A Momentary Lapse of Reason - Parts I & II

[Mad Dan Eccles]

"Thank you for the coffee." He nudged the door open with his fingertips and sniffed. A sharpness in the evening air promised a late frost.

"Thank you for the flowers," she said, smiling, "it was good of you to visit."

"Well, it had been a long time, and I was worried over him."

The woman nodded. "I'm sorry I couldn't help you. I haven't said anything, I promise. Poor Mary. You understand that I never meant to hurt him?"

"I believe you, but you know how important he is to me. Anyway, I am sorry to have been a trouble."

"Oh no, it was no trouble. Please, come by again."

When he had left, she sprayed the flowers with the atomizer, and took a deep breath of the scent. Freesias.

Charlotte loved freesias.


*******************

[The Prof]

*******************

Professor Thomas Slater realised with relief that it wasn’t going to be difficult to be inconspicuous after all. Lurking at the fringes, he was just one of the dozens of anonymous, black-coated older men, huddled deep into their collars against the persistent drizzle.

A pretty woman like Charlotte, first a jet-setting scientist and later, an up-and-coming editor at Nature, would have collected scores of male acquaintances over the years, he reflected. She had been good at it.

Slater examined his feelings. Still nothing, nada. No sadness, no pain, no regret. If anything, the slightest hint of relief that the entire episode was about to be, once and for all, buried. Literally. He knew there was terrible feeling underneath, but he simply couldn’t access it. Maybe that was for the best.

The rain misted Slater’s dark glasses, trickled a cold path down his neck. The yellow tinting of his glasses made the grey world even murkier, like a faded sepia print, all the black-clad shoulders in front of him like dead relatives from another era.

“From dust you came, to dust you shall return,” intoned the vicar, his hand holding the prayer book shaking almost imperceptibly. Incipient Parkinsons, noted Slater clinically. It wouldn’t be long before the vicar would be at the receiving end of those incantations. “Jesus Christ, our Saviour, shall raise you up on the last day…”

Slater zoned out. A single bird chirped, out of place. An aeroplane droned by low, en route for Stansted. The occasional sob, hastily stifled. A woman in front of Slater shifted, giving him a clear view of the open grave, of Charlotte’s grieving mother, and then –

It was her. His shadow. Unmistakable. Straight platinum hair, sunglasses, stylish black overcoat, expressionless. Showing up at a funeral. Like she was a Fed and he was some mobster, scared out into the light by another turf-war killing.

She had been tailing him for weeks. At first Slater had assumed she was a private detective, hired by his ever paranoid wife. But recently, he wasn’t so sure. There was something about her that screamed spook. M15, M16, maybe Foreign Office -- which made him nervous, because it suggested that his 'contact' was becoming impatient and had sent someone else to hound him. He had a bit of an idea what they wanted, but he sensed he was not in any imminent danger. She would reveal her intentions, eventually, and Slater had no desire to make the first move.

“Prof.”

A soft voice from behind, a hand on his arm. Mike. He would know that voice anywhere, with its faint Dutch accent. He hadn’t been expecting Mike. But then, of course Mike would have come. To show his loyalty.

Slater didn’t want to talk to Mike, or anyone else, but he turned to face his senior post-doc nonetheless.

[Mad Dan Eccles]

The long, black limo snaked through the gateway, attended by a convoy of mourners' vehicles. Wipers swished and squeaked, not so much clearing the glass but rather spreading the layers of grease and mud into the corners of windscreens.

Once, thought Michel, just once it would be good to attend a funeral on a glorious summer's day. He remembered how, as an undergraduate, he had wandered through the Botanical Gardens and read the notice that proclaimed 'Cambridge has a semi-arid climate'. Today was obviously a 'semi' day. He sighed softly, pinched out the joint, and trudged after the cortège.

