First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  He got to his feet and smiled down at her. ‘Dr B., thanks a lot for all your help. It’s great to have you in amongst us, believe me. This case is coming along nicely with your help. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have managed it well enough ourselves, but you’ve helped.’

  ‘Helped?’ She almost snorted it. ‘Who had to nag you into believing there’d been murder done at all? And who –’

  ‘I said I’m grateful.’ He shook his head complainingly. ‘What more do you want? By the bye’ – he had turned for the door – ‘I take it he had nothing nasty tucked up his rear end?’

  ‘Of course not. I looked for it, naturally I did. But there was no evidence I could see. We took samples but I’m pretty confident.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too. Now I’ve seen all that stuff.’ He pointed to the sheets of paper in her hand. ‘Anyway, check it all and tell me what you think. I’ll look forward to hearing your opinion. You’re good at this job, aren’t you? My job …’ And he tipped his invisible hat with his mock salute and was gone.

  23

  The Board Room, which was clearly a versatile space, had become a lecture theatre for the evening. There were rows of chairs facing a desk at which three further chairs had been set, and behind that a projection screen, and George sighed as she settled herself in the back row. That meant slides or transparencies of some sort and the lights going up and down and no chance to relax properly. God, it was a bore! She had better things to do than sit here listening to someone prosing on about a subject she knew well already; such as going over in detail the printout from Oxford’s computer.

  It was obvious now that the man had been a blackmailer on a massive scale. She had suspected so for some time – that was why she had so much wanted access to the computer – but she hadn’t expected it to be so very organized, or so lucrative. Payments of twenty thousand at a time were entered into the accounts, though there were also much lower ones. He seemed to have been as content to take five hundred as the higher sums. Altogether it added up to a great income; the past year alone had netted him two hundred thousand.

  But just as she’d settled down to deeper study of the columns of figures and letters in the hope that she might be able to tease out the identity of some of the payers, the phone on her desk had shrilled and Professor Dieter’s secretary had reminded her of the symposium. She made it very clear that to miss it would be regarded as the greatest dereliction of duty. So George had locked the papers away and come stomping furiously over here; and now she muttered irritably and pulled out the writing pad she would keep on her lap to pretend she was taking notes.

  The room was already half filled with quietly talking people. It was clear that they were all there as she was: because it was politic to be so. Dieter had sent out a three-line whip, obviously, George thought sourly as she looked at the faces, now familiar to her: row after row of the hospital’s most senior consultants as well as the junior doctors and several of the more senior nursing staff; and she found some cold comfort in at least not being alone in her irritation. There were many glum faces.

  Kate Sayers slid into the seat beside her just as she noticed that Toby Bellamy was sitting further along her own row, on his own, and she was grateful for Kate’s company and greeted her with some effusion.

  ‘What’s new?’ Kate said. ‘Tell me something interesting to help me get through the next couple of hours.’

  ‘You too? I thought I was the one who didn’t want to be here.’

  ‘None of us do, but this is one of the bees he keeps well fed in his bonnet. He’s always trying to get people to agree with him.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a Duesberg disciple.’

  ‘Duesberg? Not the chap who says that HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS?’

  ‘That’s the one. Mad as a hatter, if you ask me, but Dieter thinks he’s got it right and goes to a lot of trouble to try and convince us that we’re wrong if we don’t agree.’

  ‘It’s always the same,’ George said. ‘Cranks proselytizing. They need to share their fantasies, but I thought better of Dieter.’

  ‘Don’t jump to conclusions. He makes a strong case. Just you wait and see.’

  ‘It’ll have to be very strong to get past me,’ George said firmly. ‘The evidence is too –’

  ‘Well!’ Kate said, staring down the room. “Look who’s here!’

  George turned to look. The tall woman who had been with Professor Dieter on the night of the concert was standing beside the table in close conversation with Felicity Oxford, and everyone was watching them covertly, or at least watching Felicity Oxford. She was, as ever, worth looking at. Her hair was still the same polished primrose-yellow helmet with the huge bun pinned elegantly at the nape of her neck, but now she was wearing a trouser suit in deep green suede rather than the severe black she had worn at the committee meeting where George had first seen her, and again at the concert. George’s mouth tightened as she looked at her; there was something so insolently calculated about her choice of clothes tonight; casual and elegant but quite bright in colour and clearly relaxed, as though she were daring them to disapprove of the fact that she wasn’t dressing like an inconsolable widow. Beside her the big woman in the awkward drapery looked like an ill-dressed haystack and the glint of the jewellery with which she was heavily bedecked gave her a tawdry air that underlined Felicity’s glamour, and this time George smiled. This was a woman who did what she wanted when she wanted and to hell with everyone else.

  ‘That’s Mrs Dieter, isn’t it?’ she murmured to Kate, who nodded.

  ‘Doesn’t she look a hoot? But don’t be misled. That woman’s got the mind of a man twice her size and three times her charm. She can knock Charles into the middle of next week in any debate. Fortunately, she agrees with him on this issue. If she didn’t he’d be in trouble.’

