Jones nodded once. ‘Roadworks,’ he said. ‘On the A390, the A30 and the M5. What can I tell you? You don’t even want to know about the M25.’
‘Right.’ The Director glanced at his watch. ‘Everything should be ready for you. Good luck.’
By the end of the afternoon, there were specimens of tissue, fluid, bone, hair and nails from each of the corpses — several different specimens of each from Dundas — as well as samples of everything available from the mysterious skeletal woman. Slivers of the crystal itself were being analysed in various places throughout the establishment. Jones, having taken all the obvious samples and sent them for analysis, turned from the corpse of Dundas to the skeleton of the woman. The sergeant’s body was, apart from its unusual contents, absolutely unremarkable.
Not so the woman’s body. Her teeth, for instance, were most unusual.
At about tea time, Jones came out of the laboratory where he had been working, washed up and tapped the Director’s number into the internal phone system.
‘Yes?’ answered the Director at once, the speed of his reply giving a good idea of the importance attached to the work being done here.
‘I suppose it’s a silly question,’ Jones began, ‘but do we have a dental expert available who might be able to give us some help with what looks like Russian bridge work?’
In earlier days, the answer to such a question would have been no, but in these post-glasnost times, thing were less simple. As it happened, there were men and women available on secondment from institutes in various parts of the old Russian Empire. Men and women to whom the vast majority of the establishment’s rooms were still off limits but who were regularly accepted into low security areas.
‘Yes indeed,’ answered the Director. ‘I’ll probably be able to get someone down to you by dinner time.’
At seven thirty that evening, Pjotr Serbsky made his way down to the laboratory. The Russian was registered as a dental expert but in fact had far wider experience than that, experience which he was happy to offer to the security services of his country’s erstwhile enemies, especially as they were now his temporary hosts while he studied at their world-renowned teaching hospitals. Serbsky was in his early forties, with thick black hair and a square cut beard. He spoke English fluently and roguishly, with a twinkle in his pale eyes and a curl to his sensual lips. He was on the Director’s list of names because of the work he had done in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster — he was a recognised expert in the field of radioactivity as well as in Russian dentistry.
His security clearance was high and the current security status of a soldier who had managed to poison himself on an iceberg under the aegis of the United Nations — of which Russia was a fully paid-up member — was low, so there was no problem about allowing him into the laboratory where Jones was working. He knew his subject too, and was able to give the professor a fairly detailed breakdown of the style and date of the dental work on the teeth of the blonde-haired cadaver.
Shortly before midnight, Jones, much impressed by what the Russian knew about dentistry and aware of his work on post-radiation sickness, swept back the cover over Dundas’s stomach cavity which still contained the black glass fragment and said, ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what this is, do you?’
Under the merciless light of the laboratory, the black glass nugget gleamed wickedly and Pjotr Serbsky regarded it with all the fascination of a bird eyeing a snake. His sensuous lips parted and his bright eyes shone.
After a few moments he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have never seen anything like it before. I have no idea what it could be.’
The good doctor was lying. He had seen something exactly like it before and he knew precisely what it was.
Chapter Twenty
Paul Chan wrestled himself out of the lift onto the 38th floor of the United Nations building with a difficulty compounded by one broken thigh, lightly bandaged, two crutches and an extremely large bunch of flowers already bedraggled through the ministrations of the security guards downstairs. But Paul was a man in love, and it would have taken more than discomfort, discourtesy and the destruction of his posy to slow him down. He was upset about the chocolates, though; the guards had insisted on X-raying them to check for arms and explosives, and Paul really didn’t fancy giving his delicious Inga irradiated chocolates. He had left them at the security desk.
In the eyes of Western men, even those in her native Dresden, Bonn or Frankfurt, Dr Inga Kroll was a dumpy hausfrau, unremarkable and unappetising. Paul, however, was an Eastern man of militantly Oriental aesthetic and his eyes saw her differently. To him her hair was a golden wonder. Braided — he had yet to see it down — it seemed like gleaming, intricately woven wires of the most beautiful of metals. Her high cheekbones and narrow, slightly sloping eyes held all the allure of an odalisque. When her bright blue irises caught the light and flared like sapphire behind thick, dark lashes, he found it difficult to breathe. Her short nose, full mouth and square chin simply completed the plump, almost Chinese beauty of her features.
Her short neck and square shoulders served as the most natural introduction to the deep perfection of her bosom. No matter what she wore, be her collars never so severe and her jackets never so tightly buttoned, he always descried — or believed that he did so — the most tempting hint of a cleavage there. And even when her clothes achieved pinnacles of modest conservatism, she was one of those women whose breasts had the facility of moving independently of the rest of her body, swaying and bobbing with hypnotising grace.
Her strong, thick arms ended in unexpectedly long and artistic hands which she seemed to know were her best feature and which she kept manicured and bejewelled to perfection. She had the most delicious habit, Paul had noticed, of putting her hands on her hips in an unconsciously Teutonic gesture which emphasised the breadth of her pelvis and the surprisingly narrow confines of her waist. Paul adored her hips. They were so square, so full. They supported a bottom which to his eyes could only be described as majestic and were in turn supported by thighs which — even though he had to imagine them — echoed this perfection, he was sure. Her calves, ankles and feet completed neatly the mental picture the love-smitten doctor carried with him down the corridor towards her office.
She had been the first thing he had seen upon returning to consciousness after the operation to pin the shattered bone of his thigh together. She had popped into the hospital with a get well card from the Mau team because it was on her way home. She had stayed to talk to the increasingly alert Paul, however, because there had been no real reason for her to rush away. And that talk, at first general, had rapidly become personal. Both of them had revealed a great deal about themselves — perhaps because they were such utter strangers in such an unusually intimate situation; perhaps because each of them, for one reason or another, had had their defences down. She found New York lonely and alien, as did he on his rare visits here. She had no real social life, no friends and certainly no partner. She earned good money and did not need a flat mate. The closest she came to socialising was when she went out with people from work, and they all had firm relationships and families. She had considered joining the music societies, the dinner clubs; she had even thought of cruising the singles bars but in the end she had been put off by fear of the sort of man she might meet there. So she went out rarely in the evening — she had stopped going to the cinema and neither Broadway nor the Met could tempt her as they once had done. She went home late and stayed there until she left early for work. She ordered in — usually junk food — watched the news channels to keep up with international finance, when it was reported, read the foreign sections of the newspapers she had delivered and the volumes of economic theory she purchased through her TV ordering service, and slept alone. She lived for her work, because that was all she had.