She held his arm lightly, and began to tell him about her conversation with Stella. Marcus, Stella’s husband, was a doctor.
“What sort?” asked Jamie. “Everybody’s a doctor in Edinburgh. Or a lawyer.”
“An infectious diseases specialist—a very highly regarded one, apparently. Or he used to be highly regarded.” She went on to explain what Stella had told her. Marcus, she said, had been at the forefront of work on MRSA, the so-called superbug, which had been the cause of a growing number of deaths in hospitals.
“Apparently quite a few people are carriers of this,” said Isabel. “You or I might quite innocently have it. In our noses, I’m sorry to say. Our systems keep it under control, but we can pass it on to others, who can’t cope with it.”
Jamie looked down at Charlie, at his tiny nose. “And?”
“And he was doing a trial on a new antibiotic,” Isabel continued. “One that can knock this MRSA on the head. A drug company has come up with a pretty good candidate and has been given a licence to produce it in this country. Marcus had been involved in the clinical trials and was monitoring its use in patients.
“Everything was going perfectly well, and then, very much to his surprise, a patient who had taken the drug developed pretty serious side effects. Heart palpitations, Stella said. And another one turned up with the same sort of thing. Alarm bells started to ring.”
If Jamie had been indifferent to the story at the beginning, he no longer was. “What was that drug that was so disastrous? The one that people used before they realised that it caused terrible birth defects?”
“Thalidomide. I suppose this was a bit different. The patients were all right, even if things were a bit scary for them. Anyway, Marcus was asked by the health authorities to look into these cases. He did that, and he also published a report in a medical journal in which he showed that both of these patients had been given a massive overdose of the drug: one was a drug addict and had self-administered it in the deluded belief that he would get some sort of hit from it; the other was the victim of a nursing error. So he claimed that everything was fine and that the drug was perfectly safe within the limits they set for this sort of thing.”
She sensed Jamie’s absorption in the story, and was pleased. “But,” Isabel went on, “there was an unpleasant surprise around the corner. A few weeks later he published his findings, in the form of a letter in one of the big medical journals—a few weeks after he had said everything was perfectly safe, a man up in Perthshire was given the drug and promptly died. There was an enquiry and the hospital authorities took a closer look at Marcus’s original report—the one that said that everything was perfectly all right. And what did they find?”
Jamie frowned. “That he’d made a mistake?”
“Yes. But more than that. The data in his original paper was shown to have been falsified. It was something to do with the level of the dosage.”
They walked on. Jamie was lost in thought; then he spoke. “I see where this is going. The implication was that he had an interest in keeping the drug manufacturers happy and that he falsified the figures for their sake. For money.”
That was not what Stella had suggested, Isabel explained. She had said that although the press had had a field day and blamed Marcus for the death, they had not accused him of doing it for money. But he had been reported to the General Medical Council and he had been heavily censured for issuing a misleading report. He resigned from his university chair, too, and stopped all medical work.
“A rather sad story,” said Jamie. “Sad for everybody.” He paused. “And she wants you to…” He looked at Isabel. “She wants you to clear her husband’s name? Is that it?”
Isabel nodded.
“Oh, Isabel!” exploded Jamie. “What’s this got to do with you? What’s this got to do with being the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, for heaven’s sake?”
“Everything,” said Isabel.
Jamie looked puzzled. “I’m sorry…”
“She says that he’s completely innocent. That’s what it’s got to do with me. An innocent man is now consumed with shame for something he didn’t do. That has something to do with all of us, I would have thought. And it just so happens that I have been asked by his wife to do something about it. That brings me into a relationship of—”
“Moral proximity with him,” said Jamie. “Yes, I know all about that. You’ve told me about moral proximity.”
“Well, then,” said Isabel. “There you have it.”
“But how can you believe her—just like that?”
“She seemed to me to be telling the truth.”
“But what wife wouldn’t? Of course spouses protest that their spouses are innocent. Mothers do it too. Presumably Mrs. Stalin took the view that her son Joe was widely misjudged. That he would never have run a terror.”
Isabel laughed. “One cannot expect objectivity from a spouse, I suppose. But then I have somebody else’s view to go on as well. That cardiologist I sat next to at the dinner told me that he was convinced that Marcus was innocent. He didn’t tell me at the time what it was that he was supposed to have done, but he did tell me that he thought he didn’t do it. That’s two views in favour of innocence.”
They had reached the end of the reservoir, and Jamie now glanced at his watch. “We should go back now,” he said. “We’ll need to settle him.” He planted a kiss on the top of Charlie’s head, on the tiny tam-o’-shanter he was wearing. Then, when they had started to retrace their steps, he said to Isabel, “I’m sorry I sounded so discouraging. You want to do this, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I do.”
“Then I’m proud of you,” said Jamie. “Really proud.”
And with that he leaned over towards her and kissed her. She touched his hair. She breathed in. I am so in love, she thought, so deeply in love; and love of one is love of another, and another, until all humanity is embraced and the heavenly city realised, which will never happen, not even in your lifetime, Charlie, she thought.
WITH CHARLIE PUT TO BED, Jamie said, “I’ll cook.”
It was now almost nine in the evening and Isabel had not thought much about supper. She had a vague idea that they might have a plate of the moussaka that she had made the previous day and needed to be finished off, but she had done nothing about it and Jamie’s offer was particularly welcome. He would make pasta, he said; he had discovered some porcini mushrooms in the larder and some cream. “Not very adventurous,” he said.
“Delicious,” said Isabel. “And thank you. I want to look at some things in my study.”
She left him in the kitchen and went through to her study in the front of the house. She had a fax machine there, and there was often a small pile of papers disgorged at the end of the day, waiting for her attention: scribbled notes from the printers, queries from the copy editor, and, in this case, a report from a reader. That was what she had hoped for, and she caught her breath when she saw it.
She had sent Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem to two referees, as was normal with any unsolicited paper. She had been scrupulously careful in her choice of referees; it would have been easy to pick a harsh one—and she knew at least one professor of philosophy, himself a seldom published man, who delighted in finding fault with the work of others and recommending against publication. Isabel would not use him as a referee, although when Professor Lettuce had been in charge of the board he had taken to doing so off his own bat. This man, whom Isabel had nicknamed the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce. Two peas from the same pod, thought Isabel; Lettuce seemed to attract vegetable metaphors, she admitted—the great turnip. No, she would not send it to the Harsh Critic because he would reject it more or less automatically—or would he? If he, the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce, then might it not be possible that he would be on good terms with Lettuce’s acolyte, Dove, the oleaginous one? In which case he would probably recommend in favour of publication, as he would not like to cause Lettuce to wilt. This made matters more complex. If she decided against the Harsh Critic, then she was taking away from Dove a chance that he would otherwise have, and she wanted to treat him with scrupulous fairness. But no, he would get a random referee, one chosen by her when she opened her address book at random…like this, and there he was, the obvious choice, her friend Iain Torrance. Iain, a theologian with a philosophical background, was as fair-minded a man as one could meet, and, what was more, he had a reputation for working quickly, as he had done now. For she saw lying there, having slid down from the desk on which the fax machine was placed, his faxed report—a neatly typed page of paper subscribed at the bottom with his signature: Iain.