“I’m going to see her this evening, sir. The last time I phoned the hospital, they still hadn’t got the results of the tests. I understand that she’s still very poorly.”
“Pity. It would have to happen at this juncture, wouldn’t it? We could do with her back here double quick, as you know. Try to make some discreet enquiries as to when she might be well enough, will you?”
Tim resolved through gritted teeth not to lose his cool.
“I’ll pass on your good wishes, shall I, sir?”
“Yes, you do that. And don’t forget what I said about freeing up Kevan de Vries, will you?”
Twenty-Four
Tim wanted to carry out further searches at Laurieston. Something had been niggling at the back of his mind since the discovery of the skeletons: something that had struck him as odd or not quite right. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on; he’d racked his brains to try to think about exactly what it was, but no answer came to him. He’d therefore decided to try to confront his unease from a different angle, by thinking about how he might have followed up the discovery of the skeletons if they’d been part of a contemporary murder enquiry.
The answer was blindingly obvious: he and his colleagues would then not have been satisfied with merely raising the flags in the immediate area where the skeletons had been found. They’d have taken the whole cellar apart. Now he thought about it, that in itself might explain his half-formulated worries. What was it that Kevan de Vries had said? That his wife had stored some of his grandfather’s furniture in the cellar, but that there might be other stuff down there that was much older. He remembered the huge bank of jumbled artefacts, several items deep and high, that had been stacked against the wall opposite to where they’d found the skeletons. Some of them had been covered over with pieces of old carpet and sacking. It would be a daunting task to shift that lot, but suddenly he knew that that was what they must do. At least it shouldn’t be too difficult to get Kevan de Vries onside for this new search: if Tim were to explain that it was designed to shed further light on how and when the skeletons had come to be placed in the cellar, he was certain that de Vries, who now knew with certainty that he could not himself have been accused of involvement with these deaths, would be delighted to have the spotlight shifted from himself. Even Jean Rook would be exercised to find a reason to object to it.
He would call Kevan de Vries once he’d made sure that Giash Chakrabati – and, he supposed, Giash’s unprepossessing new mate, who seemed to be glued to him at the moment – could make themselves available to help him. First of all, however, Tim had a more pressing engagement. He was going to the Pilgrim Hospital to see the consultant in whose care Juliet had been placed. He hadn’t yet managed to visit Juliet, but reports he’d heard about her state of health were not good. Giash’s temporary sidekick – what was the woman’s name? Verity something – had apparently tried to see Juliet when she’d been back to Boston on a brief jaunt with her former colleagues and, according to her, had been told that Juliet wasn’t well enough to receive visitors. Whilst Tim didn’t exactly doubt the accuracy of this, his first impressions of the woman had not been favourable and he doubted her intentions in making such an overture. As far as he knew, she and Juliet had never met. She might not, therefore, have tried very hard to get into the ward, or perhaps not tried at all, but just claimed to have made the attempt to curry favour with her new colleagues. Or perhaps Juliet herself had decided that she couldn’t be bothered with her. What worried Tim much more was that Juliet had not contacted him and that, when he’d (twice) tried to call her, he’d been told she was sleeping.
Even more worrying was that no-one seemed to have much idea of what was wrong with her. After his conversation with Superintendent Thornton on the previous day, Tim had asked to speak to the consultant, a Mr Wu, by telephone. At first Mr Wu had sounded hostile and claimed that he couldn’t discuss Juliet’s case with someone who wasn’t a relative. When Tim had explained that she had no close relatives and that the only relations of whom she was herself aware lived in New Zealand, and furthermore that he was a policeman and Juliet’s boss, Mr Wu had been much more forthcoming, deferential even, but was still unable to offer any but the vaguest reassurance. He’d as good as admitted that Juliet’s condition was causing concern, but that they were no closer to diagnosing it. That Juliet had a high fever and had been drifting in and out of consciousness ever since the man who occupied the flat adjoining hers had heard the thud as she collapsed on the floor, and had broken in when he could not obtain an answer, did not help.
