White death

SEVENTEEN

Steven called the duty officer at Sci-Med and asked him to ring round the labs involved in analysing material taken from either Trish Lyons or Keith Taylor to ask about the presence of toxic compounds — identified or unidentified. He had his answer within an hour. The hospital labs in Carlisle and Edinburgh both reported that they had carried out routine biochemical analysis on a number of samples: all were negative for toxins. The London lab which had analysed the samples taken from Keith Taylor at the second post mortem and which was furnished with the best equipment money could buy had also drawn a blank.

Steven sighed but had to admit that the lab results were pretty much what he’d expected. After all, if any of them had noted the presence of a toxin, they would have reported it before now, but the negatives did raise an obvious question. If St Clair Genomics had detected the presence of a toxin in the vaccine vials, why hadn’t the relevant labs found it in the patients? He supposed it might have had something to do with breakdown of the toxin in the body — some poisons did this and could therefore remain undetected — but this was outside his area of expertise. He would have to seek expert advice but first he needed to gather more information about the contaminating toxin. Phillip St Clair didn’t have any chemical details; a talk to Redmond Medical was called for. He phoned Sci-Med and asked that they make contact with a senior person at Redmond Medical. He also asked for business background information on both St Clair and Redmond.

‘It’s Saturday afternoon,’ said the duty man. ‘It’ll probably mean getting someone at home.’

‘Fine.’

‘And the background info, when do you need that?’

‘Now.’

‘Watch this space, as they say.’

Steven smiled at the good-humoured response. He liked laid-back people.

The duty man called back forty-five minutes later. ‘Sorry, all the senior people at Redmond seem to be away for the weekend but I’ve managed to contact a Mr Giles Dutton; he’s the line maintenance manager at the company. He lives in Moulden at 34, Lipton Rise. He’s expecting your call.’

Steven noted down the number. ‘Okay, thanks.’

‘Jean Roberts has some stuff on Redmond. She says she’ll email it to you. She’s working from home.’

Thanks again.’

Steven had doubts about whether a line maintenance manager would be able to give him the information he was after, namely the identity of the toxic agent. He suspected not but, as he had nothing else to do meantime and nuggets of information often came from unlikely sources, he called Dutton and asked if he could come and speak to him.

‘Please yourself,’ replied Dutton.

It wasn’t quite the response Steven had expected but he took it as a yes and said that he’d be in Moulden in a couple of hours.

‘Right.’

Steven set off, feeling less than optimistic about getting anything at all out of Dutton who had sounded less than interested and hadn’t even bothered to ask what it was about but at least he was doing something. He was pleasantly surprised when a friendly looking woman opened the door to him at the pretty white bungalow in Lipton Rise. She invited him in. ‘Giles is in the conservatory,’ she said. ‘It’s through here…’

Steven followed her through a living room smelling strongly of furniture polish and out through French doors into a conservatory where the temperature was several degrees higher because of the sun on the glass. A man with thinning red hair and a matching pale complexion sat there in a cane armchair, glasses on his nose, feet up on a small footstool as he read his newspaper.

‘It’s the gentleman you’re expecting, dear.’

‘Steven Dunbar,’ said Steven.

Dutton grunted and pushed his glasses up his nose but didn’t get up.

‘Perhaps you’d like some tea or coffee, Dr Dunbar?’ asked the smiling woman. Steven got the impression she might be well used to being excessively polite and helpful in order to make up for her husband’s shortcomings.

‘Coffee would be lovely, thank you.’

Steven showed Dutton his ID card but he waved it away. ‘Makes no odds, just state your business.’

Steven sat down on the other cane armchair and said, ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about the chemical that contaminated the St Clair company vaccine.’

‘Like what?’ said Dutton, making a point of looking out of the window at a high conifer hedge in the garden rather than at Steven.

‘Ideally, I’d like to know what it was, where it came from and how it got into the vaccine vials.’

‘Me too,’ said Dutton.

‘I’m sorry?’

Dutton turned to face Steven. ‘I’d like to know that too,’ he said.

Steven sensed there was more to this comment than he was taking on board. Dutton wasn’t just being rude; he was very bitter about something. ‘You’ve no idea?’ he asked.

‘None whatsoever.’

‘But if the company don’t know what happened, you have no way of stopping it happening again,’ said Steven.

‘Very true,’ said Dutton with what appeared to Steven to be a wry smile.

