The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  ‘There’s still the monkeys in here, Joe. They opened the cage but the little buggers never moved. All the others are empty though.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Jessie whirled on him and he stood there and stared at her with his mouth half open, startled by the passion in her voice. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said the monkeys are still there.’

  She got to her feet, shaky but determined, and pushing away Joe Lloyd’s protective arm went to the animal room to stand in the doorway staring in. The place was in a shambles; the sides of the pens had been torn down and the closed cages that had been on the walls ripped down and left lying, empty, on their sides in the middle of the clutter. There was no rabbits or guinea pigs to be seen and she stared round, wildly, making the little clucking noises in her throat she used when she fed the animals and which they had seemed to her to know. But there was no sound but the chatter of Castor and Pollux who were swinging wildly in their cage but making no attempt to leave it, preferring to remain safely high up among their swinging rails.

  ‘But how did they get out?’ She said it as much to herself as to the two men who were now standing staring over her shoulder at the mess. They wouldn’t be able to run that far. They must be in the laboratory – this is the only door out ….’ And she turned to go back to the lab to look for them but the photographer shook his head.

  ‘They put ’em in sacks and carried ’em out,’ he said. ‘Every one of ’em. Shoved ’em in sacks and carried ’em out. Seein’ they’re supposed to be animal lovers, I wasn’t that impressed, I can tell you. I read as it’s wrong to pick up rabbits by their ears, and there they was, dragging the poor little bleeders up that way, shovin’ ’em into sacks and draggin’ ’em out ….’

  ‘And you didn’t stop them, you idiot?’ she blazed. ‘You let them do it? How can you be such a bloody fool?’

  ‘I got the pictures,’ he said, aggrieved. ‘There was no call for me to be playing no bleedin’ hero. Not with six of ’em rushing around all excited. But I got the pictures and they’ll be good ones, you see if they won’t. You’ll be pleased with ’em, Mr Lloyd, they’re really good ….’

  Outside in the laboratory there was a rush of feet and then loud voices and Jessie turned to see the place full of people; uniformed policemen and the night security guard from the hospital, and they were all talking at once and Jessie felt her head spin and swayed slightly, and Joe, alert as ever, caught her by the elbow and led her back to the laboratory to sit her down on Harry Gentle’s seat beside his bench.

  ‘Right.’ The most senior of the policemen was standing above her. ‘You were here, madam? Can you give me some information? Your name, first, and your business here.’

  ‘Jessie Hurst,’ she said dully. Her head was beginning to ache abominably and she felt cold, and she pulled her coat more closely around her, suddenly very aware of being in her nightdress. ‘I work here. Senior technical assistant – I look after the animals as well ….’

  ‘Ah, yes, the animals. I gather there’s been some damage done to them?’

  ‘They’ve gone.’ She almost whispered it, and she pulled her shoulders up, wanting to hide her distress from this impersonal man and the other people standing around and staring at her, feeling the tears pressing needle sharp in her throat and behind her nose. ‘All my rabbits and guinea pigs have gone – all of them ….’

  ‘What were they here for, madam?’ The policeman sounded stolid, seemingly unaware of her distress, but she felt there was a kindness about him for all that and she looked up at him and he smiled at her encouragingly. ‘Their purpose, madam? Pets were they, or ….?’

  She managed to smile. ‘Pets? Hardly. Though Castor and Pollux were a bit, I suppose. We didn’t use them much – so expensive and it wasn’t the right work for them anyway ….’

  ‘Castor and who, madam?’

  ‘The monkeys. Rhesus monkeys, very expensive research animals.’ She said it wearily, wanting them all to go away and leave her alone to grieve over her loss.

  ‘Ah, they were research animals, were they?’ The policeman nodded and wrote in his notebook. ‘Now, madam, they’ve all gone, is that right?’ He looked over her shoulder and nodded at one of his men who had emerged from the office. ‘Yes, according to my chap they’ve all gone. Now, we’ll need some information of a technical nature. Is there any risk in any of these animals being out of captivity?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Any risk, madam? Are they carrying any notifiable disease, are they infected with any organism that belongs to the group that has to be reported to the public health authorities?’

