‘They tried to get away. She’s the private detective, she got us into this mess. We’ve got to stop them.’
‘You’d better go. You’ve done enough damage.’ The consultant knelt and checked my pulse, used one hand to raise my head and help me up to a sitting position. I leant back against the wall. Put my hand to my face, sticky, swollen. I could see Agnes, she looked dazed, mouth slightly agape, eyes bleary. Had he really hurt her? You could give people brain damage if you shook them too hard, or was that just babies?
‘Go? Are you off your head? We’re in this together, Matthew. Where the hell do you expect me to go?’
‘Go home.’ He sounded tired. ‘I’ll get someone to see to you,’ he said to me. He moved towards the phone.
‘Are you deaf? The police know. They’re probably waiting for me there. These two have been on to the coroner, there’ll be a full post mortem. It’s all going to come out. They’ll want to talk to you and Montgomery.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ There was enough icy fury in the denial to freeze hell but Goulden wasn’t cowed. Maybe Matthew Simcock just wanted to shut him up or maybe he wanted to save face in front of us. Either way it was too late as far as I was concerned. The phone calls between Dr Goulden, his wife and Douglas Montgomery had made it plain that they were all in cahoots. I didn’t trust any of them but at least Simcock wasn’t beating us up; we’d more chance of leaving here alive now he was here. Meanwhile I’d keep quiet about what we knew and what we suspected.
‘Aw, please, spare me,’ Goulden retorted. ‘I am not carrying the can on my own…’
‘You’re clearly upset.’ Simcock spoke brusquely. ‘I don’t know what all this is about-’
‘They know!’ Goulden blazed. ‘Don’t bother coming the innocent. These are the bitches that blew the whistle. You haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of walking away from this. The police already know I was doping her up to the eyeballs and claiming she had Alzheimer’s. Once they get the post mortem results they’ll see there was no haematoma. So they start talking to the theatre staff, they find out we weren’t evacuating anything, we were introducing tissue.’
I remembered Simcock’s pieces in The Lancet, his pleas for more research into Alzheimer’s. Stuff about cloning and biogenetics and the brain. And all along he’d been busy conducting his very own illicit research programme.
Goulden’s face was red with exertion. He lowered his voice, his tone intense and urgent. ‘It won’t take them long to find out about the others. They’ll start looking at the records, uncovering names, five, ten, twenty. All the patients I passed through to Douglas, the ones that came here for scans, the ones with Alzheimer’s who so kindly donated their organs. And the ones you operated on, bogus operations, false scan results. All those brains for the research project with Malden’s. We are fucked, Matthew.’