Tangled Web (19 page)

Gordon smiled and nodded politely but he wondered about the foundations for such a marriage. It was a common enough thing for patients to fall in love with their physicians and an understandable one too, in situations where trust and dependency were involved. But such feelings usually faded with the help of gentle discouragement from the doctor or simply with the returning self-confidence of the patient as part of the recovery process. He was tempted to consider that Trool, who was clearly old enough to be Sonia’s father, might have abused the situation and exploited his patient’s vulnerability but, from what little he’d seen of them together so far, it was Sonia who seemed to have the dominant personality. Whatever the circumstances, he reminded himself that it was really none of his business.

The tour of the house ended in the original huge, iron-framed conservatory built on to the back of the house and which commanded uninterrupted views over the Menai. Although it was dark and these views were restricted to lights twinkling on the other side of the water, Gordon realised that, in the daytime, it would be possible to see the mountains of Snowdonia.

‘Why don’t we sit here a while,’ suggested Sonia. ‘James will join us soon and we can have a drink before we eat.’

Gordon sat down in one of the cane armchairs among the potted plants, enjoying the smell of leaves and earth indoors. ‘You know,’ said Sonia, ‘James really is grateful to you for back-pedalling on the Megan Griffiths thing. I am too.’

For a moment, Sonia seemed to look directly at Gordon as if adding silent emphasis to what she’d said. Gordon dismissed it as imagination and insisted, ‘It wasn’t a case of back-pedalling; there was just no reason to say anything to the press right now.’

Sonia smiled and said, ‘None the less, we’re very grateful. James really cares about the hospital’s reputation, you know - he takes it all so personally. He’s an old sweetie.’

Gordon thought there might just be a suggestion of that look again when she’d used the word ‘old’ but couldn’t be sure. He did however, feel more comfortable when James Trool entered the room, rubbing his hands and asking what everyone wanted to drink.

‘About time too,’ said Sonia. ‘We’re dying of thirst down here.’

A pleasant evening followed, one which ended with Gordon leaving just after eleven, thanking his hosts and now more than ever convinced that Sonia was the dominant partner in that marriage.

It was impossible for him not to wonder about Sonia Trool on the drive back to the mainland. Had she really been making eyes at him? He wondered. Or was it all his imagination? Perhaps she had just been backing up her husband’s bid to keep the Megan Griffiths inquiry as low-key as possible. He suspected that she was also a very spoiled individual who was very used to having her own way over everything.

Gordon made some coffee when he got in and settled down to take a look at the notes he’d made at the symposium. He was still puzzled at Thomas’s obvious concern over the difference in success rates between his own ICSI patients and that of the American clinic. Of the forty American cases, thirty had been successful, four had failed at the implant stage, five had failed through early miscarriage and one was a stillbirth - the still birth baby had been found to have a lung problem. The Caernarfon data listed thirty-six ICSI patients of whom twenty had been successful and sixteen had failed. Three had failed at the implant stage, five had been ascribed to early miscarriage and eight had been stillborn. The stillborn foetuses had shown a wide range of deformities. One of the live births had resulted in a child with severe deformity. Her name was Anne-Marie Palmer.

Gordon stared at the figures and summarised them in Biro at the edge of the paper. The Americans had chalked up thirty successes out of forty, Thomas’s unit, twenty out of thirty six, a difference easily explained through the difference in patient selection. The implant failure rate was similar, as was the number of early miscarriages. The big difference lay in the number of still births: eight in Caernarfon, only one in Seattle. All the Welsh cases had shown marked deformity while the American baby had simply failed to thrive.

Gordon wondered if that was what had concerned Thomas so much: eight deformed babies dead at birth and one live one …
subsequently murdered.

FIFTEEN

It occurred to Gordon in the morning that he should really take a look at the Palmer house if Lucy was seriously thinking about returning and she certainly seemed to be. He thought he’d drive up there on his way to Caernarfon, ostensibly to check that it was wind and watertight, but what was really on his mind were fears about the back garden. He wondered if the police, or whoever was responsible for that sort of thing, had restored it after the nightmare excavations.

