Ken McClure - Fenton's winter

"Good, now follow me."

The slippers padded along behind Jenny until she stopped and pointed to the clip board hanging at the foot of a bed. She said, "I want you to read off these names to me as we come to them. All right?"

A nod.

"Well then?"

"A. n.g.u.s…Cam.e. ron."

"Check," said Jenny officiously and moved on. Three more names and all thoughts of home and family left the boy as he warmed to his new role as assistant to Night Nurse Buchan.

The child recovering from surgery was in a side ward sleeping peacefully. Jenny placed her hand gently against his forehead and felt it to be quite normal. She checked the boy's notes; no medication was indicated, no special instructions. All that was needed was a good night's sleep. She tip toed out of the room and closed the door behind her, a trifle more noisily than she had intended. She looked back through the glass panel. The boy had not stirred.

Midnight came and Jenny began to feel optimistic about the chances of a quiet night. She even said so to the junior nurse as they sipped illicit coffee in the duty room while the rain outside continued to pour.

"Brrr, I'm glad I'm not out in that," said the girl, trying to draw the curtains even closer together to shut a persistent gap in the middle.

"Pity the poor sailors," said Jenny.

"That's what my mother used to say," said the girl.

"Mine too," said Jenny.

"Do you think he's out there?" said the girl.

"Who?" asked Jenny.

"The killer of course."

"Let's not talk about that."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot, I mean, I didn't…"

"Forget it."

At one o'clock the phone rang and Jenny raised her eyes before picking it up.

"I thought it was too good to last," said the junior."

"Ward 10, Nurse Buchan speaking…Yes…Yes…Understood." Jenny put down the phone and said, "Admission in ten minutes, seven year old girl, burns to both legs, hot water bottle burst."

"Poor mite," said the junior.

"Prepare number three will you?" said Jenny. "I'll get the trays ready.

As she went to get sterile dressings Jenny paused in the corridor to look through the glass panel at the surgical case. He was still sleeping peacefully, right arm outside the covers, fingers hooked over the side of the bed.

A distant siren gave early warning of the imminent arrival of their patient and the duty house officer came to the ward shortly afterwards. She had heard the same sound from her room in the doctors' residency. "Sounds like a bad one," she said.

"Burns are always bad," said Jenny.

The junior held open the ward door to allow the trolley to enter with its entourage of ambulance men, parents and a policeman. Jenny signalled to the junior with her eyes and the girl ushered the parents away from the procession and into a side room where they would be plied with tea and sympathy.

Jenny stood by as the temporary dry dressings were removed from the child's legs to reveal a mass of livid, raw flesh.

"Her mother used boiling water in the bottle," said one of the ambulance men quietly.

"She's going to need extensive grafting," said the house officer. "We'll transfer her when she' stable but in the meantime she's going to be in a lot of pain when she comes out of shock. I'll write her up for something." The house officer looked at Jenny and said, "She'll need specialling as well."

An hour later calm had returned to the ward. The girl had been sedated and installed in a side room under the care of an extra nurse who had been sent up to sit with her, the policeman had completed his note book entry on the treble nine call and the ambulance men had returned to their stand-by quarters. The parents, stricken by remorse, and now to be haunted by conscience, had gone off to spend what was left of the night at home.

At 3am Jenny walked round the ward again, gliding quietly between the cots and beds in the soft dimness of the night lights. All was quiet. She opened the door of the side ward to check on the surgery boy and found him still asleep and lying in the same position as before. As she closed the door it suddenly struck her as strange that he was lying in exactly the same position. He was sleeping not unconscious and everyone moves when they sleep.

Jenny had a sense of foreboding as she went back in again and approached the boy to put her hand on his forehead. He was cold, icy cold. There was a sound at her feet like the contents of a glass being spilled but she knew that that could not be. She looked down to see a stream of blood pour from beneath the blankets and spatter over her shoes. She felt faint but pulled back the top covers slowly to reveal a sea of scarlet.

Jenny buried her face in Fenton's shoulder and tried to find comfort in his arms. "It was awful," she murmured. "He just bled to death in his sleep. If only I had looked in sooner…"

"Don't blame yourself," whispered Fenton. "There was nothing you could have done.

"You did say it would be another patient," said Jenny.

Fenton nodded.

"There's something else," said Jenny. "The boy had group AB blood like the Watson boy."

Fenton held Jenny away from him in disbelief. "But that is just too much of a coincidence," he said. "AB is a rare group."

"Did you check up on the others?" Jenny asked.

Fenton shook his head slowly and confessed that he had not, "I thought when Sandra Murray turned out to have group B blood that we were on the wrong track."

"Maybe not?"

"But if this is all to do with blood groups," said Fenton with a sudden thought. "That's what Neil Munro's book is all about!"

Fenton felt excitement mount inside him as the letters and numbers in Munro's book began to make sense. CT did not stand for Charles Tyson because it stood for 'clotting time!' The figures in the columns were the times taken for samples of fresh blood to clot in the presence of Saxon plastic!

Against the letter 'O' were figures equivalent to the normal clotting time for human blood. The separate columns were simply repeat tests on the same samples of group O blood. Fenton found a similar set of entries against the letter 'A' and concluded, as Neil Munro must have done, that there was no problem with either group A or group O blood and that would cover the majority of the population.

There was only one entry against the letter, 'B' and the initials, S.M. were appended. Sandra Murray! thought Fenton. Neil had used Sandra Murray's blood to test the behaviour of group B blood in the presence of Saxon plastic. He could have obtained blood of group O and A from people in the lab but for group B he had had to ask the blood transfusion service. The figures for Sandra Murray's blood, although slightly on the long side, were within the normal clotting time range. Underneath Neil had written down three dots followed by the letters, 'AB'…therefore AB. Neil Munro had known!

Munro had deduced that the plastic affected people with group AB blood and that meant something in the order of three percent of the population. That was why he had requested another donor from the Blood Transfusion Service; he had wanted to verify his conclusion.

Fenton picked up the phone and called Steve Kelly to get details of Munro's last request. Kelly told him what he was now already sure of; Munro had requested a supply of group AB blood.

Fenton had interpreted everything in Munro's book except the numbers on the first page. As a last resort he considered that they might conceivably refer to a routine lab specimen number. He went downstairs to the office to check through the files and found that there was indeed a blood sample bearing the five figured number in Munro's book. It had come from a patient named Moran and appeared to have been quite normal for all the tests requested.

Failing to see the significance of a normal blood analysis Fenton returned upstairs but stopped when he got to the first landing as the name, 'Moran' rang a bell. Of course! That was the name of the patient whose sample had been a failure on the Saxon Analyser during the trials. The failure had been put down to the specimen arriving in the wrong sort of container but when it had been checked on the routine analyser it had given perfectly normal readings. It had been the Saxon Analyser at fault not the specimen and Neil Munro must have realised that! That's what had started his investigation off in the first place!