Pestilence

by Ken McClure

  Saracen told him about the overalls and visors.

  The policeman nodded thoughtfully and said, “That could be very helpful. From what you say it sounds like the sort of gear they wear to strip out asbestos from old buildings and the like. That could be a valuable lead.”

  “Good,” said Saracen without much enthusiasm for he still felt ill.

  “I’ll let you get some sleep sir,” said the officer getting to his feet and pocketing his notebook. He placed his helmet on his head using both hands coronation style and adjusted it well before nodding to Saracen and Tremaine and saying good-bye for the moment.

  “You look awful,” said Tremaine when he and Saracen were alone.

  “I feel awful,” conceded Saracen.

  “You know,” Tremaine began cautiously, “The bump on your head isn’t that bad and the X-Rays were perfectly OK…I’m surprised you’re having so much discomfort.

  Saracen’s first thought was to hit Tremaine but physical effort was beyond him for the moment. “There was more to it than the bump on the head,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Saracen screwed up his face at the question he himself had invited but could not answer. “I don’t know exactly but I think I may have been poisoned. There was something in my lungs when I came round, something that stopped me thinking clearly.”

  “You’re serious?” exclaimed Tremaine.

  “When I came to, my chest felt as if I had been breathing in some sickly sweet gas. It was heavy, unpleasant, but by the time I awoke I had been inhaling it for so long that I couldn’t recognise it. Were you one of the people who came down to the PM room when I called?”

  “Yes I was.”

  “You didn’t notice any strong smell?”

  “Formaldehyde, but you’d expect that in the PM room.

  “Formaldehyde,” repeated Saracen slowly. “It could have been that but there would have to have been an awful lot of it. You didn’t come across a broken bottle did you?”

  “No, but then I really didn’t look. We were all too concerned with getting you out of there. If you like I’ll go down and check.”

  “I’d be obliged. Tell me, did you go into the mortuary itself?”

  “The connecting door between it and the PM suite was locked.”

  “It’s not usually kept locked.” said Saracen.

  “Probably to keep these fridge engineers out of the autopsy room. Mortuaries are bad enough in themselves for the morbidly curious but PM paraphernalia tends to lend wings to already vivid imaginations.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  Tremaine got to his feet and said, “Do you know what I’m going to do now?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to call Garten and tell him that you will be out of action for a few days. That should obviate our leader’s need for a morning laxative. He is going to have to come in.”

  “Who are the housemen on A amp;E today?”

  “Doctors Prahash Singh and Chenhui Tang,” Tremaine announced.

  Saracen closed his eyes and pursed his lips silently.

  “Exactly,” said Tremaine. “Neither outstanding in their command of English.”

  “How is your Urdu and Chinese?” asked Saracen.

  “Not good enough to practise in Pakistan or China,” replied Tremaine.

  “Point taken,” conceded Saracen. “But push off now will you, I feel like death.”

  Tremaine smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He turned as he got to the door and said, “If there’s anything you want, just yell out.”

  Saracen nodded.

  By late afternoon Saracen felt a whole lot better, so much so in fact that he signed himself out of the ward at four thirty, assuring Sister Ellis that he was now perfectly all right. The speed of his recovery had surprised even him but reinforced his view that he had been subject to some mild form of poisoning. When the substance had cleared from his system he had immediately begun to feel better, just as if he had been suffering from an alcoholic hangover. Now, all that was wrong with him was a sore head and not out of keeping with the minor knock that Tremaine had declared him to have taken.

  Saracen had to walk round to the back of the hospital to collect his car which was still where the Gate Porter had left it the previous night. He was trying to remember what he had done with the keys when he came to the mortuary doors and paused for a moment to take comfort in the fact that everything looked normal again. There were no strange vans, no men in hoods and black visors and the door was securely locked. He examined the padlock and wondered for a moment about the door lock when a sudden whiff of ammonia filled his nostrils and made him reel back from the doors. “What on earth?” he exclaimed but the smell had already gone.

  It was over so quickly that Saracen began to wonder if the smell had ever really been there at all for now there was no trace of it. On the other hand a breeze had sprung up with the stopping of the rain and that could just as easily have taken away the gas. He approached the doors again and sniffed. Nothing. It must have been his imagination, some trick of his olefactory system, still upset after the events of the night before.

  Saracen shrugged and turned. He now remembered having dropped his keys beside the car in the darkness and went to look for them. Finding them in daylight presented no great problem and he was back at his flat within fifteen minutes, pouring himself a large whisky.

  Saracen took a gulp before placing a Vivaldi album on the stereo and adjusting the volume before sitting down and picking up the local paper. The big news, as it had been for the past three weeks, was concerned with predictions of Skelmore’s success in attracting the giant Japanese company, Otsuji Electronics to the area. True, the final agreement had not yet been signed and there were other towns competing for the factory, notably in Scotland and the industrial North-East, but all the signs were that Skelmore was the favourite and it was all over bar the shouting. There was, in fact, nothing new at all in the newspaper story but, in this case, Saracen found the euphoric repetition excusable for this was more than just an industrial story; it was something that meant life for the whole area.

