THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. (21 page)

‘So it was more than likely compromise? A leak?’

‘That’s the suggestion. It’s not certain.’

‘OK. Who would leak that to her and why, Jake?’

‘The lump was put on there in the first few days of the job. There were only six people that knew it was there, four of whom are in this room now. The West Yorks technical support guys were the other two; they helped fit it.’

‘Maybe it’s one of them? What do we know about them?’ asked Helen.

‘They’ve been in West Yorks PTSU for some years. Both vetted and trusted. The only odd thing is that the walker, John, who fitted it, said he left me two voicemails the other week about changing the battery on the lump. I didn’t get either of the voicemails he claims to have left. He was adamant that he left messages for me.’

‘Has he dialled the wrong number and left the voicemail for someone else? That’s how it’s got out?’

‘It’s his work mobile. I asked to see his itemised bill to check, and he was right. It was definitely my number that he called. We need to talk to the mobile-phone company and look at where those messages went to, because I certainly didn’t receive them.’

‘Good. I take it we’ve disabled the lump that Salma Khan has now got at home and there’s no way of her tracing that it was definitely us, Jake?’

‘It’s not marked. Neither she nor the newspaper can say for definite it was us, sir.’

‘OK.’ Denswood was satisfied for the moment and moved on. ‘Next item on the agenda this morning. The compromised lump wasn’t the main thing I was here to talk to you about, despite it being a conundrum that takes some beating. No, the actual problem I’m here about involves bomb victims. This is highly sensitive information. One of the seriously injured is weeping a green substance from the site of their amputation. The hospital has no idea why. I’m concerned that there was some sort of chemical or biological agent in the devices. If there was, we are in deep trouble. I don’t know if that’s the case so I’m choosing not to reveal that to anyone. I don’t want this getting out and causing panic at this stage, Jake. I need you to look into it for me.’

‘Yes, sir. No problem. Is it just one of the amputees at the moment?’

‘Yes. The hospital has said it’s very unusual. They’ve not seen it before. Helen will give you the details of the person concerned. I don’t want you talking to them – there’s a dedicated team in London that’s doing the victim contact and support. I want you to look at the bigger picture. Speak to FEL and assess if they or we have missed something.’

‘Yes sir.’ said Jake.

FEL was the forensic explosive laboratory based at Fort Halstead near Sevenoaks in Kent. Sevenoaks was one of Jake’s old stomping grounds that he didn’t mind visiting.

‘We’ll get on it.’ He nodded back at the SIO.

‘Thanks, Jake. Thanks, Lenny.’

‘I’m going to make a tea, if anyone wants one?’ Lenny asked as he got up.

‘Thanks, Lenny, but Helen and I have an urgent meeting at 1000 hours. We’re off to West Yorks HQ in Wakefield to discuss the lump compromise. They want to assess community tensions now the press are all over the fact that someone has been tracking the vehicles of the alleged bombers’ families. It doesn’t look good.’

Jake wondered what all the media fuss was about. Who cared about what the community thought as long as they got a result in the case?

Denswood must have seen the bemused look on Jake’s face and he continued, ‘It’s important. We have to work with West Yorkshire and the community and it’s their patch, Jake – so we’ll go along and make all the right noises. It was good to hear what you’ve said this morning. Find out what happened to that voicemail. We can’t have more of this stuff getting out,’ he said, shaking his head grimly.

He and Helen got up and left the room as Lenny continued chatting to them on his way to make a brew. Their voices faded as they walked down the corridor and away from Jake who remained sitting in the meeting room. His head was spinning. It was a bad day. The hangover was back, now accompanied by a compromised tracking device
and
a possible biological weapon.

58

Wednesday

17 August 2005

0804 hours

Whitechapel, East End of London

Jake and Lenny were sat outside the sari shop in the car. They’d driven down from Yorkshire together the night before. Lenny had dropped Jake home in Whitechapel before driving on to Surrey to enjoy a rare night at home with the wife.

