Rachel stared at him.
He could see she was wondering what this would mean to them, to him and Rachel. He was wondering that, too. And the truth was that he didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t something he could take in all at once. It was too big, too unlikely…
“A car crash…” Rachel said. “How?”
“She ran her car off the road.”
Rachel came over to stand by his side. She slipped an arm around his waist.
The phone buzzed. Another call was coming in. It was from his secretary. He had forgotten about the backlog of calls from the office.
He answered the call. “Alison?”
“I thought I’d never get hold of you. Everyone’s running around like headless chickens. Can you get into the office for ten?”
What had this to do with Jennifer? He couldn’t make sense of it.
“Haven’t you listened to my messages?” she said. “We had a call from Lyle Linstrum yesterday.”
“It’s not about Jennifer?”
Now it was her turn to sound bewildered. “Who’s Jennifer? Daniel, Lyle Linstrum’s flying in from Texas overnight. He’ll be in the office at ten and it’s you he wants to see. Mr O’Donnell said I had to track you down.” In as far as Daniel had a boss, it was O’Donnell, one of the senior partners. “Daniel, you can be there?”
“I’ll ring you back, OK?” He looked at his watch. Amazingly, it was only 7.30. “Ten minutes max.”
During the conversation Rachel had gone back inside.
Of course: Alison had only been working for the firm for a year. Even if she’d seen the news about Jennifer, there was no reason why she should have connected it with him. There was no question that Daniel would have to go into the office. And in practical terms getting back was no problem – a taxi would get him back to Ely in less than half an hour, which would leave him ample time to go home and get into a suit.
Rachel came back with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“That was Alison,” he said. “They want me in the office. It’s urgent.”
“Had she heard about Jennifer?”
He shook his head. “A new client, an important one – if he throws business our way it’ll be huge for the firm. He wants to see me in the office at ten.”
She frowned, but he guessed that she was simply working out what it meant and what adjustments would need to be made to the day. It was a relief to be back on the solid ground of solving little problems and making practical arrangements.
“Would you be able to manage OK getting back to Ely?” he asked, though he knew that she would. They were at the Lazy Otter moorings at Stretham, only about five miles from Ely, and there weren’t any locks. It was her boat – she’d been living on it when they first met – and she’d have no trouble managing it for that distance. But in this, his second marriage, he tried not to take things for granted.
She nodded, acknowledging his tact in phrasing it that way, and answered the question he’d really been asking. “I don’t mind. It’s the last day anyway.”
“Chloe…”
“I’ll tell her I’m promoting her to first mate. She’ll be thrilled.”
“I’ll go and shave,” he said.
“Daniel?”
He turned. “Yes?”
“Are you alright?”
“Yes… no…”
“Stupid question, really. It’s bound to be a shock.”
He shook his head, at a loss for words. That it should end like this. The golden girl – that was what he used to call her. How could someone so full of life just be gone, snuffed out in a moment of carelessness?
As he ducked his head under the hatch to go down to shave, vestiges of his dream came back to him: that beloved female presence; had it been Jennifer?
Chapter Two
Daniel locked the door of the little Regency house on Waterside, near the quayside where Rachel would later be bringing the boat to its winter mooring.
On his way back to Ely in the taxi he had tried to turn his thoughts to the coming meeting with Lyle Linstrum, but had found himself obsessively combing the internet for more information about Jennifer’s accident. There wasn’t much more than his dad had told him.
As he headed up the hill towards the Market Place, he glanced at his watch. He’d be meeting Linstrum in quarter of an hour.
The towers of Ely Cathedral came into view and Daniel found himself wondering where Jennifer’s funeral would be held. Not that he’d be there, but – there’d have to be an inquest, wouldn’t there, first? And a post-mortem. He had a flash of memory: Jennifer naked, getting into bed, and now that body was lying in a mortuary somewhere, and – his thoughts swerved away. A wave of dizziness came over him and dark spots appeared before his eyes. He stopped abruptly and a man bumped into him. The man scowled; Daniel muttered an apology. A few deep breaths and he was alright again. He continued up the hill, more slowly this time.
Ely was a sleepy little market town, remarkable only for its cathedral, and on the face of it seemed a strange place for a firm of patent lawyers. But it was very well placed for the phenomenon that was known as Silicon Fen or the Cambridge Cluster, one of the most important technology centres in Europe. The area was home to over a thousand high-tech businesses focusing on software, electronics and biotechnology, many of them with connections to Cambridge University. It was a magnet for venture capitalists, big consultancy firms, bankers – and lawyers.
As Daniel walked into his secretary’s office he was struck by the scent of lilies, a smell he had always disliked. Today it made him feel nauseous. Alison was arranging a huge sheaf of them mixed with pink and white roses in a vase on her desk.
She looked up. “He’s already here, drinking coffee in your office.”
“And those?” Daniel nodded at the flowers.
She nodded. “By way of an apology. He was, well, let’s say he was rather pressing on the phone yesterday.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows. The look she gave him acknowledged that, yes, it was a cheesy gesture, but on the other hand, the flowers were gorgeous.
He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and opened the door to his office.
