Dust to dust

SEVENTEEN

Steven left early next morning. He was looking forward to his first long-distance try-out of the new Porsche Boxter he’d bought to replace the one destroyed during the course of his last assignment. Luckily, Sci-Med took care of insurance matters for their people and it hadn’t been necessary for him to explain the reasons behind his somersaulting from the M1 into a field and the resulting fireball.

Steven was up in Scotland by early afternoon but it wasn’t until he’d left the motorway to follow the winding border country roads that he really started to enjoy the car. The exhilaration of good acceleration and limpet-like road holding ensured that he was in a good mood when he drew into the car park at Borders General Hospital and cut the engine. Not only was Dr John Motram being held here in isolation but the man he’d injured by dropping a mechanical shovel on his leg, Tony Fielding, was a patient in the orthopaedics department.

Unlike those of inner-city hospitals, where parking was always difficult and a constant bone of contention, the car parks here were extensive. He had found a space without any difficulty, enabling him to maintain his good mood as he left the car and walked over to Reception, where he asked for Dr Toby Miles, the man the file informed him was responsible for Motram’s care.

Miles turned out to be a short, tubby man with wiry, dry-looking hair and a florid face. He was dressed in a grey pin-striped suit, a pink shirt and a purple tie which didn’t help with the complexion problem. He examined Steven’s ID at some length before returning it and asking, ‘What can I do for you, Dr Dunbar?’

‘I understand you are the psychiatrist in charge of John Motram’s case, doctor. I’d like to know your thoughts on what you think might have happened to him.’

Miles appeared thoughtful for what seemed an age, and Steven was beginning to wonder whether the man had an interest in amateur dramatics when he finally said, ‘I’m sorry, Dr Dunbar, but the truth is I simply don’t know. John Motram is out of his tree.’

‘Too technical for me, doctor,’ said Steven with a smile and the ice was broken between them.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it before,’ said Miles. ‘I was told that he’d had a mental breakdown but I’m now inclined to think that it’s not a psychiatric problem at all. It’s more like some form of delirium, and the fact that he has breathing difficulties tends to support this. I’m told that tests are also showing signs of liver damage, so the ball is moving rapidly out of my court and into the realm of the physician. I suppose it was natural to assume at the time that he’d had some sort of break-down associated with stress or disappointment, but he hasn’t. It’s really beginning to look much more like a case of poisoning or even an infection of some sort.’

This was not what Steven wanted to hear. The spectre of something reaching out from a centuries-old tomb to cause modern-day havoc refused to be banished. ‘Let’s hope it’s a curable sort,’ he said without any trace of humour.

Miles shrugged. ‘Maybe things will look brighter when the lab finishes its tests.’

‘Is he conscious?’

‘He drifts in and out. We have to keep him under a certain level of sedation for the safety of the nursing staff. He gets violent if we don’t.’

‘Has he said anything at all about what happened?’

‘Words, but not sentences. Nothing that ever gives a clue to what’s going on inside his head.’

‘Are the words in English?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s not speaking in tongues if that’s what you mean. They’re English words, but apparently generated randomly so no train of thought is ever revealed.’

‘Poor man.’

‘Would you like to see him?’

Steven nodded. ‘May as well put a face to the name,’ he said, and got up to follow Miles.

John Motram was in a locked room under constant camera observation. He would remain there until the possibility of his suffering from an infectious condition had been ruled out. He was awake but obviously having difficulty breathing: an oxygen mask obscured half his face. Steven’s immediate thought was that he just looked like the 52-year-old academic he was, but on closer inspection the look in his eyes suggested a failure to recognise anything around him. He was awake but he wasn’t seeing. Steven pointed this out to Miles.

‘He’s not blind,’ said Miles. ‘His eyes follow the nurse when she goes in to see to his needs. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge her as a person but he can see her, we’re sure of that.’

He turned up the sound on the monitor. Motram was saying something but, as Steven had been forewarned, it sounded like random words. ‘Red, seventeen, blue, twist, curl, burst, diamonds, diamonds, grass, yellow, sky.’

Steven nodded his thanks to Miles and got up to leave.

In the orthopaedic unit, he found Tony Fielding doing the Times crossword. He was alone in a room that was designed for two patients and had a pleasant view out to the hills. His left leg was in plaster and several visitors had added their signature. Steven smiled when he inclined his head to read the message in red crayon and found that it said Love you Dad, Lewis.

‘He’s seven,’ said Fielding.

Steven smiled. He told Fielding who he was and about Sci-Med’s interest.

‘Good luck,’ said Fielding. ‘No one else can work out what came over him. He came out of that chamber like a man possessed by the devil. God, I’m even starting to sound like the tabloids.’

Steven smiled again, taking a liking to the man. ‘It’s an easy habit to develop,’ he sympathised. ‘Makes life so simple.’

‘I promise not to use that particular expression if the press come back again,’ said Fielding.

‘I take it you’ve no idea what happened to Dr Motram?’ asked Steven.

