He sat. Laurie gave him some space, rushing back to liaise with the new officers on the scene. The fire trucks honked their way around the edges of the complex. He heard them driving up nearby but he didn’t turn to look.
He was about to stand when his phone started ringing.
He pulled it out and answered. ‘Hello?’
The line was crackly. ‘Alex? Is this you? Your friend gave me your number.’
Alex swallowed. He was desperate for good news but didn’t want any record of this on the airwaves. There could be no trail, however small. ‘Yes, it’s me. Don’t say anything. Hang up.’
There was a pause on the other end. ‘Qui vivra verra. Goodbye.’
The line went dead. Alex looked at the phone. He sighed, but a smile crept in at the edges.
Qui vivra verra. A French phrase he and Dr Larry Van Rooyen had used back in their clinical training days when they’d witnessed a particularly harrowing but rewarding case. The patient’s outcome was unknown, but there was hope.
That was the message from Larry today. Mikey had found him and handed over Mia.
Qui vivra verra. Who will live, will see. Or rather, the future will tell.
Mia was safe.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The next few days were a blur. The lawyers descended and the knots started being tied around Hartley’s investigation. The shipping company fought back and the police withdrew, inch by inch, until there was nothing left.
The primary purpose of the raid – to apprehend the serial killer Mia Anastos – had failed. The secondary purpose, to gather evidence of illegal medical experimentation, was there only because of Alex’s reckless pursuit – Hartley’s words, not his – and had not just failed but had brought scrutiny on Hartley and her team, damaged her relationship with the police commissioner and used tens of thousands of pounds of resources and time while they searched and catalogued a major shipping hub in east London which was found to contain nothing illegal in the first sweep. Subsequent searches were on hold, postponed due to issues with warrants and international treaties. They all knew what it meant. The lawyers would tie things up long enough for anything incriminating to be moved out of the UK. They didn’t have the resources to monitor every truck and van in and out.
No trace of Mia Anastos was found in the charred remains of the building. No traces of any bodies whatsoever. The building appeared to be an office block with old-fashioned rooms, all empty apart from the odd plastic chair. No beds, no sheets and no medical equipment or drugs.
There were no cameras or CCTV in that part of the complex. The recordings from the rest of the compound were unavailable, lost in a server backup error, blamed on the fire and an electrical surge which also took out several weeks of logs and shipping manifests.
Alex’s claim that there was an observation room was explored but couldn’t be confirmed. The police believed him, of course they did. He was one of them. But there was nothing physical to support his claims. Traces of acetone were in every room and corridor. The building had been doused, according to the firefighters, a claim the lawyers instantly denied, citing shipping containers full of acetone being stored at the facility. Accidental fire was their claim. The battle raged. Alex had more than an inkling of who would win.
All Alex had was his story, and as the hours went by he began to conclude that wasn’t a bad thing.
The links between Mia and her victims, Dr Tau, City Hospital and Nova were tentative and weak. They all rested on an admission of guilt or hard evidence, neither of which was forthcoming.
The suits at the entrance and the few guards they’d picked up were saying nothing. Their lawyers probably cost more than their salaries, but they were all released on bail within twenty-four hours and had disappeared within forty-eight.
All the effort was on Mia. Find the killer, save face. That’s all everybody wanted.
Alex made no mention of Talia, and as the hours passed she began to drift into the background, a puzzle needing to be solved, but a solitary one, once he was back in his comfort zone. Away from the anxiety of the interview room.
On the third day, Alex sat in one of the many conference rooms at the Met HQ nursing a cup of bad coffee. He watched the drips beading on the rim and took another sip.
‘Nothing?’ he said.
‘Dr Tau hasn’t turned up,’ said Laurie. She sat next to Alex in front of her laptop, scanning through the endless reports. ‘Another doctor from St Mary’s – connected to Tau – has disappeared too. We’re tracing his whereabouts. Tau’s remaining colleagues at City Hospital appear to know nothing. Tau has been offered representation by the shipping company legal team in his absence. They said he was employed as a consultant on the correct shipping procedures for surgical equipment and pharmaceutical supplies.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Alex.
‘Of course,’ said Laurie, ‘but it pre-emptively ties up any connection we might find between them. Clever.’
Alex raised his eyebrows.
Hartley, sitting across the desk, also absorbed in her laptop screen, let out a snort. She peered over at him, closed her laptop and crossed her arms. ‘When we spoke a couple of days ago, I hinted at the complications I was facing.’
‘When I mentioned Nova Pharmaceuticals?’
Hartley nodded. ‘Those complications haven’t gone away. If anything, they have increased.’ She paused, glancing at Laurie. She was about to say something when Laurie cut in.
‘The forensics team say they’re missing your clothes,’ said Laurie. She frowned and glanced up. ‘Sorry,’ she said to Hartley.
‘My clothes?’
‘Yes. The blood-soaked ones. We need them for DNA matching. I thought that would be obvious.’
Alex swallowed. He knew that. Which is why he did what he did. ‘I, er, I washed them,’ he said, ‘when I got home. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’
Laurie’s jaw dropped.
