Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  Then I dialled the number Bob had given me.

  ‘Shiner,’ came the laconic greeting.

  ‘Adam Shiner? I’m ringing you in connection with a murder case,’ I said, giving my name and details.

  Shiner didn’t miss a beat. ‘Bob Edwards said you’ve been looking for me. Tianna Richardson? I used to see her from time to time,’ he said. ‘But I hear you’ve charged someone.’

  ‘That’s so, but we need to eliminate you officially. I’ll be in town this evening,’ I said. ‘I’d like to catch up with you.’

  ‘I’m a married man, Dr McCain. But I can meet you somewhere.’

  He lived at Ryde and we agreed that I’d ring him as I approached Sydney and make a time and place to meet that evening.

  I went over Brian’s words again and listed the facts. It seemed clear enough that there was sufficient evidence against Damien Henshaw to get to committal. If only, I thought, leaning back in my seat and stretching my aching neck and shoulders, we’d been able to gather such undeniable links to a suspect in the case of Dr Claire Dimitriou’s murder. I stood up and pushed my chair back under the desk. That investigation had hit a brick wall.

  I packed my notes together, jamming everything into my briefcase. I wanted to fill every minute with work so that there was no space left.

  Twenty-four

  Half an hour out of Sydney I rang Adam Shiner. I told him I had an appointment in Lane Cove and he suggested we meet later at the Country Comfort on the Pacific Highway. I agreed, grateful to be busy at this hour and not sitting alone beside the fire, knowing that Iona’s car would not be pulling up outside the cottage any more.

  About an hour later, I was at the door of Jerri Quill’s parents’ house. I knew it was her the moment she opened the front door to my knock—piles of tightly curled hair surrounding a wide, intelligent face. She wore a long striped jumper over tights, her face was scrubbed and she resembled a dancer more than someone involved in postgraduate science studies.

  After our initial introductions, Jerri took me through the large old house to her untidy room at the rear. Her desk was piled high with papers and folders and the bench tops were littered with specimen jars and other glassware. There was a decent microscope in the corner and a wash-up sink and drainage board.

  ‘Brian Kruger sent someone to take my official statement,’ she said, ‘not long after we spoke on the phone. I can’t believe Claire is dead.’

  ‘Jerri, this is not official,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard about the scene with Dr Dimitriou from your flatmate in Canberra. Now I’d like to hear it from you.’

  Jerri reached for a bottle of water and drank some, apparently nervous.

  ‘I’ve already explained all that in my statement. That scene, as you call it, couldn’t have had anything to do with Claire getting murdered! It was just one of those things. People working close together. Getting in each other’s hair. Working long hours. Tempers get short.’

  ‘From what I’ve heard, it sounded far more serious than just the stress and strain of a long day in the lab. You left town over this dispute. Wendy told me you’re considering throwing in your scientific career.’

  She turned away from me and went to stare out the window, fiddling with one of her tight curls. She wasn’t all that much older than Jacinta and I felt for her.

  ‘Please, Jerri, I wouldn’t be here except we’re just not getting anywhere with this case. I need your help. Please tell me what happened.’

  I saw her shoulders lift in a huge sigh before she slumped down on a large cushion in the corner.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m forgetting my manners with all this stress.’

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t let someone’s unfortunate over-reaction ruin your whole career.’ I would have said the same to Jacinta if she’d been in this position.

  ‘It was awful,’ she said after a silence. ‘I still get upset when I think about it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I made a mistake. With an assay,’ she said.

  ‘We all do,’ I said. ‘It’s part of being human.’

  She gave me a wan smile. ‘Dr Dimitriou didn’t seem to think so. The way she went on, it was like I’d committed an unforgiveable sin.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She was silent a moment. ‘That’s just it. I wish I knew. I don’t know what I did. When Claire went off at me I felt like a little kid again, when some stupid adult won’t tell you why you’re in trouble. Just that you’re in it big time.’

  I remembered that feeling only too well. You’re so wicked, so lost to goodness, that you don’t even recognise a terrible sin when you commit it.

  ‘I thought I’d done everything according to the instructions,’ Jerri continued. ‘I’d even opened a new kit. We’d recently switched to a new supplier of reagents and ELISA plates. They were brand new and uncontaminated.’ She reached over to get her bottle of water.

  Any sense of achievement I might have felt at finally talking to Jerri Quill evaporated. Even she didn’t know what she’d done. ‘So when did it happen?’ I asked.

  ‘The Friday before Claire was killed was the beginning of it.’ She looked down at her hands, shaken by her own words. I wrote down ‘Friday’ in my pocket diary.

  ‘Things had been tense in the lab for some weeks before that though,’ Jerri was saying. ‘Peter had been getting weirder.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, feigning ignorance.

  ‘He’d got all religious suddenly. Or something. I think he was involved with a cult. He’d brought his Bible into the lab and kept reading out all this death and destruction stuff. It got so bad that I used to dread going there.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So Dr Dimitriou yelled at you on Friday?’

  ‘No, no,’ Jerri interrupted me. ‘I prepared the assay for the automated process on Friday, but the result wasn’t apparent until after the weekend. She didn’t yell at me till Monday, when she saw the results of the assay. At the time I was writing up the results.’

