Crisis

by Ken McClure

  ‘Can’t say, sir.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Shona … ‘I’ll wait for you.’

  Bannerman was shown out to an unmarked, dark green Austin Montego and ushered into the back. Morris got in beside him. West sat in the front passenger seat and said something to the driver — also in plain clothes — which Bannerman couldn’t quite catch. He felt that there would be no point in asking where they were going and assumed that it would be the police headquarters. He was surprised therefore when the car turned in through the west gate of the Royal Infirmary. Bang went his theory about it having something to do with the disappearance of Colin Turnbull’s body. The car drew to a halt and he was invited to get out.

  SIXTEEN

  Their footsteps echoed along the corridor that took them to Seminar Room eight. There was no mistaking that they were in a hospital. Even if he had been blindfolded, Bannerman would have recognized the distinctive smells of anaesthetic and disinfectant that pervaded hospitals the world over.

  ‘In here, sir,’ said West as he opened the door and stood back to allow Bannerman to enter.

  There were three men inside. They were seated at a plain wooden table but got up when Bannerman entered.

  ‘Good of you to come Doctor. Please sit down.’

  Bannerman remained standing. He said, ‘You know who I am but I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.’

  The two men in suits looked at each other and then said, ‘I’m Jackman.’

  ‘And I’m Mildrew.’

  Mildrew indicated to the white coated man on his left, This is Dr Mellon of the poisons bureau.’

  ‘Are you Special Branch too?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘No we’re not,’ replied Jackman.

  ‘Then who are you?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘I can vouch for these gentlemen, sir,’ said Morris, attempting to defuse the tension.

  ‘I want to know who they are,’ said Bannerman, evenly.

  ‘We are from the Ministry of Defence,’ said Jackman with an air of reluctance.

  ‘Special Branch and the Ministry of Defence,’ said Bannerman slowly. Then presumably this is not in connection with a parking offence?’

  Mildrew ignored the comment and said, ‘You are Ian Bannerman, consultant pathologist at St Luke’s Hospital in London?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Last night you brought in a sample of sheep brain to the Poisons Reference Bureau and requested toxic analysis on it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Surely it’s a reasonable question, Doctor,’ said Jackman.

  ‘So is mine,’ said Bannerman.

  ‘Frankly, Doctor, I think I should warn you that if you continue to be obstructive you could be in very serious trouble,’ said Mildrew.

  ‘What did they find in the sheep brain?’ asked Bannerman. They did find something, didn’t they? That’s what this is all about.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  The impasse continued in silence for a few moments before Bannerman said, ‘I’d like to make a telephone call.’

  ‘Do you think you need a lawyer, Doctor?’ asked Jackman.

  ‘I’m not calling one,’ said Bannerman. ‘I would like to speak to Mr Cecil Allison of the Prime Minister’s office.’

  The Prime Minister’s office?’ repeated Jackman. ‘What do you have to do with the Prime Minister’s office?’

  ‘I’ve been carrying out an investigation on behalf of the Medical Research Council in conjunction with the PM’s office,’ replied Bannerman.

  Mildrew and Jackman looked at each other and then at Morris who shrugged his shoulders. ‘We were unaware of this,’ said Jackman. There seems to have been a breakdown in communications somewhere.’ His look to Morris indicated where he thought it lay. ‘Perhaps Inspector Morris will place the call for you.’

  Morris moved to an adjoining room and returned a few moments later to say to Bannerman, ‘Mr Allison is on the line, sir.’

  Bannerman closed the door behind him and picked up the receiver.

  ‘I understand you are in a spot of bother, Doctor,’ said Allison.

  Bannerman never thought he would be pleased to hear the sound of Allison’s voice, but he was. He told him about the sheep brain and about his having requested a chemical toxin analysis on it.

  ‘But what did they find?’ asked Allison. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’

  ‘They won’t tell me and I won’t tell them where I found it, so we’re sitting here, looking at each other.’

