Grave Island: a compelling mystery thriller

by Andrew Smyth

  ‘So that seems to corroborate the fact that Greg Satchwell’s Oxaban came from the same batch as we found at Holden Healthcare,’ I said to Ed on the drive back.

  ‘Looks that way. Though we’re going to have some difficulty with the evidence now they’ve cleared out their shelves. It would be your word against theirs that your sample came from them. Even if you could prove it, they could say you obtained it illegally and they’d probably be right.’

  I looked out of the windows at the passing countryside. Greta wasn’t going to like this. First she comes to me thinking her father had been killed by business associates and now it appeared that it was probably the subsidiary of a huge American hospital group. But Ed was right, we wouldn’t be able to prove it. ‘She’ll be devastated when I tell her,’ I said. ‘She’ll want to show that someone was responsible.’

  Ed sighed. ‘All we can do is follow it up and try to discover the original source of the drugs and prevent it happening to someone else and I think that’s something for MI6, rather than us.’

  12

  Back at Wapping, the unfinished jobs around Salacia greeted me with what I thought was silent reproach. True, the place was looking much better than when I’d first moved in but there was still so much to do if I was going to keep my bargain with her absentee owner.

  I’d arranged to join Greta the next day at her father’s weekend cottage on the south coast. Sally, unusually, had found some free time and was going to drive me down. First I had to run my clothes through the nearby launderette which was a chore that always left me depressed. It wasn’t so much the fact that this was where life’s losers could be found – I didn’t think this at all. What depressed me was the way so many of the regulars were able to sit in front of the machines without doing anything. I suppose it was about as entertaining as daytime television.

  Sally picked me up in her red Mazda sports car. She already had the hood down, which I wasn’t so sure about if you’re going to drive through south London, but she was obviously relieved that she’d managed to bring another week to a conclusion without doing any harm, and was cheerful company on the way down.

  I was looking forward to seeing Greta’s place. She’d told me about it before and it sounded idyllic. Although not quite on the foreshore of Chichester harbour, it enjoyed an uninterrupted view across a field to the water’s edge with a footpath that took you to a small hard where the locals launched their dinghies. I remembered the place from when I used to race cruisers on Hayling Island but I’d never been on this side before – and I don’t think inadvertently running aground counted.

  Greta seemed more relaxed than I’d known her and more outgoing. Obviously she was coming to terms with her father’s death, although she still wanted to know what I’d found out about the medication he’d been taking, even though there wasn’t much new I wanted to tell her.

  It was a glorious late spring day and we made arrangements for a waterside table at the local pub where we could watch the parked cars being submerged by the incoming tide. It was here that King Canute was supposed to have shown his courtiers that he couldn’t turn back the tide and his example was being followed by a number of tourists and we enjoyed the floor show enacted in front of us.

  ‘The best one,’ Greta said, ‘was when a dog was trapped in a car with the water rising and this parking warden took off his trousers and waded into the water in his underpants. The crowd was roaring him on and gave a great cheer when he took the dog and brought it back to the beach.’

  ‘That must be the only time a parking warden has been popular,’ I said. ‘What happened to the car?’

  ‘It was only a Citroën 2CV, so it didn’t make much difference.’

  We were served our lunch and I braced myself to tell them about the results of my visit to the Welwyn laboratory. The circumstances didn’t seem ideal but they had to know. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got the test results for your father’s medication,’ I said. ‘It confirmed that the insulin was out of date as we suspected.’

  Greta stared at me without saying anything. Sally reached across and took her hand. ‘And the Oxaban?’

  I hesitated, knowing how distressing this would be. ‘It had only twenty-five percent of active ingredients and contained some impurities. I’m afraid the view was that it was probably counterfeit.’

  ‘Counterfeit?’ Sally cried out involuntarily. ‘It couldn’t be counterfeit. We’re not a third world country. This was prescribed by a leading hospital.’

  I watched Greta whose face looked as though a cloud had passed over it; she seemed to stare fixedly at nothing until a tear coursed slowly down her cheek. Sally squeezed her hand but Greta didn’t seem to notice. I cursed myself for not breaking it more gently and tried to think of something encouraging but realised there was nothing. The sound of the people around us appeared to be silenced as though we existed in a separate world.

  ‘So he was killed after all?’ Greta whispered as though talking to the Gods.

  I couldn’t answer this and looked across at Sally – she was the only one who could.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said warily. ‘But without effective insulin and an anticoagulant, it would certainly have put him at much greater risk during the surgery.’

  ‘So they did kill him?’ Greta repeated, although it wasn’t clear who she meant by “they”. ‘I knew it must have been something. He wouldn’t have left me like that…’ She petered out and Sally and I looked at each other, helpless at the raw and irrational grief.

  ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Sally said but it was unclear whether Greta was listening.

  Greta turned to me. ‘You have to do something.’ A light glistened in her damp eyes. ‘You have to find them. Whatever it takes.’ What could I say to that? The MHRA and the security services agreed we’d reached a dead end – we simply didn’t have enough to go on. I could tell them about Tau but where would that get us? I shrugged uneasily.

