I thought about it and realised he was right, which made me weepy again for a while.
We talked. I found I needed to talk about Sarah, and how we’d got back together again. After a while, I asked him how his family was, and he said fine.
Roland poked his head round and asked if he could come in. Sure. He found a chair and sat beside Redd. I asked if I could have the IV drip out and he said he didn’t see why not.
He went on, ‘Actually, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve asked the consultant, Jill Martins, if she’d come and have a look at you in a minute. You can ask her.’
More insiders’ perks. I asked him about the bandage round my head (I’d felt it when I’d put my hands over my eyes) and he told me it was a bullet wound.
‘Don’t you remember?’ he asked.
I went to shake my head, thought better of it. ‘No.’
He explained how the bullet had just creased my skull and I’d fallen into the river afterwards. ‘You owe your life to that woman cop – police person or whatever they are now. Another few minutes in that water and you’d have been gone.’
‘She came in after me?’
He nodded. ‘You were quite a way out, she had to swim for you.’
‘And I was unconscious?’
Another nod.
‘Why didn’t I drown?’
‘She said you were hanging on to a piece of wood. Survival instinct, I suppose.’
I asked what was happening in Newton-on-Exe and he told me how the outbreak was more or less contained. ‘We’ve had a few cases from outside – people who caught it there but lived somewhere else.’
There had been thirty-nine cases so far and seven deaths, he told me. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if we had a few secondary cases, but I think the worst is over.’
I said, ‘It’s only just occurred to me – did they get who was behind it?’
‘Not so far as I know. The police’ll be wanting to talk to you, you can ask them.’
The door opened and Jill Martins, the consultant, came in. We’d met before, although I didn’t know her well. She in was in her forties with greying hair: tall, spare, confident. She commiserated, asked me how I felt, poked and prodded me about.
‘When can I go home?’
She made a face. ‘We should really keep you in a few days with an injury like this–’
‘And I really want to go home.’
She looked at me. ‘I can understand that. Let’s see how you are tomorrow morning. Then, maybe in the afternoon…’
After she’d gone, I asked Roland if I could see Grace.
He hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, but you’d better not just now.’ Another pause. ‘She’s had – I suppose, still got – smallpox, but very, very mildly. It sometimes happens like that.’ Then he said, ‘You know, it might be because she’d been breast fed.’
So Sarah’s determination to be a good mother had probably saved Grace’s life. I said so, and he slowly nodded.
‘Let’s see how things are tomorrow, and perhaps we could take you to see her.’
A nurse came in to take out the drip and give me a wash. It was mildly humiliating, but I felt better for it afterwards. I had some soup off the trolley, although the nurse warned me my guts might be in turmoil for a while. Bedpans. Yippee doo. Redd came back in the evening.
When night came, I couldn’t sleep. My head was aching and they gave me paracetamol. Lying there, however, I started remembering things and gradually, the spaces filled up. I remembered agreeing to take the diamonds, the mobile phone I found giving me orders, walking through the woods with one in front and one behind. The clearing, the gunshot, the conviction I was going to die. I remembered falling in the water, but nothing else.
I thought about Sarah. I hoped they were telling me the truth and she hadn’t been asking for me and wondering where I was. Why I wasn’t with her. Cried on and off, although I tried to stop when the night nurse looked in. Wished I could do it at home.
Eventually, I must have slept.
The next morning, Jill Martins examined me again, watched while I walked up and down the room a few times. When I told her my brother would be staying with me a few days, she said I could go home.
Before I went, Roland took me to see Grace. I had to gown up.
She looked fine. There were a couple of spots round her forehead, but they were healing already. She stared back at me, frowning. I’d like to think she recognised me, although it was more likely she was wondering about the bandage on my head. Then Redd drove me home.
Brigg and Rebecca came round later in the afternoon. Brigg had called, so I knew they were coming. As soon as they were inside, Rebecca took my hand in both of hers.
‘I’m so sorry, Herry. I can’t imagine what it must be like.’
I just nodded, took them through to the sitting room and introduced them to Redd. They sat down, then Brigg looked at me.
‘As Rebecca said, we’re both very sorry for your loss, Herry.’ The first time he’d used my Christian name. ‘I’m also sorry it’s necessary to intrude so soon. Can you manage a few questions?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I want my brother to sit in.’
His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Why?’
‘Moral support. Also, a fresh mind might help. He already knows most of it.’
Brigg’s mouth tightened. ‘I don’t think you should have –’
Redd interrupted. ‘I work for the government myself Commander, and I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act.’
Brigg took a breath. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Provided you don’t make any comments while I’m asking questions. I mean that.’
Redd nodded. Brigg went on.
‘What I want to go over with you is the sequence of events during the handover. Can you remember that?’
‘Most of it, I think.’ I told him everything I could remember. I felt curiously unemotional, uninvolved – perhaps because what happened later was worse.
That changed.
