Dust to dust

FIFTEEN

Steven caught the nine o’clock British Airways shuttle from Glasgow to London in the morning and found himself circling over West Drayton an hour later while the aircraft queued for a landing slot. For once, he didn’t mind the delay. He had mixed feelings about returning to work — perhaps as an aftermath of his last assignment. It wasn’t just the danger he’d found himself in — danger had been part of his life for a very long time — but more a case of hoping that nothing like it would happen again, particularly not on his next investigation.

He’d done his best to assure Tally that last time had been a one-off and that his job was usually much more routine, involving paperwork rather than guns and car chases. Tally, who’d been caught up in the nightmare, clearly needed the assurance and he feared that the long-term relationship he hoped to have with her might well founder if he found himself in trouble again.

He’d fallen in love with Tally and she with him, but she was an intelligent woman who knew that love needed firm foundations. The big question was whether or not his job with Sci-Med could ever be compatible with that requirement. Steven reflected on this as he watched the shadows on the cabin wall change as the aircraft continued to circle. He considered how different life might have been had he marched to the drum of convention and followed a career in medicine.

Steven had been born and brought up in the village of Glenridding in the Lake District where he’d enjoyed an idyllic child hood, playing and climbing in the Cumbrian mountains. He’d done well at school and, like so many bright children, been pushed towards a medical career. He’d complied with this pressure — mainly to please parents and teachers — but, after graduating and doing his registration year, he had admitted to himself and everyone else concerned that he had little heart for a future in medicine.

Instead of drifting along as many did, he took the major decision of resigning from the hospital where he was working as a junior houseman and joined the army. His strong build and natural athletic ability ensured that at last he now felt like a fish very much in water. His career had progressed through service with the Parachute Regiment to membership of the Special Forces, with whom he’d served in trouble spots all over the world. The army, always keen to maximise resources, never lost sight of his medical degree and he had become an expert in field medicine — the medicine of the battlefield, where deserts and jungles had been his emergency rooms.

With his middle thirties approaching and Special Forces being the young men’s game it was, he had been faced with an uncertain future as a civilian. The medical profession had little need of the skills he’d acquired in the military and he felt it was too late to retrain. This left some kind of peripheral job — perhaps with a pharmaceutical company or as an in-house physician with some large commercial concern. In the end, however, he had been saved from the humdrum by John Macmillan — now Sir John Macmillan — who ran a small investigatory unit, the Sci-Med Inspectorate, inside the Home Office. The unit looked into possible crime or wrong-doing in the high-tech areas of science and medicine where the police had little or no expertise.

Macmillan recruited science and medical graduates but never the newly qualified: he insisted that all Sci-Med investigators must have held demanding jobs in the real world before joining the unit and proved themselves in high stress situations. Weekend paintball fights and white-water rafting with the chaps in the office didn’t count; coming under fire in Kosovo did. Above all else in his people, he valued common sense.

Over the years, Steven had quickly become Sci-Med’s top investigator, but at some expense to his personal life. It was a very long way from being a nine to five job and, although he persisted in downplaying the risks — even to himself — it could be dangerous and had proved to be so in the past. His denial had its roots in guilt, the guilt he felt in acknowledging that he had wilfully continued in a hazardous job when he was the father of a little girl who had already lost her mother. However happy and settled she was with Sue and Peter in Scotland, his responsibility remained.

Steven’s belief when Lisa died that he would never find another woman he would want to spend his life with had been challenged on several occasions over the years, as time proved to be the great healer it was always mooted to be. Such incidents had always caused him to re-examine the situation with regard to Jenny and family life, but circumstances had always changed before the Rubicon had required to be crossed. Looking back, he had been profoundly unlucky in love for a whole variety of reasons, ranging from tragedy to simple, practical incompatibility. But now Tally had come into his life and all the old questions were lining up again.

Tally had had a first meeting with Jenny and the early signs were good, but Tally had a successful career of her own to consider. She was currently a senior registrar at the hospital in Leicester but would soon be thinking about applying for a consultancy, and that could be anywhere in the country. She couldn’t be expected to throw all that up in order to come and play Little House on the Prairie.

‘Sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, We’ve now been given permission to land,’ said the captain’s voice, bringing Steven’s train of thought to an abrupt end.

As Steven opened the door to his apartment in Marlborough Court, he reflected on the fact that this was something he hated doing if he had been away for a while. There was something about coming home to a cold, empty apartment that he found depressing and invariably reminded him of the great loss in his life. As usual, he compensated by switching on everything from the central heating to the TV and the kettle; this time there was no call for lighting as it was mid-morning and it was sunny outside.

The directive to return to London had not said anything about urgency so he made himself coffee and took it to his favourite seat by the window where, through a gap in the buildings opposite, he could see the river traffic pass by. He started preparing a mental list of the things he should do. He’d been away for two weeks so he should check to see if his car in the basement garage was okay and whether it would start after its battery had been maintaining the Porsche security system without charge for that length of time. He would also have to replenish the fridge and larder, which he’d run down before going up to Scotland. A trip to the supermarket was on the cards, but he’d do that late at night to avoid crowds.

He finished his coffee and showered before changing out of his comfortable travel clothes of jeans and polo shirt. John Macmillan was very much old-school when it came to dress codes. The ‘herd’, as Macmillan called them, might have stopped wearing ties and started wearing trainers to work but his people hadn’t. Steven’s dark blue suit, Parachute Regiment tie and polished black Oxfords would pass muster. He decided to let the lunch hour pass before going into the

Home Office just in case Macmillan was having one of his working lunches. It was usual for him to have sandwiches at his desk, but at least once a week he would invite someone in the corridors of power to have lunch with him at his club. It was his way of keeping in touch with what was really going on in Westminster. He might — and did — look the very essence of the Whitehall mandarin, tall, elegant and patrician, with silver hair and charming manners, but Macmillan was in many ways a maverick, a man who jealously guarded Sci-Med’s independence from all attempts to have it put on a ‘more structured basis’ as the parliamentary jargon went.

Steven settled for a sandwich and a Czech beer at a riverside pub before completing his walk to the Home Office. Showing his ID, he shared a joke with the man on the door who noted that it had ‘been a while’. Jean Roberts, Macmillan’s secretary, said much the same thing when he put his head round the door of her office. ‘Hello, stranger.’

As always, Jean enquired about Jenny and how she was getting on at school and, as always, Steven asked about the Bach Choir — Jean’s main interest outside work — and what they were doing at the moment. There was a slight pause before Jean asked, ‘And you… what about you?’

‘I’m fine.’ Jean looked over her glasses at him, the gesture prompting further comment. ‘Really I am… but thanks for asking.’

‘Good,’ said Jean, deciding to accept his assertion this time. ‘It’s good to have you back.’ She pressed a button on her desk and announced his arrival.