Tangled Web

Twenty two

‘I suppose Professor Thomas’s death changes everything?’ said Mary, as they took coffee in the hospital cafeteria.

‘It’s certainly not going to help John Palmer,’ said Gordon, feeling low. ‘Thomas was probably the only person in the world who could have told me why Anne-Marie Palmer was murdered. It might be academic now but I can’t even follow up on my suspicion that she wasn’t really the Palmers’ child. The evidence went into the incinerator.’

‘It’s still so hard to believe the professor was involved in something like that,’ said Mary. ‘I didn’t know him well but you get a feeling about people. He always seemed such a genuine man.’

‘It did seem out of character, I’ll grant you,’ Gordon agreed.

‘Maybe none of us is all that we seem,’ said Mary ruefully.

Gordon agreed. ‘It’s the age of the image.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Gordon, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘I think my only chance lies in finding something that Thomas left in writing. I keep thinking he must have made notes about his experiments or kept some kind of records: he couldn’t possibly have kept everything in his head. Scientists don’t do that.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘He was pretty thorough by all accounts. It would be out of character for him not to.’

‘Where will you start?’

‘Maybe I’ll take another look at his lab. I might have more success when I’m not so nervous and I didn’t exactly have a lot of time last time.’

‘Won’t the police have sealed it off?’

‘No reason to,’ said Gordon. ‘The medical staff on the spot seemed satisfied that it was death by natural causes despite what Davies was proposing about my involvement. Anyway, the PM results should be out today.’

‘Do you really have to do this all on your own?’ asked Mary. ‘Surely there must be someone in Thomas’s unit who could help you look through his files and records? Isn’t it possible that some of the people there might even have suspected that something odd was going on?’

Gordon realised that he should have thought of this himself. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘I could have a word with Dawes. He’s the chief cytologist in the IVF unit; to all intents he was Thomas’s right-hand man. If anyone was in a position to smell a rat, he was. I’ll talk to him.’

Mary was glad to see that the cloud of depression had lifted a little from Gordon. ‘I’m off to bed now,’ she announced. ‘But I’m not on duty tonight. Why don’t you come round this evening? I’ll cook for us.’

Gordon smiled broadly and said, ‘That sounds good to me. I’ll look forward to it. Tell me where you live.’

Mary wrote her address on a page of a small, spiral-bound notebook she took out of her handbag and tore it off to give to Gordon. He said that he knew it.

‘About eight,’ said Mary. ‘Your car’s still at Caernarfon?’

Gordon said that it was. It was still in the car park at the hospital.

‘I’ll run you up.’

Gordon protested but Mary insisted, saying that she was in no great hurry to get to bed as she wouldn’t be on duty that evening and it was always difficult to sleep on shift change-over nights. It was just coming up to nine thirty when she dropped him off in the car park at Caernarfon General and he waved good-bye. The prospect of dinner with Mary had already done much to raise his spirits. He found it hard to keep the smile off his face as he walked up to the hospital.

The staff in the IVF unit were talking in little huddles as Gordon passed through on his way to find Ran Dawes. The snatches of conversation he picked up suggested that they were still in a state of shock at the news. They were also concerned about what might happen to their jobs, should the hospital decide not to continue with the unit. He found Ran Dawes sitting at one of his microscopes. Dawes turned round when Gordon asked, ‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course,’ replied Dawes. ‘I’m on autopilot: I’m just going through the motions this morning. I still can’t believe it.’

‘Gordon nodded. ‘Actually it’s a bit delicate,’ he said, half looking over his shoulder.

Dawes looked intrigued. ‘We can talk in my office,’ he said, indicating to the door at the end of the microscopy lab.

The room was small and cluttered but, unlike the main cytology lab, it had a window in it. Dawes cleared away a pile of scientific journals from the chair in front of his desk and invited Gordon to sit. He himself he sat down on a swivel chair behind the desk and leaned forward to rest his elbows on it. ‘How can I help?’ he asked.