She was there again. But she would be. He had seen the white Ford parked illegally down Priory Street. Not that a parking ticket would worry her, of course. And what kind of Emma Peel was she pretending to be, wearing dark sunglasses on a day like this? He looked around to see if there was anyone else he recognized, anyone else to avoid. There was Prof, of course, and any number of senior scientists from Cambridge and London. One or two Nature editorial staff as well.

The familiar mumbling of the 'Our Father' faltered and stuttered to a close, and Michel wondered what these mourners had hidden away and hoped no one else knew, what hypocrisies they trumpeted, what trespasses were theirs.

"En vergeef ons onze schulden," he whispered, as he walked towards his boss.

It had to be done, although he knew he would regret it. Prof was one of the few people that he could talk to without his skin crawling, but any more than a few minutes at a time and he would be useless for the rest of day. Unless they were discussing experiments, or writing a paper — for some reason that was all right. But anything on a personal level was hell.

Slater had not heard him approach, probably too wrapped up in his own misery, thought Michel. He reached out.

"Prof."

The older man turned, a faint smile on his lips. "Good of you to come."

Michel nodded. Now, what was it? Oh yes.

"Would you like a coffee, Tom? I think my salary can stretch to it."

Slater laughed gently, seemingly genuinely amused. "That's very kind Mike, but if you don't mind, I think I need some time to myself. Maybe some other time?"

Michel tried not to look relieved. "Of course," he replied, "some other time. I shall go back to the lab and see if the sequencing results are in."

"Oh Mike, I despair sometimes," said Slater, "today of all days? Don't you ever take time off? When you're not on your bike, I mean."

"Today, Tom, it is raining. My bicycle does not like the Cambridge roads when it is wet. I shall see you later, then." Michel turned to leave, but stopped, and looked into the trees.

"Prof?" he asked, "the lady with the sunglasses. Is she known to you?"

[tideliar]

Dr. Bradley Jefferson Walker Pettier III was confused. In and of itself, this was an unremarkable occurrence. Confusion was a common feeling for Brad, and more so than usual recently. Normally he hid his confusion under a thick layer of Deep South bluster and bombast. It had stood him well during his PhD training, and had been working fine as a cover during his brief postdoctoral tenure at Tulane University in New Orleans. But then Katrina had hit and he, along with so many other young researchers, found his blossoming scientific career on hold as laboratories were suddenly closed and senior academic faculty scrambled for new positions and funding.

His own mentor had been more fortunate than most, receiving a lucrative offer to run a group at Merck Laboratories, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Unfortunately for Brad it was a case of “last hired, first fired”, when it came to filling the limited number of positions available at the new institute. Desperate not to let his career stagnate in the unemployment line, and knowing that competition would be fierce for positions in the States, he applied for every foreign postdoctoral position he could find. And now, a little over a year later, he found himself in Cambridge, England, staring in confusion at his latest result.

“Well, what does it say?” inquired the female voice at the end of the telephone.

“Um, the data are not fully conclusive at this preliminary stage of our analysis.” Brad tried to keep his voice from trembling. Damn it! He had worked so hard at trying to identify the sample the police had given him.

It was an honour, one he felt he deserved admittedly, for his lab head to pass this project off to him. He ignored the fact that it was both expediency and ethics that had had the greater part in that decision. Professor Edgerton was leaving for sabbatical soon, and more importantly, Brad hadn’t really known Charlotte. If the analysis had to be contracted out to an academic lab, so be it, they were often better equipped and trained. However, the irony that the lab was at an institute where the dead girl was known and liked was lost on no one. Especially Brad.

“Look, you’ve had the bloody thing for a week now,” snapped the woman’s voice. “What the hell’s going on? Don’t you have some machine or something that’ll just bloody tell you what it is?”

“It’s really not that simple,” said Brad, pausing while he tried to work out how to explain HPLC to an angry police officer.

“OK. Fine.” The woman’s voice interrupted his train of thought. “I’ll be back in town tomorrow and we can go over this together. I can’t wait around for ever. The girl went in the ground today. I need a result. My DCI is breathing down my neck. So…” She left the threat unfinished and hung up.

