by Manda Scott
It didn’t seem worth telling her that if the omens were right, I might not be around to talk to.
At nine thirty, Janine switched on the modem and dialled through to the number at Malcolm’s lab. This time the phone icon smiled all the way and, when the screen cleared, we were looking at a replica of the screen on Malcolm’s Macintosh.
‘Got it.’
‘Good.’
She plugged in the spare hard disk and began to transfer files. The principle was much the same as I had used on the first night in the lab, but orders of magnitude faster. Too fast.
I moved my chair in closer and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hold on. Can we have a look at some of these?’
The tip of her tongue was caught between her teeth, her mind absorbed with the electronic processes on the screen.
I asked again and this time she heard me.
She shook her head curtly. ‘It’s faster this way. We can worry about getting into the files later. You don’t want to have the line open too long.’
‘I know, but I need answers now. Can we look at some of it. Please?’
She stopped, lifting her hands from the keyboard. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kellen?’
‘Very.’
Her eyes rocked up to the ceiling and back and she sighed pointedly. ‘All right. It’s your party. Just don’t take me down with you when you go.’
‘I won’t, I promise.’
‘All right. What are we looking for this time?’
‘A name. There was something else in the eggs besides the insulin. I think Malcolm found out about it when he wasn’t supposed to and he was either blackmailing someone or about to turn them in. Whoever it was had him killed to keep him quiet. The name will be in here somewhere.’
She tried again, one last time. ‘There’s almost a gigabyte in here, Kells. It could take us all night.’
‘I know.’
Half an hour later, the phone rang twice, rang off and rang once more. I switched off the alarm system at the console over the fire and then switched it back on again a few minutes later when the black Saab rolled into the yard.
Lee.
I went out to help her put the car away in the shed.
‘Everything OK?’
‘So far. Laidlaw’s racing in small circles and going nowhere fast.’
‘Was he at the lab?’
‘Not yet. He has a bit of a transport problem. I doubt if he’ll make it for another hour or two.’ She opened the boot and I helped her to haul out the rucksacks. As she swung the lid down and locked it, I saw the number plate: L999 SCC.
‘Don’t you want to change those?’
She looked at me, brow furrowed, as if the idea were all mine and not entirely sane. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘these ones don’t change.’
And Chief Inspector Laidlaw is having a transport problem.
We gazed at each other in the darkness and the fake frown changed to a smile that was pure Lee: bright and savage. For a moment, everything felt very familiar.
‘You’re crazy, Adams.’
‘I know.’ She bounced the keys lightly on her palm and then hefted her rucksack on to her shoulder. ‘Shall we go?’
I made tea and Lee dragged in spare chairs from the living room so that we could both sit and watch while Janine played with the software and prepared to commit act after act of electronic burglary.
Most of it was unspeakably tedious. Endless pages of data detailed the results of gene translocations; experiments failed outnumbering successes by about five to one. Whole folders full of half-written papers lay waiting for the other authors to complete their sections. Regular dated memos to lab technicians or the board of directors issued either instructions or explanations as appropriate.
Janine plugged on, hacking her way through a maze of electronic lock-outs with only the regular tapping of one foot to betray the frustration at so blatant an act of stupidity.
Some time around eleven, tired, bleary-eyed and with a communal headache, we struck, if not gold, then at least a possible productive vein.
Nested inside the personal correspondence file was a whole folder of letters from Malcolm to his sister. He wrote with unfailing regularity on the first and third Saturday of every month, until the week he died, when there were two letters dated less than twenty-four hours apart. Bridget never kept the letters, but Malcolm, with a scientist’s need to retain order, had saved all the originals.
We read through the file in sequential order. Each one was neatly subdivided into personal relationships and work; Bridget’s personal relationships and Malcolm’s work. Never the other way around. Bridget worked, sometimes extraordinarily hard, and Malcolm, as far as I know, did have the occasional passing fling, but neither was of sufficient interest to make it to the letters.
The file began eight years previously, when Bridget and I were about to buy the farm together. I sat with Janine on one side and Lee on the other and all three of us read through a series of lengthy letters in which a man I regarded as close to being my brother reviewed my emotional profile and life history, and assessed my suitability as a past, present and future life partner for his sister. He was a rather better judge of character than I had thought.
The second half of each letter dealt with the progress of his career. In true Malcolm fashion, he was less than explicit about the exact technique he was developing, preferring instead to talk about the potential implications for the future of medicine when he had solved the technological problems.
Later letters followed much the same format, although after I left the farm, he never voiced an opinion of Caroline and most of his comments on the new relationship referred exclusively to specific meetings and events. Very disappointing.
Even when he began to move towards medical genetics and head his own project team, the scientific content of each letter remained consistently low and it was apparent that, for Malcolm, his sister was an ethical counsellor rather than a scientific adviser.
When the initial enthusiasm at the start of the new project gave way to frustration as funding body after funding body refused to provide further grants for the project, he used the letters to ask advice and to explore other possible avenues.