The thought that Lucy might find an open grave on her return was just too awful to contemplate. In fact, the more he thought about what had taken place there, the more he felt it was a bad idea that she should come back at all but of course, he had to recognise that it just might be that that she had no real alternative. From the outset, he’d had the distinct impression that Gina’s husband hadn’t been too keen on her being there at all. He suspected that he’d only agreed to it after pressure from his wife. Maybe that factor was beginning to make itself felt and Lucy had sensed that it was time to move out.

Lucy, or rather her sister speaking for her, had ruled out any notion of her going to stay with relatives up north, where she would be too far away from John, so what did that leave? It wasn’t as if she and John could go away somewhere together to get over the death of Anne-Marie and start a new life. In her current circumstances, she was painfully alone. Possibly she felt that she needed the comfort of familiar things around her and although the garden of the house had been the grave of her daughter, the house itself had been the focus of her life with John for the past six years.

All such considerations ceased as Gordon rounded the corner into the street where the Palmers lived and saw what spray-paint vandals had done to the house. His heart sank as he read the messages, ranging from,
Murdering bastards
to a biblical text, ‘
Suffer the little children to come unto me.’
The paint had run in several areas giving the unintentional impression of dripping blood and there was a change of colour from red to blue between
little
and
children
where the ‘artist’ had run out of paint and changed cans.

Gordon swore under his breath as he got out of the car and walked slowly up the path, appraising the extent of the damage and taking what comfort he could from the fact that the windows were still intact. As he made his way round to the back of the house, watching his footing on the cracked paving slabs, he wondered if the vandals had been encouraged by the fact that the house was empty. Would they have risked doing this if Lucy had been living there, he wondered? It was Lucy’s safety he was worried about but it was difficult for him to gauge the depth of feeling among the locals in Feli at the moment as he himself was no longer privy to their confidences. If not exactly subjected to downright hostility, he was regarded with something less than open affection. The state of the Palmers’ walls made the feeling mutual.

He was relieved to find that the back garden had been levelled after the digger had done its job. Capability Brown had clearly not carried out the restoration but at least the garden was tidy and daffodils were encroaching on the edge of the excavation site to herald the coming of another spring. He would however, have to do something about the mess on the front walls; he couldn’t let Lucy come home to that.

If his recent experience with the local electrician was anything to go by, he didn’t imagine that he would have much luck in finding local help so he decided to cut the Gordian knot immediately and do it himself. He drove back down into Feli and arrived just as Lillian Evans was opening up her hardware store. He bought brushes and solvent without saying why to Lillian, a particularly gossipy woman who had seen two husbands into an early grave and reaped a substantial insurance harvest on both occasions.

He was however, obliged to confirm what they were
not
for as she mounted an interrogation under the guise of friendly conversation. She tried in succession, ‘A bit of work at the surgery then, Doctor?’ followed by, ‘Giving the flat a bit of a face lift then?’ As she handed him his change she looked pointedly at him, as if deserving of an explanation. ‘Not exactly, Mrs Evans,’ was all Gordon said.

In all, it took him two and a half hours and a great deal of sweat, blood and almost tears when he persistently caught his knuckles on the rendering, to remove the worst of the graffiti from the walls. He finished up by giving them a good hose down. Finding the hose reel on the wall of the garage and still connected to the mains supply had been a major bonus. When he’d finished, he walked down to the front gate and turned to have a look at his handiwork. He stood with one foot on the garden wall and reflected that not one neighbour had come out to pass the time of day with him or even offer a cup of tea. Resentment or shame, he wondered? It hadn’t occurred to him before but he supposed it possible that some of them might even have been involved? He had the feeling that he knew a lot less about human nature than he had previously imagined.

As he was preparing to leave he started to worry that the perpetrators might conceivably do exactly the same again tonight: it was a depressing thought. In an effort to stop it happening, he thought he’d call the local police at Caernarfon on his mobile phone and request that they keep an eye on the house for the next couple of days.

