Free The Lazarus Strain by Ken McClure Page A

coming closer and peering up into Steven’s face.
    Steven pulled himself together and smiled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Nothing serious I hope?’
    ‘I really can’t say,’ said the woman. ‘Mary said she thought it was something to do with that dratted animal that attacked him. Anyway he’s in hospital and Mary went with him.’
    Steven swallowed. This was going from bad to worse. ‘The same hospital as before?’ he asked hoarsely.
    The woman shook her head. ‘No, I wanted to send him a card but Mary said she didn’t have an address yet. She said they’d been very good about things and that they were going to make sure that David got the best of medical attention. They told her she could stay with him in what they called their guest suite and it was all going to be at their expense.’ The woman drew even closer and added conspiratorially, ‘Somewhere private, I think.’
    ‘You don’t know who ‘they’ were by any chance?’ asked Steven.
    The woman shook her head and said, ‘Didn’t think to ask. The institute, I suppose. I mean, it was their animal and they should take responsibility for it, don’t you think?’
    Steven gave a non-committal nod and said, ‘It must have been very alarming for everyone round here.’
    ‘I’ll say,’ said the woman. ‘You don’t see men with guns running round your garden every day.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Steven who had been meaning the escaped animals, ‘I’d forgotten about the soldiers.’
    ‘Soldiers?’ exclaimed the woman. ‘More like spacemen if you ask me. They scared the living daylights out of me and Sam, I can tell you, creeping round the gardens like that.’
    ‘Spacemen . . .’ repeated Steven, struggling to appear normal when even more alarm bells were going off inside his head.
    ‘You know . . . these suits they wear . . . makes ‘em look like spacemen.’
    ‘I don’t think I do,’ said Steven. ‘Can you describe these suits, Mrs . . . ?’
    ‘Jackson, Molly Jackson.’ She went on to give a reasonable description of something Steven reluctantly recognised as a bio-hazard suit.
    ‘It all sounds very exciting,’ he said calmly but his pulse rate had risen markedly. No one had mentioned in the report that the soldiers had been wearing bio-hazard gear . . . or more importantly, why.
    ‘Frankly, I think we’ve had enough excitement round here, thank you very much,’ said Molly. ‘I liked it fine the way it was.’
    Steven returned to his car and put his head back on the restraint. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he murmured. ‘What’s going on?’
     
    * * * * *
     
    Charlene Lyndon made an appeal on the early evening news for information about the murder of her dead son. She came across on screen as an unattractive woman in her forties with a weight problem due to bad diet and a make-up problem due to bad taste. Her hair was dyed jet black which contrasted badly with her pallid white skin and painted scarlet lips. Her cheeks were smudged with mascara runs from her tears.
    ‘Robert was a good boy,’ she said, reading with difficulty from a card in front of her while her T-shirted husband sat beside her like a stuffed toy, the word ‘love’, tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, clearly visible.
    ‘He was always helping people . . . He would do anything for anyone . . . Someone must know something about what happened to him last night . . . I’m pleading with you . . . Come forward and tell the police what you know . . . My son didn’t deserve to die like that . . . No one deserves to die like that . . .’ She put down the card and buried her face in her hands.
    ‘A good boy?’ said Morley when it was over and the Lyndons had been ushered away.
    ‘They all are to their mothers,’ said Giles. ‘She didn’t see what her little boy and his mates did to Timothy Devon.’
    ‘You still think Lyndon was part of that?’
    ‘Lyndon was an ineffectual little prat who couldn’t hold down a job or get a girlfriend. He was a known