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  PALINDROME

  Nick Athanasou

  NICK (NIKOS) ATHANASOU was born in Perth. He studied medicine in Sydney and has lived in England since 1980. He is currently Professor of Musculoskeletal Pathology at Oxford University. He has written Hybrids, a collection of short stories, and two novels, The Greek Liar and The Person of the Man, which are published by Brandl & Schlesinger.

  Also by Nick Athanasou

  Hybrids – Stories of Greek-Australia

  The Greek Liar

  The Person of the Man

  Palindrome

  Nick Athanasou

  Brandl & Schlesinger

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  The moral right of Nick Athanasou to be identified as the author of this work is hereby asserted.

  Copyright © Nick Athanasou, 2016

  First published by Brandl & Schlesinger in 2016

  PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 Australia

  www.brandl.com.au

  Cover and book design by Andras Berkes-Brandl

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: (paperback)

  Creator: Athanasou, Nick, 1953- author.

  Title: Palindrome / Nick Athanasou.

  ISBN: 9781921556265 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780994429582 (epdf)

  ISBN: 9780994429599 (epub)

  Subjects: Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

  Detective and mystery stories.

  Suspense fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  Printed by Ligare

  SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS

  (Inscription: Pompeii)

  In memory of Henry Harris

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Madam I’m Adam

  Samant cycled slowly back through the business park the way he had come. He passed a group of workmen walking home and was passed in turn by an ancient bicycle with no lights and a loose black mudguard that rattled over the bumps in the road. The night was cold, black and windless. Through the mist he could see the headlamps of cars on the main road suddenly slowing down to traverse a roundabout before racing off in the direction of Oxford.

  He left the road to recover a dirt track that was flanked on one side by a wire fence and on the other by a thick hedge. When he came to a padlocked gate he suddenly stopped pedalling and stood astride his bicycle, gazing at the prison-like windows of the Nebotec building.

  One of the windows on the ground floor was lit up, and from time to time he could make out a figure moving about the room. The window was partly shielded by vertical slats, half drawn. A tall potted plant on the sill cut out a quarter panel of view but still he could see movement and identify its nature. Nothing special — a woman in a white coat, walking quickly around the room, sitting down then almost immediately getting up again. Her movements looked purposeful, almost angry, as if she were doing something routine but necessary. At one point she stopped and seemed to frown. The frown, he guessed, was one of pure concentration.

  Watching someone secretly, spying on them, even when he or she cannot clearly be seen, stimulates a desire to know more about that person, a wish to remain hidden as long as possible in order to see as much as possible. What Samant saw roused in him strong emotions: shame, excitement, passion — fear too that he be might be discovered either by the person observed or by someone passing who would accuse him of doing something wrong, being a peeping tom.

  He turned off his bicycle light and stood watching the woman in the white coat appear and disappear from view. For a few minutes he did not see her; then, just as he was thinking of resuming his journey, she suddenly reappeared in the office. At the same time a dark figure, that of a tall man, crossed over from the building to what he knew were the Nebotec offices. He concentrated so hard on the figure that he barely registered a pale bicycle light tracking stage left through the mist toward the Nebotec buildings.

  The woman in the white coat began moving about the office again, back and forth, in one direction then another; her movements were jerky and at one point she was almost running. That was how his wife moved when she was cooking several dishes and had to watch them as well as the children. In fact she was probably doing that right now in preparation for his return home from work.

  It was the loud roar of motors, several of them, from a line of lorries being released from the neighbouring refrigeration works that brought him out of his thoughts. His eyes followed the path of the vehicles until they disappeared into the mist.

  He took one last look toward the window that was still lit up. The room was now empty or at least showed no movement. For a few seconds he stood, his head still, his body rigid, as if by this means hoping to induce some activity. But there was none to be seen and he reluctantly remounted his bicycle and continued his journey along the dirt track toward Oxford.

  Adam Gabriel was not one, for want of a better phrase, to blow his own trumpet. There was in his appearance nothing to attract attention. Thin, narrow-shouldered, and shorter than the average height, he was dwarfed in all ways by most of the professorial giants who inhabited the medical faculty at Oxford. In contrast to those boastful behemoths who were driven by an ambition to create large, powerful research empires he had not succeeded, or in truth even attempted, to foster good relations with the research councils or to sweet talk wealthy donors into funding a new building or a large-scale programme of research. His scientific work was well-regarded but he had not sought to profit the University (or himself) by patenting his discoveries or turning them into spin-off companies. On administrative committees he let others do the talking, rarely challenging their determination to control the agenda unless it contained a threat from the University or the National Health Service (his other nominal employer) to cut budget or staff in his department. Then he would make something of a noise — not much but just enough for it to be noted that his voice retained more than a trace of an Australian accent.

