‘Yes, you lucky man.’
‘Let’s go for a drink tonight after work.’
‘Uncle Harold would be delighted, dear friend.’ Then, winking, ‘You can tell me all about the delights of your meeting with our Sharon. Some people say she fancies you, y’know.’
Tring smiled. ‘Don’t get your bow-tie in a twist over that one, Harold,’ he said, slapping his colleague on the arm. ‘She’d eat me alive. See you later in the lab.’ The professor then made towards the entrance, temporarily replacing thoughts of Sharon Proctor with his plans to quiz Harold Spencer more deeply over the demise of his predecessor. The Mancunian might just be the key to unlocking the Locke affair, he thought, chuckling to himself at the pun. He had to admit that Fiona’s request that he play amateur detective had created within him a bubble of excitement as well as of apprehension. He calmed himself by deciding to approach the matter as he would when researching a new drug. Explore the theories and then test them. It was with this in mind that he knocked on Sharon Proctor’s door. A CCTV camera stared down at him from above the lintel.
‘Please enter, Jonathan,’ came the Southern drawl.
He could feel a few butterflies as he went in. Sharon Proctor, dressed in one of the myriad dark designer suits whose cut only served to accentuate her perfect body shape, smiled at him benignly. ‘Good afternoon, Sharon,’ he said with false bonhomie.
‘Enjoy your lunch?’ she queried.
‘Yes, it was splendid, thanks.’
‘Jack’s very pleased that you and Fiona are hitting it off. We both like her immensely.’
God, thought Tring, was there nothing the Proctors did not know? And then he grinned, more to himself than to Sharon Proctor, for indeed there was. ‘Yes, she’s a lovely girl, and I’m very fond of her.’
‘Good,’ said the American.
Prior to his lunch with Fiona, Tring would have regarded Sharon Proctor’s glacial smile as purely enigmatic. But now he knew what lay behind it, and this gave him a certain sense of power over her.
‘Jonathan, I’d like to come down to the laboratory and look over a few things,’ she said. ‘You can explain to me all the technicalities.’
‘Of course,’ said Tring, who then watched bemused as she lifted a polished crimson fingernail to her lips and bade him to be silent.
She rose from her desk and walked over to the door, which she first opened and then closed with an exaggerated bang. The American then removed her shoes and tiptoed over towards a wall socket sporting a plug whose wire led to a table lamp.
Resting sideways on her haunches, she gently removed the plug containing the listening device. ‘That’s better,’ she said, replacing her shoes. ‘Just one of Jack’s silly games.’
Tring stood dumbfounded as she retook her seat and beckoned him to sit down. It was clear that there was no real trust among the Parados elite.
‘Jonathan, I meant what I said about coming down to see your work. I know that I’m more concerned with the business end of the company, but I’d sure like to learn the workings of molecules, however mundane.’
Tring wanted to say that molecule moulding was far from mundane for him, but decided to keep his own counsel. ‘You’re very welcome, Sharon,’ he said simply.
‘We all need a little excitement in our lives, Jonathan, a change from the routine.’
Alarm bells began resounding in the scientist’s brain. He was desperately hoping that this beautiful but dangerous woman was not about to make a play for him. If she did, and he rejected her, it might jeopardise everything.
‘How do you get your kicks, Jonathan?’
‘Rugby,’ he blurted. It was the first thing that came into his mind. Anything but weird sex.
Sharon Proctor sighed wistfully. ‘Ah, men and their sport. You know, I once dated a football player back home in Georgia. As tall as you, but built like a Redwood. Wanted to marry me. But his brain was the size of a pea. I can’t abide stupid men.’
Tring said nothing, but he felt sorry for any man who had had to try to fulfil Sharon Proctor’s exacting expectations.
‘You’re not stupid, Jonathan, are you?’
‘I would like to think not,’ he replied, wondering where the hell this was all leading.
