Chapter 9 #3
Once she and Tony had said their goodbyes, she hung up and looked at the latest text on her mobile:
Need to talk, see you at bday party. Simon.
A lovely family birthday party at Simon’s flat with her parents and Gwen in attendance. That would cap her day just perfectly.
‘I have to go out,’ she told Dominique and began packing her handbag.
Half an hour later Jo was sitting on the designated park bench in the sunshine watching the good mummies of north London pushing their organic babies about in designer buggies.
She was just finishing off the sandwich she’d bought round the corner and thinking how nice this was – Woman escapes from office to enjoy sun and sandwich – when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
‘Can I ask your name?’ said the short man behind her. He was wearing a raincoat with the collar up, a hat and dark glasses.
‘Can I ask yours?’ was her frosty reply. ‘I’m meeting someone on this bench at ten past twelve,’ the man said.
‘So am I. Look, it’s bound to be me you’re meeting, I’m Jo Randall,’ she said.
‘I’m Dr Taylor.’ He held his hand out to her and they shook.
‘Bit warm for a raincoat and hat, isn’t it?’ she couldn’t help asking.
‘Er, yes… probably. But I have to be careful.’
When her eyebrows shot up, he added: ‘Maybe if you’d been hauled before the General Medical Council on entirely trumped-up charges, which proved that your confidential files had been closely examined, and maybe if you’d had notification from Scotland Yard that your surgery phone was being tapped, you might see it slightly differently. ’
‘Well, yes,’ she agreed, ‘I probably would.’
Dr Taylor sat down at the other end of the bench. Perhaps in response to her comments, he took his hat off, revealing sparse hair the same sandy colour as his beard, and undid the belt of his trench coat. Underneath the coat, his thin frame was clothed in a dapper suit, shirt and tie.
‘Do you think you’re being followed?’ she asked him.
‘No. But I was worried that you were.’
‘Being followed?!’ she asked, incredulous. ‘I don’t think Wolff-Meyer is tailing every reporter in London, are they?’
‘You’re not just any old reporter. If anyone’s going to investigate Quintet properly, it’s going to be you, isn’t it? Because you do your health investigations very thoroughly. You have respect, even in the medical community.’
‘Well…’ She felt a slight flush at the compliment. ‘Here’s hoping.’
‘You have to realise,’ Dr Taylor went on, ‘if you’re going to take on a corporation like Wolff-Meyer, they will be very interested in you. Very interested.’
She couldn’t help smiling at this. ‘They know where the office is, they can come and find me any time they like,’ she said and tried to make light of it.
But really, it gave her a shiver of nervousness.
You couldn’t blunder into stories like this, you did have to be careful.
Jo reached into her handbag for her smallest notebook and a pen, then set her tape recorder out between them.
To reassure him, she placed another notebook on top to disguise it.
‘That’s not going to bother you, is it?’ she asked. ‘I record all my interviews.’
‘No, no, fire away.’
‘Have you always been a private doctor, or did you originally work in the NHS?’ she began as a warm-up.
‘I was NHS for years,’ Dr Taylor told her.
‘Here in London and also in my hometown. I must have done almost twenty years in the NHS. I’m committed to the idea of an NHS even though it’s like working in Communist Russia.
I only began to go private when the NHS decided they weren’t going to allow single vaccinations any more.
Even though single injections were and are, as far as I can see, safer and much more widely trialled and trusted than combinations. ’
‘Do you think combination injections cause problems?’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ he said. ‘The possible side effects come listed on the side of the box.’
‘So, Quintet?’ she asked. ‘I take it you’ll be anti-Quintet just because it’s a combination vaccine?’
He gave a small laugh and began to brush at something on his trouser leg: ‘There are a lot more reasons to be anti-Quintet than that. This is the injection that will give all the other combinations a bad name.’
‘How so?’ she encouraged him.
‘Well, Quintet: how long have we had it in Britain now?’
‘Three and a half months,’ she prompted him. ‘But it’s been in use in Canada for several years.’
‘Oh yes, Canada,’ he said, smiling. ‘We all think Canada must be a very safe and progressive place to test out a new vaccine. But I can give you some contacts over there who’ll fill you in about vaccine data procedures over there.’
Dr Taylor suddenly seemed to take an intense interest in a woman about three hundred metres away.
‘Has she got a camera?’ he asked.
‘Who? The woman in the red top?’
He nodded. His hand was reaching for his hat.
