The first thing that struck Steven when he drove into the car park at Pinetops was that there seemed to be no children about. He had expected to see lots of them, wearing brightly coloured outdoor gear, chattering, laughing as they wheeled dinghy transporters and carried canoes to and from the water’s edge.
‘Change-over week,’ explained David Williams, the Welsh chief instructor. ‘We usually have a five-day gap between groups to allow us to clean and maintain things. You wouldn’t believe the havoc children can wreak when they’re not even trying.’
Steven could see from the window that several canoes were undergoing patching repairs with fibreglass: he’d noticed the strong smell of solvent in the air when he’d got out of the car. He asked Williams some general questions about the camp to get a feel for the place, establishing along the way the number of instructors employed and the type of activities available for the children.
‘It’s all about team work and personal responsibility,’ enthused Williams. ‘When you’re out on the hills and something goes wrong, you have to pull together; you share your knowledge, discuss your options and agree on a course of action. You come back safely because you worked as a team; you didn’t all run off in different directions doing your own thing.’
Steven knew the philosophy well enough and nodded in the right places. Society needed team players, which was all well and good as long as it didn’t lead to the ostracising and exclusion of gifted individuals who preferred to work alone. You didn’t often find genius working in a team.
‘So, how can I help you exactly?’ asked Williams, returning Steven’s ID and deciding that the pleasantries were over.
‘I understand a group of children were exposed to tuberculosis here a few months ago.’
‘So I’m led to believe,’ said Williams. ‘Nothing to do with the camp, you understand. Some kid brought it in but the relevant medical authorities moved quickly and the children were given protection.’
‘BCG vaccine,’ said Steven.
‘If you say so,’ said Williams. ‘Not exactly my field.’
‘There’s one thing I’m not clear about,’ said Steven. ‘How was the child with TB discovered? Did he or she become ill while they were here?’
‘Well, no one reported sick to the camp clinic if that’s what you mean,’ said Williams, ‘or I would have heard about it. We have a full-time nurse on the staff and we can call on a local GP if needed. All incidents are logged.’
‘Then how?’
Williams furrowed his brow. ‘You know, I don’t rightly know. I was informed by telephone of the situation.’
‘By whom?’
‘A Department of Health official, I think he called himself, snooty bugger as I remember. I guess the kid must have had tests before he or she came here and the results caused the shit to hit the fan.’
‘I suppose,’ agreed Steven who had noticed that Williams had not given away whether the child was male or female. Was this because he didn’t know?
‘What happened to the boy?’ he asked.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘But it was a boy?’
‘I don’t know.’
Steven looked surprised in order to provoke further comment.
‘I suppose he or she was taken off to hospital but I wasn’t asked to make any of the arrangements so I didn’t see it happen. I was just asked to organise the other kids for vaccination.’
‘Do you know which school the child was attending?’
‘I don’t think they said,’ said Williams. ‘Does it matter? What could I have done?’
‘You’re right,’ agreed Steven, backing off. ‘The medical authorities seem to have had everything in hand and you had another hundred kids to worry about. Can you remember how long after the initial phone-call the other children were vaccinated?’
‘Next day,’ said Williams. ‘The team was here at ten sharp next morning and we had the kids ready and waiting. I remember we had a late start that day to outdoor activities.’
‘Well, no untimely delays there,’ said Steven. ‘Sounds like a very efficient operation.’
‘Maybe you’d like to see round the camp, see the clinic for yourself?’ asked Williams, who clearly wasn’t at all sure what Steven’s interest was in all of this.
Steven said that that wouldn’t be necessary, congratulated Williams on having such an enviable job and left. Deciding that he felt hungry — he had missed out on lunch — he drove along the shore to Ambleside and found somewhere advertising all-day-food.
He had to admit that he hadn’t come up with anything about the handling of the situation at Pinetops that could have upset Scott Haldane although he did feel a bit puzzled about the apparent secrecy surrounding the identity and movement of the sick child while at the camp. It was understandable after the event and the reasons given by the authorities to Macmillan and relayed by him had seemed valid enough. Anything to do with race relations issues and possible problems affecting them had to be handled with kid gloves — but the more he thought about it, the odder it seemed that Williams, and presumably his staff, knew nothing about the child. He was chewing his way through a particularly tough gammon steak when another thought struck him. How did the Department of Health know about the child so quickly? Williams had told him that it was someone from DOH who had phoned him. How did the ‘snooty bugger’ know so quickly?
‘Is everything all right for you?’ asked the waitress.
Steven nodded. ‘Fine.’ It wasn’t but it was hard to break the habit of a lifetime. Surely, he reasoned, a sick child with lung problems would be seen by his or her GP and referred to a local hospital for X-rays and tests. It was they who would make the diagnosis and arrange for the child to be admitted to hospital. There would have been no need to involve the DOH. Steven paid and left. He walked down to the edge of the lake and threw a couple of pebbles into the water while he continued to follow his line of thought.
TB was a notifiable disease, which meant that the hospital would be obliged to report any incidence of it, but notification would almost certainly be to the local health authorities in the first instance. DOH would be involved in collating national figures but surely not in individual cases and certainly not in the practical aspects of vaccinating contacts.
Maybe he was making a mountain out of a molehill, he conceded as he started to walk back to the car, but there was something not quite right about how things had been handled at official level and he wanted to know what. It preyed on his mind all the way home. There was a message from Jenny on his answering machine when he got in.
‘Daddy, I’m ringing to say I’m sorry about what I said but you’re not there. Auntie Sue says I can stay up till nine o’clock if you want to call me back. Love you.’
Steven looked at the time. It was 2 a.m. ‘Shit,’ he murmured as he poured himself a nightcap. It was impossible not to imagine Jenny’s face when 9 o’clock had come and gone. It was an image that reappeared at intervals during a restless night. He was up early to call her before she left for school.
‘Hello, nutkin, I’m sorry I was out when you called last night. I was working. I was driving home at the time but it was lovely to hear your voice when I got in.’
‘You work very late, Daddy.’
‘Sometimes I have to, nutkin.’
‘Auntie Sue says that’s why you can’t look after me and not because you don’t love me.’
‘Auntie Sue’s right, Jenny. I love you very much. We all do.’
‘That’s what Auntie Sue said.’
‘Auntie Sue’s very wise.’
‘Are you coming up at the weekend, Daddy?’
‘You bet.’
‘Can we go swimming?’
‘Of course we can.’
Steven put the phone down and let out his breath in a long sigh of relief as the tension he had been feeling over Jenny left him. He felt in a good mood as he set out for Great Ormond Street Hospital. He wanted to have a word with an old friend before he went in to the Home Office. Jim Brewer and he had gone through medical school together. Brewer had pursued a more traditional career path and was now a consultant physician, married to Linda, a radiologist who worked at another London hospital. Steven had last seen them both at the christening of Gerald, their third child, some two years ago. He noticed that his friend’s reddish fair hair had become thinner in the interim and his waistline thicker as he headed for his forties but he seemed relaxed and at ease with the world. A round peg in a round hole, thought Steven. Can’t ask for better than that.