Requiem

by Clare Francis

  Dublensky wasn’t certain he was ready for this and perhaps it showed on his face because Mackenzie said: ‘Maybe you’d prefer to rest, Mr Dublensky?’

  Calthrop threw Mackenzie a sharp look before saying to Dublensky: ‘I really don’t think we have the time for that. I need to get back to London by Tuesday at the latest. We’ve a great deal to get through.’

  Unseen by Calthrop, Mackenzie raised his eyebrows kindly at Dublensky, as if to say: I’d make up your own mind if I were you.

  Dublensky asked: ‘Miss Field, has she arrived yet?’ knowing that he wouldn’t be reassured until she did.

  Calthrop shrugged as if it wasn’t a matter of great interest, but Mackenzie looked worried, which only served to add to Dublensky’s feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

  ‘I’d really like to see Miss Field,’ Dublensky echoed dully.

  ‘Is it the contract?’ Calthrop demanded, moving in front of Dublensky. ‘Are you worried about something in the contract?’

  ‘Not exactly. I …’

  Calthrop motioned him towards a chair, holding the gesture until Dublensky had sat down. ‘Well, what is it then, Mr Dublensky?’ He dropped into the seat opposite and fastened Dublensky with a firm gaze.

  ‘I just … I guess I would have liked to talk things through with Miss Field.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t seem possible just at the moment, does it? So I suggest we get on, and then when she turns up you can talk about anything that’s still worrying you.’

  ‘It’s what’ll happen when we leave here,’ Dublensky said, putting a shape to his anxieties. ‘No one’s told me what’s going to happen.’

  From the fireplace Mackenzie said: ‘You’ll be looked after, Mr Dublensky. I guarantee it.’

  His voice was reassuring, his manner amiable, yet how far could a rock singer be trusted? ‘Perhaps a rest might be a good idea,’ he muttered indecisively. ‘I’m really very tired.’

  Calthrop pressed his lips together. ‘I think it might be best to start now, Mr Dublensky.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Simon.’ Nick Mackenzie beckoned to Calthrop, and the two of them went into a huddle by the door. Dublensky couldn’t hear what was being said, but he knew they were arguing. Finally Nick Mackenzie came back and crouched on the edge of the opposite chair. ‘How about a walk before it gets dark, Mr Dublensky? I rather wanted to show you something.’

  They took warm coats from a cloakroom and went out of the house by a side door which gave on to a hedged garden with neatly delineated rectangular beds. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so. Patches of white cloud skated across a low winter sun. Mackenzie began again: ‘You mustn’t let them persuade you into doing anything you don’t want to do, you know.’

  ‘No, but … Well, I’ve burnt my boats. There’s no turning back, that’s for sure.’

  ‘But take it at your own pace. Don’t let them pressure you.’

  They turned out of the garden and joined a path that led upward between shrubs.

  Mackenzie slowed a little. ‘You were worried about the future … Well, I just wanted to say that there’s a job waiting for you if you want it.’

  Dublensky looked across at him in surprise. ‘There is?’

  ‘It’s a trust, a research charity. It’s going to be set up in the next month or so. They’ll be needing people.’

  ‘But …’ He floundered for a moment. ‘Will they want to employ me?’

  He gave a small smile. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘What kind of research are we talking about?’

  ‘Research into the effects of chemicals, how to help people recover from them. That sort of thing.’

  Dublensky paused. ‘Well …’

  ‘No interference. No strings.’

  ‘Sounds …’ He was going to say unbelievable. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘It might mean being based over here.’

  Dublensky, who a minute ago would have considered any suggestion of moving abroad with dismay, now found himself turning the idea over in his mind. ‘This trust, could I present research proposals?’

  ‘Sure. Anything you liked.’

  They continued until, breasting a rise, they reached a paddock surrounded by a wooden rail with a stable on one side.

  ‘We could look at Silveron, for example?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  They stopped and leant on the paddock rail. ‘This trust,’ Dublensky said, ‘it’s yours, right? You yourself would be setting it up?’

  Mackenzie gave a slight shrug which was an admission, but not so much of an admission that it invited further comment.

