Palindrome Page 8

  Certain people leave an impression upon the mind. Anna had always been around, in his way really, since their days at medical school when for a brief period they had gone out together. Nothing had come of it. She had not found him sufficiently interesting or clever... or useful, for that matter. She had outshone him academically, been ambitious and sought out people who would help her to get where she wanted in her future career. And that was never going to be him. The two of them had gone their separate ways after qualification even though they had both chosen to specialise in pathology. They had met up again five years later when he, now married, had moved to the Pathology Department in Oxford. She was the star trainee there and likely to rise further. It was a piece of luck for him that she had gone to work at Nebotec and he had been appointed to her lecturer position.

  And now there was the Clinical Tutor post which came with a bit more job security and a bit more salary. Anna had contacted him a few weeks ago with an idea to do some collaborative research. He had precious few ideas of his own and so he had accepted her offer gratefully, thinking that it would not harm his chances of getting the Clinical Tutor post. In a way he was pleased that she had sought him out, had finally seen him as someone useful to her. But his bright plan had backfired. After giving her the results Anna had calmly announced to him that she too was thinking of applying for the Clinical Tutor job — his job.

  He turned and looked at the television where the newscaster, reporting on Anna’s murder, still wore her tragic mask. A comic mask, he thought, would have been more appropriate to reflect how Anna must have regarded him all the years she had known him.

  Pat was still up when Adam Gabriel got home later that evening. She seemed to be more concerned than he was by what had happened to him that evening. “Damn cheek of the police to arrest you and not let you notify me.”

  “Apparently, that’s their procedure. I learned quite a lot about police procedure this evening. About the police as well. Most of them are not that friendly.”

  “It sounds as if you consider your inspector Brook something of an exception.”

  “He seems to be. At least he isn’t twenty stone and filling in a form when he talks to you, like every other policeman I met this evening.”

  “Are you still going to help them?”

  What could he say? Since Anna’s death he had a strange feeling that he had been participating self-consciously in something extraordinary. Perhaps as a consequence his reply was a little flippant.

  “Why not? I’ll help Brook, anyway. He did rescue me, after all, and he’s been very open with me about what they’ve found.”

  Pat gazed at him blankly. A thin strand of hair had fallen over her brow. Her next words were spoken reluctantly as if she were aware that they would upset Adam.

  “But why get involved further?”

  Gabriel saw that his words had not made the least impression on her. Embarrassment overcame his discomfiture and a boyish blush crept over his face.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s been a murder. That means there’s a murderer out there. And you never know what might happen.”

  Gabriel was a little taken aback by Pat’s concern. It was almost a rule of their marriage that they did not interfere with each other’s lives. She was watching him closely. He had an uncomfortable feeling that she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  “I’ll try to be careful,” was all he could think to answer.

  “It’s not really your problem, Adam.”

  “I’m sorry, Pat. I was just trying to help. I suppose I’m a little curious as well.” But curious for what reason, he wondered.

  “I’m worried that you’re out of your depth. The way you talk you seem to regard this whole business as a kind of diagnostic puzzle.”

  Gabriel said nothing. It was often his practice to maintain silence in the face of criticism. He sat forward in his chair, his hands nursing one another; he looked like a child who had just been told off for a misdemeanour. When driving home he had visualised speaking to Pat confidently and reassuringly about what had happened to him that evening. He was surprised how wide of the mark this image had proved to be.

  “You never meet patients in your work,” Pat kept on. Her eyes were unblinkingly fixed on him. “You don’t know what people are like. You only see their tissues. Their bits and pieces.”

  Adam did not tell her that he sometimes pieced together a life from those bare details, usually a tragic one: an unlucky child with a highly malignant tumour and distraught parents; older patients who would be happy or sad to hear the news that he had diagnosed their tumour as benign or malignant — champagne or tears. But in a way she was right. People like him did not abandon their comfortable lives to play this sort of role. What could he do about Anna’s murder?

  They sat together in the sitting room which had a stone floor; the fire was burning out and it was getting cold. Perhaps it was the cold that tightened the wave in Pat’s hair and made the skin of her face look so pale. In the dim light of the fading fire her words of concern seemed to fill the room.

  “You’re just an ordinary person” she kept on, her eyes looking away from him to the shuttered window. “You can’t do anything by yourself.”

  Adam refrained from replying “About what?” They were already too near melodrama for his liking. This did not deter Pat in her own way from asking the question.

  “What is all this about?”

  She looked at him as though admonishing a child and he put on a bogus contrite air. Some response was necessary but he could not immediately think of one. He smiled and took her small hand in his — even after all these years he was struck by its delicate structure. He gave it a quick nervous pressure, as though communicating sympathy for a bereavement. He saw out of the corner of his eye the delicate ivory lobe of her ear emerging from her mouse-coloured hair.

  He had an uncomfortable feeling that he sounded foolish when he tried to narrow the gap that had opened between them.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t take any risks.”

  “No risks might be better,” Pat answered tartly.

  Gabriel smiled. The melodrama had just turned to farce.