  ‘You’d better tell me the whole story,’ I said.

  ‘I’d been rushing to leave the lab on the Friday,’ she said, ‘because my flatmate and I were hoping to get to a six o’clock screening of a movie we wanted to see. Dr Dimitriou asked me to set up the ELISA machine so that we could run an assay on the rabbits’ antibody levels over the weekend. Do you know how those tests work?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, hoping she’d give me more details.

  ‘With the Terminator Rabbit project, we’ve been working with six different strains of the rabbit pox virus—all of them carrying the sterile gene. But naturally one strain is always going to be more effective than another.’

  ‘Dallas Baxter told me a bit about this,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to hear it from you.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Jerri, leaning back. ‘We’ve been working with six rabbits who are variously immune to the six different strains of our specially treated rabbit pox virus. We’re trying to find—I mean, we were trying to find—the best strain to develop out of the six. Whichever strain we select has to satisfy two criteria. It must be lethal, at least among the feral rabbit population, and it must be efficient in delivering the sterile factor—the Terminator Rabbit gene. Once we’ve got evidence of infection, we’d be testing to see if the sterile factor has combined with the test rabbits’ own DNA. Then the next step will be to see if that in fact does make them sterile. Or if they can still reproduce but pass sterility on to the next generation.’

  ‘So you use rabbits who’ve been immunised against rabbit pox,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, nodding. ‘We don’t want to kill them. But we want them to have a non-lethal dose of the disease so that the virus combines with their genetic material. Then we can test further to see if sterility has been facto
red into their DNA. That part of it is some way down the track. At the moment, we’re still refining the different strains of the virus.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about rabbit pox,’ I confessed.

  ‘It’s a disease of laboratory animals and not yet described in the wild,’ Jerri said. ‘It’s quite harmless to any living creature except rabbits We’re hoping to use it eventually against the wild populations and the theory we’ll be testing is that after we’ve introduced some future rabbit pox epidemic, the 5 to 10 per cent of rabbits that tend to survive the virus without immunisation, and which under normal conditions would start breeding up new generations of resistant animals, will now be carrying the sterile gene in their DNA. The way things stand now, that 5 to 10 per cent that do survive pass immunity on to their offspring and so the populations start building up again. That’s what happened with myxomatosis. And it’s happening now, after the calicivirus. This way, we aim to breed out any of the survivors by having the resistant animals carry this fatal flaw in their chromosomes.’

  ‘Because of the sterile gene that’s now part of their DNA after they’ve beaten the infection,’ I said. ‘It’s a very smart hypothesis.’

  ‘Science is full of smart hypotheses,’ said Jerri with a faint smile. ‘It’s seeing if they work in practice that’s important.’

  ‘So the immunoassay that you’d set up before the weekend was to test the rabbits’ antibody responses?’ I asked. ‘To make sure they’d contracted the disease?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jerri. ‘Just to make sure they’d had a dose sufficient to deliver the sterile gene.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Standard procedure. I set up an ELISA immunoassay to determine whether or not the rabbits had been infected by a dose of rabbit pox. I’ve done this dozens, hundreds, of times. I set up the plates and the various dilutions of rabbit serum, started the ELISA run and off I went to the movies.’

  ‘Where were Dr Dimitriou and Peter Yu at this time?’

  ‘Not sure. They often worked over in the office area, either alone or together.’

  ‘Help me get a picture of what the assay involved,’ I said and gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like that.’

  ‘The plates come already coated with serum,’ she said. ‘I added our six test animals’ serum to the wells—two rows per rabbit—to test the six strains. They’re coded RP1—that’s Rabbit Pox 1—and so on to RP6.’

  ‘You allow two rows per rabbit?’ I repeated to make sure, jotting down some notes.

  ‘Yes. Each rabbit has a replicate row, just to make doubly sure.’

  ‘That’s two by eight lots of wells per rabbit,’ I said, half-thinking aloud. ‘And then after the immunoassay has done its run, the tests show either positive or negative results.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jerri. ‘If there’s been no exposure to the disease, there’s only a negative reaction and no colour development. But if it’s positive, the colour development intensifies and the material in the wells turns blue.’

  ‘Blue,’ I repeated trying to integrate this new information and thinking that two by eight equalled sixteen.

  ‘So tell me what happened on Monday,’ I continued.

  ‘I arrived early and I was the only one there. The green lights on the machine told me the assay was finished. I was writing up the results when Claire arrived.’

  ‘What were the results?’

