An Air That Kills

by Christine Poulson

  “Someone who wanted access to the lab but didn’t want to use their own ID. Tell me, Katie, how easy would it be to steal mosquitoes infected with malaria without anyone realizing that they’d gone?”

  “I’d have to check with Maddie or Tarquin. I think that once the mosquitoes are infected they keep pretty close tabs on them. They’d keep a record of how many they’ve got of those. But they don’t count the ones in the insectary. There’s no need.”

  “So someone could take some from the insectary to replace the infected ones and no one would know that there were any missing.”

  “You mean someone might have taken infected mosquitoes in order to give Gemma malaria? But that’s horrible. No, no –”

  Justin put up a hand. “OK, but let’s just run with it anyway. If she had been bitten by a mosquito recently, wouldn’t they have discovered that when they carried out the post-mortem?”

  “Not necessarily. The bite could easily have had time to heal by then. She might have been infected as much as a fortnight before she died.”

  “OK. Let’s say someone had got hold of infected mosquitoes. How would that work? Presumably they’re most active at night like they are in the wild?”

  Katie nodded. “So it would have to be someone pretty close to her. Someone who had access to her cottage and her bedroom.” A thought struck her. “Oh no, surely not! No! Not Bill!”

  “He’s the guy in charge of the malaria lab, right?”

  “He was in a relationship with Gemma. But he really loved her. I’m sure he did.”

  “Hold your horses. Why would Bill go into his own lab in the dead of night using Gemma’s ID? He had a perfect right to be there. If he wanted to pinch some mosquitoes he could just choose a Saturday or an evening when he knew the others wouldn’t be there.”

  Katie thought of the evening she had found Bill in Gemma’s cottage, and his search for evidence that she was having an affair. He had told her that he was sure someone had been in there and that things had been moved. And Katie herself had seen a light in there one night after Gemma had been taken ill.

  She told Justin what Bill had said and what she had seen. “What if Bill was right and there was another man – maybe someone who was married and Gemma was threatening to tell his wife?”

  Justin looked dubious. “In this day and age? Would someone really commit murder for that? It’s not even as if this was a spur of the moment thing. A lot of planning must have gone into it.”

  No, not a spur of the moment thing. Just as the attempt to kill Katie by pushing her into the sea had not been a spur of the moment thing. Again Katie was struggling to make a connection and again, yes, something to do with Paul. Something Paul had said? No...

  And then she knew what had been nagging at her. It was the way Caspar had looked at her when he had realized that her undercover role was to investigate Claudia’s results. There had been surprise, yes, but also an expression that was strangely familiar. It was exactly how her brother used to look when they were children and she’d got the blame for something he’d done: a look of mingled relief and triumph. Relief that it was Claudia Katie had come to Debussy Point to expose? And then... triumph because he’d pulled one over on her? Because he’d got away with it? But with what?

  Her thoughts went back to the one and only occasion when she had met Gemma before the day they had discovered her in the cottage; the brusqueness in Gemma’s voice when she spoke to Caspar, even though he was senior to her. Katie had suspected then that there was something between them. She’d assumed it was in the past, but what if it wasn’t? What if it had still been going on? Maddie had been adamant that Caspar wasn’t having an affair with Gemma, but what if she’d been wrong? Katie saw again the imperious expression on Gemma’s face – and, yes, it came back to her now: Gemma was scratching! Was that because she had been bitten?

  “Oh my goodness!”

  “What is it?” Justin asked.

  “No, wait, let me think!”

  She played back in her mind Caspar’s account of what had happened in the village. Now that she thought about it, it didn’t fit with what Gemma had actually said. The disease spreading – that was what she was worried about, but according to Caspar, it already had spread when she got to the village, and there was nothing to be done about it. But Katie only had Caspar’s word for what had gone on there. Everyone in the village was dead. The interpreter too had died, and now with Gemma gone, Caspar was the only survivor. There was no one to contradict his story.

  She had been spellbound by Caspar’s charm and charisma, almost hypnotized into accepting what he said, and flattered by his confiding in her. What a fool she had been.

  She laid it out for Justin, watching his reaction as she took him through it step by step. “It all stacks up,” she concluded.

  He looked doubtful.

  “You’re not convinced?” she asked.

  “It’s not that, but suppose you’re right? What are you going to do? Go to the police? Is there any real evidence? I mean, even if he was having an affair with Gemma, that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t see how it could be brought home to him.”

  He was right. Katie slumped in her chair. A conviction based on her interpretation of an expression on Caspar’s face would count for nothing. Had Caspar committed the perfect crime?

  Then her eye fell on the copy of Le Morte d’Arthur open on the table next to her. There might be a way after all.

  * * *

  She walked straight into Caspar’s office without knocking.

  He was sitting at his desk and looked up, startled. He smiled and got to his feet. “Hey, Katie, it’s great to see you! And I’ve just had some good news. There’s been a slight improvement in Claudia’s condition.”

  That was indeed wonderful news, but Katie couldn’t allow herself to be deflected. “Great, but that’s not why I’m here, Caspar.”

  She sat down opposite him and placed the copy of Le Morte d’Arthur on his desk. A paper marker was sticking out of it.

