by Carmen Reid
The sales assistant was wrapping the bag carefully with pink tissue paper. ‘It’s lovely,’ she told him, looking up with a smile. See, this is what commission did for you.
‘I had my eye on it myself. Is it for your girlfriend?’ she asked casually, but Marcus knew what that meant.
‘No, my mum,’ he said automatically, but then felt an unaccustomed lurch of guilt.
‘It’s her birthday,’ he added. ‘If she doesn’t like it, can I bring it back and change it for another one?’
‘Of course. No problem, just keep your receipt. My name’s Julie, I’ll put my sales card into the bag, any problems at all, give me a call.’
Marcus met Julie’s bright blue eyes: ‘Thanks,’ he said, handing over his credit card. ‘Appreciate it.’
He saw the slightest of blushes spreading over her cheeks. Aha, the glacier melts.
But he knew with certainty he wasn’t going to phone her.
Chapter Twenty
NHS nurses have been invited on luxury trips to four and five star hotels by pharmaceutical firms which manufacture the drugs they are now allowed to prescribe.
The Sunday Times
Saturday: 11.58 a.m.
Just before noon, Jeff caught the call he’d been waiting for all morning. ‘Even my back-up computer battery’s fucked,’ were Jo’s first words. ‘Either I’ll have to spend two hours or so dictating all this on the phone to someone or I’ll have to come back in. Can you wait that long?’
‘We can probably wait,’ was Jeff’s verdict. ‘Just get back as quickly as you can. I take it you’ve got it all from this woman. I mean, you can imagine how twitchy the lawyers are. They want to see your copy ASAP. Before we go accusing major drug companies of spreading death and destruction – in fact there is a lot of talk about holding this till next week to make sure it can be done properly.’
‘And what have you said to that?’ she asked, feeling a wave of anxiety.
‘I’ve said bollocks. Although we’ve got another cracker to share the front page with you: someone rather famous was arrested first thing this morning for downloading child porn on the internet.’
‘Who?’ She had to know.
When he told her, she could only give the expected: ‘No way!’ response that he expected all their readers to make.
‘The police are going to make the arrest public by the afternoon, but only Vince has the full details of the allegations,’ Jeff added. ‘Just so you know who you’re up against.’
‘Well, you know how I love a front-page battle with Vince,’ Jo said, but she could feel her heart sink. ‘I still think “Quintet Lab Releases Killer Whooping Cough” is better,’ she said, trying to convince herself. ‘It’s more important.’
‘Well, provided we get a snappier headline than that, yes, it is better. It’s a proper scandal – the latest in the long line of “Randall scandals” our paper is proud to print. Do we have a full statement about this from Wolff-Meyer yet?’ he added.
‘Their duty press officer was briefed first thing this morning. I await a reply. Although they might try to fudge it, and delay coming back to us, in the hope that without their word on it, we won’t print.’
‘Too bad,’ Jeff said. He had faith in her, absolute 100 per cent faith.
‘Really?’ she asked. ‘You’ll go ahead without hearing from them? I mean, this is a pretty serious allegation. Is Spikey fine with it? And the people above Spikey?’ She remembered de Groote and his Wolff-Meyer shares remark.
‘I think it’s going to be OK. Paper saves children’s lives. That’s always good.’
‘We’re not saving lives, we’re just revealing what these children have got,’ she reminded him.
‘Well, you know,’ he didn’t seem too bothered. ‘Paper reveals deadly child-killer. It’s all good stuff.’
‘I can’t name this woman I’ve been talking to, Joan Theroux. She won’t go on the record,’ Jo began her explanation. ‘What she said comes anonymously and obviously without pictures.’
Jeff winced. No news editor liked to hear that the source of a major story was going to be just that, ‘a source’. Almost every other reporter in the newsroom would now have been told by him, nicely, but nevertheless firmly, to get back on the doorstep and knock again. But he didn’t need to ask Jo, he knew she would have tried hard enough.
‘Absolutely nothing else we can do?’ he asked anyway.
‘No.’
Jo had been invited into Joan’s neat and floral house, where she had been told in no uncertain terms by a woman who seemed genuinely scared that the tribunal case was being dropped and she had decided to take the settlement payment being offered by Wolff-Meyer.
‘It’s the only way I can leave all this behind with my professional reputation intact,’ she had confided. ‘If I take them to court, they’ll accuse me of bad practice, negligence, they’ll throw the book at me. They’ll blame me for infecting my sister, Monique’s daughter, as if I’d ever risk something like that.’ Joan had looked at once defiant and tearful. ‘I wasn’t well, but I had no idea I was ill with a virus from the lab. I’d never have risked contact with Katie or anyone else if I’d known that.’
‘So, don’t you want to argue your case in public?’ Jo had asked, but at the same time wondered if she’d ever have the nerve to do something like that herself.
Joan had almost laughed: ‘Even if I could afford the best lawyer in the world, they’d be able to afford ten of them. I would leave a tribunal looking like dirt. They’ve as much as told me that.’
‘In writing?’
‘What do you think?’ Joan had asked straight back.
‘Do you think your home is bugged?’ was Jo’s next question.
