Читать книгу Sweet Talking Money - Harry Bingham - Страница 31

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Bryn, clamping down hard on his voice so he didn’t actually yell. ‘I’ve found twenty million pounds’ worth of funding, and you’re telling me you don’t want it?’

‘Right.’

Muscles fought in Bryn’s jaw as he composed a reply. ‘Cameron, you do understand that we need this money? That the company relies on obtaining this money?’

‘Wrong. We need money. Not twenty million pounds, maybe only a quarter of that. But whatever the amount, we don’t need this money. Not from Milner.’

‘Milne.’

‘Whatever.’

It was late at night in the boathouse, the only time it was usable, when Dai and his lads had downed tools and were doing their worst in London’s nightspots. A couple of the smaller downstairs rooms were all but finished and Cameron had been setting them up the way she wanted: bloodwork facility, microscope workshop, computer pods, library. She was dressed in her working outfit: jeans and a T-shirt, with a labcoat flung on top, hanging from her skinny shoulders as from a broomstick scarecrow. A thick rubber band of the sort dropped on the pavement by postmen twisted her hair away out of sight. Once, as Bryn had watched, an end of hair escaped its grip once too often, and she reached for a pair of surgical scissors and snipped it off at the root. ‘Damn hair,’ she muttered.

Now, ignoring Bryn, she pulled over an unpacked shipment of dyes and solvents and began to rip away the brown packaging tape. Bryn reached for the box and tugged it from her grasp.

‘Please stop that,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’

She looked irritated, glance wandering around the room, visibly thinking through how best to arrange her stores. ‘Now?’

‘Yes, now.’

She gazed round the room again, before grunting, ‘Uh, OK,’ figuring that the quickest way to get rid of Bryn was to hear him out. ‘Upstairs, then. I’ve left my tea.’

They walked up the spiral staircase to Cameron’s office. Windows looked out in each direction: north and east over central London, south and west over the river. ‘You’ll be a bloody princess in here,’ Dai had said as he’d finished the room, ‘all you need now is the knight in shining armour.’ The tower room did have something of the fairy-tale about it, but what Bryn thought of was ivory towers, academic scientists cut off from the real world, out of sight and out of touch. Cameron rummaged amongst her rapidly growing mounds of papers and found a long-cooled cup of camomile tea. ‘Ugh,’ she sipped it and put it down. ‘Forget that. OK. Shoot.’

‘Good.’ Bryn found a wooden storage cupboard that hadn’t yet been swamped by clutter and sat down. ‘First point, we need money, lots of it, I estimate twenty million pounds.’

‘So you keep saying. I don’t see us needing more than five.’

‘Look. Five million pounds only covers your human research phase. It gets you to where you’ve already got to with rats.’

‘Right. Which, as I recall, was a one hundred per cent cure of all viral diseases tested.’

‘Good. That’s the hard part, but not the most important part.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. What’s this? A lecture on the profit motive? You’re confusing me with someone who gives a damn. Please get this. I – don’t – care.’

She stood up and reached for her tea, wanting to move it to a safer spot, but Bryn interrupted. He was in a fury of impatience. He was the boss, head of the company, chief executive. At Berger Scholes he’d been a Managing Director, able to snap orders at nearly anyone in the firm and have them obeyed. Yet here he was, for all his notional power, unable even to hold a conversation with his most critical employee. He leaped to his feet and, as Cameron reached for the tea, he grabbed it first and slammed it down on a window sill.

‘No,’ he snapped. ‘This is not about profits. It’s something you need to hear. Please.’

Cameron breathed out in a sigh. ‘OK. Go ahead.’

‘Good. Now, you just told me that you can cure all major viral diseases in rats.’

‘If we get ’em early. If the disease has progressed far, then –’

‘OK. If you get ’em early, a hundred per cent. Now, tell me, could I do that? Take the Schoolroom, cure your rats?’

What? You?’

‘Yes, me. Could I personally cure a rat with an early-stage viral disease?’

‘No way. Never.’

‘How about a doctor, let’s say an infectious diseases guy in a busy hospital? A nurse? A lab assistant?’

Cameron blew out through her nose and glanced unceremoniously at her watch. ‘Listen, Kati and I can cure those rats because for the last five years we’ve worked on nothing else at all. We know our rats. We know our blood. We know our viruses. We know the Schoolroom. We know –’

‘Exactly,’ said Bryn, holding up his hand. ‘Thank you. Now tell me, once you’ve finished your human work, and you and Kati are getting a close to one hundred per cent cure rate, it’s going to be the same, isn’t it?’

Cameron looked blank, unsure what he was getting at. He continued. ‘You’ve got a technique for curing people, but no one knows how to use it. By your own statement, it takes five years of training to use the Schoolroom competently, which is four years, eleven months and two weeks too long.’ Holding his hands in front of him like a conductor damping the orchestra’s sound, he said, ‘The point is your technology’s useless unless people use it. Me, a nurse, a busy doctor, a lab guy. With training, of course. A week or two. Even a month or two. But not five years, plus a medical doctorate, plus a research doctorate, plus a brain the size of a planet which everyone tells me is going to get a Nobel Prize one of these days.’

He stopped abruptly. It was an odd way to deliver a compliment. She wrinkled her mouth in embarrassed acknowledgement of the praise.

‘Uh. I see your point.’

‘Right. So five million pounds for your clinical trials. I’ve allowed eight million, because these things run over. Then another dozen or so for development. Turning the Schoolroom into a box of tricks which anyone can use, me, a nurse, a lab guy, whoever.’

‘Hence twenty million.’

‘And hence Malcolm Milne.’

Now that Bryn no longer had to force his words at his recalcitrant partner, the space between them had grown too narrow. Cameron swivelled to look out of the window, where the black Thames marched silently towards Chelsea, Westminster, and St Paul’s. London was a new city for her, a new adventure. She still didn’t know whether her escape from Boston was the smartest move she’d ever made, or the stupidest. Bryn moved back, scuffing some piles of books on the floor. Cameron glanced at her watch, then returned her gaze to Bryn. ‘OK. I get the money part. I take the point.’

‘I knew you’d –’

‘But Malcolm Milne, no way. Sorry, but no.’