Jenny smiled her thanks, backed away, and retraced her steps.
The estate office was yet another grand, high-ceilinged room towards the rear of the castle. Picture windows, out of keeping with the rest of the building, gave a view out to the gardens and dark fringe of pines.
Aileen was sitting at a desk, thumbing something into her iPhone, an incongruous image set against Jenny’s starchy, anachronistic image of the woman from the night before. Just as the housekeeper looked up another woman appeared in a doorway to one side of the office. Dark-haired and so skinny she made Jenny feel like a sumo wrestler, her narrow eyes gave her a vaguely Asian look, while her skin was pale as Arctic snow.
The woman raised a hand, gave a nervous smile, and approached.
“You’re Jenny Layne, eh?” she said, her voice thin, her accent west coast, maybe Canadian. She offered a hand. “Lilian Lee. Head of research projects.”
Her hand was tiny in Jenny’s.
“Hi. Yes, Jenny Layne. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’ve read about your work in Vancouver.”
She saw a flash of something in Lilian’s look then. It must be unusual having a journalist out here, although Jenny still found it vaguely surreal to use that label for herself. She was just a blogger, really. Lilian Lee must be on her guard, probably assuming Jenny wouldn’t know much. Maybe that wasn’t a hint of respect in the woman’s look, but certainly an acknowledgement that Jenny had done her background work before showing up.
“Have you seen around the place?” asked Lilian. “Has Mr Carr given you the tour?”
Jenny shook her head. “No, it was dark when I showed up. I just had time to meet the midges and have a – what was it? – a dram.”
Lilian took Jenny’s arm and led her back out of the office. “There’s a scale, you know. Was it a good single malt? Or just a ten year-old? Or – the horror – was it the Famous Grouse? If it was a blend like Famous Grouse you know you’re not in favor! I think he keeps it specially.”
Jenny thought back. “Eighteen year-old? Would that be right? Glenmorangie?” He’d pronounced it like “orangey” with a soft “g”.
Lilian raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re honored,” she said. “He was trying to impress.”
“I nearly asked for a top-up of Coke,” said Jenny, and they both laughed.
They came to a heavy wooden door. Lilian pushed it open and led Jenny through into yet another grand reception room. A tray awaited them bearing a teapot, cups, milk, biscuits.
“Not what you expected, eh?” asked Lilian.
Jenny didn’t know quite what she’d anticipated. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe some kind of laboratory, perhaps? Something a little high-tech?”
They sat in chairs by windows that overlooked the gardens, somewhere to the side of the castle, Jenny thought.
Lilian leaned forward to pour tea. “Oh, I’ll show you the labs,” she said. “But really, there’s not so much to see. They’re just labs.”
For a moment Jenny wondered if her host was hiding something, but then... well, it was true. She’d seen the insides of enough labs to know what to expect. A row of test-tubes didn’t really tell her much. She wanted the story.
“So tell me,” said Jenny. “Cellular therianthropy. Autotomy. How far has all this reached since you moved away from Vancouver?”
Another of those looks from Lilian Lee. A narrowing of the eyes, a pause to reassess. The woman sent out very mixed signals, simultaneously managing to be a warm and friendly host and yet always staying on her guard. Now Jenny remembered Carr’s rather ambiguous comments about Lilian from the night before: she’s erratic and you’ll like her. That kind of made sense now.
“We reached a dead-end in Vancouver,” Lilian said now. “Big pharma funding pulled the plug once our work became associated with a few fringe theories.”
Jenny knew that much. “So you went with the fringe guys?” Taking money from an eccentric millionaire with an interest in werewolves didn’t come much more fringe.
“Sometimes you have to follow the money,” said Lilian. Then she seemed to catch herself, realizing she’d dropped her guard.
Jenny smiled. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m not here to make people look bad. I’m genuinely interested. I’ve spent so long chasing werewolf psychosis stories it’s refreshing to be talking to real scientists.”
