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Authors: J.F. Penn

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The photos were enough to push him over the edge, and his adrenalin spiked. Blake sat down heavily, pulse pounding as the visions took over his mind, whizzing through his consciousness in a cacophony of screams and flashes of grisly horror. He felt blood pulse at his ankles and wrists as if it would burst from his body, rising to a crescendo of overwhelm. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, his hearing dulled as if under a swimming pool and panic threatened to shut his body down. Then suddenly, it broke. Blake felt the cold aftershock and his heart rate began to slow as the panic subsided. This was the moment that he had waited for, and now he could regain control.
 

Blake looked up at Jamie standing a little way from him, her face concerned but also intrigued by his physical reaction. He could only imagine what horrors she had seen in her job, but she only witnessed the aftermath, while he saw visions of the atrocity in progress and actually felt the victim’s pain.
 

“Do you want some water?” Jamie said, pulling a bottle from her bag. Blake nodded and sipped at it gratefully while his heart rate returned to normal.
 

“I’m ready now,” he said after a moment and rose slowly, his legs feeling weak and sluggish. He pushed the baseline sensations of the Museum to a separate area of his consciousness and began to sift through the eddies of energy to find a strand of Jenna Neville. His eyes were drawn to the staircase and the heavy post at the bottom. Jamie noticed his gaze.
 

“That’s where she fell,” she said, walking towards it. Blake followed and then carefully laid his bare hands on the post. He felt the extinction of life, her neck broken, the grasping suffocation of asphyxia. He shuddered as he experienced her panic and fear.
 

“She died soon after her neck snapped,” he said. “But the baby didn’t.” His eyes met Jamie’s and he saw a reflection of his own stricken face. “There’s something about the child that explains why it was taken, why her body was violated. It feels different somehow but I can’t get a clear vision.”
Blake grasped for a truth that was tantalizingly close and he knew that he had felt whispers of it in the cabinets. There were echoes and reflections of Jenna here and the past of this museum had come to life in the present. Jamie leaned closer, waiting for his words.
 

“Her baby was a miracle,” Blake finally whispered. “Jenna was like one of these specimens. She shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant. You need to find who created her.”
 

Chapter 13

Parking the bike a few blocks away from Neville Pharmaceuticals Head Office, Jamie went into a little coffee shop. She was early for her meeting with Esther Neville and she wanted to review her notes on the case so far. Ordering a black coffee and dumping two sugars in it, Jamie considered how Blake’s words had disturbed her. Although she still had some doubts about him, he had definitely been affected by the Museum and seemed convinced that Jenna and her baby were somehow special. Esther Neville would be the only person who could answer that but there was no evidence with which to start such a discussion and all of the records indicated Jenna Neville was her biological child. What did Blake even mean about the baby being a miracle? Was he just disturbed by the craziness of the Museum, filled with dead things that seemed about to wake at any moment?
 

Jamie examined the file on the Nevilles that Missinghall had pulled together. Lord Christopher Neville was a distant descendant of the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family and had been raised in aristocratic circles. After Eton, he had read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford and was expected to go into Law. But at Oxford he had married Esther Galloway, a distant cousin from another branch of the same distinguished family. Esther studied medicine at Oxford and then worked in the pharmaceutical industry, increasingly specializing in genetics after DNA had been sequenced in 1977.
 

Neville Pharmaceuticals was started in 1979 with an investment from the family fortune and was now one of the most highly respected private genetics companies in the world. Jenna Neville, their only daughter, was born in 1985. Jamie read a couple of the articles from various pharmaceutical magazines profiling Esther Neville as a brilliant scientist, in total command of the business and scientific side of the research. Christopher Neville seemed to play a more social role, schmoozing with potential investors and clients, leaving the serious business to his more than capable wife. There was evidence of a number of affairs between Christopher Neville and young society women, and Jamie presumed that Esther turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions. It was certainly one way to keep a marriage of power together.
 

Her phone buzzed with a text from Missinghall.
 

Taxi dockets show Esther Neville picked up alone 10.45pm.
 

Interesting, Jamie thought, since Mascuria had indicated that she had left the gala dinner around 9.30. What had she been doing in that missing time period?
 

Finishing her coffee, Jamie drove down the road to the imposing company headquarters of Neville Pharmaceuticals. It was situated on the western edge of London, close enough to the City for ease of access but far enough out for the company to have a high rise building encompassing both official office suites and functional labs. The blue glass exterior reflected the cool winter sun as Jamie parked the bike in a visitor spot and headed in.
 

After the usual security protocols, Jamie was led into a long boardroom on one of the upper floors, with a giant window looking out over the city. There were a couple of pictures on the walls, magnified images of cells that were monstrous in close-up. Jamie stood, gazing out at London, considering the pulsing mass of humanity that crowded together below her.
 

“Detective, how can I help you?”
 

Jamie turned to see Esther Neville at the doorway, a tailored white lab coat cut close to her body and stiletto heels making her thin body appear like a stork picking its way through the marshes. She looked completely different in her own domain, clearly a scientist first, rather than a society wife. Her expertly highlighted blonde hair was tied back with a black clip, and under her lab coat she wore clothes of mourning black. Yesterday, at home with her husband, she had seemed timid, submissive and even fearful, yet here, she walked with authority. Jamie reassessed her opinion of Esther Neville and her position at the company, for this was an empire that she definitely would not want threatened, especially by her own daughter.
 

“Thank you for seeing me, Lady Neville.”
 

Esther inclined her head and sat at the head of the boardroom table, her eyes emotionless as she spoke.
 

