Part 23 (1/2)

'Jazmina Sherwin, the girl who was a.s.saulted in the Albion, Barnsbury,' said Bimsley, grasping the bigger picture.

'So, what happens now?' asked Longbright.

'We have to go after Theseus,' said Bryant, without pausing to think.

'We've got no status, no office, no dosh,' said Meera disconsolately. And we're working out of a pub.'

'Besides, Theseus is a government outsource,' May re-minded him. 'How far do you honestly think you'll get?'

'When a democratic government is no longer accountable for its actions, it becomes a dictators.h.i.+p. Besides, who says they even know what's been going on? The Ministry of Defence is a law unto itself. I wouldn't be surprised if they've hung Theseus out to dry.'

Behind them, the door banged open and Raymond Land burst in wearing a plastic mackintosh, spraying water around like a retriever emerging from a pond. Ah, here you all are. I've been looking for you everywhere.' He shook his umbrella violently, searching for somewhere to leave it.

'Get you a drink?' asked Renfield.

'No, no, can't stop unfortunately, the wife will give me h.e.l.l. Purely a business call.' He turned to his detectives and saw the paperwork spread on the table. 'Should you be examining evidence in a pub?'

'They're only copies,' April explained. 'Obviously the originals are safely stowed away.'

'Quite. Understood. You should know that Leslie Faraday has promised to try and find you new accommodation as soon as possible. This won't be forever, you know. You can't operate out of a pub.'

'Come off it, Raymondo,' said Bryant. 'You know as well as I do that they've finally got us where they want us. What's the likelihood of them rehousing the unit somewhere else?'

'I do see your point, but I'm not here to discuss that. It's rather more serious, I'm afraid.' He drew a fortifying breath. 'To me has fallen the unpleasant task of placing you and Mr May under arrest.'

'What on earth for?' asked May, startled.

'Breach of the Official Secrets Act, I'm afraid.'

'But we don't operate under its jurisdiction.'

'Since the Peculiar Crimes Unit is answerable to the Home Office, you are government employees. You have knowingly disseminated information from protected Ministry of Defence sources.'

'I forwarded Jocelyn Roquesby's computer files to the office terminal,' April admitted. 'It never occurred to me that it was already in someone else's handsa”'

'So you'll both have to come with me to West End Central and face charges.' Land's determination faded into sheepishness.

'We'd love to help you, vieux haricot, but I'm afraid it's quite impossible,' said Bryant with a smirk. 'You see, you're in Ye Olde Mitre tavern.'

'What has that got to do with anything?' asked Land.

'Well, due to a mix-up with certain clauses in the Land Registry Act several centuries ago, Ye Olde Mitre is not, technically speaking, part of London, but in ancient Cambridges.h.i.+re. The City of London police have no jurisdiction in here.'

'You're having a laugh, aren't you?' Land turned to the barman, dumbfounded. 'He's having a laugh, isn't he? Is this true?'

'I'm afraid so, mate,' said the barman. 'No-one can be ar-rested within the pub or in the immediate environs of Ely Court. This isn't London, it's Cambridge. Don't look at me, I'm Australian. You lot are the ones with the b.l.o.o.d.y silly laws.'

Bryant coaxed his distraught boss to a stool and helped him from his mackintosh. And as we're not going to be leaving here until well after the last bell has sounded,' he said, 'you might as well get another round in for all of us.'

46.

Guerrilla Tactics We unwittingly opposed a government project,' whispered May, waiting while the nurse finished attending to Mrs Quinten. 'What did you expect to happen?'

'I expected a desire to trace culpability,' snapped his partner, looking around at the sleeping hospital ward.

After a boozy night with his emphatic detectives, Land had agreed to try and have the charges against them temporarily suspended on cognisance of their exemplary records, and their willingness to abide by instructions issued from HO Internal Security. It was nothing more than they expected and demanded, but while they were cooling their heels at home for the remainder of the night, scouring Internet reports for any news of the case, they discovered that the managing director of Theseus Research had already been a.s.signed to another post, this time in Atlanta, Georgia.

