The Memory of Blood

∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

45

Genesis

“You cannot throw a cocktail party for a bunch of murder suspects and charge it to the Unit!” Raymond Land shouted, outraged. “In all my time serving at this lunatic asylum, this is the stupidest idea I’ve come across, even worse than that suspect line-up you held on the Somerset House ice-skating rink.”

“I was thinking we’d serve Bloody Marys,” said Bryant, not listening. “And little sausages on sticks. Mini-burgers are always popular.”

“Could we have some decent Indian snacks?” asked Meera.

“And chicken wings with barbecue sauce,” Bimsley added.

Land shut his eyes and held up his hands for silence. “For the last time. We are not. Having. A. Party!”

“There’s a little more to it than that,” said May. “We’re going to tell the invited guests we’ve made an arrest. They’ll think the pressure is off and they’ll drop their guard.”

“Who are you going to palm off as the arrestee?”

“An outsider. An unfamiliar name. We’re going to make the killer think we’ve been misled. Arthur has the whole thing planned.”

“I know it sounds completely crazy, but just listen to him,” Banbury suggested.

“Nobody’s going to know we’re behind this,” said Bryant. “If you agree, Ray Pryce will help us rig the whole thing up, script the event with exits and entrances. Nobody would dare stay away. The show closes without Robert’s company funding it and it’s the last time they’ll all be together. After this, they’ll be going their separate ways. It’s traditional to end a run with a farewell party. The timing’s perfect.”

“How are you going to arrange it?”

“Tomorrow night there was going to be a charity performance of the play to raise money for the Variety Club of Great Britain. The idea is to now go ahead with the performance. The crime scene has been cleared, so the obligation can be honoured. There’ll be a dedication to Robert Kramer at the end; it’s an old theatre tradition. Marcus Sigler will say a few words, and so will Judith Kramer. Ray will send a text to everyone hinting that there’s going to be some kind of revelation during the course of the after-show party. We’ll reveal that we’ve arrested someone as a potential suspect. John and I will have some carefully worded questions prepared, and we’ll be watching everyone. And we want the facts of the investigation to be subject to full disclosure – no withheld information.”

“You absolutely can’t do that.” Land was outraged. “It’s unethical and contravenes just about every rule in the book. Besides, what if still nothing happens?”

“Then we’ll be no worse off than we are now.”

“We’ll just be messing with a few people’s heads,” said Meera. “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” With a shock, Bryant realized that, for the very first time, the entire team was behind him.

“All right,” said Land finally. It was worth giving in just to stop them all staring at him. “But we’d better have someone stationed there in case this goes wrong.”

“I’ll put Fraternity DuCaine on standby,” said Longbright.

♦

An hour later, Ray Pryce came by to sort out the invitation wording with May. “How’s this?” he asked. “I’ll personalize all the texts. I’ll tell them that you and your partner wanted to thank the company and pay your last respects to Robert. I’ll mention that you’re going to be on hand to explain that you’re now ready to press charges.”

“And you think everyone will accept?” asked May.

“How can they not? They all have to be here tomorrow in order to complete their contracts. We’ve even had an email from Gail Strong asking if she could come back for the final show. A bloody cheek, after walking out like that.”

“What time does everyone finish work?”

“The play ends at nine forty-five, so I guess the last one will be out of the theatre by ten-thirty.”

“Then we start the party at eleven. My partner has come up with the perfect venue.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Ray. “I could take notes about this to use in my next play, except that nobody would believe me.”

“I know what you mean,” said May, indicating his partner. “Welcome to my world.”

♦

The weather worsened steadily through the day. Longbright had applied anti-inflammatory cream to her blue-black bruise, but the side of her face was still painful. She listened to the sound of tapping buckets as she sat in her office and ran through the contents of Bryant’s disc.

She had decided not to worry her boss with the news that she had managed to retrieve his disc. He was locked in his room with May, planning something. She settled down and prepared to search through four hundred pages of small-point type. After five hours without a break, she was still unable to find any disclosure so contentious that someone would be prepared to kill to hide it. The answer had to lie in some footnote or sidebar to the main investigations under discussion, something seemingly innocuous. She tried to think of a way of isolating the information. What would the Ministry of Internal Security find so damning in the Unit’s old cases?

