Deception

TWO

The first thing that occurred to Steven when he climbed into the cab to take him back to his flat was the fact that Jenny no longer had a father whose function it was to just, ‘eat, sleep and be there’. It was a good feeling. He was back in business and the bulging file in his briefcase suggested that there was enough there to keep him fully occupied for the rest of the day and probably most of the evening.

Although it wasn’t sunny, it was extremely sultry — just the way he didn’t like it in London. This kind of weather shortened everyone’s temper and the continual angry tooting of car horns and muttering of the cab driver only served to prove the point as they edged their way down to the river, where he had an apartment on the fifth floor of a converted warehouse building. He felt relieved to get inside and have a shower before changing into jeans and tee shirt. He poured himself a cold Stella Artois from the fridge and settled down to read through the file.

Blackbridge, he learned, was a small farming community, lying to the west of Edinburgh, about five miles inland from the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It had been named after a black iron bridge — now replaced by a more modern concrete one, which spanned the small river running through it from south to north, on its way down from the Pentland Hills to the sea. The village was also crossed by water, running east to west, in the shape of the Union Canal, a disused inland waterway that stretched out from the heart of Edinburgh, the capital to Falkirk, a small town standing in the middle of Scotland’s central belt.

The canal had carried horse-drawn barge traffic around the turn of the century but had been neglected now for over seventy years, allowing nature to reclaim much of its original, cobbled towpath and making progress along its banks almost impossible in places. The canal however, was currently scheduled for dredging and restoration and was to be given new life as a major recreational feature for the population with the aid of millennium project money. Work had already started and a section of the main Glasgow — Edinburgh Motorway was currently being raised to permit the rejoining of a section of the canal that had been severed during the motorway’s construction many years before. There was little else to distinguish Blackbridge geographically, Steven concluded. It could have been any one of dozens of small communities lying across Scotland’s most densely populated region.

The main protagonists in the current controversy appeared to be, Ronald Lane, the owner of Peat Ridge farm — who had been contracted by Agrigene to grow their experimental oilseed rape crop, and Thomas Rafferty, the owner of Crawhill farm, which lay immediately to the east of Peat Ridge. Rafferty was officially the chief objector on the grounds that cross-pollination from Peat Ridge would ruin his credentials as an organic farmer. McGraw and Littlejohn, an Edinburgh firm of solicitors, had been retained by Rafferty and seemed to be co-ordinating the efforts of the other protestors — who, as far as Steven could tell, were objecting on principle to the idea of having any kind of genetically modified crop in the area.

Agrigene in turn, had commissioned a Glasgow firm of solicitors — Macey and Elms, to represent their interests in the affair and they had adopted the position that their clients had done nothing wrong and were perfectly entitled to carry out the experimental work they had been properly licensed to do.

Rafferty’s solicitors however, had apparently come up with a trump card by producing what they claimed was a copy of a government laboratory analysis of the crop in Lane’s fields, which they claimed showed that it was not the strain Agrigene was originally licensed to grow. The crop, they claimed, contained an extra foreign gene, one more than the two that had been agreed. They were demanding a halt to the whole trial on the basis of deception.

Agrigene, through Macey and Elms, were contesting this finding, ‘most vigorously’ but adjudication in the matter was currently being impeded by the changing political scene in Scotland. The newly formed Scottish parliament now held jurisdiction over matters agricultural through its newly formed Ministry for Rural Affairs but it had been the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries (MAFF), answering to the Westminster parliament, which had granted the licence. There was also confusion over who held executive sway over major matters concerning health and safety.

‘All I need,’ sighed Steven. ‘A bloody civil service squabble in the middle of a grey area.’

He examined the map of the village and surrounding area supplied by Miss Roberts and noted that the farms were indeed very close. The prevailing west wind in that part of the world might well constitute a problem but even then, a theoretical one, he thought. The idea of large-scale gene transfer through natural pollination was much more remote than the tabloid newspapers would have people believe. It was however, too late for cogent argument on this subject, he conceded. Public opinion had clearly perceived a danger in the genetic modification of food sources so the matter of who was right and who was wrong had become largely irrelevant. ‘Don’t waste your time concentrating on what should be,’ was something he remembered from his early training, ‘concentrate on what is.’

