Кен Макклюр: Miasma

Tally had already left for the hospital when Steven woke and lay for a few moments wondering if the events of the previous evening had been real or some kind of strange dream. His conclusion that it had been real left him with neutral feelings and he knew he wouldn’t feel any better until he had formulated some plan of action. He took a leisurely shower and smiled when he remembered what Tally had said about the Rodin sculpture. He did have a lot of thinking to do, but first, he would go in to the Home Office and see if John had any thoughts about the Downing Street meeting or any other input to offer, then he would ask Jean to seek out more details about the murdered men, particularly Samuel Petrov, the late-comer to the scene.

‘John isn’t in yet,’ said Jean. When Steven arrived at eleven. ‘I hear you boys had a late night.’

‘How did you know?’

‘John left quite a long message for me on the machine, I understand you’re going code-red, but not on the murders?’

‘That’s right. I’m to work alone on the reasons behind the murder and mayhem.’

‘I took the liberty of setting some things up for you,’ said Jean, handing Steven his code-red ID and credit cards and asking if he wanted to book time to see the armourer. Steven said not but asked her to dig out as much information as possible on the victims.

‘I’ve already made a start on that,’ said Jean. ‘More will be forthcoming.’ She handed over a slim plastic file holder.’

Steven thanked her and asked, ‘Anything on Petrov in here?’

‘Russian by birth, the son of a wealthy father who made a fortune out of mining after the end of the USSR era. Unlike his father, junior wasn’t business minded and chose to follow an academic path. He studied microbiology in Moscow and then obtained a higher degree from Edinburgh University who had a special scheme for supporting Russian students interested in pursuing research in molecular biology. His particular interest was in vaccine design and he went on to serve out a couple of post-doctoral fellowships, one at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the second at Lund University in Sweden before moving to CDC Atlanta in the USA. He seemed to have settled there before surprising everyone by announcing a move to Israel and applying for Israeli citizenship — he was Jewish and Israel has a policy of giving citizenship to anyone who is Jewish. He approached the University of the Negev and asked if they might give him lab space to continue his work on vaccines and they agreed — an easy decision as the World Health Organisation had agreed to provide him with financial support.’

‘Good,’ said Steven, something which got an enquiring glance from Jean.

‘I wasn’t entirely convinced that Sci-Med should be involved in this affair,’ said Steven, ‘but Petrov being a scientist with a WHO connection makes it four out of the five victims having something in common however tenuous.’

‘My grandmother always used to say, Begin a jigsaw at the corners and the rest will fall into place.’

‘Wise words,’ said Steven with a smile.

Steven sat down at the table at home and spread out the information Jean had provided for him. He rearranged it in small, neat piles in a row, one for each of the murder victims, sub-divided further into personal and professional details. He already knew that there was no obvious or likely personal connection between the five so he wanted to see if he could forge any kind of professional one, something that might suggest why five people who had never met or communicated directly might be working towards the same goal.

He had the latest publications from the two Englishmen but nothing for Petrov as yet, apart from the fact that he was a microbiologist who had decided to opt out of the academic rat race and apply to become an Israeli citizen working at a small university in the middle of the Negev desert. The estate agent, Lang, whom everyone seemed to know was laundering money for Russian expats by helping them convert dodgy roubles into desirable London properties was less of a problem. The appearance of the dead Englishmen’s names on his books suggested strongly that Russian expat money had been used to pay them and he had been tasked with cleaning it up. Although no clear link had as yet been established between Lang and the dead French investment banker, Marcel Giroud, Steven felt confident it might still appear. He got up to make coffee.

He thought it reasonable to dismiss Lang and Giroud as just two money-men and to exclude them from consideration for major roles in whatever was going on. He downed the espresso and approached the slim file on the World Health man, Phillipe Lagarde. Steven wasn’t sure what his job description as ‘vaccine strategist co-ordinator’ meant, but, as he read, it became clear that he had played an important role in the WHO’s ambition to wipe out infectious disease from the planet. They had already succeeded in eliminating the scourge of Smallpox and were coming close to wiping out Polio if they could clear the final difficult areas where it was still clinging on — the Afghan/Pakistan border country being the most challenging and where Lagarde had been working in the months leading up to his death. He had been engaged in the geographical mapping out of vaccination plans and in dealing diplomatically with the fears and concerns of the locals. Lagarde’s former foreign postings before working the wild country of the Afghan border had been to Uganda and formulating protection of the Democratic Republic of Congo during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak.

‘Respect,’ Steven muttered, feeling the kind of admiration he had felt for Simone and all those who dedicated their lives to the fight against disease under the most demanding of conditions There was nothing in the file as yet about Lagarde’s financial status.

Some more information arrived by encrypted messaging from Jean. Steven scanned through it for anything more on Samuel Petrov and was happy to find that there was. He had been a well-respected scientist with several publications on vaccine design using the techniques offered by molecular biology to alter the genetic composition of microbes. His decision to move to Israel had come as a complete surprise to his colleagues who could only come up with vague suggestions about the strong pull Israel had for Jewish people. He himself had offered no reason. There was a lack of recent published work because of his employment at CDC Atlanta where secrecy was always a factor, but his reputation had been good enough to attract WHO support. There was no information about how his work at the University of the Negev had been going at the time of his death.

Steven acknowledged the fact that he had been ignoring the suspected Chinese element in all of this. All he had to go on, of course, was MI6’s suspicion that the killers had been Chinese — possibly with official backing. If they were right, the implication was that whatever the five victims had been involved in was more than a little annoying. Were there more murders to come?

Steven was toying with this thought when the house phone rang. It was his daughter, Jenny.

‘Hello, nutkin, what a nice surprise, I usually have to wait for boyfriends to get off the line before I get to speak to you.’

‘Oh, come on, Dad, it’s not that bad,’ Jenny insisted in a tone that made Steven smile to hear her sounding so grown-up... and giving him distinct echoes of her mother, Lisa.

Steven had met and married Jenny’s mother Lisa many years before when she had been a nurse at a Glasgow hospital and he had been working on an investigation up there. Jenny had been born a year later but Lisa had developed a brain tumour shortly afterwards and died before Jenny had had the chance to remember her. After much heart-searching, Lisa’s sister, Sue had persuaded him that the sensible option would be that Jenny be brought up as one of her family along with her own two children who were only slightly older. Her husband Richard — who had readily agreed — was a country solicitor and the family lived in the village of, Glenvane, in Dumfriesshire, an area of great natural beauty in Scotland. It had worked out well.