The escalator drew me into the half-world of Paddington Station… along platform eight… hurry, hurry! Up the stairs and across the gangway… under the motorway and through the trees and there it is…
The hospital where princesses have their babies… and my brother lay dying.
The yawning entrance bade me in… the ward, the smell of the infirm…
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’ve come to see my brother.’
‘It’s not visiting-time, you know.’ She was petite, heart-shaped face and black stockings. ‘It’s rather awkward just now, you should have phoned…’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This is my only chance…’ I swallowed. ‘The only chance… I’m sorry.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Francis Jones.’
‘Oh.’ The syllable said all. ‘He’s in a side room. All right, I’ll go and see.’
I followed her down the aisle between the beds, white headboards like gravestones, the glitter of an eye following us the only sign of life.
‘Wait here a moment,’ she said, and disappeared inside a door.
Voices, scarcely audible above the hammering at my chest and temples.
‘You can go in for ten minutes.’ She hesitated. ‘You’d better not touch him.’ Her heels clacked back along the ward.
He was lying propped against the pillows, eyes burning in a burnt-out face. He didn’t speak. His pyjamas were blue and white striped and hung loosely around him. One side of his face was stained with a livid red mark and a crusted sore spread from a corner of his mouth. He used to look like me, but I wouldn’t have known him now, except for the eyes.
‘Hello, Tom.’ The voice was husky, and he cleared his throat.
"Lo, Frank.’ His dark hair was greasy and speckled with dandruff. ‘How are you feeling?’ I sat beside him.
‘Well, at least you didn’t ask me how I was. The answer to both is bloody awful.’
‘I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I haven’t been earlier, been away on a job. Only heard about you last night.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘Devon.’
‘Oh.’ Smiled. ‘Glorious Devon. Still, I won’t be seeing it again. Why d’you think they call it Glorious?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Neither do I. Have they told you what’s wrong with me?’
I nodded.
There was a small silence while his lips twitched then he burst out, ‘It’s the bloody stigma that gets me. It’s bad enough feeling so ill, but the looks some people give me, as though I somehow deserve it. D’you know’ he shifted slightly — ‘I asked one of the doctors the other day to get me a notice, big black and white letters that say, “I’m a haemo, not a homo.” Pretty good, eh?’
We both laughed, and the years fell away until his mirth turned into a fit of coughing. Without thinking, I put a hand on his arm and patted his back.
‘Hey,’ he said between coughs, ‘you’re not supposed to touch me, remember?’
‘I don’t care, Frankie.’ I gripped his arm and my forehead touched his shoulder. ‘I don’t care.’
I felt his hand on my shoulder, grip and gently push me away. Hey,’ he said again, ‘I don’t want you to catch this thing.’
His eyes told me that he meant it and I wanted to touch him more than ever.
‘Devon,’ he continued conversationally, ‘I don’t think I’ve been there since that holiday we had. D’you remember?’ He smiled inwardly.
‘I remember you swimming like a fish.’
‘It was the only thing I could without bloody well bleeding.’
‘Even then you managed to hit your nose on a rock.’
‘So I did.’ He looked up. ‘What have you been doing down there?’
I told him, and he smiled rather mirthlessly.
‘Funny to think that blood could be worth pinching. Perhaps not, though.’ He reached down and fumbled in his bedside cabinet. ‘This is a shot of Factor VIII.’ He held up a little bottle with some freeze-dried powder in the bottom. It costs anything between thirty and sixty pounds, or so I’m told.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose it gave me some years of freedom, even though it gave me this disease in the end. ‘His eyes hardened. ‘You might ask your pals down there why they never get around to making more of it in this country.’
‘I won’t be going back.’
‘We boast about being a caring nation,’ he continued as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘welfare and all that. So, what do we do? Three million or so unemployed, yet we buy in two-thirds of our Factor VIII from America instead of making it ourselves.’ I fleetingly wondered whether to try and stop him, then thought it might be better to let him get it out of his system. ‘America, where the main force in medicine is profit and the main growth industry is homosexuality. Did you know that when I inject myself with Factor VIII, I’m injecting material from over a thousand people? It only takes one of them to have AIDS, it only takes one virus to give it to me—’
He broke off and stared at me, his mouth open.
‘D’you realize that’s the first time either of us has said it? AIDS, I mean. It’s like cancer, isn’t it? The evil eye, if you so much as mention it, tantamount to a death sentence—’ He stopped again.
‘There, I’ve said that too, the other taboo word.’
‘Don’t talk about it as though it were a certainty.’
‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
He hesitated. Then: ‘It’s all right for you, you can say that, can’t you? I’m the one who’s—’
‘It’s not all right for me.’
A longer pause. ‘No. You’ve always felt guilty about me, haven’t you?’
‘Pretty resentful sometimes.’
He shrugged. ‘One always resents feeling guilty.’
‘You’ve become a philosopher.’
‘You have to be, in my position—’
There was a tap at the door and the sister looked in. ‘I think that had better be all for today, Mr Jones.’ She tactfully withdrew.
‘Don’t philosophize,’ I said, ‘Hope.’