  In the time that Saracen had been in Skelmore he had seen the industrial heart ripped out of the town. The giant steel works of Lever Hanah had closed, the iron foundry had gone and the local colliery had been declared no longer economically viable, and shut down after a bitter strike.

  The economic depression had cast a great shadow across the area and it showed in the streets where boarded up shops and For Sale signs sprouted like weeds reclaiming the earth; it showed in the faces of the people in whom hope had been destroyed. A greyness and a passive submission to the yoke of hard times had replaced the air of cheerful optimism that had once been the hallmark of the town. Crime had risen, particularly cases of violent crime where larceny might have been the crime predicted to increase most. It seemed that people at the end of their tether ran on an extremely short fuse. Minor irritations became major bones of contention in a town without a future.

  But then came the news of Otsuji and the prediction of not only five hundred jobs from the company alone but a great many more created through a knock on effect as smaller firms flocked to the area like pilot fish to satisfy the requirements of Otsuji for components and services. Already the building trades in the area were flourishing and new housing was springing up on every available plot of land. Capital was being ventured on the well proven assumption that prosperity and home ownership went hand in hand.

  The new air of optimism was not confined to the private sector alone. New council departments with grand sounding names seemed to materialise overnight to deal with the floods of trade enquiries and brightly coloured brochures were being rushed off the press to extol the virtues of Skelmore and surrounding district as the development area of the future.

  There was even talk of the hospital modernisation programme, which had been on ice for the last five years, being brought down from the shelf and dusted off. There see
med to be a real possibility that essential renovation work at Skelmore General might actually be carried out before the place fell down.

  Skelmore General was a disgrace; at least it was a disgrace to anyone who believed in the highest standards of medical care, those befitting a nation that considered itself so abrasively often to be superior to the rest of the world. Of course, if you had lived in Britain for the last five to ten years then Skelmore General was fast becoming the norm in a health service at odds with government philosophy. Understaffing, low pay and impotent resentment manifesting itself in Trade Union bloody mindedness had all conspired to bring morale to a dangerously low ebb.

  Even the Press seemed to realise this and had stopped whipping an all but dead horse. Stories of leaking ceilings and cockroaches in hospital kitchens no longer appeared under crusading headlines. It was a waste of time for there was no incompetence or laxity left to expose. Britain’s Health Service was simply falling to bits for lack of money.

  Skelmore General felt the effects of economic stringency particularly badly because it had been a rambling Victorian slum of a building to start with. Its plumbing and electrics were antiquated and the style of its design with high ceilings and arches made it prohibitively expensive to heat. The same reason made it impossible to keep clean.

  Frequent outbreaks of diarrhoeal illness in the wards was the norm and almost certainly due, though never admitted publicly, to dirty food standards. Ironically this problem tended to work in the General’s favour for any kind of outbreak that looked as if might be infectious allowed the hospital to unload affected patients on to the Infectious Diseases Unit of Skelmore’s County Hospital, a ploy that the County was only too well aware of.

  On the last occasion of a transfer Saracen’s friend and opposite number, David Moss at the County Hospital had good naturedly claimed that anyone who farted too loudly in the General was in danger of finding themselves in an ambulance on their way to the County. Saracen had countered with the claim that Moss had deliberately pushed two of his geriatric patients downstairs during the previous week in order to have them admitted to the General’s Orthopaedic Unit.

  Saracen was idly wondering what to do with his unscheduled two day break when the telephone rang; it was Nigel Garten.

  “Hello James. I’ve just been up to Ward Four to see you, ‘found you’d flown the coop. How are you? All right?”

  “I feel a lot better thanks.”

  “Excellent. Nasty business all round really, still, can’t be too bad if you signed yourself out eh what?” Garten gave a forced laugh to augment his one-of-the-chaps act. Saracen could see what was coming. He was right.

  “Soon be back in harness eh?” continued Garten, still forcing the laugh.

  “Shouldn’t be too long,” agreed Saracen flatly. There was a pause.

  “Any idea exactly…how long?” probed Garten.

  Saracen smiled at being proved right. “A couple of days,” he said.

  “Of course you mustn’t come back until you feel absolutely well again. I’m sure sick leave can be arranged.”

  “I’m not taking sick leave Nigel; I’m due a couple of days off anyway.” Saracen left out the ‘at least.’

  “Oh absolutely old chap, no question about it. It’s just that, well you know what A amp;E is like. Having you off will be an added strain on all of us…”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Right, well then, look after yourself and of course, if you do happen to feel better in the morning…”

  Saracen put the phone down, swore once and went back to his newspaper. He skipped through the advertisements that comprised eighty percent and found the weekly feature on the history of Skelmore and surrounding district that he particularly liked. This week’s offering was entitled ‘The Curse of Skelmore’ and recounted the legend of the Skelmoris Chalice, a vessel reputed, like so many others over the course of two thousand years, to have been the Holy Grail, the dish Christ had eaten from on the occasion of the Last Supper.