“Damn. Damn. Damn. Why the hell does this happen to me?” muttered Brad under his breath. He left the office area and headed back to the laboratory. “Typical postdoc. Another night at work,” he thought. “Just have to run the damned thing again”.

[premonition]

She swore as she snapped the phone shut. After a moment's consideration, she swore again with the graphic creativity of a girl brought up around the fishing boats. It was one of the few times that Lara Colbourn's upbringing shone through.

A grandfatherly man shot her a disapproving frown, and she glared at him until the flow of commuters took him away. The crowded station did nothing to cool her temper; Lara kept a firm grip on her bag as she pushed and jostled her way across the prevailing flow with expert ease.

The phone rang, piercingly sharp above the crowd noise. Flipping it open, Lara scowled at the Caller ID. "Colbourn."

"Colbourn, where the hell are you?"

She winced at the gruff roar. "Hey, boss. I just got back."

"I'm missing a report, Colbourn. It was supposed to be on my desk yesterday."

"Yeah, I know, boss. I haven't finished with it yet." Lara had quite deliberately not told the labrat just why her boss was riding her.

There was muffled cursing on the other end. By blocking her other ear, Lara could make out her boss berating obsessive compulsive detectives. There was a pause, and a weary sigh. "Look, Lara, forensics say it's natural causes. She's in the ground. What more do you want?"

The exit ahead was plugged with a knot of youths. She pushed around them, swearing as she nearly tripped over a half dozen school bags. "Sorry, boss. I dunno. But she was a labrat. Working on viruses."

"What's your point?"

"She had a flu when she died."

A short silence, during which Lara ducked and weaved and finally made it into the open street, signalled the churning thoughts on the other end, most likely judging how serious his detective was on this. "You're thinking ... what?"

"I'm not saying anything, boss. I don't have anything. It's just ... I've got a funny feeling about this one."

He sighed. "Alright. I'll give you some time, Colbourn. But find me something soon."

"You got it, boss. Thanks." Lara breathed a sigh of relief as she stuffed the phone back in her bag. She'd bought herself a week, more if she was lucky. A week to discover just what it was about this one that bugged her.

She'd lean hard on the labrat if he didn't deliver tomorrow. One hand outstretched to hail a taxi, Lara's mind was already nibbling away at the scant information she had managed to piece together. Perhaps another visit to the girl's workplace was in order ... after her shopping and a good night's sleep.

[The Prof]

Back in the cemetery, Michel was waiting expectantly for a response.

“Which lady?” asked Slater, to buy time. His heart starting to beat a bit faster.

Michel pointed discreetly with a finger barely raised from his hip, matched it with a brief jerk of his head while Slater pretended to look for his shadow. She had belatedly put an umbrella up and was murmuring into a mobile phone.

“The blonde lady with the black coat."

“Never seen her before in my life, why do you ask?”

Voice casual, Slater dug out a packet of Marlboro and patted down his front in search of the lighter. The show was over and people were starting to stream past them away from the black hole that had swallowed up Charlotte like she had never existed, sucking at her brilliant light until it was extinguished forever. Some sort of weird fever, he had heard – the obit had been thin on facts, but rumours were already swirling around the institute. Something so weird that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had been consulted.

"I find her a bit vreemd…you know, odd.”

"Probably just someone from Nature," Slater said. "They must have been odd to have rejected our last paper without review."

Michel shrugged, restoring his gaze downward and not surprisingly, failing to laugh at the jest. Michel never looked anyone in the eye, as far as Slater could see, or managed to keep up with the lab banter. He was a bit of an odd one himself – Dutch in his directness, but lacking that happy-go-lucky goofiness that Slater usually associated with people from the Netherlands. Slater suspected that he was a bit Asperger’s – but it was so hard to tell with certain more gung-ho postdocs. And Mike was about as gung-ho as they came.

[Mad Dan Eccles]

The wind had stiffened, and Michel hunched his shoulders. Then he coughed, and looked at the darkening sky.

