The Victoria Vanishes (35 page)

'Do you know where he is, or don't you?' Renfield looked around. The buzzing overhead panels bathed the halls in sea-green light.

'The corridors are supposed to be painted differently in this section.' She turned about.
'We've gone wrong somewhere.'

'We need to go back to the big marble stairwell, where the bloke with the Frisbee was. You can work it out again from there.'

Renfield broke into a run, forcing her to keep up. They reached a narrow staff staircase and he took the steps three at a time, as if he had finally come to terms with the idea that Bryant was not playing the fool, and that a murder could only be halted by their intervention. She followed closely behind, almost slamming into him as he stopped dead and listened.

They both heard the voice, too loud for normal speech in a museum. Renfield continued
back along the passageway, put
ting on an extra spurt of speed when he spotted something she had yet to see.

He knows something bad is about to happen,
she thought. She had seen this instinctive talent, born of experience and an al-most supernatural prescience, in just a handful of policemen. It was the last thing she expected to encounter in a man like Renfield.
He's one of us,
she realised, surprised to recognise her own ability.

Jackie Quinten made a run for it but wasn't as young as she thought, and her ankle twisted
beneath her weight on the slip
pery tiled floor. She fell hard.

Masters didn't come after
her. If anything, he seemed mor
tified at having to sort out the mess he now found himself in. He was fumbling about in his desk drawer, looking for some-thing.

'Please,' he called after her.
'I just came up with the solution, it was a theoretical conundrum, that's all. I didn't want to be involved. I'm not cut out for this sort of thing. My career here is over, did I tell you? The museum is letting me go. Some new people have come in, and they don't approve of my lecture style. I'm too partisan. It seems
you can't have opinions in pub
lic these days; it's not sensitive enough. I don't get the audience figures they want. I have to do other things now in order to survive. But this is too much to expect of anyone, let alone me.' He found the object of his search and removed it from the drawer, a long red and green tartan scarf.
'I've been looking for this everywhere. Please, you must
n't be frightened. It'll do nei
ther of us any good.'

He watched as she climbed to her feet and hobbled to the door, then came around the desk to her, holding up the scarf.

'I'm afraid I don't have any
thing else I can use,' he apolo
gised, wrapping the scarf around her exposed throat and pulling it tight. 'I promise you, I've never done anything like this before. I don't want to do it now, but there's no other way out of the situation. Of course I admit it's my fault. I didn't think the police would close in on Anthony so quickly, and I certainly never imagined he would start leaving them clues. Now I have to clear up the mess he's created or they'll deal with me, too. You do understand, don't you?'

With the fiery noose of the scarf across her throat, Jackie could only stare helplessly up at her captor. His height gave him an immense advantage;
he was abl
e to keep her off bal
ance as he dragged her back into the corridor toward the stair-case.

'When you're young, you imagine rising to the top of your profession, but of course you never can.' He was almost talking to himself now, paltering in a plea to be understood. 'There's always someone above you, someone behind you, someone to watch out for, someone to answer to. Do you know how far up this chain goes? Further than you'd ever dream. There's no-one who can help me, no sympathy for what I've done, and why should there be? We live in a society that can only function by finding someone to blame, and they will rightly blame me. My solution to their problem was brilliant in its simplicity, but of course things never stay simple. I found them a madman, and now that he has failed I am being forced to finish his work.'

The more she struggled, the tighter the noose grew. He yanked on the scarf, as one would pull on a dog's chain to rein it in. She fought to stay upright, knowing that if she fell she would be strangled to death.

'It's a matter of accountability. Contract out the work and it seems almost inevitable that the person you've entrusted it to will let you down. In the old days it was
"Never mind, old chap, you did your best." Now it's "Fix it yourself or be prepared to take the blame for everything." Are you familiar with George Orwell? You remember in
1984,
how Winston Smith tells Julia "We are the dead"? That's how I feel now.'

He yanked hard on the scarf, causing her to gasp in pain. Her heels left ragged black lines along the cream linoleum floor.

'Once I was a brilliant academic with a soaring future ahead of me. When you agree to do something you know to be wrong, you tell yourself it will just happen once. Then you find yourself doing it just to remain afloat. Finally you become just like them—one of the dead, a walking cadaver obeying orders in order to stay alive.'

He hauled her to the edge of the balustrade and kicked her legs out from under her, easily holding her squirming body against the stonework. Jackie felt her centre of gravity shifting as he pulled her over the edge. They were only two floors up, but he was tipping her upside down to cause the maximum impact. She felt her stomach flop, as though she was boarding a funfair ride.

Her greying auburn hair fell over her face, obscuring her sight. His hand slipped between her thighs, sliding over her tights, so that he was holding her almost vertically. She knew that the fall would kill her. She could only fear that it would not be instant.

They were above Masters, Longbright saw that now. They had passed along the passage at the very top of the building, aligned with the roof of the Great Court, to emerge in the service area at the top of the stairwell. The academic was diagonally below them, trying to unhook Mrs Quinten's legs from the balustrade, but now her right hand had gained purchase on the rail, so he was pummelling at h
er back and stomach in a desper
ate attempt to make her release her grip.

The impossibility of the situation was enough to paralyse Longbright. If they made their presence known to Masters he would either release Mrs Quinten, allowing her to fall under her own weight, or attack her with greater violence.

She was still trying to reach a decision when Renfield threw his broad frame straight down the stairs in a foolhardy but spectacular airborne rugby tackle that slammed Masters to the steps so hard that it cracked his ribs and punched the air from his lungs.

