The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  ‘I’m no expert, but I do know that meningitis is often fatal,’ Jenny said, hoping for some words of reassurance.

  ‘The lab started work yesterday afternoon, while Sophie was still alive,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘The aim was to identify the precise strain and work out the most effective drug regime. You may not know this, but the meningitis bacterium coats itself with a protein that prevents immune cells from attacking it. It’s very clever: a Trojan Horse, if you like. I’ve even heard an immunologist call it beautiful.’

  ‘Not a word I’d use.’

  ‘Nor me.’ He reached for his computer mouse and opened an email from colleagues in the path’ lab. It confirmed his suspicion. ‘They’re telling me none of the samples cultured have responded to any drug combinations. Cephalosporin, vancomycin, ampicillin – nothing’s worked. Of course it’s too early to say with certainty, but the concern is we’re dealing with an aggressive, drug-resistant strain.’

  ‘ “Aggressive” meaning what, precisely?’

  ‘One of the major symptoms of this strain is disseminated intravascular coagulation – it means the blood clots excessively, which perversely causes multiple haemorrhages. All the girl’s major organs were affected – liver, kidneys, brain. She had also developed grotesque swelling and gangrene in her limbs. It means either that the bacteria multiplied at an unprecedented rate, or that she remained asymptomatic until the disease was already far advanced. Neither possibility is particularly reassuring.’

  ‘But we’ve only seen this one case?’

  ‘So far.’

  Jenny thought about what David had told her – his fear of drug-resistant organisms finding their way into the hospital through foreign patients.

  ‘Do you have any idea where she might have caught it? Wouldn’t you expect to see a cluster?’

  ‘Every outbreak has to start somewhere, Mrs Cooper. One of the mysteries of infectious disease is why we see a sudden flare-up then a die-off for no apparent reason. Many of us carry meningitis bacteria in our bodies benignly. The process of activation and mutation is little understood.’

  ‘But Sophie might have caught it from someone else.’

  ‘It would be foolish not to expect more cases.’

  ‘And the body – is it safe?’

  ‘As much as it can be. It’s stored in a biohazard body bag. My concern is far more for those who have been in immediate contact with her. I’m sure the Health Protection Agency is taking the appropriate steps.’ He gave an apologetic smile that said he had nothing more to give her.

  Jenny pressed him on one final point. ‘Antibiotic resistance – that means this strain must have evolved defences, perhaps through not being properly treated in the past?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  ‘I need you to be honest with me – whatever your answer, I’ll treat it as off the record. Are we sure that all deaths caused by hospital infection are being recorded as such? There’s no management pressure to downplay a problem?’

  ‘If there’s an infection, I record it – you know that,’ Dr Kerr answered carefully. ‘Whether it’s drug-resistant is another matter. I’m not usually required to conduct a full-scale genetic analysis.’

  Jenny nodded. ‘I understand.’

  He had given a non-response, but she couldn’t have expected him to go further. Were he to have told her that deaths were being caused by potentially avoidable infection, he could find himself a witness in multiple civil actions against his employers. A few unguarded words could cost him his career.

  Courteous as always, he showed her to the door, but as she started out, he said, ‘You won’t say anything to put me in an awkward situation, will you?’

  She couldn’t recall a time when she had seen him appear so nervous. He was always the embodiment of calm.

  ‘You know me better than that.’

  He gave a slow, considered nod. There was something else weighing on his mind. ‘Can you keep a confidence?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘One of the senior managers called me last night – I shan’t give the name – and let it be known that rumours would be flying around this case. I was told in no uncertain terms not to contribute to them.’

  Jenny made the customary call to the Freeman household from her office at a little after 9 a.m. Ed answered. She hadn’t heard his voice in over five years, yet it might have been five days. She remembered him as a naturally athletic man who had infuriated David by routinely beating him at squash. He had also shone as a neurosurgeon specializing in the treatment of brain tumours, while maintaining a sense of humour and a happy marriage to Fiona. Jenny had looked on their family as unfairly charmed.

