The Devil's Landscape

by Ken McClure

  ‘Really?’ Steven exclaimed. ‘None of you has had any sustained contact with the sort of people Owen worked with, have you?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t so much that I was thinking about . . . we have a young group member who has been working with suicidal people and I’ve noticed her become more and more withdrawn. She says she’s fine, but I’m not so sure.

  ‘Have you spoken to Dorothy?’

  Jane nodded. ‘She’s keeping an eye on her.

  The look that passed between them suggested that might not be enough.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ said Jane. ‘Everyone has their career to think of so she won’t want to admit to having problems which might be construed as mental frailty. That sticks, no matter what people might pretend otherwise, it sticks. The situation has made me think about the whole concept of normality. If you are surrounded by ten people who see things differently from you, like it or not, you are the abnormal one. It’s all very well thinking that there are thousands of people out there who think exactly like you, it’s the people around you who will eventually get you to establish a new norm.’

  Steven nodded, impressed by Jane’s analysis.

  Anyway, I’ll keep trying to get her to open up on a personal basis,’ said Jane. ‘As they say, it’s good to talk.’

  ‘You’re a good woman, Charlie Brown,’ said Steven. ‘We need more of you.’

  ‘And what can this good woman do for you, Dr Dunbar?’

  Steven took a deep breath as if concealing embarrassment to come. ‘This may sound like a crazy question, but have you any idea what Paul Leighton and Carrie Simpson might have been doing in the hours leading up to the fire?’

  ‘Doing in the lab?’

  ‘Before they went back to the lab that night’

  Jane’s eyes roamed round the room as if searching for inspiration and failing. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is this important?’

  ‘Very.’

  Jane took that on board and said after a moment’s thought, ‘Let me see, I was quite late in leaving myself that night so most people including Paul and Carrie had already left before I did. If they were planning to come back later – as they were – they would probably have gone to grab a bite to eat, but that’s about as far as I can take it.’

  Any idea where?’

  ‘Probably Romero’s, but that’s a guess.’

  ‘Romero’s?’

  ‘Most of us used McDonalds or Wendy’s if we were planning to work late, but Carrie was a vegetarian; she preferred Romero’s because they made proper veggie dishes rather than put out tubs of salad.’

  ‘A small place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they would go directly back to the lab from there?’

  ‘I think so. They were intent on getting through the repeat experiments as quickly as possible. I can’t see them being distracted by anything else.’

  ‘Would they be known to the staff in Romero’s?’

  ‘I guess there’s a good chance,’ said Jane, ‘they were working late a lot so they might even have been seen as regulars, but, in any case, I’m pretty sure the restaurant would have thought about them when they heard about two people dying in a fire that night,’ she added, seeing where Steven was going with his questions. ‘And now, are you going to tell me what you really want to know?’

  Steven smiled. ‘I really want to know if they were alone and, if not, who was with them.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘You were honest when I came to see you last time when you could have blanked me so I’ll be straight with you. I think there’s a possibility that Paul and Carrie’s deaths were not the result of a tragic accident. I think they were drugged or sedated in some way so they were unconscious when the fire started.’

  Jane looked as if this was a bit too much to take in. ‘Oh my God,’ she managed before shaking her head slowly. ‘How awful.’

  Steven waited for more to come. He thought the flood gates might open when Jane started wondering why anyone would want to murder her colleagues and she started answering her own question. Eventually she said quietly and in trepidation, ‘Surely you don’t think Dorothy was involved, do you?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Jane in a hushed voice, ‘She’s a top scientist, a committed Christian, she may have been shaken to the core to see the results Paul and Carrie came up with and not have wanted to believe it without seeing absolute proof – maybe even to the point of delaying seeing it – but we all know that murdering the messenger never changed anything. The message stays the same.’

  ‘How true.’

  ‘The very reason that she invited me to come with her and work here in the UK was to establish the truth . . . whatever it turned out to be.’

  Steven nodded. ‘Okay, I can’t say I like the woman, but I think I have to go along with what you say. That’s not an entirely happy conclusion however . . .’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘If Dorothy had nothing to do with the Paul and Carrie’s deaths, someone else did and, if it was because of their research, you and Dorothy are working on the same thing.’

  Jane made a face and found an argument. ‘Not exactly the same, we may be asking the same questions, but, by changing fields to epigenetics, we’re approaching from a different angle and that means we’re a long way off being able to refute or verify Paul and Carrie’s findings.’

  ‘And in a different country,’ Steven added.

  ‘Science on the run,’ said Jane, managing a smile. How about you, where do you go from here?’

  ‘The Romero’s lead you’ve given me is all I’ve got so I’ll have to find a way of checking it out, see if anyone remembers the couple being there that night. I take it Romero’s is close to the department where you all worked?’

  Jane said that it was. ‘It’s in Kelman Boulevard, would you like me to help?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I was friendly with one of the technicians in the lab at Yale; she got a job in one of the other labs when Dorothy left; we exchange emails now and again. Cindy liked Romero’s – she’s a veggie too and presumably still goes there – I could ask her to try and find out if anyone remembers Paul and Carrie being there that night and who they were with, if anyone.’

