Donor

TWELVE

On the day of the exhumation, Dunbar was on tenterhooks. Sci-Med had enlisted the aid of Special Branch in carrying out an unofficial disinterment of the body, rather than taking the gamble of going to the courts for a high-profile official order, with all the subsequent upset that might cause. Dunbar was happy with that but was well aware that covert operations carried risks of their own should anything go wrong. One person in the wrong place at the wrong time and the fall-out could be spectacular.

Amy’s parents were out of the country on holiday — her mother was still suffering from depression some five months after Amy’s death and her father had thought some winter sunshine might help her. They had been in Tenerife for the last three days and would be away for another ten. It was this fact that had swung Sci-Med in favour of a secret operation. If everything went smoothly, Amy’s parents need never know anything about it.

The plan was to exhume Amy in the early hours of the morning, take her to a Glasgow mortuary and have a Scottish Office pathologist, appointed by Neil Bannon, carry out an autopsy under special instructions. When he was finished, he would phone his report to Dunbar. Amy would be returned to her grave before the day was over.

Everything was out of Dunbar’s hands now, but he still felt like an athlete pacing the area behind the start-line before a big race. The phone rang and he snatched it from its rest.

‘Yes?’

‘Steven, it’s Lisa. Any news?’

‘Nothing yet. They seem to be taking a hell of a time.’

‘I’ll get off the line in case they’re trying to get through.’

‘I’ll call you as soon as I hear.’

Dunbar went back to fidgeting and pacing the room. He began to wonder if there had been a breakdown in communications. Tension could make you imagine all sorts of things, especially when your perceived timescale of things was being stretched. Perhaps the result of the PM had been given directly to Sci-Med in London, the police had already been informed and they would arrive at the hospital at any moment, everyone having forgotten to tell the man on the ground what was going on. He was nursing this paranoia when the phone rang again.

‘Dr Dunbar, please.’

‘Speaking.’

‘Your authorization code, please.’

Dunbar gave it.

‘Sorry for the melodrama, but I was told to go exactly by the book on this one.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘My name’s McVay. I’ve been instructed by the Scottish Office to carry out a post-mortem on the exhumed body of one Amy Teasdale at the behest of the Sci-Med Inspectorate.’

‘Yes. I’ve been waiting for your call.’

‘Sorry it took so long, but there was a fair bit of lab work to do on this one.’

‘I understand. What did you find?’

‘Well, no one provided me with too much background on the case. They didn’t think to tell me that the child had already undergone extensive PM examination.’

‘I suppose that’s entirely possible,’ said Dunbar. ‘She died after a kidney transplant went wrong. A PM would probably be necessary in the circumstances.’

‘I just thought I’d mention it. Her kidneys and heart had already been removed for examination and then replaced. I even found a couple of swabs they’d used at the time. I hate it when pathologists are too damn lazy to clean up their mess and use the cadaver as a rubbish bin. Lazy sods!’

Dunbar bit his lip to stop himself betraying his impatience. ‘What exactly did you find, Doctor?’ he asked slowly and deliberately.

‘My specific brief was to concentrate on the transplanted right kidney and carry out immunological testing with a view to compatibility. I was asked to pay particular attention to tissue type and to… species.’

‘Yes.’

‘The transplanted organ was a human kidney; it was also perfectly compatible with the patient’s tissue type. We came up with a rating of eighty-one per cent homology.’

Dunbar felt the bottom drop out of his world. ‘Human and eighty-one per cent compatible,’ he echoed. ‘Are you sure?’

It was a stupid question and the snapped answer told him that McVay thought so too. ‘Of course. Plus or minus five per cent.’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Dunbar, now on autopilot. ‘You didn’t happen to notice anything at all out of the ordinary, did you?’

‘Apart from the cadaver having been autopsied before, no. It seemed an unnecessary shame to have dug her up, if you ask me.’

‘Quite so,’ said Dunbar, and he put the phone down.

