‘It could have been Sheila.’ He was wide-eyed with horror. ‘What on earth is going on here? Who can possibly hate Sheila that much?’
‘That is what we have to find out,’ George said grimly. ‘I’m calling the police now — I’ll tell ’em myself that I’ve been doing my own checks. No need to — well, dwell on it, though.’
Alan managed a faint grin. ‘Not a word,’ he said. ‘Right…’ He looked at the others, at Peter and Danny and Jane and Sam and there was a faint murmur of assent. ‘Let’s get on with it, then. We’ll only use the other benches, OK? No one go near the end one.’
It wasn’t until they were nearly all inside the big lab that it happened. They all stopped at the sudden loud wail. It was Louise Dee, the junior, standing very still in the middle of the corridor, clutching her cyclist’s helmet to her chest with both hands, still draped in her leather jacket and trousers from her motorbike ride into work, and with her mouth gaping to let the sound out.
George took her firmly by the shoulders. ‘Now calm down, Louise,’ she commanded. ‘There’s no harm done. Jerry is fine and now we know this attempt has been made we’re in a good position to protect him and Sheila in the future, believe me. There’s nothing for you to be upset about.’
‘But there is,’ Louise wept. She dropped her helmet on the floor with a crash and put both hands to her cheeks, staring at George over them with wide-eyed terror. ‘It could have been me! Don’t you see? If it wasn’t that I keep on forgetting to fill those bottles, it could have been me what was nearly choked to death. Oh, Dr B., what shall I do? I’m scared! Is it me they’re really after?’
18
‘It’s all so bloody clumsy,’ Gus said fretfully after a long silence, ‘it’s like a bunch of kids are being mischievous, and not thinking through the result of their actions. And cases like that — casual malice, you know? — they’re right buggers to deal with. Give me the professional every time.’
‘Yes,’ George said abstractedly. She too had been thinking hard, and now she lifted her shoulders and looked at him consideringly. He had arrived promptly with a full team when she had phoned Ratcliffe Street Police Station and told them what had happened. Well before noon the SOCO had crawled all over the section of the lab involved as well as checking for prints everywhere else (a little forlornly, however. As he said, ‘The world and his bleedin’ wife have been in and out of here’): all the photographs and fingerprint tests necessary had been done: everyone possible had been interviewed: and they’d left, all except Gus. Now he sat in her office, crouching over a cup of coffee and staring gloomily at his notes.
‘I’m not surprised that poor kid got the collywobbles and thought he was after her,’ he said. ‘When someone lets off a scatter of grapeshot like that everyone feels like a target’
‘I managed to persuade her there was nothing personal in it. That Jerry had just been unlucky while she’d been the one to benefit from his misfortune.’ She made a face. ‘I’ll tell you this much — from now on I’ll never get her to refill bottles, not for a pension.’
‘Who’d be a boss?’ he said, but it was an almost automatic rejoinder. He was clearly deeply in thought. ‘Look, let’s just run through it, shall we?’ He spoke as much to himself as to her. ‘First, the car is doctored in such a fashion that it could kill — but only chokes. Then the chocolates are poisoned, using a very toxic substance but in so low a concentration that all it did was make the person who ate one sick without killing her. And now this business of rearranged chemicals in bottles — you say that the amount of hydro-whatsit left in the bench bottle was too little to make a killing dose of chlorine gas when mixed with bleach, even though it’s highly toxic, but just enough to cause a lot of discomfort.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s a fair résumé.’
‘It’s like Chummy just wants to play games, frightening people. Like he doesn’t want to kill, just to scare.’
‘I’m not entirely sure of that,’ she said after a moment. ‘I think maybe there’s been some real killing going on as well as this other stuff.’
He looked up sharply. ‘What gives you that idea?’
‘I think I might have had a helluva lot of wool pulled over my eyes,’ she said after another, longer pause. ‘Shit, this is hell to have to admit. It’s those three deaths that were put down to — dammit, I can’t use the passive sense, I put them down to accident or suicide. Now I’m not so sure.’