He gleaned very little in the way of extra information from the supplied copies of solicitors’ letters. All were couched in the cold, unemotional jargon of legal prose and said no more than they absolutely had to. He looked to the background reports on the two farmers for some more colour.

Ronald Lane was a fifty-three year old, who had returned to Blackbridge from South Africa, where he had been an estate manager for many years. He had come home after inheriting Peat Ridge farm from his late father. He had trained in the early sixties at Edinburgh’s School of Agriculture but had apparently fallen out with his father at the time over what he saw as old-fashioned farming methods being used on Peat Ridge. The pair had never been reconciled and Lane junior had gone off to seek his fortune abroad.

He was said to be generally disliked in the village since his homecoming, being seen as ‘uppity’ and an outsider, despite his roots, and as a consequence, kept himself very much to himself. He had remained unmarried and lived alone apart from his housekeeper, a local woman named, Agnes Fraser.

Thomas Rafferty of Crawhill Farm had lived all his forty-eight years in the village, having left school at sixteen to join his father and brother in working on Crawhill Farm. Although he had had to work hard when his father — a notoriously stern man — had been alive, he and his brother, Sean, had preferred to spend most of their time in the pub after the old man’s demise. Consequently, the farm had been allowed to go into decline.

Sean however, had been shrewd enough to see that there was a market for the hire of heavy farm machinery in the area. He had persuaded his brother that they should invest what remained of their capital in the purchase of agricultural machinery and set up a plant hire business. The idea blossomed into a business success and Rafferty’s Plant Hire had provided both brothers with a comfortable income for many years, which they had not seen fit to augment with the bother of doing any actual farming. Crawhill had been allowed to lie fallow.

Sean had died in 1991 and Thomas had bought out his widow’s share, leaving him and his wife, Trish as the sole proprietors of the plant hire business. Without Sean’s business acumen however, the plant hire business had not being doing so well of late. Thomas had not recognised the need to invest in new machinery or keep up expensive maintenance schedules on the old stuff. He preferred to make do with what they had and keep it going on a shoestring budget, using second hand spares and a succession of poorly paid mechanics to fit them.

It had come as a surprise to everyone when Thomas Rafferty announced that he was planning on resurrecting Crawhill as a working farm and an organic one at that. The fact that the land had not been cultivated at all for many years meant that it could be considered free of modern chemical contamination and therefore eligible for an organic accreditation, which it had now been granted.

Steven read on and noted that the licensing dates for Agrigene’s trial pre-dated Rafferty’s organic farm accreditation by quite some time. Some pen — pusher’s mistake? he wondered. Right hands not knowing what left hands were doing? This was a fact of life in any large administration and, in this case, he could see an added complication. The setting up of the new Scottish Parliament’s infrastructure had not, as far as he could tell, led to the demise of the old one, administered by the Scottish Office. He could be dealing here with permutations of two left hands and two right hands. Not a happy thought.

Steven moved on to the lab report from the ministry lab that had carried out the analysis on the oil seed rape crop and immediately thought it odd. It appeared that the analysis had been carried out at the instigation of the protestors. Why should a MAFF lab agree to do that? Did such labs carry out private work routinely? he wondered. He would check up on that, but even if that were the case, there must have been an original analysis carried out on the crop before the licence for the trial was granted. A comparison of the original and the latest one was surely all that was required to demonstrate whether the crops were the same or not, but the original was missing from the file. A copy of the licence itself was present and gave details of the two foreign genes that had been introduced to the grain. They had been inserted in order to enable the plant to tolerate a range of powerful herbicidal chemicals, most importantly, glyphosphate and glufosinate-ammonium weed killers. The use of these herbicides would completely suppress weeds in the fields and permit much higher yields of the crop.

‘And a bloody good idea, too,’ though Steven as he read on through the MAFF analysis. The two foreign genes were highlighted in the DNA sequence but so was a third, marked in a different colour. This apparently was the bone of contention between the two parties. The protestors, through Rafferty’s solicitors, were arguing that this area represented a third, undeclared gene and therefore rendered the licence invalid. The biotech company however, maintained that this was a misunderstanding and that the DNA sequence was not being interpreted correctly.

