Wildcard sd-3

by Ken McClure

  The sound of a key being inserted in the front door broke Steven’s concentration. He had been led to believe that the police and health authorities had no further interest in the apartment. He was about to get up from his seat at the desk to investigate when an elderly couple appeared at the room door.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ exclaimed the man, clearly startled to have found him there. The woman’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with alarm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Steven, realising the couple must be Ann Danby’s parents. He felt more of an intruder than ever. ‘I’m afraid there’s been some kind of a mix-up. I’m Dr Steven Dunbar from the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I’m part of the investigating team. The police gave me your key. I understood that you wouldn’t be picking it up until tomorrow. I had no idea that you’d be coming here today.’

  ‘The police gave us a key yesterday,’ said Mr Danby. ‘It was the spare that we were going to pick up tomorrow. It’s just one damned misunderstanding after another with you people,’ he complained. ‘What more is there to investigate, for God’s sake? Haven’t my wife and I suffered enough?’

  ‘I’m sure you both have,’ said Steven sympathetically. ‘But there are still some important things to establish. If you can bear with me, I really would like to ask you a few questions now that you’re here.’

  ‘Questions, questions, questions.’ Danby sighed. ‘What d’you want to know this time?’

  ‘Did Ann have a boyfriend?’

  ‘My God,’ snapped Danby, ‘we’ve been through all this with the police already. She did not have a boyfriend. Was that some kind of crime that you keep asking about it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ replied Steven but he noticed that Danby’s wife had diverted her eyes when her husband was answering. It struck him as odd, perhaps the action of someone hiding something. It prompted him to say, ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody sure,’ said Danby.

  ‘And you, Mrs Danby. Ann never said anything to you about a special… friendship?’

  ‘You heard what my husband said.’

  Steven nodded but kept on looking at the woman, who was clearly uncomfortable with this line of questioning and more particularly with his persistence. He was more than ever convinced that she was concealing something.

  ‘This is very important. I promise you that anything you might tell me will be treated with the utmost discretion.’

  ‘There were no boyfriends,’ stormed Danby. ‘Now will you please leave? We’ve told you people everything we can. Now please leave us alone to do what we have to.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Steven asked gently.

  ‘Start clearing away our daughter’s effects.’

  Steven was uncomfortable with the prospect of having to tell the Danbys that they couldn’t do that until he’d finished prying into every corner of their daughter’s life, so uncomfortable that he decided to leave. He convinced himself that the chances of the meticulous Ann Danby having left anything around concerning V were remote and he felt optimistic about finding V on the passenger list.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out your way.’ Apart from anything else, he mused as he returned to the lobby, if push came to shove, Mrs Danby could probably fill him in concerning V.

  Steven took a taxi to his hotel and connected his laptop modem to the phone socket in his room. He made the connection to Sci-Med in London and collected the e-mail containing the passenger list for the Ndanga flight. He scanned it anxiously, and found that there was only one male passenger with a first name starting with V. He was Vincent Bell and he had been sitting in seat 31D.

  ‘Ring a ding ding,’ murmured Steven. His second thought, however, was that row 31 was a long way back from where the ill-fated Barclay had been seated in row 5. There did not seem to be a lot of opportunity for contact on board the aircraft. But they could have met at some other point in the journey, perhaps in the queue at the airport or sitting in the lounge, if places like Ndanga had departure lounges. At this juncture, however, it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that he trace Vincent Bell as soon as possible. He called Sci-Med and asked for their assistance in getting details about him and they responded quickly, furnishing him with basic information within the hour. They had obtained it from the passenger record compiled by the special reception centre at Heathrow where they had dealt with the incoming Ndanga flight. As one of the passengers not deemed to have been at high risk during the flight, Bell had only been asked to leave his name, address and the name of his GP, but that was enough. Steven now knew that Bell lived at 21 Mulberry Lane, Canterbury. Not the most convenient location from which to conduct an affair with someone in Manchester, but perhaps Bell was a travelling man, drifting up and down the motorways of the land six days a week in his company Mondeo. Alternatively, it could simply be a case of love knowing no bounds. As it often said in the personal columns of the papers, ‘good sense of humour essential’ but ‘distance no object’. He would soon find out for himself: he planned to travel to Kent in the morning.

  Steven looked at his watch and saw that he was going to be late for the meeting at City General if he didn’t get a move on. He rang down to the desk to order a taxi and had a quick shower before changing. The cab driver was none too pleased at having to wait, but money smoothed the way as usual, and before the journey was over the driver was giving Steven his thoughts on the current outbreak at the hospital.

  ‘Bloody junkies — they should shoot the lot of them. Once a junky, always a junky, that’s what I say. All this shit about rehabilitation is just a bunch of crap, a waste of bloody money. And now they’re passing on their diseases to innocent people. Bloody criminal it is.’

  ‘I didn’t know drugs were involved in the outbreak,’ ventured Steven when he managed to get a word in.

  ‘Drugs are involved in most things these days, mate, take my word for it. Ninety-nine per cent of all crime in this city is drug-related, one way or another.’

