The Secret (Dr Steven Dunbar 10) (3 page)

‘All right?’ asked Sue, who was working in the kitchen when Steven entered by the back door.

‘Yes thanks,’ Steven
replied. ‘Sorry about running off.’

‘Don’t be. It’s when the death of a friend doesn’t affect you
that you should start to worry.’

Steven smiled. ‘How come you always know the right thing to say?’

‘You obviously weren’t at the last meeting of the PTA when I suggested that the collective IQs of the local council wouldn’t break three figures.’

‘Did you really?’ exclaimed Steven, his voice betraying more admiration than shock.

‘'Fraid so. Maybe you should go talk to Jenny for a bit. She’s on the games console with the other two.’

T
he children were arguing about whose turn it was next when Steven entered the playroom. Jenny rushed over to him and gave his waist a big hug. ‘Auntie Sue said you’d had some bad news about one of your friends, Daddy.’

‘I’m afraid so,
nutkin.’

‘Are they dead?’ asked Peter
, the eldest of the three.

‘Yes she is, Peter.’

‘Was she a policeman like you, Daddy?’ asked Jenny. Sue and Richard had brought her up to believe that this was what Steven did in London.

‘No,
nutkin, she was a very kind doctor who worked in far-off countries helping sick children.’

‘Was she eaten by a lion?’ asked Mary.

‘Don’t think so, Mary.’

‘What will the sick children do now?’

‘The other doctors will have to do extra work.’

‘I’d hate it if one of my friends died,’ said Peter and the other two concurred with nods.

‘Maybe we should talk about something else, like what we're going to do tomorrow,’ suggested Steven.

‘Swimming,’ exclaimed Peter.

‘Yes, swimming,’ echoed the other two.

‘Swimming it is then,’ said Steven, pleased that the tradition of going swimming at Dumfries pool
during his visits was not to be broken, although he suspected that the junk food lunch afterwards followed by as much ice cream as they could handle had more than a little to do with their decision.

With the children in bed and Sue and Richard par
ked in front of the TV watching a serial they followed, Steven went off to his room to call Tally.

‘Having fun?’ she asked.

Steven told her about Simone.

‘I don’t think you
've mentioned her before.’

‘It’s been a couple of years since I last saw her.’

‘Was she . . . special?’

‘Not in the way you mean but she was a special sort of person.’ Steven told Tally about Simone’s work with
Médecins Sans Frontières
.

‘So what was it? Guilt or booking a front-row seat in heaven?’

‘Neither,’ replied Steven, permitting himself a small smile. Tally was nothing if not forthright. ‘Simone didn’t believe in God and she had nothing to feel guilty about. She told me she had a very happy childhood; sailed through medical school with an armful of prizes before joining Med Sans.’

‘Then she really was special,’ conceded Tally. ‘A truly good person. You don’t meet many of those along the way.’

‘Yep.’

‘So what happened?’

‘John didn’t know. He just thought I should be told. He’ll call back when he learns more.’

‘Are you going to stop off in Leicester before you go back to
London?’

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Oh, I’ll have you all right,’ murmured Tally.

A broad smile broke out on Steven’s face. ‘You could make good money with a telephone voice like that.’

‘Where d’you think the flat came from?’

‘I find out a little more about you each day.’

‘I’ll have to watch that. Take care, Steven. Sorry about your friend.’

John Macmillan called just after nine thirty. ‘It was an accident.’

‘What kind?’

‘She died in a fall from a gallery
in the library of the Strahov monastery in Prague.’

‘What?’ Steven exclaimed as if it were the last thing he expected to hear.

Macmillan repeated it but added, ‘It’s not quite as strange as it sounds. She was attending a scientific meeting in Prague and a visit to the monastery was arranged for the delegates. Apparently the monastery library has a particularly beautiful painted ceiling. Dr Ricard was one of those who climbed up to the gallery to get a better look. For some reason she fell and broke her neck.’

‘God, how awful,’ murmured Steven.

‘I understand her body is being returned to Paris tomorrow. Will you be attending the funeral?’

‘I’d like to; depends what we’ve got on
, I suppose.’

‘Not much at the moment. I was going to ask you to take a look at a hospital in Lancashire where the cardiac death rates were sky high but the situation has resolved itself
. The usual reason – an ageing surgeon not realising his faculties had declined and his colleagues being too respectful to tell him.’

