Palindrome

by Nick Athanasou

“And from that you infer...?”

  “Quite a lot really. You see, we have information from a witness—”

  “Samant, I assume.”

  Grant nodded and said, “He saw a bicycle light enter Nebotec around 5.15 — he’s not exactly sure of the time. He didn’t get a good view of the cyclist because it was dark but he’s definite that he saw a light.”

  “And you think that bicycle was Tom Duncan’s?”

  “He wasn’t here when normally he should have been.”

  “That proves nothing. He might have been elsewhere in the department or gone home early.”

  “He says he didn’t. In fact he admits he lied to us. He told us that he’d gone home shortly after 5.00 when we first questioned him about his movements that night. But when we questioned his wife she said that he didn’t arrive home till late, some time between 6.30 and 7.00.”

  “Is that all she said?”

  “No, she said that he “wasn’t himself ” that night. They’re her words.”

  “But not covered in blood as you would have expected Anna’s murderer to be?”

  “No-o,” Brook said slowly. “And I believed her. But then he could have worn a mac and boots which he’d dumped on the way home. We’re running forensic tests on his wardrobe now.”

  “Why did he go to Nebotec?”

  “He says that he agreed to meet with Anna Taylor that evening. He gave her some results of tests he’d done for her.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. When we asked him whether he knew Anna was going to apply for the Clinical Tutor job he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Tried to deny at first that she said anything about it to him but then pretty quickly broke down and told us that she had and that he was not happy about it.” Somewhat reluctantly, Brook added, “But he denies murdering her. Says that she was alive when he left her.”

  “What results did he give her?”

  “They were from a test called in... in—” Brook broke off to consult his notebook.

  “In situ hybridisation,” said Gabriel. “Tom Duncan does it for his experiments on graft rejection in sex-mismatched marrow transplants. He has a probe for the Y chromosome which tells him whether the cells in the grafted marrow are male. It’s the opposite of a Barr body, which is a marker of the X chromosome. In situ is a much more sensitive and specific way of telling whether a cell is male or female.”

  “So I understand,” said Brook. “He showed us the slides they looked at together.”

  “I wouldn’t mind looking at them myself. So are you thinking now that Tom Duncan is your murderer?”

  “He’s a suspect. That’s all I’ll say. We’ve detained him for further questioning. I thought you’d like to know,”

  “I appreciate it. I wouldn’t have thought he’s the type to commit murder, though. Apart from pathology, Tom Duncan is as naïve as a child. He’s harmless, I assure you.”

  “None the less he’s got a lot to explain. He was at medical school with Anna, admits they went out together, although he denies having been her boyfriend. Says she threw him over pretty quick. Who knows? He may have harboured resentment about that. Perhaps it all just boiled over when he told her that she was putting in for the job he thought was his.”

  Gabriel compressed his lips, pulled at his broad snub nose and shook his head. He knew from experience that it was too easy to collect evidence that pointed to a wrong diagnosis. One assembled a whole lot of suspicious facts, made even more so in one’s own suspicious mind, and then—. No doubt if you looked into the lives of people in the street it would not be long before even the most blameless of them would appear suspicious.

  “And he just happened to be wearing a thick mac and size 12 boots and carrying a handy knife in his pocket when he visited her at Nebotec. I don’t think so. Tom doesn’t fit the pattern — or the facts really. There’s no reason he would want to change the slides. You haven’t charged him, I hope?”

  “No, not yet anyway,” Brook admitted.

  “There’s a lot to consider in this case. I should tell you I was with Mrs Hewitt yesterday. She was to put it mildly most anxious about the PLF results.”

  “She has every right to be. They’re not all kosher, as you suspected.”

  “In fact, she got rather angry when I suggested that PLF might be the same as MT-1, the drug Palmer originally developed with Taylor. You should check the patent details of the two drugs.”

  “We have and they’re quite interesting. It seems that Palmer took out a patent on MT-1 when he developed it, and that Taylor, who was not as wet behind the ears as Palmer imagined, did so as well.”

