Fenton's Winter (16 page)

"You will phone and tell me?"
said Jenny, ignoring everything that he had said.

"I'll phone. But whatever it
says, nothing changes. I love you and you love me and, sooner or
later, this will all be sorted out. OK?" Fenton's voice hardened on
the 'OK' as he saw Jenny's eyes begin to drift away.

"All right," she said
softly.

Fenton was sitting at his desk
when Liz Scott brought in the package. The yellow envelope on the
outside said that it was the microbiology report; the box would
contain the blood samples. He sat and stared at it for several
minutes, anxious to know but afraid of what he might find.He
brought out a paper knife and turned it over in his hand before
committing it to the flap of the envelope and slitting it slowly
and perfectly open.

SPECIMEN REPORT:MARK BROWN

BACTERIAL SCREEN: NEGATIVE

VIRAL SCREEN: NEGATIVE

BLOOD SAMPLES ENCLOSED AS
REQUESTED

The report threatened the same
effect on Fenton as the yob's fist had when it had swung in to his
stomach. The microbiology labs had found no evidence of any
infecting agent. He felt completely drained.

After a few minutes of deep
depression Fenton saw an argument. The report was not conclusive.
If there was a new bacterium or virus in the specimen then it might
well require special culture conditions, in fact, it almost
certainly would otherwise it would have been isolated and described
before. The real answer would lie in the blood samples of animals
inoculated with serum from Timothy Watson.He opened the box and his
agony was complete. Both samples had clotted perfectly. There had
been nothing in Timothy Watson's blood to infect the animals. He
had been wrong...again.

Fenton pondered the
consequences. He had built up Jenny's hopes and now this. He could
not have done a better job of pushing her towards a nervous
breakdown if he had meant to. What a stupid...He crunched up the
report in his fist and flung it across the room. Jenny would be
waiting at home for his call, she would be pretending that she was
reading or dusting or cleaning or listening to the radio but really
she would just be waiting, waiting for the phone to ring.

Fenton dialled the number. It
was answered at the first tone.

"Jenny? The report hasn't come
yet. Maybe this afternoon."

Fenton felt worse than ever but
he could not tell her, not like that, not over the phone. He needed
time to think.

So there was no virus involved,
no convenient infective agent to take the blame and clear up the
mystery. So what did that leave? A poison? That seemed unlikely for
too many people seemed to be immune, besides, you did not carry a
poison on your person and pass it on inadvertently...

Fenton suddenly saw a crack in
an otherwise smooth-walled enigma. Jenny must have passed on the
agent to Jamie but if it wasn't a bacterium or virus she must have
known about it! She must have given Jamie Buchan something that she
believed to be completely harmless but it had not been. It had
killed him.

Anger, superseding
disappointment, erupted in Jenny. "No damn it! I did not give him
anything. How many times do I have to say it! You are on the wrong
track!"

Fenton felt the unspoken 'as
usual' hang heavily in the air. He stopped badgering to create a
silence in the room that threatened to be louder than the argument.
Reining his voice, he said softly, "Jenny, you must see that it is
the only logical explanation. You must have given the boy
something, something you would not give a second thought to,
something you have forgotten about, please...think?"

"No! No! No!" Jenny's eyes
blazed as she refused to have any more to do with the notion.
Fenton made to put his arm round her but she turned away and stared
intently at the fire. Fenton got up and went to the kitchen to make
some coffee. The kettle was empty so he had to re-fill it and wait
until it boiled. He did not return to the living room in the
interim, choosing instead to stare distantly out of the kitchen
window at the blackness with his hands in his pockets. Jenny had
never turned away from him before. He felt angry, sad, sorry,
ineffectual, stupid and, after standing still in the kitchen for
some time, cold. He poured the coffee and took it through.

Jenny did not look up when he
put the mug down beside her; she continued to stare at the fire. He
sat down on the other chair and looked steadily at her left profile
until she did relent and turn towards him then he broke into a half
apologetic, half self-conscious grin. "I'm sorry," he
whispered.

"Oh Tom..."