‘Always a problem,’ sighed Steven.

‘Well, finally someone plucked up the courage. Anyway, you can let me know what you decide when you get back. When will that be?’

‘It was going to be Tuesday but I’ll be back on Monday afternoon – see if I can find out a bit more about Simone’s death.’

Steven went downstairs and told Sue and Richard what he’d learned.

‘Do you want to cancel the swimming tomorrow?’ asked Sue.

Steven shook his head. ‘I let the kids down today. I’ll take them swimming and then we’ll go to lunch, but I’ll head south after that and stay overnight at Tally’s before going back to London on Monday.’

Steven found Tally exhausted when he got
to the flat just after eight o’clock and let himself in. His hello was met with a faint mumble of reply. She was sitting in the living room with her feet up and her eyes closed, a glass of white wine on the table beside her as she listened to the BBC proms.

‘Did I mention that I hated the NHS?’ she asked without opening her eyes.

‘Many times,’ replied Steven, planting a kiss on the top of her head as he came up behind her chair. ‘But you also love being a doctor, remember?’

‘That’s what makes it so unfair,’ Tally grumbled. ‘We’ve got all these bloody managers playing around with charts and numbers and targets and ticking boxes to make it appear that we’re doing well when we’re not. If they got rid of them and employed a couple more doctors and a few more nurses, we bloody well would be.’

‘It’s an unfair world,’ Steven soothed. ‘I take it you’ve had a busy weekend?’

‘There were times when I felt I was working in a refugee camp. We’ve got to be so careful when we’re dealing with kids who’ve
just arrived in the country. It’s so easy to miss diseases and conditions you wouldn’t expect to turn up in an English children’s hospital. You tend to over-compensate by asking the lab to carry out every test under the sun and they get pretty pissed off. We’ve also got to be on our guard against TB all the time because it’s making a comeback, so we send every kid for a chest X-ray and of course the radiographers start getting grumpy.’

‘I can see the problem,’ Steven sympathised, sitting down opposite her.

Tally opened her eyes and, feeling slightly guilty, looked at Steven sheepishly. ‘But my problems are probably nothing compared to what your friend had to face,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for being such a moan. I’m losing my sense of proportion. Hungry?’

‘I can fix us something.’

‘No you won’t. You’ve had a long drive. Why don’t you shower and change? I’ll heat up a couple of quiches; we can have them with some salad and a whole lot of wine.’

‘Sounds good.’

Later, as they sat with coffee on the couch, Steven asked, ‘So how big is this TB problem I keep hearing about?’

‘Hard to say. Officialdom doesn’t want the extent of t
he problem becoming widely publicised for fear of stoking racial tensions. The kids presenting with TB are almost exclusively Asian and it would be all too easy to have the right wing shouting about English kids being threatened with a killer disease they'd caught from immigrants, so the figures are wrapped up in something which in turn is disguised as something else.’

‘Something the Civil Service are good at.’

‘Well, it could be a continuing challenge. TB might not be the only thing making a comeback. There are those who predict we’re going back to what it was like in the forties and fifties of the last century.’ Tally groaned and stretched her arms in the air. ‘God, I’m tired.’

‘That’s not surprising: you haven’t had a day off in weeks. We should think seriously about taking a holiday, somewhere nice and sunny where they have blue skies instead of grey.’

‘Holidays are for other people, Steven.’

‘C’mon. The hospital could get a locum in. Ask your boss about it. This would be a good time, right? Just after you’ve done him a favour.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘I’m serious. Talk to him tomorrow. You are going in tomorrow?’

‘Does the pope wear red socks?’

Steven was back in London before one o’clock. He parked the Porsche in the underground car park at Marlborough Court and went upstairs to check that the flat was okay before setting off for the Home Office. He and Tally had decided that he should hold on to the property for a while when he moved to Leicester because the housing market was so dire, a decision that had proved fortuitous with his return to Sci-Med. It might well be the flat in Leicester they would be looking to sell if Tally managed to get a consultancy in the capital.

Jean Roberts, John Macmillan’s secretary welcomed him with her usual good humour and asked after Jenny.

‘She’s growing up far too fast,’ complained Steven. ‘Seems like only yesterday she was a baby.’

