‘Aye, he’s living just outside Edinburgh.’
‘Right, I’ll meet you at the station in ten.’
He stood up to leave, didn’t shake the old man’s hand. ‘I’ll need a full statement at some stage.’ Threadgold nodded and walked him to the door.
‘Don’t do anything…’ he chose his words carefully ‘… irrational, eh?’
‘You’re a good cop, Davies. You should have gone further than you did.’
He walked down the driveway without looking back. Settling into his car, he pulled the seat belt across his chest and jumped slightly as a passing car backfired. It was funny how that noise sounded exactly like gunfire.
57
Glasgow 2002
Oonagh had no desire to meet Graham Anderson again, but felt she had no choice. His compliance seemed guaranteed after she assured him Dorothy’s identity would be kept under wraps – as long as he played ball.
The M8 seemed to stretch on forever, taking an hour to get from Glasgow to Edinburgh. She slipped the car back up to fifth gear just beyond junction five; the rush-hour traffic was behind her now, and for that she was grateful.
She did her best to see the bigger picture; understand the greater good, the needs of the many over the needs of the few. She couldn’t.
Slipping down a gear, she left the motorway onto the A road to the quiet Lothian suburb. Leading her to the leafy avenue where residents lived next door to a man who felt no remorse at experimenting on kids as young as five. It was all getting too much for her to stomach.
It took him longer than the last time to open the door. He’d been reluctant for her to visit his home again, but Oonagh knew he’d be even less likely to open up in a public place.
She sat down without being asked and placed the recorder on the table between them. He walked slowly, leaning on a stick Oonagh had never see him use before. She wasn’t sure if he was using it as a prop for sympathy. But after what he’d told her he’d need to be in an iron lung to illicit any sympathy from her. He stumbled slightly as he sat down on the armchair opposite. Oonagh instinctively lurched forward to help him, but he shrugged her off and tightened his cardigan across his chest.
‘I’ve just put the heating on. Takes a few minutes to kick in.’
Oonagh fanned her face. The room was like an oven and the wood-burning stove glowed red-hot embers. There was a small radiator in the room and she hoped to God it was as useless as it looked. Any more heat and she’d collapse.
‘None of it was planned, you know.’ He crossed his legs slowly, revealing an emaciated ankle. His blue eyes clouded over. She struggled to feel any sympathy for him, but instinctively thought he was telling the truth.
‘People have died, Graham, people are still dying and there’s no justice for them. You need to come forward.’
He gave a phlegmy cough that made Oonagh feel sick, and cleared his throat. ‘We were all bright young things, straight out of med school, ready to show the world what we were made of. Desperate to make a name for ourselves. Haematology wasn’t the sexiest of departments.’ He allowed himself a very slight laugh. ‘Andrew, as you know, went into forensics. He was bloody good too, and—’
Oonagh feared he was just going to give a recap of what he’d already told her. She needed to steer him back.
‘So you introduced Dorothy and Andrew?’ She already knew the answer. She was about to ask if they seemed happy, but decided against such a stupid question. No one cut their husband’s throat because they were a bit pissed off with him leaving the toilet seat up. No one, male or female, could commit such an act on their spouse without some sort of psychosis being present.
‘It’s difficult to make any sense of it all now.’
‘Well, you need to try, Graham. That’s just not good enough.’
‘It’s hard to know what order things happened in. But before we knew it we were in deep. All of us. But it didn’t seem to matter. The end goal was the prize. Nothing or no one mattered along the way. Andrew just didn’t get that. He didn’t understand.’
‘He was going to blow the whistle on the contaminated blood, wasn’t he? Marjory Channing told me as much.’
‘Andrew was a fucking idiot.’
‘A moment ago, you said he was a good surgeon!’
‘D’you think all it takes is being a bit nifty with the scalpel? It takes breeding and strength of character to become a surgeon. Jesus Christ, he was a fucking butcher’s boy. He had no idea what was at stake.’
