Deadly Misconduct

by R. J. Amos

  ‘So you think you’re going to have to move away again? Is there a place you’d prefer to go?’

  We had a bit more desultory conversation then about the various places I’d worked, and where I’d prefer to live. But while we were standing on the beach in the long Tasmanian twilight, it was difficult to imagine anywhere I’d rather be. There wasn’t anywhere else I’d rather be, to be frank. I realised I had got used to it here – the pace of life, the beauty of nature all around, the quiet, the community. Where would I go? And how would I live if I stayed?

  I didn’t have to answer those questions right away though, I had (thanks to Mum’s money management skills) time to make up my mind. And maybe I could keep getting little jobs at the uni for a while and stretch things out a bit. I would have to see how it all went.

  It was all a bit awkward – they were asking questions I didn’t have answers for, and I had questions front and centre in my brain that I didn’t want to ask them right now. I was glad when they decided to move on and I could go and buy my fish and chips.

  I thought about the drawbacks to working at a university, I wondered if Nate struggled with pressure and politics, surely he did. I couldn’t imagine the Police Department being free from those kinds of pressures. Maybe he just let it wash off his back. Did Jan have to deal with politics too, working at the café? Was owning your own business the way to go? Setting your own hours? But I had never wanted to do that – never wanted the responsibility of being the boss. I just wanted to be able to do my work well and enjoy it. Would I ever get that opportunity again?

  ‘That was moderately uncomfortable,’ said Nate to Jan as they walked away.

  ‘What? Oh, I didn’t think. Alicia’s been so happy to come and talk with me at the café.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s all that happy to talk with me yet.’ Jan and Nate continued to walk along the beach, dodging sandcastles and bits of driftwood.

  ‘Is that why you grabbed my arm and tried to push me down to the water?’

  ‘Yes, that would be it. But you’d already started waving.’

  ‘Ah well, it didn’t go too badly did it?’ Jan skirted a trench dug in the sand.

  ‘I guess not. She wasn’t eager to stay but at least she didn’t storm off like last time.’

  ‘You can’t tell her anything you’re working on yet, can you?’

  ‘Nope. Not a thing. But at least she didn’t ask. I wonder why she didn’t ask?’ Nate stopped to pick up a stick and throw it into the waves.

  ‘Well, maybe she’s so happy to have this work at the uni that it’s distracted her from trying to find invisible murderers.’

  ‘I’ll be able to tell her everything soon, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, until then I’ll do my best to keep you two apart.’

  ‘Great. I wish we’d had this conversation before you did your waving thing.’

  ‘Can’t have everything Nate.’

  I had decided to park a little closer to the biochemistry building so that I wouldn’t have to walk so far up the hill. The parking was easy if you were prepared to park a few streets away from the uni and walk for a bit, but if you wanted to be close, you had to get there early. So I’d made a quick start to the day. Even if I had to sit for a while waiting for Trudy to make it in to work, (a highly likely occurrence) it would be ok.

  It was another beautiful morning. White fluffy clouds and a blue sky. The summer light in Tasmania was awesome, the days so long. Getting up early wasn’t too hard when the sky started to lighten at four am and the sun rose at five. The roads were still quiet – just a few cars making their way in to the city to start work.

  It was a morning so peaceful and so full of promise. I couldn’t help it, I felt light hearted and ready for anything. But as I became aware of how great I felt, guilt rose in my mind like a cloud. How could I feel this light-hearted, knowing that somewhere Mrs Conneally was still grieving, not to mention the rest of the Professor’s relatives, knowing that Lisa’s future was uncertain unless she could find another supervisor, and most of all thinking that somewhere in this city was a person who was able to deliberately kill another human being and cause so much pain to so many people? But somehow, as I drove through the still of the morning, all of that seemed like something I had read in a novel last night, and the light, the blue of the sky and the olive green of the gum trees, the clear air and the peace seemed to be the real world.

  And maybe this was the real world. Maybe one day all of the hurt and pain, the bitterness and anger, would pass away and the peace and joy held in this beautiful summer morning would be all that remained. I often wondered about that. Wondered what the new heaven and the new earth would be like once all this damaged world was gone.

  Maybe the little moments of joy in the car, the summer light and the colours, were put there, right in the middle of such pain and anger, as a reminder that there is more, even in this life, than the pain and hate that can seem all consuming.

  I remembered having moments like this when my mum was ill. Little specks of light in the midst of great darkness, and how they helped me through. I prayed that Mrs Conneally was experiencing the same moments of lightness even now and that she knew how to take advantage of them.

  As I crested the hill and started the downward run to the university I could not help but rejoice in the sight. Hobart was such a beautiful city. The river glistened in the morning light and even this early there were a few yachts out with their spinnakers up. The lovely old houses of Battery Point clustered under the spire of the Anglican church never ceased to delight me. That inner-city suburb of Hobart was like an old English village – walking around there always brought Midsomer Murders to mind. And there was the bridge spanning the river, not as iconic as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but still an icon to anyone who loved this tiny city.

