Pestilence (32 page)

“You’re a cynical bastard MacQuillan,” said Saracen.

“I’m a realist,” countered MacQuillan. “A blessing in disguise, they’ll say. The ways of the Lord are strange. Some kind of timely miracle. Thanksgiving services and now a look at the weather …”

“You’re drunk,” Saracen accused.

“I am,” agreed MacQuillan, “but that doesn’t alter the fact that Beasdale, this afternoon, reduced the administration staff to a minimum and sealed off the waterworks. No one now leaves or enters. Don’t bother trying to phone anyone either. STD has been suspended, it’s local calls only.”

Saracen had had enough; he got to his car and headed for Claire Tremaine’s flat.

“You look ghastly,” she said.

“I’m just tired,” said Saracen. “Alan thought you should see this.” He handed Claire the medallion.”

Claire took the object and held it closer to the table lamp beside her. “Where on earth did you get this?” she exclaimed and Saracen told her. A sudden look of concern filled her eyes and prompted Saracen to reassure her that the medallion had been disinfected. Claire got up and came back with a book. She showed him an illustration and said, “Same emblem.”

“But it’s what the emblem stands for!” continued Claire, her voice full of excitement. “It’s the crest of Skelmoris Abbey, the monastery we have been looking for!”

“Oh,” said Saracen, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. This wasn’t good enough for Claire who insisted, “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand how important this is?”

Saracen had to remind himself that Claire had no way of knowing what MacQuillan had predicted for Skelmore, no way of knowing the awful secret that made everything else unimportant to him. “Of course, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not thinking clearly.”

“Can you find out where the boy got this?” asked Claire, her eyes bright with enthusiasm.

“He has plague, Claire,” said Saracen. “He’s close to death.”

Claire pursed her lips in frustration. “Damnation, to be so near and yet so far,” she murmured. She became aware of the disapproving look on Saracen’s face and had the grace to be embarrassed. “I’m sorry, that was unforgivable,” she said. “I know you must think this silly and unimportant and you’re probably right but seeing that emblem …” She held up the medallion. “This is the most exciting moment of my career. It proves the existence of the Skelmoris Abbey beyond doubt.”

Saracen nodded. He respected professional enthusiasm but sometimes it was hard to take.

“Can you stay?” asked Claire softly.

Saracen shook his head. “I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Then sleep here.”

Saracen started to protest but Claire was already undoing his shoelaces. He sat down on the couch and put his head back on the cushion. He felt his eyelids come together.

“Don’t worry James Saracen,” whispered Claire, “I won’t take advantage of you, even if you don’t realise how much you love her.”

Saracen awoke with a start feeling disoriented for he had no idea at all where he was until Claire said, “Sorry, I woke you. I dropped my book.”

Saracen blinked against the light. He saw that Claire had put a blanket over him. “How long?”

“Four hours.”

“I’d better get back to the hospital.”

“Don’t”, begged Claire. “You need more rest, go back to sleep.”

Saracen declined and sat up with a yawn.

“You’re still dead on your feet.”

“I’ve just had four hours sleep thanks to you,” said Saracen. “I’m grateful.” He got to his feet stiffly and put on his jacket, shrugging the shoulders to make it fit better before moving to the door.

“Any idea what’s wrong with the telephone lines?” asked Claire.

Saracen felt a chill run down his spine. “What do you mean?” he replied.

“I tried to phone London, couldn’t get through.”

“Happens all the time.”

“No, I tried several different numbers,” said Claire.

“Lack of maintenance due to the emergency,” lied Saracen.

“Probably,” agreed Claire.

Saracen drove back to the hospital through streets that were wet and empty. As he turned into the hospital gate two military ambulances were leaving and he had to give way. He watched them go, their deep-treaded tyres sending up orange tinted spray in the neon street lights, their hooded crews anonymous in white plastic.

Saracen went to A&E first and found the staff subdued. “Sister Lindeman died this evening,” said one of the nurses and Saracen nodded in resignation. “She was a fine woman,” he said quietly. The nurse agreed and asked, “When can we expect the antiserum? They seem to be taking their time.”

“Soon,” said Saracen, uncomfortable with the lie. “What’s going on here?” he asked. He was looking at a group of men being attended to in the treatment room.

“They were injured breaking into an off-license,” replied the nurse.

Saracen nodded and did not have to ask why. The pubs in Skelmore had been closed under the quarantine order and, due to an administrative oversight; the off licenses had been included in the non essential shops register. On top of everything else sudden alcohol prohibition had been a recipe for trouble. To Beasdale’s credit the order had been rescinded to allow off licenses to open for two hours a day but the order would not take effect until the following day.

“There’s a message for you on your desk,” said the nurse and Saracen went to look. The paper said, ‘Mrs Updale rang. Call her back’ and gave a number which Saracen dialled. He did not bother to check the time. For him and, he suspected, Mary Updale such considerations were a thing of the past.

“Dr Saracen you asked me to let you know if I remembered anything about Frank’s other job?”

“Yes.”

“Frank entered it in his diary. The customer’s name was a Mr Archer and he lived on Palmer’s Green. Does that help?”

“I think it does,” replied Saracen as calmly as he could under the circumstances.

Once again Archer had come up as the obvious link in the spread of the disease but the revelation raised almost as many questions as it answered. How could Timothy Archer possibly have given Updale the bubonic form of the disease? and then there was the time factor. Saracen hastily scribbled down some dates on the pad in front of him and discovered that for Archer to have given any kind of plague to Updale within the limit imposed by the incubation time Archer himself must have been in the advanced stages of the disease when Updale saw him. Was Updale well enough to confirm this?

