Tangled Web

Thirteen

As he turned off the M6, heading for the north Wales coast, Gordon felt angry and frustrated. If only he could think of a plausible motive for Anne-Marie’s murder, something other than a pathological desire to frame the Palmers and see their lives ruined. He’d actually asked John at one point about the possibility of any such enemy and had been met with a simple, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

But if sheer malice had to be ruled out, it didn’t leave much else. There again, Gordon considered as his mind strayed, who would want to steal the body of a cot death baby and fill her coffin with human offal instead? Both crimes defied analysis using either logic or common sense. Both seemed absolutely pointless and... Gordon frowned as a new thought occurred to him. Could it possibly be that these two bizarre happenings were actually connected in some way?

Frustration was replaced by excitement as he seriously considered the possibility of some common factor. If Maurice Cleef had been right and a doctor had been involved in the Griffiths baby affair, might not he have stolen the body for some scientific or experimental reason? Maybe he needed tissue or some organ from it? If that were the case, then surely it was just conceivable that the same motive had applied to the Palmer baby, only he had had to kill in order to get it.

Gordon knew that he was probing the outer reaches of plausibility with this idea, but at least it was a new line of thought and therefore worth pursuing. Could it be that some kind of research project was involved? Something that involved the bodies of two baby girls? Something that the researcher thought was so important he was prepared to kill for it?

He couldn’t examine Megan Griffiths’ body but there was a chance that Anne-Marie Palmer’s remains were still in the custody of the forensic service. He wanted to examine them. Although acid had been used extensively, it might yet be possible to detect evidence of some surgical procedure having been carried out on her before she’d been killed. Some portion of an internal organ might even be missing.

He didn’t suppose this sort of thing was exactly what Julie had in mind when she’d suggested he take some time off but it was something he had to pursue. He would get in touch with the police pathologist, Charles French as soon as he got back, even if it meant calling him at home on a Saturday evening. The thought was still uppermost in his mind when he noticed the Tesco supermarket sign and remembered just in time to turn into the car park and go in search of food to see him through the week ahead.

‘She’s still in the fridge at Ysbyty Gwynedd,’ said French. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I’d like to take a look at her if it’s all right with you,’ said Gordon, politely but matter-of-factly.

‘It’s very much not all right with me,’ French responded tartly. ‘Any unauthorised access to the body could prejudice the crown case. That body is evidence; I can’t allow anyone to interfere with it.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t think about it that way,’ said a chastened Gordon who hadn’t even considered this aspect of it at all.

French said, ‘May I ask why you wanted to examine her anyway? It’s a pretty unlikely request for a GP to make.’

Gordon ignored what he thought might be an intended insult and said, ‘I wanted to see if there was any sign of recent surgical intervention before her death.’ Without thinking, he’d created a rod for his own back.

‘Surgical intervention?’ repeated French slowly. ‘Something that I missed, you mean? Like the cause of death?’

‘No, no, I didn’t meant to imply that for a moment,’ exclaimed Gordon, suddenly embarrassed at his own thoughtlessness. ‘Really, I was thinking of something entirely different, something possibly very trivial, some tiny thing you might not even have noticed because it had no relevance...’

‘Nothing is too trivial for a forensic pathologist, Dr Gordon, that’s the nature of the job. They pay me to look for everything!’

‘Of course,’ conceded Gordon, berating himself silently.

‘The only sign of surgical activity on the baby’s body was in her lower extremities where her birth defect had been dealt with surgically shortly after she was born. Evidence of this was still clearly visible despite the acid damage to the tissue.’

‘Is it possible then that the acid may have obscured other such evidence?’ suggested Gordon.

‘Anything’s possible in the imagination. What sort of surgery did you have in mind?’

‘I’m not sure,’ replied Gordon.

‘Are you feeling all right Doctor?’

Gordon decided to stop pursuing a lost cause. ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you, Doctor, please forgive the intrusion.’

