Deep Water

by Christine Poulson

  “Napoleon thought that,” Rachel said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Napoleon used to ask when he was thinking of making someone a general. ‘Is he lucky?’”

  Katie gave a grin of recognition. “Good question. For us scientists everything depends on choosing the right research project. That’s where the luck comes in. There’s really no way of knowing in advance if you’ve picked a winner.”

  “Even so, it’s worth it, isn’t it?” Rachel said. “The difference you can make to people’s lives…”

  “Or maybe you are on the right track, but someone else gets there first. You can spend years of your life working on something and then be pipped to the post by another researcher.”

  “Like the case Daniel’s working on.”

  “That’s what I was thinking of.”

  Rachel was silent. Then she said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this – ”

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t help thinking, all that money, billions are being spent on this drug to combat obesity, when all the time children in the third world are dying of starvation.”

  “Or of malaria. I know. But this will save lives too.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if people just didn’t eat as much and took more exercise?”

  “Well, yeah, of course it would, but they’re not going to, are they? At least an awful lot of them aren’t. And meanwhile it’s costing billions to treat them for diseases linked to obesity. The therapy will save lives and money in the end.”

  “Isn’t there a danger that people will think they can eat as much as they like as long as they keep taking the drug?”

  That gave Katie pause for thought. “That could happen,” she conceded. “The law of unintended consequences. But that’s not the scientists’ fault, is it?”

  “Do you really think that? That scientists don’t have any responsibility for their discoveries?”

  “Not that exactly, but it’s difficult…”

  “Well, you’re in the clear, anyway,” Rachel pointed out. “There can’t be any question that your research is a good thing.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m one of the good guys, sure enough.” Katie laughed, but it was nice to be appreciated. “But you know, it’s hard. There’s so much pressure to come up with results. It’s not just the kudos of being first in the field. You have to get results to get further grants. You have to publish. Let’s open that second bottle of wine.” She reached for it, adding, “Sometimes I can almost understand people taking shortcuts.”

  “How do you mean, shortcuts? You mean people cheat, or what?”

  “There was a case, not so long ago. That doctor in South Korea… the one who claimed to have cloned a human embryo?”

  Katie fumbled with the corkscrew.

  “Here, let me,” Rachel said. “I read about that in the paper.”

  “What was he thinking of?” Katie said, handing over the bottle. “He was bound to be exposed when people realized that the experiment couldn’t be repeated. And using eggs from his female researchers. How unethical is that! And the strange thing is that he wasn’t a maverick or some struggling second-rater. He was a leading international scientist, and now his career is in ruins.”

  Rachel drew the cork out of the bottle. “What I didn’t understand – and what I still don’t understand – is how he could have thought he’d get away with it.” She filled their glasses.

  “It’s a world of its own,” Katie said. She propped her chin in her cupped hands. Her head was beginning to swim. “Very successful scientists – they’re very driven – they spend virtually their whole life in the lab – they lose touch with the world outside.”

  “I need something else to eat,” Rachel said.

  She went to the fridge, rummaged around and brought out some cheese.

  “Like I said,” Katie went on, “they lose touch with reality. Nothing matters except the science.” She straightened up and gestured with her glass. The wine slopped from side to side. She looked at it, focusing with an effort. She put the glass to her lips and drained it. She poured herself another glass.

  “That’s OK,” she went on, “because it is the science that matters. The problem comes when the results matter more than the science. These are hugely smart people with hugely inflated egos and they’ve been right so many times. Maybe they start to take it for granted that they’re always right. They start to see the actual experiments as just a formality. There was a case a few years ago, an article published in Nature, three lots of stem cell experiments that showed the same results. Unfortunately there was a reason for that: they were actually the same experiment – they hadn’t been repeated.”

  “What happened to the researcher?”

  Rachel’s cheeks were flushed, Katie noticed. Probably hers were, too. She laughed shortly. “What do they say in Hollywood? You’ll never eat lunch in this town again? That’s about it. You’d be blacklisted. You’d never get another job. And you know what? The ones who are found out – I bet they’re just the tip of the iceberg.”

  Rachel was staring at her, surprised by her vehemence.

  “Are we talking theoretically here?” Rachel asked. “Or do you have something specific in mind?”

  Katie hesitated. “If I tell you something, can it be just between us? Promise?”

  Rachel nodded.

  It struck Katie that Rachel wasn’t entirely sober. But then neither was Katie. Very, very far from it. Oh, what the hell.

  “When I was round at your house the other night, I saw that lab book, Will’s lab book, the one that got mislaid.”

  Rachel shook her head. “It didn’t get mislaid. It was hidden. Deliberately hidden. Jennifer had stuffed it away behind a built-in ironing board in her kitchen.”

  Katie stared at her. “Why would she do that?”

  “That’s what Dan wondered too, but he couldn’t see anything wrong with the lab book.”

  “Well, I think it’s a fake. I think Will didn’t make the discovery first. What if he somehow got hold of another lab book, and faked it to look as if he did?”

  Rachel said, “And Jennifer was on to it? That’s why she hid it?”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?”