Lilian clearly knew she was being flattered, but smiled still.
“So where has your work taken you since you took the werewolf money?”
Lilian laughed. If there’s one thing Jenny knew she was good at, it was finding a way past people’s defenses.
“We’re making incremental advances,” said Lilian. “Slow and steady. I don’t know how familiar you are with our work, although you use the right terminology.”
Was that patronizing, or simply acknowledging that knowing the words doesn’t mean you know the science?
“We’ve been studying the cellular mechanisms involved in autotomy – the regeneration of lost body parts, like when a lizard sheds its tail and then grows a replacement. If you look around nature there are lots of examples. It used to be thought that once tissues had differentiated, when stem cells become skin or bone or muscle, the process can not be reversed. But nature is far more flexible than that: under the right circumstances tissues can transform. Cells can transform.”
“Like a caterpillar pupating.”
Lilian nodded. “When a caterpillar pupates its body pretty much melts down to a goo of what we call imaginal cells within the chrysalis. These are undifferentiated, with the potential to become new tissue and structures. It’s this cellular transformation that drives my work. If we can understand the mechanisms we can use them to push change at the cellular level. It’s like those movies, Transformers: cells that dismantle themselves and put themselves back together as something different.”
“You can use this to transform people into werewolves?”
“We can turn cancer cells into something that is non-malignant. We can unpick the damage caused to brain cells by Alzheimer’s disease.”
“And you can make a werewolf.”
Jenny was smiling as she said this, teasing the scientist. In truth, she felt suddenly inspired by Lilian’s enthusiasm: were they really close to a cure for freaking cancer?
“How close are you?” asked Jenny. “How far advanced is your work on cellular transformation?”
Lilian shrugged and waggled her head from side to side. “I have a hard disk full of theory and a few tissue samples in the lab,” she said, and laughed. “Real-life applications of this work are a long way down the road.”
She drained her cup and stood. “Come,” she said. “Let me take you to the lab.”
6
After glancing down at Jenny’s footwear, Lilian led her to what she called the boot room. It was a ground-floor room towards the rear of the castle, with benches and lockers, and hooks on the walls. A long table occupied a large part of the room, and Lilian indicated a drinks cabinet by the wall.
“People gather here before a shoot,” she said. “Or afterwards. I’ve seen this table piled high with grouse. It’s not an attractive sight. What size are you?” She pointed at Jenny’s feet.
“Seven and a half.”
“Seven and a half American, eh? That would be... five here.”
Jenny nodded, not sure of the math, and watched as Lilian went to a locker and came back with a pair of knee-high leather riding boots.
“Don’t worry,” Lilian told her. “It’s just for the mud. Nobody expects you to go riding over the moors. Unless you want to?”
“My reluctance was that obvious?”
That look again: that odd mix of sizing Jenny up and laughing at something at the same time, perhaps her.
They headed outside. The sun was warm and Jenny felt over-dressed, but too self-conscious to peel her sweater off and carry it. “Far to go?” she asked, and regretted it instantly. Lilian already had her down as not
the outdoors type, and with every word she was confirming it.
Lilian nodded towards a track that led through the trees. “Not far,” she said. “The trail gets chewed up, though. It’d kill those flats you had on.”
They walked along a footpath that led around the edge of a lawn, and then joined the track. Thankfully, the midges were absent this morning.
As soon as they passed under the trees the atmosphere changed, becoming hushed, almost church-like. Pine needles carpeted the forest floor, and the air was heavy with their scent. Where an outcrop of rocks created a clearing and the sun broke through a few clumps of heather grew, accompanied by tufts of wispy grass and tall spikes of blue bell-shaped flowers. High in the trees small birds made piping and chirring sounds.
They walked in silence. Jenny suspected that despite her generous welcome, Lilian was normally a woman of few words, and the atmosphere beneath the trees was the kind you didn’t want to break.
