by Manda Scott
Lee reached into her bag, drew out a bundle of black clothing. Black sweatshirt. Black leggings. Black trainers. Black gloves. Just like hers. She laid them on the table, on top of the pile of papers. A faint patch of white showed at the shoulder of the sweatshirt as if an old paint stain had been washed and washed again until it had almost gone. A triangular tear at one elbow had been stitched with surgical precision.
A wash of adrenalin hit the back of my neck and flowed, cold and unwelcome, down my spine.
‘You really don’t have to come,’ she said carefully. ‘I know what you said last time. But I brought you these in case you decided to change your mind.’
The half-pint of bitter sat on the table in front of me, untouched. I was, without question, totally, perfectly sober.
‘You’re going tonight?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
I picked up the sweatshirt and shook it out, eyeing it critically.
‘Do you think it’ll still fit?’
‘I would think so,’ she said mildly. ‘You haven’t changed much.’
‘Only on the inside.’
‘Not even there.’ She picked up her bag and jacket from the chair. ‘Especially not there. Come on. You can change in the back of the car on the way.’
Lee’s car, strangely enough, is black. Every single one of her cars has been black, right from the beginning of the second year, when she blew an entire term’s grant on a dying Renault 4 with no brakes and a dodgy clutch and spent the best part of a week on the respray. I don’t think it has ever occurred to her that she might have one of a different colour. The reasoning has something to do with the desire to be inconspicuous. In real life a Saab 900i turbo is entirely visible whatever the colour, particularly to the average passing joy-rider, who can estimate the horsepower of any car at 500 paces on the basis of its silhouette alone. To reduce the risk, this particular model is fitted with an inordinate array of defence accessories, including a short-wave radio permanently tuned to the police waveband. I sat in the back, changing out of my day clothes into the sweatshirt and leggings, and listened to live dialogue from a raid on an illicit video copier.
We pulled up in an unpleasantly conspicuous side street about a block along from the rotting hulk of the Great Eastern Hotel: home in the old days to tramps and beggars and now, in the liberated nineties, to the teenage fall-out from the crack wars. In the dark and the rain it looked like a bad memory from Victorian London. There but for fortune.
I watched as a handful of differently conscious figures began to accumulate in the doorways. All of them could see the car and most of them looked aware enough to work out its street value.
Nodding a head in their general direction, I asked, ‘How much do we pay them to keep their paws off?’
‘Nothing.’ Lee bent and stuffed the folder of Malcolm’s papers under the passenger seat. ‘They won’t touch it.’
‘Really?’ I pulled on the gloves she had given me and thought twice about opening the rear door. ‘What does it do? Forty thousand volts to the genitals?’
‘Nice idea, but sadly, no.’ She opened the door and held it for me to get out. ‘But I bet you a tenner it will still be here when we get back.’
‘Fine.’ If she’s lost the car, another ten pounds isn’t going to make any significant difference.
Lee handed me a spare rucksack from the boot. I took a moment to adjust the straps before following her along the road away from the car.
‘Is there an easy way in?’ I asked, as we jogged steadily eastwards towards the medical park.
‘More or less. Want to look?’
‘Might be an idea.’
We paused in the orange glow of a streetlight and she produced the notepad from her rucksack. The ink ran slightly in the drizzle, blurring the outlines.
‘Can you still abseil?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’ Well, I could the last time I tried. It’s not that difficult.
‘Good. The external walls are alarmed with remote bells in the police station. If we touch the wrong place, the whole lot goes off. MacRae’s in charge of the local law. We don’t want to attract his attention.’
‘Absolutely not.’
MacRae is Laidlaw’s second in command. A pit bull terrier in human form, without a lead or a wire muzzle. Everywhere else it’s illegal to take one on the streets. Here they put it in uniform, give it a gun and point it at the bad guys. That’s us.
I examined the map. If we couldn’t touch the wall, there was only one other way in. ‘We’re going in from the top, right?’