He stared at the wall for a few minutes; he didn’t know which emotion to address first. He felt disappointed, dejected, foolish and totally bemused. He’d made a fool of himself and it hurt. He knew he should call Lisa, but right now he even felt angry with her — and with Sheila Barnes, for that matter. Between them they had convinced him the children really had been given the wrong organs during their operations. It was this that had made him read so much into what he’d seen in the post-mortem suite at Medic Ecosse.

Now it seemed that Amy Teasdale had, in fact, been given the correct donor kidney and what he’d seen in the basement was probably just an experimental dissection, bizarre to the outside observer but legal and licensed.

Now the only thing against it all having been some huge mistake was the fact that someone had set out to kill Sheila Barnes. But why? If everything to do with the transplant had been above-board and Sheila was mistaken, why set out to kill her? It didn’t make sense. But then none of this did. He picked up the phone and called Lisa.

‘Well?’ she asked anxiously.

‘There was nothing wrong with the kidney Amy was given. It was human and eighty-one per cent compatible.’

There was a pause before Lisa said, ‘But that’s impossible. Her reaction was so strong, it just couldn’t have been compatible.’

‘I’m sorry, Lisa,’ said Dunbar. ‘But those are the findings of the pathologist commissioned by the Scottish Office. We have to accept what he says.’

‘I just don’t understand. There’s no way a reaction like that could have been caused by…’ Her voice tailed off.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dunbar.

‘Then why try to kill Sheila Barnes?’ asked Lisa, clutching at the same straw as he’d found.

‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘That doesn’t fit at all. We thought it did, even if it was a strange way to do it, but not any more.’

‘What happens now?’

‘I expect to be recalled to London to explain myself. I can’t see beyond that at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry. I feel responsible,’ said Lisa.

‘No one’s to blame,’ said Dunbar. ‘With a bit of luck no one will find out about the disinterment, so in the end no great harm will have been done.’

‘God, I don’t think I could bear it if Amy’s parents found out,’ said Lisa. ‘An exhumation for no good reason, after all the pain I caused them the first time around. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I was so sure they were going to find that Amy had been given an animal kidney.’

‘Me too.’

‘You don’t think her parents will find out, do you?’ She asked anxiously.

‘As far as I know, there were no hitches, so it should be okay. Fingers crossed.’

Lisa sighed deeply, then said, ‘You know what? In spite of everything you’ve told me — and I know I have to accept it — I still know I was right. I don’t know how or why, I just do.’

Dunbar didn’t know what to say. ‘I wish there was some way you could be,’ he began.

‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him. ‘I don’t expect you to fly in the face of the facts as they stand. I just don’t understand it, that’s all. I really don’t. But then I don’t think I understand anything any more. The rejections of perfectly compatible organs, Sheila’s cancer, the pig experiments in the hospital, and now it seems that everything’s fine and above-board in that place?’

‘For what it’s worth, my gut feeling says there’s something terribly wrong too. It’s just that I have to have evidence before I do anything and there isn’t any.’

‘London weren’t too keen on the exhumation in the first place, were they?’ said Lisa.

‘You can say that again,’ said Dunbar wryly.

‘Are you going to get into trouble?’

‘I’m expecting a call at any minute, inviting me to London to face the music.’

‘You don’t think you’ll lose your job over this, do you?’ asked Lisa.

Dunbar grimaced and said, ‘I think in the circumstances I might feel obliged to offer my resignation.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You didn’t make a mistake. You acted in good faith. You had the courage of your convictions. Ring a bell?’

Dunbar smiled to himself. ‘But the fact of the matter is that the exhumation was a mistake,’ he said.

‘Only in hindsight,’ she insisted. ‘No one starts off with hindsight. Don’t resign. If they fire you there’s not much you can do about it, but don’t make it easy for them. You’re the one on the ground, not them. You did nothing wrong. Stand up to them.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Dunbar with a shrug, but he appreciated her support.

