Ken McClure - Hypocrite's Isle

An hour later, as Gavin himself was preparing to leave, the lab door opened and Peter Morton-Brown came in. He looked about him slowly, taking in the damage. ‘I heard what happened to Mary.’

Gavin didn’t respond. He just looked at him as if waiting for something more.

‘You must be feeling like shit, old son.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Making a mistake like that, I mean. Could happen to any of us and you shouldn’t feel bad about it... but all the same... what a bloody nightmare.’

‘I didn’t make any mistake.’

Peter adopted an exaggerated look of puzzlement. ‘I’m sorry? That’s what everyone’s saying. If it wasn’t a mistake... then what?’

‘It was done deliberately. It was meant for me.’

Peter now put on a contrived look of shock. ‘I see... but who would do something like that?’

‘Someone determined to see that the Valdevan experiments didn’t make it into print.’

Peter affected an amused smile. ‘I’ve heard about delusions of grandeur, old son, but this takes the biscuit. Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘The guy who’s going to turn your smug, patrician nose into a mess of blood and snot if you don’t sling your hook within the next ten seconds.’

‘Ah,’ said Peter. ‘You don’t think you’ve done enough damage for one day?’

Gavin felt himself on the edge of losing control, but he managed to confine himself to making one slight movement in Peter’s direction. It was enough to send him scurrying out through the door.

‘Bastard.’

Gavin was up at three in the morning being sick. It was the third time since coming home just after midnight, and now there was nothing left in his stomach to void. All the beer and junk food he’d consumed had been vomited, leaving only the painful spasmodic retching of an abused digestive system, which had to be endured until his body was satisfied that he had got the message. He rinsed his mouth out several times with cold water and then splashed some up into his face to combat the fuzziness. Was it worth it? He looked at himself in the mirror and defiantly concluded that it was. He’d managed to achieve a couple of hours of oblivion, an escape from the hell his life had become in the space of just twenty-four hours.

It seemed that the entire world saw him as an arrogant, insensitive nobody whose work was viewed as a threat to colleagues, to the department — even to the university — and whose carelessness had resulted in a colleague probably being disfigured for life. Even the girl he loved couldn’t stand the sight of him.

There was a knock on the bathroom door.

‘Are you all right in there, Gav?’

‘Just pissed.’

‘Then shut the fuck up, will you? Some of us have got work in the morning.’

Gavin mumbled an apology. A few minutes later he tiptoed back to his room and lay on top of the bed, looking up at the few stars he could make out in the sky through the pinkish glow of light pollution from the city. He got under the covers — as the temperature demanded he must — but stress had put sleep out of reach, making him toss and turn as he struggled to come to terms with what was happening. Worst of all was the feeling of helplessness he got when trying to fight back. It seemed that the best he could manage was an assertion that all he’d done was speak the truth. Why should that cause such problems? Why should that always cause such problems?

It wasn’t in his nature to pussyfoot around. He couldn’t pretend to Carrie that rushing off to the Lake District to be with her mother was going to do either of them any good when it clearly wasn’t. Why couldn’t she see that? Carrie was an intelligent woman; she had a mind of her own; she was studying medicine, for God’s sake. Surely she must have realised that he’d just been telling the truth? But she hadn’t wanted to hear that... she’d needed something else, something that he had failed to provide. Couldn’t provide? Love? He loved her dearly and she knew that. Comfort? Reassurance? How could he offer these when it would just be empty, meaningless nonsense. And, coming from him, that’s exactly what it would have sounded like. He screwed up his face as he recalled his pathetic attempts at reassuring Mary that everything was going to be all right when he’d held her in his arms after the fire. Now he hoped that she hadn’t heard. Telling someone that everything was going to be fine and dandy when it wasn’t was quite beyond him. It wasn’t as if he didn’t care. He did. He felt as deeply as anyone else. He just couldn’t go through the motions of uttering meaningless crap with any great conviction. Nor was he able to concede to Frank Simmons’ request that he consider the possibility of having made a mistake over the contents of the instrument beaker, when he was damned sure that he hadn’t. This, of course, brought the unthinkable alternative back into focus. Someone had made a deliberate attempt on his life.

This was not a happy thought for someone giving birth to the mother and father of all headaches, involving, as it did, facing up to the sheer number of people in the department who disliked him, and questioning who among them might go so far as to cause him actual bodily harm. A brief flirtation with the notion that, having failed the first time, they might try again, he dismissed as being over the top. The person who’d done this was not some psychotic Mafia hit man; it was someone on the staff; someone who hated him; someone who had tried to harm him, but who had got it tragically wrong and devastated the life of someone else, someone everyone liked. Being inside his own head right now was bad enough, but he suspected that being in theirs must be even worse.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Jenny Simmons as her husband came back to bed. The green digits on the bedside clock said it was 4 a.m. She’d heard him get up about an hour before, and had been aware of him pacing around the house when she’d stirred at intervals from her own restless sleep.

‘Sorry, I just can’t stop thinking about Mary,’ said Simmons, sitting on the edge of the bed. He shook his head.

‘They can do wonders with plastic surgery these days.’

‘No they can’t,’ said Simmons. ‘That’s something that everyone pretends, but ten years and twenty operations down the line she’ll still not be right.’

Jenny sighed deeply. ‘I know it’s no help and a bit of a platitude, but these things happen, Frank. It was a tragic accident.’

‘Gavin thinks not.’

‘How very like Gavin not to face up to the possibility that he might not be infallible.’

‘But if he’s right...’

‘You don’t think he’s right, do you?’ asked Jenny, propping herself up on the pillow on one elbow and rubbing her husband’s shoulder.

‘Maybe I don’t want to think he’s right.’

‘It was an accident, Frank. Gavin screwed up but won’t admit it.’

‘Gavin’s not a liar. I don’t think he knows how.’

‘But who in their right mind would do something like that deliberately?’

‘No one said anything about right minds.’

‘Are you saying you think there’s a homicidal lunatic on the staff?’

‘No, but you’re assuming that whoever did it meant to inflict personal injury. It could have been a crude attempt to cause a fire in the lab that went wrong. Flash fires aren’t predictable.’

‘Even so, who would want to stop Gavin’s research so much that they’d turn to fire-raising?’

‘Most of the staff, the head of department, the university, one of the biggest drug companies in the world. How am I doing?’

‘Going way over the top. Try to get some sleep. You’re going to make yourself ill.’