An Air That Kills

by Christine Poulson

  “Well, it wasn’t mine!” she said indignantly. “I was ever so careful.”

  Katie understood Maddie’s frustration. When a normally robust procedure fails to work, and you don’t know why, it’s infuriating.

  “And so was I,” Tarquin said. “Come on, Madds.” His tone was conciliatory. “You know as well as I do, you can’t always pinpoint what went wrong. It needn’t have been either of us. Come to think of it, didn’t Bill lend a hand at one point? Not that I think it was him, of course,” he added hastily. “But I really don’t think it was me, either.”

  “Well, however it happened, I’m going to have to do it all over again. It’s such a pain,” Maddie grumbled. “I’ll have to come in over the weekend, and me and Patrick had planned to go walking on Exmoor.”

  “And you still can,” Tarquin said. “I’ll do Saturday if you’ll do Sunday.”

  “Thanks. That’ll be a help,” she allowed. For a few moments no one spoke. Then she said with a sigh, “I’ve just had a run of bad luck lately and it’s been getting me down. I’m sorry I’ve been mardy. Friends again?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ah well,” Maddie put her shoulders back and stuck her chin in the air, “time to put on my big-girl pants.”

  “What’s that?” Katie asked, amused.

  “Oh, not heard that before? It means it’s time to stop moaning and get on with it.”

  Tarquin shook his arm to remove the mosquitoes and withdrew it from the box carefully to prevent any of them escaping. But he hadn’t noticed that one had crept under the rim of his nitrile glove. As he pulled the glove off, the insect took off. Before Katie had time to react, it had landed on her wrist and she felt the prick of its proboscis entering her skin. She yelped and tried to brush it off.

  Tarquin said, “Don’t do that! Hold on!”

  Maddie switched the light back on and they blinked in the sudden glare. Tarquin grabbed a pooter and gently sucked the mosquito in. He returned it to its cage. “I’m so sorry, Caitlin.”

  Katie inspected the bite. “Oh, well,” she sighed. “I suppose it is only one and it can’t do me any harm.”

  Tarquin showed Katie his arm. It was covered all over in small red welts. “They’ll be gone by tomorrow and I expect yours will be too,” he said. “But let me treat you to lunch to say sorry.”

  “OK, you’re on.”

  “How about you, Madds?” he asked, as he rolled down his sleeve.

  “I was planning to work through. I’ve got an apple and a piece of flapjack. I’m so behind with things at the moment.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s not proper food. Tell you what, I’ll come and do a spot of pupae-picking later on.”

  “Oh, great. Would you? OK then, but there’s something I must just do first. I’ll join you up there.”

  Katie was impressed by Tarquin’s imperturbable good humour and the way he had handled the situation. He could so easily have got annoyed in return, but he hadn’t allowed that to happen. If his scientific skills were as well developed as his people skills, he’d go far.

  As they went up in the lift, she asked, “What did Maddie mean by a run of bad luck? Was she thinking about the batch of larvae that died?”

  “That and a few other things that have gone wrong. And there’ve been some strange results lately. Bill wondered if there’d been some confusion about which pupae went into which cage. But it doesn’t seem likely. Maddie’s very conscientious. It’s not like her to make mistakes and she takes it personally. Understandable, but you just have to roll with the punches in this game. Like I said earlier, try as you might, you can’t always get to the bottom of things. Sometimes you have to accept that and move on.”

  Later, after lunch, working in her own lab, she mulled over what Tarquin had said. Yes, often experiments didn’t work as you expected them to. She knew that all too well from her own experience. And it was particularly the case when you were working with living things like mosquitoes. On the other hand she remembered a time when things had gone very wrong with her own work and she had been shocked to discover that the problems in the lab weren’t down to bad luck or poor work on her part, but had been deliberate acts of sabotage. Could that be what was going on here? Or was she beginning to get paranoid? Perhaps that was an occupational hazard. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” her supervisor used to say, quoting Nietzsche, warning her of the danger of seeing what you’re primed to see. Katie was primed to look for wrong-doing and if she wasn’t careful, she’d be seeing it everywhere.

