Resurrection (16 page)

‘
You could come out to my place if you like?’ suggested Malloy. ‘Or I could meet you somewhere in town?’

‘
Your place will be fine. 8 o’clock this evening?’

‘
I’ll expect you.’

Dewar called the Reception desk and asked about renting a car now that he was staying for a while. A dark green Rover 600 was delivered in under twenty minutes. The interior was spotlessly clean but the previous driver had been a smoker, he could still smell the lingering stale legacy of tobacco smoke. He opened the sunroof. and turned on the fan.

He drove up the Mound then circled round past the Iraqi student centre in Forest Road trying to spot the surveillance. He couldn’t. That pleased him, he’d been harbouring notions of rival surveillance teams squabbling outside the entrance after hearing what Barron had said about ‘professional rivalry’. Maybe his fears had been groundless.

He drove slowly down the Royal Mile in the shadow of the old tenements, eventually turning right to pass in front of Holyrood Palace and enter the Queen’s Park, a large green area open to the public with an extinct volcano, Arthur’s Seat, as its centrepiece. He followed the road running through the park then turned off to the right to drive up round the hill and pull into a lay-by on the south side.He got out to take in the view and stood with his right foot resting on the first bar of the railings separating the road from a sheer drop. To the east he could see the sea. In the distance an oil tanker was making its way out of the Firth of Forth into the North Sea. To the south he could just make out the white tower block of the Institute of Molecular Sciences. He shivered slightly as a cool breeze caught his cheek.

* * * * *

It was a couple of minutes after eight when he drew up outside Malloy’s church home. It had been daylight the last time he’d been here so this time he stopped at the gate to take in the atmosphere of the place in the dark. Yellow light was spilling out from the windows where the stainglass had been replaced with ordinary clear glass. He thought it unusual to see a church building exuding light. It made him think of Christmas.

‘
Come in,’ said Malloy. He was wearing jeans and an Aran sweater and holding a glass of red wine in his hand. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘
A glass of that would be very nice,’ replied Dewar, nodding to the wine.

‘
A precocious little bugger I picked up from Safeways,’ said Malloy, pouring Dewar a glass. ‘Rich in ambition but modest in price. He exaggerated a Scottish accent for the last few words. What’s the problem?’

‘
The men who tried to coerce Hammadi into working on smallpox are still in the city. I don’t know why but I have to consider all possibilities.’

‘
Why doesn’t someone arrest them?’

‘
No evidence,’ said Dewar. ‘We couldn’t even prove they met Hammadi let alone what they asked him to do.’

‘
So why do you think they’re still here?’

‘
At worst I have to consider that they might be trying to persuade someone else to help them to get what they want.’

Malloy looked aghast. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said in a shocked whisper. ‘No one in their right mind would even dream of it.’

‘
I take it, no one’s approached you?’

‘
No. They’d get short shrift if they did’

‘
How about if they were to offer you half a million pounds to do it?’

‘
Half a mil … No, absolutely not.’

‘
A million?’

‘
I … ‘

‘
Two million?’

‘
All right, I take your point,’ said Malloy. ‘We’ve started to haggle about the price. But I still hope I would say no. It would be sheer madness to attempt it and how could you live with yourself, knowing you’d resurrected one of the worst killers the world’s ever known? You wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, assuming you survived at all after playing around with something like that.’

‘
I sincerely hope everyone feels like that,’ said Dewar. ‘But I have to ask you who at the institute might be put to the test?’

‘
You’re serious?’

Dewar nodded. ‘I need you to tell me who has the necessary expertise to do the job without of course, suggesting in any way that they would.’

‘
Assuming they were supplied with everything they needed?’

Another nod.

‘
There are lots of people with DNA skills but not that many with practical experience of working with high risk micro organisms. Basically it would come down to the people in my lab and those in Gary Cairns’s lab. We work with HIV so we’re used to handling dangerous material.’

