‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just carrying out a few tests, that’s all.’
‘Why? Why on these specific samples when we’ve got hundreds of others we haven’t even looked at yet? And when we’re supposed to be working exclusively on the flu research, which, incidentally, is what I’ve come in here today to go on doing.’
It could only be his suspicion that there was some connection with Rebecca’s killing, but he couldn’t compromise Beverley in any way. ‘I want you to trust me. Trust me and not talk to anyone about what I’m doing. Which is what I am going to ask everyone else on Monday, when they see the mice and the cultures.’
‘It’s personal?’
There was only one inference if he answered that. ‘Trust me.’
Beverley regarded him steadily for several moments. ‘Am I going to regret coming in here today?’
‘You could go.’
‘I’m logged in, at the security gatehouse. As you are.’
Shit, thought Parnell. ‘You don’t know anything. You’re not part of anything. There’s probably nothing to know or be part of.’
There was another silence. ‘Were you and Rebecca doing something you shouldn’t have been?’
Beverley was too clever, too prescient, Parnell conceded. ‘Neither Rebecca nor I were betraying Dubette in any way. Nor were – or have – either of us done anything illegal or against the company.’
‘I’ve got to trust you on that?’
‘I’m asking you to trust me on that,’ qualified Parnell.
‘Do I get to know sometime?’
‘I can’t answer that. Like I said, maybe there’s nothing to know.’
‘It would have been a good day to stay at home, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would have avoided a lot of complications.’
Beverley Jackson didn’t reply and Parnell accepted, surprised, that he’d had the last word.
They read – Parnell retreating into his private office – for the rest of the morning. He was surprised, although not as much as he had been earlier, by her sudden arrival at his office door. ‘What are you doing about lunch?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it. Probably won’t bother.’
‘You know what you look like…?’
‘Don’t!’ stopped Parnell, realizing he hadn’t even bothered to shave that morning. ‘And yes, I know. Everyone keeps telling me.’
‘Shit,’ completed the woman, refusing the interruption.
‘That’s it. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’
‘Did you make breakfast?’
‘I didn’t have time.’
‘What was dinner last night?’
‘That really was shit. A prepared lasagne: I didn’t get all the plastic covering off, before the microwave. It didn’t add to the flavour. But then I don’t think anything could have done.’
‘You lectured us last night, about the danger of being brain-dead?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re a mess. And getting messier. For a lot of reasons I know and for a lot more that I don’t. What I do know is that a messed-up – fucked-up – head of department is even more of a danger than being brain-dead.’
‘I’ll do better – eat better, get better – tonight.’
‘I know you will,’ said the woman. ‘I’m personally going to see that you do. But also that you shave first. Christ, you really are a fucked-up mess!’
Twenty-One
Parnell managed to finish all there was to read by two a.m. on the Monday without finding a direction from either the English or American flu discoveries, to pursue his unit’s particular search. There was always the possibility, he told himself, that someone else in the pharmacogenomics section had spotted something he’d missed – it was at least a slender straw at which to clutch. He was at McLean by seven, determined to be the first there, although still without an explanation for the experiment Beverley had caught him conducting on the Saturday, trying to convince himself that, as head of the department, he didn’t necessarily have to provide one. He’d expected Beverley to press him further during dinner but she hadn’t, not in fact referring to it once, which he didn’t fully understand. Most of the time the talk had been light, although they’d obviously discussed the influenza project, but not in any depth, Parnell warning that neither of them at that stage had completed their reading, creating the need to avoid one misguiding the other with half-formed or ill-formed impressions. And although there’d been no indication of it, Parnell tried to overcome any difficulty Beverley might have by openly referring to Rebecca. That had been the moment he’d expected Beverley to challenge him about that morning’s experiment. They hadn’t talked at all about her ex-husband. He’d enjoyed the evening – positively, physically, relaxing. Beverley chose the restaurant, in a part of midtown he hadn’t been to before, and met him there. It was traditional home-town American cooking, which dictated portions sufficient to relieve an African famine, even though he tried to order minimally. He decided the only thing missing from the rib-eye steak were hooves and tail. As he had anticipated, Beverley initially led the conversation, but gave way to him as the evening progressed, and by its end he’d realized, surprised, that he was dominating the exchanges and Beverley appeared content to let him, not once trying for the last word. He refused her demand that they split the bill, which she accepted without continuing argument, and they’d parted quite comfortably outside the restaurant, without any awkwardness about nightcaps at another bar or either’s apartment. In the cab on his way back to Washington Circle, Parnell found himself wondering what possibly could have gone wrong between Beverley and her husband. That reflection prompted the half thought that he’d found the first evening with Beverley easier than he had with Rebecca, but that was where he’d halted it, as a half thought not to be completed. It left him feeling guilty, which was worsened throughout the following day by his failure to pick up something from the San Diego or London research. Richard Parnell wasn’t a man upon whom the rarity of professional disappointment rested easily.
None of the mice he’d injected with the French-suggested drug modifications showed any obvious ill effects after the forty-eighty-hour period, and he was halfway through extracting blood comparisons when Beverley Jackson arrived.
She said at once: ‘We going to learn all today?’
‘You finished the flu-identification papers?’ avoided Parnell.
‘Almost.’
‘I didn’t get a lead.’
‘I haven’t either, not yet.’
‘Let’s hope you do before you finish. Or one of the others might come up with something.’
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.
‘No,’ Parnell agreed, turning back to his sampling.
He was conscious of other arrivals behind him but didn’t respond to them until he had the tests from all the experimental mice on to slides. He turned back into the main laboratory unsurprised to find himself the focus of everyone’s attention. He said: ‘This has nothing to do with what we’re looking for. It’s something I set up over the weekend. Anyone come up with anything, anything at all, from what you’ve read so far?’
There were various head-shakes. Deke Pulbrow said: ‘Not a godamned thing.’
Sean Sato said: ‘It’s great research but there’s nothing here that’s going to help us.’ . ‘I haven’t found anything either,’ conceded Parnell, again. ‘Let’s talk about it when we’re all through.’ He’d tell them as much of the truth as he felt able, Parnell finally determined. Not about his suspicion that Rebecca’s death was somehow connected with the French material, but that he had become curious at the apparent secrecy in which it had been chemically tested, and had decided to put it through the most basic of genetic programmes without interfering in any way at all with what they were concentrating upon.
Parnell worked with total concentration, able as he always had been to isolate himself from all or any surrounding distraction, bow-backed over his microscope to contrast his before-and-after slides, anxious for a variation he didn’t find. Reluctant to accept yet another disappointment – at the same time objectively warning himself that there should not be any change after Russell Benn and Dwight Newton’s medical clearances – he repeated every examination under stronger magnification. And once more found nothing.