church gave up and burned the place to the ground.
‘What an awful story,’ said Jill with a shiver. ‘I think if it was up to me I would let well alone.’
Claire smiled and said, ‘The plan is that I dig during the day and write up my thesis in the evenings.”
‘Sounds like a full life,’ said Saracen.
‘I think the idea is that there won’t be too many distractions up here in the sticks so here I am as an uninvited guest of little brother.’
“Consider yourself invited,” said Tremaine, leaning across and kissing his sister on the cheek.
“I wish I had a brother like that,” said Jill. “Keith and I fight like cat and dog whenever we are together!”
Tremaine made a rather unsteady attempt to kiss Jill on the cheek too. “I’ll be your brother,” he grinned.
Jill laughed it off and expertly avoided Tremaine’s advance. In another person his behaviour might have been considered offensive but, from Alan Tremaine it was accepted with good humour. If anyone was upset by it was his sister. Saracen noticed her occasionally betray her impatience with an unguarded look.
The party broke up around midnight for both Saracen and Jill were on duty in the morning but, before she left, Jill invited Claire to cal her whenever she got too bored with writing. They could arrange an evening out for girl talk.
Saracen passed his own apartment on the way back to the Nurses’ Home. “Nightcap?” he asked. Jill agreed.
“Brrr. The place is like a morgue,” said Saracen as he fumbled in the darkness for the light switch. He lit the gas fire, drew the curtains and put some music on before pouring the drinks. “Did you enjoy yourself tonight?” he asked Jill.
“It was a nice evening,” Jill replied.
“What did you think of Claire?”
“I hated her,” said Jill with disarming honesty that made Saracen splutter. “Why?”
“She is good looking, bright, self-assured, confident, totally at ease. Is that enough to be going on with?”
Saracen laughed and said, “You had nothing to worry about. You held your own beside her.”
“You’re too kind sir,” said Jill. “But I felt like a country bumkin beside Claire Tremaine. I could feel the straw falling out of my ears.”
“Nonsense,” insisted Saracen. “Besides you were a big hit with Alan.”
“Boys will be boys,” smiled Jill and returned to thoughts of Claire. “God, I wish I had that kind of confidence.” she said.
“Maybe it’s an act.”
“Do you think so?”
“It often is. Even the most outrageous extroverts insist on being basically shy.”
“They’re usually mistaken” argued Jill. “They misconstrue selfishness as sensitivity, ‘believe they’re ‘basically shy’ because they once managed to have a thought without telling the whole world.”
“That’s astute of you,” said Saracen quietly. “I came to the same conclusion many years ago.”
“Then maybe we both know people.”
“Maybe,” agreed Saracen.
They finished their drinks.
“I’d better get back,” said Jill looking at her watch.
“Of course, I’ll drive you.”
As they got to the door Jill turned and said, “Thank you James.”
“For what?”
“Not sticking your hand up my skirt.”
Saracen smiled and said, “I won’t say the thought didn’t occur to me.”
“Good. I would have felt insulted if it hadn’t. Incidentally…why didn’t you?”
“We don’t know each other well enough.”
Jill smiled and seemed pleased at Saracen’s reply.
Saracen looked at the green digits on the alarm clock and saw that it was thirteen minutes past four in the morning. It was third time he had looked at the clock in the past hour. Three hours of sleep was not much of a basis to begin a long period of duty on but that thought just made matters worse. There was no way that he was going to fall asleep again and it was all due to Myra Archer and the pricking of his own conscience.
The explanation that a short delay in deciding which hospital Myra Archer should go to as being all that was wrong in the case was attractive and convenient because it trivialised the incident and absolved him from further involvement. In fact, there was only one thing against it, thought Saracen as he lay in the dark; it was wrong. Of that he was certain. There had to be more to it to have warranted such a cover-up and falsification of records.
Saracen realised that this was the second time in as many weeks that he had lain awake in the early hours feeling troubled about things at the hospital. The first time had been after the affair at the mortuary when the explanation on offer had seemed too pat and convenient, just like now. Thoughts of that incident had been receding but now they surfaced to niggle at him again. He reached out for the lamp switch and abandoned all hope of sleep. Any remaining reluctance to get up was solely concerned with temperature. The flat did not have central heating and maintained at best an ambience between lukewarm and cold. At four thirty in the morning it was on the freezing side of cold.
Saracen turned on the gas fire and squatted down in front of it for a few moments, trying to cram as large an area of body as possible into the path of the radiant heat before making for the kitchen to switch on the electric kettle. He lifted the kettle first to make sure it had enough water in it. It had not. He breathed a single expletive and padded over the cold lino in his bare feet to the sink. In his haste to get back to the fire he wrenched on the cold tap too hard and overdid it. The mains pressure at that hour in the morning ensured that he received an icy spray all over his bare chest. Single expletives were no longer sufficient, he launched into an adjectival soliloquy.
As he sat nursing his coffee Saracen’s gaze fell on his text books arranged in neat rows in shelves by the fire. The group nearest to him were concerned with pathological technique. Their titles reminded him again of the horror of waking up on the post-mortem examination table. It made him think of how he had come to be there in the first place. He imagined his body being dragged across the courtyard and into the mortuary, his wrists scraping the stone floor, the coldness, the stillness, the sweet sickly smell and the forgotten fact that still eluded him, the connection between formaldehyde and ammonia. He withdrew a large tome on histology and looked up formaldehyde.
Saracen found only what he already knew. Formaldehyde was a gas that could be dissolved up to a concentration of forty percent in water. A ten percent solution, known as formalin, was commonly used as a general fixative for the preservation of dead tissue. The book went on to list appropriate occasions for the use of formalin fixation in preference to others. Saracen closed it and put it back on the shelf. He lay back and idly scanned the other titles on the shelves. His eyes stopped at Cruikshank’s Medical Microbiology and he sat up sharply. That was it! Formaldehyde did have another use. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it would be used as a tissue fixative but it could also be used to kill bacteria. It was a powerful disinfectant!
Saracen thumbed quickly to the relevant section on sterilisation and methods of disinfection. He found what he was looking for. Paraformaldehyde tablets, when placed in a spirit lamp evaporator, gave off formaldehyde gas capable of disinfecting entire rooms. At the end of the process the toxic formaldehyde gas could be neutralised by throwing in rags soaked in…ammonia! He had found the connection. It made sense. He had been lying unconscious for many hours in a room next door to one that was being disinfected by formaldehyde gas.
One question had been answered but a much bigger one had loomed up. Why had it been deemed necessary to disinfect the entire mortuary in the first place and why all the lies about thieves in the night? Could it be that the affair at the mortuary and the cover-up over Myra Archer’s death were in some way connected? The flood gates to Saracen’s imagination opened up. Just how did Myra Archer die?
Skelmore General did not have a full time pathologist of its own. Post-mortems were carried out by a rota