  What at first sounded like music to Steven’s ears quickly became concern about putting Jane’s friend in danger. He said as much to Jane who considered for a few moments before concluding, ‘I don’t really think so; it’s all a very long time ago and no one ever imagined that any kind of crime was involved . . .’

  Steven was happy to go along with this.

  ‘What did you tell Dorothy about my last visit?’ he asked.

  ‘I told her pretty much what you told her, that you were gathering information on the group to get a feeling for the research we were doing. I didn’t lie to her; I told her you had asked about the fire and that you’d asked me as a relative outsider at the time rather than her out of respect for her feelings.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I didn’t admit to telling you anything about the rift between her and Paul and Carrie or what it was about.’

  Steven nodded and said, ‘That’s also good, but I don’t think I should come to the lab any more, it’s going to require too much explanation. If Dorothy asks about today, it wouldn’t be a lie to tell her that we spoke more about the changes that overcame Owen Barrowman and how you told me you were concerned about another of your colleagues.’

  Jane was comfortable with this and Steven gave her a series of contact numbers to call when she had any news.

  TWENTY

  John Macmillan was still with the Home Secretary when Steven got to the Home Office so he decided to touch base with Neil Tyler. His call went to voicemail.

  ‘Neil, I’ve been through the police and fire reports. We should talk. Are you free for lunch today? Give me a call.’

  Half an hour later, Tyler returned the call. ‘As luck would have i
t, I’ve just spent the morning with my legal retainers. Lunch would be a good idea.’

  Steven suggested The Moorings, the same riverside pub he’d used for meetings with Barrowman and they agreed to meet at one o’clock. His liking for the place had little to do with the service or the food – which was fine – but simply because it afforded good views of the Thames and its bridges. Somehow, that was important.

  ‘You were right to draw attention to the fire deaths,’ said Steven.

  ‘I’m not sure I should be pleased to hear that,’ said Tyler.

  Steven explained how he’d become suspicious after viewing the fire department photographs.

  ‘Why didn’t they pick up on that?’ Tyler murmured.

  ‘I didn’t at first, but I kept going back to them until it struck me that I was looking at two people who had died without any apparent attempt to fight the flames or escape the building and that didn’t seem right. The difference between me and the authorities was that I set out to look for something wrong and they didn’t.’

  ‘They saw what they expected to see,’ Tyler agreed, ‘They’d identified the cause of the fire – a gas leak – a tragic accident with no sign of foul play suspected . . . or looked for to any great degree.’

  Steven told him of his earlier meeting with Jane Lincoln and her offer of help in tracing the last movements of Paul and Carrie.

  ‘That’s a bit of luck, I thought you were about to tell me you were going there, in which case I was about to suggest I come too,’ said Tyler.

  ‘Does that mean you got the sack from the lawyers this morning?’ asked Steven.

  ‘Far from it,’ said Tyler. ‘A few days ago, I submitted my report on the work found on Barrowman’s computer on the make-up of psychopathic criminals and they seemed very satisfied – or rather the people behind them are.’

  ‘No objections to the publication of these results?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Dorothy will be pleased, but will they be happy to continue funding now that Barrowman’s out of the picture?’

  ‘Barrowman may be out of the picture, but they see him as having come up with the goods – a nice piece of work – and now they’re looking forward to seeing what the others in the group come up with.’

  ‘Happy bunnies all round,’ said Steven, ‘but where does this leave you? Will they still need you to ride shotgun on Dorothy’s group and keep an eye on what they’re up to?’

  ‘Apparently yes, they’d like me to continue with monthly reports on the group’s progress and to hear my assessment of where it’s going. It might have been Barrowman’s research on psychopaths that drew their attention to the Lindstrom group in the first place but obviously they’re interested in everything else that’s going on.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Steven. ‘I get the impression that they don’t know anything about Moorlock Hall and Barrowman’s studies on Lawler?’

  ‘When you think about it, there was nothing to tell,’ said Tyler. ‘You and I both think he’s hiding something but the fact that Lawler doesn’t rate a mention in his results is not much to build a case on.’

  ‘True,’ Steven conceded. ‘He told a few people he thought Lawler was special, but never said why. He didn’t confide in Dorothy or his wife apart from telling Lucy he found him mesmerising or words to that effect. What do your employers know about Barrowman?’ he asked.

  ‘Just what Dorothy told them,’ Tyler replied. ‘They know of course that he had some sort of a breakdown recently, something being put down to long term exposure to the type of people he was associating with and they know he attacked his wife and had been referred by the police for psychiatric assessment.

  ‘But they have no suspicion he was sitting on something important?’

  ‘I don’t think so; they were worried when they thought he might have destroyed his data because of his mental state and were relieved when that turned out not to be the case. They know about Moorlock Hall of course, because it was in the papers, but, like Dorothy, they took the view that one subject more or less was no big deal when there was enough data already to warrant publication.’

