by Ken McClure
‘I hope everything’s all right,’ said Morag.
‘Everything’s fine,’ replied Bannerman, with his back to her.
‘I’ll leave you for a bit, then, when you’re ready, I’ll take you back to Professor Stoddart,’ said Morag.
‘No need,’ said Bannerman, turning to face her. ‘I can remember the way.’
‘If you’re sure?’
Tm sure.’
There was an old oak desk beside the blackboard. Bannerman sat down at it and opened the drawers to see if they had been emptied. In the main they had, although half an eraser, two pencils and a broken plastic ruler lingered on. He opened his briefcase and transferred some of his own things to them. He saw this as an act of self-psychology — a conscious effort to persuade himself that this was where he was going to be working for the time being. He was considering how oppressive the room was, when a slight knock came at the door. It was Morag Napier.
‘I forgot to give you these,’ she said. In her hand she held a series of brown cardboard files. These are the notes Lawrence and I made on the brain disease patients.’
‘Lawrence?’ asked Bannerman.
‘Sorry. Dr Gill, the man I work with.’
‘I hear he’s not around at the moment,’ said Bannerman, taking the files and resting them on his knee.
‘No, we’re very worried about him.’
‘No word at all?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Have the police been informed?’
Morag Napier looked uneasy at the question. ‘No,’ she replied, looking down at her feet. The feeling is that Lawrence’s disappearance was for domestic reasons.’
‘You mean he’s run off with someone?’ said Bannerman.
‘Something like that,’ agreed Morag, coldly.
‘Can I ask what makes you think that?’ asked Bannerman.
‘His wife,’ said Morag.
‘Oh,’ said Bannerman, ‘well, I hope he kept good notes,’ he said, tapping the files.
‘I think you’ll find everything you need to know there,’ said Morag.
‘Did you work with him on the MRC survey?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Then you know all about the three men who died?’
‘I went up to Achnagelloch with Lawrence when the report came in. I carried out the preliminary lab work.’
‘Are the bodies here in Edinburgh, or still up north?’
They are in the mortuary downstairs,’ said Morag. ‘Do you want to examine them?’
‘Yes,’ said Bannerman.
Today?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Bannerman found his way back to the office of George Stoddart, where Stoddart gave him some general information about the brain disease survey in the area that Lawrence Gill had been responsible for. He added the file to the others that Morag Napier had given him.
Stoddart opened up a map and spread it over his desk. He traced a pencil line round an area in the north-west of the country and said, ‘This is the area Lawrence was concerned with. The main communities are at Achnagelloch and Stobmor.’
Bannerman saw that the line Stoddart had drawn marked out an area to the west of the Invermaddoch power station. He asked, ‘What about east of here?’ pointing to it with his finger.
‘There are no people living to the east of the station within fifty miles,’ replied Stoddart. ‘It’s barren moorland, not even good enough for sheep.’
‘I see,’ said Bannerman.
‘Do you have access to the public health records for the area?’ asked Bannerman.
‘If you mean, do I know if the region has a higher than normal incidence of child leukaemia and the like, then yes I do. The figures are higher than for non-nuclear areas, but not high enough to cause alarm or be in any way conclusive in a statistical sense.’
‘How about the figures for carcinoma?’ asked Bannerman.
‘Again, the figures for tumours are statistically higher than the norm but the population for the region is so low that it’s very difficult to reach firm conclusions. Here they are.’ Stoddart handed Bannerman a clear plastic file.
‘Was it ever different?’ murmured Bannerman.
‘Pardon?’
Trying to make sense out of statistics,’ answered Bannerman. ‘It’s often a case of the singer not the song, don’t you think?’
Stoddart’s blank look said that he didn’t know what Bannerman was talking about. Bannerman said, ‘I think I’ve managed to collect enough in the way of paper to keep me busy for a bit. I wonder if someone could tell me how to get to my accommodation? I’ll settle in there and start going through these files.’
