Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01] (32 page)

Before eight the following morning, with a Little Chef ‘Breakfast Special’ congealing to form a leaden mass in the pit of his stomach, Mariner drove over bleak moorland, following the route described to him over the phone by Dennis Weightman. His memories of the area were of the lush greens of summer, backed by the extravagant trill of the curlew. Now, in February, the countryside was bleak and cold, still in the grip of winter, skeletal trees standing stark against a milky white sky, rooted in the muted greys and browns of dormant vegetation. Even the sheep were down from the hills for the winter and would not be back up again for weeks. Despite this there was something uniquely restful about the vast emptiness and the smooth undulating skyline of the moors.

High Bank turned out to be an inhospitable, ramshackle stonewalled farm, a little way out of the town and set up on the hillside under a cowl of windswept beeches.

Progressing slowly towards it along a rough unmetalled track, pitted with potholes that intermittently scraped the Mondeo’s undercarriage, Mariner wished he hadn’t worn a suit. He was going to look like the man from the MAFF.

He parked up outside a rusting five-bar gate and was just unfastening its frayed nylon cord to step into the yard, when, from nowhere, bounded a huge long-haired Alsatian, snarling and barking, and intent on tearing him to shreds.

Shit! Mariner jumped back, banging the gate shut again as the beast leapt at him. He heard shouting, and from behind a stone barn emerged a small woman of pensionable age, wearing mud-spattered Wellingtons and a dark anorak.

Mariner half expected to see a twelve-bore nestling in the crook of her arm, but she carried nothing more threatening than a galvanised metal bucket.

The dog had quieted obediently to a low warning growl, but the woman made no attempt to call it off, instead coming right over to the gate where Mariner stood, his palms sweating and heartbeat gradually slowing to normal.

‘What canna do for you?’ She squinted warily at him.

Mariner took out his warrant card, struggling to keep a steady hand. ‘Mrs Todd? I’m Detective Inspector Tom Mariner, West Midlands Police.’

‘You’re a long way from home,’ she observed.

But, despite the remark, Mariner got the impression that she wasn’t all that surprised to see him. ‘I wanted to speak to your husband. Is he here?’

Close to, her face was ruddy from exposure to the elements, and small dark eyes regarded him warily. ‘You’d better come in.’ Mariner pushed open the gate with more than a little apprehension, but the Alsatian seemed content to grumble at him from a distance. ‘Don’t mind him.’ Mrs Todd ordered, brusquely.

The farm was as cluttered and dilapidated inside as it was out. Removing her boots, Mrs Todd took Mariner through a working kitchen and into a musty smelling lounge, crowded with ageing furniture, and randomly piled with books and half-completed knitting projects, its sofa already half taken up by a large complacent-looking tortoiseshell cat. Shooing away the animal, Mrs Todd cleared a space for Mariner to sit down, on a garish crocheted afghan, and grudgingly offered him tea. Mariner accepted, hoping it would have a dual effect on the raging thirst the aberrant cooked breakfast had given him, and his now ragged nerves. Heart and stomach sank in unison when minutes later, along with the tea, came a chunk of weighty-looking fruit loaf.

‘I baked it myself. I hope you’ve got room for it,’ she challenged, and Mariner wondered if this was his penalty for disturbing them. ‘My husband will be down,’ she added, and left him alone with the disgruntled feline.

Andrew Todd would have been tall at one time, but now his shoulders were bent, a weight of anxiety pressing down on them. His eyes swept the room nervously, never resting on anything for more than a few seconds. After introducing himself, he perched on the edge of the seat opposite Mariner, hands on his knees and fingers drumming relentlessly.

‘How can I help you, Inspector?’

Mariner saw no merit in bush-beating. ‘Mr Todd, I’m investigating the murder of a journalist, Eddie Barham.’

Emitting a groan, Todd closed his eyes, his horror genuine and absolute. ‘So it’s true. I hoped that there had been some mistake.’

It wasn’t the reaction Mariner had anticipated. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘You admit to knowing him, then?’

