Scorpion's Advance (4 page)

The chief animal technician came over as Anderson went in and asked what he could do for him. Anderson asked for
a series of guinea pig inoculations and asked how quickly they could be set up. Ray Allan checked his stock chart and said, 'Soon as you like.'

Anderson thanked him and said that he would send the samples
down. Almost as an afterthought he turned as he got to the door and said, 'Be careful with them. They may turn out to be nothing, but . . . don't splash them around.'

'Understood.'

Anderson phoned Angela Donnington at seven. Her flatmate said that she had gone out with Phillip Green, a surgical registrar on James Morton's staff. 'She expected you to call on Monday.'

'I got tied up.'

'Any message?'

'No message.'

Anderson put down the phone and went out for a walk. The air was cold but it was clean and crisp ... all right if you keep on the move. The phrase made him think of home. His mother used it.

Anderson came from a family who farmed dairy cattle on the rolling pastures of Galloway in the Scottish borders. His older brother, Tom, was destined to take over the farm one day; he had never considered anything else, but Neil and his sister, Annie, had marched to a different drum. He had studied medicine at Glasgow University and Annie, two years his junior, had done veterinary science at the Royal Dick Veterinary School in Edinburgh.

Like so many people, Anderson had not fully appreciated his family and upbringing until he had left home. It was a good relationship: they were proud of him, he was proud of them. Christmas anywhere other than at Leitholm Farm would be unthinkable. No one in the family was keen on letter writing. It was assumed that, if you heard nothing, everything was as it always was, and that was comfort enough.

Anderson's thoughts came back to Martin Klein. He wondered what Klein had been like, where he had been brought up. He presumed that the dean of the medical
school would have written to his parents and imagined their grief at receiving the letter. Had he been an only child? Did he have a sister, too? Anderson wanted to know more about Klein. If he knew more, he might be able to rid himself of this constant feeling of unease, the feeling that there was much more to the Klein affair than just the tragic death of a medical student.

Anderson ran his fingers along the wire of the guinea-pig cage; the animals dived under the straw.

"Fit as fleas,' said Ray Allan, who came over to join him. *lf anything, the injections did them the world of good.'

'So much for that idea,' said Anderson with a shrug. He returned to the lab. He contacted the student accommodation service and sought their help in finding the student who had shared a flat with Martin Klein. They responded with a name that Anderson traced to a third-year biochemistry class in the afternoon. He was waiting outside the lecture theatre when the students emerged. He asked one of them and was pointed in the direction of a tall blond boy. Anderson introduced himself and asked if they might talk.

'You were Martin Klein's friend?' Anderson asked in the empty lecture theatre as rain began to patter off the windows.

'As much as anyone was. We shared a flat.'

'Not popular, huh?'

'He wasn't actually disliked. It was more a case of him
not fitting in or not wanting to fit in would be more accurate.'

'How so?'

The boy made a face as if to illustrate his difficulty in explaining. 'Martin was middle-aged before his time. He never did anything on impulse, always looked at all the angles, weighed up the pros and cons of any situation before committing himself. Apart from that he never intended to practice medicine anyway.'

'So why a medical degree?'

'He was interested in molecular biology. You know, the science of the future, genetic engineering and all that. He figured that having a medical degree would stand him in good stead when it came to the scramble for research grants.'

'Astute.'

'Like I said, all the angles.'

Anderson asked if Klein had been home at all in the fast year.

At first the boy said no, but then changed his mind. 'Yes, he went home at Christmas, said it was no time for a good Jewish boy to be sitting around. It was the only joke I ever heard him make. He fixed himself up with some kind of vacation job at the University of Tel Aviv, but I can't remember who with ..."

'I can
,’ said Anderson. 'Professor Jacob Strauss.'

'Actually, I think you're right.'

Anderson told Kerr what he had discovered; the plasmid in Klein's gut was harmless, and Klein had, in fact, worked in the Tel Aviv lab where the vector had originated. 'Do we tell Strauss or let the matter drop?'

Tell him,' said Kerr. 'Harmless or not, the fact remains that a student in his lab contaminated himself with a cloning vector. It should not have happened.'

'Will you write?' asked Anderson.

'No, you do it but go easy; Jacob Strauss is a very distinguished man. On the other hand, don't kiss ass.'

'Scotsmen don't kiss ass.'

'But they can get up noses sometimes.'

Anderson drafted his letter three times before he was satisfied that it was both polite and to the point. He initialled the envelope and tossed it into the mail tray. He stretched and leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. That still left one outstanding question. What did kill Martin Klein?

The same question was to come up again on Monday at another meeting of the
Galomycin group. Ostensibly the meeting had been called to discuss progress with the new reduced dosage, but Lennox-Adams used it to point out angrily that, as yet, the hospital labs had completely failed to establish the cause of Klein's death.

Kerr said that Anderson had discovered something, obliging him to relate the tale of the cloning vector plasmid.

'Very interesting,' said Lennox-Adams in a voice that said the opposite. 'Perhaps something of a more practical nature might emerge before our next meeting.'

Anderson returned to the medical school alone; Kerr remained for a working lunch with the medical super
intendent. As he entered the stairwell behind the side door, Anderson thought he heard something and stopped to listen on the first step. Nothing. He paused again on the landing, convinced once more he’d heard something. The wind moaned as it searched out the gaps round the fire-escape door, then he heard the sound again; it was coming from the dark shadow of the stairwell, a gentle, sobbing cry that vied with the wind.

Anderson descended and moved into the darkness, asking if anyone was there. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw what he thought was a white lab coat and moved towards it. He recognized the slight figure as one of the juniors from the animal house. She was in a state of shock, her eyes wide with disbelief, her fingers held to her mouth.

