Catch Your Death (9 page)

There was no logic in this, of course, but in a moment of panic, logic vanishes, even when you’re a professor of science.

She felt the tears rushing back to the surface, tears of despair and anger this time, and fear. She’d lost her son. She’d lost him, she’d lost him, she’d–

‘
Hey, mummy!’

They had just moved to a different table, Jack and Paul with Billy the robot perched on the chair between them. She crossed the room on rubber legs. Paul had his laptop open. He said, ‘Jack wanted to sit by the window. Are you okay? You look pale.’

‘
I’m fine.’ She quickly composed herself, glancing at the newspaper that lay between them, finding herself hooked by the headline. The lead story was about a “controversial” scientist who’d been found murdered in his lab. Animal rights extremists were being blamed, although they denied involvement. There was a heartbreaking picture of the doctor with his family. The story sent a shiver through Kate’s bones, and she folded the paper and dropped it onto an empty chair. To Paul she said. ‘So what are you doing?’

He swivelled the laptop so she could see the screen then brought up Google and typed “cold research unit salisbury”. He scanned through the list of results. ‘These are sites telling the history of the Unit. Maybe there’s something on there that could help us.’

‘
Let’s have a look,’ Kate said, skim-reading the page. There was a black and white photo of part of the Unit, taken from a distance. The blocky, utilitarian buildings and the green spaces beyond. A chill made the hairs on her arms stand on end. She read The Unit closed down in 1990 without having found a cure for the common cold. All those years of research with no success. Had it all been a waste of time? The possibility made her feel intensely sad, especially for Leonard and Stephen.

‘
This just gives the official history of the place, and a very abridged version at that,’ she said.

He went back to the search engine page and clicked on a few other results. There was very little information available.

‘
The net isn’t going to be much help to us,’ he sighed. ‘Which is a shame. I get so used to finding everything I want on Google.’

Kate drummed her fingers on the table. Next to her, Jack was happily drawing a picture of Billy standing on an alien planet, firing a laser beam at a many-tentacled alien. She could sense Paul’s growing frustration and wished so badly that she could help him.

‘
Who else would know what Stephen might have been talking about? Is there anyone else that you might have talked to about it? Friends? Family?’

‘
Aunt Lil’s my only family, and she wouldn’t be able to help even if I’d told her everything. She’s got dementia. She barely recognises me now.’

She thought back to her frustrating visit to the nursing home two days before. It had been one of the most depressing experiences of her life. The woman who’d looked after her all those years, after her parents died, was gone, replaced by this paper-skinned creature with a body and mind that didn’t work properly any more.

Paul murmured some words of sympathy, then said, ‘You’ve told me about when you first went to the Unit. Tell me what happened after the fire? What do you remember?’

She glanced at Jack. He was still engrossed in his drawing.

‘
I remember the night of the fire itself.’ She told Paul about the rush from the building, passing out and waking up outside. And then seeing a body being carried out. Stephen’s body. After that, she must have passed out, although she had this strange, vague recollection of a doctor, a guy in a white coat, or that might have been mixed up with her next memory: waking up in hospital.

‘
I asked them how long I’d been in hospital, and they told me three weeks. I couldn’t believe it. Three weeks – lost. Apparently, I had woken up a few times, but I couldn’t remember it at all. That was one of the first things they asked me: what do you remember?

'At first, I couldn’t remember anything. I had no idea what had happened to me. They told me amnesia was common among people who’ve suffered a trauma, without telling me what the trauma actually was. I heard the doctors and nurses whispering about me. They told me I needed to rest and get strong before I could leave. So I let them look after me.’

She stared through the window at the London street. A couple walked by, hand-in-hand. A homeless man begged for change across the road. Red buses and black cabs. After sixteen years in Boston it all seemed so strange.

‘
It took me a couple of days to remember the fire and Stephen. I think I started screaming when I remembered. All the nurses came running and, well, I guess I was sedated. When I woke up again there was this man who came and sat by my bed and talked to me about how I felt. I assumed he was a therapist. He told me I had missed the funeral. He kept asking me what else I could remember. I told him that I could remember going into the Unit, and then the fire. That was it. You know, thinking about it now, I got the impression he seemed relieved when I told him that.’

Paul was shaking his head. He looked as if he was going to cry.

‘
Are you OK?’ Kate asked.

‘
Sorry. You just reminded me of the funeral – it was so horrible, knowing that Stephen was in that coffin, so badly burned that my folks couldn’t even identify him. It had to be done by his dental records…’

Kate felt her own eyes fill again. When would she stop feeling so over-emotional?

‘
Go on,’ said Paul. ‘I’m fine now.’

They smiled watery smiles at each other.

‘
I stayed in the hospital for another three weeks. It seems like a dream now. White walls, white sheets, people in white coats like angels coming to see me and talk to me in quiet voices. They brought me books and puzzles to do. No TV or radio. Great food.’

‘
So it wasn’t a normal NHS hospital?’

‘
No. They said it was a private clinic. Actually, no-one told me very much at all. Whenever I asked questions I’d be told that I needn’t worry, that I was in safe hands. And the thing was, I was so tired that I didn’t have the energy to ask too many questions. There were other patients there. I would see them sometimes if I got up to go for a walk around, although I was always escorted and never got the chance to talk to anybody else. I heard a woman crying in the night a few times. Huh, the others patients probably heard me crying in the night. Though most of the time I felt alright.’

‘
Did they have you on drugs?’

‘
I was given a ton of pills every day. I was told they would help me get better quicker, and help my memory come back.’

‘
And what about your aunt? Did she visit you?’

