Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

A few phone calls had made a walkthrough of the lab a simple thing to arrange. The excuse was meeting the distinguished professor of microbiology Taymullah Azhar. Since he wasn’t there, the offer made by one of Azhar’s two research technicians to show St. James round the lab was accepted with gratitude. They were fellow scientists after all, were they not?
    The lab was extensive and impressive, St. James told Lynley, but for all intents and purposes the subject of study was indeed various strains of
Streptococcus
. The focus had to do with mutations of these strains, and the equipment in the lab supported this work.
    “From what I could see, it appears to be a fairly straightforward operation,” St. James said.
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning what’s there is what one would expect in a lab of its type: fume cupboards, centrifuge, autoclave, refrigerators for storing DNA, sequencers for the DNA data, freezers for bacterial isolates, incubators for bacterial cultures, computers . . . There appear to be two main areas of study going on: the
Streptococcus
that causes necrotising fasciitis—”
    “Which is?”
    St. James added a packet of sugar to his coffee and stirred it. “Flesh-eating bacteria syndrome,” he said.
    “Good God.”
    “The other is the S
treptococcus
that causes pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. They’re both serious strains, obviously, but the second one—it’s called
Streptococcus agalactiae
—crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be deadly.”
    Lynley thought about this. He said, “Is there a chance someone in the lab could be studying
E. coli
on the sly?”
    “I suppose anything’s possible, Tommy, but to know for certain you’d need a mole inside the place. Some of the equipment could be used for
E. coli
cultures, obviously. But the broths for growing each of them would be different, as would the incubators.
Strep
requires a carbon dioxide incubator.
E. coli
doesn’t.”
    “Could there be more than one kind in the lab?”
    “More than one kind of incubator? Certainly. At least a dozen people work in the place. One of them may have something brewing that deals with
E. coli.
”
    “Without Azhar’s knowledge?”
    “I doubt it would be without his knowledge unless someone has a nefarious reason for studying it.”
    They exchanged a long look. St. James finally said, “Ah. It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?”
    “It is indeed.”
    “He’s a friend of Barbara’s, isn’t he? Certainly, she could have some insight here, Tommy. Perhaps if she were to go to the lab herself and do a bit of delving on a pretext having to do with Azhar . . . ?”
    “That’s not on, I’m afraid.”
    “Can you get a search warrant, then?”
    “If it comes to it, yes.”
    St. James examined Lynley’s expression for a moment before he said, “But you hope it doesn’t come to that, I take it?”
    “I’m not at all sure what I hope any longer” was Lynley’s reply.
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    He would have liked to talk to Barbara about what he’d learned from St. James. She’d been for years his go-to person when he wanted to toss round ideas in the course of an investigation. But it was unlikely that she would say anything, do anything, or admit to anything that might endanger Taymullah Azhar. So he was left to do his thinking alone.
    It had been an excellent means of eliminating Angelina Upman. Once the small matter of no one else’s having been affected by the bacteria had been dealt with in one way or another, the road was clear to declaring her death an unfortunate result of food contamination by a virulent strain of bacteria that generally—if detected soon enough—killed no one. Complications from her pregnancy had prevented the doctors from realising what they were dealing with. As did Angelina’s own reluctance to stay in hospital once she finally took herself there. As did the fact that no one else who shared meals with her and no one else in Tuscany, for that matter, turned up in hospital with the same symptoms.
    Someone must have seen how everything was going to play out, Lynley thought. That suggested Lorenzo Mura, but as to
why
he would wish to harm the woman who was carrying his child, the woman he loved and fully intended to marry . . . Unless, of course, all of his devotion was a front for something else.
    He thought back over every encounter he’d had with the man. He could see the many ways in which Lorenzo had had the opportunity to mix the bacteria into Angelina’s