  “I remember he was keen on patents at the dinner I had with Anna and him at my college. He seemed to think that he’d make his fortune that way. Most patents get nowhere unless they’re taken up by a drug company.”

  “And isn’t that what’s happened? With Nebotec, I mean.”

  “Possibly,” Gabriel conceded. “Taylor certainly must have had faith in the palindrome idea if he was prepared to take out a patent in defiance of Palmer.”

  “There may have been a reason for that.”

  Gabriel shifted forwards in his chair. “What do you mean?”

  “Matt Taylor didn’t take out the patent alone. He took it out with your colleague, Dr Reynolds. Of course, there have been subsequent patents taken out by Nebotec. We’ll just have to look at them to see how they differ from the originals drawn up — independently it seems — by Palmer and Taylor.”

  “Nebotec might find enforcing their patent on the palindrome difficult if it was known to be on a molecule that is similar if not identical to one that is already out in the public domain. I suppose it all depends on how far Liz and Matt Taylor would have been prepared to take it. Perhaps they counted on Nebotec cutting a deal with them if only to avoid a lengthy and costly legal dispute.”

  Brook nodded but was only half-listening. The other half was revealed in his next words. “Taylor and Dr Reynolds have been rather close professionally, and perhaps otherwise, for many years. What do you think?”

  Brook’s implication was clear and Gabriel thought that there was a measure of truth in it. Out of loyalty to Liz, he replied, “I couldn’t say.”

  Brook sensed that Gabriel’s words were balanced awkwardly at the edge of truth.

  “Come on, Professor Gabriel, you know yourself that Dr Reynolds introduced Anna to Matt Taylor. It must have upset her, to say the least, when he chose Anna over her. And then, to make matters worse, that she found out something about PLF which threatened the rewards she expected to gain from her patent on MT-1.”

  “That too doesn’t quite fit the pattern or the facts.”

  “Why not? It’s possible she was there. It’s always been debatable whether Matt Taylor had enough time after seeing Hewitt to murder his wife and make it look as if it was done by an intruder. But if Dr Reynolds did it herself or acted as his accomplice then that no longer becomes a problem. She could have broken the window and dropped Dr Taylor’s purse outside. That would also account for the disappearance of Anna Taylor’s jewellery and the fact that we didn’t find the knife when we searched the premises after the murder.”

  “But, just as with Tom Duncan, that doesn’t prove she murdered Anna. You said that Samant only saw one bike light at Nebotec — and you believe that was Tom Duncan’s.”

  Brook had a fierce angry look in his brown eyes which made Gabriel feel uncomfortable.

  “But cyclists can ride without lights. Far too many of them do in Oxford. Not just those intent on committing murder. And we know that Gearing saw her arrive in a great hurry at the college around 6.00.”

  To Brook it was all a process, not unlike a diagnostic one, Gabriel thought.

  “So you’ve ruled out other suspects. What about Hewitt? From what I’ve been able to find out Samant saw him walk over to the laboratory block from the office building.”

  “We know that too. In fact Samant saw him cross the other way — between
the lab and his office — before he saw the bicycle light.”

  “Of course that doesn’t put him out of the picture.”

  “Just like everyone else who worked there.”

  “By the way, did you get anywhere with what Gearing told me about Palmer’s car not being in the Fellows’ car park in Oxford?”

  “Palmer says that he’d taken his car in for a service. The garage had given him a loan car, a grey Toyota. He says he left it in the Fellows’ car park overnight after returning from Nebotec.”

  “And was it parked there?” Gabriel asked. “Did Gearing remember it?”

  “He can’t remember if a particular grey car was there. Apparently, a lot of Fellows drive grey cars. Do you?”

  Gabriel allowed himself a show of impatience. “No.”

  Brook smiled. “Which is where we came in. Anyway, I’m sending a man out to have a look at the car.”

  “I’ll be very interested in what he finds,” Gabriel said, his voice rising slightly. Brook thought he sounded almost excited. “It’s worth keeping an open mind at least until I present the PLF results on Friday.”

