by Holly Watt
‘Exactly.’ Bailey nodded at her.
Hessa took a breath. ‘I was talking to someone the other day about a new Adsero antibiotic called Corax,’ she said. ‘They said it was a very exciting new drug.’
‘Oh, yes?’ the Health Minister asked. ‘What’s going on with – what’s-it-called? – Corax, Elias?’
Bailey had gone still. ‘Would you mind me asking where you heard about that, Miss Uddin?’
‘I can’t remember.’ Hessa looked vague. ‘It might have been at a conference in San Diego the other week.’
‘Why?’ Drummond asked, all geniality, ‘What are you up to with this Corax stuff, Bailey?’
‘Nothing.’ The word was sharp.
‘Really?’ asked Hessa. ‘Because I heard that there was some sort of patent dispute going on over Corax.’
Bailey was on his feet, convulsively.
‘We haven’t got any sort of patent dispute in our antibiotic division, Miss Uddin.’
‘Oh,’ said Hessa calmly. ‘Right.’
‘And you were speaking to someone in San Diego about this?’
‘As far as I can remember. Mr Drummond, I—’
‘I would be very grateful,’ a barely controlled menace in Bailey’s voice as he interrupted, ‘if you could try and remember who you heard this from, Jessa.’
‘I believe it was during a ten-second conversation in San Diego.’ Hessa was glacial. ‘I cannot recall who mentioned it.’
Bailey sat down again but leant forward until he was only a few inches from her face.
‘Miss Uddin, I would like to know who told you about Corax.’ The politeness of the words only heightened the sense of controlled fury.
‘Mr Bailey—’
‘Now steady on—’ Drummond tried to smooth things over.
‘Housekeeping!’ It was Miranda, in a black tabard, with a copy of Drummond’s keycard and a loud knock on the door. She bustled past the bodyguards, all efficiency, pushing a trolley she had swiped from a maid down the corridor.
‘Hello, sir. Very sorry to interrupt. Won’t be a minute. Toiletries, tak?’ in what might have been a Polish accent.
The bodyguards hesitated behind her, caught on the hop.
‘I must be going.’ Hessa was on her feet. ‘Mr Drummond, I’ll catch up with you soon. Thank you so much for your time. Goodbye, Mr Bailey.’
And as Hessa hurried round the housekeeping cart and made for the lifts, Miranda solemnly upended a wastepaper basket.
Hessa took the lift down to the lobby, diving round to the back entrance of the hotel once she was sure she wasn’t being followed.
‘That was quite stressful.’ Hessa threw herself on the bed in Casey’s room. She had already switched off the tiny camera buried in the smart black suit. ‘And I didn’t get anything out of Bailey at all.’ She thumped a pillow.
‘You did,’ Casey soothed. ‘You proved that either Zac or Bailey is lying about the patent issue.’
‘Does that really matter? Bailey was furious. He’ll definitely blow my cover with Drummond.’
It wouldn’t take long for Bailey’s investigators to establish that there was no StellaBiotics in Kazipally.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Casey. ‘We’ve got more than enough on Drummond now. We’ll go to him as soon as possible, and get your conflict-of-interest story out there. All that stuff he was saying to Bailey was brilliant for your story anyway. And don’t worry about Adsero. Worst-case scenario, they’ll conclude you’ve just been doing a light bit of corporate espionage. That’s why we got the business cards, remember.’
In the past, they might have chosen a random company in Hyderabad, and hijacked it. Hessa might have set up an email address, just one letter off, for communicating with Drummond. A Trojan horse, a parasite, long gone by the time anyone checked.
This time, however, there was a London address for StellaBiotics on the business card that Hessa had handed to Bailey. The address was in Ilford, an empty house that looked habitable from the outside. When Bailey’s investigators googled the Ilford address, several websites would appear, pushed to the top of the Google rankings by Toby, the Post’s technology correspondent. Toby always enjoyed some mild skulduggery on the side.
