‘No, Mum. It had stopped working. It’s final.’
‘Final, is it? Bryn …’ Gwyneth tailed off, but her son knew what she wanted to ask.
‘No, it wasn’t anything I did. There wasn’t another woman involved. Cecily did find … She’s with another man now. Lives in the Caribbean.’
‘The Caribbean? Oh, Bryn.’ She rinsed her hands and composed her face before turning round. ‘My poor love.’
Bryn nodded, a bit too choked to respond. As the weeks had passed, he’d come to see that Cecily had been right. Over the years since their wedding, they’d floated too far apart for any amount of emergency repair work to mend the damage. If you leave a hill farm neglected for too long, the hill will claim it back, no matter what you do at the last. All the same, however sensible it might be to cut his losses, the fact remained that he had to start out all over again. He turned his head away and set his jaw against the possibility of tears.
‘It’s all OK at work, though?’ said Gwyneth, tactfully reading the need for a different subject. ‘It can be a blessing, work, staying busy.’
‘Work’s fine,’ said Bryn, regaining control of his vocal cords. ‘But I don’t know, I’m thinking of leaving, to be honest.’
A surge of relief swept into his mother’s voice. ‘Oh, I do hope so. Your dad could use the help, Bryn. He’s not been so well lately and I know Dai has his hands full.’
Bryn’s elder brother Dai, the family success story, had retired from professional rugby a few years ago through injury and started up a construction company, specialising in agricultural buildings for local farmers. Nothing would please his mother more than Bryn joining forces with Dai and helping his dad out on the farm in his spare time.
‘Lord, no. Not that. I’ve got a lot of options, but I’ll probably end up setting up on my own.’
‘Oh … I didn’t know you could do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘You know, set up your own bank, just one person. I thought you needed …’
Bryn laughed. In the fourteen years of his banking career, his mother had understood nothing about how he earned his living beyond the fact that he worked for a bank. ‘No, I won’t set up my own bank. I’m thinking of going into health technology. Medicine.’
Gwyneth searched her repertoire for an appropriate response, but came away empty-handed. She raised her eyebrows, put her hands to her perfectly set hair, and gave her son a big multi-purpose smile. ‘Medicine,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
Meanwhile, outside, the first flakes of a new snowfall began to cover up the tyre tracks and footprints that had speckled the yard outside with black.
2
‘You’re kidding.’ Cameron wasn’t fazed.
‘I know. I ought to be joking. I bought it over the phone. I was snowed up in Wales, and all I had was my dad’s blurry fax machine. It looked OK in the photo.’ He gestured around, trying to explain how he’d got drunk with his brother Dai one lunchtime, stumbled across to the farm office, peered at a string of small and fuzzy fax images of buildings, selected one on the basis of price alone, and then faxed through a signature on the contract before he’d had time to take a second look.
‘You’re not kidding? Seriously?’
They were standing inside, but their coats were on and their breath built castles in the freezing air. From a hole in the roof water dripped, joining the pools of water covering the floor.
‘It’s not all bad,’ said Bryn. ‘It’s cheap. We can fix it up. And it’s big. We wouldn’t have got this much space, if –’
‘If you’d actually bought, like, a building. You know, those things with walls, a roof, lighting, heating –’
‘No water on the floor,’ said Kati. ‘No concrete slipway heading into a river.’
‘No boats. No smell of muck that’s been allowed –’
Oh my God,’ said Kati, as a fat black rat ambled out of a stack of rotting timber and lolloped across the floor to a hole in the wall before disappearing. ‘No rats, for heaven’s sake. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like rats, but there are limits.’
They had a point. Cameron and Kati had obediently done what Bryn had begged them to do. They’d gone home to their parents, in Chicago and Vancouver respectively, and spun some yarn about looking to start the next phase of their work with a new research institution, possibly in Europe. They’d sent out letters to a handful of American colleges and research companies, deliberately weak applications that would be quite likely rejected even if Corinth wasn’t quick enough to stamp on them.
And then they’d disappeared. They took holiday flights down to Mexico City, went by bus north to Tijuana, then via a couple of further flights moved on into Latin America before catching a mainline British Airways flight direct from Rio to London. As Bryn had said, ‘Not even Corinth is going to keep up with your movements. They’ll probably catch at least some of your application letters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they snoop around your parents’ neighbourhoods, trying to pick up your trail. All they’ll see is a story of failure. Most likely, they’ll assume you got some research post in Europe. As far as your folks are concerned, you should let them think the same thing. Corinth will keep an ear to the ground, but they’ll never find you. Not here.’
Cameron poked an oil-spattered tarpaulin with her foot. Water sloshed around in the folds, but at least any wildlife under the surface stayed put. ‘You can hardly blame them,’ she said. ‘This isn’t exactly where you’d expect to find us.’
Bryn sighed. The Fulham Boathouses had certainly been cheap, and yet, in Bryn’s half-inebriated state, the estate agent’s photo had been deeply misleading. In the foreground of the picture there had been an old Victorian wharf reconfigured as modern offices, and it was this Bryn thought he’d been buying. Dominating the rear, the boathouses had stood untouched since the Fulham Boating Association had gone bankrupt in 1973. The wooden walls were wet to the touch, and large areas of timber were so rotted away that Bryn could easily enough have put his fist through the side of the building. Inside, apart from the rats, there was little enough: rowing-boat hulls covered with tarpaulins or left to rot along with everything else. The only object of any grace was a lofty barge-style houseboat, of the sort that the Oxford colleges used to keep.
And yet, there were compensations. The boathouses were located amidst a cluster of wharves, where the Thames sweeps south from Hammersmith. They were only a brisk walk from Fulham Broadway and the King’s Road, and not more than a stone’s throw from the heart of London. At the end of the main boathouse, wide double doors twenty feet high opened out on to the river. Thrown open, and assuming a warm summer’s day instead of the miserable February weather that actually surrounded them, the view would be spectacular, the far side of the Thames a mass of elderflower and rosebay willowherb, tumbling down the cobbled bank into the water.
‘You know, it’s not so bad. My brother’s a builder and he’ll help sort this out. He won’t charge much, and besides, buildings are easy. We’ve got a much more immediate problem.’
‘We have?’ said Cameron. ‘Do I want to know?’
‘You certainly do,’ said Bryn, and told her.
3
‘Pick a disease, pick any disease.’
It was certainly an excellent selection that the young man had to choose from. A small cupboard tinkled with glass-stoppered ampoules, each one labelled with an acronym denoting the killer disease inside.
‘We’ve got a good range of retro-viruses in at the