Linstrum was sitting in an easy chair by the coffee table, a cup of coffee in his hand. He unfolded himself and stood up. He was long and lean with a leathery face and hair that clustered on the top of his head with a little quiff that made Daniel think of Tintin. Some famous people look shorter in the flesh; Linstrum looked taller. He had to be at least six foot four, and the cowboy boots added to his height. Daniel recalled a photo of him in the Financial Times rounding up steers on his ranch in Texas. Linstrum liked to present himself as a latter-day cowboy and he dressed the part, inviting jokes about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. But there was a hell of a lot more to him than a bolo tie and a pair of cowboy boots.
Linstrum held out his hand. “Sorry to haul you in off your vacation.”
Daniel nodded. He didn’t make the mistake of saying that it didn’t matter.
They shook hands. Linstrum’s grip was firm to the point of discomfort. His hand was hard and calloused.
Daniel gestured for Linstrum to sit down again and took a seat opposite him.
“OK. Let me get straight down to business,” Linstrum said. “I need a lab book report in a hurry.”
“When you say ‘in a hurry’?”
“I’ve got an interference proceeding in a little over two weeks and disclosure before that. Needless to say I’m willing to pay whatever it takes to make this happen.”
Two weeks! That would mean putting everything else on hold, offloading work onto other people. And even then it would be tough. Was it even possible?
“Tell me more.”
“A few years ago, Honor Masterman was principal investigator for a postdoc who stumbled across a discovery that had huge potential for a therapy to combat obesity. The university started up a company to manage it – that was Calliope Biotech – but they just didn’t have the resources
to develop the therapy and I bought them out. It was all looking great, but then – disaster.”
Daniel remembered that. The potential of the therapy had made front page news. And so had what happened next. Six healthy young men go into a clinical trial and one of them ends up dead.
“I had sleepless nights over what happened,” Linstrum said. “Still do, truth to tell.”
Details of the therapy were coming back to Daniel. “I seem to recall it worked by using an antibody designed to target fat cells?”
“Yup, that’s right. We attached a cytotoxic payload to the antibody.”
“A virus that kills fat cells? Remind me what went wrong.”
“The antibody was designed to home in on the fat cells by identifying a specific marker on the surface of the cells. What we didn’t know – and couldn’t have known – was that a tiny subset of people express this marker on their heart cells as well as their fat cells. And that was the case with Tom Manners.” Linstrum’s face was sombre. “Poor guy. Hell, we’d tried it on mice, we’d tried it on monkeys, and it had worked just fine.”
They were silent.
Linstrum said, “I don’t need to tell you what an effective therapy would mean. An estimated 64 per cent of Americans are overweight or obese and here in the UK you’re catching up fast. It’s a leading cause of premature death in the developed world – 336 million cases of Type 2 diabetes worldwide, not to mention heart disease, cancer… They could all be cut at a stroke, and in commercial terms…”
Yes, in commercial terms the sky was the limit.
Linstrum went on. “The enquiry found that the trial was carried out properly and concluded that the mishap couldn’t have been foreseen. So, with a therapy like this,” he spread his hands, “where the fundamental molecular structure is sound…”
Yes, with a therapy like that, even a death wouldn’t halt its development. It was just too important, too much was at stake, so many lives could potentially be saved.
“We went back to the drawing board. We’re pursuing two lines of research: a test to screen out the vulnerable subset who have that marker on their heart cells, and a way to identify a different marker. We’re fighting on both fronts, and things were going just fine until a few weeks ago when we were given notice that another US company intended to challenge our patent for the antibody. They’re claiming that someone in one of their labs got there first.”
Daniel let out a long, low whistle.
In Europe, including the UK, it was first past the post. The winner was the one who got to the Patent Office and filed their papers first. In the US it was the person who actually made the invention first who was entitled to the patent. That was set to change in a couple of years. The US was planning to adopt the European system, but for now the principle still held. And Linstrum’s company, Calliope Biotech, had its headquarters in the US, so they were subject to US patent law.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Linstrum said grimly. “I’ve sunk all I’ve got into this. And I’m not the only one. I’ve drawn heavily on venture capital, and my backers are riding me hard. They’re getting jittery. I need to raise more funds and this couldn’t have come at a worse time. And that’s why I’m here. I want you to go through our guy’s lab books.”
Daniel frowned. There was something that didn’t stack up here. Lawyers should have been trawling through the lab books weeks ago to establish the exact date that the discovery had been made. Why was Daniel coming in so late in the day? There could be only one answer.
“You must have had someone else working on it,” Daniel concluded.
“Oh, for sure,” Linstrum said. “I should have mentioned that earlier. We had Jennifer Blunt.”
Daniel stared at him.
Linstrum went on. “Terrible thing, losing her like that. A car crash. It’s shaken us all up. If I were a superstitious guy, I might think there was a hex on this project.”
He broke off, looked closely at Daniel. “You don’t look so good. I guess you must have known her? It’s a small world in your line of work. Don’t tell me you hadn’t heard?”
Daniel’s head was swimming. “I’d heard.” He leaned forward and put his head between his hands.
“Hey, are you OK?”
Daniel took a deep breath and straightened up. He poured himself a glass of water.
