Wildcard

SIX

Steven said he wanted to take a look at Ann Danby’s flat. He had no specific reason in mind but it was vital that he understand as much as possible about her because she was — in the absence of any known contact — the sole cause of the Manchester outbreak. He was told that the police and Public Health people had finished their business there, and was given a key, which had been marked for collection by her parents on the following day; it had been necessary to change the lock after the police’s forced entry. He was driven over to the flats in a police Panda car, and he told the driver not to wait, as he might be some time.

‘Just like Captain Oates, eh?’ said the driver.

‘But I’m planning on coming back,’ countered Steven.

Palmer Court had little architectural merit, being a rather nondescript block of concrete flats four storeys high with roughcast walls and a flat roof, but it had a well-cared-for appearance. The grounds inside the gates were obviously professionally tended, with manicured lawns and knife-edged borders. The residents’ parking bays were white-lined and numbered and the rubbish bins, also numbered, were discreetly stored in a little stable of their own at the side of the building, disguised with climbing plants. The hallmark of the middle class, thought Steven, a place for everything and everything in its place.

A round-shouldered man wearing a blue serge suit and a grubby-collared shirt, supposedly made respectable by a thin black tie secured with an incredibly tight knot, admitted him to the building. He carried a large bunch of keys on a metal ring as if it were a symbol of his authority and walked with a shuffling gait that suggested his shoes were too large. His complexion spoke of a long association with alcohol but his breath smelled of peppermint. He seemed pleasant enough when he asked Steven his business. Steven showed his ID and said why he’d come.

‘Another one, eh,’ said the man. ‘Poor woman has had more visitors since she died than she ever did when she was alive.’

‘That’s often the way,’ said Steven, keen to engage the man in conversation in case he had useful information. ‘People tend to turn up at your funeral when they wouldn’t have crossed the street to say hello to you while you were alive.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ agreed the man. ‘You know, I still can’t get over it.’ He sighed. ‘Poor Miss Danby. She seemed happy enough when I talked to her the weekend before last. She was asking me about a good garage to service her car. I sent her to Dixon’s in Minto Street. My brother works there.’

‘Then you didn’t think she was the sort to take her own life?’ probed Steven.

‘Who’s to say?’ replied the doorman, philosophically. He put his head to one side and both hands behind his back to impart his wisdom. ‘People often put a brave face on things. Hide the truth from the world, if you know what I mean.’

‘Sure,’ replied Steven, hoping he wasn’t about to be subjected to a series of examples. ‘You implied that she didn’t have many friends?’

‘If she did, very few of them ever came here,’ replied the man. ‘Having said that, she quite often went away for the weekend but maybe that was work.’

‘She didn’t say?’

‘She was a very private person, was Miss Danby, not the sort to volunteer that kind of information, and I’m not the sort to ask,’ replied the doorman.

‘Of course not,’ said Steven. He asked for directions to the flat.

‘Third floor, second door. You can still smell the disinfectant. God knows why they’d want to go and do that.’

Steven had overlooked the fact that the Public Health people would have disinfected the flat thoroughly in the wake of the PM findings. He got the full lingering force of it when he opened the door and entered the hall. They had obviously used a formaldehyde ‘bomb’ to make sure that the disinfectant got everywhere and that no virus particles were left alive. This was effective, but unfortunate from Steven’s point of view, because he hated the smell of formaldehyde and had done ever since his early days at medical school, where the cadavers the students worked on were stored in solutions of the stuff. He put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth until he opened a window in the living room and waited by it until the air had cleared enough for him to take a look around.

The flat was very well furnished but in a pleasantly understated way — good-quality stuff but kept to a minimum so that there was a feeling of light and space about the place. He noted that Ann Danby had an eclectic CD collection, all stacked neatly in purpose-built racks beside the Bang and Olufsen music centre. A closer inspection revealed that they were filed neatly in alphabetical order. Steven moved on to her tape collection and found that the same system applied. It spoke of a tidy, organised mind. Her books, however, were arranged by subject and occupied three tiers of black metal shelving fitted to the wall opposite the window.

Many of the titles were computer- and probably work-related. They took up almost the entire top shelf, while a liking for poetry was demonstrated by the titles to the left on the middle shelf. Keats seemed to have been a particular favourite but Auden, Rupert Brooke and Wordsworth were also well represented. At the end of the poetry section, just before the shelf divider, there were a number of volumes of love poetry. Steven saw a certain poignancy in that in view of the picture the man on the door had painted of a rather solitary, lonely woman.