‘Right.’ She grinned cheerfully. ‘It’s dead easy. Whoever designed the place needs their head examining. Look.’ She ran her finger along the route: up a fire escape on an adjacent derelict tenement block, across a roof, fix a rope to the safety bar on the top and abseil down half the length of the rope. First person swings across to the roof of the closest building inside the perimeter wire. Second person slides down the taut rope. Both take a second abseil to the ground. Easy.
Only one big flaw.
‘How do we get out, Adams?’ I asked.
‘Disable the alarms and walk,’ she said, wiping the rain from her eyes and giving me a look that took me back years. ‘“Simple is safe”.’
Simple is safe. It was our motto in the surgical wards. The real surgeons hate simple answers to simple problems, but in the perpetual battlefield of hospital medicine it kept a lot of innocent civilians alive.
More than that, it had become our rallying call in the face of the enemy. Adams and Stewart versus the rest of the world. The cold mass in my abdomen began to give way to a humming anticipation. The still, small voice of reason finally abandoned the unequal struggle to make itself heard.
‘OK, Dr Adams, let’s go.’
We ran the rest of the way, keeping to the dark shadows away from the street lights, jumping puddles and empty lager cans. It stopped raining as soon as we were out of sight of the Great Eastern.
The medical park was a high-tech oasis in the middle of a derelict urban wasteland. The perimeter wall looked imposing enough to the average bystander; solid brick about eight feet high with double-stranded wire on bent angle-iron at the top. A solid double gate prevented uninvited entry from the road.
Near the back wall, a tenement block more resilient than its neighbours rose three full storeys above the height of the Medi-Gen complex. Lee signalled me into a doorway at its base and we pulled on caps and gloves and tucked pen lights into holders stitched on the sleeves of the sweatshirts. Each rucksack carried a lightweight sit harness of the type sold for competition climbing and a thirty-metre length of narrow black rope with pale tape markings at metre intervals.
‘Time?’ I asked.
We checked our watches. Ten forty-five. Pub closing time at eleven. Just over fifteen minutes of relative peace and then the place would be crawling with folk looking for somewhere warm to sleep for the night. In the meantime it was quiet. And very dark.
We fitted the harnesses, slung the ropes across the top of the rucksacks and ran up the fire escape to the roof. From there, it was a quick crawl to the edge and a decent view of the buildings below.
Inside the wall, halogen lights shone at intervals in doorways and in the corridors between buildings, creating puddles of white in the darkness. The buildings were all of modern, architecturally correct design. Single-storey labs and offices in nice red and yellow brickwork with intriguingly reflective glass windows. Every roof was flat and most had skylights. Very inviting.
They were arranged in an ordered pattern, radiating out from a central, circular reception suite. Only one building – our target – sat apart from the rest, close to the outer wall, on the opposite side from the main entrance but with its own smaller gate giving direct access. Two sets of automatic barriers provided protection against uninvited guests.
I wondered how they managed to keep the journalists away from such a patently
dodgy set-up and decided they must have a brilliant PR department. The thought of Malcolm Donnelly working there made my skin crawl.
We hit the first problem on the roof – no safety bar and so no obvious point to anchor the abseil. Minutes ran by as we rigged up a hanging belay off the edge of the building, using a loop cut from the second rope running back to a fixed block on the other side of the roof.
We both clipped on to the rope. Lee lay on her stomach and peered over the edge.
‘Ten-foot gap. D’you want to belay or swing?’
‘I’ll swing.’ I needed the practice.
‘Fine.’ She handed me a descender for the abseil and then lowered herself off the edge to a static point four feet below.
My palms began to sweat inside the gloves. I pulled them off with my teeth and wiped both hands on the sleeves of the sweatshirt. A patch of thin cloud moved slightly and a three-quarter moon heightened the shadows and lit Lee’s face as she looked up and gave the rope two tugs for go.
I slid my hands back into the gloves and turned to face inwards, clipping the rope into my harness. Nerve. It’s all a question of nerve. I looked up at the moon and thought of Tan and then of Bridget. Odd they should come in that order. The soles of my trainers gripped the bricks at the edge of the wall and I lowered over the side.
