Ken McClure - White death

‘He was a GP in Scotland who also suspected there was something wrong with the vaccine. I just wondered if he’d made contact with you or Alan Nichol at any point.’

‘Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘No matter,’ said Steven pleasantly, getting up to go. ‘Many thanks for your help.’

‘Not at all,’ said St Clair. ‘I’m glad I was able to talk openly to you this time. Living with secrets is not as easy as people might imagine.’

‘No,’ agreed Steven, thinking of Tally.

Steven drove into Cambridge proper and found a place to eat: he had skipped breakfast after a restless night. He parked the car and looked around, finally settling for coffee and croissants in a small cafe boasting Tudor beams and a frontage leading down to the river. A couple of punts moored at the water’s edge and nestling under a weeping willow set the scene for calm reflection on what he’d learned.

It was Alan Nichol himself who had raised the alarm over what was happening to the green sticker children but he was dead by the time three separate groups had set out to establish the source of the problem. It was the scientists at St Clair Genomics who had uncovered traces of the toxin in the vaccine vials and the problem had been ascribed to Redmond Medical, the company contracted to prepare injection vials of the Nichol vaccine. Redmond had been bottling toxic compounds for another company immediately before starting the vial run for St Clair so everything seemed to fit… except for Alan Nichol’s murder.

Steven ordered more coffee from a waitress who looked and sounded as if she belonged in a Jane Austen novel. She was doing a Saturday job, he concluded. She’d be back studying English Lit on Monday morning. He wondered if he could have been wrong about Nichol being murdered. If his death had been an accident, he wouldn’t be currently left trying to fit a square piece into a round hole.

Try as he might, Steven could not bring himself to believe that Nichol’s death had been accidental. He remained convinced that he had been murdered. The strange red car, parked at the head of Nichol’s street, had been just too much of a coincidence. This still left him looking for a motive. Nichol had died after raising the alarm about the health of the green sticker children but before the vial contamination had been discovered. The answer had to lie somewhere in that time frame. Nichol couldn’t have been killed to stop him talking about the possibility of contamination because it was common knowledge among the others in the lab. In fact, just about everyone at St Clair Genomics had been detailed to work on it. His death didn’t make sense unless… someone was lying about something. But what?

Steven paid the bill and left, choosing to walk by the river for a bit and feeling nostalgic for the days of his youth when he came across groups of students enjoying a sunny Saturday, free of lectures and all care it seemed as they laughed and chatted their way along the banks of the Cam. It made him wonder if he had already reached the age where he had become invisible to the young. The argument that he was only… twice their age — my God, was it really that much? — failed to provide reassurance.

Was he looking for a big lie or a little one? Start with the big. Could what he and Macmillan had been told by people at ministerial level be a complete load of nonsense, designed to elicit their sympathy and gain their collusion in keeping it quiet? Maybe the children had not been given a new anti-TB vaccine at all? Perhaps they had been given something else entirely and for some other reason?

Steven shook his head in an involuntary gesture of dismissal, noting that he’d just got a nervous sideways glance from a man out walking his dog. This was going too far, he reckoned, and would demand the involvement of too many people. It made him think of the old adage, Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

He felt inclined to accept that the Nichol vaccine was exactly what the authorities maintained it was — a new and much needed vaccine against TB. So, what did that leave to lie about? The problem with the toxin, that’s what, he concluded, the contamination of the vials with an unidentified poisonous substance. There was something wrong with that story.

Phillip St Clair had told him that it had been one of a number of compounds being checked out by a pharmaceutical company looking for new anti-cancer drugs so, being experimental, it wouldn’t be listed in any lab handbook but, even if it wasn’t a listed substance, shouldn’t one of the labs investigating the samples taken from Keith Taylor or Trish Lyons have noted the presence of a toxin, even an unknown one?

Steven wasn’t sure. It may have been present in such small quantities that it hadn’t been picked up. Maybe the automated analytical equipment had simply not recognised it and therefore failed to report it. It was also possible that the vials had been contaminated to varying degrees so that some children got a bigger dose of toxin than others but that seemed less likely. If this had been the explanation for the toxin rampaging through Keith Taylor’s body like a full-blown infection, the lab would almost certainly have uncovered evidence of its presence and they hadn’t.

Steven called the duty officer at Sci-Med and asked him to ring round the labs involved in analysing material taken from either Trish Lyons or Keith Taylor to ask about the presence of toxic compounds — identified or unidentified. He had his answer within an hour. The hospital labs in Carlisle and Edinburgh both reported that they had carried out routine biochemical analysis on a number of samples: all were negative for toxins. The London lab which had analysed the samples taken from Keith Taylor at the second post mortem and which was furnished with the best equipment money could buy had also drawn a blank.

Steven sighed but had to admit that the lab results were pretty much what he’d expected. After all, if any of them had noted the presence of a toxin, they would have reported it before now, but the negatives did raise an obvious question. If St Clair Genomics had detected the presence of a toxin in the vaccine vials, why hadn’t the relevant labs found it in the patients? He supposed it might have had something to do with breakdown of the toxin in the body — some poisons did this and could therefore remain undetected — but this was outside his area of expertise. He would have to seek expert advice but first he needed to gather more information about the contaminating toxin. Phillip St Clair didn’t have any chemical details; a talk to Redmond Medical was called for. He phoned Sci-Med and asked that they make contact with a senior person at Redmond Medical. He also asked for business background information on both St Clair and Redmond.

‘It’s Saturday afternoon,’ said the duty man. ‘It’ll probably mean getting someone at home.’

‘Fine.’

‘And the background info, when do you need that?’

‘Now.’

‘Watch this space, as they say.’

Steven smiled at the good-humoured response. He liked laid-back people.

The duty man called back forty-five minutes later. ‘Sorry, all the senior people at Redmond seem to be away for the weekend but I’ve managed to contact a Mr Giles Dutton; he’s the line maintenance manager at the company. He lives in Moulden at 34, Lipton Rise. He’s expecting your call.’

Steven noted down the number. ‘Okay, thanks.’

‘Jean Roberts has some stuff on Redmond. She says she’ll email it to you. She’s working from home.’

Thanks again.’

Steven had doubts about whether a line maintenance manager would be able to give him the information he was after, namely the identity of the toxic agent. He suspected not but, as he had nothing else to do meantime and nuggets of information often came from unlikely sources, he called Dutton and asked if he could come and speak to him.