up the hill, his breath coming in ragged sobs. He’s been a fool, a blind fool. How they must have laughed. He sees them in a kitchen, dogs under the table. Hilary serving cake, Urth chuckling, Verdandi smiling her sly smile. Skuld listening, not laughing, she’d always been more on his side than her sisters. She told him once to take care. If she hadn’t been interrupted by her sisters by the pond, she might have revealed all Ted’s words. Or perhaps not. He’ll never know.
His feet slide on wet turf, tearing the grass, he almost falls. Why him? He knows the answer: vengeance for his experiments in Glasgow. Baird McAlister, a menace to animals, a man who could be tripped by his own ambition. Straightening, he stumbles on. Or was his involvement pure coincidence? Hilary might have sent her daughters out to weave a web that caught him by chance. Skuld’s words could have been entirely innocent, and his ambition did the rest, setting in train the death of the children, Ted’s destruction. Bruce’s. Beth’s.
Beth. He halts at the top of Parliament Hill, his lungs heaving. The view over London is hidden. He can’t see the buildings or the streets, the skyscrapers or the tiny houses in between. Only the street lights remain, everything else has disappeared. There is no landscape ahead of him now, no gleaming touchstones. The wind blows against his face, he is wet through. Beth and Ted: he loved them and destroyed them both, or was it the other way around? There’s no one left who can tell him now. Harris is whining by his feet but he puts his face in his hands. He must decide where to go and what to believe, but he stands in the rain like a mourner by a grave.
At the sound of nearing sirens he lifts his head, looking to the trees behind him, where the cigarettes glow in the dark. Skuld and her sisters are huddling with their mother and their dogs. They look harmless from here, a group of women finding shelter from the storm. He could make himself believe that; make them into a family of animal lovers out for a walk, ordinary women whose path he happened to cross by chance. After all, there is nothing to prove this untrue. The fires might have been nothing to do with Hilary; the rats he saw released could have been the only ones they freed. He might have lost the notebook himself on the wards or perhaps dropped it in the street. Whoever these women are, whatever they’ve done, it would be better to think of them as incidental spectators to the course he’d set as a child, witnesses to his unfurling destiny but not part of it. Better, far, far better, to remember his beloved Beth as a loving wife and not as a victim out for revenge who had used him from the start. No one twisted his life to their purpose, it would have been impossible. His fate had been set in the stars.
Fate. Destiny. The old words burn through his body with their ancient power. He isn’t finished yet. He takes the lead off Harris; the dog will run better on his own. He starts downwards, his feet picking up speed. He is still in control, strong, young enough; he can go on, he can win. Beyond the trees around him he hears two sirens blaring, though whether behind or ahead is difficult to tell because it’s mixed with the noise of barking. He turns to look, stumbling as he does so. Over the brow of the hill comes a large pack of assorted dogs, bounding towards him, unleashed.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the publishing team at Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House, in particular my editor Jessica Leeke, whose rigorous attention to detail helped make the book what it is. Thanks are due to Clare Bowron, Sarah Bance, Nick Lowndes, Claire Bush, Jenny Platt and Matilda McDonald. I owe so much to Maxine Hitchcock for her skill, encouragement and the consummate care with which she has published all three of my books.
I am grateful to Eve White of Eve White Literary Agency for her generously given advice and friendship. Eve is a true ally, always working beyond the call of duty. Thanks to her team which includes Rebecca Winfield, Kate Prentice and Ludo Cinelli.
Heartfelt thanks to Tricia Wastvedt, who was my tutor on the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA five years ago and whose kind and perceptive wisdom has sustained me since.
Thank you to the members of my writing groups who have been generous with reading and feedback: th
ese include Tanya Atapattu, Mina Bancheva, Alexandra Bockfeldt, Victoria Finlay, Emma Geen, Mary Griese, Diana King, Christine Purkis, Susan Jordan, Sophie McGovern, Peter Reason and Mimi Thebo.
Thanks to Dr Ally Bienemann and Marcella Wyatt at the Functional Neurosurgery Laboratory at Bristol University, who guided me around the laboratory and answered my many questions.
Thanks to Rebecca Burke, secretary to Mr Colin Shieff, Consultant Neurosurgeon at The National Hospital of Neurosurgery and Neurology at Queens Square, for the time kindly given showing me around The National.
Thanks to Mr Kristian Aquilina, Consultant Neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street, for his time and patience in acquainting me with his hospital.
Thank you to Inspector Ian Smart and PC Nick Shaw (retired) for elucidating matters of internet crime and police procedures.
Thanks to Cath McCallum of The Jura Hotel, in Jura, Scotland, and to Alex Dunacchie, who gave us a unique tour of the island.
Thank you to staff and rangers at Dyrham Park in South Gloucestershire for acquainting me with their beautiful herds of deer.
Thanks to my family for putting up with me working during our holidays and on their tables: my sons Tommy Gill, for his calm wisdom on all matters IT and for his editing skills, and Henry Gill, for reading and encouragement. I owe Scott Gill, my brother-in-law, for reading the manuscript three times.
Finally, thank you to my husband Steve Gill – companion on adventures, book related and otherwise – whose work as a neurosurgeon and whose presence in my life is an inspiration, always.
1
DORSET 2010
ONE YEAR LATER
The days grow short. Apples litter the grass, their flesh pockmarked by crows. As I carry logs from the stack under the overhang today, I tread on a soft globe; it collapses into slime under my feet.
November.
I am cold all the time but she could be colder. Why should I be comfortable? How could I be?