Caroline shook her head and said, ‘No, I’m all in and I must look it. Let’s go home. You can take me to dinner when this is all over.’
‘That’s a date.’
‘What on earth possessed you to come back to St Jude’s, feeling the way you do?’ asked Caroline while they waited for the beans to heat.
‘I’m still a doctor. I couldn’t stand by when staffing levels are as bad as they are,’ replied Steven. ‘My precious feelings are a luxury the situation can’t afford.’
Caroline gave a nod of understanding, perhaps tinged with admiration, and asked, ‘Did you find it any easier today?’
‘I’ve just thrown up in your bathroom, if that answers your question, but you’ve been doing much more than me. How are you coping?’
Caroline swallowed as she thought about the question, and Steven saw vulnerability appear in her eyes for the first time. It disappeared when she tried to disguise it but then it returned and remained. It brought a lump to his throat.
‘We had nineteen deaths today,’ she said quietly. ‘We piled them up in the vestry… one on top of the other… like sacks of potatoes. Somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son, all waiting in a heap to be collected… and burned. I never thought I’d see anything like that in England in this day and age.’
‘When did you last have a day off?’ asked Steven gently.
‘None of us without family commitments are taking days off until we get some extra nurses down there,’ said Caroline.
‘You’ll make yourself ill,’ said Steven.
‘Maybe I deserve to be. Maybe if I’d put out an alert after that girl went to the disco, it really would have made a difference.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Steven. ‘We’ve been through all that. You made entirely the right decision in the circumstances. You have nothing to reproach yourself for, absolutely nothing. That MP just used you and the circumstances to get himself noticed — self-seeking little bastard.’
‘Thanks… but I’m not entirely convinced.’
Steven’s assurances were interrupted by his mobile phone going off in his jacket pocket. He went out into the hall to retrieve it and took the call there. When he returned Caroline could see that something was the matter.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘They think there’s a new wildcard case in Hull,’ Steven replied, still stunned at the news. ‘Sci-Med are sending details, but Public Health have been unable to establish any contacts. They seem to think that this is the best example yet of a case occurring spontaneously.’
‘Shit.’ Caroline sighed. ‘Where’s all this going to end?’
Steven looked at her bleakly for a moment, then said, ‘It will end when we wipe out the source, isolate all the contacts and stop the spread, just like with every other outbreak. We have to believe that.’
Caroline nodded slowly but she seemed preoccupied.
‘Don’t we?’ Steven prompted.
‘Of course,’ came the weak reply. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just so damned tired. I’m not thinking straight.’
‘And no wonder.’
‘Tell me a joke, Steven. I feel as if I haven’t smiled for weeks.’
‘Know the feeling,’ said Steven.
‘C’mon, tell me a joke.’
He thought for a moment then began, ‘There was this little baby polar bear sitting on a rock, watching the ice floes drift by. Suddenly he looked up at his mother beside him and asked, “Mum, am I a polar bear?” “Of course you’re a polar bear,” said his mother and she patted him on the head. A short time later the little bear repeated the question and got the same response. A short while later the little bear asked the question yet again. By now his mother was losing patience. “Of course you’re a polar bear,” she snapped. “I’m a polar bear, your father’s a polar bear, your brother’s a polar bear. We’re all polar bears. Now, what is this nonsense?” “Well,” sighed the little bear, “it’s just that I’m fucking freezing!”’
Caroline’s face broke slowly into a grin and then she started to laugh. She laughed until her sides were splitting, and Steven feared she might be becoming hysterical, but it was just that the joke had acted as a release valve for all her pent-up emotions. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said with the tears running down her face. ‘Spot on, Dunbar. Bloody brilliant.’
‘Glad to have been of service, ma’am,’ said Steven. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’
‘You can pour us both a drink and make the world go away for a couple of hours.’
It was late when Steven got back to his hotel but he downloaded the new information from Sci-Med on to his laptop and worked his way through it. He put to one side the extra information he’d requested on Barclay and the others while he concentrated on the new wildcard. It was easy to see how Public Health had reached their conclusions about the new case, because the patient was Sister Mary Xavier, a Benedictine nun living in an enclosed, contemplative order. The sisters had little or no contact with the outside world, and Public Health had established that Sister Mary had neither been outside the walls of the convent nor met with anyone from the outside world during the past several months.
Initial puzzlement gave way to the more positive feeling of excitement: Mary Xavier must hold the key to the mystery. She was a nun: there would be no secret boyfriends, no casual liaisons with strangers, no trips abroad and no possibility of contact with rogue animals. If he could find out how Sister Mary Xavier had contracted the illness, he would solve the whole puzzle of the outbreaks.
He learned that the sick nun had been born Helen Frances Dooley in the town of Enniscorthy in the Republic of Ireland, where she had been orphaned at the age of four. She was now thirty-six and had been in the enclosed order for the past eleven years. She had fallen ill eight days ago and the GP who looked after the sisters had been called in when her condition deteriorated. He recognised the problem immediately, after all the recent publicity, and raised the alarm. Public Health had seldom had such an easy time of it when it came to the isolation of patient and contacts. The nuns had already done that themselves. It was, after all, their way of life. The authorities had, however, called in one of the Swedish mobile laboratory units to deal with contaminated diagnostic material and the team had already established that Sister Mary was suffering from the new strain of filovirus.
Steven started out soon after breakfast and made good time over the ninety miles or so to Hull, but it took him almost as long again to find the convent, which was in a small wooded valley about eight miles north-west of the city. It was not signposted: there was no need for it to be, as the sisters did not welcome visitors or intrusion into their privacy. When he eventually found the old building, which looked as if it had been a rather grand residence at one time, he found that the police had cordoned off the approaches with chequered ribbon tape.
Two officers were sitting in a police Panda car out of the rain. He could also see the Swedish mobile lab at the side of the building. Steven showed his ID to the officers and asked what was happening. He was told that the patient was being looked after in the west wing of the building on the ground floor, which had been sealed off from the other areas. A separate entrance had been fashioned by the Swedish lab team, who had adapted the old French windows on that side of the building to create a secure tunnel. Apart from the sisters who were looking after Sister Mary, the others were going about their normal daily routine and had requested that there be as little disruption to their lives as possible.
Steven walked up to the main, stone-arched entrance and knocked on the heavy wooden door. There was no answer, but for some reason he didn’t expect there to be. He turned the brass handle and entered a dark, musty- smelling hall with threadbare carpets and large, forbidding furniture. Only the cross on the wall said that it wasn’t a suitable residence for Count Dracula.
An elderly nun crossed the hall at the junction at the end, head bowed, hands in her sleeves, but she didn’t notice Steven standing there and was gone before he could say anything. He continued slowly up to the junction where corridors diverged left and right and stopped there. Not wishing to pry any further, he waited at the intersection for someone else to appear. Eventually a young nun, wearing thick-lensed glasses and looking painfully scrawny despite her voluminous robes, came towards him.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, sounding annoyed. ‘You shouldn’t be in here.’
‘I’m sorry. No one answered my knock. My name is Steven Dunbar. I’d like to speak to Mother Superior if that’s at all possible?’ He handed the nun his ID and she held it up close to her face, turning slightly to catch more
