by T. M. Clark
‘If you’re sick, doctors will keep throwing everything at you until you improve—or die. Usually more drugs. If one antibiotic doesn’t work, you try another,’ Lily said.
‘Shoo. I’m still stuck on how a drug company could be making viruses and bacteria for the same people they are supposed to heal, just to make money,’ Natalie said.
‘The pharmaceutical companies have an astonishingly bad track record of tainted drugs. Sometimes in error, sometimes by a single person. Perhaps a whole company. They’re driven by profit. Profit for their board members and shareholders,’ Lily said.
‘I made more coffee,’ Quintin said, coming back into the room with a tray.
Natalie put her hand up for one.
‘You are mainlining coffee again,’ Piet said. ‘I’m just pointing it out because you took such pains to cut down.’
Quintin put Natalie’s coffee in front of her and a packet of biscuits on the table.
‘That was before we pulled my first all-nighter in years. Are you going to open those Romany Creams that are in front of you or just stare at them?’ Natalie asked.
‘Hint taken,’ Piet said, opening the biscuits and offering them to Natalie first.
Natalie took one, dunked it in her coffee and ate it. ‘Bliss. Coffee and chocolate. My favourite meal to get my mind back on top of its game when on little sleep.’
‘You always were one for sweet things,’ Piet said.
She looked up and out of the big sliding doors at the view of the valley below the house. ‘You know, you guys have an amazing view here.’
Lily said, ‘I don’t get to look at it that much, but I guess when you see it at dawn, it is pretty.’
‘Natalie, you have a view just as stunning. What is really on your mind?’ Piet asked. ‘Talk, what is troubling you?’
‘It’s Breanna’s birthday in two weeks. All I can think of is, there are tainted drugs out there and she might not make it if she somehow takes them. Seeing these kids die because of medication that their parents gave them to help them, it breaks my heart. When I get home, I’m going to just hold her close. Is it selfish of me to be grateful for having such a healthy daughter?’
‘You have a daughter?’ Lily asked.
‘Almost thirteen in body but thirty in her head,’ Natalie said. ‘Quite frankly, knowing all this now, I’m scared for her.’
‘I can imagine.’
Natalie took her phone off the table and held it out to Lily. ‘This is Breanna.’
‘She’s lovely,’ Lily said.
‘I think so, I’m really lucky that she’s not one of those teenagers who only communicate with a grunt in the morning and when they get home from school. She texts all the time, checking in on me, and she sends me pictures of clothes she wants me to buy her.’
Lily smiled. ‘That’s great that she talks to you about clothes. I see many mothers whose daughters at that age are already butting heads with them. Looks good for both of you if you’re still communicating.’
‘I’m lucky, and at least this way, I can still sort of control what she wears, and she can dress appropriately and not like a skank. I don’t remember shops selling clothes for me to dress like a thirty-year-old hooker when I was a teenager.’
‘At least you get clothes pictures. Your daughter sends me pictures of cute kittens and dogs needing new homes, and big puppy eyes, saying please convince Mum for me,’ Piet said.
‘I never realised that you were partner-partners,’ Lily said.
Piet shook his head and put his hands up. ‘I am Breanna’s godfather.’
‘And her way to owning a puppy, apparently,’ Lily said.
They all laughed at that.
‘I just wish I could wrap her in cotton wool and keep her safe forever from the outside world,’ Natalie admitted.
Quintin brought Lily her coffee and sat down beside her.
‘I would be just like that, too, if I had kids. I would suggest that you go home and toss any medications you have in the bin. Or better yet, bring them here so we can have them analysed. We’ll need samples of newer and older medications of all brands,’ Lily said.
Natalie nodded. ‘I’ll do that. For her birthday I wanted to take the day off, spend time with her shopping, just not working on a case. Now it all seems so silly in comparison to the parents who have lost their kids.’
‘Not silly,’ Lily said. ‘It’s nice that you can do something with her on her special day.’
