An Air That Kills

by Christine Poulson

  She came to where the path wound through the outskirts of the wood and went past Gemma’s cottage. She was aware of small rustlings and movements in the undergrowth. It was never really quiet in the country.

  She was still some way off the cottage when the door opened and light spilled out. She switched off her torch and stood stock-still. There was no reason really why she shouldn’t be there, but still, she stepped back into the shelter of the trees.

  Someone was coming out – a man, tall, broad-shouldered – but as he stepped over the threshold he swung round so that Katie couldn’t see his face. The light gleamed on a leather jacket. Gemma was at the door and he scooped her into an embrace. There was something in that gesture – ardent, protective – that spoke volumes. She thought, I wonder if Justin feels like that about me, and she felt a pang of yearning.

  Then, laughing, Gemma thrust the man from her, in the way you might push away a boisterous dog. It seemed to Katie that there was an element of contempt in it, and perhaps the man felt it too, because he made a gesture of protest. But then he seemed to accept his dismissal. Gemma went back in and closed the door. The guy switched on his phone torch and set off down the path, the narrow beam dancing along towards Katie.

  She remained perfectly still, her heart beating fast, holding her breath. How would she account for herself if he spotted her standing among the trees? He passed her only a few feet away. He was close enough for her to hear him humming “The Girl of My Best Friend”.

  Katie waited until the torch beam had disappeared and then stood for a few extra minutes to be quite sure he had gone. She switched on her torch and made her way up the hill.

  She was pretty sure that the broad-shouldered guy in the leather jacket was Bill. Was this why Maddie was so sure that Gemma was not having an affair with Caspar? If it was actually Bill that Gemma was sleeping with, loyalty to her boss might explain why Maddie hadn’t wanted to share that with Katie.

  CHAPTER 21

  SATURDAY

  Katie spent Saturday in her apartment going through her photographs of Claudia’s lab book, which she had downloaded onto her iPad. The avian virus had its own code, consisting of a list of abbreviations. Katie found it and followed it through the lab book. Every step in the procedure seemed present and correct as far as Katie could tell, and the lab book was signed off every week or two by Gemma, so there was no problem there. It appeared in every way to be a normal lab book. Claudia hadn’t always used the same pen, which suggested that she had written it up as she went along, using whatever came to hand.

  Around four o’clock Katie closed the document with a sigh. If Claudia was somehow fiddling the books, she’d found no evidence of it so far. She hadn’t really thought she would. Claudia was too smart to be caught out that way.

  The drive to Wells should take about two hours. She had brought her car over to the island the previous day. Luckily it was low tide now and she could time her return so that she’d also be back at low tide.

  She found herself scratching her wrist. There was an itchy red lump where the mosquito had bitten her. So much for Tarquin’s promise that it would soon disappear. In a first-aid kit in the bathroom cabinet she found some antihistamine and applied it to the bite. That should damp down the inflammation.

  Reluctantly, begrudging the time, she put her make-up on. She’d been enjoying a day without it, but she didn’t know who she might meet walking down to the car park. Better not let her guard slip. But she promised herself a day off from it tomorrow – at least until it was time to return.

  It was almost dark as she drove over the causeway. Something in her relaxed as she reached the other side. It was as if she was leaving Caitlin behind and becoming Katie again. She actually heard herself heave a sigh of relief.

  It was only sixty or seventy miles to Wells, but it was a slow drive along the winding A39. Katie didn’t mind. It gave her time to decompress and to savour the anticipation of seeing Justin.

  It was seven o’clock when she pulled into the car park of the White Hart, a picturesque old pub with a view of Wells Cathedral. Justin must have been watching for her, because as she got her bag out of the boot, he came out to meet her. She dropped her bag and he swept her off her feet. She flung her arms round his neck and he lifted her up into a bear hug. He smelt wonderful. She rubbed her cheek against his. They pulled back and looked into each other’s eyes.

  “Hello you,” he said.

  * * *

  Over dinner in the pub Justin asked her about the people on the island and she told him about the way Caspar reminded her of her beloved supervisor.

  Justin said, “Not your average geeky scientist then? I’m wondering if I should be jealous!”

  “Oh, that old stereotype. Well, yes, I have to admit there are plenty of those about, but there are larger-than-life characters too. Mavericks like – well, Lyle, as a matter of fact.”

  “Men with giant egos,” Justin said.

  “Well, mostly,” she admitted, “but not all. My favourite maverick scientist is Polly Matzinger. She’s an immunologist, but she worked as a jazz musician and bunny girl before she got her first degree. She credited her dog as co-author on a research paper. When she was considered for tenure there were complaints, but it was concluded that the issue of the dog co-authorship wasn’t fraud, because the dog had visited the lab and had done no less research than co-authors on a lot of other scientific papers.”

  Justin laughed. “Wonderful!”

  “As for Gemma, I think I’ve got her number. She’s an empire-builder, has her name on hundreds of papers, but she can’t possibly have contributed to them all.”

