Bloodstains

by Andrew Puckett

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll find a bus.’

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘Oh, where is it you’re staying?’ The Metropole — in the town centre?’

  ‘I know. Now who goes that way…?’

  His eyes fell on Holly, who was walking busily towards us with the air of hoping not to be noticed.

  ‘Holly.’ She looked up and stopped beside us. ‘You go through the town centre on your way home, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, no, not really.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you did. Only Tom here was wondering if you’d give him a lift?’

  I shot him a look of annoyance as Holly said, ‘oh well, I suppose I could.’

  ‘Please don’t bother if it’s out of your way. I want to learn the bus routes anyway.’

  ‘It’s no bother.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ said Wickham.

  ‘I’d rather catch a bus,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I insist.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘Well, if we’re going, can we go now, please?’

  ‘Good night,’ called Wickham benignly, as we walked up the corridor.

  As we turned the corner, a figure materialized from the room next to Wickham’s. Adrian.

  ‘Holly,’ he began, then saw me and stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wanted a word with you…’

  ‘Well, make it quick. Sorry, but I want to get through town before the traffic builds up.’

  ‘Why are you going that way?’

  ‘I’m giving Tom a lift.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you, then,’ he gusted. ‘I’ll have to wait, won’t I?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow,’ she said gently. ‘See you then.’

  As she walked on, I met Adrian s eyes; a narrow hatred glowed for an instant as he turned away.

  I followed Holly through the darkened glass doors of the lobby into the still hot sunlight. Her sandals slapped wetly on the tarmac of the road.

  She stopped beside the silver Metro and unlocked it. Flung her bag in the back and undid the passenger door.

  The heat stuck in my throat and she wound down the window. ‘The Metropole, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I hope it’s really not much out of your way.’

  ‘A bit. Not that much.’ She pulled out the choke and started the engine.

  ‘Holly,’ I said firmly, ‘I’m sorry about this, but we neither of us had much choice, did we?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her tone belied her words. ‘Put your seat-belt on, please.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ I reached behind and snapped it into place.

  The car hummed and popped as it fell down the steep road that led away from the hospital. Painted iron lamp-stands alternated with the young trees held in place by wooden stakes. The car popped again loudly, and she irritably pushed in the choke. We drew up behind a line of traffic waiting at a roundabout, nudging forward as each car found a way out.

  Above us, to the left, the white tiles and glass windows of the hospital suddenly caught the sun and blazed with light that seemed to come from within. Sweat pricked my brow and I was about to undo the seat-belt to take my jacket off when she found a gap in the roundabout and joined the traffic in the busy main road. A queue waited at a bus stop.

  ‘Holly, drop me off here.’

  She hesitated. ‘Don’t be silly. I said I’d take you to the Metropole and I will.’

  ‘Holly—’ a nice name, I thought irrelevantly — ‘if it’s really such an imposition, I’d much rather catch a bus.’ I deliberately unhitched the seat-belt.

  ‘Put it back on at once,’ she snapped pettishly, and then, as though hearing her own voice, flashed me a chagrined smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not your fault. Please put your belt back on.’

  I grinned and did as I was told. We continued in silence, but a more comfortable silence.

  I looked around as we approached the city centre. It must have been badly bombed, for nearly all the buildings were Sixtyish style, composed of pastel limestone, their hard lines softened now by the growth of the trees planted at the time. Unlike the giant hospital, they seemed to absorb the light and fizzle like sherbet under the sky.

  I stole a glance at Holly. Her suntanned squarish face might have been hard, but the feminine mouth was made softer by the dimple between it and her chin; her cheeks glowed a delicate pink and her eyelashes were long and curved — she turned suddenly and caught me.

  She smiled impishly, then changed down as the car in front braked at a pedestrian crossing. We came to a halt.

  ‘I wonder what you must think of us,’ she said, still staring ahead. ‘You must think we're a pretty unfriendly lot.’ She shot me a questioning glance.

  ‘I’ve met worse,’ I said at last.

  Her leg moved as she let in the clutch. ‘Well, that’s something.’ Her accent puzzled me, was she an American? What was an American doing here? ‘We’re not always like this, you know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know whether anyone’s said anything to you, but one of our colleagues was…’ she hesitated… ‘was killed last week. It’s left a very bad taste.’

  ‘Yes, I was told. I didn’t want to come here in the circumstances,’ I said smoothly, truth and lies in one, ‘but my masters insisted.’

  ‘They should’ve had more sense,’ she said hotly. ‘More sensitivity.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘The worst of it is,’ she said haltingly, ‘it’s looking at the people you work with, and wondering…’ She tailed off. I said nothing, hoping for more, but all she said was, ‘Well, here we are, then,’ and deftly pulled into the space in front of my hotel.

  I undid the belt for the last time and opened the door.

  ‘Thanks very much, Holly. I won’t pester you again, I promise.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, and smiled with her eyes. ‘See you in the morning.’

