The Victoria Vanishes (36 page)

'What went wrong?' asked Kershaw.

'Jukes's drug proved to have unforeseen side effects. Perhaps the infants would have live
d had they been older or health
ier—but who would allow their children to undergo such testing, even given assurances that no possible harm could come to them? So the mortified women were paid off and sworn to secrecy. They left their jobs with good severance money—we have Mrs Quinten's old pay slips—and were reminded of their allegiance to the Official Secrets Act.

'What nobody counted on was the fact that Joanne Kellerman and the others felt increasingly uncomfortable with their own consciences, and were eventually unable to process the guilt surrounding their unwitting complicity. They agreed to meet up in a pub. Perhaps just two of them met at first, but the meetings clearly grew to involve five out of the seven women. They liked a drink and they were on safe neutral ground, away from loved ones. Their security was not seen to be compromised. They could talk freely without being watched. London is full of secrets, and they were dealing with theirs in the best way they knew how, by quietly and privately discussing it.'

'But secrets have a way of escaping.'

'Exactly. It was Jackie
Quinten who remembered her col
league Masters, and went to him for advice. He didn't know the others and probably only knew Mrs Quinten slightly, but she trusted him.'

'No doubt she appealed to him as a humanitarian,' said Bryant.
'But he betrayed her.
He told Theseus about the possi
ble information leak. They, in return, hired him to come up with a foolproof way of containing the damage. Imagine the scandal if the matter got out to the press. It was an appealingly bizarre conjectural problem. A
nd his solution was suitably pe
culiar to it.'

'That's right,' said April. 'Masters was intrigued by the proposition. He decided that in order to commit the perfect crime an agent was needed, a fall guy. So he contacted various clinics and hospitals to ask t
hem about the psychological pro
files of their patients.'

'And he found someone made for the job,' Bryant explained.

'A man who would harm if carefully directed and provided with the correct means. It was Masters who placed the request to have Pellew released, with the weight of the MOD behind him. And armed with Pellew's confidential patient records, it was Masters who gave him t
he syringes. Under those circum
stances, how hard was it to get Pellew to fall back into his old habits, do you think? I mean, by pushing the right psychological buttons and supplying the method?'

'So Theseus got the poor, deranged Pellew released through Masters, who offered him easy victims?' asked Longbright.

'That's right,' Bryant agreed.
All Pellew had to do was spec
ify where and when he was prepared to commit the acts he had fantasised about for so long.'

'And he wanted to perform his little psychodramas in pubs,' said Kershaw.

'Of course;
they were the o
nly places in which he would op
erate. It was why he had kidnapped his girlfriend in the past, what had led to his original conviction. Masters would have known that.'

'Stranger things have happened,' said May. 'It could have been the perfect cover-up. With the deaths traceable only as far as a reoffending mental patient, there could be no sign of Theseus's involvement. The entire matter would have been sealed, and the plan couldn't
be traced back. But no-one con
sidered the idea that their killer might want to be caught. He started leaving behind clues.'

'Funny how you only ever really find out what people are capable of when their plans go wrong,' said Longbright, thinking about the increasingly panicked Masters.

'I hate to say I told you so.' Bryant gleamed.'Pellew knew he was being manipulated and hated it, so he set out to be caught. I can't imagine the mental turmoil he must have been going through. No wonder he ended up running into the traffic be-fore he could be brought to justice. But his death left others who could still go public.'

'Masters had already gone to extraordinary lengths to comply with whatever Pellew said he needed to carry out Theseus's cover-up,' said April,
'and because he insisted on catching Carol Wynley on her way home, they were forced to fake up the front of a public house to lure her in—'

'I told you I hadn't imagined it,' Bryant interrupted.
'You all thought I was going barmy. Once Pellew had started, he couldn't be stopped without giving the game away. By this time, Theseus must have been so desperate for the rest of Masters's plan to work that
they were prepared to hire a de
signer and a couple of scenery-shifters to knock up a simple
trompe l
'oeil,
a false pub front that would lead into the dressed and emptied shop. They bribed the owner to close down for the evening, then put everything back in place afterwards. But they messed up. They used a couple of conflicting pho
to
graphic references for the building, and constructed a pub that could not possibly exist. The Victoria had been built in 1845 but the cross wasn't awarded until 1857. They compounded the error by including the clock just as it had appeared in my photograph.
Wonderful news t
o Pellew, of course, who contin
ued to sabotage their plans by leaving us clues in the pubs he picked. "Doctor," "seven belles," "conspiracy," things that weren't as they seemed, even his own name. It was Pellew who left the photograph in the Exmouth Arms for us to find. Unfortunately, in keeping with the strange workings of his mind, these pointers proved so obscure that—'

'—that no-one but you could have found him, Arthur,' said May, sipping his bitter.

'I must admit, I do find myself intrigued by the strange pairing of Pellew and Masters. Pellew's profile pegged him as an egotist unable to empathise with others. True to type, he appears to have been selfish, withdrawn, incapable of normal social interaction. How surprised must he have been by his sudden release? He was aware of the appalling nature of his actions—why else would he try to guarantee his own capture? But Masters's behaviour, supposedly acting for the greater good, must have puzzled him. And Pellew was on a roll. Part of him was addicted to the thrill of the hunt, part of him was abominably ashamed. Still, the aberrant behaviour patterns that had been re
-
awoken in him were enough to drive him to attack a woman who wasn't on the list, purely out of desire.'

