Know Me Now

by CJ Carver

  Was he a whistle-blower of some sort, or simply an opportunist? Fifty grand would get the grubbiest criminals to crawl out from under their rocks. Murray was the answer. All she had to do was get out of this sodding hole and shake him until he told her everything.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Dan supposed he could have telephoned TarnStanleyJones, but he always found it more useful to actually visit a place. You could glean a lot in even the shortest visit to an organisation, from the way the receptionist greeted you to how helpful they were. In his experience, whatever was at the top filtered down. If you had a rude, unpleasant receptionist, you’d invariably find their ultimate employer pretty unpleasant as well.

  He hadn’t dared tell Jenny where he was going but with Lucy missing he couldn’t sit still. He had to be doing something.

  As he approached Salisbury, two buildings dominated the skyline. One was the elegant Salisbury Cathedral with Britain’s tallest spire. The other was TSJ’s office and research block. Parking in the visitor’s car park, Dan looked at the gleaming glass and steel building which held the TSJ logo at the top, where everyone could see it.

  AGE WELL. LIVE WELL.

  Had Rafe lived well? he wondered. All he knew was that the man had been terribly angry at having to endure the ignominy of illness and old age. Rafe’s gasping words came to Dan as he walked through the automatic doors and into a modern, smart reception area.

  I’m wearing a fucking nappy. Can you believe it?

  Dan wondered how Sophie was bearing up. He’d send her a text later. See if he could do anything for her.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A keen looking young man behind the acres of reception desk greeted him. His name badge read ADISA AKIWUMI.

  ‘It’s about Rafe Kennedy.’

  ‘Mr Kennedy?’ Adisa blinked. ‘He doesn’t work here anymore, I’m sorry.’

  ‘When did he leave?’ Dan was curious.

  ‘He came in on a consultancy basis until he fell ill. He hasn’t been here for . . .’ Adisa’s face bunched a little as he thought. ‘Two years at least.’

  ‘I’d like to speak with someone he worked with, please.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  Dan held the young man’s eyes. ‘I’d just like to speak with them. It won’t take long.’

  Adisa swallowed. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll see what I can do. Can I have your name?’

  Innate caution made him lie. ‘Dr David Harrow.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind taking a seat . . .’

  Dan wandered around the airy room. It reminded him of the reception area at the Isterberg Klinic where Arne and Gustav worked. Why had Gustav followed him? And what about Didrika Weber getting warned off by the BND? Something big was at stake, and no matter how much Jenny pleaded, threatened or begged, he was finding it impossible to turn his back on it.

  He just hoped Lucy was OK. She really was one hell of a friend. Extraordinarily brave too. Not just for planning to drive nine or ten hours to be with his wife, but to stand beside Jenny against one of the most frightening men in the business while he was banged up in Germany.

  Dan looked around when he heard heels clacking across the floor. A tall, rather attractive woman with thinning grey hair was approaching him.

  ‘Dr Harrow?’ she said. Her hand was already outstretched.

  He shook.

  ‘I’m Claire Hill. I used to work with Rafe.’ Her gaze was clear and candid. ‘I wondered if you knew . . .’ She paused delicately, watching his expression.

  ‘Yes, I heard he died this morning.’

  She visibly relaxed at the realisation she wouldn’t be breaking the bad news to him. ‘We’re really sorry. He was such a part of our team for so long . . . His daughter rang us. She wanted us to know from her rather than read it in some obituary or other.’

  ‘That was kind of Sophie. How is she bearing up? She loved her father very much.’

  He saw her relax further when he spoke of Sophie, putting him into the friends’ category rather than unknown.

  ‘She’s finding it tough.’

  ‘Poor Soph, I’ll ring her later.’

  Formalities over, Claire Hill looked at him, waiting.

  ‘I was a close friend of Rafe’s,’ Dan told her, ‘and I’d like to talk about Project Snowbank. He told me about it last week and I’d like to know more about it.’

