The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Norrie stared at her, almost incredulously. “You want it reopened?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “If need be.”

The waitress now brought his salad and Isabel’s pasta, and laid the plates before them. Norrie took up a fork and began to pick at the meal. “If I were you,” he said quietly, “I’d leave well enough alone. Don’t try to open anything up. Just don’t.”

Isabel speared a shell of pasta with her fork, and then another. “But if there is anything which could help him,” she said, “surely it should be brought up.”

Norrie seemed to weigh this for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “If I tell you something, will you give me your word that you won’t use it publicly in any way?”

She considered this. It would not be easy to give an assurance of confidentiality if he was going to come up with some information that could exculpate Marcus. But if she did not agree, then she would not hear it. She decided that she had no alternative.

“Very well. I give you my word. Even if it’s going to hamper me.”

“It won’t hamper you,” Norrie said quickly. “And it won’t be to Marcus’s disadvantage. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t see—”

But he cut her short. He had abandoned his salad now, and there was light in his eyes. “Marcus Moncrieff is even more guilty than you imagine. He got off lightly.”

She sat back in her seat. “I don’t see—”

“No,” he said quickly. “You don’t, do you? You don’t because you don’t know the first thing about it. Sorry to be so frank, but these things are very complex. The truth of the matter, you see, is that I warned him that the figures were high. I said to him that he should go and check the figures and see whether they really reflected what that patient had taken. And he didn’t. He said no, it wasn’t necessary. And then I spoke to him a second time, and asked him to note my reservations, but he told me not to be such a fusspot and he didn’t note anything.”

He attacked his salad. “So, you see,” he said. “Not so simple. If that had come out at the enquiry it would have looked even worse for him.”

“But you didn’t mention it?”

“No. I wasn’t even asked to make a statement. I kept quiet. I didn’t want things to get even worse for him. He’s a good doctor, you see.”

“You protected him?”

He stared at her. “You could put it that way. But let me say something else. If you mention this at all, and in particular if you suggest to anybody that I protected him, I shall simply deny that this conversation took place.”

She was puzzled. “Then why tell me?”

“To protect him again,” he said. “To protect him from you.” He pointed at her with his fork, on which half an olive was balanced. The olive tumbled down into the thick of the salad and was lost. “The last thing he needs is anybody opening up the whole can of worms. If you’re really concerned for him, then you’ll back off now that you know you only risk making it worse.”

They both ate in silence for a while. Then he spoke again. “And there’s another thing which nobody knows. In the case of the second patient, there was nothing wrong with the figures from the lab. And the dosage was not nearly as high. Yet the lab report, when it came to be looked at again, had much higher figures. Somebody had altered them.”

He looked at her knowingly.

“You’re saying that Marcus did?”

“Well, I didn’t change them,” he said.

“And you didn’t do anything about it?”

“By then it was too late. I noticed it only when the whole thing started to be investigated.”

It did not make sense to Isabel. She could understand sloppiness and not bothering to check up on suspect figures, but why should Marcus have deliberately falsified data?

Norrie sensed the reasons for her puzzlement. “Because he didn’t want the drug to be compromised,” he said. “Because he didn’t want its use to be stopped because of some awkward side effects at relatively low doses. If these things happened with absolutely sky-high doses, then that would not be the fault of the drug, it would be a sort of freak—the sort of risk that people will live with precisely because hardly anybody is ever going to swallow enough of the stuff for that sort of thing to happen.”

Isabel digested this. It certainly made sense. But why, she wondered, would he have such a stake in the continued use of the drug?

Norrie put down his fork. He had finished his salad, although a small piece of dark lettuce was stuck to the front of his teeth. His tongue moved round as he tried to dislodge it, and Isabel stared in awful fascination.

“Excuse me,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail. “There. That’s better. What do they say about these things? Follow the money. Isn’t that it?”

“He had a financial interest in the company?”

“Not directly,” said Norrie. “He wouldn’t have had shares—that would have been too obvious. But that same company had backed his research. He was beholden to them. He probably wanted them to back him in the future. So…”

Isabel listened carefully. What was occupying her now was the question of why Norrie should have so readily covered for Marcus. Was this the way that the medical profession looked after its own? She had been under the