Dust to dust

NINETEEN

Steven was still thinking about Motram at the breakfast table when Ricksen appeared and sat down beside him. ‘My guys should be here by ten o’clock,’ he said. ‘What are your plans?’

‘I’m going to take a look at the burial chamber,’ said Steven.

‘Make sure they didn’t overlook the angel of death sitting in the corner?’ joked Ricksen.

‘That sort of thing,’ Steven agreed. ‘Then I’ll check with Public Health to make sure their microbiological tests haven’t come up with anything else. After that, I think it’ll be home sweet home. And you?’

‘Should be out of here by lunchtime if the Porton guys get what they want. Shouldn’t take too long to pack up a few samples of dust.’

Steven looked at his watch. ‘If I get a move on I should be out of the way by the time they arrive.’ He got to his feet.

‘See you around,’ said Ricksen.

Steven hadn’t been quite honest with Ricksen; he hadn’t mentioned that he intended to have a word with Motram’s wife before returning to London. It was probably something to do with the little niggle at the back of his mind, but he felt he wanted to know a bit more about the man.

He walked over to where the Public Health mobile lab was parked and made himself known to the technician in charge.

‘Dr Glass said you might turn up,’ said a young red-haired woman who was setting up equipment for disinfecting the chamber later. ‘You’ll be wanting a grave-robber uniform then?’

Steven was suited up inside ten minutes, masked and ready to enter the burial chamber through the makeshift airlock. There was no need for him to use a torch; the Public Health people had already rigged up temporary lighting inside. He could see the entire contents of the vaulted stone chamber as soon as he entered, crouching, through the gap in its wall. His first thought was that it was a dormitory for the dead, sixteen black body shapes lying on stone benches, eight on either side.

On closer inspection, he could see that a circular area on the torso of each corpse had been opened up, presumably subjected to examination to make sure they had all decomposed like the one examined by Motram, he thought. Alternatively, Motram might have put his fist through each in turn after his disappointment with the first. Steven made sure his mask was fitting well before putting his gloved hand into one of the exposed areas. It went straight down to the stone bench without impediment; the shroud was an empty shell with nothing inside but dust and bones.

He tried to imagine the utter dejection Motram must have felt when he’d discovered it. Seeing the apparently preserved body shapes in the tomb would surely have been the cue for elation, but then to find that they had no substance and would crumble to nothing when touched, as Steven proved now with the tip of his finger on a thigh, must have been a crushing blow. He could understand Motram tearing off his mask and cursing his luck, inadvertently breathing in the dust and the poison spores.

There was no point in lingering any longer. Steven went through the shower and decontamination procedure in the Public Health vehicle, suspecting it was more of a gesture than a necessity, and checked with the technician that no word of any new findings had come in from the lab.

‘I spoke to Dr Glass first thing this morning,’ said the technician. ‘Harmless dust, he said. He thought that going to the local swimming pool was probably more dangerous.’

Steven set off for the village of Longthorn, noticing as he left the car park that an unmarked white van had just arrived. From the complex filtering vents on its roof, he deduced that this was the mobile lab facility from Porton that Ricksen was expecting. Seeing it brought the uneasy feeling back again. He was missing something here.

Dr Cassie Motram was on compassionate leave from the group practice where she worked, Steven had learned when he phoned earlier that morning. According to the senior partner he’d spoken to, she had tried carrying on working as normal — to take her mind off things as much as anything else — but when press interest entered the equation she had found dealing with patients well nigh impossible. A number of them believed she might give them Black Death. ‘And it’s going to take them a while to get their heads round Amanita mycotoxin,’ he added.

The look of exasperation that appeared on Cassie Motram’s face when she answered the door prompted Steven to assure her immediately that he had nothing to do with the press. Cassie looked at his ID but said, ‘Never heard of you.’

‘Not many people have,’ said Steven with a smile. He explained briefly what Sci-Med did and Cassie shrugged and invited him inside the pleasant cottage where she and John lived.

‘I’m busy in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk in there if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all.’ Steven perched on one of stools at the breakfast bar and watched Cassie busy herself collecting ingredients, which he assumed had to do with the open recipe book lying on the bar. His immediate thought was that here was a woman who was keeping herself busy for therapeutic reasons. He could sympathise. ‘How is he this morning?’ he asked.