  ‘Oh yes. Promise broken already.’

  I smiled back, then slipped out and shut the door. She waved and pulled out into the traffic.

  It was after I had eaten and spoken to Marcus from my room that the first of the telephone calls came.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mr Jones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know about you. I know why you’re here.’

  ‘Yes?’ I waited for him to go on.

  ‘I — I want to talk about it. I—’ There was a click as he hung up.

  I sat and thought for a while before going down to the bar. How had he known about me? The letter-writer?

  The voice had been muffled, probably a handkerchief over the mouthpiece. An accomplice with cold feet? The killer himself? There was no way of knowing, but I had a feeling, a certainty almost, that they would be calling again.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Oh, hi, come on in.’ I followed Holly into her laboratory where about half a dozen people were busy at their benches with tubes and racks. No sign of any blood packs. She leaned back against a bench beneath the window and faced me, folding her arms. ‘I’m still not really sure what it is you want to know.’

  ‘Tell me what you do here? How it fits in with the computer? It’s the computer system I really need to understand.’

  ‘You don’t want much, do you?’ She looked down for a moment, thumbnail touching lower lip, face and fine hair silhouetted against the morning sky.

  ‘What we do here,’ she said, looking up, ‘is find the blood groups of all the donations, then label and bank them. That’s about four hundred a day, a lot, so we get that monster to group them for us.’ She pointed to a machine the size of a small pool table covered in wires and tubes, the one that had reminded me of a robot.

  ‘It looks like a robot,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You’re not that far out. It’s trade name is the “Super-Grouper”, which is rather silly, since all the girls call him the Groper, a
nd the men, the Groupie.’

  ‘What do you call him?’

  ‘I prefer Groper. When he’s going, he fusses and frets and tends to grunt. Just like a man — excuse me a moment.’

  She crossed to where a youth lounged half in and half out of the door as he chatted to two girls. A moment later she was on her way back, the boy gone. The tongue of one of the girls appeared momentarily and disrespectfully.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ said Holly. I shook my head. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, Groper here tests all the samples, works out their blood groups on his own private computer, then feeds them into the main system—’

  ‘Holly, before you say any more, I don’t think that anything is going to make any sense until I understand the main system.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ She looked thoughtful again. ‘I’m just wondering who the best person would be to show you — what’s so funny now?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m beginning to feel a bit like a parcel, that’s all.’ She looked blank, so I said, ‘Well, Falkenham passed me to Chalgrove, who passed me to Trefor, who passed—’

  ‘All right, I get the message. I suppose I’d better show you myself, it’s probably what Trefor intended anyway. Hold on a minute while I tell the others where I’m going.’

  She was back after a few moments. ‘It might be best if I showed you each process where it takes place. Is that alright?’

  ‘Fine.’ It couldn’t be better.

  ‘Okay, let’s go to the donor registry, where the system starts.’

  ‘Lead on, Macduff.’

  She started for the door, then half-turned back to me.

  ‘I wonder why people always say that, when what Macbeth actually said was “lay on”?’

  ‘I didn’t think I knew you well enough yet.’

  She smiled a tight little smile and walked on.

  She was as much of a puzzle as ever, especially her accent, which seemed to be Transatlantic and English at the same time, East Coast perhaps. Maybe her parents had moved over when she was a kid — yes, that would explain it, the aura of clean-cut American health she carried with her, almost to the point of sexlessness, but not quite. Her bare brown ankles twinkled as he walked down the corridor, and the rhythm of her body beneath the white coat betrayed its shape as she moved.

  Nice, but not my type.

  Most of the computer systems I’d worked with before were for information storage. You keyed in your clearance code, then the name of your villain and out came his form. Or you could add to it if you wanted to. The other system commonly used is for stock control, such as in the big supermarkets.

  This system was complex because it was a mixture of both, the records of the donors on an information storage system and of their donations, separate on a stock control system. That was bad enough, but it was made worse because they were linked together at various points.

  I concentrated on the donation system; after all, it was stock that was going missing. In essence, a record was created when a donation was taken, and then had information added to it at various stages (such as Holly’s Groper), until the pack had a group label attached (through the computer) and was issued to a hospital (also through the computer). It was the last stage I most wanted to see, and needless to say, the one I didn’t get to see.

  Holly spent over an hour explaining it all to me, then we went back to the laboratory where she showed me the now operational Groper, I hung back, anxious to quit while I was ahead, although the blood, imprisoned in little glass tubes, didn’t have quite so much effect on me. ‘You’re right about one thing,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He does grunt when he’s on the job.’

  We went for a relaxed coffee, relaxed because the others had gone.

  ‘How well do your colleagues understand the system?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty well, I think. We had lectures when it was installed.’

  ‘D’you know what language it uses?’

  ‘MUMPS,’ she replied promptly. ‘Although what it stands for I can’t remember. I can only think of the disease.’

