The Chosen Seed (13 page)

He stared at the mass of papers and documents that surrounded him. Somewhere in those piles there were answers, and yet every step forward raised more questions. He had been on this quest so long that he’d forgotten more questions than he’d ever had answers, though the basic queries still remained, haunting him:
who, why, how
? And how much longer? The only two things he knew for certain were that they weren’t like us, and they’d been here for ever.
The
who
and the
why
were responsible for starting his sanity cracking, he knew that. He was slipping through the gaps. He just needed to find the answers, then make people believe. He needed there to be a point to all these years spent hoarding. He thought he might cry again.

A sudden bang on the front door made him drop his coffee cup, spilling the lukewarm drink all over his trousers.

‘Dr Cornell?’ It was a rough voice, demanding. He moved cautiously into the hallway and stared at the door with dread.

‘If you’re from the council,’ he started, happy to hear indignation rather than fear, ‘then you can’t come in. You have no right—’

A crash came from behind him and he turned, startled. At the other end of the corridor, a booted foot could be seen as it kicked the back door open. Dr Cornell mewled slightly. It had finally happened:
they
had come for him. He looked back at the front door. He couldn’t get out that way – even if there weren’t men on the other side it would take him too long to undo all the bolts and locks. Why hadn’t he taken the same measures with the back door? What had they done, climbed over the back wall? The gate was long gone, he’d bricked that up years ago. His stomach turned to water. A heavy figure came towards him, cutting through the stream of sunshine from the back.

‘You can’t be in here, this is private prop—’ He didn’t get to finish the sentence as a thick arm wrapped around his thin neck and covered his mouth.

‘It’s like a fucking a junkyard out there.’ A second man walked towards him through the kitchen, pouring liquid from a small bottle onto a piece of cloth. He didn’t look at Dr Cornell but at the brute who was holding him so firmly. ‘I told you to wait for me. Here.’ He handed over the cloth.
Dr Cornell’s heart was racing so fast he thought it would burst. His mind was pure white panic as a hand pressed the cloth against his mouth. He tried not to breathe, he really did, but still the world started to blacken at the edges and his head swam.

In front of him, the man in the black leather coat put the bottle back in his pocket and peered into the study.

‘Fuck me,’ he muttered. ‘We’re going to need a bigger van.’

Chapter Sixteen

‘I
brought doughnuts.’ Hask closed the door of the small conference room behind him and smiled. ‘Cliché, I know, but also very tasty and marginally less messy on a suit than an almond croissant first thing in the morning.’

He was glad they’d found a space away from the hubbub. Ramsey and Armstrong both had dark rings around their eyes and neither was standing as tall as normal. He couldn’t blame them for their tiredness. The news of Blackmore’s poisoning had broken two days ago, and there were plenty of accusations, spoken and otherwise, flying around. If it hadn’t been Bowman or one of his criminal associates who had organised the murder, then perhaps it had been the police, protecting themselves. That wasn’t something the public would have a problem believing, not after everything that had happened in recent months, and it was an accusation that Paddington Green Police Station really didn’t need.

‘I could do without being the lead in this case,’ Charles Ramsey grumbled. ‘There’s enough shit going on here as it is – and now the pressure’s back on to find Jones. As if I’m some kind of magician.’

‘Maybe they think Paddington has something to prove,’ Armstrong said.

‘Yeah, and they surely do,’ Ramsey agreed, ‘but why pick on the clean officers to do it?’

It was good to see that even if they weren’t exactly bonding, Armstrong and Ramsey were on the same side.

‘No, it’s my fault,’ Hask said cheerfully. ‘They need me on it, and I told the Commissioner that I wanted to work with you rather than start afresh with new people. Plus they’re already paying me to consult on the elusive Mr Jones’ case, so I suppose they think they might keep the bill down if I don’t have to factor in travel time between stations. You can thank me later.’ He smiled, and then rubbed his hands together before pulling a doughnut out of the box. ‘So, what have we got?’

Armstrong stared at him for a moment and then sighed. ‘We’ve been through all the cases of Strain II diagnosed in the past six months. There’s no one coming up who fits our man’s description, not from the corporations that insist on it, the hospitals, the private clinics, or even those Portakabin testing centres that turn up in the estates. And since it’s illegal to do anonymous testing now, I don’t know where else we can check. I’ve got some people going back another six months – maybe we’ll find him there.’