‘
Point taken.’

‘
We could leave out first year grad students. Second year? Possible. Post docs, yes and of course, Gary Cairns and me, I suppose.’

‘
Technical staff?’

Malloy thought for a moment. ‘Andrea in Cairns’s lab would be a possibility. She has the right background and she’s been here a while. She might be able to do it at a pinch.’

‘
George Ferguson?’

‘
No experience of DNA manipulation, technically able and well used to handling dangerous organisms but wrong background for this sort of thing.’

‘
So how many are we talking about?’

Malloy brought his shoulders up to his ears and made shaking gestures with both hands. ‘I’d go for eight.’ he said.

‘
I need their names,’ said Dewar.

‘
This is giving me a bad feeling,’ said Malloy, as he got up. ‘It feels like I’m betraying my colleagues. He fetched pen and paper from his desk.

‘
You’re not,’ Dewar assured him. ‘You’re simply appraising their competence and expertise.’

Malloy wrote down the eight names and handed it over. ‘Mind you, I’d bet my life savings against any of these people being involved in anything like this,’ he said.

‘
And I wouldn’t dream of betting against you,’ said Dewar. ‘If only our Iraqi friends would get the hell out of the city then we could all stop being so paranoid and rest easy.’ He declined the offer of a second glass of wine and was escorted to the door. ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell anyone else about our meeting.’

‘
It’s hardly something I’m likely to brag about,’ said Malloy.

Dewar drove back to the city, taking his time on the narrow roads in the dark In many places they had acquired a coating of wet leaves, it would be all too easy to come to grief under heavy braking and finish up among the trees whose tall, dark presence blotted out the sky. He felt better when he’d got back on to the main road and had a clear run back into the city.

Once back in his hotel room he phoned Karen to exchange notes about the day and make arrangements for the week end.

‘
You won’t think of an excuse not to come down and see my mother will you?’ asked Karen.

‘
Of course not,’ Dewar assured her, his spirits falling at the thought of an evening in the company of Karen’s mother. He found her hard to take.

‘
Good, so why don’t we say that you’ll be down for supper on Saturday and you’ll stay over till Sunday?’

‘
Fine,’ said Dewar. ‘I take it I’ll be on the couch downstairs?’

‘
You know how Mother feels about that sort of thing,’ said Karen.

‘
I know,’ agreed Dewar.

‘
Besides … she goes out to her church social on Sunday afternoon, that’ll give us plenty of time …’

‘
Here’s to Sunday afternoon,’ said Dewar.

Dewar entered the names of the eight people Malloy had given him into his laptop as part of his next report for Sci-Med. He looked at them, white letters on a blue screen. He hadn’t been quite honest with Malloy. It wasn’t just a matter of compiling a list of people with the right know-how. Once Barron had the names, all the people on that list would be subject to round the clock surveillance just like the two Iraqis. To imagine anything else would be naive. Steven Malloy and Gary Cairns headed it, Pierre Le Grice and Simone Clary were next then Sandra Macandrew and Kurt Lehman, finally Andrea Bowman and Josh Phelps. He assumed the names he didn’t recognise were people working in the Cairns lab. It might be worth running the names through the police computer. He’d bet on eight zeros coming up but it would be a sensible, routine thing to do and Sci-Med liked him to do sensible routine things from time to time. You never know, he assured himself, one of them might turn out to be a mad axe-killer. He called Grant at police headquarters on the off chance he might be there although it was now after ten. He wasn’t there but the man who answered from Grant’s office - Sergeant Nick Johnstone, said that he was still on duty.

‘
There was a nasty hit and run incident over in Marchmont;’ said the sergeant. ‘A lassie got knocked off her bike; I think she was killed. He went over to the hospital about an hour ago. Anything I can help with? The Inspector said if you called at any time we were to play ball, to use his expression.’

‘
I was going to ask him to run some names through the computer for me,’ said Dewar.

