She looked at her smartphone again, ready to close the Internet down, but a name she recognised jumped out at her from the list of hits. Dr John Ahumibe had written an obituary of Geoffrey Frei in the Lancet.
The doctor began by saying that he wrote as a medical colleague, an admirer of Frei’s journalism and ‘finally as a friend’. He briefly mentioned their membership of the same rugby team at school and their subsequent friendship at university. Although in later years they had kept in ‘more sporadic touch’, Dr Ahumibe went on to say how much he had admired Frei’s work. The doctor’s prose was starched with formalities that might have indicated grief or respect or simply a poor writing style.
Stevie breathed on the windscreen, fogging it with her breath. She drew a neat triangle on the hazed glass with her fingertip and added a name at each corner.
She wrote Dr Ahumibe’s name in the middle, and after a moment’s hesitation put Buchanan’s beside it. Reah had died of the sweats and it wasn’t unusual for people who had gone to school together to enter the same professions and keep in touch. But Dr Ahumibe had known all three men, and now all three of them were dead.
Stevie took a tissue from the glove compartment, rubbed the diagram away and then pressed dial on her phone. Iqbal picked up immediately and she said, ‘I’m sorry I hung up.’ She wanted to ask him if Frei’s death could be related to Simon’s, but any answer he could give her would only be speculation and so she said, ‘Do you think you could find Frei’s address?’
‘If you promise to come back in one piece.’ He gave a faint, awkward laugh. ‘I don’t mean come back to me. Not necessarily.’
‘I know.’ There was silence on the line. Stevie thought she could hear Iqbal willing himself not to ask her where she was. She could still see the faint outline of the crude diagram she had drawn on the windscreen: Simon, Reah and Frei constellated around Dr Ahumibe. She said, ‘If there’s an answer to why Simon died, I think it’s somewhere in the computer. Simon was determined to get it to Reah, and someone else was equally determined to get it off me.’
‘So why don’t you come back here and help me work through the data?’
It was a good question. Stevie closed her eyes and tried to picture herself at Iqbal’s desk, trawling through computer printouts. She had managed to calculate her sales figures and commission percentages without any trouble on Shop TV. Perhaps she would discover a talent for a different type of statistics. The idea of a siege made her chest tighten, but that wasn’t the only reason she was focused on staying on the road. She spoke slowly, trying to order her thoughts.
‘Simon obviously believed Reah would understand the information on the computer straight away. I thought Simon was trying to tell Reah something, but what if he already knew what the computer held? The data you’re examining might be evidence that supports something both Simon and Reah were already aware of.’ Realisation quickened her voice. ‘The laptop is crucial, but we may never know why, without putting it into context. That’s what I have to focus on.’
‘I know it’s none of my business, but I don’t like you being out there on your own.’
‘We’re a team. You’re the brains and I’m the foot soldier.’ Stevie injected a smile into her voice, to hide her irritation at the paternal edge in his, and related a version of her meeting with Melvin Summers that excluded the pub lock-in and police raid. ‘Summers was bitter, and he had the means, but I’d be surprised if he was the killer. He struck me as the kind of man who would give himself up if he’d done the deed. Broadcasting the reasons why he’d murdered Simon would be part of his revenge.’
‘Killing the man wouldn’t be enough. He’d want to kill his reputation too? It sounds like your boyfriend knew how to make enemies.’
Stevie considered telling Iqbal there was no point in being jealous of the dead, but she knew from experience that jealousy, like love, didn’t conform to reason. She said, ‘Perhaps Melvin Summers simply needed someone to blame for his losses and Simon was the obvious target.’ A convoy of army lorries rattled past, green tarpaulins shivering on their frames. Stevie asked, ‘How is it going with the data? Have you made any progress?’
‘I’m working my way through it, but the only way to go is slowly if I’m going to avoid errors. I can tell you one thing though. I did a search and it looks like the team didn’t submit all of their studies for publication.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Some of the trials showed more positive results than others. They ditched the negative ones and only published outcomes that endorsed their treatment. Those are the ones I’m concentrating on.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘According to Geoffrey Frei’s book, inconvenient results are routinely suppressed. I wouldn’t have thought to look for it otherwise.’
‘What’s the difference between only publishing positive results and publishing false ones?’
‘Limiting your publications to positive results is legal, but being caught publishing false results would be professional suicide.You could end up in jail.’
Stevie knew Simon would never have done anything that might endanger his career. She said, ‘Simon would never have risked harming children,’ and wondered at the gap between what she had thought and what she had said aloud.
She could hear Iqbal’s fingers rattling against computer keys.
‘In that case, maybe he had faith in the treatment and didn’t want to cloud its chances of being approved by publicising trials that were less than a hundred per cent.’ The key strokes stopped. ‘It looks like Frei was ex-directory, but here’s his address.’ He read out a street and house number in Swiss Cottage and Stevie punched it into her satnav. Iqbal said, ‘Will you keep me updated on where you are?’
‘Philosophically or geographically?’
His voice was serious. ‘Both.’
Stevie hung up and turned on the engine. Only a moment ago she had felt close to Simon, but now she was losing her picture of him. The man she thought she had known was fading and a new one was taking his place. Did her hunt still make sense if he was someone else?
She was kidding herself. It had never made any sense. Nothing did.
The route suggested by the satnav would take her close to Simon’s apartment block. Simon had loaded the laptop with coded data he had wanted her to deliver to Reah, but perhaps there was information he was less inclined to share still stored in his flat. Stevie checked her mirrors, steered the car away from the kerb and started to drive.
Thirty
The streets around Simon’s building were lined with parked cars. Stevie drove a slow circuit in search of a free space, taking left turns that drew her gradually further from her destination. She had tuned into Radio London, hoping for local news, but a panel of people she didn’t recognise were discussing prisons.
‘Criminals are incarcerated because they’re a danger to society,’ a plummy female voice said. ‘To truncate their sentences would not only be an affront to justice, it would be dangerous.’