Deep Water

by Christine Poulson

  It seemed that she had completely failed to transfer the growth factor to her stem cells. Somewhere in the process she had made a catastrophic mistake. What could it be? Something wrong with the DNA cloning? Or had the cell-line somehow got contaminated? Or what if it was… Oh, it could be anything. What on earth was she going to say to Paul?

  She bit her lip, but couldn’t stop the tears welling up. She let herself give in to it, allowed them to roll down her cheeks, and mopped them up with a paper towel. Come on, she told herself; it’s not the end of the world, nobody’s dead, it’s only a job. But she knew that wasn’t true. She thought of Rachel and her little girl. In the end it really was a matter of life and death.

  She left the lab and made her way down to the entrance. Tomorrow she would have to think hard about what had gone wrong. She tried to tell herself that the failed experiment was just a hiccup, that was all. She would test every link in the chain, find the problem, and fix it. She wouldn’t let herself contemplate the heartbreaking truth that sometimes it was the successful experiment that was the hiccup and the failure was the one that counted.

  There were always times like this, difficult stretches when you didn’t seem to be making any progress, when things didn’t turn out as you’d expected and you didn’t know why. You started to get bogged down; worst of all, you started to doubt yourself as a scientist. You couldn’t let that happen. What she needed was a good night’s sleep and then she’d start all over again.

  It wasn’t until she signed herself out that she remembered that someone had come into the lab.

  “Who else is working late tonight?” she asked Malcolm.

  Malcolm shook his head. “I haven’t seen a soul since Dr Orville clocked out not long after you came in.”

  “But I heard someone come in while I was in the darkroom.”

  He turned the signing-in book for her to see.

  Hers was the last name to be entered.

  Chapter Twelve

  She had thought she’d be the first into the lab the next morning and was surprised to discover Ian already there, doing paperwork. He lifted his head when she came in. The smooth grey hair pulled into a ponytail, the goatee beard, and the earring had all said “aging hippy” when she’d met him on her first day in the lab. But she’d soon seen how competent he was, and she liked the fact that he was a fellow northerner.

  “You’re in early,” she said.

  He sighed. “Trying to catch up on some paperwork. One of the big freezers has gone on the blink. Full of frozen mice, thawing out. Who knows when it was last cleared out! They should have been incinerated yonks ago. You can imagine…”

  “Nasty,” she agreed.

  “Funny thing. We’re missing a mouse. I ask you! How can that have happened?”

  Katie made a sympathetic noise. In her line of research she didn’t use mice, thank goodness, but friends did and she knew the rules were strict. Every single mouse was recorded and ear-tagged, and all the numbers were returned to the Home Office, with details that included whether or not they had been used in an experiment, and the date of death.

  Ian pushed his glasses up onto his head and massaged his eyes. “I might not have noticed if the freezer hadn’t broken down and they’d defrosted. I was just about to sling the bag into the incinerator when it split and they came slithering out.”

  “Yuk!”

  “It said ten on the bag and there were only nine.”

  “Ear-tags?”

  “No. That is what’s making them hard to trace. I’m going through to see if the books balance. But what brings you here so bright and early?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. I’ve made a complete mess of my western blot and I’ve come in to try to sort it out.”

  “Come on, I’ll make us a brew and you can tell me about it. Two heads are better than one.”

  “Well… OK, thanks… might help to talk it over.”

  He smiled and the lines around his eyes deepened. He looked as though he smiled a lot, and he was a good-looking guy – for his age. What was he? Fifty?

  “Tell you what,” he said in an Alan Bennett voice that was only a slight exaggeration of his normal voice, “I’ll crack open a packet of custard creams.”

  One of her undergraduate lecturers had told her that the first rule of life in the lab was to make friends with the technicians and porters: they were the ones who really ran the place. It was advice she’d always followed.

  They reached the common room. He opened the door and ushered her in.

  She sat down and watched while he filled the kettle, noting the care he took to fill it to exactly the right level. When he reached up and opened the door of a cupboard above the sink, light glinted off the diamond stud in his ear.

  He reached for a tea caddy. She saw a label: “Ian’s tea. Don’t even think about it.”

  “Real Yorkshire tea,” he said, spooning the leaf tea into a small brown teapot. “Can’t abide teabags.”

  He took two cups and saucers out of the cupboard. She was pleasantly surprised. A stained mug – often chipped into the bargain – tended to be what was usually on offer.

  “How do you like it?” he asked.

  “Nice and strong, please.”

  She took a sip and gave a sigh of appreciation.

  Ian smiled. “Not much a good cup of tea can’t put right. Now tell Uncle Ian all about it.”

  “Oh, heck,” he said when she’d explained, and the homely northern expression made her smile. “Let’s go through it stage by stage, shall we?”

  She said, “I’ll throw out the DNA, obviously.”

  “Yep. That’s the first thing to do. And you’ll check the cloning?”

  “Of course.”

  He pondered, pushed his granny glasses up his nose with his forefinger. No doubt about it, Katie thought, he must have been pretty hot in his day, and even now… Good job he couldn’t read her mind.

