Chapter 19
Just before noon, Jeff caught the call he’d been waiting for all morning. ‘Even my back-up computer battery’s dead,’ were Jo’s first words. ‘Either I’ll have to spend two hours dictating this on the phone to someone or I’ll have to come back in. Can you wait that long?’
‘We can probably wait,’ was Jeff’s verdict.
‘Just get back quickly. I take it you’ve got it all from this woman.
I mean, you can imagine how twitchy the lawyers are.
They will need to pore over your copy before we go accusing major drug companies of spreading death and destruction – in fact there’s talk about holding this till next week to make sure it’s done properly. ’
‘And what have you said to that?’ she asked, feeling a wave of anxiety.
‘I’ve said bollocks. Although we’ve got another cracker to share the front page with you: someone rather famous was arrested first thing this morning for downloading child porn.’
‘Who?’
When he told her, she could only give the expected: ‘No way!’ response that their readers would make.
‘The police are going to make the arrest public by the afternoon, but only Vince has the full details,’ Jeff added. ‘Just so you know who you’re up against.’
‘I love a front-page battle with Vince,’ Jo said, but she could feel her heart sink. ‘I still think “Quintet Lab Releases Killer Whooping Cough” is better,’ she said, ‘It’s more important.’
‘Provided we get a snappier headline than that, yes, it is better. It’s a proper scandal – the latest in the long line of “Randall scandals” our paper is proud to print. Do we have a statement from Wolff-Meyer yet?’ he added.
‘Their duty press officer was briefed first thing this morning. I await a reply. Although they might try to delay coming back to us, in the hope that without their say on it, we won’t print.’
‘Too bad,’ Jeff said. She glowed with the knowledge that he had absolute 100 per cent faith in her.
‘Really? You’ll go ahead without hearing from them?
I mean, it’s a serious allegation. Is Spikey fine with it?
And the people above Spikey?’ She remembered de Groote and his Wolff-Meyer shares remark.
‘I think it’s going to be OK. It’s an important story, Jo. A cover up uncovered. That’s always good.’
‘I can’t name this woman I’ve been talking to, Joan Theroux. She won’t go on the record,’ Jo began her explanation. ‘What she said comes anonymously and without pictures.’
Jeff winced. No news editor liked to hear that the source of a major story was going to be just that, ‘a source’.
Almost every other reporter in the newsroom would now have been told, nicely but firmly, to get back on the doorstep and knock again.
But he didn’t need to ask Jo, he knew she would have tried hard enough.
‘Nothing else we can do?’ he asked anyway.
‘No.’
Jo had been invited into Joan’s neat and floral house, where she had been told in no uncertain terms, by a woman who seemed genuinely scared, that the tribunal case was being dropped and she had decided to take the settlement offered by Wolff-Meyer.
‘It’s the only way I can leave all this behind with my professional reputation intact,’ she had confided.
‘If I take them to court, they’ll accuse me of bad practice, negligence, they’ll throw the book at me.
They’ll blame me for infecting my sister, Monique’s daughter, as if I’d ever risk something like that.
’ Joan had looked at once defiant and tearful.
‘I wasn’t well, but I had no idea I was ill with a virus from the lab.
I’d never have risked contact with Katie or anyone else if I’d known. ’
‘So, don’t you want to argue your case in public?’ Jo had asked, but at the same time wondered if she’d ever have the nerve to do something like that herself.
Joan had almost laughed: ‘Even if I could afford the best lawyer in the world, they’d be able to afford ten of them. I would leave a tribunal looking like dirt. They’ve told me that.’
‘In writing?’
‘What do you think?’ Joan had asked straight back.
‘Do you think your home is bugged?’ was Jo’s next question.
‘No, I’m pretty sure it’s not. My brother is a police officer, he’s come and checked. He’s also told me to walk away and not try to take them on.’
They were sitting in a bright sitting room with pink sofas, green and white patterned walls, accessorised cushions and a coffee table with house and gardening books stacked on top.
A strange setting to be discussing industrial espionage, Jo couldn’t help thinking. But she had believed Joan. Wasn’t the fact that her own email was being intercepted proof enough that they were up against a powerful corporation that would go to considerable lengths to protect its own interests?
‘You can’t take the truth away from people.’ Jo had argued, but Joan had just turned her head and looked out into her garden. The rims of her eyes were pink; she’d been crying this morning.
‘Of course you can,’ she’d said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. ‘If the company counterclaims loud enough, it will be believed. I mean what is proof? Line up enough scientists, enough scientific evidence on your side and you will be believed.’
