On the second page I saw a small piece about the closure of the Blackspot Nightclub. Since the murder of Tianna Richardson, the place had been virtually deserted and now the manager, Endo Bremmer, had been charged over licensing irregularities plus a whole lot of other charges—obstruction, resist arrest, attempted bribe. The last one surprised me; maybe it hadn’t been big enough. Jack, you’re a cynic, I thought. But, despite my heartache, I couldn’t help smiling. Some people were their own worst enemies.
I turned the page to find a double-page spread: police baffled by motiveless murder–suicide of local scientists. I was baffled too, I thought as I read it, sitting with a dish of rolled oats and honey in the kitchen at the back of the cottage.
Pale sun shone through the glass of the windows and, because the fireplace in the lounge room didn’t warm this end of the place, I had a dinky little electric heater near my feet. I should get the old range going, I thought. It would warm the whole back of the house.
Outside, a flock of galahs shrieked as they flew overhead while I reread the article and a boxed story on the same page featuring my friend the Calvinist barman, telling what he knew about the partner-swapping group who used to meet at the Cat and Castle. ‘Downright disgusting,’ he’d called it. I looked at his disapproving sneer in the small photograph. It was a warning, I thought. When you couldn’t get something, you often ended up hating it. I didn’t want to end up like that, nor turn into a bitter old man like my father. My father. It was ages since I’d contacted him. I tried to force myself to pick up the phone, but I just didn’t have it in me. My mobile rang.
‘Dad?’
I could read my daughter’s voice like I can read A B C. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. ‘What’s up?’ I asked, trying to keep the fear from my voice.
‘Shaz. She’s gone.’
‘What do you mean gone?’
‘I drove over to the motel to bring her some gear, girlie things, and she wasn’t there. Her stuff’s gone. She didn’t have much, just one bag with clothes and textbooks. I rang Bob straightaway and left a message.’
‘Ask the owner if he saw anything.’
‘I did. He hadn’t seen anything. He was at the front in reception and no one came in that way.’
I didn’t imagine Docker would advertise his visit.
‘Dad,’ said Jacinta. ‘I’m really worried.’
‘I’ll ring Bob and he can alert the local police. Try not to worry. Let me know if you hear anything,’ I said, and did exactly that, leaving a message on Bob’s voicemail.
I turned my attention back to the bare facts of Dr Claire Dimitriou’s murder and Peter Yu’s suicide as presented by the newspaper. I knew that I was going to have to do the same as Bob with his cold case. When you were baffled, there was only way to go. Start all over again. From the beginning. From that Monday morning in the laboratory when Jerri Quill made her mistake. Science began with a hypothesis and then tested it.
I couldn’t deal with hanging around the empty cottage so I grabbed up Eadie’s report and anything else to do with the case and headed back to Forensic Services.
Most of the offices and labs were still empty when I arrived and so, in the quiet permeated only by the soft humming of distant automated processes, I went through the whole story again. Acute grief cleared the mind of all petty concerns, focusing it into a sharp, painful point. In the light of that clarity, I went right through the steps of what had happened in the Faithful Bunnies laboratory, beginning with the almost hysterical overreaction to the results of a routine assay, sixteen blue wells, the heated argument between the two scientists, the charge of blasphemy, moving right up to the murder of Claire Dimitriou in her steam-cleaned laboratory, the obliteration of any records from that day, and ending with the suicide of her unstable partner.
I went over conversations I’d had with Dallas Baxter, another overworked chief like me. I had to do a terrible thing to stop a blasphemy, Peter Yu had written. I stood up and walked around, unaware of the office, putting myself back in that lab, looking down at Jerri Quill’s immunoassay plate in my mind’s eye, seeing the strong reaction to the infection in the case of RP4, one of Claire’s six rabbits. What could be more terrible than two deaths, I wondered.
The answer was simple. I turned away from the window through which I’d been sightlessly staring and almost flew the couple of steps back to my desk. Eureka moments could do that and that was what I was experiencing as I snatched up the phone to ring Jerri Quill.
‘I need your help,’ I said and outlined what I had in mind. After some hesitation, Jerri agreed, but said she’d need a day or so to organise the trip.
‘I’m still not sure what to do,’ she said. ‘At the moment, I feel the rug’s been pulled out from under me. Here I am, in the latter stages of my thesis, and I make some stupid mistake.’
‘Jerri, you didn’t make a stupid mistake. A mistake was made, but it wasn’t yours. I’ve worked out what happened.’
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘You’ll see for yourself on Thursday. Once I’m a hundred per cent sure.’
‘Okay. I’ll do what you’ve asked and write everything down,’ Jerri said. ‘And I’ll drive down tomorrow evening. That way, we can do it in the morning. Just like it happened the first time.’
All that remained was to call Dallas Baxter. Although I didn’t tell him what I now suspected had gone wrong in that assay, I told him enough to enlist his help in a reconstruction. He assured me Pauline would do anything in her power to assist, promising to ring her so that she’d be ready too.
