Miasma

by Ken McClure

  ‘Investors?’ Tally exclaimed. ‘Are you saying that people like bankers are gambling on being able to stop a pandemic?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it that way. Twelve million dollars has been released to deal with the new threat in DRC but more will be made available to finance all types of expertise to contain the outbreak. Someone has calculated it will rise to over fifty million before they’re through.’

  Tally shook her head. She said, ‘I’m finding it difficult to introduce money concerns into the threat of a pandemic.’

  ‘Me too,’ confessed Steven, ‘but they reckon that the 2014-2016 outbreak of Ebola ended up costing 11,000 lives and 3 billion dollars to bring under control because of a slow response at the outset. This time they’re going all out to nip it in the bud.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on vaccination?’

  ‘That’s part of the plan, of course, but they’re being obliged to use the same experimental vaccine as last time. They’ll use ring vaccination, concentrating on immunising concentric circles of people round victims to stop the virus moving outwards.’

  ‘Makes sense on paper,’ said Tally. Can the vaccine be used as treatment?’

  Steven shook his head. ‘It has no effect on people who already have the disease.’

  Tally thought for a moment before saying quietly, ‘I have such a bad feeling about this.’

  Steven sighed and said, ‘It may come down to hoping for the best, but four thousand doses of vaccine are already in DRC and all kinds of health professionals are being recruited as we speak.’

  TWO

  ‘What do you think about yesterday?’ asked John Macmillan when they resumed their meeting after the interruption of the previous day’s COBRA meeting.

  Steven smiled wryly and said, ‘I’ve often thought money to be at the root of everything we come across in life, but yesterday really brought it home in spades. Money versus microbes . . . and yet . . .’

  ‘And yet?’ Macmillan prompted.

  ‘Last night, when I was lying thinking about it in bed, I found myself concluding it might just work.’

  ‘I had a similar experience,’ said Macmillan. ‘Having lots of money and resources at your fingertips must be infinitely better than having nothing and depending on charity and selfless volunteers.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Macmillan, changing the subject, ‘I was about to tell you yesterday about two eminent English medical scientists who have departed this life recently. I think Sci-Med should check it out.’

  ‘Did they work at the same hospital?

  ‘No, different hospitals, different parts of the country . . . and now you are going to ask me what drew my attention to the everyday occurrence of two people dying in the UK?’

  Steven agreed with a smile.

  ‘Both were murdered.’

  Steven was taken by surprise. ‘Good God.’

  ‘The computer picked up on it.’

  Sci-Med had computer software set up to monitor any unusual happenings in science and medicine. It had picked up on the fact that both men were senior medical scientists and leading lights in their fields.

  Steven asked, ‘The same field?’

  Macmillan shook his head. ‘No, one was an expert in palliative care, an advisor in pain management to hospices all over the country and a much sought-after international speaker on the subject, and the other was involved in the design of sophisticated prosthetic limb control mechanisms, working with both the UK and US veterans’ organisations.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like they had too much in common,’ said Steven, ‘but I understand why the computer picked up on it. On the other hand, you said they were based in different parts of the country?’

  ‘One in London, the other in Leicester. One killed on Monday, the other on Wednesday.’

  ‘Have the police linked the killings?’

  ‘No, our computer did that through correlation of separate press reports that mentioned they were medical professionals.’

  ‘Did you pass this on to the police?’ Steven asked.

  ‘I did, and they gave me some details that they had withheld from the press. It turns out both men were murdered in identical fashion and were alone when they met their end. Nothing was taken from either house, despite a small fortune being available in both cases in the way of jewellery and the trappings of wealth.

  ‘So, robbery wasn’t the motive,’ said Steven – ‘the killer wasn’t trying to get a safe combination out of them.

  ‘No, and the police haven’t come up with anything else resembling a motive.’

  ‘Could be the killer was settling some kind of score with the medical profession,’ suggested Steven, ‘but that doesn’t sound right considering who and what they were.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Macmillan. ‘Giving pain relief and designing artificial limbs don’t usually figure much in revenge crime against medics. Botched surgery and mistakes over drug doses are more usually in the frame.’

  ‘Bizarre.’

  Jean has gathered some details at short notice on the two men. Let me know what you think when you’ve had a chance to look at them.’

  Steven left Macmillan’s office and sat down in front of Jean Roberts’ desk. ‘I hear you have some light reading for me?’

  Jean smiled and looked over her glasses at him. ‘Slim pickings I’m afraid.’ She took out a file from her desk drawer and handed it over, saying, ‘The entirely uneventful lives of Dr Martin Field and Dr Simon Pashley. I felt as if I were compiling the CVs of two successful men without a stain on their characters or any suggestion of wrong-doing – not even running through a field of wheat. No suggestion of money worries, far from it, both men were wealthy. Medical consultants are usually pretty well off, but even by their standards, these two were top of the heap. Big houses in smart areas, holiday homes in sunny climes, children at universities without having to eat beans on toast every day.’

