Ken McClure - White death

‘Please yourself,’ replied Dutton.

It wasn’t quite the response Steven had expected but he took it as a yes and said that he’d be in Moulden in a couple of hours.

‘Right.’

Steven set off, feeling less than optimistic about getting anything at all out of Dutton who had sounded less than interested and hadn’t even bothered to ask what it was about but at least he was doing something. He was pleasantly surprised when a friendly looking woman opened the door to him at the pretty white bungalow in Lipton Rise. She invited him in. ‘Giles is in the conservatory,’ she said. ‘It’s through here…’

Steven followed her through a living room smelling strongly of furniture polish and out through French doors into a conservatory where the temperature was several degrees higher because of the sun on the glass. A man with thinning red hair and a matching pale complexion sat there in a cane armchair, glasses on his nose, feet up on a small footstool as he read his newspaper.

‘It’s the gentleman you’re expecting, dear.’

‘Steven Dunbar,’ said Steven.

Dutton grunted and pushed his glasses up his nose but didn’t get up.

‘Perhaps you’d like some tea or coffee, Dr Dunbar?’ asked the smiling woman. Steven got the impression she might be well used to being excessively polite and helpful in order to make up for her husband’s shortcomings.

‘Coffee would be lovely, thank you.’

Steven showed Dutton his ID card but he waved it away. ‘Makes no odds, just state your business.’

Steven sat down on the other cane armchair and said, ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about the chemical that contaminated the St Clair company vaccine.’

‘Like what?’ said Dutton, making a point of looking out of the window at a high conifer hedge in the garden rather than at Steven.

‘Ideally, I’d like to know what it was, where it came from and how it got into the vaccine vials.’

‘Me too,’ said Dutton.

‘I’m sorry?’

Dutton turned to face Steven. ‘I’d like to know that too,’ he said.

Steven sensed there was more to this comment than he was taking on board. Dutton wasn’t just being rude; he was very bitter about something. ‘You’ve no idea?’ he asked.

‘None whatsoever.’

‘But if the company don’t know what happened, you have no way of stopping it happening again,’ said Steven.

‘Very true,’ said Dutton with what appeared to Steven to be a wry smile.

‘If you’ll pardon my saying so, Mr Dutton, you don’t seem to be very concerned about something so serious,’ said Steven. ‘Surely, as production line maintenance manager, it’s your responsibility if contamination occurs?’

‘It would be if that’s what happened,’ said Dutton, adding to Steven’s mounting frustration.

‘Mr Dutton, you do accept that a toxic substance was found in the vaccine vials prepared by your company?’

‘So they tell me.’

‘But you’re not concerned?’

Dutton looked at Steven and shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘My God, man, if your maintenance schedules allowed a toxic chemical to get into a vaccine…’

‘I should be on my knees asking the Almighty for forgiveness,’ said Dutton. He leaned towards Steven. ‘But it never happened.’

At that moment Dutton’s wife came into the conservatory with a silver tea tray and laid it down between them. ‘There you are. I hope you two are having a nice chat. The scones are freshly baked — just out the oven…’

Steven did his best to fake up a smile and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Dutton, that’s very kind.’

‘Just shout if you want more…’

Mrs Dutton backed out through the French doors and closed them with a last beaming smile.

‘What d’you mean, it never happened?’ demanded Steven as the electric atmosphere returned. ‘The scientists at St Clair Genomics found toxin in the vials, the same one that you had been bottling the day before.’

‘So they did.’ Dutton resumed his watch on the conifers in the garden.

‘Are you saying that it didn’t come from the production line?’ asked Steven.

‘Well, you got there in the end,’ said Dutton.

Steven’s senses were reeling. ‘But how else would it get in?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Dutton. ‘It’s true that we’d bottled a number of toxic compounds for a pharmaceutical company in Kent the day before we did the vaccine vials for St Clair and everyone thought they’d jump on the obvious bandwagon. But what the smart arses didn’t know was that the main production line broke down that day and I had to move the job to our back-up facility in C building. The technicians fixed the problem with the main line overnight and we were able to use that for the St Clair job. The contaminating chemical was never near the main line. It wasn’t even in the same building.’

Steven swallowed as he felt his throat dry. ‘But you must have told someone this?’

‘Of course,’ said Dutton. ‘They didn’t want to know. I was told not to worry. It was a technicality. Everything would sort itself out.’

‘So how did the vials become contaminated?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘But unless that is established…’

‘Redmond Medical can’t reopen for business?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Redmond Medical isn’t going to open again for business,’ said Dutton. ‘Our owners have decided to close it down. The staff have been told they’ll be paid to the end of the month and that’s it. Finito.’

‘Bloody hell, that’s a bit over the top,’ said Steven. ‘Have you any thought about what you’ll do?’

Dutton gave Steven a look that suggested he’d been thinking about little else. ‘Word gets around in the pharmaceutical business, Mr Dunbar. Who’s going to employ a production line manager held responsible for the fuck-up that closed down Redmond Medical?’

‘But from what you say, you weren’t.’

‘Yeah, I could tell them that,’ said Dutton sourly.

‘But there must be others who know what happened?’

Dutton gave a contemptuous snort. ‘Staff are in line for a bonus if they sign up to a confidentiality clause. They’re being paid extra to say nothing about anything they did at Redmond. It almost doubles their redundancy money.’

‘Surely that kind of clause wouldn’t extend to something like saying which production line was working and which wasn’t on any particular day?’ said Steven.

‘It covers everything.’

‘You’re making it sound as if Redmond are quite content for people to think the contamination happened on their production line?’

Dutton shrugged and said, ‘They don’t seem to care too much about how or where it happened. They’ve accepted it was their fault and rolled over. Any further inquiries would just be an academic exercise as far as they’re concerned.’

Steven heard echoes in that of what the Home Secretary had said at the Home Office meeting. ‘It’s not exactly what you’d expect a company like Redmond to do in a situation like that,’ he said. ‘Denial and counter claim is usually the order of the day until someone proves what happened.’

‘Well, not in this case,’ said Dutton. ‘When a toxic chemical being processed by us on one day is found in vials in the production run on the following day, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the conclusion’s going to be. All I’m saying is that it didn’t happen on my production line.’

‘Thanks for telling me all this, I appreciate it,’ said Steven, preparing to leave and feeling absurdly guilty about not having sampled Mrs Dutton’s scones.

‘If you find out what did happen, will you let me know?’ asked Dutton.