Tangled Web

Twenty seven

Gordon had the feeling that he was trapped in the plot of an ancient Greek play with events becoming so bizarre that they demanded the appearance of a deus ex machina to sort everything out. He regretted the fact that he couldn’t finally feel good about having paved the way for John Palmer’s release against what had been tremendous odds by any standards, but the things that were coming to light were eclipsing any such feelings with dark foreboding.

He had not been looking forward to telling Lucy and John that Anne-Marie had not actually been their daughter in strictly biological terms, although they had obviously loved her as if she had been. Now he was faced with the possibility that Anne-Marie might not even be dead... but there again, she still might be. It all depended on why she had been cloned in the first place. He was reminded again of the words of the American scientist at the symposium. A successful cloning, done for whatever reason, will result in a baby being born. If Anne-Marie had been cloned to provide spare parts then she might well already be dead. How would anyone who had loved her cope with that kind of revelation, he wondered? For Lucy, at least, he reckoned that might be the final straw, a nightmare too far: one she might never recover from.

The chances of discovering anything about the motives behind the cloning seemed to depend entirely on finding out who had commissioned it in the first

place and his best chance of doing that still seemed to rest with the investigation of Dawes’ finances. If he had been paid to do it, the money had to be somewhere, unless of course, he’d hidden it under the mattress. Gordon decided to have one more search of the house — including under the mattress — before he called the police.

Apart from the bathroom, Dawes had only used one room upstairs, a large bedroom with pale green walls and a window that looked out on to the Menai. The bed, an old-fashioned double with a walnut headboard, remained unmade and the grey light coming in through the window did nothing to make the room seem attractive. Gordon looked through all the drawers in the room and in both wardrobes as outside, the skies seemed to grow darker by the minute. The bedside cabinet was the only thing to reveal contents other than clothes. It contained bedtime reading material, a number of catalogues and magazines, mainly to do with cars but there were several holiday brochures too. Gordon was about to dismiss them as irrelevant when he had second thoughts and flicked through them. His interest was rewarded when he saw that biro pen had been used to mark certain pages. From what he could deduce, Dawes had had an interest in the new Jaguar S type and also in holidays in the Caribbean, not tastes easily satisfied by a National Health Service salary. Unfortunately there did not seem to be any information about how he did intend to pay for them.

There was an interesting bookmark in one of the holiday brochures. It was a leaflet, advertising a private medical clinic in Paris. It made Gordon wonder if Dawes had been offered a job there, supposing that that would be an alternative explanation for his sudden interest in material things to that of ill-gotten gains, although he still hoped that the latter might be true. He slipped the leaflet into his pocket.

Finally he took a look at the bathroom, it being the only room that he hadn’t yet searched. The dark skies outside had finally decided to break open and rain battered against the large frosted window above the bath as he checked the cabinet over the mirror and then the cupboard under the basin, both without success. The bath itself was a Victorian iron monster with peeling paint on the outside and feet fashioned as seashells. There was no panelling round it so Gordon felt round the outside as far as he could reach; he found only more peeling paint and cobwebs.

He stood up and pulled the lavatory chain, not for any reason other than the fact that you didn’t often see a high cistern these days and they sounded different from modern ones. It reminded him of Scottish tenement life in his youth. Thinking about cisterns caused him to recall that he’d seen them used as hiding places before in several films. Guns and drugs usually. He looked up at the one with ‘Gates Pat. Pending’ etched into its iron front and thought that he had nothing to lose by taking a look.

He dragged a heavy linen basket over the floor and climbed up on it. He still wasn’t high enough to be able to look into the cistern but he could reach in and feel around the inside with his fingers. The inner wall felt cold, wet and rough, like the surface of a rock on the seashore just after high tide had receded. The ball cock made a grinding noise when he moved the operating lever but, apart from

that, everything seemed normal.

Halfway along the back wall of the cistern his fingers touched plastic and it felt foreign. It was a plastic bag by the feel of it... too light to contain either a gun or drugs but at that moment, more interesting than either. He gave it a strong tug and brought out what looked to be a plastic-covered passbook, contained inside a freezer storage bag. Fate for once had been kind.

Gordon tore at the bag but paused to dry his hands before pulling out the passbook itself. It was a Nationwide Building Society passbook, the record of an account in Dawes’ name and it currently contained one hundred and ninety-seven thousand pounds exactly. There were only three entries in it, a deposit of fifty thousand pounds made on a date in December last and another of one hundred and fifty thousand made some four weeks ago. One withdrawal was listed. The sum of three thousand pounds had been taken out a week after the last deposit. Gordon guessed at the Visa bill payment. He could also guess that the first payment had been made on the birth of Anne-Marie and the second when she had been abducted. It was definitely time to inform the police. They would have ways of finding out where the deposited money had come from.

Gordon came downstairs, feeling pleased with himself but the feeling did not last long. As he reached the last three steps he found himself staring into the twin barrels of a shotgun.

