Alchemist

by Peter James

  Monty picked at a damaged thumbnail. ‘How did you make the connection originally – you know – find out about the three cases?’

  ‘By making about a thousand phone calls to hospitals and coroners’ offices.’

  ‘But what made you do it in the first place?’

  ‘It was a brief from Hubert. He asked me to find out how many cases a year would be normal.’

  Monty felt her way. ‘Do you think he’s a bit obsessed about Bendix Schere?’

  ‘He has a thing about them, definitely – I think to call it an obsession may be a bit strong. I guess if you lose a daughter you’re going to want to move hell and high water to find out why.’

  ‘So is that it? Just a distraught man trying to make some sense of his daughter’s death?’

  The reporter shook her head. ‘There’s more.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  She hesitated, then leaned forward and peered into her tea as if she was looking for something she had dropped in it. ‘It stinks,’ she said.

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘Yup. Just my instincts and maybe I’m totally wrong – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone from Bendix who rolled over my flat. I don’t have enough to go to press on – yet. I’m waiting for one more pregnant woman to die in labour from a virus and give birth to a Cyclops Syndrome baby, then I’m going to sit on her family doctor’s tail round the clock for a week until he bloody well talks to me.’

  Monty continued to worry her nail. ‘Nothing was taken from your flat, Mr Wentworth said. That right?’

  Zandra Wollerton shook her head, then stared back at Monty with a faintly bemused expression. ‘Well – there was one thing. Maybe the bastard who broke in is a closet pervert. There’s a pair of cotton panties I thought I had in the wash box – can’t find them anywhere.’

  ‘Panties?’ Monty said, surprised.

  ‘Uh huh. Had flowers on them.’

  ‘Seems very weird,’ Monty said.

  ‘There are some very weird people in the world,’ the young reporter told her.

  25

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘It’s the bizz.’ Charley Rowley stared approvingly around the living room, walked to the wide front window and looked out down the quiet tree-lined avenue one floor below. He freed the catch and raised the heavy sash a few inches. Then he listened for a moment to the faint hubbub of the Fulham Road traffic two hundred yards away. It was not intrusive, you could barely hear it.

  At the far end of the room, Conor stared through the smaller window down at the sun deck and the well-tended garden which belonged to the ground-floor flat below. ‘Seems like a reasonable rent, don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘Paying a premium for the area, but it’s not bad – considering it’s virtually Chelsea here. What about the rates and service charge? Want to watch those – that’s where you can get really stuffed,’ Rowley said, lighting a cigarette. ‘And you’ll need to do something about these windows – draughty as hell.’

  Conor re-read the letter from the estate agent that he had clipped to the particulars. It was as bitterly cold in the flat as it was outside and they both kept their coats on; Conor his long blue Crombie, Charley Rowley his battered green Barbour that had long lost its wax sheen. ‘Seems OK.’

  ‘The Bendix Schere Legal Department will do the conveyancing for you – just make sure they let you know what you’re in for with the extras.’

  ‘Sure,’ Conor said, barely listening. He wanted this apartment, had fallen in love with it when he had first seen it on Saturday with the sunlight streaming in the windows. It had a good feel – in truth, with its high ceilings with their plaster mouldings, and the large marble fireplace, it had something of the feel of Rowley’s house. A few old rugs and antiques and some pictures on the wall and it would make a really classy English pad.

  There was only one bedroom, but it was a good size, facing south like the living room, so it would get plenty of sunlight. The bathroom was spacious, also, with a wild old-fashioned bathtub with lion’s feet, a huge faucet and genuine brass taps.

  The kitchen was a bit cramped but there was a cosy dining alcove off it, beneath an arched niche, which more than made up for it. He could imagine candlelit dinners in there, maybe with Montana Bannerman. He had a meeting with her late tomorrow morning and was looking forward to it. He had thought of her a number of times over the weekend, and there was a warmth about her that kept on coming back to him.

