Jerri picked up the plate and looked at it, frowning. ‘What was it then? The plate does look a bit different—a slightly different colour—now that I look at it closely.’
‘And you quite reasonably thought it was just a variation because of the new suppliers. But this plate was one of several cartons—a wrong order that came through the same new supplier—human sera plates, not rabbits’.’ I remembered Dallas’s complaining about the wrong delivery. ‘What Claire Dimitriou and Peter Yu saw that morning—and what you’d failed to see, because you hadn’t realised what sort of plate it was—’ I stopped speaking because I was watching Jerri’s face as she returned from checking the side of the carton for herself.
‘Oh God. I think I know now what happened,’ she said, eyes widening with shock.
‘For Christ’s sake, will somebody tell me what’s going on? What the hell happened here?’ Brian demanded.
I waited for Jerri, watching her assemble the words. After what she’d been through, it was her moment.
‘One of the strains of the virus—the strain from RP4—had caused a violent reaction. In human serum,’ she said and raised her eyes to mine.
I nodded. She’d got it all right. ‘That means,’ I said, ‘that the rabbit pox had mutated. The virus had jumped species.’
And there was something more troubling even than that, I thought as we waited in silence while Dallas locked the lab. We degowned, still quiet, still thinking about what had happened in the Terminator Rabbit lab and I could see the puzzlement still in the faces of Brian and Pauline as the implications took longer to sink in.
Dallas invited us to his office, where he poured everyone except me a large brandy. I found some tonic water in a cupboard and, once Dallas had us all settled, he closed the door and we sat around, silent for a while longer. He was ashen. Like me, he was thinking that things were worse than a virus jumping.
It was Brian who finally spoke, pulling out his notebook, looking around like a puzzled schoolboy, eyebrows at twelve o’clock. ‘I’m just a country cop,’ he said. ‘Spell it out.’
‘Viruses are always jumping around,’ I said. ‘They’re extraordinary life forms. A strain of bird flu has now become a big human problem and humans are dying from a disease that once only infected chicken and other birds.’
‘Do you mean the rabbit pox could make people sterile?’ Pauline’s eyes widened with concern.
‘The genetic payload was made from and for rabbit genes,’ I said. ‘Targeting rabbits, not humans. That’s not the problem as I see it.’
‘Then what is the problem?’ asked Brian.
‘What happened demonstrates that yet another virus, a close relation of the vaccinia virus—that’s the one used in vaccinations against smallpox—has become capable of infecting humans. But more alarming, that virus has killed six rabbits—rabbits that had been immunised against it. And that is a big worry. Not only has it jumped species, it’s also increased in lethality. God knows by how much. I’m guessing here, but I think that the dangerous strain was the strain developed in number four rabbit. ’
‘There are people in the world,’ said Dallas, ‘hostile to life, who would be very interested in this sort of discovery.’
‘Claire and Peter realised what had happened,’ said Jerri, ‘but I didn’t. Because I didn’t know it was human serum in those wells.’ She frowned. ‘They must have been arguing about that. They would have both been shocked and distressed.’
‘I still don’t get it,’ said Pauline. ‘Why didn’t they do something about it?’
‘I believe they did,’ I said. ‘Or one of them was about to. I asked myself: if they’re not arguing about sex, but rather science, then the obvious point for discussion would be: what the hell are we going to do with this knowledge? Just the same question Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw had to ask and answer for themselves only a few short years ago, when they saw what had happened to the mice they’d tested after genetically tweaking their immune systems. They’d found a way to increase the lethality of mouse pox.’
I paused and saw light dawning on Brian’s face.