‘The medical legwork on this case, is it almost done now, Lily?’ Natalie asked. ‘We know that it’s tainted drugs. We simply need to know which ones. Or am I being too optimistic?’
Lily smiled. ‘From here it’s going to need your police force more than ever. I don’t have the authority to go back to the families of the deceased and ask them if they still have any of the drugs that were being taken so that we can analyse them. Would you be able to do that? You have the power to ask them for their leftover drugs, surely?’
‘We could, yes,’ Piet said. ‘It would be a long process, but it is possible. We would have to do it carefully so as to avoid a panic. How do we organise the analysis of the drugs?’
‘I want to send them to Australia, or Switzerland, where World Health have their headquarters,’ Lily said.
‘Why not a South African laboratory?’ Natalie asked.
‘To be honest, I don’t know who I can trust here in South Africa. Having an independent source seems worth spending the WHO’s money on. It’s not going to be a cheap exercise.’
‘You sure they will pay? If it is expensive, I do not think our police force will do anything about it. They might try to do the analysis themselves because we are so under-resourced,’ Piet said.
‘World Health will pay. But I’m still worried. We might have found what I think is causing the clusters, but about what happened to Ian and Chelmsford? There’s still so much unanswered. Too many loose ends dangling. I’ve been giving it some thought—why haven’t any legal letters arrived at the house if Ian was looking to find a publisher for your book? What if he had a printout of your book in his possession when he was hijacked? It was important enough to be on that flash drive, so why no letters of rejection, or further contact requested?’
‘What are you suggesting?’ Piet asked, sitting up in his chair.
‘I know the first thing I did when I saw your book was to begin checking patents on those remedies. Patents can be worth millions, and your book, it’s not written by a tribe, but you, the medicine man of Platfontein. It’s a representation of medicinal plants and the history of this area, and in the Kalahari. Surely Ian must have said something to you about the legal side of it if the money was to come to you or your whole tribe?’
‘While I have a little knowledge about what has happened with the Hoodia plant, and the fight between the pharmaceutical company and the San, we never discussed anything like that. Just that he was going to find a publisher when it was done so that the knowledge never disappeared and the book would look good. It was never meant for a big sale, a wider distribution, just for our tribe, simply to keep the knowledge from being lost. Surely Ian did not try to sell it as more than that?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t have proof of anything like that. I also don’t have any proof of him approaching lawyers or publishers. Besides, something else about Ian is bugging me: there’s the fact that he lived on such a huge property alone. Patients at my outreach clinic said they used to pay Ian, and yet that research clinic is supposed to be free. Where did his money go? It’s not like he needed to amass a fortune, he always said he inherited money, lots of it.
‘Despite all the evidence pointing to these tainted drugs, I can’t find evidence that Ian knew about it. And I’ve read his notes about his HIV research. His research pointed to him looking into the under-reporting of HIV statistics. Not that he analysed everything in his files. There is no file with a comparison analysis like I did to suggest that he was aware of what he had stumbled onto,’ Lily said
.
‘You don’t think he knew about the drugs?’ Piet asked.
‘He might have. He definitely knew he was in trouble, otherwise why hide that flash drive? But I’m still not convinced that it was about pharmaceuticals only. When we first got here, Lincoln told me that Ian said to burn all the medicinal plants if they sold his home. Why would he say something like that to him, unless he knew something was going to happen?’
‘You make a good case,’ Piet said.
‘You were attacked at the market after you gave Piet the flash drive, but also after seeing Mr Magaso and getting his list of names. Do you now think that it might be connected?’ Quintin asked.
‘I don’t know. And I would hate to speculate and take us down the wrong path. The files are pointing to that he was gathering information on deaths and people who were ill, but who did he tell? That’s my question,’ Lily said. ‘There’s always been an element of danger coming here. I knew that when I took this job. Believe me, we have been in worse places in the world, with a lot more security around and still been shot at.
