Wildcard sd-3

by Ken McClure

  ‘Shit,’ murmured Steven, causing the man in the seat beside him to turn and say, ‘Nasty business. Is it me or do we get a new disease every time medical science cures an old one?’

  ‘Certainly seems that way,’ agreed Steven, but he was thinking that his chances of speaking to Mrs Danby had just gone out the window: journalists from all the other papers would be camping outside her door. When he arrived he went directly to the City General, where he had to wait while a hospital spokesman, grasping his moment of fame and sounding like the returning officer in a by-election, made a statement to the waiting press and TV crews at the gates. ‘What we can say at this moment is that the disease is definitely not Ebola,’ he concluded. ‘Thank you all for coming.’

  ‘How can you be sure at this stage?’ yelled one of the pack.

  The spokesman gave a superior little smile and said, ‘Because the scientists at Porton have assured us that-’

  ‘Porton? Porton Down? The biological weapons establishment? Are you telling us that Porton Down is involved in this?’ yelled the reporter.

  The spokesman paled. ‘This was just a routine-’

  ‘Jesus!’ exclaimed the journalist, scribbling furiously. Questions started to rain down on the hapless man. He held up his hands with about as much success as Canute addressing the waves. Everyone wanted to know about Porton Down’s interest in the virus.

  Steven slipped past the throng and showed his ID to a policeman on the gate, who waved him through with a wry smile. ‘Talk about a feeding frenzy,’ he said. ‘That lot make sharks look like tadpoles.’

  Steven found George Byars holding an impromptu meeting in his office with the head of the Public Health team, Dr Caroline Anderson, and her deputy, a frizzy-haired young man named Kinsella. He was invited to join them.

  ‘Problems?’ asked Steven.

  ‘We thought we were almost out of the woods but we’re not,’ said Byars. ‘One of the contacts went walkabout last night.’

  ‘Not necessarily the end of the world,’ said Steven.

  ‘The lady in question is the eighteen-year-old sister of the ambulanceman who’s lying in the special unit; she sneaked out last night and went to a city-centre disco,’ said Caroline Anderson.

  ‘But if she was feeling well enough to go dancing-’ Steven said.

  ‘She’s feeling ill this morning,’ interrupted Kinsella. ‘She’s got a headache and she thinks she might be coming down with flu.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ murmured Steven, realising the implications.

  ‘I thought we’d convinced all the contacts to wait out the incubation period,’ said Caroline.

  ‘You can’t convince teenagers of anything they don’t want to be convinced of,’ said Byars, as if from painful personal experience.

  ‘We were just discussing whether to put out an appeal for all the kids who were in the disco to come forward or… whether we should hold back at this stage,’ said Caroline.

  Steven mentioned what he’d heard the spokesman saying at the gate.

  ‘Damnation!’ exclaimed Byars. ‘He was supposed to go out there and reassure everyone that it wasn’t Ebola. Now it sounds like he’s convinced them it’s something worse; the virus from the black lagoon. This makes things even more difficult.’

  ‘If I go by the book,’ said Caroline, ‘I should call the kids in, but do we really think that we can convince a couple of hundred teenagers that they should stay indoors for the next two weeks? My feeling is that we’ll just sow the seeds of panic and alarm.’

  ‘Well, it’s your call, Caroline,’ said Byars quietly.

  ‘I know,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I’m not trying to pass the buck. There were two hundred young people in that disco last night. Do I put out an appeal for them to come forward, just so that I can tell them that they’ve been exposed to a deadly virus that we can do nothing at all about? Or do I hold off until we know more?’

  She didn’t expect an answer and none was forthcoming.

  ‘Like I say, it’s your call,’ reiterated Byars.

  ‘I’m not convinced that an appeal would do anything other than cause absolute panic among the kids,’ said Caroline. ‘I’m going to take a chance and hold off until we know there actually is a problem.’