  ‘Well …’ said Dublensky. ‘It sounds … interesting.’

  They stood in silence as if all had been agreed between them, which in a sense it had.

  The wind seemed to bite suddenly, and Dublensky felt the cold. ‘You were going to show me something?’ he prompted gently.

  Mackenzie was staring up the slope of the paddock, towards the forest. ‘What?’ He came out of his thoughts with difficulty. ‘Was I?’ He blinked at Dublensky in mild surprise. ‘Of course.’ Turning, he raised a hand to the panorama below. ‘I was going to show you the view.’

  Now and again during that long evening Dublensky’s words would dwindle and his eyes travel from face to face as if to be sure that he had people’s attention. Strange that he should be in doubt: it seemed to Nick that the room was held in a breathless hush of concentration, broken only by the settling of the logs on the fire and the clinking of Anne Dublensky’s coffee cup. But then Nick realized: it was not attention that Dublensky craved, but belief.

  Simon Calthrop, hunched over a glass of best claret, armed with two tape recorders and a large note book was taking Dublensky painstakingly through the procedures used in toxicology trials: the day-to-day recordings, the tests and examinations.

  Nick found he was able to listen to the statistics of rodent extermination with a new and undreamed of detachment. It wasn’t just the ease with which he’d clobbered the rat in Daisy’s flat, it was the realization that, when all was said and done, people like Dublensky hadn’t been able to find a better way.

  He also recognized that moral dilemmas belonged to a world of hard practicalities and uncomfortable truths, a world in which he felt poorly qualified to make sweeping judgements. Alusha had died because the safeguards had failed; perhaps that was all he needed to know.

  Calthrop was leading Dublensky firmly onwards. ‘So when did you begin to suspect irregularities?’

  ‘Oh, not straight away. I mean, not until the Silveron toxicology results had been in for quite a while, like over a year.’ Dublensky was crouched forward on the sofa, arms resting on knees, hands pulling nervously at each other. ‘Then one day I was looking through the full set of data. Not many people bother with that, believe me. It runs to five or six heavy volumes: computer printouts, daily observation sheets, test results – and here you’re talking about maybe five, six specialities: immunology, oncology, dermatology, histology, pathology. I mean, these things can go on for ever. Anyway, my particular interest is haematology. That’s because I’m a chemist and I don’t know a darned thing about it.’ He smiled wrily. Beside him on the sofa, Anne Dublensky shifted in her seat and frowned at him.

  ‘Blood,’ continued Dublensky, drawing back into himself. ‘I always look at the blood tests, because it’s there that you often get the first hint of trouble. Anyway, there I was flicking the pages and I stop at this one page – a computer analysis of standard haemoglobin tests with statistical significance calculations – and I see that the figures have thrown up this strange pattern, a succession of three identical numbers. Like on a roulette wheel you’ll occasionally get a number repeating itself. Mathematicians will tell you these things can happen quite easily and that it’s well within the normal range of probabilities, but it still seems sort of strange when it appears. So I see this row of identical numbers and I think, hey, what a crazy set of figures, then I notice another oddity, a rea
lly low figure in the first column. It could be a testing error, of course, or a statistical error. Then, again, it might be a genuinely low result, just like it seems. Nothing really unusual about any of that. In fact if you didn’t get the occasional crazy figure, then things really would look strange, like too good to be true, you know.’ He jerked his head from person to person, searching out reactions, then paused modestly to recount his moment of glory. ‘Except that I suddenly get this feeling I’ve seen these figures before,’ he explained. ‘Now this isn’t possible – I mean, that’s what I tell myself. It’s just a trick of my mind. But the more I think about, the more uneasy I get. And you have to remember that by this time the production line at Aurora is pumping out Silveron for export and I’ve already had the first letter from Dr Burt. So I don’t need all that much encouragement to think unhappy thoughts.’

  Calthrop, keen as ever to get his chronology right, interjected with a request for dates. While Dublensky leafed through some old diaries he had brought, Nick helped Jenny to stack the supper plates onto a tray. As he bent over the table he became aware that Anne Dublensky was staring at him.

