Some men interpret nine memos
When Gabriel telephoned Brook on Monday he was told by a blockish policeman’s voice that Brook was busy. It was only after a little persistence that he even managed to leave a message for Brook to call back, which he duly did half an hour later.
“Did you know that Samant didn’t cycle straight home after finishing work the day Anna was murdered? He bought a lottery ticket from the newsagent’s on the estate.”
Brook said he was aware of this fact.
“The thing is I saw him over the weekend and he told me he’d cycled straight home after work. There was no mention of a visit to the newsagent ‘s to buy lottery tickets.”
“Maybe he misunderstood what you asked him? His English is quite poor.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so.” Gabriel remembered the fearful expression of Samant’s wife’s when he had answered him. “Isn’t it possible that Samant could have cycled back past Nebotec after going to the newsagent’s and seen something or someone before Anna was killed?”
“He could be lying, of course, but in his statement he says it was very dark and he saw nothing when he cycled back past Nebotec. And that he got home just after 6.00.”
“You have his wife’s statement for that, I suppose?”
“Yes, but we’ve no reason to doubt her. There are a few other witnesses who saw him cycling home. They say that he wasn’t covered in blood. Do you know something we don’t?”
Gabriel hesitated; it was the natural hesitation of a pathologist unwilling to deliver a diagnosis before it is certain. “No, but it’s all very puzzling. I keep thinking about those slides and the way the microscope stage was in the wrong place.”
“We’re keeping an open mind on that. You may be right but we carried out a few tests here, substituting a female police officer of similar height and stature to Dr Taylor at the microscope and we found that it was possible that the stage could be moved if Dr Taylor fell forward over the microscope in a certain way.”
“So, you don’t think the slides were changed?”
“I didn’t say that,” Brook replied cautiously. “But, as you said the other day, it’s difficult to see why they should have been. Dr Taylor reported that they were normal in her lab book and Nick Grant, Dr Reynolds and you say they look normal as well. So why should they have been changed?”
“But why did she ask for that particular experiment to be done again. Just to check a result? That meant a lot of work for her. A lot of slides to look at. I can’t believe she would have done all that for nothing. Have you checked the blocks of the slides?”
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line before Brook answered, “Of course.”
“And do the sections on the slides match the outline of the tissues in the block?”
“They appear to. They’re the same shape.”
“But you can’t say for certain? One mouse bone looks pretty much like any other.”
“If you can suggest any other test that we should carry out on the blocks then we’ll do it,” Brook answered flatly.
Gabriel had an inkling that he was irritating Brook with his amateur detective work. “Wait until tomorrow when I look at the slides again.” His job was almost done. He had reminded Brook that the solution to Anna’s murder might yet be in the slides he was examining. It was up to him to identify the one diagnostic feature that would convince Brook (and himself) that he was on the right track. “Anyway,” Gabriel added, “it sounds as if you may not be that interested. Nick Grant tells me that you’ve arrested someone outside Nebotec.”
“Naughty Nick. He shouldn’t have said anything about that to anyone. We’ve questioned someone to be precise. A member of an Animal Rights Group with a criminal record. We had to eliminate him from our inquiries — which we did.”
“Whoever killed Anna must have had sufficient motive to carry out a brutal murder. His (or her) clothing would have been covered in blood. Of course, it’s possible that some provision was made for that. The murderer might have worn an overcoat as well as boots. Taylor was the only one with blood on him. Lots of it too. Do you think he did it?”
“He’s certainly in the frame.”
“So, why haven’t you arrested him?”
“We’ve not worked out the details and we’ve no real evidence. We really need the murder weapon to wrap it up, all neat and tidy. We may never find it if it was thrown into the stream by the cycle track. It’s a branch of the Cherwell and it could have been dragged down river toward Oxford and the Thames.”
“Taylor doesn’t strike me as the type somehow to have done it. At least not alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not imaginative enough. He’s not an ideas man. He doesn’t initiate the experiments. Palmer does. Taylor just carries them out.”
“He may not have had ideas of his own but he could have harboured ambitions or resentments. I’ve been twenty years in this game and I’ve seen all types commit murder. There was a pause before Brook added darkly, “But, of course, this may not just be about the Nebotec slides.”
Gabriel wondered if that was a reference to Anna’s relations with Hewitt.
“What do you mean?” he asked.” Hewitt?”