They held each other tight
while the tears, the whispered apologies, the cheek nuzzling
tenderness, combined to soothe the wounds that they had inflicted
on each other. A new silence ensued but this time it was a
comfortable pool of serenity with both of them reluctant to speak
lest they ripple the surface.

Fenton woke at three, his body
damp with cold sweat. He sat bolt upright to free himself of the
images of a nightmare, Neil Munro's face, a fountain of blood from
Timothy Watson's mouth and, through a red mist, the spectre of
Jamie Buchan's dead face. A forest of arms had reached out towards
him in the dream, Mona Buchan's arm had pointed and accused,
Timothy Watson had held out both arms in pitiful appeal and
anonymous arms had reached out from a deep freeze to wave like pond
weeds. Luke Skywalker had wielded a sword; this image remained with
him as he reeled into consciousness. In the darkness of the room he
saw again the boy at the harbour, the strangely familiar boy with
his hands on the handlebars of the Honda. "Can I have a hurl
Mister? Can I have a hurl please?"

The image of the boy's face
exploded into nothingness as Fenton realised something. It was not
the boy himself who was familiar it was what he was wearing! He had
been wearing coloured plastic bands round both wrists...hospital
name tags!

Fenton shook Jenny hard in his
excitement and coaxed her into wakefulness. She covered her eyes
from the glare of the bedside lamp.

"Think Jenny think! Did you
give any hospital name tags to Jamie Buchan?"

An overture of confused sleepy
noises gave way to silence as Jenny considered the question. "Yes,
yes I did." Her eyes cleared with the recollection. "I had a bunch
in my uniform pocket. I gave them to Jamie to play with."

Fenton stared at her without
saying anything.

"All right, so you were right,
I did give him something, I gave him a few name tags but surely you
are not going to suggest that he ate them and poisoned himself are
you?"

Fenton conceded that he was not
but he was not going to be ridiculed either. He took both Jenny's
hands in his and said, "It's a start and what's more it's a
connection, a connection between Jamie and the Princess Mary. What
else did you give him?"

Fenton's surge of confidence
overwhelmed any argument that Jenny might have considered.She
thought deeply before answering. "No, I'm quite sure this time,
nothing else."

"Good, make some coffee will
you."

Jenny's eyebrows arched but
Fenton was deep in thought and didn't notice. He sat on the edge of
the bed staring into space, his right thumbnail tapping rapidly
against gritted teeth. Jenny made coffee and brought it through.
"Your coffee oh wise one."

Fenton ignored the sarcasm or,
more correctly, it did not register. He took the cup and said,
"Well if all you gave him was a plastic name tag...that's what must
have killed him."

Jenny, with less reason than
anyone to scoff at suggestions which diverted suspicions from
herself, was forced to do so at this one and said so in no
uncertain manner.

Fenton remained adamant. "If
the name tags are the only connection between the hospital and
Jamie then they are the reason. It's logical, however unlikely it
may seem."

"How?" said Jenny
accusingly.

"I've no idea," said
Fenton.

Jenny shook her head. She said,
"You said that you saw Jamie's friend wearing the arm bands. He was
quite healthy wasn't he?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I don't know, but I repeat, if
the arm bands were the only thing you gave to Jamie then they are
responsible. Do you still say you gave him nothing else?"

"Nothing," said Jenny.

"I'm going to talk to Tyson in
the morning but meanwhile..."

"Meanwhile what?"

"How long is it since we made
love?"

"Quite a while," said
Jenny.

"That situation is about to
end."

"Do I have some say in the
matter?"

"Not really," said Fenton.

"Shouldn't we discuss this
first..." murmured Jenny, her body beginning to respond to his
touch.

"No," whispered Fenton, "I've
already decided."

Tyson listened patiently while
Fenton told his tale and did not interrupt but Fenton could tell
that he was failing to convince. Tyson's eloquent silence diluted
his enthusiasm until the implausibility of what he was saying
loomed up at him like guilt for some long past sin. Tyson cleared
his throat and began to speak. Fenton could tell that he was
editing what he had to say in the cause of politeness. "What you
are really saying is that Saxon plastic kills people. Frankly, that
is ridiculous."

