Tangled Web (30 page)

‘I can’t make promises, Doctor, but I have no wish to see you get into trouble for the sake of it.’ Gordon decided that this would be an opportune moment to ask French about the post mortem on Carwyn Thomas.

‘I’m satisfied it was a heart attack.’

Fuck, thought Gordon.

‘I’ve still to get the toxicology results but I don’t think DCI Davies will be giving you any more hassle over it. Natural causes, as far as I’m concerned.’

Gordon put the phone down. He was disappointed that Thomas’s death had proved to be natural after all but he felt pleased that DNA fingerprinting Anne-Marie had become a possibility again. It seemed to signal that maybe not all the fates were against him. He poured himself a large whisky and wondered if Fairbrother at the university would be willing to carry out the tests. He’d call and ask him in the morning but he suddenly realised that sequencing Anne-Marie’s DNA would not be enough on its own; he would also need DNA samples from John and Lucy Palmer to compare the profile with. This was clearly going to be his next problem but he now had an appetite for it. He would find a way. He’d been given a second chance and now nothing was going to stop him following his theory through to the end.

He could see no possibility of getting a blood or tissue sample from John Palmer but material from Lucy alone would do. She must have had various specimens taken from her when she had been admitted to Ysbyty Gwynedd after the fire incident so it should be possible to lay hands on one of these but that would involve giving reasons to lab staff, going through channels and risking possible refusal. He supposed that, if the worst came to the worst, he could always approach Lucy directly in the Manchester hospital where she’d been transferred for plastic surgery. He’d been keeping in touch by telephone and planned to go over there in a couple of days time anyway, now that she’s settled in. But this in many ways would be the least attractive course of action. He really didn’t want to say anything at all about this to Lucy while there was still a chance he might be wrong. If that were the case and Anne-Marie should be shown to be the Palmers’ natural child, it would be unforgivable to have caused her all that angst on top of everything else. He wanted to be absolutely sure of his facts before he said anything at all to either John or Lucy. That meant obtaining samples without their knowing.

The house! Lucy’s house! thought Gordon. He had arranged for it to be made secure, but that had just involved having the broken window boarded up. As yet, he hadn’t been back there to tidy up the mess. Lucy had lost a lot of blood on the floor on that hellish night. He would be able to get the sample he needed from there.

There was a drawback in that some of the blood stains would almost certainly be his own so he’d ask Fairbrother to fingerprint a number of samples from the floor and also provide him with a fresh sample of his own blood for elimination purposes. He looked at his watch; it was just after midnight. The question now was, should he leave it until morning or should he do this right now? There was no way he could sleep; he’d go now.

As he drew up outside the house, it struck Gordon that it looked as if it had been unoccupied for years instead of only a few short weeks. This was an impression largely created by the boarded-up window and the fact that it was night time - modern streetlights seemed to exaggerate any sign of disrepair. Sunlight did the opposite. No further graffiti had appeared on the walls, but he did notice that moss was starting to creep over the path through lack of use and weeds were popping up in the cracks.

He took a few specimen containers from the medical case he kept in the Land Rover along with a pair of surgical gloves and a packet of sterile scalpel blades. It was important that he didn’t contaminate any of the samples he collected, either with each other or through contact with his own skin.

A bedroom curtain moved in the neighbouring house when he slammed the car door but he didn’t look up. Instead, he walked briskly up the path and opened the door with the key Lucy had given him at the hospital. Clicking on the hall light brought back memories of the fire and stopped him in his tracks for a moment. He felt his throat tighten. The house still smelt of burning and in his mind he could hear Lucy screaming again.

He made a conscious effort to put such thoughts behind him before beginning a search of the floor where Lucy had fallen. He identified four separate bloodstains, far enough apart to suggest that cross contamination had not taken place. Using a separate sterile scalpel blade for each, he scraped samples up into each of four specimen containers and secured the caps. He’d got exactly what he’d come for and would now call a halt. He couldn’t face doing any tidying up right now; he’d come back another time. He checked that the rooms at the back of the house were secure before locking up at the front and returning to the car.