  Some forty or so years ago, Gabriel had emerged from his high school in the inner suburbs of Melbourne where, despite a history of hardened truancy, he had obtained a place to study medicine at university. He was just as truant in attending lectures over the six years of his medicine course which he had chosen for no better reason than it was the longest on offer. Good at exams but bad at life, Gabriel liked to study in his own way and in his own time, a large part of which he spent reading novels and plays or watching old black and white films on television; he had in fact an impressive encyclopaedic knowledge of films — mostly between 1930 and 1960, although at a pinch it could be stretched to 1970 — and he could usually identify a film from just a brief glance at a scene, often recalling arcane details about it such as the name of the screenwriter or a supporting actor.

  After graduating, Gabriel worked in one uninspiring medical house job after another before deciding to try his luck in Britain. There too he drifted for a year or so until, one damp July morning, he happened to spot an advertisement for a research studentship in pathology at one of the London teaching hospitals. A week later, after submitting a hand-written letter of application, a rather nervous Gabriel was summoned to a tiny dishevelled room that functioned as an office and tea room for those working in experimental pathology. There he found himself in front of an ad hoc interview committee. He was not introduced to the three men who faced him but he knew who they were. There was Forsyth from the School of Pathology, Byers, the microb
iologist, and Deakin, the professor of biochemistry whom, rumour had it, was being considered for a Nobel prize. This distinguished interview committee then proceeded to explore not only Gabriel’s rather limited knowledge of pathology but also what he considered his equally limited background. At no stage of the interview did the committee look particularly impressed with his answers but, after the questioning abruptly ended, the three men exchanged glances and almost without a word Gabriel was offered a studentship in what Forsyth apologetically described as his “small research team”.

  Gabriel accepted the post on the spot. No one mentioned money because it was generally understood that there was not a lot to talk about.

  The first few months in the laboratory were disappointing as his work went unsupervised and most of his experiments failed. It was not long, however, before Gabriel realised that he had been directed into the solitary pursuit of pathology by those who understood his character better than he did himself; for, just as at school, he appreciated the advantages of working alone, teaching himself laboratory methods and exploring in his own way research ideas. In the end his experiments led to a novel finding, one which appeared insignificant at first but later had Forsyth jumping up and down in excitement when it was pointed out to him by Gabriel that it could be developed into a new technique to diagnose a rare cancer.

  In the late eighties, Forsyth suddenly upped sticks from London and went to Oxford to follow, as he saw it, his destiny and take the chair there. Gabriel in due course followed and also met his own — Pat Stanley, a tutorial Fellow in English. In Oxford he broke away from Forsyth’s influence and focused more and more on tumour biology and pathology, soon gaining a reputation as an outstanding diagnostic opinion.

  As so much of Gabriel’s time was spent looking at tumours and working with cancer cells, it was perhaps inevitable that he should come to look upon the world as more malignant than benign. Tumour cells were for him something of a perverse reflection of the normal, possessing, as they did, the same intracellular machinery as normal cells but using it in a fundamentally selfish way to promote their own survival and propagation. Some cancer cells proliferated with amazing speed, destroying all before them like barbarian hordes. Gabriel’s laboratory research studied the biological causes of this aggressive behaviour; but it was what he could not study in the laboratory — the lack of reasoning behind this process — that most puzzled him. It simply made no sense to him, struck him as just as perverse in fact, that the overgrowth and spread of tumour cells should lead to the death of the patient — and with it the death of every cell in the body including, of course, the tumour cells themselves?

  Such gloomy reflections had an erosive effect on Gabriel’s character if not his career. As the latter developed he became more and more convinced that it was futile to strive for more when life was so determinedly and painfully pointless. He worked long hours and often went home tired. Truth be told, he enjoyed his work, which he regarded as something akin to doing crossword puzzles for a living. He got just as much satisfaction from identifying the diagnostic clues hidden in a microscope slide as in figuring out the cryptic elements of a Four Across or Ten Down; and just like crosswords his work filled in time, which meant that less remained for gloomy thoughts. His previous interests now gave him little pleasure. Though he retained his knowledge of films he no longer watched them. His main activity outside work was in a sense a continuation of it — judging people and analysing them pathologically as he did tumours in order to determine if they were for him benign or malignant.

  When Forsyth died suddenly of apoplexy, Gabriel inherited his chair and with it the administrative duties of the department. This was a new challenge for Gabriel and one that ill-suited his instinct to resolve scientific problems by simplifying rather than complicating them. The University and hospital were now ruled by handsomely remunerated managers (many of them erstwhile clinical colleagues) who wore grey suits, shiny ties and had a knighthood to boot. They were forever demanding more accountability and greater efficiency of staff and departments. The old pragmatic approach of a handful of highly qualified, underpaid men had given way to the bureaucracy and intrigue of a bloated corporation. Gone forever were the days of Forsyth when you could easily and quickly sort out problems. Now, before anything could be decided, you had to attend wearisome meetings with uncompromising managers. All Gabriel’s knowledge and experience counted for nothing in this new age which pursued goals that he (and they) knew were contradictory: cutting costs whilst increasing services. Gabriel did his best to protect the funding and staffing of his department, but too often he found himself in the position of a normal cell in the face of a rapidly growing tumour.