  ‘But I don’t see the connection with the problem at the hospital,’ said Steven.

  ‘The junkies are riddled with disease, mate, all of them. AIDS, hepatitis, salmonella, the lot, and then when they land up in hospital they start giving it to the nurses, don’t they? That’s how it happens, mate. Those poor girls have enough to contend with without those wasters giving them things. Shoot the bloody lot of them. It’s the only answer.’

  Steven got out the cab thinking that desert islands might have a lot going for them. He was preparing to apologise for his lateness as he entered the room, but found to his relief that the meeting had not yet started and there were still two other people to come. In the interim the medical superintendent, George Byars, introduced him to some of those present. There were too many names to remember, so Steven tried to memorise them in groups. There were three senior people from the Manchester social work department led by a short squat man named Alan Morely who obviously had a liking for denim clothes, and a team of five epidemiologists led by a sour-faced, grey-bearded man introduced as Professor Jack Cane. These people seemed seriously academic, thought Steven, narrow shoulders, bad eyesight and an ill-disguised impatience with the perceived stupidity of the rest of the world. There were four senior nurses, including the hospital’s nursing superintendent, Miss Christie, for whom no first name was proffered, and finally a small delegation from the Department of Health in London. This last group was fronted by an urbane-looking man named Sinclair who smiled a lot but looked as if he might be good at playing poker.

  Steven accepted a mug of coffee but was conscious while drinking it of hostile glances from the epidemiology group and he suspected they might be resentful of his presence. This was a situation he was not unfamiliar with, having encountered it often enough before on assignment. Outside investigators were seldom welcomed with open arms by those already on the ground.

  As a consequence, he had simply learned to be as self-sufficient as possible. If anyone offered
help it was a bonus. John Donne’s assertion that no man was an island might well be true, but over the years he had become a pretty accomplished peninsula. In his view, team players — those whom society set so much store by — moved at the pace of the slowest member of the team. That the earth went round the sun was discovered by Galileo, not by a team or a group led by him.

  The two missing people arrived; both were senior doctors from the special unit.

  ‘We’ve lost another two,’ said one by way of explanation.

  ‘The two you thought this morning?’ asked Byars.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any new cases?’

  ‘No, but assuming a ten-day incubation period at the outside — it was actually less for the Heathrow people — we’ve still got four to go. Touch wood, things are looking good at the moment.’

  ‘Then I think we have cause for optimism,’ said Byars. ‘How have the barrier nursing courses been going, Miss Christie?’

  ‘Very well. There was a good response to the call for volunteer nurses, as I knew there would be. I think we can safely say that we are on top of things at the moment.’

  ‘Well done.’ He turned to Morely and asked, ‘How about contacts? Any problems there?’

  ‘All the friends and relatives we’ve seen seem to understand the gravity of the situation and are reconciled to staying indoors for the ten-day period. We’ve had no real opposition at all,’ said Morely. ‘I think the same goes for the community nurses?’

  One of the nursing staff took her cue and agreed that this was the case.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Byars. ‘How about the academics? Any progress in establishing the source of the outbreak, Professor?’

  ‘Not yet,’ admitted Cane. ‘But we had one interesting piece of news this afternoon. Porton say that the Manchester virus is identical to the Heathrow one.’

  SEVEN

  Steven returned to his hotel with positive feelings about the meeting. He would have felt less happy with the news about the Manchester and Heathrow viruses being identical had it not been for his findings at Ann Danby’s flat. As it was, it just seemed to confirm that Vincent Bell was the link, something he should be able to establish beyond doubt next day. If he did, and if the medical teams in Manchester continued to keep tight control over the outbreak, there was a good chance that the whole affair might be consigned to history by the end of the following week.

  The only loose end left would be how Humphrey Barclay had contracted the disease in the first place. It might not be relevant in a practical sense if the outbreak could be eradicated without knowing, Steven conceded, but he suspected that the question was going to niggle away at him for some time. If the answer lay in Africa, as it seemed it must, that was probably where it would remain. It would be yet another secret of the Dark Continent.

  Steven flew down to London first thing in the morning and picked up a hired car from the Hertz desk at Heathrow. Traffic on the A2 was as bad as he expected, but he still managed to make Canterbury by lunchtime, and he left the car in one of the large car parks outside the city walls. He took a walk along the main thoroughfare in bright winter sunshine, looking for a street guide to tell him where Mulberry Lane was, but also because he wanted to take a look at the old city again.

  It was a while since he’d been there and he had a soft spot for Canterbury, having spent many of the summer holidays of his youth working on an uncle’s fruit farm out in the Kent countryside. He saw the area as quintessentially English, different from the North he was more used to, England’s brain rather than its brawn. The cathedral’s huge presence still dominated the city and seemed to influence everything in it from the names of the narrow streets to the contents of its bookshops, the weight of its history almost tangibly forming a bridge between past and present. A chattering group of choristers from the cathedral school, unselfconscious in their cassocks, passed by and reminded Steven that Christmas was little more than a month away. They’d be singing carols soon.