‘Of course,’ said Stoddart. ‘I’ll have someone drive you.’
That’s not necessary,’ protested Bannerman, but Stoddart insisted, saying that they had a pool of drivers ‘sitting on their hands’. ‘You won’t mind if it’s a van will you?’
The driver sent up from the pool to drive Bannerman was a short, round-faced man with ruddy cheeks and a lop-sided grin. His peaked cap was pushed to the back of his head, emphasizing a probable easy-going approach to life. ‘Let me take that for you,’ he said, stretching out to take Bannerman’s bag from him and opening the passenger door of a black, 15 cwt van with darkened glass windows at the back. It was no great challenge to guess what the van was usually employed in transporting. The driver confirmed this by saying, ‘It’s nice to have a live passenger for a change.’
‘Do you know Edinburgh at all?’ asked the driver, as they drove towards the castle.
Bannerman said not, adding, ‘I was a medical student in Glasgow many years ago.’
‘I’d keep quiet about that if I was you,’ said the man, with a grin.
As they turned into the High Street, the driver, who by now had introduced himself as Willie MacDonald, said, ‘You’ll be staying in the Royal Mile. That’s the main street in the old town of Edinburgh; it connects the Castle at the top with Holyrood Palace at the foot.’
They turned off into a courtyard on the left and Willie said, ‘Here we are, Darnley Court.’
Bannerman got out and looked up at a recently restored tenement building, judging by the cleanness of the stonework. There was a paved courtyard at the front with large flower tubs posted around it. In January they were empty, save for wet earth.
‘You are on the top floor,’ said Willie. He led the way into the building and went up with Bannerman to open the door and then hand him the keys.
‘This is wonderful,’ said Bannerman, walking over to the window to look at the view and marvel at how high up they were.
‘It’s a beautiful city Doctor.’
‘Breathtaking.’
‘You’re looking out over Princes Street Gardens, to the new town down there,’ said Willie, ‘and beyond that, the Firth of Forth with its islands.’
‘What’s the big one?’ asked Bannerman.
‘Inchkeith,’ replied Willie. He pointed out several other prominent landmarks far below them and joked that he hoped Bannerman had a head for heights.
Bannerman felt that at least one good thing had happened to him today. He thanked MacDonald and tried to tip him, but the driver declined, assuring him that Professor Stoddart would have his guts ‘for one of his practical classes’ if he accepted.
After a quick look round the apartment, Bannerman unpacked and took advantage of the coffee that someone had thoughtfully supplied along with a few other basic necessities in the kitchen. He pulled a chair over to the window, and settled down in it with his mug to peruse the files he had been given. He had barely begun when the telephone rang and startled him. It was George Stoddart.
‘I forgot to say,’ said Stoddart, ‘that my wife and I would be delighted if you would join us for dinner this evening?’
‘That would be very nice,’ replied Bannerman, thinking it would be nothing of the kind. He took down details of the address and agreed to be there for eight. There were few things Bannerman liked less than ‘ac
ademic’ dinners but he accepted it as part and parcel of life, a necessary evil. It did however, put paid to his plans to explore the neighbouring hostelries that evening. He got back to reading through the files.
FOUR
After an hour, Bannerman stopped reading and taking notes to make more coffee. He looked out of the window while the kettle boiled and mulled over what he had learned so far. The medical records for the region had failed to provide him with what he was looking for. Although it was true that there had been an increase in leukaemia and cancer in the area round Achnagelloch and Stobmor, it was not a striking one — even when he examined the raw data instead of the statistics, which he didn’t trust.
He had been hoping to find something in the figures to indicate that the radiation leak from the power station had been severe enough to affect the health of the local community. This, in turn, would have indicated that the levels of radiation around the immediate area of the power station would have been high enough to account for a mutation occurring in the Scrapie virus. A twelve per cent increase in childhood leukaemia sounded a lot, but it was based on a relatively small number of cases. It might have been due to a radiation leak but, on the other hand, it might not. This conclusion merited an expletive from Bannerman.
