Grave Island: a compelling mystery thriller

by Andrew Smyth

  11

  Later that evening, I finally got around to telling Greta what had been happening. We were sitting out on the aft deck of the barge and it was getting to be quite a habit – at least I hoped it was. I was making things out to be somewhat more heroic than they actually were. She seemed quite impressed until I got to my latest visit to Holden and the empty shelves.

  ‘So they must be part of it?’ she said. ‘Surely that’s an admission of guilt?’

  I sighed. ‘If only it were. But we’ve got no proof. They said they were clearing out old stock so how can we prove otherwise? In any event, they probably were and that’s not illegal.’

  ‘But you know where it came from and who manufactured it.’

  ‘And what can I do with that information?’ I wasn’t going to tell her about my morning with the SIS. ‘Ed Carpenter of the MHRA was very nice about it, but he explained that without evidence there was nothing they could do. They weren’t going to start an investigation only on the evidence of a couple of dodgy drugs. There wasn’t much I could say to that – I had to agree with him, so we’re back to first base.’

  Greta thought about that. ‘Couldn’t you follow it up? Go out there, I mean, to Mumbai. See what you could find out?’

  ‘What? India? Why is everybody trying to get me out of the country?’

  ‘Who else has asked you?’

  I realised that I’d said too much. ‘No one. It was a suggestion made in passing from the MHRA. They said they’d help me with analysing equipment. But you’re not seriously suggesting I go to Mumbai? That’s crazy.’

  ‘I could pay.’ Greta was sounding desperate. ‘I could make it worth your while. I can’t stop now.’

  ‘I told you I couldn’t achieve very much on my own. And even if I could, what would be the benefit?’ I couldn’t bring myself to say that it wouldn’t bring her father back, but the words hung in the air.

  ‘From what you say people are dying out there every day because of fake or sub-standard drugs. We can’t walk away and ignore it.’

  ‘The Crusades ended a thousand years ago, we’re not going to bring them back now.’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t help,’ Greta said tersely. ‘You’re not prepared to leave it there, are you? Aren’t there any other agencies you could get involved?’

  Much as I wanted to see this through, I felt I was getting boxed in and I wasn’t sure that I could keep my independence. ‘There might be.’ I said it reluctantly. ‘I’ve spoken to some of the intelligence agencies and they might be able to help, but it’s still such a long shot.’

  ‘Perhaps there might be someone else who could help. I had a meeting with Brendan Rogers of Tribune Investments. I had to go over the Camden development with him and he told me how sorry he was about my father. I think he realised that for a while I’d thought he had something to do with it, so it was a bit embarrassing, but he said that they’d always got on really well together and that if I wanted any help in finding out what happened, then I should just ask him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said warily, ‘but it’s difficult to see what he can do.’

  ‘There’s no harm in asking. They’ve got lots of contacts.’

  ‘Many of them dubious,’ I replied rather cattily. ‘But you’re assuming that I can carry on with this. We’re facing a brick wall after the fiasco at Holden and now the MHRA have backed out, there’s nothing I can do on my own.’

  But that night, after she’d left, when I sat aimlessly watching the water go past, I realised that I’d find it impossible to walk away from this – I’d got my teeth into the chase. Then, remembering what Greta had said and thinking back to my conversation with Ken Maxwell, I thought that perhaps Brendan Rogers could help us after all.

  Tribune’s offices looked, if anything, even more opulent on my second visit. Was that a new Warhol they’d acquired since I was there last? I looked closely but saw it was only a print, which was letting the side down a bit, even if it was signed.

  I was shown upstairs to Rogers’ office. He was sitting behind his desk and I took the chair he indicated opposite. Once again, I noted Rogers’ aura of uneasy calm – a volcano whose lava was bubbling below the surface – somebody who could be a forceful enemy, but a useful friend.

  ‘I hear you’ve crossed us off your list of suspects,’ he said, coming straight to the point. ‘Not that I blame Greta for her suspicions. I would probably have felt the same in her situation. I think she was casting around for someone to blame and we happened to be the nearest target – it’s understandable. You’re still not sure of the actual cause of death?’

