by Manda Scott
‘Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I thought so.’ He looked up at the greying sky, wiping the rain from his face. ‘I was on my way home anyway,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nothing more out in this. Would you like a hand to put the stone back over?’
Why not? I’m not about to do anything more useful now.
He did as he offered and then we walked together in silence back through the wood towards the fording stones and the paddock. ‘It’s a good place to end your days, that clearing,’ said MacDonald as we followed the line of the fence back round to the gate.
‘It is.’
‘And a grand place to go when you need a break from the family wars.’
‘Mmm.’ Odd. I never thought of him as over-talkative before.
I hitched my jacket collar higher against the wind and the rain and the unwanted conversation.
‘You’re all back in the farm, I see. Dr Adams as well.’
‘Safety in numbers,’ I said.
‘Aye.’ He nodded carefully. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’
We parted at the gate and the last I saw of him was his back as he strolled on up the lane, the ferret box concealed under his jacket against the weather.
Lee met me at the back door, her hair white with plaster dust and smears of filth wiped across her forehead where she had pushed the hair up out of her eyes.
‘Good?’
‘Reasonable.’ I held out the hand with blood tube so that she could see it clearly. ‘The dog knows her way around well enough,’ I said.
‘Oh. Good.’
‘I saw Tan’s grave.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘It’s a good place.’
‘Yes.’
We stood and looked at each other while all the things that might have been said were not, and then she stepped back to let me in.
‘Kettle’s on,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’ I followed her in out of the rain.
Inside the kitchen, the electrical team had been in action for most of the afternoon. Dustsheets covered the kitchen surfaces, with a special rack set up to prevent the hot plates of the Rayburn from setting fire to the entire arrangement. Reels of cable, boxes of square-pin sockets and jars of wall clips were laid out in organized rows on the flat surfaces. The entire contents of the drinks cupboard over the fire had been consigned to a cardboard box on the floor of the pantry and the cupboard doors had been unscrewed from their hinges. An industrial-sized, hammer-action drill and a set of drill bits you could dig roads with lay in a neat row on the hearth.
I turned down the invitation to join in. Caroline, dressed in ancient overalls with her hair held up by a cable-tie, a set of tools in her hand and a list of things to do, was in her element. Better still, she and Lee were reforging a working partnership in the shared business of practical creation. The last thing either of them needed was anyone else stepping in to examine, comment or, gods forbid, offer to help.
Instead, I took a shower and then retreated to the small study-cum-conservatory at the side of the house, where I could work with the big french windows open and keep an eye on the dog, who had gone back to worrying blackbirds. Periodically, the teeth-aching scream of the drill rang through the whole house and eventually I stuffed a rolled-up wad of old sheets along the gap at the floor to keep out the worst of the noise and the dust.
Malcolm’s papers, most of his old correspondence and Lee’s suspect list were laid out on the floor in order of importance and I sat across the window, half in, half out of the room, listening to the birds in the garden and the chatter of voices in the kitchen, and tried to bring my mind back to the matter in hand.
It was very heavy going. Malcolm used to be a practical man. In his days as an academic, he was the champion of plain English, believing that if the work was strong, the world should know about it in straightforward terms. In the last four years of his life, his style had changed and the plain English had been replaced by increasingly convoluted science-speak designed expressly to hide the implications of what he was doing from anyone not conversant with the vocabulary of genetic technology.
Each time my brain reached overload, I went out to the kitchen to stretch my legs, clear my head and see how the team were getting on.
Late in the afternoon, I found Lee on her own, completely absorbed in the work, kneeling by the fire, holding a bunch of wires like spaghetti between her teeth and inserting them, one at a time, into a black console that exactly fitted the dimensions of the cupboard.
I watched, fascinated by the blinking amber lights.
‘Where’s Caroline?’ I asked eventually.
Lee spat out the remaining wires and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. ‘Up the lane, wiring in the detectors.’
‘Is that safe?’
‘I’ll check it out later.’ She stood up, stretching out her back. ‘She’s fine. She knows what she’s doing.’ She went back to the wiring, testing connections with a hand-held ammeter. ‘How’s the work going?’
‘Slowly. Most of the stuff from the last couple of years is written in undiluted techno-jargon.’
‘What was he trying to hide?’
‘I think it’s more “who from?” that matters. I’ll let you know.’
She grunted through another mouthful of wires. I cleared the dustsheets from the stool by the breakfast bar and sat down.
‘Lee?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Does the Prof do translocation work in his spare time?’
She paused for a moment, frowning into the guts of the box, then she spat the wires from between her teeth and swivelled on her heels to face me.
‘I shouldn’t think so. He hasn’t got any spare time. He’s up to his ears running the department. Why?’
‘He and Malcolm are joint authors on a short communication in the BMJ. It’s the only thing I’ve got that isn’t in Malcolm’s field.’
She put down the tools and sat back against the wall, the electronics momentarily forgotten. ‘Doesn’t sound very likely. Can I look?’
I brought the file through from the study and laid the relevant paper out on a clean bit of floor.
‘Here. “Gemmell, P. G. and Donnelly, M. D.” It was published about a year ago but the work was probably done before that.’