"Ha. You joke, Prof. I see now." Mike turned towards the iron gates of the cemetery, and added, "but I think your little April drizzle is turning into a storm, and I will catch the bus."

"Fair enough, Mike. Will you be at the wake?"

"I do not think so. There is much to do. See you tomorrow," and Michel crunched towards the main road.

"Take some time off!" Slater shouted after him, but there was no sign that he had heard.

---

Michel sat at his iMac, his fingers keeping time with the rain hitting the window. The trip back had been difficult. A young couple had been on the bus, obviously in the first flush of a romantic entanglement, and the boy's trainer laces had come untied. Unable to cope with the mounting horror Michel had got off the bus, finally, at the end of Long Road and stood watching the traffic lights for ten minutes. And he hated himself for giving in. He knew what the problem was, why could he not deal with it?

And now this. A single base mistake in ordering the primers, and what was supposed to be a simple mutant was giving him a severe headache. Changing an acidic residue (an aspartic acid) to its non-charged amide equivalent (asparagine), was exactly the kind of subtle mutation that Mike enjoyed testing. Right in the binding site, all they would have had to do was demonstrate reduced viral infectivity and the structural work would be vindicated.

But the sequencing data was clear. He had introduced a positively charged lysine — AAG instead of AAC. A simple error in transcribing from the screen to the ridiculous paper-based ordering system they were still stuck with. Such a drastic change should have completely destroyed binding and transmission, but the assays showed that this virus had at least doubled infectivity.

"Michel?"

There was only one person in the lab who used his real name, as if the French accent was not enough of a clue.

"Sabine. Please come in." Michel stood up, then turned to face his visitor.

"Am I disturbing you?"

"No, it is all right. I have found the problem with the dee-thirty five mutant assays."

"Oh? Really? That is good, isn't it?" asked Sabine.

Michel shrugged. "Maybe. It is a silly mistake. We can talk about it tomorrow - you want to go to the wake, yes?"

"Um, yes!" Sabine seemed surprised. "I wanted to ask if I might give you a lift? I brought my car today."

"That is nice. But I must culture my cells, otherwise they too will die." He lifted his chin and smiled at the woman.

"Michel," growled Sabine, "you are too macabre. Do not stay too late." She pursed her lips in mock disapproval, then winked and turned to leave. "Oh!" she called over her shoulder, "if Max turns up tell him I'll be late back tonight."

"Goodbye," Michel whispered to her retreating back. Verdomme! What was a woman like that doing with an invertebrate accountant?

[Beatrice]

Max walked down the corridor toward Sabine’s lab. It was late, and something seemed wrong. Then he realised what it was. Usually the building was semi-populated with scientists burning the midnight oil. But tonight, it was empty. He passed labs on the left and right, dark and quiet. Where were all the postdocs, doing their all-nighters?

For the life of him Max did not understand scientists. He was even sleeping with one – Sabine – and he was none the wiser. They were crazy: paid a pittance with no benefits or job security, they would nevertheless happily work 60, 70, 80-hour weeks in pursuit of…what?

“The truth,” Sabine had purred in her lovely French accent the first night they’d met. “I seek the truth, I work day and night and one day – bom – the truth she is revealed, and for a short moment I am the only person in the world, in all the history of the world, to know this one simple thing.”

It had made sense at the time, although Max suspected that he had been so intoxicated by Sabine’s accent and sexy red dress and so preoccupied with pulling her, there in that smoky Cambridge pub, that anything would have sounded plausible.

Max himself was an accountant. He was sensible, not bad looking, decent teeth, reasonably well off, and he never worked longer than his statutory 35 hours a week. Unlike most of his colleagues, he even took the full one hour at lunch. But after a few weeks with the lovely Sabine it became apparent that the only way he could spend any real time with her was to start hanging around her lab after his own clocking off time. At first the lab inhabitants were a bit wary of him, but by now, he was as much a fixture as the shiny centrifuges and obscure other weird bits of beeping, humming, flashing, shaking, and rotating kit that cluttered the long black benches. Even the guy on the front desk would wave him past without making him sign in (so much for the much-touted ‘high security policy’ in the new building), and the rest of the department would nod at him in recognition when he passed.