Just as Lilian had warned, the trail here was wet and muddy, chewed up by tire tracks, and she was glad of the boots.
After a short distance, the trail took a sharp right, and the view opened out as the slope tumbled away to the left. The two paused to take it in. The forest formed a dark blanket down this slope and up the opposite side. In the cleft of the valley the trees parted, marking the path of the river. On the far slope, not far above Jenny’s level, the trees started to thin and the ground became open, the greens and browns of vegetation skimmed over with the purple mist of flowering heather. The landscape was quite breathtaking, both rugged and delicate in equal measure.
Lilian was gazing out across the valley.
“It’s my favorite view,” she said now. “Out across the glen. This is what sold it to me, coming here, and now I walk up to the lab at every opportunity, even though the others drive. You like?”
Jenny nodded. “It really is quite awesome,” she said, and meant it. Just then she heard a high-pitched mewing sound. Looking up, she saw a bird of prey circling on an updraft. “Eagle?”
Lilian shook her head. “Buzzard,” she said. “We get a few golden eagles around here, but you’ll know when you see one. They really are big motherfuckers.”
Jenny couldn’t help but smile. Carr had been right: she did like Lilian. She suspected there were lots of depths to the woman, lots of carefully-constructed layers to peel away.
They started to walk again and a few minutes later the trail opened out into what appeared to be a parking and turning area, next to a low stone building with what looked like a dense carpet of grass and wildflowers spread over its flat roof. A BMW SUV was pulled up before the building, its shiny paintwork spattered with mud. Nearby, an old red Peugeot and two fat-tired ATVs were parked in a bay cut into the hillside.
“Welcome to my office,” said Lilian, spreading her hands to indicate the building. “It’s an old hunting lodge, restored pretty much from the ground up, entirely powered by the solar panels set into the turf roof and a turbine a hundred meters up the hill. We get water from a spring and maybe 90% of our waste is recycled on site. It’s a state of the art eco-building. Mr Carr is very exacting.”
Inside the building it was exactly as Jenny had expected of Carr’s laboratory-space: spotlessly clean, lots of glass and metal, a lab that she was only allowed to look into through a glass panel. The two technicians inside wore hairnets, masks, and blue covers drawn tight over their shoes. Music played somewhere nearby.
“Our work is very sensitive,” said Lilian. “We can’t afford to have our tissue cultures contaminated.”
“You really think this might lead to a cure for cancer?” It was hard to believe that a privately-funded lab in the middle of nowhere could be so cutting-edge, but there was something about this set-up that inspired that kind of belief.
Lilian shrugged. “Our work feeds into a bigger picture,” she said. “It is all very tentative at this stage.”
Again, that sense of being deflected. Everything Lilian had told her this morning painted a picture of somber research working slowly and methodically. It was a million miles from the kind of stories circulating a couple of years ago about the work in Vancouver. Jenny was finding it very hard to pick out the truth from the PR spin and she thought again of her evening with Jonathan Carr when she’d realized all he’d really done was tell her exactly what she already knew.
And again, she reminded herself how easy it was to fall for the conspiracy view: that this was all a glossy cover-up for what was really going on.
She reminded herself of her elevator pitch: she was a city girl who threw herself into scary shit and sometimes made sense of it. “So you’re not really turning people into werewolves, then?”
Lilian smiled. “Our work is about regenerating and repurposing human tissues,” she said. “Mr Carr is interested in the more fantastical aspects of this, but he also acknowledges that the main thrust of our work is for medical applications.”
“So no werewolves?”
“No werewolves.”
§
But there were wolves!
Lilian led her through an open plan office area beyond the main lab and out the other side of the building. Here, a terrace extended a hundred yards or so along the face of the hill, the slope climbing and falling steeply to either side. At the far end, the terrace tapered and then ended at a sheer precipice.
And most of the terrace was enclosed with high chain-mesh fencing.
