Palindrome Page 17

  What had Pat said about blood tragedies? That the murders are committed for profit or sex. Profit? Well, they all at Nebotec stood to lose if Anna had spotted something untoward in the slides. And sex? Of course, that meant passion and not gender. Anna had been an attractive girl who turned more than a few male heads. Hewitt had marked himself out as one who had been attracted to Anna. Taylor may not have liked that. And what about Samant? Like unto like? A secret passion? And then there was Frances Hewitt? She had a malicious streak in her. She had disliked Anna — that was obvious enough — but would she have gone so far as to murder her for flirting with her husband? Would she have helped him if he had got into trouble with Anna?

  It was a cloistered world at Nebotec, as much as at any Oxford college in fact. The difference was that it was more profit- than knowledge-driven. (Just like the modern NHS, Gabriel thought and almost uttered aloud). Everyone at Nebotec shared the same life, spoke the same language, had the same hopes, focused on the same goal — profit. And unless PLF succeeded there was no profit.

  Brook was more right than he had given him credit for when he had said that it was important to know what went on at Nebotec. You need to have worked in the laboratory, to have focused solely on the PLF project to understand what it meant to the people there. Not just for a week or so as he had, checking Anna’s results, but for months and years. It would have dominated the lives of everyone there. You had to be at the meetings where they discussed science, not science in general but the science of their product. You had to see the greed in their eyes. You had to hear it and see it to be part of it. Only then could you know how they carried out their science and get a feel for how secure the results were.

  Their world threw up unnatural, pharisaical relationships. Some were plain enough: the curious bond which tied Palmer and Taylor together. Palmer used Taylor as Watson and Crick must have used one of their laboratory assistants. And as for Liz, she clearly saw herself in the role of Rosalind Franklin, the ill-tempered biophysicist who believed that not only was she the true discoverer of DNA but also the one who had unjustly missed out on all the fame of Watson and Crick.

  Was there any connection between the lottery ticket purchase and Anna’s death? Gabriel reproached himself for being carried away by this one fact. Seen in perspective, there was nothing but the sequence of events to link Samant with Anna’s murder: the sequence of events and Gabriel’s intuition, experience, extra sense — call it what you will — that made him think this fact must have some diagnostic significance.

  Why had Samant lied to him about cycling straight home after work? He had told the truth to Brook and must have recognised that what he had told Gabriel was false. Had it been a slip of the tongue? Had he got the day wrong? No, there was nothing in his alert face to support a claim to absent-mindedness. Samant interested Gabriel. He was an anomaly, something abnormal, and being a pathologist, he was attracted to the abnormal: it provided the clue to diagnosis. There was Anna’s initial support and then (according to Taylor) definite cooling in her liking for Samant from the day she had helped him and visited his home. Had Samant counted on her to help him and his family remain in Britain, and when he had seen a cooling of her attitude toward him then courted the support of Hewitt and Palmer?

  Anna had always struck Gabriel as highly principled, highly determined, someone who would not easily abandon what she strongly believed. There was a lot of her father in her. Yet at Nebotec she had found herself in a world of people who distinctly lacked principles.

  Anna was complex. However much she had wanted to escape her Indian roots she could not resist being drawn back to them. Getting pregnant at medical school must have shamed her in the eyes of her family. It also must have upset that strongly envisioned future Gabriel believed Anna had mapped out for herself from an early age. She had suddenly found herself not sure what sort of man she was going to marry, how many children she was going to have. He needed to keep an open mind on Tom Duncan’s role in her life at that time and now — possibly, her death. Had not Melanie said that she could not find him when the urgent bone tumour biopsy had come through the night Anna was murdered?

  In Gabriel’s diagnostic work an observation, once verified as certain, had to be accepted; it could not just be dismissed. This was the basis of his diagnostic method. And so, in the same way Gabriel considered whether the presence of an atypical cell might indicate that a tumour was malignant, he assessed the following proposition: “Assuming that the murder of Anna and Samant’s purchase of the lottery ticket are related, what was the point of Samant lying to him about cycling home directly?”

  Gabriel remembered so well his visit to the Samant house. It had been strange because of the setting, one of neglect and poverty amongst which there was a shiny new television. Samant had pointed it out to Gabriel and was obviously proud of it. Had the new television been purchased before the murder? If so, where had the money come from? And his hopes for the future? A new house. There was another thing too about that visit — the anxious look that Samant’s wife had given him and his own conviction that Samant had been holding back some important detail about the slides he had prepared for Anna.

  Gabriel did not see how Samant could profit directly from murdering Anna. Of course, that did not eliminate the possibility that he had been a party to it in some way. If he had cycled past Nebotec on his way home from the newsagent’s it was not beyond the realms of possibility that he had seen something. Or perhaps someone: someone he recognised but did not wish to identify because withholding this vital piece of information about Anna’s murder gave him a hold over whoever that was. He instantly thought of Hewitt and Taylor.

  But in what way was Anna dangerous to them?