  He found himself comparing her to that brainless girl he’d been seated next to at Charley Rowley’s dinner party last Friday – Jesus. She came from a titled family, Rowley had told him, but it still hadn’t altered his views about her, and he had no intention of bothering to try and see her again; and anyhow, he reckoned, the feeling was very probably mutual.

  Rowley looked at his watch. ‘Meeting some friends in the Duke of Boots at seven – going to join us?’

  Conor nodded; he had no other plans. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m going to have a few jars. Get Lulu to run me into work in the morning.’

  Lulu was Rowley’s girlfriend. Conor had not got the exact hang of the relationship. She had done the cooking at the dinner party and generally seemed to run his domestic life, which included, as far as he could ascertain, if not actually living with Rowley, certainly being a permanent fixture. But in Rowley’s mind and conversations, she barely seemed to exist.

  They went out on the landing and Conor pulled the door shut, locking up with the tagged keys. ‘Have to drop these through the estate agent’s letter box tonight – they’re just round the corner.’

  ‘No problem.’ Rowley glanced at his watch, then followed Conor down the wide, dingy staircase into the lobby, past a couple of chained-up bikes, and out into the street.

  Conor walked along the pavement to his BMW. He pointed the key fob, pressed the button and the indicators winked at him. Rowley stopped and admired a girl walking by on the other side of the street.

  ‘Man, that is seriously nice,’ he said. ‘I like that a lot; do you think if I asked her very sweetly she’d be willing to have my children?’

  ‘Maybe you should start with something a little less ambitious,’ Conor said, easing himself into the driver’s seat. ‘Try a cup of coffee or something, for openers, you know, and gradually build up to the kids over the next couple of years. Don’t blow it by rushing it!’

  Rowley watched her disappear through a door, and his face dropped. ‘Too late, chance gone. Story of my life.’

  ‘One door closes, another opens,’ Conor said.

  Rowley climbed into the passenger seat, grunted noncommittally, and tugged his seat belt over his midriff, fumbling for the stalk.

  As Conor put the car into gear, Rowley leaned forward and pressed a button on the radio. ‘Just want to catch the news – see what the market’s done today.’

  ‘Do you play it?’

  ‘Dabble a bit. Peter Rawlings, who was at dinner, is a shit-hot broker – if you ever need someone, I’ll give you his number.’

  It did not take Conor much arithmetic to work out that after he had paid the rent and outgoings on the flat, plus the cost of furnishing it, there would not be a lot of income left for playing the stock markets. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Bear it in mind.’

  Rowley had found the news station on the radio.

  ‘… pharmaceuticals giant Bendix Schere announced they have agreed terms for taking over the US-owned Morgan-Pheltz. In turnover this will make British-based Bendix Schere the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world. In an interview earlier this afternoon Chairman Sir Neil Rorke announced that a substantial part of Morgan-Pheltz’s manufacturing would be moved to a proposed new plant in Glasgow, creating an estimated three thousand jobs. And now sport, and in the …’

  Rowley gave a low whistle and shook out a cigarette, then offered the pack to Conor. ‘This calls for a fag. Want one?’

  ‘No thanks. Did you
know about this takeover?’

  ‘Not a dickey. The Bendix brass keep things pretty close to their vests.’

  ‘Have you met any of the main Board Directors?’

  ‘Yah,’ Rowley said. ‘Met Rorke, he’s OK – one of the good guys. But he’s not really in the frame, he’s only part-time – couple of days a week – I think they wheel him in and out as the sort of acceptable face of pharmaceutical capitalism. I’m not so wild about Crowe.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Rowley shrugged. ‘Just a hunch. He’s a manipulator, and a scientist himself, which makes him pretty unusual for a chief exec’

  ‘I didn’t know he was a scientist.’

  ‘Molecular biologist – he started out in clinical research. You don’t get to move from the lab to the chief executive’s chair by being a good scientist – you get there by being cunning and ruthless. He has a reputation for being a total S-H-I-T.’

