Wildcard (21 page)

Steven swallowed and gave a slight nod.

‘Let’s go to it, guys,’ said Kate.

Steven worked a five-hour shift as he had the night before and left with Caroline again, feeling drained but very conscious that Caroline had worked twice as long as he had.

‘I think I have a tin of corned beef in the cupboard at home,’ said Caroline, ‘and maybe some beans. What d’you say?’

‘You temptress, you,’ said Steven, feeling again that he could do with some company. ‘But I’m sure I could get us both dinner at my hotel if you’d like?’

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 light as she read it.

‘Wait here. I’ll ask Reverend Mother.’

Steven watched the girl knock on a door about twenty metres down the corridor to the right. She disappeared briefly, then reappeared and beckoned him with an exaggerated circular motion of her arm. Steven reckoned that this was because she couldn’t actually see him at that distance. He walked towards her and was shown into a small, perfectly square room with a vaulted ceiling, where the Reverend Mother got up from behind a carved rosewood desk to greet him – although doing so made little difference to her height. Steven saw that she had a purple birthmark covering most of the right side of her face and a large blind cyst disfiguring the left.

Her voice, however, was mellifluous and pleasant. ‘Dr Dunbar, how can I help?’

‘I’m trying to find out how Sister Mary Xavier contracted her illness, Reverend Mother. I need to ask you some questions about her movements and whom she might have come into contact with recently.’

‘As I told those who came before you, young man,’ she said, ‘Sister Mary’s movements were confined to this house and the sisters here were her sole companions.’

‘But with respect, that isn’t possible, Reverend Mother,’ insisted Steven. ‘There has to be a link with the outside world, otherwise the implication would be that the virus originated here in the convent, a spontaneous creation.’

‘All things are possible with the Lord, Doctor.’

‘Are you suggesting that the Lord created a virus specifically to kill Sister Mary Xavier?’ said Steven, mildly irked at the platitude and the terminal complacency of the deeply religious.

‘I don’t think that He would necessarily construe it that way.’

‘How would He construe it, Reverend Mother? Viruses like the one infecting Sister Mary cannot exist outside a living host. Their only function is to kill.’

‘Perhaps their only function known to us, Doctor.’

Steven conceded gracefully. ‘You say you’ve already been asked about Sister Mary’s movements?’ he asked.

‘The people from the Public Health Service were as adamant as you that our sister must have been in contact with the outside world during the last few weeks, but the simple truth is that she has not been outside these walls for much longer than that. Neither has she had contact with anyone other than the sisters and perhaps the priest who comes to hear our confession. I myself can guarantee that.’

‘I take it the good father is keeping well, Reverend Mother?’

‘Apart from being concerned about Sister Mary Xavier’s health, Father O’Donnell is as well as any seventy-year-old can reasonably expect to be.’

Steven wondered if the Reverend Mother was reading his mind. The intelligent look in her eyes said that she might well be and that was why she had volunteered the priest’s age. He decided against asking for an antibody test on him. ‘As a matter of interest, when
did
Sister Mary Xavier last go out into the world, Reverend Mother?’ he asked.

‘Ours is a contemplative order, Doctor. We tend not to go out into the world at all. Rather, we pray for it and everyone in it.’

‘I see,’ said Steven. ‘Then the sister has not left these walls in over a decade?’

‘It would not be quite true to say that,’ replied the nun. ‘Sister Mary did not enjoy good health. The doctors decided last year that she needed an operation so she went into St Thomas’s Hospital in Hull for a few days some nine months ago to have it done. The Lord saw fit to return her to us fit and well.’

‘Good,’ said Steven. ‘What exactly was wrong with her?’

‘She lacked energy and tired easily; she often had to struggle for breath,’ replied the nun. ‘She gave us cause for alarm on more than one occasion and came dangerously close to collapse, but since the operation she’s been as right as rain, praise the Lord.’

‘She’ll need all her energy to fight this virus,’ said Steven.

A knock came to the door and a sister appeared to say that Reverend Mother was required immediately: Sister Mary Xavier was asking for her.

‘Of course,’ said Steven as she excused herself. He watched the two women bustle off down the corridor to the west wing, and then left the building. He sat in his car, wondering how someone who had not been outside the convent for nine months could possibly have contracted viral haemorrhagic fever. As he admitted defeat, a single bell began to toll and he knew instinctively that it was the death knell for Sister Mary Xavier.

FOURTEEN

Listening to the sombre sound of the bell, Steven wondered if it might not be tolling for all he had been taught about the mechanics of viral infection. None of this made any sense. Viruses needed a living host to maintain them and allow them to replicate. They did not have the wherewithal to lead an independent existence, not even as a simple sleeping spore, in the way that some bacteria could. Sister Mary Xavier
must
have contracted the infection from a living source, or else the textbooks would have to be re-written. The thought brought a wry smile to his face. Textbooks were always being re-written: it happened every time a fact emerged to take the place of expert opinion.