To the scientists in the Slater lab, Max was as exotic as they were to him. Max often suspected they tolerated his presence for comic relief, and worse, that accountants were completely un-cool in the eyes of these geeks. But Sabine didn’t give a toss what the others thought – she was fierce and beautiful and confident.

And French, of course. That covered a multitude of sins, in and of itself.

Max swung into the Slater lab, seeing just one bench lamp burning – Sabine’s lamp. The woman herself wasn’t around – she was probably off making x-rays of genes or whatever the hell she did, in that darkroom where once they’d had mad, giggling sex. Max sat down to wait on her stool, wondering where everyone else was. He vaguely remembered Sabine saying something about a funeral, or a wake party, some dead girl who used to work in the institute back when it was a heap of old bricks down the road. That was another thing about scientists – any excuse for a drink.

It was at that moment that Max heard the floor creak, and realized that he wasn’t alone in the lab after all. He spun the chair around quickly until he was facing the source of the sound: Slater’s inner office, whose door was ajar and which was dark except for a blue computer glow.

“Hello?” Max called out uncertainly.

[emmanc]

Ah, these silly English men, thought Sabine to herself as she walked out of the lab. They are so easily amused; it really wasn’t any work at all. All she ever had to do was smile at them and they would do anything she asked. In fact, most of the time she didn’t even need to ask, they did it spontaneously. Max, well he was ok. He certainly kept her entertained, coming hanging around the lab like a little poodle. Plus, it had to be said, he was so blinded by her, she could ask for anything and he would move heaven and earth to get it to her. In fact, the only one who seemed resistant to her charms was Professor Slater. But she suspected that under that horrid jacket - tweed was it they called it, how can they get it so wrong, she thought, he was hiding something interesting. Mind you, he wasn’t the only one with no style, what about Michel, Mon dieu! But then again, he is Dutch. These northerners are all the same, they lack a passion for life, well, apart from Max that time in the dark room, of course. Now, why wouldn’t Michel come to the party? Odd, these British, having a party to celebrate someone dying. They didn’t even have a proper mass, not that she would have gone of course. Her grandmother would have disapproved greatly.

Humm, perhaps the Prof would be at the party? It may well be a good time to prepare the land for an excellent recommendation letter, try out some real charm on him. Yes, she thought as she parked the car in the car park next to the pub where the wake was being held, it doesn’t hurt to look towards the future.

[challenge]

The funeral photos were probably going to be all right, although Toni regretted that she had had to leave before the end.

Well, not regret exactly, since she didn't like to be around when the casket was put in the ground, but it would have been a good way to get to know who was at the funeral and who was not, to confirm who was really close to the girl and who was just making up appearances.

Toni had not really thought about the idea at all -- capitalising on Charlotte's death to score a good story -- until she realised that the whole laboratory was at the funeral and lots of other people as well. Of course such a popular woman as Charlotte would have many co-workers and friends, not to mention admirers. Toni remembered what her mother used to say: “There's no better place to meet people than at a funeral”. It seemed like other people had heard that saying too.

She had tried to put faces to names but only really recognized the professor, Tom Slater. Not that he stood out in the crowd, but maybe it was more because her friend Max had described him in minute detail once when he was telling her about Sabine’s work, and she could see that horrid orange tweed jacket peeking out from under his black overcoat. Nothing escaped her journalist's eye. In fact, she had quite a few of them down as scientists based on clothes alone -- it made you wonder if they got a decent salary.

She hoped that the photos would turn out well and that she would be able to sort out who was who. It would be nice to be able to have a decent caption for her article: “Close friends and co-workers of the deceased doctor unite in grief. From left to right...".

Sneaking past the guard downstairs had been easy. Easier than the time when she had gone undercover to expose the lack of security in that chemical factory -- that had been the hardest so far. True, the piece had not made it into the paper.

