Catch Your Death (35 page)

As Gaunt spoke, Kate had flashes of memory. She remembered touring the lab. An argument with Stephen. Her storming out of his flat. Persuading him to let her go back to the CRU for a second stay.

That fatal error.

The barriers that Gaunt and his cronies had built around her memory when she was in the hospital came crashing down and the sights and sounds and smells – the happiness and pain – rushed over her, filled her, nearly knocked her over and out in a flash of kaleidoscopic light. Stephen’s skin pale in the light from his bedroom window; the artificial glow of the laboratory, the smell of summer grass outside the centre; fighting with Sarah who was in love with Stephen and jealous of his and Kate’s relationship; the terror of the fire, smoke pouring through the corridors…

‘
Sampson, who I had employed at the centre as security, overheard you and Stephen talking one afternoon. You were trying to persuade Stephen that he needed to let you back into the lab so you could get a better look around. Sampson immediately told me. I decided that we needed to silence you. You were too dangerous.’

‘
The virus we were working on at the time was a variation on Watoto. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated or ready. But it was fatal. When you thought you were being given a cold, you were actually being given this virus. You had to go; you’d been snooping around too much. What we didn’t know until afterwards – a stupid clerical error on our part, omitting to check your medical forms ,– was that you had already had Watoto when you were a child, and had survived it. So your body was resistant to it. Yes, you got ill, but you weren’t going to die.

‘
Stephen didn’t know what disease we’d given you. After seeing how ill you were he got scared and decided to do some investigating of his own. He went into the lab at night, the night of the fire, checked your records and discovered that you had been given the new Watoto virus. Imagine his horror when he discovered that his girlfriend had not only been right about the place he worked, the place where he loved working, but that she had been given a fatal virus. He went mad... Perhaps I should hand over to Sampson now.’

Sampson was like a computer booting up after a long sleep. ‘I was doing my rounds, when I saw Wilson in the lab. He had taken the antidote for Watoto from the freezer. He was going to take that to you. But first, he tried to burn down the lab. He had a bunsen burner and was going round setting fire to the paperwork. He spilled some chemicals onto the floor and threw some burning papers onto it. That’s when I arrived. We fought. He was weak, but angry and desperate. Still, I overpowered him but it was too late to stop the fire. It was out of control.’

Kate couldn’t believe it. Stephen had started the fire.

‘
And you got out and left him there to die?’ she croaked.

‘
I have something to show you. Sampson, fetch Dr. Maddox’s boyfriend. We don’t want him to miss out on the fun, do we?’

CHAPTER 43

‘
I want Mummy,’ Jack wailed, incoherent with grief and confusion, drumming his feet against the dashboard of Paul’s car.

‘
Stop it, Jack,’ snapped Vernon, more harshly than he’d intended. Jack desisted, but his sobs were so wretched that Vern pulled over to the side of the deserted lane, struggling to change down the gears in the unfamiliar vehicle.

They were a few miles outside of Mayfield, but Vernon had not the faintest idea where; nor what to do next. The one positive thing about this situation was that he had Jack – and, equally importantly – he had Jack’s passport, safe in Jack’s case. He was free to leave the country.

Well – almost free. What the hell was he going to do about Kate? She was a pain in the ass, and his life would be a lot easier if she weren’t around – Vernon guessed that Sampson wasn’t taking her and Wilson for a walk in the park – but she was Jack’s mother.

He looked over at his inconsolable son, and ruffled the boy’s hair with a heavy hand.

‘
Come on, buddy,’ he said, in what he hoped was a placatory tone. ‘I’m sure Mommy will be just fine. She’s got Paul looking after her – although I bet that she’s the one who’ll end up looking after Paul, ha!’

His weak joke did nothing to quell the flood of hysteria. Sighing heavily, Vernon unclipped his seatbelt and leaned over to hug Jack.

‘
I need your help, bud,’ he said, trying a different tack. ‘I think that nasty man Sampson took Mommy to show her where he took you right before we got you back. I need you to be a really brave boy and tell me whatever you can remember about that place. Can you do that?’