  “That’s common enough in astrophysics too. The classic example is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She was the first to observe radio pulsars, but her supervisor was listed first on the paper that announced the discovery and he was the one that got the Nobel Prize.”

  “I’m guessing good old-fashioned sexism also played a part there. But to go back to my point about Gemma. She’s off at conferences all the time, she’s chairing committees, she’s the lead investigator on lots of projects. She pretty much just lets Claudia get on with it.”

  “There has to be an element of trust, doesn’t there?” Justin pointed out.

  Of course there did. Katie knew that from her own experience. Gemma couldn’t be forever hovering over Claudia’s shoulder, even if she was so inclined, and Katie’s own principal investigators had varied quite a lot in the degree of their involvement.

  “Have you actually found anything wrong yet?” Justin went on.

  “No,” she admitted. “I’ve spent hours going through Claudia’s most recent lab book and so far there’s nothing that I can put my finger on.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah...”

  “Do you want there to be something wrong, Katie?”

  She considered this. “Good question.” Maybe she did, at that. It would be some justification for all this sneaking around. But when all was said and done she was a scientist committed to the scientific project.

  “No,” she concluded. “I do want Claudia to have succeeded. It would be another step on the road to preventing the next pandemic. But I’m not at all convinced she has. There’s just something a bit off. I know exactly what Lyle meant. The closest I can come to it is the feeling that with Claudia it’s not about the work; it’s about carving out a stellar career. She does what needs to be done, but she’s not like some scientists I know, in and out of the lab at all hours of the day and night.”

  “If she is cheating, what could it be?” Justin asked.

  “Anything really. At one end of the scale it could be massaging the results a tiny bit, tidying them up, borderline stuff. Or it could be ignoring data that doesn’t fit with the results she wants. It could be failure to replicate her results. And right at the other end of the scale, what if she doesn’t have any results at all? What if she’s just made the whole lot up?”

  “Wow!”
Justin’s eyebrows shot up. “You really think –”

  “Not really,” she admitted. “Though it has been known to happen. You’d be amazed at what people have got away with – or tried to get away with. I’ve been reading up about medical fraud. There’s the famous case of a guy in the 1970s who claimed he’d transplanted skin from a black mouse to a white, but he’d actually drawn in the black patches with a felt-tip pen.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. Sometimes people are under pressure to produce results, and they maybe begin by exaggerating what they’ve managed to do, and then they exaggerate a bit more and then things start to get out of hand.”

  “So, what’s next?”

  Katie had been thinking about that on the long drive. “There are two things. I’ll check the stores and the orders and see if they tally with what Claudia says she’s used. For instance, if she used enough reagents – that’s the media needed for growing animal cells – for it to be credible that she’s done what she claims to have done. I can do that quite openly. Making an inventory is a perfectly natural thing for an incoming technician to want to do. And if there are discrepancies, it’s just the kind of thing that might have aroused the suspicions of one of the previous technicians.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “That’s more tricky. I am going to try and replicate one of her experiments myself.”

  “Can you do that? I mean, without anyone knowing what you’re doing.”

  “I think so. One colourless liquid – and that’s what we’re talking about here – is very much like another. Who’s to know what I’m actually working on?” She yawned. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  He reached for her hand and squeezed it. He looked at the mosquito bite on her wrist. “What’s happened here?” he asked.

  She explained about Tarquin and the arm-feeding insect that had escaped. “But the mosquito was clean – I mean, it wasn’t carrying anything nasty.”

  “That looks pretty inflamed.”

  “Yeah, but I think that’s all it is. It’s not infected.”

  They went up to their room. As he unlocked the door, Justin said, “I’ve bought you something, a present.”

  What would this be, she wondered? Something traditional and romantic? Chocolates? Flowers? But somehow she didn’t think that was Justin’s style and – she didn’t quite know why – it wouldn’t feel right. It was as if they had already gone past that stage – or, no, that they’d skipped it. Because they’d had to hold off for so long, it was as if they’d gone straight into being a proper couple.

  From his suitcase he produced a package wrapped in gift paper.

  She opened it.

  Inside was a telescope and a copy of Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas.

  Justin was watching her face. He said, “There’s a meteor shower in around ten days. I know we can’t be together, but I thought we might still watch it together – you at Debussy Point and me in Cambridge.”

  “That’s a lovely idea,” she said. She put up her face to give him a thank-you kiss.

  As his lips met hers, she felt the tug of desire.

  “Are you still feeling tired?” he asked.

  And suddenly she wasn’t.

  * * *

  “Gawain was riding through the forest, when he saw a kind of smoke which seemed like air, and through which he could not pass. The voice of Merlin told him: ‘In the world there is no such strong tower as this wherein I am confined; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything else; and made of enchantment so strong, that it can never be demolished while the world lasts, neither can I go out, nor can anyone come in, save she who has enclosed me there.’”

  Gemma was reading in bed. She had decided to familiarize herself with some of the legends that Caspar was always banging on about, starting with the story of Merlin.