  ‘So do most successful guys,’ Conor said. ‘I guess Rorke’s an exception.’ He turned out into the Fulham Road. The location was great, he thought; dozens of shops and restaurants, buzzing with life. It reminded him of Georgetown.

  ‘Hey, you know those tricks you did at dinner, Conor? The hypnotizing stuff?’

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘Have you ever tried using hypnosis for anything else?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Quitting smoking. Or getting a job?’

  Conor grinned.

  ‘Why not? You have an incredible power at your disposal if you can really do what you did to Corinthia. Presumably they were tricks, right? Breaking the glass and stubbing the cigarette out?’

  Conor drove on in silence, then pulled over to the kerb outside the estate agency.

  ‘Yup,’ he said finally. ‘They were just tricks.’

  26

  London. Wednesday 9 November, 1994

  Jake Seals stepped out of the lift at the sixth floor, clutching the vinyl hold-all he used as an attaché case, crossed the deserted reception room, entered his smart-card and access code into the door lock then walked swiftly along the corridor to the lab. The only sound was the squish of his rubber-soled shoes, the steady whoosh of air from the climate-control system and a hum like a trapped insect from a faulty fluorescent.

  He yawned, feeling leadenly tired as if he had taken some drug which had not yet worn off. Needed to be extra careful when you were tired, that was when accidents happened, he knew. Then he stopped in his tracks beside a fire extinguisher on a wall, as the sharp twinge of a muscle in his forehead made him wince. It was a new pain, one he had never had before, and it startled him. It happened again and he clapped a hand to his head; it felt like an insect the size of an earwig was crawling along inside the skin just above his eyebrows.

  Tired, that’s all. Absolutely shit-tired, he thought, yawning again deeply and gulping down air, then stared furtively up and down the length of the wide corridor. All the lights in the labs and offices were off, with only the corridor illuminated. The whole floor was empty, as he had hoped; apart from the security guards downstairs and a few computer engineers on night shift, he imagined the entire building to be deserted at this time of the morning.

  His watch read 5.35 a.m. Miss Bannerman should be here any moment. With luck they would have a clear two hours before anyone else showed up. Ample time. He shivered and rubbed his hands. It was a cold morning outside, and not much warmer in here. The heating sensors should have picked up his presence and adjusted the thermostat; it would warm up in a few minutes.

  He went into his tiny office at the far end of the corridor, which was more a cubicle with a desk, computer terminal, phone and shredder, and laid his hold-all on the solitary visitor’s chair. There was the usual morning smell of citrus from something the cleaners used and he was glad they had already been, probably earlier on during the night. No interruptions. His forehead twinged again and lights sparked inside his head. He stood motionless for a moment, waiting for it to pass. No sleep, that was all, that was the problem. And stressed out as hell.

  He removed his anorak and hung it on the back of the door, but kept his jacket on and pulled his protective overalls over the top. Then he went to the vending machines in a recess by the entrance to the washrooms a few yards along the corridor, selected extra strong coffee, extra milk and a large dose of sugar.

  As the machine chuntered away, the Chief Technician realized his legs suddenly felt unsteady beneath him, as if they were about to buckle. He leaned against the wall, head swimming, and unexpectedly broke out in a heavy sweat. Closing his eyes for a moment, he took several deep breaths. Maybe picked up some bug, he thought.

  He had intended having an early night in preparation for this morning, but he had been persuaded by a mate to go out for a couple of beers. Two beers had turned into four, then six, then they had got chatting to a couple of birds who had persuaded them to go to a disco, and at half one in the morning he had found himself parked in a massive housing estate somewhere in Hounslow, trying to get a leg over in the back of his car. Without success.

  He was regretting now that he had said he would help the Bannerman woman. Posh little bitch. He wasn’t sure why he had agreed at all, and it had entailed a hell of a lot of work to get everything ready for a conclusive test – but the early indications from his findings did show something a little odd, and had intrigued him enough to want to go on. He tossed his hair back from his face. His eyes felt like sandpaper and his brain was only working at half speed.