‘
I asked to see her and they said it was difficult. Apparently, according to them, she’d been to visit me when I was first brought in, which I obviously had no recollection of. Eventually, after I kept asking, they let her visit me. She seemed uneasy. She told me she’d asked for me to be transferred to the local hospital, but that the doctors had told her I was better off here, in the private clinic. Aunt Lil was of the generation that trusted doctors one hundred per cent, so she didn’t argue. And she said that Leonard himself had phoned her and reassured her I was in good hands.’

Another memory came to her. ‘Leonard came to see me towards the end of my stay in the hospital.’

‘
What was his surname?’

‘
Bainbridge.’

Paul tapped the name into the search engine and found a page about Leonard Bainbridge. ‘An obituary. He died two years ago. Cancer. There’s a paragraph here about the CRU but it’s just the usual brief history stuff. It says he left behind a wife, Jean, but had no children. So what happened when this Bainbridge guy came to see you?’

Kate felt sad for the loss of the avuncular, warm-hearted man she’d only met a handful of times, but who had made a deep impression on her. She stared into space, picturing the scene when Leonard had come to visit.

CHAPTER 12

1990

Leonard perched on a hard chair beside her bed, his smile adding warmth to the room. He was a distinguished-looking man in a tweed suit, with sharp blue eyes, a head full of white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard.

Now that he sat here beside her she could remember his visits to her parents when they lived in the big house on the South Downs. Kate had been eight or nine. When Kate’s father heard that Leonard was coming to see them he became quite agitated, nipping into Lewes in the car to buy proper coffee and fresh bread. He sent Kate into the garden to choose flowers. Kate protested – she would rather see flowers in the ground than in a vase – but her father insisted. She doubted if this old bloke, this Leonard, whoever he was, would even notice, so she was surprised when the third thing he commented on, after Kate’s prettiness and the well-being of her parents, was the vase of flowers sitting on the mantel and how beautiful they were.

‘
Though I’ve always thought flowers might be happier in the earth. Don’t you agree, Kate?’ he said.

It was as if he’d read her mind, and from that moment she found him fascinating. She was so glad that Miranda had gone to play at a friend’s that day – she could do without any competition from her cute little sister. When Leonard and her father went into the garden to talk, she shadowed them, trying to eavesdrop. Dad turned and told her to run along, but Leonard beckoned her closer and produced a chocolate bar, a Curlywurly, from his jacket pocket. She retreated to the house where she shared it with Charlie, their Weimaraner.

Lying in her bed in the clinic, she said, ‘You gave me chocolate.’

‘
Did I?’

‘
Yes. I think you were trying to get rid of me.’

He laughed and patted her hand where it lay on the edge of the mattress. ‘I expect I was trying to make you like me.’

‘
It worked. I always looked forward to your visits after that. Not because of the chocolate,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I was intrigued by you. You seemed like the grandfather I always wanted. Kind, and wise.’

Something about the way he reacted to that made her think she’d said the wrong thing, and she blushed. He appeared troubled, but then the benign smile returned and he reached into his inner pocket and brought out a brown envelope. He handed it to her.

She studied it warily. ‘What is it?’

‘
Your exam results.’

‘
Oh my God. I totally forgot about this. How could it have just slipped my mind? I feel like I’m losing my mind.’

He patted her hand. ‘Having problems with your memory, are you? Hmm, well, you’ve been through a lot, Kate. I’m not surprised things are…hazy.’

Kate ran a finger along the edge of the envelope. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘
Don’t be. There’s no need.’

‘
I haven’t thought about Oxford or my exams for months, but when you gave me this I suddenly realised something: that I want this degree. I really need it.’

His voice was hushed. ‘Open the envelope, Kate.’

Her hands shook as she slid a fingernail beneath the flap and tore open the envelope. She removed the sheet of paper that she’d imagined herself receiving so many times, back in the past, in her old life. She could hardly bear to look.

‘
Well?’ he said. ‘Are you happy?’

‘
A First. Bloody hell – sorry – I got a First.’ She gazed in wonder at the sheet of paper.

‘
With distinction in virology. Yes, I knew already. You’re a brilliant young woman, Kate.’

Tears crept down her cheeks and splashed on the backs of her hands. She was laughing and crying at the same time. A First! With a distinction! She wanted to call everyone she knew to yell the news down the phone, to dance in the streets and scream ‘Look what I did’ to all those snobs she’d encountered at Oxford, all those snooty men who thought women couldn’t be scientists, that Marie Curie was the rule-proving exception.

Leonard grinned, and forgetting herself, Kate leaned over and hugged him.

‘
Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ve made your shoulder wet.’

‘
I assume those are tears of happiness.’

‘
Yes. Yes.’ But then she thought, If only Stephen was here to share my joy, and her tears turned into tears of sadness. Leonard offered her a handkerchief, so she dried her eyes, and he waved at her to keep it. Sniffing and trying to compose herself, she looked at Leonard and had this overwhelming urge to ask him something – but when she opened her mouth, the question had vanished. She knew there was something she needed to ask him, not just about the fire and Stephen, or the Unit closing down, but something that had happened before, while she was staying at the Unit. If only she could drag those memories from her useless brain.

Before she could get upset about it, Leonard said, ‘I have something very important to talk to you about, Kate,’ and she straightened her back and concentrated.

He said, ‘It makes me very proud to see that distinction in virology. And I know how proud your father would be. Viruses are one of mankind’s greatest enemies, and to be involved in their study, in the fight to understand them and find ways to stop those harmful strains, well, I’ve always believed that this is one of the most important scientific fields. One of the most exciting too. And things have moved on so much since I was young.’ He saw her attention wander and said quickly, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell all about what it was like when I was a lad.’