Catch Your Death (6 page)

Sampson was beginning to lose his patience. He took hold of the doctor again and moved to push him back towards the cage.

Twigger yelled, ‘No. The safe is next door. Combination 6471.’

‘
Thank you. And the AG-769 virus?’

‘
What?’

‘
AG-769. Where is it stored?’

The doctor was clearly confused. ‘Why do you want that?’

‘
Just tell me where it is.’

But the doctor had already given it away. His eyes had flicked towards the left.

‘
Thank you,’ Sampson said.

He pushed the doctor to the ground and knelt on his chest. He squeezed Twigger’s nose between forefinger and thumb and clamped a hand over his mouth. The doctor’s eyes were wide, pleading. The monkeys gazed down from their cage. Eventually, Dr Twigger stopped trying to struggle. Sampson had hoped he might feel something at the moment of the doctor’s death – not sympathy or sadness, necessarily, words he’d looked up in the dictionary and tried to understand – but something.

As always, he felt nothing.

Aware that he’d wasted precious seconds getting the combination out of the doctor – next time, he’d just go for the testicles; that always worked quickly – he opened the freezer and removed the vials containing the AG-769 virus and stored them in a padded wallet which he kept in his inside pocket. Back in the car he would transfer them to a portable freezer. He picked up the computer hard drive and realised he’d almost forgotten something. He took the animal rights leaflet with the picture of the cat out of his back pocket and left it lying on the dead doctor’s chest.

In the office, he opened the safe and removed the backup disks that contained the crucial data.

He left the building and walked through the darkness towards his car.

As he got in, one of his two mobile phones rang. It was his second phone. Only one person had this number. What, were they checking up on him to make sure he’d done what he’d said he would? The arseholes. He’d never let them down before.

‘
I’m done,’ he snapped as he answered the call.

The voice on the other end was calm. ‘Excellent. I knew you would. But that’s not what I’m calling about.’

‘
No?’

‘
No. I’ve got another urgent job for you. We’ve just had a tip-off about an old…patient who’s just returned to the UK.’

‘
Right.’

‘
Her name’s Kate Maddox.’

CHAPTER 7

Cold panic flooded Kate’s insides as she entered the hotel room. This couldn’t be real. Not again.

‘
Jack? Jack! ‘ She cried out his name. Where was he? She started to repeat his name in her mind over and over as she stood in the centre of the room, turning in a slow circle, her hand on her brow. In a kind of trance, a state of shock, she opened the bathroom door, looked inside. Stupidly – or, at least, she would think it was stupid when she looked back later – she checked the closet and behind the sofa, as if he might be hiding there, waiting to spring out and yell, ‘Boo!’ She felt suspended in time, waiting for reality to kick back in, for this strange, slow-motion sickness to pass.

A second later, she sprang back to life.

She flung the door open and pelted down the corridor towards the lift, her coat billowing behind her. She thumped the button, jabbed it, jabbed it again, stamped her foot and muttered, ‘Come on, come on, fucking come on,’ as she waited for the red numbers above the lift door to change. The numbers descended – 9, 8, 7 – with sadistic, agonising slowness. She was about to give up and take the stairs when the lift arrived. The doors pinged open and revealed a middle-aged woman in a fur coat. The woman didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry.

Kate reached into the lift, took the woman by the elbow and pulled her firmly but gently into the hallway, stepping past her and pressing the close button, the woman’s mouth frozen in a circle of surprise as the doors slid shut.

If she thought jumping and down would have made the lift descend faster, Kate would have done it. Scenarios from dark films and newspaper headlines played out in her imagination. Jack, in the hands of a paedophile. Jack, floating face down in the freezing Thames. But these images passed quickly. Terrifying as they were, these things were not her number one fear. She hadn’t woken every night for the last week dreading strangers. Her fear wore a familiar face; utterly familiar. The face which had been on the pillow beside her most mornings for the past decade, since she had promised to love, honour and obey him for ever, in a little church in a Boston chapel.

People broke promises all the time. The thought passed fleetingly through a deep seam in her brain, and was gone again, pressed out by the panic of Jack’s disappearance.

Could Vernon really have found them so quickly? Could he really have figured out what she was planning and come looking for her? She didn’t have time to consider the answer. The lift doors sprang open and she dashed out – straight into a Japanese businessman who was waiting with his luggage by the lift. Arms windmilling, he toppled backwards and Kate stumbled, losing a shoe, but she was soon on her feet and running towards the desk. The receptionists stared at her. Everyone in the lobby stared at her. She didn’t give a damn.

She slapped her palms on the desk. ‘Call the police.’

‘
Madame, what’s the matter?’ The chief receptionist, with hair tied back in an efficient ponytail, spoke softly.

‘
My son. Have you seen my son?’

‘
What does he look like?’ The receptionist seemed like she was used to dealing with hysterical guests and spoke to Kate as if she were reporting a dry-cleaning disaster. Kate wanted to reach across the desk and shake her. Her maternal instincts had taken complete control. Nobody, nothing else mattered.

The receptionist said, ‘Can you describe..?’

Kate didn’t allow her to finish. ‘He was with one of your babysitters in the hotel room and now he’s gone. They’ve gone.’ Her voice trembled on the last word as she tried to stop herself from crying. She needed to be strong. And these idiots didn’t get it. Another wave of panic crashed through her, nearly knocking her off her feet.

The receptionists exchanged worried looks. One of them said, ‘I’ll get the manager.’

The main receptionist said, ‘What’s your room number, madam?’

Kate shook her head. ‘What the hell does that matter? My son has been kidnapped. For god’s sake - call the police.’ She raised her voice with her last sentence, her words wobbling on the last few words.

The receptionist touched her forearm. ‘Madame, how old is your son? What does he look like? We might have seen him.’’

