After Effects by Catherine Aird Read Free Book Online Page B

‘With Roger Byville it’s more of an interest.’
    â€˜And,’ said Itchen, ‘it’s not such a crowded field as some.’
    â€˜I guess Joe Public doesn’t really understand the spleen,’ said Al Dexter.
    â€˜You can say that again,’ said Mike Itchen, who found the lay members of the Ethics Committee the most difficult of all to deal with. Give him a scientist any day. Unless he could have a businessman, of course.
    â€˜So what,’ asked Dexter curiously, ‘didn’t they like about the APX 125 trials, then?’
    â€˜Everything,’ said the Chief Chemist, rising to his feet rather abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s eat.’
    A curious mixture of altruism and business acumen had led the founding fathers of the firm of Gilroy Pharmaceuticals (and they were men only now just starting their retirement) to buy a large, empty Victorian mansion. It was a time when large, empty Victorian mansions were something of a drug on the post-war housing market.
    â€˜The dining room’s straight ahead,’ Mike Itchen reminded Dexter.
    It would certainly have been a misnomer to call it a canteen. The Hall at Staple St James had not been quite stately enough for preservation and had been converted into offices and research laboratories well before the Victorian revivalists had been sufficiently interested or organized enough to protest.
    â€˜Some eating place you’ve got here,’ said Dexter, suitably impressed by a painted ceiling reminiscent of the worst excesses of the French neo-classical period.
    â€˜Built to last, did the Victorians,’ said Mike Itchen with his first show of enthusiasm.
    â€˜We’ve found a use for almost everything here except the maze,’ said George Gledhill proudly, going into his set party piece for visitors. ‘You name it and we’ve got it here. Stables, ice-house, game larder, laundry, greenhouses, cellars … you’ll have a little of this white Burgundy won’t you, Al?… lake, grotto …’
    â€˜What on earth’s a grotto?’
    â€˜It’s where the bad man of the garden lived. You know—before the era of something nasty in the woodshed came in.’ Gledhill looked preternaturally solemn. ‘No real old garden was complete without a hermit.’
    â€˜You don’t say!’ Al Dexter went back to a topic he found more interesting. ‘Say, do you people get much hassle from these ethics committees of yours?’
    Mike Itchen frowned. ‘It all depends.’
    â€˜On the face of the guy putting the product forward?’ suggested Al, since human nature is the same the world over. ‘Or other things?’
    â€˜Well, Al,’ temporized Itchen, ‘you know yourself what committees are like.’
    â€˜Sure,’ said Al Dexter untruthfully. There were no committees built into the corporate structure of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc. The decision-making process was delegated to a nail-biting level; bucks stopped as far down the management pyramid as possible and all potentially unprofitable work was headed off at the pass long before it got on to anyone’s time-sheet.
    â€˜They’re the very devil,’ admitted the Chief Chemist since he was talking to a contractor and not a business rival. ‘How it can be OK to let thousands suffer and die from some untreatable condition and all wrong for one poor sod—’
    â€˜Who was going to die anyway,’ contributed Mike Itchen cynically.
    â€˜â€”to snuff it while we’re using him to try to find a cure for the same thing beats me.’
    â€˜It’s an unfair world,’ agreed Al Dexter ambiguously.
    â€˜In the first place,’ grumbled Gledhill, still sore from this morning’s rejection, ‘the Ethics Committee’s always so totally negative.’
    â€˜It’s not their product, of course,’ contributed Al Dexter reasonably.
    â€˜And as for the