  ‘You look as if you’re trying to solve Fermat’s last theorem,’ said Tyler when Steven had stared unseeingly into space for at least thirty seconds.

  ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to put pieces on the board in the right order.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Let’s go through it . . . we think that Barrowman has discovered something big but Dorothy doesn’t know about it.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘The same goes for the anonymous people you work for, but both are happy with what Barrowman did come up with, something which Dorothy sees as part of an overall understanding of what makes people tick,

  ‘Agreed.’

  The UK security services tried to block funding for Dorothy’s group and were particularly interested in Barrowman and what he was doing to the extent that they kidnapped him from the police, possibly because they have people working on the same thing’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Dorothy’s group continues trying to unravel the mysteries of what controls our genes and how, but there’s also a background agenda to prove or disprove what their two dead colleagues came up with before they died.’

  ‘And who may have been murdered to prevent these findings being made public,’ Tyler added.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘Puzzled.’

  ‘Steven raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, epigenetics is an exciting field, but it’s in its infancy. It will be one thing establishing which genes are subject to switching but quite another figuring out the details of how it works and how we can influence and eventually control it. I’m sure Dorothy and her co-workers are going to come up with a lot of interesting findings along the way but it’s going to take a long time before the Americans’ findings are confirmed or not.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Steven, ‘and maybe that suits Dorothy, but of course, lucky breaks sometimes happen . . . which brings us to Barrowman.’

  It was Tyler’s turn to look surprised. ‘Do you think he knows how it all works?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I think he learned something from Lawler that puts him way ahead of the field. Lawler was his lucky break, one that made his previous work almost irrelevant – he was happy to share all his other results, but went to enormous lengths to keep the Lawler discoveries to himself, presumably until such times as he could claim all the credit and go down in scientific history.’

  ‘I still can’t figure where your employers are coming from,’ said Steven. ‘They fund research anonymously and then sit back monitoring it. Why?’

  ‘After what you’ve told me,’ said Tyler cautiously, suppose . . . just suppose . . . they are the same people who were behind the murder of the two Americans . . .’

  ‘Wow, talk about biting the hand that feeds you . . .’

  ‘You know the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?’ said Tyler.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If Dorothy’s two post-docs were murdered to stop them making their findings public, maybe the murderers thought that the same findings might surface again albeit from a different angle.’

  ‘So, they fund them in order to keep an eye on things?’

  ‘And to put a stop to things if they feel the time is right.’

  ‘Well, Machiavelli has nothing on you, doctor,’ said Steven, ‘but funding an entire research group is not done with small change. We’re talking big bucks here.’

  ‘Which limits the field,’ said Tyler.

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘People with big bucks.’

  ‘If you keep this up, we’re going to get our own radio show,’ said Steven, ‘I’m thinking US intelligence. UK intelligence blocked initial funding for Dorothy, maybe US intelligence took a stronger line?’

  ‘A depressing thought.’

  ‘The intelligence world
is a very depressing place,’ said Steven.

  ‘You sound like you know it well?’

  ‘Our paths have crossed.’

  ‘Do you think MI5 are hiding Barrowman? Tyler asked.

  Steven shook his head and told him about Barrowman’s ‘little joke’ with the card.

  Tyler was shocked. ‘Jesus,’ he murmured. ‘Is that why you’re carrying?’ He nodded towards Steven’s left shoulder, causing him to adjust his jacket. ‘Don’t worry, the weapon’s not visible. I take it you don’t do this often enough to warrant the attention of your tailor?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Steven. ‘John Macmillan is convinced Barrowman has been given shelter by person or persons unknown. I wasn’t so sure, but just when I was beginning to think he might have committed suicide, he phones a friend in Edinburgh, asking him to forward a packet he’d been keeping for him.’

  ‘Scary stuff . . . Tell me about this packet.’

  ‘There’s a good chance it contains the data on Barrowman’s work with Lawler.’

  ‘Where was it sent?’

  ‘Good question, John Macmillan was seeing the Home Secretary this morning with a view to finding that out.’ Steven told Tyler of the PO box number problem

  It was agreed that Tyler would concentrate on trying to find out more about who was funding the Lindstrom group and Steven would let him know if and when Jane Lincoln had been back in touch.

  Steven walked back to the Home Office feeling uncomfortable that U.S. intelligence could have been involved in the deaths of the two young scientists. This was not because he didn’t think intelligence services could resort to murder when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary – a CIA plan to murder the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, A Bulgarian agent using the deadly poison, ricin via a scratch from the tip of an umbrella, Russian radio-active polonium being added to tea for a London assassination – but more the thought that intelligence services could be interfering in front-line scientific research. In his book, the search for truth should be above and beyond whatever else the human race got up to. Ivory towers should be sanctuaries for the gifted few capable of asking the right questions and seeking out truth to expand human knowledge. Dream on Dunbar. He took solace from the thought that the only reason for bringing up possible US intelligence involvement was the large amount of money required. There was absolutely no evidence that they were . . . for the moment.