by Ken McClure
‘You can pour us both a drink and make the world go away for a couple of hours.’
It was late when Steven got back to his hotel but he downloaded the new information from Sci-Med on to his laptop and worked his way through it. He put to one side the extra information he’d requested on Barclay and the others while he concentrated on the new wildcard. It was easy to see how Public Health had reached their conclusions about the new case, because the patient was Sister Mary Xavier, a Benedictine nun living in an enclosed, contemplative order. The sisters had little or no contact with the outside world, and Public Health had established that Sister Mary had neither been outside the walls of the convent nor met with anyone from the outside world during the past several months.
Initial puzzlement gave way to the more positive feeling of excitement: Mary Xavier must hold the key to the mystery. She was a nun: there would be no secret boyfriends, no casual liaisons with strangers, no trips abroad and no possibility of contact with rogue animals. If he could find out how Sister Mary Xavier had contracted the illness, he would solve the whole puzzle of the outbreaks.
He learned that the sick nun had been born Helen Frances Dooley in the town of Enniscorthy in the Republic of Ireland, where she had been orphaned at the age of four. She was now thirty-six and had been in the enclosed order for the past eleven years. She had fallen ill eight days ago and the GP who looked after the sisters had been called in when her condition deteriorated. He recognised the problem immediately, after all the recent publicity, and raised the alarm. Public Health had seldom had such an easy time of it when it came to the isolation of patient and contacts. The nuns had already done that themselves. It was, after all, their way of life. The authorities had, however, called in one of the Swedish mobile laboratory units to deal with contaminated diagnostic material and the team had already established that Sister Mary was suffering from the new strain of filovirus.
Steven started out soon after breakfast and made good time over the ninety miles or so to Hull, but it took him almost as long again to find the convent, which was in a small wooded valley about eight miles north-west of the city. It was not signposted: there was no need for it to be, as the sisters did not welcome visitors or intrusion into their privacy. When he eventually found the old building, which looked as if it had been a rather grand residence at one time, he found that the police had cordoned off the approaches with chequered ribbon tape.
Two officers were sitting in a police Panda car out of the rain. He could also see the Swedish mobile lab at the side of the building. Steven showed his ID to the officers and asked what was happening. He was told that the patient was being looked after in the west wing of the building on the ground floor, which had been sealed off from the other areas. A separate entrance had been fashioned by the Swedish lab team, who had adapted the old French windows on that side of the building to create a secure tunnel. Apart from the sisters who were looking after Sister Mary, the others were going about their normal daily routine and had requested that there be as little disruption to their lives as possible.
Steven walked up to the main, stone-arched entrance and knocked on the heavy wooden door. There was no answer, but for some reason he didn’t expect there to be. He turned the brass handle and entered a dark, musty-smelling hall with threadbare carpets and large, forbidding furniture. Only the cross on the wall said that it wasn’t a suitable residence for Count Dracula.
An elderly nun crossed the hall at the junction at the end, head bowed, hands in her sleeves, but she didn’t notice Steven standing there and was gone before he could say anything. He continued slowly up to the junction where corridors diverged left and right and stopped there. Not wishing to pry any further, he waited at the intersection for someone else to appear. Eventually a young nun, wearing thick-lensed glasses and looking painfully scrawny despite her voluminous robes, came towards him.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, sounding annoyed. ‘You shouldn’t be in here.’
‘I’m sorry. No one answered my knock. My name is Steven Dunbar. I’d like to speak to Mother Superior if that’s at all possible?’ He handed the nun his ID and she held it up close to her face, turning slightly to catch more light as she read it.
‘Wait here. I’ll ask Reverend Mother.’
Steven watched the girl knock on a door about twenty metres down the corridor to the right. She disappeared briefly, then reappeared and beckoned him with an exaggerated circular motion of her arm. Steven reckoned that this was because she couldn’t actually see him at that distance. He walked towards her and was shown into a small, perfectly square room with a vaulted ceiling, where the Reverend Mother got up from behind a carved rosewood desk to greet him — although doing so made little difference to her height. Steven saw that she had a purple birthmark covering most of the right side of her face and a large blind cyst disfiguring the left.