  She was staring up at him now with her face blank with horror. She hadn’t thought about anything yet apart from the loss of her animals; these small things which had no real personalities, no individual names and yet which had become so very important to her. She wasn’t being sentimental, of course she wasn’t, but she’d been fond of them and their loss was an emotional blow. But now, staring at the calm face of the policeman standing there with his cap tucked neatly under one arm and his pen poised over his notebook, she felt all the reality of the situation and opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again and then swallowed hard.

  ‘I might have some information on that ….’ Joe Lloyd said and stepped forwards, and she turned and glared at him, daring him to say anything. No one was to say anything at all, no one, until Ben was here. Ben had to be here, in his lab, talking to this policeman about his animals. They weren’t hers at all, they were Ben’s and she needed him here so badly she could have cried his name aloud.

  But she didn’t. She said, as calmly as she could, ‘I think we’d better get Dr Pitman to answer that, Sergeant … ah … Inspector. The work here in this laboratory is … er … it’s special work and I’m not qualified to speak of it. No one is qualified to speak of it but Dr Pitman. He’s sleeping, I think in the medical quarters tonight. If I could just phone him and get him over here, I’m sure he’ll be glad to help.’

  And he’ll have to do something fast about getting them back. Oh, God, he must get them back, and suddenly she heard her own voice talking to Ben earlier that afternoon, up on Ward Seven B. ‘That strain of 737 is a very virulent one, and they were damned ill,’ and could see there in the mind’s eye the dead and dying group A animals the night she had found them there – oh, God, Ben, get here!

  ‘I’ll call him,’ she said and tried to get to her feet, but the policeman was all solicitude and wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I’ll send one of my men to get him, Miss Hurst – no need for you to disturb yourself – Coppins, you go, will you? The night guard there’ll show you the way, no doubt. And Jenson, Curry, Pastern, you go and search for the animals, will you? I doubt there’s any sign of them now, but there may be some indication of the way they went. See what you can identify. Now, sir,’ and he turned to Joe Lloyd. ‘You said you had something to say about the health of these animals?’

  She looked at Joe with her eyes as wide and eloquent at she could make them. She had no idea what it was he wanted to say, had no way of knowing whether he had any information at all, but she was certain of one thing: no one must say anything at all until Ben came, and as Joe opened his mouth to answer, clearly ignoring her silent appeal, she said loudly, ‘This man can’t know anything about this laboratory or the work that is done in it. He’s some sort of newspaper reporter. And I want to make a complaint about him. He said he had a warning that these people were going to break in and yet he didn’t tell us.’

  The policeman lifted his brows at her and then turned to stare at Joe. ‘Really, sir? Perhaps we can leave the matter of the animals to one side for the moment, then, till the doctor gets here. What is this, then? Why are you here?’

  ‘Listen, let’s be clear on one thing,’ Joe said with an air of great pugnacity. ‘I was the one that bloody well called you, so don’t you go coming the old acid with me. I behaved as any decent citizen should. The minute I knew there was any call to get the la
w in, I got the law in. Before that if I’d called you I’d have been labelled a time-waster and a hoaxer, and well you know it, so we’ll have no nonsense.’

  ‘What was the nature of the information you had that you didn’t see fit to pass on to us, sir?’

  ‘A call from a bloke who said there was something planned to happen here tonight. He wouldn’t give any details apart from it was here at the laboratories, midnight, Wednesday. So I gave the matter a good deal of thought and decided the best course of action was not unnecessarily to waste police time on what might well be a hoax but to come out myself, in the middle of the night, outside my normal working hours, to see what I could do to help if anything should happen to occur.’ He lifted his chin at the policeman and stared him straight in the eyes. ‘And if you say I was wrong, then I will add that as a journalist I have every right to protect my sources of information.’

  ‘But not to collude in the commission of a crime,’ the policeman said in a pleasant voice. ‘Eh, Mr Lloyd? I know the law as well as you do, I imagine. Not if your silence allows the commission of a crime.’

