‘You’ve tried to contact Dr Yu?’ I interrupted.
‘Of course. He had an important meeting with a scientist from the CSIRO today. I can’t believe he’d miss that. The man was on his way down from Sydney. It was very embarrassing. But Peter’s not answering his mobile. And his car’s not at his place either. I asked Pauline to check.’
‘Maybe they’re together somewhere,’ I suggested. ‘He and Claire.’
‘But Claire’s married to another scientist!’
‘So?’ I asked, surprised. Until he’d said this, I hadn’t considered anything but a professional association. Now I immediately suspected something more. ‘Are they romantically linked?’ I asked.
‘Certainly not,’ Dallas hurried on, as if aware he’d given something away by his remark. ‘Like I said, Claire’s married to another scientist—Anthony Dimitriou—a lecturer at the University of Canberra.’ He paused a moment before continuing: ‘Pauline tells me he’s away at the moment, attending an ANZFSS conference in New Zealand.’
‘I’ll need his details,’ I said, noting down the name and remembering that Gavin Samways, one of our junior chemists, had also attended. I could check up on Anthony Dimitriou’s attendance with him, if necessary.
‘Dallas,’ I said when I’d finished writing, ‘if you know something about the two missing people in the way of a personal relationship, you must tell me.’ I indicated the general direction of the laboratory. ‘The more I know beforehand, the better position I’m in to go inside.’
Dallas picked at a spot on his cuff. I waited. Sometimes silence does the trick.
‘It’s only rumours,’ he said finally.
‘So you have heard something about a romance?’
Dallas shook his head too emphatically. ‘Just tea-room gossip.’
‘And?’
‘I’m giving the wrong impression. It was just innuendoes, jokes. That silly nudge-nudge, wink-wink business. You know how people like to carry on.’
I looked at him squarely. ‘If you’ve heard anything, you’d better tell me now. If you’re concerned about Claire’s reputation, or the reputation of the institution, it’s essential that we get to the truth.’ I paused. ‘It’s easier to put the fire out when it’s only small,’ I added.
Dallas spread his hands in a helpless gesture, and a large ruby winked on his little finger. ‘You know the way people talk in these small, intense communities.’ He waved an arm around to indicate all of the research buildings.
‘Yes,’ I said curtly, his prevarications starting to irritate me.
‘And there was something else.’ His demeanour changed as he moved to surer ground. ‘One of the maintenance staff overheard Peter and Claire having words in her office yesterday.’
I made another entry in my notebook. ‘What sort of words?’
‘He didn’t tell me. Pauline mentioned it to me this morning, when we started to wonder about where Claire might be. You must understand that it wasn’t an issue until this.’ He made an open gesture with his hands. ‘Some sort of argument, I believe. But then scientists are always arguing. Especially when there’s a joint project between them. Different ways of procedure, of moving down the decision tree.’
‘But taken in context,’ I said, ‘with all the other things you’ve heard . . .’
‘It’s still only workplace gossip,’ he said, uneasy. ‘And it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this business.’
‘How in hell can you say something like that—’ I began, wondering who or what Dallas Baxter was protecting.
‘Dallas?’ A woman in a dark maroon suit approached, high heels clicking on the vinyl floor.
‘Pauline,’ said Dallas, clearly relieved by the interruption. ‘Pauline Lamb, this is Dr Jack McCain who’s going to take a first look inside the lab.’
We shook hands, but Pauline, despite her polite smile, was preoccupied. ‘Yvonne Abernathy on the line for you,’ she said. ‘And no, she won’t tell me what it’s about. She insists on speaking to you. Now.’
‘Yvonne?’ Dallas looked at me, the worry lines on his face deepening. ‘What does she want?’
Yvonne was the wife of George Abernathy, head of the school of chemistry at the university.
‘Tell her I’ll call back,’ said Dallas, shooting an embarrassed glance at me. ‘She must have heard about Claire.’
