Woodpecker

Chapter 17 / John 4 / 2 x 2 x 2 Days Left

He moves through the kitchen using his walking stick to keep balance. To his frustration he can't get around without it anymore. It makes a click, click, clicking on the tiled floor. It's taken him by surprise how quickly his health has deteriorated in the last couple of weeks. He's resigned to the fact that whatever it is must be terminal. Giving it a name won't change that. He's seen every damn specialist that the force doctor can find, but none of them can say what it is. "It might be this, it might be that. This is what it isn't. We need to do more tests." These are the words he has heard from a brace of baffled doctors.

Helen, Geering's wife, tries occasionally to make light of it. "Here comes Poirot," she says, but then remembers how grave things are and adds, "when are you going to finish with the case John? You need to rest." But John doesn't want to rest. The opposite in fact. This case is the only thing that makes him carry on. What makes him force himself out of bed each morning and ignore the voice in his head telling him that it isn't worth fighting. He kisses her on the cheek and says "soon. I'll be finished with it soon, but I have to see it to the end, okay?" She nods agreement but is fighting the urge to shake her head so vigorously that she gets a headache. She wants to scream that it isn't alright.

Today he is taking a drive into the Berkshire countryside. He is still able to control and generate enough power in his legs to drive a car adequately, and his eyesight is only bad first thing in the morning or when he gets very tired. He likes the feeling of freedom that driving a car still gives him. To travel unencumbered through the world as he had done in his youth. As he drives, he looks ahead at the sky which in the last few weeks has taken on the slightest green tinge in the mornings. As midday comes around it seems to burn off like summer haze. No one seems to be sure what this Greening, as it has become known, is. Its colour suggests something biological, something natural, or atmospheric perhaps. The government say they are investigating and advise people not to panic. For the most part no one is. They say it will resolve itself. Whatever it is, it is making the world colder, shutting out enough morning sunlight to affect the weather. The animals have noticed too. The squirrels are busy trying to find nuts that haven't fallen yet, and the birds are flying south in v-formation already.

John doesn't have time today to think about any of this though. He's on his way to the private school where David Cooke studied as a boy.

******

The envelope Sam Brock had slipped into his pocket had turned out to be a wormhole of a lead. Just the kind of wormhole that Geering liked to slip down to see where it led. Within the envelope was a bank statement from Professor Stuart Levitsky, the friend and colleague of the dead man Joshua Matheson, and the only connection that Geering had to him. It didn't take long for him to home in on what he wanted. A large sum of money, just over ten thousand pounds, paid on the fourteenth of every month. The payment came from a company called Cinereus, which he'd spent the last three weeks looking into.

Cinereus was UK registered but just a shell. Quite illegally whoever set it up had failed to declare any person with significant interests. This was supposed to identify the end owner of the company or any shell companies and prevent the setting up of firms for money laundering. In practice it was poorly policed and the penalties for getting caught so negligible as to be attractive. This company split down a tree of other companies, all shells, with odd sounding Latin names. Fuscus Limited, Javanicus, Tristis, Pagodarum and so on. After researching these names, Geering still can't decide if it is just coincidence that these all have ornithological meanings. He doesn't believe in coincidences so when he found this out, he started to believe Brock and Erwin that a connection might exists with Project Starling. It started to seem to him that this was likely the project that Professor Levitsky and Joshua Matheson were working on together, and the money was payment for that work.