‘Which house is that, sir?’ asked the duty officer.

‘The Palmer house in Menai View, number seven.’

There was a pause before the policeman said slowly, ‘Oh yes, I know it. Actually, we’re a bit stretched at the moment.’

Doing what? Gordon wondered. North Wales wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime. Maybe there had been an outbreak of lost dogs or cats up trees or a determined raid by a five-year-old on the sweetie counter at the local newsagent’s. He did however, recognise that getting into a slanging match with the police wasn’t going to help matters. ‘Do what you can,’ he said and stuck the phone back in his pocket.

He drove back to his flat to look at the IVF clinic handout he’d picked up yesterday. The core staff of the unit, excepting Carwyn Thomas as its clinical director, comprised four medical staff, two clinical scientists, four lab technicians and a nursing staff of eight. Various other consultant staff at the hospital were affiliated to the unit through either part-time or honorary consultancy posts. These positions were exclusively the province of either surgeons or obstetricians.

He brought out the file that Trool had supplied to members of the investigating committee and looked down the list of names extracted from the Pathology Department’s records as those who had visited the department on the day that Megan’s body had disappeared. Two people appeared on both: one was Michael Deans, a senior technician in the IVF unit and the other was Professor Carwyn Thomas himself. Gordon tapped the thumbnail of his right hand slowly against his teeth as he digested this piece of information: Only Thomas and one of his technicians … what price his theory now?

He quickly decided that no idea, even the most ridiculous at first sight, should be dismissed out of hand. Everything had to be considered and appraised coldly on the facts. The idea of a man like Carwyn Thomas stealing bodies from the pathology department in his own hospital might seem patently ludicrous, but then the idea of
anyone
stealing babies’ bodies was going to appear ludicrous until a reason for it could be established, he reminded himself.

Thinking about the type of research that Thomas was engaged in, reminded Gordon that he had been meaning to find out if the Griffiths baby had been a product of the IVF unit. He was wondering just how he might go about doing this when he remembered that Julie had mentioned at one point that the cot death baby had been on ‘Jenkins’s list’ up in Caernarfon. He didn’t know the Caernarfon GP that well, but they had met on occasion at seminars and area meetings. He looked up the telephone number and dialled it.

‘What can I do for you, Doctor?’ asked Jenkins when Gordon had said who he was.

Gordon was pleased to hear that he sounded a friendly sort of man. ‘I’m part of the investigation team looking into what happened to Megan Griffiths’ body at Caernarfon General,’ he explained. ‘I understand Megan was your patient?’

‘She was indeed, poor mite.’

‘This is going to sound an odd question, Doctor, but was Megan conceived with the help of IVF by any chance?’

‘No she certainly was not,’ replied Jenkins, with a chuckle. ‘I distinctly remember Gwen Griffiths telling me at the time that Megan had been conceived on a package tour to Majorca. Sangria may have been involved but definitely not IVF. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m just trying to gather together as many facts as I can,’ replied Gordon vaguely. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Are you any nearer finding out what happened to the child’s body?’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

Gordon put down the phone; he was disappointed but none too surprised that his notion that Megan and Anne-Marie might both be IVF babies was wrong. He still had nothing to connect them and no indicator as to what kind of research might be involved either – if any. He had to concede that his idea was beginning to look decidedly frail but he would however, ask both Carwyn Thomas and the technician, Michael Deans, about their logged visits to the pathology department on the day Megan disappeared.

On his way up to Caernarfon, Gordon circled round by the Palmer house again to have a look at his morning’s handiwork with the eyes of someone just driving into the street. He congratulated himself on the job he’d done and hoped the house would stay that way until Lucy got back.

One of the neighbours looked out to see who was sitting there. Gordon recognised him as a retired accountant - he couldn’t recall the name, but he did remember that the man had come to see him at the surgery a few months ago about an allergy. Their eyes met but no sign of recognition appeared on the man’s part, just stony indifference. ‘Have a nice day,’ murmured Gordon.