“It's not a good time for something on the environment," her editor had explained when he spiked the story. He made the word environment sound like a disease. "Maybe later, Toni. How about something about those footballer's wives in Corsica?”

What a loser. She would show him. She was not in this game to become a second-class journalist. She had always wanted to be more like Gunther Grass or Bob Woodward. Investigative journalism, not Posh and Becks wearing Gucci at the film premiere.

Toni suddenly realised she was wasting precious time day dreaming. Coming back to herself, she resumed looking through Professor Slater’s papers at the desk.

The idea to get a feel for the lab environment while everyone else was at the wake had popped into her head during the funeral. She had realised as soon as she stepped in the lab that the inner office belonged to Professor Slater and had not believed her luck when it turned out that the door into the office had been left unlocked. She had simply gone inside to see if there could be anything interesting lying around.

It was dim inside the room, but when Toni accidentally bumped the cordless mouse on the table, the computer screen lit up and displayed a small dialogue box.

“Please enter password”.

Toni realised that the screen was now putting out a hell of a lot of light -- it was one of those threatre-sized flatscreens. She looked behind her nervously into the main lab, but it was still empty. She turned back to the dialogue box. These new Macs probably had some kind of tracking device so whoever owned it could tell detect failed log-ins. Toni didn’t really fancy breaking into someone else’s computer anyway, but looking at some papers and photos around the office couldn't hurt, could it?

She started to riffle through some of the mail that was stacked on one side of the desk when she noticed that there were several drawers underneath the desk. She was reaching down to test the lock on the top-most one, when suddenly a voice rang out in the lab behind her.

“Hello?”

Damn!

She quickly moved to the other side of the desk and hoped that the computer would enter screensaver mode soon and go dark. Maybe she could pretend she had just stepped in here to look for someone. After all, it would not be too conspicuous if one wanted an interview with the leading professor in the virus field when someone important just had passed away very suddenly from a nasty disease, now was it? Toni smiled, put on what her friends called her 'sweet little girl' face, and walked through the door into the lab.

It was Max. Thank god! She exhaled, realising she could definitely worm her way out of this.

“Hi, Max!” She flashed him more of that famous Toni smile.

[emmanc]

Sabine hesitated as she walked into The Volunteer. Now, would they be in the lounge bar or in the public bar? It was so confusing in these English bars, one part furnished in comfortable chairs and the other done up like a rough bistro at home in her little village in Normandy. She wouldn’t have been seen dead in the bistro at home, but sometimes she went to the public bar with the lab on a Friday. But given the circumstances, perhaps the lounge bar was more likely today. She pushed at the door, a good solid door, designed to hide whoever was behind it, no doubt, she thought. Then she heard Slater’s voice, smiled her most subtle smile and walked into the bar.

“Ah, hello Sabine”, Slater said, “what would you like to drink? Un petit verre du vin? »

«Oui, monsieur, vous êtes très gentil» she purred back, thinking to herself that he’s been practising his French and hoping he didn’t miss her use of the polite form. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to try too hard after all. Amazing what a few whiskies will do for a man’s confidence, though. Perhaps this is going to be easier than she first thought.

She slipped over to his side at the bar as he ordered her a chablis and another whisky for himself. A good 15 year old Single Malt whisky, she observed. He must have been greatly affected by that woman’s death though, because it was a rare day indeed that he drank more than his statutory glass of beer. She would have to be careful here, she wanted him drunk enough to lose any inhibitions but not so drunk he wouldn’t remember.

“I saw Michel at the lab, he said he had solved that problem with the codes”, she purred as she took a sip of her wine. “He isn’t going to come to the wake though, said he has something else to do”.

