THURSDAY
The Matilda Jane was cosy when the wood-burning stove was on. Katie was propped up on the sofa with her laptop and a pot of coffee on the table. She was doing her homework, getting up to speed on the current research into influenza.
The worst outbreak of the disease had been the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which had infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide – about one third of the planet’s population – and killed an estimated twenty to fifty million. It was staggering. And that was in the era before mass communications and cheap air travel. Katie thought about how fast it would have spread if it had happened today, and she felt a chill.
It was only in the 1990s, after a child had died in Hong Kong from a flu subtype that was known in birds but not in humans, that scientists had begun to explore the possibility that flu could jump the species barrier. In that instance eighteen individuals had been infected, six of whom died. The outbreak had been halted by the slaughter of one and a half million chickens. Current thinking seemed to be that the 1918 virus had similarly sprung from domestic and wild fowl, most probably in North America. Katie remembered the epidemic of avian flu in the UK that had resulted in the mass culling of turkeys and chickens in 2007. Luckily that had been confined to birds. But suppose it hadn’t been?
The research that Lyle was sponsoring was certainly much needed. She hoped it would be successful and that he was worrying about nothing.
In the weeks before she headed off to Debussy Point there would be a lot to do to make sure she was thoroughly embedded in her new identity. Katie had already begun her transformation into a new person. Her hair was what the hairdresser had called “bleach blonde” – she hadn’t known there was more than one kind – and was cut in a short spiky style.
Meanwhile, the old Katie was supposedly taking time off to travel and would be out of contact. The agency had created a Facebook page for her and would be posting images of remote places. Her mother knew what was going on and could be relied on to field enquiries if necessary. Rachel and Daniel also knew where she was going – and her brother had been tipped off too. In that annoying way younger brothers had, he thought it was hilarious that she was going undercover, but he could be relied on not to spill the beans. And that was it, no one else knew.
The agency had given her dossiers on both Claudia, the postdoc working on the influenza virus, and Gemma, the principal investigator and Claudia’s boss. She turned to them now. They made interesting reading.
Claudia was young – at only twenty-nine she was younger than the technicians who had worked for her. That was common enough, but it might have led to tension. And the rapid turnover of technicians might simply be down to personality clashes. Three of them, though! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To lose one technician may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness,” and to lose three – well, Lyle was right, losing three in rapid succession did ring alarm bells.
She tried to put herself in the place of a technician who was beginning to suspect that there was something wrong with the postdoc she was working for. It was very unlikely that someone so far down the pecking order would want to start making waves. Getting a job elsewhere would be a far more attractive option.
Claudia was a rising star, no doubt about it. Hers was the classic career trajectory of the successful scientist. She had begun by getting a degree in Biomedical Science from a world-class institution – in this case, Balliol College, Oxford. She had gone on to do her PhD at an equally prestigious university, Harvard, in the US, before returning to the UK to work as a postdoc. This was her second post. She was the first author on several papers in journals, including Nature, produced in conjunction with the PI she’d worked for; an impressive tally for someone of her age. Claudia had been very productive. Too productive? She was not the only author named on the papers, but it was likely that she had done most, if not all, of the work on those papers. Her PI, the senior partner in the collaboration, might have contributed little or nothing: that was common practice. This kind of publication record was essential if Claudia were to make it on to the next rung of the ladder, which could be a research fellowship or a lectureship somewhere. From there she would go on to become the principal investigator on projects, applying for grants in her own right.
Katie read her references. “Outstanding intellect... one of the most able students I have ever encountered... brilliant skilled experimenter.” Claudia seemed to have made quite an impact on everyone she had come into contact with. And yet, all the same, there was something here that Katie couldn’t quite put her finger on. Katie was beginning to get an inkling of what was worrying Lyle. Was anyone really as good as all that? Until the last couple of years, Katie had had a career that seemed set fair, but even so she had never had references like this. She would have to be careful not to let sour grapes cloud her judgment.
She had Claudia’s latest report in front of her, and on the face of it they were certainly plausible. The results were good but, as Lyle had said, not “too good to be true”. So, if there was something wrong with them, it was most likely to be along the lines of massaging the results, tidying them up. It wouldn’t be difficult to get away with that. PIs tended not to get their hands dirty and many rarely set foot in the lab. Yes, they were meant to supervise their postdocs and to sign off their lab books at frequent intervals, but essentially it was a relationship of trust. They couldn’t be looking over their postdocs’ shoulders all the time. They would be busy elsewhere, applying for grants, writing papers; they might even be in clinical practice. And the more eminent the PI, the less time there would be for supervision.
Postdocs, on the other hand, were guns for hire, moving from contract to contract, following the grant money, ambitious to become PIs themselves. It was an insecure and stressful way of life, as Katie well knew. Big egos could be involved, with obsessive personalities, and clashes were not uncommon. It would be absolutely crucial for the next step in Claudia’s career that she didn’t just get results, but got something that could be published in the kind of high-impact journal that liked complete stories without awkward caveats.
Katie turned to the dossier on Gemma. Gemma herself had been something of a wunderkind. She was still only around forty, a high-flyer with many, many papers to her name, on the council of the Royal Society, Visiting Professor at that institution, Fellow at that college, and so on and so on, all the boxes ticked. She was certainly a busy lady. She was the PI on a number of projects, which did make it more likely that she would be inclined to just let Claudia get on with it. Katie saw that she had worked with Caspar Delaney, the director at Debussy Point. Like him, one of her special interests was in the mechanisms that allow diseases to jump the species barrier.
Gemma’s own early career was remarkably similar to Claudia’s. Lyle had said that Gemma thought very highly of her. Perhaps she saw something of herself in the younger woman. Their relationship was likely to be one of mentor and protégée.
Katie yawned. She clicked to close the document on Gemma. She would find out soon enough.
And before that there was her date with Justin. They hadn’t met since leaving Antarctica. Justin had had a long-standing arrangement to go trekking with a friend in Peru and she knew that he had arrived home only a few days ago. He must have sent that text from the airport, so that was a hopeful sign.
She thought of the moment when they had first made their plan to meet. One of their number had needed an emergency operation, and with the doctor on the base missing, Katie had had to step in. It had been a tense time, to say the least of it, and Justin’s promise of cocktails at the Ritz when it was all over had been something to hang on to as she steeled herself to do what had to be done. They had been drawn to one another, but they had made a pact to save it – whatever it was – until after their tour of duty. For one thing, she was the base doctor and he was her patient. Also, it would have led to awkward tensions with the others on the base, all of them men. It hadn’t been too much of a strain to agree to wait. They had been two men down, so eight of them had had to do the work of ten. They were so exhausted all the time.
Now she wondered whether it would still be there, the attraction they had felt, or had it simply been of the moment, a matter of “what happens on the base stays on the base”? Perhaps the attraction they had felt would simply shrivel away in the light of the wider world, and their meeting at the Ritz would turn out to be an embarrassing mistake? She did hope not.
Meanwhile she was going to go shopping with Vicky from the private investigators’ agency and she was rather looking forward to that.