'Jenny snuggled down under the covers.
Fenton swung himself slowly over the edge of the bed and sat for a moment holding his head in his hands. 'I feel awful.'
Jenny leaned over and kissed his bare back. 'The whisky,' she said.
'Coffee?'
'Please,'
Fenton returned to sit on the edge of the bed while they drank their coffee.
'Are you on call this week-end?'
'Tomorrow.'
Jenny put down her cup on the bedside table and put her hand on Fenton's forearm. 'You will be careful won't you?'
Fenton looked puzzled. 'What do you mean?'
'You said yourself it must have been a lunatic who did what he did to Neil. Just take care that's all.'
Fenton was taken aback. 'You know,' he said, 'I didn't even think of that.'
The rain drove into Fenton's visor as he wound the Honda up through the streets of Edinburgh's Georgian 'New Town', streets crammed with the offices of the city's professional classes. The road surface was wet and the bike threatened to part company with the cobbles at every flirtation with the brakes. The infatuation with two- wheeled machinery that most men experience in their late teens and early twenties had proved, in Fenton's case, to be the real thing. Apart from a brief period when he had succumbed to the promise of warmth and dryness from an ageing Volkswagen beetle his love for motor cycles had remained undiminished. There was just no car remotely within his price range that could provide the feeling he got when the Honda's rev counter edged into the red sector. Tales of being caught doing forty-five in the family Ford paled into insignificance when compared with Fenton's one conviction of entering the outskirts of Edinburgh from the Forth Road Bridge at one hundred and ten miles an hour. The traffic police had shown more than a trace of admiration when issuing the ticket but the magistrate had, however, failed to share their enthusiasm and had almost choked on hearing the charge of 'exceeding the speed limit by seventy miles per hour.' His admonition that a man of Fenton's age should have 'known better' had hurt almost as much as the fine.
Fenton reached the hospital at two minutes to nine and edged the bike up the narrow lane at the side of the lab to park it in a small courtyard under a canopy of corrugated iron. The Princess Mary Hospital, being near the centre of the city, had had no room to expand over the years through building extensions and had resorted, like the university, to buying up neighbouring property as a solution to the problem. The Biochemistry Department was actually one of a row of Victorian terraced villas that the hospital had acquired some twenty years previously. The inside, of course, had been extensively altered but the external facade remained the same, its stone blackened with the years of passing traffic.
Fenton pushed open the dark blue door and took off his leathers in the outer hall in front of a row of steel lockers. Susan Daniels, one of the technicians, saw him through the inner glass door and opened it. 'Dr Tyson would like to see you,' she said. Fenton buttoned his lab coat as he climbed the stairs to the upper flat then knocked on the door bearing the legend, 'Consultant Biochemist.'
'Come.'
Fenton entered to see Charles Tyson look up from his desk and peer at him over his glasses. 'What a day,' he said.
Fenton agreed.
'We are going to have the police with us for most, if not all, of the day,' said Tyson. 'We'll just have to try and work round them.'
'Of course,' said Fenton.
'I've requested a locum as a matter of priority but until such times…'
'Of course,' said Fenton again.
'I'd like you to speak to Neil's technician, find out what needs attending to and deal with it if you would. I'll have Ian Ferguson cover for you in the blood lab in the meantime.'
Fenton nodded and turned to leave. As he got to the door Tyson said, 'Oh, there is one more thing.'
'Yes?'
'Neil's funeral, it will probably be at the end of next week, when the fiscal releases the body. We can't all go; the work of the lab has to go on. I thought maybe you, Alex Ross and myself could go?'
'Fine,’ said Fenton without emotion.
He walked along the first floor landing to a room that had once been a small bedroom but had, in more recent times, been the lab that Neil Munro had worked in. He sat down at the desk and started to empty out the drawers, pausing as he came to a photograph of himself holding up a newly caught fish. He remembered the occasion. He and Munro had gone fishing on Loch Lomond in November. They had left Edinburgh at six in the morning to pick up their hired boat in Balmaha at eight. The fish, a small pike, had been caught off the Endrick bank on almost the first cast of the day and Munro had captured the moment on film.
There had been no more fish on that occasion and the weather had turned bad in early afternoon ensuring that they were soaked to the skin by the time they had returned to MacFarlane's boatyard. Munro had ribbed him about the smallness of the fish but, having caught nothing himself, had come off worst in the verbal exchange. Fenton put the photograph in his top pocket and continued sifting through the contents of the desk. He was working through the last drawer when Susan Daniels came in. 'I understand you will be taking over Neil's work,' she said. 'Can we talk?'
'Give me five minutes will you,' said Fenton.
A system involving three piles of paper had evolved. One for Munro's personal belongings, one for lab documents and one for 'anything else.' The personal pile was the by far the smallest, a Sharp's scientific calculator, a University of Edinburgh diary, a well thumbed copy of 'Biochemical Values in Clinical Medicine,' by R.D. Eastham, a few postcards and a handful of assorted pens and pencils. Fenton put them all in a large manila envelope and marked it 'Neil's' in black marker pen. The 'anything else' pile was consigned mainly to the waste-paper basket, consisting of typed circulars advising of seminars and meetings and up-dates to trade catalogues. Fenton started to work his way through the lab document pile while he waited for Susan Daniels to return. Much of it was concerned with a new automated blood analyser that the department had been appraising for the past three months. Neil had been acting as liaison officer with the company, Saxon Medical and the relevant licensing authorities and from what Fenton could see in copies of the reports there had been no problems. The preliminary and intermediate reports that Munro had submitted were unstinting in their praise.
Fenton turned his attention to Munro's personal lab book and tried to pick up the thread of the entries but found it difficult for there was no indication of where the listed data had come from or what they referred to. Munro, like the other senior members of staff, had been working on a research project of his own, something they were all encouraged to do although, in a busy hospital laboratory, this usually had to be something small and relatively unambitious. Fenton stopped trying to decipher the figures and went over to look out of the window. It was still raining although the sky was beginning to lighten. He turned round as Susan Daniels came in.
'Sorry I'm late. The police wanted to talk to me again.'
Fenton nodded.
'It all seems a bit pointless really. Who would want to kill Neil?' said the girl.
Fenton looked out of the window again and said, 'The point is, somebody did kill him.'
'I'd better brief you on what Neil was doing,' said Susan Daniels.
'Do you know what his own research project was on?' asked Fenton.
'No I don't. Is it important?'
'Maybe not, I just thought you might have known.'
'He didn't speak about it although he seemed to be spending more and more time on it over the past few weeks.'
'Really?'
'Actually he seemed so preoccupied over the last week or so that I asked him if anything was the matter.'
'And?'