Steven picked up a little book of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work and moved through it until he found the one that had been Lisa’s favourite. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ He lingered over the last line, ‘And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death’, and felt a lump come to his throat. He replaced the book and noticed there was a triangular gap a little further along, as if one had been removed, so that the books to the right of it had flopped back. He looked around the room and noticed a small blue-covered volume lying on the lamp table beside the chair that Ann Danby had used most, judging by the letter and newspaper racks beside it.

Steven went over, picked it up and saw that The Sonnets of William Shakespeare had been her last reading companion. He checked for a bookmark, to see if he could find the last poem she’d read, but didn’t find one. He did, however, note with some surprise that the flyleaf had been ripped out. It had not been cut out, because a jagged remnant of paper had been left, as if it had been done in anger.

Puzzled as to why such a meticulous woman would do such a thing, he looked for the missing page in the waste-paper basket but found nothing. Then he noticed a piece of paper lying on the window ledge. It had obviously been crumpled up at one point, but had been smoothed out in order to make examination possible. He suspected that the police had found it on the floor but had assigned no significance to it. It was the missing flyleaf. There was some writing in light-blue ink on it. It said simply, ‘My love for ever,’ and was signed ‘V’. The initial had been done with quite a flourish, the sign of an extrovert personality perhaps?

Steven sat down for a moment and wondered why there had been no mention of a boyfriend before. Had this been an oversight or… a secret? A secret lover might explain a lot, but why had she kept him secret? Could V be a woman? Not everyone was comfortable with openly gay relationships, even in these enlightened times.

Steven remembered the policeman’s recollection of Ann’s last words, ‘All men are bastards.’ Not terribly original but now it made sense, and it was conveniently significant because it suggested strongly that V was a man. The fact that the relationship had been kept secret also suggested that he might be married, but, whatever the personal details, finding out the identity of V was now going to be a priority, particularly if it should turn out that he had been on the Ndanga flight.

Steven put the book back in its place on the shelf and glanced quickly through the other titles. There were a number of biographies, mainly of politicians both past and present, half a dozen reference books, a number of illustrated books about French Impressionist painters and fiction ranging from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before. The right-hand corner of the very bottom shelf was given over to books on hill-walking. Lakeland, Snowdonia and the Scottish mountains were all featured, but there was also a guide to trekking in Nepal. Why had there been no mention of a love of outdoor pursuits in the file on Ann Danby? Or had she kept that a secret, too? Perhaps this had been an interest that she had shared with V: it might even account for the weekends away. On the other hand, it could be that she had just been an armchair enthusiast for the outdoor life.

The question was resolved when he found hill-walking gear in the walk-in wardrobe in the main bedroom. There were two expensive shell jackets, one in red and one in blue Gore-Tex fabric, and two matching fleeces hanging on the rail beside a range of good-quality business and leisure clothing. A pair of Scarpa mountain boots sat on the floor with boot stockings stuck inside them. A Berghaus rucksack was propped up against the back wall, along with two Leki walking poles.

The smaller of the two bedrooms had been used by Ann as a study, and featured a pine desk and a wide range of computer equipment. There were two small metal filing cabinets and a swivel chair in light-cream leather with a matching footstool. Steven didn’t like the thought of doing it, but he would have to search the desk drawers for more information about Ann Danby’s life, not least for clues as to who V might be.

The fact that she had been an almost obsessively tidy person proved to be a big help. All her bank and credit card statements were filed neatly together in an A4 binder. There was a separate binder for household bills and another for mortgage and insurance details. Within minutes, he was able to establish that Ann Danby had had no money worries. Her salary, paid directly into her cheque account on the thirtieth of each month, had been more than sufficient to cover all outgoing expenses and had left enough for a monthly transfer of five hundred pounds into a savings account with the Halifax Building Society. This account currently showed a balance of something over fifteen thousand pounds. In addition, she had tended to pay off her credit-card accounts, three in all, in full every month.

Steven paid particular attention to the credit-card statements because of what the doorman had said about Ann going away for the weekends. He could not, however, find any pattern of spending to support this or give any clue as to where she had gone. Did this mean that her trips had been connected with work, in which case they would have been paid for through a company account? Another possibility was that someone else — V for example — had been paying.

He found a leather-bound diary in the bottom desk drawer and opened it hopefully, only to find that it was merely an appointments diary. Better than nothing, he reassured himself, and started looking through it to see if the weekends featured. He found that they did, but without any detail: Ann had simply written in the letter V approximately every third or fourth weekend. There had, however, not been any weekend featuring V for the last six weeks then suddenly V popped up on a weekday, the Thursday during the week before Ann Danby died. He had been pencilled in for p.m. and she had put three concentric rings around the initial.