  “No,” Rachel said slowly. “We’ll never know. Because Jennifer’s dead.”

  They looked at each other.

  Katie said, “No, no. Will couldn’t have had anything to do with that. That’s just silly. It was an accident. But the lab book – that I can believe, because so much rests on it.”

  Rachel’s face slipped out of focus, but Katie squinted and got her back.

  “These lab books,” Rachel said. “How easy would it be to get hold of a blank one?”

  “You have hit the nail on the head, Rachel. You have indeed. Not easy. Oh, no, no, no. Not easy at all. Tightly controlled. As least they’re supposed to be.” Katie put her glass down too heavily.

  She explained the process of getting a new lab book. She had to explain twice. Either Rachel was being a bit thick, or Katie was.

  Rachel questioned her. Did Polly keep her office locked absolutely all the time? What about when she popped out to the loo? And if someone did manage to swipe a lab book, would Polly notice? Would she realize when she got to the bottom of the box that there’d been, say, thirty books and she’d only given out twenty-nine numbers?

  Katie considered this. “Maybe, maybe not. She’s a sweet girl, but not the sharpest knife in the box.”

  “Know what I’d do?” Rachel said. There was just the suggestion of a slur.

  Katie shook her head very slowly. “I do not. I do not know what you would do.”

  Rachel downed the rest of her wine. She thumped her fist on the table.

  “I’d steal one myself, just to see if it could be done.”

  For a moment, Katie was taken aback, but then she saw that Rachel had indeed got to the heart of it. Clever Rachel. What a brilliant idea.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

&nb
sp; On the rare occasions when Katie had a hangover, she always felt better for eating, but maybe the macaroni cheese she had chosen for lunch hadn’t been such a good idea. As Katie picked at it and wondered whether to take some more painkillers, her gaze kept straying to Polly on the other side of the canteen. She was chatting animatedly, unaware of Katie’s attention.

  Katie had noticed that Polly usually went for lunch about twelve and today she had timed it so that she was passing the office when Polly came out. Before Polly closed the door, Katie glimpsed the box of lab books on the table. Polly locked up and put the key in the pocket of her jeans. They walked together to the canteen, chatting, and queued together at the counter. Then Polly went to join her friends.

  In the cold light of day, the idea of stealing a lab book seemed crazy, not something Katie would ever dream of doing. But there was no harm at all in mulling over the question of whether it was possible. The question was this: did Polly always lock the door, even when she went to the loo? If she was just popping out for a few minutes, surely she wouldn’t bother? After all, the lab books weren’t valuable in themselves. It was simply a matter of keeping track of them.

  Katie’s train of thought was broken by someone sitting down opposite her.

  It was Honor.

  Katie’s heart seemed to flip over. A tête-à-tête with Honor would have been daunting at the best of times, but right now… There was no way Honor could know what she was thinking about, or her suspicions about Will, but all the same, Katie felt as if guilt was written all over her face.

  Honor’s bob cut wasn’t as sleek as usual. Katie guessed she hadn’t had time to blow-dry it. And she wasn’t wearing lipstick. She looked tired, but her voice when she spoke was firm enough. “How are you, Katie? Fully recovered, I hope. That was a nasty experience.”

  Katie hastened to reassure her. “I’m fine. Will was much closer to the explosion than I was.”

  Katie caught a fleeting expression on Honor’s face. For a moment she looked vulnerable, as though it were painful to contemplate what might have happened to Will.

  “How’s Malcolm?” Katie asked.

  “I’ve just been visiting him in Addenbrooke’s,” Honor said, crumbling her bread roll. “He’ll be out of hospital in a couple of days, but it’ll be a few weeks before he’s back at work.”

  “And Ian?” Katie hardly dared to ask.

  “Not good, but it’s looking as though he’ll pull through. Of course, there’s no question of him coming back to the lab.”

  “You really think he…”

  Honor nodded and took a mouthful of soup.

  “But why?” Katie said. “I just can’t understand it.”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking myself.”

  “Will told me Ian hadn’t got a pay rise he’d put in for.”

  “He really wasn’t that good – at least not as good as he thought he was.” Honor’s voice was cool. Katie caught a glimpse of the steeliness that had got her where she was. She was flattered that Honor was talking to her as an equal, but she was conscious of the need to tread carefully. She remembered that Honor had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly.

  “He might have been sore about it, all the same,” Katie remarked.

  Honor put down her spoon. “If everyone who was passed over for promotion reacted that way, there wouldn’t be a lab left standing. There must be more to it than that, maybe some kind of psychiatric problem. I had a word with a friend in the Psychology department. There’s a recognized syndrome: people who yearn for praise and attention and manufacture crises so that they can step in and save the day.”

  Katie thought of the way Ian had comforted her over her failed E.coli culture and offered to redo it for her. She thought of what Polly had said about his being the department’s “go-to guy”, and the obvious pride that he took in it. But had he really been so needy that he would risk blowing up the lab?

  “The gas taps – that was so dangerous!”

  “He’s admitted that he was sleeping in his office. No doubt he was going to pretend to come in first thing in the morning and discover the lab full of gas so that he could demonstrate his presence of mind. I suppose he wasn’t to know that Malcolm would charge in and switch on the light.”