He said nothing, just staring at her with his eyes wide and bird-bright.
She went on, never more painfully aware of how much of a fool she felt. ‘The first one was a chap who was a recovered alcoholic, remember? Well, he hadn’t had a drink for a long time, which is as much as any alcoholic will ever admit to. They know they’re never really cured. I thought when I did his PM that his death had been accidental — that he’d slipped from the AA ideal and had a drink — only he’d taken a big one matching his previous consumption, not realizing that that would now be an excessive dose. And died. And now I’m wondering just how he came to take too much.’
‘But —’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve started, so let me finish. Though I have to say the last thing I feel like is a Mastermind. Now, the second one, Lally Lamark — though in fact she might have died first. But let that be. It’s not important — at least, I don’t think so. She was a diabetic and I assumed that she had inadvertently taken the wrong dose of insulin, or something of that sort — maybe failed to eat after taking her insulin. But I’ve read her notes again, seeing I’m lucky enough to have them in spite of the break-in, and I’ve tried to read between the lines, this time, to see what sort of person she was.’
She stopped and bit her lip for a moment. ‘Usually when you read notes you just take in factors. You don’t think about the personalities involved because there is rarely much guidance on that. Doctors aren’t encouraged to write down their subjective opinion of patients the way they used to, not now patients have the right of access to their notes. But we should — because when I looked and thought a bit more I got a picture of a woman who knew her own condition very well. She’d had it most of her life, dammit. Probably knew more about her own diabetes, and diabetes in general, than her doctors did. And the fact that she asked Sheila to show her a path, report on her own blood sugar and insulin levels and assorted assays makes me think —’
‘She asked Sheila what?’ Gus was even more alert now.
George sighed. ‘I hadn’t told you that yet,’ she said. ‘It’s all been so — Well, never mind. Sheila had a flaming row with the head of the Medical Records department a while back, as a result of which I got embroiled and Sheila and I fell out. That’s the background. The reason for the fight with Elles-mere was that Lally Lamark had asked Sheila to show her her path, reports — her own, you understand — because she was suspicious about something to do with — well, we just don’t know what. All I know is that Sheila did show Lally her records and refused to show Ellesmere when she demanded to be told. Ellesmere’s just nosy, I think, likes to be involved in everything, and got mad when Sheila blocked her. But the nub of it all is, this woman Lamark was suspicious about something to do with her doctor’s care.’
‘And then died of an overdose of insulin. It was that, you said when you first told me about it.’
‘Mmm. I put it down to an accident, but if Lally really was a mavin about diabetes, really understood her condition, there’s no way she’d have an accident with her insulin. But maybe someone arranged things so that it looked like an accident.’
‘So you’re saying …’
‘I haven’t finished,’ she said. ‘I’m saying that I’m no longer sure of my own reports when I did those PMs. I thought one was a stupid overdose, another an accident. And I thought that one, Pam Frean, was a suicide. Now I’m wondering about all three of them. Could they have been deliberate killings? And could they be linked with these other — what did you call them? — clumsy attempts? Are we lookin
g at one set of linked events rather than a series of separate ones?’
There was a silence and then he said, ‘Um,’ and lapsed into silence again.
She waited but he just sat there lost in a maze of his own thinking, until she said sharply, ‘Well? Um, what?’
‘Um is all. Except that I’ve been thinking something along these lines myself.’
She was nettled. ‘I see, Mr Omniscient, eh?’
‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘Just Mr Experienced. And I have to tell you it is as rare as hen’s teeth to have a series of nasty events, especially including deaths, on the same premises and all with different causes. They have to be linked if only by copy-catting, or so goes my experience.’
‘Oh,’ she said and subsided. ‘Well, yes, I guess so. I was thinking that sort of thing too.’
Now it was her turn to be silent and he looked at her and waited. And then said simply, ‘You’d better spit it out’
‘Spit what out?’