‘The WHO are aware of a cluster of meningitis deaths in this area. Your files showed that there were prisoners all over South Africa dying too. These combined with Ian’s folders show it is not a simple area cluster anymore, which means that this is potentially an epidemic spreading across the whole country. The WHO will want answers. And quickly.’
‘World Health want answers? They can stand in line. I want answers,’ Piet said, drumming his fingers on the table. ‘It is all very well World Health sitting somewhere in an office in a foreign country when it is our people in our country that are dying, and you are saying this could be an epidemic like it could spread the whole way across South Africa?’
‘What I’m saying is that the spread of the contaminated drugs already appears to be countrywide. If the cluster was only in Kimberley, it would’ve pointed to something in the environment causing a sickness. When I added Dr Juliet’s patients, we could already see that we have a much bigger problem. Once I tell them, WHO will bring in a specialist team that will handle this. It’s getting too big for just one person.’
‘Dr Winters, can I ask what made you suspect the drugs?’ Natalie asked.
‘Coti was not responding to the cheaper generic drugs, but when I switched her to original trade-name ones, she responded immediately, as she should have when she was on the generic ones. I went back and looked through all my other patients to see which medications were used, and I realised that while I couldn’t tell between trade-branded and generic medications, there was a drug-identification problem in my research. We will need to take as many samples across many different companies, as well as do more in-depth research at the pharmacy in the hospital.’
‘What are the possibilities of this being just one company?’ Piet asked.
‘I don’t know what to think anymore. Look here,’ Lily said, opening her computer and then her spreadsheet. On the front tab were the pictures of some of the patients, and corresponding numbers for her files.
‘You keep pictures of your patients?’ Natalie asked.
‘Every one of them. To me, they’re more than a case study. They deserve more than just a number in a research sheet,’ Lily said.
‘That’s so sad to see those kids’ faces,’ Natalie said as she looked at the thumbnail-sized pictures.
‘Unfortunately, yes. My youngest in the study was little Milutin Nyatama; he was just eight months old.’ She zoomed in on the photo, and a picture of a healthy baby filled the screen. ‘This was taken about a day before he came into hospital.’ Lily minimised the picture and enlarged another. ‘I was perplexed with this one, Jenny Parkes, because from the notes she was already unconscious when she was rushed in from one of the farms. She should have been in our care long before she was admitted. She was a healthy thirteen-year-old, as you can see from this picture of her. No reason for her to contract bacterial meningitis. Jenny had an extremely isolated upbringing out there on her grandparents’ farm; she didn’t even go to the local school. She was homeschooled, but that didn’t keep her safe in the end. So, something got out to their farm, the same thing that is in the townships, the old-age homes, the prisons and everywhere else.’
‘Perhaps we should take a look around that farm,’ Natalie said. ‘Ask them for any of the medication she was taking before she became sick, and then what she had before she came into the hospital.’
‘I called and they gave me all those details. Now I need to know if they have a sample still, without creating panic. A warning, the file says that medical personnel need to step carefully with her ouma, because she seemed extremely frail for a farmer’s wife. I would like to meet them and come with you to collect the medication if they have it.’
‘I’ll treat them with the utmost respect when we get to meet her,’ Natalie said. ‘And I think it would be a good idea to have you along. The people in this country don’t always see the police as the ones looking after them, rather the ones you run away from.’
Lily smiled. She knew that to be too true.
They heard the back door open as Bessie walked in and greeted them.
‘Good morning, Bessie, can we have a cooked breakfast for everyone, please?’ Lily asked.
‘Yebo,’ Bessie said as she went to the kitchen, and they could hear her crashing pans and banging pots.
‘Lily, who else knows about the drugs and the potential for them to be contaminated?’ Natalie asked.
‘Quintin obviously. Nobody else has been told.’
‘What are you going to be prescribing now that you have found out?’ Piet asked.