'There are others who know, you may be a.s.sured of that,' said Bryant, burying himself inside his tweed coat. 'Containment on this scale never works. I've no doubt both the birth mothers and the remaining fosterers would have their credibility destroyed should any choose to come forward, but there are others who must have seen what they saw.'

'Inadmissible hearsay, not empirical data. How thoroughly has all the proof been destroyed? Our one hope now is that Jackiea”ah, Mrs Quinten.' May sat forward in his chair and studied her sleepy eyes. 'Not in too much pain, I hope?'

'Some bruising, a few scratches, nothing a child couldn't handle,' the nurse told them. 'But she'll have a very sore throat for a while. You two shouldn't be here, you know. The other patients aren't awake yet.' She adjusted the curtains around them and left.

'I've been wondering about Harold Masters,' said Jackie Quinten softly. 'I thought I understood him. I can't imagine why any man would have done what he did. He wasn't interested in making money.'

'It was less about money than pride,' said Bryant.'The museum had reduced his workload and was in the process of let-ting him go. He'd worked for the MOD before, and knew how far Theseus would go to cover up a mistake, because at the end of the day that's all it was. Remember those British volunteers who partic.i.p.ated in the anti-inflammatory drugs trial conducted by the German pharmaceutical company TeGenero AG? Their heads swelled up and they nearly died. The drug was designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis. The Theseus drug trial was conducted for an even more altruistic reason: to prevent innocents from dying on the streets of London.'

'They showed us the paperwork,' said Jackie Quinten. All of the babies had been signed over to the state by their mothers. One was an orphan whose parents had died travelling to Britain from Ethiopia. Another was abandoned in a McDonald's bag by heroin addicts. Everyone I spoke to at Theseus was committed to helping the children. They told us it would just be one safe short-term drug trial. I saw them every day. Harold Masters saw me with the little Ethiopian boy and said, ”You could always adopt him when he leaves here.” But I couldn't, you see. I'd been turned down before, after some trouble with my stepson. And Jocelyn had faced problems with alcoholism. None of us thought we could truly adopt, not for a minute, but we grabbed at the opportunity to look after the babies during the day, and were paid a little extra.

'It was Carol's baby that got sick first. He started crying and couldn't stop, until he could barely draw breath. It all happened so quickly, on the third and fourth days of the test. One after the other they went bluea”cyanosis, the doctor saida” and their little hearts just stopped. They held a single funeral on the Friday, just hours after the last autopsy. A terrible afternoon. It didn't stop raining, and the graves couldn't be filled in because of flooding. We were never told what had gone wrong. We were paid our bonuses, reminded of our loyalties to the company, and that was that.

'But I couldn't stop thinking about my little boy. I had to talk to someone, and so I called Jocelyn. One time we persuaded Carol and Joanne to join us, and shortly after that we began holding regular meetings in different pubs.'

'It got back to Theseus that you had re-formed your group of friends,' said May. 'It looks like Masters sold you out for a contract to fix the security leak.'

'But we wouldn't have gone to the press,' said Jackie miser-ably. 'We just needed the comfort of conversation, some a.s.surance that we weren't responsible for what had happened. What I don't understand is, how could they take such drastic action against us?'

'Well, I'm afraid even we can't tell you that,' said Bryant, rising to leave. 'I'll call on you again.'

'I'll be going home in a while,' said Jackie. 'If you like, I can cook you a meal and help you answer any other questions you might have.'

'Thank you, no.' Bryant smiled sadly. 'Our work is not quite finished.'

'She doesn't understand how anyone can conceive of killing witnesses to what amounted to a humanitarian defence project,' said May as they left University College Hospital, 'because she doesn't know who commissioned it. Masters said it went all the way to the top. I can guess whose signature was on the order to test the anti-toxin. Did you know Theseus is an Anglo-American operation? There's a chap called Senator Nathan Maddock who fits the bill very nicely. A hard-line right-winger with the ear of both the President and the Prime Minister, the man who tells British Defence what to do. But I don't think even he would have agreed to act without Masters's a.s.surance that the remedy was completely untraceable.'

'What level of panic would induce a company used to handling state defence contracts to hire the services of a mental patient?' Bryant wondered as they walked through falling rain toward May's car. 'Didn't they stop to consider how many things could go wrong in that scenario?'