Pestilence

by Ken McClure

  “No problem,” replied Wright.

  Saracen walked out of the ambulance station with contrived casualness, conscious of every movement of his limbs and convinced that Wright was staring at him all the way up the hill to the gate but he steeled himself not to turn round and check.

  Saracen made directly for the whisky bottle when he got in to the flat and took a big gulp. Just what the hell was he getting himself into he wondered. The thing seemed to be snowballing out of all proportion with first the suggestion of a cover-up and now the deliberate falsification of records. The question of what he should do next bothered him. Commonsense and a desire for self preservation said that he should drop the whole affair like a hot potato but he recognised that that was no longer an option. If he were to do that then the unanswered questions would gnaw at him until he finally did seek the answers put the matter to rest…or whatever.

  It occurred to Saracen that there would have been a nurse from A amp;E on board Medic Alpha when it had answered the call to Myra Archer. Perhaps he could persuade Jill Rawlings to make a few discrete enquiries and find out what she could. He picked up the phone and dialled the Nurses’ Home. It was engaged, come to think of it, thought Saracen, it always was. He tried twice more before he eventually got through and asked for Jill. There was a long pause while distant voices echoed along corridors.

  “Hello,” said Jill Rawlings’ voice.

  “Hello Jill. It’s James Saracen. Are you free this evening?”

  Jill Rawlings agreed to meet Saracen for a drink at The Blue Angel at eight.

  The pub was busy when they arrived but a couple obligingly vacated a table as they entered and they took it before anyone else did. They were served by a teenage girl who sniffed intermittently as though she had a heavy cold and spoke very slowly and deliberately. Asking Jill if she wanted ice and lemon in her drink amounted to an ‘in depth’ interview.

  “Well, no one is going to get drunk round here,” smiled Jill as her interrogator shuffled off towards the bar.

  “I have a favour to ask,” said Saracen.

  “Never on a first date Doctor.”

  When Saracen finally did manage to explain to Jill what he wanted her to find out for him she became more serious. “Did something go wrong?” she asked.

  “That’s what I want to find out,” replied Saracen. “Discreetly.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And I will now buy you dinner.”

  They ate at an Italian restaurant, one of two in Skelmore, and afterwards Saracen drove Jill back to the Nurses’ Home where she thanked him for dinner and said that she would be in touch.

  Chapter Four

  It was four days before Saracen saw Jill again when their duty stints coincided on Friday morning. He raised his eyes in question when she came into the crowded treatment room and she nodded briefly and self-consciously in reply. Saracen mouthed the word ‘lunch?’ to her and she nodded again.

  They ate in the hospital staff canteen, a huge rambling barn of a place which reminded Saracen of a school assembly hall and where the acoustics were such that the air was constantly filled with the clatter of crockery and cutlery from the kitchens. The tiled walls were clean to shoulder height, where the agreement with the unions expired and then grew progressively filthier as they climbed to meet the vaulted ceiling some twenty feet above the lino clad floor. Proper cleaning would have required the erection of scaffolding and so was out of the question but, for the most part, poor lighting hid the dirt.

  “You spoke to the nurse?” asked Saracen.

  Jill Rawlings said that she had. “It was Mary Travers; she’s a friend of mine. She said that the patient was severely cyanosed when they got to her, almost navy blue in fact. They gave her oxygen on the way back to the General but then there was some discussion as to whether or not she should be taken on to the County Hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “Mary didn’t know. Dr Tang just told them all to stay on board while she spoke to Dr Garten. When she came back Dr Tang told Mary that the patient would be going to the County and, as she would be going with her, there was no need for Mary to stay on board. Mary was well over her duty period so she was quite glad. She returned to A amp;E and signed off.

  “So as far as Nurse Travers was concerned the patient was being taken to the County Hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was alive when Nurse Travers left her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask about times?”

  “Mary couldn’t remember. She suggests you check the ambulance log book.”

  “I already did.”

  “And?”

  Saracen hesitated before replying. It had been his intention to involve Jill as little as possible in the affair for her own good but it was becoming too difficult and he did want to discuss it with someone so he decided to confide in her. “The record says that Myra Archer was dead on arrival at Skelmore General. There was no mention of a transfer to the County Hospital.”

  “But why?” exclaimed Jill in astonishment.

  “Why indeed,” said Saracen.

  Jill asked what had made Saracen suspicious in the first place and he told her of his meeting with Timothy Archer.

  “Poor man,” said Jill when he had finished.

  Saracen confessed that, at first, he had been sceptical about Archer’s story and had put it down to the man being overwrought. But now there seemed to be grounds for believing that there had indeed been some kind of foul-up over his wife’s treatment and a subsequent cover-up.

  “But why would Garten involve himself in the cover-up?” asked Jill. “Surely the blame was down to Dr Tang?”

  “That puzzles me too,” Saracen agreed. “I can’t honestly see Garten putting his career on the line to save a junior doctor.”

  “Or anyone else for that matter,” added Jill.

  “Then he must be involved in some way.”

  “Tricky,” said Jill.

  Saracen agreed with his eyes.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Jill.

