Out of control Read online

  “I’m fully aware of that. And I’ve always been careful. This guy Rémy had, as far as I was aware, nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry and, sure, I had talked to him generally about what we were working on but nothing that wasn’t public knowledge. Bioscope’s publicity material is full of it - explaining what we are trying to do. The whole industry knew – and we knew which other companies were working on the same problem.

  “When he asked me why I was so chirpy I pointed to one of the lights in the ceiling above the bar and said ‘Rémy, see that light up there? That’s ultra-violet and that’s what’s going to get me a fat bonus at the end of my stint here in Stirling. The boss just told me today.’ That’s all I said.”

  Heather and I both looked puzzled.

  “That doesn’t exactly seem to me to be a state secret,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean,” replied Liam. “How could I possibly have imagined I had said anything wrong? That’s all I said. I ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate and the three of us polished it off.”

  “Judging from what has happened there must have been some consequences from this, I presume?”

  Liam got up and paced nervously up and down the room a couple of times. Heather seemed to want to say something and I motioned her to keep quiet. He looked out of the window for a second, ran his hand angrily through his hair and turned to face us.

  “I accidentally left one of our samples exposed to ultraviolet light overnight and, in the morning, discovered that the fusion of the molecules we were working on had taken place while we’d been asleep. It was the result that Helen and Richard had been looking for for the last two years. It sounds crazy but we carried out all sorts of test over the next few weeks and were able to confirm something pretty radical. It worked. So Bioscope was getting ready to apply for a patent for what is a revolutionary drug treatment for Alzheimer’s – probably worth millions.”

  He paused.

  “We were going to submit our file in a few weeks when, out of the blue, LyonPharma, a big international pharmaceutical company in France, announced that they had just lodged a patent application for a new drug which would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of Alzheimers. Their CEO had held a press conference and, when he was questioned by journalists he explained that they had succeeded in fusing together the same two molecules and he mentioned the use of ultra-violet light.”

  “So they discovered the same thing themselves and beat you to it?” said Heather. “It happens.”

  “No way.” Liam was adamant. “The chances of anyone looking in that direction are millions to one – right off the scale.”

  “They might have had the same accident.” It seemed to me that it was a possibility.

  I looked across at Heather. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say she had no idea.

  There was a minute’s silence and then Liam followed on.

  “When Helen Mackie heard the news she exploded. She couldn’t believe it. She knows the guys at LyonPharma and just wouldn’t believe it possible that they had found the solution on their own. She was adamant that they had somehow got the information from us and she accused me of passing it to them. She hadn’t leaked it and neither had Richard. The premises hadn’t been broken into. That left me as the only possible source. She was livid, which I could understand, because she’d invested money and time over at least two years and just seen it all go up in smoke.”

  “I presume this patent, if it’s granted, would be worth a bit of money?” I asked.

  “Millions of dollars. Who knows how many? – possibly tens of millions. I tried to explain to Helen what had happened. She didn’t want to know. She said that if she could have pressed criminal charges she would have but there was no way she could do that. She wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. She just told me to clear out immediately. I couldn’t do anything else. That was the day before yesterday.”

  “So how did you end up in the police cell?” asked Heather.

  “To be honest it’s a bit hazy,” he replied. “When I left the offices I wandered over the road to the Wallace monument just to get off the campus. I was gutted - and angry. I sat on a wall outside and thought about things. It had all blown up that morning. Helen had been so mad and things had happened so quickly that I hadn’t had the chance to think.

  “Could LyonPharma have made the same fluke discovery as me? I just didn’t see it as being possible. I’ve never been in touch with anyone at there in my life. Then I remembered about mentioning the ultra-violet light when Rémy had asked me why I was celebrating. If that had been the inadvertent source of the leak, it could only have been Rémy – and he’s French, by the way – who passed the information to them. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became and the angrier I got. I decided to go and find the little shit and knock the truth out of him.”

  “So you went looking for him? What did he have to say?” asked Heather naïvely. I thought I knew what was coming.

  “He had nothing to say because I couldn’t find him. I went straight over to the place where we usually have lunch and he wasn’t around. I asked the guy behind the counter – Will – if he’d seen him. He told me that the last time he’d seen him was a few days ago. He had stopped for lunch. He apparently had a large suitcase with him and he had told Will that he was leaving. Didn’t say where to. Disappeared off the face of the earth. More than anything that convinced me. He must have been the one who fed the information back to LyonPharma. I still can’t see any other explanation. I had been set up.”

  “So you drowned your sorrows?”

  “You bet I did. I went into town and drank myself stupid. I woke up in the police cell. Thank God they were understanding. They thought it was a bit of a joke. This whole business is going to look great on my CV,” he finished bitterly.

  He had sat down again and was leaning back in the chair, his eyes closed. I looked across at Heather.

  “Coffee for three?” she proposed.

  “Or the hair of the dog?”

  “Oh, no,” came a groan from the chair.