‘Calm down, will you?’ Jo tried to soothe him. ‘She’s probably taking pictures of her dog. Look, over there, it’s one of those beige poodles. Do you think industrial spies come with poodles?’
The doctor put his hat on anyway.
‘It may interest you to know, Ms Randall, that there have been two changes to Quintet since it was licensed, but no authority made Wolff-Meyer apply for a fresh licence. One of the injection’s preservatives has been changed from a mercury-based ingredient to an antifreeze-based ingredient.
The whooping cough element has also been altered.
What you need to know is that this alteration has been blamed for a spate of whooping cough outbreaks. ’
Jo was scribbling and underlining at speed. If this was true, it was all much better info than she’d expected. He went on to tell her of a Canadian parent-run website where she would be able to make contact with families who believed their children had been damaged by Quintet.
Just as she was noting down these details, she heard the tiny click that meant the first side of her tape had come to an end. She stopped him for a moment, popped the tape up and turned it over.
‘Quite an old-fashioned way to store information these days, isn’t it?’ Dr Taylor asked.
‘Kind of reliable though,’ Jo replied. ‘Digital recorders scare me. I think I’d find it hard to track down small conversations in the middle of huge digital megabytes.’
‘And where do you keep your tapes?’ the doctor asked.
This wasn’t a question she was keen to answer.
‘At work,’ she replied, although this was only partly true. Many important tapes were also stored in a jumbled disarray in a suitcase on top of her wardrobe at home.
‘I shouldn’t need to tell you that if you’re going to investigate vaccinations, make copies, store them in different places and take care.
If you poke about in the right corners and start asking the right questions, they will come looking for you.
Just think about what happened to me,’ he warned, making eye contact again, so she wasn’t in any doubt about how seriously he meant this.
‘But you got off, you’re still practising,’ she reminded him.
‘Yes, but my peace of mind, not to mention my faith in human nature, has been rather dented.’
He took another long look at the woman in the red top and scanned the open green parkland in front of them: ‘Why is Quintet so particularly interesting this week?’ he asked. ‘Because of the whooping cough outbreak?’
‘Yes. But we’ve also had a family approach us who say it has caused one of their twins to have a stroke.’
The doctor nodded, ‘Yes… that wouldn’t surprise me. Some children will be much more susceptible than others.’
‘But a case of measles or whooping cough can be very nasty too,’ she reminded him.
‘In medicine we are often stuck between two evils: the illness and what it can do to you, or the medicine and what it can do to you. But we certainly don’t want to be creating new evils,’ Dr Taylor said.
‘Hmm…’ as Jo paused to consider this, her mobile began to buzz at her from inside her handbag. ‘I’m so sorry, but I just need to check who that’s from.’
Jo pressed the message button and the text slipped across her screen:
Phone ASAP Mail here, Aidan
‘I’m so sorry, slight crisis at work, I’m going to have to call this person back.’
‘No problem, I’ll go for a little stroll, shall I?’ the doctor asked.
‘Thanks,’ she replied, dialling Aidan’s number, wondering if the worst had already happened: Aidan outside on the pavement, the Mail cosied up inside with the Townells, stealing her nice little exclusive from right under his nose.
‘Aidan, Jo. What’s happening?’ she asked as soon as he picked up.
‘I’m really sorry—’ Uh oh. She could hear the anxiety in his voice. ‘The reporters from the Mail are outside and Mick wants to let them in to hear what they have to say.’
‘No, no, no,’ she warned him. ‘That can’t happen. Is Mick around? Why don’t I talk to him?’
After just a few moments of talking to Mick, Jo realised she wouldn’t be able to manage this situation from London, she would have to go and join Aidan at the Townells’ home.
Mick only wanted to talk about money: he was desperate to pit one paper against another and drive the price of the story up.
This was going to be very messy, if she was going to hang onto the story now, she’d have to negotiate a higher payment, maybe in instalments, appeal to Spikey for more cash…
Once she’d hung up, Dr Taylor made his way back to the bench and sat down with the words: ‘There’s something else you should be asking me about.’
‘Oh.’ She was surprised. ‘And what’s that?’
‘Do you have a good understanding of the way vaccinations are made?’
‘Um, not really. I’m sure you know much more,’ Jo replied.
‘I didn’t know much about it either,’ the doctor admitted, ‘but I’ve since found out that laboratories grow varieties of a disease: mutations, even genetic modifications.
There’s a lot of playing about with viruses and microbes going on.
I don’t need to tell you that there is scope for harm to be done. ’