‘You can have them look,’ Hask washed down his doughnut with coffee, ‘and it’s worth doing just so you look like you’re ticking all the boxes, but I doubt you’ll come up with anything. This spate of attacks – how long has it been going on, do you think?’

‘Michaela Wheeler said she was infected at the end of October,’ Ramsey said. ‘But he was working with the junkies and homeless before then. Let’s say the beginning of October as a ballpark date.’

‘So two to three months. He should be well within your original six-month range for diagnosis. This man is arrogant. And he’s bitter. He would have started “spreading God’s word”, or
his
word, or both if he sees himself as the
not-so-good Lord, pretty soon after he learned of his own illness. He can call it what he wants, but this is a case of
I’m going down and you’re all coming with me
. That kind of thinking kicks in fast – it’s a knee-jerk reaction. If he’d been choosing particular targets, people he had personal grudges against, for example, then I might say different, but I’d put my money on this man getting to work quickly. Despite his apparent cool, he’s very, very angry, even if he’s conned himself into believing that he’s above that.’

‘So you’re saying he knows he’s got the bug but he hasn’t been diagnosed?’ Ramsey frowned.

‘He’s a smart,’ Hask reached for a second doughnut, ‘and apparently sophisticated man. He definitely has an ego. Perhaps he self-diagnosed.’

‘I don’t buy it.’ Ramsey shook his head. ‘The early symptoms could be down to any number of diseases – after all, no one dies from AIDS; you die from something else that your body can’t fight. I don’t care who this guy is, he’d have got himself checked out. Surely the bigger the ego, the less likely he’d think it would be that he would have something terrible like Strain II?’

‘Good point.’ Ramsey was smart, Hask thought. ‘But he didn’t get checked here. Could he have done it out of the country?’

‘There is another way he could have known – something else I’ve been checking out.’

Hask and Ramsey both looked over at the young sergeant.

‘What if someone he knew got diagnosed as infected? Someone he’d slept with but he’d thought to be clean?’

Hask slowly nodded. ‘That’s possible. And if he’d started getting symptoms, then he’d know what it was. I wonder if he’s privately wealthy? It’s a tall ask, but you might want to check with those corporations that do the bug tests, find
out whether they’ve had any high-ranking staff member suddenly quit with no warning.’ He smiled at the sergeant. ‘Good reasoning on the diagnosis, but I’m not sure how much it helps us.’

‘You might be wrong there.’ Armstrong shuffled through a stack of papers in a thick file. He glanced up. ‘I had another comparison done. Thank fuck we’ve got city-wide co-operation because this would have taken bloody months otherwise. A grimmer one.’

‘Go on,’ Ramsey said.

‘I got a list of all the Strain II deaths in the past six months and then cross-referenced it with the diagnoses. We know that the bug he’s infecting people with is somehow far more aggressive – not a mutation, according to the doctors, but somehow more virulent. Don’t ask me to explain the science – in fact, don’t ask
them
to explain the science, because they don’t know how it works either – but that seems to be the case, even if it isn’t killing our man quite as fast.’

‘Stick to the point, Armstrong,’ Ramsey said. ‘My brain is too tired for tangents.’

‘Sorry. My point is this: anyone infected by him, before he started doing it wilfully or since, has a much shorter life expectancy than a normal Strain II case. With normal Strain II, you have maybe a year, or eighteen months if you’re in good heath, right? But these new cases are deteriorating fast, and on a daily basis. Even Michaela Wheeler, who was both young and healthy, isn’t expected to last beyond January.’

‘I take it you’ve found something?’ Hask asked.

‘Yeah.’ Armstrong pulled a photo out of the file. ‘I think I might have done. But you’re not going to like it.’ He placed the picture in the middle of the table where both Ramsey
and Hask could see it. Pale blond hair falling over a slightly chubby, cherubic face.

‘He’s just a kid,’ Ramsey said, not quite hiding the fear in voice.

‘Joey Brannigan. Eight years old. He died of Strain II two weeks ago.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Carry on,’ Hask said. His mind was ticking over, already a step ahead. ‘I’m presuming this story gets worse?’

