Fenton's Winter (18 page)

"Stop it! Stop it!" cried a
woman's voice from above but Fenton did not look up, neither did
granite eyes. They held each other's gaze, afraid to give the other
any advantage.

"Leave him alone Scobie! And
you too Ally! He's not one of them, he's a reporter!"

Fenton gave thanks to any god
that happened to be listening as he saw granite eyes turn and look
up. He turned back again and said, "Is that right pal? A reporter
eh?" He said it as if nothing at all had gone before and they had
just been introduced. His smile revealed rows of rotten teeth.
"Doin' a wee story on Jimmy are you? Exposing these money lendin'
bastards? Good fur you."

"I'm doing my best," Fenton
lied.

"Well, ma name's Scobie McGraw
and this here's Ally Clegg - two gees by the way." The yellow
corpse grinned. "If there's anythin' we can do tae help ye only hiv
tae ask."

I don't believe this, thought
Fenton. They want their names in the paper. He smiled wanly and
said, "Thanks, I'll remember that."

"Right then," said granite
eyes, "Is that your bike ower there?"

Fenton said that it was.

"Well ye better get oan it
then!" Granite eyes broke into bronchitic laughter at his own joke
and turned to yellow skin and the fat woman for support. Fenton
smiled weakly and started to walk towards the Honda.

"Just a minute pal!"

The words hit the back of
Fenton's neck like bullets; he turned slowly.

"Whit paper did ye say ye
worked fur?"

"The Guardian," said Fenton,
saying the first name that came into his head.

"Jesus," said granite eyes as
if that were sufficient.

Fenton continued towards the
bike feeling as if he was walking on thin ice with a thaw in the
air. He heaved it off its stand and mounted it as casually as he
could in the circumstances then pressed the starter as if it were
the ejector button in a burning aircraft. The Honda growled into
life and sounded like a Beethoven sonata. He was moving, motion
beautiful motion, spinning wheels, faster, faster, away.

To Fenton's annoyance Jenny found the story funny when he
told her what had happened in Glasgow. She rocked with laughter
when he told her of the feeling in his gut when he had first seen
the open razor. "It serves you right for prying," she
said.

"It was no joke," Fenton
protested, "These things can cut you to the bone before you even
realise it and you'll end up carryingthe scar for the rest of your
life, assuming there is a rest to your life."

"I'm sorry," said Jenny, "It
was just the way that you told it. You know I couldn't bear it if
anything happened to you."

They sat down and Fenton told
Jenny of his conversation with the Lindsay woman.

"So you are no further
forward?" said Jenny.

"I suppose not," agreed Fenton.
He leaned back on the couch and Jenny snuggled up close to him to
play with the hairs on his chest through a space between his shirt
buttons.

"What did you hope to find
out?" she asked.

Fenton sighed and said, "I
suppose...I hoped to discover that Lindsay had not committed
suicide at all, that he had discovered something awful about Saxon
plastic and had been murdered to keep his mouth shut."

Jenny rolled her eyes and said,
"That was a bit strong."

"It was also wrong," said
Fenton.

"Then he did commit
suicide?"

"There's not much doubt about
that. He was up to his neck in debt to back street money lenders
and not the kind who were content to send him rude letters."

"Poor man."

"I think he must have seen
stealing tools from the factory as a way out of his troubles but
when he was caught his position became absolutely hopeless, no
money, no job, no nothing."

"How will his wife manage?"

"The way women do," said Fenton
quietly.

Saxon Medical again featured in
the newspapers on the following day, this time in the financial
section. It was not a part of the newspaper that Fenton would
normally read but the word 'Saxon' had caught his eye as he flicked
through the pages and had registered in much the same way as
hearing one's name mentioned in a crowded room. He read that
rumours of a take-over involving International Plastics were rife
in the city and a deal, said to be worth millions and founded on
Saxon having obtained a license for their new plastic, was in the
offing. The new material, it was predicted, would revolutionise
equipment in science and medicine. Saxon Medical, a small family
based concern, was deemed too small to exploit the enormous
potential of the new discovery and was now up for grabs to the
highest bidder.