The wind that had been the main feature of the weather over the last few days died away during the night to leave a still, calm morning when Gordon awoke at seven and looked out at the harbour. The downside to this was that the temperature had fallen, a feature that was apparent in the flat where the heating had failed to come on again. There was a frost in evidence on the rigging and mooring ropes of the resident yachts in the basin, making them look like decorations on a wedding cake. He could see that he’d be scraping the ice of the Land Rover’s windscreen before he went anywhere this morning.

He rubbed his hands and swung his arms across his chest a few times before spending a few minutes coaxing the heating into turning on. Despite having arranged to have it repaired by a firm in Bangor, there had been a misunderstanding about the time they were due to come. They had in fact turned up when he had been out and as yet, no alternative arrangement had been made.

He got back into bed and switched on the radio to catch up on the news while the water heated up and the chill was taken off the air. There would be no point in trying to phone Fairbrother at the university before nine, he reckoned. If Fairbrother agreed to do the DNA fingerprinting – and it was still a big ‘if’, he’d collect a sample of Anne-Marie’s tissue from French’s lab in Bangor and take it over to him along with the samples he’d collected from Lucy’s house. It was ten past nine when Gordon managed to reach Fairbrother at his third attempt.

‘Dr Fairbrother? It’s Tom Gordon here. You were kind enough to speak with me yesterday.’

‘Of course, what can I do for you?’

‘Frankly, I need your help again - pretty much in the same way that Professor Thomas did and for pretty much the same reason. I need to have some samples DNA fingerprinted.’

‘You folks are going to finish up with a DNA database for everyone in Bangor by the time you’re finished,’ said Fairbrother, but he didn’t sound annoyed.

‘I’d really be very grateful for your help,’ said Gordon.

‘How many samples are we talking about?’

‘Six, but there is a slight problem. Only two are conventional samples; four are scrapings from blood stains.’ Gordon bit his lip as he waited for Fairbrother’s response.

‘Are you sure this isn’t a job best done through the police forensic service?’

‘I’d prefer if it was done by a reliable independent agent if at all possible,’ said Gordon.

‘All right,’ said Fairbrother, ‘Bring ‘em over; I’ll see what I can do.’

Gordon let out a long sigh of relief as he put down the phone. Everything was in place. All he had to do now was pick up the sample from French and the ball would start rolling.

TWENTY FOUR

French wasn’t in the police lab when Gordon arrived to pick up the promised sample of Anne-Marie’s tissue. A colleague said that he had been called away suddenly after, ‘some shit had really hit the fan’, but had left a package for him. Gordon opened up the small Jiffy bag to check that it contained the right thing. He pulled out a small, clear plastic container with a one cubic centimetre sample of tissue in it. An adhesive label on one side of it had Anne-Marie’s name inscribed on it in black marker pen.

Gordon drove over to the university and handed it in with the other samples to Fairbrother who took down details and labelled them meticulously, using his own system. He said he’d get them done as quickly as possible. Gordon was back in Feli by ten thirty where he found a dark grey saloon car waiting outside his flat: the three aerials on the roof suggested that it was a police car. As he got out of the Land Rover, DCI Davies and his sergeant got out of the other car to stand in front of the door, blocking his way. Both wore blank expressions.

‘Problems?’ said Gordon, feeling decidedly apprehensive.

‘Thomas Gordon, I’m arresting you for the murder of Professor Carwyn Arthur Thomas … ’

The words dissolved into a hollow echo inside Gordon’s head. His jaw dropped in disbelief.

‘You are not obliged to say anything but …’

Gordon didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The desire to pour scorn on Davies and the shock of being arrested was offset by the realisation that Thomas actually
had
been murdered. He ended up by simply saying, ‘That makes much more sense.’

Davies looked at him as if he were mad. Sergeant Walters wrote it down in his notebook.

‘You’re admitting it?’ asked Davies.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ replied Gordon.

‘Get in the car.’

The drive up to Caernarfon was completed in absolute silence, with Gordon feeling as if he were sandwiched between two silent robots. He declined the opportunity to call a solicitor, opting instead to phone Mary to tell her what had happened.