She breathed deeply. ‘Look, I know you and Klein are friends, and I also know that you’re an honourable man, but the future of this company is at stake.’ She noted the concerned look in his eyes and quickly added, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to do anything against your conscience.’
Sharon Proctor then launched into an explanation of how her husband’s headstrong actions might lead to ruination, that intrigue in the pharmaceutical industry made politics look like a teddy bear’s picnic. By her very tone, Tring could see that there was something else, something very damning that was worrying the boss’s wife.
‘I believe I understand you much better that you think, Jonathan,’ she said knowingly. ‘I know that you wouldn’t let our company go under if you could help it.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ he said bluntly.
‘I want you to try to find out if your friend Klein has anything on us,’ she replied, steely-eyed.
So that was it, thought Tring. The Proctors were running scared over something, and Abe Klein or someone connected to him was involved. It was a golden opportunity for him to legitimately engage in a little non-scientific research, ostensibly on behalf of his bosses but effectively against them. But he also knew that he mustn’t show over-eagerness to accede to her request or Sharon Proctor might smell a rat. The blonde bombshell from Georgia was as wily as they came.
‘Are you asking me to spy on my friend?’ said Tring gravely.
‘Not exactly, Jonathan,’ she drawled. ‘We’re not after information that might undermine him. We want information that might undermine us. Anyway, we all enjoy a little excitement from time to time, don’t we?’
You sure do, thought Tring. He leaned forward and placed his left hand on the table for support. ‘As you mentioned before, I won’t do anything that conflicts with my conscience.’
Sharon Proctor smiled through the teeth that were achingly faultless, and then leaned towards him, placing a hand of sculptured white marble over his. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’
The professor stared at the hand for a moment, recalling that it had once held his sex in a darkened room. Ordinarily, her touch would have brought an immediate response in the vicinity of his groin. Instead, it left him as frozen as a Waynesboro cotton picker in Alaska.
Only slightly less chilly was the cold and musty garage in which Kieran Kelly now found himself. It was a derelict lock-up in Islington, tucked away in a cul-de-sac used by no one. It was one of those odd sites that had not yet been snapped up by property developers, and it had changed little since he had last visited it a year earlier. There were still dormant cells of the IRA, decommissioning or no decommissioning, that maintained arms and ammunition sites in and around the English capital. He doubted whether their whereabouts would ever be revealed. Only he and his friends in Belfast knew the existence of this one, and they were not about to compromise themselves for the sake of a peace that might turn out to be as ephemeral as a leprechaun in a Donegal mist.
The Irishman’s first task was to avail himself of emergency funds. He opened the top drawer of a dust-covered chest in the far corner. The money, ten thousand pounds’ worth of superbly crafted and suitably grubby twenty-pound notes, was still as he had left it, wrapped in a Tesco shopping bag. He placed the bag in his briefcase. The money, albeit counterfeit, would come in handy when he left his job. He then moved around the garage to inspect the crates, the contents of which he thought he’d never have to use again. The first one he opened contained a selection of handguns, mostly stolen from the British Army. He picked out his weapon of choice, a 9mm Browning High Power and played with it, tossing it from his right hand to his left and back again. Made in Belgium by Fabrique Nationale, the Browning had become synonymo
us with the SAS. The weapon had a semi-automatic action, considerable stopping power and a fourteen-round box magazine. Kelly liked this, the latest version, because it had a double action. The hammer could be cocked manually before the trigger was pulled, or alternatively cocked and fired by continuous pressure on the trigger. Still with weapon in hand, he found an empty crate and placed it inside. The Beretta he kept at home would be used as back up.
Next on the Irishman’s agenda came his preferred weapon for sniping. He couldn’t help smiling to himself as he packed away the 7.62mm LA96A1. The rifle had a plastic stock, a light bipod under the barrel and a monopod under the stock so that it could be laid on the target for long periods without tiring the firer. The Schmidt and Bender telescopic sights provided accuracy to a distance of one thousand metres. He stroked the rifle sensually and smiled, for he knew it was the SAS’s own choice for counter-revolutionary and hostage-rescue operations, where a first-round kill at a range as short as one hundred metres was critical. ‘Tuché, my friends,’ he said through pursed lips. ‘Tuché.’