Her voice, however, was mellifluous and pleasant. ‘Dr Dunbar, how can I help?’
‘I’m trying to find out how Sister Mary Xavier contracted her illness, Reverend Mother. I need to ask you some questions about her movements and whom she might have come into contact with recently.’
‘As I told those who came before you, young man,’ she said, ‘Sister Mary’s movements were confined to this house and the sisters here were her sole companions.’
‘But with respect, that isn’t possible, Reverend Mother,’ insisted Steven. ‘There has to be a link with the outside world, otherwise the implication would be that the virus originated here in the convent, a spontaneous creation.’
‘All things are possible with the Lord, Doctor.’
‘Are you suggesting that the Lord created a virus specifically to kill Sister Mary Xavier?’ said Steven, mildly irked at the platitude and the terminal complacency of the deeply religious.
‘I don’t think that He would necessarily construe it that way.’
‘How would He construe it, Reverend Mother? Viruses like the one infecting Sister Mary cannot exist outside a living host. Their only function is to kill.’
‘Perhaps their only function known to us, Doctor.’
Steven conceded gracefully. ‘You say you’ve already been asked about Sister Mary’s movements?’ he asked.
‘The people from the Public Health Service were as adamant as you that our sister must have been in contact with the outside world during the last few weeks, but the simple truth is that she has not been outside these walls for much longer than that. Neither has she had contact with anyone other than the sisters and perhaps the priest who comes to hear our confession. I myself can guarantee that.’
‘I take it the good father is keeping well, Reverend Mother?’
‘Apart from being concerned about Sister Mary Xavier’s health, Father O’Donnell is as well as any seventy-year-old can reasonably expect to be.’
Steven wondered if the Reverend Mother was reading his mind. The intelligent look in her eyes said that she might well be and that was why she had volunteered the priest’s age. He decided against asking for an antibody test on him. ‘As a matter of interest, when did Sister Mary Xavier last go out into the world, Reverend Mother?’ he asked.
‘Ours is a contemplative order, Doctor. We tend not to go out into the world at all. Rather, we pray for it and everyone in it.’
‘I see,’ said Steven. ‘Then the sister has not left these walls in over a decade?’
‘It would not be quite true to say that,’ replied the nun. ‘Sister Mary did not enjoy good health. The doctors decided last year that she needed an operation so she went into St Thomas’s Hospital in Hull for a few days some nine months ago to have it done. The Lord saw fit to return her to us fit and well.’
‘Good,’ said Steven. ‘What exactly was wrong with her?’
‘She lacked energy and tired easily; she often had to struggle for breath,’ replied the nun. ‘She gave us cause for alarm on more than one occasion and came dangerously close to collapse, but since the operation she’s been as ri
ght as rain, praise the Lord.’
‘She’ll need all her energy to fight this virus,’ said Steven.
A knock came to the door and a sister appeared to say that Reverend Mother was required immediately: Sister Mary Xavier was asking for her.
‘Of course,’ said Steven as she excused herself. He watched the two women bustle off down the corridor to the west wing, and then left the building. He sat in his car, wondering how someone who had not been outside the convent for nine months could possibly have contracted viral haemorrhagic fever. As he admitted defeat, a single bell began to toll and he knew instinctively that it was the death knell for Sister Mary Xavier.
FOURTEEN
Listening to the sombre sound of the bell, Steven wondered if it might not be tolling for all he had been taught about the mechanics of viral infection. None of this made any sense. Viruses needed a living host to maintain them and allow them to replicate. They did not have the wherewithal to lead an independent existence, not even as a simple sleeping spore, in the way that some bacteria could. Sister Mary Xavier must have contracted the infection from a living source, or else the textbooks would have to be re-written. The thought brought a wry smile to his face. Textbooks were always being re-written: it happened every time a fact emerged to take the place of expert opinion.
