by Holly Watt
‘Up in Derbyshire,’ Miranda yawned. ‘A bit of light NHS fraud.’
At Exeter, Noah was met by a pretty woman in her sixties, with rosy pink cheeks, sensible grey-blonde hair and practical shoes. She smiled at her son, hugged him close.
From a patch of moorland far above the house, Casey watched as Sally Hart’s car headed towards the little hamlet at a prudent speed, her indicators flashing at the last turn-off although there was no one to see for miles. The car disappeared behind the high green hedges that criss-crossed the valley, and Casey’s thoughts drifted to the Marines, training up on Dartmoor’s wild beauty. She had to force herself to concentrate again, sitting in the heather until she was sure no one had followed Sally Hart’s car.
‘Tiny bit paranoid?’ Miranda asked flippantly when she called later. Casey was back at the little cottage she had rented for the weekend.
And then she regretted it when she heard a choke in Casey’s voice.
‘Maybe. But hopefully Noah’ll realise that no one could ever know that we’ve spoken to him out here. And it’ll catch him off guard. Plus he’ll realise that we’re completely serious, that there will never be an escape from us.’
The morning dawned, a sapphire sky with small puffs of cloud to the west. From a respectable distance, Casey watched as Noah set off up a narrow footpath behind the house. Small brown ponies cropped the turf, and the Harts’ yellow Labrador bounded happily ahead, burying its nose in rabbit holes. No one else followed.
A few minutes later, Casey walked up the path, matching Noah’s pace. The birds were shrilling and there was a smell of honey in the air. The last of the summer had bleached the moorland grass to blond, the same colour as the dog.
Noah strode along, apparently content in this familiar place and luxuriating in the sun after weeks in the hospital. He didn’t look back. Casey waited until he had walked a couple of miles, past a stony outcrop. Then she jogged a few hundred yards, and caught up with him easily.
‘Noah.’
He turned, his face twisting with fury as he saw her. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Leave me alone!’
Noah pushed past her, and began hurrying along the track. Casey kept up with him effortlessly.
‘We need to talk, Noah.’
‘No, we don’t. This is harassment.’
‘Please, Noah.’
‘Go away!’
‘Professor Brennan is dead, Noah.’
He paused, bewildered, turned back to her. ‘Who? Who the hell is Professor Brennan?’
‘Brennan was a senior scientist at Colindale,’ Casey said. ‘He was killed not long after I spoke to him about antibiotic resistance. Not long after I met you and Flora Ashcroft, in fact.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Noah managed, still confused, ‘to hear that.’
‘And then my boyfriend,’ Casey’s voice choked, ‘died too.’
Noah stopped, turned towards her. ‘What? How?’
‘They think it was a heart attack. A heart attack that happened a few days after I spoke to you. And all these incidents … they all look like accidents.’
‘They may be accidents, Casey.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Casey pulled the copy of the Standard out of her rucksack. Noah reacted as if she had pulled out a gun.
‘Get away from me.’ It was nearly a scream. ‘Stay away from me.’
He sprinted towards the house, but Casey stayed on his heels. Noah managed a few hundred yards, his breath getting heavier, and then his foot caught on a heather root and he slammed into the ground. Casey stopped, and stood over him. The doctor was gasping for breath, the eyes of a hunted animal.
‘Abigail,’ said Casey. ‘Your sister, Abigail.’
Noah’s face collapsed into tears. ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘I saw her gravestone,’ Casey’s face was full of compassion. ‘I’m so sorry, Noah.’
10
The day before, Casey had stood in the churchyard for a long hour, staring down at the gilt letters and granite. The flowers were fresh: neat and gentle in a small blue vase.
In ever loving memory of Abigail Hart,
adored daughter, sister and friend
Dead for two years.
‘I didn’t realise she was so young,’ she had said to the churchwarden, who was unlocking the heavy oak door.
‘The old doctor’s daughter.’ The old man had shaken his head. ‘A tragedy.’