  Chapter 6

  Egad a base tone denotes a bad age

  “We have more a pathology set up rather than a discrete department, but it is well equipped, as you can see,” said Palmer when he opened the door to a laboratory room at Nebotec.

  “Who exactly runs it?” Gabriel asked.

  “Anna Taylor was in overall charge,” Palmer answered in a somewhat subdued voice. “The technical side is managed by Vishant Samant. I’ll introduce you to Samant as you may have to liaise with him about ordering any extra tests on the slides.”

  The two men walked over to a tiny office in a corner of the laboratory; it was just large enough to hold a small desk that was littered with papers; the door could not be opened fully as there was a two-drawer filing cabinet wedged in a corner behind it.

  A plump dark-skinned man with a Pekingese nose, round bulging eyes and black hair got up from an ill-fitting office chair which barely fitted into the room. He shook Gabriel’s hand when Palmer introduced him.

  “From what Ken was saying, you do a lot of work here,” Gabriel said. “Are the slides of the mice that are given the drug and those given the placebo distinguished in any way?”

  “No, sir,” Samant answered. He spoke rapidly with a pronounced Indian accent. “The slides are labelled according to the experiment number.”

  Gabriel picked up the slides and examined the printed details on the label that was attached to one end of the slide.

  He was aware of a certain tension as he made this examination; much of it seemed to emanate from Palmer whose nails were beating a tattoo on the table.

  “You don’t know which slides correspond to the control or the test animals?”

  “Palmer’s bored voice cut in. “Each slide is read blind by the pathologist who makes his or her report — without prejudi
ce you might say.”

  “How many people are involved in processing the tissues? Do you cut and stain all the slides yourself?”

  “No, but I review them to make sure of the quality before signing them out,” Samant said.

  “We have two pathology technicians — Vishant and Tina Simms,” Palmer cut in to say after a moment’s embarrassed silence. He had clearly not expected Samant to say anything. “At the end of the experiment, after the slides have been reported, the code is broken and we all sit down and compare notes, you might say.”

  “And what role does Matt Taylor play in the lab?”

  “None on the pathology side. You could say he’s in overall charge of the Nebotec lab but he works more on the molecular biology and drug biochemistry side of things.”

  “I take it he’s not back at work?”

  “No,” said Palmer flatly. “Of course, he’s still rather cut up about his wife. It’s a damned nuisance, not having someone to look after things. More work for me. He was helping to organise the symposium on Nebotec’s anti-cancer drugs next week. He was down to give a lecture on molecular strategies to target palindromes. The last time I spoke to him he told me he still intends to give his talk. I just hope he’ll be fit enough to do so.”

  Just as during the college dinner a few days ago, Gabriel was struck by Palmer’s utter lack of concern for anyone but himself. It was as if his attitude to Anna’s fate was one of “serves her right” or “what else did you expect?” Judging from his comments about Matt Taylor, this feeling was not particular to Anna. Palmer seemed to look upon all his staff as subordinates who were there to carry out his commands. Gabriel was reminded of the film director Alfred Hitchcock who was said to regard his actors as “cattle”.

  He translated his thought into words. “What about the animals?”

  “They’re in a separate facility,” Palmer answered. “Access is restricted to the scientific staff.” He turned to Samant. “Perhaps you can show Professor Gabriel our animal house and the rest of the pathology set up, Vishant. I’ll meet you back here, Adam.”

  And without a further word of explanation Palmer turned and left Gabriel alone with Samant. There was a brief embarrassed silence.

  “Have you worked here long?” Gabriel asked by way of making conversation.

  “A year and a half, sir.”

  “Do you like working here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Samant’s frequent use of “sir” in reply to his questions grated on Gabriel and stopped him making idle talk. Samant showed him around the laboratory which contained the usual work stations and processing equipment tightly packed into two fairly small rooms.

  “Where do you cut up the specimens?” Gabriel asked.

  “That’s done in the Animal House, sir,” Samant answered.

  Gabriel followed Samant through a door of the laboratory and was ushered down a corridor off which there was a short passage to an office door festooned with blue and white police tape. This had obviously been Anna’s office. Gabriel would have liked to turn off and inspect it but he dutifully followed Samant, continuing along the corridor a short distance past a couple of doors.

  “What’s in these rooms?” Gabriel asked.

  “They’re store rooms.”

  Gabriel stopped before one that was festooned with blue and white police tape.

  “Is it through here that the murderer is thought to have got in and made his way to Anna’s office?” He pointed back down the corridor in the direction they had come.

  “Yes, sir.”

  At the end of the corridor Gabriel peered through the reinforced glass of a door that opened onto a small bare concrete area — concrete walls, concrete floor, concrete ceiling; there was an identical door opposite and to one side a large metal fire door. Gabriel guessed from his late night surveillance that it opened onto the back of the Nebotec building, just beyond the loading bay.

  “Is that the animal facility?” Gabriel asked, looking directly at the door opposite.

  “Yes, sir” Samant answered, noting the direction of Gabriel’s gaze. “That door’s always kept closed. This door the same. You can only enter using a swipe card.”