  ‘After all, we’re not sure yet that this girl has the disease,’ said Kinsella. ‘It could still turn out to be flu or even just a hangover.’

  ‘Then it’s decided: no appeal?’ asked Byars.

  ‘It’s decided. I’m going to leave it for the moment,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe we’ll know more about the girl’s condition tomorrow.’

  Byars reminded them that there would be a full meeting at three in the afternoon on the following day, and Caroline and Kinsella left.

  When they had gone, George Byars asked Steven about progress in tracing the source of the outbreak.

  ‘I thought I’d found the link between the two outbreaks, but it turned out I was wrong,’ confessed Steven.

  ‘Professor Cane’s not been having much luck either. This damned virus seems to have appeared out of nowhere.’

  ‘No,’ said Steven, ‘it didn’t do that. That’s the one thing we can be absolutely sure about.’

  On the way back to his hotel, Steven asked the taxi driver to take him round by the street where the Danbys lived. As he had anticipated, a scrum of cameramen and news reporters were camped outside the bungalow, forcing the cab to slow down to squeeze between carelessly parked vehicles.

  ‘What’s your interest in this?’ asked the taxi driver, his tone betraying irritation.

  ‘Just curious,’ replied Steven.

  ‘Poor sods have enough to worry about without rubber-neckers like you turning up.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ agreed Steven distantly.

  ‘If you want my opinion-’

  ‘I don’t,’ snapped Steven, and they completed the journey in an uncomfortable silence.

  When he got to his room he ordered coffee and sandwiches from room service and leafed through the Sci-Med file again, looking for anything he might have overlooked. He suspected that it would be a couple of days before press interest in the Danbys died down enough to give him a chance to speak to Mrs Danby. He needed something to do in the interim and his attention finally came to rest on the firm that Ann had worked for, Tyne Brookman, the academic publishers in Lloyd Street. He should have thought of that before, he told himself. Ann might have had a special friend or colleague on the staff there, someone she might have confided in. It was something definitely worth pursuing, but first he would hire a car. It was beginning to look as if he would be here for some time. He asked the hotel desk to arrange it, and a Rover 75 was duly delivered to the car park within the hour.

  After a brief consultation with a street map in the hotel reception, Steven drove out of the car park to circle round the south side of the town hall on Fountain Street, intending to enter Lloyd Street. At the last moment he saw that entry was blocked at that end, as it was part of a one-way system, and had to skirt round the block on Albert Cross Street and enter from the west, off Deansgate.

  The premises of Tyne Brookman were located in a Victorian building, three storeys high and black with the grime of a century’s traffic. The high ceilings were at odds with the poor lighting arrangements, resulting in an ineffectual dull yellow light in the entrance hall and making the place depressingly gloomy. The frosted-glass door marked Reception in black stick-on letters jammed against its frame when Steven turned the handle. It juddered open when he applied a deal more force.

  ‘It sticks,’ said the young girl behind the desk, stating the obvious.

  Steven showed his ID and asked if he might speak to someone in charge.

  ‘Mr Finlay’s out and Mr Taylor’s at his brother’s funeral,’ replied the girl.

  ‘Someone else perhaps?’ ventured Steven, wondering why so many firms put an idiot at the interface between themselves and the public.

  ‘Can you give me some idea what it�
�s about?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Did you know Miss Danby, who worked here?’

  ‘Not well. She worked in computers.’

  ‘Then how about someone in computers?’ he suggested.

  ‘I could try Mrs Black — she works in computers,’ said the girl. She posed it as a question and Steven nodded. He looked about him while she made the call. Tinsel had been hung on the plain yellow walls. It fell in vertical strips at intervals of a metre or so. A single smiling reindeer galloped above posters advertising the firm’s latest books, pride of place going to A Molecular Understanding of Protein Interactions and A European View of American Corporate Law.

  ‘A couple of blockbusters there,’ said Steven when the girl had finished on the phone. She looked at him blankly, then said, ‘Mrs Black will see you. She’s on the floor above, in room 112.’