‘All their test animals died too. And they were all vaccinated mice. Jackson and Ramshaw had to face the fact that their research could have huge implications. They didn’t know what to do with their findings or if they should even publish them. I believe that the argument Kevin Waites overheard was a similar argument, Claire taking the line—in my opinion, the right line, in fact, the only line—that they must publish the facts about this event and Peter Yu saying no, they mustn’t. It would be too dangerous. In my reconstruction of these events, he was arguing that this information must be suppressed. No one else need know, he might have said. We rip the page out of the lab book, destroy the rabbits’ bodies and stop this line of research dead in its tracks. The rabbits are disposed of, the RP4 strain is dead, the lab steam-cleaned and no one need ever know how this virus not only jumped but also increased its toxicity. They didn’t even have time to worry about whether or not they’d caught it themselves.’
‘God,’ said Jerri. ‘What if I’d caught it? And they hadn’t even thought to tell me!’
I finished off the last of my drink. ‘Kevin Waites overheard Dr Dimitriou saying, “Don’t you see now we have to!” And to strengthen the urgency of the situation, she reminded Peter that Jerri had seen the sixteen blue wells on the ELISA plate, the intense antibody response, and might, in due course, realise that her test run had inadvertently been done with human serum. “She saw sixteen blue wells!” It was essential, Claire thought, that they make their findings public so that the scientific world could be prepared. “Forewarned is forearmed”,’ I quoted, ‘and in these days of bio-terrorism, being forewarned is essential. Seen in this light, their argument had nothing to do with extramarital sexual liaisons, as Brian and I first suspected, and everything to do with Terminator Rabbit.’
‘Why didn’t they destroy the rest of the carton then?’ Brian asked, looking over at the cupboard.
‘Because there’s absolutely nothing sinister about a carton of human sera plates. They were just part of an ordering error. They would have been eventually sent back to the manufacturers and replaced with the right ones. It would have been much stranger if they had destroyed them. That would have been something to explain. Wasting valuable resources.
‘So Claire’s saying “We must publish” and Peter’s saying “We can’t”. And he felt so strongly about this, what with his newfound belief that he knew the mind of God, that when he saw he couldn’t budge his colleague, he left the Ag Station, got the weapon he’d obtained previously, came back later that evening when Claire was working back—’
‘—and shot her,’ said Brian. ‘And cleaned up very thoroughly.’
‘So what do we do next?’ Jerri said.
‘You find another place to finish your doctorate,’ I said. ‘And keep the standards of science shining bright. Don’t be discouraged by what happened in the old Faithful Bunnies lab.’ I looked around the group, put my glass down and stood up. ‘Me? I’m going back to work.’
On the way back to Forensic Services, I diverted via Wendy Chen’s flat.
Shyly, she led me into the well-lit room to show me the work she’d begun on 17/2000. The reconstruction was well underway, with the eyes in place and muscle tissue building up around the small pegs that marked the depth, but because the muscles around the eyes were not yet fleshed out, the face had a shocked look, staring wildly out of the clay. A decomposing body I’d worked on in the old days had shown just such an expression—the face also incomplete, but in that case falling away.
‘I’ve bought some hair. There was just a little left.’
‘That’s a great help,’ she said, taking it and studying it in its plastic protector. ‘She’d had her hair tipped,’ she said, showing me. ‘Little blonde tips.’
W
e were both silent a moment with the poignancy of it.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Wendy offered, breaking the silence.
Today she was wearing a tight lime green leotard under the too-big, clay-spattered shirt. Reminded by this feminine presence, my heart jumped to another woman. In the excitement and drama of the reconstruction of the fatal events in the Terminator Rabbit experiment, my sorrow about Iona had receded for a little while.
‘Maybe, when she’s finished,’ I said, ‘I’ll buy something to celebrate.’
‘It’s hard to believe,’ Wendy said, ‘that no one has noticed a young girl like this going missing. Where is her mother?’
I explained that not everyone had a mother, that some kids were raised in institutions, or in families where no one gave a shit. As I spoke, my body was infused with the older pain that arose about my own mother.
Thirty-one
Over the next few days, the excitement generated by what our re-enactment had unearthed reached almost hysterical proportions.
