Palindrome

by Nick Athanasou

  “What do you have?”

  “I want you to let me know if an idea I have about the murder weapon has any merit or not. It’s just an idea, of course. If it doesn’t fit the facts I’ll give it up.”

  “Tomorrow, after work then.”

  “I’ll meet you at 7.00 at my college. We can have dinner there.”

  “So I’m going to have to earn my supper.”

  “Just for a change, Nick. Just for a change.”

  Grant’s laugh at the end of the line drowned out his goodbye.

  When he sat down he saw that Pat was hunched over the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine. She looked a little as when he had first seen her across high table at a college dinner, a thin girl with a wistful smile which he had somehow managed to broaden after a few weak Marx Brothers jokes.

  “How’s Nick,” she asked. “And Carla?”

  “He didn’t mention her. Neither did I for that matter. Why?”

  Pat said that she had promised to take Carla to the Boarstall Tower this Sunday.

  Gabriel refrained from pointing out to his wife that the Tower was probably closed over winter and said, “I’m seeing him tomorrow night. I’m taking him to dinner at college.”

  Pat smiled again but not quite so pleasantly as before.

  “So you won’t need feeding then?”

  “You can come as well, if you like,” he offered. He stared at the scarred and scrubbed wooden surface of the kitchen table for a moment before adding, “Then neither of us will need feeding.”

  Pat shook her head. “I have work to do. Essays on The Witch to mark.”

  “So you finally managed to convince your students to read it?”

  “Yes. But not many of them have managed to understand it.”

  Gabriel did not reply. He must himself have been looking at her without understanding because Pat took it on herself to explain: “The witch is under the spell of the devil who doesn’t see people as good or evil, just people.”

  “But are there no good people? People who do good, I mean.”

  Pat shook her head. “The devil would say that people do good only because they hope to gain something. What a man does depends on what he needs: if he’s really hungry he will steal; if he’s threatened he will lie; and if he’s in danger he will kill. That’s what happens in the play.”

  “And do you agree with the devil that is why people are what they are?”

  She nodded. “Those people who are nice to me are good, and those who are not — they’re bad.” She looked at him without a smile. “You are sometimes nice. Who do you think was not nice to Anna?”

  Adam shrugged, trying like a child who has committed some misdemeanour, to keep the conversation off the dangerous topic.

  “I don’t know but I’m beginning to believe that the palindromes she was working on are the devil’s business.”

  Pat didn’t wait for him to develop this new theme. “Will you be able to prove whatever it is you need to prove? It looks as though that’s what’s needed for us to return to normal.”

  “You mean this isn’t normal?” Gabriel quipped before answering seriously, “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  Tom usually left the department long after the other staff had gone home. Walking down the quiet, empty corridors of the department in the evening, he would first go to the tea room and pick up the daily newspaper one of the staff had left behind; then, after packing some papers in his brief case, he would make his way outside, unlock his bicycle, put on his helmet and cautiously cycle home. At that moment of the day he would permit himself to relax, hum a little tune. He already looked forward to the evening meal when he would question Angela about her day and let her know something of his own. He liked this settled routine — settled and predictable — and was content for it to continue for the rest of his life.

  He had married Angela in the more humble days of his career when he had been a house officer and she a nurse training to be a midwife. In some ways she was his polar opposite. She was not ambitious or intelligent; she was simple in her aims, a small demure thing, the type you don’t notice much. When Tom had told her that he intended to apply for a job in Oxford she had been surprised but not objected, even though it took her away from her native west Midlands. She accepted that his decision was one of far-sighted vision for their future. She saw the steady progress in Tom’s career as something inevitable and predictable: it was on this basis she recognised his authority.

  The two of them sat down to eat. Tom mentioned in his thin even voice that the police had been around again that day and questioned some of the staff including Melanie Stokes, Dr Reynolds, Bill Chambers.

  It was then his small demure wife surprised him.

  “One of them came here. He asked me what time you got home the day Anna was killed.”

  “And you told him?”

  Her voice wavered. “Of course. Why shouldn’t I? He was from the police. He showed me his badge.”

  Tom put down his knife and fork.

  “What exactly did you tell him?”

  “I told him you got home some time between 6.30 and 7.00, just like you did most days, and he seemed very happy with that.” As soon as the last words were out of her mouth she realised that she had said something she shouldn’t have; that what she thought was a straightforward reply Tom would now show to be not quite that. “Is there anything wrong?”

  Tom wiped his brow. “It’s just that I knew Anna at medical school and all that.” He stopped short of telling Angela that they had gone out together.

  “What do you mean? What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. Of the past mixing things up, complicating things, with the job and everything.”

  She knew that he was nervous about the coming interview for the Clinical Tutor position. One night after she’d gone to bed, he was so long coming up that she had gone out on the landing and heard him below talking to himself.

  “Didn’t the police speak to you today?” she asked.

  “No. They spoke to others in the department. I just thought they were satisfied with what I’d told them the first time. They might have asked them the same questions they asked you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  He shook his head.

