Deep Water

by Christine Poulson

  “Are you going to read it now?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “Are you having some?”

  “No, I’d better go to bed. But wake me up if you find anything.”

  ***

  At first progress was painfully slow. It wasn’t like a lab book, where the point was to allow someone to replicate your work and everything had to be crystal clear. A personal notebook was more of an aide-memoire, a way of capturing things that would later be recorded more formally. It took a while for her to tune in, to decipher Will’s handwriting and to work out what the abbreviations meant, but as she read on, the work came into focus, the process of trial and error that was so familiar. She saw the places where things had gone right and Will had marked them with huge emphatic ticks. She saw where something hadn’t worked and Will had had to backtrack. Maybe it was because she was so tired, but she saw in her mind’s eye what Will was doing in the lab with an almost hallucinatory clarity as experiment followed experiment in logical sequence. He was good, very good.

  It was about half past one when Katie came across a page with two heavy lines scored across it. Those two lines spoke of anger and frustration. Something hadn’t worked. What could it be? She struggled to make sense of what was written underneath. What did the abbreviation “m” mean? Will had stipulated ten of them. She got up and stretched, drank a glass of water, and rubbed her eyes. She wondered if Will was still asleep – she hoped he was; she didn’t want him realizing that she had pinched the notebook and coming to get it back.

  She sat down again and looked at the page. What was it that Will had said earlier? “The mouse. If it hadn’t been for the mouse.” If so that was odd, more than odd, because he hadn’t been doing animal experiments up to now. She read on, every sense alert, because she was on to something, she knew it. This solution for which he had written out the formula, he’d presumably injected the mice with it. That didn’t relate to what had gone before either. It belonged to some other set of experiments. She turned over the next page to see what the result was. There was no result. There was a jagged edge where a page had been torn out. She didn’t know what was going on, but this must have been a result so memorable – so catastrophic? – that he didn’t need or didn’t dare to record it. This was it, she knew it.

  She looked at the date of the experiment and her heart dropped a curtsey. Surely not. It couldn’t be… She fired up her laptop, and typed in the words that would call up the disastrous clinical trial. Links to newspaper articles appeared and she clicked on the first one: “Medical student dies in drug trial”. And when she saw the date, she knew. There had been a cover-up alright, but it had nothing to do with when the therapy had been discovered. It was worse than that. Much worse.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Rain slapped the car window, distorting Daniel’s reflection as he gazed out into the night.

  He saw again Harry’s head on Nick’s shoulder, Harry’s arms clasped around Nick’s neck. He thought of Chloe exhausted after a long day out, the warm solid weight of her on his shoulder, the utter trust of a sleeping child. No instinct of paternity had stirred in him at the sight of Harry. There was no sense of connection. What he did feel was pity. Harry looked so much like Jennifer, the golden child of a golden girl. And he was Nick’s child too, whatever his genetic inheritance. Daniel hadn’t seen him come into the world or watched him feeding at his mother’s breast. He hadn’t got up in the night to comfort him, or changed his nappies, or felt torn apart when he was ill. Rachel was right. Nick was Harry’s true father. And as for Nick, Daniel could find it in his heart to pity him for the burden of guilt and misery that he carried. Daniel was the fortunate one now – he had Rachel.

  It was true that he had married her on the rebound. Perhaps she had sensed that and felt that she was second best and could never compete with Jennifer. Perhaps that worked both ways? Would she have married him if she hadn’t got pregnant and wanted a child? But none of that really mattered now. Together he and Rachel had made Chloe. He thought of the texture of his life with Rachel, the way that they had coped with Chloe’s illness, the home they had made, and their gentleness with each other. Jennifer had gone, it really was over, and there seemed now to be something flimsy, insubstantial about his marriage to her. They had been so young. He saw now that they had not been well matched. He had been the one who kissed, she had been the one who offered the cheek. He had adored her, but he had never been content in the way that he was with Rachel.

  Chloe – Chloe and Rachel… they were his life now. He must have been mad to think for even a moment that he might seek custody of Harry. But the question of whether Harry’s DNA matched Chloe’s was another matter. Could he let go of that hope? Would that even be right, when it would mean so much to Chloe? That dilemma remained. But he couldn’t go it alone. He could do nothing without Rachel. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock.

  He leaned forward and spoke to Gemma. “What time do you think we’ll be back?”

  “Can’t go any faster than this, not in these conditions.”

  “No, no, I understand.”

  And it didn’t matter anyway, because whatever time he got back, he had to see Rachel. This was too important to wait. He would go round to the boat straightaway. No, he couldn’t wait that long. He had to speak to her now, right now, this very minute.

  He got out his mobile phone.

  Rachel was standing in the doorway to the galley, running a hand through dishevelled hair.

  “How are you getting on?” She looked more closely at Katie. “You’ve found something, haven’t you? Something bad.”

  “There was a clinical trial for the obesity therapy. A student died.”

  Rachel nodded. “I remember seeing it on the news.” She came and sat next to Katie at the table.