‘It’s frightening,’ agreed Jean. ‘My godson’s getting married in a few months and I still think of him as a schoolboy with grubby collars and scraped knees.’

John Macmillan, hearing the voices, emerged from his office and invited Steven through. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings about your friend. Must have put a damper on your weekend.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Steven assured him. ‘I think I will go to the funeral if that’s still
all right with you?’

‘Of course. The computer’s been rather quiet for the past week or so.’

Sci-Med had a sophisticated computer system which gathered information about anything unusual happening in the world of science and medicine by scanning all newspapers and relevant magazines and journals for significant articles.

‘Mind you, it’s been picking up on a strange story about the vilificat
ion of researchers working on ME.’

‘What’s that all about?’ Steven asked.

‘Apparently sufferers are fed up with the suggestion that there’s a psychological element to their condition. They think it supports the yuppie flu argument and brands them as lazy, shiftless, work-shy malingerers. They’re particularly incensed that so much government funding is being poured into this aspect of research when they’d prefer the money to go into the hunt for the real cause of the problem as they see it. They’re sure it has a biological basis.’

‘I thought a virus was identified a couple of years ago?’ said Steven.

‘A false dawn, I’m afraid. It turned out to be a contamination problem. No one could ever reproduce the reporting team’s results.’

‘Messy.’

‘It’s messy all round. Researchers are saying that ME. sufferers would rather be thought to be suffering from a serious but unknown viral condition than have any suggestion of mental health problems attached to them. Needless to say, the mental health lobby are not too delighted about that. They claim it perpetuates the stigma attached to mental problems.’

‘So what form has the "
vilification" been taking?’

‘Threatening letters to researchers, paint daubing, broken windows. There’s also an accusation doing the rounds that scientists would prefer not to find the virus responsible because that would put them all out of a job. They’re accused of being quite happy with the suggestion of a psychological factor because they know that’ll go on for ever and go nowhere.’

Steven permitted himself a small smile. He was no great fan of psychiatry. ‘Doesn’t sound like something we should get involved in,’ he said.

‘Agreed, but I’ll keep an eye on the situation.
'

‘Any more from
Paris?’

‘Details of the funeral arrangements came in,’ replied Macmillan. ‘Jean has them.’

Steven stopped by Jean’s desk on the way to his own office and accepted her offer to arrange flights for him. ‘It’s on Thursday afternoon,’ she said. ‘Do you want to stay over?’

Steven thought for a moment before agreeing that this might be the best plan. There would probably be people he’d want to speak to.

‘Fine, I’ll fix accommodation too.’

Steven smiled when he noticed the new namepl
ate on his office door. It said
Dr Steven Dunbar, Principal Investigator
. He had only recently agreed to have an office to himself. Previously he had spent as little time as possible in Whitehall, preferring instead to use the small Sci-Med library when he was there for any absolutely necessary paperwork and his own flat for going through files relating to any assignment he’d been given. He saw the allocation of a pleasant room and a fancy nameplate as part of Macmillan’s strategy to accustom him to permanency.

He stood at the window for a few moments wondering if he was really ready to commit to any such thing. The office could be seen as a first step in coming in from the cold – an end to front line investigation – something t
hat would please Tally but alarmed him. It gave him the same sense of foreboding he’d experienced when faced with leaving the army, but luckily on that occasion Macmillan had come along to save him from ending up in the kind of job he’d just escaped from in the pharmaceutical industry. He moved over to his desk and started going through the mail.

He stopped suddenly when he came to an envelope with a handwritten address on it. It had a
Czech Republic stamp on it. He didn’t recognise the handwriting but knew it had to be from Simone. The letter was brief and seemed to have been hastily written. It had a small computer memory card stuck to the bottom with Sellotape.

My d
ear Steven,

I’m at an international meeting in Prague this week to discuss progress in the eradication of polio programme.
Something's not right. My team and I have been working in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan and I know it sounds silly but I’m sure there’s something very wrong and they won’t let me address the meeting. I’m in London next week to meet with Dr Tom North at City College University. I thought I might come and see you? Please keep the memory card safe and I’ll explain when I see you.

As ever,

Simone.