  An uncommon weight of uncertainty descended on Angela. She was most at ease with simple truths and could tell instantly this was not one.

  “You were just friends with Anna at medical school, weren’t you?”

  “We were in the same year,” he answered in as flat a voice as he could muster. His fingers squeezed the table cloth. “I knew Anna and she knew me. We went out a few times together in company. Nothing more.”

  Tom paused. Angela remained silent and he continued.

  “She wasn’t interested in me. She liked people that could help her get on. In a way it’s not surprising what happened to her. She got people’s backs up.” He said this at speed then applied the brakes and began searching for the right words. “She was out of my league really.”

  The clock ticked loudly in the silence that followed this last remark. Tom wondered if he had successfully managed to direct their talk away from the one subject which, like that between an ill person and his visitor, is unavoidable.

  Angela’s head was bowed. She had folded her hands on her lap. He watched her anxiously as she stared out of the window into the dark night.

  “But why didn’t the police speak to you?” she suddenly asked him.

  The next morning, Gabriel’s work was interrupted by a call from Hewitt.

  “Sorry to hassle you but I was just wondering if you’ve finished looking at the PLF slides we gave you. Dr Reynolds tells me that she hasn’t found anything abnormal in the slides. She’s just waiting for you to confirm her observations before the report to the FDA can be signed off.”

  Hewitt paused. Perhaps he was waiting for Gabriel to reply. When there was nothing he went on, a little more suppliant in his voice.


  “The thing is we need to include this report in our submission to the FDA. The police won’t let me leave the country but they’ve agreed to let Frances go over to the States and present the results to our backers. They’re keen for the company to submit as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll probably let you have the report tomorrow. There are just one or two things I have to check.”

  “That’s good. The FDA are tough on original research for new products. I suppose you know that.”

  Gabriel had a sudden thought. “That’s very interesting. You see, it wasn’t clear to me from what you said to me at dinner the other night whether PLF acts on the same palindrome Palmer worked on before he joined your company or on a different, newly identified palindrome? I presume Nebotec has a patent on PLF.”

  “Some of that information is commercially sensitive,” Hewitt replied carefully, his voice suddenly stiff. “I’m a little limited in what I can say about it. But I can tell you that we have fully patent protected our discoveries and that we have the sole right to exploit and develop them.”

  “Then I presume it must be a new product you’ve developed because if it was one based on Palmer’s original research, which has been published and is therefore out in the public domain, it would be open to any company that has the wit or wherewithal to exploit the findings. It could also be challenged by those who were party to the original research.”

  There was a short pause before Hewitt answered defensively, “I can assure you that there’s no problem. After all, the whole human genome is now known and is in the public domain and that hasn’t stopped companies developing new drugs and patenting them.”

  “Yes, I know.” Gabriel interrupted, equally defensive, “but it could make it more complicated, couldn’t it? I mean, it might give other companies the idea that there is no bar to developing a similar product.”

  “All I can say to that is it wouldn’t be easy.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Gabriel conceded, making a token effort to row back from openly disagreeing with Hewitt.

  They said goodbye on this cold note.

  Gabriel put down the phone. He somewhat resented Hewitt’s phone call. It was an attempt to bully him. He faced the same problem with some too keen surgeons who put pressure on him to deliver a diagnostic opinion before he had fully investigated a case. He had learned to stand up to them; It was the only way to avoid making a mistake that could have serious consequences.

  Gabriel was used to employing his mind as a working tool to solve diagnostic problems. He settled into his office chair and picked up a pen; he turned over a memo from Poole outlining the staffing changes planned in the Agenda for Change — he might as well put it to some good use — and wrote down the dates of each experiment that had involved PLF treatment.

  Start at the beginning, he silently reminded himself: Anna looked at the first batch of slides and pronounced that the drug had caused a marrow abnormality. The experiment was repeated several times and there was no abnormality. Anna was puzzled. Had there been a mix up? Had she got the diagnosis wrong?

  He took a sip of coffee.

  What would he have done in her place? He would have checked the first set of slides to see if he had got the diagnosis right. Gabriel had looked at them and agreed with her opinion that there was a marrow abnormality; it was so pronounced in a few of the mice that a diagnosis of leukaemia might have been justified. But then the marrow of the mice given the same dose of the drug in later experiments had appeared normal. Plum normal. How was that?

  What had prompted the murderer to act? He — that was how Gabriel instinctively thought of the murderer — must have known that Anna had asked for the first experiment to be repeated one last time. Anna was checking the slides when she was killed. And, just as on previous occasions when that experiment had been repeated, the slides had shown no abnormality in the marrow.

  But the slides had been replaced. He felt sure of that. Why?

  Perhaps the answer was in the results of the first experiment? He opened again Anna’s laboratory diary and noted down her results. He put them into columns; the abnormalities had not been seen in every mouse, just in a few, and both male and female mice had been affected.