  Katie went on, “The night before it started, Will ran an experiment that didn’t get the result he wanted. I think a mouse had a bad reaction and died. I think this must have been the same procedure that was used in human trials the next day. Will ought to have stopped the trial.”

  Rachel frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t it have been tried on other animals before the human trial? Why was Will doing that at the last minute?”

  “They’d already tried it on primates and it was fine. But earlier on, when Will was experimenting on mice, I think he missed out a stage. He and Honor knew that someone else was working on the same thing and there was a race to the Patent Office. I suspect she was pressing him for results, just like Paul’s been pressing me, and he started to cut corners – he didn’t do an experiment that he said he had, or maybe he did it, but didn’t repeat it. He was certain he knew what the result would be and wrote it up in his lab book as if he’d really done it. It must have nagged at him – he is a scientist, after all, and a good one – and just before the human trials started, he decided he would run the experiment again. He would have thought he was just tying up a loose end. He wasn’t expecting a problem. He must have been horrified at the result.”

  Rachel struggled to understand. “But if the monkeys were OK, why would it matter if the mice weren’t? I mean, we’re more like monkeys than mice, aren’t we?”

  “Sure, but it’s not as straightforward as that. For one thing, mice aren’t that different from us. That’s why they’re used in experiments. The other thing is that sometimes a person’s genetic make-up is different from the norm. They might have a condition that causes them no problems in everyday life – that they don’t even know about. But because of it, they might suffer severe side effects from using a drug that’s fine for everyone else. That’s what happened to that medical student – the antibody was aimed at specific markers and he had those on his heart cells as well as his fat cells. The monkeys didn’t share that abnormality, but one of the mice did share it and died.”

  Rachel thought about this.

  “So the trial should have been halte
d. And if it had been, that student would still be alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I suppose – the police – I don’t know. I was thinking, I know it’s difficult, but maybe the obvious person – ”

  “Is Daniel?”

  “You see, he’s got the lab book. But I did wonder… He’s employed by Calliope – what about client–lawyer privilege?”

  “That doesn’t mean Daniel’s allowed to break the law. He’s an officer of the court. That’s his first allegiance.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  Rachel rubbed her forehead, pushed back her hair so that it stood on end. “The thing is, if he concealed evidence of wrongdoing, he could end up in prison. He just wouldn’t do it, so yes, I’m sure.”

  The ringing of a mobile phone startled them. They looked at each other wide-eyed. Katie thought, Will!

  But it wasn’t her phone. It was Rachel’s.

  Rachel took the call and her eyes widened with surprise. “Oh, hi Daniel. No, I wasn’t asleep.” Her tone was guarded. She walked off into the bedroom and shut the door.

  Katie sat at the table, gazing at nothing. She thought of Will in the lab staring at a dead mouse. She could follow his thought processes as if they were her own. He wouldn’t be sure that the mouse had died because of the experiment. That was the thing with animals. Sometimes they got sick and died and it had nothing to do with the treatment. Maybe it was just a mouse whose time had come. And there were always blips like this. You could run the same test ten times running and get the same result, then on the eleventh, exactly the same set-up, everything replicated to the nth degree, and it went belly-up. Often it meant nothing.

  He would have told himself that the therapy would never have been allowed to get as far as clinical trials if there had been any doubts. He would have tried to ignore the other voice in his head, the one that said that there weren’t any doubts because they didn’t know that he hadn’t run the earlier trial.

  She felt cold at the thought of how nearly she had done something that was different only in degree. She had almost decided that because she knew – or thought she knew – what the outcome was, she was justified in tweaking her results. How much more tempting it must have been for Will. If the human trials were called off at that late stage, millions of dollars would be wasted, the whole process set back by who knew how long. And what happens to the promising young postdoc who comes up with a piece of inconvenient and almost certainly irrelevant information on the very eve of human trials? Career death, that’s what.

  So what did Will do? He culled all the mice and put them in the freezer. The batch of mice might stay in the freezer for years and years before someone thought of incinerating them. When the medical student died in the clinical trial, he would have been horrified. The odds were that the dead mouse had those same markers in its heart cells. She saw Will going back into the lab, removing that mouse and disposing of it. That was why one had been missing when Ian did his inventory.

  Rachel came back into the room. Even in her distracted state, Katie noticed that her face seemed softer, she looked somehow younger.

  “Dan’s on his way home from the airport. Then he’s coming straight round to the boat. I’ve told him what’s happened. You can give him the notebook and let him sort it out. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I can understand why Will did it… why he made that decision.”

  “It wasn’t his decision to make. But in any case, it all started to go wrong much earlier than that, didn’t it? When he wrote up an experiment that he hadn’t really done. You wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Well, maybe not that exactly. But tweaking your results, tidying things up, even ignoring something that didn’t come out quite right: I’ve come very close to doing that. There can’t be many people who haven’t at least been tempted. There’s so much pressure, Rachel; it’s so competitive.”

  Rachel’s mouth was set in a firm line. “There’s no excuse.”

  “He was unlucky. It might so easily have been alright!”

  “But it wasn’t! He is responsible for that young man’s death.”