  ‘Ed, it’s Jenny. Jenny Cooper. I’m so sorry about Sophie.’

  ‘Yes.’ He answered in the familiar monotone of the recently bereaved. ‘It doesn’t seem real.’

  There were no words adequate for dealing with the sudden and unexpected loss of a child, and Jenny didn’t attempt to find any.

  ‘I’m only calling to say that I’ll be handling matters, if you’ve no objection.’

  ‘No, we’re glad it’s you. David called me this morning—’ The phrase seemed to hang, as if he had stopped himself from completing it.

  Jenny said, ‘I know you won’t feel like talking now, but you know where to call.’

  ‘There is one thing . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  He hesitated. ‘You won’t let David take any heat, will you? It’s different for me – I’ve got Fiona to fall back on.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ed said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  Jenny had barely set down the phone and begun to gather her thoughts when it rang again.

  ‘Jenny Cooper.’

  ‘Jenny, it’s Simon.’ The voice, which seemed to be coming from a moving car, belonged to Simon Moreton, an evermore-senior civil servant at the Ministry of Justice who, since the day of her appointment as coroner, had always made it his business to keep a watching brief on her affairs. Jenny’s mistake had been to flirt with him when they first crossed swords; and ever since he had convinced himself that they enjoyed slightly more than a merely professional relationship. ‘I’m making a few house calls in your neck of the woods today – mind if I pop round?’

  She didn’t feel she was being offered any choice.

  ‘When should I expect you?’

  She heard him exchange words with his driver.

  ‘I can be with you in ten minutes.’

  ‘That soon?’

  ‘Leaves you the rest of the day clear.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘Excellent. Shall I bring coffee? I know – even better, why don’t I take you for breakfast? I insist. My treat, Jenny. My treat.’

  She put down the phone with a sense of foreboding. Moreton was a man whose preferred way of doing business was over several leisurely glasses of wine at the table of an expensive restaurant. For him to have left London at dawn could only mean that he was sensing trouble.

  SEVEN

  SIMON HAD INSISTED ON HAVING them chauffeured the half-mile down the hill to the harbourside. Since his promotion to Director the previous year, he had use of a government Jaguar and was eager to show it off. Jenny had learned that it paid to humour him, so she pretended to admire the limousine and tolerated his gentle flirting. It was quiet at the docks on a weekday morning, and sitting at an outside table watching the seagulls lazily circle in the warm air, it was hard to remember that beyond the pleasant introductory chit-chat, lay a conversation about a young girl who had died horribly only hours before.

  A civil servant who had been brought up in the old school, Moreton delayed revealing the true purpose of his visit while he sipped his coffee and complimented Jenny on how well she looked. It couldn’t have been true – after her early start she felt every one of her forty-six years – but his gentle flattery was hard to resist, and she began to feel herself relax. He had taken the trouble to study her recent cases
and was full of praise for her sensitive handling of the death of a young mother killed by a police car in pursuit of an armed criminal. She didn’t tell him that she had felt furious with the jury for returning a verdict of accidental death rather than unlawful killing, but today, at least, she sensed that it was to her advantage to pretend to be the woman he had always hoped she would become: ‘one of us’.

  He had ordered more coffee for them before he finally approached the point. ‘I thought you might be interested to hear that I had a call yesterday evening – from one of my colleagues in the Department of Health. She was rather exercised about a case on your patch.’

  ‘Sophie Freeman?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘That was quick. She wasn’t dead until eight o’clock.’

  ‘Anything infectious and deadly and the whole machine seems to swing into operation with alarming speed – about the only time it ever does.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  He answered her with the questioning sideways look he often used to hint that he knew something that she might have presumed a secret.

  Jenny remained inscrutable, telling herself not to let him get behind her guard.

  ‘The last thing anybody wants is an outbreak of meningitis,’ Moreton continued, ‘especially as it’s invariably the young who die. Curious. I’m told no one seems to know why that is.’