"Have you seen Saxon since the
Sunday you helped him with the analyser?" asked Jenny.

Fenton said that he had
not.

"Then he doesn't know you think
that there's something wrong with the plastic?"

"No. Tyson told me to keep my
mouth shut about it in no uncertain manner. You don't walk up to a
manufacturer and suggest that his product is a killer without the
slightest shred of evidence. You could get very poor that way."

"Or worse," said Jenny
thoughtfully as she considered the affair with the fume
cupboard.

"Or worse," agreed Fenton.

"Did you tell Tyson about the
fume cupboard?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"The engineers who came to
re-set the fire damper found the retaining clips in the flu. They
said they were in bad condition. They could have failed of their
own accord causing the damper to close."

"But the cyanide in the
drain?"

"We use cyanide quite a lot in
the lab. I couldn't prove anything. It could have been
coincidence."

"But you don't believe that?"
asked Jenny.

"No," replied Fenton.

Jenny's sigh was full of
frustration.

Fenton said, "I'm going to take
a good look at the people who have died so far. Perhaps they have
something in common, something that would point to why they were
susceptible and others were not. You could help if you could lay
hands on the ward files on the dead children?"

"I'll try," said Jenny. "Have
you considered talking to Inspector Jamieson again?" she asked.

"No I haven't," snapped
Fenton.

"That sounded a bit personal,"
said Jenny.

"It is entirely personal," said
Fenton, recalling his conversation with the policeman just after
Jenny had been taken into custody.

"But they are the
professionals."

Fenton remained adamant.

Fenton found a message lying on
his desk when he got in to the lab. It was from the Blood
Transfusion Service and said simply, Phone Steven Kelly. He did so
and had to wait for what seemed an eternity while someone on the
other end went to look for him. He was on the point of putting down
the receiver when Kelly finally answered. "It's about the blood
that Neil Munro asked for...Can I take it that you don't need it
any more?"

Fenton had forgotten all about
the request that Munro had made. He said so to Kelly and
apologised, adding truthfully that he had not as yet come across
any reason for Neil having asked for it in the first place.

Kelly accepted Fenton's apology
with his usual good humour and then said, "So I can take the donors
off stand-by then?"

Fenton was puzzled. He said, "I
thought Neil ordered blood from the bank?"

"No, he needed fresh blood; we
had to send out postcards to suitable donors."

"Was this the first time Neil
had asked for blood?" asked Fenton.

"The second," said Kelly. "We
had to call in a donor about a week or so before. The blood was
taken off in your lab as I remember."

Fenton had a vague recollection
of having seen Munro in the lab with a stranger about seven or
eight days before he was murdered. He said so to Kelly.

"It's just that we sent out
postcards to three people warning them that they might be called at
short notice. Two of them have phoned to ask if that is still the
case."

"You can tell them no," said
Fenton, trying to think at the same time as talking. "Are you
absolutely sure that Neil never mentioned what he wanted the blood
for?" he asked.

"Absolutely," said Kelly.

Fenton had an idea. He said,
"Do you think you could give me the name of the donor who gave
blood the first time? It's just possible that Neil might have said
what he was using it for, especially if the donor came here to the
lab and he had to make conversation."

"Hang on."

Fenton put down the phone and
read back what he had scribbled down on the pad. Miss Sandra
Murray, 'Fairview', Braidbank Avenue, Edinburgh.

It was a quarter past seven
before Fenton had finished the day's blood lead estimations.As a
consequence he had to alter his original plan to go back to the
flat before going up to Braidbank Avenue. Instead he would have to
shower at the lab, grab something to eat at the pub...no, better
not, he did not want to smell of beer. He would eat in the hospital
restaurant and go straight from there. He called Jenny to say that
he would not be home before she left for the hospital. She assumed
that he would be working late at the lab and, while not actually
saying that this was the case, Fenton said nothing to disillusion
her.

