Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01]

by The Worm in The Bud (txt)

  It wasn’t the reaction Mariner had anticipated. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘You admit to knowing him, then?’

  ‘I knew o/him,’ Todd corrected. ‘We spoke only once on the phone. I knew his father, Malcolm Barham, much better.’ Todd’s openness caught Mariner off guard. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned. But maybe this was a calculated strategy. Todd must after all have known that Mariner or someone like him would turn up sooner or later.

  ‘What was your relationship with Malcolm Barham?’

  ‘He first contacted me in 1983,’ Todd said. ‘He’d come across a paper I’d written and wanted more information.’

  ‘What paper?’ Mariner’s confusion was growing. He was beginning to lose the plot.

  Todd heaved a weary sigh. ‘Between 1951 and 1964 I worked for Bowes Dorrinton, the pharmaceutical company.

  They’re based here in Chapel Dene. I was on one of their clinical research teams, testing new drugs.’ This also astonished Mariner, who hadn’t expected Todd to be employed at such a grass-roots level. ‘We were responsible for running checks on all manner of new drugs, conducting experiments using rats, mice and so forth, monitoring for any side effects the drugs might cause before they could be approved and put on the open market.’

  Mariner remained silent, waging battle with the fruit loaf but allowing Todd to talk, intrigued now about where this was leading.

  ‘In 1962,’ Todd went on, ‘a drug called Thalidomide hit the headlines. You’ll know all about that, of course.

  Hundreds of babies born with severe limb deformities.’

  Mariner did indeed. Further down the school from him was a kid who had been affected by the drug. In place of arms the boy had two flipper-like appendages, about eight inches long. Not that it stopped him from doing anything. The guy was amazing.

  ‘The problem arose with Thalidomide,’ Todd continued, ‘because it had never been tested on pregnant animals. At the time that was not a procedure required by law, which is why the appalling teratogenous side effects could never have been predicted. But once it had happened, of course, there were fears that other drugs could have similar effects.

  Consequently, most manufacturing companies began retesting a whole range of contemporary drugs. We were no exception. One of the drugs we re-examined was Pinozalyan.’ Suddenly Mariner could see the story unfolding, but he let Todd continue. ‘Miraculously we found that there were no apparent resulting foetal or birth deformities, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief and it continued to be marketed.’

  ‘But?’ Mariner prompted through a mouthful of stodgy cake that was resisting descent of his gullet. He took a gulp of tea to help it on its way.

  ‘I had conducted my tests on Pinozalyan using pregnant rats, and as the offspring subsequently born appeared healthy we retained them for other different procedures.

  Then, one day, one of my lab technicians reported that rats in one of the cages were behaving strangely. They were hyperactive, engaging in extreme self-stimulating behaviour, apparently oblivious to the resulting pain. More detailed observation revealed highly disturbed nocturnal patterns and high levels of anxiety too. I carried out some routine checks on them and found that levels of melatonin were dangerously low. It was then that I realised these were the creatures whose mothers had been administered Pinozalyan, which should have stimulated production of melatonin. It was almost as if the second generation rats had developed a compensatory mechanism to suppress the hormone.’

  ‘Naturally I reported all this straight to the clinical manager. We couldn’t be certain that it was Pinozalyan that had caused the behaviour, but having eliminated all other environmental factors, I felt that there was a close correlation and therefore an element of risk. Something had caused significant chemical changes within the brains of those rats that were in turn influencing the patterns of behaviour. I felt it imperative that we should withdraw Pinozalyan from sale until we could conduct further tests.’

  ‘So why didn’t that happen?’

  Todd snorted. ‘Although my manager supported my view, those in the higher echelons of Bowes Dorrinton did not agree. The timing was bad. Pinozalyan was at that time a high profile, high profit drug, in direct competition with a new, innovative drug soon to be released; Prozac. Taking Pinozalyan off the market then would have been potentially disastrous so they wanted more concrete evidence before they were prepared to take any action. As you will appreciate, this wasn’t the kind of data that could be produced overnight. The rats whose behaviour had changed were now eight months old. To set up a new experiment would have taken at least a year, and that was too long. In the meantime the most Bowes Dorrinton were prepared to do was issue a drug alert memo individually to GPs, warning of “possible risks”.’