  ‘There are theories, I’m sure. Presumably the Health Protection Agency will be closing down her school and monitoring everyone who’s had contact with her?’

  Moreton nodded. ‘And in this case, very discreetly. The media have been asked to stay away, and thankfully they seem to be complying.’

  ‘You don’t want the public to know?’

  ‘Hysterical reporting would hardly be in anyone’s interests. We want our people getting on with the job, not wasting precious time batting away journalists. I’m assured we’ll have some answers in a day or two.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re here – you want me to keep the lid on things?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Jenny. I felt you’d understand.’

  ‘I’m interested to know what answers you might be expecting to find.’ She feigned ignorance. ‘I was under the impression this was a disease that could erupt anywhere and for no particular reason.’

  ‘That’s often the case.’ He was briefly distracted by a passing pleasure boat carrying a boisterous party of young foreign students, most of them pretty girls. ‘But sometimes, I’m told, there’s a carrier. An originating source.’

  He threw the comment away in an attempt, she suspected, to prompt her into an unguarded admission.

  ‘All I know is what Dr Kerr, the Vale’s pathologist, has told me,’ Jenny stalled. ‘Suspected meningitis; seemingly an aggressive strain. The path’ lab’s findings point to it being drug-resistant and they’re conducting more tests.’

  ‘That’s all he said?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘I’ve no reason to assume he’s withholding anything from me.’

  ‘Jenny, Jenny . . .’ He gave her a knowing smile. ‘You’re such an awful liar, you really shouldn’t try, especially not to me, who knows you so well. If even I have heard that the Vale is alive with rumour, it can’t have escaped your notice.’

  ‘I’m meant to be impartial. I try not to listen.’

  ‘Even to your ex-husband?’

  Jenny met his gaze. ‘Especially to him.’

  ‘The thing is,’ he continued, dismissing her denial, ‘the rumours are all complete nonsense. Absolute rubbish – and that comes from the top, from the people who have no axe to grind.’

  ‘In the Department of Health?’

  ‘You see? Such cynicism – and you’ve barely opened a file. An open mind, Jenny, that’s all I’m asking of you. Doctors are very clever people, but as prone to irrational responses as the rest of us. You know, there is a very good reason why we don’t let them run hospitals by themselves.’

  She nodded, pretending that she had taken his wise counsel on board. ‘So you’d like me to do what, precisely?’

  ‘Respond to the facts and not the speculation, and please, no journalists. Whipping up a storm will only cost lives. We’re very good at containing outbreaks, we really are.’

  She got the message: if word got out, she would be receiving more than her fair share of the blame.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked, beginning to feel stirrings of guilt at being away from her desk.

  ‘Yes. For now.’ Moreton waved to the waitress to summon the bill, relieved to have the main business concluded. ‘Busy day ahead?’

  ‘Frantic. I don’t suppose you could ask people to stop dying for a week or two.’

  ‘I have many powers, Jenny, but that, I’m afraid, is not yet one of them.’ Moreton smiled. ‘I heard about the aid worker who jumped from the bridge – Jordan, was that the name?’

  Jenny was instantly suspicious. ‘How did that reach you already?’

  ‘It’s not so much the dead man as his associate – Harry Thorn. He has one of those names that make our computers excited.’

  The waitress appeared with the bill. Ever the cautious civil servant, Moreton counted out the precise change.

  ‘Yes, an old friend of mine from the Foreign Office tipped me off – Gordon Jefferies. We were at school together. He’d had a request for intel from the Department of International Development. Apparently Thorn’s outfit had been bidding for their funds, some African irrigation project or other. ID were doing the usual due diligence when it emerged Mr Thorn had a past.’

  ‘Should I know about it?’

  ‘It’s the usual sort of stuff these types get involved in – selling information, spreading rumours among the natives.’

  ‘Information? That sounds like a euphemism for spying. I can’t say I know much about that world.’