  Saracen shook his head.

  “Have you tackled Dr Tang?”

  “I tried but when I mentioned the name Myra Archer she took fright and scurried off.”

  “She might tell Garten,” said Jill.

  “That thought had not escaped me,” replied Saracen ruefully, “But I broached the subject casually; there was no suggestion of an accusation so I think I might get away with it.”

  “What happened when the ambulance reached the County Hospital?” asked Jill.

  “As far as I can tell it never did. Timothy Archer told me that he had been sent to the County when he first tried to locate his wife but the staff there had no knowledge of her and sent him back to Skelmore General. That’s when Garten acknowledged that she had been admitted to A amp;E and told him that she had died of a heart attack.”

  “But we know that the ambulance did leave for the County. It must have been recalled en route.”

  “Or maybe Myra Archer died on the way?” said Saracen, thinking out loud.

  “If that’s the case I can’t see what all the fuss is about. Can you?” asked Jill, “Presumably the decision to send the patient to the County was taken in good faith. If she was so ill that she died on the way it seems likely that she would have died anyway.”

  Saracen tapped his forehead and said, “Then why the big cover-up over an extra five minutes or so in the ambulance?”

  “It does seem a bit much,” agreed Jill.

  Saracen stopped racking his brains for answers and smiled at Jill. “I’m grateful to you for asking around,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “There is one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Alan Tremaine has asked me to have dinner with him and his sister tomorrow evening; apparently she’s coming to stay for a bit. He suggested I bring a friend. Would you come?”

  “I’d be delighted,”
said Jill.

  Social occasions were rare for A amp;E staff. When one member was off duty another would usually be on, however, it was sometimes possible, with a bit of duty swapping, for two to be off at the same time. Alan Tremaine had engineered his off duty to coincide with Saracen’s so he could give a small dinner party for his sister Claire who would be arriving on the following day.

  In actual fact the limitations imposed on social life by work in A amp;E suited Saracen very well. He disliked parties, a legacy of his time with Marion when their life had grown to revolve around a seemingly endless circuit of social gatherings, outstanding only for their superficiality. Why so many people who so patently disliked each other should have continued to seek each others’ company had been beyond his comprehension. But Marion had seen it all as an exciting game, a competition for which she would plan like a military strategist, deciding in advance who to speak to, whom to avoid, what to wear, what to say. The end result had always been a flawless performance. Marion would arrive like a film star, shine brightly, stay long enough to capture the hearts of all the men, them leave before the proceedings had begun to flag.

  “Time we were getting back,” said Jill.

  Saracen snapped out of his preoccupation and gathered their used crockery to return to the kitchen hatch as was the regulation. “Pick you up at seven thirty tomorrow evening?”

  “Fine.”

  It was raining when Saracen turned into the narrow lane that led down to the Nurses’ Home at the General and the rain drops on the back window made it awkward for him to reverse the car in the small space available at the foot, a space made even smaller by illegally parked cars. When he finally did complete the manoeuvre he saw Jill sheltering under the long canopy that fronted the building. He leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  “I saw you arrive from the window,” said Jill as she swung her stockinged legs into the car.

  Saracen made an appreciative sound.

  Jill smiled and said, ‘I thought I’d better make the effort; don’t know what the opposition is going to be like.’

  ‘I’ve never met her before,’ confessed Saracen. ‘She might be a twenty stone dumpling.’

  ‘With my luck she’ll be a Dior model,’ said Jill. “And there’s me with St Michael stuck all over me.’

  ‘You look great,’ said Saracen and meant it.

  Jill’s prediction proved to be a good deal more accurate than Saracen’s, for Claire Tremaine was no dumpling. She turned out to be a slim, confident, elegant woman in her mid twenties who proved to be as witty and entertaining as she was attractive. She was not however slow to point out the failings of Skelmore as a place to live, a view that Saracen happened to agree with, although he did feel a little irritated that an outsider should be so forthright so quickly.

  But such considerations had long since ceased to be important enough for him to take issue with. Throughout the course of the evening he smiled and laughed in all the right places. Jill might have been goaded into some kind of defence of her home town but she was kept fully occupied by Alan Tremaine who was having difficulty keeping his eyes off her cleavage and kept repeating — due to over-indulgence in Cotes du Rhone — that he hadn’t realised what delights had been lurking beneath the drab blue cotton of a Skelmore nurse’s uniform. Jill was well able to handle the situation for, at twenty seven, she had seen a lot of randy housemen come and go.

  ‘So why have you come to Skelmore Claire?’ asked Saracen.

  ‘My first job,’ replied Claire. ‘I’ve been doing a PhD at Oxford in archaeology and my supervisor is leading the search for the site of Skelmoris Abbey. He took me on despite the fact that I haven’t written up my thesis yet.’

  ‘Why the sudden interest in Skelmoris Abbey?’ asked Saracen. ‘No one has ever bothered to look for it before, have they?’

  ‘Not in recent times,’ agreed Clare but that was because no one really had any idea where the site was.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘A few months ago a librarian in Oxford was leafing through the pages of some old books that had been bequeathed to the university and he found a map. It was very old and very yellow’

  ‘How exciting,’ said Jill.

