by Manda Scott
‘Really.’
‘Yes, really. But not yet. I don’t give up that fast.’ She stood up, taking the packet of disks with her. ‘I’ll try and look at this today. I could meet you at Bee’s after work?’
‘Sure. If you think that’s enough time?’
‘It’s enough.’ She nodded, slinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Do you want to tell me what I’m looking for?’
‘Genetically engineered eggs. There’s something in them besides the yolk and the white. We need to know what it is.’
‘Right. You’ll be at the farm?’
‘Yes.’ I put out a hand as she turned to go. ‘Jan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
I watched her leave, cutting a path through the jabbering throng, red hair high above the rest. Then I ordered a coffee. When I went to pay, I found the price was already included on the bill, and it had been paid by Janine as she left.
The rain was easing by the time I reached the car and the drive back through Milngavie was pleasantly free of traffic. Too late for the morning commuters and too early for the mother-and-schoolkid shuttle. I switched on the radio and half-listened to the sledgehammer plot of the afternoon play, the other half of my mind spinning parts of the jigsaw, looking for more of the pattern.
At the farm, there were two sets of tyre marks, but only one car: an unmarked police Escort with a jacket draped across the back seat that was just the right size for a certain green-eyed WPC. The engine was still warm.
Inside, Caroline was sitting on the floor, her back against a fireside chair, with the dog lying peacefully beside her. Elspeth Philips was at the sink with her back to me, filling the kettle. She turned as I walked in the door and the usual wary animosity was, for once, gone from her eyes.
‘White, no sugar, thank you.’ I dropped my jacket on the window-seat. ‘Where’s our favourite Inspector?’
‘Gone for the vet,’ said Caroline. Her voice was tight, over-controlled.
‘I’m sorry?’
The policewoman came over and sat in the chair, laying a protective hand on her shoulder, comforting the way she had done on the night Bridget died.
‘The pup’s poorly,’ she said.
She looked very peaceful from where I was standing. I crouched down to have a closer look and realized, first, that Caroline was close to weeping and, second, that she had good reason. The pup wasn’t just poorly, she was virtually comatose. A cold, clammy, lifeless husk with a femoral pulse that pattered thinly under my fingers.
There are moments when medical instinct usefully takes over.
‘There’s a first aid kit in the glove compartment of the car,’ I said. ‘Get it.’ I was talking to Caroline but Elspeth Philips was up and out of the door before I got to the ‘please’. I suppose she was closest.
Caroline stretched the curled body out on the hearth rug for me to look at. There was a faint, unstable heartbeat palpable behind the elbow and when I opened the eyes, the pupils were wide and there was no response to light or touch. Every part of her was cold.
The first aid kit arrived. I slid the thermometer into her rectum, the way we did for the newborn kids and the geriatrics who can’t suck a piece of glass without biting it, and ran a stethoscope across her chest and the rotund swelling of her belly. Breathing harsh, gut sounds minimal, temperature falling off the bottom of the scale.
A young dog, dying of whatever young dogs die of. Way out of my field.
I sent Caroline to find something warm to cover her and Elspeth to put the kettle back on. Both diversionary tactics to keep them busy until the Inspector showed up with the right professional person.
The fits began as we wrapped her in the blankets. Small twitches at first, then a tremor that started deep in her body and worked its way in spastic jumps down her legs. Within the space of five minutes, it had progressed to full-blown seizures, her head and neck arching back in a series of violent tetanic spasms.
A Land Rover drew up outside and a single set of footsteps ran for the door.
‘Well?’
‘He’s out at a calving,’ said a familiar West Highland burr from the doorway. ‘They said he’d get here as soon as he can.’
‘Shit. That’s no good.’
‘Aye.’
Inspector MacDonald stood in the doorway, his skin the colour of peat ash, the worn lines on his face giving him ten extra years.
I wouldn’t have said he was the sentimental kind.
