Resurrection

TWENTY

Jutland Place did not look any better in daylight than it had done in the darkness of his last visit. There was an air of quiet decay about the street that suggested the tenements had outlived their time. Like the sprawling docks nearby, they were an anachronism, a reminder of the time when families were traditionally large, cramped conditions were the norm and unskilled jobs were plentiful. The bulldozers of progress were lurking just to the west, inching ever nearer, just waiting for the chance to clear the way for luxury apartments, waterside bistros and chic galleries, many of which would ironically chronicle in painting what had just been knocked down.

Dewar remembered the unpleasant smell of the common entrance to the building. He recalled thinking last time that it could have done with a good sluice out with disinfectant. This time however, the same thought stopped him in his tracks. He brought his hand to his forehead and cursed his stupidity. ‘What an idiot!’ he berated himself. He had been assuming that the flat had been lying empty since the night he and Sharon Hannan had left it to take her husband, Tommy to hospital but this wasn’t so. The Public Health people would have been here in the interim! They would have carried out a full fumigation of the place immediately after the couple’s admission to the Western General!

Dewar cursed as he saw the implication of just what that meant. The team would have taken the cat away and most likely had it put down. The cat itself couldn’t get smallpox but its fur would have been seen in the same light as contaminated bedding or clothes — a potential vector for spreading the disease. How could he go back and tell Sharon that? A dead pet at a time like this was all she needed!

He looked down at the keys in his hand, feeling stupid and thinking about turning away but at the same time trying to think of some way the cat might have survived. It was just conceivable that the Public Health people had decided to attempt cleaning it up but that would have meant going to a lot of trouble and it would still have left a risk, albeit a small one. On balance, he felt it more likely they had decided to put it down and take no risks at all. They would have put it to sleep and burned the corpse.

On the other hand, he argued with himself, this had happened at an early stage in the outbreak — before any real pressure had been put on the public health service. Hannan was only their second case. They just might have gone for the difficult option. He took out his mobile phone and called the switchboard at the Scottish Office, asking to be patched through to Mary Martin.

Reception on the phone was a bit poor because of the high tenements. He walked slowly towards the corner of the street as he waited for an answer, watching the strength of signal pick up on the meter.

‘Hello Adam. What can I do for you?’ said Mary Martin’s voice.

‘You can confirm my worst fears, Mary. This is going to sound silly, but when your people carried out the decontamination of the Hannans’ place did they have the cat put down?’

‘The cat, did you say?’

‘Yes. Sharon Hannan had a cat.’

‘Hold on.’

Two young boys, kicking a plastic football backwards and forwards between them came past. One spat at regular intervals like he’d seen his heroes do on TV. Perhaps he thought it aided ball control, Dewar thought idly. The other boy, wearing baggy jeans and baseball cap fashionably reversed, looked up at him and saw the mobile phone. ‘Prat!’ he said on the way past.

Dewar digested the social comment without response and ignored the itch in his right foot. He watched as a huge lorry, laden with beer, according to the markings on its side, came labouring past, heading for the docks. The noise it made drowned out the first part of Mary Martin’s reply. ‘Sorry, can you say again?’

‘I said, I’ve spoken to the team leader. He doesn’t actually remember a cat being in the flat. He certainly didn’t have one put down. If there was one there, of course …’

‘Quite so,’ said Dewar, filling in the details for himself. The gas used in the fumigation procedure would have killed it.

‘Thanks, Mary. I’m obliged.’

Dewar looked at the keys in his hand again and decided to take a look at the flat anyway. He’d better know the worst. It could have been hiding. Cats did have a habit of finding obscure hiding places for themselves, under beds, in cupboards, on top of high shelves, so it was quite possible that the decontamination team had overlooked its presence if they’d had no prior warning.

The flat felt cold and damp and still smelt strongly of the disinfecting gas. Dewar examined the windows and saw that the seals applied during the sterilising procedure had been broken so the team had returned after the fumigation to air the flat. Nevertheless, the smell remained. He suspected it might for a very long time. He imagined some future tenants wondering what it was.

