Tangled Web (34 page)

Gordon looked to both sides of the bath and underneath and finally found what he was looking for, lying on the frame cross members, a pair of long- handled tongs. His proximity to the uncovered bath was exposing him to too much in the way of fumes from the acid. He backed off for a few moments to take in a few deep breaths before returning to his task.

Holding the tissues to his face with one hand while fishing with the tongs held in the other proved successful, but only after half a dozen frustrating attempts with watering eyes and lungs bursting through holding his breath as long as possible. He finally extracted the bone to bring it over to a conventional sink, mounted on the wall to his right, to rinse away the acid and take it in his hand. He decided that he would examine it upstairs in daylight, maybe even outside in the garden: he felt the desperate need for fresh air and for more than one reason.

As he stood outside the kitchen door, running his fingers lightly along the smooth white bone he found no difficulty at all in identifying it at all but this in itself, posed a new problem and one that utterly confused him. What he was holding in his hands was a leg bone – the tibia of a small child. The trouble was it was a bone that Anne-Marie Palmer
did not have
; it could not possibly have come from her.

Gordon started to walk round the garden, his head bowed as he tried to think this latest twist through. He had the distinct feeling that he was playing three-dimensional chess with God but yet … he felt excited not dejected. He knew he was getting closer to the truth. He had the right pieces: they were just being played in the wrong order. If the child in the acid bath had had leg bones, then the child was not Anne-Marie Palmer … Oh, sweet Jesus Christ! It was Megan Griffiths!

It suddenly became clear to him what had happened. It had been Megan in the bath, not Anne-Marie. Megan’s dead body had been altered to make it look as if she was Anne-Marie Palmer! Her legs had been removed with the saw on the wall and then tissue damage inflicted, particularly on her lower extremities with acid in order to disguise the recent surgery. The whole exercise had been undertaken to create a corpse that would be accepted as that of Anne-Marie Palmer.

The why? was now obvious too. ‘Finding’ Anne-Marie’s body would stop people looking for her! He’d already considered the difficulties involved in stealing a cloned child from doting ‘parents’. Kidnapping had appeared to be a major stumbling block and one that he had not managed to see a way around. Dawes, or whoever he’d been in league with,
had.
Anne-Marie Palmer
had
been abducted but in order to stop a police hunt for the kidnapped child, the body of an already dead child had been made to look like her and then buried in the Palmers’ garden. The police, seeing no conceivable motive for the kidnap of a handicapped child, had followed their instincts, as the kidnappers must have reckoned they would, and this had led them to suspect the parents, unable to cope with their badly deformed child, had murdered her. They had found what they expected to find when they dug up the Palmers’ garden – a small legless corpse. Case closed. The child’s father even confessed to the crime. What a bonus that must have been, thought Gordon. But either way, it meant no more police hunt for Anne-Marie. The cloners had got clean away with their child.

In the same way that pain can be described as ‘exquisite’ Gordon found an almost mesmerising beauty about the whole horrific scheme. Whoever had dreamed up the scam was both brilliant and evil in equal measure. As everything started to fit, he wondered if thought had even been given to the type of acid used on the child’s body. Had they deliberately chosen hydrochloric over a more appropriate one because they knew that John Palmer would have had access to hydrochloric in his school science lab and the police would latch on to that fact?

Gordon returned to the cellar and took a last look around. The tissue from the teeth of the saw would be subjected to forensic study and there was no doubt in his mind as to what the outcome would be. The tissue would match that of the body found in the Palmers’ garden but neither would match the DNA profile of the Palmers - not because she wasn’t their biological child, but because she wasn’t even Anne-Marie!

Carwyn Thomas must have worked this out for himself when Fairbrother had given him his DNA fingerprinting results. The fact that he’d blurted out Megan Griffiths’ name at the time suggested that he’d made the connection and realised the motive for the theft of the cot death baby’s body.