‘Can you not do something, lass?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. It doesn’t look like the average bout of neonatal gastric “flu”, but I haven’t a clue what it is.’
I ran my mind through the differential diagnoses for coma and symptomatic treatment for fits. Mostly the benzodiazepines: diazepam or midazolam. Or temazepam.
An idea grew teeth and gnawed at the back of my mind.
Caroline was sitting on the floor, staring fixedly at the twitching form, her head jerking fractionally in time with each spasm.
I covered the pup with one hand and lifted Caroline’s chin up so that her eyes met mine.
‘What happened, C?’
She shook her head free.
‘Nothing’s happened. She fell asleep and she won’t wake up. That’s all.’
Her voice was ice-cold.
I picked up a hand as cold as her voice and pulled her round to face me. ‘Tell me what she’s done since I left.’
‘Nothing. She played with the cats for most of the morning till I shoved them out for a bit so I could feed her.’ Her eyes came back to meet mine. ‘You didn’t feed her this morning, did you?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry. Forgot.’
‘I thought you had. Anyway, I let the cats come back in again after she’d finished and the whole lot of them went to sleep on top of the Rayburn. When Elspeth and the Inspector arrived, I tried to move them off to make coffee, she just wouldn’t wake up. She’s gone to sleep and she won’t wake up.’
‘She’s dying, lass,’ said Stewart MacDonald simply.
A new corner of the jigsaw fell into place. Just one more piece to go and we have one whole edge.
‘What did you feed her?’ I asked.
‘The eggs you got from the bantams this morning. I used up all the others yesterday. The meal list said to give her scrambled eggs once a day and . . . where are you going?’
‘To my car,’ I said from the doorway. ‘She’s got insulin poisoning. It’s in the eggs. It’s how they killed Bridget.’
Once in a while, I’m glad I did medicine. And I’m glad I stock up my car now and again with the kind of things wandering medics usually carry and members of the lay public do not. The medical kit in the boot is considerably larger than the first aid box in the glove compartment and very comprehensive.
I grabbed a bag of dextrose solution, a vial of diazepam, a drip set and a handful of catheters, and carried them back to the kitchen, telling myself that I did paediatrics once and a baby dog can’t be that different from a baby human.
It’s not true of course. Kids aren’t covered in hair and they have nice blue veins on the backs of their hands and the tops of their heads. Dogs don’t have either. I settled instead for the jugular vein and we shaved the hair off the side of her neck with a scalpel blade.
The years on the ward paid their due. Inspector MacDonald held the head still while I slid a catheter into a vein filled with sludging black blood. The dose of dextrose seemed fairly arbitrary. I guessed the dog’s weight, pretended she was a five-year-old child, did some rapid mental arithmetic and opened the drip set to full bore. Half a cc of diazepam went in through the injection port and I watched it flow down into the vein before turning the drip rate down to a slow dribble. The Inspector held out a hand and took over as voluntary drip stand.
Time passed. The fits became more violent and ran closer together. I gave her another half cc of the diazepam, praying hard that we were nowhere ne
ar the overdose rate. I shut my eyes. Prayers come easier that way.
‘She’s stopping,’ said Caroline.
The shuddering spasms slowed to a standstill, leaving her deathly still.
I glued my stethoscope to the dog’s chest and listened to the rhythm of her heart. It was there, but that was about the best that could be said for it.
‘Diazepam’s worked,’ I said. Nobody gave me a gold star.
Caroline pulled the steaming kettle from the Rayburn and filled a hot-water bottle, wrapping it in a thick layer of tea-towels.
‘She’s cold,’ she said simply.
It wasn’t such a bad idea. We laid the pup on the warm towels and I eased the thermometer back into her rectum. Watching the mercury column edge upwards took our eyes off the slow, dysrhythmic rise and fall of her chest.
Time moved like a crippled slug. I remembered other eternities like this from the long, late nights on ICU. Poised for ever with one finger on the cardiac arrest alarm waiting for an erratic ECG trace to flatten out. Except this time there was no ECG and no crash team to call on with their advanced resuscitation technology. Just a mercury thermometer and a stethoscope and a dextrose drip.