‘Not good.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So what is it you are investigating exactly?’ asked Cassie as she weighed flour out on a set of digital scales.

‘I was sent to find out what happened to your husband in the tomb at Dryburgh Abbey,’ said Steven.

‘And whether it had anything to do with the Black Death corpses lying there,’ added Cassie with a wry smile.

‘That was our fear,’ agreed Steven. ‘The idea of Black Death making any kind of come-back certainly concentrated minds in Whitehall, but now we know what really happened — a combination of fungal spores and sheer bad luck.’

Cassie glanced at Steven sideways. ‘I’ll be frank with you, Dr Dunbar. When John told me he was planning to open up a seven-hundred-year-old Black Death tomb, I was far from delighted. I knew such fears were groundless — I’m a doctor; I can work out the odds — but even in the twenty-first century the thought of Black Death tends to grip the imagination.’

Steven nodded. ‘I know what you mean. I went inside the tomb this morning. Whatever you tell yourself beforehand, your mind starts working overtime as soon as you’re inside.’

‘But your fears were groundless, doctor; mine weren’t,’ said Cassie, pausing in what she was doing. ‘My husband didn’t come back to me. They were considering putting him on life support this morning when I phoned.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Steven saw the sadness in Cassie’s eyes and felt a lump come to his throat.

Cassie quickly recovered her composure. ‘Would you care for some coffee, Dr Dunbar?’

‘Thank you,’ said Steven, collaborating in the restoring of normality. ‘Black, no sugar.’

As they grew comfortable in each other’s company, Steven tried to inject some encouragement into his words. ‘Now that the hospital know what the problem is with John, they’ll be better placed to come up with treatment,’ he said.

‘There’s really nothing they can do right now,’ said Cassie. ‘Dr Miles has withdrawn from the case and the toxicologist I spoke to admitted it’s down to life support and good nursing at the moment. He thinks John must have inhaled a massive dose.‘

Steven nodded. ‘That’s what I heard from the Public Health people too,’ he said. ‘But their lab failed to find any spores in the dust. They were quite embarrassed about it.’

Cassie shrugged but didn’t respond. Steven continued: ‘I was puzzled, so I asked the Sci-Med lab about it. The other possibility is that it wasn’t a massive dose but that John was in some way hypersensitive to the Amanita toxin. Was he the type to suffer from allergies?’

Cassie moved her head one way and then the other, as if suspecting this line of inquiry was not going to go anywhere. ‘Cats,’ she said. ‘He liked them but he started itching if he was in their company for any length of time. If he patted one, he had to wash his hands afterwards, but that was all.’

Steven continued undeterred. ‘Another possibility would be stress. I’m told that that can render people more susceptible to the effects of toxins. Was John under any pressure? Had he had any problems in his life recently?’

Cassie shook her head slowly as she thought. ‘I really don’t think so. Opening up the chamber at Dryburgh has been the single thing uppermost in John’s mind for weeks — ever since he got the letter from Oxford.’

Steven nodded to indicate he knew about the Balliol connection.

‘I suppose you could say he was a bit stressed when Health and Safety got involved and delayed the start of the excavation, but that didn’t last long. He was more pissed off than stressed.’

‘They get up everyone’s nose.’

‘And had to make a trip to London. I suppose that was a bit out of the ordinary for him but hardly stressful. Everything seemed to go all right.’ Steven’s expression invited further elaboration so Cassie continued, ‘He was called down to a hospital in London to screen a man who was due to donate his bone marrow to a patient with advanced leukaemia.’

‘Why John if it was a London hospital?’

‘It was a quid pro quo for the funding John got for the excavation at Dryburgh. Under the terms of the agreement, the funding body had the right to call him in as a consultant. He was just away the one day and then he had some work to do in his own lab on the samples he brought back with him. But it seemed quite straightforward, no stress or pressure involved.’

Steven nodded.

‘Actually, it’s probably nothing, but there was one odd thing that came out of that trip…’

‘Yes?’

‘Some time after John came back, there was a report on television about a young marine who’d died in Afghanistan. When he saw the picture on the screen, John was convinced he was the donor he’d seen in London.’

‘And was he?’

‘It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The marine had been wounded in Afghanistan on the very day John saw the young man in London.’

‘Ah,’ said Steven.