  ‘Where’s Daisy Field?’ she asked tensely.

  ‘Something important must have come up,’ he said.

  ‘Important?’ Her tone demanded to know what on earth could have been more important than this.

  Returning to his chair Nick too wondered what could be so vital that it could keep Daisy away from this meeting which she had fought so hard to stage.

  ‘I thought and thought, but it didn’t get me too far,’ Dublensky was saying. ‘So I got methodical. I went through all the test data I’d read in the last three years or so. Quite a job. Even then, I missed it first time round because the 8,3,5-Q file was never on my official reading list, so to speak. Picked it up by chance and zoomed through it, you know.’

  ‘What product was that?’ asked Calthrop.

  ‘8,3,5-Q? It was an insecticide that never got beyond development stage. It was in initial development at the same time as our big seller Bulwark – was quite similar to it chemically in fact – but once it was realized that Bulwark was the more effective product, 8,3,5-Q was put on what turned out to be permanent hold, and the data buried, forgotten. But not’ – he made a sound of fresh surprise – ‘by TroChem.’

  ‘TroChem had carried out trials on 8,3,5-Q?’

  ‘They had.’

  ‘So when you looked through the 8,3,5-Q data you found what?’

  ‘I found that many of the haematology results between Silveron and 8,3,5-Q were identical.’

  ‘When you say identical …?’

  ‘I mean identical. Ten sheets of results that were the same in every respect. Coincidence wasn’t in it. I mean the chances were so remote as to be mathematically incalculable. No – TroChem had simply lifted the data and reused it.’ With this, a dreaminess crept over him as if he were reliving the moment of discovery. It was a moment before he responded to the next question. ‘Why would TroChem do it?’ he echoed. But he’d obviously thought about it a great deal because his reply flowed easily: ‘Commercial pressure. Lack of staff. Human nature. The temptation to take short cuts. A desire to please the client. A belief that no harm would come of it.’ He spread his hands. ‘Any of those. All of them. Who knows.’

  ‘But how could they expect to get away with it?’ Nick chipped in.

  ‘Oh, easy. It goes like this. They sincerely believe the product’s okay – I mean, it’s been developed by Morton-Kreiger, hasn’t it? All the expertise, all those expensive labs – they think the trials are just a question of waving things through, of rubber-stamping something that’s bound to be okay. They’ve no reason to think the data will ever be queried. So they cheat things – or maybe only one man cheats things, an overworked head of department, a guy who’s under pressure to hurry things along, who’s got problems with his budget. He just slips in some ready-made data that no one’s ever seen – or he thinks no one’s ever seen, stuff from a defunct product. No problem. End of story.’

  ‘Were no genuine tests done at all then?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt TroChem got the trials under way; it was just the analyses they didn’t get round to doing.’

  There was a silence. Dublensky rubbed his eyes, Cal-throp shuffled thoughtfully through his notes, Anne Dub-lensky watched, looking worried.

  ‘Can we move on to your dealings with Morton-Kreiger then?’ murmured Calthrop. ‘How you reported your worries to them and what sort of a reaction you got?’

  Just then Mrs Alton buzzed through to say Mr Weinberg was on the line and needed to speak to Nick ‘very urgently’. Nick took it in the hall.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m here, David.’

  ‘You’re meant to be bloody rehearsing.’

  In all their years together Nick couldn’t remember David swearing at him, however mildly.

  ‘A couple of days won’t make much difference.’

  ‘The tour starts in one week, Nick! Not only can’t it wait, it’s beyond a bloody joke. I never thought I’d get this sort of prima donna shit from you, Nick. Never! Joe, Mel – I’ve never expected anything but grief from them, but you … Christ, the entire band managed to turn up at the studio at ten sharp this morning, just like yesterday and the day before, and what do they find? What are you trying to do to us, Nick? Just tell me? Mmm? Mmm?’ Words temporarily failed him.

  ‘I’ll be there, David.’