She looked up at Slater through her long, brown lashes and smiled at him. She was glad she had worn the deep v-neck tight black t-shirt this morning and her jeans that moulded her figure. That combined with her favourite strappy black high heeled sandals that she always kept at hand in the car. And it had to be said, she did stand out against these English girls, dressed in their washed out t-shirts and baggy jeans and nasty tennis shoes. They looked like homeless people half of the time. She flicked her long wavy brown hair over her shoulder and pulled back her shoulders. She felt Slater trying desperately to avoid looking at her cleavage. She secretly thanked her grandmother again for having introduced her to the benefits of good lingerie; it really did make or break a figure.

Sabine knew he had a very possessive wife, in fact the wife had called the lab once when she was there, demanding to know where Slater was. Sabine had had no clue who this screaming banshee was on the other end of the phone but decided to be polite. Slater had later apologised and lab rumour had told her the rest. Sabine, glanced around, no wife tonight, wonder where she is?

“Tom, you are alone tonight, that is sad, especially on such a sad day, you shouldn’t be alone at a time like this” Sabine said in a hushed voice as she gently placed her hand on top of his. She rarely used his first name and its impact was not lost on him. She saw him swallow and his eyes slightly widen in response.

[The Prof]

God. There was something about his postdoc, in the smoky light, a familiarity that hit him in the gut. Something familiar.

And then he placed it: it was that look. Charlotte’s look. The look she’d given him that first time she’d marched into his office with bright eyes and a very short skirt, demanding a place in the lab to work with him on his rabies virus research. Oozing sex, as if a professor of Tom’s age and experience could possibly be swayed by a bit of leg. A common misconception.

Young, she’d been, young and feisty and still with that post-PhD confidence that she could conquer the world and win a Nobel Prize, that the data would fall into her lap with a smile and a bit of cleavage, that the papers and grants would come her way simply because she willed them to.

Yes, he was attracted to her, but that’s not why he’d taken her on. He’d taken her on because she had a hot CV and a pair of irreproachable reference letters, because he couldn’t interest any of his other postdocs in something as arcane as rhinovirus replication - not with pandemic flu on the horizon.

Slater passed a hand over his eyes, remembering that it was Sabine before him, not Charlotte. Or Charlotte's ghost. Sabine, who wanted something and was waiting for a response. He knew instinctively that she did not want sex: there was something colder behind her eyes. Something calculating.

[Beatrice]

“Toni! You scared the fuck out of me.” Max sank back down on the stool, embarrassed how his heart was racing. “What in hell were you doing in there?”

Toni shrugged and leaned against the door frame. “Just poking around. I might ask the same question of you.”

“I’m waiting for Sabine.”

“You’d better get comfortable – she’s at the party.”

“What?” Max pulled out his mobile, scanned its screen, but no message alert was there. “How do you know?” Why hadn’t she let him know? Why hadn’t she invited him? For the tenth time that week he wondered if she were having an affair with one of the boffins in the building. That sly-eyed, metrosexual little Italian shit down the hall, maybe, the one he’d caught flirting with her over a bucket of dry ice last night.

“I came from there,” she replied, shrugging. “It was boring, so I thought I’d see what there was to see around here.”

“Are you working on a story about Slater?” Max asked, curiosity overcoming his irritation.

“Not exactly,” Toni said. ‘Too soon to reveal anything…”

“You always say that.”

“Max, I don’t suppose you know Slater’s computer password?”

“No, of course not!” Max hated all this cloak-and-dagger crap. He liked Toni – they’d been friends since Uni – but for the life of him he couldn’t understand why she enjoyed poking around where she wasn’t wanted. Max himself hated breaking rules – and he hated himself for being in essence a coward. Toni’s brazenness just reinforced his own weakness.

“Would Sabine? Could you get it out of her?”

“Not bloody likely,” Max said gloomily. “Sabine never tells me anything anymore.”

[tideliar]

Brad stared at the printout in front of him. There it was again, that damned high molecular weight peak he had seen on both previous runs. Everything else was normal, or as close to normal as to be normal, as his PhD advisor had often repeated. But, once again that damned peak. What the hell was it? It had no place being in the sample he had got from the LSoTH, who in turn had cultured it from a pathologists sample.