  ‘Just like Treasure Island,’ added Tremaine.

  ‘It included a plan of Skelmoris Abbey and it contained information about the surrounding area. A lot has changed of course in six hundred years but we now think we have a reasonable chance of finding the actual site.

  ‘There was something about this in the local paper,’ said Saracen. ‘The abbey was supposed to have been destroyed by fire wasn’t it?’

  ‘The fire is fairly well documented,’ said Clare.

  ‘And the legend?’ smiled Saracen.

  Clare smiled and said, ‘Legends are legends.’

  ‘So the curse doesn’t bother you?’

  ‘What curse?’ asked Jill.

  Claire said, ‘According to the story, the abbey was entrusted with the safe-keeping of a chalice. Anyone attempting to remove the chalice would incur the wrath of God and pay with his life. Legend has it that a lot of people did.’

  ‘Creepy,’ said Jill.

  ‘What the story in the paper didn’t say was that the fire was deliberate,’ continued Claire. ‘After the deaths of the original Abbot and brothers the church tried several times to re-open the abbey. Although the new monks were God-fearing and had no intention of removing the chalice they met with the same fate as the others. In the end the church gave up and burned the place to the ground.

  ‘What an awful story,’ said Jill with a shiver. ‘I think if it was up to me I would let well alone.’

  Claire smiled and said, ‘The plan is that I dig during the day and write up my thesis in the evenings.”

  ‘Sounds like a full life,’ said Saracen.

  ‘I think the idea is that there won’t be too many distractions up here in the sticks so here I am as an uninvited guest of little brother.’

  “Consider yourself invited,” said Tremaine, leaning across and kissing his sister on the cheek.

  “I wish I had a brother like that,” said Jill. “Keith and I fight like cat and dog whenever we are together!”

  Tremaine made a rather unsteady attempt to kiss Jill on the cheek too. “I’ll be your brother,” he grinned.

  Jill laughed it off and expertly avoided Tremaine’s advance. In another person his behaviour might have been considered offensive but, from Alan Tremaine it was accepted with good humour. If anyone was upset by it was his sister. Saracen noticed her occasionally betray her impatience with an unguarded look.

  The party broke up around midnight for both Saracen and Jill were on duty in the morning but, before she left, Jill invited Claire to cal her whenever she got too bored with writing. They could arrange an evening out for girl talk.

  Saracen passed his own apartment on the way back to the Nurses’ Home. “Nightcap?” he asked. Jill agreed.

  “Brrr. The place is like a morgue,” said Saracen as he fumbled in the darkness for the light switch. He lit the gas fire, drew the curtains and put some music on before pouring the drinks. “Did you enjoy yourself tonight?” he asked Jill.

  “It was a nice evening,” Jill replied.

  “What did you think of Claire?”

  “I hated her,” said Jill with disarming honesty that made Saracen splutter. “Why?”

  “She is good looking, bright, self-assured, confident, totally at ease. Is that enough to be going on with?”

  Saracen laughed and said, “You had nothing to worry about. You held your own beside her.”

  “You’re too kind sir,” said Jill. “But I felt like a country bumkin beside Claire Tremaine. I could feel the straw falling out of my ears.”

  “Nonsense,” insisted Saracen. “Besides you were a big hit with Alan.”

  “Boys will be boys,” smiled Jill and returned to thoughts of Claire. “God, I wish I had that kind of confidence.” she said.

  “Mayb
e it’s an act.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It often is. Even the most outrageous extroverts insist on being basically shy.”

  “They’re usually mistaken” argued Jill. “They misconstrue selfishness as sensitivity, ‘believe they’re ‘basically shy’ because they once managed to have a thought without telling the whole world.”

  “That’s astute of you,” said Saracen quietly. “I came to the same conclusion many years ago.”

  “Then maybe we both know people.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Saracen.

  They finished their drinks.

  “I’d better get back,” said Jill looking at her watch.

  “Of course, I’ll drive you.”

  As they got to the door Jill turned and said, “Thank you James.”

  “For what?”

  “Not sticking your hand up my skirt.”

  Saracen smiled and said, “I won’t say the thought didn’t occur to me.”

  “Good. I would have felt insulted if it hadn’t. Incidentally…why didn’t you?”

  “We don’t know each other well enough.”

  Jill smiled and seemed pleased at Saracen’s reply.

  Saracen looked at the green digits on the alarm clock and saw that it was thirteen minutes past four in the morning. It was third time he had looked at the clock in the past hour. Three hours of sleep was not much of a basis to begin a long period of duty on but that thought just made matters worse. There was no way that he was going to fall asleep again and it was all due to Myra Archer and the pricking of his own conscience.

  The explanation that a short delay in deciding which hospital Myra Archer should go to as being all that was wrong in the case was attractive and convenient because it trivialised the incident and absolved him from further involvement. In fact, there was only one thing against it, thought Saracen as he lay in the dark; it was wrong. Of that he was certain. There had to be more to it to have warranted such a cover-up and falsification of records.