‘If you’ll pardon my saying so, Mr Dutton, you don’t seem to be very concerned about something so serious,’ said Steven. ‘Surely, as production line maintenance manager, it’s your responsibility if contamination occurs?’

‘It would be if that’s what happened,’ said Dutton, adding to Steven’s mounting frustration.

‘Mr Dutton, you do accept that a toxic substance was found in the vaccine vials prepared by your company?’

‘So they tell me.’

‘But you’re not concerned?’

Dutton looked at Steven and shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘My God, man, if your maintenance schedules allowed a toxic chemical to get into a vaccine…’

‘I should be on my knees asking the Almighty for forgiveness,’ said Dutton. He leaned towards Steven. ‘But it never happened.’

At that moment Dutton’s wife came into the conservatory with a silver tea tray and laid it down between them. ‘There you are. I hope you two are having a nice chat. The scones are freshly baked — just out the oven…’

Steven did his best to fake up a smile and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Dutton, that’s very kind.’

‘Just shout if you want more…’

Mrs Dutton backed out through the French doors and closed them with a last beaming smile.

‘What d’you mean, it never happened?’ demanded Steven as the electric atmosphere returned. ‘The scientists at St Clair Genomics found toxin in the vials, the same one that you had been bottling the day before.’

‘So they did.’ Dutton resumed his watch on the conifers in the garden.

‘Are you saying that it didn’t come from the production line?’ asked Steven.

‘Well, you got there in the end,’ said Dutton.

Steven’s senses were reeling. ‘But how else would it get in?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Dutton. ‘It’s true that we’d bottled a number of toxic compounds for a pharmaceutical company in Kent the day before we did the vaccine vials for St Clair and everyone thought they’d jump on the obvious bandwagon. But what the smart arses didn’t know was that the main production line broke down that day and I had to move the job to our back-up facility in C building. The technicians fixed the problem with the main line overnight and we were able to use that for the St Clair job. The contaminating chemical was never near the main line. It wasn’t even in the same building.’

Steven swallowed as he felt his throat dry. ‘But you must have told someone this?’

‘Of course,’ said Dutton. ‘They didn’t want to know. I was told not to worry. It was a technicality. Everything would sort itself out.’

‘So how did the vials become contaminated?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘But unless that is established…’

‘Redmond Medical can’t reopen for business?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Redmond Medical isn’t going to open again for business,’ said Dutton. ‘Our owners have decided to close it down. The staff have been told they’ll be paid to the end of the month and that’s it. Finito.’

‘Bloody hell, that’s a bit over the top,’ said Steven. ‘Have you any thought about what you’ll do?’

Dutton gave Steven a look that suggested he’d been thinking about little else. ‘Word gets around in the pharmaceutical business, Mr Dunbar. Who’s going to employ a production line manager held responsible for the fuck-up that closed down Redmond Medical?’

‘But from what you say, you weren’t.’

‘Yeah, I could tell them that,’ said Dutton sourly.

‘But there must be others who know what happened?’

Dutton gave a contemptuous snort. ‘Staff are in line for a bonus if they sign up to a confidentiality clause. They’re being paid extra to say nothing about anything they did at Redmond. It almost doubles their redundancy money.’

‘Surely that kind of clause wouldn’t extend to something like saying which production line was working and which wasn’t on any particular day?’ said Steven.

‘It covers everything.’

‘You’re making it sound as if Redmond are quite content for people to think the contamination happened on their production line?’

Dutton shrugged and said, ‘They don’t seem to care too much about how or where it happened. They’ve accepted it was their fault and rolled over. Any further inquiries would just be an academic exercise as far as they’re concerned.’

Steven heard echoes in that of what the Home Secretary had said at the Home Office meeting. ‘It’s not exactly what you’d expect a company like Redmond to do in a situation like that,’ he said. ‘Denial and counter claim is usually the order of the day until someone proves what happened.’

‘Well, not in this case,’ said Dutton. ‘When a toxic chemical being processed by us on one day is found in vials in the production run on the following day, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the conclusion’s going to be. All I’m saying is that it didn’t happen on my production line.’

‘Thanks for telling me all this, I appreciate it,’ said Steven, preparing to leave and feeling absurdly guilty about not having sampled Mrs Dutton’s scones.

‘If you find out what did happen, will you let me know?’ asked Dutton.

Steven assured him that he would.