“First time it’s an accident; second time it’s a fluke; third time it’s data,” he muttered under his breath. “I guess I got data.”

What was he going to tell that cute lady cop when she came to his lab in the morning though?

“Well, Ms. Cute-Lady Cop,” what the hell was her name again? “I have analyzed and reanalyzed the sample from your victim,” that had a nice professional ring to it, “Either your pathologist is a dolt and has contaminated it with something or…”

or what? The virus has been engineered to…

“Don’t even go there Bradley!” he snapped at himself outloud. Don’t even think crap like that. Not nowadays. That’ll get you fired in a heart beat. Damn, that could even get you sent back home.

Sighing with both frustration and exhaustion, Brad rubbed his tired eyes, digging his fingers in hard, until flashing lights filled his skull. He blinked his vision clear, reached out and pressed send on the automated form that would send the sample he had purified to be sequenced the following day. He probably wouldn’t get a whole sequence, but even a fragment of that unknown protein might help. By searching the online databases he should be able to identify whatever the idiots in London had contaminated it with.

He turned off his desk light and headed towards the exit. Time to pay his last respects at the wake. He knew the freak Dutchman wouldn’t be there, and he hoped that old asshole Slater had gone by now. If not he could cover himself by claiming he thought the rugby club was meeting there tonight, even though he knew they were meeting at The Weatherspoons further up the road. He’d head there afterwards and get nice and “pissed” as his English friends said. They had a game this weekend; he grinned as the thought of the imminent and bloody aggression cleared his head. “Just like college gameday.” he thought.

He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that in his tiredness he didn’t notice the lights suddenly snap on in Slater’s office window.

[challenge]

Toni sighed. It was going to be one of those nights. She really liked Max, but anyone could see that the French girl was playing him and he was hopelessly in love with her. This had been the story of their friendship since Uni. When she first met Max she thought that they might hit it off. After one night of talking, after several pints, she realized that Max didn’t have the things she was looking for in a man she planned to stay with. He had always been a romantic – no matter how sweet this might seem, she didn’t think he was that realistic about things and especially girls. On the other hand, he didn’t deserve this treatment, just because he loved Sabine.

“Ah Max, she probably had to go to the wake. She knew Charlotte, didn’t she? And the whole lab went.”

“I don’t know, she never tells anything,” Max repeated with a sad voice, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Eeyore.

This just wouldn’t do. Max needed something to take his mind off things.

“Well, just look at it this way,” Toni said, brightening. “You can always help me poke around.”

“Poke around?”

“Are you sure Sabine never told you anything interesting about Slater? Apart from the strange things you already mentioned, I mean? He seems to have a bit of a story underneath all that tweed. He’s here in the lab, exploring viruses and their diseases…and she dies from one… come on Max, one peek in the office wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

Max looked like she’d smacked him in the face. Coward.

“It’s his private office Toni. Come on. Plus, it's a ludicrous suggestion that Slater's viruses had anything to do with the dead girl.”

Toni tried another tack. “Well, I thought you wanted to know if there was something going on between him and Sabine. You know, you said something about that when we were met last Tuesday at the bar, how they’d spent a lot of time talking recently…”

Toni let her voice drift off, waiting for Max to see the possibilities here. They were alone in the lab, and somewhere there had to be some juicy stuff that could help her with the article. She didn’t believe for one second that a woman like Sabine would sleep with Slater, but let Max think he was looking for dirt on a possible affair, while she focused on the really interesting stuff in the office.

Max gave her that stubborn look he had just before he got really into something.

“Well, I am not going to snoop in Sabine’s desk!”

“I am not asking you to, silly. I just thought we could look into Slater’s office again. Who knows, we might find a photo or something.”

Max let his breath out and got up from his chair.

“Ok. I guess it wouldn't hurt if I stood in the door, kept watch. Do you really think you’re going to find something in there? Honestly, all these scientists seem to collect is boring scientific papers. Heaps and heaps of them, stacked and gathering dust.”