Four feet. I stopped and Lee switched the ropes so the fulcrum of the swing focused at her harness point – a lever to keep me away from the edge of the building and allow me to build up a pendulum.
‘Go.’ A voice in my ear.
I let the pressure off the rope and ran backwards down the wall in sliding six foot steps. It’s fun once you remember how. At thirty-five feet I stopped and began to step sideways along the wall, drawing back as far as I could to give myself momentum on the swing. Kicking out, I pushed off from the side and swung out over the perimeter fence towards the flat roof below.
Too high, much too high. My feet clawed air a good ten feet above the landing point. I needed more length and less of a drop. I spun in the air, bringing my feet round to break the impact with the side of the tenement as I swung back.
Second go, eight feet lower. Further back along the wall and more of a kick.
Almost.
I cursed, silently but with feeling, as I grazed along the wall on the return swing. I am, without question, too old for this.
Third try lucky. I swung out over the target and released the rope, dropping down the last few feet to land clumsily on the roof top. It was not an elegant entry.
A balustrade of pale stone projected up an inch or two above the roof top. I sat down with my feet braced against it and fixed the free end of the rope into my harness loop before pulling it taut.
Two tugs for go.
Lee slid down feet first to land smoothly beside me.
‘Well done.’ She patted me gently on the back.
Very funny.
‘Sure.’ I left her to free up the first rope and began setting up the belay for the second abseil. This time the handle of the skylight provided a sensible anchor point and we were down to ground level in seconds.
The main door to the lab was round the corner. I left Lee coiling the rope and went to have a look. A single halogen light lit up the doorway, throwing harsh black shadows into the corners. Shadows that moved.
I froze in place, reaching out for Lee as she slid past. Putting my finger to her lips I jerked a nod at the furthest mass of shadow. She followed my gaze. Four blood-orange points glowed at us from the darkness and there was the very faintest of panting sounds.
Dogs.
‘Shit.’ She let the word through between her teeth on the outbreath.
Quite.
Dobermanns, two of them, standing about five feet apart. As we watched, they edged out into the circle of light, mouths open, tongues lolling gently, waiting. The noise of their panting was damply harsh in the quiet. The air smelled faintly of old meat and saliva.
A cloud slid briefly over the face of the moon again and when it cleared, they were another two feet closer. Still silent. Still waiting.
Ordinary dogs don’t wait. Ordinary dogs take out people who drop into their nocturnal domain and they are not generally quiet about it. It takes a lot of work to train a dog to kill and then to persuade it to be silent and selective in the process; to get it to wait for the right move or word to trigger the attack. Or the right absence of a word.
I took one step forward and held up my hand. Both dogs exploded from a standing start to a full gallop, coming in an arrow formation with its apex on my jugular.
There wasn’t time to think again. There was only time to take one deep breath and take my voice as deep as it would go and say ‘Diolch’ in my best fake Welsh accent.
They stopped, both of them. To get two dogs to go from full gallop to a standstill on a single word takes a quite remarkable amount of work. There is only one man in the whole of Scotland who trains dogs that well. His name is Dafydd Thomas and he lives half a mile from the farm which Bridget and I bought together eight years ago. Seven and a half years ago, he helped me train up a new collie pup by the name of Tan.
‘You’re out of your tiny mind, Stewart. You know that?’ Lee stepped up quietly, level with my shoulder. ‘What the hell did you say?’
‘Diolch. It means “thank you”. It’s Welsh.’
‘Is that an intelligent thing to say to a dog that’s going for your throat?’
‘It is if it’s one of Dafydd’s Dobermanns. It’s the only thing that’ll stop them. He trains them to inverse commands.’
‘In Welsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wonderful,’ she said drily. ‘I knew there was a good reason I brought you along.’ She looked over their heads to the door. ‘Do they roll over and die on command or do we stand here all night and wait for the handler to come back in the morning?’