“No. But there may have been someone else. We went through the student records of Anna Taylor and found that she had to miss a term for medical reasons in her second year.”
“Did you find out why? Gabriel asked, impressed with the thoroughness of Brook’s research.
“Apparently she had a curettage for vaginal bleeding when she was a student in Nottingham.”
“Do you know what for? A pathologist would have looked at the curettings.” Gabriel quickly considered the diagnostic possibilities before asking, “Was it because she was pregnant? That would be the most common cause.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“I wonder if that was why her father was angry with her. He told me that she had shamed the family.”
“It’s very likely.”
“I didn’t ask but I assume Anna wasn’t pregnant at the time of her death, was she?”
“No,” Brook answered simply.
Gabriel recalled his conversation with Pat and wondered if Brook’s investigations now covered the same possibilities. Very likely.
“You don’t know who was the father of Anna’s child?” he asked. “Unless there were fetal contents in the curettings, which is unlikely, then all the DNA would be of maternal origin.”
“Is that the case? No, we don’t know who was the father. We are using traditional police methods to go through the medical school records.”
Gabriel thought of quiet, fearful Tom Duncan who had been in Anna’s year at medical school.
“You will let me know if you find anything in the Nebotec slides, won’t you?” Brook spoke in a way that Gabriel interpreted as an attempt to end the conversation more amicably than it had begun.
“Of course,” Gabriel answered before plaiting together the skeins of Tom Duncan’s life into a cord. “But there’s something else you should know. About one of my staff in the Pathology Department...”
“Poole and co are hell bent on a rebanding exercise,” Gabriel told Liz who had popped in before going home to discuss the outcome of the meeting of the hospital management board. “They’re going to make every non-clinical staff member write their own job description and then offer a new grade on that basis.”
Liz was not amused. “That sounds very much like constructive dismissal to me.”
“You know, I never thought of it that way, but you’re probably right.” Gabriel looked down; he seemed to be apologising for his role in the whole business. “Still, they wouldn’t be attempting it if they didn’t think they could get away with it. They want to save money on support staff like medical secretaries, reorganising them into teams and giving them a new job title. It all sounds barmy...”
“Talk about using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. It’ll cause chaos.”
Gabriel echoed her tone. “And I bet it won’t save a penny. It’s only a matter of time before they do the same to doctors.”
They discussed ways and means of minimising the effect on their department. They had a common purpose and their solidarity was for a moment familiar and confidential. This was followed by a short silence from which they both immediately deduced that, despite all their talk, they had achieved nothing.
Liz Reynolds carefully pulled down her skirt to the level of her knee and stood up. The movement was so sudden that for a moment Gabriel had the embarrassing notion that she was going to pat him on the shoulder, or worse, hug him, but she abruptly wheeled away and, coolly changing the subject, said, “Speaking of other useless activities, I saw Palmer and Hewitt again at the college the other night. They both asked me when our final report on the PLF histology would be ready. I said you’d taken charge of it.”
Gabriel cleared his throat. “It’s all typed up and ready to go. I don’t know why I’ve delayed delivering it to them.”
Liz’s face wore a slightly acid smile. “I do.”
“Why then?” Gabriel asked, genuinely curious.
“Because the slides are all normal and, being a pathologist, you keep thinking there must be some pathology that you haven’t spotted. Isn’t that right?”
He nodded. “I still can’t help feeling that I must have missed something Anna noticed in those slides. She was murdered when she was looking down the microscope at them. I’ve found out that she wasn’t entirely happy about the results of some of the experiments that were going on at Nebotec. Wasn’t happy with a few people at Nebotec, in fact.”
Liz stood very still. “But you can only report what you see. Isn’t that what you’re always telling the trainees? And what you see looks normal. Why don’t you just get rid of it and move on? I mean, it’s not as if you’ve nothing else to do. There’s all the diagnostic work and your own research. Don’t you think...”
Liz stopped, aware that she was perhaps talking a little too harshly, scolding him in fact. The uncomfortable pause that followed was brushed away by Gabriel with a shrug of his shoulders.
“I don’t see any harm in holding onto the slides a day or so more. I still have a few things to get straight before letting them go.”
“Such as?”
“I need to know more about the palindromes Palmer was working on.”
