using the facilities of the medical library at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he had a reader’s card. He would have access there to all the reference books and current journals he might need.
The first page of the Sci-Med file was entitled ‘Primary Victims’. Humphrey Barclay, he read, had been a middle-ranking civil servant who had been attached to the Foreign Office for the last fourteen years after shorter stints at the Ministry of Agriculture and the DHSS. He had a BA from Durham University in geography and had joined the civil service immediately after gaining his degree, a lower second. Two years later he had married Marion Court-Brown, daughter of a Surrey stockbroker, whom he had met at university. The marriage had produced two daughters, Tamsin and Carla.
Barclay’s annual job appraisals suggested that his career had been in the doldrums for the past few years, his performance never being assessed any higher than ‘satisfactory’ during the past four. Illness had played a part, in that he had suffered intermittently from heart problems, although this had apparently been put right after surgery earlier this year.
Barclay’s being sent to Ndanga had been seen as a bit of a test by his superiors to find out if he merited promotion to the next grade after all. Barclay himself had been made aware of this and had been keen to do well, according to his superior, Sir Bruce Collins. Confidential vetting reports obtained from Special Branch suggested that there was no scandal in Barclay’s life. He was honest, straight and reliable to the point of being dull. Steven sighed and moved on to the next file.
Ann Danby had been thirty-three at the time of her death; she was unmarried and lived alone in Palmer Court, an expensive apartment block on the West Side of Manchester. She was a graduate of the University of Manchester in computer studies, and worked as an IT specialist with Tyne Brookman, a large academic publishing firm in the city. Her parents also lived in Manchester and she had one brother, John, who lived and worked in London for a public relations firm. By all accounts, she had been settled and content, even if regarded as a bit of a loner by her neighbours — although university involvement in a whole variety of societies had suggested otherwise. No one interviewed could suggest a reason why Ann Danby should want to take her own life, and the possibility of this action being connected with her illness seemed entirely plausible. She had not been outside the UK since 1998 when she had taken a package holiday to Majorca, apparently alone. She had never been to Africa, nor had she any known connection with anyone who had.
Steven shook his head and sighed again. There was absolutely nothing in these two biographies to suggest an opening course of action. He couldn’t see a first move and first moves were all-important, be it the first leg of a journey or the first move in a chess game. Get it wrong and it could be hard to recover lost ground. He moved on to the list of ‘Secondary Victims’ but found nothing helpful — it was quite clear how these people had contracted the disease. It was impossible not to be struck by the tragedy of so many young lives being wiped out; the stewardess and the nurse had both been well under thirty.
Steven noted down some key points for a plan of action. He saw the impending report from Porton as being critical, because it would establish whether or not the two outbreaks had been caused by the same virus. If, by any chance, they had not — and he sincerely hoped against hope that this might be the case — he would concentrate all his efforts on finding out where Ann Danby had picked up the disease, starting first with any animal connection he could establish. If, as was more likely, the two viruses turned out to be one and the same, he would have to gamble on there really being a connection between Ann Danby and the Ndanga flight, despite the authorities’ failure to find one. Either way, Manchester was the place to be. He would travel up there in the morning. In the meantime, he would read up on filovirus infections and in particular the reports on any recent outbreaks of the disease. He started with the 1995 epidemic of Ebola in Kikwit in Zaire where 80 per cent of the 360 cases identified in the outbreak died.
Steven’s arrival in Manchester coincided with the newspapers getting hold of the story. ‘Killer Disease Stalks Manchester Hospital’ was what he read on the first billboard he saw in the station. He bought several papers and flicked through them while he had a weak and slightly cold coffee in the station buffet. The press had the basic story but not much more. They knew that several people connected with the hospital had gone down with an unidentified disease, but they didn’t appear to know anything about Ann Danby, the cause of it all. One of the tabloids, however, speculated that the source of the illness might well have been a drug-addicted prostitute who had overdosed and been picked up by the police before being taken to the hospital in question. They went on to cite the problems that Glasgow had suffered recently with a killer disease that struck at drug addicts. That had been shown to be due to the toxin of a bacterium called Clostridium. Was this the same thing? the paper asked.
‘I wish,’ thought Steven. He finished his coffee and took a cab to the City General Hospital, where he was introduced to the medical superintendent, Dr George Byars, a short dapper man wearing a pinstripe suit which emphasised his lack of height and narrow shoulders.
‘They tell me you’ll be working flat out on finding the source of this damned thing,’ said Byars.
‘I’m going to give it my best shot,’ replied Steven. ‘How do things stand at the moment?’
‘Not good. The pathologist, Saxby, died early this morning and two of the others, the lab technician and PC Lennon, are dangerously ill. Everyone feels so helpless, but there’s nothing we can do other than give them nursing care. They either pull through or they don’t.’
Steven nodded and asked, ‘Have there been any more cases?’
‘Not yet, but Public Health aren’t counting their chickens and, frankly, we could be in trouble. This hospital isn’t equipped to deal with a big outbreak of a disease like this. We have a special containment unit, but it’s really designed to deal with the occasional foreign traveller who goes down with something nasty. As for an… epidemic?’ Byars seemed reluctant to use the word. ‘Forget it.’
‘I suspect that’ll be the case with most hospitals?’
‘Correct. It’s been government policy for some time now to close down all the old fever hospitals.’
‘So what are you guys going to do?’
‘Hope that Public Health have been quick enough off the mark in rounding up the patients’ contacts. If they have, they tell us we can expect something in the order of ten to twenty new cases. We plan to re-open two of the wards we closed last year and use them as an isolation unit. We’ve already got in the Racal suits for the nurses and we’re running refresher courses on barrier nursing for the nursing volunteers we’ve asked for.’
Steven nodded, but the look on his face prompted Byars to add, ‘I know, it all smacks of wartime spirit and backs-against-the-wall stuff, but that’s the way it is, I’m afraid. We’re just not prepared for this sort of thing.’
‘At last a use for the Millennium Dome,’ murmured Steven.
The comment made Byars relax a little. ‘I think we’ll be okay as long as there aren’t any more wildcards like Ann Danby in the pack. If there are, God knows what the outcome might be.’
‘Well, she’s my problem.’
Steven was taken on a tour of the hospital special unit, where he had to suit-up before entering and where he could look at the current patients behind glass screens. They did not make for pretty viewing. ‘Poor sod,’ whispered Byars as they looked at Lennon who was not expected to pull through; he seemed to be bleeding all over.
‘You know, it’s a funny thing,’ said Byars. ‘Despite all the bleeding, haemorrhagic fever cases rarely die from blood loss.’
‘You’ve had experience of it before?’
‘No,’ Byars confessed. ‘I read it in a book.’
Steven accepted an invitation to attend a meeting later in the hospital with representatives from the Public Health Service and other bodies concerned with the outbreak, then headed for the police station where Lennon and Clark had worked.
He was seen by a chief superintendent who seized the opportunity to subject him to a short lecture about the dangers his officers on the street were constantly exposed to. It was short because Steven interrupted him with a request to see the shift rota the two sick officers were on at the time of the call to Ann Danby’s place. He followed this up with a request to speak with Sergeant John Fearman.
‘I’ve known Tom Lennon for fifteen years,’ said Fearman. ‘Salt of the earth, he is. That’s why I put young Clark with him — I thought he’d teach the lad a lot about what police work’s all about.’
‘Tell me about that night,’ said Steven.
‘It’s all in the report,’ said Fearman. ‘We got a call from one of the neighbours about loud music. Tom and Clark attended and had to force an entry to the Danby woman’s flat. The rest is history.’
‘No, tell me the details.’
