“Which proves?”
“Absolutely nothing unless you start thinking that someone in Palmer’s group might have done the deed.”
“I thought Palmer was safely ensconced on a plane at the time.”
Gabriel nodded.
“And Taylor? Brook seems rather keen on him as a suspect.”
“Well, it doesn’t do, does it, to be found at the scene of the murder covered in blood?”
Gabriel heard himself utter these words with a feeling of absolute absurdity. From his position at High Table facing the students in hall, he could not help but wonder what on earth he was doing there, discussing a murder with Grant.
“But the murder weapon wasn’t found on Taylor,” he went on. “His wife’s ring and necklace are missing too. It’s not easy to explain how he managed to dispose of those items and somehow contrived to make it look like a robbery in the short time he had between seeing Hewitt at 5.30 then again at 6.00 when he alerted him about the murder.”
“That is a problem. But perhaps Taylor had help. He could have murdered her and got covered with blood while someone else who was there laid a false trail, making it look as if a thief had broken in and committed the murder.”
“The same thought had occurred to me,” Gabriel said in agreement. “It does rather open up the field, looking for two people rather than one who was at Nebotec.”
“And you think that person had access to your lab at the hospital? Was it a member of the Pathology Department?”
“That’s what Brook thinks anyway.”
“And you?”
Gabriel did not answer or, more precisely, did not know what to answer. His eyes fell again on Gearing who was stoically drinking the last drops of his claret; he looked for all the world like the classic figure of the cultivated Oxford don. The image, of course, was too perfect and Gabriel could tell that beneath his sober expression he was suffering. He felt pity for Gearing and resolved to sit next to him when they left the hall and went for “afters”.
It did not quite work out as Gabriel expected. The Warden, being the senior Fellow, took charge of seating in the private dining room. He placed the young postgraduate Law student next to Grant, much to his delight, then motioned for Gabriel to sit opposite Gearing.
“The last time we met Palmer was in some form, talking about his palindromes,” Gabriel said.
“You didn’t seem altogether convinced of their significance.”
“I wasn’t but I’m prepared to keep an open mind about them.”
“They’re somewhat troublesome from the college point of view.”
Gabriel looked at Gearing. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Palmer’s commercial activities clash rather often with his teaching duties. He’s let quite a few tutorials slip and as Senior Tutor I’ve had to remind him that he is paid by the College to teach.”
“And how did he take that?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid. The fact is that Palmer, like so many of us, has been here too long. He feels that gives him certain rights and privileges. He spends most of his time at that drug works he runs outside Oxford and has almost no contact with his students. He says he’s far too busy to teach. He leaves that sort of thing to Liz Reynolds who is naturally peeved to find herself — unpaid of course — covering for him.”
“Palmer’s never been easy to manage. I believe Forsyth had problems with him. I’ve given him a wide berth since coming here.”
“I can understand why. But you can’t avoid someone like Palmer forever in Oxford. You inevitably come up against him just as you do all those frightful Norman churches around Oxford.”
“I take it you prefer Lycian tombs.”
Gearing smiled then compressed his lips. “Palmer’s crafty. He may not have time to teach but he still seems to have sufficient to attend quite a few consequential college committees on which he’s managed to wangle himself God knows how, doing God knows what. Teaching certainly isn’t one of them. He always seems to be in on things.”
“Sounds like a real Oxford type,” Gabriel ventured.
“He likes to think he is, but he’s no Jowett or Bowra. Or Florey for that matter. They were clever and scheming. They had real talent. Whatever talent Palmer has he keeps discreetly well hidden. I suppose Oxford is too big, too expanded and too business-like in this new age of university funding, graduate taxes and the like, to produce characters like that now. Palmer’s the modern type. More businessman than scientist. Maybe even a Backhouse as I said the other evening.”
Gabriel was a little taken aback by this last remark. “It’s a bit much, comparing old Palmer with the master forger of Chinese manuscripts.”
“Maybe, but there was his famous Nature paper moment.”
“You know about that?”
“My dear chap, everyone in the college knows something of it. Probably not the exact truth but something approaching it. It’s not exactly something you can keep discreetly well hidden.” His re-employment of the earlier phrase was deliberate and it pleased him. “You were about to say something?”
“No, nothing. Just that you can’t accuse Palmer of forging the results there. Only of getting it wrong. Perhaps trying to force the results, trying to get more out of them than there was. A lot of scientists do that. He published a retraction. He didn’t try to brazen it out.”
“That’s not how Liz Reynolds tells it.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “She was one of his students before she had the good sense to switch to Forsyth as her supervisor. She says that Palmer stretched the findings well beyond where they were legitimately expected to go. She told me that he was very unwilling to publish a retraction; that it was Forsyth who forced him to do it.”
“I didn’t realise Liz had it in quite so much for old Palmer.”
“Well, she’s settled down a bit now. She was a Junior Research Fellow at the college. Energetic. Damned clever. Bit of a temper though. Still like that now. Fierce on the college committees where she always seems to come up against Palmer.”