‘I know Noah,’ Casey murmured. ‘Are there any other brothers and sisters?’
‘Anna and Julia. Lovely girls.’
‘It’s so sad.’
‘It was a terrible thing.’
‘What happened to Abigail? Noah never said.’
‘A car crash, up on the moor. It was truly awful. John and Sally have never been the same since.’
Noah pushed himself upright until he was sitting on the stony path. Casey crouched beside him.
‘No one,’ she promised, ‘will ever know that you’ve spoken to me.’
Noah stared across hundreds of acres of moorland. It was empty, the grass rippling in the wind. The weather was changing now. To the west, heavier clouds were gathering, a first band of rain rolling in off the Atlantic.
‘I don’t know,’ Noah said stiffly, ‘what happened to Abigail.’
‘But you have your suspicions?’ Casey prompted. ‘Doubts about the car accident?’
‘Abbie always drove like a madwoman.’ Noah’s face softened. ‘She knew that road well. Too well. We think that she was probably driving too fast, racing back over the moor after an evening with some friends in Tavistock. There was no other car involved in the collision, as far as we know. The police checked for scrapes of paint on the wreckage, stuff like that. I asked them … Asked them specifically if something could have happened up there, but they said there was nothing … There was nothing … ’
Noah broke off, stared at the horizon.
‘But you weren’t sure?’
‘It was the middle of the night and it seems that there was no one else around. But it didn’t make sense that she’d gone off the road at that precise place. Gone right over the edge.’ Noah’s voice broke, then went on more strongly, ‘The police said she might have gone to sleep, just drifted off … But Abbie would have spent the night in Tavistock if she was tired. She’d done that before. Her friends all said she was fine, happy, wide awake. And she was well under the limit.’ He looked at Casey. ‘I know it sounds odd, but there are wild ponies up there. If someone had made them bolt into the road at exactly the right minute … Abbie always loved horses. She would have swerved. There were hoof prints near the crash. But of course there would be … There were footprints too. But then there were paramedics, firemen, any number of people up there that night.’
Casey thought of the small brown ponies she had seen that morning, and a ripple of blue lights in the dark. ‘Why did you think it could be more, Noah?’
He swallowed, the fear returning in a flood. ‘Just before it happened,’ he forced the words out, ‘someone left a copy of the Standard in my locker at work. There were two words underlined on the front page. “Last” and “chance”. Last chance. The words weren’t even next to each other, you had to look quite carefully. And I only looked carefully because I knew that I hadn’t left a copy of the paper in my locker. But they were quite heavily underlined.’
‘Do you still have it? The paper?’
‘I threw it away.’ Noah’s mouth twisted with frustration. ‘And then a few days later Abigail died, and everyone was – well, you can imagine.’
‘What did you do after receiving that message? After being told it was your last chance?’
‘I … ’ he stalled.
‘You didn’t tell anyone about the message at the time?’ Casey doubled back. ‘After the crash?’
‘People would have thought I was mad. I’ve got two other sisters,’ he cried. ‘And my parents. If anything had happened to Julia or Anna … My parents … I didn’t
know what to do … ’
‘What had happened?’ Casey asked gently. ‘After you got the warning in the Standard.’
Noah sat silently on the ground, looking at his walking boots.
‘You promise no one will ever know I spoke to you?’
‘Yes,’ swore Casey.
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
Noah breathed out slowly, and began to speak.
‘About three years ago, I went to work for a private company in the States. On a sort of secondment. I wanted time away from the NHS,’ Noah spoke haltingly. ‘Needed it, I suppose. My bosses approved anyway – they thought it might be useful.’
‘What were you doing in America?’
‘I was working for a company called Pergamex. A pharmaceutical company based in San Francisco.’
‘I haven’t heard of it.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have. It was small, and very secretive. I mean, a lot of pharma companies are secretive anyway, because some of the stuff is market sensitive, or there are issues with corporate espionage. But even by those standards, Pergamex was paranoid.’
