An Air That Kills

by Christine Poulson

  “I did Biology, Chemistry, and Maths.” Easy to remember because that was what Katie had done. They had kept her fake history as similar to her real one as they could, so that she only had a few big lies to remember.

  “And after that?”

  “A two-two degree in Biochemistry.” Now that was a lie.

  Julia frowned. “Try not to fiddle with your hair like that. It’s a sign that you’re feeling anxious, and people will pick up on that. It’s the same with any kind of fidgeting.”

  Julia saw Katie’s downcast expression and relented. “Look, it’s not as bad as all that. It’s not rocket science. The trick is to volunteer as much information as you can before anyone asks for it. That usually deflects curiosity and you can avoid being caught on the hop. In any case, there are only three things people ever want to know: your name, where you live, and where you worked before. As time goes on, they might ask for more details, but you won’t have to give out all that much to satisfy them.”

  She looked at her iPad. “OK, we’ve agreed that we’ll stick with your own date of birth. It’s very difficult to lie about that, especially if you are taken unawares. It’s such an automatic response. National Insurance and the Inland Revenue, that’s no problem. Mr Linstrum’s company is sponsoring you and is paying you directly, so no one at the lab needs to know those details and we can use your real ones.” She opened a folder on the desk. “Here’s your CV. I’ll email it to you. But you may as well have this hard copy too.”

  Katie ran her eye down it. A thought struck her. “What if someone on the island has worked at one of the places where I’m supposed to have worked?”

  Julia gave a pitying smile. “We’ve thought of that. We’ve trawled through everyone’s work history, their online presence, and planned your CV accordingly.”

  Katie was embarrassed. Of course they had. This was a highly professional outfit.

  “We’ve created a kind of buffer zone. The new you has been out of the country for the last year. We’ve based it on your real-life gap year after you were at medical school. So your story is that you’ve been travelling for the past six months and before that you were working in a lab in Christchurch in New Zealand.” She gestured to the CV. “You need to go through this over and over again. We’ll meet again several times before you go and I’ll test you on it.”

  “Christchurch? That was where I worked in a bar.”

  “Precisely. That’s why we chose it: so that you know enough about the city to be able to talk about it if necessary – but it won’t be. And we’ve created an online profile for you, in case someone Googles you, but before we can put up any photos, we’ve got to fix your appearance.” She looked at Katie appraisingly.

  Katie was conscious that she hadn’t had her hair cut since she got back from Antarctica. It was held back with a scrunchie. And she wasn’t wearing make-up. She hardly ever did.

  “You need a new wardrobe. I’ll assign someone to go shopping with you,” Julia said.

  “I’ll be wearing a lab coat when I’m at work.”

  “But you won’t be at work all the time. We have to construct a new persona for you. Your clothes... now, what should we go for?” Julia pondered. “Something a bit bolder, I think. More cutting edge.”

  “But won’t that be drawing attention to myself?”

  “Yep, that’s the idea. It’s a mistake to try and fade into the background as if you have something to hide. Am I right in thinking you were a jeans and T-shirt girl in your old life? Yes, well, you need to look quite different. We don’t want anyone thinking they recognize you from somewhere.”

  “So I am kind of hiding in plain sight.”

  “Think of it another way. You’re not hiding at all. You’re playing a part.”

  “How often when your staff go undercover do they find that there’s something wrong?” Katie asked.

  Julia considered this. “Good question. It depends on the kind of work. We have a lot of commercial clients and often we’re sent in because they suspect theft or some form of industrial espionage. This job is rather unusual.”

  “And what about when someone comes to you because they think their partner’s cheating?”

  Julia gave a wry laugh. “I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. How many times do you think the person who hired us wasn’t right? Once! That’s not as bad as it sounds. By the time she’s suspicious enough – and it usually is a woman – to go to a firm of private investigators, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that if someone suspects their partner of cheating on them, they are usually right. And you know the biggest giveaway? Suddenly the partner’s mobile phone never leaves their side. They even take it into the bathroom with them, because they don’t want their partner to see their messages and the numbers they’ve called. And that reminds me, talking of partners, we haven’t decided if you are in a relationship – as Caitlin, I mean.”

  “What do you think?”

  Julia thought for a moment. “Best perhaps if you’re unattached at the moment. Less to remember.” She glanced at her watch. “Now, about your clothes. I think Vicky’ll be the right person to go shopping with you. She’s about your age, and I’ll make sure she’s fully briefed. But meanwhile you have an appointment.”

  “I have?”

  Julia smiled. “Yes, indeed. With a hairdresser. You’re going blonde.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THURSDAY

  The Matilda Jane was cosy when the wood-burning stove was on. Katie was propped up on the sofa with her laptop and a pot of coffee on the table. She was doing her homework, getting up to speed on the current research into influenza.

  The worst outbreak of the disease had been the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which had infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide – about one third of the planet’s population – and killed an estimated twenty to fifty million. It was staggering. And that was in the era before mass communications and cheap air travel. Katie thought about how fast it would have spread if it had happened today, and she felt a chill.