  “You’ll need to check that the cell-line hasn’t been contaminated. It could have been infected with mycoplasma; that happened to Minnie a few weeks ago.”

  She sighed. “There are so many possibilities.”

  “Agreed. You could check the copy-number of the gene in your stem cells. You could also check that the cells were producing mRNA for your protein.”

  Katie groaned. Both would require techniques that were time-consuming and difficult.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It’d be a pain. It makes sense to start with the DNA – rule that out first.”

  “That was what I was thinking, too.”

  “If you’d like me to run something for you, you’ve only to say.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, back to the drawing board. And I’ve got to get back to my mice.”

  What a lovely guy he was. Feeling much better, she went back to her bench to begin all over again culturing her E.coli from scratch. She started to assemble what she needed.

  If that wasn’t the problem and if it wasn’t the cell-line, she’d really be in trouble. It wasn’t just that she was running out of time, she was running out of money, too. Some of the chemicals she’d need for further tests were expensive.

  It was at times like this that she missed Michael, her old supervisor. He wasn’t one for ladling out easy sympathy, but he could always make her laugh. Once she’d been feeling sorry for herself and had complained to Michael: “Sometimes I feel like one of those people in Greek myth or fairy tales with an endless task that they have to keep repeating day after day without getting anywhere.” He didn’t say anything, just smiled and nodded, but the next day he emailed a quotation to her. “‘La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’ Albert Camus.” He didn’t translate it. She looked it up on the internet and it made her laugh. “The struggle itself towards the summit should be enough to satisfy the human heart. One can imagine Sisyphus happy.”

  Hah! She bent her head to her work and was soon absorbed. Hours passed. She was barely awa
re of people coming and going around her. At eleven everyone departed for the common room for morning coffee.

  “Coming?” Minnie asked.

  “In a bit.”

  The lab emptied and she was vaguely aware of Ian doing something in the background. Then he uttered a loud curse.

  She was startled out of her reverie.

  She turned to see him, a few metres away, bending over something on a bench.

  He looked up and she registered the dismay on his face.

  “What’s up?” she said, moving towards him.

  And then she didn’t need to ask – she could hear for herself. Ian had his hand on a Geiger-Müller tube and it was clicking at a rate that meant it was registering high radiation.

  “I’m radiation officer for the lab and I was just checking that this works,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Look at this reading! How did this bench get so hot?”

  They stared at each other.

  “Is that the only hot spot?” Katie said. “Here, try my bench.”

  He picked up the GM tube, and together they walked towards her bench. The clicking slowly subsided. Katie hadn’t realized that she had been holding her breath. She slowly let it out now.

  They looked round the lab. No one else had come back from coffee yet.

  Ian moved on to Minnie’s bench. The clicking increased with a sound like the fierce crackle of radio interference, then subsided as he moved on to the next.

  He moved on round the lab. Half the benches were hot. This was a disaster. They’d all have to be decontaminated.

  Ian’s face was set. Something seemed to occur to him and he set off down the lab with long strides.

  Katie followed him, half-running to keep up.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply. They reached the door. He held the GM tube against the handle. It went wild.

  “Someone’s been tracking radioactive material all over the lab.”

  Katie was aghast. She hadn’t thought things could get any worse, but –

  “There’ll be hot spots everywhere,” Ian said. “I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to close the lab and clear the building.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “But it has to be somewhere!” Honor said.

  That was undoubtedly true, Daniel thought, but it wasn’t very helpful. He had rung her to let her know that a thorough search of both Jennifer’s office and her home had failed to turn up the missing lab book.

  Honor continued. “I don’t know how Jennifer could have been so careless – and so unprofessional! Why didn’t she make a copy as soon as she got her hands on it?”

  “I’m surprised too,” Daniel said. “What has your postdoc got in the way of notes?”

  “He hasn’t got anything!” The pitch of her voice was rising. “It was all in the lab book!”

  “Nothing? Nothing at all?” This was worse than he had thought; much worse.

  “I don’t want to be hard on Jennifer after this terrible thing’s happened to her and she isn’t here to defend herself, but I wish now that I’d asked Lyle to take her off the case. I never dreamt she could drop the ball as seriously as this…”

  “You weren’t happy with her work?”

  “I was impressed by her at first, and Lyle thought so highly of her, but as time went on… It was clear her mind wasn’t totally on her job. She was late for an appointment with me, failed to return a phone call…”

  Daniel was taken aback. This didn’t sound like the Jennifer he knew.

  “Where do we go from here?” There was an edge to her voice that made him wonder if she was losing it. He couldn’t blame her. For a lab book to go missing, and such a vital one, too… Well, at least no blame could be attached to him.

  “We haven’t reached the end of the road yet,” he said. “We’ve still got some options. I’ll look at the technicians’ lab books – see if I can find any confirming details – maybe look at the order books for materials. And I’d better talk to Will Orville. The sooner the better.”