  ‘So, you didn’t spot any possible motive for the killings?’

  ‘Jealousy?’ joked Jean.

  ‘Me too,’ said Steven. He thanked her for the file and said that he would need to interview the widows of the murdered men, starting with the London based one. ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Notting Hill.’

  Steven spent the afternoon at home, reading through the notes Jean had prepared and coming to much the same conclusions. Neither man had ever put a foot wrong as far as he could see and there was no obvious connection between the two of them. They had grown up in different cities, gone to different schools, different universities and had worked in different hospitals as they rose quickly up the career pole. Likewise, there was nothing to suggest that their wives had any friendship or link. If there was anything connecting the two dead men, it must have happened after they had risen to the top of their respective fields, maybe very recently, maybe at a medical or scientific conference. He found that Jean had photocopied the most recent of the pair’s published scientific papers to give him a feeling for what they did and smiled. She thought of everything.

  Steven was pleased to see that Field’s latest paper had been published in Nature, perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. This meant that firstly, the contents of the paper had been judged to be of significant importance to people working in the same field and secondly, that it would be written in such a manner as to make it accessible to scientific readers working in different fields. Lesser journals tended to exclude casual readers, often by virtue of publishing papers using technicality to obscure the fact that not very much was being said at all – another brick in the wall of career-building scientists.

  It quickly became obvious to Steven that Field’s current work on pain relief given to people suffering from terminal conditions had been centred on delivering such relief remotely in order to make the patient less dependent on nursing staff for palliative care and, if reliability could be established, the aim was that patients could safely be allowed to continue their own care
at home.

  Hospices for the terminally ill were widely regarded as being wonderful and rightly so, but there weren’t enough of them. If Field’s work on slow-release systems of giving pain relief were to come to fruition, it would be a win-win situation. As more patients were stabilised and sent home to see out their days in comfort, more could be admitted for care.

  Steven couldn’t face reading through another scientific paper so he opted instead for fresh air and a walk. When he did this, he nearly always found himself drawn to the Thames and today was no different. At three in the afternoon on a sunny day in May the Embankment wasn’t too crowded although Japanese tourists ensured it wasn’t empty either and demanded that he execute occasional slalom moves to ensure not intruding on smiley pics.

  Although he’d come out for a break, he found it impossible not to continue thinking about the two dead men. It had been the Sci-Med computer that had highlighted both of them being leading medical professionals. Their deaths had not made it to the national press – perhaps because the police had not released sufficient detail. It seemed that murder without lurid detail could be dismissed as a parochial affair and yet . . . the tourists with their cameras had reminded him of how global we had become. The great cities of the world were all complaining about the sheer numbers of foreign travellers pouring onto their streets. People were constantly on the move. This was not a happy thought when viewed in the light of the current Ebola epidemic in DRC, but it did have a relevance when thinking about the two dead men. He wondered if any other top medical professionals had met a sorry end recently . . . perhaps in other countries?

  Steven called Jean when he got back to his flat and asked if she would put in a request to Interpol to carry out a search. He settled down and started working his way through Simon Pashley’s latest scientific paper. Unlike Field’s paper in Nature, it was hard going although it too had appeared in a prestigious journal and therefore had been published on the recommendation of expert peer reviewers beforehand. Steven picked up that it wasn’t so much the design of prosthetic limbs that Pashley had been involved in but the control of their movement through electronics, particularly micro-electronics. After half an hour, Steven took on board that small was beautiful and left it at that.

  It was after eight before Tally got home from the hospital. ‘Sorry I couldn’t phone earlier,’ she said, ‘I was called to another meeting in late afternoon and we were asked to leave phones outside.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Steven, not sure whether he should ask in the circumstances.

  ‘It was a follow up from yesterday’s meeting about the Ebola outbreak,’ said Tally.

  ‘Please don’t tell me it’s arrived here?’

  ‘No, nothing like that . . . yet, but there are fears that we are not getting a true picture of the situation. The last outbreak caused so much damage to commerce in DRC that the belief is that people are covering up possible cases of Ebola – they’re simply not reporting them so that prospective trade customers won’t be scared off.’

  ‘What are they doing with them?’ Steven asked.

  ‘They’re being nursed at home by the families who keep them hidden.’

  ‘Until they all go down with it,’ Steven murmured.

  ‘Exactly, the authorities know what’s going on, but they have an interest in keeping everything low profile too. They introduce curfews and legislation to stop the movement of people, but this is largely for the benefit of outside observers: they know they can’t enforce them. River traffic is banned at night, but with six hundred kilometres of Congo River between Mbandaka and Kinshasa and countless tributaries joining it, there is no possibility of patrolling it.’

  ‘Could get messy,’ Steven sighed.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Tally. ‘It’s now believed that the latest outbreak possibly started as far back as December 2017 and wasn’t reported until it reached Mbandaka and the DRC Ministry of Health finally reported it to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on May 8th.this year.’

  ‘So, things could be even worse than we’ve been led to believe?’

  ‘Published numbers cannot be relied on.’