Gordon saw no easy way of approaching the subject so he took the plunge. ‘I think Professor Thomas was involved in some illegal experimentation,’ he said. ‘I think he was dabbling in human cloning.’

Dawes looked shocked. ‘You can’t be serious?’ he exclaimed.

Gordon affirmed that he was. ‘I think that’s why the unit’s figures for ICSI were worse than other labs. Donor DNA was being injected into patients’ ova instead of their husbands’ sperm. The high failure rate from these implants was skewing the figures.’

‘God Almighty,’ exclaimed Dawes. ‘I don’t rightly know what to say.’

‘You didn’t suspect anything?’ asked Gordon, disappointed that Dawes’ reaction already suggested that was the case.

Dawes shrugged and said not. ‘It never even occurred to me. What put you on to this?’

‘Let’s say, it’s where my interest in Anne-Marie Palmer’s death has led me,’ replied Gordon. ‘I think Anne-Marie herself was the result of a cloning experiment: I don’t think she was the natural child of the Palmers at all and this fact had a bearing on her death.’

‘My God,’ whispered Dawes. ‘But I suppose that might well explain her deformity.’

‘Last night I met Professor Thomas in the car park when I came up to the hospital. He helped me gain access to the mortuary where it was my intention to take a tissue sample from Anne-Marie: I wanted her DNA fingerprinted to get conclusive proof that she’d been cloned, but it didn’t quite work out that way.’ He told Dawes what had happened.

‘You think Carwyn tried to kill you?’ exclaimed Dawes, his voice now strained. ‘This is absolutely incredible.’

‘I was destined for the incinerator along with Anne-Marie Palmer’s body,’ said Gordon. ‘I survived but her remains didn’t, so I can’t prove what Thomas was up to. That’s where I’d like you come in.’

‘Me?’

‘I need your help,’ said Gordon. ‘He must have written something down about what he was doing; he couldn’t have kept it all in his head. I have to find these notes or records to have any chance at all of convincing the police that there was more to the death of Anne-Marie Palmer than met the eye.’

‘So who do you think did kill her?’ asked Dawes.

‘I don’t know,’ confessed Gordon. ‘But I am convinced that her death was linked to what’s been going on here in the unit. I found her file in Thomas’s lab along with a lot of stuff on human cloning.’

`You searched the professor’s lab?’

Gordon nodded.

‘Now you come to mention it...’ said Dawes thoughtfully, ‘Carwyn had become rather secretive about what he was doing on his own account.’

‘Did you normally share the lab work?’

‘Between three of us.’

‘Will you help me?’ asked Gordon.

‘I’ll certainly do what I can,’ agreed Dawes. ‘Where would you like to start?’

‘I think we should make a thorough search of his lab and office and see what we come up with.’

Dawes nodded but said, ‘I think I’ll have to leave you to do that on your own while I explain to the symposium delegates just what’s happened. I’ll suggest that we suspend proceedings as a mark of respect. We’ve only got one more day to go anyway but I suspect the press will be swarming all over the hospital by lunchtime.’

‘Probably,’ said Gordon. ‘Maybe you could mention to the rest of the IVF unit staff that I’ll be around for a bit?’

Dawes nodded and said that he would. ‘I’ll be back by lunchtime,’ he said. ‘You can tell me how you’ve got on and we can talk about what you’d like to do next?’

Gordon arranged to meet Dawes outside in the car park rather than inside the hospital. ‘It’ll stop the staff wondering what we’re up to.’

Dawes accompanied Gordon along to Thomas’s office where they found the door locked. ‘Damn,’ said Dawes. ‘I’ll ask Rita.’ He left Gordon alone for a few moments before returning with a key and saying, ‘His secretary had a spare.’ He unlocked the door, handed the key to Gordon and said, ‘I’ll leave you now. Hope you find what you’re looking for. See you later.’