  It was only in the 1990s, after a child had died in Hong Kong from a flu subtype that was known in birds but not in humans, that scientists had begun to explore the possibility that flu could jump the species barrier. In that instance eighteen individuals had been infected, six of whom died. The outbreak had been halted by the slaughter of one and a half million chickens. Current thinking seemed to be that the 1918 virus had similarly sprung from domestic and wild fowl, most probably in North America. Katie remembered the epidemic of avian flu in the UK that had resulted in the mass culling of turkeys and chickens in 2007. Luckily that had been confined to birds. But suppose it hadn’t been?

  The research that Lyle was sponsoring was certainly much needed. She hoped it would be successful and that he was worrying about nothing.

  In the weeks before she headed off to Debussy Point there would be a lot to do to make sure she was thoroughly embedded in her new identity. Katie had already begun her transformation into a new person. Her hair was what the hairdresser had called “bleach blonde” – she hadn’t known there was more than one kind – and was cut in a short spiky style.

  Meanwhile, the old Katie was supposedly taking time off to travel and would be out of contact. The agency had created a Facebook page for her and would be posting images of remote places. Her mother knew what was going on and could be relied on to field enquiries if necessary. Rachel and Daniel also knew where she was going – and her brother had been tipped off too. In that annoying way younger brothers had, he thought it was hilarious that she was going undercover, but he could be relied on not to spill the beans. And that was it, no one else knew.

  The agency had given her dossiers on both Claudia, the postdoc working on the influenza virus, and Gemma, the principal investigator and Claudia’s boss. She turned to them now. They made interesting reading.

  Claudia was young – at only twenty-nine she was younger than the technicians who ha
d worked for her. That was common enough, but it might have led to tension. And the rapid turnover of technicians might simply be down to personality clashes. Three of them, though! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To lose one technician may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness,” and to lose three – well, Lyle was right, losing three in rapid succession did ring alarm bells.

  She tried to put herself in the place of a technician who was beginning to suspect that there was something wrong with the postdoc she was working for. It was very unlikely that someone so far down the pecking order would want to start making waves. Getting a job elsewhere would be a far more attractive option.

  Claudia was a rising star, no doubt about it. Hers was the classic career trajectory of the successful scientist. She had begun by getting a degree in Biomedical Science from a world-class institution – in this case, Balliol College, Oxford. She had gone on to do her PhD at an equally prestigious university, Harvard, in the US, before returning to the UK to work as a postdoc. This was her second post. She was the first author on several papers in journals, including Nature, produced in conjunction with the PI she’d worked for; an impressive tally for someone of her age. Claudia had been very productive. Too productive? She was not the only author named on the papers, but it was likely that she had done most, if not all, of the work on those papers. Her PI, the senior partner in the collaboration, might have contributed little or nothing: that was common practice. This kind of publication record was essential if Claudia were to make it on to the next rung of the ladder, which could be a research fellowship or a lectureship somewhere. From there she would go on to become the principal investigator on projects, applying for grants in her own right.

  Katie read her references. “Outstanding intellect... one of the most able students I have ever encountered... brilliant skilled experimenter.” Claudia seemed to have made quite an impact on everyone she had come into contact with. And yet, all the same, there was something here that Katie couldn’t quite put her finger on. Katie was beginning to get an inkling of what was worrying Lyle. Was anyone really as good as all that? Until the last couple of years, Katie had had a career that seemed set fair, but even so she had never had references like this. She would have to be careful not to let sour grapes cloud her judgment.

  She had Claudia’s latest report in front of her, and on the face of it they were certainly plausible. The results were good but, as Lyle had said, not “too good to be true”. So, if there was something wrong with them, it was most likely to be along the lines of massaging the results, tidying them up. It wouldn’t be difficult to get away with that. PIs tended not to get their hands dirty and many rarely set foot in the lab. Yes, they were meant to supervise their postdocs and to sign off their lab books at frequent intervals, but essentially it was a relationship of trust. They couldn’t be looking over their postdocs’ shoulders all the time. They would be busy elsewhere, applying for grants, writing papers; they might even be in clinical practice. And the more eminent the PI, the less time there would be for supervision.

  Postdocs, on the other hand, were guns for hire, moving from contract to contract, following the grant money, ambitious to become PIs themselves. It was an insecure and stressful way of life, as Katie well knew. Big egos could be involved, with obsessive personalities, and clashes were not uncommon. It would be absolutely crucial for the next step in Claudia’s career that she didn’t just get results, but got something that could be published in the kind of high-impact journal that liked complete stories without awkward caveats.

  Katie turned to the dossier on Gemma. Gemma herself had been something of a wunderkind. She was still only around forty, a high-flyer with many, many papers to her name, on the council of the Royal Society, Visiting Professor at that institution, Fellow at that college, and so on and so on, all the boxes ticked. She was certainly a busy lady. She was the PI on a number of projects, which did make it more likely that she would be inclined to just let Claudia get on with it. Katie saw that she had worked with Caspar Delaney, the director at Debussy Point. Like him, one of her special interests was in the mechanisms that allow diseases to jump the species barrier.

