The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Are you seriously trying to say it was man-made?’

  Miles shrugged. ‘Who’s to say it wasn’t? Even to this day, we’ve never really got to the bottom of what could have caused it. There were lots of vague theories at the time, like the one that the disease might have originated in a large field hospital in Étaples in north-west France, which was a rural area rich in goose, duck and pig farms that could have harboured the virus. Truth is, they literally didn’t know what had hit them. But if you look at the evidence, you can’t avoid the fact that the symptoms of this so-called influenza were uncannily similar to the effects of Achlys-14. It didn’t behave like any kind of flu anyone had ever seen. Patients’ fevers ran so high some doctors believed it was some terrible form of malaria. The excruciating bone and joint pain it caused made other medical experts think they were dealing with dengue fever, which you’d normally find in the tropics.

  ‘But it was far, far worse than that. Victims often bled heavily from the nose, ears, mouth and eyes, just like the lab rats and chemists at the Clarkson laboratory. Lung damage in the infected was so severe that surgeons compared it to the ravages of mustard gas. Mustard gas. Ringing any bells? Pockets of gas would bubble up from under the skin as it leaked out of their ruptured lungs. The collapse of the lungs stopped the supply of oxygen to the blood, which caused the condition called cyanosis where the skin turns dark blue. Many of the dead were so badly discoloured that you couldn’t tell the body of a white man from a black man.’

  ‘Just like Holloway, the lab chemist,’ Ben said.

  ‘Exactly like Holloway, and his colleagues too. Now that it was out among the general population, the blackening of the bodies of the dead caused panic among troops and civilians who started to believe it was a return of the dreaded bubonic plague. Meanwhile the list of strange symptoms goes on. Autopsies of the dead showed that the disease caused damage not just to the lungs, but to the brain. Which was further evidence it was very unlikely to have been any kind of influenza, because flu doesn’t cause neurological problems like that. Yet the rare survivors of this disease were often left with permanent brain damage and altered behaviour, like psychosis. After the epidemic spread to the USA, President Woodrow Wilson fell gravely ill from it and recovered, but was left with strange neurological symptoms and a changed personality. Some historians think that could even have been a contributing factor to the rise of World War Two.’

  Ben wanted to say something, but there was nothing he could do but listen grimly as the rain kept pattering on the windows and Miles Redfield kept talking.

  ‘There were other big differences between influenza and this disease. Your normal influenza epidemic tends to infect the very young or the very old, creating a U-shaped curve that leaves the middle age groups largely unaffected. Most fatalities are among older people, especially those with serious pre-existing health conditions. But this epidemic attacked indiscriminately. Young, old, healthy, sick, it didn’t matter. People in the prime of life were struck down along with everybody else. It’s estimated that five to ten per cent of the world’s healthy young adults were wiped out by it. The world’s best medical experts were flummoxed. By 1919, they began to agree that the epidemic was viral. But where had it come from? In Britain and the USA, ironically but not surprisingly, theories ran rife that it was something artificially cooked up in an evil German plot to destroy them. And how could it be cured? Nobody knew that either. Medical treatments for the disease were almost completely ineffective. They ranged from bleeding to enemas, to saline and glucose injections, alcohol, heroin, morphine, and some weird cocktails of lard mixed with chloroform or turpentine. Some of those treatments probably caused more deaths on top of those produced by the disease itself. Folk cures included stuffing salt up children’s noses, hanging magic charms around your neck, and gargling with disinfectant. In every affected country – which was most of the developed world – trains and buses were fumigated. The public were made to wear masks and told to stay apart. Social contact was shut down tight. Families broken up. Couples becoming afraid to kiss one another. Men, women and children dropping dead in the streets of major cities everywhere, their bodies turning black where they lay and nobody daring to touch them. An aura of fear hanging over everyone’s life, and with good reason. Whole areas evacuated, public spaces turning into ghost towns. Economies devastated.’

  ‘How many people died?’ Ben asked.