  ‘There must be something you could do.’ Greta repeated and turned to Sally. ‘Tell him. Tell him he’s got to follow this up.’

  Sally turned back to me. ‘How far did you get?’

  I told them about tracing the drugs back to Tau Pharmaceuticals in Kenya but said the trail grew cold after that.

  ‘Can’t you organise a raid on their premises, or something?’ Sally asked.

  I shook my head. ‘We don’t have enough to justify a raid even if we had the authority to organise one. In any event, Tau doesn’t manufacture drugs themselves so whatever we found wouldn’t get us far. We have to discover who is making these counterfeits and I’m afraid we’re no nearer that.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Greta said so loudly that people started to look at us. ‘You’ve tracked these adulterated drugs from Harley Street to Kenya, but you say you’re no nearer finding out the truth?’

  Ouch, I thought, that hurt. ‘I didn’t quite say that. I said we still don’t know who’s making the fakes so it’s difficult to see where to go next.’

  ‘You said that this company, Tau Pharmaceuticals, was supplied by an Indian company, Bakaar. Why can’t you investigate them? The fakes must be coming from them.’

  ‘We know that there’s fake Oxaban being made, we know it’s associated with Tau and we know Tau are supplied by Bakaar, but they’re only one supplier amongst dozens. I suppose we might be able to follow that trail.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’ Greta said. ‘Why don’t you go back to your friends in intelligence and tell them people are being killed by these fake drugs? Tell them they have to do something.’

  ‘Kenya seems to be the main destination. It’s where a lot of the fake drugs end up and it’s not just people who are dying but whole communities.’

  ‘It’s always the poor countries that suffer,’ Sally said. ‘My charity does a lot of work in East Africa. We set up micro-financing units which have been very successful.’

  ‘Mainly with the women,’ Greta said bitterly. ‘Why is it always the women
who have to make the running?’ I couldn’t tell whether this was aimed at me.

  ‘Nearly all our successful case studies have been of women,’ Sally continued. ‘The men are too easily tempted by other things, while the women generally stay dedicated. Setting up new little businesses like that is becoming increasingly necessary with the problem of terrorism and its disastrous effect on the tourist industry. Visitor numbers are down – in some places by nearly half – and there’s no sign of containing the terrorism anytime soon.’ Sally turned to me. ‘Do you know anything about Al-Shabaab?’

  I thought about this and decided that there wasn’t anything secret about the little I did know. ‘It was another classic case of people ignoring problems unless it affected them directly. When ships started being taken by Somali pirates then finally the world’s security forces did something about it. Somalia was lawless and no multinational had any interests there, so there wasn’t anything that could be done by land forces and nobody was interested anyway. But the pirates were making fortunes: millions in ransoming shipping so Al-Shabaab organised them and used the money to fund their terrorism. More recently they’ve looked further south towards Kenya and have carried out numerous horrendous attacks. Al-Shabaab is well equipped and heavily armed but it’s difficult to see what their strategic objective is. They’re not going to be able to undermine the entire Kenyan state so I suppose it’s the usual murder and mayhem. Their only strategic objective is to keep Kenya as near a subsistence economy as possible. If they could, they’d bomb everyone back to the Stone Age and then step in to fill the gap that’s left. Fortunately, Kenya has too many friends in the West to let this happen but it doesn’t stop them trying.’

  ‘Poor Kenya,’ Sally said. ‘As soon as they sort out one problem they’re hit with another. When we were preparing reports about Islamic terrorism one of the features we looked at was the effect that poverty had. The better off the people were the more they felt they had a stake in their society and the less easy it was for fundamentalists to influence them.’

  ‘That’s why Al-Shabaab wants to do as much damage as possible. They don’t care about poverty – they positively welcome it.’

  ‘And do everything they can to ensure it,’ Greta added.

  ‘And fundamental to creating wealth is increasing life expectancy,’ Sally took over the subject – after all she knew much more about it than I did. ‘Studies show that if people can expect their babies to survive childhood then they reduce the size of their families. And if you couple that with improvements in agricultural production societies become more stable. And one of the keys to that is reducing diseases – particularly childhood diseases and Kenya, along with most of East Africa is making huge strides in achieving this.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be an obvious target for Al-Shabaab?’ Greta asked. ‘Given what you say about the relationship with development and health, wouldn’t they attack any programme designed to improve health?’

  ‘I think they’re always on the lookout for new targets,’ I said. ‘The other day you mentioned a big vaccination programme. Has anything moved with that?’

  ‘Apparently, it’s imminent,’ Sally said. ‘My agency isn’t directly involved but our partners have been gearing up for this for some time. It’s under the umbrella of the WHO but involves all the local charities. It’s one of the largest programmes there’s been. Tens of millions of pounds.’

  I suppose it was my ingrained suspicious nature that made me sit up at this piece of news. I had learnt quickly that where there were contracts for pharmaceuticals up for grabs there were counterfeits ready to fulfil them. ‘Do you know anything more about it?’