Brian and Dallas were plagued by journalists and the Ag Station itself, now the subject of an inquiry, had to pull the always-open boom gate down and put a security man on duty. Dr Leonie Pringle was said to be considering resigning from the board of examiners. There were calls for more stringent protocols on research projects and, for a while, the jumping virus was very hot news.
Then, as was always the case, another scandal, another disaster, took precedent in the press and the fuss died down. Sober articles from senior scientists drew attention to the facts that human beings posed the greatest threat to each other and that nature herself, without any genetic tweaking, was the mother of all terrorists, the Spanish flu of 1918 killing between 20 and 30 million human beings; the AIDS epidemic responsible for a similarly huge number of deaths over a longer period. But it was always more menacing when human malice took to the laboratory to do harm.
With both investigations now coming to an end, I found that the grief around my loss of Iona was worsening. I tried to fill in the silent hours of the weekend back at the cottage by taking out my water colours and attempting to capture the soft grey mauve of dusk over the worn, dry hills.
At work on Monday morning, I tidied up, preparing at last to take some time off and go to Sydney for a while. I put Bob’s box of bones, 17/2000, in a large sealed bag and signed off for them, calling Bob to tell him I’d act as courier myself and deliver them to Bradley Strachan at the Glebe morgue on the way in to Sydney. Then I rang Wendy Chen to see how she was progressing with the facial reconstruction.
‘Come and see for yourself,’ she said. ‘And bring that bottle with you.’
‘You’ve just missed Jerri,’ Wendy said, letting me in. ‘She’ll be disappointed.’ Today she was wearing a tight red jumper with jeans and her glossy black hair fell around her shoulders. She looked about fourteen years old.
‘I hope she forgives me one day for what she had to do in the Terminator Rabbit lab.’
‘She told me all about the re-enactment,’ said Wendy, as I followed her through to her workroom.
‘I’ll get some glasses,’ she said, taking the bottle of Australian champagne from me, ‘and then you can come and have a look at the progress we’ve made with your unknown young woman.’
I wasn’t sure if it was progress or not to have an unknown male turning into an unknown female. But when I stood in front of the head that Wendy Chen had rebuilt from a cast of the stark cranium and mandible from the bone room, I felt something like awe, not to mention a powerful sense of recognition that was just out of my reach. Somehow, I knew this young woman. Somewhere, I’d seen her.
I viewed the restored head from all angles, the sense of recognising her growing stronger every second. I know this person, I thought. But how could I? A young woman murdered at Queanbeyan probably two decades ago. I wasn’t even working in Canberra at that time.
Wendy had placed the head on a table, where there was room enough for a vase of violets. Their delicate, old-fashioned fragrance reached me as I walked around again, examining the work. The unknown woman’s eyes, now set finely in their fleshed-out orbits, fringed with lashes, gazed a little to my left so I moved until I was in the right place. Now she was looking straight into my eyes. Soft hair, bleached at the tips, waved around her cheeks, a mid-length style that would allow viewers to imagine it shorter or longer as they needed. Wendy returned with two glasses.
‘Let me,’ I said, seeing her about to tackle the champagne bottle and taking it from her.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘You’re a genius,’ I said. ‘It’s almost a breathing presence.’
‘Kind of you to say so. I’ll probably never know if I got it right, or even if I was close.’ She poured two glasses of the home-grown champagne—nothing sham about the pain, I used to think, the morning after.
‘I don’t drink,’ I said, ‘but I wanted you to pour two glasses.’
I picked up the tall glass, with its bubbles beading in horizontal lines up the sides, and placed it carefully near the vase of violets. ‘This is for you,’ I said, ‘whoever you are, wherever you are. This is an offering for you.’ When I turned to Wendy, I saw she had tears in her eyes.
‘If I can take her and get our technicians to post a photo of her on the Missing Persons link, it could have results. I promise I’ll take great care of her.’
‘Sure,’ said Wendy. ‘Just don’t let her out of your sight. What can I get you to drink then?’