Dunbar received the expected call just after 4 p.m. He was told to report to Sci-Med in London the following day. The director would see him at eleven. He called Lisa to tell her.

‘Come round later,’ she said. ‘The condemned man deserves a fond farewell.’

Dunbar took the tube into central London from Heathrow. It was raining heavily and the carriage began to smell of wet clothes. There were no smiles among the morning commuters. They were apparently looking forward to the day as much as he was. He passed the time trying to predict what each of his immediate travelling companions did for a living. Unfortunately he couldn’t ask them if he was right.

He was glad of the fresh air when he finally got off the train and climbed the stairs to the outside. It didn’t matter that it was raining. He started looking for a cab to take him up to the Home Office. Because of the weather it took some time to find one, but he didn’t mind the wait. Turkeys didn’t long for Christmas.

‘Nice to see you again, Dr Dunbar,’ said the director’s secretary, Miss Roberts, with a welcoming smile. ‘Mr Macmillan won’t keep you waiting long.’

‘I’m in no great hurry,’ replied Dunbar with heavy irony.

She smiled but said nothing. A buzzer sounded on her desk and she nodded to Dunbar. ‘Good luck,’ she whispered as he passed.

‘Ah, Dunbar. Come in, sit down,’ said Macmillan. Tall and silver-haired, in any other environment he would have stood out as being extremely distinguished-looking, but here in Whitehall he was one among many. The upper echelons of the Civil Service seemed to attract such people. Dunbar often wondered if the job did it to the man or vice versa. On reflection he supposed that there was a type of person for most jobs. There were exceptions, of course, but the Hollywood stereotype for most professions often wasn’t far from the truth.

Macmillan closed the file he had been working on and put an end to Dunbar’s philosophizing. ‘You’ve dropped us in it, Dunbar,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dunbar. ‘I was sure I was right.’

‘Do you realize how much it cost us to mount an unofficial exhumation?’

Dunbar had no idea but felt sure he was about to be told. The director told him. Dunbar looked suitably shocked.

‘Not to mention the calling in of favours and the fact that we are now beholden to Special Branch, of all people.’

‘Everything pointed to the dead child having been given the wrong organ — an incompatible animal organ,’ said Dunbar.

‘You mean a hysterical woman pointed to the dead child having been given the wrong organ. And you jumped to conclusions.’

‘Neither of the women involved can in any way be described as hysterical,’ argued Dunbar. ‘I’ve interviewed both of them and made up my mind about that. There’s also the fact that one of them, Sheila Barnes, has been the subject of what I believe to be a deliberate murder attempt, one that’s going to be successful very soon.’

‘Ah yes, the isotope in the wall,’ said Macmillan. ‘But I must remind you that the lab found nothing that linked the source to the Medic Ecosse hospital.’

‘That doesn’t mean they weren’t involved,’ said Dunbar.

Macmillan conceded the point with a doubtful shrug. He stroked his moustache thoughtfully, then said, ‘My feeling is that we should hand the Barnes case over to the police. There’s little doubt that a crime has been committed so they can take it from there and we can, with a bit of luck, extract ourselves from this mess you’ve landed us in.’

‘Despite your man’s findings I still think there was something odd about the two children’s deaths,’ said Dunbar. ‘I did a computer search for deaths under similar circumstances; there were none. Yet Medic Ecosse has had two. I believe we should hang on to the investigation. We’re the best qualified people to look into this sort of thing. That’s why we exist.’

‘Don’t try to tell me why we exist, Dunbar!’ snapped Macmillan.

‘No, sir. I just feel that handing everything over to the police at this stage is a bit of a cop-out. They’ll mount an investigation but they won’t get anywhere. As for us, we seem to be more interested in keeping our noses clean than in seeing this affair through to a conclusion.’

For a moment Dunbar thought he had gone too far. His P45 form floated before his eyes like a kite in a mocking breeze, but the anger died out of the director’s eyes.

‘You think that, do you?’

‘Yes, sir, I do.’