As the shower head cleared its
throat and spluttered into life Fenton shivered in its margins
until the temperature had settled down. The controller was faulty,
making the water either too hot or too cold until adjusted with
micrometer accuracy. Fenton made do with tepid rather than play
around any more.

He soaped himself and tried to
remember what the stranger he had seen in the lab with Neil Munro
had looked like, the woman he now knew to be Sandra Murray. About
five foot three seemed to be the limit of his recollection.
Marvellous, he thought...Fenton of the Yard.

He turned the water off and
stepped out to towel himself down, pausing briefly to listen if the
rain had stopped outside. There was no sound coming from the dark
skylight above the washroom although he could see water running
down it. Condensation from the shower, he decided. No rain would be
an unaccustomed bonus but the fact that the wind seemed to have
dropped as well made it all seem to be too good to be true. It was.
He stepped out of the lab into thick fog.

The Honda's headlight beam
bounced off the swirling mist creating a translucent corona that
slowed him down to a crawl as he edged out on to the main road and
wiped his visor more in frustration than of necessity. Bloody
weather, he grumbled inwardly for, to Fenton, Edinburgh's weather
was part of a vendetta being waged against him personally. His
meteorological paranoia now suggested that the fog was a gambit to
prevent him finding Braidbank Avenue.

He knew vaguely that Braidbank
would be part of a well heeled, comfortable sprawl of leafy avenues
that fringed the lower slopes of the Braid Hills in Edinburgh so he
headed off in that direction, slowly at first because of the fog,
but then gathering speed as the fog thinned with his climb out of
the city. He slowed to turn off Comiston Road and began to work his
way through the quiet back-roads.

The contrast between the Braids
area of Edinburgh and the Glasgow streets where he had found Mrs
Lindsay could hardly have been more marked. Braidbank Avenue, when
he found it was absolutely silent and exuded an aura of solidity
and order. Twin rows of Victorian mansions stood like rocks of the
establishment amidst mature and cultivated greenery. They stretched
out like troops guarding a royal route for two hundred metres or
more up to an intersection where they separated into echelons left
and right.

There would be no Scobie or
Ally to worry about here, no ineffectual bawling and screaming.
This was where life's winners lived; these were the homes of the
successful, either by profession or birth, where cheque books and
pens substituted for fists and razors, where quiet telephone
callsremoved troublesome intruders without obliging the caller to
do so much as lay down his gin and tonic or lift his eyes from the
pages of 'Scottish Field.' It was an open-plan fortress with no
walls or gates and its garrison recognised each other by accent and
attitude.

'Fairview' boasted a black,
wrought iron gate that squealed on its hinges when Fenton pushed it
open. He closed it slowly to avoid any further histrionics but the
latch still fell with a loud metallic clang when he turned his
back. His feet crunched on the gravel making him sure that everyone
within a two mile radius must be aware of his presence but there
was no sign of stirring from within the house. He pressed the
polished brass bell push, an action that had no audible effect, but
he waited just in case something had happened deep inside the dark
temple. He was about to try again when the area in which he stood
was suddenly bathed in light and a series of rattles came from
behind the front door.

"Yes?" said the silhouette of a
large ungainly man who now filled the doorway.

"I wonder if I might have a few
words with Miss Sandra Murray?" said Fenton.

A silence which probed the edge
of embarrassment followed before the man said, "Come in."

Fenton had to wait in the
hallway while both outer and inner doors were secured with double
locks and, in the case of the outer one, a chain. At his host's
bidding he followed him into a subtly lit room and accepted an
invitation to sit.

Now that he could see him more
clearly, Fenton saw that the man was even more ungainly than he had
taken him to be. He was very large, well over six feet, with
narrow, sloping shoulders that hung above the fat of his middle.
His general untidiness was accentuated by the fact that his double
breasted jacket had been buttoned on the wrong hole and his squint
tie bore distinct signs of egg as did the front of his jacket along
with contributions from other past meals. Hair jutted out from his
head at odd angles almost nullifying the attempts that had been
made to comb it. He peered at Fenton through metal framed glasses,
perched on his nose like a see-saw at rest.