  ‘Is she that powerful, then? After all, he’s the Professor here and –’

  Kate snorted with laughter. ‘Whatever he is here, she’s queen at home, ducky! She’s also a very assertive type – lecturer in biology at the University. When she was doing original research back in the Sixties they used to murmur she was Nobel material. But she dropped that and now she just gives her lectures and runs Charlie’s life and keeps her hand in that way. And also, of course, she has the money, it seems, or so the gossip goes. And the gossip, as you know –’

  ‘– is never wrong. Indeed I know,’ George said. ‘Well, as long as you’re there to fill me in on any nuggets I may have missed, maybe the evening won’t be a total write-off. Whoops! Here we go.’

  Professor Dieter had come in, followed by a thin lugubrious woman in a sagging grey suit and a man who looked half asleep in neat black. As the little troop arrived at the table at the front, Felicity and her companion nodded at them and moved away, and George watched them out of the corner of her eye as they came and sat down in the same row as the one in which she was sitting, with Felicity taking the place next to Toby. Her jaws tightened again, and she looked steadily ahead at the people now fussing over who should sit where at the table in front. Gus hadn’t been wrong about Toby. They were close, very close, he and Felicity. It was none of her business, of course it wasn’t, and why the hell should she care? But she did.

  The speakers were settled at last and the room slowly quietened into an expectant hush as Dieter got to his feet.

  ‘Welcome all of you to this important seminar in our series of Modern Medical Issues. I make no apology for returning to the question of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It is one that is exciting a good deal of comment and work and we should be sure we keep ourselves abreast of the newest information and ideas in the field. Working as we do in a deprived area with more than our share of drug-abusers and homeless alcoholics, we are in the front line of the battle. We’ll inevitably get more than our share of patients.’

  He cleared his throat and looked down at his notes and George felt her face tighten. It always irritated her beyond measure when people t
alked of high-risk groups for infections; as though viruses and bacteria were respecters of persons, and she considered for a moment standing up to say so, but then decided against it. Better to hear the arguments before joining in, however knowledgeable she might be already.

  The thin woman was the first speaker after Professor Dieter and set the agenda by defining the subjects they were to cover, and she turned out to George’s surprise to be an American, by her accent from California, and that in itself made George dubious. She was as open-minded as she knew how to be, but the prejudices of her parents were inevitably part of her own and they had for as long as she could remember scoffed at the sort of lunatics who inhabited the West Coast. However, she made a conscious effort to set aside the bigotry of such a reaction and concentrated.

  It wasn’t easy. The woman was producing reams of statistics to prove that HIV, while it was always present in people who had AIDS, was far from the most important of the factors in causing the disease. It was due largely to drug abuse, in her opinion. The misuse of narcotics and other psychotropic drugs depressed the immune system and led to the appearance of symptoms that resulted as AIDS. Alcohol abuse was also incriminated, and she offered another string of statistics on the screen behind her to show the death rates among such people and the various organisms they harboured which could be as responsible as HIV was supposed to be.

  She was followed by the man in black, who was quiet-voiced and had an accent which proved to be from Austria and who also offered statistics on the screen to support the idea that HIV was no more significant in the human host than E. Coli. ‘Just as we all carry this in our gut as harmless passengers and only suffer disease from it when it is transported to other body systems,’ he said in his carefully clipped tones and perfectly rounded vowels, ‘so we carry HIV. Unless we are deprived of good living, unless we abuse our bodies with drugs – and alcohol of course is a drug of damage – then we do not suffer from AIDS, whether or not we have HIV …’ and more of the same as George steadily became increasingly involved in what she was hearing. She’d come under pressure, but, now she was here, she found herself getting more and more interested. This after all fell into her field of expertise, to an extent, and she knew these people were misinterpreting their data, and ached to tell them so.

  ‘Easy,’ Kate whispered in her ear. ‘Your temper’s showing.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such stuff!’ she hissed back. ‘Don’t these people read the work that’s been coming out of the States these past few years? And there’s all the French work, let alone our own.’

  ‘I know, I know. But this is like religion. They’ll find figures to support their thesis just as religious people find quotes in the Bible that give them permission to treat other people like shit. Do keep your head down, ducky. It’ll get you nowhere to fuss.’

  But George couldn’t keep her head down. Dieter was on his feet now, burbling happily on about the brilliant papers that had been put before them and speaking with admiration of the concise and logical position that was being offered, and even before he asked for contributions from the floor George was on her feet.

  Dieter looked gratified and said happily. ‘Dr Barnabas. As our pathologist you will of course see the validity of the papers we’ve been offered here tonight.’

  ‘But I don’t! How do you explain the high incidence of death from AIDS in Africa where the disease is clearly proven to be sexually transmitted? The presentations we’ve had this evening have barely touched upon that mode of transmission.’