  Caspar opened his mouth to speak and closed it again when he saw the expression on her face. He sat down. His face was wary. “What’s this all about?”

  “Nemesis, I suppose you could call it,” she said. She opened the book at the marker. A flattened mosquito was stuck to the page. “This book that you lent me – you lent it to Gemma first, didn’t you? I saw it in her bedroom. Did you retrieve it yourself, or did Gemma’s sister see your name in it and give it back to you? It doesn’t matter. I can see exactly what must happened. Can’t you? The book was open on the bedside table. Gemma saw the mosquito land on it and she clapped the book shut. Of course she had no way of knowing that the mosquito was infected with malaria.”

  If she had had any doubts at all, they were dispelled by the shock on his face. He reached for the book, but she snatched it away.

  “Oh, no you don’t. What do you think the forensic scientists will find when they test this mosquito? I think they’ll find that it’s infected with malaria, don’t you? It could only have come from the Cat 3 lab. So, tell me, Caspar, how many mosquitoes did you take?”

  He stared at her and she thought he was going to brazen it out. He shrugged.

  “Five.”

  “Five! How could you have taken that risk? Did you think about who else might be infected? Or didn’t you care, as long as Gemma was one of them?”

  He shook his head. “No, no. It was Gemma having that cottage and being away from everyone else that made it possible.”

  “What if one of us had visited Gemma while one of them was still active? What about Bill? You did know about Bill?”

  “Oh, I knew about Bill. She made no attempt to hide it. That was a calculated risk. I picked a night when I knew he wouldn’t be there.”

  “When was it? When did you do it?”

  “It was the Monday, the day after you arrived.”

  Katie’s blood ran cold. Her first day at the lab, the restless night that had followed, the dream about mosqui
toes? She had woken with a start, certain that there was one in her room.

  “Look,” he said impatiently. “It was safe. Or safe enough. In that temperature, the mosquitoes couldn’t have lived long enough to make it to the main house.”

  “One of them did! I heard it in my bedroom. I might have caught malaria!”

  “Oh, really?” he said in a tone of scientific detachment. “One of them made it all the way over to the main house? That’s interesting. I wouldn’t thought that was possible.”

  She felt an absurd impulse to say, I thought you were my friend. Instead she said, “But why? Why did you do it?”

  “It was either that or remain under the heel of that –” he sought for a word, “that harpy! We’d had an affair while we were out in the DRC. I wanted to end it, but I couldn’t. Not with what she had on me. And that wasn’t all. She demanded the best accommodation on the island, all kinds of preferential treatment. Believe me, there would have been no end to it. And the worst of it was that she was a phony – you found that out for yourself. She was a disgrace to the scientific community. She must have suspected what was going on with Claudia, but all she cared about was the results; she was out for herself right down the line.”

  His disgust about that was genuine, Katie realized. That was the strange thing.

  “But why?” she said. “What did you do? How could she have that kind of hold over you? Out there in the DRC, was it you that froze, that failed to act?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Neither of us lost our head. But we’d been to that village on an earlier occasion, when it was only the boy that was sick. If I’d called it in, we’d have had to stay there, and even though it might have been nothing, we’d have been quarantined and it would have jeopardized our research. With hindsight, obviously, I’d have done things differently. Mind you, I still don’t think I did anything wrong. It was a judgment call and he didn’t seem as sick as all that. And then when our interpreter died, it didn’t seem necessary to, well...” He shrugged.

  She finished his sentence. “It didn’t seem necessary to own up.” She remembered something Lyle had once said: “It’s not the crime that gets you; it’s the cover-up.” How true that was. Had Caspar committed a crime? No, not exactly that, but selfishly he had put his research interests first; he’d made a catastrophic error of judgment and as a result a horrible disease had got a hold. Scores of people had died, and that might not have happened if quarantine restrictions had been put in place earlier.

  “And Gemma was the only one who knew,” Katie said. “She was your assistant at the time.”

  His face broke into a smile – the smile she had liked so much. “You have to admit, it was a brilliant idea. It so nearly came off. Even now, well, I’m wondering. I’ve looked into your history. Your career as a researcher crashed and burned. You’ve had some bad breaks, but that could all change. I could be a good friend to you, Katie.”

  Her mouth fell open. She was literally lost for words.

  Caspar read her expression and shrugged. “Suit yourself. But let me point out that we’re all alone here, and when you come to think of it, do you really have any evidence? One squashed mosquito doesn’t really amount to much, does it?”

  “Well, actually, I do. Now.”

  She took her mobile phone out of her pocket and showed it to him. The line was open.

  His reaction was so immediate that she was taken unawares. He sprang to his feet. In a flash he was round the desk. He put both hands flat on her chest and pushed. She toppled off her chair and went sprawling. He snatched a set of keys off the desk and then he was out of the door.

  CHAPTER 45

  Then Caspar was racing off down the corridor, past the startled gaze of Justin, who was waiting outside. Caspar expected to hear the thud of footsteps pursuing him, but no, and glancing back he realized that Justin had heard the crash of Katie hitting the floor and gone to her.