He put the plastic bag containing the cat food on the kitchen table and took off his coat, hanging it on the back of a chair. Starting with the kitchen itself, he walked slowly round each room, expecting, at every turn, to find the corpse of a poisoned cat lying there. The bathroom door was difficult to open and he feared the worst but it was a scrunched up bath mat rather than a feline corpse causing the trouble. He completed a tour of the premises without finding a body.

He then started on the airing cupboard, patting the lagging on the hot water tank to make sure the cat had not slipped inside. He continued his search in the bedroom wardrobe, which was empty but for a few cardboard boxes containing photographs and memorabilia of Sharon and Tommy’s life together He searched through the boxes briefly, sadly contemplating a framed wedding portrait showing the couple smiling at each other.

Now the marriage was over, one way or the other. If Sharon survived she would be a widow, badly scarred and maybe even blind. If she didn’t, the Hannans would just be two more people who’d briefly passed through the tenement in its long life. Dewar put the boxes back and stepped down from the chair to stand there, wondering where to look next.

As he shivered slightly in the cold of the bedroom, he became aware of a scratching sound. His eyes darted to the skirting board where he thought the sound had come from. He waited for movement. Had mice or worse still, rats, moved in to replace the Hannans as tenants? The noise came again but still he saw nothing move despite being sure that the sound was coming from inside this room. Another scratch and his gaze finally settled on the fireplace in an unblinking stare.

Before the decontamination team had set off the gas ‘bomb’ to fumigate the flat they would have sealed up all the doors and windows to make sure that the gas could not escape before it had done its job. The bedroom fireplace would have been seen as a route to the outside; they had sealed it up with plywood secured by adhesive tape. The scratching was coming from behind the seal that the team had obviously forgotten to remove when they returned to air the flat.

Could it be that the cat was behind it? Had it been hiding in the chimney when the team arrived? Maybe it had fled there out of fear when strangers had walked in?

Dewar stood in front of the fireplace, regarding it with a mixture of hope and apprehension. It could still be a mouse or a rat, and angry rats came pretty high up the list of things Dewar would rather not have fly at his face when he removed the plywood seal. He looked around for some kind of protection, quickly deciding that the black-wire fire-guard standing beside the fireplace should suffice.

Before he did anything else he went back to the kitchen and opened one of the tins of the cat food he’d brought and tipped it out into a plastic dish, filling a second dish with water. He brought them both back to the bedroom and placed them under the window. This might be tempting fate, he thought but he needed a positive thought to work on. He really wanted it to be the cat but common sense demanded that he make another trip to the kitchen and return with a heavy soup ladle just in case.

He closed the bedroom door and positioned the fire-guard in front of him with one hand while he started to strip away the adhesive tape with the other. The scratching noise stopped instantly. He couldn’t help but imagine the animal preparing its next move, crouching, tensing its limbs, preparing to spring, ready to fight for its freedom. A frightened cat or an angry rat?

He paused for a moment then repositioned the fire-guard for maximum protection before taking a deep breath and pulling away the last piece of tape holding the seal.

Cautiously, he slid the board away and recoiled slightly in anticipation before looking into the maw of the grate. There was nothing to be seen. He was looking at an empty black grate that hadn’t been used in years. Once again silence reigned supreme in the room. Dewar shivered with the cold and a sense of anticlimax. He waited for what seemed an eternity for the scratching noise to come again but instead, he saw something appear at the top of the fireplace. It was a furry nose, a cat’s nose. He watched, fascinated, as more of it appeared until finally a cat’s head emerged to look him in the eye. It was a ginger cat but covered in soot.

‘Hello Puss,’ said Dewar, suddenly filled with relief. ‘Fancy something to eat?’ He lowered the protective fire-guard and stepped back to let the cat make its exit in its own time. The smell of food ensured this did not take long. Dewar watched the cat pad quickly over to the dish and tear into the meat.

As he watched it, he started to wonder where exactly it had been hiding. Still curious, he knelt down in front of the fireplace to look up the chimney. He could see nothing but blackness then he remembered that chimneys in countries where it rained a lot did not rise up in a straight line. They had to have a kink in them to stop rain water dowsing the fire.

