‘Hello, John boy,’ said Marjorie Ryman. ‘I see you haven’t found your way back to Waltons’ Mountain.’
‘Still looking, Elizabeth,’ said Steven. ‘Still looking.’
‘Dr Martin’s brother isn’t here yet. Would you like to take a dekko at the body first or will you wait?’
‘We’ll wait,’ said Giles quickly.
Fearing an uncomfortable silence about to develop, Steven told Giles that he’d go back out and wait in the car park. Giles nodded.
‘You could wait in my office,’ suggested Marjorie Ryman. ‘There’s a coffee machine…’
‘I’ll get some air,’ said Steven.
He had completed three slow laps of the car park with his hands deep in his pockets, seemingly having examined every cigarette butt lying there and flicked at every loose pebble with his toe, when he was joined by Marjorie Ryman at his elbow.
‘I’m sorry, John boy. Frank just told me that you and the deceased were friends. I didn’t know.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Steven.
‘I naturally assumed your interest in the case was professional. I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s okay. Really,’ said Steven. ‘You weren’t to know.’
At that moment, a dark Rover drew up. It was unmarked but might well have had ‘Official Government Vehicle’ stamped all over it. A tall man wearing a dark overcoat over a light coloured suit got out from the back and thanked the driver before listening for a few moments to details about a later pick-up. He straightened up and looked at the building. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what he was thinking, thought Steven, but there was already too much going on inside his own head for him to dwell too long on the pain of others. Marjorie Ryman had gone inside as soon as the car arrived leaving Steven the only other person in the car park.
‘Mr Martin?’ he said, straightening up and walking towards him.
‘Yes. And you?’
‘Steven Dunbar. I was a close friend of your sister while she was working at the Crick Institute.’
They shook hands. ‘You’re a scientist too?’ he asked with the same pleasant French accent that Leila had had.
‘Actually, no… I’m a doctor.’
They went inside to where Martin was introduced to Giles and Marjorie Ryman who both shook hands and offered their condolences.
‘If you’d care to come this way, Mr Martin,’ said Marjorie in subdued tones. ‘We can carry out the formal identification and then you can have some time alone with your sister if you’d like before we discuss arrangements for repatriation.’
The four of them trooped along a narrow corridor in single file to where Marjorie stopped outside a door and turned to Martin to ask, ‘Ready?’
Martin nodded and she opened the door.
They entered a small, square room where some attempt had been made to soften the reality of the building with paintings on the walls depicting pastoral scenes and alluding to the possibility of an afterlife. A simple crucifix sat on a semi circular table between candlesticks and purple drapes — hung albeit on an interior wall because the room had no windows. All attention was focused on the trolley that sat in the middle of the floor with a plain white sheet draped over the body that lay on it.
Marjory Ryman went to the head of the trolley and gripped the top of the sheet with both hands. She paused to give Martin a questioning look. Martin nodded and she lowered the sheet to reveal the head and shoulders of the deceased.
‘Is this your sister, Dr Leila Martin, sir?’ asked Giles.
Martin took two steps forward and looked at the dead woman. He nodded slowly and with great sadness. ‘Yes, this is Leila,’ he replied, a sob catching in his throat. ‘This is my sister.’
Steven swallowed and felt a lump come to his own throat as he waited for Martin to step back before moving forward to say his own goodbye. He made eye contact with Marjorie Ryman who gave him a small smile of encouragement tinged with residual guilt from the earlier misunderstanding. He bowed his head and closed his eyes for a moment, steeling himself to see Leila in death rather than the vibrant image of her he’d kept alive in his mind. When he opened his eyes his heart missed a beat and his stomach turned over as his subconscious railed against this latest outrage of fate. His voice sounded foreign, even to him, when he said, ‘This is not Leila Martin.’
Steven was looking at the body of a woman who bore almost no resemblance to Leila at all. This woman was plain where Leila had been beautiful. This woman had a small thin mouth, a broad nose and a chin that was almost masculine and looked about ten years older than Leila.
‘But you told me it was…’ said Giles, obviously bemused and more than a little embarrassed. ‘At the cottage…’
‘Ali told me. I didn’t see the body,’ said Steven, still staring at the unknown woman.
Martin, looking at Steven as if in complete disbelief, spluttered out, ‘Of course it’s Leila, are you suggesting that I don’t know my own sister? What the hell are you talking about, man?’
Wheels were spinning inside Steven’s head like the machinery of a fairground ride picking up speed. He looked at Martin without really seeing him but recovered some sense of the moment and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s been some awful misunderstanding…’
‘The man’s crazy,’ murmured Martin.
Giles looked like a man wading in out of his depth. He said to Martin, ‘I’m sorry sir, I must ask you again; are you quite certain that this woman is your sister, Dr Leila Martin.’
‘Of course it’s Leila,’ snapped Martin, still angry at what Steven had said. ‘I don’t know what this idiot here is talking about.’
Giles made a gesture with his head to signify that Steven should leave the room and Steven complied.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ hissed Giles when he came out to join him.
‘That’s not the Leila Martin I knew,’ said Steven. ‘That is not the Leila Martin who worked at Crick.’
‘I just don’t get this,’ stormed Giles, still struggling to keep his voice down to avoid those inside hearing. ‘Then who the hell is the woman lying on the trolley in there?… the woman whose own brother has just identified as being Leila Martin?’
Steven now understood the look he’d seen in Ali’s eyes when he had told him whose body was in the plastic bag. He had been enjoying a joke of his own. ‘I think she’s Leila Martin,’ he replied without emotion.
‘Am I missing something here?’ asked Giles, now displaying serious exasperation. ‘Are you telling me there are two Leila Martins?’
Steven looked at him distantly and said, ‘No, I think not. There is only one real Dr Leila Martin and I think that’s her lying on the trolley in there… She must have been intercepted as soon as she entered the country… Leila took her place.’
Giles’ eyes opened wide. ‘An imposter?’
Steven nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘What the hell was she doing there?’
The awful answer to that question was becoming crystal clear to Steven as was so much else as he realised what a fool he’d been. Leila, his Leila, the beautiful woman at the Crick had encouraged their relationship just so that she could use him to keep tabs on what he and the Intelligence services were thinking so that she could report back to Ali Mansour.
When she thought she had no further use for him, it had been she who had set up the attack on his life. She had simply passed on the details of their dinner arrangements to Ali so that he could intercept him on the road to her cottage. Even the cottage now made sense where it hadn’t before. Leila hated the place but it was remote and that must have been its attraction. It was a convenient, safe base for Ali — and it had an ice-cold cellar. Steven could see that Giles was waiting for an answer.
‘The woman I knew as Leila Martin wasn’t working on a vaccine at all. Quite the opposite; she was growing up Cambodia 5 virus. That’s why we could find no trace of the eggs al-Qaeda needed for cultivation. She was growing up the virus at the Crick.’