  CHAPTER 19

  FRIDAY

  The next day Katie buckled down and got in a good day’s work. She was getting used to the Cat 3 lab, feeling more on top of it all now, and was growing in confidence. It was time to start doing what she had really come for. Claudia would be leaving work early to go to London for the weekend, so would be well out of the way. Katie could begin by taking a look at Claudia’s lab books, which recorded all the details of the experiments she had carried out. If Katie organized things so that she would have an excuse to come back to the lab around eleven o’clock, hopefully there would be no one else there. She knocked off at five thirty, went back to the flat and made herself some pasta.

  After that, however, the evening stretched ahead of her and it was hard to settle down to anything. The silence was broken by the buzz of an incoming text. It was from Maddie: “Karaoke? See you there at eight! Don’t be late!” Katie had forgotten all about the karaoke. But why not? As Katie she wouldn’t have been up for it, but as Caitlin she absolutely was. Caitlin was more fun-loving and extroverted than Katie. Caitlin might even join the poker school!

  What to wear? She looked through her clothes and selected a hot-pink silk shirt topped by a denim jacket.

  She arrived just after eight to allow Maddie time to get there first. The pub, the Coach and Horses, was down near the quayside, not far from the labs. It dated from the 1920s and was designed in the Arts and Crafts style, and was all inglenooks and horse brasses. A stage had been squeezed in at one end of the saloon bar and the place was crowded. She looked around and saw Maddie waving from a table where she was sitting with Tarquin. She made her way over.

  “What are you drinking, Caitlin?” Tarquin asked.

  She saw glasses of beer on the table and said, “Thanks. I’ll have what you’re having. But just a half, please.” Julia had advised her to avoid alcohol. She needed to have all her wits about her, but she did want to enter into the spirit of the evening.

  Tarquin got up from the table “Devon Pride it is.”

  Golden Oldie Karaoke seemed to encompass a wide variety. People came up and sang songs by the Beatles, Cole Porter, and the Beach Boys. Katie began to enjoy herself. Around half past nine, Maddie got up and went to the platform. She began to sing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”. She had a frail voice, but very sweet.

  “Your turn now, Caitlin,” Maddie said, as she came back to their table.

  “Oh no, no!”

  “Yes, come on! Choose something from the playlist.”

  Why not? What did it matter if she made a fool of herself? No one knew who she really was.

  She chose “Strangers in the Night” and stepped up onto the platform. She looked at the faces turned towards her and her stomach lurched, but Maddie was nodding encouragingly and the music was beginning. She gripped the microphone and opened her mouth to sing.

  After the first bar or two, her confidence increased. She didn’t have a strong voice, but she was at least in tune. By the time she got to the end and everyone was joining in, her nerves had completely gone and she was enjoying herself.

  She came back to the table and took a swig of her second half-pint of beer. Why didn’t she always behave like this, taking risks and having fun?

  “See, you did great!” Maddie told her.

  “Hey, look who’s here!” Tarquin gestured towards the back of the room. Katie looked round and saw that Bill had just come in. He looked as if he wasn’
t expecting to see all these people, and Katie got the impression that he might have slipped out again if he hadn’t been spotted. But it was too late.

  Maddie stood up and called to him. “Come on, Bill, you’re up next.”

  He shook his head.

  Maddie said, “Hey, guys, let’s get Bill up on stage!” She started a slow hand clap. “Bill! Bill!” she chanted and others too started clapping and chanting.

  Bill spread his hands in a gesture of surrender and made his way between the tables and stepped onto the platform. The clapping died down and was replaced by an expectant silence.

  Maddie handed him the microphone and skipped down to join Katie. “Wait till you hear this,” she whispered.

