by HRF Keating
Christ, Harriet thought, what has this man of granite got in his head now? Jesus, I’ve just had a son of mine horribly killed. I’ve another lying in hospital with the threat of death hanging over him. Or, perhaps worse, the threat of becoming a mindless zombie. And there he is, sitting on the other side of this big desk of his, proposing that I should undertake an active investigation.
‘Aye, I see you’re thinking I’m an unfeeling block of wood. And I misdoubt whether I am or not. But think of this. However terrible the trouble you’re in, the trouble any one of us is in, there is something that can help us out of it. Help you out of it. And that’s work. Work. It’s what we poor wee creatures are put on God’s earth to do, and when trouble comes the more we do it and the sooner we do it, the more it helps us out of those troubles.’
There was a part of Harriet, the hologram part, that knew what Andrew Brown had said had in it more than a little truth.
‘I expect you’re right, sir,’ she answered him. ‘Only … Well, yes, I do expect you’re right.’
‘Very good. Now, let me tell you something in the strictest confidence.’
‘Sir?’
‘You must know Heronsgate House, the agricultural research station.’
Heronsgate House. And wasn’t I saying to John, just before all this happened, that the place was anything but a target for terrorists. What is this?
‘Yes, I know it, sir.’
‘Perhaps you know, too, that they recently produced an extremely effective herbicide there. So, what — bevy of mad scientists that they are — did they do? They set out further to manipulate it, and contrived to produce an unstoppable runaway substance, several thousand times more effective than the original.’
‘My husband told me there was a story about that in the Star,’ Harriet put in. ‘He said what they’d done paralleled something that happened in California, I think it was, where they altered a tuberculosis bacterium and caused that, too, to run amok.’
‘I dare say they did. However, the story in the Star happens to be the simple truth. And, of course, the lab at Heronsgate House was ordered to destroy the stuff once and for all. But, as you won’t find it hard to believe, they’ve delayed in carrying out that instruction. Fond of their pet discovery, I suppose.’
Into Harriet’s mind there flashed a horrible suspicion.
‘They want to conduct some sort of trial of it, sir?’
‘If that were all … No, last night, or half an hour before midnight on Tuesday to be exact, a gang of criminals broke into the place and stole from the Director’s own office the one specimen of the stuff in existence.’
The implications spread through Harriet’s mind as rapidly as the stolen specimen itself might do were it released.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘if the work you had in mind for me is investigating the break-in there, then I’m ready to start at once.’
‘Aye. I thought I’d not be wrong to ask you. But, first, listen to this. If any sort of word gets out of the threat that’s hanging over the whole of Birchester, then we’re more than likely to be in for as nasty a panic as anything al-Qaeda has brought about. Worse, even. Up to now we’ve succeeded in informing people anent terrorist threats to be provident rather than induce panic. But when something comes as near to home as Heronsgate House, that will alter. It’s because of that danger I am tasking you, you alone, with the initial investigation.’
Again the implications spread through Harriet’s mind.
‘Sir, you can rely on me,’ she said at last.
‘I hope so. They used to call you the Hard Detective, as I recollect. Well, I’m giving you a hard task, working on your own. As hard a task as any you had back when you earned that name. But I believe you’ll be up to it. Yes, up to it, at least till we’ve found out the full extent of the danger.’
He looked down for a moment at the uncluttered surface of his wide desk.
‘Very well then, you’ll be wanting to get over there to that Heronsgate place as soon as you can. So I won’t keep you. Oh, but yes, I will, for a moment. When the Chief was told about this — the Director at Heronsgate House had got in touch with an official at the Home Office — he was given a name as a possible perpetrator. A certain Ernst Wichmann, former Professor of German Studies at the University here. No more than that. But you had better take a look at him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And remember this. If your personal circumstances now become too onerous, if indeed you need urgently to visit your injured son, let me know at once. I’ll not stand in your way.’
Harriet forced herself to hold back the tears she instantly had thought would come.
‘Thank you, sir.’
And left.
John, at Majestic, she said to herself, would have to be given a carefully worded message.
*
Heronsgate House, Harriet remembered as she brought her car to a halt outside, had once been a private school for girls. On the edge of Birchester, swept past by a later flood of boxy building, it had since been put to a series of different purposes. The last of which, made plain by a tall shiny chimney rising up over it, was this research institute. Sitting gathering herself together, she realised that Mr Brown had done more for her than simply task her with a serious confidential inquiry. He had, in the course of the hammering quarter of an hour she had been with him, forced her hologram image and her real self back together once more into one fully active organism.
Yes, she thought, I now have Graham’s killing, Malcolm’s mutilation, lodged somewhere in my head where I can look steadily at them both. Andrew Brown’s treatment of me was something I could never have submitted to of my own will. But, done now, it’s left me — I know it — stronger than I could possibly have believed.
She got out of the car, locked it and marched up the short, dustily gravelled drive of the house, the keen March wind tugging at the skirts of her coat.