Steven was determined to keep thinking along logical lines. None of the other nuns was ill so Mary Xavier must have picked up the virus outside the convent. That left the unpleasant little fact that she hadn’t been outside the convent in the last nine months. Steven cursed in exasperation and leaned forward to rest his forehead on the top of the steering wheel while the tolling of the bell and the patter of the rain on the roof continued to mock him.
On impulse, he decided to drive into Hull and ask at St Thomas’s Hospital about the nature of Sister Mary’s illness and subsequent operation. He couldn’t see how it would help, but he would be amassing more information about a wildcard patient and, until such times as answers were forthcoming, no one could say what was going to be relevant and what was not. In the meantime, doing anything was better than doing nothing.
Mr Clifford Sykes-Taylor, FRCS was not at all sure about divulging information about his patient, and said so in no uncertain terms. He treated Steven to a monologue about slipping standards of patient confidentiality and the erosion of the patient-doctor relationship. He was a short, tubby man but with all the self-confidence in the world and a booming voice that belied his size. A spotted bow tie assisted in his quest to establish presence.
Steven imagined that he might have to stand on a box at the operating table, but certainly no one would have trouble hearing him.
‘I do have the authority to ask you for this information,’ said Steven calmly.
Sykes-Taylor sighed and said, ‘The authority, yes, of course, the authority, always the authority. Well, I’m not at all happy about authority’s role in this. I see it as a betrayal of my patient’s trust, and in my book my patient comes first. So far you haven’t given me one good reason why I should tell you anything.’
‘I’ll give you three if you like,’ said Steven. ‘One, like you I am a doctor, and the information will go no further. Two, I have the legal right to compel you to give me it if necessary. Three, your patient is dead; she died an hour ago.’
Sykes-Taylor looked surprised and then alarmed. ‘I hope you’re not here to suggest that my surgery played any part in her demise?’ he said, suddenly suspicious and defensive.
A surgeon’s epitaph for his patient, thought Steven. ‘No, Mr Sykes-Taylor, I’m not suggesting anything of the sort,’ he said. ‘But I would like to know why Sister Mary Xavier required your services in the first place.’
A look of relief spread over Sykes-Taylor’s face. ‘People sue if you as much as look at them the wrong way these days,’ he said, managing a half-smile for the first time. ‘Bloody legal insurance has gone sky-high this year, I can tell you. I sometimes wonder why I bother operating on the buggers, for all the thanks I get.’
Steven wondered what had happened to agonised concern about patients’ interests, but didn’t think it in his own interest to say so because Sykes-Taylor had got up to open his filing cabinet. He returned to his desk and flipped open a bulky cardboard file, slipped on half-moon glasses and began reading.
‘Ah yes, the good sister had a heart problem — she’d had it for the past five years or so. It manifested itself in the usual way, a lack of energy, breathlessness, that sort of thing. She was initially diagnosed as having a weak mitral valve — it was operating at around seventy per cent efficiency, but until the beginning of the year she wasn’t considered a high-priority case. At her check-up in December last year, however, it became apparent that the valve was becoming weaker and the stenosis worse: we thought there was a chance that it might fail completely, so we listed her for corrective surgery. She was brought in in February. She wasn’t in hospital long and the operation was straightforward and, as far as we were concerned, very successful. She left here feeling like a new woman and, to my knowledge, she hasn’t had any problems since — apart from the fact that she’s now dead.’
‘Nothing to do with her heart,’ said Steven.
‘Thank God for that,’ said Sykes-Taylor.
The milk of human kindness is not strained, thought Steven. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…
He drove back from Hull feeling thoroughly depressed. He had felt sure when he set off that morning that this would be the day when he made definite progress but now here he was, driving back through the rain with an apparently insoluble puzzle for company instead of an answer.
