Tangled Web

Sixteen

Dawes left Gordon alone in the coffee shop, saying that he wanted to catch the second talk; it was going to be on the option of sex determination in IVF cases, an increasingly likely possibility in the near future. Carwyn was chairing the session and he thought he might be asked for his views at some point. Gordon decided not to join him, saying that he’d heard most of the moral arguments, both for and against the choice of sex in pregnancy and didn’t wish to add to his technical knowledge of the techniques involved. He opted instead for more coffee and a doughnut.

The fact that both Thomas and Dawes were going to be away from the IVF unit for the next hour was uppermost in his mind as he sipped his coffee. He was intrigued by the notion of Thomas having his own private lab and there was no doubt that the easiest way to find out what he might be up to in it would be to take a look while he wasn’t there. He wasn’t sure if he had the courage to do such a thing or if he should even be contemplating it... but it was a tempting thought. While he was debating the pros and cons, he noticed that his second cup of coffee tasted different from the first and glanced back at the counter. It had come from the same flask. It wasn’t the coffee that had changed but his taste buds: they were reacting to the mixture of fear and excitement building up inside him as he made his decision.

He left the coffee shop and walked back along the main corridor, feeling that everyone he passed knew exactly what he was planning. A casual glance from a porter seemed rife with accusation; the laughter of two nurses suggested they knew more than they should. He felt his pulse rate rise as he mounted the stairs leading up to the IVF unit and rehearsed his excuse should he be challenged. He would say that he needed some more leaflets about the IVF service for the surgery; he had underestimated the demand for them.

He reached the head of the stairs and looked in through the glass panel on the door. There was no one about so he opened the door, just far enough to slip inside, then paused for a moment to listen. He could hear the hum of lab equipment but little else until he heard the sound of laughter coming from a room along the corridor on the left. He remembered, from his conducted tour, that this was where the staff common-room was. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was coming up to three o’clock; they were probably having coffee. It was a bit of luck for him that they were all in the one place for the time being but things could change at any second.

He moved swiftly along to where Thomas’s room was situated — three doors short of the staff room and on the same side. He did so on tiptoe, holding his breath as he came to the door and tried the handle. There was no resistance; the lever went right down and the door opened quietly without any noise from the hinges. He gave silent thanks and slipped inside, steeling himself to close the door slowly again behind him.

As the door closed fully and the handle reached the top of its travel, he relaxed and leaned his forehead against the wood for a moment, letting out his breath and taking a moment to allow his nerves to calm down. There was sweat on his forehead and he was aware of the blood pounding in his ears. He turned round to see the photographs of children that he’d admired on his first visit here. This time the smiles of their parents made him feel dishonest.

He looked at the dark blue door at the window end of the wall. He had noticed it last time, but had assumed that it was a cupboard or a toilet, not the laboratory that Dawes had alerted him to. The Venetian blinds on the main window of the office were half tilted, making the room slightly gloomy, but not dark enough to warrant turning on the lights. He walked over to the blue door and tried it: it was locked.

He closed his eyes and swore softly as it started to look as if he’d taken a big risk for nothing but then it occurred to him that the key might be somewhere in the room. He looked in the various receptacles on Thomas’s desk and felt along the flat surfaces of the bookshelves before conceding the possibility that Thomas kept it on his person but then again...

With a growing sense of wrongdoing, he sat down in Thomas’s swivel chair to pull open the top drawer of the desk and start sifting through the contents. For a moment he thought he’d been successful as his fingers came across two metal keys on a small ring but he quickly realised that they were too small to be what he was looking for: the lab had a Yale lock. These were for something like a filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held a series of files in a corrugated cardboard holder. They contained patients’ notes, about ten sets in all. Gordon guessed that these would be the current patients in the clinic. He pushed them back to see if a key could be lying on the bottom of the drawer but stopped suddenly when he heard voices outside in the corridor.

‘Is the Professor back yet?’ asked a male voice with a strong Welsh accent.

‘He’s at a meeting; just go in and leave them on his desk,’ replied a softer female voice.

Gordon, who had frozen at the sound of voices, was galvanised into

action. He dropped to his knees and crawled into the kneehole of the desk, prepared to remain stock-still and hold his breath for as long as was necessary. He heard the door open and feet move across the carpet. There was a plop, as mail was dropped on to the desk above his head, then nothing. For the next few moments there was no sound at all. The unseen man was standing perfectly still in front of the desk.

Gordon’s nerves were stretched to breaking point as he imagined the man’s suspicions had been aroused but then he realised with immense relief that he was probably looking at the baby pictures on the wall. Another few moments and the feet moved away. The door closed and Gordon could let out his breath. He was about to crawl out from his hiding place when he his head brushed against something on the underside of the desk. He reached up and felt a round metal block there. There was something stuck to it but it moved without losing adhesion to the surface. The block was a magnet and there was a key stuck to it! He’d found what he was looking for.