Gabriel sighed. “Palindromes may not be as biologically significant as Palmer thinks they are but they do appear to cause a significant amount of trouble.”
“They’re quite ancient, of course. They have them in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. There was a fellow at Trinity where I was a student — he’s dead now — who made a study of them. SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. That was one of them.”
“What does that mean?” Gabriel asked as he passed on the claret, port and dessert wine. As usual, he could have none of them as he had to drive home to Boarstall.
“Well, that was the problem. He wasn’t sure. The problem was the word AREPO. You see, it’s unknown in Latin. So, he translated the palindrome as “The sower, Arepo holds the wheel at work.” It doesn’t make much sense, I’m afraid.”
Gabriel smiled slyly. “That’s the problem with most palindromes.”
“You shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss them,” Gearing cautioned. “You see, if the words are written out vertically rather horizontally they form a square — the SATOR square, he called it — which reads out the words of the palindrome, no matter which side you take as your starting point.”
He took out a silver ball point pen and drew out the SATOR square in his University diary.
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
“He thought that the way the word TENET, which forms a cross in the square, had a coded Christian significance.” Gearing smiled. “Of course, as a Greek scholar, I’ve always been more fascinated by the word palindrome itself. It comes from Palindromos — running back again. And you as a cancer doctor should be interested in what the Greeks used to call palindromes: karkinike epigrafe — crab inscription.”
“Karkinos meaning cancer?”
“Exactly. You could translate palindrome as the “Inscription of Cancer.”
“So, in classical t
erms, etymologically speaking that is, Palmer is on the right track?”
“Correct.”
Gabriel poured Gearing another claret. A neat compact man, he leaned back and closed his eyes behind his thick black-rimmed glasses.
“Not a bad wine, Adam. Not bad at all. The cellar must be good here at the college.”
Gabriel smiled gently. “What are you going to do after you bring out your book on Lycian dialects? Take a holiday?”
Holding his glass before his lips, Gearing looked into the candles. He paused before replying, not unaware of the significance of his words. “Work on the next edition, of course.”
He drank his claret then proceeded to pour himself another. Gabriel’s question had roused him and he began to hold forth.
“The problem is that nowadays society and the University bow down and worship at the altar of science and technology — so-called useful and practical subjects. In an age swamped by computers the only rock left above the surface is classics. I tell you, Gabriel, it is the one remaining manifestation of a higher disinterested learning. A university which has no room for classics is an inadequate one.”
Gabriel attempted a reply. “I should have thought that was understood at Oxford. The picture’s not all black”
“But it is all black. Even at Oxford the noise in the street cannot be ignored. At my college, and I’m sure yours as well, you have a better chance of becoming a don — and at a younger age as well — if you specialise in the sciences rather than the humanities. Modern Oxford, it seems, has little need for those whose aim is to make sense of the past. Human understanding is re-entering the monastery, which is what this and most other Oxford colleges were in the Dark Ages.”
“I am sorry if Liz and I merit your disapproval,” Gabriel commented.
Gearing pursed his lips. “I have no quarrel with Liz or you. But I do with others. I find it extremely difficult not to identify the ideas I dislike with the people I dislike. This is a university and I’ve no time for academics who can’t be bothered to teach. That’s what we’re here for, after all. Not playing politics, striking business deals, getting in money. It’s partly the University’s fault: it’s too preoccupied with cash nowadays; it’s not bothered about where it comes from, how it’s made.”
Gearing spoke like someone who had read everything and would have no more of books. The allusion to Palmer was clear. What was it Gabriel determined in his voice? Self pity? Concern? Envy? Hate?
“You can hardly blame people like Liz Reynolds and Ken Palmer for doing their job,” Gabriel observed.
“I suppose so — though I certainly thought less of Liz last Tuesday in the Fellows’ car park.”
“Why was that?”
“I had to go to a dinner in London where I was to make a speech at a fund raising event for the college. I was in my dinner suit and walking to my car when Liz came haring through on her bike. Almost knocked me over she was in such a hurry. She was all very apologetic. Said she was late for her tutorial. It was a miracle I managed to get out of the way, just in time. Gave me a nasty shock.” He briefly exhaled a smile, reliving his escape. “Hardly helped me to make such an important speech. I also had trouble getting into my car on the driver’s side because another car was parked in such a way that it had boxed mine against a large tree; the previous fellowship in their wisdom had planted it there when the car park was part of the college garden.”
“When I was at the UN...” The warden’s boasting voice dominated the conversation with Grant and the Law student,
“And was Palmer’s car there?” Gabriel asked Gearing.
“I don’t think so.” He struggled to picture the scene exactly. “No, it wasn’t. I had plenty of time to look round the car park. He usually parks it right at the back, by the fence, where there’s less chance of it getting damaged by other cars entering and leaving the car park.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t there?”
“He has a BMW. A company car, I believe. He gave me a lift in it once. Very plush, very fancy, very new. I’m sure I would have noticed it.”
