by Ken McClure
"Good, now follow me."
The slippers padded along behind Jenny until she stopped and pointed to the clip board hanging at the foot of a bed. She said, "I want you to read off these names to me as we come to them. All right?"
A nod.
"Well then?"
"A. n.g.u.s…Cam.e. ron."
"Check," said Jenny officiously and moved on. Three more names and all thoughts of home and family left the boy as he warmed to his new role as assistant to Night Nurse Buchan.
The child recovering from surgery was in a side ward sleeping peacefully. Jenny placed her hand gently against his forehead and felt it to be quite normal. She checked the boy's notes; no medication was indicated, no special instructions. All that was needed was a good night's sleep. She tip toed out of the room and closed the door behind her, a trifle more noisily than she had intended. She looked back through the glass panel. The boy had not stirred.
Midnight came and Jenny began to feel optimistic about the chances of a quiet night. She even said so to the junior nurse as they sipped illicit coffee in the duty room while the rain outside continued to pour.
"Brrr, I'm glad I'm not out in that," said the girl, trying to draw the curtains even closer together to shut a persistent gap in the middle.
"Pity the poor sailors," said Jenny.
"That's what my mother used to say," said the girl.
"Mine too," said Jenny.
"Do you think he's out there?" said the girl.
"Who?" asked Jenny.
"The killer of course."
"Let's not talk about that."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot, I mean, I didn't…"
"Forget it."
At one o'clock the phone rang and Jenny raised her eyes before picking it up.
"I thought it was too good to last," said the junior."
"Ward 10, Nurse Buchan speaking…Yes…Yes…Understood." Jenny put down the phone and said, "Admission in ten minutes, seven year old girl, burns to both legs, hot water bottle burst."
"Poor mite," said the junior.
"Prepare number three will you?" said Jenny. "I'll get the trays ready.
As she went to get sterile dressings Jenny paused in the corridor to look through the glass panel at the surgical case. He was still sleeping peacefully, right arm outside the covers, fingers hooked over the side of the bed.
A distant siren gave early warning of the imminent arrival of their patient and the duty house officer came to the ward shortly afterwards. She had heard the same sound from her room in the doctors' residency. "Sounds like a bad one," she said.
"Burns are always bad," said Jenny.
The junior held open the ward door to allow the trolley to enter with its entourage of ambulance men, parents and a policeman. Jenny signalled to the junior with her eyes and the girl ushered the parents away from the procession and into a side room where they would be plied with tea and sympathy.
Jenny stood by as the temporary dry dressings were removed from the child's legs to reveal a mass of livid, raw flesh.
"Her mother used boiling water in the bottle," said one of the ambulance men quietly.
"She's going to need extensive grafting," said the house officer. "We'll transfer her when she' stable but in the meantime she's going to be in a lot of pain when she comes out of shock. I'll write her up for something." The house officer looked at Jenny and said, "She'll need specialling as well."
An hour later calm had returned to the ward. The girl had been sedated and installed in a side room under the care of an extra nurse who had been sent up to sit with her, the policeman had completed his note book entry on the treble nine call and the ambulance men had returned to their stand-by quarters. The parents, stricken by remorse, and now to be haunted by conscience, had gone off to spend what was left of the night at home.
At 3am Jenny walked round the ward again, gliding quietly between the cots and beds in the soft dimness of the night lights. All was quiet. She opened the door of the side ward to check on the surgery boy and found him still asleep and lying in the same position as before. As she closed the door it suddenly struck her as strange that he was lying in exactly the same position. He was sleeping not unconscious and everyone moves when they sleep.
Jenny had a sense of foreboding as she went back in again and approached the boy to put her hand on his forehead. He was cold, icy cold. There was a sound at her feet like the contents of a glass being spilled but she knew that that could not be. She looked down to see a stream of blood pour from beneath the blankets and spatter over her shoes. She felt faint but pulled back the top covers slowly to reveal a sea of scarlet.