‘What were you working on?’
Noah hesitated. He looked up at Casey again. ‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘We were working on an antibiotic. A brand new one.’
A lark shrilled far overhead, and Noah flinched.
‘I’ve been told that new antibiotics are very unusual,’ said Casey.
‘Exactly. And the Pergamex one – Corax, we called it – was really good. It was a whole new class of antibiotics, far better than anything we had seen before.’
‘It sounds great.’
His face was alive. ‘It was.’
‘So what happened?’
Noah’s smile faded. ‘One evening, Pergamex just shut down operations. From one day to the next, we were locked out of the building, all our data destroyed, our jobs over. Everyone who had worked there had signed non-disclosure agreements, of course. Everything just disappeared.’
‘Do you know why they shut it down?’
‘No.’ Noah stared at the larks, dancing high up in the air. ‘No one would say anything about it at all.’
‘Who wouldn’t say anything about it?’
‘Well, there was Garrick, who set up the company. He’s an entrepreneur.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He grew up in the UK, but spends a lot of time in the US. He’s charismatic, I suppose. Charming. A bit of a player. He’s always got various girls on the go. He’d worked with lots of startups before, but Pergamex was his unicorn, he’d say. The one that would make the real billions. He’d already got a nice place in Pacific Heights, and he would go and stay in an amazing house up in Lake Tahoe too. He had money even before Pergamex.’
‘Who else would have known about Corax?’
‘It wasn’t a very big team working on it. Zac was the doctor in charge of the technical side. He was English too, actually. But he was brilliant. Really brilliant.’
‘And neither of them would say anything to you after it shut down? Neither Zac or Garrick?’
‘No. I was angry about it. Very angry, I suppose. Corax could have been an incredible drug. It could have cured loads of different diseases, according to the early results. And among a lot of other things, it could have helped CF patients with abscessus.’
Flora Ashcroft.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I was only very junior on the project,’ said Noah. ‘They kept everything pretty siloed too, so I was only carrying out tests on bacterial samples. I would have broken my NDA, but I didn’t know enough. I tried though. I went to Garrick and told him he had a moral duty to keep going with Corax.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He just ignored me. Walked straight past me in the street.’
‘And Zac?’
‘Zac?’ Noah shrugged. ‘After Pergamex shut down, Zac just took off.’ He stared across the moor. ‘I never saw Zac again.’
‘Did you try and find him?’
‘Yes, of course I did. I tried to find out where he was working, but he had just disappeared. He seemed to have stopped being a doctor, or doing research. And he’d been the very best.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Zac’s an arrogant git,’ Noah shrugged. ‘Rude, too, at times. But he could be a laugh, in the right mood, and he was good at a lot of things. He plays the piano brilliantly, knew a lot about art. He was teaching himself Italian when we were in San Francisco. Sporty too. Annoying, quite frankly.’
It was starting to spit with rain, half the sky still blue, the other black clouds.
‘So why do you think,’ Casey asked, ‘that you got that message in the Standard?’
‘I’d come home to England by then,’ said Noah. ‘I went back to working at the Royal Brompton. But I was still furious, you know? I’d put a lot of work into Corax, and it was important. I was spending day after day in that wretched hospital watching people die when this drug might have helped them. And then one night, very late, I was at home, falling asleep in front of a programme about kiteboarding … ’
‘Kiteboarding?’
Noah waved defeatedly at his hiking boots. ‘I used to love it, but when do I get the time these days … ’
‘What did you see on the programme?’
‘I saw Zac. Right there on the beach. He wasn’t featured or anything, but he was there, in the background. Hanging out. I’m not even sure if he knew he was being filmed.’
‘Where was the programme based?’
Noah’s face twisted into a rueful grin. ‘Zac always fell on his feet. Mauritius. That bloody programme was filmed in Mauritius.’