  Clearly it was going to be either very bad or very good and Katie had no idea which. Perhaps he was the Florence Foster Jenkins of the scientific community.

  He wasn’t.

  As he sang the first line of “The Girl of My Best Friend”, the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Bill had a fabulous baritone voice. There was nothing showy about his performance – it wasn’t an Elvis impersonation – but it was warm and true, and there wasn’t a trace of self-consciousness. The shy, diffident man had gone and he was in full command of the stage.

  The song ended and people were stamping their feet and cheering. All Katie could say was, “Wow!”

  “Bill’s got a trained voice,” Maddie told her. “He did a year at the Royal College of Music before he decided that science was his first love.”

  “How can anyone follow that?” Katie marvelled.

  “You’ll see,” Maddie said and gestured to where Tarquin was already getting to his feet. “We usually end the night with this little number.”

  The backing track of “Monster Mash” began. The audience began to stamp their feet and there were a few good-natured catcalls.

  Tarquin swept a low bow to the audience. He didn’t attempt to sing, but spoke over the music in sepulchral tones: “I was working in the lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight...”

  It struck Katie that Tarquin had the confidence of someone who had always been sure of his place in the world. And yet there wasn’t a hint of arrogance. He was like a friendly dog that is sure of its welcome.

  Everyone in the pub joined in with the chorus and when it was over, that was the end of the evening. They parted outside the pub, Maddie and Tarquin to go home and Katie to head back to the lab.

  CHAPTER 20

  The sound of people laughing and chatting and saying goodbye died away. The quietness settled around her. The cold night air was bracing. The sky was clear and stars glittered overhead. She thought about what Justin had said about the lack of light pollution and felt a pang of longing. She wished he were here to share his knowledge of the stars with her.

  She thought about Bill. There were hidden depths there. Of course, that was true of everyone. There was a gulf between the persona they presented to the world and their secret self – the person they were when they were alone. Perhaps the fact that she herself wasn’t who she seemed to be had heightened her awareness that this might be true of others. Was Claudia, for example, really the brilliant and meticulous researcher she appeared to be, or was she too only playing a part? Time to start finding out.

  The lab lay almost in darkness. Only the main entrance was lit. Katie took her pass out of her pocket and swiped it to enter. The security guy was someone she hadn’t seen before. He was reading a Terry Pratchett novel. He put it down and looked at her pass. She read the name on his badge: Greg.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” he said, as he turned the signing-in book towards her.

  She nodded. “Do you get many people working late?”

  “The odd one. Just you tonight. Do you need a lone-worker alarm?”

  “Please.”

  Katie really did have to check a culture in her Cat 3 lab – even though that wasn’t all she’d be doing. So the alarm was mandatory and was to guard against the possibility that a lone worker might have an accident or be otherwise incapacitated. If the alarm detected no movement for ten minutes, it was activated and sent a signal to the night porters.

  She took the alarm and put the lanyard round her neck. She thanked him, using his name so that she’d remember it. Good manners were important in the lab, as elsewhere. That was a lesson that had clearly passed Gemma by, she thought, remembering how rude she’d been on Tuesday. Quite apart from just being the right thing to do, it always rebounded on you if you treated people as though they didn’t matter. “As you sow, so shall you reap,” she’d heard Rachel say once – or to put it another way, what goes around comes around.

  As she made her way down the empty corridor, she smiled at the memory of Tarquin’s karaoke turn. The truth was that it could be eerie working in the lab late at night. The florescent light flickered briefly as she approached the lift down to her lab, reminding her of clichéd scenes in scary movies.

  She signed into the lab, got gowned up, and went into the inner room to sort out her cultures. Afterwards, she stripped off the gown and shoe covers. She usually worked alone there, and it could be any time of night or day down there in the basement.

  But when she went up to the ordinary lab it was a different matter. During the day there was always activity and noise, people coming and going, working at their benches or chatting, in the background the hum of the container hood. But at night it was quiet, and the stillness was unsettling. She found herself listening for something – she wasn’t sure what.