Jenny buried her face in Fenton's shoulder and tried to find comfort in his arms. "It was awful," she murmured. "He just bled to death in his sleep. If only I had looked in sooner…"
"Don't blame yourself," whispered Fenton. "There was nothing you could have done.
"You did say it would be another patient," said Jenny.
Fenton nodded.
"There's something else," said Jenny. "The boy had group AB blood like the Watson boy."
Fenton held Jenny away from him in disbelief. "But that is just too much of a coincidence," he said. "AB is a rare group."
"Did you check up on the others?" Jenny asked.
Fenton shook his head slowly and confessed that he had not, "I thought when Sandra Murray turned out to have group B blood that we were on the wrong track."
"Maybe not?"
"But if this is all to do with blood groups," said Fenton with a sudden thought. "That's what Neil Munro's book is all about!"
Fenton felt excitement mount inside him as the letters and numbers in Munro's book began to make sense. CT did not stand for Charles Tyson because it stood for 'clotting time!' The figures in the columns were the times taken for samples of fresh blood to clot in the presence of Saxon plastic!
Against the letter 'O' were figures equivalent to the normal clotting time for human blood. The separate columns were simply repeat tests on the same samples of group O blood. Fenton found a similar set of entries against the letter 'A' and concluded, as Neil Munro must have done, that there was no problem with either group A or group O blood and that would cover the majority of the population.
There was only one entry against the letter, 'B' and the initials, S.M. were appended. Sandra Murray! thought Fenton. Neil had used Sandra Murray's blood to test the behaviour of group B blood in the presence of Saxon plastic. He could have obtained blood of group O and A from people in the lab but for group B he had had to ask the blood transfusion service. The figures for Sandra Murray's blood, although slightly on the long side, were within the normal clotting time range. Underneath Neil had written down three dots followed by the letters, 'AB'…therefore AB. Neil Munro had known!
Munro had deduced that the plastic affected people with group AB blood and that meant something in the order of three percent of the population. That was why he had requested another donor from the Blood Transfusion Service; he had wanted to verify his conclusion.
Fenton picked up the phone and called Steve Kelly to get details of Munro's last request. Kelly told him what he was now already sure of; Munro had requested a supply of group AB blood.
Fenton had interpreted everything in Munro's book except the numbers on the first page. As a last resort he considered that they might conceivably refer to a routine lab specimen number. He went downstairs to the office to check through the files and found that there was indeed a blood sample bearing the five figured number in Munro's book. It had come from a patient named Moran and appeared to have been quite normal for all the tests requested.
Failing to see the significance of a normal blood analysis Fenton returned upstairs but stopped when he got to the first landing as the name, 'Moran' rang a bell. Of course! That was the name of the patient whose sample had been a failure on the Saxon Analyser during the trials. The failure had been put down to the specimen arriving in the wrong sort of container but when it had
been checked on the routine analyser it had given perfectly normal readings. It had been the Saxon Analyser at fault not the specimen and Neil Munro must have realised that! That's what had started his investigation off in the first place!
Fenton checked with Medical Records and ascertained that the patient Moran had had group AB blood. More checking revealed that Susan Daniels had also had AB blood. A call to the records department at the Eye Pavilion told him that the same had been true for Jamie Buchan.
The conclusion was perfectly simple. Saxon plastic killed people with group AB blood. It totally destroyed the clotting mechanism. Susan Daniels had constantly been in contact with it through the samplers for the Saxon Blood Analyser she had been testing, the patients had had Saxon plastic name tags permanently against their skin, as had Jamie Buchan after Jenny had given him some to play with and the ward maid would have handled Saxon products every day in the ward. It made sense.
On the day that Neil Munro had worked out the problem with AB blood he must have told Saxon and gone down to the Sterile Supply Department immediately to have all Saxon plastic products withdrawn. Saxon must have followed him and pushed him into the steriliser before he had had a chance to tell anyone.