  ‘Because it is of less significance than the other factors we discussed.’ The Austrian was on his feet too now. ‘The mode of transmission for HIV we accept may be sexual congress, but our argument is that too much emphasis has been placed on the organism and not enough on the real factors that cause the symptoms of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which are drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, poor housing and all the other things which we know compromise immunity and permit disease to flourish. I must remind you that in the nineteenth century tuberculosis was rife, probably all the population was exposed to infection by the bacteria, but by no means all succumbed to the disease of tuberculosis. It is the same, we are convinced, with HIV. We have the virus, yes, perhaps transmitted in the sexual mode, but it is not necessarily a killing virus. This is where we are concerned with the emphasis health education puts on the spread of the virus rather than the treatment of the contributing factors such as substance abuse and poverty.’

  ‘Yes, but –’ George protested and then Toby was on his feet and joining in, and to her relief he agreed with her. He spoke with passion about the risks of telling people that HIV was not responsible for their disease when it was present in every person who died of it; couldn’t the posture of the speakers tonight contribute to the rapid spread of the epidemic? And then everyone was off, with one after another getting to their feet and joining in, and Dieter looked more and more satisfied as the noise levels and the temperature of the big room rose in equal degrees.

  Kate sighed into George’s ear at one point when she was sitting down and listening to the others, ‘Now look what you’ve done! If you’d shut up they’d have all stayed quiet and we could have gone home by now.’

  George shook her head. ‘Someone would surely have had a go,’ she said and Kate made a face and had to agree that she was probably right.

  The symposium had been billed to end at eight sharp but it was almost half past eight before a flushed and clearly pleased Dieter called a halt. Enough people in the audience had seemed to accept his colleagues’ papers and conclusions as reasonable to make him happy; and he even managed to say a few gracious words in his summing up about those people who had, like George, refused to be beguiled by the arguments.

  ‘We’ll come back to this important subject again, I have no doubt,’ he said. ‘Now I must allow you all to depart for your evening meal. I’m sure all this talk has made you very hungry.’ And he smiled charmingly and turned to his speakers as a gesture of dismissal.

  It was more than George could bear. Despite the fact that the Oxford papers were waiting for her in her office, demanding to be considered, she couldn’t leave it there. She said a quick goodnight to Kate, who fled as fast as she could, and pushed her way to the front to talk to the speakers. She had to make her points more strongly, she felt; and she joined the little cluster of people at the central table to wait her turn.

  Behind her there was a little flurry as Mrs Dieter came bearing down on the group. George made way for her politely.

  ‘Now, everybody!’ She had a high rather thin voice that didn’t match her presence at all. ‘I really must hurry us along. I’ve arranged dinner for our speakers and I’m sure they’re very hungry. Charles, if you don’t mind …’

  ‘But I did want to say very quickly …’ George began and Mrs Dieter turned and looked at her sharply.

  ‘Have you met our pathologist, Beatrice?’ the Professor said swiftly. ‘Dr Barnabas, Dr George Barnabas.’

  ‘Good to meet you,’ Mrs Dieter said. ‘And now, if you’ll forgive me?’

  ‘But I really must speak about those statistics,’ George said stubbornly.

  Mrs Dieter looked at her again and said crisply, ‘Then you’d better come to dinner.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Dinner,’ Beatrice Dieter said as though she were speaking to a halfwit. ‘At our house. It’s all arranged and as it’s a buffet there will be room for as many as wish to come. Charles, bring Dr Schenck and Dr Esposito and come along. There’ll be, let me see …’ And she stared round and counted on her fingers. ‘Felicity, of course, and her friend, and you two and ourselves, and of course Mr Herne and the Coopers and – oh, yes, you, Dr Barnabas, ten of us. Excellent.’ And she was gone, surging ahead of them to the door as people scattered to make way.

  ‘I really don’t think …’ George began but Professor Dieter took her elbow and smiled a little weakly.

  ‘I think it’s a splendid idea. The
re’s clearly much more for you to discuss with our speakers, and as the person on the staff with almost the most involvement on the nonclinical side of the AIDS story, then it is important that you get the chance to do so. And dinner won’t be all that bad. We have a very good cook, you know, Filipino, and she does excellent Eastern food for these evenings. Do come along. Perhaps there’s room in our car for you if you don’t mind crushing in the back seat with our speakers. I’m sure you won’t. It will give you a chance to speak to them immediately, won’t it?’

  She stopped trying. It was like being caught in a strong tide and there was little point in kicking against it with her feeble swimming strokes. And she did indeed want to challenge the evening’s speakers.

  It was a surprisingly good dinner in surprisingly comfortable circumstances. The drive to the house had taken just over an hour of fairly fast moving along the main roads out of London to the north, during which she had at last been able to pin down both speakers to listen to her strong views on their interpretation of their statistics, and it had not been possible to see much of the house when they’d arrived, though she had an impression of a large front garden and a great many trees as the car moved through a pair of iron gates and travelled up a noisy gravel drive to the front door. Inside the house was warm – a great pleasure to George after the long hard cold nights she spent in the residence where heating was meagre to the point of being totally absent – and furnished with an eye to comfort rather than elegance. Deep chairs, deep carpets and deep dark colours were everywhere, and there were open fires in both the drawing room where they congregated for a very quick drink (‘You’ll all take sherry?’ Beatrice Dieter said loudly. ‘Yes, I thought you would.’) and in the dining room where a long table had been set with food.