The sun set about 7 p.m. — a blood-red ball that drenched Lagos with its glow before it plunged into darkness. Al and Janet dressed for dinner and prepared to meet the other conference delegates who’d come from all over the world. They wouldn’t know anyone — not even any of the eleven other British guests — and they were glad to have each other.
The dining hall was splendidly set. To look at it, you wouldn’t know that barely a mile from this hotel there existed one of the seediest slums in the world, so poor that the people who lived there had to use the streets as a toilet. Here were crisp, white tablecloths, fizzy water in bottles and appetizing baskets of freshly baked bread rolls. There were five large round tables, each with ten place settings, and a table plan pinned to a board by the entrance. When Janet and Al checked it they saw, to their relief, that they were sitting next to each other. To Janet’s right there was a professor from Helsinki in Finland; to Al’s left an American journalist. The couple accepted a glass of wine from a smartly dressed waiter with a tray of drinks, then went to find their seats.
The Finnish professor was an eccentric-looking man with a bald head but a bushy white beard. He was already sitting down when they approached, but stood up when he saw Janet. ‘Allow me,’ he said, and he pulled out her seat for her. ‘My name is Jenssen. It is very nice to meet you…’ He glanced at the name tag on Janet’s place setting. ‘Dr Darke.’
Janet smiled. ‘And you, Professor Jenssen.’
The American journalist didn’t arrive until everyone else was sitting and the waiters were serving the starter. He was hugely fat, and had sweat pouring down his face. ‘Africa,’ he said with a huff as he plonked himself down on his seat. ‘Every time I come here, I promise myself I’ll never come back. Perhaps I should listen to myself a bit more.’
Perhaps you should, thought Al Darke, but he didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he thanked the waiter who had just placed a plate of food in front of him. Slices of colourful fruit were laid out on the plate like a fan, with some kind of dressing drizzled over the top.
‘This looks delicious,’ Al said.
‘Give it three days,’ the journalist replied. ‘You’ll be begging for a cheeseburger.’ Al saw, though, that he tucked in to his food with gusto.
Al was halfway through his starter when he noticed that his nose was running. Embarrassed, he grabbed his napkin and held it to his face. By the time he had covered his face, though, he felt moisture seeping from his eyes and his vision was blurred. He turned to look at Janet. Her eyes were wet too, the pupils as small as pinpricks.
‘What’s happening?’ Al started to say. But as he spoke, his chest collapsed into a fit of coughing and he found himself struggling for breath.
‘Al…’ Janet was looking at him with fear on her face.
The pain came next — a horrible, sharp needling behind the eyes and in the throat. Al felt dizzy. He looked around the room. About half of the guests had stood up, and from the way they clutched their heads and throats, it was clear they were suffering the same symptoms. At the far end of the room, one man collapsed. Al was half aware of the waiters, buzzing around them like panicked bees. They didn’t know what was happening any more than the diners.
Al felt himself slump in his seat. He couldn’t help it — it was as though his muscles had turned to jelly and he had lost the power to control them, even in order to breathe. His eyes fell on the half-eaten fruit. The bright colours of the mango and papaya looked ten times brighter, and they burned into his retinas. He turned to his wife.
‘The food,’ he said.
Janet Darke didn’t hear him. For her the room was spinning more violently. People were shouting around her, but all she could really concentrate on was the nausea. She wanted to be sick, but was too weak to do even that.
Al and Janet weren’t the first to die. The professor from Helsinki was already slumped on the table, his face in his half-eaten plate of fruit; and the American journalist was twitching on the ground. They knew it was coming, though. With what little strength they had left, they reached out with their hands and clasped their fingers together.
When the Nigerian police arrived half an hour later, they needed to prize Al and Janet Darke’s hands away from each other before they could remove the bodies.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
THE SHADOW
‘Darke!’
Giggling in the classroom.
‘Darke!’
Zak looked up. He’d been staring out of the window, where the late afternoon sun was glowing over the school football pitch. He had a pencil in his hand, which he twirled through his fingers. On his table there was a circuit board. It was covered with transistors and diodes and connected to a small loudspeaker.
‘Zachary Darke,’ his physics teacher, Mr Peters, said in a nasal voice. Peters had bad skin, square glasses and a tragic dress sense. He’d only been teaching at the Camden High School in North London for six weeks, but in that time he’d managed to make himself unpopular with pretty much everyone. ‘You’ve got ten minutes left to complete your assignment. I don’t think staring out of the window is a very good way to—’
He was interrupted by a noise. Zak had flicked a switch and the sound of Lady Gaga singing ‘Just Dance’ filled the room. The physics teacher had told them to construct a transistor radio, after all.
Peters was a total nightmare. He loved to set his classes almost impossible tasks and watch them squirm as they failed to complete them. All of them except Zak. He was good at stuff like this, but even that didn’t seem to impress Peters. The jokers at the back singing along to the music didn’t impress him either. His pockmarked neck turned red. ‘Turn it off, boy.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Zak replied. He stared back out of the window.
Mr Peters walked up to Zak’s table. Zak had grown tall in the last year — taller than a few of the teachers, even. It meant that some of them, like Peters, puffed themselves up when talking to him. ‘Showing off isn’t a very attractive habit, Darke,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t, sir. I was just—’
‘Quiet. I don’t want to hear another word from you.’
‘No, sir,’ Zak said, and went back to his daydreaming.
He had plenty to daydream about.
When the police had showed up six months ago on the doorstep of his uncle and aunt’s house to tell him what had happened, they had said it was food poisoning. An acute case, a terrible accident. It had affected everyone in the hotel dining hall that night. Fifty of them. And for a while Zak had believed them. Why wouldn’t he? The story had made it onto the news, and he was too shocked and upset anyway to think about it much.
But as time passed and the Nigerian police had refused to release his parents’ bodies for burial, Zak had grown suspicious. If it had been just food poisoning, then why the delay? Why couldn’t they just send his mum and dad back so they could have a proper funeral? And what was so virulent that it could kill fifty people at a single sitting? Zak had hit the Internet, done his research. There was botulism; e. coli, maybe. But Mum and Dad had been in good health. Those kind of bacteria might have made them feel very unwell, but kill them? And everyone else they were dining with? Not likely.