He shook his head as he got into the car and sat for a few moments thinking about what he’d just learned. It was a totally unexpected twist and not at all what he had been looking for in an investigation in which the ground continually seemed to move beneath him. A boy with TB in a Leicester hospital? — no such boy — a boy with TB in a Swedish clinic? — no such boy — the boy disappears completely. All lies, smoke and mirrors designed to obscure the truth about a secret trial of a new vaccine. Children receiving the new vaccine fall ill and a rogue toxin getting into the production process is blamed. But now… there was no rogue toxin in the production process of the vaccine according to Dutton, so where did it come from?

Steven called Tally. There was no reply from her home phone so he left a message saying he’d called. He set out to return to London but had barely gone a mile when she rang.

‘Hi, I’ve just got in. I found your message. Where are you?’

‘Near Milton Keynes. I thought I might come up but maybe if you’re just in…’

‘No, that would be great. I look forward to seeing you.’

Steven suddenly felt a whole lot better. The thought of seeing Tally was just so good — the prospect of light, warmth, company and intelligent conversation — not to mention sex — instead of going home to sit in silence and brood about the latest puzzle in the green sticker saga was the perfect antidote to feeling depressed about his progress. He joined the motorway and gunned the Honda up to seventy, reckoning that he should be there in about an hour.

Traffic was light and, as the miles passed by, he allowed himself to wonder if it could ever be this way on a more permanent basis. Driving home to Tally was a nice thought; it had a comfortable ring to it… or maybe it was just a daydream? Yes it was, but there was no harm in that, he reckoned. He started to wonder how Jenny would take to Tally and vice versa if they should ever meet. The two ladies in his life, would they get on? Could they get on? It was seductive to imagine that they would and a short step from that to thinking about picnics, days out, whispered confidences, Christmas at home…

The reality would probably be different, he conceded. Tally’s career was every bit as demanding as his own and equally important to her. His cosy notion of domestic bliss — if it really existed — probably required a completely different cast or enough commitment to change things to make it possible… Old doubts returned. Were the problems really insurmountable or was he looking for an excuse to treat his association with Tally as a finite thing, a beautiful love affair but doomed from the start because of fate — his preferred reason — or maybe the fact that he was a selfish bastard — a strong contender.

Steven turned the car into Tally’s street and drew heavily upon his favourite mantra: Life is what happens to you while you’re planning for the future…

Tally was waiting for him at the door to her apartment when he emerged from the lift. She was dressed casually in a sweater and jeans, barefoot and her hair still damp from the shower and smelling of shampoo. Steven kissed her and wrapped his arms around her, unwilling to detach himself from the perfumed heaven he found himself in.

‘What have you been up to?’ he asked.

‘Working,’ replied Tally ruefully. ‘I should have known. As soon as I arranged to meet up with my sisters for a boozy lunch and a long gossip, something turned up at the hospital and I had to work on my weekend off.’

‘Bad luck,’ said Steven. ‘I didn’t know you had sisters.’

Tally laughed and said, ‘I’ve got two. There’s a lot you don’t know about me. We hardly know each other. And if you say it seems like we’ve known each other for ever, I’ll knee you where it hurts.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Steven with a smile.

‘Anyway, what have you been up to? That’s got to be much more interesting. What happened at the meeting?’

‘The government are hell-bent on developing new vaccines because of fears of a biological attack.’

‘And?’ asked Tally when she saw Steven hesitate.

‘It seems a number of over-ambitious civil servants thought they’d please their masters and accelerate their own careers by setting up an unofficial trial of a new vaccine against TB using the kids at Pinetops. The company involved, a biotechnology outfit called St Clair Genomics, convinced them that getting the necessary paperwork was just going to be a time-consuming formality. There was some talk of a misunderstanding over how far the officials could bend the rules but, in any event, it all went terribly wrong when the vials got contaminated with a toxic agent on the production line.’

Tally was speechless for a few moments during which she spread her hands and looked up at the ceiling. ‘A misunderstanding?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could you have a misunderstanding over something like that? And then they managed to poison them? How on earth could something like that happen? That’s absolutely outrageous. They should all be hung, drawn and quartered…’

Tally suddenly realised what Steven’s long silence implied. ‘Oh God, you’re not going to tell me they’re going to get away with it, are you?’

‘I’m afraid that’s the bottom line,’ said Steven. ‘I’m as sick about it as you but the alternatives are just too awful to contemplate.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Tally, her eyes full of accusation.