Chapter 17
Dennis sinned
The next morning, Gabriel was slightly late for the weekly pathology meeting in the departmental seminar room. He answered Liz’s interrogative glance with one of his own, returned in a whisper the brief greetings of the other consultants in the department then sat down in a chair facing a screen on which the microscopic features of a thoracic tumour were being shown by Melanie Stokes. There was a church-like atmosphere from which he could immediately deduce that the diagnosis of a tumour case was unresolved.
Melanie, peering down the microscope, cleared her throat before continuing to show the details of the case on the screen; she moved the slide to different areas of the tumour, pausing briefly to show first an unusual pattern of blood vessel proliferation then a monster cancer cell with a large nucleus.
“It’s a high-grade malignant tumour,” she said. “The question is what type.”
There were a few suggestions from the consultants, some expressed with an extraordinary degree of confidence. When Gabriel was asked his opinion he was more circumspect. He agreed with the consensus opinion that the tumour could be a metastasis from a cancer but, as the patient was fairly young, he thought the possibility of a primary embryonal tumour was also worth considering.
“The tumour could have arisen in the midline of the thorax and embryonal tumours can do that and look pretty wild, just like this one. It may not be a metastasis.” There was a brief discussion about the investigations that should be ordered before other, more straightforward cases were presented.
At the end of the meeting Gabriel returned to his room. He glanced briefly at the pile of tumour cases awaiting diagnosis. He shook his head, like a man calling himself a fool, then sat down by his microscope. He looked momentarily overwhelmed by the work that awaited him. There would never be a whole week or even a single day when he would not have a tumour to diagnose. People were always developing them. Why was that? Was it because of palindromes? Was Palmer right?
Briefly, with nostalgia, Gabriel thought of his father and the way cancer had horribly claimed him when he was quite young, in his forties. Some cancers, like those of the stomach in his father’s case, ran in families. There were known inherited faults in the genetic code that predisposed to cancer development. Gabriel had already outlived his father; he now regarded every day that passed as an unmerited bonus. It was all down to luck. He was troubled by the thought that his slice of good fortune had been so large: certainly larger than that of his father who had worked long hours in his grocer’s shop in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and received little reward for it. Perhaps his father would have looked upon Gabriel’s present position as just reward for all his hard work. But Gabriel was not so certain.
Gabriel still had friends in Melbourne. Good friends too, the type with whom he did not need to pretend. In many ways he would have preferred to be amongst them still. But the winds of fate had blown him to Oxford, to what most people thought a better place, one where in a way he was always pretending not to be the boy from Melbourne. There or here. He had chosen here for better or worse. His past could now be somebody else’s story. It was perfectly useless to have regrets or get angry.
“Have you signed off the report for Nebotec yet?”
Gabriel wheeled round and on his alert thin face all his thoughts were for a moment clearly visible. Whether Liz could discern their nature was another question.
“No. Something’s come up.”
“What?”
Gabriel hesitated before replying. “I have a strong suspicion someone changed the slide that Anna was looking at when she was killed.”
“How did you work that out?”
Gabriel’s answer remained guarded. “I noticed that the stage of the microscope Anna’s body was slumped over had been moved forward. Brook doesn’t completely agree with me. He thinks that it may have happened when she was killed. But I�
��m not so sure.”
Liz’s colour was normal but she had a tight-lipped look and didn’t reply immediately. “So you think someone tampered with the slides? Is that why they all look normal?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Possibly.”
“I can see why Palmer and co. might have done that.”
“So can I. There are quite a few people at Nebotec who would have a vested interest in ensuring those tissues look normal.”
“What have you done with the slides?”
“I’ve given them all to Brook for further forensic analysis. I took some photographs of what I thought was interesting in them.” He paused to observe her reaction. There was none. “Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t prepare a report for Nebotec. We can let them know that we’ve found no abnormality in the slides we’ve looked at. We don’t have to say more than that. It would be a shame not to finish the job and get paid for the work we’ve done. The department can use the funds.”
Liz said nothing. She looked at her watch as if she were late for an appointment. But she did not make a move to leave.
“Did Anna let on to you that she suspected anything like that when you spoke to her?” Gabriel asked.
“No, not at all.”
“I wonder if that’s why she wanted to leave Nebotec and return to academic medicine?”
“She sounded more fed up than anything else.”
“You said that she wanted to make a fresh start?”
“I thought that was just a turn of phrase.”
“Didn’t you ask her how the work was going at Nebotec?”
“No. We talked more about the Clinical Tutor job.”
“She didn’t say anything about Palmer or Taylor?”
Liz shook her head. “Not about Taylor but she said that Palmer was putting pressure on her to get the results out. Of course, he’s always been like that. I’d personal experience of it when I was doing my D.Phil with him.” She shifted her position slightly. “I know Palmer. In fact I’ve been studying him on and off for years — as no doubt a lot of his former students have.” She looked directly at Gabriel. “Some people find it difficult to decide whether he’s a crook or a genius.”
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