In the end, when he made the decision to approach the directors of Medi-Gen with an outline of the commercial value of the technique, it was with a heavy heart and much against his better judgement, but with the implicit support of his sister.
Subsequent correspondence had a different tone. He was clearly pleased with the facilities and revelled in the chance to prove his theories correct without the need to continually publish data to keep the university authorities happy. On the other hand, he found the atmosphere of commercialism threatening and hated the secrecy with which the whole venture was conducted, supposedly to avoid the inevitable industrial espionage. He began to spend regular evenings back at the university, communing with his erstwhile colleagues, trying to maintain a stable sense of perspective.
The eggs, and the note which went with them, had been dispatched in a hurry with no obvious motive, although he had followed them up the next morning by a more detailed, and very apologetic, letter. A letter which had never been sent, or, if it had, had never arrived, which was a pity, because if his sister had read it she would probably never have died.
In his final communication, Malcolm told Bridget all the things he had never told her before: the technique of genetic splicing, the idea of using eggs as a vehicle for producing proteins, the world-wide need for human insulin and how he was going to be able to supply the demand. And then, in bold type at the top of the second page, was a warning to Bridget that she should not, under any circumstances, eat the eggs from the bantams.
But the rest of the letter held the reason why it had never arrived. He told her about the Hen’s Teeth, about discovering a different protein to modify the insulin which he could splice into the yolk gene, about his surprise at finding one already there, about the tests he had ru
n to work out what it was and about the prospective meeting with the person he believed to be responsible at which he intended to confront him or her with the facts and force them to withdraw from the project.
It was naïve to the point of stupidity and he had paid for it. The letter was written and printed on the day of his death. Malcolm Donnelly had written and signed his own death warrant and, right at the top, he had put his sister’s name and address.
The three of us sat around the console, each dealing in our own way with the facts on the screen. Janine broke the silence.
‘Do you want me to copy this one?’ She was looking at me.
‘Yes, please.’ I nodded, still trying to think it through. ‘Can you copy the whole file, in case there’s anything in there we missed?’
‘Sure, if you want.’ Her eyebrows travelled up a fraction. ‘Do you want me to . . . edit them first?’
A week ago I might have done, but not now. Too late in the day for that.
I shook my head. ‘No. Just copy the lot. Thanks.’
‘No problem.’ A red light blinked on the spare disk drive and it whirred into action.
I turned away to find the coffee pot by the fire and was brought back by a strained expletive from Janine.
‘Shit. Kellen. There’s someone there.’
The screen was blank, the text files and folder icons replaced by a uniform grey. As I watched, the telephone icon reappeared, smiled for a second or two and then reverted to the sad grimace with the cross drawn through it.
‘What’s up?’
‘Someone’s pulled the plug. We’re off-line.’ She hit half a dozen keys in rapid succession, swearing under her breath.
‘Were we traced?’
She shrugged expressively. ‘How the hell should I know? They could have been there for the last three hours or they might just have walked in the door. I told you this was crazy.’
Very true, but then we knew that already.
Lee looked at me across the top of the console and very slowly, out of site of Janine, she raised a thumb.
Janine, oblivious to the exchange, took it upon herself to explain, in words of one syllable, exactly what I had made her do, how absolutely unsafe it had been and how low her estimation of me had fallen as a result. Something like that.
I waited until she had blown off the worst of the steam, and then pointed out that, in view of all the foregoing, the farm might not be the safest place to stay in the immediate future. She calmed down sufficiently to accept Lee’s offer to help her pack the hardware into the car and within ten minutes she was back on the road, heading for Rae Larssen’s, secure in the belief that we were about to follow and with a request not to worry the others unnecessarily.
As soon as she had gone, we turned on the alarms and then changed into the clothes Lee had brought in the rucksacks – the same as before, but with the trainers swapped for something a little more robust, more appropriate for wandering about the fields in the dark.
I took a torch and made a brief and fruitful search of the loft for the one remaining piece of equipment that Lee hadn’t brought. She produced a new saw-wire from her rucksack and set about the necessary modifications while I went through the house, switching off all of the lights and dousing the fires so that the only light came from the moon, full now and sitting high over the crown of the beech wood.
After that, all we had to do was wait.
Several lifetimes passed in the space of the next hour. Long enough for every creaking branch in the wood to change to an invading battalion and for each cat that stepped in through the cat flap to face death ten times over before it reached the sanctuary of the Rayburn.
We sat quietly together near the dead fire in the kitchen, sharing the peace: the silent centre in the eye of the storm.
At midnight, the clock on the upstairs landing struck the hour with nerve-jangling clarity. The chimes resonated round the house, so that when the red light blinked on the console for a moment it felt like an extension of the noise.
Lee stood up and handed me my rucksack. ‘Time to go, Stewart.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Take care.’
‘You too.’ I found her eyes in the darkness. ‘Don’t go playing the hero, huh?’
‘I won’t. You neither.’
‘Right.’
