“I’ll make them,” offered Eddie.
Isabel did not argue, but loosened her apron and went over to sit with David McLean at the table near the window. The lawyer waited courteously while she took a seat before lowering himself into a chair. She noted that, and the shoes he was wearing—expensive black brogues, highly polished.
“Your friend told me that you would be here,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you at work.”
“My friend?”
“At the house. Jamie. Your young musician.”
“I see.”
David McLean was resting his left hand on top of the table. Isabel noticed that there was a ring on the little finger, a signet ring, on which there was engraved in the gold a tiny ax. Isabel knew that this was the symbol of the clan McLean. Charlie McLean had told her that when she had seen the ax on his kilt pin. He took his hand off the table.
“I’ll come right to the point,” he said. “My firm acts for a pharmaceutical firm. They are not based here in Scotland—they are based abroad, in fact. But we represent their London lawyers in Scotland.”
Isabel hardly had to ask, but did; more to say something than to find out the answer. “The people who make the antibiotic that…”
“Yes,” said David McLean. “Precisely.”
He put his hand back on the table. The ring caught a shaft of sun coming through the window, and glinted briefly.
“As you know,” he went on, “there was a very unfortunate incident not all that long ago. The doctor in question was represented by somebody else in the proceedings before the medical authorities; we merely watched the situation for our own clients. Obviously they were very concerned about the reputation of their product.”
“Obviously.”
“Yes. People are very quick to blame manufacturers for things that go wrong. And this seems to apply particularly to those who manufacture drugs. That’s curious, isn’t it? Everybody wants new drugs to be made available, but nobody seems to want to accept the risk that goes with putting these things on the market. And it’s always the fault of the drug companies, isn’t it, when something goes wrong? Or that’s what the press implies.”
Isabel had forgotten about the coffee, but now it arrived. Eddie put two mugs on the table, glancing with distaste at the lawyer as he did so.
David McLean lifted the mug to his lips and sipped at the hot, milky liquid, looking at Isabel as he did so. It seemed to her that he was waiting for her to agree with him, with what he had just said.
She blew across the surface of her coffee to cool it. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised,” she said. “The pharmaceutical companies make very considerable profits. They are quite simply rich. People have never liked —”
He interrupted her, smiling as he spoke. “People have never liked the rich? I suppose you should understand that, Miss Dalhousie.”
She caught her breath, and she thought of saying to him, “That remark is unprofessional.” But she did not. He had unwittingly—perhaps—declared his hostility, but she did not want to engage. She looked over towards the counter, where Eddie was standing, dealing with a customer. Suddenly, she felt vulnerable. This stranger knew who she was; he had been to the house; he knew her personal circumstances. Or did he? Had he merely seen the house and concluded that anybody who lived in a large self-contained Victorian house in that street, in that part of town, must have money in the bank? It did not require any great skill to reach that conclusion.
“The point is that public understanding of the industry is less than impressive,” David McLean went on. “I take it that you know that the return on capital for the pharmaceutical industry in this country is about seventeen percent, which is very much in line with other large industries. And I take it that you know that one third of profits are put back into research and development—so that there can be new drugs at the end of the day.” He paused, watching her. “But that’s not the point of my visit. The point is that there’s a great deal of pointing of fingers and not a lot of solid information out there. Obviously my clients have to watch situations where their position is potentially under scrutiny.”
Isabel glanced at her watch—pointedly.
“All right,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. This is my concern: you have been involving yourself, I understand, in this very unfortunate business of Dr. Marcus Moncrieff.”
Isabel said nothing. She was thinking about what interest the company who made the drug in question would have in whether or not Marcus had been negligent in failing to check the results from the laboratory. They would have benefited from this negligence, as it meant that the drug was considered safe and could have been continued to be used. Their problems started only when it was discovered that a much smaller dose had caused the side effects.
David McLean leaned forward slightly. He dropped his voice. “We—or shall I say, our clients—would prefer it if you did not disturb the result of the internal enquiry. In other words, we don’t think that it’s helpful for you to do anything that might reopen this case. That would not be in Marcus Moncrieff’s interests, I think.”
She stared at him; to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it would not have occurred to them that somebody might have interfered with the figures. She went over in her mind what might have happened. The patients may have taken a normal overdose. Norrie might then have changed the figures so that it looked as if they had had a massive overdose. He might have guessed, correctly, that Marcus would dismiss the risk, and then, once he had made his report, he could be exposed as being negligent. But even if Norrie had done this, it would have had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical company; they had done nothing wrong. Unless, of course…It dawned on her suddenly. Norrie might have had a very different motive for falsifying the results than the one she had been thinking about. He might have done it not in order to discredit his uncle, but because somebody had made it worth his while to do so. And the obvious people to have done that would be the drug’s makers. It would suit them perfectly to have the side-effects cases shown to have been the result of a grossly excessive overdose rather than a more likely one. Of course it would, she thought; of course it would.
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Doesn’t it offend you,” she asked, “that an innocent man should have