Tim regarded himself as a cut-and-dried sort of person. He disliked it when professionals failed to give answers to the questions that he put to them. He suspected the consultant to be guilty of incompetence, indifference or both. Furthermore, he needed an outlet for his increasing anxiety about Juliet. If this Wu weren’t doing his job properly, Tim was resolved to find him out. Mindful, however, that Juliet herself – or Katrin, if he’d been prepared to worry her with it – would have advised him to be both cautious and polite, in the first instance he’d merely made an appointment to see the consultant. He’d be better able to gauge what kind of care Juliet was getting if he could see it for himself.
Tim didn’t like hospitals. The Pilgrim Hospital, which he’d visited several times in the line of duty and which had also been at the centre of the one distressing period of his marriage, held little for him but unpleasant memories. He detested its seventies concrete architecture and resented its plundering of history for a name that was hardly suitable, since the seventeenth-century pilgrims to which it referred had mostly run away from or been forced out of Boston. His mood therefore became increasingly truculent as he approached the building and was not helped by the amount of time that it took him to find a parking space.
He had omitted to ask Mr Wu how he might be reached. He therefore concluded that he had no option but to present himself at the reception desk in Outpatients and say that he had an appointment. It was only after he’d embarked upon a baffling and increasingly cross-purposed conversation with the burly porter who seemed to be doubling up as receptionist, and who told him bluntly that he wouldn’t get anywhere without ‘your hospital letter’, that it dawned upon him that almost everyone who turned up there would have had an appointment of some kind. Irked by his own stupidity, he decided that the best way out of the impasse would be to show his identity card and say that he had arranged to see Mr Wu on police business. Not strictly speaking true, but near enough.
The porter-receptionist asked him to wait and turned his back on him while he made a telephone call. It was conducted sotto voce and Tim could not hear much of what the man was saying, but after he’d put down the receiver he gave Tim a thumbs-up. Tim thought that this looked promising, even if it was an unorthodox way of managing a reception desk.
“Mr Wu’s registrar will come down to meet you,” he said. “Mr Wu is expecting you; you’re quite correct.” Tim felt and quelled a further surge of irritation. He stood to one side of the desk and waited as patiently as he could.
An earnest young woman wearing a white coat appeared after a very short time. She was walking rapidly down the corridor towards Tim, looking from side to side as she went, obviously trying to spot someone. When her eyes focused on Tim, she attempted a polite smile. She held out her hand as she reached him.
“Detective Inspector Yates? I’m Louise Butler, Mr Wu’s registrar. Mr Wu’s asked me to meet you, as giving directions to his office can be quite tricky.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
She turned on her heel and headed back the way that she’d come, walking so swiftly in her high-heeled patent leather pumps that Tim had to lengthen his stride to keep up. She headed for the lifts, pressing all the buttons until one arrived.
“Juliet Armstrong is a colleague of yours?” she asked, as the lift doors swung shut and it began its laborious ascent.
&
nbsp; “Yes,” said Tim. “I’m very concerned that I haven’t heard from her, even though she’s ill. It’s quite out of character for her to . . .”
The lift juddered to a halt and the doors opened again. A couple of porters were waiting to enter with their charge, a man reclining in a full-sized hospital bed on wheels.
“Room for a little’un?” said one.
Louise Butler smiled at him.
“We’ve only one more floor to go. We’ll get out of your way,” she said. She sprang out of the lift and headed for a door marked ‘Stairs’, with Tim loping in her wake. She ascended the two flights of stairs so rapidly that Tim was quite breathless by the time they’d completed another sprint and finally come to a halt outside a door marked ‘Dr Wu’. She knocked at it tentatively.
Dr Wu did not answer, so she poked her head around it and then looked over her shoulder at Tim.
“Do come in,” she said. “Dr Wu, this is DI Yates.”