‘No, I’m pretty sure it’s not. My brother is a police officer, he’s told me what to look for. He’s also told me to walk away and not get involved in this any further.’
They were sitting in a bright sitting room with pink sofas, green and white patterned walls, accessorized scatter cushions and a coffee table with house and gardening books stacked on top.
A strange setting to be discussing industrial espionage, Jo couldn’t help thinking. But she had believed Joan. Wasn’t the fact that her own email was being intercepted proof enough that they were up against a big and powerful corporation that would go to considerable lengths to protect its own interests?
‘You can’t take the truth away from people. You can’t take away the fact that they are right,’ Jo had argued, but Joan had just turned her head and looked out into her garden. The rims of her eyes were pink, Jo had noticed. She’d been crying over this again this morning.
‘Of course you can,’ she’d said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. ‘If the company counter-claims loud enough, it will be believed. I mean what is proof? Line up enough scientists, enough scientific evidence on your side and you will be believed.’
‘But people are more cynical than that. People are fed up with everything big: big businesses, big chain stores, big politicians. If it’s big it’s bad. That’s how people feel now. They will listen to the person speaking out against the system. They will,’ Jo had argued, trying her hardest to persuade this woman to change her mind.
But Joan’s head had remained turned to the window looking out over her flowerbeds, her deep green lawn, a white wrought-iron table and a single matching chair.
‘What do you know?’ Joan had asked finally.
Carefully, putting in as much authenticating detail as she could, Jo told her everything she had been able to glean from her late night session at the computer with Bella.
‘Well, you have all the essential details,’ Joan had said when the spiel was over. ‘If you write that, you won’t be wrong. The information you’ve got is good. We were working on new vaccine development,’ she’d explained.
‘Some “older” strains of whooping cough like the ones recovered from the historic samples from the West London Pathology Department are still in evidence in different parts of
the world,’ she’d continued. ‘We’re always inventing and investigating new vaccines and more efficient versions of existing vaccines. I don’t just think of this as added profit for the company, you know. I also like to think about the lives I might be helping to save. To know that I might somehow cause the death of a child . . . that’s just unbearable.’
As Jo headed back down the motorway to London, she took a revealing phone call from Bella, on the hands-free, obviously.
‘Are you finally awake then?’ Jo greeted her friend’s still groggy voice.
‘Am I finally awake? If this is the kind of thanks I’m going to get after staying up most of the night looking at hundreds of tedious computer files for you, you can get yourself another hacking assistant,’ Bella replied.
‘Were you able to go through more?’ Jo asked, excited all of a sudden.
‘Yes, I was. Things calmed right down again once you’d gone. I’ve always suspected that you’re one of those people with high personal static who has a strange effect on hard drives. But anyway, I’m phoning to give you three important nuggets of information that I think you should have.’
‘Yes?’ Jo moved over into the slow lane so that she could concentrate.
‘Number one thing,’ Bella began: ‘In certain extremely rare cases, with susceptible children, the Wolff-Meyer safety investigation team suspects that Quintet can be linked to seizures and brain damage.’
‘Oh my God!’ Jo exclaimed.
‘They are paying for research work into this area in the States. They are also keeping this extremely confidential. I only found out because someone had emailed a document to their home computer, so it was on the email system, which wasn’t so highly protected.’
‘You are a genius.’
‘I know. Now, the next thing is that a company called Bexley Computing Systems Ltd is being paid a monthly retainer for unspecified “maintenance”. My suspicion is that this is where your email is going and probably quite a few other people’s, judging by the size of the retainer. So see what your tech department can find out. Now finally, the news you may not want to hear . . .’
‘OK. I’m listening.’
‘Let’s hope not too many other people are,’ Bella joked, then said, ‘The Joan Theroux situation may not be quite as straightforward as you thought.’
‘Oh?’
‘Wolff-Meyer is investigating the possibility that she was stealing material from the lab and passing it – well, make that selling it – on to a competitor.’
‘Oh.’
Jo thought of Joan’s pink eyes and frightened face, her sincere-sounding words, and felt a bubble of anger.
‘The whooping cough strain, which dates from the 1830s by the way, and is making these children so ill, almost certainly comes from the lab, but it may be entirely Joan’s fault that she caught it and let it out.’
No wonder Joan was so upset. No wonder the thought of children possibly dying as a result of her greed felt so ‘unbearable’. Jo couldn’t respond for a moment or two, because this was such a surprise.
Then she asked Bella: ‘But they’ve no proof?’
‘Well, according to one report I saw, they know she did on several occasions remove material from the lab without authorization and she’s never given satisfactory explanations for this, which is why they threatened her with a negligence charge.’
‘Bella, you’ve gone to so much trouble for me.’ Jo was moved by her friend’s exhaustive efforts.
‘Not just for you, Jo, I had to find out for myself. However much of a hard-nosed capitalist you may take me for, I don’t want to make my money on the back of a bunch of evil baby-killers. And I think I’ve now come to the conclusion that they’re not as bad as you maybe believe. Mistakes get made, but they seem to be doing what they can to rectify them.’
‘Hmm,’ was Jo’s reply to this. She was distracted, already deep in thought about how she could write up her whooping cough story around this new information.
