by Manda Scott
Lee was impressed. ‘Did you know she could do that?’
‘No.’ Life is full of small surprises. ‘Good though, isn’t it?’ I whistled the dog to heel and clipped back the gate. ‘Let’s get them moving, the rain’s on its way.’
It began as we walked the herd up the hill. A few heavy drops beat a slow drum roll on the roof of the barn, the rhythm gathering pace as we hauled back the big main doors and ran down the rows, opening boxes. By the time each horse was safely in bed, with hay and water to last the night, it was a solid, unrelenting downpour. Quite enough to soak all three of us on the run back to the house.
Lee stood watching the water run down the windows while I towelled the worst of the wet off the dog.
‘Seen the moon?’ She sounded thoughtful.
‘Uhuh. It’ll be full the night after next.’
‘That’s the equinox.’
‘I know. These are the equinoctial gales. We’ll be lucky if there aren’t trees down by the morning.’
The dog wriggled free and flopped to the floor in front of the fire. The smell of wet canine percolated steamily through the room.
I went to join Lee by the window. We both stood for a while and watched the water run in rivulets off the glass, thinking.
‘Will you go and see Mhaire?’
‘No.’ Her eyes looked out through the window, but her mind was somewhere else. ‘Things will happen whether we know about them or not. On the whole, I’d rather stay in blissful ignorance for a while longer.’ She turned round and the voice carried nothing more than gentle irony. ‘You could always try, but if she’s started on the rhyming couplets, you could be in for a bad time of it.’
‘No thanks. Once a year is enough.’
She went to bed soon after that and I spent the rest of the graveyard shift reading Malcolm’s papers through until I knew the contents inside out and back to front. It passed the time, but I can think of better ways to spend an evening.
At four, I woke Caroline and left her sitting in the chair by the fire with a copy of yesterday’s Herald crossword. I crawled back into bed, too tired this time to dream of anything.
The rain was still sheeting down against the windows and running in torrents off the cracked guttering at the side of the roof when Lee woke me at seven.
‘I’m off. I have to be in for the department rounds at eight. Caroline’s still asleep. She wants to be woken at midday if she hasn’t surfaced before then.’
I came round slowly, fighting up through layers of black cotton wool. ‘Fine. Call me if there’s anything special on Bridget’s blood results.’
‘Sure.’
I took a leisurely shower and dressed slowly, listening to the radio news with the forecast of rain and more rain, then took the dog out to the barn and spent the next couple of hours working off mindless frustration, trundling barrowloads of horse dung to the muck heap and forking out bales of straw to make the new beds.
Just before coffee time, I remembered to check the bantams. Food and water stocks were holding out nicely. The two hoppers in the middle of the floor were designed to keep a dozen or so hens well fed for a week and this pair had barely made an impact. They sat in the far corner and clucked at me nervously as I ducked in the door, refusing to move until I was almost within reach. When they finally scuttled off, complaining briskly, each neatly rounded dip in the straw revealed two small, brown eggs – replicas of the ones we had taken from Malcolm’s lab. I scooped them into a pocket and left, locking all the multiple chains and bolts behind me.
Caroline, half-awake and wrapped up in a vast blue towelling dressing gown, was sitting at the breakfast counter with a piece of toast in one hand and the phone in the other when I walked, dripping, in through the back door.
‘It’s Lee,’ she said, ‘for you.’
Who else?
I laid the eggs carefully on the counter and took the handset. Small puddles of water began to form on the flagstones at my feet.
‘Hi. What’s up?’
‘Things are moving. Can you meet me in town?’ It was her professional medical voice: clipped and terse.
‘Where?’
‘The Man. Half an hour.’
I looked at my clothes and imagined walking into the Man carrying that much horse debris.
‘I need to change. Can you make that forty-five minutes?’
‘Fine. Upstairs bar. Usual place.’ She hung up.
I left Caroline with all the alarm systems switched on and a series of numbers to call if she thought there was going to be trouble. Not the best security in the world but the best that common sense and a reasonable amount of invention could produce.
The drive in to Byres Road was wet. The dash down the hill from the multistorey car park to the Man was wetter still. I arrived, soaked to the knees from car spray and with water running off my hair down the inside of my collar.
The bar was as busy as ever. You would think that anyone with any conscience would be at work at half-past ten on a Monday morning, but the business breakfast people seemed to be working their way towards a liquid brunch and the lower lounge was packed out with postgraduate students busily generating a degree of enthusiasm for research after a hard weekend’s drinking.
Lee was sitting at her usual table on the balcony over the main bar, reading the morning paper.
I picked up a fresh coffee and a glass of mineral water on the way past the bar and carried them over to the table.
‘Hi. What’s up?’
‘All sorts of things.’ She flipped the paper across the table towards me. ‘Have you seen that?’
Janine had an article on the science pages. One I hadn’t read before. One, by now, of the several I hadn’t read before. This time, she was writing about computer protection and the sub-editor had pulled out a phrase to highlight in a box under the main picture.
No protection system in the world is unbreakable, the best you can hope for is to make it so boring for the average hacker that he (or she) gives up before the end.