Thomas’s lab was quite small but obviously well equipped, the centrepiece being an island bench with a Zeiss microscope and revolving test tube holder on it. Half a dozen tubes were on its rollers. They contained a red fluid that Gordon remembered being told on his tour, was cell culture fluid. The fluid would bathe the cells sticking to the glass as the rollers turned the tubes and keep them supplied with nutriment. There was a fridge, a chest freezer, two incubators and a piece of apparatus that looked as if it was designed for delivering electric current at varying voltage. There was a large sink equipped with arm-operated tap levers with a liquid soap dispenser mounted above it and a pedal bin below. Surgical gloves were available from a box at the side.

Gordon became frustratingly aware of his own limitations in laboratory medicine. He had succeeded in getting into Thomas’s lab, but how could he tell what was going on there if he had no idea what the test tubes and incubators contained? The numbers on the tubes meant nothing to him and he had no idea what half the chemicals in the fridge were for. He needed to find some kind of written indication of what was going on, a notebook or scientific protocol.

There were a number of photocopied scientific papers sitting beside the microscope. He leafed through them and felt a tingle at the back of his neck as he found a common factor: they were all concerned with some aspect of human cloning. Was that it, he wondered? Was Thomas actually dabbling in human cloning? Such a venture would undoubtedly be dangerous and definitely illegal but it was not exactly unknown for very bright people to consider that rules and regulations were meant for everyone but themselves. But how would this fit in with what had happened to Anne-Marie Palmer or Megan Griffiths for that matter?

He searched through all the under-bench drawers of the lab, looking for more substantial evidence. Lying under a pile of chemical company catalogues, he found one cardboard envelope file. It was a patient’s notes file and the white nametag on the front was dirty but the writing itself was decipherable. It read: Anne-Marie Palmer.

Gordon felt his throat tighten as he sat down on a stool by the microscope to open the file and start reading. He quickly realised that this was the full medical record file for Anne-Marie, running from the time of Lucy Palmer’s first appointment at the IVF clinic up until Anne-Marie’s birth. He turned to the end to look at the most recent entries, hoping to find anything that would suggest a connection between Thomas’s research and the baby’s death, but there appeared to be nothing like that. The file ended with Anne-Marie’s death simply being recorded as ‘violent’.

Gordon felt a giant pang of disappointment as he concluded that there was nothing to indicate why hers was the only file that Thomas had been keeping in his lab. He felt there had to be a reason; there had to be a clue there somewhere. He flicked through the pages two or three times more until his eye was caught by a series of highlighted text markings. Three groups of numbers had been highlighted in blue. The first was the date of the ICSI procedure carried out on Lucy Palmer’s ova; the second was the date of implantation of a fertilised tetrad into her womb and the third was a reference number. A comment in pencil beside the number said, ‘no siblings!’ Gordon noted the exclamation mark then wrote the numbers down on one of the Post-it notes lying beside the microscope. He folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket while he continued a search of the drawers. He found nothing else.

Gordon glanced at his watch and decided that it was time to leave: he’d been here longer than he’d intended but he thought he’d just take a quick look in the cupboards before he left, just in case he had missed something. He really didn’t have that much to go on in terms of hard evidence. The cupboards contained various pieces of scientific apparatus but little else. Almost as a last gesture, he raised the lid of the chest freezer and froze with horror. The faces of three foetuses stared up at him through clear but misty plastic bags.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Gordon. What were they? Who were they? He lifted up one of the bags and looked for labelling on it. There was a number written on the back in black grease pencil. He noticed that it had the same number of digits in it as the reference number he’d copied down from Anne-Marie’s file. He made a note of the numbers of all three then laid the little bundles back down in their icy lair and closed the lid. He rested his hands on it for a moment to recover his composure for they were shaking slightly: it was definitely time he was out of this place.

He clicked the lab door shut and replaced the key on its holder under Thomas’s desk. His nerves were beginning to settle and anxiety was being replaced by almost a sense of elation. He put his ear to the outside door, listening for any sounds in the corridor. To his dismay he heard the sound of raised voices, both male and they were getting louder. What was worse, he recognised one as belonging to Carwyn Thomas. The talk must have finished early. He was going to be caught red-handed!

Gordon took a deep breath and decided that there was no alternative but to brass it out. Hiding under the desk was not going to be an option this time. Hoping to disguise the fact that the door to the office had been closed, Gordon opened it wide and backed out into the corridor, holding the door handle and hoping to give the impression that he had just looked into the room to see if anyone was there. He turned to face the men coming towards him who had seen him and stopped talking. He could now see that Carwyn Thomas had been arguing with James Trool.

