Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘I promise,’ she said softly. ‘Really, really promise. No strings. No expectations.’ Her warm body pressed against the fabric of my sports jacket, still chilled from the outside evening air. I stepped back.

  She took no notice.

  ‘I’ve grown up a lot since we last met.’

  ‘Alix,’ I said. ‘You should be spending time with someone your own age. Not an old chap like me.’ That phrase has been used so often, I thought, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been worn out.

  ‘I like older men,’ she said. ‘They don’t get sentimental and want babies.’

  I could hear Charlie saying she was looking for the father who had never engaged with her. I’d just say she was looking for mischief. But she pressed up against me again and her warmth flooded me so that after a moment’s awkward hesitation, I did what most men would do. I put an arm around her and kissed her. It was very nice. ‘I’m not sure I have any condoms,’ I said and it sounded pathetic.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. I come with a clean bill of health. And I’m built for pleasure, not brutish reproduction. I’m not a breeder.’

  I was almost certain that at the bottom of my wash bag was an opened packet with only a couple missing. I disentangled myself from Alix and went to the bathroom. Sure enough, there they were. I looked at myself in the mirror. ‘Don’t do this, Stupid,’ a little voice said to me. ‘Send her packing.’ I recalled conversations I’d had with Charlie about our pattern with difficult women, its connection to the first woman in every man’s life—our impossible mother.

  I stayed a moment longer, irresolute, not seeing my face in the mirror. Then I deliberately pulled out the packet of condoms.

  Hell, I thought. I’ve always liked difficult women.

  Six

  I woke with a start hours later, listening to Alix’s steady breathing. Already, I was regretting the pleasure of the last few hours. This is a big mistake, the little voice kept telling me. Why don’t you ever listen?

  Unable to get back to sleep, I nearly jumped out of my skin when my mobile rang a while later. I groped to find it beside the bed, aware of Alix sitting up beside me. The outside lights around the quadrangle filtered through the blinds and I could see on the clock radio that it was nearly 4 o’clock. I went cold and it wasn’t just the chill of the night air. Thoughts of dread about my children filled my mind as I fumbled with the bed lamp and picked up the mobile.

  ‘Jack!’ It was Digby. ‘I’m ringing from the hospital! They’ve just admitted Livvy to Emergency. She’s terribly ill. She’s got some acute infection. I’m scared. I keep thinking meningococcal disease.’

  I was surprised that he’d rung me. After all, it wasn’t as if we were close friends. Maybe the poor bastard doesn’t have anyone else, I thought. I was on the verge of saying, ‘I’m sure she’ll be all right,’ but stopped myself.

  ‘She’s in the right place, then,’ I concluded, at a loss as to what to say next.

  ‘She’s in a dreadful way,’ he said, talking over me. ‘I’m so sorry—I haven’t given her the time she needed. I thought I could do everything. Now I see how wrong I was. I wish I’d never ever—’ His voice trailed away. ‘Jack, I’m scared.’ Sobs shuddered through my boss’s voice, sounds I’d never heard before.

  Now I was wide awake. ‘What are the doctors saying?’

  ‘They just don’t know. They’ve taken blood tests but God knows how long they’ll take to get a result. They’ve given her as many antibiotics as they dare. She’s resistant to so many of them already. One minute she was okay, bad chest cold but cutting up oranges for marmalade, next minute I’m ringing an ambulance.’

  He paused. I could hear the panic in his voice. I’d never heard Digby like this before. ‘She had a terrible headache and this awful cough. At first I thought it might be pneumonia. She had it once years ago and it really knocked her out. Now I’m thinking meningococcal disease.’

  ‘Take it easy. A lot of different illnesses start that way. It’s probably just one of those bad viruses.’ I said, attempting to console him. But I could tell he wasn’t listening.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  He rang off. The whole situation seemed unreal, as if I’d entered some sort of parallel universe where I’d found a naked woman in my bed and my boss had rung, almost hysterical. Except it wasn’t a parallel universe; it was mine and I was slap-bang in the middle of it.

