The sound of people laughing and chatting and saying goodbye died away. The quietness settled around her. The cold night air was bracing. The sky was clear and stars glittered overhead. She thought about what Justin had said about the lack of light pollution and felt a pang of longing. She wished he were here to share his knowledge of the stars with her.
She thought about Bill. There were hidden depths there. Of course, that was true of everyone. There was a gulf between the persona they presented to the world and their secret self – the person they were when they were alone. Perhaps the fact that she herself wasn’t who she seemed to be had heightened her awareness that this might be true of others. Was Claudia, for example, really the brilliant and meticulous researcher she appeared to be, or was she too only playing a part? Time to start finding out.
The lab lay almost in darkness. Only the main entrance was lit. Katie took her pass out of her pocket and swiped it to enter. The security guy was someone she hadn’t seen before. He was reading a Terry Pratchett novel. He put it down and looked at her pass. She read the name on his badge: Greg.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” he said, as he turned the signing-in book towards her.
She nodded. “Do you get many people working late?”
“The odd one. Just you tonight. Do you need a lone-worker alarm?”
“Please.”
Katie really did have to check a culture in her Cat 3 lab – even though that wasn’t all she’d be doing. So the alarm was mandatory and was to guard against the possibility that a lone worker might have an accident or be otherwise incapacitated. If the alarm detected no movement for ten minutes, it was activated and sent a signal to the night porters.
She took the alarm and put the lanyard round her neck. She thanked him, using his name so that she’d remember it. Good manners were important in the lab, as elsewhere. That was a lesson that had clearly passed Gemma by, she thought, remembering how rude she’d been on Tuesday. Quite apart from just being the right thing to do, it always rebounded on you if you treated people as though they didn’t matter. “As you sow, so shall you reap,” she’d heard Rachel say once – or to put it another way, what goes around comes around.
As she made her way down the empty corridor, she smiled at the memory of Tarquin’s karaoke turn. The truth was that it could be eerie working in the lab late at night. The florescent light flickered briefly as she approached the lift down to her lab, reminding her of clichéd scenes in scary movies.
She signed into the lab, got gowned up, and went into the inner room to sort out her cultures. Afterwards, she stripped off the gown and shoe covers. She usually worked alone there, and it could be any time of night or day down there in the basement.
But when she went up to the ordinary lab it was a different matter. During the day there was always activity and noise, people coming and going, working at their benches or chatting, in the background the hum of the container hood. But at night it was quiet, and the stillness was unsettling. She found herself listening for something – she wasn’t sure what.
The lab was on the ground floor, but with high windows. Even if someone was passing and saw the lights on, they wouldn’t know who was in there or what they were doing. She went to her own bench and got out her lab book to record what she had just done. Yes, she was undercover, but she was still determined to do the work of a technician to the best of her ability, and that included recording everything. The lab books contained all the details that were needed to replicate an experiment or procedure. And if it was ever necessary to prove that the lab had made a particular discovery at a particular time, the lab books could be scrutinized for evidence, so they were potentially documents of public record.
That done, she moved towards Claudia’s bench. Her lab book should be there somewhere. They weren’t supposed to take them out of the lab. Sure enough, when Katie opened the top drawer of the desk, the lab book was lying there. She took it back to her own bench. If someone came in, it would look less suspicious than if she was seen rummaging around at someone else’s bench. Plus she wasn’t visible from the door.
Lab books were as individual as the people who kept them. Some people wrote them up as they went along, other people once a week or whenever it occurred to them. Claudia’s was messy, both inside and out. Katie’s lab book was so new that it was still pristine, but she knew that it would soon be battered and dog-eared and stained with ethanol, just like Claudia’s.
Katie wasn’t really expecting to find anything obviously wrong here – it would be too easily detected – but she had to cover all the bases. Rather than go through the book then, she took out her phone and began to photograph the pages so that she could go through them later at her leisure and compare them with the lab book of the last technician. As she turned the pages over, she found herself humming “The Girl of My Best Friend”.
