‘Of course,’ replied Dawes. ‘I’m on autopilot: I’m just going through the motions this morning. I still can’t believe it.’
‘Gordon nodded. ‘Actually it’s a bit delicate,’ he said, half looking over his shoulder.
Dawes looked intrigued. ‘We can talk in my office,’ he said, indicating to the door at the end of the microscopy lab.
The room was small and cluttered but, unlike the main cytology lab, it had a window in it. Dawes cleared away a pile of scientific journals from the chair in front of his desk and invited Gordon to sit. He himself he sat down on a swivel chair behind the desk and leaned forward to rest his elbows on it. ‘How can I help?’ he asked.
Gordon saw no easy way of approaching the subject so he took the plunge. ‘I think Professor Thomas was involved in some illegal experimentation,’ he said. ‘I think he was dabbling in human cloning.’
Dawes looked shocked. ‘You can’t be serious?’ he exclaimed.
Gordon affirmed that he was. ‘I think that’s why the unit’s figures for ICSI were worse than other labs. Donor DNA was being injected into patients’ ova instead of their husbands’ sperm. The high failure rate from these implants was skewing the figures.’
‘God Almighty,’ exclaimed Dawes. ‘I don’t rightly know what to say.’
‘You didn’t suspect anything?’ asked Gordon, disappointed that Dawes’ reaction already suggested that was the case.
Dawes shrugged and said not. ‘It never even occurred to me. What put you on to this?’
‘Let’s say, it’s where my interest in Anne-Marie Palmer’s death has led me,’ replied Gordon. ‘I think Anne-Marie herself was the result of a cloning experiment: I don’t think she was the natural child of the Palmers at all and this fact had a bearing on her death.’
‘My God,’ whispered Dawes. ‘But I suppose that might well explain her deformity.’
‘Last night I met Professor Thomas in the car park when I came up to the hospital. He helped me gain access to the mortuary where it was my intention to take a tissue sample from Anne-Marie: I wanted her DNA fingerprinted to get conclusive proof that she’d been cloned, but it didn’t quite work out that way.’ He told Dawes what had happened.
‘You think Carwyn tried to kill you?’ exclaimed Dawes, his voice now strained. ‘This is absolutely incredible.’
‘I was destined for the incinerator along with Anne-Marie Palmer’s body,’ said Gordon. ‘I survived but her remains didn’t, so I can’t prove what Thomas was up to. That’s where I’d like you come in.’
‘Me?’
‘I need your help,’ said Gordon. ‘He must have written something down about what he was doing; he couldn’t have kept it all in his head. I have to find these notes or records to have any chance at all of convincing the police that there was more to the death of Anne-Marie Palmer than met the eye.’
‘So who do you think did kill her?’ asked Dawes.
‘I don’t know,’ confessed Gordon. ‘But I am convinced that her death was linked to what’s been going on here in the unit. I found her file in Thomas’s lab along with a lot of stuff on human cloning.’
`You searched the professor’s lab?’
Gordon nodded.
‘Now you come to mention it...’ said Dawes thoughtfully, ‘Carwyn had become rather secretive about what he was doing on his own account.’
‘Did you normally share the lab work?’
‘Between three of us.’
‘Will you help me?’ asked Gordon.
‘I’ll certainly do what I can,’ agreed Dawes. ‘Where would you like to start?’
‘I think we should make a thorough search of his lab and office and see what we come up with.’
Dawes nodded but said, ‘I think I’ll have to leave you to do that on your own while I explain to the symposium delegates just what’s happened. I’ll suggest that we suspend proceedings as a mark of respect. We’ve only got one more day to go anyway but I suspect the press will be swarming all over the hospital by lunchtime.’
‘Probably,’ said Gordon. ‘Maybe you could mention to the rest of the IVF unit staff that I’ll be around for a bit?’
Dawes nodded and said that he would. ‘I’ll be back by lunchtime,’ he said. ‘You can tell me how you’ve got on and we can talk about what you’d like to do next?’
Gordon arranged to meet Dawes outside in the car park rather than inside the hospital. ‘It’ll stop the staff wondering what we’re up to.’
Dawes accompanied Gordon along to Thomas’s office where they found the door locked. ‘Damn,’ said Dawes. ‘I’ll ask Rita.’ He left Gordon alone for a few moments before returning with a key and saying, ‘His secretary had a spare.’ He unlocked the door, handed the key to Gordon and said, ‘I’ll leave you now. Hope you find what you’re looking for. See you later.’
Gordon entered Thomas’s office and closed the door behind him. This time there was a feeling of anticlimax and sadness. The pictures on the wall seemed to be a poignant reminder of a brilliant career that had taken a fatal wrong turning, but it wouldn’t be the first, he mused. He walked across to the lab door and paused to look out of the window through the slats of the venetian blinds as he’d done last time. He saw Ran Dawes hurrying across the yard but then saw him stop as if someone had called out to him.
James Trool came into view and the two men stood talking for a few moments. Gordon drew back involuntarily when both men looked up at the window. He supposed that they were discussing the tragedy that had befallen Thomas, but he wondered if Dawes might be telling Trool about his presence. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Thomas’s lab looked pretty much as it had on the last occasion. He supposed that the man hadn’t had much occasion to use it again, what with the symposium taking up so much of his time, although he did notice that the articles on cloning were no longer sitting by the microscope. He noticed that there was a layer of dust on its plastic cover.
He pulled out the drawer where he’d found Anne-Marie Palmer’s medical file last time and found it empty. He stood there for a moment, transfixed by the empty space, considering that he’d made a mistake, although quite sure in his own mind that he hadn’t. He pulled out several other drawers in quick succession but the file wasn’t there either. They were all completely empty.
Gordon cursed and faced the fact that the file had gone the same way as the articles on cloning. The lab had been cleared out. ‘Shit,’ he exclaimed, resting both hands on the bench then he had another thought. The freezer! What about the bloody freezer? He hurried over to the chest freezer and pushed up the lid to find what he’d feared. The frozen foetuses had gone too. Only test tubes and chemical bottles remained.
Gordon cursed again. His chances of proving anything now seemed more remote than ever. He supposed that Thomas must have been panicked into destroying everything — maybe that was why he’d had a heart attack. Then Gordon remembered that he’d also had a lot of cleaning up work to do before that, down in the mortuary and in the incinerator room too. It struck him as odd that Thomas had done all that clearing up... then he’d destroyed everything in his lab that could possibly implicate him in cloning experiments... and then he’d had a heart attack and died. It all suddenly seemed just too tidy to be true.
He felt troubled as he prepared to leave. He closed all the drawers and cupboards he’d opened but when it came to closing the last drawer — something he did with his knee — he heard a noise as the drawer slid in. The drawer still appeared to be empty when he pulled it out again to take another look but when he slid it backwards and forwards on its runners the sound of crinkling paper was coming from somewhere.