Oonagh felt chilled by his change in manner. The coldness in his eyes.
‘OK, sometimes we bent the rules, but, as I told you before, we were in this for the long game.’
‘If you were all so brilliant why didn’t you guess the risks of the blood products? You must have known there was a huge risk of cross-contamination. You were using skid-row donors, for God’s sake!’
‘Aye, hindsight’s a wonderful thing. There was so little known about the treatment of haemophilia. At the time we knew the clotting agent was working. That was good enough for us. Not to mention to advance into the treatment of hep C. I’m sorry, if there were casualties as we perfected the treatment then so be it.’
‘Did it really all come down to money?’ Oonagh felt sick and it wasn’t down to the heat.
‘Who d’you think pays for all this research?’ He pointed to her handbag. The corner of her cigarette packet was visible through the open zip. ‘When you’re diagnosed with lung cancer, or worse, you’ll be the first one crying for treatment. D’you think that comes ready made from the lab? Years, decades, lifetimes of research go into perfecting each and every treatment. Despite what you may think, it’s painfully slow to have a drug approved for use. The drug companies are king when it comes to this. They pay for everything, so they call the shots. That’s why the States have Blood Shield Statutes which effectively gives outright immunity to the pharmaceutical industry.’
‘How?’
‘It’s a bit long winded, but basically all treatment with blood products is regarded as a service and not a product, therefore hospitals, blood banks and the likes are safe from sales based liability.’
‘So they can peddle a pile of poison and nothing can be done?’ Oonagh could barely believe what she was hearing.
‘Well they can’t be sued in the strictest sense of the word. But what d’you think would happen if the pharmaceutical giants pulled their funding? There would be no drugs, no treatments. Nothing. Just tea and sympathy from the NHS and see where that gets you when you’re screaming in pain with bone cancer.’
It sounded like a well-rehearsed speech. Oonagh stood up; once again Graham Anderson was trying to excuse the inexcusable. ‘That doesn’t give them carte blanche to trample over human beings, destroy lives and use innocent patients as guinea pigs.’
‘Well, guess what? It does!’
‘It’s all profit margins, then, eh? The pharmaceutical giants dangle a big carrot in front of the NHS and you all roll over?’
He sat back, gave a smile. His teeth were small and perfectly even. His lips slightly slack. ‘That’s about the size of it. How many senior MPs d’you think have links to these drugs companies?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘MP’s that can actually shape NHS policy, and everyone turns a blind eye.’ Graham Anderson didn’t need to spell out the corruption to Oonagh, but he did. ‘I won’t even mention paedophile rings in Westminster, ones that go right to the top. But, you know, everyone’s so busy covering their own tracks they’ve no time to blow the whistle on anyone else. And at the end of the day, why rock the status quo? For the most part it works.’
‘You’re a monster. You actually make me sick.’
‘Listen, I’m on your side here. I’m giving you the information you want. But I won’t be judged. Not by you or anyone else.’
It slowly dawned on Oonagh that Graham Anderson did indeed have a God complex. It wasn’t his sister who was the ill one; this man was insane.
‘You used the blood
drained from corpses in Russian morgues. What’s that to do with forging ahead with new treatments? That’s about profit. Blood money. Simple as that.’
Graham Anderson licked his lips slightly then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I know how that must sound. But you have to believe me when I say we didn’t know where the blood was sourced from. OK, we knew there was a prison programme and the likes, but that was all within the legal framework. We had no idea how contaminated it was.’
He was right to a point. They hadn’t. Not right away. But it had soon become apparent, yet continued for decades.
Oonagh fished around in her briefcase; she held the notes in front of her face. ‘A certain children’s unit in Glasgow using infected products two years after they knew it was infected. Two years.’
Graham held his hands up. ‘OK, I’ll admit that was wrong. There’d been a suggestion that one of the medical reps was either shagging or bribing the sister who signed off the order for the products and they just kept using it.’