Kelly then collected a pair of night-vision goggles before moving on to the last two items for his armoury. The first was a 66mm M72 one-shot, throwaway anti-tank weapon. It was the only one he had, but at less than two-and-a-half kilos it was extraordinarily light. Its one-kilo rocket could penetrate armour to more than three hundred millimetres at any range. Although he doubted that he would be forced to use it, the British authorities might be tempted to bring in armoured vehicles of some description if things got hairy. It might be prudent for him to disabuse them from the start.
The final item was something the Irishman definitely hoped he would never have to use. Resembling some innocuous putty, the two kilos of Semtex would be the last resort of a desperate man, but he was prepared to blow himself and everyone else to kingdom come if the British Government and the pharmaceutical companies did not accede to his demands. He placed the explosive and a few detonators into the crate, along with the appropriate rounds of ammunition for his weapons.
All was now ready for him to collect when the time was right.
‘Well,’ said Harold Spencer raising his glass towards his lips and his voice above the hubbub, ‘what did she who shall be obeyed have to say for herself?’
Tring downed a few gulps of his Beck’s while he pondered again whether he should tell the truth to his head of clinical research. He decided it might be prudent to be economical with the precise facts. ‘Mrs Proctor wants to come down and visit us in the lab.’
‘Does she, by heck,’ said the gruff Mancunian with a hint of cynicism. ‘What the hell does she know about science and chemicals? She just rings the bloody till.’
Tring smiled. ‘Sure, but you know what it is with the new, liberated women. They like to have a finger in every pie.’
‘As long as she keeps her finger out my Petri dish, I don’t mind.’
‘I’ll handle her, Harold, don’t you worry. It’s just that’s she’s concerned for the new patch to be a success.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Tring decided it was time to jump in. ‘Look, Harold,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘between you and me, she’s a bit concerned that the opposition might have stolen a march on us. It has something to do with Locke.’
The portly Mancunian leaned against the bar and fingered his trademark bow tie nervously. ‘No, your predecessor wouldn’t have sold out the company however much he was scared of Jack Proctor. Martin Locke was as loyal as they came.’
‘Then perhaps he knew something that had nothing to do with the product, something that could harm the company in another way. Perhaps he told someone else before he died.’
‘Well it certainly wasn’t me.’
‘But you knew him as well as anyone at Parados.’
Spencer shrugged. ‘Sure, but I didn’t socialise much with him. I’m married and I always thought he was queer, so—’
‘So was there anyone else he was close to?’
Spencer frowned and shook his head. ‘Not that I knew about, although hold on a minute.’
Tring waited with bated breath while his colleague searched the inner recesses of his memory. Give me a name, the professor pleaded silently, any name.
‘I don’t know who he was,’ Spencer said at length, ‘but I do recall someone telling me where he worked.’
Tring found he wanted to scream at the Mancunian as the older man decided at that precise moment to take another long swig of lager.
Harold Spencer burped loudly before adding, ‘Yes, that’s right. The bloke worked at KleinKinloss.’
While Jonathan Tring and his colleague were enjoying a last beverage before the pub closed, Kieran Kelly was cradling the head of his lover in his powerful arms. The Countess moaned as he moved his lips towards her forehead and planted a kiss gently beneath the hairline. Once again, their lovemaking had been of extraordinary tenderness, followed by ferocity of need that surprised them both.