It must have been Saxon personally, decided Fenton, for Neil had told no one else in the lab and he would have gone down to see Sister Kincaid as soon as he had realised what was going on. There would not have been time for Saxon to arrange for someone else to have done his dirty work. Saxon must have done it himself and for that, given half a chance, there would be a reckoning before society had its say.
TEN
Tyson was out of the lab at a meeting so Fenton called the hospital secretary, James Dodds, on his own authority. He was asked to wait while a lady with an affected accent checked to see 'if Mr Dodds was available.'
"Dodds here."
"Fenton, Biochemistry, I think you may find this a little difficult to believe…"
Fenton was right, Dodds found it hard to swallow. He indicated his difficulty by making spluttering noises into the phone and other sounds of incredulity.
"You must withdraw all Saxon plastic products at once," concluded Fenton.
"But are you absolutely sure?" protested Dodds.
"Absolutely. There is no madman on the loose in the hospital, it's the plastic."
"But Dr Munro's death?"
"I'll be speaking to the police about that," said Fenton. "But the main thing is to stop the staff using anything made of Saxon plastic."
"Of course, of course," murmured Dodds. "Right away."
Saxon products were withdrawn from circulation, a task accomplished without much difficulty due to the fact that stocks in the hospital were generally low as the initial gift from Saxon Medical had dwindled down to a few weeks supply. More was on order for when they became commercially available but now, thankfully, that would never happen.
Fenton wished that Tyson would return from his meeting for he felt the need of moral support. For the past two hours, ever since his conversation with Dodds, he had done little else but answer the telephone and deal with personal callers who wanted more details. He felt like the Caliph of Baghdad on a bad day but without the power to cut the heads from those who pleaded their case too strongly. If just one more person were to ask him if he was 'absolutely sure'…
"But are you absolutely sure?" asked Inspector Jamieson, making Fenton's foot itch. "Yes, I am sure," replied Fenton through gritted teeth. "But for conclusive proof I have asked the Blood Transfusion Service to provide some group AB blood for us to test."
"Who's bringing it?" asked Jamieson.
"Its owner. It has to be fresh blood. The donor will be coming here."
Jamieson suggested that a police car should be sent to collect the donor so Fenton gave him Kelly's number. He passed it to his sergeant. "See to it will you." He walked over to the lab window and looked out at the greyness. "So we have a plastic murderer," he said, still with his back to Fenton.
"So it seems," said Fenton. He could sense Jamieson's discomfort and could understand it. The man had been hunting a non-existent killer and there would be no glory in this for him, no self effacing media interviews, just another bumbling copper story. But there was still the Munro death. Fenton thought that he could read Jamieson's mind.
"I understand you have some ideas about the Munro death?" said Jamieson.
Fenton said, "I think I know why he was murdered and I think I know who did it." He brought out Neil Munro's notebook and said, "I didn't understand this at first but I do now. It proves that Neil Munro knew that there was a problem with Saxon plastic and, what's more, he had worked out exactly what."
"And you think this is why he was killed?"
"The license for Saxon plastic was worth millions."
"To the Saxon Company," said Jamieson.
"Saxon the company, Saxon the man." said Fenton.
"Point taken."
Charles Tyson came in to the room and broke the spell. He came straight over to Fenton. "I think I owe you an apology," he said.
"Let's just be glad it's over," said Fenton.
"I should have listened to you earlier. I could kick myself."
Fenton said, "You took the only line possible. Besides I was out of my head with worry over Jenny at the time."
Fenton's reference to Jenny had been for Jamieson's benefit. The policeman shifted his weight to the other foot but showed no signs of embarrassment. He said, "Perhaps you will let me know when you have completed the blood tests?"
"Will do," said Fenton.
Tyson asked, "What blood tests?"
Fenton told him about the donor who was on his way.