In his father’s arms, Jack began to calm down. ‘Are you going to call 911, daddy?’ he asked.

‘
Well, I would – but my cell phone battery is dead, and I don’t have a car adaptor to charge it up. So we need to look out for a red telephone box, OK, if there are any left these days. Or maybe some kind person might loan us their cell phone. Shall we see if we can see anyone who looks friendly?’

Vernon felt his son’s nod. ‘Good boy. You’re my great little helper, aren’t you? Now, what was this place like?’

‘
It was a big house with no other houses next to it,’ Jack whispered tremulously. ‘It had a downstairs bit what didn’t have any windows, like in Scooby Doo.’

Vern frowned, trying to second-guess his son’s thought processes. ‘You mean like a cellar?’

The nod came again. ‘Yeah. It was kind of like a hospital down there, and a regular house upstairs. I think the downstairs bit is a secret, like a prison.’

‘
How come it was like a hospital?’

Jack shrugged, sniffing mightily. ‘There was beds in some of the rooms, and I had to go and talk to a lady in one of the rooms, and she was sick in bed. Her door was locked, ‘cos I think she was a bad ghost what would’ve run away if the door wasn’t locked. But she was pretty sick. I don’t think they needed to lock the door.’

‘
You had to visit with this sick lady?’ Vernon felt cold fingers of dread clutch at his heart.

‘
Yeah. She was sad. I wish I’d had Billy with me to cheer her up. Maybe she wanted her mommy too.’ Jack’s voice started to fade and Vernon hugged him closer.

Holy shit, he thought, what the hell was going on in that place? His mind raced through the possibilities: was it the same Cold Research place that Kate had been to? No – that burned down, she said. Anyway he had a feeling that place had been somewhere near Stonehenge.

‘
Daddy, I’m tired.’

‘
I bet you are, son. It’s way past your bedtime. Why don’t you hop in back and take a nap? I’ll drive us right to the airport, and then we’ll jump on a plane, and guess what? By tomorrow you’ll be home. Maybe you can even go and see your pal Tyler, if he’s free.’

Even as he said it, Vernon felt guilty. Because they couldn’t go home, could they? If Kate managed to escape from Sampson, she’d have the police onto them in no time. If they made it back to Boston, they’d probably have to stay at Shirley’s – not the most kid-friendly of apartments – till he could rent someplace for him and Jack…Man, this was horrendously complicated.

Vernon helped the now-quiet Jack into the back seat. The poor kid was all cried out. In shock, probably, he thought, as he covered him tenderly with his jacket.

‘
Will Mommy be back when I wake up?’ Jack asked sleepily.

‘
I bet she will be, don’t you worry, son,’ lied Vernon, gunning the engine and roaring away down the dark quiet country lane.

By the time he found himself on the motorway that led to the airport, Vernon had made up his mind. I’m outta here, he thought. I’ve done my bit. Now all I got to do is get my boy home again.

He would call the police once he was safely on the plane and no-one could stop him from taking Jack out of the UK. Then, a matter of hours later, they would be far away from Kate and the chaos she surrounded herself with. When they were together he had had always found her straight-laced and kind of boring, if he was honest with himself. And now she was involved with rogue scientists and their henchmen and who knew what else. If only she’d been so interesting when they were together he might never have needed to go to Shirl to get his kicks. Not that there was any going back. He had surprised himself that he’d felt no jealousy when he’d met Paul. He actually liked the guy. Good luck to him. As long as he didn’t plan on playing step-daddy to Jack.

He glanced over his shoulder at his sleeping son on the back seat.

Why had they made Jack visit ‘a sick lady’? What the hell were the people who had snatched his son up to?

Oh, Jack’s just fine, Vernon thought, trying to convince himself. He just needs to be taken out of this screwed up country and its wacko populace. If he gets a cold, or whatever the hell this is all about, he’d get Shirley to take Jack down to the Medical Centre in Boston tomorrow afternoon once they were home. One more day wouldn’t make any difference, would it?