‘
Fire away,’ said Johnstone.

Dewar read out the list and Johnstone wrote them down with Dewar providing spelling where necessary.

‘
Wait a minute … ‘ said Johnstone.

‘
What’s the matter?’

‘
Just a minute … ‘

Dewar heard the phone being put down. The wait started to seem endless when Johnstone finally returned and the receiver was fumbled before being picked up successfully.

‘
I thought so,’ said Johnstone. ‘The lassie in Marchmont, she’s on your list, if it’s the same one. Sandra Macandrew. Student at the Institute of something or other?’

‘
That’s her,’ said Dewar, feeling as if a heavy weight had suddenly descended on his shoulders. ‘You said she was dead?’

‘
The report from the attending officers said she was a gonner.’

‘
I see,’

When Inspector Grant heard she was a student at the institute he said he was going up to the hospital. That was the last I heard. That was about an hour ago.’

‘
Where did they take her?’

‘
The Royal Infirmary.’

‘
Thanks,’ said Dewar, feeling numb.

‘
Do you want me to call you back when the computer’s had a look through your names?’ asked Johnstone.

‘
No, I’ll get back to you later. I’m going to see if I can catch Grant at the hospital.’

Dewar felt sick in his stomach. He hadn’t known Sandra Macandrew well but well enough to like her as a person and see that she was a bright student with a promising future. Now she was dead. Hit and run, Johnstone had said, the second person from Malloy’s lab to die in the space of a month. The uneasy feeling he’d been -carrying around with him had just multiplied tenfold.

Mounting frustration at the slowness of the traffic was pushed to even higher levels at not being able to find a parking place near the hospital. He tried reminding himself there was no hurry; Sandra was dead, but his instincts overruled his reason. His gut feeling was that somehow Sandra’s death must have had something to do with the smallpox thing and the sooner he got to the hospital and talked to Grant about it the better.

He saw a Ford Fiesta start to vacate a place by the kerb so he braked abruptly to the annoyance of the driver behind. He ignored the angry tooting and waited until the Fiesta had pulled away before putting the Rover in nose first and abandoning it with its tail sticking out untidily.

‘Arsehole!’ shouted the driver who’d been held up. Dewar ignored him and headed for the hospital. He only had eyes for the infirmary which loomed in front of him against the night sky. It was an old fashioned hospital, all towers and turrets on the outside -like a Disney castle, with endless corridors and peeling ceilings on the inside. Light spilled out from the A&E entrance, lighting up the ambulance apron where two vehicles stood waiting for fate to play its next card. Dewar entered through the automatic doors and approached the desk.

‘Sandra Macandrew,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Hit and run victim, brought in dead about an hour ago. Are the police still here? I’m looking for Inspector Grant in particular.’

The clerk looked at him over his glasses. ‘And you are?’

Dewar showed him his ID.

‘Are you Ms Macandrew’s own doctor?’ asked the man.

‘No,’ answered Dewar, wondering why the question was asked in the first place and what the politically correct term was these days for mental defective. Differently intelligent, he supposed. Right now he didn’t feel like going to war with obstructive officialdom.

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No,’ replied Dewar, now having difficulty keeping his temper. ‘Is Inspector Grant still here or not?’ he asked again in level tones devoid of social nicety.

‘Ms Macandrew’s not dead,’ said the man, trumping Dewar’s card.

Dewar felt stunned. He felt his mouth drop open. ‘Not dead,’ he repeated in a bewildered voice.

‘She’s in a bad way; she’s in intensive care but she’s not dead. The police are still here. I’m not sure if your Inspector Grant is one of them.’

Dewar asked for directions and followed them quickly without actually running, a memory from his early medical training. Nurses and doctors don’t run inside the hospital. They can walk fast but they don’t run. He found Grant who had just been briefed on Sandra Macandrew’s injuries by a young looking doctor who’d then disappeared into a side room in the Intensive Care Unit.