  I found a park on the hill near the biochemistry building (it was worth the early start) and took my mind away from these lovely thoughts and back to the question at hand. It was Dan’s question that echoed in my head. Why did Joshua have a lab tech job when he had done so much study? That was the key to the whole puzzle. The missing piece. But I knew I would have to find some proof, some evidence.

  And I felt so bad for poor Joshua. If my hunch was correct, his life must have been so awful, and I couldn’t imagine what would be going through his brain right now. Even if it was just that he had never finished his PhD. Imagine putting in all that effort but never actually getting the piece of paper, never doing the walk at the graduation with the floppy hat. But I was scared that there was much more of a connection between Joshua and the dead professor.

  Trudy found me sitting out on the front steps of the biochemistry building, wishing I had stopped for coffee on the way in.

  ‘Morning! How are we this morning? What exactly do you want to look at here?’ she asked.

  ‘I need to see files, any files, from that PhD thesis that was canned for cheating. I’m pretty sure you’ll find that it belongs to one Joshua Hume.’

  ‘Joshua?! The guy who works for Susannah? That Joshua?’

  ‘One and the same. Do you have any idea where we’d find his old lab books or anything at all about it?’

  ‘Now what year was that? Oh dear, I have no idea but I know where any records will be. Come and see the lovely windowless back closet where we keep all of the paperwork that we just can’t throw away. You can look through the boxes, I’ll try the computer archives and see if there’s anything left on the server. Knowing the name will be helpful but you never know how people will save their stuff. He might have a folder in his own name but you know, because we want the files, you can bet they will be stored under something random.’

  Trudy led me to the storage space behind the main lecture theatre, unlocked the door, and let me in. I looked around, and gathered my courage for the job ahead. In the dark and dreary space lit by a single hanging bulb was a row of compactors full of badly labelled boxes, books, and even loose papers. Over on one side was
a small bench space that I thought I might be able to use as I sorted through the flotsam and jetsam of years of university research. All of the teaching props were also squeezed in here: preserved and mounted samples of body parts, organs, and diseased pieces of flesh rubbed shoulders with human anatomy statues, and to add to the mess, rolled up posters from previous conference sessions were stacked against one wall, getting accidentally creased and squashed by even more boxes filled with old exam papers. It was not the most spacious place and a bit spooky to be honest, and I was grateful that I wasn’t claustrophobic. Who knew how much time it would take to find what I wanted?

  Trudy propped the door open and I stole a chair from the lecture theatre and set up at the bench. I’d try to find boxes labeled with dates from ten years ago and see what I could find. If that didn’t work, I would have to start on the mysterious unlabelled boxes. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it – I’ll come and dig you out at around lunch time if I don’t see you before. I’ll go look in the electronic records and see what I can find.’

  ‘Hopefully the records aren’t password protected – I don’t want to bring Nate in on this until I’m absolutely sure.’

  ‘We’ll do what we have to do – you know I’ll have to leave at 3pm to take boys to soccer practice.’

  ‘Don’t spend too much time on this Trudy. I have all the time in the world but you are one of the busiest people I know.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to spend time on this. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in years. Catching a killer. How brilliant is this?’

  Trudy raced off to her office and I dug into the mountain of work. I wouldn’t have thought that I’d ever want to spend time in a little cupboard like this, sorting through someone else’s paperwork, but it’s amazing what you’ll do when you think there’s a reason to do it. I wasn’t put off by the mess much at all, I was almost as excited as Trudy.

  Now, back ten years and look under C. Or maybe J. Or H. Hmmm.

  A couple of hours later I was still hard at it. I held one box up against the bench with my knee and tried to sort through it with one hand while keeping it steady with the other. My neck and shoulders hurt from lugging the boxes around. My back hurt from getting into all sorts of strange positions trying to find the right boxes. My eyes hurt from trying to read the lab diary notes by the meagre rays fighting through the dust coated on the lonely light bulb. Still the tiny bench top was piled with books and notes that might be meaningful and I’d searched my way through almost every box in the room. There was no way that I’d be able to put it all together in this tiny space though, I needed room to breathe and spread out.

  I pulled up the last few pages in the box. I had this to say for Joshua, he definitely worked hard. I had so many lab books with his name on them, and yep, here were some more notes, they looked like journal article drafts or thesis drafts – nicely typed up and covered with the red and green pen of supervisor feedback. I put them in the pile with the other drafts, put the box back on the floor and stretched my aching back.

  Trudy popped her head in the door.

  ‘How are you going?’

  ‘I’m getting there I think. This looks to be most, if not all, of his stuff. I can’t look at it properly here though. Do you think it would be alright if I took it home?’

  ‘I’m sure it would be fine. No one has looked at these for over ten years. They won’t miss them if you don’t tell them.’

  ‘Well, I won’t be here to tell them. So it’s up to you.’

  ‘Ha. That’s a good point. Anyway, I have something to show you too. It looks like various drafts of a thesis. If you compare it with the lab diaries you might be able to get to the bottom of it all. I’ve put all I could find on a memory stick for you, it’s pretty jumbled I’m afraid.’

