Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘The evil of this world,’ she finally said, making a small gesture around the vegetables and buildings.

  ‘Do you mean in this convent?’ I asked. ‘Is there someone or something here that troubles you?’

  Felicitas didn’t answer me. But she was rattled, there was no doubt about it. I decided to leave any further interrogation of her until the results of the autopsy and any DNA samples taken from the crime scene.

  ‘I’ll be talking to you again quite soon,’ I warned her, ‘because I’m not entirely satisfied that I have all the facts.’

  Again she raised an eyebrow at this but remained silent.

  Bob and I nodded goodbye and started walking towards the front of the building. I felt Jeremiah’s eyes on my back and swung around. He was closer behind me than I’d thought, standing staring after us, next to one of his stone cairns.

  ‘Those piles of stones,’ I asked him, pointing to the low pyramid. ‘What are they all about?’

  Jeremiah looked down at his feet and took his hat off, squeezing it while he spoke. He glanced at Felicitas and shrugged, turning back to me with a half-smile. There was a strange opaque quality to his eyes and I sensed that he was immensely relieved to be speaking about something other than the events of the previous night.

  ‘The stones,’ he repeated. ‘I build a pile of stones,’ he said, looking up towards the brilliant winter sky, ‘wherever I see God’s energy pouring down from Heaven into the garden. Sometimes I see great shafts falling on the earth.’

  Bob and I looked at each other, nodded goodbye again to Jeremiah and walked away towards our cars. When we were a decent distance, Bob muttered sideways at me. ‘You asked for it,’ he said.

  We paused near our cars. ‘Something very fishy in the convent,’ I said.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ said Bob. ‘Let’s talk more later. I’m taking the rest of the day off to concentrate on a lecture I have to give tonight.’

  His words triggered a memory I’d been avoiding. In a weak moment I’d agreed to do several lectures for the Biochemistry Department at the Australian National University later in the term and ‘later’ was starting to get worryingly close. It wasn’t that I was concerned about lecturing, but the preparation would require some time.

  I looked over the rolling winter countryside. A couple of horses, spooked by the wind, raced away, tails flagging. Felicitas was bothering me. I thought of all the people I’d interrogated. Honest people shine straight and true with their replies. They don’t have to think hard because their answers are right there, in their memory, just waiting to be called on. When people lie they have to make it up and that takes a little time and effort. Or they use tactics such as high dudgeon to avoid a direct answer. Apart from her straightforward denials, I wondered why Sister Felicitas’s manner had been generally evasive.

  As if reading my thoughts, Bob broke the silence. ‘What do you make of Sister Felicitas?’

  ‘Cagey,’ I said. ‘In fact, none of them seem overly keen to be helpful. I’m sure that room has been changed. And I can’t help getting the feeling that Felicitas is lying through her wimple. I’d love to know what those little flakes of plaster or whatever it is came from.’

  ‘And I’d love to know what’s missing from the wall,’ said Bob. I knew he was thinking what I was; that murderers often like to take a souvenir away with them.

  ‘The dust from it still hadn’t fallen away,’ I said.

  I looked around the grounds and at the sheets flapping on the clothes lines, the strange underclothing, long johns, vests and spencers. ‘What makes a woman want to live like that?’ I asked after a silence.

  ‘Beats me,’ said Bob.

  We got into our respective vehicles and I paused halfway into my seat. ‘How about a love affair between the dead nun and the gardener?’ I suggested, leaning out of my car window. ‘Sister Chatterley’s lover.’

  Bob laughed. ‘Jeremiah and Sister Gertrude and the shaft of God’s energy?’ he offered.

  ‘His POE was right next to her room,’ I said.

  ‘I noticed that, too,’ said Bob.