  ‘That’s all?’ queried Mariner.

  ‘It was the minimum requirement at that time. I was very unhappy about it and felt it wasn’t enough but no one would listen, so I decided to publish my findings in a pretty low level science publication. At least then I would have tried to do something. But, when the article was published, I was asked to leave my post for failing to “act in the best interests of the company”. As an alternative to direct dismissal I was given the option of taking retirement on the grounds of ill health. Financially it was the sensible thing to do, but it of course meant that my research findings could be discredited as the ramblings of a sick man. I was also made to sign a disclaimer, preventing me from passing on any information relating to the work I had done at the company.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘It’s a common enough practice, to guard against commercial espionage, but this one went further. I was also advised, verbally, not to compromise my own or my family’s personal safety.’

  ‘That was an open threat. You didn’t report this to the police?’

  ‘What was the point? I couldn’t prove anything, and it would have just looked like sour grapes from a man who had been forced out of his job.’ He was right.

  ‘And the company took no further action on Pinozalyan?’

  ‘The memo was the only thing. And that would have made little difference. Many GPs are living in the pockets of the major drugs firms anyway. Pinozalyan continued to be distributed for another nine years, up until 1972.’

  ‘It was withdrawn because a substitute had been found?’ said Mariner, but Todd shook his head.

  ‘That was the year the Medicines Act was introduced to control the manufacture and sale of medicinal products in the UK and all drugs were required to be submitted for licensing. Although the law itself was introduced in 1971, there had been a “transitional exemption” for any drugs that were on the market before licensing began, but in September 1972 that transitional period ran out and licences “as of right” had to be applied for. For the first time, Pinozalyan would have come under close scrutiny from the Committee on the safety of Drugs. Pinozalyan mysteriously vanished from the market shortly before then. By that time even Bowes Dorrinton seemed to consider that it was too much of a risk.’

  ‘So your fears were vindicated.’

  ‘What did that matter?’ snapped the old man, crossly.

  ‘More significantly, Pinozalyan had remained in circulation for almost a further ten years, during which time I was entirely impotent.’ Mariner tried not to flinch. ‘The good thing was, however, that in that time I came across no reports of any negative effects on humans, so I told myself that what I had seen was peculiar to rodents. I concluded that I had been wrong and that by some miracle Bowes Dorrinton had got away with it. I decided to leave the pharmaceutical industry altogether. That was when we bought this place and I tried to forget.’

  ‘Until Malcolm Barham came along.’

  ‘Malcolm wrote to tell me about his thirteen-year-old son, Jamie, who had been diagnosed autistic. In researching possible causes of his son’s autism Malcolm had identified a possible link with Pinozalyan and then he’d come across my article, which supported his hypothesis exactl
y. At first I tried to put him off. The last thing I wanted was to get involved again, I was afraid of what I might learn I suppose. But Malcolm was clever. He invited me to go and meet Jamie. It was a surreal experience. The boy exhibited almost exactly the same behaviours as those lab rats: obsessive, repetitive self-stimulation, high anxiety.

  The disastrous consequences of Pinozalyan were right there, staring me in the face. Impossible to ignore. Susan Barham had been prescribed Pinozalyan for three months of her pregnancy.’ Andrew Todd gazed at a point somewhere in the middle distance, appalled anew. A nervous tic had taken control of his right eye. Then suddenly he turned to Mariner. ‘The worm in the bud,’ he said. ‘Its devastating corruption invisible until the flower blooms.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘Malcolm persuaded me to help him, to provide him with the clinical evidence he needed to support his ideas.

  But one isolated case isn’t enough to verify anything.

