She sat back in her seat. “I don’t see—”
“No,” he said quickly. “You don’t, do you? You don’t because you don’t know the first thing about it. Sorry to be so frank, but these things are very complex. The truth of the matter, you see, is that I warned him that the figures were high. I said to him that he should go and check the figures and see whether they really reflected what that patient had taken. And he didn’t. He said no, it wasn’t necessary. And then I spoke to him a second time, and asked him to note my reservations, but he told me not to be such a fusspot and he didn’t note anything.”
He attacked his salad. “So, you see,” he said. “Not so simple. If that had come out at the enquiry it would have looked even worse for him.”
“But you didn’t mention it?”
“No. I wasn’t even asked to make a statement. I kept quiet. I didn’t want things to get even worse for him. He’s a good doctor, you see.”
“You protected him?”
He stared at her. “You could put it that way. But let me say something else. If you mention this at all, and in particular if you suggest to anybody that I protected him, I shall simply deny that this conversation took place.”
She was puzzled. “Then why tell me?”
“To protect him again,” he said. “To protect him from you.” He pointed at her with his fork, on which half an olive was balanced. The olive tumbled down into the thick of the salad and was lost. “The last thing he needs is anybody opening up the whole can of worms. If you’re really concerned for him, then you’ll back off now that you know you only risk making it worse.”
They both ate in silence for a while. Then he spoke again. “And there’s another thing which nobody knows. In the case of the second patient, there was nothing wrong with the figures from the lab. And the dosage was not nearly as high. Yet the lab report, when it came to be looked at again, had much higher figures. Somebody had altered them.”
He looked at her knowingly.
“You’re saying that Marcus did?”
“Well, I didn’t change them,” he said.
“And you didn’t do anything about it?”
“By then it was too late. I noticed it only when the whole thing started to be investigated.”
It did not make sense to Isabel. She could understand sloppiness and not bothering to check up on suspect figures, but why should Marcus have deliberately falsified data?
Norrie sensed the reasons for her puzzlement. “Because he didn’t want the drug to be compromised,” he said. “Because he didn’t want its use to be stopped because of some awkward side effects at relatively low doses. If these things happened with absolutely sky-high doses, then that would not be the fault of the drug, it would be a sort of freak—the sort of risk that people will live with precisely because hardly anybody is ever going to swallow enough of the stuff for that sort of thing to happen.”
Isabel digested this. It certainly made sense. But why, she wondered, would he have such a stake in the continued use of the drug?
Norrie put down his fork. He had finished his salad, although a small piece of dark lettuce was stuck to the front of his teeth. His tongue moved round as he tried to dislodge it, and Isabel stared in awful fascination.
“Excuse me,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail. “There. That’s better. What do they say about these things? Follow the money. Isn’t that it?”
“He had a financial interest in the company?”
“Not directly,” said Norrie. “He wouldn’t have had shares—that would have been too obvious. But that same company had backed his research. He was beholden to them. He probably wanted them to back him in the future. So…”
Isabel listened carefully. What was occupying her now was the question of why Norrie should have so readily covered for Marcus. Was this the way that the medical profession looked after its own? She had been under the impression that all that had changed. It was difficult to understand.
“But what I can’t work out,” she said, “is this: Why did you not say something? Why did you not reveal your suspicions that he had actually gone so far as to change data?”
Norrie pushed his plate away from him and glanced at his watch. “I’m going to have to dash,” he said. “I’m doing a couple of endoscopies this afternoon in an hour or so.” He paused, as if weighing whether to say something. Then he did. “All right, bearing in mind that this conversation is completely deniable: Marcus Moncrieff is my uncle. He’s my mother’s brother.”
He looked at her in a way that she thought said: You are admitted to a conspiracy; I think you understand. Then he signalled to the waitress to bring the bill.
“Edinburgh’s a bit like that,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
JAMIE WAS PLAYING that evening at the Festival Theatre. Scottish Opera was doing Don Pasquale, and although Isabel had seen the production when they had first performed it in Glasgow, she had been invited to the opera, and a reception beforehand, by Turcan Connel, the firm of lawyers who represented her in such legal business as she had. It was one of their partners, Simon Mackintosh, who had purchased the Review of Applied Ethics for her the previous year, and he said that this transaction entitled her to at least some corporate hospitality.
Champagne was served in one of the suites alongside the grand circle. Isabel looked about her: she knew a number of the guests, but for some reason she did not feel much like socialising, so she busied herself looking at the framed theatrical memorabilia on the wall. There was the programme for a concert by Harry Lauder, the Scottish vaudeville artist of the 1920s, with a picture of the famous bekilted figure with one of the twisted walking sticks that became his trademark. He had opened the show with “Will Ye Stop Your Tickling, Jock” and had ended it with “Keep Right on to the End of the Road.” Isabel smiled; her father had loved Harry Lauder and had sung his songs to Isabel and her brother when they were children. “Keep Right on to the End of the Road” moved her still, mawkish though the words were in cold print. “Every road through life is a long, long road, / Filled with joys and sorrows too.” Trite? Yes, it was, but then the truth was often trite, but nonetheless true for that. And had Harry Lauder not sung that on the very day that he had heard of the death of his only son in the trenches of France? And he had insisted on going onstage to sing it when his heart must have been broken within him. People did that then. They were brave.
Or were they too brave, Isabel thought; too brave, with the result that they were imposed upon in the name of vainglorious patriotism, chauvinism, easily led to the slaughter? Should one be brave about the loss of one’s only son, or should one break down and weep for the waste, the pointlessness of the loss; rail against the whole monstrous system that sent young men off in droves to climb up those ladders and stumble through the mud into veils of machine-gun fire? Why should anyone be brave about that?
She remembered the Latin teacher at school translating “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—it is a sweet and decorous thing to die for one’s country. “Horace, girls,” she said. “That’s from Horace’s Odes. Horace was a poet who wrote about the pleasures of living in the country.”
“Who died for his country?” asked one of the girls.
And the teacher had said, “No. He was talking about other people.” And left it at that.
She turned away from the Lauder programme and raised her champagne glass to her lips. Simon, who was standing with a knot of people near the door, saw her and came across to speak to her.