The Victoria Vanishes (34 page)

She panicked. She co
uld think of no-one else but Dr
Masters to discuss the matt
er with, but even he had proved
elusive. Suddenly, it seemed,
the events of the past had re
turned
to
disturb
her
sleep

The person she should have called, she realised, was Arthur Bryant. The problem was that she liked him, and enlisting his aid meant revealing the full extent of her complicity.

The corridor seemed to le
ad nowhere. Its end wall was en
tirely blank, the skirting board merely running around it to connect to two opposing doors. A marble bust of a forgotten plunderer of antiquities stood on a discoloured marble plinth. Jackie checked the number on the slip of paper in her hand and counted down the doors. She knocked on 2135 and waited, but there was no answer. The handle turned easily, so she entered.

The room was lined with plans chests, upon which were piled tagged sections of stone, statues patiently awaiting reassembly. Masters was seated beneath the single cone of
light from his green enamel reading lamp, intently writing, his eyes so close to the page that his nose almost touched the paper.

'Harold?' She took a step further into the darkened room. 'I'm sorry, am I disturbing you?'

'No. I suppose I was half expecting you.' He sounded confused, as if he had just woken up to find himself in a strange place. He sat back in his chair, stretching his spine. 'You lose track of time down here. It's terrible for the posture.' He did not rise to greet her.
'How are you, Jackie?'

'I expected to see you at the Yorkshire Grey this week.'

'Oh, the Immortals. It completely slipped my mind. I've had a lot to worry about lately. I suppose you've heard something. It was inevitable that you would.'

She came forward into the light, setting her handbag on the edge of the swamped desk. 'I haven't been able to concentrate on anything else all day. I don't know what to think. I tried calling Jocelyn, but I couldn't get any answer.'

'She's also dead.' Masters seemed to lose interest, and re-turned to his writing.

'That's absurd.'

'Absurd or not, it's a fact,' he said impatiently. 'She died in the Old Bell tavern in Fleet Street. Rather, I should say she was killed, just like the others.'

'In
another
pub...it
doesn't
make
sense.'

'Oh, I'm afraid it does.' Masters placed a ruler on the page and carefully drew a line in blue ink. 'That was the way he worked.'

'But that just leaves me, Mary and Jennifer. I mean, out of the mothers.'

'You weren't real mothers or even surrogate ones; you were little more than day nurses.'

'We became attached to our charges. How could they have expected us not to?'

'Well, you shouldn't have. There's no room for sentiment where science is concerned. He would have come after the rest of you as well, but the police stopped him. He's dead.'

'My God.' Jackie drew out a chair opposite Masters and sat down heavily. 'I can't believe somebody would have done this. Was it really so important that we knew?'

'Do
n't be so nai
ve;
of cours
e it's important. You can't com
promise in a situation like this.'

'Then I don't understand why the press aren't making more of it. Surely people want the facts?'

'Really?' He looked up at her now and slowly removed his reading glasses. 'Don't you think it's in the ministry's interests not to let it get out?'

'We still live in a democracy, Harold, no matter how tainted it's become of late. Things like this can't—'

'Things like this,' he cut across her, 'happen all the time in places where the powerful gather. What about Litvinenko? His dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane was poisoned with polonium-two-ten, for God's sake. A series of government murder plots involving Russian
spies, death and a trail of ra
dioactive contamination? It sounds more suited to the plot of
a James Bond film, but it happened right here. Nobody cares about a relapsed psychotic putting a few alcoholic middle-aged legal secretaries to sleep. Ho
w many times have stories about
re-offending
"care-in-the-community"
patients made the papers for a couple of days before being forgotten?'

'How do you know so much about it?' she asked, suddenly suspicious. She had once valued Masters's friendship, had comforted him during his wife'
s decline and death, but his de
fensive attitude was starting to disturb her.

'The MOD re-hired me on a freelance contract.'

'I thought you said you would never go back there.'

'They had an academic problem that I found intriguing. I said I'd help them out.'

She glanced nervously back at the door, and he caught her looking.
'Why would you do that?' she asked.
'What happened to you?'

'You may ask, what is the purpose of an academic? What are we for? I thought it was to
make discoveries, to render vis
ible the lines that bind civilisations. Then one day I made a discovery that called into question everything for which I thought I stood. It's not just the slow accumulation of empirical data, you know; we are granted epiphanies occasionally. We may even pronounce them to the world, but like the Oracle, we are doomed never to be believed.'

'What did you do for th
e Ministry of Defence?' she per
sisted.

'There's such a thing as accountability, Jackie. The research teams there couldn't be seen to—they needed a solution to a thorny ethical problem. You must understand. I didn't know any of them except you, of course.' He pushed his writing pad back with careful deliberation.

She spoke in shocked gravity.
'What did you do?'

'Society must abide by the ru
les it creates, otherwise we de
scend into moral anarchy.' He spoke with the clarity of a man who had something to hide.
'You know how the law works in cases like this. You were sworn to secrecy, and now you're in breach of your contracts. The documents you signed—you
all
signed—are still legally binding. And you were paid well. Do you want to betray your country?'

