With his middle thirties approaching and Special Forces being the young men’s game it was, he had been faced with an uncertain future as a civilian. The medical profession had little need of the skills he’d acquired in the military and he felt it was too late to retrain. This left some kind of peripheral job — perhaps with a pharmaceutical company or as an in-house physician with some large commercial concern. In the end, however, he had been saved from the humdrum by John Macmillan — now Sir John Macmillan — who ran a small investigatory unit, the Sci-Med Inspectorate, inside the Home Office. The unit looked into possible crime or wrong-doing in the high-tech areas of science and medicine where the police had little or no expertise.
Macmillan recruited science and medical graduates but never the newly qualified: he insisted that all Sci-Med investigators must have held demanding jobs in the real world before joining the unit and proved themselves in high stress situations. Weekend paintball fights and white-water rafting with the chaps in the office didn’t count; coming under fire in Kosovo did. Above all else in his people, he valued common sense.
Over the years, Steven had quickly become Sci-Med’s top investigator, but at some expense to his personal life. It was a very long way from being a nine to five job and, although he persisted in downplaying the risks — even to himself — it could be dangerous and had proved to be so in the past. His denial had its roots in guilt, the guilt he felt in acknowledging that he had wilfully continued in a hazardous job when he was the father of a little girl who had already lost her mother. However happy and settled she was with Sue and Peter in Scotland, his responsibility remained.
Steven’s belief when Lisa died that he would never find another woman he would want to spend his life with had been challenged on several occasions over the years, as time proved to be the great healer it was always mooted to be. Such incidents had always caused him to re-examine the situation with regard to Jenny and family life, but circumstances had always changed before the Rubicon had required to be crossed. Looking back, he had been profoundly unlucky in love for a whole variety of reasons, ranging from tragedy to simple, practical incompatibility. But now Tally had come into his life and all the old questions were lining up again.
Tally had had a first meeting with Jenny and the early signs were good, but Tally had a successful career of her own to consider. She was currently a senior registrar at the hospital in Leicester but would soon be thinking about applying for a consultancy, and that could be anywhere in the country. She couldn’t be expected to throw all that up in order to come and play Little House on the Prairie.
‘Sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, We’ve now been given permission to land,’ said the captain’s voice, bringing Steven’s train of thought to an abrupt end.
As Steven opened the door to his apartment in Marlborough Court, he reflected on the fact that this was something he hated doing if he had been away for a while. There was something about coming home to a cold, empty apartment that he found depressing and invariably reminded him of the great loss in his life. As usual, he compensated by switching on everything from the central heating to the TV and the kettle; this time there was no call for lighting as it was mid-morning and it was sunny outside.
The directive to return to London had not said anything about urgency so he made himself coffee and took it to his favourite seat by the window where, through a gap in the buildings opposite, he could see the river traffic pass by. He started preparing a mental list of the things he should do. He’d been away for two weeks so he should check to see if his car in the basement garage was okay and whether it would start after its battery had been maintaining the Porsche security system without charge for that length of time. He would also have to replenish the fridge and larder, which he’d run down before going up to Scotland. A trip to the supermarket was on the cards, but he’d do that late at night to avoid crowds.
He finished his coffee and showered before changing out of his comfortable travel clothes of jeans and polo shirt. John Macmillan was very much old-school when it came to dress codes. The ‘herd’, as Macmillan called them, might have stopped wearing ties and started wearing trainers to work but his people hadn’t. Steven’s dark blue suit, Parachute Regiment tie and polished black Oxfords would pass muster. He decided to let the lunch hour pass before going into the
Home Office just in case Macmillan was having one of his working lunches. It was usual for him to have sandwiches at his desk, but at least once a week he would invite someone in the corridors of power to have lunch with him at his club. It was his way of keeping in touch with what was really going on in Westminster. He might — and did — look the very essence of the Whitehall mandarin, tall, elegant and patrician, with silver hair and charming manners, but Macmillan was in many ways a maverick, a man who jealously guarded Sci-Med’s independence from all attempts to have it put on a ‘more structured basis’ as the parliamentary jargon went.
Steven settled for a sandwich and a Czech beer at a riverside pub before completing his walk to the Home Office. Showing his ID, he shared a joke with the man on the door who noted that it had ‘been a while’. Jean Roberts, Macmillan’s secretary, said much the same thing when he put his head round the door of her office. ‘Hello, stranger.’
As always, Jean enquired about Jenny and how she was getting on at school and, as always, Steven asked about the Bach Choir — Jean’s main interest outside work — and what they were doing at the moment. There was a slight pause before Jean asked, ‘And you… what about you?’
‘I’m fine.’ Jean looked over her glasses at him, the gesture prompting further comment. ‘Really I am… but thanks for asking.’
‘Good,’ said Jean, deciding to accept his assertion this time. ‘It’s good to have you back.’ She pressed a button on her desk and announced his arrival.
SIXTEEN
‘He’s currently in isolation at Borders General Hospital near Melrose,’ said John Macmillan in reply to Steven’s question when he’d finished. ‘He’s being kept under heavy sedation for the safety of nursing and medical staff, and he’ll stay there until lab tests are complete.’
‘Quite a story,’ said Steven. ‘What made them excavate at Dryburgh Abbey in the first place?’
‘According to his wife, the Master of Balliol College approached him. The college had come into possession of some old letters which suggested that the bodies of a number of Black Death victims — members of the Scottish army, which had been camped in the Selkirk Forest in the mid thirteen hundreds waiting for their chance to invade — had been recovered at the request of their kinfolk, preserved by some Borders family who specialised in that sort of thing and hidden away in a secret tomb. Apparently this family had been responsible for preserving the heart of the Lord of Galloway, John Balliol… so that his wife could keep it with her in a little box.’ Macmillan made a face. ‘Not exactly your usual sort of memento mori.’
‘Devorgilla,’ said Steven.
‘You know about this?’ exclaimed Macmillan in surprise.
‘You forget, my daughter lives up in that area of the country. The lady is well known in Dumfries and Galloway. Jenny and I were standing on Devorgilla’s Bridge in Dumfries the other day. Why did Balliol College approach Motram?’
‘Motram has an interest in old plagues and their causes — he’s actually a specialist in cell biology and an expert on the mechanics of viral infection. His personal hobbyhorse is a belief that Black Death was caused by a virus and not by bubonic plague as the rest of us were taught. This was his chance to get some proof, if the bodies in the tomb had been preserved well enough.’