Final Venture

'OK,' I nodded.

As soon as BioOne took over Boston Peptides, Lisa wanted to get hold of some of the data on neuroxil-5. She wanted to see if she could use it in her work with Parkinson's.'

'So Henry Chan told me,' I said. 'But he didn't tell me much more.'

'At first Enema said no way. He runs everything with total secrecy, no one is allowed to know anything unless they absolutely have to. But Lisa can be pretty persuasive.'

I smiled.

'Somehow she got through to Enema. But he was very careful what data he would let her see. It was mostly just some of the early animal experiments, on aged rats.'

Kelly took a bite of her quiche. I waited while she chewed.

'The information was pretty useless, but it was all Lisa could get. As she studied it, she noticed something than Enema seemed to have missed.'

'What was that?'

'Several months after taking the neuroxil-5, quite a few of the rats died.'

I raised my eyebrows. Kelly saw it. 'Nothing wrong in that. Old rats die. It's kind of what you'd expect. Except that a higher number than usual died of strokes.'

'Strokes? Do rats get strokes?'

'Rats get many of the same kinds of diseases that we do. Especially in laboratories.'

'I see.'

'Do you know what a stroke is?' Kelly asked.

'Some kind of blood clot in the brain, isn't it?'

'Yes, it can be caused by that, or by the opposite, a haemorrhage in the brain. It can lead to paralysis, or death.'

'So this was serious?'

'Maybe.'

'What do you mean, maybe? If all these rats died of strokes, doesn't that make neuroxil-5 lethal?'

'It's not that easy. Most of the rats survived, or died of natural causes. It's just that a slightly higher proportion than usual died of strokes.'

'But Lisa thought this was significant?'

'She did. At first she spoke to Henry about it. He told her to talk to Enema. Which she did.'

I could see where this was going. 'And he said there was nothing wrong.'

'That's right. He said that Lisa's observations weren't statistically significant. When she asked for more data to check whether this was a real problem, Enema refused to give it to her. He said that it had been thoroughly analysed and there was nothing to be worried about.'

'But that didn't satisfy Lisa?'

Kelly smiled. 'You know her. She wouldn't be satisfied until she had seen the data itself. When Enema still refused to show it to her, she more or less called him a liar. She accused him of not checking the numbers carefully enough.'

'So he fired her?'

'Not surprisingly,' said Kelly.

It didn't surprise me at all. I knew that she had given Henry Chan a similarly difficult time over the years, but he had much more patience than Enever. I now understood why he felt that Lisa wouldn't fit into the new BioOne culture.

'Do you think Lisa was right to be concerned?' I asked Kelly.

'I didn't see the data myself; this is all stuff I heard from Lisa,' Kelly said. 'And I'd guess that statistically Enema was right. But I've worked with Lisa for two years. I trust her hunches. There may be something there, I don't know.'

'How can I find out?' I asked.

'You?' Kelly looked surprised. 'You can't.'

'Can you help me?'

Kelly looked down at her plate, now almost empty. 'I can't. Unlike Lisa, I don't have another job to go to if I get fired. Thomas Enever is a powerful enemy that I don't need right now.'

'Hmm. Have the clinical trials shown the same problem to be present in humans?'

'I assume not,' Kelly said. 'I mean all that data is shown to the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA would be pretty unhappy if everyone who took neuroxil-5 had a stroke the next day.'

'But what if it was just a few patients and it was several months later?'

Kelly thought about it. 'I don't know. The Phase One and Two clinical trials probably involved only about a hundred people, total. It is possible that something that affected a small minority of patients might slip through unnoticed. That's why they have these massive Phase Three trials, with a thousand patients or more.'

'And that's what's going on now, isn't it?'

'That's right. They end in March next year.'

'Do you have any idea about the results of these trials?'

'Are you kidding?' Kelly snorted. 'Only Enever knows. And at this stage, even he isn't supposed to.'

I remembered the note in Art's BioOne files about the trial being double blind.

'Is there any way of finding out?'

'No,' said Kelly. I paused to let her think. 'Not unless you actually go and talk to the clinicians who are conducting the trials themselves.'

'Can you get me a list of them?'

'No way,' Kelly said.

I was disappointed. I was sure Lisa had been on to something, but it was hard to see how I, single-handedly, could break through BioOne's wall of secrecy.

'There is one thing you could do,' Kelly said. 'I'm pretty sure that the Phase Two trial was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine. I remember the buzz in the industry when it was published.'

'So do I. That was when the BioOne stock price shot up, wasn't it?'

'Possibly. You're the money man. I just make the drugs.'

I acknowledged the dig.

'Sorry,' Kelly said. 'There will probably be a list of clinicians involved with the Phase Two trial there. Many of them will be signed up for the new trial. You could talk to some of them.'

'Thanks,' I said. 'I'll try it.'

We ate our food, Kelly hurrying so that she could get away without being seen.

'How's Boston Peptides getting on without Lisa?' I asked.

'We miss her. BP 56 is going well. We're getting the first responses from human volunteers. It looks like the drug is safe, although it seems to cause depression in some people.'

'Depression?'

'Yes. It can reduce the levels of serotonin in the brain. Kind of like the opposite of Prozac'

Depression.

Lisa had been taking BP 56.

I remembered her fragility a week or so after Frank's death, the way she had lost her temper with me, her uncharacteristic irrationality, her black moods, and most of all, my total inability to help her. A chemically induced depression, combined with all those other pressures, must have been very hard to cope with. No wonder she had cracked and run away.

'What is it Simon?'

Lisa had said she wanted to keep the fact she was taking the drug quiet from everyone at work. I wasn't sure whether that included Kelly, but it was probably up to Lisa to tell her, not me. 'Oh, I was just thinking,' I said, vaguely. 'It's not serious enough to fail the drug, is it?'

'Oh, no,' said Kelly. 'There are ways around it. It may be as simple as prescribing Prozac in combination with BP 56.' She looked at her watch. 'I've got to go. Do you mind if you wait here for a couple of minutes before you leave? I really don't want anyone to see us together.'

'OK,' I said, deciding that there was no need for Kelly to know that she was being watched as she spoke. 'You go. And thank you.'

She smiled quickly and left.

I waited a few moments, and sauntered round the corner to a bar I used to frequent, just on the Cambridge side of the bridge from the Business School. My female tail stayed outside. I ordered a beer, and thought through what Kelly had told me.

So Lisa had been depressed. Not the kind of depression that comes from stress at work, and grief, and marital difficulties, but biochemically induced stress, which would make the world seem bleak even in the most normal of times. Given the pressure Lisa had been under, the world must have seemed a very dark place indeed.

In some ways, this news made me feel better. Without the drug, I should have a much better chance of persuading her to come back to me. But I still needed to prove that I hadn't killed Frank.

So the next question was, was there a problem with neuroxil-5? I had to admit that there was a chance that the answer was 'no'. That the numbers that Lisa had seen were not from a valid statistical sample, and just represented the kind of false coincidences that happened all the time. Well, if that was the case, then I was wasting a lot of time and effort.