Gordon put the phone down and stood still for a moment, feeling absolutely stupid. He cringed with embarrassment as he thought through his conversation with French again. Maybe Julie was right about his state of mind. Maybe he did need a holiday before people started to question his sanity. But it was too late to consider that option seriously, he supposed. Apart from that, he’d end up taking all that was going on inside his head with him wherever he went: there would be no escape. He would however, he decided, have a day out in the hills tomorrow to get things into perspective.

Gordon could tell by Ellen Edwards’ expression when she came out to meet him in the farmyard that things were better. She was smiling and the worry had gone from her eyes. She stood, drying her hands on her apron, until Gordon reached the door. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning,’ she said pleasantly.

‘I’m on my way to the hills so I thought I’d pop in on my way past,’ lied Gordon; it had always been his intention to visit Glyn. ‘How is he?’

‘A lot better, thank you, Doctor, he’s much more like his old self this morning. I had a bit of a fight to keep him indoors when he saw the sun but I’m glad to say, he saw sense and is staying put for the time being.’

Gordon felt pleased and relieved. In the final analysis, his mistake had not caused any delay in Glyn’s treatment. He had prescribed the new drug on Saturday morning and he couldn’t have done it any quicker had a lab report been available — although he could have been more sure of its efficacy. But as he listened to Ellen, Gordon knew that if he had he not told Ellen to call the surgery on Saturday if Glyn had not been getting any better, several days might have elapsed. Glyn might even have ended up losing his leg. He declined Ellen’s offer of tea but popped in to have a quick word with her husband before setting off for the mountains.

Julie had been right about him having too much on his plate and his work suffering because of it. He couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes like the one over Glyn Edwards, not if he wanted to continue working in the practice. He’d have to call a halt to something. He was taking some time off, which he’d use to pursue his investigation of the Palmer case, but if he didn’t start making progress soon, he would have to call a halt to his investigations and think again.

He could even resign his partnership. To his own amazement, he found himself actually considering this as an option, so great was his sense of injustice over what was happening to the Palmers. As he turned the Land Rover into the mountain car park, he made an effort to concentrate on the more immediate future and put all other thoughts to one side.

Half way up the Llanberis path on Snowdon, he decided that he would drive up to Caernarfon General on Monday morning. There lay the answer to the Megan Griffiths riddle and possibly the connection, if there was one, with the Palmer baby’s death. Happily he had a tailor-made excuse for going there in Carwyn Thomas’s invitation to attend the IVF symposium. If he turned up at the opening session he might just manage to have a word with Thomas himself and ask about research projects in general in the hospital. He hoped he might find out what was being done and by whom. That would be a start. He might even spot a project that could conceivably involve the corpses of two young baby girls.

It was worth a try and certainly better than doing nothing. With this plan in mind, he continued with the climb, knowing that the exertion involved would do him good and help relieve the stress that had been building up inside him all week.

Thomas was a good speaker and his audience warmed to him quickly. This was especially so when he put up a first slide of happy-looking children, announcing that they were, ‘The end product of our science.’

Thomas gave an overview of IVF treatment from the time of its inception to the present day, when it was now, as he put it, ‘just another everyday run of the mill sort of service’. He recalled that in the early days he had once been called the ‘Son of Satan’ by one of the tabloid newspapers, which had accused him of playing God by attempting to create life in the laboratory and had orchestrated a petition against him to have the work stopped. Several years later, the same paper sponsored triplets, born as a result of IVF treatment here in Caernarfon.

‘We’ve always had to struggle,’ continued Thomas. ‘These days people will argue that our funding be cut in order to finance what they see as the more pressing needs of medicine. We must resist them. Children are our future, our fulfilment; there is no more pressing need in medicine than that of a woman who wants to conceive but cannot. We can make it happen and we must be allowed to continue to make it happen.’

The professor sat down to warm applause, his place at the lectern being taken by a tall distinguished-looking man with close-cropped grey hair and silver-framed spectacles. Gordon thought that he looked American and was proved right when the speaker was introduced as Professor Richard Meyer from the University of California at Los Angeles.