Wiping her hands on a rag, Lee picked the paper up carefully by the edges and read the title and then the abstract. It was a fairly basic paper on gene translocation in the Xenopus Toad. Not particularly related to the studies Malcolm had been working on, not in the least bit high-powered and certainly not written in Malcolm’s usual style. It had the ring of someone feeling their way into writing and it would have benefited from a serious brush-up by an editor.
I watched in silence while Lee read and reread the title page, shaking her head.
At length, she put it back on the folder and looked up at me. ‘Philippa,’ she said.
‘Come again?’
‘Prof’s daughter. She did her fifth-year project with Malcolm. He took her on as a favour to the boss.’
‘Doesn’t look like she was up to much.’
‘You said it.’
‘What’s she doing now?’
‘Pass.’ Lee shrugged. ‘Spawning the next generation of medical superstars as far as I know. She got married two weeks after graduation.’
She stopped, arrested in mid-thought.
‘Kemp,’ she said succinctly.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Kemp. She married a guy called David Kemp.’
‘The same David Kemp who does locums for the Bearsden practice?’
‘Could have been. There can’t be that many.’
‘Find out, will you?’
‘Sure.’
I went back to the study and wrote ‘Kemp?’ at the top of my list, then sat back feeling more optimistic than I had done in a long time.
The light was beginning to fade and there was a fine mist rising from the fields out beyond the gar
den by the time I reached the end of the pile and put my notebook down. The coffee was cold, the fire had burned down and my brain felt like scrambled spinach.
Malcolm was undoubtedly good at his job, probably one of the best. He was developing a new technique that involved taking the gene for an existing protein, splitting it in half and splicing the DNA code for another protein into the middle so that two proteins would be made in the place of one.
Then all he had to do was put the engineered DNA into something that naturally produced protein – say, a bacterium – and watch it spit out an endless supply of something useful.
By two years into the new research programme, he had done it successfully with bacteria and had buckets of bugs producing albumin: a simple protein found in blood and egg whites. All very laudable in scientific terms, but hardly earth-shaking stuff. Certainly not worth dying for. His method may have been slick and an advance on existing technology, but dozens of genetic engineers spend every day doing much the same thing, only with fancier bugs and with far more commercial end products. None of them dies for it.
I threw a couple of peat bricks on to the fire and crouched in front of it, watching the flames crisp the dried-out fuzz at the edges, trying to work out what it was about genes and proteins that was enough to make a man forfeit his life.
Somewhere along the line, there were a lot of pieces of jigsaw still missing.
‘Problems?’
Lee. Standing in the mist at the open french windows.
‘Mmm.’ I stayed where I was. ‘I need to see the disks we got from Malcolm’s lab.’
She came in and knelt beside me, holding her hands out to the fire. ‘They’re in my bag, under the bench in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘I had a look at them yesterday. All the interesting ones are booby-trapped.’
‘What’s that in English?’
‘If you try to open them without the right password, they’ll erase the contents automatically.’
‘Shit.’ I stared at the burning peat, avoiding the obvious train of thought.
Change the subject.
‘How’s the electrical engineering going?’
‘Done. We need to change all the sockets over to square-pin plugs but it shouldn’t take too long. There’s a bit of replastering to do after that, but we’ll have it finished by bedtime.’
She sat back on her heels and put both hands lightly on the back of my neck. ‘Can you ask Janine to help with the disks?’
I threw another brick on the grate. It rolled to the back and messed up the balance of the fire.
‘I don’t think I’d get much out of her just now.’
‘I know.’ She pushed the balls of her thumbs into the taut muscles running up the side of my neck, easing them out. ‘Caroline told me.’
‘Caroline talks too much.’
‘Possibly. But she still cares about you.’ Lee took hold of my wrist and turned me away from the fire so that I had to look at her face. ‘I’ll go if you want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think I’d necessarily get any results.’
Six
Rae Larssen lives in one of the more prosperous micro-suburbs wedged between the Botanic Gardens and Queen Margaret Avenue near the top end of Byres Road. I parked the car in the ‘Residents Only’ spaces marked out on the pavements and flicked a ‘Doctor on Call’ card left over from my respectable past on to the dashboard to keep the wheel clampers at bay for a while.
The street door hung conveniently open and I let myself in. The hallway and stairs were lined with late-1980s designer tiles: a random sea of line-drawn lavender triangles on a white glaze background swirled up the stairway towards the flat.
A lady of very individual tastes, our Rae. I don’t visit often.
Upstairs, multicoloured light flooded through the stained-glass panels above the door, turning the pale marble landing into an Impressionist seascape.
Opium perfume clung in the air, catching the back of my throat as I stood waiting for an answer to the genteel burr of the doorbell.
A tall woman with Nordic features and ice-white hair opened the door. Her face was set in the same half-quizzical, half-friendly smile that greets the television cameras on the nightly Scottish news programme. It froze in place as she opened the door. A wash of warm-bread scent billowed out into the cold air of the hallway.