Her phone buzzed and made her jump. The text was from Justin. “Fancy a chat?”
She replied, “Can’t now. Later?”
The answer came back immediately. “Sure.”
She heard the door of the lab open with a pneumatic hiss and her heart lurched. She pulled open a drawer and thrust Claudia’s lab book into it. She had her own open on the desk when Caspar appeared around the end of the line of benches.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re working late.”
“Oh, I haven’t been here all evening – just popped in to check on a culture.” She hoped she didn’t look as flustered as she felt.
“Are you settling in OK?”
“Oh, yes, thanks. I’ve been to the karaoke night.”
He laughed. “Did Bill do his party piece?”
“He did.”
“Bill’s a great guy. He does the occasional recital for charity. I always think it’s important to have interests outside the lab. Some people seem to live their whole lives in here. That’s not healthy. All work and no play and all that.” He stood beside her, smiling, radiating goodwill. “Have you nearly finished?” he asked. “We could walk back up to the house together.”
She hesitated. It would be nice to have company, but she wanted to finish what she had come to do and to put Claudia’s lab book back. “I need to write up what I’ve done tonight. I’ll be a while yet.”
“OK. I’ll say goodnight then.”
But when he’d gone, she felt too wired to go on with her photographing. She’d have to come back another night. There wasn’t that much left to do, and she could make a start with what she had.
She went over to the door and looked out into the corridor to check that she really was alone before she went back and replaced Claudia’s lab book in her desk.
It was only as she checked out that she wondered what Caspar had been doing in the building so late in the evening. He didn’t, after all, have cultures to nurture, and his office was in the old house. She wondered if he made a habit of wandering around the labs at any time of day or night. She really hoped not.
* * *
As she stepped out of the building she saw that the sky was now overcast. Even the faint light from the stars was gone, and when she left the circle of light around the entrance, the darkness seemed to press against her face like a thick, dark, velvety curtain. She stood for a few moments to let her eyes adjust before she switched on the torch on her phone.
She made her way up the path past the arcade with its statues in their shadowy niches. She ran her torch along them as she went. From the book about Debussy Point she’d learned that they represented Arthurian characters: Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Merlin, the Lady of Shalott. The missing figure was Morgan le Fay. She had asked Siobhan about that and was told that the frost had finally done so much damage that she’d been taken away for repair.
She came to where the path wound through the outskirts of the wood and went past Gemma’s cottage. She was aware of small rustlings and movements in the undergrowth. It was never really quiet in the country.
She was still some way off the cottage when the door opened and light spilled out. She switched off her torch and stood stock-still. There was no reason really why she shouldn’t be there, but still, she stepped back into the shelter of the trees.
Someone was coming out – a man, tall, broad-shouldered – but as he stepped over the threshold he swung round so that Katie couldn’t see his face. The light gleamed on a leather jacket. Gemma was at the door and he scooped her into an embrace. There was something in that gesture – ardent, protective – that spoke volumes. She thought, I wonder if Justin feels like that about me, and she felt a pang of yearning.
Then, laughing, Gemma thrust the man from her, in the way you might push away a boisterous dog. It seemed to Katie that there was an element of contempt in it, and perhaps the man felt it too, because he made a gesture of protest. But then he seemed to accept his dismissal. Gemma went back in and closed the door. The guy switched on his phone torch and set off down the path, the narrow beam dancing along towards Katie.
She remained perfectly still, her heart beating fast, holding her breath. How would she account for herself if he spotted her standing among the trees? He passed her only a few feet away. He was close enough for her to hear him humming “The Girl of My Best Friend”.
Katie waited until the torch beam had disappeared and then stood for a few extra minutes to be quite sure he had gone. She switched on her torch and made her way up the hill.
She was pretty sure that the broad-shouldered guy in the leather jacket was Bill. Was this why Maddie was so sure that Gemma was not having an affair with Caspar? If it was actually Bill that Gemma was sleeping with, loyalty to her boss might explain why Maddie hadn’t wanted to share that with Katie.