‘Whatever it is you think you ought to tell me but don’t really want to, either because you feel a bit daft saying it or because you want to deal with it on your own. If it’s the first, forget it. Nothing you do say or think is ever daft in my eyes. Misguided and due to conclusion-jumping maybe, but never daft. And if it’s a case of preferring to do it alone, do me a favour and forget that too. We always do better as a team.’ He spoke more loudly as she opened her mouth to protest. ‘I know, I know, it was different last time, that business at Connie’s factory, but we’re not talking about that. I’m talking about the here and now. And right now, you ought to spit it out’
She shook her head in mingled irritation and relief. ‘Oh, you are the — All right. It’s not easy and if you make any of your nasty cracks, I’ll probably hit you. Just hear me out.’ She took a deep breath and tried to find the best way to start and of course it all came out wrong. ‘Zack Zacharius. I know you’ve been a bit jealous of him but —’
He flared up at once. ‘Jealous? Me? I haven’t got a jealous bone in my body! I may know the difference between what’s proper behaviour and what isn’t but that ain’t got a thing to do with being jealous, and never you say it has! And anyway, what has that cock-eyed sod got to do with —’
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. ‘I knew I’d get it all wrong! Listen, will you? I think maybe … I’m worried that he might be involved with all this.’
She almost laughed then. She had never seen him quite so surprised by anything in all the years she had known him and she let herself grin at the sight of his face.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said after a moment. ‘Bloody hell! I thought you had a fancy for him.’
‘I did,’ she said calmly. ‘He’s a dishy fella.’
‘Well, thank you very much, ducks. What am I supposed to say to that?’
‘You can start worrying the day I stop noticing which are the attractive men,’ she said, feeling better than she would have thought possible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so very comfortable with him; it was an agreeable sensation. ‘The important thing is I come back to you, however much I might enjoy the passing scenery. And don’t tell me you never notice what other women look like. I’ve seen you with your fangs dripping, you pant so hard when some bouncy bottom goes by. But I’ve got more sense than to fret over it.’
He shook his head, as much to clear his thinking as to disagree with her. ‘That’s something to talk about some other time,’ he said with dignity. ‘Tell me now what you mean about this fella. Has he said something? Done something? Come on, doll, don’t torment me!’
She was sober again at once. ‘It’s no one thing exactly. Well, maybe it was last night … Look, he asked me to come and advise him on his research. I told you that and it was perfectly true. I thought that was all that he wanted and maybe a silly flirty dinner afterwards, and what harm would there be there? Especially if you were doing your famous porcupine-in-a-pet act at me. But when it came to it, he set me up.’
He frowned, never taking his eyes from her face. ‘How?’
She explained as best she could, but it wasn’t easy. ‘You don’t understand this business of research grants,’ she told him. ‘The thing is, unless the Institute can get at least two big projects funded from outside, it’ll die. The consultants and the people involved — the Professor, the research fellows — will all lose a hell of a lot of face, as well as their income. The hospital will lose a good deal of status too, and in these days of marketing hospital services because the NHS is run like a market, status is valuable. Loss of it could reduce the number of patients referred to us. So the Institute’s survival matters. And all Zack wanted to use me for was to prod the other two researchers so that they came up with a research protocol that could lead to the discovery — or development’d be a better word — of a highly profitable drug. That’s the bottom line for him. Money. And I hadn’t realized that till last night.’
‘Is that the only thing that makes you suspicious?’ he said after a while.
‘Not the only thing, no. It’s all a bit nebulous, that’s the trouble, but I just feel … well, look at what facts there are. He’s been around all the time when things have happened. When Sheila’s car went up, there he was in the car park. He gave me a very good reason for being there — it was the same as my own, in that he kept his car there and he needed to get it out, and also he said he wanted to get it out to pick me up at the Institute instead of having to walk together all through the hospital and make people gossip. We’d arranged to go out for a drink after the Professor’s party, you see.’ Gus’s brows furrowed for a moment, but she just went on, pretending she hadn’t noticed, and slowly he relaxed.
