He reached the head of the stairs and looked in through the glass panel on the door. There was no one about so he opened the door, just far enough to slip inside, then paused for a moment to listen. He could hear the hum of lab equipment but little else until he heard the sound of laughter coming from a room along the corridor on the left. He remembered, from his conducted tour, that this was where the staff common-room was. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was coming up to three o’clock; they were probably having coffee. It was a bit of luck for him that they were all in the one place for the time being but things could change at any second.
He moved swiftly along to where Thomas’s room was situated — three doors short of the staff room and on the same side. He did so on tiptoe, holding his breath as he came to the door and tried the handle. There was no resistance; the lever went right down and the door opened quietly without any noise from the hinges. He gave silent thanks and slipped inside, steeling himself to close the door slowly again behind him.
As the door closed fully and the handle reached the top of its travel, he relaxed and leaned his forehead against the wood for a moment, letting out his breath and taking a moment to allow his nerves to calm down. There was sweat on his forehead and he was aware of the blood pounding in his ears. He turned round to see the photographs of children that he’d admired on his first visit here. This time the smiles of their parents made him feel dishonest.
He looked at the dark blue door at the window end of the wall. He had noticed it last time, but had assumed that it was a cupboard or a toilet, not the laboratory that Dawes had alerted him to. The Venetian blinds on the main window of the office were half tilted, making the room slightly gloomy, but not dark enough to warrant turning on the lights. He walked over to the blue door and tried it: it was locked.
He closed his eyes and swore softly as it started to look as if he’d taken a big risk for nothing but then it occurred to him that the key might be somewhere in the room. He looked in the various receptacles on Thomas’s desk and felt along the flat surfaces of the bookshelves before conceding the possibility that Thomas kept it on his person but then again...
With a growing sense of wrongdoing, he sat down in Thomas’s swivel chair to pull open the top drawer of the desk and start sifting through the contents. For a moment he thought he’d been successful as his fingers came across two metal keys on a small ring but he quickly realised that they were too small to be what he was looking for: the lab had a Yale lock. These were for something like a filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held a series of files in a corrugated cardboard holder. They contained patients’ notes, about ten sets in all. Gordon guessed that these would be the current patients in the clinic. He pushed them back to see if a key could be lying on the bottom of the drawer but stopped suddenly when he heard voices outside in the corridor.
‘Is the Professor back yet?’ asked a male voice with a strong Welsh accent.
‘He’s at a meeting; just go in and leave them on his desk,’ replied a softer female voice.
Gordon, who had frozen at the sound of voices, was galvanised into
action. He dropped to his knees and crawled into the kneehole of the desk, prepared to remain stock-still and hold his breath for as long as was necessary. He heard the door open and feet move across the carpet. There was a plop, as mail was dropped on to the desk above his head, then nothing. For the next few moments there was no sound at all. The unseen man was standing perfectly still in front of the desk.
Gordon’s nerves were stretched to breaking point as he imagined the man’s suspicions had been aroused but then he realised with immense relief that he was probably looking at the baby pictures on the wall. Another few moments and the feet moved away. The door closed and Gordon could let out his breath. He was about to crawl out from his hiding place when he his head brushed against something on the underside of the desk. He reached up and felt a round metal block there. There was something stuck to it but it moved without losing adhesion to the surface. The block was a magnet and there was a key stuck to it! He’d found what he was looking for.
Thomas’s lab was quite small but obviously well equipped, the centrepiece being an island bench with a Zeiss microscope and revolving test tube holder on it. Half a dozen tubes were on its rollers. They contained a red fluid that Gordon remembered being told on his tour, was cell culture fluid. The fluid would bathe the cells sticking to the glass as the rollers turned the tubes and keep them supplied with nutriment. There was a fridge, a chest freezer, two incubators and a piece of apparatus that looked as if it was designed for delivering electric current at varying voltage. There was a large sink equipped with arm-operated tap levers with a liquid soap dispenser mounted above it and a pedal bin below. Surgical gloves were available from a box at the side.
Gordon became frustratingly aware of his own limitations in laboratory medicine. He had succeeded in getting into Thomas’s lab, but how could he tell what was going on there if he had no idea what the test tubes and incubators contained? The numbers on the tubes meant nothing to him and he had no idea what half the chemicals in the fridge were for. He needed to find some kind of written indication of what was going on, a notebook or scientific protocol.
There were a number of photocopied scientific papers sitting beside the microscope. He leafed through them and felt a tingle at the back of his neck as he found a common factor: they were all concerned with some aspect of human cloning. Was that it, he wondered? Was Thomas actually dabbling in human cloning? Such a venture would undoubtedly be dangerous and definitely illegal but it was not exactly unknown for very bright people to consider that rules and regulations were meant for everyone but themselves. But how would this fit in with what had happened to Anne-Marie Palmer or Megan Griffiths for that matter?
He searched through all the under-bench drawers of the lab, looking for more substantial evidence. Lying under a pile of chemical company catalogues, he found one cardboard envelope file. It was a patient’s notes file and the white nametag on the front was dirty but the writing itself was decipherable. It read: Anne-Marie Palmer.
Gordon felt his throat tighten as he sat down on a stool by the microscope to open the file and start reading. He quickly realised that this was the full medical record file for Anne-Marie, running from the time of Lucy Palmer’s first appointment at the IVF clinic up until Anne-Marie’s birth. He turned to the end to look at the most recent entries, hoping to find anything that would suggest a connection between Thomas’s research and the baby’s death, but there appeared to be nothing like that. The file ended with Anne-Marie’s death simply being recorded as ‘violent’.
Gordon felt a giant pang of disappointment as he concluded that there was nothing to indicate why hers was the only file that Thomas had been keeping in his lab. He felt there had to be a reason; there had to be a clue there somewhere. He flicked through the pages two or three times more until his eye was caught by a series of highlighted text markings. Three groups of numbers had been highlighted in blue. The first was the date of the ICSI procedure carried out on Lucy Palmer’s ova; the second was the date of implantation of a fertilised tetrad into her womb and the third was a reference number. A comment in pencil beside the number said, ‘no siblings!’ Gordon noted the exclamation mark then wrote the numbers down on one of the Post-it notes lying beside the microscope. He folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket while he continued a search of the drawers. He found nothing else.