“Oh absolutely old chap, no question about it. It’s just that, well you know what A amp;E is like. Having you off will be an added strain on all of us…”
“A couple of days.”
“Right, well then, look after yourself and of course, if you do happen to feel better in the morning…”
Saracen put the phone down, swore once and went back to his newspaper. He skipped through the advertisements that comprised eighty percent and found the weekly feature on the history of Skelmore and surrounding district that he particularly liked. This week’s offering was entitled ‘The Curse of Skelmore’ and recounted the legend of the Skelmoris Chalice, a vessel reputed, like so many others over the course of two thousand years, to have been the Holy Grail, the dish Christ had eaten from on the occasion of the Last Supper.
According to the story the chalice had been brought to Skelmoris Abbey, a Dominican monastery, which, in the fourteenth century, had occupied the site where the town of Skelmore now stood. The vessel had been brought there from London for some unrecorded reason and handed over to the Abbot, one Hugo Letant, for safe- keeping.
Unknown to the Church authorities Letant and the brothers of Skelmoris could hardly have been a worse choice for they were, in fact, evil men who preyed on travellers unwise enough to seek food and shelter at the abbey. The story went that God, in his anger at having seen the chalice fall into the hands of such villains, had struck them all dead and, in the years that followed, a similar fate had befallen any other mortal who had approached the abbey in search of the vessel. In the end the place had been destroyed by fire. The legend of the chalice had died with the abbey and only the story had survived the mists of time.
The Chronicle reported that interest in the abbey had been awakened recently with the arrival in Skelmore of an archaeological team from the University of Oxford to begin exploratory excavations. Saracen smiled and had to put down the paper as the phone rang again; this time it was Alan Tremaine.
“I checked out the PM room. I didn’t find any broken formaldehyde bottles I’m afraid.”
“Just a thought,” said Saracen.
“It’s funny; I thought the place actually smelled of ammonia not formaldehyde.”
Saracen felt his pulse rate rise a little. He had been right. It had not been his imagination after all. “Really?” he said non-committaly.
“God knows what they’d want with ammonia in the PM room,” said Tremaine.
Saracen agreed but somewhere in the back of his mind a vague memory had begun to stir, there was something he could not quite recall, some kind of a connection between formaldehyde and ammonia, if only he could remember…”
“Garten was up looking for you,” said Tremaine.
“Yes, he called me.”
“Asking if you would be back tomorrow?” asked Tremaine.
“Something like that,” agreed Saracen.
“I hope you told him what to do.”
“I said I would be taking a couple of days off.”
“That man is incredible. Do you think he ever worked himself?”
“I’m on leave. I don’t want to think about him,” replied Saracen.
“Enjoy the break. You deserve it,” said Tremaine.
Saracen put down the phone and stared thoughtfully out of the window. There was something decidedly odd about the whole affair at the mortuary, something that tales of thieves in the night did not answer satisfactorily. Apart from the unexplained chemical smells there was another detail that had begun to bother him. The man who had opened the door at the mortuary could not have picked the lock with the speed he had. He must have had a key and that implied an inside job, someone on the maintenance staff maybe or perhaps someone connected with the refrigeration firm.
Saracen permitted himself the luxury of a second drink and lingered over the pleasing thought that he did not have to go out tonight. There were no patients to consider, he could get stoned out of his head if he had a mind to. He did not intend to but it was nice to know that he could. He added a little water to the whisky and sat down with the glass between his palms. Good whisky was one of the few luxuries that he allowed himself, not a single malt for he had no real liking for malt whisky but a deluxe blended whisky, The Antiquary.
He sipped it from a crystal glass, one of a set of six that he had won a long time ago as a prize in an essay competition at medical school.
Saracen followed the engraving in the crystal with his thumb nail and remembered how different his world had been then. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He had been bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to take on the whole world but instead he had taken on the medical establishment and come a poor second.
Saracen had been a very new doctor in his first residency having obtained a position in a world famous professorial unit as befitting the top student of his year. He had set out to impress his chief, Sir John MacBryde with his capacity for study and hard work but it was this zeal that had led him to probe a little too deeply into the case histories of a group of MacBryde’s patients being used to illustrate a point being made by the great man.
MacBryde had submitted a paper to The Lancet and Saracen had discovered that he had falsified certain aspects of the data in order to make his proposed ‘MacBryde Effect’ even more pronounced. No one had been at risk over the misrepresentation and no one would have come to any harm but Saracen, with all the holier than thou rectitude of the young, had exposed the misdeed publicly. MacBryde’s reputation had been destroyed and he had retired a broken man.
While outwardly praising his vigilance in the matter, the medical establishment had never forgiven Saracen for putting feet of clay under John MacBryde. Nothing had ever been said to that effect; he had been left to figure it out for himself as one career avenue after another had closed in front of him and all applications for research grants and fellowships were now politely declined where before he had appeared to have had the Midas touch.
When he had finally realised what was going on, Saracen had been filled with impotent anger, impotent for there was nothing to be done about it. No one would ever tell him to his face why he had not been appointed to a particular position. That was not the way things were done. He had been black- balled by a club that would not even admit its existence. The affair also destroyed his marriage. Being married to a loser had not figured in Marion’s plans.
Saracen had been captivated by Marion from the day he had first met her. She was beautiful, she was charming and she was vivacious to the point of being larger than life. Other women paled into insignificance in her presence. She had all the assurance and confidence that stemmed from being the daughter of a career diplomat and for some strange, but wonderful reason, she had always made Saracen feel that he belonged where, without her, his much more humble origins as the only son of an insurance clerk, would have said that he did not.
Saracen had been beside himself with joy when Marion had agreed to marry him in the face of all the odds, for Marion captured the hearts of all the men who met her — and was loathed by just about as many women for the same reason. They had been married in the university chapel on the day after Saracen had graduated first in his year and Saracen had felt that there was nothing he could not do, no goal was beyond reach. With Marion at his side he could ride the wind, catch the stars, and talk to the angels.
True, money had been a consideration, especially when he had found out that Marion’s dress allowance from her father was actually more than twice what he would be earning as a houseman but Marion’s father, although never in favour of the marriage, had been prepared to indulge his daughter until such times, and it could only be sooner rather than later, that Saracen became a successful consultant. When Saracen suddenly found himself having to take any job that he could get, invariably junior posts in unpopular specialities in third rate hospitals, things began to change.
There had never been a big scene between Marion and himself. Instead, Marion had started seeing more of her old friends, taking advantage of the legion of admirers ever willing to wine and dine her while her husband worked all the hours that God sent. Being Marion she had always been quite open about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do and, for her, it was. Saracen had been sad but, strangely, never angry. He had tried to keep a beautiful butterfly in a net and that had been against the laws of nature.
What bitterness and anger there was in the situation came between Saracen and his father-in-law and it was to prove final. Saracen stubbornly refused all offers of financial help to set himself up in private practice, having