  “We’ll see how much it closes after that. We’re still questioning Tom Duncan, Matt Taylor and Liz Reynolds.”

  “That’s okay. And if you don’t mind, perhaps you could check out one or two facts for me before then.”

  “He didn’t say much when they arrested him,” said Jane. “He looked as if he was almost expecting them.”

  “You think that’s because he’s guilty?” asked Melanie.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  “I thought he looked more resigned than guilty.”

  “It could have been an act. He may have been laying the groundwork for a plea of insanity”

  “Tom Duncan isn’t mad. Just sad.”

  “Diminished responsibility then.”

  “That’s the last thing anyone would say about him.”

  “My stallion can be perfectly calm one minute and a mad terror the next,” said Jane, her voice wavering.

  “Being male doesn’t make him guilty.”

  Jane took a deep breath and puffed it out again. “Maybe, but you know something—”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch,”

  Melanie had reached the point where she could not resist passing her own budding pathologist’s opinion. “I think it was just a case of him working out that there was no point resisting.”

  “Do you think he’s guilty?”

  Melanie shook her head.

  “No, though he is guilty of leaving me with a lot of work. Prof Gabriel asked me to take over his cases.” She held up a tray of slides. “I’ve got this case to show him. It looks as if he was right about that thoracic mass being a germ cell tumour and not a metastasis. Is he in?”

  Chapter 20

  Murder for a jar of red rum

  Gabriel stood at the front of the lecture theatre behind a squat maple lectern that protected him like a shield from the steeply sloping benches before him. His audience of Nebotec staff were seated in the first few rows, like houses scattered at the foot of a mountain. On the lectern the screen of a laptop computer displayed what was projected on the screen behind him — the structure of the long PLF molecule, the three arms of which were intertwined at one end; a repeated sequence of letters coloured in yellow appearing at regular intervals along the course of each chain.

  “Perhaps I should first begin by apologising for bringing you all in here so early in the morning. My secretary tells me that this is the only time at which a room that has projection facilities is available today. Apparently there’s a meeting of the Agenda for Change committee at 9.00. Hopefully, we should be done by then.”

  “Aren’t you a member of that committee?” asked Liz. Her face wore a sarcastic half- smile.

  Gabriel reluctantly acknowledged Liz’s question with a nod before continuing, “You are all familiar with the PLF molecule and the regular palindrome sequence that is found along each of the three chains that form its structure.” Gabriel did not have a pointer and he waved his finger toward the screen. “They’re in yellow.”

  He stopped and looked for a moment as if he had lost the thread of what he was about to say. Just as in his student lectures, he couldn’t resist the urge to go off on a tangent and work through an idea that had suddenly occurred to him. “I should first say that I’m very grateful to Ken Palmer for introducing me to this molecule. It prompted me to make a discovery.”

  “What’s that?” asked Palmer who was seated at the front, a little apart from Frances and James Hewitt.

  “That palindromes really are universal.”

  “Have you really only just discovered that, Adam?”

  “I was never so clever as you, Ken. But it’s true. If you look for them you find them everywhere — not only in DNA and proteins but, when you think about it, in all cells and organisms, at all levels of existence. In people too.”

  “I never thought of it that way. And I’m not sure you should either.”

  “You may be right, Ken. But some people are like a record stuck in a groove. They play the same tune over and over again.”

  Palmer coughed out a laugh. “I’d concentrate on the science if I were you, Gabriel. Oxford is full of scientists who keep making the same mistake. They’re called professors. Of course, no one remembers what a mess they made of everything after they’re appointed.”

  “But it was you who pointed out to me how depressing it is that the palindrome of bad science lives on. Rather embarrassing really. For the bad I mean.”

  The arc of his tangent having been reached, Gabriel nodded wearily, as though finally agreeing with Palmer. He pushed a key on the laptop and the next slide appeared. He waved airily towards the screen which showed the microscopic features of a cancer.

