Palindrome Read online

  Gabriel nodded. He waited for Tina Simms to take a sip of her coffee before asking, “What’s Taylor like to work with?”

  “He’s a little pernickety. He’s a clone of Palmer. Keen to get things done. Very ambitious. Wants the results yesterday before the specimens have even been processed. I can’t for the life of me think what Anna saw in him.”

  Gabriel enjoyed the secret, gossipy tone of Tina’s chatter. He listened with courteous interest to her almost literal retelling of an irrelevant conversation she recalled between Anna and her husband then digested with absolute patience a long parenthesis on the subject of the amount of work that went through the lab.

  “It strikes me that Anna can’t exactly have hit it off with Hewitt’s wife,” Gabriel remarked when she had finished.

  “She didn’t. Frances hated Anna. She was insanely jealous of any woman that worked with her husband. Anna got on with Hewitt but I don’t think that there was anything between them. Of course, Frances didn’t see it that way. She was horrid to Anna, always sneering at her in a nasty way. She didn’t like who she was, where she came from. Racist it was. She once said to me that she didn’t know whether to wash something after Anna had handled it. She hated blacks. Anna just ignored her. That’s what really upset Frances.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Frances likes people to take her on so that she can attack them in her own way. But Anna saw through her game. She didn’t take the bait.” Tina took another sip of her coffee. Her slim hands were wrapped around the china cup as if it were a mug. “Anna liked helping people. She helped out Vishant’s family. That was how she got into real trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Hasn’t anyone told you? About the frightful row Frances had with her husband?”

  “No.”

  “Let me tell you,” she said in a subdued voice. “It’s a good story. It seems that Anna had borrowed Hewitt’s car — he’s got a Mercedes estate car — to help Vishant move something large — parts of a greenhouse he’d bought. It didn’t fit into his Nissan. Frances had come to the lab to see Hewitt but when she wanted to leave her car wouldn’t start so she asked to borrow his. Well, all hell broke loose when Hewitt told her that Anna had borrowed it and was using it to help Vishant. She accused him of all sorts of things. Said that he didn’t have to insult her by helping out one of his girlfriends.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “A couple of months ago.”

  “And you don’t think there was anything between Anna and Hewitt?”

  “No, Anna was ambitious to get on but I don’t think she would have stooped to conquer.” She let out a childish laugh. “She always said that the quickest way out of this place for all of us was to win the lottery. We played it twice a week, the three of us — Vishie, Anna and me. We had a little syndicate. We won a hundred quid once but we’ve spent more than that over the time we’ve been playing it.”

  “Who buys the tickets?” Gabriel asked.

  “Vishie. He gets them from a newsagent’s on the estate. It’s a bit out of the way for me. Not on my route to the bus stop. He gets them every Tuesday and Friday.”

  “So he must have got them the day Anna was killed?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you checked the results of that draw?”

  She nodded. “We didn’t win — as usual.”

  “Anna must have got on pretty well with Vishant Samant to give him all that help.”

  “I think it was because he was Indian, like her. She was always doing little favours for him and his wife. She helped him to get his job at Nebotec. He doesn’t have permanent residence in the UK so he needs to have a job to stay in the country.”

  “Apparently she was sponsoring his application for British citizenship?”

  “I know. She said to me after she went to his house that the family needed all the help it could get.”

  Gabriel looked Tina Simms straight in the eye as he continued to probe gently. “What about the work Anna was doing at Nebotec?”

  “She had her concerns about some of the experiments they were doing. She didn’t like the animal experiments. Thought they were cruel. Poor little things running around with grafted tumours — like caravans — on their backs. She used to say that she wasn’t sure it was all worth it, what we did to the animals. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t hold back questioning some of the results.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of course, Vishie and me, we’re just lab technician. We don’t go to the weekly research meetings. We don’t know the details. But she told us after one of them that she’d had a row with Palmer because she thought that the drug — this PLF — damaged normal tissues. Palmer said it hadn’t been seen before. But Anna thought that was because they had never really looked. Anyway they did more experiments...”

  “Yes, I’m looking at them.”

  “And?”

  Gabriel smiled and said, “I haven’t finished yet. There are a lot of slides to go through. I’ve still got to check a few things.”

  “Worse than Anna, you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anna was very careful. She spent hours looking down the microscope. She really worked hard in the lab. All those late nights. Checking results.” She looked sharply at Gabriel, who was smiling benignly but listening intently to what she was saying. “She didn’t mind rolling her sleeves up and working hard.”

  Gabriel nodded before he spoke. “I see. Incidentally, you haven’t mentioned that incident about Hewitt’s car to anyone else, have you?”

  Tina looked at him and shook her head.

  There was a general movement of gowned Fellows out of the Common Room.

  “It looks as if the GBM is about to start,” Gabriel said. “I’ll walk with you back to the lodge as I have to get a gown from my room.”

  As they made their way back round the quad, Tina said it was very nice in the colleges; that she had lived in Oxford all her life but had been in very few of them. “Harry’s probably going to leave Nebotec,” she said, suddenly confidential. “He’s looking to go back and do a D.Phil at Oxford. I’ll probably stay at Nebotec as one of us will have to pay the mortgage.”