It worked, but only just, and I have still got no idea whether it was the dextrose or the diazepam, or whether she would have come back on her own given time.
When it was obvious she was coming round, we sent Elspeth out to the butcher in the village for puppy meal and when she came back, MacDonald stoked up the fire, wrapped the pup in a blanket and sat with her on his lap, feeding her small warmed fragments with his fingers as a father would feed a sick child. I sat on the floor against the side of the chair, feeling worn out and useless.
Elspeth Philips came to sit opposite me, her hands wrapped round a mug of Lee’s cat’s-piss tea. She looked as tired as I did. Almost in the mood for a real conversation.
‘What’s the official treatment for insulin overdose, Kellen?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘Glucose infusion to correct the hypo-glycaemia and an anticonvulsant for the fits. I only used diazepam because I had it in the car. Any of the others would have done.’
‘Like temazepam?’ she asked.
‘Maybe.’ I nodded, slowly.
‘Bridget had temazepam in her stomach contents, didn’t she?’
‘I think so.’ I tried to sound unsure. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a casual conversation. MacDonald was still feeding the pup but I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck.
‘Could she have eaten the eggs from the hens as well?’
‘She did,’ said Caroline. ‘She had scrambled eggs for lunch. I saw the pan when I came in.’
Thanks, kid.
I watched the tumblers fall into place in Elspeth Philip’s brain. She looked at me directly and I heard echoes of Laidlaw’s size 14s tramping triumphantly across the yard. Very depressing.
‘If the pup had died and we got a post-mortem on it now,’ said the woman from SCC thoughtfully, ‘it would look almost exactly like Bridget, wouldn’t it?’
‘Bride didn’t have needle marks anywhere,’ I said, ‘but otherwise, yes.’
‘So it’s possible that someone gave her the sedative but not the glucose.’
‘It’s possible.’
MacDonald broke in. He laid the pup at his feet and turned his attention openly on his colleague. ‘What are you saying, lass?’ he asked.
‘I think Bridget was murdered,’ said WPC Elspeth Philips simply. ‘Just like Caroline said.’
Inspector MacDonald looked up from the dog and smiled a little sadly. ‘In that case, we’d better inform Chief Inspector Laidlaw that he has a murder in his patch,’ he said, as if he had never considered anything else.
Eight
The telephone rang: a nasty insistent chirrup, invading the silence. Caroline reached it first.
She listened for a moment, then held it out to me, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Janine,’ she said. ‘She’s waiting for you in town. You’re late.’
I took the handset out into the hall, away from listening ears, and grovelled, promising to be at Bee’s as soon as was humanly possible, allowing for the need to collect Lee on the way.
When I got back, Inspector MacDonald was still sitting by the fire, staring morosely into the flames. The pup looked better. She was sitting at his feet with her nose on his knee and he pulled absently at her ears.
I knelt down by his chair.
‘I have to go out,’ I said. ‘Do you have to tell the Chief Inspector today?’
‘We do,’ he said. ‘As soon as we get back to the office.’ There was a tinge of regret there if you listened for it, but his face had closed over, all the conspiratorial friendship of the poacher washed to nothing beneath a smooth professional glaze.
‘Chief Inspector Laidlaw’s in Edinburgh for the Community Policing conference,’ said a voice from the other side of the room. ‘He’ll not be back till tomorrow night.’
Elspeth Philips sat on the window-bench under the kitchen window, silhouetted against the ice-light of the dusk. Her face was unreadable in the heightened shadows and her voice held nothing more than mild conversation. She could have been reading the day’s racing results and made it sound more interesting.
‘I don’t expect he’ll look at his mail before Wednesday morning,’ she said.
There was a brief silence while everybody avoided making eye contact.
Eventually, Inspector MacDonald leant down and pushed the dog gently off his feet.