  “First, there is no doubt that PLF has a major effect on cancers. It causes death of tumour cells — necrosis — and it seems to be remarkably effective in that regard.”

  “We all know that,” Frances Hewitt said impatiently. “I thought we came here to be told something new.”

  “And so you will,” said Gabriel. “This is what the non-tumour tissues of the PLF-treated mice look like: liver — normal; brain — normal; kidney — normal...” Gabriel barely paused between the words as he swiftly showed the succession of slides. “...bone and bone marrow — normal. All normal.”

  “So that’s it then,” said Frances Hewitt. “There isn’t a problem. We can go ahead and submit to the FDA.”

  “You should hear me out first, Mrs Hewitt, before deciding whether you want to pursue that course.”

  Gabriel flashed up another slide of bone marrow.

  “You are all aware that Anna Taylor had some concerns regarding the effect of PLF on the bone marrow. These were noted in the first experiment when the mice were given a large dose of PLF in their feed.” Gabriel waved again at the screen. “She noted an increase in the number of marrow cells, something she thought raised the possibility of a myeloproliferative disorder.”

  “What’s that?” Frances Hewitt asked.

  “It’s an unhealthy proliferation of marrow cells, a kind of pre-leukaemia,” Gabriel explained in a flat voice just as if he were giving a lecture to students. “It develops into a full-blown leukaemia with time, at least that’s what happens in humans.

  “Naturally, Anna Taylor felt that her observation needed further investigation so she recommended that the experiment be repeated at the same dose of PLF. To her surprise these showed completely normal marrow. That baffled her. She was not prepared to accept the explanation that it had something to do with the mice. After all, you cannot make up pathology. It is either there in the tissues you’re looking at, or it isn’t. She asked for recuts and checked the slides against the data sheets which recorded the information on the mice. There appeared to be nothing wrong with the way the experiments had been carried out
.”

  “We indulged her concerns but I told her at the time that there was nothing to worry about,” Palmer said.

  “But some mice did die,” Gabriel persisted.

  Palmer’s reply was a calculated put-down. “Gabriel, even in your limited research career, you must know that it is not uncommon for mice in a litter to die suddenly.”

  Gabriel paused for a moment and looked towards the back of the lecture theatre before directly addressing Matt Taylor who was seated next to Liz Reynolds, a couple of rows behind Palmer.

  “When Anna came to you and voiced her concerns, what did you do? Did you listen to her and take them seriously? Or tell her that she must be mistaken? Did you go to Hewitt and Palmer and ask them what to do? Perhaps they said just to ignore her or to find out what she wanted. But she wanted nothing. Not money anyway. She just wanted to know the truth.”

  “What truth?” Palmer suddenly exploded. “You’ve questioned our findings, insinuated that there’s something wrong with them, and not provided a shred of evidence to back up what you’re saying.”

  “Palmer’s right,” said Frances Hewitt. “You should either put up or shut up.”

  “I’ll show you,” Gabriel said. “Anna Taylor had a good pathologist’s eye, and she no doubt examined the slides that troubled her very carefully for a very long time. That is what good pathologists do. They look at everything: every cell, every nucleus, searching for a crucial diagnostic detail. And she found it.”

  He paused for just a moment before showing the next slide. He did it unconsciously, without purpose, or rather with the unconscious purpose of seeing whether this image — this tiny new surprise — would elicit a start of fear in whoever recognised it.

  “She noticed that the nuclei of some of the bone marrow cells that were supposed to have come from a male mouse were hypersegmented — more folded than they should be. One reason for that is the presence of a Barr body, the redundant X chromosome, which is found in all cells of female — XX — origin. Then she noticed that cells in other tissues from the same animal were not like that, which was, of course, consistent with them being from a male mouse. She checked her lab book, the pathology files on the computer and the data sheets of the experiments. They all showed that an equal number of male and female mice had been fed PLF. I checked all the slides, just as Anna must have done. And sure enough, she was right. The marrow samples of a few PLF-fed mice were of a different gender from the other tissues, sometimes male when they should have been female, and sometimes female when they should have been male.”