Uddin Private Investigations, one website would blare. Uddin Risk Solutions, another. With the same phone number on every site. And if Bailey’s investigators ever called it, Hessa would answer, ‘Uddin Corporate Investigations, can I help you?’ And so Bailey’s people would report back. Someone’s taken an interest. No, they haven’t got anything. Just some amateurs in east London, don’t worry.
And that would be the end of the hunt for Jessa Uddin.
‘Drummond certainly won’t rock the boat.’ It was Miranda behind them, stripping off the tabard after dumping the trolley two floors away. ‘He and Bailey will probably work out there was something a bit dodgy about Jessa Uddin, but that doesn’t matter.’
Thanks to Toby’s work, nothing would ever connect Jessa Uddin to Hessa Khan. The Post’s involvement would be completely hidden until Hessa sent the email to ‘Dear Mr Drummond … ’
They all turned back to the laptops. Bailey had recovered his equilibrium now, and was chatting calmly with Drummond.
As she listened to the men talking, Hessa reached for her burner mobile and typed out a message. My apologies, Minister – I have to return to London urgently. Enjoy your time in Wrocław! All the best, Jessa.
Casey watched as Drummond reached for his phone and read the message without reacting. He wouldn’t try and track her down, she knew. The last thing he would want was an investigation into a Jessa Uddin. He would wait, and hope that it would all go away. Because, quite often, it did.
Now Bailey was leaning forward to emphasise a point. Finger jabbing, pugnacious body language, the mood only slightly leavened by his half-smile. He was a brutal businessman, Casey thought. Absolutely ruthless.
And she pushed another thought to the back of her mind. That at the moment when it was spinning out of control, when Jessa Uddin was pinned down with nowhere to go, it had been Miranda who leaped to her feet. Miranda who moved decisively and precisely. While Casey had sat there, frozen and terrified, her mind a whirling chaos.
23
Back in the office in London, Casey slumped into frustration.
‘You haven’t really got anything new on Corax.’ Miranda was sympathetic. ‘We know that either Zac or Bailey is lying, but that doesn’t really help us much. And I don’t think you’re going to get anything more out of either of them now.’
Ross, at least, was delighted by the footage of Drummond asking Bailey for a donation to the party. ‘The sting’s sting. We should have got Drummond to offer pharma boy a peerage for a million,’ he said. ‘Lord Bailey. Baron Bailey. That would have put sodding Drummond in jail.’
Over the years, Ross had spent quite a lot of time trying to work out how he could manoeuvre a peerage out of Downing Street. ‘We could send in Casey,’ he would say wistfully. ‘She could be Baroness Benedict of Fleet.’
‘Fleet?’ the home affairs editor asked.
‘Well, Fleet Street would be a bit obvious, you goon.’
‘I’m not,’ Dash would shut down the conversation, ‘handing over a million quid for that.’
‘The thing is, I think they’re both lying.’ Casey had sidled into the investigations office after Dash had gone home for the evening. ‘Zac’s story doesn’t make sense, because if Corax is a completely new antibiotic, why would there be a patent issue with an Adsero drug? And Bailey … Why the hell are they doing it? Why?’
She threw herself on the sofa and kicked out at the wastepaper basket.
‘Never ask why,’ Miranda said unexpectedly.
‘What?’ Casey looked up, mid-kick.
Who, what, where, when, why? The words were embedded in every journalist, like Brighton through rock.
‘Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur,’ the Post’s deputy editor – who took his Oxford education seriously �
� would murmur in the morning conference.
‘And I want the fucking answers in the first sodding para,’ Ross – who didn’t – would retort.
‘It’s what Delphine used to say,’ said Miranda. ‘You can never know why someone is doing something, unless they have specifically told you.’
‘I don’t … ’
‘You have to look at the facts, Casey,’ said Miranda. ‘And only the facts. You can’t extrapolate why someone is doing something, and you’ll look very stupid in court trying to defend it later.’
Casey sat on the sofa, processing this. ‘Because they can just say, “no, that’s not what I was thinking”, and you can never prove otherwise.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Except,’ Casey pointed out, ‘when you’re undercover, and then sometimes they do tell you what they’re thinking.’
