Jill was nowhere to be seen when Saracen got to the ward and for a moment he felt a chill of apprehension. One of the other nurses put his mind at ease. Jill was on her rest period.
Updale’s breathing was shallow and rapid and his eyes had the look of a man running in a race that he knew he could not win.
“Hard going,” said Saracen.
Updale agreed with a single breathless syllable.
“I have to ask you some questions. The answers could be very important.”
Updale continues to stare at the ceiling and gave no sign of having understood.
“You did a job for a man called Archer down on Palmer’s Green,” said Saracen.
Updale licked his lips and moved his head to the side. “…Heating,” he said with great difficulty.
“Yes on the heating system. Was Mr Archer ill when you saw him?”
Updale rolled his head from side to side on the pillow. “No…not ill,” he breathed.
“Think carefully. It’s very important.”
“Not ill…perfectly well.”
Saracen sighed wearily as he saw two and two add up to five. If Archer was well when Updale had seen him how could he have passed on the disease? The answer was not difficult it was just hard to face but Saracen forced himself to come to terms with it. However unlikely it seemed he had to consider the possibility that Updale had not contracted the disease from Archer at all, he had caught it somewhere else. The involvement of Archer had been a coincidence. Saracen baulked at the notion and remembered MacQuillan’s same reluctance to consider anything other than the Archers as the cause of the death of all the residents in the block where they had lived. “Just too much of a coincidence,” he had maintained and Saracen had agreed. He still felt that way but there was something desperately wrong with the explanation somewhere.
“You just spent the one day down at Palmer’s Green?” Saracen asked Updale.
“Thought it was going to be easy… found the air grille blocked… cleared it but flow still poor… fault was in the trunking… too big a job for me… removed the filters to improve the flow until he could call in a bigger firm… “
“You didn’t go back to Palmer’s Green again?”
“No.”
“Did you speak to anyone else when you were there?”
The caretaker.”
“Was he ill?”
“No.”
“No one else?”
“No one.”
Saracen told Updale to rest and left quietly. He looked back once through the glass door to see him staring at the ceiling again, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he continued an unequal struggle.
Saracen noticed that Philip Edwards, the boy with the medallion and the other sufferer from bubonic plague, was in the next cubicle. He went in and approached the bed to see if he was awake or sleeping. He found him to be neither. Philip Edwards was dead.
The Staff Nurse was upset when Saracen told her. “Oh no,” she moaned. “He was stable when I looked in a few minutes ago. I had to go help Nurse Rivers at the top of the ward. There’s just so much… “She mopped her brow nervously.
“I know,” said Saracen.
Saracen thought about the name Edwards as he came back down the stairs. He felt that it should mean something to him but for the moment could not think what.
MacQuillan phoned to say that Dave Moss had died in the County Hospital and Saracen took the news stoically for he had been preparing himself for it. It still did not prevent an empty, hollow feeling from settling in his stomach. “Any more thoughts on the bubonic cases?” he asked.
“None,” replied MacQuillan. “The game’s over. We’ve lost.”
MacQuillan’s attitude annoyed Saracen and he said so before slamming down the phone. “Damn the man,” he muttered. It was obvious that MacQuillan had stopped working on the epidemiology of the outbreak and that was their last hope gone. Without establishing the true reason for the apparent random spread of the disease there would be no chance of creating the right conditions for it to burn itself out. Plague would claim the whole town unless Beasdale pre-empted it.
Saracen began to write. He wrote down every single fact he knew about the epidemic in the hope that some new fact would emerge. Thirty minutes later he was no further forward. The best fit for all the pieces of the puzzle was still the one that MacQuillan had been using but once more the bubonic cases stood out like a sore thumb. Could that mean that all the rest was wrong? Saracen tried to free himself from the blinkers of the obvious and started to question everything right back to the very first assumption. Supposing, just supposing that Myra Archer had not started the outbreak at all… “
Saracen loosened his tie and tugged at his top shirt button. If the first assumption was wrong how about the second? Could he test it? He got out the files on Archer and Cohen and felt excitement grow within him. Myra Archer died on the sixth so that meant that she must have been very ill on the fifth and probably on the fourth as well. That being the case she must have infected Cohen on the second or third when she was relatively well otherwise Cohen would have raised the alarm and called in a doctor for her. Cohen himself was brought in dead on the fourteenth. A man of his age, living on his own would have succumbed to the disease after three days at the most. That meant that Cohen must have developed plague on the eleventh…an incubation time of nine days…It was too long! It was more than six days and that’s what Chenhui Tang had been saying when she had had her ‘breakdown’! More than six days! She had realised that Myra Archer could not have infected Leonard Cohen! That’s why she had been so upset!
Saracen fumbled in his desk drawer for a marker pen and then highlighted the cases on his list that had been assumed to have evolved from contact with the Archers. What else did they have in common if it wasn’t the Archers? The answer was plain for Saracen to see. It was Palmer’s Green! Myra Archer had not brought plague to Palmer’s Green. Palmer’s Green had given it to her!
Saracen found that it was one thing to come to come up with a new theory but quite another when it came to finding evidence to support it. How could the place have given all these people plague? He threw his pen across the room in anger and frustration as he failed to come up with anything. Somewhere in the distance he heard the wail of sirens and was reminded that time was running out. Suddenly he saw his best line of approach. It was Francis Updale.
Updale had spent only one day at Palmer’s Green and yet he had contracted bubonic plague. Something he had done on that day had given him the disease. One day in Updale’s life had to be re-created. Saracen needed help and the Public Health Department was hors de combat. It would have to be MacQuillan.
MacQuillan had been sleeping in his clothes and smelt strongly of whisky. “We have to talk,” said Saracen.
“The time for talking’s over,” growled MacQuillan.
“It’s just beginning. Sober up,” said Saracen pushing his way past.
“What are you talking about?” grumbled MacQuillan, scratching his head.
“You and the others, you got it all wrong. Myra Archer wasn’t the source of the epidemic at all. It was a place not a person. The source of the outbreak is the flats on Palmer’s green.”
MacQuillan looked at Saracen as if he were mad. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“Get cleaned up and then we’ll talk,” said Saracen forcibly.
“Who do you think you are talking to!” exclaimed MacQuillan, trying to recover some semblance of dignity.
“Are you going to wash or am I going to stick your head under the tap?”