  ‘Sounds like the big money initiative has got off to a very big test.’

  ‘WHO are still hopeful about being able to contain it. They’re pointing out that people learned a lot from the previous outbreaks. They’ve been educated about safe burials and burning any clothes and bed linen used by victims. They understand the importance of washing and using disinfectants and fears of vaccination are not as widespread as they used to be. Every effort is being made to help them understand what ring vaccination is all about – at first, they couldn’t understand why sick people were being ignored while healthy people a kilometre away got injections. A lot of circles have been drawn in a lot of sand to demonstrate why the virus can’t spread once it’s been surrounded by immune vaccinated people.’

  Steven’s lapse into silence prompted Tally to enquire about his day.

  Steven told her about the two murders and how he was struggling to see a connection between the dead men.

  ‘Did you say one of them was named Pashley?’ Tally asked.

  ‘Simon Pashley.’

  ‘From Leicester?’

  ‘Of course,’ Steven exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten about you working in Leicester when we first met, did you know him?’

  ‘He was quite an orthopaedic star,’ said Tally. ‘I didn’t know him personally but what I do remember is that he had a Rolls Royce – just like consultants did in the old movies.’

  ‘Ooh – err, Matron,’ said Steven, making a bad allusion to Carry On films.

  ‘That sort of thing. But, seriously, he was regarded as a bit of a genius in his field.’

  ‘Prosthetic design,’ said Steven.

  ‘I think it was more the control of such devices, but I may be wrong.’

  ‘No, you’re quite right,’ Steven assured her. I’ve just spent an afternoon wading through one of his papers.’

  ‘Heavy going?’

  ‘Certainly was, but my electronic expertise begins and ends with the TV remote.’

  ‘How about the other man? I take it he didn’t work in the same field if you can’t see a connection?’

  ‘Pain relief,’ said Steven, ‘a leading expert in palliative care.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill these people?’ exclaimed Tally. ‘Are you sure there’s a connection, not just an awful coincidence?’

  ‘Both were murdered in exactly the same manner’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘They were exsanguinated.’

  ‘They had the blood drained out of them?’ Tally exclaimed with a horrified look on her face.

  ‘And not by having their throats cut,’ said Steven, ‘that would have been too quick. The killers accessed and opened up their femoral arteries so their victims could watch their lives drain away.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Tally exclaimed, obviously feeling quite queasy.

  ‘Nothing has come in yet,’ Jean replied when Steven arrived at the Home Office next morning and asked about a response from Interpol and beyond. ‘But I have arranged a meeting for you with Mrs Field, Dr Field’s widow.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Steven, ‘that couldn’t have been easy, it’s a bit soon . . .’

  ‘Takes a woman,’ said Jean.

  ‘And a special one at that.’

  ‘I simply assured her that we were as keen to see her husband’s killer brought to justice as she was,’ said Jean, slightly embarrassed but not displeased.

  ‘How did she sound?’ Steven asked. ‘Fragile?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. She seemed calm and self-assured, like a woman brought up not to display emotion in public, if you know what I mean?’

  ‘I do,’ said Steven.

  Next morning, Steven turned up at a substantial house in Notting Hill at the appointed hour of eleven’.

  ‘Hello, I’m Martha Field,’ said the smiling woman who opened the door.
>
  Steven shook hands with an elegant woman of around forty years old and was invited to follow her through to the conservatory. ‘Such a beautiful morning,’ she said. ‘So nice to see the sun after the winter we’ve had.’

  Steven agreed.

  ‘I’ve just made some coffee. Would you like some?

  Steven smiled and nodded. ‘Black, no sugar please.’ He ended the polite ritual by taking a sip and saying, ‘I hate to trouble you at a time like this, Mrs Field, and I’m sure I’m going to ask you things the police already have, but, when there is no obvious reason why anyone would want to kill your husband, we’re all struggling.’

  ‘I understand, Dr Dunbar.’

  ‘I’m taking it for granted you’ve no idea who’d want to kill your husband, he didn’t have any enemies, he wasn’t a secret gambler and had no money worries?’

  ‘About sums it up.’

  ‘Are you rich, Mrs Field?’

  ‘Martha Field recoiled a little from the directness of the question before saying, ‘We’re . . . I suppose you could say we were fairly well-off.’

  ‘No, I mean rich.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean exactly, Dr Dunbar.’

  ‘Bank accounts into seven figures . . .’

  ‘Martin dealt with our finances. I honestly couldn’t say.’ Martha Field’s smile muscles were excused further duty. ‘Is this really relevant to my husband’s death?’

  ‘What kind of car did your husband drive, Mrs Field?’

  ‘Really, this is getting ridiculous . . .’

  Steven waited silently for a reply.

  Martha Field softened her expression and managed a slight smile. ‘Actually, Martin’s one failing was for cars, for some reason. Don’t ask me why . . . men and their cars I suppose.’ She threw her hands in the air and said apologetically, ‘He drove a Maserati.’