Jake, on the other hand, had not even had Ted to keep him company. He had called her from the back window, but she was nowhere to be seen. She’d deserted him after he’d deserted her for Leeds. In the end, he’d stopped calling her name and closed the window. When Claire then didn’t answer her phone, he’d given up on both the women in his life and decided to get a good night’s sleep instead.

Lenny looked quietly contented. ‘Are we off to the British Medical Association then, Jake?’ he asked, as he pulled away from the kerb and into the busy rush-hour traffic.

The amputee suffering from the ‘green gunge’ complications had been a victim of the bus bombing. Fortuitously, whilst trawling through the HOLMES system, Jake and Lenny had happened upon a highly appropriate expert to help them solve their medical mystery. Her name was Professor Sandy Groom-Bates and she had actually been caught up in the carnage of 7/7 herself.

An Australian who’d been living in London since 2001, she’d given an interview with a Sydney newspaper saying how she had immediately come running out of her office to help victims of the Tavistock Square bombing. She’d been working for a journal based in the British Medical Association building, next to the spot where the Number 30 bus had been blown to pieces on 7 July.

She’d been hailed a hero in her native Oz for assisting with the victims and their injuries and had since been interviewed dozens of times by media outlets Down Under.

Her police statement said that she was a professor of wound microbiology and Lenny had subsequently dug up her profile to discover that she’d been a medical doctor for fifteen years prior to that.

‘Just the person we need to see,’ said Jake, when Lenny had presented all the details to him.

Jake had called the BMA to speak with Professor Groom-Bates the previous afternoon. He’d been passed from person to person before eventually being told she was off sick from work. Finally he’d been put through to her manager, Dr Herbert Watson, who’d seemed strangely evasive on the phone and had agreed to meet Jake the following morning.

Lenny parked in a taxi rank in Endsleigh Place at the north end of Tavistock Square. They walked in silence across the busy road toward the red-brick BMA building. What a difference forty days had made. The place looked back to normal. There was no indication that anything had happened there at all, thought Jake.

The BMA receptionist smiled at them as they approached the front desk.

‘We’re here to see Dr Herbert Watson,’ said Jake.

The receptionist punched in a number on her console and handed them both passes.

After a few minutes, a greying man in tweed trousers and a bright pink jumper appeared from down the hallway. His outfit made him look like an elderly hare-brained inventor from a children’s TV show.

‘Detective Flannagan, I presume?’ said the man in a public-school accent.

Jake proffered his hand. ‘Jake Flannagan. Good to meet you.’

‘I’m Dr Herbert Watson. Follow me, please.’

The doctor led them down a hallway toward the back of the building and up two flights of stone stairs to a stately looking office with a dark green, deep-pile carpet. Dark wood panelling covered two walls and a packed bookshelf framed another. Opposite the door, a gigantic Georgian window overlooked a central courtyard.

The doctor sat at his desk with the window behind him. Jake and Lenny sat in studded leather chairs on the other side.

‘You’re here to speak to Sandy Groom-Bates, I understand?’ The doctor wasted no time getting to the point.

Lenny pulled out a notebook and pen.

‘That’s right,’ Jake replied. ‘Professor Sandy Groom-Bates.’

‘No, not professor,’ said the doctor. ‘Correction. She wasn’t a professor at all.’

‘A GP?’ asked Jake.

‘No, not a GP. She wasn’t a doctor either.’

‘But that’s what she said in her police statement. What did she do here exactly?’

‘She was an editor on a medical publication.’

‘Don’t you need medical knowledge to do that?’

‘You need a certain amount of medical knowledge but you don’t have to be a GP or have a PhD, as such.’

‘She told both us and the newspapers that she was a doctor and a professor in wound microbiology.’

There was a long pause.

Watson gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘Um, no… she wasn’t. She had very little medical experience and… well… it now appears that she lied about a lot of things. After the bombings, she sent various emails to an Australian newspaper that purported to have come from a friend of hers. The emails praised her work in helping victims. An Aussie journalist did some digging on her qualifications and found them all to be false. The newspaper gave us a heads-up about two weeks ago that she wasn’t even a doctor. She’d done a year’s training in a Sydney hospital as a laser therapist, and some sort of diploma qualification in health management. The rest appears to have been completely made up.’