‘Sometimes, they might.’
‘So.’ Casey went back to kicking the wastepaper basket. ‘That’s what we have to do.’
‘Casey. Give up.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘Oh,’ Miranda yawned, ‘not much. The Treasury dumped thousands of pages on their website under Freedom of Information. And I know there is a story somewhere in here, but it’s very buried. You know how they bury the good stuff in a million pages of dross.’
‘A needle in a haystack,’ Casey sighed. ‘Thousands of pages of chaff.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But what if Bailey—’
‘Casey.’
Later, Casey meandered back to her flat. She walked into the sitting room, and folded into the sofa. Clutching a cushion to her chest, she stared across the room, exhausted.
Four patches of paint slapped on the wall.
Cat’s Cradle or Kissing Gate? I love you. Feather Pillow or Wood Smoke?
The patches of paint blurred.
She stood, straying towards the fireplace, which had been blocked up decades ago. There were a few cards on the mantelpiece, still. Condolences. Commiserations. Miranda had opened them as they arrived, and read them aloud as Casey stared into space.
There weren’t many. And most of them had been sent via the Post.
She peered at them now. Several from Ed’s friends, thoughtful.
Dear Casey, I was so sorry to hear …
Dear Casey, I hope that …
One from Delphine Black, Miranda’s old boss.
It is a truly dreadful thing, Casey. For months after Finlay died, I couldn’t feel a single emotion. Like a woman after one of those terrible bomb blasts, and she doesn’t even realise that her arm is gone. She just wanders the streets, quite oblivious, covered in her own blood. Or one of those burns that is so deep that all the nerve endings are cauterised and obliterated and you can’t feel anything at all. But you do survive, Casey. You do.
There was something pathetic about the letters. Pieces of card: twee pictures of daffodils, a sunny beach in Cornwall, some sad-looking teddy bears. Words, nothing more.
A life reduced to words.
Casey’s eyes drifted to a photograph frame on the windowsill. Ed had placed it there, of course. Casey stared at it for a long time. The two of them, smiling at the camera, his arms around her. Wiltshire, and a glorious day in the sun.
One glorious day, a tiny stitch in a lifetime of happiness. One pretty bead on a necklace. And now the necklace was snapped. Junk, swept away.
I miss you, a whisper.
I miss you so much.
And I don’t think I can do it without you.
Later, she found herself staring at one of the cards again.
A beach in Cornwall.
There had been a few days at the seaside, once.
A childish heaven of fish and chips and buckets and spades. A few pastel houses: a rosy pink, a sun-bleached turquoise, a faded foxglove purple. Their cottage was yellow. Primrose, her mother called it. With a golden thatch pulled down like a bonnet.
One day, he took her hand: we’ll go fishing.
She remembered peering into rock pools as the seagulls bickered overhead. Barnacles and mussels and anemones shiny as tourmalines.
He had bought her new sandals, red and white, and most precious. She took them off to keep them safe as they clambered over the rocks.
‘Wait for me, Daddy.’ Those most treasured syllables. And there was that quick glance around, always.
He smiled at her though, fishing rods over his shoulder.
‘We need bait,’ he decided, as he put down the fishing rods. ‘Limpets.’
He’d brought a little knife, a blunt one.
‘The secret is,’ he said, ‘to get the blade under the shell before they clamp down. Once they’ve heard you coming, they lock up and then nothing will get them off. Nothing. It’s one of the strongest things in the natural world, a limpet.’
She scrutinised them – drab brown triangles, boring – and watched as he wrestled them off, revealing a slimy underbelly: black and yellow and greenish.
‘Yuk,’ she said, and he laughed, gouging with the knife.
They didn’t catch anything, the limpets dangling aimlessly on hooks, but she was perfectly happy, blissfully content. Hours, just the two of them, watching the waves dance and dazzle.
‘Right.’ He stood up in the end. ‘Home time.’