  “You have one?”

  Samant nodded, forsaking for once his ritual Indian army response. He pulled a card out of his laboratory coat pocket and swiped it twice, first to leave the laboratory block, then to open the animal house door.

  The pungent smell of caged mice instantly overwhelmed Gabriel. It was a clean facility but nothing could get rid of that odour. Gabriel had never been sure whether it was entirely due to the animals themselves or what they were fed. He had worked a lot with animals doing his doctorate in London but did no animal work now and was grateful for that. Pat had always disapproved and so, in his own way, had he.

  He was grateful when the brief tour of the animal house ended. They came back into the main laboratory area. A door opened to their left and the two of them drew back to let pass a diminutive woman wearing a laboratory coat. Gabriel guessed that she was Tina Simms, the other laboratory technician. Samant made no effort to introduce her to him. She gave Samant a nod then headed purposefully but none too quickly down the corridor.

  “It’s terrible about Dr Taylor,” Gabriel said as he watched her walk away.

  Samant nodded his head sympathetically. “Yes indeed, sir.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Her father came from Delhi. Like my family.” “Did you know them there?”

  He smiled, showing his large teeth. “Delhi is a big place, sir. Not like Oxford. There are a lot of people.”

  “So, you’d never met Anna before she came to work at Nebotec?”

  “No.”

  Gabriel paused before saying, “It seems Dr Palmer found her a little difficult to work with.”

  “No,” Samant replied quickly before correcting himself almost immediately, “Maybe, sometimes.”

  “Do you know what the problem was?”

  “No, sir. She was always very good to me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, she helped me to get my job here.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “She chose me at the interview. I think Dr Matt wanted another person. But she convinced him I was better. She was always very nice.” He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. “I always worked hard for her.”

  Gabriel followed Samant back to the pathology laboratory where Palmer was waiting for them. Gabriel had the impression that Palmer was reluctant to let him out of his sight for too long.

  “Interesting tour?” Palmer asked. “Have you seen all you need to?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “I’ve just had Hewitt on the phone. Anxious about the final results of the PLF studies. I’m afraid we need a report on the pathology rather quickly as he’s preparing a submission to the FDA for the drug to go into a Phase One trial. Of course, he’s a businessman and doesn’t realise that our work can’t be done instantly...”

  Gabriel let Palmer rattle on. When he had talked himself to a temporary standstill, Gabriel assured him that he would do what he could. He made a move to pick up his black shoulder bag which he had placed on a laboratory bench but, as he did so, his elbow brushed against several trays of slides. Both Samant and Palmer in panic moved forwards to stop any slides falling to the floor but Gabriel managed to right the trays before they shifted too far.

  “Sorry about that,” Gabriel said, putting back the few slides he had dislodged. “Bit of an ape there.”

  “Do be careful. They’re the slides of the mice we want you to look at. What we want to know from Liz and you, at least informally before next Tuesday when the symposium is to be held, is whether the tissues in the organs of the mice are normal or not. Some of them have been given the drug, others the placebo. There are also some mice that have had tumours grafted under their skin — you’ll see them in some of the slides. We’ll be interested in your comments on them, of cour
se, but the data we’re lacking is to do with the effect of the drug on normal body tissues. Anna Taylor did a mini post-mortem on the mice and sampled all the organs.” He paused and smiled. “The bones as well, you’ll be happy to hear, Adam.”

  Gabriel nodded. “It’s a long time since I’ve looked at mouse bones. Not since the days of my PhD. My memory is that they’re not too different from human. Just smaller, of course.” He shuffled through the twenty or so trays filled with slides. “Do these include the slides Anna was looking at when she was killed?” he asked.

  “No, they’re a different set. The police haven’t yet released the ones they found at the scene. We’ve had to recut the sections from the tissue blocks in our files. Damned nuisance that.”

  Gabriel lifted the trays up and down, as though he was trying to guess the weight of a cake at a fete. “There are an awful lot of slides to look at here.”

  Palmer looked him straight in the eye, smiling. “Anna used to complain about that. I don’t think she expected to have so much work to do when she came here. Even so, she was rather slow at getting through it and giving us the results. That was one of the issues I had with her.”

  “Maybe she was just being thorough,” Gabriel answered, carefully putting down the slide trays on the bench.

  Palmer smiled grimly. “That would be something of an understatement in my opinion.”

  The smile told him much about Palmer. It was the smile of a man who makes a habit of contempt and practises it frequently, who is clever but whose cleverness is always tinged with nastiness. Palmer was frightful in every sense. Frightful but not unimpressive.

  An hour later, Gabriel was sitting in The Rose and Crown, eating sandwiches and drinking a pint of bitter. The pub was patronised chiefly by students (presumably with no tutorials to attend) from local digs. There was also a smattering of what Gabriel regarded as North Oxford types, distinguished by their evident middle age and more conventional dress. Like the students they seemed to have about them that air of self-importance which pervaded much of Oxford town and gown. He wondered whether just living and working in Oxford made these people feel superior, like the desk staff in expensive hotels.