Tim found himself in a small square room containing a large desk that faced the door. There was a tiny window behind it that would barely have admitted enough light to allow its occupant to see the words that he was writing so furiously upon a large lined pad of paper, had its deficiency not been over-compensated for by a yellow striplight that ran the length of the room. It bathed the figure seated at the desk in its harsh glare.
Dr Wu put down his pen and looked up. He held out his hand to Tim, but did not rise to greet him. Tim saw that the doctor was a fairly thick-set Asian man, probably a Chinese national, who had a mop of straight black hair and a very pock-marked face. Like all the hospital doctors Tim had met, he seemed weary. Tim thought he also detected the faint aroma of cigarette smoke clinging to the doctor’s clothes, though he could have been mistaken.
Tim was about to clasp the proffered hand when the doctor let his own fall. He proceeded to wave it about in an agitated fashion.
“Ah, Dr Butler, don’t go! I’m sure that DI Yates will want to know about the care you’ve been taking of our patient, and especially your diagnosis.”
Louise Butler was close to the door and had evidently been planning a hasty exit. She halted now and turned to face both Tim and the doctor, nervously fiddling with one of the buttons on her white coat in a childlike gesture. Dr Wu beamed at her.
“Dr Butler is very talented, DI Yates, and also a very unassuming lady. But you should know that she has suggested a diagnosis for Juliet Armstrong’s condition that, in my opinion, will turn out to be the correct one. We’re just awaiting the results of some tests as we speak.”
Tim looked at the callow young woman with new interest.
“You think you know what’s wrong with Juliet? What is it?”
“As Dr Wu said, we’re still awaiting tests, so we can’t be sure . . .”
“Leptospirosis,” said Dr Wu, cutting in. “DI Yates understands that we’re not certain, but,” – he turned from his subordinate to Tim – “that is what Dr Butler thinks is wrong and, now she’s told me why, based on her observations of Miss Armstrong since she was admitted, I’m bound to say that I concur. In fact, I’m jealous of her perspicacity: I should have thought of it myself.”
Tim was beginning to lose patience again. He disliked jargon, whether it came from computer programmers or the medical profession. He always suspected the person using it of being less than above board.
“Come again?” he said. “I apologise for my ignorance, but I’m afraid that I’m none the wiser.”
Dr Wu grinned. Tim felt his face redden. He was about to ask the doctor to stop playing games when Louise Butler spoke. She was suddenly much more confident.
“You may know it as Weil’s disease,” she said. “It’s the more commonly-used name for it.”
“I have heard of Weil’s disease, but I don’t know much about it. Isn’t it something to do with rats?”
“Correct,” said Dr Wu. Tim noticed for the first time that he spoke with a vaguely American drawl. “It’s actually much more common than people realise, and very unpleasant. It’s transmitted by water that’s been polluted by rats’ urine. In certain circumstances, it can be fatal.”
“How did Juliet come into contact with it?”
It was Dr Butler who replied.
“She’s been able to tell us the answer to that now, I think. She’s much more lucid, because we’ve managed to lower her fever. I went to examine her this morning. She said that her ankle was troubling her. When I looked at it, I could see some puncture marks; the area around them was inflamed. It probably didn’t swell up at first, which is why it went unnoticed. Juliet told me that some creature rushed at her when she was following up an inquiry in Sutterton earlier this week. She thought that it might have been a rat. She’d hardly been in a state to remember it before.”
“Was that when I sent her to interview Jackie Briggs?”
Louise Butler smiled.
“She didn’t disclose the details of her inquiry. She’d probably think it unethical.” She regarded him sympathetically. “I don’t think you should beat yourself up about it, anyway. It’s hardly the sort of hazard you’d have expected to have to safeguard her against.”
“But if this disease is transmitted by rats’ urine, how did she get it from a bite?”
“She says that she rubbed water from the stream on to the bite, to soothe it. The water must have been infected.”