  Her expression turned puzzled. It seemed quite genuine. ‘I’ve never heard of a project with that name. Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Still puzzled, she said, ‘Would you mind waiting a minute while I make a call?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  She moved to the reception desk where she picked up the phone and spoke. Five minutes passed, then ten. She was still on the phone when a white-haired man in a lab coat appeared. He looked at Claire Hill who glanced at Dan and nodded. The lab coat came to Dan.

  He said, ‘You wanted to know about Project Snowbank?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s never been any project here called by that name. Perhaps it was something Rafe worked on before he came to us.’

  ‘Where did he work before?’

  ‘Er . . .’ The man looked away then back. ‘If you don’t already know, then I’m not sure if I can divulge that information.’

  It was the man’s discomfort that kicked Dan’s childhood memory into action. Of course. His father, Arne, Gordon and Rafe had all gone to uni together to study science. After they’d graduated, Arne had gone to Germany to set up his Klinic, Gordon had taken up pathology, Dan’s father had gone into the marines, but Rafe had remained in the research field. A light bulb blinked on inside Dan’s head. Dad and Rafe had had the same employer.

  The government.

  ‘Ah,’ Dan said. ‘I remember now. He used to work up the road, didn’t he?’

  The man’s expression cleared. ‘Yes.’

  Suddenly, everything started to make sense.

  ‘He used to work at Porton Down.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Mac paced the car park of the Fiddichside Inn, on his phone. It was drizzling, freezing cold, but he didn’t notice. He was concentrating on finding the next lead to Lucy. He’d already heard from the truck driver who’d had to stamp on his brakes behind her car on the A95 yesterday evening, and now he was after a man called Murray, no surname, who’d left the Fiddichside pretty much at the same time as she had. Murray could be the last person who’d seen her. He had to find him.

  Constable Murdoch sat in his patrol car. He was also on the phone. Murdoch had been furious to discover that Lucy Davies was actually a Detective Constable who had been secretly investigating Connor Baird’s murder. Cops rarely liked cops from other districts on their turf, and Murdoch had been no exception. Although on the surface he appeared helpful, Mac could sense the resentment simmering beneath.

  Mac had arrived in Duncaid at six in the morning having driven like a maniac through the night, no doubt collecting a handful of speeding tickets along the way – losing his license was nothing compared to losing Lucy.

  He’d already interviewed the owner of the black van Lucy had texted him about. Peter Kendrick, funeral director, seemed as baffled as Mac at her interest in his vehicle.

  ‘It’s a mortuary van,’ he told Mac. ‘I can’t think why she’d have any concern over it.’

  ‘Where was it around five o’clock yesterday?’

  ‘Outside the office. Where it’s been all day and all night.’

  Mac thought for a bit. ‘You share the same surname as Brice Kendrick, the Procurator Fiscal. Are you related?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ The man blinked. ‘He’s my brother.’

  With no other connection to help him further in finding Lucy, Mac had prowled the area, unable to work out Lucy’s thinking, monumentally frustrated that he didn’t have more to go on. In future, he would make her report to him daily to prevent anything like this happening again. And if she didn’t change her behaviour, well
, he’d pull the plug on her autonomy and chain her to a bloody desk.

  ‘Any ideas where I might go next?’ Mac was talking to the editor of the Northern Scot. Jo, the owner of the Fiddichside Inn, had told him that he’d seen Murray a couple of times but didn’t think he was local. Maybe from Aberdeen way. It wasn’t much to go on until Jo said that Murray used to be a journalist.

  ‘That’s what he said, anyway,’ Jo had added. ‘He’s a bit washed up now. Never got the big story, apparently.’

  Since then, Mac and PC Murdoch had been on their phones, ringing around newspapers and journals, trying to track the man down.

  ‘I’d try Herald Scotland.’ The woman rattled off a phone number. Mac hung up and redialled, went through the same spiel he’d recited half a dozen times until he got through to the editor.