‘Heard what about Claire?’ I asked. ‘You told me you’d kept this under wraps.’
Dallas blinked. ‘I simply meant the fact that her car’s been here all night,’ he stuttered.
We both knew straightaway that his answer didn’t make sense.
‘She wants to talk to you,’ said Pauline. ‘Personally. I’ve been running round all over the place trying to find you.’
‘I want to know what Yvonne could have heard about Claire,’ I persisted. I was also interested in why she’d be ringing Dallas Baxter.
Dallas frowned. ‘Peter might have said something to someone.’
‘But he’s not here. You just said so yourself.’ I looked from one to the other.
‘I called his parents in Sydney, Dallas, just in case he’d made a quick visit,’ said Pauline. ‘No one seems to know where he is.’
‘Tell me about Peter Yu,’ I said, notebook at the ready.
‘Peter is a very bright, up-and-coming researcher,’ said Dallas. ‘University medallist. Got his doctorate three years ago and he’s been working with Claire for about two years now.’
‘Girlfriend?’ I asked.
Dallas shrugged. ‘I believe there’s a girlfriend somewhere.’
‘There’s always a girlfriend,’ said Pauline with a tolerant smile. ‘Dr Yu has the reputation of being a bit of a heartbreaker,’ she said, then suddenly turned around and wrinkled up her nose. ‘Can you smell something off in here?’
I shuffled my feet. Surely it couldn’t be that goddamn shoe again.
‘It’s probably something from one of the pens,’ she concluded.
‘What’s this nonsense about being a heartbreaker?’ Dallas said, his face becoming pinker.
‘You must have noticed, Dallas,’ Pauline insisted.
One of the most common motives for crime—sex—was already becoming a possibility. The crime scene I’d visited earlier came back vividly. Tianna Richardson had almost certainly died because of sex.
I refocused my attention on the present situation.
‘Were there rumours of something going on between Claire Dimitriou and Peter Yu?’ I asked again, looking from one to the other.
Pauline looked at Dallas. Secretaries generally knew everything going on in a department. She gave me an arch look and shrugged again. ‘It’s quite possible,’ she said. ‘This place is a hotbed of intrigue.’
‘Don’t exaggerate!’ Dallas scolded.
Pauline rolled her eyes. ‘What’s to exaggerate?’
I made a mental note to get Pauline aside for a chat.
‘What were Claire and Peter Yu working on?’ I asked.
Instead of answering, Pauline tapped her boss on the sleeve. ‘Are you going to take that call?’ she insisted.
‘Tell Yvonne I’m in the middle of something,’ said Dallas, looking irritated. ‘Can’t you see I’m tied up here?’
Pauline looked at Dallas uncertainly and then turned and walked away in her clicking heels.
Sometimes government scientists, sworn to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act, undertake work for the Department of Defence. I wanted to know as much as I could about what had been going on in the sealed-up laboratory before I went in.
‘You’re sure they weren’t involved in some sort of secret Defence project?’ I said.
‘Not unless the Army’s taken to using rabbits and mice as WMDs,’ Dallas joked, standing back to
allow me through a security door.
‘So what were they working on?’
‘Straightforward, non-secret, agricultural research on rabbit control,’ he said. ‘Claire and Peter started their Faithful Bunnies project about two years ago.’
‘Faithful Bunnies?’
‘It started as an experiment to alter the mating habits of rabbits.’
‘And all the research is open and available to scrutiny?’ I asked.
‘Of course. It’s a supervised project. Dr Leonie Pringle was signing it off every month.’
Immediately, the project rose in my esteem. Leonie Pringle was Emeritus Professor in the science department at our premier state university, not to mention an international legend in the world of molecular biology. She was the expert in lagomorphs—gnawing animals with large incisors top and bottom; unlike rodents—as well as leporids: rabbits and hares.
‘I know from my own experience that researchers can be very protective of their projects,’ I said, thinking of the other big motive. ‘Especially if it involves something that has the potential to make a lot of money down the track. Like rabbit eradication.’