  So that explained why Ian hadn’t needed to sign in at night. He’d never left. Katie understood now why he was always in the lab so early – and it was probably him who had come into the lab that time when she was in the darkroom and she’d thought she was alone in the building.

  Honor sighed. “I’m seeing Ian’s wife this afternoon. Poor woman. There are two children. Pretty much grown up, thank goodness.”

  “I didn’t know he was married.”

  “Apparently they’d separated. Very likely that also had a bearing on the situation. We’ll know more when Ian comes round. There are signs of improvement.”

  No wonder she looked tired, Katie thought. What must it be like to be in charge of a lab? To have all that responsibility, not just for your own work, but for other people, too. She couldn’t imagine it, but perhaps it was something you grew into.

  She glanced over at Polly, who was sharing a joke with her friend. They were giggling like schoolgirls.

  And that was when it struck her. Honor was Will’s principal investigator and they worked closely together. She would have scrutinized his lab books and signed them off – week by week, probably. Wouldn’t she have noticed if there was something wrong? Katie felt a chill. What if Honor had not only noticed? What if she’d condoned it? Because with all Katie’s preoccupation with whether Will had been able to steal a lab book, there was one thing she had been forgetting. This was Honor’s lab. She was the boss and she could do as she damn well pleased. There was no way someone as far down the pecking order as Polly would query anything she did, and in any case, there was bound to be a set of master keys somewhere. Probably Honor could come and go as she liked.

  If Honor wanted to get hold of a substitute lab book, there’d be no problem.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  By six o’clock Katie had transfected her new stem cells and now she had to wait for them to start producing whole virus. It would be another twelve hours before she could harvest them, so she packed up for the day.

  The supermarket near the station was open late, so she stopped off on the way home. She was walking along the displays of vegetables, uncertain what to cook – did there really have to be so much choice? – when her attention was caught by an elderly woman standing further down the aisle. One leg seemed strangely straight and stiff: it was encased in a metal caliper. Katie didn’t think she’d ever seen an adult wearing one.

  The woman slipped her hand into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a mobile phone, and not just any mobile phone, but an iPhone – much sleeker and cooler than Katie’s own smartphone. How incongruous was that, the juxtaposition of the phone and the caliper!

  Katie was close enough to hear her say, “Was it Cox’s you wanted? Or Golden Delicious?”

  How old was she? Seventy maybe? And vaccination had begun in the early 1960s, so yes, she could have had childhood polio. Katie’s mother had been born in the late forties and one of her childhood memories was of the polio epidemic of 1956 and her terror of catching it and ending up in an iron lung. It was amazing. In just a generation, polio had been eradicated in Europe and there was a prospect of eradicating it worldwide.

  Katie thought of that later as she sat with Chloe on her knee, trying to distract her. The child knew too well what was coming and pushed the book of fairy stories aside. She wasn’t going to be fobbed of with Rumpelstiltskin. In the end, Katie just clasped Chloe to her and felt the little arms clamp Katie’s waist as the needle went in. She flinched herself in sympathy.

  As soon as it was over, Chloe brightened up. She clamoured for a goodnight kiss. Katie left Rachel to settle her down and went into the galley to start cooking dinner. She felt wrung out. As she unwrapped the chicken breasts, she thought about
the day-to-day effort that Rachel put into managing Chloe’s disease. Working in the lab, you could lose sight of the reality of the disease you were studying. You could forget that it was not just cells in a Petri dish, not just an intellectual puzzle, but real children suffering in real life. Sometimes the goal of finding a cure for DBA seemed very far off, but that was what they must have thought about polio once.

  Rachel came in and heaved a sigh.

  “Are you alright?” Katie asked.

  There was no reply. Katie turned and saw tears were welling up in Rachel’s eyes.

  “Hey…” Katie put down the chicken. “What is it?”

  Rachel dashed a tear off her cheek.

  “Do you want to tell me all about it?” Katie asked.

  The tears were overflowing. Rachel gave a helpless little gesture, buried her face in her hands and wept.

  Katie grabbed the kitchen roll, and tore off a couple of pieces. She pressed them into Rachel’s hands and put a gentle hand on her shaking shoulders. She guided her to a seat.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Rachel waved a hand as if to say, “Wait a minute.”

  Katie sat down and waited.

  After a while, Rachel sat up straight and blew her nose.

  “The thing is – it’s just – giving Chloe her infusion – if only I could have had another baby, one who might have been a match for Chloe.”

  “And that hasn’t been on the cards?”

  “Not really. I nearly died giving birth to Chloe.”

  “That’s tough,” Katie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Though of course, even if we’d had another baby, they might not have been a match for Chloe.”

  “Well – but IVF? Embryo selection?”

  “That’s what Dan would have wanted, I’m sure.”

  “And you wouldn’t?” Katie asked. Surely it was the obvious solution. How could there be any question?

  “I don’t know, that’s the thing. Sometimes I think I would have done anything to find a cure for Chloe. But that doesn’t mean it would have been right.”