A thin, sullen-faced man with a stoop, who looked as if he hadn’t smiled much in the last thirty years, held the gun. He was wearing a dark, waxed-cotton jacket and had a gamekeeper’s satchel slung over his shoulder. A collie dog sat at his feet, anxious to be doing something but restrained by training and discipline.

Gordon smiled, hoping to convey the impression that he was no threat, and put his hands up slowly, eager to defuse the situation before accident or misunderstanding led to his chest being opened up like a volcanic crater. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he ventured.

The man gestured that he move away from the foot of the stairs and back into the kitchen. Gordon complied, saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m Doctor Tom Gordon from Felinbach.’

‘My arse you are,’ growled the man. ‘Thievin’ bastard.’

‘Really, I am,’ insisted Gordon.

‘So how’s the patient?’ sneered the man.

‘Doctor Dawes is dead,’ Gordon replied, thinking it sounded stupid in the circumstances.

‘Bloody right he is and he didn’t die here! Poor bugger’s not even cold in his grave before bastards like you start sniffin’ round like bloody hyenas.’

‘Look, I really am a doctor. I’m not here to rob anyone,’ said Gordon.

‘What’s that in your bloody hand then?’ growled the man angrily. ‘Your prescription pad? Give it here!’

Gordon handed over the passbook and the man snatched it quickly from him with his left hand while still keeping the gun trained on him in his right. ‘Bastard,’ he swore when he read out the cover. ‘Nationwide bloody Building Society. Didn’t come here to rob, my arse!’ He put the passbook down on the table and returned to holding the gun in both hands.

Gordon could see that the man was becoming dangerously angry. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just call the police and we can sort the whole thing out. I was just about to do that myself.’

‘Police? Judges? Courts? Bunch of tossers. It’s about time we returned to making our own justice round here. Leave it to that lot and the likes of you’ll end up getting off with a poxy fine, couple of weeks community service and not so much as a kick up the arse.’

‘Just call the police, will you?’ said Gordon, becoming increasingly anxious.

The man moved a little closer and leered at him. You’d like that wouldn’t you. Bastard! The whole bloody system’s designed for criminals these days and bugger the victims. Well, boyo, you fucked up this time!’ With that, the man swung the stock of his gun round to stab it with both hands into Gordon’s face, knocking him clean out.

When Gordon opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Mary’s face and she seemed angry. ‘I do not believe it, Tom’ she said. ‘You make Inspector Clouseau seem like the consummate professional! What is it about you that makes you do these things?’

Gordon struggled to find a reply but his jaw hurt and before he could get anything out a voice on the other side of the bed, he recognised with a sinking feeling as belonging to Chief Inspector Davies said, ‘Frankly, I’ve given up on you Gordon. I’ve decided that there’s probably a limit to how much your head can take in the way of punishment so I’m going to let you reach your threshold and then maybe that’ll convince you not to play the Lone bloody Ranger all the time.’

Gordon closed his eyes again, wishing he were somewhere else.

Mary continued, ‘We’re thinking of a keeping aside a special bed just for you because you’re here so often. What on Earth possessed you to break in to Dawes’ house?’ she asked.

‘All right, all right, give me a chance, will you?’ said Gordon, holding up his hands in self-defence. He insisted that he hadn’t broken in; he’d been given a key and had just gone to take a look around when some madman had attacked him.

‘Clem Rees,’ interrupted Davies. ‘Slightly to the right of Saddam Hussain is old Clem. He sister’s place was done over by yobs two or three months ago. Duffed her up bad, they did. Clem didn’t take it too well. I think he sees himself as Charles Bronson in that film Death Wish? He says you attacked him and he had to hit you in self- defence. Is that right?’

‘What d’you think?’ said Gordon sourly.

‘Do you want to press charges?’

Gordon shook his head. ‘First things first.’ he said. ‘I found out lots of things in that house today. Did you get the passbook?’

‘Clem presented it as evidence of your intention to rob. He was quite disappointed to find out you really were a doctor. Surprises me too some times.’

‘And me,’ agreed Mary.

‘You’ve got to find out where that money came from,’ insisted Gordon. ‘It’s the key to the whole thing. Listen to me! There’s a chance that Anne-Marie Palmer might still be alive.’

Davies and Mary gave each other a look that suggested that Gordon might really have gone too far this time and it was perhaps time for sectioning him under the auspices of the Mental Health Act.

‘I’m serious. Just listen, will you?’ Gordon told them both what he’d discovered at the house in Aberlyn and finally felt he was getting somewhere in the credibility stakes when he saw the look of horror appear on both their faces as he told them about the cellar and what had gone on there. ‘So you see, it wasn’t Anne-Marie Palmer that you found in the garden, it was Megan Griffiths made to look like Anne-Marie.

‘My God, that’s sick,’ said Mary.