‘Right then,’ he said, in a voice transparent with its lack of inflection, ‘I’ll write him a report tonight and put it on his desk personally in the morning.’
We stood at the door and watched them leave. Elspeth went first in her white, unmarked Escort, with Stewart MacDonald’s Land Rover close on its tail. Five minutes later, when they were well clear of the drive, we turned the alarm system on.
Almost an hour later, Lee drove me to Bee’s to meet Janine. We left the car on a meter outside the Botanic Gardens and walked the three blocks along to the café. The wind had died and the rain fell sluggishly, straight down, like drips from a cracked cistern, splattering noisily on the wet pavements.
Monday and Thursday are the ‘women-only’ nights at Bee’s. It encourages a stable clientele when folk might otherwise stay at home to recover from the excesses of the weekend. Even so it was quiet as we walked in.
A dozen or so women sat scattered among the tables in twos or threes, leaning forward in muted conversation or sitting back in silence, listening to the piped jazz.
There was no sign of Janine. I left Lee on her own at a corner table and explored the bar downstairs. It was empty, except for a single woman, her face hidden behind a newspaper, sitting at the same table I had shared with mad Mhaire Culloch the previous evening.
Janine.
She lowered the paper as I sat down.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘You’re always late.’ For once, it didn’t seem to matter. There was a tingle of excitement about her that took the chill off the words. She reached into the bag slung on the back of the chair and pulled out a handful of printed A4 sheets in a cardboard folder. ‘I found out what’s in the eggs,’ she said.
‘Insulin?’
‘You knew?’ She was disappointed. I should have kept my mouth shut and let her tell me.
‘Caroline found it by accident.’
‘Does that mean you don’t need this?’ She tapped the folder.
‘No. We need it. What have you got?’
‘Lots. Your friend was good. He had three different protection systems running together. The more interesting it got, the better it was protected. Letters and the like were easy, you could have opened them if you’d tried. The stuff in the middle was dynamite. Pure dynamite.’
‘Tell me.’
‘He took the gene sequence for human insulin and spliced it into the genes for the egg albumin. So he had hens that laid eggs with insulin in
the whites. And it takes next to no processing to extract it and convert it into something injectable.’
‘Hell. The medics would give their eye teeth for that.’
‘Wouldn’t they just? Take a look.’ As she pushed the folder across the table, I saw the faintest shadow of a grin. Beautiful science inspires my beloved the way Ecstasy inspires the raver and if what she said was true, Malcolm had made some beautiful science.
The world is full of diabetics and each one of them has to inject themselves twice daily with insulin. Modern insulin comes from cows. Tons of bovine pancreatic tissue are collected from the slaughterhouses and the insulin is squeezed out.
The problem is that once in a while someone reacts to the foreign protein in the insulin they inject and ends up with more problems than they started with. Human insulin would be infinitely safer, it’s just that tons of human pancreatic tissues are hard to come by and the stuff has proved difficult to make. Until now.
Janine watched me from under lowered lids as I leafed through half a dozen pages of test results that listed the early experiments and purity of the compounds extracted. All very elegant. The kind of science I used to expect from Malcolm. In purely biological terms, what he had done was clever, even beautiful. In commercial terms, it was a licence to print money.
She caught on to the train of thought. ‘It’s a goldmine.’
‘It is,’ I agreed, staring blankly at the folder. There was no record of anything with a significant street value. No Hen’s Teeth. ‘But then why did they kill him? As I remember the story, it was always considered uncommonly stupid to kill the goose who laid the golden eggs.’
‘Maybe it was an accident?’
I shook my head. ‘Unlikely.’
‘But not impossible.’ She took the file back and pulled a single sheet from the bottom of the pile and slid it across the table. ‘Look at this.’
It was a half-page memo, limited circulation, from Malcolm to the heads of research and development announcing the isolation of pure human insulin from the egg whites of the genetically engineered bantams. The last sentence was laid out in bold type and underlined:
