by Manda Scott
Carrying crates that had held other chickens in other days stood stacked in one of the sheds. WPC Philips and Inspector MacDonald, who had metamorphosed into Elspeth and Stewart during the chase, held a chicken each while I selected the two boxes with the most intact lids and escape-proof walls. We carried them back in triumph to the kitchen for a well-earned coffee.
A very faint tang of blood overlaid the ingrained smells of wet dog and peat smoke as a reminder of the night before. Other than that, the kitchen floor was cleaner than I had ever seen it. Lee had worked off a lot of aggression with a scouring mop. A lot more than the mess should have needed. I nipped upstairs on the pretext of going to the loo and checked the bedrooms.
The whole place looked like a hotel in limbo, waiting for the next set of guests.
Tidying things up is as good a way of searching as pulling them apart. I wondered if she had found anything useful.
Downstairs, Elspeth was having serious trouble with the Rayburn. Inspector MacDonald, who could have made it behave itself in seconds, was suffering a blatant attack of chauvinism along the lines that inspectors don’t make coffee for the underlings. He must have picked that one up from Laidlaw, it had a familiar ring to it.
I left the lass blowing ineffectually at the air vents and put on the electric kettle. Practical training might have been good for her soul but I needed my caffeine boost to kick my brain back into action. When I poured out the coffee, she left in a huff and went to talk to the hens on the porch. Odd girl.
The Inspector had draped his jacket over a chair. I raided the inside pocket as I handed him his coffee. He watched me do it and said nothing.
The post-mortem report was a finished, freshly typed version of the one I had seen the night before. The single addition was a concluding paragraph which suggested that the subject was almost certainly unconscious at the time of death, that there was a highly significant dose of temazepam in the stomach contents, reflected in an assay of plasma samples, and that this dose was likely to have been self-administered either for recreational purposes or with the intention of ending the subject’s life. The cause of death was therefore considered to be either accidental or self-inflicted. The pathologist was unable to offer an opinion as to which. The signature at the base was that of one Professor P. G. Gemmell, MD, PhD, FRCPath. For all I know, it could have been genuine.
MacDonald slurped at his coffee, his eyes on my face. ‘Did you know her well?’ he asked. His voice lost the gravel, softened for the time being by a kind of paternal concern.
‘Bridget? Yes. We’re joint owners of this place.’ I moved my head to indicate the farm and surrounding area.
‘Uhuh?’ It wasn’t really a question. He knew that already. ‘Would she have done it, d’you think?’
‘I don’t know. It’s four years since I last saw her.’ I shrugged. ‘I’d be extraordinarily surprised if she did.’
‘Mmm.’ He wasn’t really listening. Too busy watching the cats dissecting something small and feathered outside the window. ‘What about Dr Adams?’ he asked, mildly curious. ‘Do you still keep in touch with her?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was trying to call the Pathology Department to talk to the Professor about the results. He’s away for the day but the lassie on the phone said I could talk to a Dr Adams instead. I remembered she used to be a friend of yours. I didn’t realize she was in pathology.’
Ouch.
‘She was in surgery when the Chief Inspector knew her.’
‘And she’s working with Professor Gemmell now.’ He nodded as if it confirmed everything. ‘He was a colleague of the brother’s, is that right?’
‘He was his PhD supervisor. They went on working together after, right up till Malcolm died.’
‘He’s a great friend of the Chief Inspector. Did you know?’
Nothing would surprise me.
‘I suppose if you run the Forensic Department, you get to know the police fairly well.’
‘Aye. You do.’
A diplomatic pause.
This man is seriously on the ball. Why is he stuck out here in the middle of nowhere?
We drank our coffee in silence for a while and I watched him think. Like watching a fox move in on a pheasant. Slowly, very slowly. But always forwards.
‘I’ll maybe go and talk to her GP first,’ he said eventually. ‘We can have a look at the prescription records and see if she got the stuff from there in the first place. Time enough to bother the pathologists after that.’
He gathered his jacket and stood up, depositing a cat on to the floor.
‘Could you bring your friend back here for a chat?’ he asked. ‘Say perhaps tomorrow lunch-time? Twelve o’clock?’
‘Sure.’ I took his empty mug from his hand. ‘Do you mind if I tell her the post-mortem findings first? It might make it easier for her.’
‘No problem.’ He shook his head, smiling vaguely. ‘No problem at all.’
I left him to collect his hen-loving assistant and see himself out. Sadly, neither of them accepted my offer to take the chickens as they went. Unsporting of them. I’m sure the local station would be improved by the presence of a bantam or two. And no one would ever dream of trying to lift the little dears from there.
Caroline was out when I got home and there was no indication of when she was due home again. I carried the chickens up the stairs, doing my best not to alert the neighbours, and put the crates in the living room as a temporary measure while I made a sandwich and thought about what to do with them.
First-floor, two-bedroom, West End flats are not designed as substitute hen farms. The mere thought of what Janine was going to say made my head spin. On the other hand, it’s my flat, I pay for it and I keep the mortgage going, and there really was nowhere else to put them.
In the end, I knocked up a makeshift chicken coop in a corner of the spare room, wrote a hasty note to Caroline telling her where I’d gone and when I hoped to be back, and then headed off for the library. Probably I should have thought more about the incompatibility of chicken shit and computers but it didn’t occur to me at the time.
John Harries, chief librarian of the university library, is a dinosaur of the kind that justifies the theory of evolution: slow and ponderous, with a brain entirely resembling a filing cabinet and a charisma to match. It makes him the last of his kind, utterly incapable of reproduction. On the other hand, he has a brilliant memory and the kind of stunning naïveté that denies ever having made contact with the real world. As a combination, it has its uses.
He greeted me like a long-lost friend, which was true in part – it was years since I had last used the library – and waved me through the chicane of electronic security systems. Twenty minutes later I was safely ensconced in a booth with a microfiche reader digging out references.
In the days when the world and John Harries were young, cramming text in small type on sheets of blue plastic was state-of-the-art information processing. In the current era of on-line, worldwide data retrieval at the flick of a switch, it is slow, clumsy and inspires terrific headaches for minimal reward. But it is also untraceable and costs nothing.
By mid-way through the afternoon, I had a list of everything Dr Malcolm Donnelly had ever published, from his days as an undergraduate right through to a posthumous paper published, together with several pages of heartfelt obituary from colleagues and co-workers, in the most recent issue of Immunology.
Once upon a time, Malcolm was a paediatric physician, a very good one. Good enough to be spotted by the academic moguls during his time as a registrar and enticed away from the wards to the scholastic haven of the pathology research laboratory. Once there, he sailed through a PhD in cytology, moving from there into immunology and eventually into genetics. From then on his career kept him in the forefront of medical science, with papers published at frighteningly regular intervals in all the major international journals as indices of progress and achievement. He spiralled up the ladders of medical achieve
ment as far as he could possibly go, winning accolades and gathering kudos on the way. When I last spoke to him, just before I moved out of the farm, he was sitting on a senior lectureship and waiting for his professor to keel over so that he could take his place as head of department. In the meantime, he was working flat out to bring in grant money to keep himself and his multiple research projects afloat.
I gave up trying to understand Malcolm Donnelly’s work while we were still on the wards. He had a brain like a surgical laser and a capacity for lateral thinking that kept him on the leading edge of half a dozen fields at once. Whatever he was doing, Malcolm was a man driven by the need to be at the forefront of science. To be acknowledged as the best at whatever it was he chose to do. To create things he could point to in his old age and say, ‘Here I made a difference to the world.’
Except that somewhere along the line something had happened and there was not going to be an old age. All that was left of the man and his career was a three-page list of reference papers.
Somewhere, in one of them, there had to be a clue as to why. Two floors up from the microfiche readers, back copies of all the world’s medical journals are stacked in order of name and date. I picked up a coffee from the vending machine on the inter-floor landing and began the laborious process of finding and copying papers. Professor Norrie Lear still had his name on the credit list for the photocopier, which was fairly surprising given that he died eighteen months before I graduated, but his posthumous generosity saved me a substantial sum in photocopy fees all the way through my final year and beyond. There are reasons why the Health Service is broke and I am one of them.
Shortly after eight, with my head spinning and lines of text floating in waves past my eyes, I treated myself to coffee in the canteen and used the pay-phone to call home.
Caroline was still out and I listened to my own recorded voice informing me that I would attend to my message as soon as I got home. Some hope. All of my friends know that this is a fantasy, even when life is stable. I keyed in a four-digit code and listened to the single message, which was from Lee, telling me that she would be at the Man in the Moon at half past eight if I wanted to meet her there. Even over the phone her voice had the kind of tone that suggested it would be in my best interests to go. The joys of modern high-speed communication.
I was late, of course, but not excessively so. Lee was there ahead of me, sitting at the usual place on the balcony, mashing a fork idly through the remains of her haggis and neeps, her concentration focused on a shorthand pad that stood on the table in front of her, propped up against the ubiquitous glass of mineral water. She was dressed entirely in black. Very odd. I thought she’d grown out of that years ago.
I collected half a bitter from the bar and sat down.
‘You look like a spare part from a Pride march, Adams, you know that.’
She closed the notepad and glanced up, amused. ‘Thanks. I knew you’d appreciate it.’ She flicked her fork at the food, still smiling. ‘Hungry?’
‘Are you finished?’
‘It’s all yours.’ Her plate slid across the table towards me. ‘Did you find anything useful in the library?’
‘I hope so.’ I pulled the sheaf of photocopies from my bag and dumped them on the table. ‘I didn’t have time to copy everything. This is the first and the last five years. If there’s nothing in these, I can go back and find the rest.’
She shook her head. ‘If there’s anything to see, it’ll be recent.’
‘All we have to do is find it.’
‘Right.’
We spread the papers out on the table and worked through them together while I ate.
The early papers were deeply familiar. The Donnelly trademark of good data, concisely presented and clinically relevant shone through them all. He combined the clinical instincts of the physician with the abstract understanding of the scientist and applied them to unravelling the mysteries of human genetic disease.
Then, gradually, there was a shift in emphasis away from the dissection of disease over to the grey area of quasi-academic, industry-funded, non-clinical lab work. First there was an increase in the list of acknowledgements at the end of each paper, showing the commercial sources of some, at least, of his funding. Later, the list of co-authors began to change, away from the medics on the wards and over to the back-room, white-coat, anti-clinical brigade.
Finally, a little under two years previously, he completed the shift from medical geneticist to genetic engineer with a change of address. Dr Malcolm Donnelly abandoned the safe, tenured hallways of the university and set up his lab in the pristine new medical science park built on the rubble of an East End redevelopment scheme. Why?
‘Money,’ said Lee, underlining the name of the firm in question, which called itself, with a stunning absence of originality, Medi-Gen.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Malcolm wasn’t interested in money. All he wanted out of life was the chance to do good research.’
‘I know. But you can’t do good research without sensible funding and you won’t find that in the universities these days. Can you imagine what the cutbacks did to a man like Malcolm? He couldn’t sit on his backside and watch the world he had built crumble round his ears for lack of finance, when the boys at the drug companies have shiny new toys for the asking and the people to make them go. He might not have wanted it for himself, but you can’t run a research programme without hard cash and there are not that many places to find it. Someone offered him a decent lab with good money and he went. Simple.’
‘Mmm. Maybe.’ It didn’t sound like the man I thought I knew, but there was an easy way to find out. I pulled a biro from my pocket and wrote down the address of the laboratory on a separate piece of paper. ‘I’ll go in the morning and talk to the people he was working with when he died. We need to get more of a feel for what he was doing and what his priorities were.’
I began to make a list of the people I wanted to talk to: lab technicians, co-workers, the project director, other postdoctoral staff, friends. Some of the people he worked with must have been friends as well as colleagues, I just had no idea any more which ones they were.
Lee leaned forward, reading my writing upside-down. ‘On the other hand,’ she suggested, ‘we could go now. It might be easier in the long run.’
I glanced at my watch. It had gone ten o’clock. ‘No, it’s too late. There’ll be nobody there at this time of night.’
‘I know.’
The penny dropped rather later than it should have done. I stopped writing and looked up. Lee was watching me, sitting very still, waiting. She had that predatory look. And she was dressed in black.
There are times when I think Caroline might be right. I put the pen down carefully and shook my head slowly. ‘You’re crazy, Adams.’
‘True.’ She nodded and twitched a shrug. ‘But all things are relative. I don’t, for instance, gut dogs as a hobby.’
‘Neither,’ I said pointedly, ‘do the people who work for Medi-Gen. Professional killers do not spend their daytime hours working in a medical genetics lab.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘but the one who pays the cash and gives the orders might well do.’ She reached under the pile of papers and pulled out her notepad. ‘Whoever killed Malcolm knew their way around the place.’ She flipped open the pad. ‘Look at this.’
On the top page was a map of the medical park: an outline of the perimeter wall and a rough diagram showing the layout of the buildings inside. On the page beneath was a detailed floor plan of an L-shaped, single-storey building. Offices and laboratories had been sketched in with minimal attention to detail. The doors and windows, on the other hand, had been drawn to scale and beside each one, sketched in red biro, was an alarm. A multicoloured wiring diagram had been scribbled to the right of the main sketch.
Lee turned the pad round for me to read and laid her thumb on one of the long, windowless rooms at the back of the building.
‘This is Malcolm’s lab. A technici
an found his body here at 8 a.m. on Monday, the fifteenth of August. Time of death estimated as Friday night or early Saturday morning. Either he was murdered in here or they killed him somewhere else and moved his body in afterwards. Whichever it was, they had to get past three alarms and a locked gate to do it.’
‘Which means they had inside help?’
‘I think so.’
‘Or they had access to the same information as you?’ I tapped at the map with the pen. ‘If you can buy this, what’s to stop half of Glasgow getting hold of it first?’
She shook her head ‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Really? So how did you get it? Services rendered?’
There was a long gap and this time neither of us was pissing about. In the past, I never questioned her sources or their integrity. But things change and loyalties change and trust doesn’t always come easily.
‘I was owed a favour,’ she said eventually. ‘This is good and nobody else has a copy. I trust it. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.’
Quite. People keep reminding me of my personal rights. I don’t have to stay. I don’t have to do anything. And if I do, it doesn’t have to be something at this level of insanity. I could walk in the front gate tomorrow morning as a legitimate citizen, ask reasonable questions of reasonable people and reasonably expect to be given an answer. But then, if Lee is right, someone will pick up a phone, amend an order and Caroline will join the growing list of the dead. Or Lee. Or Janine. Or me.
The logic was perfectly pedestrian. I didn’t have to like it. I just had to make a decision.
I stared at my fingernails and tossed mental coins.