'It was blood money, and you know it!'

Masters sighed. 'This is all water under the bridge.

Everything has been cleared up now. There's no reason why any of it should ever get out.'

'It will get out, Harold. Mary and Jennifer are still here.
I'm
still here,
'Jackie persisted.
'I'm still alive.'

'No, I'm afraid you're not,' said Masters, wearily rising from behind his desk.

43

BENEATH THE ANTIQUITIES

T

he British Museum was the oldest public museum on the planet.

It had been built to house the purchases and gifts collected from around the world by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, items of such antiquity that appreciating the convoluted circumstances of their history had become a challenge in itself. Almost every exhibit told an extraordinary story, from the graceful Portland Vase, produced before the birth of Christ only to be smashed into two hundred pieces by a drunken sailor in 1845 and then painstakingly reassembled, to the Lindow Man, a two-thousand-year-old peasant preserved in the acids of a Cheshire peat bog.

It was not a particularly friendly or accessible museum. Artefacts withheld their sec
rets, and the weight of lost em
pires hung heavily about the remains. A mere stroll through chambers of glass cabinets taught little, and left no impression; the museum worked best wh
en no more than half a dozen ob
jects were examined at one time.

Janice Longbright and Jack Renfield had managed to get themselves admitted, but t
he girl who had opened the side
door thought Masters had gone for the night, and went off to look for him in the direction of the Egyptian Hall.

'I'm not going to wait for her,' said Renfield.
'She could be up to something dodgy. He'll be out of the toilet window before we can grab hold of
him.'

'He's a senior curator and lecturer at one of the world's most prestigious institutions,' said Longbright, studying the Grecian statues at the top of the stairs.
'He doesn't leap out of lavatory windows. You have a suspicious mind.'

'I'm a bloody copper. Come on, let's have a shufti. You're go-ing to have trouble keeping up with me in those shoes. I can't believe they let you get awa
y with breach of uniform regula
tions like that.'

'I've always worn heels on duty; it's my look. Mr Bryant says he believes in the foolishness of consistency.' Longbri
ght reluc
tantly followed her opposite number up the south staircase. Dominating the entire landing was a white marble discus thrower, devoid of its correct setting, out of place and time.

'You don't have to get all toffee-nosed about it, Janice. I know where you come from—you're South London working-class just like me. Either you want to catch a lawbreaker, in which case you do everything within your power to do so, or you're happy to let him get away.'

'We don't usually do a lot of running about,' she said lamely. Renfield made her realise how sheltered she had been at the PCU. There had been one hundred and eighty murders in the capital over the last year. Two and a half thousand reported rapes. Nearly two hundred thousand instances of violence against the person. And nearly one million men and women in the Met. Perhaps now she would have to go back into the force and deal with the crimes
they
faced every day of their working lives.

'Do you know what this bloke looks like, Janice?'

'I'd recognise him, but you're going the wrong way. He'll be in the basement at the back of the building, where the researchers' offices are.' She hunted about for the correct avenue. 'Down here.'

'This isn't the way my old squad would have gone about it,' grumbled Renfield. 'If she's with Masters, do we take them both in for questioning? As far as I know, they haven't broken any law.'

'We talk to them honestly, Renfield;
that's what the PCU does best. It's not always about following rules.'

'Yeah, I figured that much out. This geezer's not dangerous, is he?' Renfield tried the door opposite, but it was locked.
'She's not at risk? Not that I'm bothered. If we find 'em and he cuts up rough we'll be all right, 'cause you're big, I'm stocky and he's just a bookworm. Now which way?'

'Left here.' Hopping to pull her shoe strap back in place, she led them along a harshly lit passage painted in searing stripes of cadmium yellow.

'How do you know where to go?'

'Mr Bryant has a lot of friends who use these offices. Restorers, engravers, historians.' She tried a heavy oak door as they passed, but it failed to open. 'He sounded worried, and when he gets like that I know there's something going on in his head that he hasn't told us about. I think Masters should be in one of the chambers along here.'

'You all seem to have so much respect for him, but he doesn't
do
a lot, does he, your Mr Bryant?'

'People either get him or they don't; he's old school. He does things quietly, in his own way. Doesn't like to waste words or expend unnecessary energy. He believes in unfashionable concepts—grace, calm, gentility, tolerance, understatement.'

'Then he's out of step with the world, and he'll get trodden on.'

'I thought you were going to try to understand.' 'I'm still biting my tongue sometimes, okay? What are you doing?'

'I'm calling him.' She pressed an ear hard against her cell phone.
'The reception's terrible down here. Can you hear me? Yes, we're there now, Masters is supposed to be somewhere nearby. What? We'll try it, but you need to get here as soon as you can.'

'What did he say?' asked Renfield as Longbright closed her cell phone.

'He says we're to try rooms twenty-one hundred to twenty-one forty.' Longbright pointed to the corridor ahead. And he thinks Jackie Quinten's life is in the balance.'

44

ACCOUNTABILITY

W

ait, we have to go back,' said Longbright. All the passages had begun t
o look the same. 'We're too far
over.'