White death

SIXTEEN

‘What a mess,’ growled Macmillan when he and Steven got back to his office. He poured sherry into two glasses and handed one to Steven before settling in behind his desk.

‘Do we really believe it was down to a few ambitious civil servants and a misunderstanding over the rules?’ asked Steven.

Macmillan looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I think we have to, don’t you? The alternative that a British government presided over such a completely unlawful experiment is just too much to contemplate.’

‘It’s not without precedent for people in high places to let it be known that they are unhappy about certain situations and for more junior people to take the hint,’ said Steven.

‘So if it goes wrong, the powers that be can deny all knowledge of it,’ added Macmillan.

‘They do all the wrong and we end up with all the angst,’ said Steven.

‘It was certainly the time to play the collective responsibility card, I’ll grant you,’ said Macmillan ruefully. ‘One out, all out and it will all be Sci-Med’s fault, the fall of the government, a monumental scandal… the incoming government faced with an impossible situation… the country hopelessly vulnerable to biological attack. Ye gods, you couldn’t make it up.’

After a few moments of deep thought, Macmillan asked, ‘What are your feelings?’

‘The need for new vaccines has certainly put them between the proverbial rock and a hard place but occasionally, that can be more comfortable than it sounds. It can be used as an excuse for all sorts of suspect decisions and actions. The pendulum may have swung too far in the direction of health and safety legislation where vaccines are concerned — and it has — but actually there’s still something that worries me about the Nichol vaccine.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They’ve decided that there’s nothing wrong with it before establishing exactly how the problem arose last time. They’re using a presumption as a basis for conclusion — never a good move.’

‘They would argue that time is not on their side.’

‘Another comfortable excuse.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Macmillan, giving birth to yet another long silence that neither found easy. The weight of responsibility on their shoulders was almost unbearable but the seemingly impatient patter of rain on the windows served as a reminder that a decision had to be made.

‘It’s incredible,’ said Steven. ‘We went into that meeting holding all the aces and we came out with a pair of twos and it’s our turn to bet or fold…’

‘I don’t think we have any option,’ said Macmillan. ‘We have to keep this quiet. The alternative just doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ agreed Steven. ‘But it doesn’t half leave a nasty taste in the mouth…’ He was thinking of the parents of the dead boy, Keith Taylor, and of Trish Lyons facing life without her arm if indeed she had a life to look forward to at all. Guinea pigs used in a good cause? Just one of these things? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? Sacrifices for the common good? Tough choices, difficult decisions? They died so that others… Bollocks to the lot of it. The big picture just did not translate to personal circumstances.

‘Then we’re agreed?’ asked Macmillan before Steven talked himself out of going along with it. ‘We say nothing?’

Steven nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Can I take it that Sci-Med’s interest in the Pinetops affair is now officially at an end?’

‘No,’ said Steven. ‘Not yet, I need a bit of time to mull things over. There are some things that still bother me.’

‘Like what?’

‘Scott Haldane’s death… why the poison raced through Keith Taylor’s body the way it did… why the kids are reacting to it in different ways at different times… how the poison managed to survive the cleaning process and get into the vials… things like that.’

Macmillan nodded. ‘Does that mean you want me to tell the Home Secretary about your continuing interest despite the fact we won’t be taking things any further?’

‘No,’ said Steven. ‘I’ll just pick away at it on my own for a bit.’

‘I know this is not the sort of ending we might have hoped for but you did well taking things as far as you did,’ said Macmillan.

‘Thanks,’ said Steven but his heart wasn’t in it.

Steven decided that he needed fresh air and walked by the Embankment for a bit, low in spirit and with a sense of anticlimax that seemed to be accentuated by the very normality of everything around him. Did these people pushing prams and carrying briefcases appreciate what was being done on their behalf in the name of security? Of course they didn’t, but they expected it. In fact, they demanded it. They expected government to respond to every threat to their person, even the merest suggestion of a threat or woe betide them come election time.