Steven was no molecular biologist but he did understand the principles involved in genetic engineering. In particular he appreciated the structure of DNA, the blueprint of life, and knew about the specificity of restriction enzymes that cut the molecule at particular sites. He understood the technical procedures involved in the cutting out of genes from one DNA molecule and the pasting of them into another.

This gave him an advantage over any lay investigator and, in this instance, enabled him to wonder why the supposed third gene had not been identified and described by the analysing lab. They had just classified it as a ‘foreign element’ in the report.

Although one stretch of DNA sequence looked pretty much like any other to the naked eye — an apparently endless, alternating alphabet of only four letters, A,T,C, and G, representing backbone of the molecule — many computerised databases had been set up to analyse these strings of letters and compare them with the DNA sequences of known genes. The lab had obviously run the sequence through a database in order to classify the suspect third section as foreign but they had not given any indication as to what it might be or where it might have come from. Steven wondered why not.

While he was thinking about this it occurred to him that this was something he could actually do for himself with the aid of his laptop. Using a modem link to the Sci-Med computer, he would type in the rogue foreign sequence and ask it to scan various DNA databases, looking for similarity. It would take a little time to key in what amounted to a meaningless string of letters and it would have to be done carefully — a bit like copy typing text in a language you didn’t understand — but it was worth a try. It might well be that the MAFF lab had already tried this and failed to detect any similarity to any known gene but the fact remained that they hadn’t reported doing that and even if it had been an unknown sequence, that alone would still have been worth reporting.

Steven keyed in the sequence of letters and painstakingly checked his work by reading the letters backwards, four at a time, using a postcard to cover up the others as he moved back along the screen. When he felt satisfied that his entry was accurate, he made the link with the Sci-Med computer and requested a database comparison. It didn’t take long. The sequence was recognised almost immediately: it was present in the first database that the computer scanned. The sequence, it reported, was that of a DNA insertion element known in the trade as a transposon.

‘Of course,’ muttered Steven as it suddenly became clear to him why it was there. He now understood the biotech company’s argument. This third element wasn’t really a foreign gene at all. It was simply an easily detectable marker that had been used by their scientists as a convenient label in their experiments. Although foreign to the oil seed rape plant, this supposed third unlicensed ‘gene’ had simply been inserted to enable the Agrigene scientists to detect the presence of the two real foreign genes.

In the laboratory, it was impractical to demonstrate the presence of foreign genes by painstakingly sequencing the entire DNA blueprint of the plant so it was usual for experimenters to tag their genes with something that would be much easier to detect — usually with some kind of chemical marker. If this tag was present there was every chance that the foreign genes were too.

So why all the fuss? Steven wondered. The ministry lab must have known this when they made their report. It was common practice for scientists to use this technology. Why hadn’t the reporting lab pointed this out to the protestors and their legal representatives? Or could this be a case of lawyers deliberately exploiting a misunderstanding for their own ends? Even so, he found it hard to believe that no one in the MAFF lab had pointed out that the tag could not reasonably be considered as a third foreign gene.

Once again he was forced to wonder why the original sequence had not been produced by both parties for comparison. The marker gene must have been present in the original sequence and therefore quite legal and subject to the licence whether lawyers now considered it foreign or not. There was clearly a big misunderstanding here. The big question for him now was, was it accidental or deliberate? In either case, Agrigene had the right to be annoyed and the more he thought about it, the more he could understand their frustration.

In the present climate of distrust over GM technology however, the company might still have an uphill struggle on their hands, whatever the justness of their cause. Prosecution counsel simply asking in court, ‘Were there or were there not three foreign genes present in the strain when you were licensed for two?’ might carry the day. The company’s reply of, ‘Yes but…’ followed by an explanation, might simply be swept away by the flow of public opinion. There were none as deaf as those who did not want to hear.

Steven moved on to the final section of the file and found the report on the three boys from the village who had gone swimming in the canal. The Sci Med computer had been programmed to pick up on anything unusual happening in the Inspectorate’s current areas of interest, whether it appeared at first glance to be relevant or not. The simple supposition was that no one really knew what was relevant and what was not at the outset of an investigation. Accordingly, the computer would collate all local newspaper reports and police incident reports emanating from the geographical area and incorporate them into the file, hence the local newspaper report on three boys who had contracted Weil’s disease.

