Kate’s whole body starts to shake as he chucks the remote to Putin and gets into the car with Catrine. He never meant to fall in love with her.

98

Silas

‘Have a read of this,’ Silas says, passing Strover back her iPad. ‘It’s the article that was on Dr Varma’s desk.’

They are sitting in a café around the corner from Queen’s Square. Silas has already given one statement to the Met and the senior investigating officer wants to talk to him again shortly, find out why a prominent neuropsychiatrist was shot dead in cold blood in his central London consulting room. Silas has a good idea. Varma knew too much and had already started to talk, telling Jake where Kate was being taken. It’s what else Dr Varma knew that’s worrying Silas.

He watches Strover as she reads from the iPad. There were a number of interesting documents on Dr Varma’s desk, but two in particular caught his eye. One was a sheet of results for a recognition test he’d conducted at the weekend on Kate – something to do with a P3 brainwave. Another was a printout of a story headlined ‘The Frozen Addicts’. He took pictures of them both on his iPhone and called up the article on Strover’s iPad while she was fetching the coffees.

‘Seems like the drug that the addicts took induced an advanced state of Parkinson’s,’ Silas says.

‘This is awful,’ Strover says, scrolling through the article.

Awful doesn’t come close to describing what happened. In 1982, six drug users in the San Francisco Bay area consumed an impure form of synthetic heroin that turned them into living statues, rendering their bodies rigid and twisted. The neurotoxic contaminant, later identified as MPTP, had targeted dopamine-producing neurons in a part of the brain, the substantia nigra, that coordinates movement. The results were devastating, much like the debilitating last phase of Parkinson’s. Although the addicts’ bodies were catatonic, their minds were normal, alert and fully aware of the world around them.

‘Dr Varma had highlighted the line about the local neurologist who found the addicts in various jails and psychiatric wards,’ Silas says. ‘Apparently he reversed their condition with a drug called levodopa.’

‘And kickstarted research into Parkinson’s in the process,’ Strover says, finishing the article. She looks up, waiting for an explanation, a connection with what they’re investigating.