‘Now I really am going to be sick.’ She thought for a moment. ‘So who killed Andrew, then?’
Graham looked at her, clearly confused. ‘Dorothy. I thought you knew that.’
‘Oh, come on. That’s a bit convenient. And where does Dorothy fit into all of this?’
He didn’t answer, instead stared out of the window. She was totally pissed off with this.
‘Right, you won’t talk? I’m going to the police.’
He let out a snort. ‘For almost thirty years thousands of people have been campaigning for a public inquiry. For almost thirty years victims have begged for justice. For almost thirty years people have died from medical negligence and not one person has lifted a finger to help. And you. You? You think you can change that with one phone call. Grow up! Get your ego in check, you stupid cow, and realise this is bigger than anything you can imagine.’
She wasn’t prepared for that and didn’t like being on the back foot. Then it slowly dawned on her.
‘This has nothing to do with keeping your kids away from press intrusion, has it?’
For the first time he looked genuinely scared.
‘You’re terrified. Those kids are the insurance policy against you blabbing.’
He shot her a look.
‘I’m right, aren’t I? Listen to me, Graham, you tell me what I came here for or I guarantee I’ll find your family, and I can find them, you’re darn tootin the guys that found Marjory Channing’ll find them too. The press’ll be the least of your worries.’
The by now familiar sense of panic was rising in her chest, but she swallowed it down. The buzz from her phone snapped her back on track. A text from Davies. She didn’t read it. She’d get it later. Whatever he wanted, it could wait. She sat back and crossed her legs.
‘I’ve got all the time in the world, Graham. And if you don’t play ball I guarantee when you croak it, I’ll be screaming from the rooftops about how much information you gave me – and what you don’t tell me, I’ll make up. We’ll see how safe your family is then.’ She was aware there were tears in her eyes, but she needed to keep this in check.
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Well, you’ll hardly be in a position to stop me.’
‘Bitch.’
‘Is that how you refer to strong women on the east coast? You need to visit Glasgow more often.’ The sadness for Dorothy Malloy and Eva Muirhead now formed a solid ball of anger in the pit of her stomach. Moments passed. The clock on the wall the only thing to break the silence. Then he spoke.
‘Andrew was never meant to die.’
Oonagh gave the slightest nod, telling him to continue.
‘Things just got out of hand. He’d been keeping his own set of notes from each autopsy. When he could see that young kids were presenting with chronic liver failure he was convinced they were contracting it from the blood products. He was going to blow this thing wide open.’
His voice was low and calm but Oonagh could see a thin band of sweat form on his top lip. Globules of saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth.
‘But as you already said, a lot of this was in the public domain—’
He cut in before she could finish. ‘Not at that stage. We were still at the very early days. We had everything to go for with this.’
‘What was your cut?’ Oonagh guessed Graham Anderson wasn’t just complying with this for the greater good of mankind.
‘My what?’
‘You must have got something out of this.’
‘We needed the contaminated victims.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I need you to know it wasn’t about the money. We needed to know the pathology of the diseases. We were getting patients under near perfect conditions.’ He became more animated, almost looked excited. ‘D’you realise how rare that is in medical research?’
She didn’t bother answering him. She’d heard about as much as she could take. But was still no closer to the truth about who killed Andrew Malloy, and this old man in front of her knew the answer. He looked tired, grew increasingly frail, but she wasn’t leaving until she had what she was looking for. She let him continue.
‘Then, when a completely new viral strain started to appear, well, let’s just say that’s not something which happens in medical science every day. This was a chance to be part of history. Be up there with Lister, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming.’
Oonagh knew he was talking about AIDS, HIV. She’d been a teenager in the eighties. Grown up with the threat of AIDs. More terrifying than any unwanted pregnancy. She was scared to ask. But knew she had to. ‘Was there ever an occasion…? Did you ever…?’