Gordon entered Thomas’s office and closed the door behind him. This time there was a feeling of anticlimax and sadness. The pictures on the wall seemed to be a poignant reminder of a brilliant career that had taken a fatal wrong turning, but it wouldn’t be the first, he mused. He walked across to the lab door and paused to look out of the window through the slats of the venetian blinds as he’d done last time. He saw Ran Dawes hurrying across the yard but then saw him stop as if someone had called out to him.

James Trool came into view and the two men stood talking for a few moments. Gordon drew back involuntarily when both men looked up at the window. He supposed that they were discussing the tragedy that had befallen Thomas, but he wondered if Dawes might be telling Trool about his presence. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Thomas’s lab looked pretty much as it had on the last occasion. He supposed that the man hadn’t had much occasion to use it again, what with the symposium taking up so much of his time, although he did notice that the articles on cloning were no longer sitting by the microscope. He noticed that there was a layer of dust on its plastic cover.

He pulled out the drawer where he’d found Anne-Marie Palmer’s medical file last time and found it empty. He stood there for a moment, transfixed by the empty space, considering that he’d made a mistake, although quite sure in his own mind that he hadn’t. He pulled out several other drawers in quick succession but the file wasn’t there either. They were all completely empty.

Gordon cursed and faced the fact that the file had gone the same way as the articles on cloning. The lab had been cleared out. ‘Shit,’ he exclaimed, resting both hands on the bench then he had another thought. The freezer! What about the bloody freezer? He hurried over to the chest freezer and pushed up the lid to find what he’d feared. The frozen foetuses had gone too. Only test tubes and chemical bottles remained.

Gordon cursed again. His chances of proving anything now seemed more remote than ever. He supposed that Thomas must have been panicked into destroying everything — maybe that was why he’d had a heart attack. Then Gordon remembered that he’d also had a lot of cleaning up work to do before that, down in the mortuary and in the incinerator room too. It struck him as odd that Thomas had done all that clearing up... then he’d destroyed everything in his lab that could possibly implicate him in cloning experiments... and then he’d had a heart attack and died. It all suddenly seemed just too tidy to be true.

He felt troubled as he prepared to leave. He closed all the drawers and cupboards he’d opened but when it came to closing the last drawer — something he did with his knee — he heard a noise as the drawer slid in. The drawer still appeared to be empty when he pulled it out again to take another look but when he slid it backwards and forwards on its runners the sound of crinkling paper was coming from somewhere.

He pulled the drawer completely out and looked into the space to see that something had fallen down the back. He reached in and pulled out a single, folded sheet of paper. It was a carbon copy of a hospital lab requisition for supplies and services. It had been submitted to, Dr Leonard Fairbrother, School of Biological Sciences, University of Wales at Bangor. There was an official order number along with a date but no other details. Gordon folded it and put it in his pocket. It was the only document he was to find in an extensive search of the lab and office.

He returned the key to the secretary and asked her to give his apologies to Dawes for not having waited. He left the unit to walk out into watery sunshine and a stiff breeze. There seemed to be little point in hanging around now.

He was just about to start up the Land Rover when he noticed a worried looking James Trool leave the front door of the hospital and get into his car. Gordon noted that it was the Jaguar that Carwyn Thomas had been surprised to see in the car park last night. Gordon mused that he didn’t envy the man his job in trying to defend the hospital’s image at a time when scandal and shock seemed hell bent on damaging it from all angles. He watched him drive off before he himself followed suit and set out on the road back to Felinbach.

When he got in, he made coffee and sat down to re-read the piece of paper he’d found in Thomas’s lab. ‘Well, Leonard Fairbrother,’ he murmured. ‘Just who the hell are you? Feeling that he had nothing to lose, he grabbed at the phone directory and looked up the number for the University of Wales. He was going to go for a direct approach. ‘I’d like to speak to Dr Fairbrother in the Department of Biological sciences,’ he told the operator.

‘Trying to connect you...’

‘Fairbrother.’