Brigg produced a tape machine and we went over it again, after playing each sequence of the recording. That brought it back all right – I started shaking as soon as I heard that hateful voice. However, it also brought back details I hadn’t remembered.
The way the moon lit up the wasteland, and later the river; the curious light on the skyline. And another quality of his voice.
The slight Bristolian accent came over in the tape, but so did the calm, almost reassuring quality he’d had, even though he knew he was sucking me into a trap …
The voice of the other one – Jase! I’d forgotten that too, and how much rougher his voice was, more brutal.
Then the moment when they shot me – no, he – Jase – shot me…
A splash, then nothing more.
Brigg switched off the machine. ‘A couple of things stand out,’ he said. ‘Jase was obviously expecting to shoot you – the other one actually called him over to do it. And yet he shot Jase before Jase could kill you. Was that deliberate?’
I went over it in my head, listened to the tape again. At last:
‘I think he fired at exactly the same time as Jase –’
‘Yes, that comes over on the tape.’
I went on, ‘If he wanted me dead, he’d have waited for Jase to finish… wouldn’t he?’
‘You’d have thought so, yes. If that’s the case, d’you have any idea why?’
‘None whatsoever.’
He nodded as though he was expecting that. ‘D’you think they’re the same men who attacked you in the hospital?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Was there anything – anything – familiar about either of them?’
I pushed my brain, but there wasn’t. He asked if I wanted to hear the tape again. No, it was the last thing I wanted to hear, but I listened, several times, trying to pick up something. I couldn’t.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘The next thing is that I think they must have had some kind of inside information: they knew my name as
well as yours, they knew enough to order that you should be the courier, they knew – or guessed – that we had a bug among the diamonds. Have you any idea of how they could have got that inside information?’
‘Did I open my trap, you mean? No, I didn’t. The only people I said anything to about any of this were the SCRUB team, and then not about the bugs or the diamonds.’
‘All right,’ he said again. ‘It’s just that we’ve been wondering if there’s any connection between these things. Can you think of one?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, the fact they wanted you as courier, the fact they tried to kill you – or at least, one of them did – the fact they had inside information…?’
I pushed my by now aching brain, I really did, but the answer was… No.
None of us could think of any connections.
Chapter 39
A week later, the government announced that the smallpox emergency had been contained and was all but over. It had been started, they said, by a group of Geo-terrorists (a term I hadn’t heard before) most of whom were dead through an internal feud. Arrangements were in hand to arrest and charge the few remaining members of the conspiracy.
With an ingenious mix of prevarication, obfuscation, procrastination and lies, they managed to keep most of the truth out of the public domain.
Using the Anti-terrorism Act, Brigg and Co. arrested and grilled all BTA members and associates over an extended period of time and got absolutely nowhere. They searched for the identity of the person they called the Nameless One… and got nowhere.
Meanwhile…
Where do I begin?
The funeral, I suppose. Redd stayed with me until a few days after it was over. The funerals of all the victims were held quickly.
They were also all cremated beforehand.
Having just got over one emergency, the authorities were taking no risks whatsoever – and funerals with infected bodies definitely came in the category of risk.
Some of the funerals were held with the casket of ashes inside a coffin. I preferred honesty, as would Sarah, and hers was held with a casket.
That was the first disagreement I had with Pops (Pat was almost completely recovered, and Pops, incredibly, hadn’t even caught it). The second, much more important disagreement, was over the custody of Grace. Both Pops, and I regret to say, Pat, felt I wasn’t up to it and wanted custody themselves.
Ironic and sordid. I hoped the breach would be healed, because a child should know her grandparents. So, for me, a near vertical learning curve. I didn’t go back to work for a couple of months, what with the head injury and trauma. A nurse/nanny called Victoria came every day to help, although I had the joy of nights to myself.
When I did go back to work, I was allowed to make my own hours at first. I’d been wondering whether long-term I could stay in the job – like Sarah, I was determined that Grace should have a proper parent. So she had about half the day with me and half with Victoria.
The department had ticked along quite happily without me, Caroline doing most of the running. I think she enjoyed it and was sorry when I came back.
Tim had spent most of his time with decontamination, bombing all the buildings that had had infected people in them and collecting all the potentially contaminated articles for incineration.
He’d always been an introvert and after the emergency, became even more so. He confided in me that the whole business had got him down. He wanted to leave the area and had already put his house on the market.
I asked him what he was going to do. He shook his head.
‘I don’t know. I just know I need a change.’
Truth to tell, so did I, but I wanted to get my life into some sort of equilibrium first.
Sarah? I don’t know how to describe it.
Someone asked me if I missed her. I told them they were missing the point. They seemed quite offended.
You don’t just miss someone. You grieve.
You grieve for the fact that a good person has been snuffed out to no purpose. For what she missed. For what might have been. Because it wasn’t fair. For the fact that Grace didn’t have a mother, I didn’t have a wife and John and Pat didn’t have a daughter. And yes, I did miss her …
It was just plain bloody wrong, for her and for all the other poor saps who’d been caught up in it.