  ‘Murray?’ The man sounded startled. ‘You mean Murray Peterson?’

  Every cell in Mac’s body came alert, quivering.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ Mac said. ‘When you last heard from him?’

  As the man spoke, Mac brought out his iPad and rested it atop the bonnet of his car. He googled the name Murray Peterson, to see he was a freelance journalist ‘known for his contributions to national newspapers, popular UK magazines.’

  ‘We haven’t taken anything of Murray’s in ages. I thought he’d dropped out completely until he called a couple of weeks ago. He said he had a story for us and when we said we weren’t interested he got . . . well, quite aggressive. He told me to eff off, and that he was going to go to the Mail on Sunday and that I’d regret it.’

  ‘Did he have any luck?’

  ‘I have no idea. I certainly didn’t look out for it if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘What was the story?’

  ‘Er . . . If I remember correctly, it was something to do with the longevity of residents in one Scottish town compared to the shorter lives of residents in another, also in Scotland. He was investigating diets and lifestyle, whether if we all turned vegetarian we could all live to a hundred. We’ve done things on this before and in all honesty, it didn’t sound as though he’d come up with anything different.’

  ‘Do you have his contact details?’

  ‘Shall I email them over?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They came through almost immediately. Mac went to Murdoch’s car, knocked on the window. The policeman glanced up, obviously irritated at the interruption. Mac gestured for him to wind down his window.

  ‘What?’ said Murdoch.

  ‘I’ve found the journo. Aberdeen. I want you to find out if he’s at home and if so, get a car sent there to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.’

  Mac ignored the way Murdoch pushed out his lower lip, and walked away to make another call. This one to the Mail on Sunday.

  ‘Sure, we took a piece from Murray,’ the editor told Mac. ‘It wasn’t that great to be honest, but he had some fantastic photographs to go with his piece. That’s what really made it.’

  When the link came through, Mac could see what the editor had meant. The pictures were of farmers and fishermen, chefs and factory workers. They were poignant and haunting, even more so when you saw how young the residents of the second town were, and they’d all died in the town of Duncaid.

  His gaze jammed on the word Duncaid.

  He stalked over to Murdoch.

  God alone knew what his expression was but Murdoch wound his window down double-quick saying, ‘He’s in. The Aberdeen lot are sending a car there now.’

  ‘Tell them I’ll meet them there.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Stomach churning with anxiety, Grace had spent the morning with Ross, driving the roads around Duncaid looking for Lucy and her car to no avail. They’d rung everyone they could think of to check that Lucy wasn’t with them, and then called the police again to double check she hadn’t turned up in a hospital somewhere. Zero results.

  Finally, Ross suggested she return to the surgery.

  ‘I’ll keep looking, OK?’ he told her. ‘You’ve got patients to look after. If I can think of anything you can do to help, I’ll ring.’

  Reluctant but unable to think what else she could do, she’d gone to work. Checking her emails, she saw she had one from her old friend and pharmacologist, Ben Sharman. She was surprised to hear from him so soon. She opened his email. He’d written two words.

  Ring me.

  She picked up the phone and dialled. ‘Ben?’

  ‘Grace. Thanks for calling me so quickly. I really wanted to talk you through what we found.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Paul and I. I hope you don’t mind, but I started work as soon as I got your samples. They came in at nine last night and I was so bored . . .’

  ‘You were still at the lab at nine?’

  ‘I’m always at the lab at nine.’ He yawned. ‘I’m an owl. Do my best work with the vampires.’

  ‘You worked on them last night?’

  ‘Yup. You know me, I love the fun stuff. I hope you don’t mind but when I saw your notes and that we had a “father and daughter” sample, I dropped all thoughts of red blood cells mutating due to a bad diet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought something far more exciting was going on, so I did a genetic screen of the two samples—’

  ‘Doesn’t that take an age?’