She touched my arm briefly, then I whistled Tîr to my heel and stood for a moment at the back door, listening for the sound of a car on the lane. It was there, a whispering crackle of gravel, and then, after that, the very faintest of sounds as a door was shut. He had parked in the same place as last time, at the bend in the drive.
On a count of five, I left the shelter of the doorway to walk across the yard, the dog a pale ghost in my wake. At the field gate, I waited for another count and then slid through the rails and ran down the line of the fence. The ponies huffed sleepy surprise as I passed and Midnight followed along companionably for a pace or two before turning aside to explore a new tuft of grass.
The river was running higher and faster than I had ever seen it. It swirled in frantic eddies at the edges of the bank and white water foamed crazily across the line of the fording stones. It might have been possible to wade across, but not in a hurry. I turned upriver and jumped across the narrow gap at the bend. At the wood’s edge, I waited long enough to hear the ponies move again before following the fox path, straight between the trees, to the clearing.
It was a bright, cold night. The mist had vanished with the falling sun and the few clouds left in the sky skittered across the bright face of the moon like tangled strips of tissue paper. The shadows of the tall stone cairn angled sideways into the clearing, like a sundial just off noon. The swollen belly of the mound lay beyond it, expectant and still, and the dried grass on the top ruffled in the breeze. The wood held its breath; the only sound was the steady rush of water on stone in the background and the scuff of dog’s feet on the grass.
As we crossed the open ground, sliding in the shadows between the cairn and the mound, the dog turned, pressing herself against my knee, and then stiffened, nose forward and foreleg raised, like a gundog on point. I followed the line of her attention and felt, rather than saw, the movement in the wood to the north of the fox trail.
Time to go.
Hunter and prey. Cat and mouse. Fox and rabbit.
I would not, for choice, be either a mouse or a rabbit, but there are times when there is no choice. Then, the aim is to stay ahead as long as possible. I had the advantage that I knew the wood as well as I knew the farmhouse, possibly better, and I knew where I needed to be.
With the dog glued to my side, I dropped into a crouch behind the mass of the mound and then ducked sideways into the undergrowth. Using the moon as a compass point, I made a wide sweep, curving uphill to the east of the clearing and then back down again, south and west towards the starting point.
The route followed the rabbit paths that coursed between the thickets of beech saplings sprouting from the boles of the adult trees; narrow, winding paths littered with dead leaves and rotten branches and with the occasional root stretching across at ankle height as a trap for the blind or unwary.
We moved, almost as a team, me in the lead, the dog close behind and the man somewhere in the background, following each move as I ducked and squirmed through the undergrowth, pushing through non-spaces between clumps of beech saplings, twisting round the trunks of centuries-old hawthorns and, once, perilously close to a bramble thicket.
The wood found its voice again as we passed through: a muted groaning of wood moving on wood, a shuddering of leaves and a crackle of breaking twigs as the wind wove its own path between the branches. The nocturnal wanderers warmed to the glare of the moon and began a twittering chorus of high-pitched conversations.
For a while I felt the excitement more than the fear. The odd, light-headed exhilaration that comes from risking everything in a single challenge. The wood and the moon and the brooding mass of the grave mound were on my side
and it was easy to forget the wren and the merlin and the fact that the man behind me was a paid killer with a long series of messy knife-kills to his credit.
I quickened the pace, moving steadily and as quietly as it is possible for anyone to move who hasn’t spent their life in the forest. Not perfectly quiet, but enough to be difficult to follow. The dog, uncannily, proved to be a natural, stepping out soundless as a cat on velvet. Her pale coat glowed, almost white in the moonlight, but that was no bad thing.
Forty yards from the edge of the clearing, I slid down into a hollow beneath a fallen trunk and lay there, listening. He was there, just beyond the bramble thicket, moving slowly forward, hunting by instinct rather than by sound. I felt him behind me, a mind like a nightmare brooding on the edge of the night.
A cold, sharp mind. No anger, no venom, no blood-lust, just a single, inviolate purpose and the certainty of fulfilment.
Then I felt the fear.
I lay face down, cheeks pressed to the wet earth and every muscle, bone and tendon turned to water. Like a mesmerized rabbit, I was caught and the hunter knew it. A twig cracked on the path as he changed direction, bearing down on the hollow.
The dog was made of firmer stuff. She took hold of my hand and bit firmly, dragging me back to time and place and a reason to keep moving.
A tawny owl called once, not far away.
I shoved the dog away, pointing to where she should go, and waited long enough to see her move in the right direction before I, too, moved up and out, not so noiseless now, towards the trees at the edge of the clearing.
He caught up with me as I reached the big tree on the eastern side, just behind the great cairn. The leaves shivered slightly at my back and, split seconds later, I felt the touch of hand-warm steel at my neck.
‘That’ll do.’ A voice like Malcolm’s, as Caroline said, but harder and with an undercurrent Malcolm could not have dreamed up in his wildest nightmares.
I stood very still while his free hand slid up and down in a rapid, fruitless search. I had no weapons on me. I’m not going to carry something I can’t use. Not with the real professionals about.