For Maxwell Kirkpatrick, senior clerk with the Scotia Insurance Company (est. 1864) this was the kind of call he had been waiting for all his life. His previous pinnacle of achievement in becoming secretary of the Grants Hill Church of Scotland Badminton Club (Monday Group) was now dwarfed thanks to a blood group that set him apart from mere mortals.
As the white police Rover with the fluorescent orange stripe squealed through the gates of the hospital and genuflected to the front door Maxwell got out and looked up at the Latin inscription above the stone arch. A missionary zeal shone from his eyes. He didn't understand it but somehow it seemed right. The policemen fired off a two door salute and drove off leaving Maxwell to enter reception. "Good day," he announced in tones that suggested he might also collect cigarette cards and go train spotting, "I understand that…you need me."
Tyson took the blood from Kirkpatrick and handed the full syringe to Fenton who ejected half the contents into a regular test tube and the rest into a Saxon plastic one. The click of the stop watches sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet of the room.
As time passed Kirkpatrick found it increasingly difficult to maintain his expression of expectant interest. His smile began to pucker like a beauty queen held too long on camera and his eyes moved backwards and forwards between Fenton and Tyson as he searched for clues from the pre-occupied men.
"This one has gone," said Tyson quietly. He tapped the side of the tube with his pen to make sure.
"This one hasn't," said Fenton who was monitoring the Saxon tube.
"Completely clotted," said Tyson.
"Quite, quite fluid," said Fenton.
"Game, set and match." said Tyson. He turned to Kirkpatrick and apologised for his rudeness. He explained what they had been looking for.
"Do you mean…there is no patient?" asked Kirkpatrick with an air of disappointment.
Tyson, sizing up the man, assured him that what he had just done would be instrumental in the saving of many lives. Fenton added his agreement and Kirkpatrick beamed. "Just doing what little I could," he said with a downward cast of his eyes.
"We are very grateful," said Tyson. "I'll ask the police to see to it that you are taken where you want to go."
"Really?" said Kirkpatrick, his eyes opening wide. He had not reckoned on being returned to the office in a po
lice car. This was an added bonus. Would they use the flashing light on the return journey? And would a constable hold the door open for him when he got out? By God, this would show that bitch in accounts that Maxwell Kirkpatrick was not a man to be trifled with.
Tyson pulled on a pair of surgical gloves with traditional difficulty and took the test tubes to the sink as Inspector Jamieson arrived. He gently tipped the Saxon tube on to its side and let the blood stream out in a thin, even flow. "You know," he said, "It's quite ironic really, this stuff is probably going to turn out to be the most efficient anticoagulant known to man."
"I think Neil had plans to investigate that," said Fenton.
"How so?"
"He had a range of standard anticoagulants and a bottle of solvent in a locked cupboard in his lab. I think he must have been planning on trying to solubilise the plastic in order to test its anticoagulant capacity before he realised the significance of the blood groups."
Fenton was intrigued by the amount of care that Tyson seemed to be exercising in dealing with the plastic test tubes. As he checked his gloves yet again for signs of damage he became aware that Fenton was watching him. He said quietly, "Worked it out yet?"
The truth dawned on Fenton. "The dirty tube…it wasn't a dirty tube at all. It was your blood! You have group AB blood."
"Correct. I was lucky, I haven't had any reason to come into contact with the damned stuff for any length of time but I don't relish coming that close again."
"Any news about Mr Saxon Inspector?" Tyson asked.
"Mr Saxon will be shortly helping us with our inquiries sir," said Jamieson getting up to leave Fenton screwed up his face at the official jargon but he had his back to the policeman.
"I take it you and Inspector Jamieson don't get on too well?" asked Tyson when the door had closed.
"Something like that," agreed Fenton.
"The business over Jenny?"
"I suppose so."
"You may not like it but Jamieson was right to do what he did. On the face of it he had every reason to suspect Jenny and what's more, the very fact that he saw the link between the deaths in the hospital and the boy's death up north makes him good at his job!"