‘Then, with the business of Sheila’s chocolates, he was in and out of Ballantyne Ward to see her as much as the rest of us — as me even, although he’d never even met her before the event. He just sort of latched on. And then he turned up here at the lab the day after the break-in and the messing-up of my files and — Oh, I don’t know. It sounds so little now I’ve spelled it out, but last night it seemed to me to be so important …’ Her voice trailed away.
‘And it may well be important,’ he said. ‘I have to agree if that’s all there is, then it doesn’t add up to much. But I like circumstantial pointers as much as the next man. It’s just circumstantial evidence I can’t be doing with. But maybe his behaviour can point us towards something concrete. Hmm. Let me think…’
‘I’ve been thinking too,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas you might like to try.’
‘I’ll bet you have. Like what?’
‘I don’t feel comfortable about this but — make a deal with me, Gus. If I point you in an actual direction and it turns out I’m wrong, you’ll never let on to him I suspected him, will you? I’d hate that.’
‘Why? Don’t want to hurt little diddums’ feelings, is it?’ He sounded extra sardonic and she grimaced at him.
‘You see what I mean? You always jump to the worst possible conclusion. It’s because the man’s a colleague, dammit. I’ll have to go on working in this place with him afterwards. If he turns out to be straight up but he finds out I fingered him as a bad lot, then …’
‘It’d be embarrassing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stop his Dishiness from asking you out to dinner again?’
‘Oh, the hell with it. If the best you can do is make snide cracks like that, let’s forget it!’ The good feelings she had about him began to dilute and she scowled. At first he scowled back but then relaxed, slowly.
‘Oh, shit!’ he said after a while. ‘Maybe I am a bit jealous at that.’
‘Wow,’ she said, staring upwards with studied concern. ‘Where are the flying pigs? Watch out below!’
‘The time for you to start worrying is when I’m not jealous,’ he snapped. ‘Isn’t that what you said to me? So, goose and gander, OK? And truce, fainites, Tom Tiddler’s ground and all that. What is it you want me to do?’
She was mollified.
‘It’s not what I want you to do. It’s just a suggestion.’
‘So suggest it’
‘He said he’s a Canadian. Trained there, did some important work there. Well, maybe it’d be worth doing a check-up to make sure that all the things he says about himself are true.’
‘Is there any reason to doubt they are?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know. He seems to be abreast of his subject as far as I can tell, though as I’m no neurologist, how can I say for sure? But it seems to me that he’s excessively nervous about the possibility of losing this chance for the Institute and I wondered why. I thought maybe he was embroidering his CV, making himself out to be something he isn’t? It’s hell being in research. You can’t be a researcher in the accepted sense of the term till you publish a worthwhile paper in an important journal of record, and you can’t get such a paper published until you’re a researcher. Sometimes I suspect people cut corners. Scientific fraud isn’t unheard of. There was that chap who made claims about fertility research, and got himself struck off the register, remember? Maybe Zack’s in that mould. Maybe he’s trying something on here. If we check his past and find out he isn’t all he claims to be, well, we’re on our way.’
He thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘OK, doll. That makes good sense to me. And tell me, I contact where to make these checks?’
‘I thought you had contact with the Canadian police?’
‘Hell, yes, of course. But I have to have some basis on which to work, you know, some reason for my enquiries. Like where he claims to be at university, where he did earlier research, all that stuff.’
She pondered and then brightened. ‘Some of it should be here in his files in Human Resources.’
‘Human … ?’ Gus shook his head irritably. ‘You mean what you and I used to call Personnel. OK, yeah. But in my experience they won’t part with staff members’ files unless you have a warrant. And I can’t get a warrant without due cause, can I? Is there any other way you can get a lead on this for me?’
Fourth Attempt Page 18