He sat down with his coffee and turned his attention to the details of the three deaths. It made alarming reading. The dead men had been employed as farm labourers on Iverladdie Farm, to the north of Achnagelloch. Only one of them, Gordon Buchan, had been married; he had lived with his wife in a tied cottage on the farm. The other two had stayed in lodgings in Achnagelloch. An outbreak of Scrapie had been reported in the sheep of Inverladdie and all three had been involved in the disposal of the carcasses.
The men had died within a three week period of working on the slaughter, after suffering headaches, vomiting, and finally, dementia. One of the two bachelors had run amok in the streets of Achnagelloch, smashing windows and screaming obscenities before being constrained and taken to the cottage hospital where he died the following day. Witnesses had described him as being ‘out of his skull’.
The married man had been nursed by his wife until he had gone into a coma. His eyes had remained open but he had not been able to communicate or respond to anything she said. Just before she called the doctor for the last time, who in turn called the ambulance, the man had appeared to develop some unbearable itch and had scratched himself all over until he bled.
There were no details of how the third man’s illness had progressed. He had been found dead in his room by his landlady. She had, however, noticed that his arms had been scratched and bloody and there had been a wax candle in his mouth, as if he had been trying to eat it.
Bannerman knew that there was not much to be gained by studying the behaviour of deranged patients. Once control of the brain had been lost, the patient would be liable to do anything without necessary rhyme or reason. His or her entire behavioural pattern would be indicated by circumstances and events in his or her immediate surroundings. The reports of scratching, however, were alarming and Bannerman saw the significance in them. The sheep disease had been given the name Scrapie because of the infected animals’ habit of scraping themselves against fences, as if fighting a constant itch. It sounded like the men had displayed the same symptoms.
The pathology reports from Lawrence Gill and Morag Napier reported extensive spongioform encephalopathy in the brains of all three men, just as Bannerman had seen for himself in the microscope slides the MRC had sent him. He could find no loophole in the report as it stood. Many of the lab tests had yet to be completed but all the circumstantial evidence pointed to the dead men having been infected with Scrapie while handling contaminated carcasses on Inverladdie farm.
Gill had included some notes on Scrapie research. It had been established that the disease could be transmitted from one animal to another through scarified tissue. Bannerman supposed that this must be how the dead men had been infected. The agent had got into their bodies through cuts and grazes on their hands while they worked on the disposal of the slaughtered sheep. The supposedly mutant Scrapie virus had breached a normally impassable barrier and attacked their brain cells.
Bannerman had a nightmarish thought. Perhaps there was no species barrier at all. Maybe the virus could cross to man quite readily under normal circumstances but the incubation time was so long that the disease did not appear until old age. Under these circumstances it might be called senile dementia. The Achnagelloch mutation might be one which speeded up the disease rather than allowing it to cross any barrier. It was a complication he would have to bear in mind.
Although Gill had referred to the possibility of ‘mutant’ Scrapie in the notes he had not offered any thoughts on what might have caused the mutation. No mention was made of radiation or the proximity of a nuclear power station. If it hadn’t been radiation, what else could it have been? Bannerman wondered. Chemical or spontaneous mutation were the other two possibilities. Viruses were notorious for changing their structure. The AIDS virus did it all the time. The ‘flu’ virus did it too. UV radiation? UV light was a powerful mutagen. It was not inconceivable that changes in the ozone layer might allow UV levels to reach mutagenic levels. Chemical mutagenesis? Modern society produced a host of chemicals capable of altering DNA and inducing mutations. The possibilities seemed endless.
There were several practical questions that Bannerman wanted to ask. How soon after the diagnosis of Scrapie in the sheep of Inverladdie had the infected animals been slaughtered, and by what means? Had the corpses been buried quickly? Dead sheep lying around the hillside would be prey to vermin and carrion which would spread the virus.
