‘I don’t have a problem with that,’ said Gordon. ‘But if that means turning my back on my friends when I know they’re innocent, the answer is no.’
There was a long silence before Julie said, ‘We really can’t go on like this.’
‘No,’ agreed Gordon. ‘What is it that you want me to do?’
Julie hesitated before saying, ‘I think it might be best if I brought in a locum for the time being, at least until the Palmer business blows over.’
‘Blows over?’ questioned Gordon.
‘Well, until the trial is over and things settle down again.’
Gordon let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘You mean until John is convicted and gets sent down. Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘But I have to tell you, I’ve no intention of leaving Felinbach.’
‘Understood,’ said Julie. ‘I’m not sure what our financial state is exactly but we’ll work something out when I’ve done the figures.’
‘Sure,’ said Gordon.
‘Want that lift?’
‘Maybe not,’ said Gordon. ‘I’ve got one or two things to do in Bangor before I go back.’
‘Okay... well, see you around.’
‘See you.’
Julie left and Gordon remained seated on the bed for a few moments. He felt numb. Mary Hallam looked in and saw him sitting there. ‘I thought you’d left without saying good-bye,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I think I just got the sack,’ said Gordon.
Mary looked at him for a few moments in silence before saying, ‘In that case, the least I can do is offer to buy an unemployed colleague some brunch. You can tell me all about it and while you’re at it, you can tell me why you think John Palmer is innocent. I’m off duty in five minutes. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Gordon.
They drove down into the town in Mary’s car, a Honda Civic with more than ninety thousand miles on the clock. ‘Never let me down yet,’ replied Mary when Gordon commented on it.
‘How long have you had it?’
‘Three weeks.’
Gordon found himself forced to laugh when he thought that that might be the very last thing in the world he felt like doing. Mary was not only attractive; she was extremely easy to like.
They stopped at a pub near the pier in Bangor that Mary said she liked and ordered bacon and eggs at a table by a bay window overlooking the Menai.
‘I’m all ears,’ said Mary as they waited for their food.
At first, Gordon tried to be guarded about what he said, a bit unsure of Mary’s motives in bringing him there but he had taken such an intuitive liking to her that he found it difficult. Apart from that, he desperately needed to confide in someone. He found himself encouraged to say more and more until he had told her just about all his suspicions. He found it positively therapeutic: it made him realise that he’d had no one to confide in for such a long time.
‘Well,’ he said when he’d ended by telling her about taking a surreptitious look round Thomas’s private lab. ‘What d’you think?’
‘I think you’re mad,’ said Mary.
Nineteen
Gordon saw that Mary was serious and immediately regretted having been so forthcoming. He now felt embarrassed.
‘You can’t possibly believe that a man like Carwyn Thomas is mixed up in something like that,’ said Mary. ‘He’s a national institution — people round here regard him as a saint.’
‘So he has a pretty formidable reputation and he’s at the show-business end of medicine,’ countered Gordon, ‘That doesn’t mean he’s any different from the rest of us when it comes to self-interest and ambition, quite the reverse I would have said. Successful people tend to be ruthlessly ambitious; that’s largely why they get to be successful in the first place.’
‘There’s a big difference between being ambitious and being some kind of criminal,’ protested Mary. ‘I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you. In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, don’t you think you’re being just a little obsessive about this whole Palmer thing?’ She accented the words ‘just a little’ to make them sound like ‘a whole lot’.
Gordon rubbed his forehead, betraying growing feelings of vulnerability. The incident involving Lucy and the at least temporary parting of the ways with Julie had brought him close to nervous exhaustion. It was a gesture that reached Mary.
‘Look,’ she said softly, ‘I appreciate that you are absolutely convinced that your friend is innocent and I understand your desire to help him but making wild accusations about respected figures in the medical profession isn’t going to get you anywhere. Apart from anything else, the profession itself will crucify you. You’ll end up practising in Greenland!’
Gordon smiled ruefully and nodded. Mary put a reassuring hand on his. It was a gesture that made his skin tingle and made him realise how much he missed human contact. He looked at Mary, hoping that nothing of what he was thinking would show on his face. ‘I really haven’t been making wild accusations, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re actually the first person I’ve confided in.’
Mary looked puzzled. ‘Why me?’ she asked quietly.
Gordon shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, not wanting to weaken his position further by admitting that he found her so attractive. ‘Sympathetic stranger and all that,’ he continued. ‘Maybe the time was right: I needed to tell someone.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Mary. ‘You certainly seem to be all on your own when it comes to the Palmer case and swimming against the tide is never easy. You must have been under a lot of strain over the past few weeks.’
‘Maybe but it hasn’t coloured the way I feel about things though,’ said Gordon, almost defiantly.
Mary smiled at what she saw as the streak of obstinacy in Gordon. She didn’t think it unattractive. ‘You really do believe that the IVF unit is trying to clone a human being, don’t you?’ she said.
‘How else would you interpret what I found in Thomas’s lab?’ Gordon countered.
‘Mary looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose I would expect a man in Professor Thomas’s position to keep up to date with the research literature in his field so I wouldn’t think it odd at all to discover he’d been reading up on factors relevant to human cloning.’
‘What about Caernarfon’s poorer than average success figures for the birth of ICSI babies?’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed Mary. ‘But that doesn’t automatically mean that someone is putting donor DNA into patients’ ova instead of sperm,’ she added. ‘The failure-rate could be down to a lot of things; you said so yourself.’
‘I did,’ said Gordon, ‘And I’m not suggesting for one moment that, taken on its own, it proves anything one way or the other, but when everything is taken into consideration, I’m convinced that something illegal has been going on in Thomas’s unit. He did have Anne-Marie Palmer’s notes in his lab, remember? Just hers, no other patient’s.’
‘That’s harder to explain, I agree,’ conceded Mary.
‘The disappearance of Megan’s body fits into it somewhere too,’ said Gordon. ‘It’s just that I can’t see where at the moment.’
‘Liam Swanson wants to hand that over to the police,’ said Mary.
Gordon nodded but added, ‘Not just yet.’
Mary saw the steely determination in Gordon and found it slightly unnerving. This seemed to convey itself to Gordon who noticed the look in her eyes and felt obliged to explain, ‘I’m really not mad. I’m just someone who got caught up in something he hadn’t bargained for. I really was quite content as a country GP but all this just happened out of the blue and now I’m determined to see it through to the bitter end. I have to.’