‘I guess it could be a goldmine one day,’ Dallas said, after a pause. ‘But you could say that about any of our research. If the project is successful. And it’s always a pretty big “if”.’
I knew there were a hell of a lot of steps between doing research and then attracting the big money. Most scientific research was underfunded, so researchers had to scratch for money all the time. Until the events in Bali and Jakarta had opened the funding purse more generously, research labs had not had big budgets.
‘They might have been using potentially dangerous pathogens,’ I said.
‘Like myxomatosis and the calicivirus?’ Dallas’s voice was derisive. ‘They’re only dangerous if you’re a leporid. Claire and Peter were working at the cutting edge of molecular design, shuffling receptors and genetic markers, encoding proteins, that kind of thing. No pathogens dangerous to humans were involved.’
‘But they were arguing,’ I reminded him, glancing down at my notebook.
‘That’s hardly a revelation. As I said, scientists are always arguing.’
I made a note to get back to that one later.
We’d stopped at a large, secured biohazard door with a warning about unauthorised entry and a sheet of Hazchem protocols affixed to it. Tanks of oxygen and fire extinguishers stood nearby, adjacent to a cleaning station where gumboots, buckets and sophisticated cleaning and antibacterial agents sat on a shelf.
‘Beyond this door is the clean room, where you can gear up, and then an airlock and a negative pressure chamber, then the lab,’ said Dallas.
‘There seems to be a great deal of security for an innocuous research project,’ I said. ‘You’re talking about a set-up demanding high levels of safety. There must have been some concern about what they were working on.’
‘Highly infectious material is handled here,’ Dallas said, ‘but it’s only dangerous if you’re a rabbit. We’re still using these old Level Four labs even though we now have the new additions—you saw the ones we walked through. We’ve got state-of-the-art Levels Three and Four safety rooms in the new wing, so the old hot suites in this building are used for routine work. We can’t afford to have any of our facilities lying idle.’
‘Anyone else use this lab?’ I asked.
‘Claire and Peter have had exclusive use of it for the last two years. Apart from Claire’s PhD student who’s sometimes here.’ He pulled out a photocopied building map. ‘This is the layout inside the lab,’ he said, passing it to me. ‘You might find it helpful when you go in.’
‘I’d better have the name of Dr Dimitriou’s student.’
‘I can’t think of it just now. I’ll look it up and let you know.’
‘Tell me more about the change in mating habits,’ I said, taking the plan from him before unpacking the respirator and checking it. ‘What were they hoping to achieve?’
‘They were working on the receptors for vassopressin.’
‘Isn’t that a hormone?’ I asked, trying to remember.
Dallas nodded. ‘They’d based their original project on an experiment with field voles and mountain voles in the USA.’
‘Voles?’ I wasn’t even sure what a vole was.
‘The American scientists induced behavioural changes in voles with hormonal tweaking,’ said Dallas. ‘From being promiscuous, they became faithful to one mate.’
I considered that. Restricting a male rabbit to only one mate could have a big impact on rabbit populations. ‘You said the project started out that way,’ I reminded him. ‘Did it change?’
‘The original Faithful Bunnies series was not successful,’ said Dallas. ‘Consequently, over the last few months, they’ve been working on another angle—a double-edged sword. They called it Terminator Rabbit. Working with rabbit pox in a double-barrelled way. Increasing lethality as well as tweaking the virus genetically to carry a sterilising payload.’
I tried to keep up but Dallas must have sensed my bemusement.
‘You know there’s always this arms race going on between the virus and its host,’ he explained. ‘The virus getting weaker over the generations, the host animal developing immunity. The idea is that any females who survive the initial infection—and that’s generally around five to ten per cent of the population—will eventually breed themselves out of existence because the sterility will be passed on to the next generation as part of the maternal DNA material. So that, one day, the last litter will be born and, after those individuals have all died without issue, that’s the end of the rabbits in Australia.’