‘I’ll tell you what. If you can come up with an explanation of how these two damned women could still be right, in spite of the fact — fact, mind you — that Amy Teasdale’s body contains the right organ, then we’ll keep hold of the investigation.’

‘How long have I got?’ asked Dunbar.

‘Three days.’

Dunbar left the Home Office with mixed feelings. It could have been worse, he supposed. They could have fired him then and there. Instead they’d given him three days to come up with an explanation he’d been up most of the night searching for already. He walked along the Embankment hoping for inspiration, but all he got was wet. London was his favourite city but today he found himself totally impervious to its charms. In the rain, it could have been East Berlin. He returned to the airport to catch the shuttle back to Glasgow.

On the plane, he succumbed to the lure of a large gin and tonic offered by the stewardess. He was feeling low and his mood was not helped by the arrival of a plump northern businessman in the seat next to him. From the opening of ‘D’you go to Scotland a lot, then?’ he knew he was in trouble. Monosyllabic responses were no deterrent to Arthur Shelby, who was in hydraulic systems and was determined to fill this particular gap in Dunbar’s education during the following fifty-five minutes. There was barely time for Shelby to get round to ‘What line are you in yourself, then?’ before the plane landed and Dunbar was free at last. He called Lisa from the airport.

‘Well?’

‘They didn’t fire me. They gave me three days to come up with an idea.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Depends if I do or not.’

‘Are you going to come over?’

‘I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we go out to dinner this evening?’

‘We might be seen by someone who works at Medic Ecosse,’ replied Lisa.

‘We can drive to some place out of town.’

‘If you’re sure you want to take the risk.’

‘Let’s do it. Pick you up at seven?’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

Dunbar arrived at Lisa’s place on time and found her ready, She had dressed up for the occasion. He smiled and said, ‘You look wonderful.’

‘Well, thank you. All this new-found freedom is making me feel dangerously like a human being.’

‘How is your mother, by the way?’ asked Dunbar, remembering the key to Lisa’s freedom.

‘She’s holding her own.’

‘I’m going to have to rely on you to suggest where we go this evening.’

‘I thought we might drive up to the Lake of Menteith. It’s not that far and there’s a nice hotel there. It’s right down on the shores of the lake.’

‘Sounds good. Do you think we’ll get in?’

‘I took the liberty of booking after you rang,’ Lisa confessed.

The drive up to the Lake of Menteith was straightforward and uneventful, and Dunbar was glad to see there were only four other cars in the car park as they drew to a halt. He wanted a quiet evening with time to talk. They both sipped gin and tonic while deciding what to eat. It wasn’t until they had ordered and the waiter had left that Lisa said, ‘So, what sort of an idea do you have to come up with?’

‘One that explains how you and Sheila Barnes could still be right in spite of everything.’

‘It sounds as if you took our part in London.’

Dunbar nodded.

‘Well, you were right to,’ she said.

Dunbar looked at her in silence for a moment, then said, ‘It’s a comfort to hear you sound so sure. You haven’t wavered once, have you?’

‘I came pretty close when you told me of the pathologist’s findings,’ she confessed. ‘But I know what I saw, and it was not the result of the transplant of a compatible organ.’

‘So our starting-point must be that Amy was definitely given the wrong kidney.’

‘Yes,’ said Lisa flatly.

Dunbar paused as their first course arrived. Then he said, ‘So if the correct donor kidney was found inside Amy after the exhumation… it must have got there some time after her operation. In fact, if she died of rejection problems, it must have been put there sometime after her death… At the first post mortem, of course!’ he exclaimed as things slipped into place. ‘As simple as that. Amy was given the wrong organ but it was switched to the right one after she died.’

Lisa’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what must have happened. But why?’

‘Let’s see. A donor organ becomes available; Medic Ecosse obtains it from the source hospital… but instead of giving it to the patient, they use him or her for one of their animal experiments.’

‘And if it goes wrong, they cover their tracks by substituting the correct one at post-mortem!’ said Lisa.

