‘Liam Kelly, yes. He was the one who told me what Hausman had really done with them.’
Macmillan posed the question by tilting his head to one side and opening his eyes a little wider.
Steven nodded. ‘It’s a good idea — I’m just not sure about involving him in something like this. He’s only a boy… with a career to think about.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of any active role for him,’ said Macmillan, ‘more a case of an insider being able to offer a few helpful pointers about where things might be found… Have a think about it.’
Steven thought about little else on his way up to Leicester. Liam Kelly would know not only where Hausman worked — that much he knew already — but where his office space was located, which desk was his, his locker, his filing cabinet… but perhaps more important, Kelly would have an access key for the building and the lab. All PhD students in biological subjects needed out-of-hours access to their labs on a regular basis to follow the progress of experiments. It shouldn’t put him at much risk to ‘lose’ it for a few hours. The decision to approach Kelly was made: it was a weight off his mind. That just left the problem of what he was going to say to Tally.
‘Oh my God,’ Tally exclaimed as she hugged Steven and withdrew quickly. ‘I don’t have to ask what’s under your arm; I remember from last time. Oh, Steven…’
‘It’s just a precaution, Tally,’ said Steven, knowing how weak it sounded. ‘Just tell yourself every policeman in Europe carries one…’
‘They do it routinely, you don’t. There has to be a reason, a very good one and one I’m not going to like.’
‘Look, the man I think killed Simone and Aline Lagarde is in London: we don’t know why. As I say, it’s just a precaution.’
Tally looked Steven straight in the eyes for a few silent moments before looking down at the floor and sighing. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being unreasonable. I was the one who persuaded you to return to Sci-Med and now I’m making things difficult for you. You’ve got enough on your plate without me nagging at you. Forgive me?’
Steven made to take her in his arms but Tally put both hands against his chest. ‘Not till you take that thing off.’
After a late supper they sat together on the couch, heads back, shoes off, feet up on a footstool, their toes flirting.
‘I heard on the news there was another ME protest attack yesterday,’ said Tally. ‘A microbiologist in Edinburgh was sent a dead rat in the post.’
Steven grimaced. ‘Not my problem any more,’ he said. ‘I’ve been taken off that investigation. John thinks I’ve got enough to do with the Afghanistan business. Scott Jamieson has taken over. D’you remember Scott?’
‘We met at some point when John Macmillan was ill. Nice man, pretty wife, they live down in Kent. They invited us down as I remember.’
‘Maybe we’ll take them up on that when you get the job at Great Ormond Street. We’ll wander hand in hand through the hop fields wondering what we’re going to do with all the money you’ll be making.’
‘Let’s not count our chickens.’
‘It’s in the bag.’
‘Thursday,’ said Tally.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The interview. It’s next Thursday. I wasn’t going to tell you because I didn’t want to distract you from the Afghanistan business, as you called it. Afghanistan,’ sighed Tally, snuggling into Steven. ‘What are we doing there? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Our young are out of work, our health service is falling to bits and we’re strutting around on the world stage like we owned the place. One of our soldiers gets blown to bits every week and TV newsreaders look sad for five seconds before telling us, the family has been informed. Well, that’s all right then. What’s it all about?’
‘Ssh,’ said Steven, eyes closed, his arm hugging Tally a little tighter. ‘I could come out with some spiel about the war on terror, making our country a safer place, standing up for human rights, introducing democracy to the downtrodden masses, expanding the free world… but I don’t believe any of that rubbish either. Money will be behind it, money and oil. It always is.
‘Aren’t you one of them?’ asked Tally. ‘The establishment, I mean?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think I love you. I’m so glad I found you. I think I stopped feeling lonely the day I met you.’
Steven was taken aback at Tally’s impromptu declaration but felt very pleased. He planted a kiss on her forehead and asked, ‘Who’s going to fetch the drinks?’
‘You are.’
Steven returned with two gin and tonics and Tally smiled sleepily. Thinking about their conversation over supper, she asked, ‘When you said Khan and Andrews were going to be in London… Do you have enough evidence to arrest them for Simone’s murder?’
‘No.’
‘Promise me you’re not considering taking matters into your own hands.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Steven?’
‘There’s a good chance the French police will come up with a DNA match to convict Khan and he’ll probably shop Andrews to minimise his sentence.’
Tally looked at him accusingly. ‘They’re intelligence community people, not naughty schoolboys who stole sweeties from a corner shop.’
‘They’re not beyond the law.’
‘It’s whose law they’re subject to I’m worried about.’
TWENTY
Jean Roberts looked surprised when she found Steven sitting in her office at ten minutes to nine on Monday morning. ‘Don’t tell me, you had a fight with Tally and you’ve been here all night?’
‘No. Well not yet, anyway,’ Steven replied. ‘I’d like you to get some information for me as soon as you can. I need to know what the City College authorities have decided about Tom North’s group. Is it still functioning as a research group or has it been broken up? I’m particularly interested in Dr Dan Hausman and a PhD student named Liam Kelly. I need you to do it as discreetly as possible: I don’t want to advertise our interest, particularly not to Hausman.’
Jean looked up from the pad she’d been noting things down on. ‘I’ll make an approach through their administration. I’ll pretend I’m from one of the grant-funding bodies making a routine check.’
‘Perfect,’ said Steven. ‘I also need to make contact with Liam Kelly but I don’t want to turn up at the lab. An address for him would be good.’
‘What year is he?’ asked Jean.
‘First year PhD, just about to start his second.’
‘If I were a first year PhD student who’d just lost my supervisor, I think I would be spending a lot of time in the library boning up on things that might make me attractive to other potential supervisors.’
‘Jean, you’re a genius.’
Jean demurred with a modest little smile. ‘I’ll still get you the information. Coffee?’
Steven got to City College library just before noon. He showed his Sci-Med ID to the librarian and told her he needed to check some things in an early edition of the Journal of General Virology which his usual library didn’t have. The implication of bibliographic superiority seemed to please the woman, who directed him across the room with the end of her pen.
Steven extracted one of the heavy, bound volumes, placed it on a nearby table and opened it, taking care to give the impression he was looking for a specific article before sitting down and taking out a notebook from his briefcase.
When people in the vicinity stopped taking a casual interest in the newcomer Steven started taking an interest in them but found no familiar faces among the students and staff he could see from where he was sitting. Periodically he would get up and return to the sliding bookshelf area where he would remove a volume and pretend to search through the pages while really looking through the gaps on the shelves at other areas of the library. After his second such sortie, he spotted Liam Kelly sitting at a study carrel with his back to him.