He paused for a moment then repositioned the fire-guard for maximum protection before taking a deep breath and pulling away the last piece of tape holding the seal.
Cautiously, he slid the board away and recoiled slightly in anticipation before looking into the maw of the grate. There was nothing to be seen. He was looking at an empty black grate that hadn’t been used in years. Once again silence reigned supreme in the room. Dewar shivered with the cold and a sense of anticlimax. He waited for what seemed an eternity for the scratching noise to come again but instead, he saw something appear at the top of the fireplace. It was a furry nose, a cat’s nose. He watched, fascinated, as more of it appeared until finally a cat’s head emerged to look him in the eye. It was a ginger cat but covered in soot.
‘Hello Puss,’ said Dewar, suddenly filled with relief. ‘Fancy something to eat?’ He lowered the protective fire-guard and stepped back to let the cat make its exit in its own time. The smell of food ensured this did not take long. Dewar watched the cat pad quickly over to the dish and tear into the meat.
As he watched it, he started to wonder where exactly it had been hiding. Still curious, he knelt down in front of the fireplace to look up the chimney. He could see nothing but blackness then he remembered that chimneys in countries where it rained a lot did not rise up in a straight line. They had to have a kink in them to stop rain water dowsing the fire.
He rolled up his sleeve and reached up inside the fireplace to find a narrow shelf leading off to the left. This was where the cat had been sitting. He smiled. ‘Now that was one smart place to hide, Puss,’ he said, reflecting that it was the only place in the flat where she could have survived the gas. The decontamination team had unknowingly protected her by installing an airtight seal in front of her and of course, she’d had a supply of fresh air from above.
‘One down, eight to go, Puss,’ he muttered.
As he investigated just how far the shelf stretched before the chimney turned upwards again, Dewar’s fingers touched something else lying there. It felt like some kind of smooth plastic container. Carefully, he coaxed it round into a position where he could grip it firmly between his fingers then he brought it slowly down. It was a small plastic box about eight inches by four. He wiped the dirt off the top and removed the lid. Inside were a number of sealed glass vials but it was a syringe that took Dewar’s attention and in particular, the long needle still mounted on the end. He’d just stumbled on Tommy Hannan’s drug stash and fixing gear.
His blood ran cold as he realised he should have known better than to reach into blind corners in a drug addict’s flat. He’d been careful enough when looking into the boxes on top of the wardrobe, appraising what was there before touching anything but the excitement of finding the cat and then the box on the ledge had made him careless. If the syringe hadn’t been in a box but inside a plastic bag, for instance, he might have stuck himself on the needle and given himself hepatitis or even AIDS for his trouble. Many addicts were HIV positive through needle sharing. He’d got away with it this time with nothing more than a dry mouth and a hollow feeling in his stomach.
The sound of the cat lapping water made him turn round and see that the food bowl was empty. He took the plastic box with him when he went through to the kitchen and put it down on the draining board by the sink while he opened a second tin of cat food and added some dry biscuits to the mix on the plate. He gave it to the cat before coming back and taking a closer look at the contents of the box. The glass vials were a puzzle. Drugs off the street didn’t come this way and the vials had no manufacturer’s label on them. It wasn’t just that they’d had the label stripped off, he felt. They seemed far too small and narrow ever to have had one. Something told him they hadn’t come from a pharmaceutical company at all. The sealing on their ends seemed strange too. Irregular taper, uneven in size as if they’d been sealed individually instead of by a machine, as if someone had manually melted the ends in a flame.
Very carefully, he picked up one of the vials and examined it more closely. There was a white crystalline powder inside and a narrow little strip of paper with something written on it in pencil by the look of it. He held it up to catch the light from the window. He could make out the initials VM and the numbers 4 and 9. It didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t recall seeing drugs being supplied like this before. Sealed glass ampoules usually contained sterile liquid substances for injection and had a weakened area on their stem so that it could be snapped open cleanly. These vials contained a crystalline solid and there was no weakened area. They weren’t meant to be opened easily. All the same, there was something vaguely familiar about them and it disturbed him. For the moment, he put the vial back in the box and went back to see how the cat was getting on.
There was a gas water heater in the bathroom that provided instant hot water. Dewar prepared a shallow bath for the cat. He was idly watching the water level rise — painfully slowly because of the narrowness of the instant supply pipe, when he suddenly realised why the glass vials in the box seemed familiar. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and his fingers tightened on the rim of the bath. These vials didn’t contain drugs at all and they hadn’t been supplied by a pharmaceutical company. He’d seen vials just like them before; he’d come across them at medical school. They were used for the long-term storage of freeze-dried cultures of viruses and bacteria! Liquid cultures of laboratory-grown micro-organisms were aliquotted into small volumes in thin-bore glass tubes and subjected to vacuum drying. When all the liquid had evaporated the dried culture would be sealed inside the glass tube by melting the end. In that form, viruses could stay viable for many years.
The letters on the paper strip inside were the key to what the vial contained. In this instance, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that VM must stand for Variola major, the most dangerous form of smallpox virus. No wonder Denise Banyon and Sharon Hannan had thought bad drugs to blame for their men’s condition. Kelly and Hannan had injected themselves with live smallpox virus!
Exposure to a large dose of virus now seemed like a gross understatement.
Thanks to the cat rescue operation, Dewar had just solved part of the puzzle. This of course, led to more questions. How many of these vials did Kelly have? Where had they come from? If these really were the ‘bad drugs’ then, according to Sharon Hannan, it had been Kelly who had stolen them from a man who had asked him to help in their recovery. She hadn’t known know any more than that. There was only one person who could perhaps tell him about the man and where the vials had been recovered from and that was Denise Banyon. She had to talk now. The nightmare had come true. There was a source of live smallpox outside the institute and right now, he didn’t know where the hell it was!
Dewar went through the process of cleaning up the cat which had fortunately decided that he was a friend — or at least, a provider of food, and should be tolerated as such. This was fortunate because his mind was on other things and dealing with a reluctant snarling moggie wouldn’t have helped either of them. This was particularly true of the last part of the clean-up when Dewar had to immerse the cat completely for a few seconds in warm water containing disinfectant.
He turned on the gas fire in the living room because there was no towelling in the flat to help dry the animal. The decontamination team had taken away all clothes and linen for destruction. The cat would have to see to its own rehabilitation while he thought about what to do next. It wasn’t enough to raise the alarm about the virus source, maybe not even desirable. There was nothing anyone else could do about it. It was going to be up to him. He needed a positive plan of action and it unfortunately had to centre on Denise Banyon. He took out his phone and called George Finlay.