  Picking up the hot cup, he carried it back to his office, opened the hold-all and began setting the contents out methodically on his desk. Six small white vials labelled with batch and lot numbers, each containing Maternox capsules. Beside them he laid the copy he had obtained of the correct pattern of compounds that should show up in a thin layer chromatography plate. Then he read the number on the first vial again: BS-M-6575-1881-UKMR.

  The digits and numbers all had a significance, primarily so that in the event of any quality problems the exact site and time of manufacture could be pinpointed. Over one hundred thousand women a year in England alone took Maternox. Two capsules had to be taken four times daily for fourteen days in each month, for a minimum of six months, and the average length of use before conception was five months.

  Miss Bannerman had asked if he could find out the batch numbers of the Maternox taken by the three pregnant women who had died. On Monday afternoon after his lunch with her he had rung his friend Rick Wilson, Head of Quality Control at the Reading plant, and given him the prescription details from the dead women’s doctors. Instead of being his normal friendly, helpful self, Wilson had become quiet and absurdly formal, informing Seals that such a request could only be processed through Dr Linda Farmer, Director of Medical Information and Liaison.

  Wilson owed him a debt going back a few years. Seals had stored it away, knowing there would be a pay-off one day; he did not really want to use it up on this Maternox business, but he dropped a mention of it into the conversation all the same. Wilson did not seem to pick up on it and was antagonistic, so Seals had not pressed it.

  Then to his surprise on Monday night, a brown envelope was pushed through his letter box accompanied by a brief, unsigned note with a request at the end for it to be destroyed. The note, in handwriting which he presumed to be Rick Wilson’s, stated that the three dead women had each had their prescriptions fulfilled with Maternox from the same batch number, BS-M-6575-1881-UKMR, which had been made at Reading. Along with the vial of these capsules, in the envelope were five further vials, enclosing other batch numbers taken at random.

  The dead women had lived, respectively, in Reading, Birmingham and Edinburgh. It seemed more than an odd coincidence that out of the thousands of different batches manufactured at the three UK plants each year, these three women, in totally different geographical regions, should all have been given Maternox from the same batch.

  Seals glanced at his watch. 5.45. She was quarter of an hour late. He pushed the v
ials into the pocket of his overalls, picked up the reference chromatogram and his coffee, and carried them into the lab across the corridor, which was the one he used for the experiments he supervised directly. The lights came on automatically, activated by sensors. It felt very still, and the silence was broken only by the faint hum from the flow hoods and incubators.

  As he walked between the benches of white speckled work tops, he paused to check on a couple of important experiments he had been running, and whose results he intended, illegally, taking with him to his new post at Cobbold Tessering next month. In one test tube a cluster of cells lay in a very weak solution of the toxic acid BS93L5021 that he had nicknamed Bendix Soup. He could see, even with his naked eye, that there had been no reaction during the night.

  The solution was too dilute, he decided, setting down the coffee and plate and quickly pulling on his protective gloves. He should put on his protective glasses, he knew, standard company safety policy, but with his muzzy head he did not think he could cope with the clamminess of the glasses – and there wasn’t anyone around right now to see him setting a bad example.

  He walked down to the Perspex-fronted fume cabinet marked ‘DANGER BIOHAZARD’, reached in and carefully gripped a blue plastic tub with a screwtop lid, containing a half-gallon Winchester bottle of the acid.

  Then suddenly, just as he had taken the weight of the tub and raised it a few inches, he felt a blinding pain behind his right eye as if a knife had been plunged through his temple. At the same moment there was a deep, throaty snarl, followed by another, even more loud and vicious, and a wolf, its jaws wide open, its teeth yellow, sharp, slimy with saliva, hurtled from out of the back of the fume cabinet straight at him.

  As he screamed in shock and disbelief, his legs buckled, collapsing under him as if the bones had been ripped out of them. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. His eyes swelled in their sockets in horror as he watched the blue bucket rotate in mid-air above his head, saw the lid drop off and the amber half-gallon Winchester bottle inside tumble out, head first, down towards him.