  ‘Perhaps I should speak to them,’ suggested. Allison.

  ‘I’d be grateful.’

  Mildrew spoke to Allison in private, then returned to the room and indicated to Bannerman that Allison wanted to speak to him again.

  ‘Bannerman, I suggest that you cooperate fully with Mr Mildrew and his colleagues,’ said Allison.

  ‘Without question?’ said Bannerman.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No way,’ said Bannerman, flatly. ‘I’ve not come this far to be fobbed off like this. I want to know what was in the sample.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Allison. ‘I warned Mildrew you might. Mr Mildrew is prepared to tell you more but first you will have to sign the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘Ye gods! What next,’ exclaimed Bannerman.

  ‘If you lab boffins had got this right in the first instance, none of this would have been necessary,’ said Allison and put down the phone abruptly.

  ‘Well thanks a lot,’ said Bannerman to the dialling tone.

  ‘Sign where I’ve marked it,’ said Jackman, handing Bannerman a copy of the Official Secrets Act.

  Bannerman signed without comment and pushed the form to one side.

  The brain sample you presented last night contained traces of a chemical called NYLIT,’ said Mildrew.

  ‘Nylit,’ repeated Bannerman. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘We would have been surprised if you had.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘This is the cause of our interest, Doctor,’ said Mildrew. ‘NYLIT is not a by-product of any chemical process, as so many toxins are. It was a specific component of a biological weapon developed in 19 … some time ago.’

  ‘A weapon?’ exclaimed Bannerman.

  ‘It was one of a chain of compounds developed by our defence establishment.’

  ‘And it’s a powerful mutagen?’

  ‘Among other things, yes.’

  ‘So how the hell did it get into a sheep in the north of Scotland?’

  ‘That’s what we intend finding out, Doctor, with your help of course.’

  ‘I’ll give you all the information I have,’ said Bannerman.

  It was after ten in the evening before Bannerman got back to the hotel. He was exhausted, having told Mildrew and Jackson every single detail he could remember about the investigation in Achnagelloch and Stobmor.

  ‘I’ve been so worried,’ said Shona. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘The sheep were exposed to a powerful mutagen,’ said Bannerman.

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘We don’t know, but the best guess at the moment is that some canister was washed up on the beach at Inverladdie and through time it leaked and contaminated the ground. Grazing sheep which were incubating the Scrapie virus at the time were affected by it, and the rest you know.’

  That still doesn’t explain how Colin Turnbull came to be affected,’ said Shona.

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ agreed Bannerman but there was a more pressing question on his mind. He was again considering why the brain sections taken from the dead men at Inverladdie had shown such perfect signs of classical Creutzfeld Jakob Disease when the sections from the poisoned sheep showed no brain degeneration at all? He feared that the answer to that must lie with the people responsible for the pathology on the dead men, Lawrence Gill who was dead and Morag Napier … who was n
ot.

  It was late and Bannerman did not want to voice his suspicions to Shona. Despite the fact that it was he who had finally worked out the puzzle he was smarting over his earlier certainty about the involvement of the Invermaddoch nuclear power station. He seemed to have been so wrong so often in this affair that he decided he would keep his thoughts to himself for the moment. He would go into the medical school in the morning and try out a little test of his own. He still had the samples of sheep brain. He would let Morag go ahead with the animal tests she had promised to do.

  Bannerman had just left for the medical school when the phone rang and Shona answered.

  ‘May I speak to Dr Bannerman please?’ asked a female voice.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s just gone out. Can I give him a message?’

  This is Morag Napier at the medical school. I wanted to remind him about the sample he said he would bring in for animal inoculation.’

  ‘I think he’s on his way to see you now, Dr Napier, with the news.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘Apparently the sheep were affected by some poison on the land, but Ian will tell you all about it himself when he gets there.’

  ‘That sounds interesting, thank you,’ said Morag Napier.

