of her condition from an outside source, preferably the hospital or clinic that referred her to you.’
‘I see,’ said Ingrid. ‘I very much doubt if Mr Giordano or Dr Kinscherf will agree to this.’
‘If they don’t, I will lodge a formal complaint of obstruction with my colleagues at the Scottish Office and suggest that an investigation be mounted immediately by the Serious Fraud Office.’
Ingrid tried to maintain eye contact with Dunbar, by way of a challenge, but she failed after a few moments. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said quietly; she was obviously unnerved at seeing a side to Dunbar she hadn’t encountered before.
The door closed behind her and Dunbar remained in his chair, sitting perfectly still, wondering how well he’d played his hand. Would they give in and tell him what he wanted to know or would they try to delay as long as possible? He had to admit that the latter would be the bright thing to do. They were vulnerable only as long as the Omega patient was in the hospital. Once she’d gone they’d be safe. She’d be lost in the mists of secrecy. His only hope lay in Ingrid relaying his threat to call in the SFO as being imminent. They might just believe that his interest was still financial and gamble on giving him the information he asked for. After all, no figures had been declared for the current Omega patient. They had nothing to worry about on that account. He decided to help matters along by exploiting the fact that his computer screen was being monitored. He sat down at it and started drafting a letter requesting that the Scottish Office consider calling in the SFO on the grounds that he’d been denied access to files he thought might be concealing fraud.
After nearly half an hour, Ingrid returned, carrying a file. ‘Here are the notes you asked for, Doctor,’ she said without emotion. ‘I’m asked to remind you of their strictly confidential nature. Please inform me as soon as you’re finished with them.’
‘Of course.’
Dunbar felt a thrill of excitement as he flipped open the cover and started to read.
The patient was a thirty-year-old Saudi Arabian woman, the wife of a sheikh with extensive oil interests and an income to match. She was pregnant for the third time. Her first two babies had been stillborn from a congenital heart defect. The sheikh, who doted on his wife, was anxious that she be monitored every step of the way through her current pregnancy. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, had been given the task but after it was diagnosed at an early stage, through the use of the latest foetal monitoring equipment, that the foetus was suffering from the same cardiac defect as the others, the woman had been removed from the Mayo and flown across the Atlantic to Medic Ecosse. Corrective surgery was planned immediately after a successful birth.
Dunbar noted the name of the attending physician at the Mayo Clinic, Dr Gordon Hasselhof, and closed the file. There was certainly more to it than just a difficult birth, but did it help him at all? It was difficult to see how little Amanda Chapman could be involved in the obstetric care of a thirty-year-old Middle Eastern woman. He phoned Ingrid and told her he was finished with the notes. They were collected within minutes and without comment.
There was one question that sprang to mind though — although it might not be relevant, thought Dunbar. Why had the woman been transferred to Medic Ecosse? The Mayo Clinic was one of the most famous medical institutions in the world. A transatlantic flight and the trauma of moving to yet another strange country and hospital could not have been the most restful experience for the patient. What had precipitated it? Had there been some kind of disagreement over her treatment at the Mayo? Some undisclosed problem?
It had not been Dunbar’s intention at the outset to contact the referring doctor or hospital; he had made his request for their identity purely as a safeguard against being fobbed off with anything Medic Ecosse cared to tell him. But now he decided he would make inquiries. In his present state of ignorance, no detail should be overlooked. He looked at his watch. Making adjustments for the time differential, it would be around 10 a.m. in Minnesota. He asked the switchboard to make the call.
‘Good morning. Mayo Clinic. How may I help you?’ said a robotic female voice.
‘I’d like to speak with Dr Gordon Hasselhof, please.’
‘May I ask who’s calling?’
‘Dr Steven Dunbar. I’m calling from Glasgow in Scotland.’
‘Please hold.’
For a few moments the line was left open and Dunbar could hear the everyday sounds of a hospital in the background; then music cut in as he was put on hold. ‘Greensleeves’ coming from the wrong side of the Atlantic seemed slightly bizarre.
‘Hello, caller.’
‘Yes?’
‘Dr Hasselhof is currently in conference. Would you care to leave a message or call back later?’
‘I’ll try later,’ said Dunbar.
‘Have a nice day, Doctor.’
‘You too,’ said Dunbar. He cautioned himself that it was better to be told to have a nice day by someone who didn’t mean it than to get lost by someone who did.
He put down the phone and started to tidy up the papers on his desk. He saw that his letter to the Scottish Office was still on the screen of his computer and decided to copy it to disk rather than cancel it. He picked up the disk he had initialled earlier and inserted it. He saw it come up as ‘Research Data One’, the title he’d given it when covering up the mistake of inserting one of Ross’s disks. Looking at it and thinking of Ross’s research reminded him where he’d seen the term ‘immuno-preparation’ before: in the title of one of Ross’s research papers, the one he had put aside while he read the others. He grabbed his jacket and briefcase and made for the car park. The paper was in the file in his hotel room.
There was a laundry bag sitting on his bed when he got there, with a note pinned to it. Dunbar feared it would be a complaint from the hotel about the state of the things he’d sent for cleaning, the clothing he’d used on the ill-starred expedition with Jimmy Douglas. He opened the envelope. It wasn’t a complaint. They were returning a set of car keys that had been left in one of the pockets. Dunbar looked at them. They were the keys to Jimmy’s Land-Rover. He’d have to find a way of returning them.
When he retrieved Ross’s paper from the Sci-Med file, Dunbar noticed that it was over three years old. This was not encouraging. Could what Ross had been working on over three years ago really be relevant to what was going on at the moment? If it had been a successful line of research, why had he not published any more about it in the intervening period? He sat down and started reading.
He had to struggle with the immunological jargon at the beginning but it soon began to make sense and he jotted down the major points as they emerged.
Fact number one was that the human foetus did not start out with an immune system of its own. If biological material from a foreign source were to be introduced to it before its own system developed, it would be accepted. More importantly, when the baby finally did develop its immune system, it would continue to accept material from that source throughout its life. Animal experiments using stem cells… Dunbar swallowed as he read the words… had shown this to be the case. Unborn mice, surgically infused with human stem cells before development of their immune system, had subsequently been born with a human immune system as well as their own.
Using this technique, it was possible to ‘prepare’ a foetus by surgically introducing stem cells from a putative donor into it while still in the womb, making a subsequent transplant after the baby’s birth problem-free. There was no need for steroids or any other kind of immuno-suppressants to overcome rejection problems. There simply wouldn’t be any. The tissue would be one hundred per cent compatible. The perfect transplant, in fact.
The limitations to this strategy, as Ross pointed out in his paper, were obvious. Such transplants would have to be restricted to organs that the donor could afford to lose, such as a half or whole kidney. If the foetus needed a heart or liver then, of course, there could be no human donor. It was suggested, therefore, that the development of this technique of ‘immunizing’ foetuses against rejection of a future transplant would best be pursued with animals in mind as the donors. Improvements in foetal surgery would also have to be achieved if stem cells were to be introduced without a high risk of premature labour induction.
Dunbar felt a chill down his spine as the picture became clear. He had discovered something so awful that his mind almost rejected it. He looked back over the text and picked out the the words ‘there could, of course, be no human donor’. He was mesmerized by them. In his head he started to modify the text: there could, of course, be no human donor unless… the stakes were high enough… to include murder as part of the procedure. And that’s what the ape experiments were all about. Ross was practising foetal surgery because he needed to introduce stem cells into unborn foetuses. Christ! It all fitted now. Kenneth Lineham, Amy Teasdale and now Amanda Chapman had not