  ‘Not until we get the autopsy results and the medicines analysed,’ I said. ‘But Greta told you about his medications – the out-of-date insulin and relabelled Oxaban?’

  ‘She did, although I‘m told that you’re not sure about the Oxaban – that you’re going to get it analysed. She said that you’d called in the government drugs agency and they mounted a dawn raid on the wholesaler.’

  ‘The MHRA, yes, but it wasn’t as dramatic as a dawn raid – it was all very low key, but I think they were expecting us and they removed anything incriminating.’

  ‘So you think IHG or Holden Healthcare might be involved?’

  ‘I don’t know. Without any evidence, they’ll probably shrug it off and explain away the problems with Greg Satchwell’s drugs as simply an aberration – a rogue contamination which they say happens from time to time.’

  ‘So how can Tribune Investments help?. I told Greta we’d do what we could – within reason of course.’ He picked up the phone and pressed a button. ‘We’d better get Warren Bidwell up here; this is more his thing than mine. I understand that you’ve just left the army?’ he said while we waited. ‘Greta said you were in intelligence?’

  ‘Military intelligence, it’s not the same thing. These days we leave the spying to our civilian brothers.’

  ‘So why did you leave?’

  ‘Differences of opinion, I suppose.’ I certainly wasn’t going to give him the full details. ‘Perhaps it was time to try something else.’

  ‘And is this investigation the “something else”?’

  I wasn’t going to be drawn. ‘We’ll see,’ is all I said before Warren Bidwell came into the room.

  ‘Warren – you remember Philip Hennessey?’

  ‘Of course.’ Warren, sitting on the chair next to me, shook my hand. ‘Brendan has told me a bit about this, so how can we help?’

  ‘I’d like you to help me set up a dummy company.’ I then explained my plan. ‘Holden – that’s the IHG wholesaler – explained away the drugs as being an aberration, so we asked them who the supplier was and they gave us the name of one of the leading European parallel traders. They explained that they were probably bought in Greece and that’s where the relabelling occurred, although an out-of-date batch must have found its way in somehow.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I found out who actually supplied these drugs and it wasn’t who they said it was. By the time they’d cleared out their shelves and deleted the computer records, the MHRA didn’t have anything left to go on.’

  ‘But if they went as far as doctoring their records, then surely IHG must be involved in the counterfeiting?’ Warren asked.

  ‘Again, not necessarily. It could be another case of parallel trading and all they’re trying to conceal is that the supplier didn’t have EU certification. It’s a big jump from there to deliberately sourcing fakes.’

  ‘How did you find out where they actually came from?’

  ‘Let’s say I went undercover.’ I didn’t add that it was under the cover of two layers of thermal underwear. I handed them the prints I’d made for the MHRA.

  Rogers looked at them and then handed them to Warren. ‘Mombasa. I didn’t know they manufactured drugs in Kenya.’

  ‘The MHRA don’t think they do, they think it’s just a wholesaler and that the actual manufacturer is a company in Mumbai,’ I replied. ‘Greta wants me to foll
ow this up. People are dying because of counterfeit or out-of-date drugs and she thinks she owes it to her father to do something about it. She says she stands to inherit his estate and the money would be tainted unless she did something with it. But if I do go out there I need a cover story that holds water. That’s why I want you to set up a company for me. From what I understand, it’s something you do quite often with your other partners. You could announce that you’re looking into a new partnership in pharmaceutical distribution. In fact, from what I’ve seen, there’s so much money in it that I’m surprised you haven’t done it already.’

  Brendan Rogers smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ he said to Warren. ‘Perhaps it might work. After all, it’s effectively only a feasibility study that you’re proposing, you’re not going to be doing any trading. What I don’t understand though, is what’s in it for you? What’s your real interest in this?’

