Peterman went on paying no attention as I packed my trophies into a nest of scrumpled tissues inside a plastic food container from the kitchen and firmly closed the lid. Automatically I raised a hand to pat the old fellow, to say thanks, and in mid-gesture stopped dead. What if, I thought, in patting him, I transferred his ticks to myself? What if I’d already done it? Would it matter? I hadn’t even thought of wearing protective gloves.
Shrugging, I left my old friend unpatted, washed my hands in the kitchen, and within five minutes I was spinning along the road in the direction of Heathrow Airport.
I phoned Isobel on the way.
‘You’re going where?’ she said.
‘Edinburgh. Be a dear and keep all the phone lines switched to you until I get back. Bonus, of course.’
‘OK. How long will you be gone?’
‘A day or two. I’ll keep phoning you, to stay in touch.’
By luck I had a clear run to the airport, parked in the short-stay car park and caught the last seat on the noon shuttle at nothing faster than a flat-out sprint. My only luggage was the kitchen food container and the envelope of money from the safe. My clothes were the jeans and sweatshirt I’d worn to work. Everyone else on the aircraft seemed to be sporting huge scarlet and white scarves and loudly singing bawdy songs. ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ with the obscenest of gestures. Life grew steadily weirder. I held the container on my lap and slept away the hour in the air.
Lizzie was waiting at the other end beside a man who looked more like a ski instructor than a professor of organic chemistry, the impact of his dark beardless good looks heightened by a rainbow jacket straight off the slopes.
‘Quipp,’ he introduced himself, extending a hand. ‘I suppose you’re Freddie.’
As I’d just kissed Lizzie, this seemed a reasonable assumption.
‘I told him you’d get here,’ she said. ‘He worked out that you couldn’t do it in the time. I told him your jockey instincts made you faster across country than a hurricane.’
‘Hurricanes are slow across country,’ I said, ‘actually.’
Quipp laughed. ‘So they are. Forward speed, not much more than twenty-five miles an hour. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Come on, then.’ He eyed the kitchen container. ‘You’ve brought the goods? We’re going straight to the lab. No time to waste.’
Quipp drove a Renault with a verve to match his jacket. We pulled up at what looked like a tradesmen’s back entrance of a private hospital and entered a light featureless corridor that led round a corner to a pair of swing doors with ‘McPherson Foundation’ painted in black letters on non-see-through glass.
Quipp pushed familiarly through the doors, Lizzie and I following, and we entered first a vestibule, and then a room windowed solely by skylights.
From pegs in the vestibule, Quipp issued to each of us a white lab overall-coat which buttoned at the neck and needed to be tied round the waist with tapes. Inside the lab itself we met a man similarly dressed who turned from a microscope on our arrival and said to Quipp, ‘This had better be good, you son of a bitch. I’m supposed to be at the International rugby match at Murrayfield.’
Quipp, unabashed, introduced him to me as Guggenheim, the resident nutter.
Guggenheim, who seemed, like Quipp, to prefer to be identified solely by his last name, was audibly American and visibly about as young as the computer wizard.
‘Disregard his youth,’ Quipp advised. ‘Remember that Isaac Newton was twenty-four when he discovered the binomial theorem in 1666.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I said dryly.
‘I’m twenty-five,’ Guggenheim said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve brought.’
He took the plastic container from me and retreated to one of the work benches that lined two of the walls. With time to look around, it seemed to me that except for the microscope there wasn’t a single piece of equipment there that I could identify. Guggenheim moved in this mysterious territory with the certainty of a Rubik round his cube.
He was slight in build with light brown crinkly hair and the well-disciplined eyes of habitual concentration. He transferred one of the brown dots from the soap to a slide and took a quick look at it under the microscope.
‘Well, well, well, we have a tick. Now what do you suppose he’s carrying?’
‘Er,’ I said, but it appeared that Guggenheim’s question was rhetorical.
‘If it came from a horse,’ he said cheerfully, ‘perhaps we should be looking for Ehrlichia risticii. What do you think? Does Ehrlichia risticii spring to mind?’
‘It does not,’ I said.
Guggenheim looked up from his microscope in good humour. ‘Is the horse ill?’ he asked.
‘The horse is standing still looking depressed, if that doesn’t sound fanciful.’
‘Depression is clinical,’ he said. ‘Anything else? Fever?’
‘I didn’t take his temperature.’ I thought back to Peterman’s behaviour that morning. ‘He wouldn’t eat,’ I said.
Guggenheim looked happy. ‘Depression, anorexia and fever,’ he said, ‘classic symptoms.’ He looked at Lizzie, Quipp and myself. ‘Why don’t you three go away for a bit? Give me an hour. I might find you some answers. I’m not promising. We’ve some powerful microscopes here and we’re dealing with organisms on the edge of visibility. Anyway... an hour.’
We retreated as instructed, leaving our lab coats in the vestibule. Quipp drove us to his lodgings, which were masculine and bookish but bore unmistakable signs of Lizzie’s occupation, though her expression forbade me to comment. She made coffee. Quipp took his cup with the murmured thanks of familiarity.
‘How’s my little Robinson?’ Lizzie asked me. ‘Still in the same place?’
‘A low-loader’s coming on Monday to bring it up here.’
‘Tell them to be careful!’
‘It’ll reach you in cotton wool.’
‘They’ll have to disassemble the rotor linkage...’
We drank the coffee, strong and black.
I telephoned Isobel. All going well, she reported.
‘What exactly is the McPherson Foundation?’ I asked Quipp.
‘Scottish philanthropist,’ Quipp said succinctly. ‘Also a tiny university grant. Small public funding. It has state-of-the-art electron microscopes and at present two resident geniuses, one of whom you met. It pushes out the frontiers of knowledge, and people in obscure places cease dying of obscure illnesses.’ He drank some coffee. ‘Guggenheim’s speciality is the identification of the vectors of Ehrlichiae.’
‘I don’t speak that language,’ I said.
‘Ah. Then you won’t understand that when I asked him about ticks on horses he was, for him, riveted. It’s remotely possible that you’ve solved a mystery for him. Nothing less would have torn him away from Murrayfield.’
‘Well... what are erlic... whatever you said?’
‘Ehrlichiae? They are,’ he said with a touch of mischief, ‘pleomorphic organisms symbiotic in and transmitted by arthropod vectors. In general, that is.’
‘Quipp!’ Lizzie protested.
He relented. ‘They’re parasitic organisms spread by ticks. The best-known make dogs and cattle ill. Guggenheim did some work on Ehrlichiae in horses back in America. He’ll have to tell you about it himself. All I’m sure of is that he’s talking about a new disease that arose only in the mid-nineteen eighties.’
‘A new disease?’ I exclaimed.