  ‘Massachusetts University Medical Programs System,’ I said, ‘although I sometimes think you’re nearer the mark with “disease”.’

  She looked at me curiously. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, those girls we saw in donor registry, tapping in information all day — have you noticed how much they’re being conditioned by it? Oh, it’s still the servant all right, none of that futuristic stuff — yet. But doesn’t it occur to you how dependent you’ve become already? Is that healthy?’

  She gave an uneasy laugh. ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that. It’s a funny view for a computer man to have.’

  Perhaps I’d gone too far. ‘What I mean is…’I paused. What did I mean? ‘People seem to have absolute faith in what comes out of a computer, because they’re told that computers don’t make mistakes. Computers don’t, not often, but the information they give you is only as good as the person who put it there in the first place. D’you follow?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It’s like when you query your overdraft and you’re told that it must be right because the computer says so.’

  ‘Exactly.’ I grinned. ‘And that’s all I want people here to understand.’

  ‘I see. But you’re still not like any work study or computer man I’ve ever met before.’

  ‘Well, I’m the first of a new model, see. Trying to improve the image.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s what I mean, you’ve got a sense of humour.’

  ‘How long have you had the system now?’ I asked to get her off the subject.

  ‘Oh, about nine months, I think.’

  I turned this over in my mind, wondering whether it had any bearing on Leigh’s killing.

  The rest of the morning was not so successful. After talking a while longer, we went to David Brown’s laboratory to see how he fed his results into the system. Not that there was much to see, they simply keyed them in on a VDU, but David’s refusal even to be visibly polite infuriated Holly.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ was about the best we got out of him, that was when Holly asked if she could show me his system. With shaking hands and two red spots on her cheeks, she called up his program through the keyboard and showed me how it worked.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked as we left.

  ‘Just don’t talk to me about him,’ she said between her teeth.

  A thought occurred to me. ‘I noticed you put in your own password to get through to his program. Are all the staff’s passwords as versatile as that?’

  ‘Senior staff, yes, and a few of the others. Not many.’

  Could be important. I made a note to find out whose password did what.

  She showed me how a blood pack was labelled and banked ready for use, (scarcely a tremor), then took me to the Issue Room.

  Adrian Hodges didn’t even look up. ‘I’m far too busy this morning.’ he said.

  Holly asked if she could show me.

  No, he’d rather she didn’t. Perhaps if we came back tomorrow?

  ‘What about this afternoon?’ said Holly. No, he was having a half day.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as we came out. ‘It’s a bad time. People just aren’t themselves at the moment.’

  No, they weren’t, but why was she so much more forgiving with Adrian?

  It was nearly twelve, so I persuaded her to show me the hospital canteen. She led me up some stairs and through the door into — a space-ship.

  Yes — it was a passage, the double-decker tendril of concrete, aluminium and green-tinted glass I had noticed when first approaching the hospital. Walking along it gave the impression that you were suspended somewhere above the Earth, regarding as a Martian might the glittering city below and the sombre bulk of the moors beyond.

  ‘Is that Dartmoor?’ I asked.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘It looks so close.’

  ‘It’s only about five miles away.’
/>   The passage was alive. Dangling stethoscopes and white coats stained green; nurses’ uniforms rendered pastel by the muted sunlight, all hurrying somewhere in the living hospital.

  A canteen is a canteen. We found an empty table and sat down.

  ‘I’ll never find room for all this,’ she said, looking down at her plate.

  ‘It’s good for you. Nourishing.’

  ‘Fattening.’

  ‘That’s not something you need worry about, anyway, it’s mostly salad.’

  She tried a mouthful. ‘If I ate like this every day, I’d blow up like a balloon.’

  ‘Don’t you have lunch?’

  An apple. Perhaps a banana.’

  ‘Then I’m honoured.’

  A couple of noisy housemen sat at an adjacent table and began discussing patients.

  Holly said, ‘How long do you think you’ll be here?’

  ‘A week. Two at the most.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I write a report. Make suggestions, although they’ll be pretty tentative until I’ve seen a few more Centres.’

  She took a sip of water. ‘Doesn’t all the travelling get you down?’

  ‘No, I enjoy it.’

  ‘I think I’d get bored in the evenings. Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘Sometimes. I usually find something to do.’ An idea had been forming in my mind and I found myself putting it into action before I intended. ‘I usually find someone to go out with for a drink. Someone like you, for instance.’ I smiled. ‘Would you like to come out for a drink with me?’

  I half-expected a flippant rejection, but to my surprise she flushed faintly.

  ‘Oh no. Yon must think I’d been hinting, it wasn’t that at all.’ She half-heartedly took another mouthful.

  ‘I don’t think that, I’d like to take you out. Would you like to come? Tonight?’

  ‘I can’t, not tonight.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  She hesitated, put down her knife and fork. ‘I can’t eat any more of this.’ She looked up. ‘All right, then, tomorrow.’

  I was surprised by the pleasure I felt.