Magda von Esterhazy felt she was as near to Nirvana as she would ever be. She was once again a real woman, and the sense of fulfilment was overwhelming. Her main satisfaction had come from being able to fulfil the needs of her partner despite her disability. She’d been afraid that the first time might just have been a one-off, a brief encounter between two people trying to dissolve their respective hurts in a sunburst of lust. It had seemed to her that they had been like two fireflies desperately seeking to mate before the dawn. But now it was different. Kieran had come back to her. She was not just a one-night stand. She recognised his need to fill the terrible void left by the death of his wife. Strangely, she found the Irishman’s protestations of his eternal love for Teresa only made her more attracted to him. However, she felt she still needed to know more about this man named Kieran O’Donaghue: his likes, his dislikes, his plans for the future and whether they included her or not. But she also knew that she would never be the first to raise these issues.
‘Secrets and lies,’ he said suddenly.
‘What do you mean, Kieran?’
‘The world is full of secrets and lies.’
She snuggled closer to him. ‘You mean the general attitude towards arachnoiditis?’
‘Not only that,’ he said with a tinge of bitterness. ‘There is so much evil out there. So little honour.’
‘But, Liebling, didn’t someone say that honour was the last refuge of a scoundrel.’
‘I think it was patriotism that Samuel Johnson was talking about.’
‘That, too.’
Kelly felt a desperate need to gain her support for his rationale. ‘You know, some unknown Vietnamese said it was better to die with honour than live in disgrace. Honour is the highest plane to which man can aspire. No wrongs would ever be righted unless there were men who acted in its interest.’
She leaned on one elbow and gazed lovingly at his strong profile. ‘But surely honour is only satisfied when it is just.’
‘Precisely.’
‘So when an Arab villager slaughters his own daughter because she has been raped, that is just?’
‘Yes, I suppose that in his eyes, it is.’
‘So honour is only in the eye of the beholder?’
‘Who are we to judge other cultures and their codes of honour?’
‘Can we agree to disagree on that one,’ she smiled and leaned her head back on the pillow.
‘So you don’t believe in the concept of revenge,’ he said.
‘I believe in the concept, but I don’t practise it.’
He stroked her long blonde hair. ‘But don’t you hate the people who did this to you. Don’t you ever wish you could get back at them?’
She shook her head. ‘A grudge only destroys the bearer. It eats away at him like a cancer.’ She snuggled deeper into his shoulder, then, ‘you see, we too are culpable. We have an emergency, and then expect that the medical community will somehow have all the answers. We need to stop treating our physicians as gods and recognise them as human beings. We all
need to ask the questions that need to be asked.’
Kelly kissed her again. ‘I don’t quite understand your drift,’ he said.
Magda smiled. She loved intellectual conversation. It was something she had desperately missed until the Irishman had come along. ‘There are so, so many questions we all need to ask, Kieran. Why, for instance, are cigarettes still legal when each of us knows that they are harmful to our health, and that it drives the cost of medical care through the roof? Why haven’t the citizens of the world demanded that the manufacture and sale of this killer be banned? I don’t think many people are investing time and effort in this country to make things right. Most people sit around hoping that someone else will do it. In the end, we seem to get what we deserve, whether it is inept governments, poor medical standards or, how you say, dodgy pharmaceutical companies.’
‘Magda, are you telling me you deserve the pain you suffer?’
‘No, Liebchen, no one deserves to suffer, but it is a fact of life nevertheless. The trouble is that no one can truly understand another person’s suffering. My ex-husband used to say, “Magda, surely it can’t hurt all that much”. I asked him if he’d invented a machine that he attached to the pain centre of my brain that somehow broadcast the pain I was feeling to him. I told him that if suddenly, out of the blue, he had just five seconds where he went from normal to my pain level, he would think he was dying, that he’d fall to the floor screaming and do pee-pee in his pants. Then, at the end of those five seconds, when he went back to normal, he would never again doubt me.’ She hesitated, then, vehemently, ‘That’s the trouble with pain. Aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn. Out of sight, out of mind. You can’t prove it, so people are prone to doubt it. When I fell on that ice, it was the worst agony I’d ever experienced, but that day would now seem like a day off. Am I boring you, Kieran?’
‘No, please go on. I want and need to understand everything, every single thing about this disease.’
Cry of the Needle Page 16