  “Perhaps I can help him. I can make some inquiries.”

  Gabriel gave her his card.

  At the gates of the college she thanked him effusively for the lift, the coffee and the card. “Well, goodbye. I hope you got your coffee’s worth out of me.”

  “I think so,” said Gabriel in farewell before she disappeared into the Oxford throng.

  A gaggle of students, very young-looking, swept past him, laughing and shouting. Their youth and energy vaguely unsettled Gabriel who stood for a moment watching them. As a student he had never been so hopeful or happy, so careless of the future. Looking back, he had been a budding morbid anatomist, all right.

  Chapter 9

  Stop Rose I prefer pies or pots

  An energy saving fluorescent light lit up the white walls of Gabriel’s office and the bench behind which Gabriel sat, peering down a microscope.

  Grant and Brook stood either side of him, watching him go through the twenty or so slides in a tray beside him. Gabriel’s movements were brisk and confident as he assimilated a large amount of information quickly, seemingly without effort.

  “The slides all looked normal as far as I could tell,” said Grant stiffly.

  Brook stood next to Grant, shifting his weight from one leg to the other; there was only one chair in the room and neither he nor Grant felt like taking it.

  “I agree,” said Gabriel. “They’re no different from the ones that Liz and I looked at.”

  “Is that what you would have expected?” asked Brook.

  “To be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect. From Anna’s lab diary, these are supposed to be slides of the tissues taken from the last set of experiments where the animals were given the drug or the placebo in their feed. She’d already looked at
similar experiments before.” Gabriel picked up the slide on which the code number was clearly printed in black ink at one end of the slide and checked it against the number in the lab book. “Yes, that’s right. The numbers match. Whose prints were on these slides?”

  Brook looked towards Grant. “Should we tell him?”

  “Why not? It can’t do any harm.”

  “Tell me what?” asked Gabriel. “Were none of Anna’s prints found on the slides?”

  “They were present on the slide found under the microscope and one or two of the others but not on all of them,” Brook answered. “But there’s something a little unusual about her prints.”

  “I bet I can guess what that is,” said Gabriel.

  “Well?”

  “The prints are in odd positions on the slide. Not where you would expect them to be if you naturally picked up a slide.”

  “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  “It would go with the position of the stage on the microscope. That always suggested to me that someone had moved it forward to change the slide on the stage. I suppose the murderer was in something of a hurry and just pressed Anna’s thumb and a finger anywhere on the slides.”

  “You know, Adam, you really missed your vocation,” said Grant. “You and Brook here should try trading places for the day. It might accelerate the solving of this case.”

  “I couldn’t do what he does for the same reason I couldn’t do what you do,” Gabriel answered.

  “Which is?”

  “Too messy.”

  “And this from a man who cuts up tumours for a living.”

  Brook cut in to restore order. “I’m not sure it’s that clear cut. The slide under the microscope was covered with blood, which is what you would have expected. And the slides in the tray next to it had a few traces of blood on them; that’s consistent with an aerosol effect after the murder given that so much blood was spilt.”

  “It’s possible that only one or two of the slides Anna was looking at were changed,” Gabriel observed.

  “You can’t say that for certain without doing more forensic tests,” Grant responded. “But that’s one possible interpretation.”

  “But if they were changed, the question is by whom,” Brook said.

  From somewhere in the hospital, the siren of an ambulance suddenly made itself heard; it seemed to approach and then fade as it passed down the hill in the direction of Oxford.

  “Matt Taylor and Tina Simms told me that Anna had noticed something unusual in the slides from the first batch of mice,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes, they told me that too,” said Brook.

  “Did Hewitt and Palmer have anything to say about that?”

  “Hewitt didn’t seem to know anything about it and Palmer just dismissed it as one of those things. He said it wasn’t a problem. Matt Taylor seemed to agree with him.”

  “Hewitt said that any hold up in getting FDA approval of the drug would have a major impact on Nebotec’s survival prospects,” said Gabriel.

  “FDA?” Brook asked.

  “Food and Drugs Administration,” Gabriel explained. “They’re a US body that assesses the experimental evidence of any new drug product. Their approval is required before any drug can go into clinical trials. Hewitt said that Nebotec had a lot of their investment riding on the success of PLF.”

  “PLF?” Grant piped up. “It sounds like the old Palestine Liberation Front.”

  “I hate acronyms as much as you do, Nick — they exclude people — but that’s what they call this anti-palindrome drug they’ve developed.” He spoke querulously. “It’s short for Palindrome Limiting Factor.”

  There was an awkward silence during which it seemed as if Grant and Brook momentarily lost interest in the case. For a few seconds Gabriel had the rattled look of a host who has lost control of his guests.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked, looking from Brook to Grant then back at Brook.

  Brook shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve thrown a net over the period between 5.00 and 6.00 PM on the day Anna Taylor was murdered and tried to account for everyone’s movements as best I can.”