‘Ah, there you are, Professor,’ said Gordon, hoping his smile wasn’t going to fracture like that of an anxious beauty contestant held too long on camera. His heart rate was topping 140.

Trool smiled and said, ‘Hello there’.

‘What can I do for you, Doctor?’ asked Thomas, looking distinctly puzzled.

‘I know you’re very busy, Professor, but I hoped I might catch you here between symposium sessions. I wanted to have a private word with you. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.’

‘What about?’

Gordon noted that Thomas appeared to have lost his usual charm. He seemed preoccupied with something, presumably what he and Trool had been arguing about. ‘The Megan Griffiths business,’ said Gordon.

Thomas looked at him blankly for a moment before turning to Trool and saying, ‘I’ll get back to you. We’ll talk further.’

‘As you wish,’ said Trool coldly and walked off.

Gordon decided not to say anything about having come at a ‘bad time’. He followed Thomas into his office and sat down as invited.

‘I’m wearing a different hat this afternoon, Professor; I think you know that I’m one of the unofficial investigation team into what happened to Megan Griffiths’ body,’ said Gordon pleasantly. ‘I’m talking to everyone who was listed as visiting the Pathology Department on the day in question.’

‘So?’

‘You were listed,’ said Gordon.

Thomas looked at him as if his mind were still elsewhere. ‘Was I?’ he murmured.

‘You signed in at two-fifteen along with one of your technician — a Michael Deans.’

‘Oh yes, I remember,’ said Thomas quietly, still sounding heavily preoccupied, ‘I went down to see Sepp.’

‘Was Dr Sepp there?’

Thomas snapped out of his preoccupation. ‘Of course he was. I had an appointment to see him.’

‘And Deans?’

‘I thought he might be needed.’

Gordon let his silence prompt Thomas into saying more.

‘I thought we might have some tissue samples to deal with, that’s why I asked Deans to come along.’

‘Tissue samples?’

‘I hoped Sepp might still have path specimens from some patients I was interested in.’

‘Dead patients?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your patients? Babies?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think that need concern you,’ said Thomas.

‘As you wish,’ said Gordon evenly.

Thomas suddenly seemed uncomfortable with what he’d said. ‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to know if Sepp still had samples of tissue taken from the stillbirth babies at the unit. I wanted to carry out further tests on them to see if I could find some clue as to what had gone wrong.’

‘I see,’ said Gordon, immediately thinking that he’d been right about what had been upsetting Thomas at the American’s seminar. But now, in the light of what he’d seen in Thomas’s lab, he could imagine an alternative reason for Thomas wanting to get his hands on the specimens. It was possible that he had planned to get rid of them to make sure that there was no damning evidence lying around in the Pathology Department. If Thomas really had been experimenting with human cloning and that was the reason for the increase in stillbirths in the clinic, he’d want to make sure his tracks were covered if people started asking questions.

With the symposium coming up, the high failure-rate of ICSI babies in his unit might well come to light when Caernarfon’s figures were compared with those of other labs. This was exactly what had happened during the American physician’s talk. The only thing that didn’t fit was that Thomas himself had seemed the one most keen to investigate the problem. The double bluff of a clever man, Gordon wondered? He smiled politely and said, ‘Thank you for your time, Professor. I’ll get out of your way now and let you get on.’

There were two messages on the answering machine when Gordon got back to Feli, the first from Liam Swanson, asking that he get in touch and the second from Lucy, saying that she was moving back home today. She wondered if he’d care to join her for supper tonight around seven. If he couldn’t manage, he wasn’t to worry. It was very short notice and she’d quite understand.

Gordon smiled and rang Lucy’s number to tell her answering machine that he would be there at seven. He called Swanson next.

‘I thought we might have a meeting when this symposium thing is over,’ said Swanson.

‘If you like.’

‘I think between us, we’ve talked to most of the people recorded in the Path Department’s book apart from Professor Thomas. He’s been tied up with the symposium.

‘I spoke to him today,’ said Gordon. ‘I knew he was on the list and as I’ve been attending the symposium, it seemed too good a chance to miss.’

‘No joy, I suppose?’ said Swanson.

‘Afraid not. I didn’t speak to his technician, Deans though.’

‘I did, yesterday,’ said Swanson. ‘He’d been asked to accompany Thomas to collect some tissue samples from the Path Department.’

‘That’s my understanding too,’ said Gordon.

‘I suspect we’re not going to get anywhere with this,’ said Swanson. ‘We’d be as well handing it over to the police.’

‘The question is, will they?’ said Gordon.

‘Maybe not,’ agreed Swanson. ‘But I’ve been ringing round some of the others and there’s a general feeling that we’re not making progress and won’t, however many times we question the staff. There’s not a lot more we can do really.’

‘I‘d like one more week before doing as you suggest,’ said Gordon.

‘You have an idea then?’

‘Maybe.’