Deception (3 page)

‘
I think we both know that most of the “breakthroughs” aren’t breakthroughs at all,’ said Steven, without noticing the look. ‘They’re research groups trying to get their names in the papers in order to attract more grant money. When push comes to shove, the work’s always “at a very early stage” and they hope “it will lead to advances in patient treatment in about five to ten years time”. It almost invariably never does and what genuine ‘breakthroughs’ there are, are usually diagnostic rather than therapeutic. They can tell you at a much earlier stage that you’re going to die but they still can’t do a damn thing about it.’

‘
That’s all a bit cynical, isn’t it?’ said Macmillan.

‘
I’d prefer, “realistic,” ‘said Steven. ‘Seeing things as they really are, is part of my job, is it not?’

Macmillan broke into a genuine smile. ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘I sometimes wish they’d call the buggers to account for their supposed “breakthroughs” myself.’

‘
Making them repay the grant money they’ve flushed down the toilet might be a better idea,’ said Steven.

‘
Research progress is always such a difficult area to appraise,’ said Macmillan. ‘There are so few facts to go on and that means we’re left with expert opinion masquerading as the next best thing and it very often isn’t. Medical research can be such a happy hunting ground for the charlatan and confidence trickster.’

‘
It’s the loudest voice that wins through, not the brightest. The singer not the song.’

‘
Good,’ said Macmillan. ‘We are agreed on that and this may actually be relevant to your assignment,’ said Macmillan. ‘If you’re feeling up to it, that is?’

‘
I’m fine, sir.’

‘
There’s some kind of a scientific disagreement over a genetically modified crop up in Scotland. It’s probably just a storm in a teacup – something to do with the paperwork in a licensing agreement, but I’ve got an uneasy feeling about it and it’s such a touchy subject these days that I think we should take a look.’

‘
What sort of gene modification are we talking about?’

‘
The company concerned, an outfit called, Agrigene, has obtained permission to grow two fields of genetically modified oilseed rape. Apparently the variety can withstand the action of powerful pesticides thanks to a couple of foreign genes their scientists have introduced to the seeds.’

‘
Sounds reasonable enough.’

‘
It probably is, if truth be told, but the government of the day made such a hash of the BSE affair that nobody believes a word officialdom says when it comes to matters of biological safety. As I recall, the relevant minister wearing a funny hat didn’t seem to work too well either.’

‘
It was his predecessor announcing that it was quite safe to eat your words as long as they didn’t contain beef, that I remember best,’ said Steven.

‘
But we’re not here to question the wisdom of our masters,’ said Macmillan, putting an end to that line of conversation.

This was something that Dunbar liked about Macmillan. He might look like a typical po-faced Whitehall mandarin with his regal bearing and swept-back silver hair but underneath, he came pretty close to being one of the lads. But only up to a point and when that point was reached he was good at letting it be known without giving offence. He also had a well-deserved reputation for being fiercely loyal to his staff and was almost obsessive in his determination that Sci-Med should remain independent of direct executive control. He had come close to resigning on several occasions when bigger government bodies had tried to influence the course of his department’s investigations.

‘
No, we just have to live with the consequences of their actions,’ said Steven. ‘So what exactly has this company done wrong?’

‘
They didn’t tell anyone locally what they were doing. They did their best to keep everything quiet and persuaded the farmer involved to do likewise.’

‘
Can’t say I blame them in the circumstances, considering what’s been happening to fields of GM crops here in England.’

‘
Quite so, and as far as the book goes, they appear to have done nothing wrong. They went through all the right channels and are, by all accounts, properly licensed to grow their crop.’

‘
So what’s the problem?’

‘
When the locals found out about it, they didn’t like it one little bit and they’ve been kicking up one hell of a fuss ever since.’

Steven shrugged. ‘I suppose I can see their point of view too,’ he sighed. ‘Fear of the unknown, happily fuelled by the media, no doubt.’

‘
Well, it’s turned into more than just a few farmers shouting the odds, I’m afraid.’

‘
You’re now going to tell me that one of the locals is an organic farmer and he insists that his crop is going to be cross-pollinated by the big bad grass in the next field,’ said Steven.

‘
Spot on,’ smiled Macmillan, ‘but there’s a twist to it. The company, Agrigene, says that this chap was not licensed as an organic farmer when they sought permission for their trial. They insist that they checked the area out thoroughly beforehand for any such farms. They maintain that the paperwork for this chap must have been processed after permission for their trial had been approved.’

‘
But why?’

‘
Just so as to make trouble for them, so they say.’

‘
Sounds a bit bizarre, even allowing for commercial paranoia about government regulations.’

‘
It gets worse and this is the real worrying aspect. The opposition now maintains that the Agrigene crop in the fields is not the one that they were licensed for.’

‘
Now that sounds a bit more serious,’ agreed Steven. ‘How did they come to that conclusion?’

‘
They had a sample of it analysed at a ministry lab over in Ayrshire. The lab reported the presence of a third foreign gene, not declared by the company at the outset.’

‘
So the locals are right?’

‘
Agrigene deny it. They don’t deny that there is a third foreign element in the genetic make-up of their crop but they say that to call it a foreign gene is a technical misunderstanding on the part of the lab that analysed their crop.’

‘
Sounds like the old Olympic athlete defence,’ said Steven.

‘
Quite so. You’d think the bright thing for them to do at this juncture would be to admit to a technical oversight and apologise for it but this they stubbornly refuse to do. They maintain instead that there is some kind of conspiracy against them to discredit the company and they’re determined to do battle in the courts if necessary.’

‘
Who do they think has conspired against them?’

‘
They don’t know and they can’t even suggest a motive.’