Lee held her thumb under the by-line at the bottom of the page: ‘“Jay Caradice”. Is this herself?’
‘Janine? Yes.’
‘She writes as if she knows what she’s talking about.’
‘She does.’
‘Could she hack into the computer at Malcolm’s lab?’
‘I’m sure she could, yes. Whether she would is entirely another question, and whether it would be sensible to ask her is something else again.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s got a habit of believing that rules are there to be kept. Hacking into other people’s systems is against the law. If you read the rest of the article, it’ll probably tell you what the penalties are.’
‘I have. It does.’ She folded the paper and slipped it into the bag at her feet. ‘But I think some time soon, you’re going to have to decide which side she’s on. We’re running out of options.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
She looked down and drew a line between the damp rings on the table, thinking. When she looked up, her eyes were blank. ‘All the blood samples I put into the lab have gone. And there’s no record they ever existed, on the computer or in the day book.’
She stared at me over her glass while I tried to believe yet one more impossible thing before lunch and failed. The Pathology lab has one of the most up-to-date filing systems in the university. Facts do not go missing overnight.
‘That’s impossible.’
‘No.’ She sat back and stared out over the balcony. ‘It just takes someone who knows their way around the inside of the Pathology labs.’
We know that already.
‘Have you checked out who Philippa’s married to yet?’
‘Yes. It’s the right David Kemp. And I was wrong about her spawning the next generation. Apparently she discovered the joys of science and stayed on as research assistant after she qualified. She’s one third of the way to a PhD, with Malcolm as first supervisor.’
Wonderful.
‘I suppose you haven’t got a good reason, just off the top of your head, why the reptile would want to wipe out the last remaining scions of the Donnelly line?’
‘Not off the top of my head, no.’
I thought not.
I’m too tired, or too old, to play games like this. I pinched the bridge of my nose and squinted past my thumb. ‘Did you get anything useful from the bloods?’
‘Some.’ She reached into her bag and pulled out two sheets of computer printout. ‘Take a look at these.’
The paper spun across the table towards me, sticking on the damp coffee rings.
It was a Pathology lab report: a full blood screen for a female patient, name of Sally Wentfield. Age: thirty-eight; medical diagnosis: chronic diabetes mellitus; possible cause of death: insulin overdose.
The abnormal figures were in bold type. The blood glucose was catastrophically low, easily consistent with the diagnosis of insulin OD.
The odd thing about the figures in front of me was that, whereas the glucose had fallen through the floor, there was no insulin to speak of at all.
I looked at Lee. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a blood screen. Too many things were going missing so I put in a duplicate set of samples under a pseudonym. This is the result.’
‘These are Bridget’s blood results?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. One of the few things consistent with her pathology picture was an insulin overdose. It was worth a try. The late Ms Wentfield did genuinely overdose, so she was a rather obvious choice.’
I remembered the name. ‘Sally Wentfield’s the body they switched for Bride?’
‘Right.’ She gave a humourless smile. ‘One of life’s smaller ironies, but not entirely relevant.’
‘What makes you think she overdosed on insulin?’
She shrugged. ‘A hunch. And the temazepam in the stomach. Insulin ODs usually have fits towards the end when the blood glucose gets too low. If you filled someone full of temazepam first, it would stop the seizures, so there’d be no signs of self-trauma on post-mortem. You’d get a very peaceful death. It’s what I would do if I was trying to cover up.’
Brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant. Except that the results don’t make sense.
‘If it’s an insulin overdose, Doctor, where’s the insulin?’
‘I don’t know. That’s where the hunch falls through. There’s nothing in the blood and no obvious route of administration either.’
‘Did she have needle marks?’
‘No. We went over her with a magnifying glass on Friday. She was clean. Whatever it was, it wasn’t injected.’
‘Oral tablets?’
‘Doesn’t exist. There isn’t an oral form of insulin. The HCI in the stomach denatures it. Besides, it’d be lethal if you put it on the market. If you can OD by accident on the injectable stuff, imagine what you could do with tablets.’
She spoke absently, her eyes fixed on the lounge bar below. She saw me looking and nodded her head down towards the crowd.
‘Does anyone down there look out of place to you?’
I scanned the room below. Twenty-something jeans and sweatshirts mixed with thirty-something business suits. Hair length varied at random. Drinking habits were more or less uniform.
On the second scan round, one stood out. Almost directly beneath us: a very, very quiet suit with cropped blond hair and an untouched pint. Male. Mid-twenties. Someone trying so hard to be invisible that, in itself, it made him conspicuous. That and the radiating sense of unfocused panic.
If he had been dressed differently and sitting in the library rather than the lounge bar of the Man, I would have put him down as a student with resit exams on the way.
Then he stretched out his hand for the pint and blew the cover completely. There, all the way round his wrist where it was exposed by the receding cuff, was the thin blue band of a tattoo.
A vague memory tugged at the back of my mind. A square blond outline framed in a doorway. ‘I’ve seen him before somewhere. Recently.’