‘But people are more cynical than that. They will listen to the person speaking out against the system. They will,’ Jo had argued, trying her hardest to persuade this woman to change her mind.
But Joan’s head had remained turned to the window, looking out over her flowerbeds, her deep green lawn, a white wrought-iron table and a single matching chair. ‘What do you know?’ Joan had asked finally.
Carefully, putting in as much authenticating detail as she could, Jo told her everything she had been able to glean from her late-night session at the computer with Bella.
‘Well, you have all the essential details,’ Joan had said when the spiel was over. ‘If you write that, you won’t be wrong. The information you’ve got is good. We were working on new vaccine development,’ she’d explained.
‘Some “older” strains of whooping cough, like the ones recovered from the historic samples still exist in different parts of the world,’ she’d continued.
‘We’re always inventing and investigating new vaccines and more efficient versions of existing vaccines.
To know that I might somehow cause the death of a child… that’s unbearable.’
As Jo headed back down the motorway to London, she took a revealing phone call from Bella, on the hands-free, obviously.
‘Are you finally awake then?’ Jo greeted her friend’s still groggy voice.
‘Am I finally awake? If this is the kind of thanks I’m going to get after staying up most of the night looking at hundreds of tedious computer files for you, you can get yourself another hacking assistant,’ Bella replied.
‘Were you able to go through more?’ Jo asked with a burst of excitement.
‘Yes, I was. Things calmed right down again once you’d gone. I’ve always suspected that you’re one of those people with high personal static who has a strange effect on hard drives. But anyway, I’m phoning to give you three important nuggets of information.’
‘Yes?’ Jo moved into the slow lane so that she could concentrate.
‘Number one thing,’ Bella began: ‘In certain rare cases, with susceptible children, the Wolff-Meyer safety investigation team suspects that Quintet can be linked to seizures and brain damage.’
‘Oh my God!’ Jo exclaimed.
‘They are paying for research work. They are also keeping this extremely confidential. I only found out because someone had emailed a document to their home computer, so it was on the email system, which wasn’t so highly protected.’
‘You are a genius.’
‘I know. Now, a company called Bexley Computing Systems Ltd is being paid a monthly retainer for unspecified “maintenance”. My suspicion is that this is where your email is going and probably many other people’s, judging by the size of the retainer.
So, see what your tech department can unearth.
Now finally, the news you may not want to hear… ’
‘OK. I’m listening.’
‘Let’s hope not too many other people are,’ Bella joked, then said, ‘The Joan Theroux situation may not be quite as straightforward as you thought.’
‘Oh?’
‘Wolff-Meyer is investigating the possibility that she was stealing material from the lab and selling it on to a competitor.’
‘Oh.’ Jo thought of Joan’s pink eyes and frightened face, her sincere-sounding words, and felt a bubble of anger.
‘The whooping cough strain, which dates from the 1830s by the way, and is making these children so ill, almost certainly comes from the lab, but it may be entirely Joan’s fault that she caught it and let it out.’
No wonder Joan was so upset. No wonder the thought of children possibly dying as a result of her greed felt so ‘unbearable’. Jo couldn’t respond for a moment or two, because this was such a surprise.
Then she asked Bella: ‘But they’ve no proof?’
‘Well, according to one report I saw, they know she did on several occasions remove material from the lab without authorisation and she’s never given satisfactory explanations for this, which is why they threatened her with a negligence charge.’
‘Bella, you’ve gone to so much trouble for me.’ Jo was moved by her friend’s exhaustive efforts.
‘Not just for you, Jo, I had to find out for myself. However much of a hard-nosed capitalist you may take me for, I don’t want to make my money from a bunch of evil baby-killers.
And I think I’ve now come to the conclusion that they’re not as bad as you maybe believe.
Mistakes get made, but they seem to be doing what they can to rectify them. ’
‘They still need to make public that certain children can be harmed by this vaccine and they know it. That’s important too,’ was Jo’s reply to this.
‘But it looks like they didn’t release the whooping cough and they’ve tried to do everything they can to track down the leak and stamp out this outbreak. ’
‘Yup,’ Bella confirmed. Jo was already thinking about how to write up her story around this new information.
‘I’m going now. You need to work and I need to get outside and see some daylight.’ Bella wound up. ‘See you tomorrow for lunch, OK?’
‘OK.’ Jo was roused from her thoughts. ‘Thank you, Bella, I owe you big time. Bye-bye.’