Ken McClure - Crisis

That still doesn’t explain how Colin Turnbull came to be affected,’ said Shona.

‘No it doesn’t,’ agreed Bannerman but there was a more pressing question on his mind. He was again considering why the brain sections taken from the dead men at Inverladdie had shown such perfect signs of classical Creutzfeld Jakob Disease when the sections from the poisoned sheep showed no brain degeneration at all? He feared that the answer to that must lie with the people responsible for the pathology on the dead men, Lawrence Gill who was dead and Morag Napier … who was not.

It was late and Bannerman did not want to voice his suspicions to Shona. Despite the fact that it was he who had finally worked out the puzzle he was smarting over his earlier certainty about the involvement of the Invermaddoch nuclear power station. He seemed to have been so wrong so often in this affair that he decided he would keep his thoughts to himself for the moment. He would go into the medical school in the morning and try out a little test of his own. He still had the samples of sheep brain. He would let Morag go ahead with the animal tests she had promised to do.

Bannerman had just left for the medical school when the phone rang and Shona answered.

‘May I speak to Dr Bannerman please?’ asked a female voice.

‘I’m afraid he’s just gone out. Can I give him a message?’

This is Morag Napier at the medical school. I wanted to remind him about the sample he said he would bring in for animal inoculation.’

‘I think he’s on his way to see you now, Dr Napier, with the news.’

‘What news?’

‘Apparently the sheep were affected by some poison on the land, but Ian will tell you all about it himself when he gets there.’

‘That sounds interesting, thank you,’ said Morag Napier.

‘Hello again ,’ said Bannerman as he entered Morag Napier’s lab.

‘Good morning,’ smiled Morag. ‘You’ve brought the sample?’

Bannerman took out a small bottle containing sheep brain. ‘Here you are. Can I watch you do the inoculations?’

‘If you like,’ said Morag. She took the bottles over to a fume hood and switched on the extractor fan. It accelerated slowly into life and settled down to a steady hum.

Morag, now gloved and gowned, transferred the contents of the first bottle into the heavy glass reservoir of an emulsifier. She added sterile saline solution and fitted the cap which housed a sharp metal blade mounted on a long shaft that reached to the foot of the bottle. She clamped the reservoir to its platform and made the motor connection to the upper end of the shaft. She then switched on the power and the blade started whirling inside the glass, emulsifying the brain into a smooth, injectable solution.

Morag inspected it by eye and then gave it another couple of minutes. She then loaded the contents of the reservoir into two sterile plastic syringes. She fitted needles to both and said, ‘Shall we go down to the animal lab?’

There was still a vague smell of burning about the animal laboratory despite the fact that it had been completely reconstructed since the fire. It mingled with animal smells and that of fresh paint in an unpleasant cocktail which made Bannerman wrinkle up his nose as they went in. He noticed that Morag used her own key. There was no one inside.

‘I thought I would do six mice,’ said Morag.

‘Good,’ said Bannerman watching her every move.

‘I wonder, would you get me the experiment register from the office?’ asked Morag.

Bannerman went to the office but as soon as he turned the corner he turned back to look at what Morag was doing. He saw her take out two filled syringes from a drawer below the bench and replace them with the two she had brought down from upstairs.

‘Is that how you did it last time?’ asked Bannerman from behind her.

Morag jumped, but regained control quickly. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘It had to be you. You faked the brain sections and the animal tests to make it look as if the men in Achnagelloch had died from sheep Scrapie. Lawrence Gill must have found out what you’d done and tried to send true samples of the men’s brains to the MRC for proper analysis but he was murdered before he could say anything about it.’

‘He wasn’t murdered!’ insisted Morag with flashing eyes. ‘He fell from the cliff. It was an accident! The whole thing was an accident! If the farm workers hadn’t been so greedy the sheep would have been safely buried and none of this would ever have happened!’

‘How about Colin Turnbull, Morag? What did he do wrong?’

‘Perhaps I can answer that Doctor,’ said a foreign voice.

Bannerman turned round to see a man emerge from the animal food store. He was holding a gun. Bannerman felt himself go cold when he looked into the man’s eyes. He had seen them before. They had been above a ski mask up on Tarmachan Ridge. He’d only seen them for a second but now it all came back to him. There had also been two other occasions when he had seen this tall, fair, good-looking man. The first had been when he had been partially obscured behind Morag Napier when they had both come into the restaurant where he was eating in the Royal Mile and the second time had been in van Gelder’s car up in Stobmor on the night he had been assaulted in the car-park. ‘You’re van Gelder’s son,’ he said.

‘My fiance, Peter,’ said Morag. ‘We met and fell in love when I first went up to Scotland with Lawrence.’

Bannerman reckoned that Peter van Gelder had to be at least ten years younger than Morag and he was very handsome. ‘Really,’ he said.

‘We didn’t want any of this to happen,’ said Morag, who was now sobbing. ‘It was a simple accident. There was a leak of a chemical they use for treating the quarry stone and it killed a few sheep. It all stemmed from that, a tragic accident. That’s all it was. The company would have been forced to close down if the accident had been made public. There was so much resentment to their success among the locals. Peter’s father would have been ruined and we couldn’t have got married as we planned.’

Bannerman looked at Morag and shook his head. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ snapped Morag.

‘Will you tell her van Gelder, or shall I?’ asked Bannerman.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said van Gelder.

Bannerman turned back to Morag and said, ‘You’ve been used. The story about a chemical to treat stone is rubbish. They’re using the quarry as a dump for dangerous, illegal chemicals. The one that killed the sheep workers and Colin Turnbull was a powerful mutagen developed for biological warfare.’

‘Tell him it isn’t true!’ demanded Morag.

‘He also murdered Lawrence Gill,’ continued Bannerman, as he saw all the pieces start to fit. ‘He was the fair-haired man who pretended to be Gill at Cairnish post office. He even tried to push me off the Tarmachan Ridge and the only person who knew I was going there was you; I told you on the phone the morning before I left. You must have passed on that information to him.’

Bannerman could see by Morag’s expression that he was right. ‘You were the one who told him where Lawrence Gill was going because you overheard the conversation on the phone with Shona MacLean.’

‘But Peter just wanted to reason with Lawrence!’ protested Morag. ‘He just wanted a chance to explain why I had switched the slides.’

‘The slides came from Creutzfeld Jakob patients?’ asked Bannerman.

Morag nodded.

‘Why?’

‘I knew that Lawrence would make the connection with the official report of Scrapie in the sheep. All the affected sheep had been destroyed so I thought everyone would be keen to write it off as a freak accident and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately Lawrence found out about the switch.’