  Mrs Black turned out be an extremely attractive fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing a white blouse over a navy-blue pencil skirt. She got up from her desk and offered her hand when Steven entered. ‘Hilary Black. What can I do for you, Dr Dunbar?’ she asked in a friendly and pleasantly cultured voice.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Steven. ‘I’m trying to build up a picture of Ann Danby’s life so I’m doing the rounds, speaking to people who knew her. I take it that would include you?’

  ‘She was our systems manager.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m now our systems manager; I was Ann’s assistant.’

  ‘I see. Did you know her well?’

  ‘She was extremely good at her job.’

  ‘That isn’t quite what I asked.’

  ‘We had the occasional after-work drink together, a pizza once in a while, that sort of thing, colleagues rather than friends.’

  Steven nodded and asked, ‘How would you describe her?’

  Hilary Black sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. ‘Pleasant, responsible, reliable, intelligent, discreet…’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘Lonely? No, I don’t think so. Ann wasn’t lonely. Loneliness suggests a state that’s forced on one. That wasn’t the case with Ann. People liked her. She kept them at a distance through her own choice.’

  ‘What did you think when you heard that she’d taken her own life?’

  ‘I was shocked. We all were.’

  ‘How about surprised?’

  ‘Yes… that too,’ agreed Hilary but less surely.

  ‘You hesitated.’

  ‘Ann had something on her mind, something that had been getting her down for at least a month before she died. She hid it from most people, simply because she was used to hiding most things from people, but working together I could tell that she was worried or depressed about something, though she wouldn’t say what.’

  ‘You asked her?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to help but she wouldn’t let me. That was Ann, I’m afraid. But now I come to think of it, I remember thinking at one point that she had got over it. It was one day during the week before she died because she came in that day and was all smiles again. But it only lasted the one day.’

  ‘You can’t remember what day that was, can you?’ asked Steven.

  ‘Give me a moment.’ Hilary opened her desk diary and flicked through the pages before tracing her forefinger slowly down one of them. ‘It would have been a Thursday,’ she said. ‘Thursday the eighteenth of November.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Steven. Thursday, 18 November, was the day that had been marked in Ann’s appointments diary as the day she was due to meet V — for the last time, as it turned out.

  ‘Mean anything?’ asked Hilary.

  ‘Not on its own.’ Steven smiled. ‘But the pieces are building. Did Ann have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Not that she ever admitted to.’

  ‘That’s an odd reply.’

  ‘All right, no, she didn’t have a boyfriend,’ said Hilary.

  ‘But she did?’ ventured Steven.

  Hilary conceded with a smile. ‘Maybe she did. I had my suspicions. I think he was probably married.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she ever let slip a name?’

  ‘I thought she did once but then she covered it up so well that I sort of dismissed it as my imagination.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was telling her about an interview I’d seen on television with Michael Heseltine. John Humphrys was asking him about the Millennium Dome and she said something like, “Wotsisname says that’s a load of rubbish about urban regeneration,” and I said, “Who’s Wotsisname?” She sort of blushed and said, “Oh just someone I was talking to.” I know what you’re going to ask now but I don’t think I can remember the name. It was just a passing moment.’

  ‘If I were to tell you that his name begins with V?’ said Steven.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hilary, her eyes lighting up. ‘I remember now. It was Victor.’

  EIGHT

  ‘You haven’t said why you want to build up a picture of Ann,’ said Hilary. ‘I take it it’s her illness rather than her suicide that you’re interested in?’

  Steven agreed that it was.

  ‘It’s incredible, the papers are saying it was Ebola.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘But something just as bad?’

  Steven nodded. ‘Could be.’

  ‘But how would someone like Ann get something like that? She wasn’t exactly a jet-setter. I only knew her to go abroad once, and that was a few years ago.’

  ‘That’s what I have to find out,’ said Steven.

  ‘And you think that this man, Victor, might have something to do with it?’