  While Heather went off I sat quietly reflecting. No real harm had come to Liam. He’d been indiscreet but not much more. He’d get over it. How could he have known? Nineteen was too early to start regarding everyone you meet with suspicion. Time enough for that later. But the effect on Helen Mackie must have been catastrophic. Her reaction was understandable.

  But there was no doubt that, if what he suspected had happened, this was a blatant case of theft – and my family had been inadvertently involved. That I didn’t like one bit.

  It struck me also that Liam would get over it more easily if there was a way of proving what had really happened.

  Coffee consumed, I made a suggestion. “Look, let’s go and see Helen Mackie and see if we can get you re-instated. Maybe she’ll have calmed down a bit and will listen to what you have to say.”

  “There’s no point. There’s no way she’ll take me back. And anyway, after what’s happened, I don’t think I could go back. All I want to do is find that little bastard and knock the truth out of him.”

  I looked at him sorrowfully. This was one rather washed out, worried kid with a hangover and I wanted to help him as much as I could.

  “Well, I’d like to go and speak to her anyway. Even if it is only to apologise to her for what’s happened. After all it was me that got you the job in the first place. We’ll go up to the residence and you can pack up your stuff. Have you got much? Will it go in the Mercedes? We’ll bring it up here for the moment.”

  “I’ve not got too much but we might have to make two trips.”

  “OK. We’ll do that. It’ll not take long and save us hiring a van.”

  I explained to Heather where we were going and why and we got in the car and headed in towards Bridge of Allan. A thought occurred to me as we were on the road.

  “Liam, are you sure that this guy, Will, doesn’t know where your R�
�my has gone?”

  “Well I didn’t interrogate him very deeply but he said he didn’t.”

  “Why don’t you go back and see him again while I go and see Helen Mackie? See if he can give us any clue as to where he was going?”

  I was angry at what had seemingly been done to Liam. And I didn’t like the fact that it looked as if Helen Mackie had been screwed out of millions of dollars by some bloody great multi-national pharmaceutical company with absolutely no moral conscience whatsoever. Mind you, where do you find a moral conscience in business? – but I won’t go into my thoughts on that.

  And then I had remembered where I had heard of LyonPharma before….

  Chapter 3

  Six months earlier:

  The grass in front of us stretched down towards the lake. A gentle slope of some fifty yards, until it seemed to merge into the quiet grey waters which reflected a silvery sheen from the lowering sun. It was about four kilometers wide at this point and we could easily see the town of Versoix on the other side and, behind it, rising into the distance, the rugged skyline of the Jura Mountains.

  At this time of year, July, the weather stayed warm well into the evening. In a couple of hours the sun would disappear behind the peaks. The water was busy with sailing boats of various shapes, sizes and colours heading back to their ports – Corsier, Geneva, Coppet and the many other small harbours that were scattered along both shores of Lake Geneva. Pierre and I sat contentedly, sipping the champagne which he had opened in honour of my sixty-seventh birthday.

  “Pierre,” I said, raising my glass to him, “Your health. Thanks again for inviting me over here.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Bob” he replied. “What’s the point of having a place like this if you can’t share it and who better to share it with than family?”

  He raised his glass to me in return.

  I was part of Pierre’s recently acquired family. He had only come into my life a few months before. I had been quietly getting used to widowhood and retirement in Letham, my home village in Scotland, when he had turned up out of the blue on my doorstep and informed me that he believed we were half-brothers.

  Apparently during the war, when my father had been in France for a short time liaising with the French Resistance, he had had an affair with a French girl and, after he had returned home, she had discovered she was pregnant. She had known that Dad was engaged to a girl back in Scotland and had kept the information to herself.

  Dad had never known about it, and Pierre had been brought up like many other children in France at the time knowing only that his father had been a Scottish officer and he had ‘gone away’.

  Fortunately for us both, after his mother had died, he had decided to try to trace back his roots. His possession of an identical photograph of Dad in uniform had convinced us – me, my sister Heather and younger brother Mike – that the whole story was true.

  Over his life time Pierre had built up a highly successful IT company but, nearing seventy, he had decided to sell out – for several tens of million euros - and enjoy the rest of his life. His decision to dig into his father’s history had resulted in him acquiring a family which he had never known.

  The ‘place like this’ was a magnificent five bedroom villa, which I guessed to be about a hundred and fifty years old and which must originally have been built by a very wealthy Swiss. Pierre had bought it a year ago from the estate of the old lady who had lived in it all her life but whose heirs couldn’t afford to take it on. It had needed extensive renovation and even then would be expensive in upkeep. That, however, was not a problem for my half-brother.

  “More or less recovered from your ailments?” Pierre asked solicitously.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Judicious nursing?” he asked with a smile.

  I took another sip of my champagne thinking back over the events of the last few months.