Early Thursday morning, Jerri called me on her way out to the Ag Station. After shovelling down the last of my scrambled eggs and coffee, I cleaned my teeth, grabbed a clean jumper and jumped into my wagon. I was doing okay, I thought, after Iona. The night before I’d rung Bob about Shaz but he had no news of her.
It was nice and early and most of the staff hadn’t yet arrived. Sheep were bleating and I saw a utility parked near their external pens and a man hauling bales of lucerne hay to accompany their usual feed-lot breakfast.
Dallas was unlocking the building that housed the Faithful Bunnies lab as I pulled in and Pauline was getting out of her car. A moment after I had parked, Jerri arrived.
As we were entering the building, I heard someone calling and looked across to see Brian hurrying across the frosty grass. He made his apologies for being late. The giant chicken had struck again at Woden, but this time the angry shopkeeper had tackled him down. Brian had been up most of the night trying to get some order into his paperwork and some sense out of the captured chicken.
The five of us were oddly silent as we gowned up and then stepped into the erstwhile Faithful Bunnies laboratory, which still smelled faintly of antiseptic and rabbits.
Jerri walked a little ahead of us, turning uncertainly halfway over to the central workbench, looking absurdly young in her lab gear. ‘What should I do?’ she asked.
‘See if you can repeat what you did last Monday morning, when you came in,’ I said.
Over the last two days, I’d used my notes to make rough scripts of what Jerri had told me had passed between Dr Claire Dimitriou and herself that morning and now I handed Pauline and Dallas a page apiece. ‘You can use these when you play your parts,’ I said, then turned my attention back to the young woman. ‘Jerri, what did you do first when you came in?’
‘First thing I did was go over and say hello to the rabbits.’
‘Do that,’ I said.
Jerri headed for the room at the other end of the laboratory space, where once the experimental animals had lived in their locked and airconditioned space, now neither locked nor airconditioned. Jerri paused at the unlocked door and stood at the threshold. ‘Hi guys,’ she said, to the six empty cages, her voice trembling. She turned round to explain. ‘My favourite one was RP4, t
he smallest one, and I went over to him and patted him through the cage. Then I had to wash my hands and get my gloves on.’ She went through the motions of this while we stood around, watching.
‘This really feels strange,’ she said.
‘You’re doing great,’ I told her. ‘What happened next?’
Jerri approached the ELISA machine then hesitated. ‘I walked over here and checked that the run was finished. It’s like an incubator and the green light tells you when the process is completed. You’ll have to imagine the little green light there is on.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The green light is on, so now show us exactly what you did.’
Jerri undid a fitting at the base of the machine and pulled out a sliding tray. ‘I pulled out the tray like this,’ she said. ‘And lifted the plate off it.’
‘Let’s get an ELISA plate, for realism,’ I said. ‘Where are they stored?’
Jerri pointed to a large white cabinet near the entry to the lab. ‘The glassware and stores are kept in there. Down the bottom. You’ll see the carton on the floor. Each unit is sealed in a sterile pack. You’ll have to open one.’
I went over and opened the cupboard door and pulled out the large laboratory supplier’s carton that was taking up almost all of the space. The handling instructions were printed down the side and the contents and quantities, in small print, were partially obscured by brown masking tape. I peered closely at what was written and felt the triumph of a suspicion vindicated, however I kept this to myself just for the moment. I ripped off some of the masking tape to make things easier and lifted out one of the tightly packed units and took it over to Jerri. She tore the pack open, lifted the sterile vacuum seal and pulled out a 96-welled plate in her gloved hand. I came up close, to watch exactly what she was doing.
‘Here. The plates fit in that housing. Like that,’ she said and secured it before closing the door.
‘Okay,’ said Brian. ‘So let’s imagine it’s been cooking over the weekend and now it’s ready for you. What happened when you took it out again?’
Jerri undid the housing once more and drew out the new plate, which was light grey in colour, reminding me of a miniature egg-carton suitable for 96 tiny pointed eggs. ‘This one’s unused,’ she said, ‘so all the wells seem empty and colourless but they’re not empty. Each one comes coated with a very fine layer of refined rabbit serum which is barely visible. But it’s there.’ She looked around at us. ‘I don’t know how technical you want this to be?’
‘Keep it simple,’ I said. ‘Brian and I are outclassed here.’
‘Please,’ said Pauline, ‘I’m not a scientist.’
‘And I’m no teacher,’ said Jerri, ‘but I’ll do my best to explain it. I’d already made dilutions from the blood of our infected rabbits. Because our rabbits are infected with rabbit pox, their blood has disease antigens in it and once I’ve dropped this into the clean rabbit serum at the bottom of each of those 96 wells, a reaction starts. Just as a real rabbit’s system would, the serum recognises the presence of dangerous foreign disease material and starts to make antibodies—these are proteins produced by the immune system when it recognises the threat posed by the infected blood. And when antibodies start being made, this creates a reaction and the colour in the wells starts changing.’ She looked around to see if we all understood.
‘That’s what I’d done on Friday,’ she said. ‘I’d added disease dilutions from our rabbits to each of the wells—the wells that came coated with clean rabbit serum.’
‘Two rows of eight wells for each rabbit,’ I added, so the others would understand what was going to unfold.