Before she reached the wide front door with its arched overhead window and its flight of unwashed, whitish steps in a wide arc, from round the side of the house two men appeared. At once she recognised from the long, bright-blue, brass-buttoned overcoats they were wearing that they must belong to a local security firm, dignified by the name Birchester Watchmen.
She came to a halt and watched as they headed for the gate, two burly individuals, one black, the other, from the particular cast of his ruddy face, perhaps Irish.
She let them get to within a few yards of her, and then, seizing the opportunity, spoke.
‘Good morning, am I right in thinking you’re on duty here?’
They stopped, the black man less quickly than his companion. But it was the latter who answered.
‘What’s that to you?’
Yes, thickish Irish accent.
‘Greater Birchester Police, Detective Superintendent Martens.’
Quick looks from one to the other.
Well, security guards are often even more involved with the lower criminal ranks than detective constables are.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘But I understand there was a break-in here last night. I’m making inquiries.’
‘You’re right about the break-in,’ the Irishman replied. ‘We were on duty here last night, me mate an’ meself, an’ we bore the brunt of it.’
Harriet did her best to disguise her quickening interest.
‘So, tell me what happened,’ she said. ‘Are you here reporting about it?’
‘We are so,’ the Irishman answered. ‘And I’ll tell you what happened. I’ll show you. Here, Winston, let the lady see your face.’
Winston visibly hesitated.
‘Go on, matey, let the lady have a good look.’
Reluctantly he approached and, turning down the thick collar of his coat — yes, a Birchester Watchmen shoulder-flash — tilted his head so that a dark area of broken bruising was visible.
‘Oh yes,’ Harriet said, anxious to reassure the fellow enough to get him to talk freely, ‘that
looks nasty.’
‘Sure it does,’ the Irish guard put in. ‘Nasty as can be. An’ that’s not all. Not by a long way.’
‘Have you got bruises to show, too?’
‘Bruises? I was damn near being a burnt corpse, so I was.’
‘Burnt? How was that?’
‘They only doused me head to foot with petrol. Tied me there, an’ told old Winston they’d put a match to me ’less he gave them his keys.’
She turned to Winston, who looked sheepishly at the gravelly ground by his feet.
‘So what did you do?’
‘What could he do?’ The Irishman broke in. ‘Only do the decent thing for his old mate and hand over the whole set. Didn’t you, matey? An’ what did ye get for your help to the damn lot of them, me old Winny? That club in your face. He was at the hospital half the night, so he was. An’ here he is back after reporting, good as gold, to Mr Lennox in his office.’
Winston gave his fellow guard a quick anxious look.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I was. At St Ozzie’s.’
So perhaps he had something to look sheepish about, Harriet thought, having yielded to that threat, however reasonably.
‘Yes,’ she said to him. ‘If that was the situation, with your fellow guard being menaced like that, you did absolutely the right thing. It’s always —’
‘If that was the situation?’ the Irishman banged out. ‘Look, lady. Smell this. Smell the coat I have on. The petrol’s not gone from it yet.’
He stepped up close and thrust his arm almost into Harriet’s face. And, yes, she could smell petrol.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘you had a tough time, both of you.’
For a moment she thought of the tough time she had had herself when, idly chatting with John about the thoughts a peal of thunder could put into your head, the phone had suddenly rung with its obliterating message. Yes, anything like that could leave you for long afterwards as jumpy as this fellow seemed to be.
‘We did. So, we did. Didn’t we, Winny?’
‘Yeah, Mike, yeah.’
‘Now, tell me everything you can remember.’
‘We have, so we have, every last thing.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said with a touch of sharpness. ‘For example, how many of them were there?’
‘Sure, how’d you expect us to tell? Wasn’t it all over in a couple of minutes? A ring at the bell. Winston opened up. Didn’t think nothing of it. Then wasn’t he shoved right out of the way, gun in his belly? An’ they were in. Rope over me head an’ round me arms before I knew it. An’ next the petrol, an’ what they said to Winston. How much time d’you think we had to call a fecking roll? An’ all in the half-dark. May’ve been four o’ them, may’ve been only three. Might have been half a dozen behind. Damned if I know. Damned if Winston does.’
‘Yeah, I didn’t go counting, no more than what Mike did.’
‘All right, but you must have had a better look at them when they left. Were they black or white, Asian or what?’
‘Do you think I cared a damn what they were?’ Mike came back. ‘Wasn’t it half-dark in the hall there, an’ them wid scarves across their faces, rubber gloves on their hands, an’ me scared out of me wits all along? How could I tell anything about them? How could Winston?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ the black guard quickly agreed.
How dozy can you get, Harriet said to herself. Still, Birchester Watchmen were a cheap outfit, so they might be expected to recruit pretty duff staff.
She sighed.
‘All right. But tell me what happened in the end. Did someone find you tied up like that?’
‘Not at all, not at all. D’you think I can’t get rid of a few ropes that a lot of — that fellas like that put round me wrists?’
‘So you managed to release yourself, and Winston after you?’
‘That was the way of it, wasn’t it, Winny, me lad?’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’
‘So what time was that? How long were you tied up there?’