Gordon sat down again behind Dawes’ desk to figure out where all this was leading him. There were two very important questions he still had to answer. Who had been cloned to produce Anne-Marie Palmer? And perhaps, most important of all, why? He was wrestling with this when he suddenly realised with a jolt that there was more to this than an intellectual puzzle. There was something that had to be considered urgently.
Anne-Marie Palmer could still be alive!

TWENTY SEVEN

Gordon had the feeling that he was trapped in the plot of an ancient Greek play with events becoming so bizarre that they demanded the appearance of a
deus ex machina
to
sort everything out. He regretted the fact that he couldn’t finally feel good about having paved the way for John Palmer’s release against what had been tremendous odds by any standards, but the things that were coming to light were eclipsing any such feelings with dark foreboding.

He had not been looking forward to telling Lucy and John that Anne-Marie had not actually been their daughter in strictly biological terms, although they had obviously loved her as if she had been. Now he was faced with the possibility that Anne-Marie might not even be dead … but there again, she still might be. It all depended on why she had been cloned in the first place. He was reminded again of the words of the American scientist at the symposium. A successful cloning,
done for whatever
reason
, will result in a baby being born. If Anne-Marie had been cloned to provide spare parts then she might well already be dead. How would anyone who had loved her cope with that kind of revelation, he wondered? For Lucy, at least, he reckoned that might be the final straw, a nightmare too far: one she might never recover from.

The chances of discovering anything about the motives behind the cloning seemed to depend entirely on finding out who had commissioned it in the first

place and his best chance of doing that still seemed to rest with the investigation of Dawes’ finances. If he had been paid to do it, the money had to be somewhere, unless of course, he’d hidden it under the mattress. Gordon decided to have one more search of the house - including under the mattress - before he called the police.

Apart from the bathroom, Dawes had only used one room upstairs, a large bedroom with pale green walls and a window that looked out on to the Menai. The bed, an old-fashioned double with a walnut headboard, remained unmade and the grey light coming in through the window did nothing to make the room seem attractive. Gordon looked through all the drawers in the room and in both wardrobes as outside, the skies seemed to grow darker by the minute. The bedside cabinet was the only thing to reveal contents other than clothes. It contained bedtime reading material, a number of catalogues and magazines, mainly to do with cars but there were several holiday brochures too. Gordon was about to dismiss them as irrelevant when he had second thoughts and flicked through them. His interest was rewarded when he saw that biro pen had been used to mark certain pages. From what he could deduce, Dawes had had an interest in the new Jaguar S type and also in holidays in the Caribbean, not tastes easily satisfied by a National Health Service salary. Unfortunately there did not seem to be any information about how he did intend to pay for them.

There was an interesting bookmark in one of the holiday brochures. It was a leaflet, advertising a private medical clinic in Paris. It made Gordon wonder if Dawes had been offered a job there, supposing that that would be an alternative explanation for his sudden interest in material things to that of ill-gotten gains, although he still hoped that the latter might be true. He slipped the leaflet into his pocket.

Finally he took a look at the bathroom, it being the only room that he hadn’t yet searched. The dark skies outside had finally decided to break open and rain battered against the large frosted window above the bath as he checked the cabinet over the mirror and then the cupboard under the basin, both without success. The bath itself was a Victorian iron monster with peeling paint on the outside and feet fashioned as seashells. There was no panelling round it so Gordon felt round the outside as far as he could reach; he found only more peeling paint and cobwebs.

He stood up and pulled the lavatory chain, not for any reason other than the fact that you didn’t often see a high cistern these days and they sounded different from modern ones. It reminded him of Scottish tenement life in his youth. Thinking about cisterns caused him to recall that he’d seen them used as hiding places before in several films. Guns and drugs usually. He looked up at the one with ‘Gates Pat. Pending’ etched into its iron front and thought that he had nothing to lose by taking a look.

He dragged a heavy linen basket over the floor and climbed up on it. He still wasn’t high enough to be able to look into the cistern but he could reach in and feel around the inside with his fingers. The inner wall felt cold, wet and rough, like the surface of a rock on the seashore just after high tide had receded. The ball cock made a grinding noise when he moved the operating lever but, apart from

that, everything seemed normal.