  Against this, Gabriel still enjoyed his clinical work and the esprit de corps of staff in his department who were loyal to him as they could see he worked long hours and performed something of a miracle in keeping the show on the road. All of which goes some way to explaining why, returning from a research meeting in Madrid, Gabriel had come straight from the airport back to the Pathology Department and was now looking down a double-headed microscope at the request of a junior registrar in need of an urgent tumour diagnosis.

  “So what do you think the diagnosis is?” Adam Gabriel asked, leaning back from the microscope.

  “I’m not sure,” the registrar answered, her eyes still glued to the eyepieces. She focused the microscope lens on the slide containing a tiny C-shaped piece of tissue not much larger than a pin head. “The cells have very big nuclei and there is a lot of proliferation. It looks like it’s a rapidly growing tumour.”

  “I agree it doesn’t look very nice and I suppose we’re both glad not to have such a tumour in one of our bones but do you think it’s malignant or not.”

  “I’m really not sure,” answered the registrar, Melanie Stokes. “That’s why I’m showing it to you, Prof.” Her face wore a smile that apologised for her ignorance.

  “How old is the patient?” Gabriel asked.

  “He’s—” Melanie searched for the Pathology request card and read out, “sorry, it’s a she. The date of birth is...” She did a rapid calculation in her head and said, “She’s about fifteen.”

  “What’s the X-ray show? Have you seen it?”

  She hesitated before answering, “Not yet. It’s not on a CD but on old style X-ray films. The case is from Turkey.”

  “The radiology is important because it tells you where the tumour is in the bone, how big it is, whether it looks invasive or not. You need all that information to make the diagnosis.”

  Melanie Stokes looked contrite and Gabriel gave her a forgiving smile. She looked very self-contained behind her thick black-rimmed glasses. She had worked in pathology for only a year but already had a good idea of what to look for down the microscope. She may not have been certain of the significance of everything she observed but that would come with time. Bone tumours were rare. Melanie would see very few cases if she became a general pathologist like most of the trainees who passed through Gabriel’s department. Still, she needed to know what to do when she would encounter such a case in the future.

  “Pathology is a bit like spotting who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in a western,” Gabriel added. “The trouble is malignant tumour cells don’t always look like baddies and wear black hats; they can be white — or grey for that matter. And benign cells can look like baddies.”

  From the look on Melanie’s face Gabriel was aware that his analogy was lost on her. “I’ll bet London to a brick, Melanie, that you’ve seen very few westerns, at least of the type I grew up with.” He smiled before adding, “You may finish your rotation through this department not knowing much about bone tumours but you should at least end up knowing something about westerns.”

  Melanie was not sure whether this was the moment to admit to Gabriel her utter lack of interest in westerns and her belief that not even a lengthy rotation in Gabriel’s department would heighten their appeal.

  She dodged the issue b
y remarking, “By the way, the surgeon wants this result urgently. I couldn’t find Tom Duncan or Dr Reynolds when the slides came through last night. I mentioned the case to Tom this morning but he said it would be best to wait and show it to you today as you’d be sure to be in.”

  Rousing himself, Gabriel leaned forward. “Back to business then.” He refocused the slide under the microscope and, after viewing it for a few seconds, said, “Well, it’s a small biopsy but it does suggest a number of diagnostic possibilities. We really need to have a look at the radiology before we can say for certain what this is. Tell me, do you have any idea at this stage what sort of tumour it might be?”

  There was an awkward pause before Melanie was able to summon a response. “It’s got some areas of cartilage and a funny pink matrix around some cells which are rather large and look malignant. It could be an osteosarcoma.”

  “I entirely agree about the cells,” said Gabriel, “but I’m not so sure they’re malignant. The patient is the right age for osteosarcoma. And you’re right, there is some cartilage there, but that doesn’t rule out—” Gabriel stopped himself before declaring aloud what he suspected the diagnosis to be. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper, before continuing,”— other possibilities.”

  He sat back from the microscope and saw that Melanie Stokes was hanging on his every word. A fresh weight of responsibility descended upon him. “The X-rays will be very useful in this case. Why don’t you go down to the ward and bring them back here so we can look at them together?”

  As Gabriel walked back to his office he reflected on the case which he had just been shown. It was most likely a benign tumour; it would cause problems and need surgical treatment — its mere presence in the bone weakened it — but it would not grow quickly and spread to other parts of the body; it did not have the potential to kill the patient, like an osteosarcoma. In a way the patient had been lucky for the cells that made up the tumour had stopped just short of transforming into full-blown malignant cells.