  ‘Hardly a major crime, Inspector,’ Joe said. ‘A handful of rabbits and guinea pigs and the like running round loose, back in their natural habitat? You can’t call that a crime. What happened here tonight was more in the nature of a demonstration. People have the right to make political statements of this nature in this democracy of ours.’ He almost smirked as he said it.

  ‘A law-abiding democracy, Mr Lloyd.’ The policeman shut his notebook. ‘Well, it’s not for me to decide whether you were right or wrong to say nothing to us about the information you had. I leave it to higher than me to consider what happens about that. Meanwhile, what information is it you have about these animals in a health sense?’

  Joe stared at him, his mouth set in a sullen line, and the policeman sighed and said, ‘I’d let us have it all, Mr Lloyd, if I were you, I really would. Could make all the difference to the reactions people might have to your sitting on that warning.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ Joe said, and the policeman smiled.

  ‘Mr Lloyd, now, you ought to have more sense than that! As if … ah, now, this would be Dr Pitman, I take it?’

  Jessie got to her feet and ran across the laboratory to seize Ben by the arm. ‘Ben,’ she said urgently. ‘Did they tell you?’

  He nodded. His face was grim and he looked over her shoulder at the policeman. ‘Some idiots let my animals out?’

  ‘Hard to say, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘We do know they were taken out of here in sacks, but whether they’ve been let loose is another matter. If they are, is there any information we ought to have about them? Are they carrying any notifiable disease or organism that ….’

  ‘I’ll say they bloody are,’ Joe Lloyd said loudly. ‘I’ll say they are. The bloke you ought to have here is Dan Stewart, Inspector, as well as this one. He’s the one who knows what’s going on. I talked to him not all that long ago and he couldn’t deny there’s a hell of an epidemic building up, that there’s a very nasty strain of flu that’s a real killer that started showing itself at the school on Petts’ Hill and ….’

  ‘Now, just a minute, just a minute,’ the policeman said patiently and held up one hand. ‘All this is too fast for me. Dr Stewart, you say? Our Public Health chap?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Joe said. ‘You ask him what’s going on at Bluegates. Ask him about the two kids that died there. Ask him how he feels about the sort of reports that are coming in from here and there about the spread of the illness. And then ask this fella what sort of research he was doing with those animals of his. You might find you’ve got a bigger case to deal with than just the theft of a few bunnies, and so I bloody well tell you ….’

  21

  Joe sat at his usual table at Dimitri’s with all the national papers spread out in front of him over the remains of his breakfast and wanted to shout his excitement from the rooftops. There it was, his story, all over them. In spite of the plethora of heavy news, ranging from famine in Ethiopia via chemical pollution killing thousands in Bhopal and miners’ strikes to political fury over university student grants, there the headlines were.

  ‘Mystery epidemic in top private school – hospital researcher blamed’, was about the mildest in the Daily Telegraph as the tabloids shrieked their versions of the story at a much higher pitch. ‘Child killer plague hits South Coast’; ‘Lethal animals loosed on helpless children by animal rights extremists’; ‘Hospitals warned. New children’s disease ravages South Coast’, and so on and on. Last night’s – or rather this morning’s – phone calls had paid off.

  Two of the stories had his by-lines on them and he pored over those with particular glee. He’d made it; he’d got his toe in the Fleet Street door, and it was just a matter of biding his time – choosing which of the offers that must come his way he would accept – and the story wasn’t over yet, by a long chalk. He had more to offer them, much more. There were colour pieces to be done about Bluegates School; parents of the girls to be tracked down and interviewed; the Animal Freedom Brigade people to be found somehow – and the pictures might help him get hold of them, if he was lucky; those stocking masks didn’t always disguise people as much as they thought – and altogether a lot of work to be done. He hadn’t looked forward to a day’s work so much for years.

  Simon Stone was hovering at the door of the news room as he got there, waiting to pounce, but Joe shook his head at him as he went bustling by, refusing to stop and talk to him.

  ‘Got a lot to do, too much to waste time talking to bloody you,’ he shouted over his shoulder in high good humour. ‘But I’m in a reasonable mood, so you can do the courts today, and let Robert do the obits and the hatch and match pages – get on your way, boy!’