He nodded; she didn’t even have to finish. ‘Did we ever knowingly infect someone with HIV? Yes. Yes, we did. I’m not proud. But I’m not ashamed either.’
Both Marjory and Eva had already told Oonagh that it was primarily children, boys as young as five, who were infected with the AIDs virus. The best way to understand the pathology of a disease was to examine it for as long a time as possible. The best way to do that was to experiment on children. Oonagh felt a sense of shame when she recalled her first conversation with Marjory. She’d thought she was a nutter. A fantasist. Bigging up her part and getting lost along the way. But everything she’d said was true. And lots more besides.
‘Miss O’Neil,’ Graham cut in on her thoughts, ‘we now live in a world where people live with HIV, rather than die from it. It’s no longer the death sentence it once was. Can you honestly tell me you’re not pleased about that?’
‘But your kids are safe.’
‘I beg your—’
‘Your kids. You’ve spent all this time in exile terrified that they’ll come to harm. Let them die for the greater good. If you knew that five thousand people would live if they had to die would that be OK?’
‘This is not personal.’
‘It’s personal to the mother whose seven-year-old son died from AIDs. It’s fucking personal to her husband, who topped himself because the doctors accused him of having a homosexual affair and infecting his son in the womb. It’s fucking personal when it haunts her dreams each night and each day is a living nightmare for her!’
She stared into his eyes and he didn’t falter for a moment. His rheumy gaze was fixed on her.
‘As I say, Andrew was never meant to die.’
Suddenly the murder of Andrew Malloy was more palatable than talking about the deliberate genocide of the innocents.
‘We knew Andrew was keeping his own research notes, which could put half of us in prison. It’s one thing having a nurse or a legal secretary squawking away, but when it comes from a top surgeon who works closely with the Home Office, then…’ he shook his head ‘… that’s just not on. I need you to know I wanted to protect Dorothy from all this. I was trying to make sure she was OK.’
‘Have you any idea what happened to her in Cartland? More fucking medical experiments by posh boys wit
h their medical degrees playing God again. Well done.’
‘I’d had no idea she was suffering from post-partum psychosis. Well, what I mean is I had no idea how damaging that could be. We drip-fed her information. Made calls suggesting that Andrew was having an affair.’
‘What for? How could that stop him being a whistle-blower?’
‘At first it was as a distraction. A warning to him. Then we needed to discredit him.’
Oonagh’s phone buzzed once more. Alec again. Once more she ignored it. This wasn’t the time to break for a chat. She wasn’t liking what she was hearing. Judging by Dorothy Malloy’s diary, it hadn’t taken much to tip her over the edge.
‘Dorothy became more and more unstable. Her paranoia being fed by the belief that Andrew was cheating on her.’
‘Was he?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’
Oonagh wasn’t getting this. The leap from suspicious wife to vicious killer.
‘Even with the erratic behaviour, did she have enough reason to kill Andrew?’
‘As I said, things just got out of hand. That stupid bastard just wouldn’t listen. He was ruining it for the rest of us. He wouldn’t get off his fucking moral high horse.’
Oonagh could picture the scene. The young Andrew Malloy not being grateful enough to be part of the gang.
‘Did he really have to die?’
Anderson sank his head into his hands. ‘I wanted out by this time. After the first girl was killed.’
Oonagh’s heart raced in her chest. Her throat grew dry. She needed to tread carefully with this one. ‘Janet Channing?’
He nodded. ‘She was feeding Andrew information from her sister in the States. Giving him the backup, the proof if you like, that the blood came from “skid-row donors”, as you put it. And that it was most likely so contaminated as to be deadly.’
‘Who signed off that one?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Cut the bullshit.’
‘I’ve got no reason to lie to you now, have I?’ He faltered for a few seconds. ‘The truth is I just don’t know. All I know is that she was passing Andrew the information from her sister, then she was killed.’
Keep Her Silent Page 25