  Mulberry Lane, when he eventually found it, comprised a row of pretty little cottages backing on to the River Stour. It would not have looked out of place in a scene from The Wind in the Willows and he half expected Ratty and Mole to appear at any moment, arguing about nothing too important. He found the cottage he was looking for and walked up its meandering gravel path to knock on the heavy wooden door. After a short delay a stocky man with dyed auburn hair combed over a freckled, balding scalp opened the door and looked him up and down. He was wearing an apron with vintage cars on it and wiping his hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Mr Bell?’ asked Steven.

  ‘No, who wants him?’ asked the man. His voice had a lisp.

  ‘My name’s Dunbar. I’m an investigator with the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I’d like a word with Mr Bell.’

  The man turned away and called, ‘Vincent! There’s a big handsome policeman here to see you. You’d better have a good story, love, I can tell you.’ He turned back to Steven and said, ‘And you’d best come in.’

  Steven stepped inside the cottage, suspecting that his beautiful theory was about to turn to dust. Vincent Bell entered the room and with one word, ‘Hello,’ managed to blow even the dust of it away. Bell was overtly homosexual; he was clearly not Ann Danby’s secret lover.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Bell. He put admiring emphasis on the word ‘you’.

  ‘I understand you were a passenger on the ill-fated Ndanga flight recently, Mr Bell?’ said Steven, not at all sure what he was going to do now.

  ‘I was indeed and d’you know, I still wake up sweating when I think about it, don’t I, Simon? There but for the grace of God, I say.’

  ‘You haven’t been unwell at all yourself?’

  ‘No, love, right as rain. Can I tempt you to some lunch? We’re just about to have ours.’

  Steven was taken unawares by the offer, but with his theory shot to pieces and not having anything else to say he replied almost automatically, ‘That would be very nice, thank you.’

  He sat down at the table and was treated to carrot and coriander soup and a smoked mackerel salad, prepared by Simon and accompanied by chilled Australian white wine.

  ‘Now, what else would you like to know?’ asked Bell.

  The truth was, nothing, but Steven asked a few questions out of politeness. ‘Did you have any contact at all with the sick passenger, Humphrey Barclay?’

  ‘No, thank God. He was in a right state, by all accounts.’

  ‘How about a woman named Ann Danby?’

  Bell looked blank. ‘No, sorry. Was she on the flight, too?’

  ‘No, she lives in Manchester.’

  ‘Poor woman. Where does she come into it?’

  ‘I don’t think she does any more,’ said Steven resignedly. ‘Have you visited Manchester recently, Mr Bell?’

  ‘Not recently, not ever, if truth be told — and let’s keep it that way, that’s what I say,’ replied Bell, getting a nod of agreement from his partner. ‘They say it rains there all the time.’

  Steven smiled and said, ‘Don’t think me rude but can I ask you why you were in Ndanga?’

  ‘Business, love. African arts and crafts. Simon and I run a business marketing African carvings and artwork through zoos and wildlife parks. We needed some new lines so I went over to get them. Got some super carved rhinos. Would you like to see them?’

  Steven said that he should really be going, as he had a lot to do. It wasn’t strictly true but he did have a date with depression about his wasted journey and for that he needed to be on his own. He had been wrong. Whoever V was, he certainly wasn’t Vincent Bell.

  The sky had darkened during the course of lunch and it started to rain as he walked back to the car. It suited his mood. He sat for a while in the car park, pondering on the fickleness of fate and wondering what his next move was going to be. Bell was the only male passenger on the manifest with a first name beginning with V, but there had been a couple of females whom he’d dismissed at the time in the li
ght of Ann Danby’s valediction about men. He wondered if he’d been wrong to do that. Her comment, he supposed, could have been unconnected with the end of her love affair… but he still thought not. That would be just too much of a coincidence. He decided against visiting the females on the list for the time being. Instead, he would have a try at making Ann Danby’s mother reveal what she knew about her daughter’s relationship. Something told him that she knew exactly who V was.

  Steven spent the night in his own flat in London before flying back up to Manchester in the morning. His spirits weren’t exactly high when he boarded the aircraft, but when he opened out the newspaper he’d been handed by the flight attendant, they hit rock bottom.

  ‘IS IT EBOLA?’ asked the headline.

  The story, concentrating on the Manchester outbreak, showed that the paper had identified the source of the outbreak as Ann Danby. It emerged that Ann’s mother had telephoned the paper, outraged that her daughter had been portrayed variously as a prostitute and a drug addict by the tabloids, when in fact she was neither. Having got that message across, she had gone on to tell the paper about the questions the authorities had been asking her and her husband. The paper had latched on to queries concerning Africa and connections with people on the Ndanga flight. ‘FIVE DEAD IN LONDON, FOUR IN MANCHESTER. HOW MANY MORE?’ it wanted to know. It followed up by accusing the authorities of covering up the truth and then drew parallels with the BSE crisis: ‘HAVE THEY LEARNED NOTHING?’