There was a glass beaker lying on its side under the gantry. Simmons righted it and moved it beside his right hand. He mimed the action of taking the forceps from the beaker and flaming them. ‘And then what?’
‘She’d take the stopper out of the cell culture bottle and flame the neck before adding the Valdevan...’
‘Where’s the vial?’ asked Simmons.
Gavin and the others started looking.
Eventually, it was Gavin, who had got down on his hands and knees, who recovered the vial and the melted plastic remains of an automatic pipette from below the bench. ‘I probably knocked them off with the extinguisher,’ he said.
‘Still nothing to tell us what happened...’ said Simmons.
‘She could have knocked the beaker over with the pipette and set fire to the ethanol,’ suggested Jack Martin. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.’
‘An ethanol fire wouldn’t have caused a blast,’ said Gavin. ‘Or done so much damage so quickly. Something else must have been involved, something really volatile.’
‘We have to remember that ethanol burns with an almost invisible blue flame,’ said Martin. ‘She may not have been aware of a small fire on the bench until it was too late and the flames set something else off.’
‘But what?’ said Simmons. ‘What was lying around on the bench that would flare up like that?’
No suggestions were forthcoming.
‘There’s another smell in here,’ said Simmons, sniffing the air.
‘A number of chemical bottles exploded with the heat,’ said Gavin. ‘It could be that. I didn’t see which ones. I was too busy ducking.’
Simmons took another exaggerated sniff of the air. ‘I know that smell,’ he said. ‘I just can’t put a name to it...’ He went on a slow circular walk round the damaged area. ‘It’s the kind of smell you associate with... hospitals.’
‘This is a medical school, Frank,’ said Martin.
‘No, it’s something that takes me back to my childhood, something that once you smell it you always associate it with hospitals... ether! It’s ether!’
‘Now you come to mention it,’ said Martin, taking in a long sniff of the air, ‘you could be right.’
‘Did you have a bottle of ether sitting on your bench, Gavin?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive. I’ve had no reason to use it.’
Simmons went over to the metal cupboard on the floor under the fume cupboard where dangerous and inflammable chemicals were kept and squatted down to unlock it. There was a series of clunking glass sounds as he moved the stock bottles around. When he stood up, he was holding a one-litre, dark glass bottle. ‘Ether. Half empty.’ He read out the date on the label. ‘Obtained from the stores two days ago... but already half empty?’ He returned it to the cupboard. ‘Ether vapour is notorious for causing flash fires,’ he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘If you leave a container of ether open to the atmosphere for long enough you’ll get an explosive mix of ether and air which would be heavier than air itself.’
Simmons walked back to the burnt bench. ‘The fumes would have built up around Mary until the concentration became critical and the Bunsen flame would have set off a flash fire in her face.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Martin.
Simmons looked at Gavin and said, ‘You say there was no ether on your bench... so the obvious explanation is that the beaker the instruments were sitting in — the beaker that Mary thought contained alcohol — actually contained ether.’
‘No way,’ said Gavin. ‘I filled it myself this morning with ethanol.’
‘The ethanol is kept in the same cupboard as the ether,’ Simmons reminded him.
Gavin remained silent and didn’t flinch.
‘Is it not just possible that...’
‘I didn’t mix them up,’ said Gavin, cutting off the question. ‘No way.’
The haunted look had returned to Simmons’ eyes. ‘Then the alternative is just too awful to contemplate,’ he said.
Martin voiced it. ‘Someone meant this to happen? They deliberately substituted ether for ethanol, knowing that Mary would turn on the Bunsen near it?’
‘No,’ said Simmons. ‘It’s Gavin’s bench. They thought it would be him.’
‘Christ,’ said Gavin.
‘Shit,’ said Martin. ‘Attempted murder?’
Gavin could see that both Simmons and Martin were having trouble believing this. It was clearly a step too far for both of them. They would be much more comfortable with an explanation involving a mistake or an accident, and it was making him feel uneasy — like a schoolboy who wasn’t being entirely believed by his elders. He found the silence threatening.
People were being allowed back into the building, and the corridor outside was busy and filled with the buzz of staff discussing what had happened. Ten minutes later Graham Sutcliffe came in and took in the scene imperiously, before asking Simmons, ‘Do we know what happened here? Health and Safety are going to be crawling all over the place in the next hour or so.’
‘It looks very much as if there was a flash fire in the lab resulting from ether fumes getting into the air,’ said Simmons.
‘How did they get into the air?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’
‘The university will be keen to —’
‘Absolve themselves from all blame,’ interrupted Simmons. ‘Yes, I know. I think we’ve established it was either an accident... or a deliberate act of sabotage. Either way, Old College can rest easy in their beds. They weren’t to blame.’
‘This is hardly the time for levity,’ said Sutcliffe.
Simmons ignored the rebuke. He looked at Gavin, adopting an exaggerated grimace of embarrassment, and said, ‘Gavin, can we just assume for a moment...’ He paused as if the words were causing him pain, ‘... that a mistake was made. You obviously didn’t realise it, otherwise you would have changed the solution immediately, but will you at least consider the possibility that this could conceivably be what happened? I mean, we all make mistakes from time to time. It was just unfortunate that in this case it had such tragic consequences.’
‘I did not make a mistake,’ said Gavin flatly. He saw the look that Sutcliffe gave Martin. It suggested that this was exactly what he expected to hear from the Liverpool paddy. Blank denial when in the wrong.
‘Then we are faced with the prospect of calling in the police,’ said Simmons, after a long pause.
Gavin nodded his agreement. ‘And if I can just remind you, it was my arse they were after.’
Sutcliffe rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, come on, no one in their right mind would do something like this deliberately. It was clearly an accident caused by thoughtlessness, carelessness, kismet, call it what you will.’
‘No, it was sabotage,’ said Gavin. ‘Someone wanted to put a stop to the Valdevan experiments.’
‘What arrogant nonsense,’ stormed Sutcliffe. ‘What makes you think your piddling little experiments could possibly provoke criminal action like this?’
‘The fact that they’re not piddling little experiments,’ said Gavin. He was angry but in control.
‘Someone has already added hydrochloric acid to a drug solution in this lab in an attempt to wreck Gavin’s experiments,’ said Simmons. ‘So there is precedent.’
Sutcliffe’s mouth fell open and he waved his arms around in a gesture of utter bewilderment. ‘What on earth is happening to this department?’ he pleaded to the heavens. ‘This beggars belief. We are a centre of excellence with a research record that stands comparison with that of any university in the world, and suddenly people are behaving like guttersnipes and talking about sabotaging each other’s work.’
The look Sutcliffe gave Gavin left him in little doubt where he thought the blame lay.