After two months, Brigg and Rebecca, who were still in the city, confided in me that the official view was now that the other man, the one who’d killed Jase and got away with the diamonds, must have been the ringleader, maybe even the Nameless One.
‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.
Brigg hesitated, then he said, ‘No, I don’t. Whoever he was – is – he has to be someone in the know, and I don’t think that man was.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because everything I know about him – most of which I’ve got from you – screams rentathug to me. Oh, a bit more intelligent than the late, lamented Jase, but a thug just the same.’
‘Why d’you think he killed Jase?’
He replied, ‘Even more to the point, was it part of the original plan, or was he ad-libbing? And… was he being just a bit greedy, or very greedy?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I incline toward the latter.’
I said, ‘There’s something else – d’you remember, right at the beginning, how you asked Fenella and me whether one of them knew something about viruses?’
He nodded. ‘I know what you’re going to say – none of them did, unless it was our smooth-talking rentathug. And no, I don’t think he knew anything about viruses, either.’
*
A few days after that, I was working late at the lab with Tim, tidying away loose ends. Had every potentially infected site been bombed? Had all the contaminated material been destroyed? Was there anything left that could restart the infection?
There had been a partial healing of the breach, and Grace was with Pops and Pat. She, Pat, had realised the futility of quarrelling and had made the first approach.
John’s misery, she said, had been compounded by the guilt of knowing he’d been a bad father, also that he’d survived while Sarah hadn’t, and he’d been lashing out at the first thing he could find. Which just happened to be me.
We were in Tim’s office. Rachel, the research assistant, looked in.
‘I’m off,’ she said. ‘Can I leave you two to lock up and set the alarm?’
Tim said, ‘Sure.’
She said, ‘Oh, I knew there was something – d’you know what happened to the jar of Potassium Cyanide that was in the cabinet? Only I thought I’d do some KCN tests since we’ve got it…’
Tim and I both gaped at her, then looked at each other.
I said to him, ‘I thought you said we didn’t have any.’
‘We don’t.’ He looked at Rachel. ‘You must have misread the label or something.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t. It had a danger in red capitals on the bottom.’
Tim got to his feet. ‘Show me.’
‘That’s the point – I can’t. It’s gone.’
‘Show me where you saw it.’
She shrugged. ‘Sure. Have you got the key?’
He opened a drawer and took it out. Saw me looking and said shamefacedly, ‘Yeah, I know, it should be in a more secure place. But there’s nothing really dangerous in it…’ he tailed off.
We followed Rachel to the drug cabinet, which was a large, old fashioned stainless steel locker tucked away at the back of the store. Tim opened it and stood back –
‘Where was it?’
She pushed aside some of the containers at the front and pointed. ‘There, behind the Nitric Acid.’
He eased it aside. ‘Well, there’s nothing there now.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘How long ago was it you saw it?’ I asked.
‘Three months? No, more like four.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure?’
/> ‘Yes!’
We took every single container out and put them carefully on the floor. Examined the label of each one.
‘When did you do the inventory?’ I asked Tim.
‘About four years ago, not long after I started here.’
‘Could you have missed it?’
He took a breath and let it out. ‘I don’t think so, but… I suppose it’s just about possible. I was more interested in going through George’s inventories, to see if there was anything really dangerous we should get rid of.’ George had been the last Safety Officer. ‘I took his word for it that his inventories were accurate.’
‘Have you still got them – George’s original inventories?’
‘In my office…’
‘Tim,’ Rachel said, ‘Sorry, but d’you mind if I go? Only I told my boyfriend I’d meet him at seven, and it’s past that now…’
‘Yeah, you go on,’ he said. Then to me, ‘Let’s go through them, shall we?’
‘Shouldn’t we put this lot away first?’
‘We’ve got to get this sorted, we can do that later.’
We went back to his office. He pulled out a file and went through it…
‘Here –’ He handed me a couple of crisp white sheets.
They were headed, Chemical Inventory. I went through them. No mention of Potassium Cyanide. But there wouldn’t be, would there?
I looked at Tim, found him looking intently at me. I said,
‘I suppose we ought to ask around and check that no one else has seen it. If they haven’t, I think we can put it down to Rachel’s imagination.’
He nodded slowly, his eyes still on me. ‘OK,’ he said. Then, ‘I suppose we ought to get all that stuff back into the cabinet.’
‘Want a hand?’
‘Please.’
I gave him back the sheets and he put them away. We stood. He waited for me to go out before him.
I walked quickly down the corridor, then stopped at my office door.
‘I just want to check something, I’ll be along in a sec.’
‘Sure.’
I went in and shut the door. I pulled out my phone, unlocked it and had got two digits in before the door burst open and he cannoned into me. I shot across the room into the table, staggered against a chair, grabbed at it, held it up …
Bad Medicine- A Life for a Life; Bed of Nails; Going Viral Page 62