  Although I had the theoretical material, the scientific data, we also needed more in the way of statistics to prove that this wasn’t pure coincidence or that Jamie didn’t have some kind of predisposition. Autism is a complex condition with many and varied causes. For every child whose condition had been caused by the drug there was at least one who had developed it for other reasons. Malcolm and Susan Barham knew other parents of autistic youngsters, so they began to contact them, to find out whether any more of these mothers had taken Pinozalyan during pregnancy.

  But the cases were few and far between, until Malcolm wrote a letter to some kind of autistic group magazine.’

  ‘And got an overwhelming response,’ said Mariner, thinking of the letters in the shoebox and the names on Eddie’s database.

  ‘Did he?’ Todd said. ‘I never knew, because shortly after his letter was published, Malcolm and Susan were killed.’

  ‘The car crash. Did you ever consider that it could be related?’

  ‘I tried to believe that it was just an unhappy coincidence, but afterwards I attempted to establish whether Malcolm’s briefcase had been recovered from the scene.

  I knew he kept a lot of the vital information with him, for security reasons. It never was. It just vanished. I suppose I had a feeling then that there could be more to it.’

  ‘But you never attempted to follow this up yourself?’

  ‘No. I’m ashamed to say that since Malcolm’s death I have never pursued it. I didn’t have Malcolm’s emotional incentive and I was fearful. My family had already been threatened. The implications of this thing are enormous, Inspector. Were this ever to be made public, Bowes Dorrinton would be liable for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of pounds in compensation. I always suspected that they would do anything in their power to suppress it and as far as I was concerned, Malcolm’s death was confirmation of that.’

  ‘But how did Bowes Dorrinton know what Malcolm Barham was up to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did they know that he’d been in touch with you?’

  ‘I’ve sometimes wondered about that. Even after leaving the company, I often used to get the feeling that I was being watched, but put it down to my own paranoia. So now I have that on my conscience too. If only I hadn’t published that research, if only Malcolm hadn’t read it…’

  ‘You couldn’t possibly have foreseen the outcome,’ Mariner said, feeling an unexpected sympathy for the burden this inoffensive man had carried for so long. ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Nothing, for years. I thought that was finally an end to it, until a few weeks ago Eddie Barham tracked me down.

  He’d discovered his father’s original notebooks and begun compiling data from the letters sent to his father. He wanted to meet. I tried to call him back to warn him, but apparently I was too late.’

  ‘That was when you spoke to Anna Barham. His sister.’

  ‘Oh. Poor girl.’

  ‘Who’s behind all this, Mr Todd? Who does Bowes Dorrinton get to do their dirty work?’

  ‘You mean the real people? I honestly can’t tell you. I don’t know. They used to have a whole department of people to deal with complaints. They called them “the bleachers” because they made everything look whiter than white. But now? I don’t know. I’m sure procedures are much more sophisticated these days.’

  Mariner hadn’t really expected any different.

  But the old man was becoming increasingly agitated, the nervous twitches becoming more pronounced. ‘I’ve said more than enough. I’d like you to go now.’

  ‘But I will have to come back, Mr Todd.’

  Mrs Todd walked him to the gate.

  ‘My husband isn’t a well man. If anything happens to him, I shall hold you personally responsible,’ she said, uncompromisingly.

  Leaving the farm, Mariner couldn’t help but feel desperately sorry for Andrew Todd. He, Mariner, had got this so spectacularly wrong. Todd was on Malcolm Barham’s side and probably, in his way, had suffered just as much; a man with integrity, trying to do the right thing.

  But what had it got him? He’d exchanged a comfortable indoor job for a rundown farm, and carried the deaths of three people on his conscience. What a thing to wake up to every morning.

  From the farm, Mariner dropped down to the more familiar territory of County Durham, and the desolate, undulating moors. In the distance, he could see a single stone-built chimney standing alone, the sole remnant of the once prevalent smelt mills, built to carry the poisonous filth from populated areas in the valley, to be expelled high on the deserted hills, out of harm’s way. Unsettled by the interview with Todd, Mariner pulled up on the roadside, discarded his jacket and tie in favour of a fleece, and changed his shoes for boots. He probably looked ridiculous, but there was no one around to see as he strode out over the brown springy heather along the course of the underground flue. The moors were eerily silent, with not even the distant bleat of a sheep.