  ‘If you go through the normal channels, yes. Look, Grace, this is just between you and me at the moment, OK? I’m simply giving you a broad-brush stroke of my initial thoughts from a very hasty first look. We’ll need days and weeks to nail things down and test properly but I thought you’d like to know the direction we’re headed.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said hastily. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No problem.’ He gave another yawn. ‘So long as you understand where I’m coming from.’

  ‘I do,’ she assured him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Right. So, I did a genetic screen but neither sample had a genetic link to any recognised inherited form of diseases. I didn’t like the fact your girl, Sorcha, had Alzheimer’s so aggressively or so early, so I looked at her RNA – the messenger that carries instructions from the DNA for controlling the synthesis of proteins. Existing databases can now tell us the synthesis of which protein is associated with Alzheimer’s, you see. And it’s my belief that her telomeres are, for some reason, shortening faster than usual, which is why she’s got Alzheimer’s today and not when she’s in her seventies or eighties.’

  Grace put her head in her hand as she concentrated on what he was saying. A telomere sat at the end of each chromosome, which protected it from deterioration or from fusing with neighbouring chromosomes. The length of a telomere declined from when you were born until the day you died.

  ‘There’s a healthy ageing signature that’s common to all our tissues, and then there’s Alistair and Sorcha’s signature.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’m not sure. All I can say is there’s something really weird going on. Paul agrees. We’ll keep testing until we find out what the score is. And if anyone else walks into your surgery and you think they might be at risk, grab a blood sample and send it down, would you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’d better be getting on with some more research that’ll put me on the front cover of Genetica and get me life membership in the Royal Society.’

  She was glad Ben was finding it all so exciting, but then he hadn’t watched Iona Ainsley’s husband howling with grief when his wife died so young of an infection, or witnessed Sorcha’s heartbreaking inability to recognise someone she’d only seen five minutes before.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  ‘His name is Professor Sun Chia-Jen,’ Philip Denton told Dan. ‘He used to work with Rafe Kennedy before Rafe got lured away by the big bucks of big business. They were good friends apparently. Sun Chia-Jen saw Rafe at the hospice three weeks ago.’

  Dan was still outside the TSJ building, tapping his fing
ers on the steering wheel.

  ‘Amazingly,’ Philip went on, ‘he’s prepared to meet you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Even more amazingly, at the bear’s den itself.’

  Dan was so surprised he fell silent. Porton Down was involved in national security at the highest level, with much of its work classified, and few people were allowed past its hallowed fences of electrified razor wire.

  ‘He says he knew your father.’

  Dan had never heard of Sun Chia-Jen but then he hadn’t known his Dad’s Bristol-based friend Olivia Liang either.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Any time this afternoon.’

  Porton Down was just twenty minutes away. He checked his watch. ‘I’ll be there at three o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll let him know.’

  Small pause.

  ‘You do realise—’

  ‘I owe you.’ Dan was curt.

  Before he headed off he quickly checked his phone for messages. Saw there was some breaking news. Another terrorist attack. A suicide bomber had driven a van packed with explosives into a police station in Belgium, killing two people. India, China, Sweden and England, vehicles were now the weapon of choice for lone wolf attacks. He didn’t envy the authorities, trying to foil the impossible.

  He put his phone aside. Climbed out of the car into a stiff, cold breeze. As he bent double, the scar across his stomach protested but he kept moving around his vehicle, looking for tracking devices. Most trackers were linked to GPS satellites, so wouldn’t function deep under the car where metal blocked the connection, so he focussed on the perimeter of the underside, looking for suspicious boxes, taped-on objects, and antennas.

  At first glance there seemed to be nothing.

  He checked the petrol tank, an easy place to stick a magnetic device. Nothing.

  As he searched, he thought again of the listening device Lucy had found in Christopher’s VW Polo. Why Christopher? Was it something to do with his research? He checked under the plastic guards of each wheel well. Nothing.

  Finally, he looked inside the bumpers and bingo. A tiny device had been slipped under the front bumper. He left it there.