The sun broke through the clouds and Steven took the opportunity to sit down for a few minutes and enjoy its warmth on his face. How good was the intelligence that suggested biological attack was imminent? How imminent was imminent? Was the information more reliable than the intelligence that sent the army to war in Iraq? Or less? Had it been filtered, manipulated, sexed-up, made to fit an alternative agenda? Or might even the suggestion of that lead to personal disaster as it had for Dr David Kelly in the weapons of mass destruction furore?

For his own peace of mind, he felt that the deaths of both Scott Haldane and Alan Nichol had to be fitted into the picture before he could fully accept the explanation given by Coates for the Pinetops disaster and, for the moment, he could not see how that was going to come about.

He thought about each in turn as he continued to enjoy the sunlight on his eyelids. If Scott Haldane’s unease over Trish Lyons had centred on a suspicion that she had been poisoned, why hadn’t he said anything about it at the time? There was no reason to keep such a theory to himself, particularly when her doctors at the time were failing to find any cause of infection. There was certainly no reason to keep quiet ‘until he was sure’ — the explanation given to his wife for his silence. It didn’t make sense.

Apart from that, harbouring such a suspicion would certainly be no reason to commit suicide but on the other hand, could voicing it to the wrong person have provided grounds for murdering him? It was certainly true that the government had no desire to see what had happened at Pinetops being made public — in fact, they had everything to lose — but Haldane had displayed no desire to tell anyone: he didn’t even want to tell his wife. Introducing state-sanctioned murder into the equation seemed to be going a little far.

As for Alan Nichol, the designer of a new TB vaccine, something that was still being regarded as a big success despite the contamination problems, why should anyone want to kill him? Nichol would have been among the first to see from the green sticker survey that all was not well with the kids on the trial. He or one of his colleagues would have raised the alarm and started an immediate investigation. They would have left no stone unturned before establishing the presence of a toxin as the cause of the trouble. Nichol probably had less reason than anyone to make this public, so killing him to keep it quiet seemed a non-starter. As the designer of the vaccine, he would automatically get the blame from the public whatever the truth of the matter.

It occurred to Steven that it might be worth checking with Phillip St Clair the series of events leading up to the discovery of the contamination problem. He also reminded himself that his search for a murder motive was personal. Officially, Alan Nichol’s death had been an accident.

Steven phoned St Clair Genomics and was relieved to get an answer considering that it was nearly seven o’clock on a Friday evening. It was Phillip St Clair himself who answered the phone because — as he pointed out — he was the only one there.

‘What can I do for you, Dr Dunbar?’

‘I wondered if we might have another chat,’ said Steven. ‘Now that we’re both aware of what’s been going on?’

‘Yes, I heard there had been some sort of meeting,’ said St Clair. ‘When would you like to come?’

‘I don’t suppose you work on Saturdays?’

‘I work every day that God sends,’ said St Clair. ‘This is a small business, remember. The buck stops with me.’

‘Then tomorrow?’

‘I’ll be here from about ten: I allow myself a long lie-in at the weekends,’ said St Clair with what Steven felt was a somewhat strained attempt at humour.

‘See you then.’

There was only one other car in the car park when Steven arrived, a black Porsche Cayenne, which he assumed would belong to Phillip St Clair. The Honda looked like a toy beside it. The door to the building was locked so he rang the bell and waited for a voice from the grille beside it. Instead, St Clair came and opened the door personally. ‘Come on in. I’m just about to have some coffee. Will you join me?’

Steven thanked him. ‘Black, no sugar. Nice car,’ he said, looking back at the Cayenne.

‘Thanks, a 4x4 with the performance of a 911, what more could you ask? You’re a Porsche man too, aren’t you? In the garage?’

‘Bit of an accident,’ said Steven.

‘Sorry to hear that, not your fault, I hope. Insurance is a bit of a killer on these things.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Steven as St Clair went next door for the coffee.