  ‘A lot would be an understatement. From when it appeared out of nowhere to when it suddenly seemed to peter out without a trace, the pandemic killed an estimated fifty to a hundred million people, out of a global population of less than two billion. Proportionately, that would be the equivalent of a casualty rate of up to 430 million people, if a pandemic of that lethality were to strike the world today.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘To put it another way, the so-called Spanish flu claimed more lives in its first twenty-five weeks than the AIDS virus did in its first twenty-five years. In America alone, it killed more people in a single year than the combined combat casualties of both world wars, Korea and Vietnam. Nothing else in history, no war or famine or natural disaster, not the scourges of bubonic plague or smallpox, has ever caused as much devastation as the mysterious “Spanish flu” that never was.’

  ‘But what if you were wrong about this?’ Ben said. ‘What if it really were just a very, very bad flu outbreak?’

  ‘Then it would have to be an impossible freak of nature. Listen, the influenza virus has been around for a long, long time. The first global flu pandemic was in 1580, and at least sixteen other major epidemics happened in the next three centuries, some of them deadly enough to wipe out entire cities. In the modern age, the Asian flu of 1957–8 killed up to four million people, out of a world population that was well below half of what it is today. Which, I’ll grant you, is pretty bad. Ten years later, the Hong Kong flu claimed a few more million and was the last really serious epidemic of its kind. But anyone who tries to compare any of them with the devastation of the Spanish flu is badly in need of a history lesson. It was the single most savage killing force of human beings that ever existed. And I’m certain beyond a doubt that the man who started it all was Sir Elliot Clarkson.’

  Chapter 36

  Clarkson, Clarkson, Clarkson. The name kept coming back like a bad smell. He was a player in this for sure, but Ben needed to know how and why. ‘Tell me more about this Sir Elliot.’

  ‘I’ve read all I could find about the man. He was born in 1883, the son of a wealthy merchant. Public-school education, showed an amazing flair for chemistry at a young age, graduated from Cambridge and founded his chemical company in 1908, when he was just twenty-five. Clarkson Chemicals made money in fertilisers, printing ink and other ventures, before he got into the munitions business and patented a new formula for smokeless gunpowder that was claimed to produce more velocity with less pressure.’

  ‘That was how he came to the attention of the War Office?’

  ‘And how he was awarded the contract to produce their secret weapon after just seven years in business, aged thirty-two. That was his big break. And needless to say, he did very well out of it. I don’t imagine that the top brass were too pleased after the Achlys-14 experiment went so badly wrong. But luckily for him, the government were so satisfied with his initial results that they gave him a knighthood and showered him with money. He’d already been a rich man before the war, with a big estate in Staffordshire, a posh home in London, and all of that. By the end of it, his wealth had more than tripled. He used his fortune to build Clarkson Chemicals into a much larger company called Galliard Pharmaceuticals, now the Galliard Group.’

  And there was the Galliard connection Ben had been expecting. But something else Miles had just said struck a chord in his ear. ‘An estate in Staffordshire?’

  ‘It had come to him by inheritance,’ Miles said. ‘The Bridgnorth Estate, a thousand-odd acres and a great big seventeenth-century manor house.’


  ‘And you say he had a place in London, too?’

  ‘Seems he wasn’t much of an urbanite and just kept an apartment here for when he was in town on business. Park Lane, I think it was. Slumming it, as one does.’

  With an almost audible click, Ben felt another chunk of the puzzle sliding into place in his mind. The ‘respectable citizen’ Wilfred Grey had gone to kill on that fateful day in 1924, and died trying, lived in Staffordshire. The city property from which Violet had stolen the Anthony Trollope novel the year before had been described in her memoir as ‘a large, luxurious apartment in Park Lane, the London home of a wealthy gentleman who spent most of his time at his country mansion’.

  Ben was now able to link up the events, like fragments of a mosaic that were slowly drawing together into a coherent picture. He thought back to Violet’s memoir and wondered at the twist of fate that had just happened to lead her, in her last ever robbery for the Forty Elephants, to the luxury London pad of none other than Sir Elliot Clarkson. And to have been drawn to the ornate, beautiful book that just happened to contain a secret stash of notes – secretly and somewhat carelessly stored at his apartment, saying a lot about the man’s casual, cynical attitude towards what he’d done – revealing the true origin of the devastating outbreak. The hidden evidence of his complicity in what had to be, if any of this was true, the biggest mass murder in history.