  The lab was on the ground floor, but with high windows. Even if someone was passing and saw the lights on, they wouldn’t know who was in there or what they were doing. She went to her own bench and got out her lab book to record what she had just done. Yes, she was undercover, but she was still determined to do the work of a technician to the best of her ability, and that included recording everything. The lab books contained all the details that were needed to replicate an experiment or procedure. And if it was ever necessary to prove that the lab had made a particular discovery at a particular time, the lab books could be scrutinized for evidence, so they were potentially documents of public record.

  That done, she moved towards Claudia’s bench. Her lab book should be there somewhere. They weren’t supposed to take them out of the lab. Sure enough, when Katie opened the top drawer of the desk, the lab book was lying there. She took it back to her own bench. If someone came in, it would look less suspicious than if she was seen rummaging around at someone else’s bench. Plus she wasn’t visible from the door.

  Lab books were as individual as the people who kept them. Some people wrote them up as they went along, other people once a week or whenever it occurred to them. Claudia’s was messy, both inside and out. Katie’s lab book was so new that it was still pristine, but she knew that it would soon be battered and dog-eared and stained with ethanol, just like Claudia’s.

  Katie wasn’t really expecting to find anything obviously wrong here – it would be too easily detected – but she had to cover all the bases. Rather than go through the book then, she took out her phone and began to photograph the pages so that she could go through them later at her leisure and compare them with the lab book of the last technician. As she turned the pages over, she found herself humming “The Girl of My Best Friend”.

  Her phone buzzed and made her jump. The text was from Justin. “Fancy a chat?”

  She replied, “Can’t now. Later?”

  The answer came back immediately. “Sure.”

  She heard the door of the lab open with a pneumatic hiss and her heart lurched. She pulled open a drawer and thrust Claudia’s lab book into it. She had her own open on the desk when Caspar appeared around the end of the line of benches.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re working late.”

  “Oh, I haven’t been here all evening – just popped in to check on a culture.” She hoped she didn’t look as flustered as she felt.

  “Are you settling in O
K?”

  “Oh, yes, thanks. I’ve been to the karaoke night.”

  He laughed. “Did Bill do his party piece?”

  “He did.”

  “Bill’s a great guy. He does the occasional recital for charity. I always think it’s important to have interests outside the lab. Some people seem to live their whole lives in here. That’s not healthy. All work and no play and all that.” He stood beside her, smiling, radiating goodwill. “Have you nearly finished?” he asked. “We could walk back up to the house together.”

  She hesitated. It would be nice to have company, but she wanted to finish what she had come to do and to put Claudia’s lab book back. “I need to write up what I’ve done tonight. I’ll be a while yet.”

  “OK. I’ll say goodnight then.”

  But when he’d gone, she felt too wired to go on with her photographing. She’d have to come back another night. There wasn’t that much left to do, and she could make a start with what she had.

  She went over to the door and looked out into the corridor to check that she really was alone before she went back and replaced Claudia’s lab book in her desk.

  It was only as she checked out that she wondered what Caspar had been doing in the building so late in the evening. He didn’t, after all, have cultures to nurture, and his office was in the old house. She wondered if he made a habit of wandering around the labs at any time of day or night. She really hoped not.

  * * *

  As she stepped out of the building she saw that the sky was now overcast. Even the faint light from the stars was gone, and when she left the circle of light around the entrance, the darkness seemed to press against her face like a thick, dark, velvety curtain. She stood for a few moments to let her eyes adjust before she switched on the torch on her phone.

  She made her way up the path past the arcade with its statues in their shadowy niches. She ran her torch along them as she went. From the book about Debussy Point she’d learned that they represented Arthurian characters: Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Merlin, the Lady of Shalott. The missing figure was Morgan le Fay. She had asked Siobhan about that and was told that the frost had finally done so much damage that she’d been taken away for repair.