Iqbal lingered on an article headlined The Breakthrough That Could Transform the Treatment of Cerebral Palsy, which had been published three years ago in Archives of Disease in Childhood. Scans of a series of contracts followed. The first was with a pharmaceutical company, TelioGlaxin©; the rest were a series of franchises licensing various organisations to carry out the treatment developed.
Iqbal scooted his chair closer. He leant in, put his finger on the touchpad and moved the cursor down until he reached the bit about money. He let out a low whistle and returned to the three names at the top.
‘You know these guys?’
Simon’s name was written above John Ahumibe’s and Alexander Buchanan’s.
‘This is Simon Sharkey’s laptop. He was my boyfriend. I’ve met the other two men once, recently. They were colleagues of Simon’s.’
‘Did he do this to you?’ Iqbal stretched a hand towards her bruised face, but didn’t touch it. ‘Your boyfriend?’
‘No, that was someone else.’
He nodded to show he believed her.
‘They had a lot of money coming in.’
‘Enough to incite murder?’
Iqbal raised his eyebrows. ‘How much is enough? Six months ago, a schoolkid was stabbed to death for twenty quid, outside the shops at the end of my road. It can happen to the best of us.’ Iqbal looked at her. ‘But yes, these guys were making the kind of big money some people would kill for.’ He came to the end of Simon’s downloads. ‘Okay, I think we may have exhausted this particular seam.’ He closed the computer window and scrolled the cursor down the start-up menu. ‘Last, but most certainly not least, let’s have a look at the picture library.’ Iqbal clicked and Simon’s gallery sprang on to the screen. There was one, solitary image saved there.
Stevie had forgotten the photograph’s existence, but as soon as she saw it she remembered the afternoon it was taken.
It had been one of their few daytime excursions. They had shared a boozy lunch at the Charlotte Street Hotel and then walked to Russell Square. Neither of them had been dressed for lazing around on the grass. Simon had been at meetings that morning and was still in his suit, and Stevie had been wearing a dress more appropriate for fine dining than picnics, but they had sat together on the lawn amongst tourists with time to kill, and office workers grabbing a quick lunch.
Stevie remembered how Simon had suddenly leapt to his feet and accosted a passing couple. How he had handed the woman his phone, explained how to operate the camera function and then sat nimbly back down on the grass and reached an arm around Stevie, drawing her close. It was a good photo. They were both laughing, trees dappling the sunlight behind them.
Iqbal asked, ‘Is that him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is he now? In prison?’
‘He’s dead.’
It was harder to say with Simon’s face in front of her, his smile wide and reckless.
‘The sweats?’
‘No, I think he was murdered because of something to do with all of this.’ She closed the computer window, banishing the photograph to the archives. ‘Why did you ask if Simon was in prison?’
‘That kind of money? It’s too good to be true and in my experience, too good to be true can be a short cut to a long stay in the big white hotel. I learnt that the hard way.’
‘You went to jail?’
‘No, but I could have. That’s the reason I do the odd favour for PC Caniparoli.’
‘He bribes you?’
Iqbal’s expression had turned serious at the mention of murder, but he favoured her with a smile.
‘Derek’s a decent guy. He gave me a break. I owe him big time.’
‘That’s what I need, a break.’ Stevie gestured at the documents stacked together on the desktop. ‘I thought that if I could get into Simon’s computer I’d know why he was killed and what to do about it. But all I’ve ended up with is a bunch of hospital notes I’ll never be able to understand and an incomprehensible jumble of numbers.’ She got to her feet and closed the laptop’s lid. ‘I’m more confused than when I arrived.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Iqbal took a sip of his tea. It was cold. He made a face and set the mug back on its coaster. ‘You know your boyfriend was part of a major medical breakthrough. You also know there’s big money involved and who the other two people included in the contract are. I’d say that’s quite a lot of information to go on. As for the rest of the stuff.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You seem like an intelligent woman. Maybe you wouldn’t get the finer points of the scientific argument, but I bet if you read the articles and patient notes, you’d understand the gist of it.’
‘Maybe, but there’s no way I can get to grips with the CP files, whatever they are. They’re just a mass of numbers. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘When you said all you wanted was to get past the password I guessed it would just be the beginning.’ Iqbal raised the laptop’s lid and the files sprang back on to the screen. ‘My first degree’s in maths, but I took a postgrad in statistics. Raw data is a language I speak.’
‘You’ll help me?’
‘PC Caniparoli asked me to sort you out and like I said, I owe PC Caniparoli. It might take a while though.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know, an hour or six, maybe more.’ Iqbal stuck a memory stick into the computer, saved the Archives of Disease in Childhood article and patient reports to it and then inserted the stick into his own computer and pressed print. A printer at the other end of the desk hummed into life and started to scroll forth pages. ‘Why don’t you settle yourself on the couch and read through these while I spread out over here and do my best to make sense of all this?’ He grinned at her. ‘You can put the kettle on and make us another pot of tea if you like. I’ve been preparing for a siege. There should be enough tea bags and biscuits to last us through Armageddon and into the beyond.’
Twenty-Two
Stevie woke unsure of where she was, and then she saw the lights of the city shimmering in the darkness beyond the large picture windows and remembered. She pushed herself upright on Iqbal’s couch.
‘How long was I out for?’
‘Hours. I reckoned you needed it.’
She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it away from her face.
‘I feel awful.’
Iqbal went behind the breakfast bar, took the packet of frozen peas from the freezer and tossed them to her.
‘I stuck them back in when I saw you’d fallen asleep.’
‘Thanks.’ Stevie held the pack to her face. The coldness hurt. ‘Do I look awful?’
‘Better than when you arrived. You hardly remind me of Joseph Merrick at all.’
‘Cheers.’
She lifted one of the cushions from the couch.
‘Looking for these?’ Iqbal held up the notes he had printed earlier. ‘How much did you manage to get through before you dropped off?’
‘Not much.’
She had passed out almost as soon as she had sat on the couch.
‘It makes interesting reading. Put it together with some of the other stuff I’ve found and it becomes fascinating. Come and take a look.’
Stevie gave the city lights a last glance. There was something different about them. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. She turned her back on the lights and joined Iqbal at his desk. He swivelled round in his chair to face her.
‘Okay, did you read the article about the breakthrough your boyfriend and his colleagues made?’
‘A bit of it.’ Stevie was ashamed to admit she hadn’t got beyond the first paragraph before sleep had ambushed her. ‘I’m not sure I absorbed it all.’