  Elsewhere in her memoir Violet had described Wilfred’s grief over the loss of his parents, his brother and his sister in the Spanish flu pandemic. The discovery of the papers hidden inside the book had given Wilfred all the reason in the world to want to take revenge on the man he had discovered, by chance, was its orchestrator. His crime had been one of passion; his only mistake had been to let his enemy get the better of him.

  ‘What happened to Sir Elliot in the end?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Apart from becoming richer and richer and dying very peacefully in 1978 at the ripe old age of ninety-five, nothing. He never had to account for what he’d done, and enjoyed a much better life than he deserved. Galliard Pharmaceuticals went from strength to strength, prospered through World War Two, swallowed up a bunch of smaller rivals and became the Galliard Group in 1963. His only disappointment in life was his son Robert, who was born in 1929. Clarkson had always intended him to take over the firm one day, but Robert went his own way and ended up in Paris after the war, doing the bohemian artist thing in Montmartre and hanging out with boozy poets and actors. By the time Robert’s son was born in 1966, the old man had pretty much written him off. But Sir Elliot doted on his grandson, Gregory. He was a precocious little boy who showed a real talent for science at a young age, unlike his father, who’d never had a talent for anything except spending the family money.

  ‘In the meantime, Robert Clarkson’s career as an artist had gone south, predictably enough, and he’d degenerated into a full-blown alcoholic and drug addict. He died soon after Gregory’s eighth birthday. The mother was some French actress and had been out of the picture for a while. Probably relieved to be shot of his worthless son, old Elliot took the boy under his wing, moved him into the Bridgnorth Estate and for the next four years taught him everything he knew about life, money, politics, business and, of course, chemistry. Gregory was twelve when his grandfather died. For the next few years the company was run by one of Sir Elliot’s senior executives, but according to the old man’s wishes Gregory took over as CEO of the Galliard Group in 1989, fresh out of university. He might have been young but he was as tough-minded as his grandfather before him, and his talent for business was every bit as sharp as his scientific genius. The ruthless bastard has been top dog there ever since.’

  ‘Your former boss,’ Ben said.

  ‘Correct. Billionaire, philanthropist, supplier of chemical weapons to terrorist regimes and murderer of anyone who gets in his way. You might say a chip off the old block, skipping a generation.’

  ‘With one difference,’ Ben said. ‘Elliot Clarkson got away with it. Gregory isn’t going to be so lucky.’

  ‘I wish,’ Miles said bitterly, picking up the picture of Suzie and gazing at it with a tortured look. ‘He has it coming, and that’s for sure.’

  ‘I lost someone too,’ Ben said. ‘A long time ago. But it never goes away.’

  ‘No. It never does. I loved her.’

  ‘You want to talk about how it happened?’

  Miles laid the picture down in his lap with a sigh. ‘I’ve told you how Suzie and I found the documents in a safe in the basement of the Galliard building. Why Clarkson never had them destroyed, I’ll never know.’

  ‘The Clarksons have a careless way of leaving things lying around.’

  ‘Like I said, there were the original lab reports written by Holloway, Watson and Liddell. Plus a load of technical data on the development of the Achlys-14 formula, and a heap of War Department correspondence that Elliot Clarkson had never disposed of. Maybe he enjoyed gloating over his handiwork too much to burn them, who knows? There was also an envelope containing what looked like period photographs of other incriminating notes that were all creased, as though they’d been folded up.’

  The notes Wilfred had found inside the book, Ben thought. He said, ‘So you stole them.’