He rolled up his sleeve and reached up inside the fireplace to find a narrow shelf leading off to the left. This was where the cat had been sitting. He smiled. ‘Now that was one smart place to hide, Puss,’ he said, reflecting that it was the only place in the flat where she could have survived the gas. The decontamination team had unknowingly protected her by installing an airtight seal in front of her and of course, she’d had a supply of fresh air from above.

‘One down, eight to go, Puss,’ he muttered.

As he investigated just how far the shelf stretched before the chimney turned upwards again, Dewar’s fingers touched something else lying there. It felt like some kind of smooth plastic container. Carefully, he coaxed it round into a position where he could grip it firmly between his fingers then he brought it slowly down. It was a small plastic box about eight inches by four. He wiped the dirt off the top and removed the lid. Inside were a number of sealed glass vials but it was a syringe that took Dewar’s attention and in particular, the long needle still mounted on the end. He’d just stumbled on Tommy Hannan’s drug stash and fixing gear.

His blood ran cold as he realised he should have known better than to reach into blind corners in a drug addict’s flat. He’d been careful enough when looking into the boxes on top of the wardrobe, appraising what was there before touching anything but the excitement of finding the cat and then the box on the ledge had made him careless. If the syringe hadn’t been in a box but inside a plastic bag, for instance, he might have stuck himself on the needle and given himself hepatitis or even AIDS for his trouble. Many addicts were HIV positive through needle sharing. He’d got away with it this time with nothing more than a dry mouth and a hollow feeling in his stomach.

The sound of the cat lapping water made him turn round and see that the food bowl was empty. He took the plastic box with him when he went through to the kitchen and put it down on the draining board by the sink while he opened a second tin of cat food and added some dry biscuits to the mix on the plate. He gave it to the cat before coming back and taking a closer look at the contents of the box. The glass vials were a puzzle. Drugs off the street didn’t come this way and the vials had no manufacturer’s label on them. It wasn’t just that they’d had the label stripped off, he felt. They seemed far too small and narrow ever to have had one. Something told him they hadn’t come from a pharmaceutical company at all. The sealing on their ends seemed strange too. Irregular taper, uneven in size as if they’d been sealed individually instead of by a machine, as if someone had manually melted the ends in a flame.

Very carefully, he picked up one of the vials and examined it more closely. There was a white crystalline powder inside and a narrow little strip of paper with something written on it in pencil by the look of it. He held it up to catch the light from the window. He could make out the initials VM and the numbers 4 and 9. It didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t recall seeing drugs being supplied like this before. Sealed glass ampoules usually contained sterile liquid substances for injection and had a weakened area on their stem so that it could be snapped open cleanly. These vials contained a crystalline solid and there was no weakened area. They weren’t meant to be opened easily. All the same, there was something vaguely familiar about them and it disturbed him. For the moment, he put the vial back in the box and went back to see how the cat was getting on.

There was a gas water heater in the bathroom that provided instant hot water. Dewar prepared a shallow bath for the cat. He was idly watching the water level rise — painfully slowly because of the narrowness of the instant supply pipe, when he suddenly realised why the glass vials in the box seemed familiar. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and his fingers tightened on the rim of the bath. These vials didn’t contain drugs at all and they hadn’t been supplied by a pharmaceutical company. He’d seen vials just like them before; he’d come across them at medical school. They were used for the long-term storage of freeze-dried cultures of viruses and bacteria! Liquid cultures of laboratory-grown micro-organisms were aliquotted into small volumes in thin-bore glass tubes and subjected to vacuum drying. When all the liquid had evaporated the dried culture would be sealed inside the glass tube by melting the end. In that form, viruses could stay viable for many years.

The letters on the paper strip inside were the key to what the vial contained. In this instance, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that VM must stand for Variola major, the most dangerous form of smallpox virus. No wonder Denise Banyon and Sharon Hannan had thought bad drugs to blame for their men’s condition. Kelly and Hannan had injected themselves with live smallpox virus!

Exposure to a large dose of virus now seemed like a gross understatement.

