The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

42

Blood Money

Jackie Quinten had all but given up hope of finding Dr Harold Masters.

She had tried his darkened house in Spitalfields before heading back to the lecture hall in the British Museum, where an assistant had traced him to a rear section of the basement. Jackie was presented with instructions for finding Room 2135, but the building was a labyrinth of identical corridors and office doors. This was the backstage area of the British Museum that the public never saw: institutional, drab, unchanged in decades.

Overhead, neon strip-lights buzzed faintly behind dusty plastic panels. The last of the visitors had gone. Only the night guards and a few members of staff were left, but the museum was larger than a city block, and the handful who remained were hidden somewhere behind sound-deadening walls. The building that acted as a great repository of the past had defied many attempts to make it less oppressive, and only the dimpled glass roof of the new Great Court was truly capable of raising spirits. Elsewhere, in the narrow back channels, morgue-like chambers and suffocating windowless rooms, the weight of history bore down with a melancholy pressure that slowed movement and reduced all conversation to awed whispers.

Jackie had been feeling unsettled ever since she awoke that morning. She had discovered some days ago that Joanne Kellerman had died, and although it seemed a tragedy there was nothing to be done, for they had hardly been close friends. But in today’s issue of Hard News she found two more names, Naomi Curtis and Carol Wynley, dead within a day of one another. She scoured the newspapers looking for further articles, found one small piece in the Evening Standard, another in a local free sheet, but the rest of the news items were only concerned with a pretty young black girl who had died of unnatural causes in a pub Jackie had never heard of.

She panicked. She could think of no-one else but Dr Masters to discuss the matter with, but even he had proved elusive. Suddenly, it seemed, the events of the past had returned to disturb her sleep…

The person she should have called, she realised, was Arthur Bryant. The problem was that she liked him, and enlisting his aid meant revealing the full extent of her complicity.

The corridor seemed to lead nowhere. Its end wall was entirely blank, the skirting board merely running around it to connect to two opposing doors. A marble bust of a forgotten plunderer of antiquities stood on a discoloured marble plinth. Jackie checked the number on the slip of paper in her hand and counted down the doors. She knocked on 2135 and waited, but there was no answer. The handle turned easily, so she entered.

The room was lined with plans chests, upon which were piled tagged sections of stone, statues patiently awaiting reassembly. Masters was seated beneath the single cone of light from his green enamel reading lamp, intently writing, his eyes so close to the page that his nose almost touched the paper.

“Harold?” She took a step further into the darkened room. “I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?”

“No. I suppose I was half expecting you.” He sounded confused, as if he had just woken up to find himself in a strange place. He sat back in his chair, stretching his spine. “You lose track of time down here. It’s terrible for the posture.” He did not rise to greet her. “How are you, Jackie?”

“I expected to see you at the Yorkshire Grey this week.”

“Oh, the Immortals. It completely slipped my mind. I’ve had a lot to worry about lately. I suppose you’ve heard something. It was inevitable that you would.”

She came forward into the light, setting her handbag on the edge of the swamped desk. “I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything else all day. I don’t know what to think. I tried calling Jocelyn, but I couldn’t get any answer.”

“She’s also dead.” Masters seemed to lose interest, and returned to his writing.

“That’s absurd.”

“Absurd or not, it’s a fact,” he said impatiently. “She died in the Old Bell tavern in Fleet Street. Rather, I should say she was killed, just like the others.”

“In another pub…it doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, I’m afraid it does.” Masters placed a ruler on the page and carefully drew a line in blue ink. “That was the way he worked.”

“But that just leaves me, Mary and Jennifer. I mean, out of the mothers.”

“You weren’t real mothers or even surrogate ones; you were little more than day nurses.”

“We became attached to our charges. How could they have expected us not to?”

“Well, you shouldn’t have. There’s no room for sentiment where science is concerned. He would have come after the rest of you as well, but the police stopped him. He’s dead.”

“My God.” Jackie drew out a chair opposite Masters and sat down heavily. “I can’t believe somebody would have done this. Was it really so important that we knew?”

“Don’t be so naïve; of course it’s important. You can’t compromise in a situation like this.”

“Then I don’t understand why the press aren’t making more of it. Surely people want the facts?”

“Really?” He looked up at her now and slowly removed his reading glasses. “Don’t you think it’s in the ministry’s interests not to let it get out?”

“We still live in a democracy, Harold, no matter how tainted it’s become of late. Things like this can’t – ”

“Things like this,” he cut across her, “happen all the time in places where the powerful gather. What about Litvinenko? His dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane was poisoned with polonium-two-ten, for God’s sake. A series of government murder plots involving Russian spies, death and a trail of radioactive contamination? It sounds more suited to the plot of a James Bond film, but it happened right here. Nobody cares about a relapsed psychotic putting a few alcoholic middle-aged legal secretaries to sleep. How many times have stories about re-offending ‘care-in-the-community’ patients made the papers for a couple of days before being forgotten?”

“How do you know so much about it?” she asked, suddenly suspicious. She had once valued Masters’s friendship, had comforted him during his wife’s decline and death, but his defensive attitude was starting to disturb her.

“The MOD re-hired me on a freelance contract.”

“I thought you said you would never go back there.”

“They had an academic problem that I found intriguing. I said I’d help them out.”

She glanced nervously back at the door, and he caught her looking. “Why would you do that?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

“You may ask, what is the purpose of an academic? What are we for? I thought it was to make discoveries, to render visible the lines that bind civilisations. Then one day I made a discovery that called into question everything for which I thought I stood. It’s not just the slow accumulation of empirical data, you know; we are granted epiphanies occasionally. We may even pronounce them to the world, but like the Oracle, we are doomed never to be believed.”

“What did you do for the Ministry of Defence?” she persisted.

“There’s such a thing as accountability, Jackie. The research teams there couldn’t be seen to – they needed a solution to a thorny ethical problem. You must understand. I didn’t know any of them except you, of course.” He pushed his writing pad back with careful deliberation.

She spoke in shocked gravity. “What did you do?”

“Society must abide by the rules it creates, otherwise we descend into moral anarchy.” He spoke with the clarity of a man who had something to hide. “You know how the law works in cases like this. You were sworn to secrecy, and now you’re in breach of your contracts. The documents you signed – you all signed – are still legally binding. And you were paid well. Do you want to betray your country?”

“It was blood money, and you know it!”

Masters sighed. “This is all water under the bridge. Everything has been cleared up now. There’s no reason why any of it should ever get out.”

“It will get out, Harold. Mary and Jennifer are still here. I’m still here,” Jackie persisted. “I’m still alive.”

“No, I’m afraid you’re not,” said Masters, wearily rising from behind his desk.