Thirteen-year-olds going swimming in a canal seemed daft when viewed with the unfailing accuracy of adult hindsight but had probably been perfectly understandable at the time, he thought. When you were that age, you did what felt good without stopping to think. Young boys had never been noted for their foresight and vision and never would be. This was part of growing up. Learning the hard way was part of the curriculum. They’d probably never even heard of Weil’s disease or the fact you got it from contact with rat urine or that canals were one of the commonest sources of it. It was an odd thing about the rat having attacked one of them though. He hoped that the kid would be all right. The working file would be updated daily by the computer and any change transmitted to his laptop when he logged on each morning.

It was just after nine in the evening when Steven poured himself a gin and tonic and got out a fresh sheet of paper to write down a summary of his thoughts as a prelude to forming a plan of action. Some aspects of the affair seemed pretty straightforward. A farmer, growing GM crops on his land at the behest of a properly licensed biotech company was at loggerheads with the rest of the community. Nothing unusual in that these days; it was something that had been happening all over the country. The main protestor was a would-be organic farmer shouting the odds about cross-pollination — again, par for the course — although in this case, he didn’t as yet have a crop to cross-pollinate! This man was backed by most of the local community who just didn’t like the idea of GM anything — again, nothing out of the ordinary in this, although it did occur to Steven that there was no indication who was paying the legal bills for the protestors. Agrigene could afford a legal battle. Could Rafferty and his fellow villagers?

A lab report from a government lab — he underlined this — gave the impression of the presence of a third, unlicensed foreign gene in the crop and hadn’t done much by all accounts to correct what he now believed to be, a false impression. This, he felt, was decidedly odd as was the fact that the original analysis had not been produced to demonstrate that the strains were (must be?) in fact identical.

It was normal practice for Sci-Med investigators to spend as much time as they felt necessary, familiarising themselves with their assignment file before starting out on their investigation. Occasionally it was necessary for them to be sent on mini-courses if the subject matter should turn out to be highly specialised. This usually involved Sci-Med setting up a one to one meeting with an acknowledged expert in the relevant field to carry out a personal briefing.

Steven saw no need for any crash course in this instance; he felt quite at home with the technical elements of the investigation, but he did want to ask some questions. Firstly, he wanted to know if it were normal practice for government labs to carry out private contract work — as the MAFF lab had apparently done on this occasion. He would also ask Sci-Med if they had any information about who had paid for this work and who was footing the protestors’ legal costs. Finally, he wanted to know the whereabouts of the original DNA analysis of the Agrigene crop strain. When he had the answers to these questions he would start thinking about heading north.

The response to Steven’s questions arrived on his laptop at a quarter to noon next day. Yes, it was normal practice for government labs to carry out analyses on a contract basis for private companies and even individuals. This was part of a government initiative to make such labs more ‘cost effective’ and this kind of work was actively encouraged. No, they had no information about who had paid for the analysis of the Agrigene crop or who was paying McGraw and Littlejohn’s bills, but they would try to find out. Finally, they themselves had noted that the original crop analysis had not been supplied when they had requested a copy from the ministry’s licensing department. They had asked again for it and would forward it as soon as it became available — probably some time this afternoon.

Steven was a little disappointed at the response to his query about private work being carried out in government labs — he thought he had stumbled across something unusual, but he supposed that this was now the way of the world in the public sector. Everything had to make a profit these days. Colleges and universities were encouraged to cooperate with industry, form partnerships, seek sponsorship and welcome consultancies. Collaboration was the name of the game. Ivory towers and the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of it were concepts that belonged within the ivy-covered walls of the past.

He was even more disappointed that the original DNA analysis of the Agrigene crop was still not available because he saw that as the key to sorting out the whole misunderstanding. It was such an obvious thing to do — compare the original sequence to the current one — that he couldn’t understand why this had not already been done. If the two sequences were identical, the crop was licensed, if not, there was a problem. It seemed so simple that he had to consider that he was missing something. He decided to phone Sci-Med to find out if there was any chance of hurrying up the access to the document.