Once again Mike produced his hurt and irate look.
‘D’you think we were after looking at our watches when we got rid of them ropes? Half-dead as we were?’
Harriet thought for a moment.
Half-dead was right. The two of them must have been half-dead from the time they came on duty. Look at the way Winston went blundering down the instant he heard the door-bell and opened up as if he was welcoming a pizza delivery.
‘So, what did you do when you’d got rid of those ropes?’ she asked. ‘At whatever time it was?’
Mike drew himself up.
‘What did I do? I did my duty, that’s what. I took poor old Winston straight over to St Ozzie’s. That’s what I did, with him bleeding like a pig.’
‘Was he that bad? There isn’t any blood on his coat that I can see.’
‘I — I —’ Winston stammered.
‘Sure, didn’t they wash it off of him at St Ozzie’s? What d’you expect of a grand hospital like that?’
And you left this place wide open, Harriet said to herself. Well, I suppose I could expect no better from a couple of dolts like you.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave it at that. For the time being. Now, give me your names. I suppose I can always find you again through your office.’
Mike looked more cheerful.
‘Sure, you can. Any time at all. Just ask for Michael O’Dowd or Winston Earl, an’ they’ll bring us up to you, sweet as you like.’
*
She decided it was a good deal more important to see the Institute Director. If only to discover the circumstances in which he had retained the runaway herbicide and, worse, had kept it where it had been easy enough to steal.
She went up to the big, green-painted, shabby-looking front door and put a firm finger on the button of the round brass bell beside it.
Unpolished, she noted.
Inside, at the mention of her name and rank, the receptionist promptly took her up to the top floor of the house. Past the open door of a small bedroom — tousled duvet and head-dented pillows on the wide bed — past a door marked Private, the Director’s lavatory presumably. And, next to it, came a door with an impressive metal plaque: Dr Giles Lennox, Director.
A discreet tap on the panel below that.
‘Enter.’
Harriet saw, behind a desk wider even than Andrew Brown’s, a neat-featured, pale, smallish man, dark hair clipped short, dressed, slightly surprisingly, in a brown, green-flecked countryman’s suit, with a woven green tie at the neck of his checked shirt. The scientist as farmer. Or no, as gentleman farmer.
She had scarcely time, however, to register the discrepancy between the Director’s free-and-easy appearance and the single formal ‘Enter’ he had snapped out before, the moment his door been softly closed behind her, in no countryman’s burr he began issuing instructions.
‘Detective Superintendent Martens, your Assistant Chief Constable for Crime telephoned me that he was sending you here. Now, let me make it clear, once and for all: the business you have been sent to look into is to be kept absolutely secret. I understand you are reporting solely to Mr Brown, and I emphasise that, solely. Not a word is to be said about what has happened to a single other person. In any circumstances. Is that clear?’
Harriet wondered for an instant just how to reply. But she had little difficulty in framing her answer.
‘I understand what you are saying. And, subject to Mr Brown’s further orders, I will do as you have asked. But, should he give me an order that requires me to tell any other individual what has happened, then I have to say I will do as I am instructed.’
All right, she thought, we’ve begun on the wrong foot. But so be it. I’m not going to let myself, or Mr Brown, be put under any restrictions by the man who is wholly responsible for the deeply threatening situation caused by his failure to destroy that extraordinarily dangerous substance.
Her eyes flicked immediately to a tall filing cabinet
in a smart shade of very pale grey just behind the Director’s massive desk. Its deep top drawer, she saw, still half-open, had been wrenched and distorted where some instrument had been used to force it.
Without waiting for any response to what she had said to Dr Lennox, she gestured towards the cabinet.
‘That, of course,’ she said, ‘is where you were keeping the substance your laboratory produced.’
The Director’s mouth clamped shut.
‘It was in there.’
Is he going to try the say-nothing tactic, she thought. And how to …? Ah, yes. Try this.
‘Dr Lennox, I find, quite absurdly, that I do not even know what that substance is called. Mr Brown didn’t happen to mention its name when he tasked me this morning. So what do you call it?’
The comparative harmlessness of her question did the trick. Dr Lennox produced a slight smile, not without a touch of superiority.
‘It has no name,’ he said. ‘We simply use “CA 534”, the number allocated to the experimental procedure that achieved final success.’
Success, Harriet thought. What sort of success was it to have produced, by some error, such destructive runaway stuff?
However, I’ve got him talking. So keep on with the soft approach.
‘On my way in,’ she went on, ‘I chanced to see the guards from the Birchester Watchmen firm who were on duty here last night. I gathered from them — I understand you have spoken to them as well — that the break-in last night was a distinctly professional job. Can you suggest any criminal, or even terrorist, organisation that might have got to know about this CA 534 and what use it might be put to?’
But Dr Lennox at once fought back.
‘Don’t you think, Superintendent,’ he said sharply, ‘that if I had, I would not have informed the Home Office of my suspicions? And they would, of course, have passed on the information to … your superiors?’