She took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. ‘He’s six. He’s got light brown hair and he was wearing a…’ She paused. What had he been wearing? She pictured him sitting on the bed watching TV, already in his pyjamas. She’d made him get ready for bed after his bath because she hadn’t liked the idea of the babysitter undressing him. And now, right now, what was the babysitter doing to him? Betraying him. Betraying both of them. How much had Vernon paid her to do it? Kate fumed inwardly. Where was he?

‘
He’s wearing orange Finding Nemo pyjamas, with a big clown fish on the front, you know, from the movie…’

The receptionist nodded over Kate’s shoulder. ‘Like that boy over there?’

Kate swung round.

A small figure in orange pyjamas with an open denim jacket over the top of them was tumbling gleefully out of the lift, still clutching Billy the robot. He turned immediately back and pressed the button on the elevator’s side panel as if to summon it, although it was already standing there open, with the babysitter waiting indulgently inside. He was laughing at something the babysitter was saying.

‘
Jack!’

Kate ran across the lobby. The moment she reached him she scooped him up and hugged him so tight he shouted, ‘Ow!’

‘
Oh thank God…’ She turned to the babysitter. ‘What the hell were you doing? You stupid…’

‘
Mum, Lena let me go up and down in the elevator. It was brilliant. We went right up to the roof and got out and went in the roof garden and I saw all of London.’

Still squeezing him, Kate said, ‘How many times have I told you not to go off with strangers?’

Jack wriggled. ‘Lena’s not a stranger. She’s my friend. Can I get down?’

Kate put him down and turned back to the babysitter, who put her palms up.

‘
Hey, I’m sorry – he would not settle so I tell him we can go in the lift as special treat, if he go to sleep straight after. We had a deal.’

Kate narrowed her eyes. ‘Get out of my sight.’

‘
I would never have taken him out of the hotel. This is not fair. I did not expect you back so soon. But if that’s the way you feel, I am sorry.’ Lena shrugged and stalked off towards the desk and the gawping receptionists.

Kate knew that in a while she’d feel hot with embarrassment. She would regret shouting at the babysitter, though she thought it was totally out of order to leave the hotel room with Jack for anything less than a fire alarm (she still shuddered at the mere thought of a fire alarm).

She’d feel pretty bad about dragging the woman with the fur coat out of the lift, too, and for knocking over that businessman. If she’d come out of the room two minutes later, Jack would probably have been in the lift already, instead of the fur-clad woman, and all this embarrassment could have been avoided. She’d have to apologise. Right now, though, she just felt relief. Her greatest fear hadn’t come true. Not yet anyway.

She crouched down and stroked Jack’s hair, thinking, From now on, I’m not going to let him out of my sight.

‘
So you had fun?’ she said, forcing a smile.

‘
Yeah, it was awesome.’ Spotting something behind her, he said, ‘Hey mum, look. It’s that man.’

‘
What?’

‘
That man we met today.’

Kate turned her head and found Paul looking back at her from his position by the door.

Paul had walked into the hotel just as Kate emerged from the lift and collided with the unfortunate businessman. He had watched with astonishment as Kate bowled past this guy, sprinted over to the reception desk and started gesticulating. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, and could only see the back of her head. What the hell was wrong with her?

Watching her knock people over and shout abuse at the hotel staff, he wondered whether she deserved the apology he’d planned to give her.

He almost walked straight out again.

But as he turned to go, he saw the kid, Jack, coming through the doors of the same elevator, just minutes later, with some other woman, and then Kate had turned around and the look on her face – the sheer relief – told him the whole story of what was going on here. She wasn’t crazy. She was a mother. Paul didn’t have kids of his own, but he remembered times when he was small and he’d wandered off, obliviously walking around the supermarket or garden centre while his parents searched for him frantically. He remembered their joy and anger when they found him – or sometimes him and Stephen, the two of them having disappeared together.

So instead of leaving, he hung around, waiting for Kate to notice him. He still wasn’t sure about her. He didn’t know anything about her. And although he understood how panicked she must have felt when she came back to the hotel and found her son missing, he still thought she’d over-reacted a little.

Later, when he found out the whole truth, he would understand exactly why Kate had reacted as she did.

CHAPTER 8

‘
Do you want to grab a coffee?’ Paul nodded towards the hotel’s coffee bar.

Kate hesitated. ‘I don’t know. It’s way past Jack’s bedtime.’

But Jack was far too hyped up to want to go to bed now. Lena’s strategy sucked, thought Kate. She herself wasn’t tired anymore either. Her body was still flushed with adrenaline. Add that to the fact that they had only been in the UK for a few days so their body clocks were out of kilter, and it wasn’t surprising that they felt wide awake.

‘
I really want to talk to you about what you said earlier,’ Paul said.

Jack said, ‘Mum, I want a hot chocolate.’

She sighed. ‘Okay. But then it really is bedtime, no more messing around.’

The two males smiled at each other, and something about this little exchange squeezed Kate’s heart. This was scarily close to an old fantasy of hers: of Stephen being the father of her child. It was like the family she’d so often dreamt about. But then she shook the fantasy away. It was ridiculous. Reality check, Kate. Stephen’s dead. Paul is his brother but he’s a stranger. And Jack’s father is an arsehole called Vernon.

She needed a coffee badly.

They sat on soft, cracked-leather sofas, Kate and Jack on one side, Paul on the other. Kate sipped her coffee. Paul was clearly agitated, wrestling with a series of questions, unsure of what to ask first. They were both alike in a lot of ways – used to dealing with computers, data, facts. The scientist and the computer geek – or rather, expert; Paul was too cool to be a classic computer geek, not to mention too good-looking. Put them in the lab or in front of a PC and they were like dolphins in water. Ask them to deal with awkward questions and they floundered and flapped.