  ‘I think I mentioned that they’re trying a new approach by delivering the vaccines directly to the villages.’ Sally considered this for a moment. ‘It’s covering the whole of East Africa so the possibility of introducing fakes must be enormous.’

  ‘And what would be the result if substandard counterfeits were delivered instead?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose that without proper protection all the targeted recipients could be at risk. In the worst case, it could even lead to thousands of preventable deaths. But it could take some years before anyone noticed.’

  Greta turned to me and it was clear that she was now on a mission.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I said. ‘I get the message. I’ll go back to Ken Maxwell and see what I can do. See if I can arrange to go to Mumbai and follow it up from there, but whoever’s making these fake drugs seems to be covering their tracks pretty well.’ I looked around at the empty plates. ‘Now, do you want anything else? I’ll go and order it.’

  I went in and got some more drinks, but as I was about to go back out I heard Sally talking, and I stopped and listened. At first I couldn’t hear properly as a crowd outside started to leave, but then I heard her say. ‘He tries to hide it, and most of the time it’s fine, but there’s a part of him that you can’t reach and I never discovered what it was. He has this terrible temper and it’s as though he’s trying to take out his problem childhood on everyone else. He used to frighten me at times.’

  ‘Did he ever…?’ Greta didn’t finish.

  ‘Hit me? No, no. Nothing like that. But it was like living on the slopes of a volcano, you never knew if it was going to erupt and whether you’d be covered by the fall out. It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘Did you discuss it with him?’

  ‘I tried. I suggested some sort of counselling, but he said that counselling was for wimps and started to get angry that I’d even mentioned it so I had to drop it. In the end there was too much that I was supposed to ignore that I gave up. At times he was so… so dangerous really. I think it was only the army that channelled his aggression, It always seemed such a waste that he couldn’t adapt.’

  I flushed and held the glass so tightly that I was about to break it. I recognised the throbbing starting in my head and thought about walking off, but I didn’t have a car. I knew I had a temper but I didn’t think it had affected our marriage. I thought we’d grown out of it and found incompatibility in each other’s dedication to their work but to find out that I was at fault was shattering. I stood with the glasses in my hand in a state of indecision but I realised that I couldn’t abandon them but would have to pretend I hadn’t heard anything. I would have to grit my teeth and carry on and try to work it out afterwards.

  They saw me coming and obviously changed the subject but as I put the glasses down on the table, I saw that my hand was shaking and hoped they wouldn’t notice. Sally looked up at me. ‘We were wondering whether you were missing the army,’ she said smoothly. ‘It must be quite a wrench for you after all that time.’

  I sat down and tried to draw a breath, I could still feel my heart pounding and I forced myself to relax. ‘I haven’t had much time to miss it,’ I said eventually. ‘In the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time with the security services than I ever did when I was in the army. But unlike you I don’t want to spend my life trying to put right the world’s ills.’

  ‘Cynic,’ Greta said. ‘You were doing valuable work in the army.’

  ‘It didn’t always feel like it,’ I said. ‘Trying to make a difference in a country where normal standards don’t seem to apply and where people would say one thing to your face and quite another to their neighbours. Most of them didn’t seem to want our help so I don’t know why we bothered.’

  ‘But you did,’ Sally said. ‘You cared about your work, I know you did, so why keep up this pretence? Greta might not be able to see through it, but I can.’

  I wondered how such a view squared with what I’d heard her say about me just before, but my work in the army had been important to me whatever anybody else thought. ‘Perhaps. I suppose both of us were preoccupied with our work with little time left over for the other. A recipe for a divorce, I would think.’

  ‘Which duly came.’ Sally didn’t sound too upset about it. Perhaps after what I’d heard she thought she was well out of it.

  �
��Are you seeing anyone else?’ I regretted it as soon as I said it but then I wasn’t feeling at my most tactful.

  Sally gave me that quick look that I recognised as a danger sign. This was none of my business. ‘No time,’ she said instead. ‘What about you?’ She suddenly blushed as she looked across at Greta. I always liked that about her; one minute the doctor in control, the next blushing like a schoolgirl. She used to get so angry when I teased her about it, but this time I decided to ignore it. As if to cover her embarrassment, she looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back. I’ve got a huge stack of reports to read.’ She stood up and took her car keys out of her bag. ‘Thanks for lunch. Enjoy yourselves,’ she said and left us alone.

  We watched her go without saying anything.

  ‘So why did you two split up?’ Greta asked after a while.

  I turned to look at her. The sunlight was slanting across her face, revealing hardly visible thin veins of scarring, presumably from her accident. But rather than detract, it only added to her attraction. I suddenly realised that I was staring, but in view of what I’d heard Sally say, it wasn’t a question I was keen to answer. ‘What was that?’ I asked. ‘Sorry, I was elsewhere. You want to know why we split up? As always, a variety of reasons. Partly it was her work. Sally’s an unremitting idealist. I tried to tell her that she couldn’t change the world single-handedly, but she thought she could.’ I stood up and went to the bar to pay.

  When I got back, Greta was gathering her things.

  ‘A walk along the seafront?’ I suggested.