Alchemist

  He clutched his glass. ‘Charley Rowley. I guess you didn’t hear?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘That he drowned in Hawaii.’

  She almost dropped her whisky, feeling as if something had just detonated inside her.

  Conor rummaged for his cigarettes and lit one. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘Conor, this is terrible! God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I –’ He shook his head. ‘Something’s very wrong about it; there’s something doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Or makes too much sense?’

  There was a sudden, uncharacteristic flash of anger in Conor’s voice when he next spoke. ‘An accident! Every time it’s just another goddamn accident. Rowley was scared as hell when we left the pub. I remember him in the taxi looking out of the rear window. And this wasn’t a guy who got scared of anything.’

  It was Conor who looked scared, she thought, his face still drained of all colour. ‘Did they give you any details? How it happened?’

  ‘High jinks. He got drunk, tried to swim in the dark – that’s what they’re saying.’

  Monty slipped down beside him and put an arm around him. ‘I’m sorry; you really liked him, didn’t you?’

  ‘He was one of the good guys; they’re thin on the ground in Bendix Schere.’

  ‘They’re thin on the ground in life.’ She gently prised the cigarette from him, held it with shaking fingers and took a puff. ‘Is my father next?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re going to harm one of their major assets.’

  Monty wished she could detect more conviction in his voice.

  ‘One of two things is going to happen, Monty. If your father finds nothing of significance in those capsules, then we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘And if he does?’

  ‘Then we have to make the decision whether we go to Rorke, or the police, or the CSM –’

  A sharp buzzing sound in the hall startled them.

  Monty froze. Conor’s face stiffened as well. There was another buzz; it seemed louder, more intense.

  ‘Entryphone,’ he said, walking back out of the room.

  ‘Careful, Conor, don’t let anyone in.’

  ‘I’m not going to.’

  Conor lifted the internal phone in the hallway. ‘Hello?’ Monty watched his face. ‘Pizza? No, I didn’t order any pizza. What address do you have?’ There was a pause. ‘This is Apartment Two; you rang the wrong bell. OK, no worries.’

  Monty edged her way to the curtainless window and peered down into the street. A motorcycle was parked outside, the large red words ‘PIZZAS PIZZAS’ on its pannier.

  Firm, strong hands slipped around her waist, moist, warm lips kissed the back of each ear in turn, then the hands held her more firmly. His face nuzzled hers. ‘Just a false alarm.’

  In the draught, goose pimples ran down her legs and arms and she pressed further back into his body for warmth. ‘I’m sorry – I’ve never been so jumpy.’

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ he said quietly. ‘Being jumpy keeps you vigilant. Being vigilant is smart right now.’

  They ate on the sofa, using the coffee table. Conor forked the last morsel of monkfish into his mouth. ‘This is delicious,’ he said. ‘You’re a demon in the kitchen! There’s a great restaurant I’m going to take you to one day in Washington –’ He stopped, suddenly remembering. ‘I have to go to Washington next week. Just for a couple of days.’

  ‘Next week? When next week?’

  ‘Guess I’ll fly out Wednesday and come back at the weekend.’

  ‘I’m going to Washington on Thursday with my father!’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘No, I’m not. We’re having dinner with Clinton no less, and Daddy’s talking at a symposium on genetics. Is that what you’re going over for?’

  ‘No, I didn’t hear about the symposium. I have to visit the Patent Office, no less.’ He drank some wine. ‘Hey, this is good news! First time in Washington?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘December’s not the best month to visit. It’s too cold.’

  ‘Tell you what, I’d love to meet your mother.’ She looked at him brightly. ‘Could we do that?’

  He nodded. ‘I want you to meet her, too. We’ll fix it.’

  Monty refilled their glasses, then she looked at him again. ‘What did your father do?’

  Conor tapped ash off his cigarette. ‘He was a civil servant.’

  ‘In Washington?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Were you close?’

  ‘No, he died when I was eight.’

  ‘What a shame – was it illness?’

  Conor drew on his cigarette in silence. Monty sensed she had touched a raw nerve and changed the subject.