  ‘Everyone wants a piece of Africa, it seems; blessed with natural resources but cursed with violent tribalism. You don’t do any sort of business there without men on the inside. That, I’m told, is what your Mr Thorn is. Available for hire to the highest bidder.’

  ‘He’s my Mr Thorn now, is he?’

  Simon smiled. ‘You were seen, Jenny – paying him a visit.’

  She felt her cheeks glow with embarrassment. ‘I was going to collect my son from college. He called when I was en route. I took a statement, that’s all. He told me hardly anything.’

  ‘Shouldn’t your officer be doing that sort of legwork?’

  ‘You know how I like to do things, Simon. Besides, I was passing his front door.’

  He gave her a searching look. ‘Gordon tells me he’s an incorrigible liar, Jenny. And as we both know, there is no cure for that particular chronic condition. I’m just warning you to tread carefully, that’s all.’

  ‘So he’s being watched? Is there some sort of parallel investigation going on?’

  ‘To yours? Not so far as I know. But of course anything you turn up will be of interest, let us say.’ He stood up from his chair. ‘I really ought to be getting back on the road – I’ve a one o’clock with the Secretary of State. Can I give you a lift back to the office?’

  ‘It’s out of your way. Go on – you’d better hurry.’

  Moreton smiled, but Jenny sensed that beneath the veneer he was anything but relaxed. He was holding something back. He touched her lightly at the elbow. ‘Good to see you, Jenny. Keep me posted.’

  Jenny made her way past the cathedral and across the lawns of College Green, preoccupied with unravelling Simon Moreton’s coded messages over Adam Jordan and Harry Thorn. However much he had tried to reassure her that there was no cause for alarm over a single case of meningitis, the fact of the news blackout was proof beyond doubt that in the halls of government alarm had been overtaken by full-blown fear.

  Rounding the corner into Jamaica Street, Jenny resolved to get a line directly into the path’ lab. She recalled that Alison had once had a contact amongst its small team of haematologists – a tech
nician she had got to know during her former career as a detective sergeant in CID. Jenny’s few short years as coroner had taught her one inviolable fact about large organizations: the truth seldom emerged from the top, but often did leak out of the bottom.

  Jenny heard Alison hastily ending a phone call as she approached along the hallway. She entered to an uneasy atmosphere, but Alison gave her a brittle smile and handed her a thick wedge of mail before she could ask any questions.

  ‘Was that Mr Moreton’s car I saw you climbing into earlier?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Jenny sorted through the pile of envelopes, tossing the junk and Ministry circulars unopened into the bin. ‘He wanted to talk about the Sophie Freeman case.’ Jenny looked up, remembering how quickly events had unfolded. ‘Oh. You may not have heard.’

  ‘I had a call first thing, from a woman at the Health Protection Agency. She’s requested we don’t talk to the media or anyone outside the investigation.’ Alison plucked a note containing a phone number from the side of her monitor. ‘She’d like to speak to you.’

  She waited for Jenny to explain the reason for Moreton’s visit.

  ‘Government’s nervous about causing a panic,’ Jenny said. ‘Simon’s anxious we keep our inquiry low-key.’ Jenny slipped the number into her pocket. ‘I don’t suppose you could do me a favour – that contact of yours in the Vale path’ lab, what was his name?’

  ‘Jim Connings? What about him?’

  ‘Perhaps you could ask him if there’s a story other than the official one. We won’t have heard it from him, of course.’

  ‘Story about what?’ Alison asked guardedly.

  ‘Drug-resistant infections. Staff coming under pressure to disguise them. There are a lot of well-paid people on the fifth floor who might want to keep a lid on that sort of information.’

  ‘I can ask him,’ Alison said, ‘but things aren’t what they were. No one’s safe.’

  ‘We have to try.’

  ‘There’s an email from DI Watling you might want to look at,’ Alison called after her. ‘He doesn’t know what happened to the figurine in Jordan’s car, but they found another couple of receipts in the junk under the seat. I’ve forwarded it to you.’