‘Oh, come on—’
‘Hope.’ I said, standing up. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’
The sister sat in the office at the other end of the ward with a harassed-looking young man in a white coat. She looked up.
‘Thanks for letting me see him,’ I said.
‘That’s all right.’
I hesitated. ‘I was wondering whether I could speak to a doctor about him.’ I glanced meaningfully at the white-coated figure who was still scribbling busily at the desk.
‘Well, Dr Day is rather busy at the moment…’
‘Yes,’ said the man, not looking up. ‘At the moment Dr Day is even more overworked and underpaid than usual.’
‘This gentleman’s the brother of Francis Jones, the AIDS patient, Doctor.’
‘Oh.’ I found myself looking into a pair of round blue eyes beneath tousled fair hair. ‘Oh, all right. Be with you in a sec. Sit down.’
He scratched at a few more forms, then put his pen away.
‘Right,' he said briskly. ‘If you could take care of these, Sister, I’ll take… uh… Mr Jones over to the examining room.’
I followed him across the corridor into a room with a bed and a glass-topped trolley covered with instruments.
He shut the door. ‘Forgive me for being cloak and dagger, but I’d rather the patients didn’t hear us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well, now, your brother. I take it you know what’s wrong with him?’ The blue eyes met mine and I nodded.
‘Is it true?’ I said quickly. ‘That there’s no cure for it, I mean?’
‘At the moment, I’m afraid so. But there is treatment, and the longer he survives, the better his chances.’
‘How long will be survive?’
‘There’s no way of telling. Some die quite quickly, although I’m sure your brother won’t. Two chaps in America have had the disease for
some years, and actually seem to be getting better—’
‘Could that happen with Frank?’
‘As I said, there’s no way of telling. There are so many factors — Do you know anything about the mechanism of the disease?’
‘Only what’s in the papers.’
‘Ah. Well, it might help…’ He pondered for a moment. ‘AIDS is an acronym, and a bad one in my opinion, for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. What the patient actually acquires is a virus — your brother got it from a Factor VIII preparation — which specifically infects and destroys white blood cells called lymphocytes. Without these cells, the immune system stops working, and the patient becomes susceptible to the kind of trivial infection that wouldn’t bother you or me. Can you follow that?’
‘Like a cold, you mean? Is that what he’s got?’
‘That sort of thing, yes. He’s actually recovering from a rare form of pneumonia that wouldn’t begin to harm either of us. It’s under control with antibodies at the moment, he’d be dead but for that.’
‘So, he could go on getting these infections?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What are the marks on his face?’
‘The lesion on his mouth is Herpes, the other…’ He hesitated. ‘The other is a type of skin cancer called Kaposi’s Sarcoma that a lot of AIDS sufferers get.’
‘Cancer!’ I swallowed. ‘Don’t these… lymph things ever come back?’
He shrugged expressively. ‘Nobody knows. There are drugs which boost their growth and seem to help for a short while, but unfortunately it doesn’t last.’
I thought quickly. ‘Doctor, I’m a computer systems designer and my last job was in a Blood Transfusion Centre. If these lymph-cells are in the blood, wouldn’t a blood transfusion help?’
He smiled. ‘That’s good thinking, Mr Jones. Again, unfortunately, lymphocytes don’t survive for very long in a pack of blood, although having said that, it can help for a short time. Another approach might be a bone-marrow transplant, if we could find a suitable donor.’
‘Would I be a suitable donor?’ Another part of me heard this and looked on in amazement.
‘You could be, yes. But your brother’s condition isn’t critical yet, it might be best to keep you in reserve, so to speak.’
I started to say something, but he held up his hand.
‘The best thing you can do for the present, Mr Jones, is to visit him as often as you can. It’s amazing how big a part the will to live can play, it seems to be the force behind the two men still alive in America. I’m told that one of them practises some kind of meditation in which he imagines that his lymphocytes are rabbits that are busily multiplying.’ He shrugged. ‘It seems that his lymphocytes are increasing, and I’ve got no explanation for it. Look, I hate to sound like Mr Micawber, but if he can stay alive, something’ll turn up.’ He began edging towards the door, anxious to get back to his forms.
I said, ‘I really want to do something to help him.’
He paused, pursed his lips, then looked up. ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll speak to the consultant immunologist and tell her about your offer. She’s in a much better position than I am to know whether it could help.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, but I really must be going now. I expect you’ll be in again soon, won’t you?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘I’ll arrange for the sister to take a sample of your blood for tissue-typing. And now if you’ll excuse me.’ He held the door open and followed me out.
As the Bakerloo train rattled south, little pieces started falling away from the mass clogging my brain.
I knew I could help Frank, and not just by being there giving him the will to live.
The stuff inside me, my blood — even thinking it made me quail — yes, that’s what would save him, the very perversity of it made sense.
But I needed advice.
My own doctor? No — he hardly knew me. The answer was obvious — Chalgrove, who’d actually worked at St Mary’s.
What I needed was an excuse for going back to Tamar.
As soon as I got back to the flat, I sat down with a pencil.