Steven felt a small surge of excitement as he realised that a meeting on that particular day would make V a possible suspect for having given Ann the virus. The subsequent incubation period would have been about right. But what had happened to V himself? Why hadn’t he gone down with the disease? Steven decided there was no point in wasting time worrying about that at the moment. His first priority must be to find out if there had been any passengers on the Ndanga flight with a first name starting with V. The passenger manifest had not been included in the Sci-Med file, so he requested the information by mobile phone, asking that the list be e-mailed to him as soon as possible.

The sound of a key being inserted in the front door broke Steven’s concentration. He had been led to believe that the police and health authorities had no further interest in the apartment. He was about to get up from his seat at the desk to investigate when an elderly couple appeared at the room door.

‘Who the devil are you?’ exclaimed the man, clearly startled to have found him there. The woman’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with alarm.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Steven, realising the couple must be Ann Danby’s parents. He felt more of an intruder than ever. ‘I’m afraid there’s been some kind of a mix-up. I’m Dr Steven Dunbar from the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I’m part of the investigating team. The police gave me your key. I understood that you wouldn’t be picking it up until tomorrow. I had no idea that you’d be coming here today.’

‘The police gave us a key yesterday,’ said Mr Danby. ‘It was the spare that we were going to pick up tomorrow. It’s just one damned misunderstanding after another with you people,’ he complained. ‘What more is there to investigate, for God’s sake? Haven’t my wife and I suffered enough?’

‘I’m sure you both have,’ said Steven sympathetically. ‘But there are still some important things to establish. If you can bear with me, I really would like to ask you a few questions now that you’re here.’

‘Questions, questions, questions.’ Danby sighed. ‘What d’you want to know this time?’

‘Did Ann have a boyfriend?’

‘My God,’ snapped Danby, ‘we’ve been through all this with the police already. She did not have a boyfriend. Was that some kind of crime that you keep asking about it?’

‘Of course not,’ replied Steven but he noticed that Danby’s wife had diverted her eyes when her husband was answering. It struck him as odd, perhaps the action of someone hiding something. It prompted him to say, ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Of course I’m bloody sure,’ said Danby.

‘And you, Mrs Danby. Ann never said anything to you about a special… friendship?’

‘You heard what my husband said.’

Steven nodded but kept on looking at the woman, who was clearly uncomfortable with this line of questioning and more particularly with his persistence. He was more than ever convinced that she was concealing something.

‘This is very important. I promise you that anything you might tell me will be treated with the utmost discretion.’

‘There were no boyfriends,’ stormed Danby. ‘Now will you please leave? We’ve told you people everything we can. Now please leave us alone to do what we have to.’

‘And what’s that?’ Steven asked gently.

‘Start clearing away our daughter’s effects.’

Steven was uncomfortable with the prospect of having to tell the Danbys that they couldn’t do that until he’d finished prying into every corner of their daughter’s life, so uncomfortable that he decided to leave. He convinced himself that the chances of the meticulous Ann Danby having left anything around concerning V were remote and he felt optimistic about finding V on the passenger list.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out your way.’ Apart from anything else, he mused as he returned to the lobby, if push came to shove, Mrs Danby could probably fill him in concerning V.

Steven took a taxi to his hotel and connected his laptop modem to the phone socket in his room. He made the connection to Sci-Med in London and collected the e-mail containing the passenger list for the Ndanga flight. He scanned it anxiously, and found that there was only one male passenger with a first name starting with V. He was Vincent Bell and he had been sitting in seat 31D.

‘Ring a ding ding,’ murmured Steven. His second thought, however, was that row 31 was a long way back from where the ill-fated Barclay had been seated in row 5. There did not seem to be a lot of opportunity for contact on board the aircraft. But they could have met at some other point in the journey, perhaps in the queue at the airport or sitting in the lounge, if places like Ndanga had departure lounges. At this juncture, however, it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that he trace Vincent Bell as soon as possible. He called Sci-Med and asked for their assistance in getting details about him and they responded quickly, furnishing him with basic information within the hour. They had obtained it from the passenger record compiled by the special reception centre at Heathrow where they had dealt with the incoming Ndanga flight. As one of the passengers not deemed to have been at high risk during the flight, Bell had only been asked to leave his name, address and the name of his GP, but that was enough. Steven now knew that Bell lived at 21 Mulberry Lane, Canterbury. Not the most convenient location from which to conduct an affair with someone in Manchester, but perhaps Bell was a travelling man, drifting up and down the motorways of the land six days a week in his company Mondeo. Alternatively, it could simply be a case of love knowing no bounds. As it often said in the personal columns of the papers, ‘good sense of humour essential’ but ‘distance no object’. He would soon find out for himself: he planned to travel to Kent in the morning.

