Harri had shed the worst of her tears on the drive over. She couldn’t believe Sabih had betrayed her. She’d sacrificed everything for him. He wouldn’t even be alive if it hadn’t been for her, and he’d rewarded her by breaking promises he’d made to ‘always have her back’ and ‘never forget what she’d done’. He’d laid her personal life bare and worst of all he’d exposed it to Powell, the man who’d done most to ruin her. The man who could have taken her side and backed her in disciplinary proceedings, but who instead seized the opportunity to drive the knife in.
She sobbed at the betrayal. She’d given so much of herself to the job, and everything for Sabih, and it still wasn’t enough. They felt they could throw her out like rotting trash.
She pulled herself together as she reached the outskirts of Newcastle-under-Lyme and had managed to stem the tears by time she parked the Golf on campus.
She went in the lobby of the Endeavour Building, which stood at the heart of Keele Science Park. The smoked glass and brushed black steel structure was eight storeys high. The security measures were far stricter than anything she’d seen in the lab where she’d first met Dr Abiola. Harri introduced herself to the receptionist, and the bored man handed her a visitor’s pass. She followed his instruction to wait in a seating area opposite the reception desk, where she took the opportunity to wipe her reddened eyes. She checked her make-up on her phone’s selfie camera. She looked puffy and miserable, but there was nothing she could fix in the few minutes she had available. Dr Abiola would have to take what she got: a broken, humiliated failure.
‘Ms Kealty?’
Harri looked up to see a movie star in a black suit. Well, he wasn’t a movie star anyone would recognize, but he had the good looks of an idol.
Harri cleared her throat and straightened her top as she stood. ‘Yes.’
‘Thank you for coming. I’m Nick Sullivan. I run security for the science park. Dr Abiola is waiting for us.’ He smiled to reveal rows of gleaming pearls. ‘If you’ll follow me.’
Harri nodded and followed him silently through the building, passing through long anonymous corridors. They reached a security door near the heart of the ground floor, and Nick tapped a code into a keypad to open it.
When they stepped into the small windowless antechamber on the other side, Harri saw Dr Abiola standing next to a security guard who was posted at a desk by a steel door that looked as though it belonged in a bank vault.
‘Thank you for coming, Ms Kealty,’ Dr Abiola said. ‘I was bothered by an issue you raised when we last met. Nick, if you wouldn’t mind?’
Nick pressed his palm against a scanner beside the steel door.
‘I was suspicious of who you might be working for. I thought you were trying to gather evidence against the university to suggest we might have been negligent in exposing one of our employees to a toxin,’ Dr Abiola said.
Behind her, the steel door slid back an inch from the frame, revealing a pressure seal which deflated.
‘Once I’d had a chance to reflect on our conversation and look further into your background, I took a different view,’ Dr Abiola added.
‘My background?’ Harri asked, suddenly ashamed. Would she ever escape her past?
‘I told you the first time we met that I didn’t believe the allegations surrounding your dismissal . . .’
Harri couldn’t bear to hear it. ‘My dismissal was not a reflection of guilt.’
The heavy door had completed its slow slide. Nick stood beside the open doorway, studying his shoes intently, pretending not to listen, and Harri shrank inside.
‘I understand. And I believe you, but even if you are a killer, you are hardly likely to admit it to me,’ Dr Abiola said.
‘I’m not a killer,’ Harri replied, flushing crimson.
‘Good, but that’s not my concern. What I am interested in is your track record prior to the event that led to your dismissal. You were a good detective, first in London, then up here, and, according to the people Nick knows in the Met, you had an excellent clearance rate.’
Dr Abiola walked through the open doorway. ‘Come,’ she urged gently. ‘Through here.’
The security guard at the desk eyed Harri the way people always did when they discovered why she’d been kicked off the force. She wanted to explain herself, but she knew it would do no good. So she shone her warmest, most innocent smile at the man, and followed Dr Abiola through the doorway. Nick came in behind them.
They entered another small antechamber that was separated from a larger room by a reinforced glass window that spanned the eighteen feet of the far wall. Another security door had been cut into the window, and was also surrounded by a vacuum seal. Beyond the window were rows of shelves that stored radioactive and toxic substances. At least that’s what the large, bright warning signs said.
‘It seems your instincts are still good,’ Dr Abiola said. ‘The government imposes strict controls on organizations authorized to use certain materials. We have safeguards . . .’ she trailed off. ‘Well, you can see the level of precautions we take.’
Harri looked around. They were in a vault at the heart of the building, and the materials room that lay beyond the reinforced glass divider was a vault within a vault. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘An inside job?’ she guessed.
A burglary would have been almost impossible, and the university would have noticed a break-in sooner.
‘Our safeguards were circumvented,’ Nick admitted. ‘Someone has stolen a small quantity of Cobalt 60. We’re conducting a full investigation, but it seems clear it was an insider.’
‘Cobalt 60 is used as a tracer in chemical reactions and for radiography. It is radioactive, and can cause lymphoma,’ Dr Abiola revealed.
‘Why are you telling me?’ Harri asked. ‘Surely this is a police matter?’
‘There is an official notification process,’ Dr Abiola replied.
‘But it will help the optics if we’re seen to have taken our own steps to recover the material,’ Nick added. ‘You’re a former police officer.’
‘And you already have an interest in the matter,’ Dr Abiola remarked. ‘You said you work privately now. If there is no conflict, we’d like to engage you as a private investigator to help us track down the missing cobalt.’
Harri didn’t know what to say. She’d never even considered becoming a private detective, but somehow she’d stumbled into her first case and secured her first client. She’d been obsessed with trying to prove her innocence and get her job back, but was she wasting her time? Was this her new life?