Steven moved on to chat to some of the others about their work before Cleary eventually escorted him to the front door. Steven handed him his card and looked him directly in the eye. ‘Let me know if you think there’s anything else I should know.’
‘Of course,’ said Cleary.
Steven sat in the car for a few minutes, trying to decide whether or not his investigation was over. The institute hadn’t been licensed to carry out work on the highly dangerous bacteria and viruses normally associated with biological weapons and the escaped animals had not been carrying anything more dangerous than flu virus. Five of the six beasts were already dead and the other probably wouldn’t last long in the wild. End of story… or not, because there was no denying that he did feel uneasy about something. Nothing the police or Cleary had told him had given him cause to feel this way. It was just a feeling that he wasn’t in full possession of all the facts. Someone was holding something back and that someone was Nick Cleary.
There had been something about Cleary’s body language during the interview that had aroused his suspicions. He felt sure the man had been considering telling him more but had changed his mind. It might have been something important: equally, it might not, but a small seed of doubt had been planted and Steven had the kind of mind that nurtured such things to maturity. He still had to talk to Marjorie Ryman, the police pathologist, but it seemed unlikely that she would be able to offer him reassurance or wipe away the unease.
Marjorie Ryman was at work in the post-mortem room when Steven arrived. One of the mortuary technicians spoke to her over an intercom link in the reception area: she asked him to put Steven on. After apologising for still being busy at the time they had arranged to meet she gave him the choice of joining her in the PM room or of waiting until she had finished — she thought about forty minutes. He chose to join her rather than wait — a trip to the supermarket was still on the cards. He was shown into a small adjoining room by the technician where there was a row of pegs along one white-tiled wall with green, surgical gowns hanging from them. Below them and underneath a wooden slatted bench, Wellington boots were lined up like troops guarding a royal route.
‘Size?’ asked the technician.
‘Eleven,’ replied Steven.
Steven slipped off his shoes and put on the boots he was handed before standing up to slip his arms through the sleeves of the green gown being held out to him by the Technician, who then secured the ties at the back. He declined the offer of gloves, saying, ‘I won’t be that involved.’
He entered the PM room, wrinkling up his nose at the smell. ‘Dr Ryman?’ he asked.
‘Come in, Dr Dunbar. Sorry I’m still up to my eyes but the police are anxious to have the report on this one and it just seems to have been one thing after another today,’ said a pleasant, endomorphic woman in her early forties with dark hair that was just beginning to grey and intelligent eyes that seemed to reflect a confident but pleasant personality. ‘Otherwise we could have had tea and biscuits in my office.’
‘The murder victim from last night?’ asked Steven, joining her at the furthest away of three stainless steel tables on which the pale corpse of a young man lay with its chest cavity already opened up.
‘This is the fellow,’ agreed Ryman. ‘Dead before his twenty-fifth birthday…’
There was a pause during which the gurgle of water sluicing down the drain on the table seemed to offer up a mocking requiem.
‘Inspector Giles seemed to think there might be a link between this murder and that of Professor Devon at the Crick Institute,’ said Steven.
‘So I understand,’ said Ryman. ‘But there’s no pathological reason to think that, so I couldn’t really comment. Suffice to say their deaths were very different. This chap was killed in anger after a short, violent knife attack. Prof Devon was subjected to slow deliberate torture over a period of several hours before being killed suddenly and efficiently by someone who knew exactly what he or she was doing. It takes some skill to puncture the heart with one thrust from a venous cannula. Can I ask why Sci-Med is interested in these deaths?’
‘It’s more the escaped animals that caught our attention,’ said Steven. ‘And what Prof Devon might have been using them for.’
‘Oh, of course, the monkeys,’ said Ryman with a knowing smile. ‘I should have realised. One of them actually bit someone I understand?’
‘A man over in Holt,’ said Steven.
‘Hope it wasn’t carrying anything too nasty.’
‘Only flu,’ said Steven.
‘That was a bit of luck,’ said Ryman. ‘I keep thinking it can only be a matter of time before one of these people releases something really nasty into the wild. They don’t seem to consider what “freeing” the animals means when they start throwing open the doors of research labs.’
‘They probably think it’s a Tales of the Riverbank world out there. All the animals will nip down to Toad Hall to attend a lecture on social responsibility with regard to the spread of infectious disease.’
‘You sound like Frank Giles,’ said Ryman with a smile. ‘He’s a sarcastic bastard too.’
‘Must be the job,’ said Steven.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Ryman, gesturing to the corpse on the table. ‘Strikes me, we’ve all come a long way from Walton’s Mountain.’
‘So what kind of person does what they did to Prof Devon?’
‘Not my province,’ said Ryman. ‘I deal with the dead not the living and in this instance, I’m glad about that. I don’t even want to think about the kind of minds behind that one.’
‘That bad?’
Ryman stopped working and looked directly at Steven. ‘I was physically sick when I wrote the report.’
Steven nodded and said, ‘Well, the general feeling seems to be that the animal rights brigade has gone too far this time. Any public sympathy they might have had has all but evaporated. That can only help the police catch whoever was responsible.’
‘I really hope so,’ said Ryman. ‘And when they do… they should melt the key.’
Steven thanked her and turned to leave. As he got to the door, Ryman said, ‘G’night John-boy.’
Steven smiled and turned. ‘G’night Elizabeth.’
‘I wish,’ said Ryman, already back at work inside the chest cavity.
Steven walked slowly back to the car, giving the light breeze that had sprung up time to eliminate any traces of the PM room that might be clinging to his hair and clothes. He hated the smells associated with pathology including that of the bloody awful air freshener they all tended to use. Even after all these years the sickly sweet smell of formaldehyde brought back images of cadavers stored in tanks of the stuff for medical students to hone their skills on.
‘And so farewell, Norfolk…’ he murmured as he started heading south, thinking about what he would tell John Macmillan in his report. No cause for alarm; the apparent secrecy surrounding Devon’s work had just been routine bureaucracy. Devon had been working on nothing more sinister than an influenza vaccine… unless of course… Nick Cleary knew different.
‘Damnation,’ said Steven as the lingering doubt about Cleary came back to haunt him. He tried arguing himself out of the sinister possibility that the animals had been infected with something more dangerous by considering the member of the public who’d been bitten by one of the animals but who had been released from hospital and was safely back home. He was absolutely fine… wasn’t he? This last doubt pushed Steven over some inner threshold. He turned the car through 180 degrees at the next roundabout and started heading back into Norfolk. He was on his way to Holt. He had to see for himself.