‘So how did you not know any of this – you’re her manager, aren’t you?’

‘Well… I
was
her manager…’

‘Was?’ Jake interrupted. ‘Have you taken disciplinary action already?’

‘You’ve not heard? Oh. We instigated an enquiry just over a week ago. She tendered her resignation immediately but we were duty-bound to continue. Then, just this morning, I got a call from her father. She was found dead in the early hours at her flat in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s all very tragic. She was only in her mid-thirties.’

Christ, thought Jake. Green gunge and now another dead body so soon after the bomb blasts. Maybe they did have some sort of lethal outbreak on their hands?

59

Wednesday

17 August 2005

1029 hours

British Medical Association, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London

‘Do you have her address please?’ asked Jake.

Watson scribbled out an address on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

Jake passed the piece of paper to Lenny. ‘Can you get hold of the nick that’s dealing with it, Len? I think it’ll be Hammersmith and Fulham who’d cover that one. Tell them not to touch anything. I want to have a look first.’

Lenny got up and left the room.

The doctor continued, ‘Since we started our internal investigations I’ve heard all sorts. I hear that she claimed to have given birth to twins who then died, had incurable cancer but made a full recovery, had hip-replacement surgery, went overseas to help with earthquake and hurricane victims, was stalked by various people in this building, and had relationships with people that have now been found not to exist. Her life appears to have been one big fantasy, I’m afraid to say. And now she’s dead. What a desperate tragedy…’

Jake was curious about something. ‘When my colleague, DS Sandringham, looked her up, he read that she was once involved in a study that looked into blood clots? Was that here with you?’ he asked Dr Watson.

‘I think that might have been during her time in Australia interning at a hospital. She did nothing here but edit a journal. I know that she used to carry a stethoscope in her bag at all times, but that really had nothing to do with us. That was her own personal one. Like I say, she was away with the fairies quite a lot. We always thought she lived in a bit of a fantasy world.’

‘I understand. Look, what we really wanted to speak to her about was a rather delicate medical issue. One of the survivors of the bus bombing has experienced some unusual medical complications. There are signs of a green fluid leaking from the site of their amputation. None of the other victims from this bomb scene have these symptoms. It’s very strange. Now Groom-Bates is dead, albeit that people are saying she didn’t do much, is she the fifty-third death of 7/7 – not including the bombers? Was there some form of contaminant in the bus blast?’

The doctor thought for a moment before he replied, ‘Well, when a limb is blown off, it’s not clean. It’s torn off; ripped away. The blast will have carried with it all sorts of nasty contaminants; debris from the bus, blood and other bodily fluids. We saw bone fragments from the bomber embedded in victims. They even found a set of intestines at the door of our building. If that sort of debris has got up inside the wound, it’s very difficult to get out.’

‘She treated some of the victims, is that right? Could she have had something to do with this?’ asked Jake.

‘She claimed to have treated the wounded. I’m not so sure she did. No one from the team saw her go onto the bus, but none of us really know.’

‘If there was a toxin involved that caused this, could she have died from the same substance? Has anyone else here had side effects?’

‘To my knowledge, there have been no reports of people from the BMA falling physically ill. However, I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that many people are still missing from work. We’re dealing with an enormous amount of post-traumatic stress. People are still coming to terms with some of the horrors they saw on the day that bus exploded. It was unspeakable, ghastly…’ Dr Watson trailed off, shaking his head.

Jake knew only too well the grisly scenes from that day. He had had no counselling. His nightmare was one where there were no answers to the crime and where Wasim continued to taunt him from the grave.

Dr Watson composed himself and placed the tips of his fingers together. He spoke quietly but pointedly. ‘Look, it might be that Sandy took her own life, Mr Flannagan. Her behaviour changed markedly when we instigated the initial enquiry into her qualifications. She knew that her fantasy world had been found out. Maybe she felt she had nothing left?’