Crisis

Stoddart’s blank look said that he didn’t know what Bannerman was talking about. Bannerman said, ‘I think I’ve managed to collect enough in the way of paper to keep me busy for a bit. I wonder if someone could tell me how to get to my accommodation? I’ll settle in there and start going through these files.’

‘Of course,’ said Stoddart. ‘I’ll have someone drive you.’

That’s not necessary,’ protested Bannerman, but Stoddart insisted, saying that they had a pool of drivers ‘sitting on their hands’. ‘You won’t mind if it’s a van will you?’

The driver sent up from the pool to drive Bannerman was a short, round-faced man with ruddy cheeks and a lop-sided grin. His peaked cap was pushed to the back of his head, emphasizing a probable easy-going approach to life. ‘Let me take that for you,’ he said, stretching out to take Bannerman’s bag from him and opening the passenger door of a black, 15 cwt van with darkened glass windows at the back. It was no great challenge to guess what the van was usually employed in transporting. The driver confirmed this by saying, ‘It’s nice to have a live passenger for a change.’

‘Do you know Edinburgh at all?’ asked the driver, as they drove towards the castle.

Bannerman said not, adding, ‘I was a medical student in Glasgow many years ago.’

‘I’d keep quiet about that if I was you,’ said the man, with a grin.

As they turned into the High Street, the driver, who by now had introduced himself as Willie MacDonald, said, ‘You’ll be staying in the Royal Mile. That’s the main street in the old town of Edinburgh; it connects the Castle at the top with Holyrood Palace at the foot.’

They turned off into a courtyard on the left and Willie said, ‘Here we are, Darnley Court.’

Bannerman got out and looked up at a recently restored tenement building, judging by the cleanness of the stonework. There was a paved courtyard at the front with large flower tubs posted around it. In January they were empty, save for wet earth.

‘You are on the top floor,’ said Willie. He led the way into the building and went up with Bannerman to open the door and then hand him the keys.

‘This is wonderful,’ said Bannerman, walking over to the window to look at the view and marvel at how high up they were.

‘It’s a beautiful city Doctor.’

‘Breathtaking.’

‘You’re looking out over Princes Street Gardens, to the new town down there,’ said Willie, ‘and beyond that, the Firth of Forth with its islands.’

‘What’s the big one?’ asked Bannerman.

‘Inchkeith,’ replied Willie. He pointed out several other prominent landmarks far below them and joked that he hoped Bannerman had a head for heights.

Bannerman felt that at least one good thing had happened to him today. He thanked MacDonald and tried to tip him, but the driver declined, assuring him that Professor Stoddart would have his guts ‘for one of his practical classes’ if he accepted.

After a quick look round the apartment, Bannerman unpacked and took advantage of the coffee that someone had thoughtfully supplied along with a few other basic necessities in the kitchen. He pulled a chair over to the window, and settled down in it with his mug to peruse the files he had been given. He had barely begun when the telephone rang and startled him. It was George Stoddart.

‘I forgot to say,’ said Stoddart, ‘that my wife and I would be delighted if you would join us for dinner this evening?’

‘That would be very nice,’ replied Bannerman, thinking it would be nothing of the kind. He took down details of the address and agreed to be there for eight. There were few things Bannerman liked less than ‘academic’ dinners but he accepted it as part and parcel of life, a necessary evil. It did however, put paid to his plans to explore the neighbouring hostelries that evening. He got back to reading through the files.

FOUR

After an hour, Bannerman stopped reading and taking notes to make more coffee. He looked out of the window while the kettle boiled and mulled over what he had learned so far. The medical records for the region had failed to provide him with what he was looking for. Although it was true that there had been an increase in leukaemia and cancer in the area round Achnagelloch and Stobmor, it was not a striking one — even when he examined the raw data instead of the statistics, which he didn’t trust.

He had been hoping to find something in the figures to indicate that the radiation leak from the power station had been severe enough to affect the health of the local community. This, in turn, would have indicated that the levels of radiation around the immediate area of the power station would have been high enough to account for a mutation occurring in the Scrapie virus. A twelve per cent increase in childhood leukaemia sounded a lot, but it was based on a relatively small number of cases. It might have been due to a radiation leak but, on the other hand, it might not. This conclusion merited an expletive from Bannerman.

He sat down with his coffee and turned his attention to the details of the three deaths. It made alarming reading. The dead men had been employed as farm labourers on Iverladdie Farm, to the north of Achnagelloch. Only one of them, Gordon Buchan, had been married; he had lived with his wife in a tied cottage on the farm. The other two had stayed in lodgings in Achnagelloch. An outbreak of Scrapie had been reported in the sheep of Inverladdie and all three had been involved in the disposal of the carcasses.

The men had died within a three week period of working on the slaughter, after suffering headaches, vomiting, and finally, dementia. One of the two bachelors had run amok in the streets of Achnagelloch, smashing windows and screaming obscenities before being constrained and taken to the cottage hospital where he died the following day. Witnesses had described him as being ‘out of his skull’.

The married man had been nursed by his wife until he had gone into a coma. His eyes had remained open but he had not been able to communicate or respond to anything she said. Just before she called the doctor for the last time, who in turn called the ambulance, the man had appeared to develop some unbearable itch and had scratched himself all over until he bled.

There were no details of how the third man’s illness had progressed. He had been found dead in his room by his landlady. She had, however, noticed that his arms had been scratched and bloody and there had been a wax candle in his mouth, as if he had been trying to eat it.

Bannerman knew that there was not much to be gained by studying the behaviour of deranged patients. Once control of the brain had been lost, the patient would be liable to do anything without necessary rhyme or reason. His or her entire behavioural pattern would be indicated by circumstances and events in his or her immediate surroundings. The reports of scratching, however, were alarming and Bannerman saw the significance in them. The sheep disease had been given the name Scrapie because of the infected animals’ habit of scraping themselves against fences, as if fighting a constant itch. It sounded like the men had displayed the same symptoms.

The pathology reports from Lawrence Gill and Morag Napier reported extensive spongioform encephalopathy in the brains of all three men, just as Bannerman had seen for himself in the microscope slides the MRC had sent him. He could find no loophole in the report as it stood. Many of the lab tests had yet to be completed but all the circumstantial evidence pointed to the dead men having been infected with Scrapie while handling contaminated carcasses on Inverladdie farm.

Gill had included some notes on Scrapie research. It had been established that the disease could be transmitted from one animal to another through scarified tissue. Bannerman supposed that this must be how the dead men had been infected. The agent had got into their bodies through cuts and grazes on their hands while they worked on the disposal of the slaughtered sheep. The supposedly mutant Scrapie virus had breached a normally impassable barrier and attacked their brain cells.

Bannerman had a nightmarish thought. Perhaps there was no species barrier at all. Maybe the virus could cross to man quite readily under normal circumstances but the incubation time was so long that the disease did not appear until old age. Under these circumstances it might be called senile dementia. The Achnagelloch mutation