‘Thank God you didn’t ask for a skinny, decaf latte or some such thing,’ laughed St Clair when he returned with two mugs bearing the company logo. ‘Coffee seems to have become an A level subject these days.’

‘Know what you mean.’

‘So, how can I help you?’

‘The Nichol vaccine,’ said Steven. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘What’s to say? It’s a brilliant piece of work from a brilliant scientist who tragically won’t see his work receive the acclaim it richly deserves. I understand they still haven’t got the bastard who ran him down.’

‘Was anyone else involved in the design?’

St Clair shook his head. ‘Not really. Alan had technical help but it was really all his baby. He snipped away at the genome of the TB bug until it was no longer infectious but still stimulated good levels of antibodies against TB — exactly what the doctor ordered, you might say.’

‘Absolutely, but I’m afraid I’m still not quite clear about the funding for the work,’ said Steven. ‘Vaccine design and production isn’t something you associate with small companies, no disrespect.’

‘None taken and you’re quite right but times have changed. Government needs all the help it can get these days and cash incentives were on offer to those who could come up with the goods, small or otherwise.’

‘Incentives?’ asked Steven.

‘If you were willing to take the risk and could find financial backers to support your confidence in your researchers and they came up trumps, the rewards for success were substantial — an initial seven-figure prize plus reimbursement of development costs, a further lump sum on completion of field trials and finally a government contract to supply the vaccine for general use.’

‘I see,’ said Steven. ‘But then you fell at the last hurdle and one hundred and eight children were injected with something that’s already caused one death with the possibility that it may still cause more?’

St Clair stopped smiling as if conceding that he had been insensitive in over-emphasising the positives. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘An unfortunate accident did occur, there’s no denying this but it was something beyond our control, a chance in a million, a problem in the manufacturing plant leading to contamination of the vials, something we worked day and night to help uncover, I have to say.’

‘How many were involved in that?’ asked Steven. ‘Alan Nichol and who else?’

‘Not Alan,’ said St Clair. ‘Alan died shortly before we discovered the source of the problem.’

‘I didn’t realise that,’ said Steven.

‘I had every other member of the scientific and technical staff drop whatever they were doing to work on it. The manufacturing company, Redmond Medical, had a team working round the clock and a government lab was also involved.’

‘Which one of you discovered the toxin?’

‘We did,’ said St Clair. ‘Traces of a cytotoxic agent were found in the injection vials. We discovered this by taking samples from the vials and injecting them into human cell cultures. When the cells started to die, the alarm bells started ringing. Naturally we informed both the DOH and Redmond Medical immediately and the plant was closed down.’

‘Does anyone know how the toxin got into the vials?’

‘Only that Redmond had been producing ampoules of these cytotoxic chemicals for a pharmaceutical company investigating combinations of these agents for anti-cancer properties. It’s pretty obvious there must have been cross-contamination at some stage but, as yet, we don’t know at which one.’

‘A worry,’ said Steven.

‘Tell me about it. Redmond is still at a standstill. The government has withdrawn their accreditation and we’ve had to use another company to start production again.’

‘Was Alan Nichol alive when kids started to fall ill?’

St Clair nodded. ‘Yes, it was Alan who drew our attention to it in the first place. He raised the alarm. He’d been keeping a close eye on the children’s health records.’

‘The green sticker monitor?’

‘Exactly. It wasn’t obvious to the rest of us at first but Alan saw a pattern emerge and hit the panic button.’

‘I think I may have asked you this before, but does the name Scott Haldane mean anything to you?’

St Clair appeared to give the question some thought before saying, ‘I do remember you asking but it meant nothing to me then and nothing now. Should it?’

‘He was a GP in Scotland who also suspected there was something wrong with the vaccine. I just wondered if he’d made contact with you or Alan Nichol at any point.’

‘Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘No matter,’ said Steven pleasantly, getting up to go. ‘Many thanks for your help.’

