The Test Data

She was a nurse in Harare. In England she is subject 114.

Nyasha Mudede came to Kent on a care worker visa. When her employer's sponsor licence was revoked she had sixty days to find another one, and she did not find one. Her nursing qualification is not recognised here. She has no right to work.

But a clinical trial stipend is classified as expenses rather than earnings. Which means it is not work. Which means that Wickham Clinical, a licensed medical research unit at the end of four miles of sea wall road on the North Kent marshes, is the only place in the country that can lawfully give her money.

Ninety-six beds. Saltmarsh on three sides. Food that is genuinely very good. And a contract, in plain English, at the reading age required by the guidelines, which says that if she leaves before the end she forfeits everything.

Gil Farrow has been cleaning clinical databases for twenty-one years and has never once asked what the rows are.

Brought in on contract to tidy study TSL-114 before the database is locked, he finds forty-one participants removed from the analysis, a set of medical judgements quietly revised, and an audit trail that by law is not permitted to forget. He raises a query. He is answered within twenty minutes, kindly, over tea, and given a contract extension.
He gets as far as the car park.

Nobody at Wickham breaks the law. That is the whole problem.
Every locked door has a documented clinical reason. Every deduction is itemised. The register that could end a participant's livelihood was built in good faith, after a real disaster, to keep people exactly like Nyasha safe. And the most effective restraint anyone ever devised on that peninsula is not a lock or a threat or a man on a gate.
It is a bus that runs twice a day.

A cold, controlled, devastating thriller about consent, compliance and the people we agree not to see, from the author of a.I.? and SEB533.