  ‘What is it?’Alix was asking.

  I put the mobile down and got up, collecting clothing, shivering as I turned up the heating and dressed in the living area.

  ‘My boss’s wife has suddenly taken ill,’ I said. ‘That was him.’

  ‘You’re not going out at this hour?’ she said.

  I stopped short as I zipped my trousers. It was an automatic response, I realised, honed over years of jumping awake at call-outs to crime scenes.

  I looked more closely at the sleepy woman half-sitting up in my bed and remembered her stalking campaign, how she’d trampled an unfinished watercolour of mine. And like a dickhead, I’d allowed her back into my bed and now here she was, carrying on like a wife, wanting to know what I was doing.

  ‘I have to go out,’ I said, terse and relieved that this situation was giving me a way to escape. ‘You’re welcome to stay until a more convenient hour.’

  ‘You have such a quaint way of putting things,’ she said, resettling in the bed. ‘You don’t sound as if I’m very welcome at all.’

  I got my jacket from where it was draped over the wardrobe door. I wanted her gone in my absence. ‘The cleaners come round a bit after nine,’ I lied and waved goodbye from where I stood.

  She didn’t answer and I left, hurrying to the car in the freezing cold, driving through the almost deserted streets out to the hospital. My mind was full of the death of Dr Tony Bonning and I couldn’t stop the suspicion that arose in my mind. Livvy Worthington was a scientist, too. For an asthmatic such as Livvy, any respiratory infection can create complications. But Tony Bonning had presented with symptoms of a severe gastric illness, not a respiratory infection. Come on, I told myself. You’ve got Bacillus anthracis on the brain. And maybe Digby is also overreacting. But I couldn’t shake the bad feeling.

  As I parked the car, I rallied my thoughts, sure that Livvy had nothing worse than one of the vicious viruses that had been doing the rounds, and that my fears were one hundred per cent wrong.

  There wasn’t much activity on the ground floor of the hospital as I went to the front desk and asked after Mrs Olivia Worthington. The woman on the night desk rang through to the Intensive Care Unit and waited until someone up there answered the phone.

  She listened for a few moments and then hung up. The expression on her face had changed. ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.

  ‘My boss, Digby Worthington, is her husband. He just rang me,’ I said. ‘I’m here at his request.’ It wasn’t quite true.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘But Mrs Worthington is in isolation in the infectious diseases ward at the moment. Her husband is up there with the doctors. No visitors permitted, I’m afraid.’

  There was little I could do so I was about to leave a message that I’d called and retrace my steps when the lift doors opened and suddenly Digby was there, grey-faced, hair sticking up and tie undone. Coming out of the lift behind him, like some angel of disaster, was a tall woman in a nightie, pushing her drip post ahead of her. Digby pulled a handkerchief out and wiped his face and for a moment I thought he was about to burst into tears. Then he saw me.

  ‘Jack!’ he called.

  I hurried over and we stood there together a few moments, without words. He shoved the handkerchief away and looked around the foyer, disoriented and ashen faced. The shuffling woman turned slowly around her post, staring first at Digby then at me. I
saw that the tiny rosettes on his tie were actually tiny naked women.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ he finally said.

  As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the hell I saw in his eyes; that gaze of his fixed itself in my memory. Then he twisted away blindly, groping for the lift.

  ‘They’re not saying anything yet,’ he whispered, ‘until they get a positive ID on whatever this bug is. But I just saw the X-rays. The radiologist wasn’t saying much but it just didn’t look right to me. Her lungs looked clear enough, but there was swelling around them.’

  ‘She’s in the best place and in the best hands,’ I said. ‘Try not to worry too much. Is there something I can do?’

  His bloodshot eyes looked right through me. Then he shook his head.

  ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘I’m really frightened. You know what I’m thinking.’

  I didn’t answer him because I was thinking the same myself.