‘Not at all,’ said St Clair. ‘I’m glad I was able to talk openly to you this time. Living with secrets is not as easy as people might imagine.’

‘No,’ agreed Steven, thinking of Tally.

Steven drove into Cambridge proper and found a place to eat: he had skipped breakfast after a restless night. He parked the car and looked around, finally settling for coffee and croissants in a small cafe boasting Tudor beams and a frontage leading down to the river. A couple of punts moored at the water’s edge and nestling under a weeping willow set the scene for calm reflection on what he’d learned.

It was Alan Nichol himself who had raised the alarm over what was happening to the green sticker children but he was dead by the time three separate groups had set out to establish the source of the problem. It was the scientists at St Clair Genomics who had uncovered traces of the toxin in the vaccine vials and the problem had been ascribed to Redmond Medical, the company contracted to prepare injection vials of the Nichol vaccine. Redmond had been bottling toxic compounds for another company immediately before starting the vial run for St Clair so everything seemed to fit… except for Alan Nichol’s murder.

Steven ordered more coffee from a waitress who looked and sounded as if she belonged in a Jane Austen novel. She was doing a Saturday job, he concluded. She’d be back studying English Lit on Monday morning. He wondered if he could have been wrong about Nichol being murdered. If his death had been an accident, he wouldn’t be currently left trying to fit a square piece into a round hole.

Try as he might, Steven could not bring himself to believe that Nichol’s death had been accidental. He remained convinced that he had been murdered. The strange red car, parked at the head of Nichol’s street, had been just too much of a coincidence. This still left him looking for a motive. Nichol had died after raising the alarm about the health of the green sticker children but before the vial contamination had been discovered. The answer had to lie somewhere in that time frame. Nichol couldn’t have been killed to stop him talking about the possibility of contamination because it was common knowledge among the others in the lab. In fact, just about everyone at St Clair Genomics had been detailed to work on it. His death didn’t make sense unless… someone was lying about something. But what?

Steven paid the bill and left, choosing to walk by the river for a bit and feeling nostalgic for the days of his youth when he came across groups of students enjoying a sunny Saturday, free of lectures and all care it seemed as they laughed and chatted their way along the banks of the Cam. It made him wonder if he had already reached the age where he had become invisible to the young. The argument that he was only… twice their age — my God, was it really that much? — failed to provide reassurance.

Was he looking for a big lie or a little one? Start with the big. Could what he and Macmillan had been told by people at ministerial level be a complete load of nonsense, designed to elicit their sympathy and gain their collusion in keeping it quiet? Maybe the children had not been given a new anti-TB vaccine at all? Perhaps they had been given something else entirely and for some other reason?

Steven shook his head in an involuntary gesture of dismissal, noting that he’d just got a nervous sideways glance from a man out walking his dog. This was going too far, he reckoned, and would demand the involvement of too many people. It made him think of the old adage, Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

He felt inclined to accept that the Nichol vaccine was exactly what the authorities maintained it was — a new and much needed vaccine against TB. So, what did that leave to lie about? The problem with the toxin, that’s what, he concluded, the contamination of the vials with an unidentified poisonous substance. There was something wrong with that story.

Phillip St Clair had told him that it had been one of a number of compounds being checked out by a pharmaceutical company looking for new anti-cancer drugs so, being experimental, it wouldn’t be listed in any lab handbook but, even if it wasn’t a listed substance, shouldn’t one of the labs investigating the samples taken from Keith Taylor or Trish Lyons have noted the presence of a toxin, even an unknown one?

Steven wasn’t sure. It may have been present in such small quantities that it hadn’t been picked up. Maybe the automated analytical equipment had simply not recognised it and therefore failed to report it. It was also possible that the vials had been contaminated to varying degrees so that some children got a bigger dose of toxin than others but that seemed less likely. If this had been the explanation for the toxin rampaging through Keith Taylor’s body like a full-blown infection, the lab would almost certainly have uncovered evidence of its presence and they hadn’t.