  ‘No worries. I’ll take these and that and perhaps go home where I can be more comfortable. I’ll bring it all back, don’t worry.’ I put the USB key into my pocket. Then I moved the remaining papers in one half-emptied box into another that was also now half-empty and sorted my piles of papers into the empty box. The mess on the bench I managed to cram into two boxes and Trudy helped me to tidy away all the other boxes of notes and lab diaries.

  ‘It’s not really well catalogued anymore, if it ever was. But it will have to do. You can blame me if it ever causes problems.’

  ‘Want a hand getting that to the car?’

  The two of us made short work of packing the paperwork into my car and Trudy wished me good luck as she waved goodbye.

  ‘Let me know how you get on. It’s actually pretty exciting being part of the team ...’

  ‘Sure, I will. I think I have a rather less than exciting afternoon and evening coming up but I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track now. Getting more sure all the time.’

  I was also absolutely sure that there was no way I could get a coherent story out of the pile of books and papers in the boot of my car without a large shot of caffeine. I wouldn’t stay at The Lemon Tree though, I needed to keep going now, the information in those papers was calling to me and I was pretty sure the answer I needed was there. I was a miner, searching for information, just like so many other times in my research career, but this time there was more urgency – someone’s life hung on this, justice hung on getting the information right, and I knew that if the killer was caught, Mrs Conneally would have the chance to move on with her life – she wouldn’t be stuck forever asking ‘why?’.

  I pulled up at my little cottage and lugged the boxes into the house. I made myself a quick sandwich to have with the coffee and prepared for an afternoon of hard work. I cleared all the surfaces in the lounge room, grabbed a notebook and my laptop, and sorted through the boxes for the first laboratory diary and a draft of the thesis. I was determined to find out what had happened during Joshua’s PhD. I was sure that this was the key to the whole mystery.

  Everything gets written in the lab diaries. They are the record of what happens daily in research, the place where everything is laid out – the good, the bad, and the ugly. And when you take what you’ve done in three years of PhD research and compile it to make a PhD thesis, you generally leave out the ugly, and sometimes you leave out the bad. But sometimes the bad things are part of the whole story and need to be included. If they are left out, then people get the wrong impression, especially when you are talking about drug discovery.

  So that was what I was looking for. I wanted to find something that was in the lab diaries, but was not in the thesis drafts. Something that had been left out that should have been kept in.

  I needed an overview of the project, so I started with the abstract. It looked like Joshua was working on a pretty important topic. Here it was: ‘Sometimes called Motor Neurone disease, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) attacks the nervous system and hinders the ability of the brain to control the muscles.’ Nasty stuff! I read through Joshua’s description of the disease progress. What a horrible way to die. You can’t move, you can’t eat, and eventually you can’t even breathe. Good on Joshua and Professor Conneally for working on this one. A truly noble cause.

  The next part of the abstract explained the work they were doing to fix the problem. They were looking into some novel prospective drugs – chemicals that would stimulate the nervous system and keep the patients alive and active for longer. And in Joshua’s case, the patients were mice.

  Now that I had some idea of the overview of the project I went back over the lab books, looking for chemical names and mouse records. As I went through the pages I could see the results of the testing, all nicely labelled with the various drug codes.

  It was really neat way of testing too. The feet of the mice were dipped in paint and then they were made to walk along a paper path. I could see that when the mice were sick, their feet dragged, the footprints overlapped. I could imagine the poor little mice trying to pull themselves along the paper and not being able to m
ove properly. It was a pathetic image.

  There was the path for the control mice, and then as the diaries went on there were different traces of mice being treated with different drugs. To be honest, there wasn’t a lot of change in the footprints for quite a long time. They’d start out firm and well defined but in no time at all they would deteriorate and the mice would die.

  But then, in the third lab book a new chemical appeared. When the mice were given this chemical, this potential drug the footsteps stayed firmer for much longer, the prints were much better defined. The little mice were veritably marching along the page. The treatment gave the little mice a much longer life span, and a few weeks for mice could translate into years, or decades for humans.

  I cross-checked between lab diary records and the drafts of the thesis and papers that Trudy had given me on the memory stick. It looked like great news. In fact, I was getting excited. The sick mice were responding so well. This drug could be a real success story. I wondered if it could even be useful to help treat more diseases than just ALS. Maybe multiple sclerosis, maybe Parkinsons ...

  But then reality came crashing back in, there was Joshua washing dishes in the lab. If this drug was the big success story that it looked, then he would be sailing on a yacht in the Caribbean. Or at least working for a large pharmaceutical company in a big city somewhere. Something must have gone wrong. I wondered what it was.

  I kept working through the lab diaries, following the progress of the mice that were being treated with the new wonder drug and cross-checking diary charts with the PhD thesis drafts. I found the answer in the fourth lab book. Suddenly pages were scored with scrawls of ‘Why???’ and ‘WTF???’ and ‘Argh!!’. The mice were dying. Not the sick mice, they were still doing fine, but Joshua had given some of the potential drug to healthy mice as a control and the healthy mice were dying.