David. He’d been stealing plasma and had phoned me hoping a confession would get him some sort of immunity.
But David’s a killer?
Possible — just. An unstable neurotic might be pushed over the edge by being caught in the act by his old boss.
Suicide? But if David had killed Leigh and then himself, where was Hill? Also killed by David? Bodies aren’t that easy to hide.
Suicide? Surely not, David had liked himself too much.
Perhaps Hill had killed Leigh. But in that case, who pushed David?
And who pushed me?
Adrian? He had two motives — Holly, and my silence. He was still the most likely.
Back to the only fact I knew, that David had been stealing plasma. Had he thought of it himself?
Unlikely — not clever enough. Master-mind behind the scenes?
Surely not for £5,000, which was about all the operation could have made.
And yet Leigh’s killing made no sense unless big money was involved. Unless it was a crime of panic.
OK, assume panic, then it had to be either Hill or David.
If it was Hill, what happened to David?
If it was David, where was Hill?
Round in circles. Yes, back to the beginning — there was another fact I’d overlooked: David had phoned me, yet it hadn’t been him in the washing-up room. No — I shivered as I remembered those powerful legs kicking me — no, that hadn’t been David.
I went out for a walk, hoping the exercise would shake the facts into a pattern. It didn’t.
I went back to the flat, and on impulse rang Holly. ‘Tom! How are you?
‘Fine. I wanted to thank you for… for last Friday.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I only hope…’ she tailed off.
I said, ‘How would you like to give me a guided tour of Dartmoor?’
She laughed. ‘That would take months.’
‘I’ll settle for an afternoon.’
‘It would be lovely, but when? I mean…?’
I’ve got to come back to the Centre next week, to finish off what I was doing.’ Silence. ‘Holly?’
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Tom,’ she said quietly.
‘But you sounded pleased just now—’
‘Not next week, not so soon after David.’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said slowly, ‘but there may be no choice.’
‘Tom it would be lovely to see you again, but not this way, please.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I lied.
‘At least leave it until after the funeral.’
‘When is that?’
‘We don’t know, there’ll have to be an inquest.’
The happiness that had been in her voice was gone now, and after a few more sentences we rang off.
I felt sad, then suddenly angry. What a stupid way to break a friendship, but I had no choice.
I dug out and played the only classical record I possess, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and played it over and over until its violence drained away a little of mine.’
I knew I wouldn’t sleep, so in the evening I ran in the park, round and round until it got dark and my thighs ached and my hand throbbed. Back to the flat. Whisky.
Bed, where perversely I slept immediately and wished I hadn’t. The night was wretched with dreams in which Frank kept changing into an undead David who chased me around the endless corridors of the Centre. A door opened, and Holly beckoned, but just as I reached it, she slammed it in my face.
Chapter Fifteen
It might have been a year ago, or yesterday, or perhaps just a parsec away; whichever it was, the feeling of being trapped in a time-warp was overwhelming as I emerged from the station into the brilliant sunshine of Tamar. The same sunlight scattered over the same bleached buildings, the same taxi-driver taking me to the
same hotel, and it was with a shock that I realized that they hadn’t given me the same room.
From this point, however, resemblance ended. I found a friendly local and sat back with a pint and toasted sandwich amid the clink and chatter of the lunch-time drinkers.
Today was Thursday.
On Monday I’d written up a full report recommending further investigation and dropped it into the office for typing on the way to the hospital.
Frank was difficult, inevitable perhaps after the high of our reunion. When he heard my plan, he accused me of being patronizing and of trying to give him false hope. Haltingly at first, I told him of my phobia and its cause, which was the best thing I could have done, since it somehow brought us back on a level.
He said, ‘I think it was Dad who should have seen the shrink.’
On Tuesday Marcus read my report, patted me on the head and said no further action was necessary.
We argued, and he told me that Bennett had been in touch with him.
‘He can’t shake Adrian Hodge’s story, and he’s going to close the case whatever we think.’
I grew stubborn and he lost his temper.
‘Look, you’ve done your bit, it’s over, finito! If you go back now, you’ll rile Falkenham and Bennett so much they’ll go over my head to Sir, who’ll conclude that we’re more trouble than we’re worth and close us down. Let’s quit while we’re ahead, Tom.’
‘All right, Marcus! You’ve got my report and we both know that there’s something going on down there that stinks. What if it comes out after you’ve given the place the all-clear?’
He groaned and put his head in his hands and I knew I’d won.
It was fascinating listening to him a few minutes later trying to persuade Falkenham to have me back. He should have been a lawyer.
It seemed that David’s body had been released on Monday for burial, and the funeral was tomorrow, Wednesday, so Falkenham reluctantly agreed for me to return on Thursday for two days.
Which brought me to where I was now, sitting in the pub with my second pint, wondering what my reception would be like. With a sigh I finished it, resisted the temptation to a third and walked out to the bus stop.
Fifteen minutes later I was toiling up the hill towards the hospital. It shimmered in the heat like a palace and the first bead of honest sweat had begun to trickle when a car pulled up beside me.
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