  I walked away from the reception area, stepping out into the freezing early hours of a Canberra winter morning, feeling helpless and useless in the face of Digby’s situation. Losing myself in work seemed very attractive and I hurried to my car. I had a lot to do and I needed to clear Digby’s desk as quickly as possible. By now, I expected to see a result one way or the other from the material I’d placed in the bio-hazard lab incubator hours ago. But I needed to fortify myself for what was going to be another long, hard day, and the gravelly feeling behind my eyes told me I hadn’t had enough sleep. There was muscle soreness, too, in my gluteus muscles. Too much sudden action after too long a period of celibacy. I didn’t want to go back to University House in case Alix decided to breakfast there, so I drove to a favourite café. Nikos smiled beneath his Cretan moustache, and nodded as I came in, greeting me as I picked up yesterday’s newspaper. I ordered toast, poached eggs and coffee, glancing at the article on Natalie Haynes, still fighting for her life. Touch and go, the doctors said. If they’d caught it early enough, the mother of three had a fighting chance.

  I checked my voice mail to find a message from late last evening; Dr Harry Marshall, senior pathologist, ringing from the morgue.

  ‘Jack,’ ran the message. ‘I’ve just closed up your murdered nun. She’s nice and tidy now. When are you coming over to have a look? I don’t know what it is she’s got carved on her leg, but it looks most intriguing.’

  I rang the morgue but it was too early even for Harry, so I put the phone back on my belt. Harry Marshall was an insomniac and often worked late into the night or extremely early hours when the rest of us were snoring. I polished off my poached eggs on toast and left most of the coffee, paid Nikos and got back into my car, putting the heater on full bore. I drove to work in the dawn, using my security pass to get in, the only sounds the early carolling of magpies in the darkness of the trees. A few lights were on in the buildings but I could have been the only person alive on the premises and the locked offices and empty corridors hummed softly as technical machines and computers worked away in the stillness. It was smooth white noise, unbroken by the footsteps and desultory chat that were part of the usual soundscape of the place later in the day.

  As I passed the small glass window in the crash doors on the way up to my level, I was surprised to see someone in full gear in one of the hot suites. Some keen bugger, I thought.

  I geared myself up, and went straight to work. I lifted out the samples Detective Sergeant Tomlins had couriered down for me and examined them. The Sydney pathologist had labelled his specimens clearly and I carefully took them over to the workbench where I delicately sliced tiny sections of tissue from the lung and mediastinum, the area between and around the lungs. I prepared several different Petri dishes, and on each of them I streaked a tiny drop of sample material. I now had half a dozen glass dishes, each inoculated with anthrax-infected tissue. I labelled and dated them and loaded them into another bio-hazard incubator.

  Then I noticed that the red light on the computer had started flashing an alert, indicating that the plate I’d incubated yesterday from the solution taken from the red foil and chocolate fragments was showing a positive reaction; that is, some sort of bacterial growth. I took the Petri dish out and studied it. Even with the naked eye, I could just make out the growth rings of tiny colonies on the dish. In our records were the standard references against which we could check our findings and I knew this time it would be a fairly quick process. Because we already knew what had killed Tony Bonning, I didn’t have to do the time-consuming series of tests down a decision tree before identifying what was growing in my culture.

  Despite all my years as a bench analyst, I’m still affected by the drama of magnification, of seeing tiny galaxies and the living things that inhabit them. At first there was only a blur, but as I focused the microscope the colonies on the plate came suddenly into focus. What I could easily see now were three soft-edged circles, the bacterial colonies, one rather flat, the others slightly convex, and all of them showing the granular ‘ground glass’ quality that I knew was a characteristic of Bacillus anthracis. The irregular borders of the three circular colonies were already developing the comma-shaped edges which are a well-documented characteristic. I used a sterile glass rod to tease the centre of the largest colony and it behaved as I suspected it would, demonstrating yet another of its identifying characters, clinging to the end of the glass rod, standing up like whipped meringue. Many bacteria behave like this although the tenacity of the so-called ‘Medusa head’ projections showing around the colonies’ edges left me in almost no doubt as to what I was growing in the culture beneath me. I’d seen these before, but only in animal tests. Medusa, I knew from reading the kids’ tales from the Greek myths, was a terrible gorgon who turned men to stone, causing death to whomever looked upon her face.

