‘Have you heard how she is?’
‘Not much change. Her life’s not in danger, but she has yet to be told about the full extent of her injuries.’
Gavin nodded and looked around. ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing I can do here at the moment.’
‘Best stay away for a bit.’
‘Everyone would like that.’
Simmons shrugged, but felt he could offer no reassurance.
Outside in the lab, Gavin sat back down at Mary’s desk, waiting until the men in suits had finished so that he could gather together some stuff to take home with him. If he was going to take time off, he’d need his notebooks and some relevant journals. He wondered briefly what else he should take, before deciding to move the Valdevan and polymyxin, in case anything ‘unfortunate’ happened to them. Ever since the episode with the acid contamination he had been hiding them in a plastic box with the contents labelled as something else in the big communal fridge out in the corridor. He’d be happier now with the box in the fridge at the flat. If anything happened to the Valdevan, the company certainly wouldn’t give him any more. There would be no more experiments and possibly no published paper if the results had to depend on a single series of experiments.
Gavin fetched the box from the corridor fridge and removed the two bottles containing the drugs which he relocated in a small, thick-walled polystyrene container before adding ice to it and sealing it with tape. He packed it away in his rucksack.
The Works Department men had finished their work and were stuffing their clipboards back in their briefcases. Gavin watched as they filed out with a series of nods and smiles in his direction, of the type afforded to unknown people of unknown status.
Simmons came out of his office and said, ‘I’m off to the hospital.’
Gavin, who was very much aware of the barrier that had come down between Frank and himself, said, ‘Tell Mary... to hang in there.’ He knew it sounded lame. He would send flowers on his way home.
Simmons nodded. ‘Has Tom come back yet?’
Gavin said not.
‘Maybe you could make sure he’s all right before you go?’
‘Sure, Frank.’
Simmons left and Gavin took a slow walk round the lab, tracing his hand over the charred surface of his bench. He had been so busy fending off the suggestion that it had all been his fault that he hadn’t had time to consider exactly how an unknown third party could have done this. It wouldn’t have been easy. If he had filled the beaker with ethanol — as he was sure he had on that morning — and then left the lab in response to Carrie’s phone call, someone must have switched the ethanol for ether in the time between his leaving and Mary arriving. Frank had already gone off to the library and Tom had been about to leave for the airport... Gavin’s throat tightened as he realised that Tom Baxter had been the only person in the lab at the critical time — and he, of course, would have had no idea that Mary was about to sit down at his bench and work there...
As if on cue, the lab door opened and Tom Baxter came in, looking deathly pale. He was holding a white envelope which he placed on Mary’s desk, before looking at Gavin through dark, empty eyes. Gavin read in them all he needed to know.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he said hoarsely, now understanding why Tom was so upset over what had happened. ‘You must have heard on the news last night that someone had been injured in a fire at the university but no name was mentioned. You thought it was me until Frank told you this morning.’
The blank stare did not change.
‘Why, for Christ’s sake?’
A look of utter disdain appeared on Tom’s face. ‘Have you any idea how much I loathe you?’
The look on Gavin’s face said not.
‘I have to work my butt off just to keep my head above water in this place, while everything comes so natural to you, Mr bloody know-it-all. If I forget something you’ll know it. Any time I screw up, you’ll be there to point it out. You do bugger all for weeks on end and then you make one suggestion and suddenly you’re Frank’s ace researcher. I get my one lucky break: Grumman Schalk are prepared to give me a job, a good job, much better than anything I was going to be getting on the poxy postdoc circuit for second-rate researchers like me — yes, you see, I do know my limitations. After that, I’d probably end up teaching biology in some bloody comprehensive to a bunch of teenage fuckwits who didn’t want to know.’
Gavin was mesmerised by the change that had come over Tom Baxter. The body of the gangly, dishevelled student seemed to have been taken over by a spirit of malevolence and bitterness. Even his voice seemed different. The nervous pauses and unnecessary clearing of the throat were no longer in evidence.
‘Then you have your big idea and fuck things up. Grumman are going to pull the plug on everything, including the job offers, because you won’t stop fucking around with Valdevan — but what does that matter to the great Gavin Donnelly? He knows best. He always knows fucking best.’
Gavin tensed himself as Tom started to come towards him. He sensed that Tom’s anger had reached the critical level where action had to take over to provide some sort of release. He tried anticipating what he might do and noticed, with a frisson of horror, the scalpel lying on the island bench. It had a blade so sharp that it could open up his face before he realised anything had happened, and it was just about to be within Tom’s reach.
Gavin’s heart missed a beat when Tom paused next to it but, to his enormous relief, Tom didn’t appear to see it. He didn’t seem to see anything, and Gavin realised that he was lost in the nightmare of what he’d done.
‘Mary... poor Mary,’ Tom murmured. ‘She just had to do you a good turn and... Christ, what have I done?’ He put his hands to his face and his shoulders started to heave.
Gavin kept perfectly still, feeling that Tom was so unstable that anything could happen. He clearly couldn’t come to terms with being the cause of Mary’s disfigurement, so it was still possible that he might turn his anger and guilt on him in an effort to block out the pain. Any move he made, even a wrong word — and right now, they’d all be wrong — might trigger a sudden explosion of violence.
Tom brought his hands down slowly from his face and looked at Gavin, who felt himself tense again. He expected to see eyes filled with hatred, but that wasn’t what was there. He saw nothing but emptiness: deep, dark, despairing emptiness. He sensed the danger had passed.
‘And now I have to make it right...’ murmured Tom as he turned away and made for the door. Gavin let out his breath and felt his shoulders relax. He considered going after him but dismissed the idea, recognising that he was the last person on earth that Tom would want near him. He assumed that his assertion about ‘making it right’ meant confession, giving himself up to the police, but he decided to call security anyway. ‘Try to stop him leaving the building, will you? He’s not well.’
‘Do we call the police or an ambulance?’
‘The police.’
Gavin slumped down into a chair, feeling the adrenalin drain from him. He started to take comfort from the silence in the lab, but only until somewhere out in the corridor a woman started screaming. It went on and on.
Gavin rushed out, as did others from the neighbouring labs, exchanging questioning looks as they followed the source of the sound. It was coming from behind the doors leading to the stairs. There they found a slight, blonde girl — one of the junior technicians from the Drummond lab — screaming hysterically as she pointed down into the stairwell. ‘He just... went over...’ she stammered as two of her colleagues wrapped their arms round her.
Gavin looked over the banister to see the body of Tom Baxter spread-eagled on the stone floor far below. Even at this height he could see that his skull had shattered. This was what Tom had meant by ‘making it right’.