Steven looked at his watch and saw that he was going to be late for the meeting at City General if he didn’t get a move on. He rang down to the desk to order a taxi and had a quick shower before changing. The cab driver was none too pleased at having to wait, but money smoothed the way as usual, and before the journey was over the driver was giving Steven his thoughts on the current outbreak at the hospital.

‘Bloody junkies — they should shoot the lot of them. Once a junky, always a junky, that’s what I say. All this shit about rehabilitation is just a bunch of crap, a waste of bloody money. And now they’re passing on their diseases to innocent people. Bloody criminal it is.’

‘I didn’t know drugs were involved in the outbreak,’ ventured Steven when he managed to get a word in.

‘Drugs are involved in most things these days, mate, take my word for it. Ninety-nine per cent of all crime in this city is drug-related, one way or another.’

‘But I don’t see the connection with the problem at the hospital,’ said Steven.

‘The junkies are riddled with disease, mate, all of them. AIDS, hepatitis, salmonella, the lot, and then when they land up in hospital they start giving it to the nurses, don’t they? That’s how it happens, mate. Those poor girls have enough to contend with without those wasters giving them things. Shoot the bloody lot of them. It’s the only answer.’

Steven got out the cab thinking that desert islands might have a lot going for them. He was preparing to apologise for his lateness as he entered the room, but found to his relief that the meeting had not yet started and there were still two other people to come. In the interim the medical superintendent, George Byars, introduced him to some of those present. There were too many names to remember, so Steven tried to memorise them in groups. There were three senior people from the Manchester social work department led by a short squat man named Alan Morely who obviously had a liking for denim clothes, and a team of five epidemiologists led by a sour-faced, grey-bearded man introduced as Professor Jack Cane. These people seemed seriously academic, thought Steven, narrow shoulders, bad eyesight and an ill-disguised impatience with the perceived stupidity of the rest of the world. There were four senior nurses, including the hospital’s nursing superintendent, Miss Christie, for whom no first name was proffered, and finally a small delegation from the Department of Health in London. This last group was fronted by an urbane-looking man named Sinclair who smiled a lot but looked as if he might be good at playing poker.

Steven accepted a mug of coffee but was conscious while drinking it of hostile glances from the epidemiology group and he suspected they might be resentful of his presence. This was a situation he was not unfamiliar with, having encountered it often enough before on assignment. Outside investigators were seldom welcomed with open arms by those already on the ground.

As a consequence, he had simply learned to be as self-sufficient as possible. If anyone offered help it was a bonus. John Donne’s assertion that no man was an island might well be true, but over the years he had become a pretty accomplished peninsula. In his view, team players — those whom society set so much store by — moved at the pace of the slowest member of the team. That the earth went round the sun was discovered by Galileo, not by a team or a group led by him.

The two missing people arrived; both were senior doctors from the special unit.

‘We’ve lost another two,’ said one by way of explanation.

‘The two you thought this morning?’ asked Byars.

‘Yes.’

‘Any new cases?’

‘No, but assuming a ten-day incubation period at the outside — it was actually less for the Heathrow people — we’ve still got four to go. Touch wood, things are looking good at the moment.’

‘Then I think we have cause for optimism,’ said Byars. ‘How have the barrier nursing courses been going, Miss Christie?’

‘Very well. There was a good response to the call for volunteer nurses, as I knew there would be. I think we can safely say that we are on top of things at the moment.’

‘Well done.’ He turned to Morely and asked, ‘How about contacts? Any problems there?’

‘All the friends and relatives we’ve seen seem to understand the gravity of the situation and are reconciled to staying indoors for the ten-day period. We’ve had no real opposition at all,’ said Morely. ‘I think the same goes for the community nurses?’

One of the nursing staff took her cue and agreed that this was the case.

‘Excellent,’ said Byars. ‘How about the academics? Any progress in establishing the source of the outbreak, Professor?’

‘Not yet,’ admitted Cane. ‘But we had one interesting piece of news this afternoon. Porton say that the Manchester virus is identical to the Heathrow one.’