Palindrome Page 3

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just that it doesn’t leave much margin for error.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If things don’t go to plan then it leaves you with a problem.”

  “And did she have a problem?”

  “I don’t know. She made up her mind very quickly about things and was very stubborn in her own way. Fortunately, in her work she was more often right than wrong. That’s what made her such a good pathologist. I wanted to promote her because she was good.”

  “I always thought she was very sweet.”

  “I’m not saying that she wasn’t. You know, her accent always used to throw me. It was quite posh-sounding and just about the last thing you would have expected to hear coming out of an Indian girl from west London.”

  “Perhaps you should have concentrated more on what she was saying rather than the way she said it.”

  Gabriel nodded. “She told me that she was dead keen to stay in the department — which may or may not have been true — but she didn’t tell me that she was looking at other possibilities. Didn’t say anything while I was running around, trying to find the money to fix up a lecturer position for her. She was probably plotting to leave all along and just playing the University against Nebotec, trying to secure the best deal for herself. If so, she gave me no clue that was what she was up to.” Gabriel paused before joking feebly, as if to break the tension of their talk. “These pretty young things, like you, my dear, they make you feel like a rooster one day and a feather duster the next.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  “Just as it did with Anna, I suppose. I never expected to hear from her again.”

  “She contacted you? You spoke to her?”

  “Yes and no. She left a message with my secretary last week but I didn’t get to speak to her as I was abroad. She telephoned Liz about the Clinical Tutor post we’ve advertised. Told her that she wanted to apply for it but that she needed to speak with me first to make sure I had no hard feelings about her having left.”

  “I wonder why she was so keen to get back into academia?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Who knows? Palmer’s ideas are fashionable at the moment but I’ve not always been convinced about them. He gets very touchy when you question him too closely. He puts up a good front though and biotech companies tend to focus their research on ideas they think may prove profitable.”

  “You don’t think that would have suited Anna?”

  “I know it wouldn’t have suited me,” Gabriel answered immediately. “I really don’t know what the reason was for her interest in the lecturer job,” he added, recalling what Liz Reynolds had mentioned about Anna wanting to make a fresh start.

  He did not continue his thought and for a time Pat took charge of the conversation. She made an effort to lighten their talk, bringing up subjects —acquaintances, work, shopping — that on the face of it were superficial but in fact constituted shared experiences, affirmations of their relationship. At one point she spoke of the difficulties she found teaching her second year English students one of the allotted drama texts, The Witch of Edmonton.

  “That’s one of the blood tragedies, isn’t it?” Gabriel asked. “Is it Tourneur or Webster?”

  “Neither. It’s Dekker. Although Ford and others are thought to have had a hand in it.”

  Gabriel would have liked to continue talking literature — he read as much of it as he did science — but, by a process of thought he did not follow, Pat began to talk of a family wedding taking place next month in London and the arrangements they would have to make to attend it. “The trains run at such odd times. I suppose we’ll have to drive to Oxford then get the bus.”

  Pat leaned over to put down her empty mug. In the subdued light which darkened her normally pale eyes, she looked to him suddenly very pretty. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her warmly.

  She was pleased and tried conscientiously not to show it. “You smell offensively of garlic, Adam.”

  “Your breath by the way is not much better,” he answered. “Anyway, I am what I am.”

  “I wouldn’t boast about it if I were you,” Pat said as she got up suddenly and went over to a bureau in the room. She extracted a few envelopes and handed them to him.

  “There were some letters for you while you were away. Mostly junk mail, I expect.”

  But Gabriel was already tearing open one that was not junk mail. His name and address was hand-written on the envelope in large, unambiguous letters. Men didn’t write like that. It was a female hand.

  Sorry to bother you prof but I tried to contact you yesterday and was told you were abroad. For a number of reasons things haven’t worked out for me here at Nebotec and I’d like to get back into academic pathology. So, don’t be too surprised if you hear from me in the next few days.

  I hope you don’t mind me contacting you like this.

  Best wishes.

  Anna.

  The letter was dated Friday, last week, and was written on Nebotec headed paper. It did not mention having contacted Liz Reynolds. Letters, even those that were first-class, generally took a few days to get to Boarstall from anywhere in the country.

  Pat looked at her husband’s expression change from one of anxious curiosity to real concern. In a way her expression, as it so often did, mirrored his own, and it remained unchanged when, clearly baffled, he suddenly spoke aloud:

  “But why on earth did she write to me at home?”

  The next day Gabriel spoke first with Nick Grant before contacting the police and being put through to a Chief Inspector Brook. He sounded at first less than interested in what Gabriel had to say, not immediately, it seems, being able to differentiate him from a host of hoax callers who claimed to have some information about the case. In the end he realised the significance of Gabriel’s information and said that he would see him in his department at the hospital mid-afternoon.