I said I’d settle for anything soft. Wendy poured herself a second champagne.
‘That was a lovely thing to do,’ she said, ‘to make an offering of wine.’
I signalled with a lifted hand. ‘It was the least I could do.’
‘And I’m really pleased with how she turned out,’ she said.
‘You should be,’ I said. ‘She’s so good, she looks familiar. I feel I’ve seen her somewhere.’
‘Remember, it’s not like a photographic likeness or anything. It’s only ever going to be a passing resemblance. We don’t know the habitual expressions that made her face her own. We can’t derive that from statistics.’
I kept staring at the dead woman’s serene gaze and I felt uneasy. The familiarity worried me.
‘Maybe you met her once,’ Wendy said. ‘Years and years ago.’
‘That could be it,’ I said, not wanting to labour the point.
When it came time to leave, I placed 17/2000’s reconstructed head, wrapped up in tissue paper and an old evening gown that Wendy was happy to contribute for the occasion, and put her on the passenger seat beside me, cradled in a box and seatbelted in.
On the drive back to Weston, I came to the conclusion that the sense of recognition I’d experienced when looking at the face of the unknown young woman hadn’t derived from twenty years ago. Impossible though this was, I recognised the features of 17/2000.
I was sure I’d seen her quite recently.
Back at work, and still puzzling about the impossibility of this, I walked down to the technicians who would scan 17/2000’s head onto our records for posting on Missing Persons and other police sites. After giving them the reconstruction, we discussed a press release and decided that if we didn’t get any results from the first line of exposure, we’d go to the newspapers with the likeness.
In my office, a phone call reminded me that a group of Sydney detectives were arriving the next day for the forensic conference and I wondered if Wendy would be available at such short notice to give an off-the-cuff talk about her work with cranial and facial reconstruction. I rang her and asked. She liked the idea, but . . .
‘I’ve never done anything like that before,’ she said. ‘I’ll be very nervous.’
‘Consider it practising for invitations in the future. There would also be a guest speaker’s fee in it as well
as your payment for the job,’ I bribed. ‘Remember, you’re an impoverished postgrad student.’
That clinched it.
I reclaimed 17/2000 from the technicians, who’d finished with her, and, remembering my promise to Wendy, installed her on top of my tall filing cabinet where inactive paper files were still stored. I couldn’t resist hanging the evening dress down the front of the filing cabinet and, together with a Brumbies football team scarf that someone had left lying in the meal room ages ago, I draped the exposed top area of the cabinet. I smiled to myself as I stepped back to admire my handiwork. At first glance, it looked as if a tall woman dressed for an evening out was standing in the corner of my office. She looked very good there, and the slight angle I’d given to the bust gave her eyes a come-hither look. Maybe it was a strange thing to do, possibly even pathetic, I thought. Was this the only sort of woman I could make it with? I sat at my desk with my head in my hands, staring at the Venetian glass paperweight and wishing like hell I knew how to get Iona Seymour back into my life.
After that, I spent a long time bringing my records up to date and dealing with the endless mountain of mail, from both the outside and internal world. Days like this, I’d like to track down the liar who promised us a paperless office twenty years ago.
My mobile rang while I was absorbed in this and I grabbed it up. When I heard who it was, I wished I hadn’t.
‘Jack, I’m in town,’ said Earl Richardson. ‘Drove down with some of my old mates from the academy.’
I tried to think of something to say.
‘Anyway, I thought it would be a great chance to catch up with you. Show you my appreciation. What say we get together? Swap a few war stories from the old days. Have a few quiet ones? I’m very grateful for what you did for me.’
‘I didn’t do anything for you,’ I said. In my irritation with the man, my fingers flicked and fiddled with the paperweight. ‘I simply did my job. Same as I’d do any day, any time for anyone. I gathered the evidence and the evidence fell in a certain direction.’
Dirty Weekend Page 36