Anderson's questions failed to elicit anything at all from the girl for a few minutes, then she said, 'Mr Allan . . . it's Mr Allan

The chief technician?'

'Mr Allan ... Mr Allan ..."

At that moment one of the department secretaries came into the building.

'Look after her. Sheila, will you?' said Anderson, ushering the girl towards the startled woman and running off towards the basement steps. He narrowly missed hitting his head on one of the tunnel's bulkhead lights in his haste to get to the animal house. When he got there the door was standing wide open. The guinea pigs stopped their ridiculous cries as he stepped inside, leaving the scratching of the mice the only sound apart from the intermittent buzz of a faulty fluorescent light.

'Mr Allan . . . ? Are you there . . . ?'

There was no answer.

Anderson walked slowly through the animal house calling the chief technician's name. He looked into one of
the side rooms and recoiled at the sight of a rat spread-eagled on the examination hoard, its insides exposed through a long mid-incision, a bloody scalpel lying by its side. Anderson closed the door and continued through the passage towards the back of the animal house. He turned left at the end and stopped dead in his tracks. Ray Allan, the chief technician, was staring at him through the glass-panelled door of his office, only ... the eyes looked straight past him at the bleak prospect of eternity.

Allan's nose was pressed against the glass and his lips were drawn back over his teeth in a silent scream of agony. He looked like some fearsome medieval demon snatched from the crumbling stonework of an ancient cathedral. Blood dripped slowly from his mouth.

Anderson swallowed hard to contain the urge to vomit and started making frantic phone calls. He had managed to push Allan's body back from the door by the time Kerr arrived and, together, they managed to get inside the room.

Lennox-Adams appeared and examined the body. 'Poor chap's had a heart attack,' he said, getting to his feet rather stiffly after kneeling for a few minutes.

'What about the blood from his mouth?' asked Kerr.

'He's bitten through his tongue. Must have been the pain.'

'He looks like Klein did,' said Anderson.

'He looks like anyone who has just died in agony,' said Lennox-Adams. But Anderson's comment had germinated inside his head. He said, 'He wasn't one of the
Galomycin volunteers, was he?'

'No,' said Anderson, 'he wasn't.'

The post-mortem on Ray Allan failed to establish the cause of death; his heart had been perfectly sound. The words 'possible toxic shock' leapt out at Anderson from the report and triggered off the thought: just like Klein. He went to see John Kerr with the report still in his hand. 'It's that bloody plasmid!' he said.

'Shut the door,' said Kerr.

Anderson shut it.

'Now, what do you mean?'

'Don't you see? Klein dies in agony; I find PZ9 in his gut. I give PZ9 to Allan to test; Allan dies in agony. The plasmid is the link! It must be . . .'

'I presume Mr Allan did not inject it into himself?' said Kerr with consummate calm.

'No, but . . .'

'And the guinea pigs he did inject it into remained alive and well?'

'Yes, but . . .'

'You are a scientist, Anderson, not an astrologer. Science says that the plasmid is harmless.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Mind you,' Kerr continued, pausing once more to put
flame to tobacco, I’m not saying that there isn't a place for intuition in science, gut feeling, hunch, call it what you like, but pursue it quietly. Let it show you the target but keep your mouth shut till you've hit it.'

'Yes, sir.' Anderson closed the door behind him.

Anderson came in next morning to find an air-mail letter bearing the crest of Tel Aviv University. It was from Jacob Strauss.

Dear Dr Anderson,

I was saddened to hear of young Klein's death. It is always a tragedy when a young person dies, all the more so when it is someone of Klein's undoubted ability. He worked in my laboratory for a period of six weeks during December and January.

The plasmid you mention does indeed originate from my laboratory: Ref. PZ9. The inserted gene is, in fact, taken from the harmless gut organism
E. coli
and therefore poses no danger. Indeed, Klein, being an undergraduate, would not have been permitted to work with anything that posed even a remote threat to his health. It is interesting to note, however, that plasmid PZ9 can survive in the human gut and I am grateful to you for the information.

Yours sincerely,

Jacob Strauss

Anderson tapped his pen on the desk and read the letter again; he found it reassuring. The niggling doubts that he had felt about the plasmid were beginning to fade. There was something very comforting about seeing things in black and white. He opened his desk drawer and took out the file on Martin Klein, flicking briefly through the lab test reports before removing the most recent one, a computerized printout of Teasdale's analysis from the Molecular Biology Department. He was about to staple Strauss's letter to it when he thought again and decided to show it to John Kerr.

Kerr grunted and threw it back across the desk at him. 'Satisfied?'

'Yes.'

Anderson decided to close the file on Martin Klein and checked through the paperwork to make sure that it was complete. It was not; the post-mortem report on the test guinea pigs was missing. It was customary practice, even when test animals showed no ill effects, to kill one and examine it for hidden internal damage. Anderson phoned the animal house and said that he was coming down.

He was met by a tall dark girl whom he had not met before. She came towards him and smiled at the uncertainty in his eyes.

‘I’m Ann Veitch,' she said, 'on secondment from Immunology until you get a replacement for Mr Allan. Can I help you?'

Anderson said who he was, taking a liking to the girl, who exuded an easy self-confidence. 'How are you finding things?' he asked.

'With difficulty,' Ann Veitch laughed. 'Very much the new girl, I'm afraid. Still, I'll learn.'

Anderson didn't doubt it. 'I'm looking for a path, report on one of my guinea pigs,' he said, handing over a copy of the request form with its reference number.