  ‘Hello again,’ said Bannerman as he entered Morag Napier’s lab.

  ‘Good morning,’ smiled Morag. ‘You’ve brought the sample?’

  Bannerman took out a small bottle containing sheep brain. ‘Here you are. Can I watch you do the inoculations?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Morag. She took the bottles over to a fume hood and switched on the extractor fan. It accelerated slowly into life and settled down to a steady hum.

  Morag, now gloved and gowned, transferred the contents of the first bottle into the heavy glass reservoir of an emulsifier. She added sterile saline solution and fitted the cap which housed a sharp metal blade mounted on a long shaft that reached to the foot of the bottle. She clamped the reservoir to its platform and made the motor connection to the upper end of the shaft. She then switched on the power and the blade started whirling inside the glass, emulsifying the brain into a smooth, injectable solution.

  Morag inspected it by eye and then gave it another couple of minutes. She then loaded the contents of the reservoir into two sterile plastic syringes. She fitted needles to both and said, ‘Shall we go down to the animal lab?’

  There was still a vague smell of burning about the animal laboratory despite the fact that it had been completely reconstructed since the fire. It mingled with animal smells and that of fresh paint in an unpleasant cocktail which made Bannerman wrinkle up his nose as they went in. He noticed that Morag used her own key. There was no one inside.

  ‘I thought I would do six mice,’ said Morag.

  ‘Good,’ said Bannerman watching her every move.

  ‘I wonder, would you get me the experiment register from the office?’ asked Morag.

  Bannerman went to the office but as soon as he turned the corner he turned back to look at what Morag was doing. He saw her take out two filled syringes from a drawer below the bench and replace them with the two she had brought down from upstairs.

  ‘Is that how you did it last time?’ asked Bannerman from behind her.

  Morag jumped, but regained control quickly. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘It had to be you. You faked the brain sections and the animal tests to make it look as if the men in Achnagelloch had died from sheep Scrapie. Lawrence Gill must have found out what you’d done and tried to send true samples of the men’s brains to the MRC for proper analysis but he was murdered before he could say anything about it.’

  ‘He wasn’t murdered!’ insisted Morag with flashing eyes. ‘He fell from the cliff. It was an accident! The whole thing was an accident! If the farm workers hadn’t been so greedy the sheep would have been safely buried and none of this would ever have happened!’

  ‘How about Colin Turnbull, Morag? What did he do wrong?’

  ‘Perhaps I can answer that Doctor,’ said a foreign voice.

  Bannerman turned round to see a man emerge from the animal food store. He was holding a gun. Bannerman felt himself go cold when he looked into the man’s eyes. He had seen them before. They had been above a ski mask up on Tarmachan Ridge. He’d only seen them for a second but now it all came back to him. There had also been two other occasions when he had seen this tall, fair, good-looking man. The first had been when he had been partially obscured behind Morag Napier when they had both come into the restaurant where he was eating in the Royal Mile and the second time had been in van Gelder’s car up in Stobmor on the night he had been assaulted in the car-park. ‘You’re van Gelder’s son,’ he said.

  ‘My fiance, Peter,’ said Morag. ‘We met and fell in love when I first went up to Scotland with Lawrence.’

  Bannerman reckoned that Peter van Gelder had to be at least ten years younger than Morag and he was very handsome. ‘Really,’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t want any of this to happen,’ said Morag, who was now sobbing. ‘It was a simple accident. There was a leak of a chemical they use for treating the quarry stone and it killed a few sheep. It all stemmed from that, a tragic accident. That’s all it was. The company would have been forced to close down if the accident had been made public. There was so much resentment to their success among the locals. Peter’s father would have been ruined and we couldn’t have got married as we planned.’

  Bannerman looked at Morag and shook his head. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ snapped Morag.

  ‘Will you tell her van Gelder, or shall I?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said van Gelder.