  The higher Mariner walked up the winding single track, the mistier it got, until he was enveloped in a dense freezing fog and a biting wind that whipped at his ears and he could see only a few grey yards in each direction. But the route was well marked, occasionally the sky lightened as the fog drifted away, and from the top it suddenly cleared again, exposing a commanding view of the rusty red moorland.

  It took him twenty minutes to reach the tall, crumbling tower of the chimney and sitting on its plinth he leaned back against the rough stone, gazing out over the vast exhilarating emptiness, and asking himself as he always did in this situation, why he didn’t leave the city completely. There was nothing keeping him there. Not yet anyway. But if he lived somewhere like this all the time, where would he escape to?

  Afterwards, Mariner drove into the town to have a look at Bowes Dorrinton Pharmaceuticals. It was more or less as he’d expected; a complex of vast, featureless, factory hangars and a block of offices, set back off the road behind immaculately groomed lawns. The only identifying feature, the company trademark: capitals BDP linked together to form a distinctive logo. The guard at the barrier wasn’t overtly armed, but as far as Mariner was concerned, he may as well have been. Somewhere on the other side, in those innocuous-looking buildings, were individuals who had gone as far as conspiring to murder in order to protect their own interests. The question was: who did they get to deal with their filth?

  Not knowing how difficult Todd would be, Mariner had planned to stay in the north-east for another night. But the job was done and it was still only late morning. One of his options was to have a lunchtime drink in a couple of the nearby pubs and chat up a few locals to see if anything interesting turned up. But it was a long shot. He couldn’t see anyone around here spilling the beans to a complete stranger, even if there was anything to spill. This was evolving into a different beast, and a far more dangerous one than he had anticipated. These people were resourceful and sophisticated, and the conversation with Todd had left Mariner feeling uneasy about Anna Barham, with or without police surveilla
nce.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Although Mariner had instructed her to do nothing, Anna had found it impossible. Inactivity just was not in her nature. Besides, the two of them shut in the flat, Jamie was going to drive her crazy. The climbing club seemed the obvious solution, but when she’d phoned to book had been told that Saturday and Sunday mornings were dedicated to under 16s. She’d even considered taking Jamie swimming, but couldn’t face the complications that getting him changed would cause.

  At the surgery, Dr Payne was out on call and the officious receptionist was uncertain of the procedure for getting hold of Anna’s mother’s medical records. She promised to get back to Anna ‘as soon as possible’.

  The only other useful option Anna could think of was a visit to the library to see if she could locate a copy of her father’s letter to Autism Review, which surely couldn’t do any harm. Mariner had told her to behave normally and normal people went to the library every day. And part of her was intrigued now to know what it was that she’d missed all those years ago. Besides, the city’s main central library was only a short walk from her flat.

  To be on the safe side Anna decided to employ the tracking device Mariner had given her earlier that week. Activating the handset as Mariner had shown her, as she and Jamie were poised to go out of the door, she surreptitiously slipped the tiny receiver into his shirt pocket. But, despite her subtlety, Jamie saw immediately and wasn’t having that, so he pulled it out again. Diverting his attention, Anna then tried clipping the receiver to the back pocket of his trousers, but he felt it and ripped it off. As a last ditch, using distraction tactics again, she attached it to a belt loop. This time, it stayed where it was, but only until they got out into the hallway.

  ‘No!’ With an emphatic shout Jamie tossed the tiny black button on the floor. Defeated, Anna picked it up and pocketed it before recognising the stupidity of carrying the now-redundant, bulky transmitter with them. Unlocking the front door again, she dropped the device just inside on the floor. Securing the flat again she sneaked them out of the back entrance to the apartments, so avoiding any awkward questions from the young PC who was vigilantly keeping watch outside in his car.