The two dogs lay motionless on the ground, watching. I snapped a finger and told them politely to bugger off. In Welsh. They whined and grinned and trotted forwards to sit hopefully at my feet. I wasn’t carrying doggy chocs, which was an unfortunate oversight, but they seemed happy enough with a pat on the head and a lot of overdone Anglo-Celtic insults.
Lee stepped past them carefully and went over to look at the door. It’s more her style. When I finally joined her, she was holding her pen torch between her teeth, working at the lock.
‘OK?’ she asked, as I took the torch from her mouth and focused it on her fingertips.
‘OK.’ I nodded. ‘They’ll be all right as long as I come out first.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She nodded absently, frowning at the lock.
‘Did nobody give you the keys?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Thoughtless of them.’
‘Nearly as thoughtless as forgetting to tell me about the dogs.’
‘Maybe you didn’t owe someone a big enough favour.’
‘Maybe not.’
The lock clicked and the door opened. We paused, waiting for the alarm, and when nothing happened slid inside, closing the door behind us.
Lee’s map showed a fairly accurate floor plan. A cross marked the lab that used to be Malcolm’s. Main corridor, down to the far end, third on the left. The inner door opened with less resistance than the first, letting us into a medium-sized office much like Lee’s place in Pathology but bigger and more salubrious, although without, of course, quite the same view of the Kelvin Grove.
A Macintosh workstation with a double A4 screen occupied the main desk. A laser printer, a modem and a phone sat on a smaller desk beside it.
I opened the disk box at the side of the computer and began to read the labels.
‘What do you suppose happened to Malcolm’s disks?’ I asked.
Lee was on the far side of the room, notebook in hand, working on another door. ‘Does Caroline not have them?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Better find them then.’ The door opened. She shone the fine to
rch-beam inside. ‘Right. This is the lab. You check for the disks. I’ll go through here.’
None of the disks was labelled in Malcolm’s writing. I searched through the desk and surrounding cupboards looking for more. There were a couple of spare packs in a wall cupboard but the seals were unbroken.
The rest of the office yielded nothing. No papers in progress, no letters, no rubbish in the bin, no pens on the desk. The coffee rings on the desk top were old, which was odd. Even computer freaks drink coffee.
The filing cabinet was locked. I fiddled with it briefly but cracking locks was never one of my strong points.
I turned back to the disks in the tray. One or two had printed labels with out-of-date program titles: Statview, Word 3.0, Filemaker Pro 1.0. Nothing out of the ordinary for the average overpaid research scientist. Most of the rest had a single three-letter label with no indication of the contents of the files: MIC. FRG. HAM. HEN.
Hen. I reached round to the back of the machine and found the power switch by feel. The machine bleeped quietly to itself and hummed to life. I fed in the disk, drumming my fingers quietly on the desk while it went through the start-up routine, and opened a file at random.
Bingo. A hatching log of temperatures and humidities for sixty eggs. Sixty eggs mean sixty chickens and chickens are part of the jigsaw.
I contemplated taking the entire disk tray home, but the whole idea was not to let anyone know we had been. Super-tidy, anally retentive computer freaks notice disks that go missing by the boxload, even if they don’t drink coffee. They might notice less, of course, if the missing disks are unused.
There were twenty blank double-sided, high-density disks in the cupboard above my head and eighteen worth taking in the tray on the desk. I sat down on the ergonomic office chair and began the tedious job of copying.
Floppy disk into drive, copy to hard disk, new disk in, copy from hard disk. Next disk. Eighteen disks packed full of hard data and research papers. One of them had to say something useful. All I had to do was find out which one.
Eighteen high-density disks, two minutes’ copy time each, thirty-six minutes.
Six disks down the line, the novelty value began to wear off in a big way. I checked my watch: eleven thirty. We were pushing too many limits to be safe. I stared at the screen, willing it to go faster. The screen stared back and the disk drive chuntered at the same, monotonous, steady pace. I stared harder at the screen and began reading the files on the hard disk. Files with names like ‘MDD letters’. Malcolm Daniel Donnelly. Letter file. Jackpot.