  Gemma’s own early career was remarkably similar to Claudia’s. Lyle had said that Gemma thought very highly of her. Perhaps she saw something of herself in the younger woman. Their relationship was likely to be one of mentor and protégée.

  Katie yawned. She clicked to close the document on Gemma. She would find out soon enough.

  And before that there was her date with Justin. They hadn’t met since leaving Antarctica. Justin had had a long-standing arrangement to go trekking with a friend in Peru and she knew that he had arrived home only a few days ago. He must have sent that text from the airport, so that was a hopeful sign.

  She thought of the moment when they had first made their plan to meet. One of their number had needed an emergency operation, and with the doctor on the base missing, Katie had had to step in. It had been a tense time, to say the least of it, and Justin’s promise of cocktails at the Ritz when it was all over had been something to hang on to as she steeled herself to do what had to be done. They had been drawn to one another, but they had made a pact to save it – whatever it was – until after their tour of duty. For one thing, she was the base doctor and he was her patient. Also, it would have led to awkward tensions with the others on the base, all of them men. It hadn’t been too much of a strain to agree to wait. They had been two men down, so eight of them had had to do the work of ten. They were so exhausted all the time.

  Now she wondered whether it would still be there, the attraction they had felt, or had it simply been of the moment, a matter of “what happens on the base stays on the base”? Perhaps the attraction they had felt would simply shrivel away in the light of the wider world, and their meeting at the Ritz would turn out to be an embarrassing mistake? She did hope not.

  Meanwhile she was going to go shopping with Vicky from the private investigators’ agency and she was rather looking forward to that.

  CHAPTER 7

  THURSDAY

  ELY

  “My little brother,” Chloe crooned. She patted Rachel’s belly. “I love him.”

  Of course she had no idea what his birth might mean for her. He was just her longed-for little brother – she was sure it was going to be a boy. She didn’t know that he might be her savior. There was no point in telling her, when the odds were against his being a match.

  “We don’t know that the Bean’s a little boy,” Rachel reminded her, though privately she thought so too. “It might be a little girl.” They could have found out when Rachel had her scans, but they had decided not to.

  “No,” Chloe shook her head. “It’s a little boy.” She laid her cheek against Rachel’s bump. “You’ve been in there long enough,” she murmured. “I want you to come out now.”

  You and me both, thought Rachel. Her back ached and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get comfortable. There was another two weeks to go. She really wanted to get it over with now, perhaps even more for Dan’s sake than her own. She looked across the room to where he was sitting at the table, scrolling through a document on his laptop.

  Over the last month or two, she’d been aware of his mounting anxiety. He hadn’t said anything, but she could tell and she knew that he was keeping an iron grip on himself, not wanting his fear of what was to come to infect her and Chloe. Thank goodness Katie had agreed to be her birth partner. That had taken some of the pressure off him.

  At the sight of his tired face and the threads of grey in his hair – it almost seemed that there were more every day – her heart contracted with love. She’d wondered if she would feel afraid as her due date grew near, but that didn’t seem to be happening. She was too much absorbed by the question of whether the Bean would be a match for Chloe. That was the best scenario. One in four, so the odds were against it. And yet it wasn’t a remote possibility; it was a decent chance. She imagined four people in a room
. The door opens and one is called. Which one? She knew she would not love the baby any less for not being the one to be called. That would be a bonus, the icing on the cake.

  The worst scenario was that the Bean would also have DBA.

  Neither Rachel nor Daniel appeared to have the mutation, or at least neither of them had symptoms of the disease. The genetic counsellor had said that it could well be that Chloe was the first in the family to have the mutation, that it had simply arisen spontaneously. But there was also a more troubling possibility: that Rachel or Daniel had the mutation, but had not developed signs of DBA. That could happen. And it would mean that there was a risk, though a reduced one, that the baby would inherit it.

  But there was nothing she could do about it. What would be would be.

  Earlier that day she had gone to Ely Cathedral to pray in the Lady Chapel. Rachel had been raised as a Quaker, but she found solace in the beauty of the ancient building and in lighting a candle in front of the Madonna. It helped her to clear her mind. Whatever happened, they’d manage somehow.

  Chloe was getting sleepy, and anyway it was time for bed. Rachel sent her upstairs to clean her teeth.

  Daniel shut up his laptop and came to sit next to her. He took her hand and caressed her wrist with his thumb. “How are you feeling?”

  She smiled at him. “Just fine.”

  He asked this a score of times a day and she had given up saying that she wasn’t ill, just pregnant.

  He nodded. “OK. I’ll go up and see to Chloe.”

  “Bless you.” It was the third night in a row that he had taken on the chore that never really got any easier.

  Propped up with cushions on the sofa, she let herself relax. She could hear Dan talking to Chloe upstairs; not the words, but a comforting murmur of voices. A brief silence as he carried out the procedure – it sounded as if Chloe wasn’t making too much fuss tonight – and then Dan reading a story.