‘But it worked,’ said Gordon. ‘The bottom line says, they took Anne-Marie and nobody bothered to look for her. The perfect kidnap.’

‘So the big question is, what did they intend doing with her?’ said Davies.

Gordon nodded and went through the possibilities.

‘So, what d’you reckon?’ asked Davies.

‘I have to think that they wanted some or all of her organs,’ confessed Gordon. ‘If they’d wanted a cloned child I suspect the fact that Anne-Marie was so badly disabled might have persuaded them to try the cloning again rather than kidnap her. I hope I’m wrong but...’

‘Makes sense,’ conceded Davies quietly.

‘I agree,’ said Mary, sounding very subdued. ‘But how could they do such a thing?’

‘The point is,’ insisted Gordon. ‘Maybe they haven’t yet. Maybe Anne-Marie is still alive.’

‘Do you really think there’s a chance?’ asked Mary.

Gordon shrugged and admitted, ‘It’s a slim one, considering the amount of time that’s elapsed, but while we don’t know for sure, we’ve got to try and find her and the key to doing that lies in that damned passbook!’

Davies was galvanised into action. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to the Nationwide, see what they can tell us. Mind you, if Dawes walked into their office with cash in a brown paper bag, we’re all up Shit Creek.’

Davies left, leaving Gordon alone with Mary. ‘How’s the jaw?’ she asked.

Gordon rubbed it gently. ‘Okay,’ he said.

Mary smiled affectionately and said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before. You’re either the bravest, most noble man I’m ever likely to come across or you’re a complete and utter pillock.’

‘Plenty of room for manoeuvre there,’ said Gordon. ‘I’d happily settle for somewhere in the middle.’

‘We’ll see,’ smiled Mary.

‘Well, I suppose you know what happens next by now,’ said Gordon, swinging his legs round and off the bed.

Mary looked at him and nodded, ‘You ask me for your clothes and then you sign yourself out?’

‘Correct.’

‘Are you sure you won’t stay in the night this time. You were knocked unconscious and damn it, you are a doctor, you should know better than to play the John Wayne thing.’

‘A man’s gotta do...’

‘What exactly, in your case?’ asked Mary.

Gordon sighed and looked down at the floor for a moment in silence. ‘I do have my pride, you know,’ he said, finally looking up at her. ‘I’m aware of people giggling in the corridor as I turn up yet again in A&E as a patient when I’m supposed to be a bloody doctor!’

Mary stifled a giggle behind her hand.

‘I suppose I just want to be out of here. I never want to see the place again if truth be told!’

Mary sat down on the bed beside him, once again smitten with Gordon’s vulnerability. ‘Maybe you are at the right end of that spectrum after all,’ she said gently.

Gordon looked at her and said, ‘Of course if you were to kiss me long and hard I just might be able to convince that lot out there that I keep getting my head bashed in just so I can come and see you...’

‘Well, if it’s a question of saving your street-cred, Doctor, that would seem to be the very least I could do.’

They were kissing when a domestic assistant came in to remove a tray. They were still kissing when she left.

‘That should do it,’ said Gordon.

‘Did it for me,’ smiled Mary.

Gordon made to kiss her again but she put her hands on his chest. ‘I’m on duty, and you are going to go straight home to bed.’

‘If I get knocked out again can I come back for more?’

‘Don’t even dream it!’ said Mary. ‘I’ll get your clothes.’

‘Shit, my car’s over in Aberlyn,’ said Gordon.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Mary. ‘The police brought it over here. It’s in the car park. I think they regard you as one of their own these days... or something like that.’

‘The bone!’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘The saw! They’ll need these as evidence. I didn’t tell Davies where they were exactly! I’d better get over to Aberlyn and...’

‘No!’ insisted Mary. ‘You told Chief Inspector Davies about these things. His men are perfectly capable of finding them without your help, YOU are going home. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ said Gordon weakly.

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

Gordon drove back over to Felinbach, wondering how Davies was getting on with the Nationwide. It was now eight in the evening. He supposed that someone must have been dragged from his or her home to open up the office in Caernarfon where the account was registered. He wondered idly if they would see this as a nuisance or something to brighten the humdrum existence of working in a building society. Either way, please God, they’d come up with something useful.

Davies rang at nine thirty. Gordon snatched the receiver off its cradle.

‘We’ve got the source,’ said Davies. ‘Both payments were in the form of personal cheques signed by one Sonia Trool.’

‘Sonia Trool?’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Make any sense?’

‘Her daughter!’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘Her daughter was blinded in a car accident. It was through the accident that she met James Trool. The little girl’s eyes were too badly damaged for a corneal transplant to be of any use but the optic nerve was undamaged so if more material were available and it was a perfect match...’ Gordon paused.

‘Jesus Christ, are you telling me they cloned a kid to steal her eyes?’

‘That’s what it looks like.’