  And what an extraordinary tale that was! The source for this particular version was a fifteenth-century French romance in which Viviane agrees to become Merlin’s mistress on condition that he teaches her his necromancy. One day they walk through the forest of Broceliande and they lie down to make love beneath a hawthorn tree. Merlin falls asleep and he wakes to find Viviane has trapped him in a tower from which he can never escape, though Viviane can come and go at will.

  A woman after Gemma’s own heart! She rather fancied herself as a modern-day Viviane. In those days when women had been the chattels of fathers and husbands, hadn’t the enchantresses of the legends, the Vivianes and the Morgan le Fays, been proto-feminists in their way – bold, powerful and wilful, at the beck and call of no one? And then, could science be regarded as a kind of magic? Or was that stretching the analogy too far? Perhaps.

  She poured herself a last glass of wine from the bottle on the bedside table. Thank goodness she’d managed to get Bill to go home. He was good in bed, but out of it he was such a bore. If she had to hear one more thing about moths! She wished she could trap him in a tower and leave him there. He was so irritating, gazing at her with those puppy dog eyes, and finding excuses to come to the cottage. She could do better than Bill – was doing better than Bill – and she’d have to find a way to choke him off.

  She looked with satisfaction at her surroundings: the pretty William Morris curtains, the Persian rug in red, black and cream, the bed linen of high-end Egyptian cotton. She stretched luxuriously. This lovely little house was easily the nicest on the island. She smiled to herself. Her tastes were really very simple – just the best of everything. Life was good. Her career was going from strength to strength. She congratulated herself on making an excellent choice with Claudia. Claudia reminded her of her younger self: energetic, ambitious, hungry for success, and very, very smart. In the pipeline there was already another publication with Gemma as the senior author – written by Claudia, of course – and there was no knowing what further breakthroughs might result from this research.

  Just for a moment, a troubling thought hovered on the edge of her mind. Claudia didn’t seem to have much luck in hanging on to her technicians – one or two people had remarked on that. She dismissed the thought: Claudia was young and impatient. She had high standards and demanded a lot from the people she worked with. That was all it was. Gemma had been the same as a young woman.

  She yawned, couldn’t understand why she was so tired. She had a bit of a headache too. Time to settle down to sleep. She got out of bed to go and brush her teeth and was overcome by a wave of dizziness. She thought for a moment that she was going to have to lie down, but it passed. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something. An early night, a couple of paracetamols and some hot whisky, honey, and lemon. That should do the trick.

  CHAPTER 22

  SUNDAY

  The next morning Katie and Justin got up late. They had a leisurely breakfast and then set out to explore Wells.

  The weather was unusually mild for the time of year, and it was warm in the sun. As Katie strolled hand in hand with Justin past the medieval houses on Vicar’s Close, Debussy Point and suspicions of fraud seemed a world away. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a Sunday like this, just relaxing with a boyfriend. It was – what? – two years, or no, more like three, since her last relationship had ended, and she’d begun to think she’d be single forever. It was lovely to be part of a couple again.

  By the time they had wandered round the close and explored the garden of the Bishop’s Palace, the morning service in the cathedral was over and people were streaming out of the main entrance. They made their way inside, pausing to take in the spectacle of the extraordinary curving scissor arches that supported the central tower and the soaring columns of the nave.

  Katie regarded herself as almost an atheist, or perhaps an agnostic of the palest possible hue, but there was something about a cathedral that always moved her. She wasn’t sure what it was – the huge vaulted space and the sheer drama of the architecture? Or perhaps the feeling that hundreds of years
of prayer and music had somehow soaked into the fabric of the place to create this oasis of peace.

  They walked past a chapel where a stand of lighted candles gleamed in the dimness.

  “I think I’ll light a candle for Chloe,” Katie said, a little shame-faced, because after all it was just superstition, wasn’t it? And Justin was a scientist like herself. It couldn’t really do any good. But by the same token, she reflected, it couldn’t do any harm.

  Justin seemed to take it as a matter of course. “Let’s do that,” he said. He took some coins out of his pocket and fed them into a box attached to the stand.

  At first Katie had trouble getting the taper to light the candle, but then it took and the flame sprang up. There was something hopeful and brave in the contrast between the little flickering flame and the vastness of the cathedral.

  They stopped in the choir stalls to examine the misericords. The medieval craftsmen had given their creativity full rein in their carving of foliage, elephants, mermaids, dragons, and grotesque faces. Justin wanted to examine everything and had something to say about everything they saw.

  They reached the entrance to the chapter house. Justin said, “I’ve been wanting to see this. It’s supposed to be the finest in the country.” It was reached by a stone staircase of such drama and beauty that they both came to a halt. The staircase divided part of the way up, with one side sweeping round to the chapter house in a movement that was like the swell of a breaking wave.

  As they continued up the stairs, Katie said, “You seem to know a lot about cathedral architecture.”

  “Well, you do tend to absorb these things when you have a vicar for a father.”

  She stopped and looked at him. “No, really?” All those months in Antarctica and she hadn’t known that. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised, because after all why shouldn’t his father be a vicar?