  ‘We were totally stunned, because we’d gone in there looking for evidence that Galliard were illegally shipping botulinum toxin, and instead found all this crazy stuff. We knew we had to stash it somewhere safe. Suzie had a friend, Lynne, who owned a cottage in the Lake District. I couldn’t get the time off work, and so it was Suzie who volunteered to make the drive up there in her Mini Cooper with the bundle of documents. But we’d been rumbled somehow. To this day I don’t know how the bastards found us out. All I know is that …’

  Miles’s voice faltered, on the brink of cracking. Tears came into his eyes and he picked up the picture again, clenching it with shaking hands. ‘… that she never got there. The accident happened on a quiet stretch of road, far from anywhere. There were no witnesses. The police said she must have lost control of the car. It … it was …’ He couldn’t say any more.

  ‘The documents vanished,’ Ben said.

  Miles looked up at him with pain-streaked eyes. ‘Of course. Everything was gone. The evidence I’d have needed to take those fuckers down. And there was no way I could prove that Suzie had been murdered. Just like there was no way anyone could prove what they were doing with the botox, either. These bastards will just squash anyone who’s a threat to them. Snuff them out, just like that.’ He snapped his fingers, then was silent for a long moment, staring down at his feet. He shook his head. ‘It felt like the end. I spent a lot of time wanting to die, too. I loved her so much. I should have been the one in that car.’

  ‘Tell me how Carter Duggan comes into this.’

  Miles wiped his eyes and sniffed. ‘Duggan employed a computer geek in Canada,’ he replied wearily. ‘He was the one who tracked me down on the dark web, although I keep my real identity carefully hidden there. When Duggan approached me he said that he was an investigator working for the family of someone called Wilfred Grey. That name meant nothing to me.’

  ‘Wilfred Grey died in 1924,’ Ben said. ‘Elliot Clarkson shot and killed him, claiming self-defence after Grey broke into his manor house. It was a minor incident at the time. Emily Bowman was his granddaughter, who hired Duggan to find out more about the reasons behind his death.’

  Miles nodded. ‘Duggan had spent a lot of time exploring old archives. Obscure newspaper reports from ninety-odd years ago aren’t always available online, but the bigger libraries have everything catalogued on microfiche for researchers willing to put in the hours sifting through it all. Duggan was obviously a pretty canny investigator. He’d worked out the connection between his client’s ancestor, Clarkson and Galliard, and picked up a scent, but he still lacked the knowledge about Galliard’s dodgy history. That was what he was hoping to learn from me, because I’d been so critical of Galliard in my anonymous blog posts.’

/>   ‘Did you write about botox and Achlys-14?’

  ‘Never explicitly. I was too afraid to, even from behind a false identity. I danced around the subject, making plenty of insinuations and hinting at insider knowledge of their dirty dealings, past and present. Mostly I’ve always stuck to my general theme, which is how grasping and corrupt the whole pharmaceutical industry is, and has always been. It was enough to draw Duggan’s interest, but I sensed it was just one of various leads he was following. I don’t think he realised how potentially big this was until he met with Joe.’

  ‘Brewster didn’t tell him much.’

  ‘Because he didn’t know much. I was just using him as a buffer, to sound the man out. But what little information Joe did pass along was enough to get Duggan excited. He said he was as keyed up as a bloodhound following a blood trail.’

  ‘He also said he thought Duggan was too interested in money. What did he mean by that?’

  ‘We both agreed that Duggan was almost certainly a gold-digger. The hint of some kind of major scandal involving a big pharma company was clearly much more engrossing to him than his work for his client. That’s why I decided there was nothing to be gained from meeting the guy, and to let it drop. People like that can’t be trusted.’

  Ben asked, ‘Do you think Duggan tried to find out more about Achlys-14 on his own?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Miles replied. ‘Though I don’t see where he could have got the information from. The Galliard documents were the only source I know of. But we’ll never know, will we? Duggan’s dead.’

  ‘Joe Brewster seemed pretty sure that he was killed by agents working for Galliard. Do you think that too?’

  Miles made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a bitter laugh. ‘They kill everyone else. What’s one more?’

  ‘Which means Duggan put himself on their radar somehow. Made himself a threat to them. How, if he didn’t know the truth?’