  I got back into the car, thinking hard. I’m no psychologist but after years in the job working on cases like this, and talking things over with Charlie, some things just jump up in front of me, demanding attention. By the time a person gets to committing the ultimate act of violence, he’s generally been schooled and educated in his craft. I’d already formed a few half-gelled ideas and I started building up my own profile. Whoever had done this, almost certainly would have had a history of violence, and was possibly someone who had killed before. He’d come unerringly to her room. It was someone who knew the layout of the place.

  Five

  I arrived back at work and looked in at Digby’s desk. There was a mountain of paperwork already piling up, all of which would have to be dealt with and soon. I had a quick look through it and my heart sank. Invoices that would need checking against stock, management conferences that would demand my attendance or delegation, orders for new furnishings, stationery, glassware and equipment. Somehow, I would have to deal with it all. Then there was his and my electronic mail to contend with. But first things first; right now, I had some items to search.

  What I was looking for was a Level-three pathogen, the handling of which requires extra special care. The sealed bio-hazard container with the samples I’d lifted from Tony Bonning’s place needed to be examined in a lab dedicated to dangerous substances and pathogens, sometimes called a ‘hot suite’.

  Once again, I geared up in protective mode, spacesuited with a respirator before entering the bio-hazard lab. In these laboratories, ducted airflow is directed towards, rather than away from, any areas liable to be contaminated. Walls and floors are smooth and seamless, so that contaminants have nowhere to hide. They are steam-cleaned or bleached frequently.

  Inside, I prepared the work surface in a biological safety cabinet, covering it with absorbent material saturated with a strong bleach solution. Then I gently released the square of red foil from its container and peered at it with my hand glass. I could just make out the heart-shaped outline of the object it had wrapped, embossed in a curve some way in from the crushed edges. I measured the raised area; it was about the same size as an egg, although with only half the depth. Jacinta had given me a chocolate heart last year that would have been the same size. I turned the foil over, smoothing it as softly as I could, gently straightening the crinkles, using a tiny brush to sweep out any crumbs and particles. This resulted in all sorts of things—fibres, hair, dirt particles and some relatively large particles of the dark, waxy substance. It was these chocolate fragments that keenly interested me. If the pathogen had been delivered via the chocolate gift that had surprised Bonning, I was hopeful of finding some traces of it here.

  I cut some samples and examined them under the lenses of the light microscope. At 1000 times magnification, I focused the tiny particles of chocolate until I could see great dark mountains covered in rocks and fissures. I hoped that these might have trapped my quarry.

  What I was looking for was about one to two micrometres in size and it was at 1000 times magnification that I saw clumps of what looked like misty eggs. I peered closer, amazed. There, among the highly magnified strands of fibres and lumps of dirt, clustering along the microscopic ridges and valleys of the fragments I was examining, were a lot of egg-shaped bodies. I blinked and gazed at them again, almost sure I was looking at the highly refractile spores of Bacillus anthracis. But so many organisms look similar and scientific analysis demands the gold standard of bacterial identification: find it, grow it, and identify it beyond all doubt.

  I washed the chocolate crumbs and their contents in a sterile solution that captured any microscopic organisms. Then I filtered the contents of the solution, separating them from the other debris. Eventually, with an inoculating loop, I was ab
le to streak a small amount of this across a prepared blood agar plate, taking care not to tear the surface of the nutrient jelly. Now, all that remained was to place the glassware in the incubator at thirty-seven degrees to see what might grow. The computer would alert me to any positive results growing on the plate but the process could take as long as the rest of the day and evening. So I tidied up, stepped out of the lab into the airlock, removed my protective gear for autoclaving and secure disposal, and took a regulation shower.

  There was no excuse now. I could no longer avoid making a start on the pile of papers on Digby’s desk. I went upstairs. Unusually, Vic Agnew wasn’t in his office when I passed it on my way to Digby’s. I guessed he was working elsewhere, observing someone else’s work in a lab somewhere or in an examination room. I knew he was young and keen and determined to get ahead. Above his desk, several prints of optical illusions hung, together with a perceptual puzzle that, if looked at one way, showed a three-quarters profile of a pretty young woman, but if perceived in another way, suddenly changed into a hideous old hag.