At first, Jenny couldn’t see why this area should be enclosed and then she saw movement about halfway along the fenced-off area. At first it was the flick of a tail that caught her attention, and then she saw the shape of a wolf stretched out on the roof of a low shelter. The beast was powerful, a hundred pounds at least. Its coat was a mix of grays and browns, with black markings along the flank. Its neck and shoulders were heavily muscled, its head heavy, the muzzle long and blunt.
She’d seen a lot of wolves in her time, but few as powerful as this one.
As she studied what must surely be the alpha male, she made out others gathered on the rough ground around the shelter. All of them were smaller, slimmer, all lazing in the summer sun, without a care in the world.
Jenny looked across at Lilian, saw that the scientist was smiling.
“They’re not... werewolves are they?” she asked.
Lilian bobbed her head as if about to laugh, then simply shook it, and said, “No. Our work really is very theoretical. These are Eurasian gray wolves, the species that, until around three centuries ago, lived wild in these hills.”
That explained the howling last night. At least Jenny wasn’t going mad. “So why, if you don’t mind my asking, do you have a pack of tame wolves?”
“Oh, they are most certainly not tame,” said Lilian. She was enjoying this far too much. “We have them for a variety of reasons. We have them because, yes, Mr Carr is keen for us to explore the possibility that some kind of cellular transformation plays a role in the werewolf legend and they provide us with tissue samples. We have them because another big thrust of Mr Carr’s work is the reintroduction of formerly native species and there are few more exciting than the wolf. And we have them because Mr Carr is a very rich man and, quite simply, he can.”
There was a noise from the building just then. A door creaking open and then thudding shut.
Jenny turned and saw Jonathan Carr there. Had he been watching them, listening in, waiting for just the right moment to appear?
He looked every inch the country gent, ready for the shoot or a day’s fly-fishing. He wore stout boots, knee-high socks, tweed trousers that came down to just below the knee, a check shirt and sleeveless tweed vest. “So,” he said amiably, “you’ve met the pack?”
Jenny nodded. She had known she was being played, from the moment she’d pulled up at Craigellen Castle, but both Carr and Lilian had a way about them that simultaneously charmed her and made it seem okay. Would she ever get a story out of this that was more than just a PR puff? Maybe if she was a pro
, but in reality she was just an amateur blogger who had struck lucky with a few stories. She didn’t have the guile to unpick this kind of spin.
“You’re really planning to set these guys free?” Jenny asked now.
She saw the excitement immediately in his eyes.
“I’d love to,” he said. “But... well, there are issues, you know?”
Lilian stepped past them then. “If you’ll excuse me?” she said, and then slipped away into the building, the relief that she could stop being polite and get back to her work almost palpable.
“How did you find Lilian?” Carr asked, as the door thudded shut again.
“I liked her,” said Jenny. “She seems very focused. And her work has some exciting possibilities, as long as she doesn’t get sidetracked.”
Carr smiled. “I thought it was that kind of sidetracking that captured your interest?” he said. “I thought it was the werewolf angle that brought you here?”
“I like it as long as it doesn’t delay little things like the cure for cancer, you know?”
He laughed, clearly enjoying the sparring.
“So what kind of issues do you have?”
He took a moment to adjust back to the conversation they’d been having. Then he smiled and said, “The great British public are not so keen to have ravenous packs of wolves roaming the countryside,” he told her. “No number of assurances about controlled conditions and careful monitoring are enough to convince them, it seems.”
“But you keep wolves here, just in case?”
“We do what we can,” Carr said. “One day the mood will change. We maintain contact with all the right people and bring them here to the estate so they can understand our aspirations. One day I’m sure we’ll secure that license for a trial reintroduction, just as we have with our red squirrels, beavers and wild boar.”
“But until then you keep them here.”
Carr shrugged. “They’re fine beasts, don’t you think?”
She looked back into the enclosure. The big alpha had dropped his head to rest on his front paws, asleep in the sun.
Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance Page 3