  Bannerman turned back to Morag and said, ‘You’ve been used. The story about a chemical to treat stone is rubbish. They’re using the quarry as a dump for dangerous, illegal chemicals. The one that killed the sheep workers and Colin Turnbull was a powerful mutagen developed for biological warfare.’

  ‘Tell him it isn’t true!’ demanded Morag.

  ‘He also murdered Lawrence Gill,’ continued Bannerman, as he saw all the pieces start to fit. ‘He was the fair-haired man who pretended to be Gill at Cairnish post office. He even tried to push me off the Tarmachan Ridge and the only person who knew I was going there was you; I told you on the phone the morning before I left. You must have passed on that information to him.’

  Bannerman could see by Morag’s expression that he was right. ‘You were the one who told him where Lawrence Gill was going because you overheard the conversation on the phone with Shona MacLean.’

  ‘But Peter just wanted to reason with Lawrence!’ protested Morag. ‘He just wanted a chance to explain why I had switched the slides.’

  ‘The slides came from Creutzfeld Jakob patients?’ asked Bannerman.

  Morag nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I knew that Lawrence would make the connection with the official report of Scrapie in the sheep. All the affected sheep had been destroyed so I thought everyone would be keen to write it off as a freak accident and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately Lawrence found out about the switch.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He overheard me talking to Peter on the phone.’

  Bannerman stared at Morag in silence. ‘And now Peter is going to kill us,’ he added.

  Morag looked bemused. She turned to van Gelder. ‘Tell him this is nonsense,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I’m afraid the man has a lot more brains than you, you stupid bitch,’ said van Gelder, matter-of-factly.

  Morag looked stunned, as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘But we love each other …’ she said distantly.

  ‘Love?’ mocked van Gelder. ‘What do you think I could possibly see in you, you dried up old bitch? You were useful and now you are not. It’s as simple as that.’

  Toxic waste is big business Morag,’ said Bannerman. ‘Governments pay through t
he nose to get rid of it. It’s an embarrassment and a political liability.’

  Morag did not register having heard what Bannerman had said. She was staring wide-eyed and unblinking at van Gelder, the man who had just shattered all her dreams with one viciously unkind outburst. Van Gelder held her stare with an amused smirk on his lips. Bannerman used the opportunity to move his hands slowly along the bench behind him until he felt his fingers wrap round the thin, wire bars of a rat cage. He heard the rat scuttle about inside it and hoped it wouldn’t go for his fingers.

  ‘And now the end is near, as Mr Sinatra would say,’ smiled van Gelder.

  ‘I did everything for you,’ said Morag in a low whisper. ‘I lied and cheated. I let you …’

  “That was a treat,’ sneered van Gelder.

  ‘You bastard!’

  Van Gelder raised the pistol higher when he thought that Morag was going to rush at him, and she stopped. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘But then you always did have trouble relaxing …’

  Bannerman sensed Morag tense beside him. ‘And how do you plan to dispose of our bodies?’ he asked van Gelder.

  ‘I’m going to drive you both back up to Achnagelloch. You’ll be buried under a thousand tons of rock on the next blasting day, along with Turnbull.’

  ‘Why did Turnbull die?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘He was doing some stupid little geological survey to impress us. Unfortunately he stumbled on to a cave where that greedy old bastard Sproat had hidden a pile of dead sheep because he was too mean to bury them properly. It was Turnbull’s own fault for ignoring the warning signs to keep out of the area. He must have contaminated himself when he examined the sheep.’

  Morag snatched a scalpel up from the bench and started to move towards van Gelder. The look in her eyes said that she was not to be reasoned with.

  ‘Put it down!’ commanded van Gelder.

  Morag kept moving towards him.

  ‘Drop it, you stupid bitch!’

  The latest insult made Morag raise the scalpel above her head and lunge at van Gelder. The Dutchman fired and Morag was jerked backwards by the impact of the bullet. She collapsed like a discarded rag doll, a red stain spreading over the front of her white lab coat and an expression of surprise etched on her face.