Gill’s notes indicated that the local vet, Finlay, had been called in quickly by the farmer. According to Finlay’s report, the infected sheep had been slaughtered without delay and the corpses had been buried immediately in lime pits on the farm. Everything seemed satisfactory. Compensation had been paid to the farmer at Inverladdie and the veterinary inspectorate were keeping an eye on other farms in the area for further signs of Scrapie.
Bannerman found a problem with the research notes, however, when he tried to find out what experimental measures had been taken to investigate the pathology of the men’s deaths. He checked through all the papers again but found nothing. He felt sure that brain samples would have been sent to the Neurobiology Unit for testing in mice. He would check. He got out his diary where he had made a note of Hector Munro’s number, and called it. He remembered that Munro had said at the meeting in London that his people would be happy to give any help they could.
‘Munro.’
‘Dr Munro? This is Ian Bannerman. We met at the MRC in London.’
‘Of course, you decided to take the assignment then?’
‘This is my first day,’ said Bannerman. ‘I’ve been going through the case notes and I find I need some information.’
‘Fire away.’
‘I presume Gill asked your people to test the brains of the dead men for confirmation of slow virus infection and to measure incubation times in mice. Do you have any results yet?’
‘I’m afraid you presume wrongly,’ replied Munro. ‘Gill did not send us anything from the autopsies.’
‘But your people are the acknowledged experts on this sort of thing!’ said Bannerman. The short incubation time is one of the most striking and worrying features about this whole business!’
‘I wouldn’t disagree with that,’ said Munro, ‘but nothing has come to us. I supposed that Stoddart’s people were carrying out their own investigation.’
Bannerman let out a sigh of frustration. ‘Departmental politics,’ he complained. ‘I’ll check on that. In the meantime would you mind if I sent you some brain biopsies for mice inoculation. I understand the men’s bodies are in the medical school here in Edinburgh. I’ll take the samples myself.’
‘We’d be delighted to help in any way,’ said Munro. The sooner we got this sorted out the better.’
Bannerman put down the phone and cursed under his breath. What the hell was Gill playing at? He must have seen the awful implications in the men’s deaths, and yet he had failed to send samples to Munro’s Unit, and he had picked this very moment to bugger off with some dolly-bird. ‘Clown!’ he murmured. He called Stoddart to be told by his secretary that he had left for the day. He looked at his watch and muttered, ‘Short day George.’ He remembered that he would be seeing him later for dinner. He could ask about it then.
The Stoddarts lived in a spacious Georgian Flat in Edinburgh’s new town, the elegant area to the north of the castle and Princes Street, favoured by the professional classes. The room was freezing. Bannerman had to exercise great restraint in not rubbing his arms to keep the circulation going. A ‘small problem’ with the hearing, as George Stoddart called it, had been compensated for by placing a single-bar electric fire at the head of the dining-room. In a room which was thirty feet long and something like fourteen feet high, this did not make a lot of difference.
The room was also oppressively quiet. Bannerman was the only guest, since Morag Napier and her fiance? had had to call off at the last moment. Every clink of the cutlery seemed to resound in the long silences that punctuated the meal between infrequent, staccato bursts of polite conversation.
Bannerman gathered, when introduced to Stoddart’s wife, that she did not have a medical background. He therefore thought it improper to pursue the subject of brain pathology while eating the haggis which the Stoddarts had thought appropriate to welcome him to Scotland. He had managed to glean, however, that she was a leading light of the university wives’ ‘Friends of Rumania’ circle, and did his best to make conversation about that.
Stoddart seemed totally uninterested in anything his wife had to say and would interrupt, at will, with completely unrelated observations. ‘Of course I’m a pituitary man myself,’ he suddenly announced in the middle of a discussion about orphanage conditions. ‘Really?’ said Bannerman, embarrassed on behalf of Stoddart’s wife, who looked down at the tablecloth and appeared to be holding her tongue in check.