A Suitable Vengeance

'For you, Mr Malverd.' She reached for a pile of telephone messages which were joined together by a paper clip. 'I don't know what to tell people.'

Malverd picked them up, flipped through them, dropped them on to her desk. 'Put them off,' he said. 'Put everyone off. I've no time to answer phone calls.'

'But-'

'Do you people keep engagement diaries up here, Mrs Courtney? Have you evolved that far, or would that be too much to expect?'

Her lips whitened, even as she smiled and made a polite effort to take his questions as a joke, something which Malverd's tone made difficult. She pushed her way past him and went behind her desk where she took out a leather volume and handed it over. 'We always keep records, Mr Malverd. I think you'll find everything in perfect order.'

'I hope so,' he said. 'It'll be the first thing that is. I could do with some tea. You?' This to St James, who demurred. 'See about it, will you?' was Malverd's final comment to Mrs Courtney who fired a look of nuclear quality in his direction before she went to do his bidding.

Malverd opened a second door which led to a second room, this one larger than the first but hardly less crowded. It was obviously the office of the project director and it looked the part. Old metal bookshelves held volumes dedicated to biomedicinal chemistry, to pharmaco-kinetics, to pharmacology, to genetics. Bound collections of scientific journals vied with these for space, as did a pressure reader, an antique microscope and a set of scales. At least thirty leather notebooks occupied the shelves nearest the reach of the desk, and these, St James assumed, would contain the reported results of experiments which the technicians in the outer lab carried out. On the wall above the desk, a long graph charted the progress of something, using green and red lines. Below this in four framed cases hung a collection of scorpions, splayed out as if in demonstration of man's dominion over lesser creatures.

Malverd frowned at these latter objects as he took a seat behind the desk. He gave another meaningful glance at his watch. 'How can I help you?'

St James removed a stack of typescript from the only other chair in the room. He sat down, gave a cursory look at the graph, and said, 'Mick Cambrey evidently came to this department a number of times in the last few months. He was a journalist.'

'He was murdered, you said? And you think there's some connection between his death and Islington?'

'Several people feel he might have been working on a story. There could be a connection between that and his death. We don't know yet.'

'But you've indicated you're not from the police.'

'That's right.'

St James waited for Malverd to use this as an excuse to end their conversation. He had every right to do so. But it seemed that their previously acknowledged mutual interest in science would be enough to carry the interview forward for the moment, since Malverd nodded thoughtfully and flipped open the engagement diary in what appeared to be an arbitrary selection of date. He said, 'Well. Cambrey. Let's see.' He began to read, running his finger down one page and then another much as had the receptionist a few minutes before. 'Smythe-Thomas, Hallington, Schweinbeck, Barry – what did he see him for? – Taversly, Powers… Ah, here it is: Cambrey; half-past eleven' – he squinted at the date – 'two weeks ago last Friday.'

'The receptionist indicated he'd been here before. Is his name in the diary other than that Friday?'

Co-operatively, Malverd flipped through the book. He reached for a scrap of paper and made a note of the dates which he handed to St James when he had completed his survey of the diary. 'Quite a regular visitor,' he said. 'Every other Friday.'

'How far back does the book go?'

'Just to January.'

'Is last year's diary available?'

'Let me check that.'

When Malverd had left the office to do so, St James took a closer look at the graph above the desk. The ordinate, he saw, was labelled tumour growth, while the abscissa was called Time – post injection. Two lines marked the progress of two substances, one falling rapidly and bearing the identification drug and the other, marked saline, rising steadily.

Malverd returned, cup of tea in one hand and engagement diary in the other. He tapped the door shut with his foot.

'He was here last year as well,' Malverd said. Again, he copied the dates as he found them, pausing occasionally to slurp a bit of tea. Both the lab and the office were almost inhumanly quiet. The only sound was the scratching of MaJverd's pencil on paper. At last he looked up. 'Nothing before last June,' he said. 'June the second.'

'More than a year,' St James noted. 'But nothing to tell us why he was here?'

'Nothing. I've no idea at all.' Malverd tapped the tips of his fingers together and frowned at the graph. 'Unless… It may have been oncozyme.'

'Oncozyme?'

'It's a drug Department Twenty-Five's been testing for perhaps eighteen months or more.' 'What sort of drug?' 'Cancer.'

Cambrey's interview with Dr Trenarrow rose instantiy in St James' mind. The connection between that meeting and Cambrey's trips to London was finally neither conjectural nor tenuous.

'A form of chemotherapy? What exactiy does it do?'

'Inhibits protein synthesis in cancer cells,' Malverd said. 'Our hope is that it'll prevent replication of oncogenes, the genes that cause cancer in the first place.' He nodded at the graph and pointed to the red line that descended it steeply, a sharp diagonal that indicated the percentage of inhibited rumour growth versus the time after the drug had been administered. 'As you can see, it looks like a promising treatment. The results in mice have been quite extraordinary.'

'So it's not been used on human subjects?'

'We're years away from that. The toxicology studies have only just begun. You know the sort of thing. What amount constitutes a safe dosage? What are its biological effects?'

'Side effects?'

'Certainly. We'd be looking closely for those.' 'If there are no side effects, if there's nothing to prove oncozyme a danger, what happens then?' 'Then we market the drug.'

'At some considerable profit, I should guess,' St James noted.

'For a fortune,' Malverd replied. 'It's a breakthrough drug. No doubt about it. In fact, I should guess that oncozyme's the story this Cambrey was writing. But as to its being a potential case for his murder' – he paused meaningfully – 'I don't see how.'

St James thought he did. It would have taken the form of a random piece of knowledge, a source of concern, or an idea passed on by someone with access to inside information. He asked, 'What's the relationship between Islington-London and Islington-Penzance?'

'Penzance is one of our research facilities. We have them scattered round the country.'

'Their purpose? More testing?'

Malverd shook his head. 'The drugs are created at the research labs in the first place.' He leaned back in his chair. 'Each lab generally works in a separate area of disease control. We've one on Parkinson's, another on Huntington's, a new one dealing with AIDS. We've even a lab working on the common cold, believe it or not.' He smiled.

'And Penzance?'

'One of our three cancer locations.'

'Did Penzance produce oncozyme, by any chance?'

Malverd looked meditatively at the graph again. 'No.

Our Bury lab in Suffolk was responsible for oncozyme.'

'And you've said they don't test the drugs at these facilities?'

'Not the sort of extensive testing we do here. The initial testing, of course. They do that. Otherwise, they'd