Wildcard

THIRTEEN

By mid-afternoon William Victor Spicer had been taken into custody, charged with the murder of Anthony Pelota, and Steven was nearing his wits’ end trying to establish how Spicer had managed to contract the disease. The MP had not been anywhere near Africa in the past five years and could recall no recent dealings with anyone who had. Absolutely nothing in what Spicer had told him in their long interview even hinted at a new line of inquiry.

His worst fears about the man being a red herring, rather than the common factor in the virus outbreaks, looked like being realised. Humphrey Barclay, Victor Spicer and Frank McDougal still appeared to be independent, unconnected sources of filovirus outbreaks. He called Fred Cummings and arranged to meet him over at City General. He needed a sounding board and Caroline was working down at St Jude’s; her answering machine had just told him so.

‘You did well in getting to Spicer,’ said Cummings when Steven told him about the morning. ‘Cane’s people didn’t even know he existed.’

‘But it hasn’t got me anywhere. Spicer has just replaced Ann Danby as the wildcard in the pack. We’re left with a virus that looks as though it’s breaking out at random.’

‘But we both know better than that.’

Steven nodded. ‘But I am beginning to wonder.’

‘You’ll find the link,’ said Cummings encouragingly. ‘It’s out there somewhere, as someone used to say.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ Steven smiled. ‘So what’s happening in the real world?’

‘More and more cases, and it’s been spreading out of the city, as we knew it would. People move around, and with the best will in the world we’re not going to put a stop to that with a city population of over two and a half million. All the medical services have been put on the alert for it nationwide, so there’s a better chance of snuffing it out than there was here in Manchester at the beginning. There are no new wildcards as far as we know, but there are still a few cases we have to work on to establish the line of contact.’

‘What are CDC up to?’ asked Steven.

‘They’re having a re-think about whether this particular flilovirus might be airborne after all.’

‘Shit,’ said Steven.

‘They’re reaching the same conclusion we did: that there are just too many people going down with it for it to be body-fluid transmission alone.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘We ring-fence the city and burn down all the houses,’ replied Cummings, adding, in response to Steven’s expression, ‘It’s ironic, really, but that’s what they do in the African outbreaks and it’s very effective.’

‘But not an option.’

‘I think a curfew is the best we can manage. We’ve got to stop people mingling in public places. We’ve closed the big things like cinemas and football grounds, but so many small businesses got exemptions from the last order that it ended up making very little difference. People are more frightened now, though, and that’s going to work in our favour.’

‘Fear is our friend,’ said Steven.

‘A good soundbite,’ said Cummings. ‘I’ll make a note of it.’

‘How about resources?’

‘No problem about equipment. The Americans and Swedes have been flying in state-of-the-art stuff. I think the CDC people see us as a bit of a testing ground for what they’ve been preparing for in a big American city for years. The Swedes have prided themselves on being expert in mobile facilities ever since Linkoping in 1990. That aside, we have a growing nursing-staff problem as I think you’ve seen for yourself?’

Steven nodded.

‘There’s a country-wide call going out for volunteers, preferably those with infectious-disease experience but they’re a dying breed. Most of the old infectious-disease hospitals have been closed down over the last ten to fifteen years.’

‘I guess we didn’t need them with all these old churches lying around empty,’ said Steven sourly. ‘They’re ideal. All we need do is tack a crematorium on the back and they’re tailor-made for the job.’

Cummings looked sidelong at him and said kindly, ‘Don’t let it become your problem, Steven. You’ve got to stay detached from the nitty-gritty and concentrate on finding the source. There must be one.’

Steven said, ‘It’s hard to remain detached when people are dying around you and you haven’t a clue where to look next.’

‘It’ll come to you. It sometimes takes more courage not to become involved.’

‘How’s Sourpuss Cane doing?’

‘He’s all but given up,’ replied Cummings. ‘Going strictly by the book, as he’s done all his life, has yielded precisely nothing. Your coming up with a boyfriend for Ann Danby whom he and his lot failed to spot and the government calling in help from CDC were severe blows to his pride. It’s my guess he’s about to realise that he needs to “spend more time with his family” and resign.’

‘Another resignation?’ said Steven. ‘Not good for morale. Who’s taken over from Caroline at Public Health?’

‘Her number two, Kinsella. He’s okay but Caroline already ran a good department; he’s just taken up the reins. Pity Spicer played politics with Caroline’s job. She was a big asset.’

‘Right.’

Steven returned to his hotel and started to work his way once more through all the data he had gathered on the people classified as wildcards. Yet again he searched for a common factor he might have overlooked but yet again he and his computer failed to spot one. ‘More data,’ he murmured. ‘Must have more data.’

He rang Sci-Med and asked for more information about the people involved. No, he couldn’t be more specific, he told them, just send anything they could come up with, however trivial. Better too much information than too little.

Steven thought long and hard about what Cummings had said about not becoming too involved. It made sense, and he acknowledged that, but his gut instinct was telling him something else. It was telling him that waiting for inspiration was something that could be done anywhere. It might just as well be down at St Jude’s.