I fixed my own smile and looked past her into the flat, checking rooms and occupants: four doors, only one open and that leaking a hum of mixed women’s voices in low conversation. A handbag lay on a hall seat. Definitely not Janine’s and probably not Rae’s; she is not the kind of woman to leave a handbag lying about in her own hallway.
Company.
‘I’m sorry.’ I took a step back. ‘I’m interrupting. I’ll call back later.’
Rae Larssen inspected me briefly, pale eyebrows flickering upwards. ‘Kellen? Did Jan call you?’
‘No.’ I began to turn away. ‘I needed to talk to her. It’s all right. I’ll call her at work tomorrow.’
The woman caught hold of my arm. Her face creased in the faintest of concerned frowns.
‘I think you should come in,’ she said. ‘She’d never forgive me if I let you go.’
I wasn’t sure about that but I let her lead me through into the clinical neatness of the flat. There was a perceptible pause. She was about to offer to take my jacket and I was about to refuse. We looked at each other for a moment, then she inclined her head towards the open doorway and this time there was a hint of amusement in the pebble grey eyes.
‘She’s in there with the others.’
Her voice was straight off the Orkney ferry. Pure Viking. Pure music. Not bad given that it’s three generations since her family moved over the water and down the mainland to Cambuslang.
Her eyes flicked to a closed door to my left.
‘You can use the spare room to talk if you need it.’
‘Thanks.’ I took a steadying breath and walked towards the murmur of voices, braced for the severing silence.
There were eight of them, talking in pairs. Janine was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the sofa, holding a tall wine glass in one hand and drawing imaginary shapes in the air for the woman at her side with the other. The epitome of the happy, relaxed party animal.
I knew all of the rest by sight, so most of them must have known me and I have no doubt that the grapevine had carried the news of my circumstances with its usual efficiency.
The conversations wavered and died as I walked in through the door. All except Janine, who carried on for a moment or two, laughing in the sudden silence, then stopped, abruptly, in mid-phrase. Her arm hung, unnoticed, in mid-air and her eyes blazed in the way only a redhead’s eyes can.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know . . .’ I began.
And then I saw who it was she was talking to.
She was still dressed all in blue but not in uniform this time, much softer, much more relaxed. Smooth, dark hair curled under at the ends, framing an open, friendly face and neatly sculpted eyebrows rose over a pair of green, green, feline eyes. Eyes that were suddenly very blank.
I took one very slow breath and let it out into the hush.
‘WPC Elspeth Philips,’ I said. ‘What a tremendously interesting surprise.’
Behind me, a roomful of women held their collective breaths.
Rae Larssen, her perfect hostess instincts tuned to impending conflict, appeared at my side with a fluted glass and a bottle of white Burgundy.
‘Wine, Kellen, now that you’re here?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Janine softly. ‘I don’t think Dr Stewart was intending to stay.’ She looked directly at me. ‘Kellen?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
Rae stepped back, her eyes full of a smile that didn’t quite intrude on to her face, and gestured towards the door. ‘I’ll hold dinner till you’re ready, Jan.’
Ms Larssen’s spare room is a study in Scandinavian asceticism. Beautifully appointed but spectacularly sparse. A pine be
d sits in exact asymmetry on a white rug, which in turn lies to one side of a polished pine floor. I sat carefully on the perfectly flat, white linen coverlet, grateful that I had changed into something passably clean before I left the house.
Janine closed the door and then slid down to sit with her back against it – either protection against the curious intruder or a way of keeping me in the room. She cocked her head on one side and chewed her bottom lip.
‘I thought you were going to call when you were ready to talk?’
‘I am. I didn’t come to talk.’
‘You surely didn’t come to crash the party?’ Her voice acquired a freshly sharpened edge.
‘No.’ I stood up and moved back to the window. There’s safety in distance. ‘Is this working out?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said my ex-lover from the doorway. ‘I’ve only been here twenty-four hours and I spent most of this afternoon at work trying to sort out tomorrow’s leader from a mess of floppies.’
‘How’s it going?’
Her eyebrows rose as far up as they could go. ‘Kellen, did you really come here at this time of night to talk about work?’
No.
The curtains hung half-closed, leaving a two-inch gap. I looked down at the streetlights and the dark, captive trees lined up inside the fenced compound of the Botanic Gardens and tried to assemble a logical train of thought. The disks hung heavy in my pocket. I lifted them out and laid them on the floor at my feet.
‘How well do you know our friend in blue?’ I asked.
‘Elspeth? Not as well as you from the sound of things. I’ve only ever met her here. She’s usually at Rae’s parties.’
And I am not, because I don’t like Rae’s parties. Point taken.
‘Did she tell you she was one of Laidlaw’s blue-eyed kids?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘She’s in the force. A woman police constable of the Strathclyde Central Constabulary. Did you know?’
‘Of course.’
‘So what’s she doing here?’ I asked. ‘Is she the token straight?’
There was a long gap then. Janine looked at me as if I had, perhaps, finally gone over the edge. Her lips compressed to a single line and her nostrils flared whiter at the edges. ‘I don’t think so, Kellen,’ she said quietly, ‘she only split up with Rae two months ago.’