‘I’m going now. You need to work, don’t you? And I need to get outside and see some daylight.’ Bella wound the conversation up. ‘See you tomorrow for lunch, OK?’
‘OK.’ Jo was roused from her thoughts. ‘Thank you, Bella, I owe you really big time. Bye-bye.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Sing in the car, sing in the rain, in the bath, even when you’re tidying up. Be an entertainer and add actions to the songs. Make finger puppets together to help with the actions.
The Basic Skills Agency
Saturday: 5.25 p.m.
‘I don’t eat fish fingers and Nettie really doesn’t like peas and she only likes her potatoes in chunks, not mashed,’ Mel was explaining to Gwen for the second time.
Their dad had been called off to an emergency at the hospital and they had spent several sulky hours with Gwen, who was now expecting them to eat a horrible looking supper of over-browned fish fingers, mashed potato, peas and boiled, boiled carrot.
‘I need ketchup! I need ketchup!’ Nettie, exhausted and increasingly fraught after a late night and early morning, yelled, kneeling up on a chair at the head of the small table, banging her fork down hard on the surface.
‘Look -’ Gwen thought she had done well to remain patient and calm throughout the last two hours with these girls, but now she was feeling wound up in the extreme. ‘I have cooked this nice supper for you and I think you should be good girls and eat it up now. You must be very hungry.’ She would quite like to have added: ‘And I don’t have to do this, you know. I’m not your parent, nobody’s paying me to do this! I’m just trying to be a nice person and help Simon out, but it’s a lot harder than I thought.’
‘I not eating peas,’ Nettie added forcefully. Mel had a suspicion of what was coming next and smirked at the prospect.
‘Come on, Nettie, I’ll help you.’ Gwen turned to the little girl, picked up her fork and heaped on potato, fish finger and just one of the offending peas.
The oven in the flat obviously ran hot or something. How else had she managed to nearly burn something that required no cooking skills at all? Gwen wondered.
The fork was raised to Nettie’s mouth, but she stuck out her chin, clenched her jaw tight shut and shook her head.
‘Come on . . . it’s a train . . . choo-choo.’
Nettie waved a hand in front of her mouth now, as if to bat the offending fork away.
‘She really, really doesn’t like peas or mash,’ Mel warned, exasperated now.
‘No!’ Nettie shouted and she banged her fist on the table.
‘That is naughty,’ Gwen warned. ‘Naughty girls will. . .’ she paused for a moment, wondering what sanction she could offer. She wouldn’t dream of smacking these girls, or making them stand in the corner or anything like that. So, she felt out of control of them. There was no sort of punishment she could threaten to discourage the cheeky way they were treating her.
‘. . . will not get any pudding,’ was the best she could come up with. Nettie immediately opened her mouth and Gwen put the forkful of food inside.
Nettie chewed for several moments, then slowly leaned forward, hands on the table, face in front of Gwen, who thought this must mean she wanted more.
But no, once Gwen was in close range, Nettie forcefully spat the mouthful of food out at her. Then she beamed at Mel in triumph and the pair giggled wickedly together as Gwen uttered a horrified: ‘Oh no! You silly little girls!’
Most of the potato and pea goo had landed on her blouse, but some had even splattered onto her chest, where she could feel it slithering down her skin. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she added, getting up from the table, ‘I really have.’
This made the pair laugh even harder.
‘We’ve had enough of you too,’ Mel retorted. ‘You’re so bossy.’
‘So-o-o-o-o bossy,’ Nettie echoed.
‘Just stop it!’ Gwen snapped. ‘Eat your supper on your own, I’m going to change.’
And with that she stomped away from the table an
d into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
She could hear Nettie saying to her sister in a rather pained voice: ‘I want Mummy.’ Mel’s reply was a soothing: ‘Mummy’s at work but don’t worry Daddy will be home soon.’
However, this didn’t have much of a comforting effect, because Nettie began to cry. Gwen hesitated for a moment, wondering whether or not to go and comfort her, but then decided she would stay in the bedroom for just the few minutes longer it would take her to calm down and change her top.
She peeled off her blouse, disconcerted to hear Nettie’s cries becoming more shrill; even more disconcerted to hear the lock turning in the door and Simon arriving back.
His cheery ‘Hello everybody!’ was quickly followed with a concerned: ‘Oh dear, what’s the matter?’
Gwen struggled to get her buttons done up quickly. She didn’t want Simon to hear only the girls’ version of events.
‘Gwen!’ he was calling now. ‘Where are you?’
When she came out of the bedroom, she saw Simon still in his coat, briefcase by his side, kneeling on the floor with a wailing Nettie in his arms. Mel was standing beside them, arms folded, glowering in her direction.
‘I told her Nettie didn’t like her food and I never eat fish fingers,’ Mel got in first.
‘Look, Simon, I don’t want you to think. . . ’ Gwen began.
‘What’s happened?’ he directed the question at her.
‘The girls didn’t like the supper I made,’ Gwen said defiantly. ‘They were very cheeky about it, Nettie spat her food all over me and I told them both off. I was just changing my top.’