A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(108)

“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 Friday.”

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

Cooperatively, Malverd flipped through the book. He reached for a scrap of paper and made 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 abcissa 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 Malverd’s pencil on paper. At last he looked up. “Nothing before last June,” he said. “June 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 instantly in St. James’s mind. The connection between that meeting and Cambrey’s trips to London was finally neither conjectural nor tenuous.

“A form of chemotherapy? What exactly 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 tumour 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 cause 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 chorea, 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.”