“She was a friend?” Linstrum asked.
“Not exactly. She was my ex-wife.”
“Oh gee, that’s tough. I’m sorry.”
“It won’t be a problem,” Daniel said, answering the unspoken question. “I’ve remarried and that’s all in the past.”
“So you’ll take the job?”
“I’ll have to clear it with my colleagues.”
There was really no chance that they’d want to turn down this kind of work and Linstrum knew that too. He reached over and they shook hands again.
Daniel expected him to leave, but instead he sat in thought for a few moments.
“Something I’d better tell you,” he said. “Jennifer thought there was something wrong somewhere.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“No, dammit, I can’t. She didn’t want to talk about it on the phone or in her office. We planned to meet at her house in Cambridge. She was on the way there when she died.”
Chapter Three
“No, Mummy, no. Please, Mummy!”
Chloe was sitting on her bed in her nightie with her arms around her legs. Her face was scrunched up, tears were welling in her eyes.
Rachel was sitting next to her, the needle in her hand. Daniel sat on the other side.
“Come here, little chicken,” he said. Gently he unwrapped Chloe’s arms and lifted her onto his lap so that she was sitting sideways. Daniel’s heart contracted at the sight of her spindly legs and knobbly little knees. Was there anything more vulnerable and touching than a little girl’s legs?
Chloe turned her face into Daniel’s shoulder. She knew there was no escaping it and she didn’t resist as Rachel swabbed her thigh. Her acquiescence hurt him more than her protest. Chloe had been diagnosed with Diamond-Blackfan anaemia at birth. Her body could not make red blood cells. She needed blood transfusions every three or four weeks and this had the side effect of laying down too much iron in her body, especially in the heart and liver. If it were allowed to build up, it would eventually kill her. Five times a week she had to have subcutaneous infusions to shift the iron deposits. The needle went into her leg or waist and an infusion pump was attached to deliver the therapy overnight.
When the needle went in, Chloe flinched and gave a little moan. Daniel tightened his grip on her. Then it was over and she relaxed against him. Rachel taped the infusion pump to her thigh.
“All over now,” Daniel said. “Story time.”
Rachel leaned over to kiss the child goodnight, but Chloe shook her head and burrowed deeper into Daniel’s shoulder, rejecting the parent who had hurt her.
Rachel kissed the back of her head. “Night, night, sweetiepie,” she said. As she straightened up, Daniel saw the pain in her eyes. He’d had this treatment, too, and it was part of the reason why they took it in turns to deal with the infusion. It wouldn’t be fair or good for Chloe for just one parent to bear the brunt of it. Bad cop, good cop, was how he thought of it.
Rachel went off down the stairs.
Daniel swept Chloe’s hair back and kissed her forehead. “What’ll it be?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Rumpy, tilt, skin,” she said, separating out the syllables.
“Rumpelstiltskin it is. Hop into bed, then.” He reached over to the bookcase and pulled down the big pink book of illustrated fairy stories. The book fell open at the familiar page.
Chloe snuggled under her duvet and put her thumb in her mouth. Daniel propped himself up on a pillow beside her and she leaned against him. She adored fairy tales. In fact, she adored fairies, full stop. They decorated every possible surface: her duvet cover, her nightdress, even her wellingtons. F
or Daniel it was all part of having a little girl, and he relished her femininity. Rachel found it all a bit much. He had tried to console her by pointing out that Chloe was keen on Lego too and they hadn’t started to make that in pink yet. Rachel had snorted. “Don’t you believe it! It’s the latest thing. Chloe just doesn’t know it yet.”
The pink-shaded bedside lamp cast a soft light and Daniel began to feel sleepy as he read the story of the little man who turned straw into gold for the miller’s daughter and the terrible price he tried to exact, claiming her first-born child unless she could guess his name. The story exerted a curious charm over him, too. Was it something to do with the repetition, the way everything had to happen three times? And he liked the way it ended with the plucky girl turning the tables: “The little man came in, and asked, ‘Now, mistress queen, what is my name?’ At first she said, ‘Is your name Conrad?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is your name Harry?’ ‘No.’ ‘Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?’ ‘The devil has told you that,’ cried the little man, and in his anger he plunged his right foot so deep into the earth that his whole leg went in, and then in rage he pulled at his left leg so hard with both hands that he tore himself in two.”
He had wondered if this was too much for Chloe, whether he ought to tone it down a bit, but Rachel said no, she thought it was a mistake to censor everything. And it was true that Chloe didn’t seem at all disturbed by it. In fact, it was her favourite story.
He looked down at Chloe. Her thumb had dropped from her mouth. She was asleep.
Carefully, he disengaged himself. He pulled the duvet up and tucked it round her.
He sat down in the little nursing chair that had belonged to his grandmother and was now Chloe’s. Above him, a mobile of floating fairies shifted lazily in the heat from the bedside lamp.
At intervals during the day he had managed to put Jennifer to the back of his mind, only to be ambushed all over again, brought up short by the stark fact: he would never see or speak to her again. Had it always been there, then, unacknowledged, hidden even from himself, the hope that their story hadn’t really ended, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary?
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