  “I could meet you in the lab in an hour.”

  “Fine. I’ll have to let Lyle know the situation.”

  “Of course.”

  They hung up.

  He was beginning to think that Rachel was right and he should never have taken on this case. Even if everything had gone according to plan, time would have been very tight. And now this! He’d taken a gamble on his knowledge of Jennifer. He’d thought he could trust her as a lawyer even though he hadn’t been able to trust her as a woman. Was she going to let him down yet again? Was this her final legacy to him? A case so screwed up that he wouldn’t be able to salvage it? Everything depended on what he could scrape together as evidence.

  He wondered if Bryony had realized how flaky Jennifer was getting. Surely she must have done, or – more likely – was she too loyal to admit that Jennifer was going off the rails?

  Of course it was still possible that the lab book would come to light – it had to be somewhere. Honor was right about that. But as he punched in Lyle’s number, he had to admit to himself that it wasn’t looking good.

  When Daniel turned into the car park, he saw straightaway that something was amiss. A throng of people was milling about outside the entrance to the lab. He got out of his car and made his way towards them. As he approached the fringes of the crowd, he saw a woman that he guessed must be Honor. She was older than almost everyone there and she wasn’t wearing a lab coat. She was conferring with a man with a grey ponytail.

  Someone said hello to him, a young woman, and he realized it was the girl that Rachel was renting the boat to. What was her name? Katie – yes. Her hands were thrust into her pockets of her lab coat and she was shivering.

  “What’s going on?” he asked her. “Fire alarm?”

  “Worse. Radioactive hot spots. I wasn’t even allowed to go up to my office and get my coat. They’re checking the rest of the building before they let us back in.”

  A stocky blond young man was standing next to her.

  Katie noticed Daniel looking at him and said, “Sorry, this is Will, and Will, this is – umm – Mr Marchmont – it’s his boat that I’ll be staying on.”

  Will? This must be Honor’s postdoc. He looked pale and drawn – and no wonder – the loss of the lab book must be a bitter blow for him, too.

  Honor had spotted Daniel and was making her way towards him followed by the man with the ponytail.

  “It is Daniel?” she said, holding out her hand. They shook hands. “You’ve found us at a bad moment – ”

  She didn’t get a chance to say more. There was a screeching of tyres as a red Audi swung into the car park and came to a halt. Lyle Linstrum got out, leaving the car askew across two parking bays.

  “What the hell is going on here, Honor?” He gave off waves of energy. Daniel remembered one profile of the man that described him as sucking the oxygen out of the room. More than that, he seemed about to combust. Daniel resisted the urge to step back.

  “Lower your voice, Lyle,” Honor said, raising a hand, and such was her natural authority that he did restrain himself – at least for a few moments. “We have a problem with the lab. Probably it’ll turn out to be a storm in a teacup.”

  “Exactly what sort of problem?”

  She told him. He stared at her in disbelief.

  “Just what kind of outfit are you running here? Do you realize what’s resting on this?”

  Honor’s face was grim. “All too well,” she said.

  Lyle told her anyway. “Billions of dollars. I’ve staked everything on this.”

  “And I haven’t?” Honor said.

  Daniel thought of the rumours going around and the gossip in the scientific press. There were some who thought that a Nobel Prize was long overdue and next year it could be Honor’s turn.

  As if she hadn’t spoken, Lyle went on, “What am I going to tell the investors?”

  Daniel glanced at Will. He hadn’t said a word yet.

&nbs
p; “Something you seem to be forgetting, Lyle,” Honor said. “This is no fault of mine or Will’s.”

  “Oh no?” he said. “Didn’t it occur to anyone to make a copy of the lab books?”

  Will spoke at last. “Jennifer said she’d make a copy and return it to us.”

  “But she didn’t! Unbelievable! You guys are really something!” He was shouting now. “Are you telling me there isn’t anything – no rough notes – no nothing?”

  Daniel was uncomfortably aware that everyone in the car park could hear what Lyle was saying.

  “Lyle, lower your voice,” Honor said.

  “I will not!” But he had, if only by a fraction.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Daniel said firmly. “I’ll begin by talking things through with Will. See if he can reconstruct what he did. The lab’s order books will tell us what materials were bought and when, and that will give us some idea of a timeline.”

  “Ian can help you with that,” Honor said. She gestured to the ponytailed man who was hovering behind her. “Ian Gladwill is our head technician. What he doesn’t know about what goes on in the lab isn’t worth knowing.”

  “OK,” Lyle said. “It’s a start. But don’t think I’m leaving it at that. I’m going to get to the bottom of what happened to that lab book if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “This kind of thing gives a lab a bad reputation,” Daniel told

  Rachel. “The Health and Safety people will be all over the place like a rash.”

  Chloe was in bed and asleep at the proper time for once, and they were having a late supper together.

  “What’ll happen if the lab book doesn’t come to light?” Rachel asked.

  “I put the best gloss I could on it, but it’s not looking good. I’m going to have my work cut out finding evidence that they really did make the discovery first.”