  I sat down on my boss’s squeaking chair. I felt strange presiding over his office like this and I wasn’t entirely comfortable about it. Outside, a couple of gang-gang parrots squawked overhead. I went to the window but missed them. Birthday cards celebrating Digby’s fifty-fifth were stuck on his noticeboard together with the holiday roster and the names of staff members who needed time off to be with their families. There were photographs of Digby in his role of the ghost in the local amateur production of Hamlet from a few years ago, looking suitably forbidding in his helmet and robes. There were also some other snaps of him and Livvy from last year’s production of The Boyfriend. They smiled widely in their roaring twenties costumes. Looking more closely I noticed that in all the snaps they were standing some distance apart. It was too much to be a leading research worker, a jobbing analyst, and as well spend any free time in rehearsing dramatic roles. No wonder Livvy was often depressed.

  I still couldn’t face the desk, so I rang Bob.

  ‘Jeremiah Dokic,’ I said, repeating the name Bob gave me. ‘Have you had a chance to check with records yet?’

  ‘I have,’ said my diligent ex-partner. ‘He seems to be a cleanskin, but I’m still chasing up a couple of things.’

  I had a gut feeling that Jeremiah was nervous or knew something, the sort of instinct that had served me well in other investigations and I was determined to take things further. It wasn’t only intuition. Single men of a certain age who live alone in isolated places show up frequently in crime and other statistics. I’d cut down too many of them suicided in their shacks, or searched their derelict boarding house rooms for evidence against them. Maybe interstate records would show another result.

  ‘I’ll check with the interstate police,’ Bob said, ‘and let you know what they come up with.’

  I went to get a drink from the water cooler in the corridor. On the way, I saw Henry Dupont through the small glass window in the door of one of the examination rooms, poring over some items of clothing in the bright, white space. Because of his fastidious paperwork, someone like Henry would have been much better than me as head of department, I thought, but he was a difficult character and his people skills were poor. He lived alone in a little cottage out on a five-acre block across the river from the Worthingtons’ Seven Oaks. Years ago, before my time, I’d heard he’d had a crush on Livvy and some people claimed they’d seen him sitting on the verandah of his old timber cottage with binoculars, spying on the Worthingtons across the river. He seemed to have no family and I’d heard alarming stories of his misogyny from Florence and my colleagues Jane and Sarah. Certainly, something had soured him. He had a well-equipped home lab, and spent all his free time in it, never socialising.

  I finally settled down to work sorting paper—a printed email relating to the PC Project that was so dear to my boss’s wife and my boss as well. Devised by an Oxford chemistry don, and commanded by a software program that automatically kicked in whenever the processor chips were idle, it called for all idle PCs to be dedicated to work for the Centre for Computational Drug Design. Thousands of PCs from dozens of countries ran constantly, day in, day out, working through huge amounts of data, checking small molecules for suitable candidates from which to create cancer inhibitors. Our own computers, too, were part of this distributed computing. I went into the store area and it was eerie to see the PCs all in rows, their screens lit up, conjuring masses of figures, working away endlessly, generating thousands and thousands of hours of computing time. The same thing was happening in storerooms and labs and offices and cupboards all over the world. According to Digby, the campaign was proving very successful. Within only a few weeks, he told me, twelve thousand likely candidates and hundreds of thousands of hopefuls had been identified. With bio-warfare becoming more of a possibility, any research into toxin inhibitors could have implications far wider than helping people with cancer.

  I rang the coroner’s office to see when I could expect the clothing and other physical evidence from Sister Gertrude’s body and was told that these were already on their way. If the killer had touched her and was a ‘shedder’, with a bit of luck we might even have his DNA profile in a day or two. Also I was very curious about the fragments of chalky white stuff on and around the dead woman’s black robes. Something had broken. Something had definitely been removed from this crime scene.