Noah ducked as two hikers appeared on the horizon. The rain was pouring down now. Casey sat down beside him, pulling up her hood and fiddled with her shoe as she waited for them to pass. They were a couple, in their forties. Matching Berghaus fleeces and identical Karrimor rucksacks. Completely unthreatening, but Noah only breathed when they were past and Casey saw how distressed he had been, for so long.
‘It’s OK,’ said Casey. ‘It’s all right, Noah.’
‘But you don’t know that,’ he said.
In silent agreement, they began walking back towards his parents’ house.
‘What did you do after you’d seen that programme?’
‘I was even more angry,’ said Noah. ‘There was Zac, living the life of Riley in Mauritius. And I’d heard that Garrick had moved into an even bigger place in the Pacific Heights, and meanwhile Corax had disappeared into the ether. I emailed Garrick, telling him I was going to go to one of the other pharmaceutical companies with what I knew. I didn’t know much, but I might have been able to put them on the right path. It would have given them a start at least. And the very next day, that copy of the Standard was in my locker.’
‘Then what?’
‘I ignored it. I decided to go to Adsero. That’s the company that makes zentetra.’
‘The drug Flora’s on?’
‘Yes, and they’re developing their new drug, saepio, too. That makes them one of the very few pharma majors still working in antibiotics. They’ve got big headquarters just outside Milton Keynes, so I got on the train and went up there.’
‘And?’
‘I was waiting in the queue for a taxi outside that huge station. And just as I was getting to the top of the queue, the man next to me said, very quietly, “I wouldn’t if I were you.” I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. I turned towards him, and he gave me this polite look, and said again: “I wouldn’t go to Adsero.”’ Noah shook his head at the memory. ‘He looked friendly, you know. Affable. And then he smiled, and his whole face changed. His eyes went dead, and he just looked like pure evil. I panicked. It’s pathetic, I know, but I ran to the platform. Got on a train and went back to London.’
‘And two nights later … ’
Noah’s face crumpled again. ‘Two nights later, Abbie died. It was my l
ast chance, and I think just by getting on that train, I blew it.’
Casey gave him a moment. ‘Why do you think they didn’t just kill you?’
‘In my email to Garrick,’ Noah’s eyes were distant, ‘I threatened him. I said I’d lodged letters to be sent in the event of something happening to me. You know the sort of thing. Melodramatic, I suppose. But there was something about the Pergamex set-up. I don’t know if that was what … Even before anything happened, I was scared.’
‘This man you saw in the taxi queue in Milton Keynes. What did he look like?’
‘Short dark hair,’ said Noah. ‘Caucasian. A bit taller than me. Brown eyes. They didn’t really seem to reflect the light, if you see what I mean? Flat. I can’t really describe them.’
‘Hollow eyes?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hollow.’
It might be the man who chased her on Hampstead Heath, thought Casey. But her own sighting had been so fleeting, as to be almost useless.
They walked along the footpath in silence.
‘What was so special about Corax?’ asked Casey eventually.
‘It was a completely new class of antibiotics,’ said Noah, a flicker of enthusiasm returning. ‘That’s what made it so extraordinary. Different classes of antibiotics destroy bacteria in different ways. The beta-lactams – like penicillin – block the bacteria’s cell-wall biosynthesis, for example. The tetracyclines block the synthesis of protein, which means the bacteria can’t grow. Bacteria have started to find a way around all those blocks, so they can carry on reproducing. But because Corax was a completely new class, the bacteria had no way of resisting it.’
‘How did Pergamex find it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Noah. ‘Finding new antibiotics is bizarre. You’d think it was all done in a laboratory, but you’re basically looking for a quirk in nature. Something that has evolved a way of fighting bacteria for a specific reason. You always hear that they discovered penicillin in soil, for example. But what Fleming actually found was a fungus – Penicillium chrysogenum – that produces penicillin, probably to compete with bacteria for food sources originally. Today, scientists look all over the world for potential antibiotics. They’ve looked at Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and found a possible antibiotic there. They even looked at leaf cutting ants in the Amazon, for heaven’s sake.