  ‘I have to explore every avenue, as they say,’ said Steven. ‘Tell me, were you aware that Ann went hill-walking?’

  Hilary looked blank. ‘No, did she? That’s news to me. She didn’t strike me as the sort.’

  Steven felt that he’d just made progress. If the hill-walking had been kept secret, it was probably something that Ann had done with Victor. ‘Do you think I could see where she worked?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. I decided not to move in there, so you’re in luck. Her office hasn’t been touched.’

  Steven was shown into an office three doors along the corridor. It felt cold and unwelcoming, like a disused cellar.

  ‘Brrr, the janitor’s turned the heating off in here,’ said Hilary as she clicked on the lights. ‘Maybe I should just leave you to it?’

  Steven was left standing alone in the office that had been Ann Danby’s. It was large, square and high-ceilinged, like all the other rooms. It reminded him of a primary school classroom of yesteryear. It had two tall windows that looked out on to a brick wall less than twenty feet away. Steven walked over and looked down at the cobbled lane below, and saw litter blowing about in the breeze and the lights of the early-evening traffic on the main road at the end providing intermittent illumination. He sighed at the thought of working in such a place, sat down at the desk and switched on Ann’s desk lamp. The yellow pool of light was a welcome island in a sea of gloom.

  Steven found the same meticulous attention to detail in Ann’s office as he had found in her flat. Each project she had worked on had its own box file on the shelves above her computer, and the first page in each gave details of where on the computer the master files were stored and where back-up files could be found. She had recently been working on the design of a new payroll system for the company, and the amount of detail listed suggested that Hilary Black would have little trouble in carrying on where Ann had left off. A second project had been concerned with providing computer-generated graphics for the illustrations for a book on Italian Renaissance architecture, which was due to be published by the firm in the late spring.

  There was very little in the way of personal effects: no letters or cards that were not concerned with work, and the desk diary had been used exclusively for work-related appointments and meetings, with one exception. Ann had entered details of an appointment to have her hair done on Wednesday, 17
November, at 5.30 at a salon called Marie Claire. The date was interesting; it was the day before she had been due to meet Victor.

  There were a number of prints on the walls which Steven presumed were Ann’s own: they were mainly of popular Canaletto and Monet paintings but there was a less well known Rory McEwan watercolour of African violets that he paused to admire. The attention to detail was awe-inspiring. He could understand why Ann had liked it. On a bookcase there were a couple of framed photographs featuring Ann herself at company functions. One of them he’d seen at her flat. It was the one where she was wearing a pink suit and shaking hands with a man wearing a chain of office while a number of other men in suits looked on with fixed smiles. In the other she was in a group of people watching a lady with a large hat cutting a ribbon to declare something or other open, although it wasn’t clear what.

  ‘A very private lady,’ murmured Steven when he had finished. He put out the lights and went along to Hilary Black’s office to return the key.

  ‘Find anything?’ she asked.

  Steven shook his head. ‘Not really. She didn’t exactly put her personal stamp on things. There are a couple of photographs…’

  ‘Our centenary celebrations last year,’ said Hilary. ‘We put on an exhibition of our published work in the big room on the ground floor. You know the sort of thing, a celebration of all the titles we’d published. Local dignitaries came along and it was opened by the countess of something or other.’

  Steven smiled at the irreverence.

  ‘Hardly anyone came, apart from university types. I guess they’re about the only ones who understood the titles, anyway,’ said Hilary.

  ‘I don’t see many of your books on the shelves at WH Smith,’ agreed Steven.

  Hilary held up a book that had been lying on her desk. ‘ The Weaponry of Ancient Rome. It’s not exactly the heart-warming story of a boy and his dog, is it?’

  Steven smiled and thanked her for her help.

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘One more thing. Can you tell me where I’ll find a hairdresser called Marie Claire?’

  ‘Not your kind of place, I would have thought, but it’s not too far from here. Turn left when you go out the front door then take the second on the right.’