Hartley’s phone rang. She excused herself and left the room.
‘You washed them? Evidence of a person you told us was bleeding out on a hospital bed?’
Alex met her eyes. He held them, his mind screaming at him. Of course he couldn’t let Mia’s blood go to the forensics team. His story didn’t support it and he wanted as few traces of Mia left behind as possible. He’d thought about it carefully. He could have said she was bleeding and he helped her. But the amount of blood would invite too much scrutiny. She would have to have been dying.
What did you do with her? You say she was strapped to a chair and bleeding? How did you get covered in it? Let’s start again, Alex.
No. The simplest story was one in which he saw Mia during his escape but didn’t go near her, didn’t speak to her and didn’t touch her. He had to keep to the story, and the blood was an inconvenient element that needed to be washed away. Literally, in this case, going through a boil wash three times.
Laurie rested on her elbows. Her eyes were piercing but Alex’s conviction carried him through.
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ he said. ‘I was stressed. I’m sorry.’
Laurie shook her head, her eyes narrowing. She chewed her bottom lip. Alex could almost hear her mind churning away, calculating, sifting through everything she knew about the events of the last few weeks.
Eventually, she sighed. ‘Well,’ she said.
‘Well, what?’ Alex forced his voice to remain light, friendly. The stress of the last few days had intensified his feelings for Laurie, but the situation he’d created, the secret he now held, meant he couldn’t see how a relationship could work.
‘That’s it for me,’ she said. ‘I’m off the case. Hartley allowed me in to help with all of this,’ she said, indicating the forms and reports on her laptop screen, ‘but I’m back in Holborn tomorrow. Hartley is leading from here. Mia Anastos is hers.’
She huffed and closed the screen. The suspicion in her eyes hadn’t departed, but she tilted her head. ‘So, about you standing me up . . .’ she said.
&nbs
p; Alex smiled.
Somebody knocked at the door and an officer poked his head in. ‘Dr Madison? Your wife and daughter are here.’
Grace stood at the reception desk with her hands clasped together. Katie stood next to her, face buried in her phone.
‘Alex,’ said Grace, as he stepped out of the lift. He grinned and she punched him in the chest before throwing her arms around his neck. Her touch was warm and electrifying. Alex embraced her, burying his face in her neck.
‘Hi, Katie,’ he murmured.
‘Hi, Dad,’ said Katie.
Grace pulled herself away. ‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘You were being pampered,’ said Alex. ‘Spa weekend, wasn’t it?’
‘You should have called,’ she said. ‘I don’t like getting text messages saying you were involved in a police raid and a fire, then signing off with an emoji!’
Alex smiled. The mixed emotions after they’d left the compound had resulted in a hastily typed message to Grace. A cry for attention, perhaps, or a cry for love. It was worded in a way that conveyed altogether the wrong mixture of light-hearted anecdote and near-death experience. He regretted sending it but didn’t regret the result – Grace and Katie turning up to see him.
But he didn’t want to burden Grace with his work. He’d involved them far too much over the years. Katie, in particular, he wanted kept away from his murky world. He could shield her from it, but he found it hard to keep Grace away.
‘Are you free for lunch?’ asked Grace.
Alex checked his watch. Hartley was busy for the moment and Laurie wouldn’t be too bothered if he stayed away for a couple of hours. The sight of Grace made his head spin anyway. Thoughts of Laurie were jostled out of place and he found himself sinking back into his old feelings.
‘John not around?’ he said.
Grace’s eyes flickered. She swallowed, her delicate neck tensing.
‘Not at the moment,’ she said. Alex could see hurt in her eyes. Had John hurt her?
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Grace shook her head and smiled. ‘I’m OK. John’s OK. He’s away for a couple of weeks, that’s all. Now,’ she said, turning to Katie, ‘where for lunch?’
They linked arms as they walked out of the Met headquarters.
‘You’re not baggage, Dad, are you?’ said Katie, as they stepped on to the pavement. They headed east in search of an Italian.
Alex raised his eyebrows at Grace. ‘John said that?’
Grace shrugged and clasped Alex’s arm even more tightly. ‘He said I talk about you too much.’ She sniffed and linked her other arm with Katie’s.
Alex glanced at them both and his smile widened. She talked about him. Too much. His heart skipped a beat, despite the heavy weight on his chest from the previous days and the difficult path ahead. Just for now, however, in this moment, he felt happier than he’d felt in years.
The three of them, a family, going for lunch. What could be more normal?
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The second glass of wine sank more easily than the first. The Xanax had blanketed Alex and he relaxed into his leather chair with a sigh.
He needed the alcohol to temper his swirling emotions. He knew it was temporary, and with each sip the problems seemed more distant but became more urgent. But he couldn’t stop it.
Off the case. First Laurie, then Alex. Hartley had broken the news that afternoon. She hadn’t even invited him into the office but had preferred a phone call full of huffs and awkward throat-clearing.
Alex said all the right things. He valued her valuing him and agreed that his professional conduct had started solid but ended up verging on careless. He’d helped them to an extent, and it was noted. His relationship with the Met would continue, but on this particular occasion his name was being mentioned in the wrong places by the wrong people. A change of guard was necessary.