“Shouldn’t you be treating her for this now, instead of waiting for the results of the tests? Has any harm been done by the delay in diagnosing it? What is the treatment for it, anyway?”
“Steady on!” said Dr Wu. “One question at a time, please.”
“It’s OK,” said Louise Butler. Then, turning to Tim, “I understand how anxious you are about her. We can’t give you any absolute assurances yet, but, if it is Weil’s disease, we’ve actually caught it quite early. It can take more than a week to manifest itself, but Juliet got the symptoms very quickly. We have started the course of antibiotics used to treat it already and we should have the results of the tests by lunchtime, in any case. We’re therefore hopeful that there won’t be long-term damage in her case. If untreated, it can damage the internal organs, especially the liver and kidneys, but it is unlikely to have spread to those organs so soon: it usually takes about a week to do so.”
“Is it OK for me to see her?”
“Yes, if she agrees to it. She’s quite weak. She’s had a high fever and very bad headaches, and she’s been unable to eat since she was admitted, though she’s been on a drip. The antibiotics may make her feel worse at first, as well. They certainly won’t improve the muscle aches that she’s been experiencing.”
“Poor Juliet! This is just terrible. Will you ask her if she’ll see me? I assume she’s in a ward on her own?”
“Certainly. Yes, she’s been isolated for the moment. If the diagnosis is correct and she responds well to treatment, we may move her into a small shared ward in a few days’ time.”
“It’s not infectious?”
“Not if the proper hygienic precautions are taken. It’s passed on through urine-infected water, as Dr Wu said, not from person to person. In the past, it was believed that humans infected each other, but it’s almost certain that they were in fact infected by sharing a joint source of polluted water.”
“We’ve just found out that my wife is pregnant. Does that mean I ought not to come into contact with Juliet?”
“You should be fine, but just to be safe, we’ll fit you out with scrubs and a face mask. That’s if she’ll see you, of course. And you must promise not to worry her about work.”
“I won’t! How long is she likely to be here?”
“We’ll probably keep her in hospital for at least a week. She’s unlikely to make a full recovery in less than six weeks, though.”
“That won’t please my boss!”
Dr Butler
gave him a curious look.
“I’ll go and tell her you’re here. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting in the ante-room, so that we can leave Dr Wu in peace.”
Tim turned to look at Dr Wu, and saw that he had started writing his rapid notes again.
“Certainly. Thank you, Dr Wu, you’ve been most helpful.”
The doctor looked up, momentarily startled, as if surprised to see that Tim was still there.
“Always a pleasure,” he said in his American drawl, obviously selecting at random from his collection of courteous comments. He turned back to his task immediately. Tim followed Louise Butler out of his office.
It was a quarter of an hour before Dr Butler returned.
“I apologise for the delay, DI Yates. Juliet feels up to seeing you now.” She offered no explanation for the length of her absence. “I’ll take you to the nurse’s station to get fitted out with a gown and mask. The nurse will show you where Juliet is and she’ll return after five minutes to tell you that time’s up. I’m afraid that five minutes is the most that we can allow at the moment.”
“Thank you. I’m grateful,” said Tim. “Will you stay, too?”
“No, I have some rounds to make and I also want to check on the lab to make sure they’ve prioritised those tests. So promise me – no talking shop!”
“Scout’s honour!” said Tim. Once more he followed Dr Butler’s swift-moving form down a couple of corridors to an area fronted by a desk console.
“This is DI Yates,” she said to the nurse seated there. “He’s come to see Juliet Armstrong. Could you tog him out, please? Goodbye, DI Yates,” she added. “I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”
Tim took her hand, which was surprisingly small and limp. After a token shake, she extracted it and walked rapidly away.
The nurse in whose charge he had been left was dumpy and businesslike. She provided Tim with a green gown that, once he’d put it on, almost swept the floor, and handed him a barrier mask and a hairnet. He donned these as well.
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