‘Yep. Joey Brannigan’s a care-home kid; he was taken by Social Services when he was five after running away from an abusive family home. He showed early signs of TB, but other than that he was clean. He was fostered when he was six, but got put back into the system seven months ago when the foster mother got pregnant. He was put into a private care home in Lambeth. Social Services tested him on the way in: his lungs were weak, a result of that early TB, but he had put on weight and other than that was looking healthy. When he suddenly fell very ill in October they gave him a routine Hep-and-TB test and bang, there it was: Strain II.’

‘How?’ Ramsey asked.

‘At first the care home manager tried to claim that his previous test must have been misread, or mixed up with someone else’s, but Social Services weren’t having any of that. Apparently they’d had concerns about the welfare of the children in the—’

‘—Happy Smiles Care Home?’ Ramsey broke in. ‘Caroline Hurke’s place?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Have I missed something?’ Hask asked.

‘You must have,’ Ramsey said. ‘It was all over the news: she was arrested a month ago and charged with supplying
minors. She ran a small home for difficult children in the state’s care.’

‘Yeah,’ Armstrong said, ‘the alarm bells started ringing because the children all became
too
manageable: turned out they were terrified – being abused, and kept mildly sedated to stop them kicking up about it. Little Joe’s test results finally made Social Services sit up and take notice, and once they started looking more closely they discovered all the kids showed physical evidence of sexual abuse.’ He swallowed, hard. ‘They were all under ten.’

There was a momentary silence while they all considered this.

Then Ramsey said quietly, ‘I don’t remember reading about a Strain II case.’

‘Lambeth Social Services have kept it quiet, at least so far. They figured things were bad enough without the public getting hold of that as well. So far they’ve managed to keep it out of the papers, but when Hurke’s case goes to trial next year it
will
come out. They got a statement from Joey Brannigan before he died.’

‘And how does this piece of shit account for poor Joey Brannigan’s Strain II infection?’ Ramsey asked.

‘Interestingly, she hasn’t. She’s given up other clients, but not the one who requested Joey. Prosecution have stopped pushing – they’ve got more than enough to convict her – and Brannigan’s family don’t care. You know how it is, sir—’ Armstrong looked at Ramsey a little apologetically. ‘You never get the whole lot of them if there’s a paedophile ring. Time and resources are too thin.’

‘I think we should pay Ms Hurke a visit,’ DI Ramsey growled, his eyes still on the photograph.

‘I’ve already primed Holloway.’

‘People in her situation stay silent out of fear.’ Hask looked
thoughtfully at the photo. ‘We have to make sure she’s more afraid of us than she is of whoever killed Joey Brannigan. That shouldn’t be too hard; I should imagine that she’s feeling isolated and paranoid by now.’

He grinned and took another doughnut from the bag for the journey. Waste not, want not. At least it was finally beginning to feel like they were getting somewhere.

Caroline Hurke had a face that matched her personality: deeply unpleasant. She was an overly thin woman in her fifties, and hard lines pulled down her mouth, leaving her with a permanent sour frown – not that she’d had much inclination to smile recently. Her eyes looked bitter too; Hask could see clearly exactly how Caroline Hurke felt about her current situation:
she
was the victim here; she was the one left to carry the can when all she’d done was facilitate – she’d never touched the brats herself … There was an angry whine of
it’s not fair
coming clearly from her. It was all there in the expression. Hask decided he didn’t like her very much at all.

‘I have nothing to say about that. I don’t remember.’ She leaned back in the chair and folder her arms defiantly.

‘Of course you remember.’ Ramsey smiled. ‘And you will tell us.’

‘No, I won’t.’ She looked like some awful parody of a sulking teenager being told off by a headmaster. ‘I didn’t tell them, and I won’t tell you.’

‘If Joey’s dead, then maybe he is too.’

‘He’s not dead.’ She smiled, but under it was a death mask of terror. ‘You know that and I know that. We get the papers in here too, you know. I’m only on remand, remember?’

Hask felt the tension crackling between them. She’d recognised the e-fit: so she really had procured children for the man they were hunting.

‘Remand’s a funny thing, isn’t it?’ Armstrong hadn’t sat down. Now he leaned against the wall next to the table. ‘It’s like you’re a prisoner and yet not – it’s amazing how slack security can get in remand …’