It wasn’t their home, but that didn’t matter.
She held up her little blue bucket of limpets, most of them still in their homely brown shells.
‘Shall we put them back?’
‘You can’t,’ he explained. ‘Once you’ve pulled them off, they can’t go back on.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at her bucket of green and brown and yellow triangles. ‘That’s a shame.’
‘We can’t take them home,’ he said. That word, again.
They threw them off the rocks into the clear blue water, and she watched as they sank down and down, watched until they disappeared.
Later she wondered if her mother had spent those days thinking: could this be real?
And, of course, much later she wondered what story he had told his family.
The other family.
The real family.
There must have been a story for those few days.
There must have been a story for everything.
She told only one person. At university, when he was drunk, tragic, reeling from a father admitting a twenty-year affair.
A childhood, in fragments.
‘It’s every memory,’ he said. ‘Every single holiday, he was waiting to see her as soon as we got home. Every birthday was a missed day for them. Every Sports Day, a lost afternoon. I see her in our family photographs, now, as if she was there all along. A shadow unseen. Every snapshot, a lie. Every memory, a lie.’
We only know snapshots.
‘It probably wasn’t like that, you know. Not for her.’ And she told him some fragments.
‘At least you had a sort of truth,’ he said.
And she didn’t tell anyone for years, after that.
She kept a few things. The red and white sandals. A pack of cards. Pocket chess, and a photograph of three children, found by mistake. A battered music box, with a name engraved. Cassandra, in lavender italics. Tenderness there, surely?
For a while, maybe.
She opened the music box one year, and almost cried at the cracked notes.
A limpet, torn away.
24
Casey woke up on the sofa, stiff and cold. Making a coffee, she rang Noah Hart.
‘Are you calling about Flora?’ Noah asked immediately.
A thud of apprehension.
‘No,’ said Casey. ‘Why? She seemed fine a few days ago.’
She thought back to Flora in the office, delighted at tracking down those addresses, and laughing as she tried to remember all the tea orders.
‘Flora’s back in hospital,’ said Noah flatly. ‘An infection flared up suddenly. Give her a call? It’s not looking … Well. Call her, anyway.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Casey. ‘I will ring her. Will she be … ’
‘I don’t know.’ There was a long pause. ‘So what were you calling about?’
‘Corax.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘I was just wondering if you could think of anything else that might take us forward?’ Casey could hear the hopelessness in her own voice.
‘Sorry, no.’
‘Anything at all?’
‘I don’t think I sh—’
‘It might help Flora, Noah.’
‘You could go and talk to Professor Jalali … Maybe. Down in Tooting.’
Casey took care as she travelled to Professor Jalali’s hospital from the Post office. First, she got on the Victoria line heading north before jumping off at Green Park. Then she took the Piccadilly line west for a couple of stops and trotted across the platform to the eastbound line. Finally, she climbed on the Northern line at Leicester Square and headed back south again.
Not ideal, she thought, for a health editor.
As she walked from the Tube to the hospital, she called Flora.
Flora answered with a gasp. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Casey.’
‘Oh, hello.’ Flora’s laugh turned into a cough. ‘How are you?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Not really.’ Flora didn’t try to pretend. ‘It’s the abscessus. It’s staging a bit of a comeback. Stupid thing.’
I can’t help you, Casey thought in despair, I’m failing you day by day, and you don’t even know it really.
‘I gather you’re back in hospital?’
‘Room 23A,’ Flora laughed. ‘The apricot feature wall is going to finish me off altogether.’
‘Oh, Flora.’
‘I know. It’s fine though, really.’ A third laugh. ‘Might repaint it when they’re not looking. Undercover decorator. Not the original plan, maybe, but it’ll keep my hand in.’
They talked, filling the air with nothing and everything. The leaves were falling now, fluttering into the road to be crunched by the cars. It looked like rain, the sky a dappled grey.
‘So work experience at the Post didn’t put you off altogether?’ Casey asked.
‘I loved it,’ said Flora. ‘I’ll be on the investigations team soon.’