CHAPTER 44

Gaunt led Kate back out into the harshly-lit corridor, gripping her wrist hard, breathing his foul halitosis into her hair and face.

Sampson unlocked the door of the room across the corridor, and dragged out a protesting Paul, bending his arm up behind his back to incapacitate him. ‘Move it, Wilson, you’ve got a meeting to go to.’

Paul glanced at Kate, glad she seemed to be unharmed, apart from the fear etched on her face.

The awkward procession halted outside another heavy door, this one with a glass porthole cut into it. Gaunt poked several of the keys on an alpha-numeric keypad beside the door. A light turned from red to green, and he pushed the door which opened into a large subterranean laboratory, illuminated by long strip lights.

As they shuffled inside, Paul glanced again at Kate’s face. Her eyes were glassy with stress. She looked like she wouldn’t mind right now if someone put a gun to her head, just so she wouldn’t have to worry any more. He knew that the only thing keeping her going, stopping her from curling up into a ball, was the hope that burned inside her, the hope that she would somehow be able to save her son.

‘
I love you,’ he mouthed, but Kate was in no fit state to respond, or even acknowledge the declaration. She felt as if she was inside the sort of bad dream which just goes on and on, silently unfolding and transmuting from one nightmare scenario to another.

A very thin, hunched, bald old man in a white coat was seated at the far end of the room, his back to them, tapping away on a keyboard.

’
Who’s this?’ Kate said in a tired voice. ‘Another member of the Gaunt family?’

At the sound of Kate’s voice, the old man on the computer turned his head slowly, like a tortoise.

Gaunt laughed. ‘Oh no. He’s not a member of my family.’

Looking thoroughly pleased with himself, Gaunt gestured to the thin bald man, who was now advancing towards them, an expression of fear and confusion on his deathly white face.

Sampson closed the lab door behind them, released Paul, and leaned back against the wall, his arms folded, as if he was waiting for a show to begin.

It was Paul who realized first.

‘
Holy shit,’ he muttered, grabbing on to the edge of a workbench for support. ‘Holy – fucking – shit. No…’

Something in the tone of his voice snapped Kate back to reality, back to an acceptance of the full, terrible reality of the situation.

She looked at the ghostly man still advancing like a zombie, and half-gasped, half-sobbed: ‘Stephen?’

It was undoubtedly her former lover. He looked like he’d spent the last decade and a half in the grave, and that Gaunt, like some real-life necromancer, had brought him back from the dead, built his very own Frankenstein’s monster. But it was definitely him.

Stephen had been alive all these years.

He was motionless, gripping the nearest bench with weak fingers. Kate looked at Paul, who was staring at his brother, a cocktail of emotions on his face: shock, pity, horror. It was impossible to believe they were twins. Stephen appeared twice as old as Paul. He had burn marks down one side of his face and on his hands, long-healed scars from the night of the fire.

Without thinking, she stepped towards Stephen, her arms outstretched, wanting to hold him, to fling her arms around him just as she’d fantasised about doing so many times, in dreams and daydreams, all those times she had found herself caught in a reverie in which Stephen was alive. But in all those dreams, he hadn’t looked like this. He’d been the same beautiful young man she’d known in the summer of 1990.

She tried to hug him and he made a squeaking noise and cowered away.

‘
Stephen,’ she said, in the voice she used when Jack was upset, ‘It’s me, Kate. Don’t you remember?’

He wouldn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at her. He kept his eyes fixed on the laboratory floor.

Paul stepped forward. ‘What about me, Stephen? Do you remember me? It’s Paul. Remember, Stevie? Remember me?’

Stephen looked up, his eyes bloodshot and watery. Kate wanted to know what he was thinking: what was going on inside that head? His eyes spoke of terrible confusion, of pain and incomprehension. But there was something else there, when he looked at Paul. A sign of the old Stephen. Maybe in Paul he could see the man he should have been. Maybe it gave him strength.

But when Paul moved towards him and tried to touch him, he backed away like a dog that has spent its whole life being beaten. Tears filled Paul’s eyes. ‘Oh Stevie,’ he said quietly. ‘What have they done to you?’