‘Dr Fairbrother, my name is Tom Gordon; I’m a GP in Felinbach; I was wondering if I might come over and talk to you — some time today if possible?’

‘What about?’

‘I’d rather leave that until I saw you, Doctor.’

‘Intriguing,’ said Fairbrother. ‘Let’s see... Would twelve noon be any good?’

‘Ideal,’ replied Gordon. He hadn’t meant to sound cryptic but establishing contact with Fairbrother had been so easy and so rapid that he hadn’t had time to think about what he wanted to say. By the time he was dodging traffic to cross the main road outside the biological sciences building, he had a better idea.

Fairbrother had ivy growing on the wall outside his office but the room itself was located in a dirty brick building fronting a busy main thoroughfare. The ivy was its only claim to cloistered charm. An ambulance went wailing by outside as Fairbrother invited Gordon to sit. ‘What can I do for you, Doctor?’

Fairbrother had turned out to be much younger than Gordon had imagined from his voice on the telephone. He’d pictured a middle-aged man in sports jacket and flannels but here was a fresh-faced young man, dressed in sweatshirt and jeans who looked more like a member of a rock band than a don.

‘I believe you know Professor Carwyn Thomas at Caernarfon General,’ said Gordon.

‘I do, or rather, I did,’ agreed Fairbrother. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news. What a tragedy.’

‘How did you come to know Professor Thomas?’

‘I only met him for the first time recently,’ said Fairbrother. ‘He asked me to help him out with something. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s what he asked you to do for him that I’m interested in,’ said Gordon.

Fairbrother gave a little laugh that suggested the discomfort of a person about to be rude when it really wasn’t in their nature. ‘Frankly, you have me at a disadvantage, Doctor,’ he said. ‘I don’t quite see what I was doing for Professor Thomas has to do with you.’

‘I’ve reason to believe that illegal experiments were being carried out in Professor Thomas’s unit,’ said Gordon, hoping for shock value in the blunt statement. ‘I’m hoping to help the police with their inquiries by piecing together what the professor was doing scientifically before he died,’ lied Gordon. ‘It’s not easy for people outside the profession to carry out that kind of investigation.’

‘Of course not,’ agreed Fairbrother. ‘Professor Thomas asked me to do some DNA fingerprinting for him.’

‘DNA fingerprinting?’ exclaimed Gordon, failing to mask his excitement at Fairbrother’s reply. The words almost stuck in his throat when he asked, ‘What sort of work, exactly?’

‘He hoped to establish the true identity of a child he had some doubts about. He wanted me to DNA test a tissue sample — discreetly.’

‘Were you able to do what he wanted?’ asked Gordon.

‘Yes, I think so. He seemed satisfied with results — shocked, surprised and then pleased, I’d say, if I’m any judge of reaction. It was as if he’d just solved some puzzle that had been bothering him.’

‘What were these results?’ asked Gordon calmly, his mouth going dry at seeing only one more hurdle to cross.’

‘I can’t rightly say,’ confessed Fairbrother, appearing embarrassed at his own answer.’

Gordon felt himself fall at the final hurdle and come crashing to the ground. Surely fate couldn’t be this cruel. ‘You can’t rightly say?’ he repeated.

‘I was working blind, you see, with numbered samples. Professor Thomas didn’t want me to have the names of those involved. I just know that the child I was fingerprinting was definitely not the child of samples one and two but was in fact the child of samples three and four.’

Gordon put a hand to his forehead in anguish. ‘No names,’ he said. ‘Just numbers! Jesus!’

‘Actually, Professor Thomas did mention a name at one point. He seemed to be taken so much by surprise that he sort of blurted it out,’ said Fairbrother.

‘Can you remember it?’

‘Give me a moment... there was something familiar about it... a girl’s name; I remember that much...’

‘Anne-Marie Palmer?’ prompted Gordon, prepared to bet money that he was right.

‘No, it wasn’t that,’ said Fairbrother. ‘Ah yes, I remember now. It was Megan Griffiths.’