  In the subsequent experiments there had been no abnormality. Anna could not explain her observations. She had dutifully reported that the slides were normal but not believed the results. Otherwise, why keep repeating the same experiment? Did Anna suspect that the slides she was looking at had been replaced? And if so, why did she not suspect it earlier? Had she missed something that she should have noted? Something not obvious, something that would not normally be noticed? The numbers on the slides matched. Could the slides she was looking at have been cut from a different block of tissue? He had asked Brook to check the blocks of tissue against the slides. Apparently they matched. So the slides were cut from the blocks that were in the file. There was of course the possibility, which Gabriel could not dismiss, that both the blocks and slides had been changed? But why would anyone do that?

  No. It still didn’t make sense. It wasn’t tidy. Nothing made sense. Nothing. He needed to re-examine the data. That was what he did when he hadn’t a clue what the diagnosis was? Have another look at the slides. Look at everything again. Examine each of the cells in detail.

  He took out the slide of bone marrow Anna was examining when she had been murdered and looked at it under his microscope for several minutes. He looked at it first at low-magnification, sweeping across the slide. He could often make a diagnosis of disease at low-power but in this case there was nothing abnormal to see and he changed to high-power, going up through the lenses quickly: 100, 250, 400 then 600 times magnification. He flicked back and forth between 400 and 600, looking carefully at each cell. Was there any difference between the cells? Were they abnormal in any way?

  At one point Gabriel stopped scanning the slide and focused on the nucleus of a marrow cell in one field. He moved the slide to a neighbouring field and paused, concentrating on the same feature. He picked out another slide from the same experiment and put it under the microscope. His heart beat faster as with growing astonishment he noticed what he had failed to see earlier. He checked Anna’s laboratory diary and then fell back into his chair, shaking his head, angry with himself.

  Now he knew. Now he knew what Anna had seen. He had relied too much on pattern recognition and missed what should have been obvious if he had taken the time to analyse stepwise what he had been examining.

  Some marrow cells appeared to have a nucleus that was highly segmented and one or two had what looked like a small drumstick-like structure. That was a sign, not definitive in itself, of the presence of a Barr body, an extra X chromosome, which meant that the cell must have come from an XX female mouse. This unusual feature could not be seen in every cell; only in those where the staining was crisp enough to make out this fine nuclear detail. In the slide that Anna had apparently been examining when she was murdered, this evidence of a Barr body was present in the marrow cells of a mouse that, according to her lab diary, should have been male. Male cells do not have a Barr body; they are XY not XX; it is the extra (redundant) X chromosome in females that makes the cells look unusual under the microscope.

  Gabriel looked at slides of liver and heart from the same mouse and confirmed that the cells in these tissues did not have a Barr body and that the mouse was indeed male. Only the slides of bone tissue showed the abnormality. Someone had substituted a slide of normal bone from a female mouse into a set of slides that was supposed to be from a male PLF-treated mouse. He looked again at Anna’s lab book and, making a quick calculation, confirmed that the number of male and female mice that had received PLF or the placebo was the same. He examined several more slides of bone and other tissues, both those Brook had given him and those Palmer and Hewitt had asked him to re-examine. It soon became clear to him that in some but not all the samples of bone marrow from PLF-treated mice this nuclear feature was present when it sho
uld not have been in males and vice versa in females.

  Had the murderer got careless and not thought to check the sex of the mice from which the sample of mouse bone had been taken? Even animal house workers find it difficult to tell whether a mouse is male or female without careful examination. Under the microscope cells from male and female mice look pretty much the same; evidence of a Barr body in the nucleus has to be looked for very carefully, very deliberately.

  He sat staring at the slides for several minutes then suddenly stood up and, picking up his coat, strode quickly out of his office. There was something he needed to check immediately.

  He was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he did not immediately register that his name was being called. Turning, he saw Jane at the door of her office, one of her arms outstretched like Eurydice, calling him back.

  “Dr Poole’s on the phone,” she said with undisguised disgust. “He wants to speak to you.”

  “Tell him I’ll ring back,” Gabriel replied irritably.

  He made an about-turn and pushed his way through the swing doors. He could just hear the voice of Jane, calling after him as he marched down the corridor, “But he says that he needs to speak with you now. Right now.”

  Chapter 15

  Do geese see God?

  Gabriel nodded to the Nebotec receptionist then made his way to the Pathology laboratory. He paused for a moment to study a notice board on which were pinned a few messages. There was a sheet of paper with a list of staff members and their telephone numbers, a Health and Safety notice, and a fluttering poster announcing a forthcoming international conference (in Davos) on drug development.

  He rounded a corner and found himself in a corridor illuminated by fluorescent bulbs that were buried in the ceiling; they cast a kind of white metallic light that was unnaturally bright. There were no windows, only a row of doors that had a strip of safety glass. He opened the door to the Pathology laboratory but could see no one. Apart from the regular burping noises of the processing machines there was a great silence. Suddenly he heard the clatter of feet behind him. He turned round and was face to face with Tina Simms.