A smile faded from Liz’s face — too quickly for a genuine smile. “I thought you said that no sensible man should waste his time on palindromes. I’ve been there and I know you’re right. I wasted a year of my D.Phil studying them before switching to proper genes. Palmer hasn’t converted you, has he?”
“Hardly. Let’s just say I’m making a few inquiries. I need to know a little more about them.”
Liz raised her eyebrows. As ever, she was quick to sense a change in the wind. Much too quick. “The trouble with you Adam is that you’re too clever by half.”
Gabriel pursed his lips but said nothing.
“You’re both never satisfied.”
“Both?”
“Palmer and you,” she explained.
Gabriel was genuinely surprised and a little hurt to be linked with Palmer in the same breath.
“You’re like he was when I worked with him as a student.”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t mind having one last gander at the slides of the PLF-treated mice before signing them all off as normal. I’m treating them as I would the slides of any case that’s difficult to diagnose. I’ve put them to one side and deliberately not looked at them for a couple of days. I’ll see if I have any fresh ideas when I look at them tomorrow. If I don’t spot anything new, I’ll hand in the report unchanged.”
“I’ve had enough of them. I’m sorry I ever got involved again. They’ve brought me nothing but trouble.”
“I just feel we should know as much as we can about what we’ve been asked to give our opinion. After all, isn’t that what we’d do if it was a tumour we had to diagnose? Why should this be any different?”
These questions summarised their divergent opinions which, deeply held, they both seemed to realise would not profit from being aired any further. Not now anyway.
Liz nodded. She said goodbye and, with a wave of her hand that was something of a peremptory command to get on with it, added, “Okay Adam, if that’s the way you want to play it, it’s your funeral.”
Gabriel noted the mixed metaphor.
Gabriel tried to return to his work after Liz left, but in the same way that the elusive diagnosis of a tumour nagged him he could not get the problem of Anna out of his mind.
He became aware of the sound of rain outside; he went to the window and parted the blinds. Steady rain was falling. By tomorrow the fields would be sodden.
Why the letter? That was what puzzled him more than anything else. Why had it been sent to his home address rather than to his work? After all, it was in his department in Oxford Anna was applying for the job. How had the letter read? For a number of reasons things haven’t worked out for me at Nebotec. And then there was what she had told Liz? Something about it being necessary to make a fresh start.
What had Pat said about blood tragedies? That the murders are committed for profit or sex. Profit? Well, they all at Nebotec stood to lose if Anna had spotted something untoward in the slides. And sex? Of course, that meant passion and not gender. Anna had been an attractive girl who turned more than a few male heads. Hewitt had marked himself out as one who had been attracted to Anna. Taylor may not have liked that. And what about Samant? Like unto like? A secret passion? And then there was Frances Hewitt? She had a malicious streak in her. She had disliked Anna — that was obvious enough — but would she have gone so far as to murder her for flirting with her husband? Would she have helped him if he had got into trouble with Anna?
It was a cloistered world at Nebotec, as much as at any Oxford college in fact. The difference was that it was more profit- than knowledge-driven. (Just like the modern NHS, Gabriel thought and almost uttered aloud). Everyone at Nebotec shared the same life, spoke the same language, had the same hopes, focused on the same goal — profit. And unless PLF succeeded there was no profit.
Brook was more right than he had given him credit for when he had said that it was important to know what went on at Nebotec. You need to have worked in the laboratory, to have focused solely on the PLF project to understand what it meant to the people there. Not just for a week or so as he had, checking Anna’s results, but for months and years. It would have dominated the lives of everyone there. You had to be at the meetings where they discussed science, not science in general but the science of their product. You had to see the greed in their eyes. You had to hear it and see it to be part of it. Only then could you know how they carried out their science and get a feel for how secure the results were.
Their world threw up unnatural, pharisaical relationships. Some were plain enough: the curious bond which tied Palmer and Taylor together. Palmer used Taylor as Watson and Crick must have used one of their laboratory assistants. And as for Liz, she clearly saw herself in the role of Rosalind Franklin, the ill-tempered biophysicist who believed that not only was she the true discoverer of DNA but also the one who had unjustly missed out on all the fame of Watson and Crick.
Was there any connection between the lottery ticket purchase and Anna’s death? Gabriel reproached himself for being carried away by this one fact. Seen in perspective, there was nothing but the sequence of events to link Samant with Anna’s murder: the sequence of events and Gabriel’s intuition, experience, extra sense — call it what you will — that made him think this fact must have some diagnostic significance.