‘That’s right. Over the weekend, because of the disease proteins that I’d added from the rabbits, the serum at the bottom of the wells started producing antibodies, demonstrating that our rabbits have come into contact with the rabbit pox virus. In other words, they’re infected and making antibodies against the infection. We want to know that they’re infected properly so that later, when we release this into the wild, we’ll be confident that the virus will spread through the rabbit populations and start mixing it with their DNA.’
‘So what did the wells look like that day?’ Brian asked.
Jerri looked at me. ‘Like I’ve already told Jack, I must have done something wrong. Instead of all the 96 wells going blue, only two lines of wells were demonstrating the colour change.’
‘Sixteen blue,’ I said.
‘You didn’t expect this?’ Brian asked, his pen poised over his notebook.
‘No way. I would have expected all the wells to be showing lighter blue or darker blue, depending on the strength of the dilution and how strong the antibody build-up in each rabbit is.’
‘So what did you do next?’ I asked.
‘I racked my brains, trying to work out what I might have done wrong and I checked the steps in the previous records in the lab book. But there was nothing there to help me. I’d done exactly what I always do when I run this assay on ELISA. There was nothing to account for this. So I did what a good scientist does—I started noting down the results, describing the lack of reactions, noting that only RP4 had developed antibodies this time. And querying this response. I wrote that the experiment would need to be repeated so as to discover what was going wrong.’
‘Then what happened?’ I asked.
‘Claire came in,’ said Jerri.
‘Okay, Pauline,’ I said. ‘This is your moment. You come in now. Have you got your lines? Jerri, where were you?’
‘I was sitting at the bench, writing in the lab book. Like this,’ said Jerri.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Do it just like you did that day.’
Jerri hunched over the book, head down, writing away.
Pauline walked over, glanced at her lines then fixed her attention on the ELISA plate sitting beside the machine.
‘What have you done?’ she cried in a theatrical voice. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘I’m not sure!’ said Jerri, paling. ‘What is it?’
‘Can’t you see what you’ve done? Can’t you see what’s happened here?’
‘I know there’s been an unexpected variation in the antibody reactions,’ she said.
‘That’s what I’m talking about! Don’t you see what’s happened? What that means?’
Jerri, about to respond as she had done that day, suddenly abandoned her script and stood up, out-of-role and shaken. ‘This is awful going over it like this. It’s bringing it all back to me. And now Claire’s dead. My heart is racing.’
I hurried over to the cupboard near the door where the carton of new plates was stored, beckoning to Dallas.
‘Come on, Dallas,’ I said, ‘this is where you come in.’
Dallas, very pink in the face, playing the role of Peter Yu, strode into the centre of the lab and stood next to Pauline. ‘What’s the problem?’ he demanded self-consciously. Then to me, ‘Is that all I’m supposed to say?’
‘You’re doing a great job. Just finish your walk-through,’ I said.
‘Look what she’s done! Look at that plate!’ Pauline was thundering, enjoying her role.
Dallas, acting the part of Peter Yu, grabbed the ELISA plate from Pauline. I watched as the colour drained from his face. ‘Oh my God!’ he cried and he wasn’t acting.
I hadn’t scripted that line. But it was the right one.
Dallas stared at the plate, turning it over in his hands.
‘This is not the right sort of plate!’ he said.
I certainly hadn’t scripted that line either, but it was perfect. I took the empty plate from his hands, looking around for something to make this more realistic. A container of blue fluid—window and glassware cleaner—stood on the bench and I grabbed it up, dripping some into two rows of wells.
‘Remember,’ I told them, ‘that
the wells on the plate containing RP4’s antibodies had reacted very strongly. Isn’t that right, Jerri?’
‘That’s absolutely right. RP4’s wells were the ones that had turned blue.’
Dallas looked up at me. ‘Sixteen blue,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘That’s right. Sixteen wells turned blue.’
‘Stop it, Dallas!’ Jerri’s distressed cry brought me back to earth. ‘You’re frightening me! That’s just how Claire was looking at me! She was staring at me just like you are now! As if she couldn’t believe her eyes!’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘For God’s sake, tell me! Tell me what happened here last week!’
I went to her and took her arm. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said.
‘You used the wrong plate!’ said Dallas.
‘That’s just what Claire said too! What wrong plate?’
Pauline put her arm around the distressed girl. This had gone on long enough.
‘Do you want to explain, Dallas? Or will I?’ I said.
‘The new suppliers,’ he said. ‘There was a mix up last time and they delivered some cartons of the wrong plates. I thought I’d collected all of them but this carton must have been overlooked. Nuclear biology is not my forte.’
‘What do you mean wrong plates?’ Brian asked.
‘My God,’ said Dallas, looking at me. ‘I hope I’m not held accountable for this.’
‘Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’ said Brian.
‘You thought some mistake had been made, Jerri, because it looked as if only RP4 had developed antibodies this run, except that it wasn’t rabbit serum on that plate.’
I glanced at Dallas, who was studiously avoiding my gaze. He knows, I thought. He’s worked it out too.
Dirty Weekend Page 35