Thanks to the cat rescue operation, Dewar had just solved part of the puzzle. This of course, led to more questions. How many of these vials did Kelly have? Where had they come from? If these really were the ‘bad drugs’ then, according to Sharon Hannan, it had been Kelly who had stolen them from a man who had asked him to help in their recovery. She hadn’t known know any more than that. There was only one person who could perhaps tell him about the man and where the vials had been recovered from and that was Denise Banyon. She had to talk now. The nightmare had come true. There was a source of live smallpox outside the institute and right now, he didn’t know where the hell it was!

Dewar went through the process of cleaning up the cat which had fortunately decided that he was a friend — or at least, a provider of food, and should be tolerated as such. This was fortunate because his mind was on other things and dealing with a reluctant snarling moggie wouldn’t have helped either of them. This was particularly true of the last part of the clean-up when Dewar had to immerse the cat completely for a few seconds in warm water containing disinfectant.

He turned on the gas fire in the living room because there was no towelling in the flat to help dry the animal. The decontamination team had taken away all clothes and linen for destruction. The cat would have to see to its own rehabilitation while he thought about what to do next. It wasn’t enough to raise the alarm about the virus source, maybe not even desirable. There was nothing anyone else could do about it. It was going to be up to him. He needed a positive plan of action and it unfortunately had to centre on Denise Banyon. He took out his phone and called George Finlay.

‘How is Denise Banyon today?’

‘Still no problem,’ replied Finlay. ‘She must be one of these people with natural immunity.’

‘George, I need a favour. An unethical favour.’

‘What?’ replied Finlay uncertainly.

‘I want you to give her a TAB shot.’

‘An anti typhoid injection?’ exclaimed Finlay. ‘What on earth for?’

‘I want her to feel ill. I want her to feel achy all over. I want her to think she’s going down with smallpox. She’s the key to this whole damned outbreak. I’ve got to make her talk.’

‘Making someone believe they’ve got a deadly disease is just not on,’ protested Finlay.

‘Remember you said something about it being all right not to know the details of how all this started as long as the source of the epidemic wasn’t still out there?’ interrupted Dewar. ‘Well, it is.’

‘Good God.’

‘Denise Banyon can help me get to it.’

There was a pause before Finlay finally said, ‘All right, I’ll do it.’

‘As soon as you can please. I’ll give her a few hours and then come in. With a bit of luck she’ll be feeling ill.’

Dewar phoned Steve Malloy next.

‘Nothing new to report, I’m afraid,’ said Malloy. ‘And I’ve just about exhausted every avenue.’

‘I’ve found several cultures of the virus.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Malloy. ‘Where?’

‘In Tommy Hannan’s flat. Freeze dried cultures in glass vials. He and Kelly must have thought the vials contained heroin.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ whispered Malloy, painting the picture for himself. ‘They injected themselves?’

‘Looks that way. I’d like you to take a look at the vials,’ said Dewar. ‘Maybe you could confirm their origin?’

‘Of course,’ replied Malloy. ‘When? Where?’

‘If you could come over to the Scottish Office? I’m going back there right now. My first priority is going to be trying to get my hands on all the vials that Kelly had in his possession. I think I’ve got all the ones he gave to Hannan. I’ll have to talk to the team who decontaminated Kelly’s flat. They may have taken possession of them without realising what they were or maybe even the police have them, believing, like Kelly, that they contained drugs.’

‘Jesus, but where did Kelly get the damned things from?’

‘The story, as I know it, is that some man approached Kelly and asked him to help him recover a stash of drugs and at some point, maybe when his back was turned or whatever, Kelly stole some from him. I haven’t been able to find out anything about this man or where the stuff was hidden — or why he needed help in the first place, but I’m assuming that Pierre Le Grice must be involved somewhere along the line.’

‘I suppose you’re right, but God knows how he came to make it without anyone suspecting,’ said Malloy. ‘And as you say, why would he need help in recovering the vials? Where had he hidden them that they that they needed “recovering”?’ he asked.

‘’Can’t think,’ admitted Dewar, although he had just remembered that Sharon Hannan had happened to say that this had taken place before Kelly had lost his job. Maybe this was relevant.

‘I’m going to have another go at getting Denise Banyon to talk,’ said Dewar. ‘She knows far more than she’s let on so far.’

‘Anything you’d like me to do?’

‘There is one thing you might be able to help me with.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘I need a home for a cat.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘”Fraid so.’