  His eyes suddenly opened very wide. Of course — in one way, in one way only — as a pathologist who has made the correct diagnosis, who has realised that there had been a deliberate attempt to manipulate the data. Whoever had murdered Anna must have realised that her request for the experiment to be repeated and her insistence on personally sampling the tissues of the PLF-treated mice, would lead to her discovering that there was something wrong with the results. That brought him back to the letter. It was likely that whoever killed Anna was anxious that she should not talk to him; after all, he was in the same game as her and knew the implications of the deceit that was being manipulated.

  It made some sense, but not much. It put Vishant Samant, his lies, his complicity, his wife’s fear, at the centre of the whole business. There was a lot that was still unexplained. What about Hewitt’s car and his phone call to his wife? What about Anna’s missing belongings? Who could Samant have seen? Was it the murderer?

  Nothing was certain. He had constructed a long chain of possibilities but the links were insubstantial; they did not bear the weight of scrutiny. The diagnosis was still open. In pathology it is not enough just to diagnose whether the tissue contains a tumour or not: it is necessary to define what type of tumour it is, to identify the nature of the cell that has undergone neoplastic change — the cell wot dunnit.

  Gabriel got up and stood a long time at the window. The rain had stopped. Sharp-edged beams of car headlamps criss-crossed the hospital car park. The wet tarmac of the road looked shiny.

  He had little inclination or energy to sit down and continue his diagnostic work. In the end he managed to do so — there were urgent biopsies to report and there was no getting away from them. He had to find answers to the problem they posed and, as in the case of Anna Taylor, they were not easy or straightforward to figure out.

  Chapter 13

  No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention

  The next day for Gabriel began with a lecture to the medical students. He arrived in the lecture hall just before it was due to begin and loaded up his talk on the computer. The whole process was easier now than in the old days when he had used a slide projector to deliver his lecture. Still, he regretted the passing of old technology. Too bad that in the old days the projector
had sometimes jammed and cooked his slides. At least then the cause — the failure of a mechanical link — had been obvious. It really bothered Gabriel that his Meccano-age brain did not have the foggiest idea how a computer worked.

  Gabriel did not give many lectures these days and his delivery was not as fluent as it used to be. Fortunately he knew his subject well and the format (and content) of his lectures had changed little over the years. He had long ago concluded that lecturing was little different from acting and that it was important to remember your lines and to deliver them confidently. This was something he still managed to do, stringing out the familiar phrases in succession from memory, almost without thought. He was aware that he possessed very little of that native talent which made an exceptional lecturer. He was more repertory than West End; he knew his limitations and, as a teacher, restricted his aim to getting across clearly the essential facts of his subject.

  Gabriel himself had been a very ordinary student, obtaining little more than an undistinguished pass in most subjects. He could not recall any of his lecturers and suspected that for his students this would be his fate. Of course, medical students these days scored their teachers as much as their teachers did them. And Gabriel often scored badly as he had a tendency to wander off his main theme and dwell on facts which interested him more than the students. Much of what he said went beyond the syllabus; in fact, when lecturing about a disease mechanism that was little understood, he appeared to be trying to figure it out on the hoof, from first principles, right in front of the students.

  Most medical students liked the syllabus to be followed rigorously; they demanded printed handouts which contained the key facts of the lecture and (as if pathology was a simple business!) complained when these were too many. But Gabriel was fascinated more by the questions than the answers that appeared in pathology textbooks. As far as he was concerned it was just too bad that students, who had spent good money on those textbooks (and had student loans to repay), wanted simple reproducible answers for their exams.

  Sometimes, like an actor, Gabriel could sense that he was dying before his audience; that the students were impatient with his approach, or worse, considered him a poor teacher. And so, now and then, he cracked a joke that made them suddenly laugh. Gabriel was always shocked by their response and perhaps the tiniest fraction disappointed that he had to resort to this measure of making this audience of sinners, whom God had appointed him to instruct, fall to laughing in His temple.

  He planned to take the morning easy after his lecture but he could not stop the work coming in and had to deal with two frozen sections on cases undergoing surgery; these were urgent diagnostic opinions requested in the course of an operation, the surgeon modifying his procedure according to Gabriel’s verdict on the pathology.

  Gabriel requested some further investigations on one of these cases from Bill Chambers, the chief laboratory technician, who had lingered after delivering the frozen sections to him. He apologised for the quality of the sections which he said was due to the fact that they had been cut with a microtome knife that had not been sharpened for some time.

  Bill Chambers combined a family retainer’s butler-like service to the department with a union man’s strictly enforced — so far but no further — interpretation of NHS employee duties and rights; he had a distinct Brummie accent and his talk, filled as much with opinion as information, always struck Gabriel as that of a man ever ready to call out the staff on strike — Fred Kite in I’m Alright Jack. His complaints, though frequent, were less about working conditions than standards: he took pride in the fact that he ran an efficient, first-rate laboratory and was always concerned with any drop in the quality of the work it produced.