‘Carwyn has spoken eloquently of the past,’ began Meyer. ‘It’s my job to say a little about the future of IVF. We’ve come a long way from the time when we mixed ova and sperm, injected the mixture and hoped for the best. The technique has become more and more refined, multiple births are no longer as prevalent as they used to be, and the specificity of ICSI is becoming almost common place in many labs. The use of helper cells has increased our success rate and we are able to treat more and more difficult cases with an ever-growing confidence in our ability. But there is one challenge on our horizon however, Ladies and Gentlemen and one we will all have to face up to sooner or later. This is the challenge of human cloning. The public’s imagination has been captured by the subject and the technological advances we are making in the lab are bringing us ever closer to making it possible in the foreseeable future. There will undoubtedly be a demand for it. We must think about our response.’

A murmur ran round the room and Meyer looked over his glasses at his audience.

‘You speak as if human cloning is inevitable,’ said a German voice from among the delegates.

‘I believe it is,’ replied Meyer bluntly. ‘I’ve always found the maxim, “if it can be done it will be done”, to be a safe bet in science.’

‘Surely it needn’t be if there’s a will to stop it,’ said an English woman who announced herself as, Dr Linda Moore from Cambridge.

Meyer shook his head and said, ‘Even then, someone somewhere will do it. Be sure of that.’

‘Isn’t this all rather academic anyway,’ said someone else. ‘We can’t do it yet: the technology doesn’t exist.’

‘We’re not that far off,’ said Meyer, ‘so it’s as well to be prepared, don’t you think? Our development of ICSI technology will be very relevant to human cloning. You could say we’re becoming expert in the required techniques without even realising it.’

‘But why? What’s the point of it all?’ asked a man in the front row. ‘We’ll never be able to clone a person in the true sense of the word, in terms of character and personality; the best we can ever hope to do is produce a baby with a clean sheet for a mind, just like any other baby. The child may grow up to look exactly like the person he or she was cloned from but its mind will comprise its own ideas and experiences not anyone else’s.’

‘But the potential is there,’ said the Swedish woman Gordon had spoken to earlier. ‘Clone a genius and you’ll get a genius.’

‘I think Dr Linnstrom has just put her finger on it,’ said Meyer with a smile. ‘Applied selectively, human cloning could enrich society by ensuring that our finest minds remain with us always.’

‘Well, I’m against it. It wouldn’t stop there and we all know it. Most people will consider themselves unique in some way or other and no doubt worthy of preserving. We’ll be inundated with requests if we don’t do something to regulate it now.’

There was a general murmur of agreement before a lady in the row in front of Gordon stood up and identified herself as Dr Maisie Land from Trinity College Dublin. She said, ‘But aren’t we all forgetting that human cloning technology could make a tremendous impact in transplant surgery?’

‘So I keep hearing,’ said Meyer testily, ‘perhaps you’d care to explain how, Doctor?’

A hush fell over the room, caused by the American’s change of tone. Everyone looked to the woman who had attracted his aggression; she herself was obviously embarrassed and bemused. ‘Surely it’s obvious, Professor, that organs taken from a clone of an individual would be a perfect match for that individual.’

‘Of course, but how do you clone an organ, Doctor?’

Maisie Lang became even more embarrassed: Gordon was close enough to see her hands tremble. ‘Well, it’s not exactly my field,’ she said, ‘but I imagine some sort of cell culture might be...’

The American started shaking his head long before she had finished her sentence. ‘Can’t be done,’ he said. ‘To obtain a living kidney, liver, heart or whatever, you need a living human being. That means you start out with a cloned healthy baby so are you telling me that you would consider cutting up live babies to provide spare parts, Doctor? I think not. Human cloning when it starts, will give you human babies, ladies and gentlemen, nothing else, no supermarket shelves with livers and kidneys, just bonnie, bouncing babies.’

‘Food for thought,’ said Carwyn Thomas, getting to his feet again, obviously pleased that the general level of interest in the opening session boded well for a lively symposium.