Renfield climbed to his feet, unfazed, and reached over the balcony just as Mrs Quinten's grip failed, dragging her back across the balustrade like a sack of flour. He fell onto the stairs beside Masters, with Mrs Quinten lying on top of him. It was undignified, but seemed to have done the trick.

'You make one sudden move, sunshine,' he told the inert doctor, 'and I'll tear your bleeding head off.' But with the scarf loosened from her throat, Mrs Quinten suddenly started to scream and thrash about in shock, and in the brief
moments it took Renfield to quell the tangle of limbs, Masters had risen and run into the gallery straight ahead of
them.

Renfield abandoned his charge and was following now, but Longbright had the lead. She closed in behind Masters as he blundered past the Cetole, the only surviving English musical instrument of the Middle Ages, resplendent in its glass case.

He was limping, clutching at his cracked rib cage, and she caught up with him in the clock room, by Congreve's rolling-ball timepiece of 1810. He flung out his right arm with such suddenness that she was taken by surprise. The blow to her face knocked her head back, sending her to the floor, but she was up on her feet even before Renfield appeared in the door-way.

'No, Jack,' she told the sergeant.
'He's mine.'

Masters was more shocked than anyone when Longbright slammed into him, pressing down on the fractured ribs in his chest. Masters yelped painfully and fell back, hitting the case behind with his full weight. Inside, the bulbous black-and-white vase tilted onto its rim.

Longbright stepped back in horror.
'Oh no,' she said quietly. 'The Portland Vase. Not again.' The priceless antiquity had survived two millennia only to be shattered once before. In one of the greatest restoration feats ever attempted in modern times, it had been made whole once more. She watched the vase in horror as it rolled around
on the edge of its base, teeter
ing on its plinth.

The vase had passed its point of equilibrium, and tipped over.

The glass case was not wide enough to allow it to properly fall, and the vase was held at a forty-five-degree angle, settling safely as the wounded academi
c slid down to the floor and be
gan to cry for his own shattered life.

45

THE METHOD

I
t's all in here,' said April, tapping the rescued folders.
And it's all about babies. Or rather, mothers and babies.' Ye Olde Mitre tavern in Ely Court, Hatton Garden, was a godsend to the nine drenched, exhausted men and women who found themselves together on a miserably wet Saturday night. The members of the PCU had nowhere else to go. Alma Sorrowbridge had ban
ned them from Bryant's house be
cause Colin Bimsley had tracked something nasty onto the carpet before knocking over a jug less unique, but with more sentimental value, than the Portland Vase.

April, Meera and Coli
n might have uncovered the docu
mentation needed to resolve the investigation, but Renfield was nonplussed to find himself the hero of the hour. Uncomfortable with the attention, he spent most of his time at the bar, returning with fresh drinks whenever he spotted an empty glass on the table. He had already bought Longbright three pints of Guinness. He liked a woman who could drink pints.

'We're still piecing togeth
er a timeline of events,' April
warned, spreading the printouts and typed pages across the beer-stained table. The detective constables had elected her to translate their elements into something resembling a narrative. As far as we can tell, it begins with Dr Peter Jukes, chief scientist for chemical and biological defence at the MOD's Porton Down laboratory.'

'Jukes?' repeated Kershaw. 'What has he got to do with all this?'

'If you recall, Giles, we knew he was a colleague of Jocelyn Roquesby, and that he ha
d drowned while he was still em
ployed as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. It made sense that she met Jukes at work. She might even have had an affair with him. He was single,
and looks pretty fit in his pho
tographs.'

'But she wasn't at MOD—'

'No, like the others, Mrs Roquesby worked for Theseus Research in King's Cross, one of the companies to whom the ministry outsourced contra
cts. The women were legal secre
taries, nothing more than that. Jackie Quinten was formerly employed there. She'd retired, but had agreed to be pressed back into service on a part-time basis. Her security rating was still intact, after all, but what brought her back? Well, they were seven middle-aged women who all appeared to share something in common. None
of them were able to have chil
dren of their own.'

'Wait,' said Banbury, 'doesn't Mrs Roquesby have a daughter?'

'Eleanor Roquesby is adopted,' April corrected. 'And Jackie Quinten's child is her stepson,' Bryant pointed out.

'One of the MOD's chief remits was—and no doubt still is—to prevent a chemical ter
rorist attack from occurring in
London and the other major cities of Great Britain,'April continued. 'You remember the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in Japan? In 1995, they attempted to hasten the apocalypse by carrying out five sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro, killing twelve and injuring a thousand. It would appear from Mrs Quinten's unburned notes that Theseus had indeed developed a new vaccine. It had been tried on animals with a high level of success, but they needed to test it on humans, and in the light of increasing terrorist warnings that culminated in the 7/7 attacks, they had to act quickly.

'So, in the course of their experiments, Jukes discreetly asked around for volunteers to take part in an experiment. He needed to carry out an unethical expediency. His brief was to administer a preventative vaccine to live subjects, humans less than eighteen months old. None of the infants is identified in Mrs Quinten's notes, but it s
eems at least two had been aban
doned in Eastern European orphanages. To Joanne Kellerman and the others, it lessened t
he moral burden if they were as
sured that the babies had been given up for adoption in the direst of circumstances. It also seems clear the women were told that their charges faced absolutely no risk of infection. They agreed to foster them, taking care of the infants during their working hours at Theseus, helping to monitor their well-being throughout the day. Th
e babies were to be allowed med
ication for ten weeks, but at the end of this period they unexpectedly became sick, and one by one they died. All this we have from Mrs Quinten's notes.'