‘I knew o/him,’ Todd corrected. ‘We spoke only once on the phone. I knew his father, Malcolm Barham, much better.’ Todd’s openness caught Mariner off guard. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned. But maybe this was a calculated strategy. Todd must after all have known that Mariner or someone like him would turn up sooner or later.

‘What was your relationship with Malcolm Barham?’

‘He first contacted me in 1983,’ Todd said. ‘He’d come across a paper I’d written and wanted more information.’

‘What paper?’ Mariner’s confusion was growing. He was beginning to lose the plot.

Todd heaved a weary sigh. ‘Between 1951 and 1964 I worked for Bowes Dorrinton, the pharmaceutical company.

They’re based here in Chapel Dene. I was on one of their clinical research teams, testing new drugs.’ This also astonished Mariner, who hadn’t expected Todd to be employed at such a grass-roots level. ‘We were responsible for running checks on all manner of new drugs, conducting experiments using rats, mice and so forth, monitoring for any side effects the drugs might cause before they could be approved and put on the open market.’

Mariner remained silent, waging battle with the fruit loaf but allowing Todd to talk, intrigued now about where this was leading.

‘In 1962,’ Todd went on, ‘a drug called Thalidomide hit the headlines. You’ll know all about that, of course.

Hundreds of babies born with severe limb deformities.’

Mariner did indeed. Further down the school from him was a kid who had been affected by the drug. In place of arms the boy had two flipper-like appendages, about eight inches long. Not that it stopped him from doing anything. The guy was amazing.

‘The problem arose with Thalidomide,’ Todd continued, ‘because it had never been tested on pregnant animals. At the time that was not a procedure required by law, which is why the appalling teratogenous side effects could never have been predicted. But once it had happened, of course, there were fears that other drugs could have similar effects.

Consequently, most manufacturing companies began retesting a whole range of contemporary drugs. We were no exception. One of the drugs we re-examined was Pinozalyan.’ Suddenly Mariner could see the story unfolding, but he let Todd continue. ‘Miraculously we found that there were no apparent resulting foetal or birth deformities, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief and it continued to be marketed.’

‘But?’ Mariner prompted through a mouthful of stodgy cake that was resisting descent of his gullet. He took a gulp of tea to help it on its way.

‘I had conducted my tests on Pinozalyan using pregnant rats, and as the offspring subsequently born appeared healthy we retained them for other different procedures.

Then, one day, one of my lab technicians reported that rats in one of the cages were behaving strangely. They were hyperactive, engaging in extreme self-stimulating behaviour, apparently oblivious to the resulting pain. More detailed observation revealed highly disturbed nocturnal patterns and high levels of anxiety too. I carried out some routine checks on them and found that levels of melatonin were dangerously low. It was then that I realised these were the creatures whose mothers had been administered Pinozalyan, which should have stimulated production of melatonin. It was almost as if the second generation rats had developed a compensatory mechanism to suppress the hormone.’

‘Naturally I reported all this straight to the clinical manager. We couldn’t be certain that it was Pinozalyan that had caused the behaviour, but having eliminated all other environmental factors, I felt that there was a close correlation and therefore an element of risk. Something had caused significant chemical changes within the brains of those rats that were in turn influencing the patterns of behaviour. I felt it imperative that we should withdraw Pinozalyan from sale until we could conduct further tests.’

‘So why didn’t that happen?’

Todd snorted. ‘Although my manager supported my view, those in the higher echelons of Bowes Dorrinton did not agree. The timing was bad. Pinozalyan was at that time a high profile, high profit drug, in direct competition with a new, innovative drug soon to be released; Prozac. Taking Pinozalyan off the market then would have been potentially disastrous so they wanted more concrete evidence before they were prepared to take any action. As you will appreciate, this wasn’t the kind of data that could be produced overnight. The rats whose behaviour had changed were now eight months old. To set up a new experiment would have taken at least a year, and that was too long. In the meantime the most Bowes Dorrinton were prepared to do was issue a drug alert memo individually to GPs, warning of “possible risks”.’

‘That’s all?’ queried Mariner.