The words, coming from Tyson,
carried the weight of a punch. Fenton tried to defend himself. He
began, "I know it sounds a bit..."

"Not a bit, a lot. It is just
plain ridiculous. Saxon plastic has been through every test in the
book and passed with flying colours. Do you know what tests any new
health product must pass before it ever gets near a hospital?"
Fenton did not but he could guess.

"Saxon plastic is safe. It is
non toxic, non poisonous, non inflammable. It is safe when you heat
it; it is safe when you freeze it and safe if you are stupid enough
to want to eat it! Now I know that you have been under great strain
but this kind of nonsense is dangerous. We have enough trouble in
this hospital without a law suit from Saxon Medical.
Understood?"

Fenton sat in his lab silently
licking his wounds. Nothing Tyson had said had made him change his
mind; he clung to his belief like a bull dog gripping a rag. The
only thing now was he would have to prove it all on his own.

Fenton's lonely war was waged
on a battlefield of paper as he read and re-read every scrap of
information he could find on Saxon Medical and their new product.
He examined all the graphs and tables from the original trials and
re-plotted the data in what turned out to be a fruitless search for
flaws. Quite simply, there were none, a fact that he had to come to
terms with after a week of silently preoccupied evenings during
which Jenny had plied him with coffee and kept, what politicians
liked to call, a low profile. As he conceded defeat and put down
his pen to rub his eyes on Friday evening he heard the sound
outside of an ambulance siren floating above the wind and rain. It
made him wonder if its occupant was bound for the Princess Mary.
She was.

The week had been special for
Rachel Morrison because it had been her eighth birthday on
Wednesday, a day she had been looking forward to for weeks because
of an anticipated bicycle. As her father had promised it had been
waiting for her at the foot of her bed when she had woken on
Wednesday morning, all red, white and shiny chrome. Her happiness
had been complete, well almost complete for the weather had been so
bad that she had been unable to take it outside to ride it, but it
was there and she could touch it and that was the main thing.

After school several of her
friends had come to the house for a special birthday tea and they
had laughed and played and eaten ice cream and meringues till they
were exhausted. Rachel ate so much that she got a pain in her
stomach, at least that was what her mother had said, but the pain
had become worse as the evening had progressed until, finally, her
tears had convinced her mother and father that the doctor should be
called.

By the time the doctor arrived
the pain had moved down and to the right so that he had had no
difficulty in diagnosing acute appendicitis and summoning an
ambulance. There was nothing to worry about; appendicectomy was
probably the simplest and most routine operation in the book. On
the following day Rachel Morrison died in the Princess Mary
following a massive haemorrhage.

The fact that Rachel Morrison
and Jenny Buchan had never met and that Rachel had been admitted to
the Princess Mary during Jenny's suspension ended that suspension
and freed Jenny from suspicion. Although it had not been discussed,
both Fenton and Jenny had been aware that the deaths had appeared
to cease after Jenny's suspension. Now they spoke openly about it.
Jenny was prepared to construe the pause as an unfortunate quirk of
fate, just her luck, but Fenton read more into it.

It now seemed obvious to him
that there would be a pause in the deaths for a pause would be
bound to occur when all the susceptible people had died leaving a
stable immune population. No one else would die until a susceptible
person appeared on the scene again, a new member of staff perhaps
or, much more likely in the case of a hospital, a new patient. He
blamed himself for not having predicted this earlier.

Jenny put a stop to his self
recrimination by pointing out that it would not have made the
slightest difference, a fact he eventually had to agree with. But
should he tell Tyson? Predictions made after the event, he decided,
were about as useful as three pound notes. He would say nothing,
besides, with Jenny in the clear he felt so much better, more able
to concentrate, much sharper. He would find the link.

Jenny looked up from the
newspaper she had been buried in and said, "Listen to this,
someone...a James Lindsay, aged forty three, committed suicide
after being dismissed from Saxon Medical for alleged theft. He
threw himself under a train."