couple of hundred teenagers that they should stay indoors for the next two weeks? My feeling is that we’ll just sow the seeds of panic and alarm.’
‘Well, it’s your call, Caroline,’ said Byars quietly.
‘I know,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I’m not trying to pass the buck. There were two hundred young people in that disco last night. Do I put out an appeal for them to come forward, just so that I can tell them that they’ve been exposed to a deadly virus that we can do nothing at all about? Or do I hold off until we know more?’
She didn’t expect an answer and none was forthcoming.
‘Like I say, it’s your call,’ reiterated Byars.
‘I’m not convinced that an appeal would do anything other than cause absolute panic among the kids,’ said Caroline. ‘I’m going to take a chance and hold off until we know there actually is a problem.’
‘After all, we’re not sure yet that this girl has the disease,’ said Kinsella. ‘It could still turn out to be flu or even just a hangover.’
‘Then it’s decided: no appeal?’ asked Byars.
‘It’s decided. I’m going to leave it for the moment,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe we’ll know more about the girl’s condition tomorrow.’
Byars reminded them that there would be a full meeting at three in the afternoon on the following day, and Caroline and Kinsella left.
When they had gone, George Byars asked Steven about progress in tracing the source of the outbreak.
‘I thought I’d found the link between the two outbreaks, but it turned out I was wrong,’ confessed Steven.
‘Professor Cane’s not been having much luck either. This damned virus seems to have appeared out of nowhere.’
‘No,’ said Steven, ‘it didn’t do that. That’s the one thing we can be absolutely sure about.’
On the way back to his hotel, Steven asked the taxi driver to take him round by the street where the Danbys lived. As he had anticipated, a scrum of cameramen and news reporters were camped outside the bungalow, forcing the cab to slow down to squeeze between carelessly parked vehicles.
‘What’s your interest in this?’ asked the taxi driver, his tone betraying irritation.
‘Just curious,’ replied Steven.
‘Poor sods have enough to worry about without rubber-neckers like you turning up.’
‘You’re probably right,’ agreed Steven distantly.
‘If you want my opinion-’
‘I don’t,’ snapped Steven, and they completed the journey in an uncomfortable silence.
When he got to his room he ordered coffee and sandwiches from room service and leafed through the Sci- Med file again, looking for anything he might have overlooked. He suspected that it would be a couple of days before press interest in the Danbys died down enough to give him a chance to speak to Mrs Danby. He needed something to do in the interim and his attention finally came to rest on the firm that Ann had worked for, Tyne Brookman, the academic publishers in Lloyd Street. He should have thought of that before, he told himself. Ann might have had a special friend or colleague on the staff there, someone she might have confided in. It was something definitely worth pursuing, but first he would hire a car. It was beginning to look as if he would be here for some time. He asked the hotel desk to arrange it, and a Rover 75 was duly delivered to the car park within the hour.
After a brief consultation with a street map in the hotel reception, Steven drove out of the car park to circle round the south side of the town hall on Fountain Street, intending to enter Lloyd Street. At the last moment he saw that entry was blocked at that end, as it was part of a one-way system, and had to skirt round the block on Albert Cross Street and enter from the west, off Deansgate.
The premises of Tyne Brookman were located in a Victorian building, three storeys high and black with the grime of a century’s traffic. The high ceilings were at odds with the poor lighting arrangements, resulting in an ineffectual dull yellow light in the entrance hall and making the place depressingly gloomy. The frosted-glass door marked Reception in black stick-on letters jammed against its frame when Steven turned the handle. It juddered open when he applied a deal more force.
‘It sticks,’ said the young girl behind the desk, stating the obvious.
Steven showed his ID and asked if he might speak to someone in charge.
‘Mr Finlay’s out and Mr Taylor’s at his brother’s funeral,’ replied the girl.
‘Someone else perhaps?’ ventured Steven, wondering why so many firms put an idiot at the interface between themselves and the public.
‘Can you give me some idea what it’s about?’ asked the girl.
‘Did you know Miss Danby, who worked here?’
‘Not well. She worked in computers.’
‘Then how about someone in computers?’ he suggested.
‘I could try Mrs Black — she works in computers,’ said the girl. She posed it as a question and Steven nodded. He looked about him while she made the call. Tinsel had been hung on the plain yellow walls. It fell in vertical strips at intervals of a metre or so. A single smiling reindeer galloped above posters advertising the firm’s latest books, pride of place going to A Molecular Understanding of Protein Interactions and A European View of American Corporate Law.
‘A couple of blockbusters there,’ said Steven when the girl had finished on the phone. She looked at him blankly, then said, ‘Mrs Black will see you. She’s on the floor above, in room 112.’
Mrs Black turned out be an extremely attractive fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing a white blouse over a navy-blue pencil skirt. She got up from her desk and offered her hand when Steven entered. ‘Hilary Black. What can I do for you, Dr Dunbar?’ she asked in a friendly and pleasantly cultured voice.
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Steven. ‘I’m trying to build up a picture of Ann Danby’s life so I’m doing the rounds, speaking to people who knew her. I take it that would include you?’
‘She was our systems manager.’
‘And you are?’
‘I’m now our systems manager; I was Ann’s assistant.’
‘I see. Did you know her well?’
‘She was extremely good at her job.’
‘That isn’t quite what I asked.’
‘We had the occasional after-work drink together, a pizza once in a while, that sort of thing, colleagues rather than friends.’
Steven nodded and asked, ‘How would you describe her?’
Hilary Black sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. ‘Pleasant, responsible, reliable, intelligent, discreet…’
‘Lonely?’
‘Lonely? No, I don’t think so. Ann wasn’t lonely. Loneliness suggests a state that’s forced on one. That wasn’t the case with Ann. People liked her. She kept them at a distance through her own choice.’
‘What did you think when you heard that she’d taken her own life?’
‘I was shocked. We all were.’
‘How about surprised?’
‘Yes… that too,’ agreed Hilary but less surely.
‘You hesitated.’
‘Ann had something on her mind, something that had been getting her down for at least a month before she died. She hid it from most people, simply because she was used to hiding most things from people, but working together I could tell that she was worried or depressed about something, though she wouldn’t say what.’
‘You asked her?’
‘Yes. I wanted to help but she wouldn’t let me. That was Ann, I’m afraid. But now I come to think of it, I remember thinking at one point that she had got over it. It was one day during the week before she died because she came in that day and was all smiles again. But it only lasted the one day.’
‘You can’t remember what day that was, can you?’ asked Steven.
‘Give me a moment.’ Hilary opened her desk diary and flicked through the pages before tracing her forefinger slowly down one of them. ‘It would have been a Thursday,’ she said. ‘Thursday the eighteenth of November.’