  According to the story the chalice had been brought to Skelmoris Abbey, a Dominican monastery, which, in the fourteenth century, had occupied the site where the town of Skelmore now stood. The vessel had been brought there from London for some unrecorded reason and handed over to the Abbot, one Hugo Letant, for safe-keeping.

  Unknown to the Church authorities Letant and the brothers of Skelmoris could hardly have been a worse choice for they were, in fact, evil men who preyed on travellers unwise enough to seek food and shelter at the abbey. The story went that God, in his anger at having seen the chalice fall into the hands of such villains, had struck them all dead and, in the years that followed, a similar fate had befallen any other mortal who had approached the abbey in search of the vessel. In the end the place had been destroyed by fire. The legend of the chalice had died with the abbey and only the story had survived the mists of time.

  The Chronicle reported that interest in the abbey had been awakened recently with the arrival in Skelmore of an archaeological team from the University of Oxford to begin exploratory excavations. Saracen smiled and had to put down the paper as the phone rang again; this time it was Alan Tremaine.

  “I checked out the PM room. I didn’t find any broken formaldehyde bottles I’m afraid.”

  “Just a thought,” said Saracen.

  “It’s funny; I thought the place actually smelled of ammonia not formaldehyde.”

  Saracen felt his pulse rate rise a little. He had been right. It had not been his imagination after all. “Really?” he said non-committaly.

  “God knows what they’d want with ammonia in the PM room,” said Tremaine.

  Saracen agreed but somewhere in the back of his mind a vague memory had begun to stir, there was something he could not quite recall, some kind of a connection between formaldehyde and ammonia, if only he could remember…”

  “Garten was up looking for you,” said Tremaine.

  “Yes, he called me.”

  “Asking if you would be back tomorrow?” asked Tremaine.

  “Something like that,” agreed Saracen.

  “I hope you told him what to do.”

  “I said I would be taking a couple of days off.”

  “That man is incredible. Do you think he ever worked himself?”

  “I’m on leave. I don’t want to think about him,” replied Saracen.

  “Enjoy the break. You deserve it,” said Tremaine.

  Saracen put down the phone and stared thoughtfully out of the window. There was something decidedly odd about the whole affair at the mortuary, something that tales of thieves in the night did not answer satisfactorily. Apart from the unexplained chemical smells there was another detail that had begun to bother him. The man who had opened the door at the mortuary could not have picked the lock with the speed he had. He must have had a key and that implied an inside job, someone on the maintenance staff maybe or perhaps someone connected with the refrigeration firm.

  Saracen permitted himself the luxury of a second drink and lingered over the pleasing thought that he did not have to go out tonight. There were no patients to consider, he could get stoned out of his head if he had a mind to. He did not intend to but it was nice to know that he could. He added a little water to the whisky and sat down with the glass between his palms. Good whisky was one of the few luxuries that he allowed himself, not a single malt for he had no real liking for malt whisky but a deluxe blended whisky, The Antiquary.

  He sipped it from a crystal glass, one of a set of six that he had won a long time ago as a prize in an essay competition at medical school.

  Saracen followed the engraving in the crystal with his thumb nail and remembered how different his world had been then. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He had been bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to take on the whole world but instead he had taken on the medical establishment and come a poor second.

  Saracen had been a very new doctor in his first residency having obtained a position in a world famous pr
ofessorial unit as befitting the top student of his year. He had set out to impress his chief, Sir John MacBryde with his capacity for study and hard work but it was this zeal that had led him to probe a little too deeply into the case histories of a group of MacBryde’s patients being used to illustrate a point being made by the great man.

  MacBryde had submitted a paper to The Lancet and Saracen had discovered that he had falsified certain aspects of the data in order to make his proposed ‘MacBryde Effect’ even more pronounced. No one had been at risk over the misrepresentation and no one would have come to any harm but Saracen, with all the holier than thou rectitude of the young, had exposed the misdeed publicly. MacBryde’s reputation had been destroyed and he had retired a broken man.

  While outwardly praising his vigilance in the matter, the medical establishment had never forgiven Saracen for putting feet of clay under John MacBryde. Nothing had ever been said to that effect; he had been left to figure it out for himself as one career avenue after another had closed in front of him and all applications for research grants and fellowships were now politely declined where before he had appeared to have had the Midas touch.

  When he had finally realised what was going on, Saracen had been filled with impotent anger, impotent for there was nothing to be done about it. No one would ever tell him to his face why he had not been appointed to a particular position. That was not the way things were done. He had been black- balled by a club that would not even admit its existence. The affair also destroyed his marriage. Being married to a loser had not figured in Marion’s plans.

  Saracen had been captivated by Marion from the day he had first met her. She was beautiful, she was charming and she was vivacious to the point of being larger than life. Other women paled into insignificance in her presence. She had all the assurance and confidence that stemmed from being the daughter of a career diplomat and for some strange, but wonderful reason, she had always made Saracen feel that he belonged where, without her, his much more humble origins as the only son of an insurance clerk, would have said that he did not.