  Gabriel and Grant looked at him expectantly. There was a perceptible pause before Brook responded. He seemed reluctant to divulge more information than he had to and it was only when Grant finally said in exasperation, “And...?” that he spoke again.

  “At about 5.00, according to the telephone records, Anna Taylor telephoned the laboratory and spoke for about two minutes with Matt Taylor. He was a bit vague as to the time of the call and its length, but, as far as he could remember, they spoke only of the time he should pass by the laboratory to collect her after his meeting with Hewitt. We’ve inquired into the couple’s habits and found that the two normally left Nebotec together at around 6.00 PM, although occasionally, according to some of the laboratory staff, they sometimes both worked till quite late.

  “If the murder was planned then the murderer would have known that Anna often worked after 5.00,” said Gabriel. “It’s hardly likely that he would have based his plans on the off chance that he would find Anna still at work after that time.”

  “I agree. We’ve interviewed the staff and it seems most of them left the premises before 5.00 PM. Tina Simms was the last to leave. When she left a little before 5.00 to catch the 5.10 bus to Oxford, she saw a light on in Anna Taylor’s office. So it’s fairly clear that the murder was committed some time between 5.00 and 6.00 PM.

  “The security officer has told us that no unauthorised visitor entered the Nebotec site between 4 00 and 5.00, and none of the secretarial staff or employees in the animal house and labs, who clock off before 5.00, saw or heard anything suspicious that evening.”

  “What about the movements of those who might have had an interest in changing the slides that Anna was looking at?” Grant asked.

  “Palmer drove back to his college from Nebotec and was seen leaving the college at 4.00 PM by the staff in the lodge. He’s got an endorsed ticket for the 4.30 airport bus from the Gloucester Green bus station and he certainly caught a 7.30 PM flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh. So he’s out.”

  “What about Hewitt?” Gabriel asked.

  “Hewitt says that he was in his office at Nebotec all the time between 5.00 PM and 6.00 PM. The staff in his section left before 5.00. He says he tried to ring his wife just after 5.00 to let her know that he intended to work late. She wasn’t there and he rang again about twenty minutes later; this time he spoke to her and told her that she should have dinner without him. He worked alone in his office until Taylor came at 5.30 to give him the results he wanted to incorporate into a report that he was putting together to present to a group of investors in the US — he’s a bit miffed that he hasn’t been allowed to leave the country to do so.”

  “Does the wife confirm all these details?” asked Grant.

  “More or less. Although there is one thing...”

  “What?”

  “Hewitt seems to have telephoned his wife on his mobile phone after he contacted the police. He says it was because he knew that what had happened would clearly delay him and that he just wanted to let her know he’d be home later than expected.”

  “So he could have done it. He could have fixed his story with her on the phone before the police spoke to her,” said Grant. It was the quickness as much as the content of his speech which gave people the impression that he did not take whatever he said seriously.

  “Even so,” Gabriel commented, “it still leaves him quite a lot to do in the very short time he had before and after seeing Taylor — murdering Anna, changing the slides, getting rid of the murder weapon and whatever blood-stained clothing he must have worn.”

  “That’s the same problem we have with Matt Taylor,” said Brook. “He had time enough to commit the murder, and possibly even time enough to drop her purse on the cycle track outside Nebotec; but it’s difficult to see how he could have done all that and got rid of the murder weapon, the boot
s and gloves he must have worn in the time available. Unless of course he had help...”

  “You could say the same for Hewitt,” said Gabriel. “The wife may have been of assistance there.”

  “Right,” said Brook.

  “We’re assuming, of course, that the slides were changed,” Gabriel said, leafing through Anna’s laboratory diary, an A4-sized notebook.

  “I thought that’s what you suspected,” said Grant.

  “And I still do. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it? To change one set of normal slides for another.” He held up the notebook. “I’m glad you brought along Anna’s lab diary. She was always a stickler for detail in recording her results. She’s got down here exactly which slides she looked at before in similar experiments and what she found in them. And according to her records she noticed nothing abnormal when she looked at those slides. They’re as normal as the ones I’ve just looked at.” He flicked over a few pages. “As far as I can tell, the results are the same. I can’t see the point of anyone changing the slides if that was the case.”

  Gabriel leafed through a few more pages of Anna’s laboratory diary. He felt that somewhere in it was the real reason for her murder and that he had missed it.

  “You’re right,” said Brook. “We’ve got very few definite facts there. We suspect that the slides were changed but we can’t prove it. And I should tell you...”

  They both looked up at him.

  “We’ve not eliminated the possibility of someone outside Nebotec committing the crime.”

  Gabriel looked at Grant but was silent.

  When he reached home that evening Adam Gabriel found Pat hunched in an armchair she had pulled toward the inglenook. She was curled up like a cat before the fire, her legs drawn up beneath her body. She nursed a glass of white wine on her thigh.

  “You’re late,” she said hoarsely. “This is my second glass.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked at his wife with pleasure and surprise, both more than usual after a hard day at work.