‘For now, I’ll avoid generic drugs in the hope that the contamination is only in those. In reality, I cannot trust the drugs at all. I’ll be avoiding them whenever I can. However, I can’t take anyone off their HIV blockers. It’s too dangerous for them. I’ll be ordering in original brands for the clinic, that is a certainty. Hopefully, switching over the blockers now will not cause any panic.’
Piet was nodding. ‘Right, let’s see when narcotics want to get involved. I know a guy I worked with a few years ago in that department. He’ll keep this under wraps, but he’ll also be a big help to us,’ Piet said. ‘Before I do this, are you sure that you want to continue as a police adviser on this case?’
Lily frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘From here, an investigation involved with the Narcotics Enforcement Bureau is going to take up a lot of your time. That will be time away from your clinic.’
Quintin squeezed her hand.
‘I don’t have a choice, do I. I either treat people, or I fight whatever is killing them. And I don’t want to have it on my conscience that I prescribed a drug that killed one of my patients,’ Lily said.
‘Good, I had to check. Quintin, you okay with this?’
Quintin nodded. ‘If it’s what Lily feels necessary, then I go where she goes.’
‘Good,’ Piet said.
Natalie ran her hand through her hair. ‘Epidemic? You keep using that word.’
‘Between our results, we’ve probably only scratched the surface across the whole of South Africa. It’s across the whole population, and there’s no hope of quarantining the drugs responsible, not until we identify exactly which drugs the contaminants are in.’
‘I’ll phone Colonel Vaughan Smith and ask him where he is and if he can get to Kimberley for a visit,’ Piet said.
‘Right, while he’s doing that, we can clear the table for Bessie to set it for breakfast,’ Quintin said. ‘I’m starving.’
Bessie set the table quickly and brought through their breakfasts.
‘Thank you, Bessie,’ they all chorused.
‘Tuck in,’ Quintin said.
They had covered Piet’s food with another plate to keep it warm and were halfway through their meal when he walked in from the lounge area.
‘He doesn’t look like a man with good news,’ Lily said.
‘Vaughan cannot come to
Kimberley right now, so he has organised one of his team to speak with us. He also said that they had a weird tip come in, which he thinks might be related—it is from a drug company. Their informant said that somebody is messing with their manufacturing process,’ Piet said.
‘How did he put that together so fast?’ Lily asked. ‘If you’ve only just spoken to him?’
‘Vaughan is in charge of the whole narcotics division of South Africa. We go way back to his time as a Recce in the Caprivi Strip. He always has his fingers on the pulse of all his unit. He is in the middle of a sting operation on a big drug bust in Richards Bay. The sad news is he is pissed as hell that somebody tampered with HIV blockers—his son died of meningitis a few months or so ago, and now he is out for blood.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Lily said.
‘Ja, his son contracted HIV from a bad blood transfusion, and they thought that they would lose him, but he was still hanging in there. Vaughan is angry deluxe, with reason,’ Piet said.
Lily nodded, and she put down her knife and fork.
Piet sat down at the dining-room table, but he didn’t lift the cover off his food. ‘Eish, I am heart-sore. And after talking with Vaughan, I think that it is possible that Ian had come to the same conclusion as we have and was going somewhere with his evidence, and that is what got him killed. I do not have the authority to put a full-time police escort on you—we would have to tell our boss, Chetty, what is going on, and he has a mouth bigger than the Limpopo delta when it reaches the sea. Vaughan asked us to keep this tight, till he can be here, but might take a little while longer than we want it to. Lily and Quintin, is there a possibility that you can hire private security contractors to help keep you safe while we investigate further? I can give you a number for a guy I know who operates out of Bloemfontein; his firm has extensive experience in the Middle East and across Africa. Bringing in a private security contractor for personal protection is now a priority. There is a definite escalation in the amount of danger you are in, and Natalie and I cannot protect you twenty-four-seven as well as try to investigate this case.’