  Pierre’s arrival on the scene had led to more than just the addition of a half-brother to the family. We had all had become involved in the unmasking of a fraud at an asset management firm in Edinburgh, which had turned out to be dangerous for me and had resulted in a well- known local businessman ending up being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. It had also resulted in an attempt to dispose of me and in Maggie coming into my life.

  It was the successful resolution of that which had prompted Pierre to invite me over to Geneva.

  I smiled back. “Yes. It’s a pity Maggie couldn’t have come out but she really had to stay and look after the hotel. This is right in the middle of her busiest three months. She gets full bookings of hikers at this time of year, all eager to bag a few more Munros to their collection.”

  “What’s a Munro?” asked Pierre.

  I grinned at him. ”You can tell you’re not a real Scot. You’ve got some catching up to do on our culture. A Munro is a peak in Scotland which is at least three thousand feet above sea-level. There are two hundred and ninety three of them. Keen climbers like to boast of the number of Munros they’ve climbed. Mike has done twenty eight at the last count.

  Pierre thought about this for a moment.

  “So people collect mountain tops, do they?”

  “Sure.

  “And Mike’s got the collector’s instinct. Like the photographs of his conquests at home!”

  “For God’s sake don’t tell him I told you about that and don’t mention them to Sophie.”

  Sophie was an old friend of Pierre’s who worked as an IT consultant and had been instrumental in helping us in the AIM affair. In the process she had met Mike and seemed to have put an end to his bachelor existence. They were back in Scotland climbing.

  “All I can say is that if he’s got any sense he’ll stop his collection now,” said Pierre with a grin.

  Our bottle was soon empty and Pierre got up and disappeared into the house, coming back a few minutes later with a new one. As he proceeded to uncork it he said to me, “Bob, how would you like to do a little travelling – just you and me?”

  “What do you mean? I’ve only been here two days.”

  “I know but I’m feeling a bit restless. You showed me around Scotland when I was over. I’d like to show you a bit of France. You’ve got golf courses but we have vineyards. I could do with replenishing my stock. And there’s someone I’d like to look up who lives in the Loire valley. How about three or four days touring?”

  “Fine by me,” I replied. The idea of discovering more of France and sampling a few wines appealed. So it was decided and we set off the next morning, planning to be away for three nights.

  My only previous experience of France had been summer holidays in Brittany when Callum was a boy. Liz and I had been young and enthralled by the totally different culture – and also the food, the wine, and the weather. They had been good holidays but with a young boy in tow there hadn’t been much opportunity to explore. I was looking forward to being shown around by a native.

  We took the magnificent motorway from Geneva towards Bourg en Bresse. It had been carved through the mountains – tunnels and viaducts and mountain lakes visible below us – and then drove up into the Beaujolais. The rolling hills were covered in vines as far as the eye could see. Pierre had a couple of small vineyards that he wanted to visit – one near Villefranche and another further up in the Burgundy country. At both stops we were received as old friends and, after the inevitable tasting of a selection of wines of various hues and vintages, we loaded up the boot with a few cases of Pierre’s selections.

  On the journey Pierre added to my education about the various types of wine, on the subtleties of different ‘terroirs’ and, when we eventually drew up in front of a small ‘Logis’ in a hamlet not far from our last stop, I was beginning to appreciate how involved and complicated the whole business was. I would have to study it more. The village looked as if it had only a few hundred inhabitants. Narrow main street, old grey stone buildings, the inevitable ‘boulangerie’ and café, with a couple
of tables sitting outside on the pavement, and that was about it. The hotel itself had a comfortable dark interior, old- fashioned simple bedrooms and a restaurant of about thirty tables, all set for dinner.

  When we came down to eat I was surprised to find that we were the only guests. I presume on some occasions it was full but on that particular evening we had the place to ourselves and the undivided attention from Monsieur le Patron.

  Lord knows how these places make any money but we weren’t complaining. When I mentioned this to Pierre he grinned. “Weekends, evenings, Sunday lunches and weddings.”

  The menu was simple – a choice of three or four starters, four main dishes and half a dozen desserts printed out on two sides of a plasticised piece of A4 paper. The wine list however was presented ceremoniously to Pierre in the form of a large, leather-bound folder of at least eight pages.

  I watched, amused, as Pierre glanced at the menu and made his choice in about five seconds and then proceeded to spend at least ten minutes studying the wines.

  There followed a brief discussion with the owner/chef/waiter of which I understood not a word except “Très bien, Monsieur.”

  He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with three half bottles of wine, at which I raised my eyebrows more than just a little.

  “Bob, we’re going to enjoy our dinner,” he said contentedly sitting back in his chair after having inspected the labels. “You showed me some great golf courses. Now I’m going to show you some great wines.”

  The following day we drove to Orleans and then headed west, following the Loire valley. Again vineyards were in evidence. Low-lying countryside, the magnificent wide slow-moving river, castles and enormous mansion houses several centuries old. It was easy to see why the French aristocracy had favoured this part of the country when they wanted to get away from the Court. All was bathed in sunshine.