Alex staged a reasonable protest but conceded gracefully. He considered the key reasons to fight but came up empty. Laurie was back in Holborn. She hadn’t called and Alex’s brain performed one U-turn after another as he struggled to figure out what he wanted. His suggestion of a determined attack on Nova and the paper trail through the shipping company had been put on the backburner. Despite everything, Hartley had been nudged away, and her new team would follow. The case was a traditional manhunt. Find the killer. Lock her up. Standard.
Except they’d never find her.
Alex wrestled with his decision. Mia was a killer. Always would be, perhaps. Her victims deserved justice. But would justice ever have been served by apprehending her? Mia was a machine, an automaton. She couldn’t control her actions any more than a spider could control the instinct to pounce and kill the bugs struggling for their lives in its web. When Alex witnessed her frenzied attack on her own body he knew death would find her quickly if he handed her over. He thought she deserved more than that – the chance to find out the truth and have it put right. There might not be a quick cure for her mangled nervous system, but there might be a slow one, and Alex had decided she deserved to try it out.
If the police wanted to stop her, it had been achieved. Mia wouldn’t kill anyone, not any more. Would the victim’s families be satisfied if they knew? Certainly not, but neither would they be able to grasp the enormity of what had happened before. The cause, not the effect.
The group behind all of this, whether called Nova or by another name, was bigger than Alex and bigger than the police. It was bigger than one experiment. Alex had witnessed it first with Victor Lazar, and now with Mia Anastos. Both had been subjected to brutal medical experimentation and found their way into Alex’s path. Whether or not the cases were related was impossible to say, but Alex knew that medical research at the highest levels was a small and secretive world, ruled by a few and financed by an unknowing public. As long as the cures kept coming, the public were happy in their ignorance. If they could truly understand the price of such progress – how many innocent subjects like Mia had suffered in the making of their drugs – would they still be happy?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. It wasn’t a referendum anybody would be willing to hold.
But deeper still was Alex’s certainty that this wasn’t about medical progress. The results of these trials were specific outcomes that, if one were to posit them in more sinister terms, could be used for more menacing objectives. The ability to read or control people, the absence of pain, an empathy so deep you could smell a person’s emotions from across the room. Such outcomes were not purely benign treatments for an eager public.
Alex refilled his glass, settling back into the chair. His mind wasn’t done.
State actors were involved. Hartley had hinted at it, and the hint would be as much as he ever heard from her on the matter. Laurie had been more direct. Government meddling in the industrial world was hardly news, or a secret. Most governments had their own research programmes, ostensibly open to audit and scrutiny by the political party of the day. The reality was far away from smiling lab recruits holding test tubes for a front-page shot in the Daily Telegraph. Join the civil service. Make the world a better place.
And that was where Alex’s interests lay. His focus and his drive, from this point on.
He’d continue as usual, of course he would. He had a medical practice to run and criminal cases to work on. Hartley had already forwarded him a piece of profiling work for an incarcerated sex offender going through an appeal. It was important work, interesting work, and it paid the bills.
He had a mortgage and expensive tastes to nurture, not to mention a loving family who might just let him closer if he put in the work. And he fully intended to do that. Grace had offered to help with his addiction and, this time, he’d accept it. His heart would be Grace’s if she wanted it. Until then, he would live the best he could. He was only human.
But in the background he would search. They were out there. Talia was out there. The Russian connection was impossible to ignore. His father’s work was ripe for
reanalysis – his contacts and research programmes were in the past, but fragments would remain, out in the ether and in parts of the world where the scrutiny was lower and the results quicker.
Alex would hunt, and he would piece together what he could. His target was movable and his aim wouldn’t be true. But he’d try, and hopefully, he’d find supporters along the way.
Once in a while, he would make a visit to someone who might be interested. His first ally.
Mia Anastos, when she was ready, might accept him as a visitor. And perhaps they could talk. Perhaps she might be willing to help.
EPILOGUE
Dr Boucher savoured the fresh air coming through the open window. He resisted the urge to stare out at the mountains. The village of Beaufort-sur-Doron enjoyed the most incredible views of the Alps and Dr Boucher never tired of it. Only when the skiing season was at its peak did he sometimes close the window against the bustle and noise of the tourists. Even then he considered it hardly unpleasant.
You didn’t get many unpleasant people in Beaufort-sur-Doron. Unless you counted the town planning officials, he thought, which was a little unfair, although their scrutiny of his planning applications was always tiresome.
The quiet private medical facility which he owned and ran was in a converted chateau of nineteen rooms with ten private patients. The other rooms were given over to state-of-the-art treatment resources along with a medical staff of five, three of whom lived on site, the rest in the village below.
His facility was unique and well respected. The service he offered was straightforward and discreet. A fully capable psychiatric and therapeutic treatment centre for the most exclusive and special of cases. What determined special status was a combination of the patient’s condition and who was asking. He’d accepted a range of patients from celebrities to government officials and military personnel. Spies and oil company executives all got a place if he thought he could help them and he had room.
Pain Page 28