  Gabriel was kept busy all morning and did not stop for lunch. He spent most of that time looking down his microscope at slides containing biopsies of tumours that required diagnosis. Some contained characteristic tumour cells and a recognisable pattern of growth which permitted a rapid diagnosis; these slides he looked at for less than a minute before dictating his diagnostic report. Others showed features that were not sufficiently distinctive to permit an instant diagnosis. Gabriel spent a long time examining the microscopic details of these more difficult cases; his experience helped him to narrow down the diagnostic possibilities, each of which required further investigation.

  During the morning he was interrupted by Melanie Stokes. She had drafted her diagnostic report on the bone tumour biopsy they had examined last night. He watched her hands clasp and unclasp on her navy blue dress as he went over the text of her report. He corrected one spelling mistake — there was an e and not an a in “dependent”, a common error of young folk. He also rewrote a sentence that was too long. Any text which bore his name, be it a short diagnostic report or a long scientific paper, had to read clearly and be grammatically correct. When he handed back the corrected report, he checked an impulse to point out her errors, considering that, though justified, it would be unlikely to have the desired outcome. He reckoned that Melanie was the type who would make a point of studying his corrections later.

  He was not sure if he could say the same of Tom Duncan who, a short time later, rushed into his room. He wanted Gabriel’s opinion on a frozen section that had to be reported immediately to the surgeon in theatre. The two of them agreed on the diagnosis but Gabriel was as usual struck by a certain lack of confidence in the way Tom expressed his opinion. Tom had passed his specialist exams last year. He had a lot of knowledge but gave Gabriel the impression that he did not yet really know how to use it. His mind was still that of the examinee: alert, crammed with facts and not flexible or discriminating.

  Tom applied himself to his work with terrifying conscientiousness. H
e spent almost his entire day studying microscope slides. The thought once occurred to Gabriel that if everyone in the department suddenly took off their clothes and walked naked past his office Tom would not turn to look but would go on squinting down his microscope. He wrote several drafts of his diagnostic reports — no spelling or grammatical errors there — and checked and re-checked the slides as he feared getting the diagnosis wrong. Not surprisingly, his reports often came over as long-winded and lacking clarity; they mentioned too many diagnostic possibilities and in some cases did not conclude whether a tumour was benign or malignant, leaving the clinician (and the patient) none the wiser. Tom scrutinised the latest scientific papers and remembered everything that he read, an admirable quality in its own way, but all the papers he studied and all the long hours he put into his work did not seem to make him a more capable pathologist.

  Gabriel also supervised Tom’s research project on the effects of bone marrow transplantation. It was the type of research that used a novel technique to confirm or show more clearly what was already known about tissue transplantation. In a sense it reinvented the wheel — showed again that it was round, worked by turning, and so forth. This type of research was perfect for Tom who regarded working long hours and any result, however thin, as worthwhile. In Gabriel’s opinion Tom and others like him were little better than well-trained monkeys, the chief simian feature distinguishing them from researchers of real talent being their lack of knowledge of anything outside their narrow field. When Gabriel once happened to mention to Tom that a certain observation had been made by the Australian Robert Florey who had been Professor of Pathology in Oxford, Tom had simply turned to him and said in a flat voice about the Nobel prize-winning creator of penicillin: “Oh really, and you say he worked in Oxford?”

  Gabriel could imagine Tom’s future quite plainly. In the course of his life he would do a reasonable job in pathology, probably in a well-known department — perhaps even this one. He would progress inexorably up the career ladder aided by his interest in management and computer systems. He would be a sound if uninspired diagnostician. He would write scientific papers, some even worthy, although they would always be with co-authors who understood the subject better than he did. He would not do anything remarkable himself. He would never create penicillin. To create penicillin one needed imagination, originality and the ability to realise that a problem is not only something to be solved but also to be understood.

  Tom had been the major beneficiary of Anna Taylor leaving the department, stepping into the post Gabriel had planned for her. But Gabriel would not in a month of Sundays have chosen him over her for the Clinical Tutor post. Of course, he had said nothing to discourage Tom from applying for the position; he had the necessary qualifications and experience; he had no right to stop any mug having a go.

  The urgent pattern of Gabriel’s day was established and just about bearable because his thinking was so completely immersed in it; so much so that he was surprised when just after mid-afternoon Jane ushered Inspector Brook into his office.

  The two men greeted each other with a certain stiff formality. The inspector, a tall, thick-set man with a red pitted nose and sharp, alert eyes, was dressed in a grey suit. Gabriel, using the pattern recognition method of a pathologist, swiftly diagnosed Brook as benign — a Dixon of Dock Green type who looked uncomfortable out of uniform, in civvies. His dark grey hair, cut very close, was no more than a black patch on his head; it undulated back and forth across his brow like a coastline and disappeared somewhere around his ears.