  ‘I told you, I’m doing it to help Greta. And I can’t leave it. This needs investigating.’ Obviously I couldn’t tell him anything about the involvement of SIS.

  ‘And you’re even prepared to go traipsing around the world on what will probably turn out to be a waste of time?’

  ‘I don’t think it will be. I’ll say that I’m looking into the feasibility of setting up a new pharmaceuticals’ wholesaling business and if I’ve got a believable backstory then I don’t see why manufacturers wouldn’t make me welcome. Other wholesalers, too. It’s not as though there’s much of a commitment. All we need to say is that I’m trying to see if there’s a viable business. A research trip, but I need to establish that the business behind me is a serious player. People need to see that there’s some muscle behind the venture.’

  ‘What do you think, Warren?’ Rogers asked Bidwell.

  ‘We could certainly help.’ Warren laughed. ‘Especially if we didn’t actually have to do anything.’ He hesitated. ‘But it’s not really our style to advertise our involvement. We’ve always kept in the background.’ He turned to me. ‘We call it the Google test. If you Google us and can’t find anything then that’s how we like it and want to keep it.’

  ‘What about one of your associated companies?’ I asked. ‘One that people can Google if they want to check up on me?’

  ‘There’s Orion,’ Warren said looking at Rogers. ‘They might be amenable to this. They might even be interested to see if there’s a market there for themselves.’ Warren turned back to me. ‘They’re a specialist chemical company, so it’s the right sort of area. It wouldn’t commit them to anything. We might not even need to start up a dummy company; they could say they were retaining a consultant.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But you’d have to act the part. You can’t walk in and pretend to know what you’re talking about. You’d have to know what you’re talking about.’

  I sighed. ‘Appear to know at least. I’m having to go back to school.’ This was something Ken Maxwell had insisted upon. ‘The MHRA have arranged a session with one of their investigation laboratories. I’m going there for a briefing in the morning.’

  ‘But this lead you’re following up,’ Rogers said. ‘Greta says that the insulin was out of date but you don’t have the analysis of this Oxaban.’

  ‘Not yet. But we’re taking it with us to get it analysed at the laboratory. Since it came from the same supplier as the insulin, it’s quite likely that there’s something wrong with it, but we’ll see.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Rogers. ‘I’ll let you know what Orion say.’

  This time we were heading north on the old A1 in Ed Carpenter’s BMW. The laboratory was in Welwyn Garden City, about twenty miles north of London and Ed had decided to come with me as a sort of refresher course. I had to admit feeling a bit nervous; I’d only done a few years of chemistry at school and didn’t exactly distinguish myself. Ed’s satnav guided us to the company’s entrance and we were met at reception by a woman who introduced herself as one of the analytical chemists. Libby Anderson was an elegant-looking woman, probably in her late forties, but her white coat concealed a trim figure which suggested that she kept in shape. She kitted us out with our own white coats and gave us safety glasses.

  But the laboratory we were shown into was like nothing I remembered. Instead of the stained wooden work surfaces with test-tube racks and Bunsen burners, the place was spotless. ‘Most of our analysis is automated these days,’ she explained pointing to the rows of space-age-looking machines. The atmosphere here felt more like a church, with hushed voices of the staff and the low hum of the machines and the flickering of computer screens. ‘I understand you’re particularly interested in pharmaceutical analysis,’ Libby continued. ‘We’re one of a number of laboratories which are accredited by the MHRA to provide independent testing and analysis.

  ‘Most pharmaceutical companies have their own in-house labs, but they need independent corroboration so we’re sent random samples of each batch. We have the details of the original constituents programmed into the machines and the analysis compares each batch with the control.’ She led us across to one of the machines. ‘The standard technique is GC.’ She looked at me expectantly, hoping to see signs of recognition which I was unfortunately unable to provide.