  Carefully, I took a tiny sample from the colonies and streaked it over several small viewing slides, using a fixing agent to ‘set’ them, and then using polychrome methylene blue, the classic diagnostic test, to stain them. I slid one slide into position, adjusting the focus of the powerful light microscope, my eyes and mind taking in the frozen world on the screen. I refined the focus and it sharpened perfectly.

  Brilliantly lit like the crystals of a kaleidoscope, I saw the pathogen face to face. The bacteria that causes anthrax exhibits qualities that differentiate it from its two other harmless, and almost identical, relatives; but neither of them have a capsule which stains purple-blue. Now, there was no shadow of a doubt about what was lying on the glassware, with its shining blue rods, spores just visible in the sporangia: the ancient enemy to man and beast, Bacillus anthracis.

  Bacillus anthracis is a relatively large, rod-shaped organism, 1–1.2 micrometres wide, and about 3–5 micrometres long—and protected by its tough capsule. And here it was, plain to see. I thought of the malice involved in sending a man a chocolate heart laced with BA spores in the sure knowledge that he would die a horrible death and I determined to do everything in my power to bring this offender to justice.

  I pressed the ‘print’ command and watched while the screen images of the pathogen printed out. Any prosecutor or defence lawyer knows that a picture saves a thousand words. When we had an offender to bring to trial these images would be invaluable. I picked up the printed copy and studied it. If we had an offender to bring to trial, I corrected myself.

  I was now eager to bring myself up to speed with the latest research on the pathogen I’d just identified. It would be another eighteen hours or so before I could expect a positive result from the plates I’d prepared with extracts from Tony Bonning’s diseased body. Once I had those, I would compare them with those from the chocolate heart wrapping, and if they were identical—and I was pretty certain they would be—I could say in court that this pathogen came from this piece of confectionery.

  I went into the forensic library and logged on, checking with international microbiology sites. Over
the next couple of hours, I did some advanced study concerning Bacillus anthracis. Forensic labs such as mine often lag behind the latest developments coming out of research laboratories in universities around the world and it was imperative that I familiarise myself with the latest developments.

  When the first of the eager beavers started arriving, I was still reading and making notes. I’d already downloaded masses of refined research and piles of paper now lay in the printer tray for closer study. I found my eyes were blurring and regretted all over again the shindigs with Alix. Not only on the emotional and psychological levels, but also the physical. I needed a break, so I went outside, enjoying the morning unfolding and the sulphur-crested cockatoos clowning around on the grass. You’re getting too old, Jacko my lad, I told myself, to keep up with an athletic younger woman. I rubbed the muscles of my lower back, feeling sorry for myself. I tried to remember back a few years, if I’d had those sorts of regrets the time I spent the afternoon and the evening in Iona Seymour’s bed.

  I went back to my research, skipping over the less serious, cutaneous form of BA to concentrate on the two most dangerous forms of the disease, the ingestion form, which had killed Tony Bonning and the inhalational form of the disease, with which Natalie Haynes was even now battling. Both forms of the illness came on with severe headache, high temperature, nausea and muscle stiffness, the ingestion form moving rapidly to the symptoms of severe food poisoning. The inhalational form manifests itself in the airways before spreading after the victim breathes in spores. Natalie Haynes’s systems were fighting the toxicity of lethal factor; and so far, according to a related site, no biochemical means had been discovered to neutralise its toxic effect. Many tumours also produce deadly toxins as by-products, and any treatment that could neutralise toxicity would be a cause for joy. This was the area of research Livvy’s work covered, as far as I could glean from the little she’d let drop over the years.