Masters he would either release Mrs Quinten, allowing her to fall under her own weight, or attack her with greater violence.
She was still trying to reach a decision when Renfield threw his broad frame straight down the stairs in a foolhardy but spectacular airborne rugby tackle that slammed Masters to the steps so hard that it cracked his ribs and punched the air from his lungs.
Renfield climbed to his feet, unfazed, and reached over the balcony just as Mrs Quinten’s grip failed, dragging her back across the balustrade like a sack of flour. He fell onto the stairs beside Masters, with Mrs Quinten lying on top of him. It was undignified, but seemed to have done the trick.
“You make one sudden move, sunshine,” he told the inert doctor, “and I’ll tear your bleeding head off.” But with the scarf loosened from her throat, Mrs Quinten suddenly started to scream and thrash about in shock, and in the brief moments it took Renfield to quell the tangle of limbs, Masters had risen and run into the gallery straight ahead of them.
Renfield abandoned his charge and was following now, but Longbright had the lead. She closed in behind Masters as he blundered past the Cetole, the only surviving English musical instrument of the Middle Ages, resplendent in its glass case.
He was limping, clutching at his cracked rib cage, and she caught up with him in the clock room, by Congreve’s rollingball timepiece of 1810. He flung out his right arm with such suddenness that she was taken by surprise. The blow to her face knocked her head back, sending her to the floor, but she was up on her feet even before Renfield appeared in the doorway.
“No, Jack,” she told the sergeant. “He’s mine.”
Masters was more shocked than anyone when Longbright slammed into him, pressing down on the fractured ribs in his chest. Masters yelped painfully and fell back, hitting the case behind with his full weight. Inside, the bulbous black-and-white vase tilted onto its rim.
Longbright stepped back in horror. “Oh no,” she said quietly. “The Portland Vase. Not again.” The priceless antiquity had survived two millennia only to be shattered once before. In one of the greatest restoration feats ever attempted in modern times, it had been made whole once more. She watched the vase in horror as it rolled around on the edge of its base, teetering on its plinth.
The vase had passed its point of equilibrium, and tipped over.
The glass case was not wide enough to allow it to properly fall, and the vase was held at a forty-five-degree angle, settling safely as the wounded academic slid down to the floor and began to cry for his own shattered life.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
45
The Method
“It’s all in here,” said April, tapping the rescued folders. “And it’s all about babies. Or rather, mothers and babies.”
Ye Olde Mitre tavern in Ely Court, Hatton Garden, was a godsend to the nine drenched, exhausted men and women who found themselves together on a miserably wet Saturday night. The members of the PCU had nowhere else to go. Alma Sorrowbridge had banned them from Bryant’s house because Colin Bimsley had tracked something nasty onto the carpet before knocking over a jug less unique, but with more sentimental value, than the Portland Vase.
April, Meera and Colin might have uncovered the documentation needed to resolve the investigation, but Renfield was nonplussed to find himself the hero of the hour. Uncomfortable with the attention, he spent most of his time at the bar, returning with fresh drinks whenever he spotted an empty glass on the table. He had already bought Longbright three pints of Guinness. He liked a woman who could drink pints.
“We’re still piecing together a timeline of events,” April warned, spreading the printouts and typed pages across the beer-stained table. The detective constables had elected her to translate their elements into something resembling a narrative. “As far as we can tell, it begins with Dr Peter Jukes, chief scientist for chemical and biological defence at the MOD’s Porton Down laboratory.”
“Jukes?” repeated Kershaw. “What has he got to do with all this?”
“If you recall, Giles, we knew he was a colleague of Jocelyn Roquesby, and that he had drowned while he was still employed as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. It made sense that she met Jukes at work. She might even have had an affair with him. He was single, and looks pretty fit in his photographs.”
“But she wasn’t at MOD – ”
“No, like the others, Mrs Roquesby worked for Theseus Research in King’s Cross, one of the companies to whom the ministry outsourced contracts. The women were legal secretaries, nothing more than that. Jackie Quinten was formerly employed there. She’d retired, but had agreed to be pressed back into service on a part-time basis. Her security rating was still intact, after all, but what brought her back? Well, they were seven middle-aged women who all appeared to share something in common. None of them were able to have children of their own.”
“Wait,” said Banbury, “doesn’t Mrs Roquesby have a daughter?”
“Eleanor Roquesby is adopted,” April corrected.
“And Jackie Quinten’s child is her stepson,” Bryant pointed out.
“One of the MOD’s chief remits was – and no doubt still is – to prevent a chemical terrorist attack from occurring in London and the other major cities of Great Britain,” April continued. “You remember the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in Japan? In 1995, they attempted to hasten the apocalypse by carrying out five sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro, killing twelve and injuring a thousand. It would appear from Mrs Quinten’s unburned notes that Theseus had indeed developed a new vaccine. It had been tried on animals with a high level of success, but they needed to test it on humans, and in the light of increasing terrorist warnings that culminated in the 7/7 attacks, they had to act quickly.
“So, in the course of their experiments, Jukes discreetly asked around for volunteers to take part in an experiment. He needed to carry out an unethical expediency. His brief was to administer a preventative vaccine to live subjects, humans less than eighteen months old. None of the infants is identified in Mrs Quinten’s notes, but it seems at least two had been abandoned in Eastern European orphanages. To Joanne Kellerman and the others, it lessened the moral burden if they were assured that the babies had been given up for adoption in the direst of circumstances. It also seems clear the women were told that their charges faced absolutely no risk of infection. They agreed to foster them, taking care of the infants during their working hours at Theseus, helping to monitor their wellbeing throughout the day. The babies were to be allowed medication for ten weeks, but at the end of this period they unexpectedly became sick, and one by one they died. All this we have from Mrs Quinten’s notes.”
“What went wrong?” asked Kershaw.
“Jukes’s drug proved to have unforeseen side effects. Perhaps the infants would have lived had they been older or healthier – but who would allow their children to undergo such testing, even given assurances that no possible harm could come to them? So the mortified women were paid off and sworn to secrecy. They left their jobs with good severance money – we have Mrs Quinten’s old pay slips – and were reminded of their allegiance to the Official Secrets Act.
“What nobody counted on was the fact that Joanne Kellerman and the others felt increasingly uncomfortable with their own consciences, and were eventually unable to process the guilt surrounding their unwitting complicity. They agreed to meet up in a pub. Perhaps just two of them met at first, but the meetings clearly grew to involve five out of the seven women. They liked a drink and they were on safe neutral ground, away from loved ones. Their security was not seen to be compromised. They could talk freely without being watched. London is full of secrets, and they were dealing with theirs in the best way they knew how, by quietly and privately discussing it.”
“But secrets have a way of escaping.”
“Exactly. It was Jackie Quinten who remembered her colleague Masters, and went to him for advice. He didn’t know the others and probably only knew Mrs Quinten slightly, but she trusted him.”
“No doubt she appealed to him as a humanitarian,” said Bryant. “But he betrayed her. He told Theseus about the possible information leak. They, in return, hired him to come up with a foolproof way of containing the damage.