Why had Samant lied to him about cycling straight home after work? He had told the truth to Brook and must have recognised that what he had told Gabriel was false. Had it been a slip of the tongue? Had he got the day wrong? No, there was nothing in his alert face to support a claim to absent-mindedness. Samant interested Gabriel. He was an anomaly, something abnormal, and being a pathologist, he was attracted to the abnormal: it provided the clue to diagnosis. There was Anna’s initial support and then (according to Taylor) definite cooling in her liking for Samant from the day she had helped him and visited his home. Had Samant counted on her to help him and his family remain in Britain, and when he had seen a cooling of her attitude toward him then courted the support of Hewitt and Palmer?
Anna had always struck Gabriel as highly principled, highly determined, someone who would not easily abandon what she strongly believed. There was a lot of her father in her. Yet at Nebotec she had found herself in a world of people who distinctly lacked principles.
Anna was complex. However much she had wanted to escape her Indian roots she could not resist being drawn back to them. Getting pregnant at medical school must have shamed her in the eyes of her family. It also must have upset that strongly envisioned future Gabriel believed Anna had mapped out for herself from an early age. She had suddenly found herself not sure what sort of man she was going to marry, how many children she was going to have. He needed to keep an open mind on Tom Duncan’s role in her life at that time and now — possibly, her death. Had not Melanie said that she could not find him when the urgent bone tumour biopsy had come through the night Anna was murdered?
In Gabriel’s diagnostic work an observation, once verified as certain, had to be accepted; it could not just be dismissed. This was the basis of his diagnostic method. And so, in the same way Gabriel considered whether the presence of an atypical cell might indicate that a tumour was malignant, he assessed the following proposition: “Assuming that the murder of Anna and Samant’s purchase of the lottery ticket are related, what was the point of Samant lying to him about cycling home directly?”
Gabriel remembered so well his visit to the Samant house. It had been strange because of the setting, one of neglect and poverty amongst which there was a shiny new television. Samant had pointed it out to Gabriel and was obviously proud of it. Had the new television been purchased before the murder? If so, where had the money come from? And his hopes for the future? A new house. There was another thing too about that visit — the anxious look that Samant’s wife had given him and his own conviction that Samant had been holding back some important detail about the slides he had prepared for Anna.
Gabriel did not see how Samant could profit directly from murdering Anna. Of course, that did not eliminate the possibility that he had been a party to it in some way. If he had cycled past Nebotec on his way home from the newsagent’s it was not beyond the realms of possibility that he had seen something. Or perhaps someone: someone he recognised but did not wish to identify because withholding this vital piece of information about Anna’s murder gave him a hold over whoever that was. He instantly thought of Hewitt and Taylor.
But in what way was Anna dangerous to them?
His eyes suddenly opened very wide. Of course — in one way, in one way only — as a pathologist who has made the correct diagnosis, who has realised that there had been a deliberate attempt to manipulate the data. Whoever had murdered Anna must have realised that her request for the experiment to be repeated and her insistence on personally sampling the tissues of the PLF-treated mice, would lead to her discovering that there was something wrong with the results. That brought him back to the letter. It was likely that whoever killed Anna was anxious that she should not talk to him; after all, he was in the same game as her and knew the implications of the deceit that was being manipulated.
It made some sense, but not much. It put Vishant Samant, his lies, his complicity, his wife’s fear, at the centre of the whole business. There was a lot that was still unexplained. What about Hewitt’s car and his phone call to his wife? What about Anna’s missing belongings? Who could Samant have seen? Was it the murderer?
Nothing was certain. He had constructed a long chain of possibilities but the links were insubstantial; they did not bear the weight of scrutiny. The diagnosis was still open. In pathology it is not enough just to diagnose whether the tissue contains a tumour or not: it is necessary to define what type of tumour it is, to identify the nature of the cell that has undergone neoplastic change — the cell wot dunnit.
Gabriel got up and stood a long time at the window. The rain had stopped. Sharp-edged beams of car headlamps criss-crossed the hospital car park. The wet tarmac of the road looked shiny.
He had little inclination or energy to sit down and continue his diagnostic work. In the end he managed to do so — there were urgent biopsies to report and there was no getting away from them. He had to find answers to the problem they posed and, as in the case of Anna Taylor, they were not easy or straightforward to figure out.