  ‘Gas chromatography,’ she added as though it was obvious. ‘It’s our basic analytical tool. It’s analogous to distillation where each chemical has a different boiling point, so as the temperature is raised each individual chemical evaporates successively giving us a spectrum where we can identify each constituent. These machines use inert gases to move the constituents through a column, like the refractory in a whisky distillery which detects each component part. When I first started we had to read them off a rolling graph paper, with a needle spiking as it detected each component. Nowadays, it’s automatic and we can see it here on the computer screen.’

  Ed and I peered over her shoulder at the screen but the chemical formulae were beyond me. ‘You don’t have to worry about those,’ she said, as though reading my mind. ‘We pre-programme the machine with the name of each of the compounds so you only have to call up the name; so it’s aspirin, rather than acetylsalicylic acid.’ We followed her to the next machine.

  ‘This is a Raman spectrometer. It’s sort of like a prism: we send a laser beam into the compound and the light is scattered in different ways by the different molecules so once again we can tell what the constituent parts are.’

  She moved over to a desk and picked up what looked like an oversized mobile phone. ‘And this incredible piece of equipment is a Truscan which uses the same principles of spectroscopy, but, as you can see, in a highly miniaturised form. We’re testing it here against its big brother and the results are remarkable. You can point it at the compound and it’ll check against its database and come up with a pass or fail. You don’t even need to unwrap them; it’ll work through the packaging. It’s revolutionised the detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals.’

  She took us over to another workbench and let us try it on several of the sample compounds they had. That something so small could identify fakes seemed to me more like magic than science. ‘You said you had something you wanted us to check?’ Libby said. ‘Some samples of Oxaban and some insulin, wasn’t it? Let’s put it through the GC machine first.’

  I took out the evidence bag and handed it to her, along with the Oxaban I’d taken from Holden Healthcare. I followed her across the lab where she took out a capsule and placed it into a stainless-steel container which she pushed into a slot. Moving across to the computer screen, she scrolled through the various anticoagulants until she came to Oxaban, and entered that and started the machine. ‘I’ll turn on the running display so you can watch it working. Along the bottom here is the control – you can see the spikes corresponding to each compound, while this along the top is our sample which should mirror the control.’

  We watched as the line stayed flat until it suddenly spiked before running flat again. ‘There you go. It’s matching the control, but do you see the spike isn’t as high?’

 
When the test came to an end, Libby took the second sample of Oxaban and put that in the machine and repeated the process. ‘Shall we try the insulin now?’ she asked and took out the sample and re-programmed the machine. When she had finished she printed out the three read-outs and spread them on a nearby table.

  ‘Taking the insulin first, it’s the identical chemical make-up so it hasn’t been adulterated in any way, but the active ingredients are way down, which is what you’d expect if it’s out-of-date stock which it appears to be from the label underneath.’

  ‘What about the Oxaban?’

  ‘They’re certainly both Oxaban. Or rather they used to be. Like the insulin, you can see that nearly all the peaks correspond, but are not as high. That means that although they contain the right active ingredients, they’re not in sufficient quantity – it’s only showing about twenty-five percent of what it should be. That could be as a result of it being out-of-date, but you can also see some peaks which aren’t on the control graph. That can’t be a result of natural degradation over time; it has to mean they’ve deliberately used an inert compound to dilute it.’

  ‘So you think both fakes?’ I asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t call them fakes,’ she said. ‘Fakes don’t usually have any active ingredients at all. I’d call this counterfeit because, although they do have the correct elements, they’re not there in sufficient strength.’

  ‘Does that mean it wouldn’t work?’

  She laughed. ‘I’m only a chemist. You’d have to ask a pharmacist, although it stands to reason that at only twenty-five percent strength, it’s not going to do much good.’ As she handed the Oxaban back to me, she added, ‘We’ll email the official report through later. I’ll show you how to use the Truscan now and we can repeat this to see how it checks out.’

  We spent the rest of the morning going through the various drug classifications and more detailed instructions on how to programme the Truscan, before heading back to London. I thought that smartphones were the latest in miniaturised technology, but the analytical equipment she had shown me far surpassed it. If only they were cheap enough to send out to all vaccination stations then perhaps counterfeit drugs would never get through.