Ken McClure - Wildcard

Steven switched out the lights and rested his head on the chair back for a moment to look up at the sky. It was a clear night and he could see the stars — that was why he liked sitting in this chair. He reflected that finding out what he wanted to know had all been surprisingly easy. No one had reported that they didn’t know or that they weren’t sure. Everyone had said that there was no haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga. Barclay’s misfortune in contracting the disease had just been one of these things — whatever that meant, he mused; it tended to be a generally accepted explanation anywhere outside academia. Just one of these things… just one of those ‘crazy’ things, as the song said, or one of those ‘unexplained’ things that spawned late-night television programmes that invariably never came to any conclusions. To the list he added one of those ‘foolish’ things, when he realised with a wry smile that this was the title of the current Getz track. But whatever the reason for Barclay’s bad luck, he felt confident that he could tell Macmillan in the morning that there was no good reason for the foreign secretary’s visit not to go ahead. With a bit of luck, he himself should be able to catch an afternoon flight up to Scotland and be in Dumfriesshire with his daughter by early evening.

Steven’s five-year-old daughter, Jenny, lived with his sister-in-law, Sue, and her solicitor husband, Richard, in the Dumfriesshire village of Glenvane where she was being brought up with their own children, Mary, aged eight, and Robin, six. This had been the case since Steven’s wife, Lisa — Sue’s sister — had died of a brain tumour some two years ago. It had become his practice to visit Scotland every second or third week and stay the weekend, so that Jenny would not forget who her real father was and he could enjoy watching her grow. Despite her tender years, there was a lot about Jenny that reminded him of Lisa and he took pleasure from that — especially the look in her eyes when she thought that he might be keeping something from her. That was Lisa to a tee and he just melted inside when she did it.

To say that Steven had taken Lisa’s death badly would be a gross understatement. Although there had been seven months to prepare for the inevitable after the initial diagnosis, her death had hit him hard, and after the funeral he had given up on just about everything. He hadn’t worked at all for over nine months afterwards, preferring instead to seek solace in booze and trying desperately to live in the past by shutting out the present and ignoring the very possibility of a future. But, like most people going through the hell of bereavement, he survived and came out the other side — perhaps not better for the experience, but knowing a great deal more about himself than he had before. He could now look back on his painfully short time with Lisa — a little over four years in all — with great fondness. He still missed her but it was no longer that awful knife-in-the-guts feeling.

The situation with Jenny was not ideal but his job was such that it ruled out arrangements involving day help or nanny care. He had toyed with the idea of finding a more ordinary job so that he would be home every night and could therefore have Jenny living with him, but, if he was absolutely honest with himself, it hadn’t gone much further than that and it wouldn’t. It might be selfish — in fact, it almost certainly was, he admitted — but he liked working for Sci-Med too much to give it up. Any feelings of guilt he might harbour were comfortably offset by the fact that Jenny seemed very happy living with Sue and Richard and their kids, and they saw and treated her as one of their own.

The Getz track changed to something soulful and almost subconsciously he started to look round the room in the dim light coming from outside. There was a photograph of Lisa in her nurse’s uniform — she had been a nurse in Glasgow, where he had met her while on an assignment — and a photograph of the pair of them together when they went on holiday to Skye. He remembered that it had rained solidly for seven days before the weather had afforded them one beautiful day to walk in the Cuillins and appreciate just how lovely the island was. There was a picture of Jenny with Sue’s children at the beach in Dumfriesshire, holding hands as they paddled together, their eyes bright with childish joy. There was a picture of himself in uniform and one in civilian clothes with his friend Mick Fielding when they had served in Special Forces together. Mick now ran a pub down in Kent; at least, that’s what he’d been doing the last time Steven had heard about him — Mick tended not to keep up with old friends. God help the troublemakers down there, he thought with a smile.

There were a few bits and pieces he had rescued from the family home after his parents died, mainly books, but also a Spanish guitar he had bought when he was seventeen and still played when the notion took him. Not much to show in the way of possessions for a man on the wrong side of thirty-five, he concluded. The music stopped and he got up to pour himself another drink. He turned on the TV to hunt for news.

‘The virus that has recently claimed the lives of three airline passengers, a stewardess and a nurse at the hospital where they were treated is thought to be a new one, previously unknown to medical science,’ announced the newscaster.

‘How the hell did they get hold of that so quickly?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘This was the conclusion of medical scientists who examined specimens taken from the victims of the Heathrow incident in a maximum-security lab at Britain’s biological defence establishment at Porton Down. The source of the virus remains unknown. Health officials when contacted by Sky News in the last hour, however, have stressed that the outbreak posed no threat to the general public.’

Bloody hell, thought Steven. Does everything leak these days?

The report was accurate and had obviously been leaked to the media by someone present at the briefing. Accurate or not, any government assurance that things posed ‘no threat’ still smacked of the false assurances given during the time of BSE, he thought.

The news editor had decided to pad out the story and had found a microbiologist to interview.

‘Dr Marie Rosen is a medical microbiologist at a leading London hospital. Where do you think this virus emanated from, Doctor?’ asked the interviewer.

‘Well, I haven’t seen the report yet,’ replied the woman. She was dressed in ‘sensible’ clothes and rimless glasses that sat well down her nose. Her skin looked as if it desperately needed moisturising and her plentiful mop of grey hair suggested she had recently been standing out in a gale. ‘But I understand that the aircraft at the centre of this incident had just arrived from Africa. That would seem to be the likely source of the virus. It wouldn’t be the first to come

… “ out of Africa ”.’ She seemed pleased with her allusion.

‘Why do you think this is, Doctor?’ continued the interviewer, not bothering to smile. ‘Why should new viruses appear all the time in Africa when this doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world?’

‘I would question whether or not they really are new viruses,’ replied Rosen. ‘I think it highly likely that they’ve been there all along, but with so much of the African interior being opened up these days, and people moving around much more than they used to, we’re seeing what happens when a vulnerable population are suddenly exposed to agents they have not come into contact with before.’

‘A bit like the situation when Native Americans were exposed to measles when the Pilgrim Fathers landed?’ suggested the interviewer.

‘Quite so.’

‘But surely it can only be a matter of time until one of these viruses slips through the net and threatens us all?’