  ‘That’s where the problem started,’ Jerri sighed. ‘As soon as I took the plate out, I could see that it hadn’t been a successful run. The colour hadn’t developed in most of the wells. Usually—depending on the degrees of immunity in the individual rabbits and which RP strain they’ve been given—all the wells are some sort of blue. Paler or darker. But except for RP4’s two rows, none of the other wells had developed any colour at all. Either the other five rabbits had become so resistant that their systems were no longer even recognising the antigen as a threat and no longer making antibodies, or I must have put the wrong dilutions in or something. But I swear I did exactly the same procedures as I’ve done many times before. Why would I alter things? I knew the routine by heart. I wondered then if the plate had lost its integrity, been exposed to sunlight or got wet or something. But I knew it had been a brand new sterile pack I’d opened from a brand new carton of supplies. And after all, RP4’s wells were showing the deep blue colour development of a positive reaction. So the plate must have been viable. All I could do was start writing up the results. And that’s what I was doing when Claire came in. I told her about the results and she looked at the plate. She kept staring at me and then at the plate. I asked her, “What is it? What’s wrong?” But she seemed speechless. She stood there, pointing to the plate and staring at it. Then she started screaming at me. “Can’t you see what’s happened here? What have you done?”

  ‘I tried to tell her I’d done exactly what I always did. I tried to calm her down. But she was crazy. She kept saying: “Can’t you see what you’ve done? Can’t you see what’s happened here?” What did I think I was doing using that plate, she asked. I kept telling her it was brand new, from the new supplies. But she couldn’t seem to hear me. She kept saying, “What the hell have we done here?” Then she snatched the lab book out of my hand.’

  ‘Did you see what she did with it?’

  ‘No,’ said Jerri. ‘She just grabbed it, going on about this terrible thing I’d done. Then Peter came in and went over and had a look. They started arguing but I couldn’t take any more so I ran out. I didn’t want him to start on at me too.’

  ‘Don’t make any hasty decisions about your career yet,’ I said after a silence. ‘I’m sure the board of examiners would understand your distress—under the circumstances—and you could switch to another research lab without penalties to your doctorate.’

  Jerri stood up and went to the window. ‘I just don’t know. I’m not used to that sort of behaviour. I didn’t think science was like that. I don’t want to work in a world where people behave hysterically. And Peter had been freaking me out with his religious stuff and, before that he’d been stressed out of his head. And now, with Claire murdered . . . Everything’s gone crazy and irrational.’

  I had to keep a straight face. What did Jerri Quill think the world was like? Irrational was a defining characteristic.

  ‘I hope I’ve been of some help. I can’t cope thinking that Claire’s killer is out there somewhere,’ she said, taking her glasses off and slipping them in a pocket.

  ‘Wendy asked me to send you her love,’ I said, remembering after a pause.

  ‘Before I go,’ I added, paying great attention to her face, ‘did you ever see anything between Claire and Peter of a romantic nature? Anything to indicate that they might be more to each other than workmates?’

  Jerri shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. Claire was a very proper woman.’

  I smiled to myself. If only she knew.

  ‘She didn’t approve of Peter Yu at all,’ Jerri continued.

  ‘She knew about his girlfriends?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone knew about his girlfriends! He had a new one every month! He was notorious. Even a humble little doctoral student like me knew about it.’ She looked down at her fingernails. ‘He was pressuring me at one stage—wouldn’t let up until I practically had to insult him.’

  As I was leaving, I turned to her. ‘Wendy misses you. Don’t lose sight of your ambition, just because of this. Your life’s too important.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No maybe about it. Because one day, if you finish your doctorate, I might need to call on you. Jerri, we all need each other in this game.’

  I sat in the car, thinking about what I’d just heard from Jerri, keeping my mind away from Iona by working hard at pu
tting things together, trying to fit the pieces in the right way. Something had happened in the Terminator Rabbit lab, something to do with a rabbit pox assay and whatever it was, it had created the necessary conditions for the murder of a scientist. ‘She saw sixteen blue . . . something’ Claire had repeated to her partner in the heated argument overheard by Kevin Waites. Sixteen blue wells. Claire must have been referring to Jerri and the assay results. But why? Why did sixteen positive wells create such a disturbance? Wouldn’t Dr Dimitriou have been more disappointed with the negative results from the other five test rabbits? At least RP4 had responded to the infection successfully.

  Taking a break from trying to make sense of all this, I rang my daughter and left a message to tell her that I had some jobs to chase up in Sydney and that I’d be spending the night at Malabar, arriving later.

  I stayed sitting in the car. I kept rerunning a scene in my head, like a video replay, of the grief counsellor brushing dandruff from a man’s suit. The intimacy of that gesture had been troubling me, stirring under the surface of my everyday mind. While in Sydney I was going to drop in on Earl Richardson. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t out of the frame for his wife’s death. Then I turned the car in the direction of the Pacific Highway and aimed for the Country Comfort.

  I didn’t recognise Adam Shiner immediately but I could hardly be blamed—this was the first time I’d seen him clothed. I looked around the restaurant and, seeing a fair man sitting alone at a corner table, took a punt and won.

  Shiner had unruly fair eyebrows, cagey eyes and a thin mouth. He watched me warily as I approached to introduce myself. He didn’t offer me a chair but I sat down opposite him anyway.

  ‘You having a drink?’ he asked and I shook my head.

  ‘Why didn’t you come forward earlier? You must have known we’d turned up your photograph,’ I said.

  ‘I thought the reason would be pretty obvious,’ he said after a pause. ‘Like I said on the phone, I’m a married man. You know how these things are. Besides,’ he added, ‘I was with Tianna the afternoon she died. It wouldn’t have looked good.’