‘Haven’t a clue. Before he went into that chamber he was the nicest sort of bloke you’d ever want to meet, but when he came out…’ Fielding made a face. ‘He’d only one thing on his mind and that was murder. God, I’m doing it again! I wonder if the Sun does a decent crossword… I might think of changing. Anyway, I consider myself lucky to have got away with only this,’ he said, tapping his plastered leg. ‘If he’d actually managed to get that digger down the ramp, well, none of us would be here to tell the tale.’

‘It sounds horrendous,’ said Steven. ‘I take it you personally didn’t go in the chamber?’

‘None of us did apart from John,’ said Fielding. ‘Do you really think it was something in there? Something from the past?’

‘Common sense says not,’ said Steven. ‘On the other hand I haven’t the slightest idea why John Motram is the way he is right now. But, just for the record,’ he added, bringing out a small notebook, ‘do you think you can talk me through everything that happened that day up until the time Dr Motram entered the tomb?’

Fielding puffed his cheeks and exhaled slowly. ‘Not much to say really. The four of us — John, Alan Blackstone, Les and myself — met in the car park at the abbey and allowed the Health and Safety people to inspect the equipment we’d be using on site. When they’d finished ticking their clipboards and giving us the OK, we crossed over to the hotel to meet the doctor from Public Health, who interviewed each of us briefly about the state of our health, gave us a tetanus shot and basically said everything was fine by him. Then the four of us walked round to the site and Les and I set about loosening the stones in the wall of the tomb. When we’d finished we let John take over and watched him remove enough of them to gain an entrance. He disappeared inside and we waited — he was actually in there for more than twenty minutes, but we supposed that was because it was his big moment, if you like, and he was sort of savouring the experience.’

‘What happened when he did come out?’

‘I have to say he seemed a bit odd… he was having trouble with the plastic sheeting across the entrance so I gave him a hand, then Alan tried to talk to him, then… well, all hell broke lose. John really lost the plot. He smashed Alan in the face with the torch he was carrying, and then hit Les when he tried to help Alan. The three of us ended up in a ball in the trench with John doing his best to murder us with the digger. Luckily, he wasn’t too familiar with the controls and that’s really what saved us in the end. He ended up tipping it over on to its side and being thrown out.’

‘Was he knocked unconscious?’

‘No,’ said Fielding thoughtfully. ‘I mean he didn’t hit his head on anything. He seemed to be having difficulty breathing. He lay on the grass for a while, gulping for air, and then seemed to pass out, thank God.’

Steven thanked Fielding for his help and made his way to the exit. He checked his watch and saw that there would still be time to talk to Kenneth Glass at Public Health if he got a move on. He decided to do this rather than visit the site at Dryburgh because, at four o’clock on an early March day in Scotland, the light was already failing. He would visit the abbey first thing in the morning.

Glass turned out to be a pleasant, helpful man in his late thirties with his feet firmly planted on the ground, who seemed keen to put any notion of curses or plagues from the past to rest. ‘It’s early days for some of the tests,’ he said, ‘but I think I can tell you what happened to John Motram.’

‘You can?’ exclaimed Steven. ‘That’s wonderful… or maybe not if we’re on the brink of an epidemic.’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Glass. ‘We’ve been working closely with the hospital lab and we’ve discovered that Motram was poisoned with a mycotoxin from the genus Amanita — a large dose.’

‘I’m all ears,’ said Steven.

‘Although we don’t think there were any living organisms inside the tomb we think that there was a large accumulation of fungal spores present in the dust that Motram stirred up when he went inside. We think that inhaling them when he took off his mask was the cause of the problem. It would also account for his apparent breathing difficulties and the liver failure that’s beginning to show up.’

‘And the mental derangement?’

‘There’s no telling what a massive dose of this toxin can do. It’s a very powerful poison.’

‘Well, I think we’re all in your debt, doctor. John Motram did not have any kind of mental breakdown and he wasn’t infected by some super-bug from the past. He was poisoned.’

‘That’s certainly the way it looks,’ agreed Glass. ‘There is one embarrassing thing, though…’

‘What?’

‘We haven’t been able to find any more of the spores in the air samples we took from the chamber. Everything so far seems to suggest there’s nothing but harmless dust in that tomb.’

‘I take it you and your people were wearing full bio-hazard gear when you went in?’

‘Absolutely. But we carried out extensive tests. The air inside the tomb is not the sort of stuff you’d want in your air freshener, but as far as we can see there’s damn all wrong with it in a biological sense. John Motram must have been really unlucky: the spores must have been present in the residue of the one cadaver he chose to disturb.’

‘Poor guy,’ said Steven. ‘But thank God you’ve found the answer. The sooner the tabloids return to exposing thieving bankers the happier I’ll be.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Glass. ‘Incidentally, our mobile lab is still on site up there. You’re welcome to use it for anything you need. We’re going to disinfect the site when everyone’s finished taking samples.’

Steven got back in the car feeling very relieved. There was no danger of an epidemic arising from the opening of the tomb. Motram had been poisoned by inhaling fungal spores, something which had absolutely nothing to do with Black Death. The only problem Steven had now was that he didn’t have anywhere to stay for the night if he still intended taking a look at the excavation site in the morning. Then he remembered reading in the file that Jean Roberts had given him that the Dryburgh Abbey Hotel was situated right next to the ruins. He called and booked himself in.