And the end of Thomas Austin, Esquire’s experiment, I thought. The wealthy Geelong grazier had imported rabbits to Australia from England in 1859 so as to have a little hunting and shooting.
‘Of course,’ Dallas was saying, ‘it’s still in the developmental stage.’
It had been estimated that rabbits caused trillions of dollars of damage per year to farmers and, in the long run, to the economy. Many countries are plagued by them and a scientific solution to their infestation would certainly be lucrative.
‘So how close were they to delivery?’ I asked.
‘Years away. It was a very long-range project.’
I couldn’t make up my mind about Dallas Baxter. Though he was expansive, almost boasting, about his scientists’ work now, he had been evasive previously and I wanted to know why.
‘I want you to go in there, Jack, and find out what the hell is going on. I’m hoping there’s been some malfunction with Claire’s mobile or even that they have eloped . . .’ He paused.
‘Get Hazchem on standby,’ I said. ‘I can’t go in until you do that.’
He seemed reluctant and again I wondered why. But I stood, waiting, until he made the phone call, turning away into a corner as he talked to the chief of the local Fire Investigation Unit.
Eventually he rang off and came back. ‘Ewan Purcell confirmed the protocols state that in the case of a possible biohazard, you’re to go in first.’
‘I’ll bet he did,’ I said. ‘You’ve just spent some time assuring me nothing toxic could be involved. Now you’re behaving as if there’s a risk of contamination.’
‘There’s no risk to humans at all,’ said Dallas, sounding annoyed. ‘I might have been an administrator a long time, but I am, first and foremost, a scientist. I’m simply being ultra-cautious. Until I’m sure in my mind that it’s safe in there, I’d rather be too careful than not careful enough. But I can assure you, there’s nothing in the Terminator Rabbit program nor the earlier project that could cause any concern to a human being.’
At this stage, I had to keep my suspicions to myself, but if I’d been a betting man I’d have taken odds-on that Dallas Baxter knew a grea
t deal more about all of this than he was revealing. His unease was obvious as he strode over to the first door.
Once I’d made a last check of my gear—including the respirator, which I was using in case the air was contaminated—Dallas swiped the door free of its locks. I stepped into the clean room, past the shelves of white lab coats, boxes of shoe protectors and face masks. The next door had a cartoon pasted on it—a fierce-looking, AK47-swinging Terminator Rabbit.
Not since my last investigation, involving Bacillus anthracis—better known as anthrax—had I worn a full respirator suit on the job. Yet despite Dallas Baxter’s reassurances, I would take no chances. Staying on the side of caution kept investigators alive longer. Accidents in labs were not uncommon and, excluding suicide, every year there was a workplace fatality in a lab in Australia.
I opened the door and stood a moment, taking in the scene. Somewhere a radio was playing. My first impression was how extremely clean everything appeared and, for the briefest of moments, I envied Claire Dimitriou and Peter Yu’s neat habits. But hard on the back of that thought came another. This is not natural. This didn’t look like a working research lab—or indeed any working lab I’d ever been in. Stepping carefully, I moved further inside.
I couldn’t hear the hum of the airconditioner over the soft hissing in my ears as I breathed, but I could see it was on. Every surface was sparkling clean, the sinks shone as if brand new, the glassware sparkled. The walls, bench spaces, fridges and feed bins, apparatus covers, enamelled technical equipment all gleamed white and chrome, bright as the day they’d been delivered. The frosted glass of the windows, the light fittings and vinyl floors were spotless. On the bench to my left, an ELISA—enzyme-linked-immunosorbent-assay—machine sat, lights on, ready to go, linked up to the colour monitor and printer. But no assay was in progress—the machine was not loaded with test material. The lab looked as if it had been cleaned by a team of detailers. Then I saw why. Standing near a large stereoscopic light microscope was the portable generator and handgear of an industrial-strength steam-cleaner. The whole lab had been steam-cleaned.
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