Steven ran the tips of his fingers lightly over the signature. Simone was worried about something and a day later she was dead. Coincidence? Re-reading the letter clearly wasn’t helping. He cut the memory card free of the paper and inserted it in his computer. Nothing on it made sense: the contents comprised a series of unrelated letters, numbers and symbols which caused him to give up after a few minutes. His suspicion was that the card had been corrupted by security scans used by airports or the mail service. Fed up with trying to interpret gobbledegook, he took out the card and set up a
Google search for Dr Thomas North.

There were a number of
Norths listed but he quickly found the one he was looking for – a senior lecturer at City College, a virologist with a special interest in polio, especially the problems patients who survived paralytic polio encountered in later life. Steven remembered reading something about that recently. Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction writer, was one such example.

North’s research group was profiled on the university website along with its research aims and a substantial academic publications list suggesting that North was a top man in his field. Steven called the number for
City College and asked to speak to him. He was put through to North’s lab where a young man with a Scandinavian accent said North was in a meeting. Steven left his number and North called him back an hour later.

‘Good of you to call back, d
octor. My name’s Steven Dunbar; I work for the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I was a friend of Simone Ricard.’

‘Ah, what happened to Simone was absolutely tragic. If ever there was an example of the good dying young, that was it. Such a lovely person.’

‘I understand she was coming to see you this week?’

‘Yes, that’s right, she was
, and now . . . I can still hardly believe it.’

‘Will you be attending the funeral,
doctor?’

‘I’m afraid I ca
n’t; I have a prior commitment – one I can’t get out of.’

‘A pity, I was hoping to have a word. I wonder; do you think I could possibly come over and have a chat with you?’

North hesitated. ‘Ye . . . es, but can I ask what this is about? I mean, sorry to be rude but who exactly are you?’

Steven told him. ‘I’m interested in the work Simone was doing on polio eradication. She wrote to me about it.’

‘I see. Look, at the risk of sounding macabre, Simone was down to come here on Wednesday morning. You could come in her place?’

Steven
agreed and arranged to be there at eleven.

He
went through and told Macmillan about the letter from Simone with the computer card attached.

Macmillan raised his eyes and sat back in his chair. ‘But no actual indication as to what she thought was wrong?’

Steven said not. ‘But my curiosity’s been aroused. I’ll ask our lab boys to take a look at the card.’

Macmillan nodded. ‘Perhaps her colleagues will be able to throw some light on things when you see them at the funeral. Mind you, French citizen dying in the
Czech Republic with a UK investigator asking questions . . . Could be the overture to a bureaucratic nightmare if you get too involved.’

Steven acknowledged with a grimace. ‘I’ve also arranged to see the scientist she’d set up a meeting with in
London. Maybe he’ll have some idea what she was worried about.’

‘Was he at the
Prague meeting?’

‘I’ll find out on Wednesday.’

Steven, wearing a dark blue suit and Parachute Regiment tie told the man in uniform behind the desk whom he’d come to see.

‘And what company shall I say
you’re
from?’ asked the man, barely disguising a sneer and clearly assuming that anyone found wearing a suit in City College must be a sales rep and therefore worthy of derision.

‘The Home Office,’ replied Steven, placing his ID down in front of him.

The man looked up to find Steven looking through him. It spoke volumes.

‘Right sir, sorry sir. I’ll let them upstairs know you’re here. Perhaps you’d care to take a seat over there?’

A few minutes later a young man wearing jeans and a checked shirt appeared from one of the lifts. He had an engaging if lopsided smile and a shock of curly red hair. When he spoke it was with an Irish accent. ‘Dr Dunbar? I’m Liam Kelly. Tom’s expecting you. I’ll take you up to the lab.’

‘You’re one of Dr North’s people?’

‘PhD student, just about to start my second year.’

‘Working on?’

‘Virus survival strategies.’

‘I’m imagining a dozen virus particles sitting round a table making plans for the future,’ said Steven.

‘I’d like to be a fly on the wall at that meeting,’ Liam laughed as the lift doors opened. ‘It would save me a whole bunch of work.’

He
led the way through swing doors into a brightly lit lab with a number of people at work in it. All seemed intent on what they were doing as familiar lab smells from long ago of solvents and Bunsen burner-heated air assaulted Steven’s nostrils. Thomas North’s office was one of two adjoining rooms at the head of the lab. Liam knocked and put his head round the door. ‘Dr Dunbar is here.’