Assuming that Caroline and Kate would take their mid-shift break around the same time they had on the previous evening, Steven drove down to the church and waited for them to emerge. He waited fifteen minutes before the pair of them appeared with hair wet from the shower and dark rings under their eyes from tiredness.

‘I really didn’t think I’d see you here again,’ said Caroline quietly.

‘I find I have another free evening,’ said Steven, using bravado to combat what he really felt.

‘Good for you,’ said Kate. Caroline echoed this but her eyes said that she understood just how big an effort it was for him.

When the two women returned to work after after their break, Steven joined them as an extra pair of hands. If anything, conditions in the old church had got worse overnight. Patient numbers had risen sharply; there was an extra line of beds, making three in all and housing something in the region of sixty desperately ill people.

‘We’re having to use the old vestry as a mortuary,’ said Kate Lineham. ‘The crematoria are finding it difficult to cope. There’s a bit of a backlog.’

Steven swallowed and gave a slight nod.

‘Let’s go to it, guys,’ said Kate.

Steven worked a five-hour shift as he had the night before and left with Caroline again, feeling drained but very conscious that Caroline had worked twice as long as he had.

‘I think I have a tin of corned beef in the cupboard at home,’ said Caroline, ‘and maybe some beans. What d’you say?’

‘You temptress, you,’ said Steven, feeling again that he could do with some company. ‘But I’m sure I could get us both dinner at my hotel if you’d like?’

Caroline shook her head and said, ‘No, I’m all in and I must look it. Let’s go home. You can take me to dinner when this is all over.’

‘That’s a date.’

‘What on earth possessed you to come back to St Jude’s, feeling the way you do?’ asked Caroline while they waited for the beans to heat.

‘I’m still a doctor. I couldn’t stand by when staffing levels are as bad as they are,’ replied Steven. ‘My precious feelings are a luxury the situation can’t afford.’

Caroline gave a nod of understanding, perhaps tinged with admiration, and asked, ‘Did you find it any easier today?’

‘I’ve just thrown up in your bathroom, if that answers your question, but you’ve been doing much more than me. How are you coping?’

Caroline swallowed as she thought about the question, and Steven saw vulnerability appear in her eyes for the first time. It disappeared when she tried to disguise it but then it returned and remained. It brought a lump to his throat.

‘We had nineteen deaths today,’ she said quietly. ‘We piled them up in the vestry… one on top of the other… like sacks of potatoes. Somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son, all waiting in a heap to be collected… and burned. I never thought I’d see anything like that in England in this day and age.’

‘When did you last have a day off?’ asked Steven gently.

‘None of us without family commitments are taking days off until we get some extra nurses down there,’ said Caroline.

‘You’ll make yourself ill,’ said Steven.

‘Maybe I deserve to be. Maybe if I’d put out an alert after that girl went to the disco, it really would have made a difference.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Steven. ‘We’ve been through all that. You made entirely the right decision in the circumstances. You have nothing to reproach yourself for, absolutely nothing. That MP just used you and the circumstances to get himself noticed — self-seeking little bastard.’

‘Thanks… but I’m not entirely convinced.’

Steven’s assurances were interrupted by his mobile phone going off in his jacket pocket. He went out into the hall to retrieve it and took the call there. When he returned Caroline could see that something was the matter.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘They think there’s a new wildcard case in Hull,’ Steven replied, still stunned at the news. ‘Sci-Med are sending details, but Public Health have been unable to establish any contacts. They seem to think that this is the best example yet of a case occurring spontaneously.’

‘Shit.’ Caroline sighed. ‘Where’s all this going to end?’

Steven looked at her bleakly for a moment, then said, ‘It will end when we wipe out the source, isolate all the contacts and stop the spread, just like with every other outbreak. We have to believe that.’

Caroline nodded slowly but she seemed preoccupied.

‘Don’t we?’ Steven prompted.

‘Of course,’ came the weak reply. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just so damned tired. I’m not thinking straight.’

‘And no wonder.’

‘Tell me a joke, Steven. I feel as if I haven’t smiled for weeks.’

‘Know the feeling,’ said Steven.

‘C’mon, tell me a joke.’

He thought for a moment then began, ‘There was this little baby polar bear sitting on a rock, watching the ice floes drift by. Suddenly he looked up at his mother beside him and asked, “Mum, am I a polar bear?” “Of course you’re a polar bear,” said his mother and she patted him on the head. A short time later the little bear repeated the question and got the same response. A short while later the little bear asked the question yet again. By now his mother was losing patience. “Of course you’re a polar bear,” she snapped. “I’m a polar bear, your father’s a polar bear, your brother’s a polar bear. We’re all polar bears. Now, what is this nonsense?” “Well,” sighed the little bear, “it’s just that I’m fucking freezing!”’

Caroline’s face broke slowly into a grin and then she started to laugh. She laughed until her sides were splitting, and Steven feared she might be becoming hysterical, but it was just that the joke had acted as a release valve for all her pent-up emotions. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said with the tears running down her face. ‘Spot on, Dunbar. Bloody brilliant.’

‘Glad to have been of service, ma’am,’ said Steven. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’

‘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 right 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.