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        “What if it’s someone new, who’s not on the radar yet? Or someone good enough to disguise what they’re doing?”

        “It could be someone new, I guess. But they’re certainly not good. Attacking that door was stupid. You couldn’t get through it with a hundred axes, let alone one.”

        “Maybe the axe thing was a diversion, to make you take the attack less seriously. Maybe they got in another way.”

        “There are no other ways. And the door’s security log shows no one opened it.”

        “Couldn’t the log have been hacked? Or fiddled?”

        “There’s an outside chance of that, yes. Which is why a hazardous materials team is coming tomorrow to do a full inventory. But based on the sum total of all the data from all our avenues of enquiry, I believe they’ll prove the correct amount of caesium is here, and put the whole question to bed.”

        “Why wait till tomorrow?”

        “We need a team with special equipment. You can’t just pick this stuff up and count it, obviously. And tomorrow’s the soonest they can be here.”

        “Aren’t there emergency crews?”

        “For containing leaks, and urgent relocation from compromised facilities, yes. But not for inventory work. And don’t forget, the scene of crime report showed no evidence of any tampering and no manic axe men were picked up anywhere on the CCTV, so it was more likely to be a badly trained fireman who damaged the door.”

        “Why would a fireman have been here?”

        Melissa stopped her chair in the centre of the corridor and looked up at me.

        “Oh,” she said. “David, I owe you an apology. I forgot you weren’t in this from the start. The marks on the door were discovered by the hospital technicians when they tried to go back in after a fire alarm. Standard procedure calls for them to report any damage, then lock down the site so it can be investigated.”

        “Was there actually a fire?” I said.

        “No. And I know what you’re thinking. But remember your Freud, David. Sometimes a false alarm is just a false alarm.”

        I thought about what Melissa had told me, and I had to agree - you couldn’t rule out the possibility that nothing nefarious was going on. Not yet, anyway. There was plenty to be skeptical about - someone attacking the one door in the hospital which led to the radioactive waste - but that was circumstantial. I could think of several occasions over the years when I’d scratched the surface of something suspicious and found only chaos, not conspiracy. But those judgments had been based on evidence, and evidence was one thing that seemed to be lacking here.

        “You mentioned CCTV,” I said. “There’s a camera pointing at the door. Doesn’t it show who did the damage?”

        “It should,” Melissa said. “And that would make my life a million times easier. But on the night of the fire alarm, it wasn’t working.”

        “Just that one?”

        “No. That would be too coincidental, for sure. Four separate zones were down, spread randomly across the site. And that’s what our next meeting is about. It’s with the hospital security chief. I’m going to rattle his cage about his maintenance record, and see how he reacts.”

        “Should be fun. But what about the firemen, themselves? Could we talk to the ones who were on duty that night, and see if any of them own up to it?”

        “I’m sure we could. And then we could check the geriatric wards for grandmothers, in case any want to learn to suck eggs.”

        I didn’t reply.

        “Obviously, we spoke to the firemen,” she said. “But here’s the problem with them. All the crews from all four stations that cover this place are supposed to know that they never, ever, under any circumstances, try to open that door. So you’re asking them to land themselves, and probably their commanders too, in seriously hot water.”

        “So you think we’re either dealing with an over-ambitious terrorist, or an under-attentive fireman.”

        “I know that’s what I’m here to deal with,” she said, turning her head again to look me straight in the face. “With thousands of lives potentially in the balance. But I’m not so sure about you.”

        “Then why do you think I’m here?” I said.

        “We all know what it means when someone from another agency is brought in to ‘help’ on some flimsy pretext. The rat squad are behind it. They don’t want to show their nasty little rodent faces, so they’re staying in their sewer and using you to do their dirty work.”

        I didn’t reply.

        “It’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “There’s no point denying it. That’s not going to change what I think.”

        “You can think whatever you like,” I said, after another moment. “I’m not going to comment.”

        “Thank you. Only, it goes further, doesn’t it, what you’re here to do?”

        “What do you mean?”

        “They’re after me, specifically.”

        “Not as far as I know.”

        “So they didn’t spell that part out. So what. Think about it. Only two people from Box were assigned to the hospital. And since Jones is (a) too new to have had time to get his nose dirty, and (b) not here cause you conveniently took him out of the equation, who else does that leave under the microscope?”

        Put like that, Jones’s injury did look a little coincidental. I was pretty sure I’d have reached the same conclusion, in her shoes. You don’t last long in our world, taking coincidences on blind faith.

        “You can rule someone out, as well as in, you know. If they’re even a suspect in the first place.”

        “In theory. But here’s my problem. I’ve been doing this job for twelve years. It’s my life. It’s the reason I’m not rich. Not married. Not a mother. And don’t have many friends. But it’s what I love doing. I’m good at it. I’ve never once turned a blind eye or slipped a hand into the till. And if anyone says I have, I want to look them in the eye. I want the chance to prove them wrong. I don’t want to wake up one morning with a blade in my back, and no way to pull it out.”

        “I understand.”

        “Look, I realise you have a job to do. It’s not easy, and I’m sure you didn’t volunteer for it. I wouldn’t have said anything, only back in the garden it sounded like you care about doing the right thing, and I just wanted you to know - well, I do, too.”

We swung by my room so I could change into something more business-like than my hospital pyjamas, then headed to the next building to meet the Head of Security. He wasn’t there when we arrived, two minutes early for our appointment.

        “Mr Leckie will be here very soon,” his secretary said, as she showed us into his office. “Please, take a seat. Can I get you some coffee? Tea?”

        “No, thank you,” Melissa said.

        “I hope there’s not been another urgent family situation,” I said. “What’s the temperature like outside?”

        The secretary flushed slightly and scampered from the room, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from flicking up to the array of pictures on the wall above Leckie’s desk as she went. They were all of golf courses. I recognised St Andrew’s in Scotland, plus one in Karlovac, Croatia, where I once had to arrange the disappearance of a corrupt Serbian diplomat. I had no idea about the other dozen. They could have been anywhere.