“I had my suspicions,” Tarquin said, “when I saw you in Wells Cathedral looking quite different from the Caitlin we know here. And then my friend thought he recognized that good-looking guy that you were with. Later he remembered that he’d seen him at a conference and that he was an astronomer at Cambridge. So that was it, really. I did some research online and got his name. He’d been in Antarctica and the woman medic out there did bear a resemblance to you if you got rid of the make-up and dye job.”
“Does anyone else know? What about Claudia?”
“Don’t worry. You’re among friends. I’m sure Claudia hasn’t a clue. I assume that you are here to check up on her?”
Katie nodded. “There’ve been some concerns about her results – and the rapid turnover of technicians.”
“Claudia is far too arrogant to imagine that anyone would have doubts about her work. And I only told Maddie here, because she’d already confided in me that she thought there was something dodgy going on.”
Maddie said, “I haven’t said anything to anyone else, because, well, there might not have been anything in it. But I know Sophie was worried. She was pretty sure there was something wrong. She didn’t know what to do. She thought of confronting Claudia, she thought of going to see Gemma, but in the end...” She shrugged.
“She decided not to do anything,” Katie said.
“Yeah, and I couldn’t blame her really. For one thing, she wasn’t absolutely sure – she said there wasn’t really a way that she could be certain, and then even if she had been...”
Yes, even if she had been, she was just a technician, low down in the pecking order. Everyone she might have spoken to was invested in the success of the research. They wouldn’t want to believe her, and even if they did, the record of what happened to whistle-blowers was a dismal one, as Katie knew from bitter experience.
“Did she say what she thought was wrong?” she asked. “Did she think Claudia was manipulating her results, fudging things to make them look better than they were?”
“It was more than that, but what exactly I don’t know. And that’s why I think it must have been something serious. Sophie didn’t want to tell me what she thought it was.”
“Do you think it was out-and-out fraud of some kind? Maybe that Claudia hadn’t even been running the experiments that she was supposed to?”
Maddie shook her head. “No, she had been running them. I know it wasn’t that.”
If it wasn’t a question of the data being manipulated, or the experiments never being carried out in the first place, then what was left? Katie thought about the inventory and the discrepancy that she’d decided she needed to double-check. Light was beginning to dawn.
“You don’t have any idea at all what it might have been?” she asked Maddie.
Maddie looked at Tarquin. “I’ve thought and thought about it, and I haven’t come up with anything. But Tarquin had an idea.”
Tarquin said, “There is a way that you could get those results and yet they’d be a fake –”
“What is it?” Katie asked.
“It’s just a crazy idea and I don’t know how you’d get away with it.”
Katie said, “Could it be something to do with the avian virus that Claudia claims to have transmitted to her human cell-line?”
Tarquin stared her. “So you’ve had the same idea.”
“I’ve just been comparing what we have left in stock with what Claudia claims to have used. It doesn’t quite add up. It won’t be all that difficult to find out. In fact I might be able to have a result by tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do?” Tarquin asked.
“I’m going to get hold of a sample of the cell-line that Claudia claims she’s infected with avian flu and I’m going to send it off for sequencing.”
And amazingly she could do that through the ordinary mail with an FTA card, a chemically treated paper designed to preserve biological samples. You only needed a microlitre, which you applied to the card. The result would be returned to her in the form of a link to a website and a password.
“Can you really get it back by tomorrow?” Maddie asked her.
“At a price. And Lyle’s said he’s willing to pay for whatever I need. But I’ll need to get a move on if I’m to catch the post.”
* * *
Katie didn’t want to put the sample in the post at the lab and risk someone seeing it and wondering about it. There was a postbox down by the quayside. She headed for that and was only just in time. The postman had collected the contents of the box and was about to drive away. She had to run to hand the package to him. She watched as the van headed out across the causeway and then made her way up the hill to her apartment.
As she unlocked her door, a phone buzzed. It was Katie’s private phone, which she’d left on the kitchen table. A text had come in. It was from Minnie. “Have found out about Claudia! Ring me.”
Katie rang her and Minnie answered straightaway.
“It was Sam who’d heard something about her. It was from a guy who worked in the same lab when Claudia had her first postdoc job. Apparently there were rumours going around that there was something wrong with her work. But she was her PI’s blue-eyed girl and in the end no one said anything. She managed to get several publications out of the work she’d done – her PI was a named author – and then she moved on to Debussy Point. No one was sorry to see her go.”
“What kind of rumours?”
“That she hadn’t really got the results she claimed she’d got. Sam didn’t know any more than that. And you know how it is. No one wanted to put their head above the parapet.”
Oh, yes. Katie knew alright.
“And something else. There’d been some unpleasant things happening in the lab. Someone came in one morning and found their photos wrecked – that kind of thing. It stopped when she left.”
Before Katie ended the call, she thought to ask, “You haven’t heard about the job yet, I suppose,” and Minnie said she hadn’t and wasn’t sure she’d take it even if it was offered.
After they’d ended the call, she wondered about the mishaps in the malaria lab. Could those be down to Claudia? For some people it wasn’t enough to succeed; others must fail.
There was another text waiting. It was from Rachel and it simply said, “FaceTime me!”
* * *
As soon as she saw Rachel’s face, Katie knew it was good news.
“He’s a match!” Rachel said.
“That’s wonderful!”
“Of course, we mustn’t get our hopes up too high. There are all the other tests that have to be done. And then if he’s approved as a donor, there’ll be the operation.”
Yes, as Katie was well aware, there were still formidable obstacles ahead. It would be several months before they could be sure that Benjamin did not have DBA, and he would have to be screened for other diseases.
“But if all goes well?” Katie asked.
“Surgery’ll be scheduled for some time in the summer.”
They both knew that even if all was well and Benjamin was approved as a donor, Chloe’s operation would not be straightforward. The danger would not be as great with a sibling as from a donor who was a stranger, but all the same, there were risks. She would have to have chemotherapy drugs to knock out her immune system so as to reduce the risk that her body would reject Benjamin’s stem cells.
But how could they not hope, when they had got this far? It would mean so much, nothing less than a complete cure for Chloe. No more blood transfusions every month, no more infusions five nights a week. Always they lived with the knowledge that these were difficult for young adults to manage. It was something they never talked about – because what was the point? – but they knew that life expectancy was not high among sufferers of DBA.
Rachel lifted Benjamin up so that Katie could see him. He would soon be three weeks old. Already, he looked different – less like a generic baby and more like a person, already himself, unique.
“He’s less fussy than Chloe was,” Rachel said. “Or maybe I’m just more relaxed.” She nuzzled his neck. “Whatever happens, you’re my beautiful boy,” she told him.
Katie put out her hand to the screen and Rachel put the tiny hand to touch it on her side.
“He’s so gorgeous. I want one!” Katie said.
Rachel laughed. “Well, you never know. How are things going with Justin?”