Part 21 (2/2)

'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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 re-turned 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 G.o.d.' 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 naive; 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 gla.s.ses. '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'ta”'

'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 G.o.d'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. n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p, had comforted him during his wife's decline and death, but his defensive att.i.tude 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 acc.u.mulation of empirical data, you know; we are granted epiphanies occasionally. We may even p.r.o.nounce 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 toa”they needed a solution to a th.o.r.n.y 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 doc.u.ments you signeda”you all signeda”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.

43.

BENEATH THE ANTIQUITIES.

T.

he British Museum was the oldest public museum on the planet.

It had been built to house the purchases and gifts collected from around the world by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, items of such antiquity that appreciating the convoluted circ.u.mstances of their history had become a challenge in itself. Almost every exhibit told an extraordinary story, from the graceful Portland Vase, produced before the birth of Christ only to be smashed into two hundred pieces by a drunken sailor in 1845 and then painstakingly rea.s.sembled, to the Lindow Man, a two-thousand-year-old peasant preserved in the acids of a Ches.h.i.+re peat bog.

It was not a particularly friendly or accessible museum. Artefacts withheld their secrets, and the weight of lost empires hung heavily about the remains. A mere stroll through chambers of gla.s.s cabinets taught little, and left no impression; the museum worked best when no more than half a dozen objects were examined at one time.

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