‘I’d like to speak with Dr Gordon Hasselhof, please.’
‘May I ask who’s calling?’
‘Dr Steven Dunbar. I’m calling from Glasgow in Scotland.’
‘Please hold.’
For a few moments the line was left open and Dunbar could hear the everyday sounds of a hospital in the background; then music cut in as he was put on hold. ‘Greensleeves’ coming from the wrong side of the Atlantic seemed slightly bizarre.
‘Hello, caller.’
‘Yes?’
‘Dr Hasselhof is currently in conference. Would you care to leave a message or call back later?’
‘I’ll try later,’ said Dunbar.
‘Have a nice day, Doctor.’
‘You too,’ said Dunbar. He cautioned himself that it was better to be told to have a nice day by someone who didn’t mean it than to get lost by someone who did.
He put down the phone and started to tidy up the papers on his desk. He saw that his letter to the Scottish Office was still on the screen of his computer and decided to copy it to disk rather than cancel it. He picked up the disk he had initialled earlier and inserted it. He saw it come up as ‘Research Data One’, the title he’d given it when covering up the mistake of inserting one of Ross’s disks. Looking at it and thinking of Ross’s research reminded him where he’d seen the term ‘immuno-preparation’ before: in the title of one of Ross’s research papers, the one he had put aside while he read the others. He grabbed his jacket and briefcase and made for the car park. The paper was in the file in his hotel room.
There was a laundry bag sitting on his bed when he got there, with a note pinned to it. Dunbar feared it would be a complaint from the hotel about the state of the things he’d sent for cleaning, the clothing he’d used on the ill-starred expedition with Jimmy Douglas. He opened the envelope. It wasn’t a complaint. They were returning a set of car keys that had been left in one of the pockets. Dunbar looked at them. They were the keys to Jimmy’s Land-Rover. He’d have to find a way of returning them.
When he retrieved Ross’s paper from the Sci-Med file, Dunbar noticed that it was over three years old. This was not encouraging. Could what Ross had been working on over three years ago really be relevant to what was going on at the moment? If it had been a successful line of research, why had he not published any more about it in the intervening period? He sat down and started reading.
He had to struggle with the immunological jargon at the beginning but it soon began to make sense and he jotted down the major points as they emerged.
Fact number one was that the human foetus did not start out with an immune system of its own. If biological material from a foreign source were to be introduced to it before its own system developed, it would be accepted. More importantly, when the baby finally did develop its immune system, it would continue to accept material from that source throughout its life. Animal experiments using stem cells… Dunbar swallowed as he read the words… had shown this to be the case. Unborn mice, surgically infused with human stem cells before development of their immune system, had subsequently been born with a human immune system as well as their own.
Using this technique, it was possible to ‘prepare’ a foetus by surgically introducing stem cells from a putative donor into it while still in the womb, making a subsequent transplant after the baby’s birth problem-free. There was no need for steroids or any other kind of immuno-suppressants to overcome rejection problems. There simply wouldn’t be any. The tissue would be one hundred per cent compatible. The perfect transplant, in fact.
The limitations to this strategy, as Ross pointed out in his paper, were obvious. Such transplants would have to be restricted to organs that the donor could afford to lose, such as a half or whole kidney. If the foetus needed a heart or liver then, of course, there could be no human donor. It was suggested, therefore, that the development of this technique of ‘immunizing’ foetuses against rejection of a future transplant would best be pursued with animals in mind as the donors. Improvements in foetal surgery would also have to be achieved if stem cells were to be introduced without a high risk of premature labour induction.
Dunbar felt a chill down his spine as the picture became clear. He had discovered something so awful that his mind almost rejected it. He looked back over the text and picked out the the words ‘there could, of course, be no human donor’. He was mesmerized by them. In his head he started to modify the text: there could, of course, be no human donor unless… the stakes were high enough… to include murder as part of the procedure. And that’s what the ape experiments were all about. Ross was practising foetal surgery because he needed to introduce stem cells into unborn foetuses. Christ! It all fitted now. Kenneth Lineham, Amy Teasdale and now Amanda Chapman had not been admitted to Medic Ecosse as transplant recipients at all. They were the donors.
Dunbar rubbed his forehead as he struggled to come to terms with the discovery. Amanda’s marrow puncture had been carried out to obtain stem cells for surgical introduction into the unborn foetus of the Omega patient. That’s why she had been taken up to the Omega wing. In the intervening weeks, the Omega baby had been developing Amanda’s immune system and it must now be ready to accept Amanda’s tissue as its own. Dunbar guessed at an operation timed to coincide with a Caesarian delivery when the baby was large enough to receive a child’s heart.
It also seemed a fair guess that Ross had put out a request to the black market for a suitable kidney for Amanda, knowing that if the price were high enough one would be found. At some point before or during Amanda’s operation, he would substitute an incompatible kidney, an animal organ, knowing that she would reject it and die. He would then steal her heart for the Omega baby. At autopsy he would put the correct donor kidney into Amanda to make everything neat and tidy. Her death, like those of Amy and Kenneth before her, would be just another one of those things… unless two nurses said otherwise!
Dunbar thought back to McVay’s report on Amy Teasdale. He’d said that not only her kidney but also her heart had been removed; they had both assumed at the time that this had been part of a routine earlier autopsy. McVay had been asked to examine Amy’s transplanted kidney. If only he’d been asked to examine the heart too. He would almost certainly have discovered that it was not her own but the previous Omega patient’s baby’s heart. It was odds-on that Amy’s heart was currently beating inside the offspring of some unknown Omega patient in a foreign land. This could be proved with a second exhumation of Amy, but Dunbar prayed that that wouldn’t be necessary. In the meantime, the prime objective was to save Amanda Chapman’s life.
His immediate thought was to inform Sci-Med and call in the police. That would put an immediate stop to everything. The problem was that ‘everything’ included Amanda’s chances of a transplant in time. Despite everything, it was true that a real, compatible kidney had been found for her. It just wasn’t Ross’s intention to use it until after her death. There must be some way of allowing things to continue so that the kidney arrived safely and was given to Amanda. He’d contact Clive Turner at the Children’s Hospital but first he’d tie up a last loose end. He’d call Hasselhof at the Mayo Clinic again.
‘Who is this?’ asked an American voice after a short wait.
‘My name is Steven Dunbar. I’m calling from the Medic Ecosse Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland.’
‘You’ve got a nerve!’ retorted Hasselhof.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Dunbar, recoiling slightly from the earpiece.
‘The medical profession has enough problems without carpetbaggers like you in it.’
‘I’m sorry, there must be some kind of mistake. I really don’t understand what you’re talking about, Doctor. I’m calling about one of your patients who was transferred here from the Mayo Clinic.’