  I spent the next hour in the downstairs storeroom checking off new items of equipment against their invoices. Digby had ordered a number of grounding strips, used to prevent the build-up of static electricity in the laboratories. This can cause all sorts of nasty shocks one way or another, unless it’s dealt with. I saw he’d also applied to import vaccines against smallpox and anthrax.

  I was on my way out of the office, stock in hand, to check the dates and tallies of the invoices when a smart young woman, blonde hair swinging on her shoulders, almost bumped into me in the doorway. She had very pink cheeks, the sort of skin that flushes in cold weather.

  ‘Digby Worthington?’ she asked, hesitating at the door and its nameplate.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s off on special leave for a while. I’m handling his work. I’m Jack McCain.’

  ‘I have a package here for him,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Tomlins.’

  I saw her name written on the label of the sealed tins and packets she was handing me, and I signed for them.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, squinting at the labels.

  ‘It’s the tissue samples from the pathologist,’ she explained, ‘from Tony Bonning’s autopsy. I was coming down from Sydney on another matter and I offered to bring them myself. Gavin Wales is my boss. You met him this morning, I hear.’

  I remembered the stooped, balding detective with the sad face and cigarette near the Mobile Incident Response Vehicle. ‘I’m acting in Dr Worthington’s position now,’ I said. ‘You lot were very quick off the mark. Can I make you a coffee or something?’

  I was hoping to hear more detail, any detail, about Tony Bonning’s death. ‘I’ve already started work on the physical evidence I found this morning,’ I told her. ‘And I’ll get started on this as soon as possible, Detective Tomlins.’

  ‘Call me Tom,’ she smiled. ‘Everyone does.’

  I couldn’t. ‘How are you going with the investigation?’ I asked.

  ‘We interviewed his work mates again, in case we missed out on anything the first time. We were very interested in the person who remembered how chuffed he’d been over getting a valentine in July.’

  It’s surprising how often the most helpful of the witnesses turns out to be not a witness at all but, later on, the prime suspect.

  ‘And who’s that?’ I asked.

  Tomlins checked her notebook. ‘A woman called Cecily Henderson,’ she read. ‘A haematologist.’

  ‘What’s her relation to t
he deceased?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re working on that,’ she said.

  I noted the sex and occupation of the late Tony Bonning’s friend.

  ‘She was very helpful,’ Tomlins continued. ‘Told us all about how Bonning rang in sick saying he had food poisoning. A few of them from work had gone out for drinks the night before and then on to dinner. He naturally thought he’d eaten something that disagreed with him. Later in the day, he was sick enough to go to his local doctor. The doctor didn’t like the look of him and sent some blood tests off to pathology. But way before they came back, Bonning was in hospital in a very acute stage. It wasn’t until the hospital’s pathology people isolated the damn thing that they knew what they’d been dealing with.’ She paused. ‘They threw every known antibiotic at him, but he failed to respond,’ she said.

  ‘Any suspects?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re chasing up a few people who might be of interest to us,’ she said.

  I recalled all the sweet wrappings in the bin under the basketball hoop in the dead man’s bedroom. A killer has to make sure that he hits his target and not someone else.

  ‘Someone had to know his habits to send him chocolate. And know that he’d eat it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be happy to know there’s an ex,’ Tomlins said. ‘She told us about his sweet tooth.’

  ‘Wife or girlfriend?’ I asked, thinking of Genevieve who would be quite capable of sending me a poisoned gift on a bad day. Even on a half-good day.

  ‘Ex-wife,’ said Tomlins. ‘She’s remarried and says there’s no animosity. And hasn’t been for years. In fact, she said it’s impossible to dislike Tony Bonning. It was just that he was a hopeless husband.’

  Briefly, I wished Genevieve could hold such a benign opinion of me. ‘What cases was he working on?’ I asked.