Using a technique she had learned from Bryant, she decided to tackle the problem from an entirely different perspective. Oskar Kasavian had been transferred to the department from the Ministry of Defence a couple of years ago. She ran a search on Kasavian’s background but was shut out of the MoD’s files, so she called up his CV through a public access request. It meant that her enquiry would be logged at HOIS, but that couldn’t be helped.

The CV contained no detailed information, just a list of dates and employment statistics. She was about to shut it down when one date jumped out – a period spent at Porton Down, the military science park in Wiltshire. Porton Down was home to the MoD’s Science and Technology Laboratory, DSTL. It was an executive agency that had been set up by the Ministry of Defence itself. It was common knowledge that the site housed Britain’s most secretive military research institute, but access was denied to journalists without written permission from a variety of senior officials.

She scanned back through the pages of Bryant’s memoir and found what she was looking for: the suicides of eleven Asian workers, all based at a company outsourced by the DSTL. The case had made news headlines at the time, until all details of it had suddenly been pulled. Their dates fell within the period that Kasavian was employed there.

She scanned through the disc and found what Bryant had written. He mentioned the case in reference to an entirely separate matter – a mentally ill man who had killed a number of women in London pubs. That investigation had been solved and closed, so why had he mentioned Porton Down at all?

Then she saw it, a small reference number directing her to an addendum at the end of the chapter. She went in to see Bryant.

“You shouldn’t have come in today,” Bryant said. “Your poor face.”

“I’m fine. It looks worse than it is. Arthur, what is Project Genesis?”

Bryant’s aqueous blue eyes sought focus as he remembered. “It was a bioscience initiative. I always felt it was linked with the deaths of some technicians.”

“The drownings – you think the MoD had something to do with them?”

“Let me put it this way: the deaths could have been avoided. I think they were probably suicides, but they were caused by the stress of the situation. You have to remember that an awful lot of people worked there under conditions of absolute security.”

“But why would they all pick the same method of death?”

“I talked about that with our old pathologist, Oswald Finch, at the time. He reckoned many scientists see drowning as a painless, clean method of taking one’s life. The whole thing came to our attention because of a man named Peter Jukes. He was project leader for chemical and biological security at the MoD’s Wiltshire laboratory. He was found dead in suspicious circumstances. I requested his notes from the Home Office, but the Defence Secretary refused to acknowledge that there was a case. Supposedly Jukes had been suffering from depression and had long been recognized as a security risk. It was said he drowned, but there were anomalies in the case. At the time, military contractors were desperately trying to spend out the year-ends of their budgets before the axe fell on their departments. Project Genesis was closed down.”

“What were they trying to do?”

“I can’t remember the details – what we heard was mostly rumour – but it was something involving gene splicing. The management had been exaggerating their progress to the MoD, and it turned out their technology wasn’t quite as advanced as they’d led everyone to believe it was. So the unit was shut and the staff dispersed.”

“Then I have some bad news for you,” said Longbright. “I think someone’s opened it back up again. You mentioned the Porton Down case in your notes.”

“You think that’s what they were after?”

“You flagged it yourself. You showed your hand by contacting the MoD. That’s why Oskar Kasavian has been trying so hard to close us down all this time. He’s desperate to discredit you. He’s been monitoring us. And then he discovers that an outsider – a well-connected writer and editor to boot – has the information. The situation was containable so long as it remained inside the Unit, but suddenly he discovered a leak. She probably ran fact-checking enquiries from her computer. I’m willing to bet that Mrs Marquand’s so-called carer copied Anna’s entire hard drive and then wiped it.”

“You think Kasavian acted on his own initiative to kill the story?”

“It looks that way. He mustn’t know that we know. We need the advantage over him.”

Bryant ran a wrinkled hand through his side tufts. “OK, let’s get through the party. I’m not a woman.”

“Sorry?”

“Can’t do two things at once.”

She left him studying the spreadsheet Banbury had created from the activity at the Kramers’ party. As she walked away, a chill ran across her back. Things are coming to a head, she thought. There’s danger here for all of us. Nobody is safe now.