  As Caspar burst through the double doors to the entrance hall, Greg at the porter’s desk looked up, startled. Caspar slowed down and waved a hand, tried to smile. At the very moment that his hand touched the outer door an alarm went off. That must have been Katie.

  Then he was out into the night. The wind had got up. It was as if his inner turbulence had spilled into the outer world. Clouds streamed across the sky, and the trees seemed alive with writhing branches. He ran down the path towards the promontory, almost carried along by the wind at his back.

  He wasn’t thinking, he had no plan, just an instinct to flee. If he could only get off the island, somehow escape from this place and the wreckage he had made of his life. He could find somewhere to hole up. He had plenty of money. He had friends all over the world; he could go to Africa.

  His car was in the car park at the base of the hill. He didn’t need to consult the schedule of the tides. He knew them by heart. It would be tight, very tight, but he’d driven over before when the water was beginning to slop over his tyres. And he had never minded taking a risk.

  He jumped into the car. The moon was full and high, and for a few moments the clouds dropped away and he saw the bay in the moonlight. The water was lapping up against the promontory. He drove down the ramp onto the road and the wind buffeted the car. Already there was a thin wash of water spurting up from his tyres.

  The clouds covered the moon and he put the car into second gear and ploughed on into the darkness.

  He was less than halfway across when he realized that he had misjudged the speed of the tide – or not taken into account the gale force winds. It was too late to go back. He knew without looking that the sea had closed in behind him. His headlights shone on choppy water and the resistance that the water offered was growing as he urged the car forward. If he could just pick up enough speed to carry him through!

  The undertow lifted up the car and pushed it sideways and he fought to keep the car on the road. The sea was trying to take the car and him with it. He had to get out! He managed to push open the door a few inches, but the pressure of the water pressed it back. The window – frantically he tried to get it open, but it was all too late. Water had got into the electrics. He was losing control of the car. It was rocking and slipping sideways into deeper water.

  They say that when you’re drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes.

  He saw again that village in the jungle, and himself gazing down at the sick boy. He’d tried to conceal his impatience. He had gone out to the Congo to do research on diseases that had made the leap from an animal host to human beings, but he had never expected to deal with actual patients. He was not a clinician, after all.

  He saw himself wiping the sweat away from his forehead as he looked at the boy, careful not to touch him or go too near.

  “What’s that?” he’d asked the interpreter, pointing to a recently healed wound on the boy’s hand.

  The interpreter asked the father and relayed the answer: “He was bitten by a baby monkey.”

  “When did that happen?”

  Again, a consultation. The father waved an arm to indicate a place some way off.

  “It was ten days ago,” the interpreter reported. “At his uncle’s village.”

  Ten days ago. And the boy had got sick a few days ago. Perhaps he had contracted this disease from the monkey. That would fit with a plausible incubation period.

  “How far away is it?” he asked.

  “Ten kilometres.”

  “And is the monkey still there?”

  The father shrugged and spoke. The interpreter said, “He thinks so. He’s not sure.”

  Caspar had looked again at the boy, weighing up the situation. Could this be Ebola? No, the symptoms weren’t quite right and he would surely be sicker than this.

  The mother spoke. The translator said, “She thinks he is a little better today.”

  He had come to a decision. In his eagerness to discover the source of the boy’s illness and make an important breakthrough, he had behaved incredibly foolishly. Afterwards he wo
ndered whether the heat had somehow sapped his judgment.

  And it had all been for nothing anyway: when he got to the uncle’s village the monkey had already been killed and eaten. When he got back to the little village three days later the boy was dead and everyone else was sick and dying. Worse, he had neglected to ask the family about the boy’s movements. He had simply assumed that the child had not left the village. In fact he had gone from his uncle to his boarding school, and his parents had brought their child home from there, but not before he had infected thirty-five other boys, twenty-eight of whom had died. Altogether, several hundred people died before the disease was brought under control.

  No one from the village had survived and he had been able to pretend that the first visit had never happened. The only person who knew otherwise was Gemma.

  And now the sea was rising up against the windows, and as the car tipped sideways he understood that his luck had finally run out. Perhaps it had run out that day in the DRC when he had made the wrong call and Gemma had witnessed it.

  It was simply that it had taken him this long to understand there was no way back.

  CHAPTER 46

  THURSDAY

  Lyle said, “It’s ironic that Caspar was caught out in the end by Gemma trapping that mosquito.”

  “Well, yes,” Katie said. “It would be – if that was what had happened.”

  They were talking on the phone the following day. The quarantine had been lifted and Katie was busy packing when Lyle rang.

  There was silence, then: “So – the mosquito didn’t come from the lab, or what?”

  “Oh, it came from the lab alright, but it wasn’t infected with malaria. Tarquin kindly supplied me with a mosquito from the insectary.”

  “What! You mean –”

  “That’s right. I squashed it between the pages of the book myself.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Lyle made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh.

  “I have to hand it to you, Katie. You’re quite something. It’d almost be funny if it weren’t that two people have died – not to mention all those poor folk who contracted Sangha fever. I wonder, did Caspar really think he could escape after what he had done? I suppose there’s absolutely no chance that he did escape? Any way he could have survived?”