Jill was nowhere to be seen when Saracen got to the ward and for a moment he felt a chill of apprehension. One of the other nurses put his mind at ease. Jill was on her rest period.

Updale’s breathing was shallow and rapid and his eyes had the look of a man running in a race that he knew he could not win.

“Hard going,” said Saracen.

Updale agreed with a single breathless syllable.

“I have to ask you some questions. The answers could be very important.”

Updale continues to stare at the ceiling and gave no sign of having understood.

“You did a job for a man called Archer down on Palmer’s Green,” said Saracen.

Updale licked his lips and moved his head to the side. “…Heating,” he said with great difficulty.

“Yes on the heating system. Was Mr Archer ill when you saw him?”

Updale rolled his head from side to side on the pillow. “No…not ill,” he breathed.

“Think carefully. It’s very important.”

“Not ill…perfectly well.”

Saracen sighed wearily as he saw two and two add up to five. If Archer was well when Updale had seen him how could he have passed on the disease? The answer was not difficult it was just hard to face but Saracen forced himself to come to terms with it. However unlikely it seemed he had to consider the possibility that Updale had not contracted the disease from Archer at all, he had caught it somewhere else. The involvement of Archer had been a coincidence. Saracen baulked at the notion and remembered MacQuillan’s same reluctance to consider anything other than the Archers as the cause of the death of all the residents in the block where they had lived. “Just too much of a coincidence,” he had maintained and Saracen had agreed. He still felt that way but there was something desperately wrong with the explanation somewhere.

“You just spent the one day down at Palmer’s Green?” Saracen asked Updale.

“Thought it was going to be easy… found the air grille blocked… cleared it but flow still poor… fault was in the trunking… too big a job for me… removed the filters to improve the flow until he could call in a bigger firm… “

“You didn’t go back to Palmer’s Green again?”

“No.”

“Did you speak to anyone else when you were there?”

The caretaker.”

“Was he ill?”

“No.”

“No one else?”

“No one.”

Saracen told Updale to rest and left quietly. He looked back once through the glass door to see him staring at the ceiling again, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he continued an unequal struggle.

Saracen noticed that Philip Edwards, the boy with the medallion and the other sufferer from bubonic plague, was in the next cubicle. He went in and approached the bed to see if he was awake or sleeping. He found him to be neither. Philip Edwards was dead.

The Staff Nurse was upset when Saracen told her. “Oh no,” she moaned. “He was stable when I looked in a few minutes ago. I had to go help Nurse Rivers at the top of the ward. There’s just so much… “She mopped her brow nervously.

“I know,” said Saracen.

Saracen thought about the name Edwards as he came back down the stairs. He felt that it should mean something to him but for the moment could not think what.

MacQuillan phoned to say that Dave Moss had died in the County Hospital and Saracen took the news stoically for he had been preparing himself for it. It still did not prevent an empty, hollow feeling from settling in his stomach. “Any more thoughts on the bubonic cases?” he asked.

“None,” replied MacQuillan. “The game’s over. We’ve lost.”

MacQuillan’s attitude annoyed Saracen and he said so before slamming down the phone. “Damn the man,” he muttered. It was obvious that MacQuillan had stopped working on the epidemiology of the outbreak and that was their last hope gone. Without establishing the true reason for the apparent random spread of the disease there would be no chance of creating the right conditions for it to burn itself out. Plague would claim the whole town unless Beasdale pre-empted it.

Saracen began to write. He wrote down every single fact he knew about the epidemic in the hope that some new fact would emerge. Thirty minutes later he was no further forward. The best fit for all the pieces of the puzzle was still the one that MacQuillan had been using but once more the bubonic cases stood out like a sore thumb. Could that mean that all the rest was wrong? Saracen tried to free himself from the blinkers of the obvious and started to question everything right back to the very first assumption. Supposing, just supposing that Myra Archer had not started the outbreak at all… “

Saracen loosened his tie and tugged at his top shirt button. If the first assumption was wrong how about the second? Could he test it? He got out the files on Archer and Cohen and felt excitement grow within him. Myra Archer died on the sixth so that meant that she must have been very ill on the fifth and probably on the fourth as well. That being the case she must have infected Cohen on the second or third when she was relatively well otherwise Cohen would have raised the alarm and called in a doctor for her. Cohen himself was brought in dead on the fourteenth. A man of his age, living on his own would have succumbed to the disease after three days at the most. That meant that Cohen must have developed plague on the eleventh…an incubation time of nine days…It was too long! It was more than six days and that’s what Chenhui Tang had been saying when she had had her ‘breakdown’! More than six days! She had realised that Myra Archer could not have infected Leonard Cohen! That’s why she had been so upset!

Saracen fumbled in his desk drawer for a marker pen and then highlighted the cases on his list that had been assumed to have evolved from contact with the Archers. What else did they have in common if it wasn’t the Archers? The answer was plain for Saracen to see. It was Palmer’s Green! Myra Archer had not brought plague to Palmer’s Green. Palmer’s Green had given it to her!

Saracen found that it was one thing to come to come up with a new theory but quite another when it came to finding evidence to support it. How could the place have given all these people plague? He threw his pen across the room in anger and frustration as he failed to come up with anything. Somewhere in the distance he heard the wail of sirens and was reminded that time was running out. Suddenly he saw his best line of approach. It was Francis Updale.

Updale had spent only one day at Palmer’s Green and yet he had contracted bubonic plague. Something he had done on that day had given him the disease. One day in Updale’s life had to be re-created. Saracen needed help and the Public Health Department was hors de combat. It would have to be MacQuillan.