Halfway along the back wall of the cistern his fingers touched plastic and it felt foreign. It was a plastic bag by the feel of it … too light to contain either a gun or drugs but at that moment, more interesting than either. He gave it a strong tug and brought out what looked to be a plastic-covered passbook, contained inside a freezer storage bag. Fate for once had been kind.

Gordon tore at the bag but paused to dry his hands before pulling out the passbook itself. It was a Nationwide Building Society passbook, the record of an account in Dawes’ name and it currently contained one hundred and ninety-seven thousand pounds exactly. There were only three entries in it, a deposit of fifty thousand pounds made on a date in December last and another of one hundred and fifty thousand made some four weeks ago. One withdrawal was listed. The sum of three thousand pounds had been taken out a week after the last deposit. Gordon guessed at the Visa bill payment. He could also guess that the first payment had been made on the birth of Anne-Marie and the second when she had been abducted. It was definitely time to inform the police. They would have ways of finding out where the deposited money had come from.

Gordon came downstairs, feeling pleased with himself but the feeling did not last long. As he reached the last three steps he found himself staring into the twin barrels of a shotgun.

A thin, sullen-faced man with a stoop, who looked as if he hadn’t smiled much in the last thirty years, held the gun. He was wearing a dark, waxed-cotton jacket and had a gamekeeper’s satchel slung over his shoulder. A collie dog sat at his feet, anxious to be doing something but restrained by training and discipline.

Gordon smiled, hoping to convey the impression that he was no threat, and put his hands up slowly, eager to defuse the situation before accident or misunderstanding led to his chest being opened up like a volcanic crater. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he ventured.

The man gestured that he move away from the foot of the stairs and back into the kitchen. Gordon complied, saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m Doctor Tom Gordon from Felinbach.’

‘My arse you are,’ growled the man. ‘Thievin’ bastard.’

‘Really, I am,’ insisted Gordon.

‘So how’s the patient?’ sneered the man.

‘Doctor Dawes is dead,’ Gordon replied, thinking it sounded stupid in the circumstances.

‘Bloody right he is and he didn’t die here! Poor bugger’s not even cold in his grave before bastards like you start sniffin’ round like bloody hyenas.’

‘Look, I really am a doctor. I’m not here to rob anyone,’ said Gordon.

‘What’s that in your bloody hand then?’ growled the man angrily. ‘Your prescription pad? Give it here!’

Gordon handed over the passbook and the man snatched it quickly from him with his left hand while still keeping the gun trained on him in his right. ‘Bastard,’ he swore when he read out the cover. ‘Nationwide bloody Building Society. Didn’t come here to rob, my arse!’ He put the passbook down on the table and returned to holding the gun in both hands.

Gordon could see that the man was becoming dangerously angry. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just call the police and we can sort the whole thing out. I was just about to do that myself.’

‘Police? Judges? Courts? Bunch of tossers. It’s about time we returned to making our own justice round here. Leave it to that lot and the likes of you’ll end up getting off with a poxy fine, couple of weeks community service and not so much as a kick up the arse.’

‘Just call the police, will you?’ said Gordon, becoming increasingly anxious.

The man moved a little closer and leered at him. You’d like that wouldn’t you. Bastard! The whole bloody system’s designed for criminals these days and bugger the victims. Well, boyo, you fucked up this time!’ With that, the man swung the stock of his gun round to stab it with both hands into Gordon’s face, knocking him clean out.

When Gordon opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Mary’s face and she seemed angry. ‘I do not believe it, Tom’ she said. ‘
You
make Inspector Clouseau seem like the consummate professional! What is it about you that makes you do these things?’

Gordon struggled to find a reply but his jaw hurt and before he could get anything out a voice on the other side of the bed, he recognised with a sinking feeling as belonging to Chief Inspector Davies said, ‘Frankly, I’ve given up on you Gordon. I’ve decided that there’s probably a limit to how much your head can take in the way of punishment so I’m going to let you reach your threshold and then maybe that’ll convince you not to play the Lone bloody Ranger all the time.’