As he entered the outskirts of Manchester and headed towards the city centre he saw newspaper stands featuring the word ‘Disaster’ prominently as the ‘hook’ on their advertising hoardings. Intrigued, he stopped and bought a paper, only to find that the story was the commercial disaster of Manchester’s Christmas. City stores’ takings were down by more than 60 per cent on the previous year. Fear was keeping people away from the shops. Good, he thought. Let’s have an old-fashioned Christmas, folks — just like the ones we used to know.
There hadn’t been time the previous evening to go through all the new material from Sci-Med on the wildcard patients, so Steven applied himself to it as soon as he got in. There was a lot on Humphrey Barclay, ranging from school reports to his dental records. He had been fined twice for speeding over the last ten years, and had spent three days in hospital in 1997, having a wisdom tooth removed.
This last piece of information reminded Steven of something in the original Sci-Med file about Barclay having been ill more recently, that being the reason for his poor rating at annual appraisal time. He looked out the file and found that Barclay had undergone heart surgery in the early part of the current year. Like Sister Mary’s operation, it had been straightforward and he had made a full recovery. No further details were available.
Steven’s satisfaction at having found some common factor, however tenuous, between two of the wildcards was greatly tempered by the fact that it hardly seemed relevant. Both Barclay and Mary Xavier had undergone successful surgery in the past year and both had made a full recovery. So what? Almost half-heartedly he thought he’d better check Ann Danby’s file and, to his no great surprise, he found no mention of surgery in her medical records, and the record seemed complete.
He was about to dismiss the surgery angle as mere coincidence when he reminded himself that Ann Danby’s status had changed. She was no longer a wildcard: she was a contact, because she had contracted the disease from Victor Spicer. Spicer was the real wildcard in the Manchester pack: it was Spicer’s medical records he should be looking at, and they were not yet available. The same applied to Frank McDougal. Steven contacted Sci-Med and asked for more details on Barclay’s illness and also for McDougal’s medical history. As for Spicer, he would go and see his wife, and find out for himself.
As he drove through the city, Steven was struck by ho
w quiet it was. It was just after seven in the evening but it felt more like three in the morning. It was unusually dark. Many neon signs had been switched off because the premises they advertised were closed until further notice or FOR THE DURATION OF THE EMERGENCY, as the signs outside said. Pubs remained open at the licensee’s discretion, as did off-licences, the authorities having decided that closing them would be tantamount to prohibition, a measure not noted for its success in the past. Buses still ran, but on a reduced service schedule, and the night service had been abandoned altogether.
On his way to Spicer’s house, Steven came across three ambulances, blue lights flashing as they ferried patients across town, but there was no call for their sirens in the light traffic. Their silence added to the air of surrealism. Thinking about their destination made Steven wonder if Caroline would be working at St Jude’s this evening. He resolved to drive down there after he had spoken to Matilda Spicer.
He was shocked at her appearance when she opened the door. She was no longer the confident political wife with the ready smile and charm to spare. He had been wrong to categorise her as a traditional, stoic Tory wife, for in her place stood a pale, haggard figure with a haunted look that suggested she hadn’t slept properly for some time.
‘You!’ she exclaimed when she saw Steven. ‘Just what the hell do you want?’
‘I’m sorry. I hate to trouble you, but I need some more information about your husband, Mrs Spicer,’ said Steven.
‘Then why are you asking me?’ she snapped. ‘What the hell do I know about him? I seem to be the last person on earth to know what he gets up to.’
‘I’m sorry. I know this can’t be easy for you.’
‘Easy for me!’ she repeated. ‘Can you even begin to imagine what all this is doing to my daughter and me? We’ve lost everything, absolutely everything. You appear on the scene and, abracadabra, our life disappears in a puff of smoke. I don’t have a husband; Zoe no longer has a father; the charities I worked for don’t want to know me; even the au pair has been taken away by the agency — apparently we’re no longer a suitable placement for her.’