  ‘But Mr Lloyd, I’ve got a story for you …’ Simon went trotting after him. ‘At the hospital last night … you told me to wait over at the hospital and there wasn’t anything happening so I was asking around, got talking to one of the night nurses and there’s a story, I think you’ll ….’

  ‘I was there last night, I got all there was to get,’ Joe said, and swept his desk clear of its drift of paper and assorted proofs so that he could pull his typewriter towards him. ‘So go away and do as you’re told, unless you actually want to do the bloody obits again ….’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. But I do want to tell you about what this night nurse told me about this treatment they’re using – it’s new, you see, and ….’

  ‘I’m sure. Later, son, later. Right now I’ve got a bloody follow-up story to write and if I don’t get on with it I’ll miss the early editions and I might even miss tomorrow’s editions. I made the late news pages this morning, but tomorrow I want news and features – so go away and stop pestering ….’

  And Simon, knowing when he was defeated, went away, but he was simmering with frustration. He knew he had a story; what had happened to that child on Ward Seven B was a super story, and even Joe Lloyd would have to admit it. Once the bastard sat still long enough to hear it. But until he did there wasn’t a thing Simon could do. If only, he thought gloomily as he collected his notebook to go to the courts, if only there was another paper in Minster I could work for ….

  ‘Now, let me get this clear. Dr Stewart, you say there’s no blame to be attached to the hospital over this, and you, Inspector, seem to think there is. So, where do I go from here?’ Mrs Cloudesley folded her hands neatly on her desk blotter and stared at them owlishly. ‘I have to know what to put in my report, d’you see. I have to take the meeting’s guidance – it isn’t something I can decide just on my own, is it?’

  ‘I don’t see why it matters who’s to blame,’ Ben said. ‘The real problem is what we do about the fact that those animals are out and could be spreading 737. If we’re lucky, they’ll die soon, and I think we could be lucky. They’re all bred in captivity, not really capable of fending for themselves in the wild, even a wild as tame as the country around this
town, and they’re also not hardened to winter conditions out of doors.’

  ‘We’re having a singularly mild winter so far,’ Dan Stewart said sourly. ‘And we’ve had a hot summer and a very fine autumn. The earth’ll be pretty warm still. It’ll need one hell of a sudden cold snap to kill off those animals, and there’re no signs of that happening, going by the weather charts. I checked this morning because I was thinking along the same lines. That fish won’t bite, Ben. We have to work on the basis that the animals will survive and will interact with animals in the wild and with their bugs.’

  ‘In the wild then. But there’s no reason to suppose they’ll interact with humans ….’

  ‘Like bloody hell,’ Dan said forcibly. ‘One dog goes after a rabbit, takes it, goes wagging its arse back to its cosy little suburban kennel and the kids welcome it home with kisses. Like bloody hell they won’t interact.’

  ‘There’s no need to be coarse, Dr Stewart,’ Mrs Cloudesley said. ‘And you still haven’t answered my question. Who’s to blame?’

  ‘What the hell does it matter who’s to blame?’ Stewart almost shouted it. ‘I don’t give a three ha’penny curse about that. So you can whine – “It’s all his fault” – what difference will that make? It won’t bring the lousy animals back, won’t stop Ben’s bloody 737 spreading itself all over the place. That’s all I care about ….’

  ‘There may be a case to answer,’ Inspector Cahill said. ‘There are laws governing the control of infectious agents, as well you know, Dr Stewart. If I have reason to believe a law has been broken it’s my duty to inform the necessary authority and ….’

  ‘And I have to send a report to my authority, so it does matter, Dr Stewart,’ Mrs Cloudesley said. ‘Though of course I do agree you have a health problem in dealing with any unfortunate sequelae of this distressing incident.’

  ‘Unfortunate sequelae …’ Dan said disgustedly, and then took a deep breath. ‘All right, all right, I here offer my opinion. Ben was not behaving in any way improperly in doing the work he was doing in the lab. He made all the necessary efforts to contain the animals and the materials he was using, and from what he says, he’s had it all well in control this past four years. Four years, for God’s sake! It’s obvious it isn’t his fault there’s this panic now. It’s those bloody idiot animal rights people or whatever they call themselves. I never heard such crap as they dish out.’