  Katie was silent for a few moments, then, “No, you’re right. Of course you are.” She put her head in her hands. “I’ve just had an awful thought. And how do we know it stopped there? The explosion in the lab. Maybe that was Will? Maybe he thought Ian suspected – after all, he was going around talking about a mouse being missing…”

  Rachel put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Look, Daniel’ll be here soon. Leave it all up to him. It’s after two o’clock in the morning. Why don’t you go and lie down, see if you can get a bit of sleep? That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Katie shook her head. “I’m too wired to sleep – and that coffee – no, I’ll plug on with the notebook. See what he did next.”

  She read on for a few more pages, then gave such a huge yawn that her jaw clicked. The page blurred before her eyes. There was a tightening across her temples. She put her head on the table and closed her eyes to rest them for a few moments. Outside the storm raged, in here it was warm and safe. The rocking of the boat lulled her. She slipped away into sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Normally he would have slept in the car, but as they headed north up the M11, Daniel was aware of the wind picking up speed, trees thrashing. He was conscious of tension in the hunched shoulders of Gemma, his driver. He half-expected her to suggest that they stop somewhere and wait out the storm, but she didn’t, and he was too anxious to get back to Rachel to suggest it himself.

  He thought of what she had told him on the phone. His instinct had been right. Hadn’t he known all along that Jennifer had had her reasons for hiding that lab book? She had told Lyle that something was wrong and she had been on her way to tell him about it when she had had the accident. She must have realized that there was a problem with the lab book. Rachel hadn’t gone into details, so he didn’t know exactly what was wrong, just that Will had known something that meant he should have put a stop to the clinical trial. He had no idea what this would mean for the patent case. What a mess! But it didn’t matter the way it would have mattered a week ago. Nothing really mattered, as long as he and Rachel and Chloe were together.

  They left the rolling Hertfordshire countryside and bypassed Cambridge. It was as they headed for Ely on the A10 that the full blast of the storm hit them. The wind came roaring across the Fens with nothing to break its force. A plastic carrier bag hit the windscreen and wrapped itself round one of the wipers, flapping frantically as if it were trying to free itself. Gemma had to pull over. She got out, struggling to control the car door. The wind rushed in, ruffling his hair, pulling at his coat. It was like something alive, and he felt a twinge of fear at its power.

  Gemma managed to untangle the plastic bag and the wind snatched it away. She got back into the car.

  Daniel said, “Are you OK with this?”

  She smoothed down her hair and shrugged. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes. And it has actually stopped raining.”

  But a few minutes later there were flashing lights on the road ahead. Gemma exclaimed and braked.

  Daniel leaned forward. The headlights caught a man in a high-visibility jacket, and behind him floodlights illuminated the roots of a tree heavy with earth.

  The road was blocked.

  “Mummy, Mummy, there’s a monster!”

  It seemed just a few moments since Rachel had fallen asleep. Without opening her eyes, she stretched out her arms, hoping to haul Chloe into bed with her. Sometimes that was enough and Chloe would settle down to sleep beside her.

  But Chloe was shaking her arm.

  “Mummy, Mummy, there is a monster. I know there is, I heard it! It went whoosh! And, Mummy, look out of the window!”

  There was a crackling, tapping noise like the sound of a big insect trapped in a lampshade. She opened her eyes. The cabin was full of a whitish-yellow light,
as bright as a summer’s day. Had she overslept? She squinted at the alarm. It was the middle of the night – and a winter’s night, she now remembered. She sat bolt upright, as wide awake as if she’d been dowsed with cold water. Something else was wrong. The boat was moving in a way that couldn’t be explained by a high wind.

  She jumped out of bed and looked out of the porthole. They were drifting into the middle of the river. The Matilda Jane must somehow have slipped her moorings. And now she could hear a muffled roar. The brilliant light was reflected off the water, and it was coming from the wheelhouse. The boat was on fire.

  ***

  It was five by the time the taxi turned onto Quayside and pulled up outside Daniel’s house. Gemma had managed to make a detour, driving on small roads round by Wicken Fen and coming out at Stretham, only a few miles south of Ely. Daniel gave her a very large tip. He braced himself and got out of the car, gasping as the wind slapped his face. It was like being plunged into a different element, something hostile, inimical to human life. Pushed and buffeted first one way and then the other, he struggled to his front door. He managed to get his key in the lock and opened the door. He turned and raised a hand. Gemma acknowledged his salute and drove away. She lived only a few streets away, she’d told him on a previous occasion, so the night’s work was over for her.

  The heating was off and the house had a musty smell. He switched the lights on. Everything was just as he had left it – except, he didn’t mind the absence of Rachel and Chloe as much. He imagined the house as it would be in a few hours’ time: the warmth, the smell of coffee, the bustle of family life beginning again.

  He dumped his bags in the sitting room. He went into the kitchen and got a set of spare keys for the boat and a torch to light his way along the quay. Outside he struggled to stay upright and to make headway, the force of the wind pulling at the skin on his face, whipping his hair around. It took his breath away.