‘It was the minimum requirement at that time. I was very unhappy about it and felt it wasn’t enough but no one would listen, so I decided to publish my findings in a pretty low level science publication. At least then I would have tried to do something. But, when the article was published, I was asked to leave my post for failing to “act in the best interests of the company”. As an alternative to direct dismissal I was given the option of taking retirement on the grounds of ill health. Financially it was the sensible thing to do, but it of course meant that my research findings could be discredited as the ramblings of a sick man. I was also made to sign a disclaimer, preventing me from passing on any information relating to the work I had done at the company.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘It’s a common enough practice, to guard against commercial espionage, but this one went further. I was also advised, verbally, not to compromise my own or my family’s personal safety.’

‘That was an open threat. You didn’t report this to the police?’

‘What was the point? I couldn’t prove anything, and it would have just looked like sour grapes from a man who had been forced out of his job.’ He was right.

‘And the company took no further action on Pinozalyan?’

‘The memo was the only thing. And that would have made little difference. Many GPs are living in the pockets of the major drugs firms anyway. Pinozalyan continued to be distributed for another nine years, up until 1972.’

‘It was withdrawn because a substitute had been found?’ said Mariner, but Todd shook his head.

‘That was the year the Medicines Act was introduced to control the manufacture and sale of medicinal products in the UK and all drugs were required to be submitted for licensing. Although the law itself was introduced in 1971, there had been a “transitional exemption” for any drugs that were on the market before licensing began, but in September 1972 that transitional period ran out and licences “as of right” had to be applied for. For the first time, Pinozalyan would have come under close scrutiny from the Committee on the safety of Drugs. Pinozalyan mysteriously vanished from the market shortly before then. By that time even Bowes Dorrinton seemed to consider that it was too much of a risk.’

‘So your fears were vindicated.’

‘What did that matter?’ snapped the old man, crossly.

‘More significantly, Pinozalyan had remained in circulation for almost a further ten years, during which time I was entirely impotent.’ Mariner tried not to flinch. ‘The good thing was, however, that in that time I came across no reports of any negative effects on humans, so I told myself that what I had seen was peculiar to rodents. I concluded that I had been wrong and that by some miracle Bowes Dorrinton had got away with it. I decided to leave the pharmaceutical industry altogether. That was when we bought this place and I tried to forget.’

‘Until Malcolm Barham came along.’

‘Malcolm wrote to tell me about his thirteen-year-old son, Jamie, who had been diagnosed autistic. In researching possible causes of his son’s autism Malcolm had identified a possible link with Pinozalyan and then he’d come across my article, which supported his hypothesis exactly. At first I tried to put him off. The last thing I wanted was to get involved again, I was afraid of what I might learn I suppose. But Malcolm was clever. He invited me to go and meet Jamie. It was a surreal experience. The boy exhibited almost exactly the same behaviours as those lab rats: obsessive, repetitive self-stimulation, high anxiety.

The disastrous consequences of Pinozalyan were right there, staring me in the face. Impossible to ignore. Susan Barham had been prescribed Pinozalyan for three months of her pregnancy.’ Andrew Todd gazed at a point somewhere in the middle distance, appalled anew. A nervous tic had taken control of his right eye. Then suddenly he turned to Mariner. ‘The worm in the bud,’ he said. ‘Its devastating corruption invisible until the flower blooms.’

‘What did you do?’ Mariner asked.

‘Malcolm persuaded me to help him, to provide him with the clinical evidence he needed to support his ideas.

But one isolated case isn’t enough to verify anything.

Although I had the theoretical material, the scientific data, we also needed more in the way of statistics to prove that this wasn’t pure coincidence or that Jamie didn’t have some kind of predisposition. Autism is a complex condition with many and varied causes. For every child whose condition had been caused by the drug there was at least one who had developed it for other reasons. Malcolm and Susan Barham knew other parents of autistic youngsters, so they began to contact them, to find out whether any more of these mothers had taken Pinozalyan during pregnancy.

But the cases were few and far between, until Malcolm wrote a letter to some kind of autistic group magazine.’

‘And got an overwhelming response,’ said Mariner, thinking of the letters in the shoebox and the names on Eddie’s database.

‘Did he?’ Todd said. ‘I never knew, because shortly after his letter was published, Malcolm and Susan were killed.’

‘The car crash. Did you ever consider that it could be related?’