  “Couldn’t you have borrowed a sharp one from the research department?” asked Gabriel.

  “I suppose I could have but I couldn’t see any point in doing that?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m fairly certain that it was one of Palmer’s researchers who’d made off with our microtome knife in the first place. I can’t prove it though. Quite a few things have gone missing from the lab over the past few months. His students come down in the evenings or on weekends when no one’s here, and they “borrow” things. They use the processing equipment too — it’s better than what they’ve got up in their lab.”

  “You don’t know for certain who may have taken it?”

  “No.”

  Bill Chambers was a straight NHS man. He disliked the University research department which, because it had nothing to do with patient care, he regarded as somehow leech-like on the public purse. Gabriel and Liz Reynolds who divided their time between research and NHS work were tolerated as they still did some useful clinical work and were not just “research rubbish”. Bill came to work even earlier than Gabriel and in the course of his work had to deal with staff at all levels in the hospital. As a consequence he knew everything that went on there. When, for instance, the previous Medical Director had been forced to resign, he was the first to know who was in the frame to be his successor. He had known that Poole was the favoured candidate, explaining that so and so was likely to refuse the post judging from rumours he had overheard in the Trust offices, the wards, the operating theatres...

  “You’ve done everything but draw a picture of Palmer.” Gabriel sniffed. “You’ve been fighting turf wars with his group for years.”

  “I’m not saying it is someone in his group this time. Well, I am but I’m not...”

  “Then, what are you saying?”

  “Just that it started happening after that bloke who runs Palmer’s lab at Nebotec—”

  “Taylor?”

  “That’s right. He wanted to pull some tumours from our files and stain them with an antibody. He said that Dr Reynolds was working with him to see if it reacted with human tumours. I said that’d be fine but the lab would have to make a charge for doing the work that was required.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Taylor said that the company would cover any costs. But then he didn’t come back to me.”

  “And the microtome knife went missing after that?”

  Chambers nodded. “I can’t say for certain that it was definitely taken by Taylor. Tom Duncan was doing some work he said was for Nebotec at the same time. The thing is Palmer’s lot are always down here making a nuisance of themselves, asking for favours. One way traffic it is: they borrow our glassware, knives, chemicals or whatever and forget to return them so you have to go upstairs to fetch them yourself. And then they’re all — you know — “Sorry, we forgot... ” But a fat lot of good that is when you need something for a job and it’s not there. I couldn’t find my umbrella a couple of weeks ago when it was pouring outside. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of Palmer’s lot had pinched that as well.”

  “I’ll have a word with Palmer and Dr Reynolds,” Gabriel said.

  “What I don’t understand is why Palmer and his cronies need our stuff when they have their own pathology set up at Nebotec. I’m not sure whether they’re trying to save a few bob by doing the work here or whether they’re just plain lazy.”

  “Possibly both,” Gabriel offered, not very convincingly.

  Chambers continued his rant. He liked arranging his thoughts aloud. The resultant monologue demanded practically nothing of Gabriel but an occasional nod. From the denigration of Palmer he moved on to criticism of the management review, then to the government, and finally (unaccountably) to the state of the weather: it had rained so hard that the roads near his village had become flooded, causing him to be late for work yesterday. To a man like Chambers, who liked to run himself as efficiently as he did his lab, this was an event worth noting and, as it were, reporting to the vicar.

  Gabriel said that it was quite bad too out in his direction. He tried to strike the right sympathetic note but feared his response was inadequate. Fortunately, at this point, Jane brought in some letters for him to sign. Bill Chambers recognised her as one of his NHS tribe
and shared with her his last complaint, winning in response from her a reciprocal one on how difficult all the endless rain made it for her to look after her horses, something she did every morning before she came to work

  Gabriel sat down, signed the letters and waited for them both to leave. They continued talking oblivious of him. For a moment he saw them as strangers, not as people he worked with but as outsiders who made work for him. Seeing the two of them together, he wondered whether they would both come through the management re-banding exercise unscathed. They were probably senior enough to survive but there were those under them who would not.

  He took a sip of his coffee. It had gone cold.

  The NHS lift rose very slowly, carrying Gabriel to the pathology research laboratories on the top floor. When the lift juddered to a halt at the ground floor, a recorded female voice redundantly announced, “Doors opening.” A wide-mouthed porter managed to wheel in his trolley before the recorded voice announced, “Doors closing.” On the trolley was an elderly woman with white hair and glasses. She was being accompanied back to the ward from the radiology department by a nurse cradling a set of notes. The presence of neither the patient nor Gabriel inhibited the porter from trying to chat her up.

  “What time do you knock off this evening?” he asked jauntily.

  “I’m on the late shift,” the nurse answered minimally.

  “So am I. They work us hard, don’t they. No time for fun...”

  His efforts were to no avail, at least up to the fourth floor. When the lift doors announced their opening and parted with a clunk, the nurse and the porter exited, turning the trolley in the direction of Ward 4B.