‘We’ve already put in an urgent request,’ came the response. ‘We’ll send it over by courier as soon as it arrives.’

Fine, thought Steven. If he got it this afternoon and the sequence was identical he could take the overnight train up to Scotland, visit both sets of lawyers and clear up the matter of the mystery gene in a civilised manner.

At a quarter past three Macmillan phoned him in person and asked him to come in to the Home Office. He didn’t give any indication why but Steven got the impression that he was less than happy about something. His ill humour had obviously transmitted itself to Miss Roberts when he arrived because she gave him a warning shrug before whispering that he should go straight in.

‘Sit down,’ said Macmillan, looking up from his papers momentarily.

Steven sat.

‘The bastards! What do they think they’re playing at?’

‘Sir?’

‘I’ve been warned off! Me! How dare they!’

Steven sat quietly until Macmillan was ready to continue.

‘I understand from Miss Roberts that you put in a request for the original DNA analysis on the Agrigene crop?’

‘It’s the obvious key to settling the argument about whether the crop they were growing was the one they were licensed for or not,’ said Steven. ‘A simple comparison is all that’s required. It will still leave the proximity problem to the organic farm site but at least it would get any allegation of illegality out of the way and probably put an end to our interest in the affair.’

‘Well, they’ve ‘misplaced’ it. Would you believe it? The licensing authority has bloody-well misplaced it.’

‘Sort of weakens the case against Agrigene then,’ said Steven.

‘They think not,’ said Macmillan. ‘They maintain that the fact the original licence was for two foreign genes and the current analysis says there are three is sufficient enough to sustain the protestors’ case.’

‘But that’s not on,’ protested Steven. He told Macmillan about his identification of the third gene.

‘But surely they must know that,’ said Macmillan.

Steven shrugged his agreement. ‘You would think so.’

Macmillan looked at him for a moment before saying, ‘When the ministry told me the sequence was missing, it occurred to me that Agrigene might have a copy of the original analysis themselves so I called their MD and asked him. He asked me if I was, “trying to be funny”. When I asked him what he was talking about he put down the phone on me.’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘I called him back and when I explained what my position was and what the Sci-Med Inspectorate was all about, he calmed down a little but I don’t think he fully trusted our independence. He made some remark about it being a bit like the police investigating themselves but I did get out of him what had happened. The company’s copy of the license was sent to their solicitors in Glasgow when the allegation was first made. The solicitors’ premises were subject to a break-in during the next few days and guess what went missing? ’

‘The license?’

‘The license,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘Among other things, of course.

Steven let out a low whistle.

‘I called MAFF’s licensing department back and asked if their premises had been broken into too. I asked if this was the reason their copy had “been misplaced” and if so, had the matter been reported to the police? The lackey I spoke to damn nearly perforated his backside sitting on the fence. ‘Said he’d get back to me.’

‘Did he?’

‘The minister’s PPS called me in person to assure me that there was nothing for Sci-Med to concern itself with in the situation in Scotland. They were on top of things and the minister would consider it a personal favour if we wouldn’t “muddy the water”.’

‘Well, well, well. I’m beginning to think that Agrigene has a point. Someone is out to get them.’

‘But why?’

‘Maybe someone made a cock-up over accrediting an organic farm next to a GM crop and they’re looking for excuses to pull the plug on Agrigene?’ suggested Steven.

Macmillan looked at him thoughtfully as he tapped the end of his nose slowly with his index finger. ‘And the minister would deem it a personal favour if we didn’t muddy the water…’ he intoned slowly. ‘Well, I think not. Something tells me there’s more to this than meets the eye. ’

‘So I run with it?’ asked Steven.

‘Your daughter still lives in Scotland?’

‘Near Dumfries.’

‘How far from Blackbridge?’

Steven shrugged. ‘About eighty miles, I suppose.’

‘Why don’t you go visit her this weekend but take a quiet, unofficial look at Blackbridge while you’re up there and see what you think. If you smell a rat… well, to hell with the minister. We’ll go ahead with the investigation anyway.’