“What exactly do you need from me? I’m keen to help find my daughter’s killer but I’m sure you understand I’m a busy woman.”
 

Jamie sat down to one side and spread her files out in front of her, keeping them closed. She noticed Esther glancing sideways at them, achieving her purpose of making the woman wonder exactly what she knew.
 

“Can you explain a little of what Neville Pharmaceuticals does? Just for some background.”
 

Esther inclined her head, beginning a clearly well-practiced speech.
 

“Our main business is genetic engineering for the agricultural and farming industry. You must know of the increasing pressure that food production has experienced with dramatic population growth. We investigate efficient ways to feed more people cheaply, researching faster growth methods for protein sources. We also have a smaller part of the company that researches genetic mutation and how to eradicate birth defects in animals caused by environmental toxins. The exact details are protected, as the work is for the Ministry of Defense, but it’s both a profitable business and an important one for the world. Do you think that the company is related to my daughter’s death?”
 

Jamie shuffled her papers to detract from Esther’s piercing scrutiny.
 

“What did you think of Jenna’s legal investigations and protests against the company?”
 

A flicker of disturbance flashed across Esther’s face.
 

“Oh, she was just going through a rebellious patch, encouraged by that man she was seeing.” Esther was haughty with a tone of dismissal. “Jenna seemed willing to do anything to undermine me and her father. Although she reaped the rewards of what we do, she was determined to bring it all down and to make victims of the - very few - bodies we use for research.”

“Bodies?” Jamie pushed.
 

Esther sighed. “The best way to learn anatomy is to dissect the human body, Detective. We all want surgeons to know what they’re doing, don’t we? But Jenna would never acknowledge that truth.” Jamie waited, counting the beats of silence until Esther continued. “You have to break humanity before you can fix it. John Hunter knew that. He was driven by the need to understand life, and he wouldn’t take accepted wisdom as truth. He would only believe the evidence of his eyes, and only by dissecting the bodies of animals and of people, could he truly understand their inner workings.”
 

“So you objected to Jenna’s legal work?”
 

“We argued about it, yes. But the use of the dead to benefit the living is entirely scientific. It has always been this way. It’s superstitious nonsense to think that the body has to be intact for the resurrection, or that somehow we are dishonoring the dead by using them for scientific matters. There are those who would prefer not to think of this side of things, but they are also the ones who expect medical science to cure them, for their drugs to work and for treatments to be pain free. But drugs must be tested on human subjects and the surgeon must know exactly where and how to cut. What are they to practice on, if not real flesh? Of course, these days there are computer simulations but that doesn’t give the proper sense of cutting into a body, the push of a blade through resistant skin. It doesn’t part like butter, you know, you have to cut. Surgeons sweat as they work, it can be physically draining.”
 
Her voice was strangely wistful. “The human body is so well put together, it can be hard to pull it apart. ”
 

Jamie looked down at her notebook to leave some silence between them, as she considered Esther’s vivid words. After a moment, she looked up again.
 

“Can you talk me through your movements on the night of the Gala Dinner?”
 

Esther froze, her face stony, then slowly answered.
 

“I had a headache that night. I get migraines and one was threatening. I put up with that odious dinner for as long as I could, but I got up to leave as the dessert was being served. I felt giddy so I sat in the toilets for a while.” She looked away from Jamie. “I don’t know how long I was there. The pain was all I could think about, and eventually I caught a taxi home.”
 

“And did you argue with Jenna that night?”
 

Esther laughed, a shrill sound that seemed out of place in the austere surroundings.
 

“Of course. I argued with my daughter whenever we spoke, Detective. That night wasn’t any different.”
 

Jamie decided to change tack and circle back on the alibi later. There should be some footage from near the bathrooms of the Royal College of Surgeons, and she could check on the migraine medication.
 

“What about Jenna’s active membership of the National Anti-Vivisection Society? The marches against this office, against you and Lord Neville personally.”
 

Esther rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I know she meant well, but she was misguided. Come with me and I’ll show you how humane we are. I want to give you the scientific side of the story so you’ll understand.”
 

She led the way out of the lab, into a corridor and then to a lift. Esther pressed the −3 button, and Jamie noticed that there were five floors underground as well as the twenty above ground. It was an extensive facility. Esther was silent in the lift, and Jamie said nothing either. Finally, the door opened to an atrium, which smelled of disinfectant, like a vet’s surgery.
 

“This floor is where we keep some of the animals and also where we perform legal vivisection.”
 

Jamie noticed her emphasis on the legal basis of the research. “Can you explain to me exactly what that is?” she asked.
 

“In the UK, any experiment involving vivisection, where we use a live animal for experimentation, must be granted a license from the Home Secretary. The license is only given when the benefits to society outweigh the adverse effects to the animal.”
 

“What’s your definition of adverse?”
 

“It depends on the procedure. The definition of vivisection is that the animal is alive when we experiment but of course we use anesthesia, so there is no pain. We also have an external ethics committee.”
 

“Why was Jenna so against this practice?”
 

“She believed it was morally wrong to inflict pain or injury on another animal, for whatever reason, and so any kind of animal experimentation would be unacceptable.” Esther shook her head. “But Jenna was short-sighted about this, she only saw the propaganda spread by the anti-vivisectionists, and she put everything in the same box.”
 

“What do you mean by that?” Jamie asked.
 

“Well, I agree that it’s pointless to test household products by spraying them into the eyes of rabbits, and there are some needless experiments where positive results on animals have no application to humans. But here, we carry out genetic research, and since we cannot experiment on humans, we must make do with animals, as did the great John Hunter. Although of course, he did experiments on live animals with no pain relief.”

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