'Jazmina Sherwin, the girl who was assaulted in the Albion, Barnsbury,' said Bimsley, grasping the bigger picture.

'So, what happens now?' asked Longbright.

'We have to go after Theseus,' said Bryant, without pausing to think.

'We've got no status, no office, no dosh,' said
Meera discon
solately.
And we're working out of a pub.'

'Besides, Theseus is a government outsource,' May re-minded him.
'How far do you honestly think you'll get?'

'When a democratic government is no longer accountable for its actions, it becomes a dictatorship. Besides, who says they even know what's been going on? The Ministry of Defence is a law unto itself. I wouldn't be surprised if they've hung Theseus out to dry.'

Behind them, the door banged open and Raymond Land burst in wearing a plastic mackintosh, spraying water around like a retriever emerging from a pond.
Ah, here you all are. I've been looking for you everywh
ere.' He shook his umbrella vio
lently, searching for somewhere to leave it.

'Get you a drink?' asked Renfield.

'No, no, can't stop unfortunate
ly, the wife will give me hell.
Purely a business call.' He turned to his detectives and saw the paperwork spread on the tab
le.
'Should you be examining evi
dence in a pub?'

'They're only copies,' April
explained.
'Obviously the origi
nals are safely stowed away.'

'Quite. Understood. You should know that Leslie Faraday has promised to try and find you new accommodation as soon as possible. This won't be forever, you know. You can't operate out of a pub.'

'Come off it, Raymondo,' said Bryant.
'You know as well as I do that they've finally got us where they want us. What's the likelihood of them rehousing the unit somewhere else?'

'I do see your point, but I'm not here to discuss that. It's rather more serious, I'm afraid.' He drew a fortifying breath. 'To me has fallen the unpleasant task of placing you and Mr May under arrest.'

'What on earth for?' asked May, startled.

'Breach of the Official Secrets Act, I'm afraid.'

'But we don't operate under its jurisdiction.'

'Since the Peculiar Crimes Unit is answerable to the Home Office, you are government employees. You have knowingly disseminated information from protected Ministry of Defence sources.'

'I forwarded Jocelyn Roquesby's computer files to the office terminal,' April admitted. 'It never occurred to me that it was already in someone else's hands—'

'So you'll both have to come with me to West End Central and face charges.' Land's de
termination faded into sheepish
ness.

'We'd love to help you,
vieux haricot,
but I'm afraid it's quite impossible,' said Bryant with a smirk. 'You see, you're in Ye Olde Mitre tavern.'

'What has that got to do with anything?' asked Land.

'Well, due to a mix-up with certain clauses in the Land Registry Act several centuries ago, Ye Olde Mitre is not, technically speaking, part of London, but in ancient Cambridgeshire. The City of London police have no jurisdiction in here.'

'You're having a laugh, aren
't you?' Land turned to the bar
man, dumbfounded.
'He's having a laugh, isn't he? Is this true?'

'I'm afraid so, mate,' said the barman. 'No-one can be ar-rested within the pub or in the immediate environs of Ely Court. This isn't London, it's Cambridge. Don't look at me, I'm Australian. You lot are the ones with the bloody silly laws.'

Bryant coaxed his distraught boss to a stool and helped him from his mackintosh.
And as we're not going to be leaving here until well after the last bell has sounded,' he said,
'you might as well get another round in for all of us.'

46

Guerrilla T
actics

W
e unwittingly opposed a government project,' whispered May, waiting while the nurse finished attending to Mrs Quinten.
'What did you expect to happen?'

'I expected a desire to trace culpability,' snapped his partner, looking around at the sleeping hospital ward.

After a boozy night with his emphatic detectives, Land had agreed to try and have the charges against them temporarily suspended on cognisance of their exemplary records, and their willingness to abide by instructions issued from HO Internal Security. It was nothing
more than they expected and de
manded, but while they were cooling their heels at home for the remainder of the night, scouring Internet reports for any news of the case, they discovered that the managing director of Theseus Research had already been assigned to another post, this time in Atlanta, Georgia.

'There are others who know, you may be assured of that,' said Bryant, burying hims
elf inside his tweed coat. 'Con
tainment on this scale never works. I've no doubt both the birth mothers and the remai
ning fosterers would have their
credibility destroyed should any choose to come forward, but there are others who must have seen what they saw.'

'Inadmissible hearsay, not empirical data. How thoroughly has all the proof been destroyed? Our one hope now is that Jackie—ah, Mrs Quinten.' May sat forward in his chair and studied her sleepy eyes.
'Not in too much pain, I hope?'

'Some bruising, a few scratches, nothing a child couldn't handle,' the nurse told them.
'But she'll have a very sore throat for a while. You two shouldn't be here, you know. The other patients aren't awake yet.' She adjusted the curtains around them and left.

'I've been wondering about Harold Masters,' said Jackie Quinten softly. 'I thought I understood him. I can't imagine why any man would have done what he did. He wasn't in
ter
ested in making money.'

'It was less about money t
han pride,' said Bryant.'The mu
seum had reduced his workload and was in the process of let-ting him go. He'd worked for the MOD before, and knew how far Theseus would go to cover up a mistake, because at the end of the day that's all it was. Remember those British volunteers who participated in the anti-inflammatory drugs trial conducted by the German pharmaceutical company TeGenero AG? Their heads swelled up and they nearly died. The drug was designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis. The Theseus drug trial was conducted for an even more altruistic reaso
n: to prevent innocents from dy
ing on the streets of
London.'