  Gabriel noticed that Brook had one quality he shared with many tall, large-boned men: a lack of awareness of his own massive presence. It was something he saw in a lot of ex-rugby players which, Gabriel guessed, Brook probably was. In compensation his body movements were slow and deliberate, as if intended not to cause alarm.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you any inconvenience, Inspector, having to come to the hospital,” said Gabriel. “It was difficult for me to get away today. I’ve been abroad and I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

  “No trouble,” Brook said, nodding his head as if to emphasise his words. There was a slight Oxfordshire burr to his voice. He was not sure what he would make of Gabriel. No one had heard of him at the station. He had telephoned Grant who told him that he had spoken to Gabriel and that he was all right. As Grant rarely had a good word to say about anyone, what he said about Gabriel had impressed Brook: “He’s an Aussie. There’s not much to him. He looks as if he’s wearing his dad’s trousers. He’s older than he looks, straight as a die, and he’s clever, really quite clever...”

  Well, Gabriel was certainly thin. His clothes seemed to hang off him and even his spectacles looked too big for his nose. Brook had expected someone a little more academic-looking — more impressive, more confident, brash even. Though Gabriel had chosen to wear a shirt and tie on this day, they somehow did not seem to fit him; taken with his politeness and slight formality of manner, he reminded Brook of a schoolboy trying to make a good impression on a teacher.

  Gabriel took the letter from his wallet and put it on the desk. “This letter was sent to me at home. My wife gave it to me last night.”

  “She opened the letter?”

  “No. She doesn’t usually open my mail.”

  Brook’s brown eyes quickly scanned the letter then rested on Gabriel. “When did this letter arrive?”

  “On Monday, two days ago.”

  “And you mentioned another communication from Dr Taylor.”

  “Yes. She left a message with my secretary on Friday, the day I left for Madrid. She spoke too with Dr Reynolds, a Reader in the department, regarding a post that had been advertised. She was interested in applying for it but first wanted to speak with me about it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story but Anna surprised me when she suddenly decided to move on in the way she did. I had other plans for her and she rather upset them. Maybe she felt bad about having done that. Anyway, I suppose she wanted to speak with me first, perhaps to see if I still had any hard feelings before definitely applying for the job. At least, that’s what she told Liz Reynolds.”

  “She’s the other doctor you mentioned?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll need to have a word with her as well. You work only at the hospital, do you sir?”

  “I’m actually employed by the University, but I spend a lot of my time doing diagnostic work for the hospital.” His answer sounded inadequate and he felt compelled to add with a little smile, “I’m a surgical pathologist. My speciality is tumour diagnosis. I do some research and a fair bit of teaching as well.”

  Brook glanced at the letter which he held in his big square hand. “It’s curious that this letter doesn’t actually mention the post she was interested in.”

  “I agree that is unusual. And I don’t understand why the letter was sent to my home address rather than to my work.”

  Brook unwound himself and not for the first time stretched his large frame. Gabriel suspected that most chairs were too small for Brook who gave the impression that sitting for too long in one place tortured him.

  Gabriel cleared his throat and said, “I suppose it could just have been a mistake that she addressed her letter to me at my home rather than my work. But it doesn’t strike me that way.”

  Brook nodded as if he agreed, but in such a way that Gabriel wondered whether he was really listening and no more than barely following what he said. After a brief pause, he asked, “Do you know any of the people at Nebotec, Professor Gabriel?”

  “I know Ken Palmer. He’s actually a member of the academic department I head. He’s a scientist rather than a clinician and carries out research with some of the pathologists in the department. I don’t have much to do with him professionally, on a day-to-day basis that is, as our research interests don’t overlap that much. He worked more with Ian Forsyth, the previous professor. He’s acknowledged me on a few of his scientific papers,
more out of courtesy than anything else, when I helped him to obtain some tissue specimens for his research. Oh, and I’ve met Matt Taylor, Anna’s husband, a couple of times, once at a scientific conference and once at a dinner I had with Anna and him at my college.

  Brook appeared to stiffen slightly at the mention of Matt Taylor.

  “It was Taylor who told me about Anna’s death when I rang last night,” Gabriel added.

  “I see. You hadn’t heard about her murder earlier?”

  “No, I was abroad when it happened.” Gabriel felt a need to give more details. “I was at a conference in Madrid. I arrived there on Friday. I only got back yesterday.”

  The two men looked at one another in silence. Until that moment it had not occurred to Gabriel that Brook might regard him as a suspect. Brook looked at him as though considering whether there was any mileage in entertaining such a possibility. He stretched his legs, sat up in the chair and for the first time smiled at Gabriel.

  “I don’t understand this science business, Professor Gabriel. Not my cup of tea, really. Perhaps that’s why I instinctively don’t like it. It’s ignorance that does it. My own ignorance, I mean. It makes it hard in a case like this. I’ve trouble understanding answers to some of the questions I ask people at Nebotec. Not sure what they’re talking about half the time. It’s a bit like town and gown here in Oxford. There’s a divide that’s not easy to bridge. You scientists have got your own lingo, your own way of thinking, and I need to understand it if I’m to figure out what happened to Dr Taylor.”

  He broke off to look briefly out of the window as if something of interest had suddenly caught his eye there. When he shifted his gaze back to Gabriel, he added “I don’t really understand what Dr Taylor was working on. Was it just cancer?”

  “I suppose so,” Gabriel answered. “I don’t know. Nebotec are a drug discovery firm. Their main interest is in developing drugs to treat cancer.”