  That night, Conor had the dream again. The bird dived in a long, sharp zigzag from the sky; it half flew, half plummeted, like a shadow chasing itself. But when it hit the ground it did not look up at him and become his father. Instead it remained still.

  A ring of fire began to burn around it, small fierce flames as if someone had drawn a circle with petrol. Then a voice whispered in his ear: ‘They shouldn’t have done that. They knew he couldn’t swim!’

  Conor sat up with a start, wide awake, a drumming roar inside his head, his body engulfed in a thick coating of sweat.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Monty stirred beside him, then he heard her voice in the darkness. ‘What is it? What’s the matter, Conor?’

  ‘Charley Rowley.’ He turned on the bedside light, went over to the closet where he had hung his jacket, and slid his hand into the inside pocket to pull out a sheet of paper. It was the memorandum from Dr Crowe informing employees of Charley Rowley’s death. Monty sat up a little and he showed it to her.

  ‘So you didn’t get one of these yet?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve got the bastards! All these goddamn accidents, now we really have these bastards.’ He tapped the bottom of the first paragraph with his finger, and read it aloud. ‘… missing, presumed drowned, whilst on a business trip to Bendix Hilo in Hawaii.’

  She looked at him. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I asked Mr Walker, who brought me this, what actually happened. Like I told you, he said that Rowley had accepted a bet to make a midnight swim. Across a bay and back, I think it was.’ He let go of the piece of paper, clenched his hands and pounded the knuckles together. ‘Monty, I’ve just remembered something Rowley said on Thursday, when he announced that he was leaving for Hawaii. I told him I’d be thinking of him over the weekend, sitting on a beach sunning himself, swigging Margaritas and cooling down in the ocean.’ He took a breath. ‘Charley said he wouldn’t be cooling himself down in any ocean, because he had a phobia about water – he was terrified of it.’

  Conor began to pace the room. ‘So what Walker said is one big goddamn lie.’ He stopped, stared at Monty, eyes blazing, and clenched his fists again. ‘Charley told me himself that he couldn’t swim.’

  81

  Tuesday 29 November, 1994

  The MG’s heater whined, and something trapped inside it rattled and clattered intermittently, irritating Monty. Her feet were roasting inside her ankle-length boots and her cheeks were frozen from the air blasting in through a crack in the vinyl roof; she badly missed her shawl, which she normally wore to protect her neck from the draught.

  The engine nearly died and she blipped the accelerator hard. The car needed some attention; at least as a result of the Bendix takeover there was some money in her bank account to pay for it. She wondered if the garage could do anything while she was in Washington, but that was only going to be a couple of days.

  The brute front end of a juggernaut filled her wing mirror as she stared impatiently at the jammed traffic in front of her, waiting for it to inch forward again. Interchangeable voices droned on the radio, telling her that the capital’s traffic this morning was bad, bad, bad. She turne
d her brain to her own thoughts instead.

  Charley Rowley. She had only met the man briefly and could barely remember what he looked like, but she had been unable to get him out of her mind all night. Death by drowning.

  What a sorry mess. The Medici File. The buck stopped there, she was sure. And the contents were stored on Conor’s computer.

  Why Medici? Why name a drugs trial after a Florentine Renaissance family? What was the real connection? OK, the Medicis were immensely powerful and under their influence medieval Florence became the cultural centre of Europe. The Medicis were pretty ruthless, also. But drugs? She wondered if there was some connection between the words Medici and Medicine, but could not think of anything that made any sense. Medic?

  She weighed up again the pros and cons of going to see Sir Neil Rorke. If Charley Rowley had been murdered for getting the Maternox template, or trying to get more samples, they were all at risk: her father, Conor, herself.

  Conor was badly shaken. With the death of his friend, the people who had died were no longer just names on a list to him. She thought through his arguments in favour of waiting until her father had the results of his analysis of the capsules. Those arguments applied only so long as they had no hard evidence. With this clearly fictional account of Rowley’s end, now they had that evidence.