‘But how do we go about proving it?’

There was a long silence.

‘Let’s eat first,’ said Dunbar, picking up his knife and fork. ‘We’re doing okay.’

They didn’t talk much as they ate, largely because they were both deep in thought. They reached the coffee stage still without coming up with any good idea as to how to prove their theory. It was, however, early days and both of them were pleased about having solved the first bit of the puzzle.

As they left the hotel and wandered down to the jetty to take a look at the lake in the frosty moonlight, Dunbar said, ‘Medical researchers are trained scientists, meticulous people, precise in all things. Facts and figures are of paramount importance to them.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across a researcher who didn’t keep notes.’

‘So?’ said Lisa.

‘It’s a basic requirement of the job that you keep accurate records of everything you do in order to write up your results for the journals. You also have to be in a position to show data to back up your claims, should the scientific community request it. All your work is subject to peer review.’

‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at,’ said Lisa, snuggling down deeper into her coat.

‘They must have records somewhere.’

‘Secret notebooks, you mean?’

‘More likely to be computer files these days,’ said Dunbar.

‘So if you could get your hands on them you might find all the evidence you needed?’

‘That’s what I’m thinking,’ he agreed. ‘They must have kept records of all the experiments they’ve done, what went right, what went wrong, what their conclusions were, what they’re going to do next.’

‘Makes sense. But how on earth are you going to get your hands on something like that?’

‘Presumably the records are kept somewhere in Ross’s research lab. I’d have to get in there somehow, but nothing has happened to spook the people in the transplant unit. They’ve no reason to be on their guard. I’m sure I can think of a way and once inside I think I’ll be able to lay hands on what I need. If I could hand the police records of experiments involving the kids, I think we could nail them.’

Lisa looked dubious. ‘I don’t think you should rush into this. It could be dangerous. You don’t really know what you’re up against.’

‘They’re not professional criminals,’ said Dunbar. ‘I think we’re talking about a few ambitious bastards who’ve been cutting corners to speed up their research.’

‘But they’ve killed two children and we think they’re also killing a nursing sister and her husband. Don’t you think that’s an unusually high price for even the most ambitious of researchers to contemplate?’

Dunbar had to agree. ‘You think I’m missing something?’

‘I think it’s possible, and I wouldn’t like it to kill you,’ said Lisa.

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘You haven’t had any more thoughts about the isotope, have you?’

Dunbar shook his head. ‘I suppose Medic Ecosse were just too clever and careful to use one that could be traced back to them. They seem to think of everything — including switching the organs in corpses in case anyone should dig them up and examine them.’

‘You’ll get a break soon,’ said Lisa, slipping her arm into his as they turned back to the car park. ‘I can feel it.’

Dunbar phoned Sci-Med first thing in the morning and spoke to Macmillan. ‘Sir, you asked me to reconcile the nurses’ allegations with the pathologist’s findings. I think I can.’

‘Amaze me,’ said Macmillan drily.

‘They switched the organs after death, probably during the post-mortem.’

‘After death?’

‘It’s still possible they’ve been carrying out experiments on children, using animal organs. They wait until a compatible donor organ becomes available for their patient and then obtain it. But they don’t use it; they just keep it as insurance. If their experiment fails, they replace the animal organ with the human one before releasing the body for burial.’

Macmillan said, ‘Good God, what an awful thought. It’s possible, I suppose, but damn nearly impossible to prove I’d have thought.’

‘I’d like to try but I need more time.’

‘But even supposing you’re right, Dunbar, don’t you think they’d have stopped after the first death?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why didn’t they abandon the whole thing after the first patient died? Why would they continue, knowing the experiment was a failure?’

‘Perhaps they believed they’d solved the problem,’ ventured Dunbar.

‘Mmmm,’ said Macmillan, unconvinced.

Dunbar offered no further argument. Lisa had suggested there was more to it than he thought. Macmillan was doing the same. It was just possible they were right.