‘
Someone just doesn’t like them,’ said Steven.

‘
Paranoia or not, they’re absolutely adamant that they’ve done nothing wrong while the opposition in the village is calling for the crop be destroyed. This is where you come in. I’d like you to take a look at things up there. Talk to everyone involved and try to get a feel for what’s been going on.’

‘
Am I right in thinking that I’m going to be dealing with a lot of angry people?’

‘
That would be a fair summation. Brigadoon, it aint. Tempers have been running very high and there’s now talk of the GM farmer bringing in a private security firm to protect his farm and Agrigene’s investment.’

Steven raised his eyebrows. ‘Muscle?’

‘
Uniforms with dogs.’

‘
Not exactly designed to calm things down. Have any outsiders appeared on the scene yet?’

‘
Not as yet but I suspect it’s only a matter of time before every civil liberties group from A to Z takes an interest.’

‘
What about police involvement?’

‘
They’re aware of the situation, of course. They’re keeping a low profile. I think their preference would be for a government order putting an end to the trial. That way, the Agrigene crop could be legally destroyed and everything could return to normal in the village. But the company is adamant that they will fight any such move every step of the way and we both know that once our legal friends sense a fat fee, we could be in for a very long haul indeed.’

Steven nodded and asked, ‘Anything else I should know about?’

‘
Miss Roberts has prepared a file for you as usual. It lists all the key players and gives as much background information as we could get hold of. There is perhaps just one other thing you should be aware of; three boys from the village have been admitted to a local hospital suffering from Weil’s disease.’

‘
Three!’ exclaimed Steven. ‘From one village?’

‘
Apparently Weil’s disease is becoming more common these days,’ said Macmillan. ‘For two reasons as I understand it. One, there has been a general increase in the rat population all over the UK and two, the current fashion among the young for drinking beer out of bottles.’

‘
Of course, ‘said Steven. ‘I remember now, the disease is spread through rat urine.’

‘
Macmillan nodded and said, ‘Exactly, the beer crates are stored in open warehouses. Rats crawl over them and contaminate the bottles. Jack the Lad opens his bottle of designer, Krustenbufferstumpenschlotz and . . . yum, yum.’

‘
But presumably there’s nothing to link these cases with the GM problem in the village?’

‘
Only that one of the boy’s fathers works as a mechanic on the farm that’s recently obtained organic accreditation. But no, it was a clear case of them coming into contact with rat urine. They had all been swimming in a canal that runs through their village, so it seems obvious enough where they got the disease. There was one strange feature though; a rat apparently attacked one of the boys while he was swimming. It bit his foot for no apparent reason and hung on to it for grim death.’

‘
Maybe the boys provoked it in some way?’

‘
Whatever the reason, the animal did quite a bit of damage to the boy’s foot. They managed to repair the tendons with an operation at the local hospital but since then he’s developed rat-bite fever.’

‘
Poor kid.’

‘
The latest now is that he now has some kind of post-operative infection on top of everything else. ‘It’s going to be touch and go.’

‘
And all for a swim.’

‘
Boys will be boys,’ said Macmillan.

‘
The world over,’ agreed Steven.

TWO

The first thing that occurred to Steven when he climbed into the cab to take him back to his flat was the fact that Jenny no longer had a father whose function it was to just, ‘eat, sleep and be there’. It was a good feeling. He was back in business and the bulging file in his briefcase suggested that there was enough there to keep him fully occupied for the rest of the day and probably most of the evening.

Although it wasn’t sunny, it was extremely sultry - just the way he didn’t like it in London. This kind of weather shortened everyone’s temper and the continual angry tooting of car horns and muttering of the cab driver only served to prove the point as they edged their way down to the river, where he had an apartment on the fifth floor of a converted warehouse building. He felt relieved to get inside and have a shower before changing into jeans and tee shirt. He poured himself a cold
Stella Artois
from the fridge and settled down to read through the file.

Blackbridge, he learned, was a small farming community, lying to the west of Edinburgh, about five miles inland from the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It had been named after a black iron bridge – now replaced by a more modern concrete one, which spanned the small river running through it from south to north, on its way down from the Pentland Hills to the sea. The village was also crossed by water, running east to west, in the shape of the Union Canal, a disused inland waterway that stretched out from the heart of Edinburgh, the capital to Falkirk, a small town standing in the middle of Scotland’s central belt.

The canal had carried horse-drawn barge traffic around the turn of the century but had been neglected now for over seventy years, allowing nature to reclaim much of its original, cobbled towpath and making progress along its banks almost impossible in places. The canal however, was currently scheduled for dredging and restoration and was to be given new life as a major recreational feature for the population with the aid of millennium project money. Work had already started and a section of the main Glasgow – Edinburgh Motorway was currently being raised to permit the rejoining of a section of the canal that had been severed during the motorway’s construction many years before. There was little else to distinguish Blackbridge geographically, Steven concluded. It could have been any one of dozens of small communities lying across Scotland’s most densely populated
region.

The main protagonists in the current controversy appeared to be, Ronald Lane, the owner of Peat Ridge farm - who had been contracted by Agrigene to grow their experimental oilseed rape crop, and Thomas Rafferty, the owner of Crawhill farm, which lay immediately to the east of Peat Ridge. Rafferty was officially the chief objector on the grounds that cross-pollination from Peat Ridge would ruin his credentials as an organic farmer. McGraw and Littlejohn, an Edinburgh firm of solicitors, had been retained by Rafferty and seemed to be co-ordinating the efforts of the other protestors – who, as far as Steven could tell, were objecting on principle to the idea of having any kind of genetically modified crop in the area.