  Someone had not done their homework properly. Presumably Rowley’s family and girlfriend would be told the same story; and they’d know he couldn’t swim too. Questions were going to be asked. If Monty was a member of his family, she’d be demanding an immediate investigation by the Hawaiian authorities. No doubt that’s exactly what they were going to do.

  All the more reason to see Rorke and warn him of what was going on behind his back, and the potential disaster for the company.

  Monty finally passed the roadworks and the traffic began moving more steadily. After a quarter of an hour she took the exit she wanted, and a few miles later began to recognize some of the landmarks she’d seen in the dark on her trip with Conor on Sunday.

  She passed a scrapbreaker’s yard of dismembered taxis and found a parking space outside Winston Smith’s low-rise. She primed the car’s primitive alarm, then hurried up the concrete steps to the second-floor walkway.

  Her watch said 9.15. The mountain of work stacked up in her office would have to wait, because right now this took priority. Then she was having lunch with her father in the Italian café up the road from Bendix; they’d agreed that except for emergencies, they would discuss nothing over the phone.

  Ducking her head against the beginnings of rain, she rang the Smiths’ doorbell. A shadow moved behind the glass pane; Monty heard the metallic sound of a latch, then the door opened a few inches. She saw Mrs Smith, sitting in a wheelchair in her dressing gown, looking up at her with a bleak frown of recognition.

  ‘Hello,’ Monty said. ‘I’m sorry to be a pest again, but we need to have a talk.’

  ‘He’s still in the Clinic.’

  ‘Actually it’s you I wanted to see, Mrs Smith.’

  ‘I can’t stand up.’ The woman’s hands were shaking and she seemed to Monty to have lost weight since Sunday. ‘It’s one of my bad days; can’t get out of the chair.’

  Monty put on her most beguiling you-can-really-trust-me smile. ‘Could you possibly let me in for a few minutes? It might be easier.’

  Mrs Smith hesitated, then reluctantly eased back, allowing Monty to step into the minuscule hall from where she could see a little sitting room through to the right. But she was not invited beyond the hall.

  Monty took the plunge. ‘Look, Mrs Smith – I know you believe Bendix Schere are doing the best they can for your husband, but I think they’re using him.’

  The seated woman watched her expressionlessly; Monty was not sure what she was thinking, but went on: ‘Winston told me that he volunteered for some drug trials about twelve years ago, and that he’s been unwell almost on and off ever since. Isn’t that right?’

  Mrs Smith fixed her eyes on Monty for some moments without acknowledgement. ‘I took part in the same trial,’ she said finally.

  This was what Monty had suspected on her earlier visit. She felt horror mingling with the pity she now felt. ‘You did that, and then you got this – this – Parkinson’s?’

  A tremor seemed to go right through the other woman, rippling her from head to foot. For Monty the effect was as though she was watching a reflection of Mrs Smith in water, instead of seeing her in the flesh; unnerved, she found herself wanting to step back, and had to force herself not to.

  ‘This started six years after,’ the reflection said. ‘The Doctor Seligman, he can’t tell me what’s wrong – I been ’ad all kinds of tests. He say I have the same symptoms as Parkinson’s, but I don’t have Parkinson’s.’

  Monty frowned. The name ‘Seligman’ seemed familiar. Then she remembered the name tag of the rather smooth character who’d accosted her outside Winston Smith’s door at the Clinic. Dr F. Charles Seligman.

  ‘Have you seen any independent doctors?’

  Mrs Smith looked furtive, as if she was trying to pluck up the courage to tell Monty something. ‘I see the doctor in the health centre just locally, here. He take blood sample and other tests; then when I go back he say the same thing: that it is symptoms like Parkinson’s but does not test as Parkinson’s, and he say this was too long after the trials and could not be connected.’ A tremor, similar to the previous one but smaller, ran through her body. ‘He tell me he think it is all in my mind.’

  Monty grimaced. ‘And your husband, when did you last see him?’

  ‘Yesterday – I went in the taxi the company sent – they very good to us, you see.’