‘Here. Last week when we had to leave a bit faster than intended. We were his diversion. His friends have unpleasant habits. Not the kind of people you want to meet unprepared.’
Or, indeed, at all. I looked at Lee. ‘Friend of yours?’
‘An . . . acquaintance. His mother’s from the Island.’
Which probably makes him at least a second cousin.
‘Has he come up with the goods?’
‘More or less.’ She pulled a tightly folded sheet of paper from an inner pocket. ‘He gave me this before you arrived.’
The paper was a page torn from a notebook. On it was a childlike drawing of a bird. The beak was overlarge and had a shark’s-tooth pattern along each edge. Underneath that was a price: £200/gram.
I smoothed the sheet flat and fixed it on the table between my cup and her glass. The hen’s eye had been coloured in with a gilt pen, giving it a manic gleam as it stared up from the table. ‘Am I supposed to understand this?’
‘Not unless you’re good at cryptic puzzles, no. Our Daniel can’t write. He copped out of school before they got that far. He draws things instead.’ She ran her finger round the gilt-eyed chicken. ‘This is Hen’s Teeth. It’s the ultimate designer drug. Heroin buzz in a capsule. Crack by mouth. No needles, no fuss, no mess and, so far, no fatalities. The crack-heads love it. Laidlaw hates it. He’s doing his nut trying to find out what it is and where it comes from.’
‘Do you know?’
‘Not yet.’ She tapped the paper again. ‘This is a step towards finding out. Young Daniel’s offering access to the storehouse and he might be a lead back to the hen coop. I haven’t had a chance to test any yet but I think it’s probably an endorphin derivative. If they’ve got the formulation right, they could have something that would give you a heroin buzz without any of the legal complications.’
‘How so?’
‘Easy.’ Her smile was positively cheerful. ‘It’s not illegal to possess endorphins, Kellen. You can’t legislate against something that every marathon runner generates by the bucketload every time they hit the road.’
‘Hell.’ No legislation. No arrests. No risk. Liquid gold. ‘It’s not surprising Laidlaw doesn’t like it.’
‘Not just Laidlaw. This’ll play havoc with the current drugs controls.’
‘Has this got anything to do with the matter in hand?’
‘I think it might.’ She traced a finger around the drawing. ‘The hen has teeth. And Malcolm sent hens to Bridget. Then the woman herself dies on a last meal of egg.’
‘That’s a lot of synchronicity.’
‘I thought that. Try something else. Malcolm was a genetic engineer and he was making new proteins. Supposing one of the things he made was illegal?’
‘Like Hen’s Teeth?’
‘Right. It raises the stakes a little. Something like this would be worth dying for. Or, at least, worth killing for.’
‘Malcolm wouldn’t do that. He may have sold out to commerce but he wasn’t bent.’
‘Malcolm might not, but he had made the technology and someone else might have thought of a new use for it. This retails at £200 a gram. If you have hens that lay eggs full of the stuff, you might kill to keep it secret.’
You might well. And Malcolm, unless he had changed beyond all understanding, would never have stood around and watched someone else abusing science to that extent. He would have tried to stop them, one way or another.
The pattern was beginning to make sense. All we had to do was to test it and see if the facts fitted.
‘We need to see what’s in the eggs we picked up from Malcolm’s lab and then compare it to the stuff from your friend downstairs.’
‘We do. Which is a little sad because I don’t have them any more. Someone turned my office over during the weekend. Nothing else was touched, but the eggs have gone.’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’
‘Quite.’
&nb
sp; We stared at each other silently across the table.
Nothing is impossible, but some things are less probable than others. I would have thought that breaking into Lee’s office was fairly low down the list of likely events. Obviously not.
Small spasms of paranoia vied with simple disbelief and an overwhelming urge to return to the normality of everyday life.
I pulled myself back together.
‘You mean, all we have left from the other night is the disks?’
‘I’m afraid so. That’s why we need your tame journalist. The only other option is to go and look for Malcolm’s body in Anatomy, and even if we find it, there’s no guarantee it’ll tell us anything.’
Worth a try, though.
‘Have you got a password for the Anatomy records computer?’
‘Sure.’ She produced a blank file card from the bag at her feet and wrote out a series of numbers and letters in upper and lower case, then pushed it across the table towards me.
‘Are you going to go now?’ She looked at me sceptically.
‘Of course.’ I met her eye. ‘I’ll think about going to see Janine later on. If you could warn McNeill that I’m on my way, it might make getting in easier.’
‘Will he recognize you?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Fine. You can be my research student. You’ll need a name.’ She thought for a moment. ‘How would you like to be Ms Mhaire Culloch for the day?’
The thought of stepping into the madwoman’s shoes made my hair stand on end, but it had a certain symmetry. ‘I’d hate it, but it’ll do.’
‘Poetic justice.’ She grinned cheerfully and stood up, handing me the newspaper. ‘Here. You can read this on the Underground. Have a look at the front page. It’ll restore your faith in humanity.’
The lead item was an article, complete with full frontal pictures, of Chief Inspector Laidlaw addressing a conference in Edinburgh on improving police attitudes towards women as the victims of crime.
