The road they were following traced a route round the side of it before making its way up to the head of the glen, to peter out at the just-visible buildings of an isolated sheep farm. The surface of the loch was still, as there was no wind, no breeze, and the sky ahead, high and empty, was reflected on the water; no clouds, just blue. She turned to Jamie and took his hand, easily, unself-consciously. The touch of him thrilled her, and she shivered.
“I met Stella Moncrieff for coffee this morning,” she said. “Remember, I said I was going to do that.”
He was looking up, trying to make out something halfway up the hill. “And?”
“Well, she wanted to see me. She’s asked me to help her with something.”
As Isabel expected, this caught Jamie’s attention. He turned to her. “Isabel…” There was an unmistakable note of warning in his voice. Jamie did not approve of Isabel’s getting involved in matters that did not concern her and had told her as much, on numerous occasions.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And then, after a few moments, “I could hardly refuse.”
Jamie shook his head. “But that’s exactly what you could do,” he said. “Life consists of refusing things we shouldn’t be doing.”
Isabel reflected on this for a moment. Perhaps for some people life did indeed consist of refusing to do things —there were those who were adept at that. But she was not one of them. Her problem, rather, was one of deciding which claims on her moral attention to respond to and which to ignore; and it seemed, for some reason, that there were always more of the former than the latter. How can we ignore a cry for help? she asked herself. By steeling our hearts? By closing them?
She stopped and turned to Jamie, placing a hand on his forearm. Behind him, above the hill, a bird of prey circled watchfully; the evening sun, still with a touch of summer warmth in it, touched the heather with gold. At this time of year in Scotland it would be light until eleven at night; farther north, in the Shetlands, it would never get dark at all; at midnight the
“Don’t you want to know what she asked me to do?” He could hardly say no, she thought.
He sighed. “All right.” They began to walk again, and he added, “But I don’t approve. You know that, don’t you?”
She held his arm lightly, and began to tell him about her conversation with Stella. Marcus, Stella’s husband, was a doctor.
“What sort?” asked Jamie. “Everybody’s a doctor in Edinburgh. Or a lawyer.”
“An infectious diseases specialist—a very highly regarded one, apparently. Or he used to be highly regarded.” She went on to explain what Stella had told her. Marcus, she said, had been at the forefront of work on MRSA, the so-called superbug, which had been the cause of a growing number of deaths in hospitals.
“Apparently quite a few people are carriers of this,” said Isabel. “You or I might quite innocently have it. In our noses, I’m sorry to say. Our systems keep it under control, but we can pass it on to others, who can’t cope with it.”
Jamie looked down at Charlie, at his tiny nose. “And?”
“And he was doing a trial on a new antibiotic,” Isabel continued. “One that can knock this MRSA on the head. A drug company has come up with a pretty good candidate and has been given a licence to produce it in this country. Marcus had been involved in the clinical trials and was monitoring its use in patients.
“Everything was going perfectly well, and then, very much to his surprise, a patient who had taken the drug developed pretty serious side effects. Heart palpitations, Stella said. And another one turned up with the same sort of thing. Alarm bells started to ring.”
If Jamie had been indifferent to the story at the beginning, he no longer was. “What was that drug that was so disastrous? The one that people used before they realised that it caused terrible birth defects?”
“Thalidomide. I suppose this was a bit different. The patients were all right, even if things were a bit scary for them. Anyway, Marcus was asked by the health authorities to look into these cases. He did that, and he also published a report in a medical journal in which he showed that both of these patients had been given a massive overdose of the drug: one was a drug addict and had self-administered it in the deluded belief that he would get some sort of hit from it; the other was the victim of a nursing error. So he claimed that everything was fine and that the drug was perfectly safe within the limits they set for this sort of thing.”
She sensed Jamie’s absorption in the story, and was pleased. “But,” Isabel went on, “there was an unpleasant surprise around the corner. A few weeks later he published his findings, in the form of a letter in one of the big medical journals—a few weeks after he had said everything was perfectly safe, a man up in Perthshire was given the drug and promptly died. There was an enquiry and the hospital authorities took a closer look at Marcus’s original report—the one that said that everything was perfectly all right. And what did they find?”
Jamie frowned. “That he’d made a mistake?”
“Yes. But more than that. The data in his original paper was shown to have been falsified. It was something to do with the level of the dosage.”
They walked on. Jamie was lost in thought; then he spoke. “I see where this is going. The implication was that he had an interest in keeping the drug manufacturers happy and that he falsified the figures for their sake. For money.”
That was not what Stella had suggested, Isabel explained. She had said that although the press had had a field day and blamed Marcus for the death, they had not accused him of doing it for money. But he had been reported to the General Medical Council and he had been heavily censured for issuing a misleading report. He resigned from his university chair, too, and stopped all medical work.
“A rather sad story,” said Jamie. “Sad for everybody.” He paused. “And she wants you to…” He looked at Isabel. “She wants you to clear her husband’s name? Is that it?”
Isabel nodded.
“Oh, Isabel!” exploded Jamie. “What’s this got to do with you? What’s this got to do with being the editor of the
“Everything,” said Isabel.