  ‘It sounds like it. How was he?’

  She shook her head and her face fell. ‘He’s real bad.’

  ‘Will you let me get another doctor to see him?’

  Mrs Smith looked defeated. ‘No, thank you. They doing everything they can for him; I don’t think he’s got the strength to go through more tests.’

  Monty swallowed her frustration. ‘Well, will you give him my regards, please.’

  ‘Miss Bannerman?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Mrs Smith’s eyes had sharpened suddenly, as if focusing for the first time during the conversation. ‘My memory is not so good. My husband, he was a little delirious last night, but he wanted to make sure if you came back I give you this message.’

  Monty’s eyes widened.

  ‘He wasn’t too clear – I should have wrote it down. It was about a car park.’

  ‘A car park?’

  ‘Yes. He said you have to go into the multi-storey car park across the street opposite Bendix. Charles Street? Chalter Street? He say that’s where the entrance is.’

  ‘What entrance?’

  ‘He told me you’d understand.’

  Suddenly Monty twigged. She nodded vigorously. ‘Right! Brilliant! I do understand, yes. Thank you!’

  Minutes later she hurried from Albany Court and drove as fast, and as recklessly, as the heavy traffic would permit, towards the office.

  82

  Conor was surprised to find a three-page fax from the US Patent Office already waiting for him when he arrived at work. Also awaiting him was a warning memo regarding the state of his car, and reminding him of the penalties for not keeping it clean. It was signed: ‘G. Snape, Staff Relations Officer.’

  The wheels and sides of his BMW were caked in mud from Monty’s farm track and he had been too preoccupied to think about it. Irritated by the tone of the memo, he dropped it into the shredder, making a mental note to take the car through a wash before tomorrow. He was going down to Monty’s cottage again tonight; getting his car dirty looked like becoming part of the relationship.

  Entertaining himself with the pleasurable thought of suspending G. Snape over hot coals and ritually disembowelling him, he skimmed the fax, which was signed by Dave Schwab. As previously hinted, there were a number of factors in the application that Dave
was not happy about, and he suggested the interview which they’d tentatively made for next Thursday be brought forward a day – to allow more time to set things in motion afterwards.

  Conor’s thoughts veered to Charley Rowley. Rowley had not just died, he had been killed. And Conor had to live with the fact that he was the one who’d got the poor guy involved in this whole can of worms. He owed it to Rowley to go hunting some guts for garters.

  He made a decision to go out in his lunch break, find a pay phone and try to track down and speak to Rowley’s parents. He knew they were a wealthy family. Maybe they had a bit of influence as well. If he could get a song and dance stirred up quickly over this, it might send Bendix Schere’s hit squad running for cover.

  They only needed a short while. Just long enough to get the results from Dick Bannerman. Ten days.

  There was a rap on his door and Martin Walker, Head of Department, glided in. ‘Good morning, Mr Molloy, you have my agenda for our nine o’clock meeting?’

  ‘No, I haven’t read my eMail yet.’ He held up Schwab’s fax. ‘Been occupied with this.’

  Walker looked a fraction less self-assured than normal. ‘There seem to be a number of conflicting stories about how our poor Mr Rowley died. I had been led to understand he was attempting an unwise swim, but apparently he fell overboard on a late-night fishing trip.’

  ‘That’s quite a difference.’

  In a masterful display of self-control, Walker’s expression barely altered. ‘Well – it reminds me of your Chappaquiddick. All kinds of different stories start flying round when accidents occur.’

  ‘That’s because someone was trying to do a cover-up at Chappaquiddick,’ Conor said, his eyes fixed on Walker’s.

  ‘Yes, tragedy does make people panic, doesn’t it? Maybe they all got drunk at the beach barbecue first, and someone made up a story to prevent the skipper of the boat being prosecuted for negligence. The sad truth is that Mr Rowley has drowned, and whatever the circumstances, that remains the case.’

  Conor wondered how much all this had cost the company in bribes to the relevant authorities in Hawaii. ‘Have they found his body yet?’