  ‘But when? Listen, I’ve been on the phone the whole bloody day getting these lawyers to pull out the stops and get these charges dropped. The rest of the time I’ve been telling the underwriters it’s all a terrible mistake and you’ve never touched drugs in your life and the newspaper stories are crap and begging them on my hands and knees not to pull out the rug from under the tour, and all to no bloody avail because their hearts are made of concrete, and I find I’m wasting my breath anyway because I’m getting shot in the back by my own team. You’re killing me, Nick, killing me. Tell me, just tell me, why are you trying to stymie the whole goddam thing? Huh? Is it that you don’t want to do this damn tour?’ He sounded close to tears.

  ‘David, I’ll be down tomorrow.’

  There was a silence. ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘First thing?’

  ‘Well … No. Can’t do first thing. Later, David, later.’

  A weary pause. ‘Nick, you’re the one person who can kill me, you know that?’

  ‘Tomorrow, David, I’ll be down tomorrow.’

  ‘Suppose there’s an alarm?’

  But Campbell, having pocketed a torch, was already hoisting himself up the low wall at the back of the property and hooking his heel over the lip. After a great deal of heavy breathing he heaved his bulk onto the top and for an instant lay there, face down, limbs hanging loose, like a lion resting on the branch of a tree.

  Someone came round the corner: a leather-jacketed youth in a hurry, hands thrust in pockets, head down. Daisy glanced up to warn Campbell, but he was already gone. She passed the youth at a stroll, face low. Rounding the corner she went a few yards along the main street, looked in the window of an electricity showroom then sauntered back. Reaching the door in the wall, she gave a sharp tap. Someone came out of a house in Peregrine Road. Moving quickly away from the door, she went to the car and pretended to let herself in. Two minutes later she returned to the door and tapped again.

  There were two bells by the door, she noticed, a large brass-mounted one next to the engraved plate of Reynard Associates, and above it a small plastic type marked by a blank label stuck into a cheap metal surround. Campbell hadn’t mentioned a second bell. A second bell meant a flat, a flat with occupants who came back at all times of the day and night. She began to feel jittery again.

  There was a sound, a scraping scrabbling noise to her left; quite close. A movement took her eye up to the top of the low wall, and she watched Campbell’s dark bulk appear over the top and drop
untidily to the pavement.

  ‘Couldna’ make it up the back. Nowhere to get a grip,’ he panted as he dusted himself off.

  ‘Well, we tried.’

  The sweat shone on Campbell’s temples, he blew out noisily through his lips. ‘We’re no’ finished yet.’

  ‘But how?’

  He jerked his head towards the door in the wall.

  ‘Jesus, Campbell.’

  He was already sliding the jemmy out of the warren of pockets and compartments that lined his jacket.

  ‘Isn’t there another way?’

  ‘Eh?’ he answered distractedly, already moving towards the door.

  ‘What about keys – can’t we use those skeleton things?’

  He threw her a protesting look. ‘I dinna’ carry stuff like that!’

  Now you tell me, she thought as she took up station to one side of the door, trying to shield Campbell from casual observers in the main street, a fairly ludicrous exercise when she was half his size.

  ‘Isn’t it going to show, the damage?’ Daisy called nervously. ‘The Bill always check doors.’

  In reply, there was a grinding sound, a vicious groaning of timber and an almighty report, so loud it was like a pistol shot. A pedestrian on the far side of the main road paused and looked across. When he didn’t move on, Daisy uttered a loud yelp of laughter. Behind, Campbell gave a startled exclamation and grabbed her am. ‘What is it?’ She laughed again and jerked her head towards the pedestrian who, convinced he was hearing nothing more than a couple of people returning from an alcoholic afternoon, gave one last look and moved on.

  Inside, Campbell found a light switch and Daisy held the door while Campbell wedged it closed with rolled pages torn from a stack of telephone directories sitting on the floor. The door was severely damaged, the wood badly splintered around the lock and jamb so that, even when it was closed, a large chink of light showed through from the street outside. No bobby in his right mind would miss something that obvious, but she tried to close her mind to that as Campbell led the way through the narrow hall to a flight of stairs which wheeled round a blind turn to a first-floor landing.