She too asked if she should contact a lawyer on his behalf.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ he replied.

Davies switched on the recorder in the interview room, related who was present and permitted himself a small smirk as he faced Gordon across the table.

‘I would strongly suggest, Dr Gordon that you make a clean breast of it all and tell us everything.’

‘What’s to tell? I’m completely in the dark. I was under the impression that the professor had died of natural causes - at least that’s what Dr French told me last night.’

‘You spoke to French?’

Gordon didn’t think a confirmation was necessary.

Davies smirked and said, ‘All doctors together is it? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours? Well, let me tell you this, my son, you might have been clever enough to fool your fellow medics but you didn’t fool the forensic toxicology boys for one moment. ‘Amyl nitrate ring a bell?’

‘’Should it?’

‘That’s what they found in the professor’s samples. He’d been given a large amount of the stuff. It makes the heart race, but then you’d know that, being a doctor wouldn’t you?’ Davies leaned over the table till his face was very close to Gordon’s. ‘And because
you
administered it!’

‘So that’s how he did it,’ said Gordon calmly.

‘Who?’ asked Davies, sounding more annoyed than inquisitive.

‘The man who killed Professor Thomas and probably Maurice Cleef too, maybe even Anne-Marie Palmer.

Davies did not break into fits of sarcastic laughter. Instead he sat back in his chair again, looking at Gordon as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. He turned his pen, end over end on the surface of the table several times, and then he said, ’What is this shit?’

‘I was wrong about Thomas experimenting with human cloning,’ said Gordon. ‘It wasn’t him - it was a member of his staff, an embryologist named, Ranulph Dawes. Thomas must have latched on to what he was up to and started to investigate on his own.’

‘And what brought you to that conclusion?’

Gordon calmly told Davies all that he’d worked out and was relieved to see that Davies was – or appeared to be, taking what he said seriously.

‘That’s quite a story,’ said Davies when he’d finished. ‘But is that all it is or can you prove any of it?’

Gordon was honest. ‘It’s going to be difficult,’ he admitted. ‘I stupidly tried to enlist Dawes’s help when I thought Thomas was the guilty party so he’s had time to get rid of all the evidence. I did, however, take down some reference numbers from the frozen foetuses I found in Thomas’s freezer and there’s the all important tissue sample taken from Anne-Marie Palmer’s body that French came up with. I took it up to the university labs this morning; they’re going to DNA fingerprint it. I’m sure it’s going to show that she wasn’t the natural child of the Palmers.’

‘The university labs?’ asked Davies, latching on to the last bit.

‘I asked the same scientist that Professor Thomas used when he started to become suspicious. An entirely independent expert on the technique.’

Davies looked at Gordon like an owl contemplating its supper but decided against any more confrontation at this juncture. ‘And if this should confirm what you claim, what then? How does it help?’

‘The IVF unit must have records of who actually carried out the actual lab work for each patient. If it was Dawes who carried out the IVF procedure in the case of Lucy Palmer and it should turn out that her baby was not her biological child, then he obviously has some explaining to do. With a bit of luck he’ll see that the game’s up and fill in the missing details himself.’

‘And maybe Bangor will win the European Cup next year,’ said Davies but that was as far as the sarcasm went. He turned and said to Walters, ‘We’d better check this out.’ Turning back to Gordon, he asked, ‘Will this Dawes character be at the hospital right now?’

‘I should think so,’ said Gordon. ‘He’s still under the impression that I think Thomas was the guilty man. He also still thinks that Thomas’s death has been put down to natural causes unless you’ve told anyone it was murder?’

‘It’s not common knowledge but I did inform Dr Trool that Thomas had been murdered,’ said Davies. ‘He’s been phoning up every five minutes, worried about possible scandal and the bloody hospital’s reputation. He just about had a heart attack himself when I told him what the toxicology report on Thomas said.’

‘Did you ask him to keep it to himself?’

‘He was hardly likely to go blurting it out to all and sundry was he?’ retorted Davies.