Ken McClure - Resurrection

‘Perhaps you’d like to take a look at Kelly before you meet Miss Banyon?’ Finlay asked.

‘Might as well,’ replied Dewar after a moment’s thought. ’If only to see what we’re dealing with.’

He did up the top flap of his suit and followed Finlay along the corridor and through a negative pressure air lock. Finlay opened a door to his left and said, ‘There’s an observation window in here.’

The room was small and quite dark. Finlay did not put on the light. There was a glass panel in the back wall. Light from the adjoining room was coming in through it. Dewar joined Finlay in looking through to where the patient, Kelly was lying on his back, motionless. He had been expecting the worst but the sight that met his eyes still made him gasp slightly. Kelly’s skin was covered in rough pustules to such an extent that skin itself was scarcely visible. Against the white of the sheets he looked like an unwrapped Egyptian mummy.

‘Not a pretty sight,’ said Finlay.

Dewar looked on in silence as a nurse, dressed in a Racal ‘space’ suit tended to the man. Her visor and gloves made fluid motion difficult but she was obviously adapting well to the problems and had slowed the speed of her hand movements to match the limitations of the suit. She was doing her best to clean up the pustulation round the man’s eyes with cotton wool swabs and saline. Her biggest problem was that the pustulation wasn’t only around the eyes; it was actually in them. He remembered what Wright had said about patients who recovered from the disease often being blind. ‘Poor bastard,’ he whispered.

‘Seen enough?’

Dewar nodded.

Denise Banyon was not in bed. She was sitting in a chair watching television and smoking a cigarette. She turned away from the children’s programme she was engrossed in when Finlay entered.

‘Denise, this is Dr Dewar. He’d like to ask you a few questions.’

‘I’m fed up answering bloody questions. I’ve been here long enough. I want out this bloody rabbit hutch. I wanna see my friends.’

Dewar smiled politely. He was looking at a woman in her twenties who could have passed for early forties. She was painfully thin and markedly round-shouldered with straight, lank hair that rested on boney shoulders, exposed unselfconsciously in the night-dress she was wearing. She tucked her bare feet underneath her on the chair and went back to watching television.

Finlay looked at Dewar and shrugged.

‘I won’t keep you long, Miss Banyon,’ said Dewar, taking over. ‘It really is rather important I talk to you. I’d be very grateful for your help.’

Denise looked at him balefully then, pleased at being treated like a lady, she said, ‘Five minutes. No more.’

Finlay smiled and backed out of the room, leaving Dewar alone with Denise.

‘How are you feeling?’ Dewar asked.

‘Bored bloody stiff.’

‘At least if you’re bored, you’re not ill,’ said Dewar. ‘And that’s the main thing.’

‘Course I’m not ill. Mike’s the one who’s bloody ill. Have they found out what’s wrong with ‘im yet?’’

‘They’re not quite sure,’ lied Dewar. ‘What d’you think’s wrong with him?’

‘I keep telling them. He took some bad stuff. It happens.’

‘Tell me about it. What happened exactly?’

Denise shrugged and took a final drag from her cigarette before stubbing it out nervously. The process seemed to go on for longer than it needed.

‘He was okay when he came home at tea time but about nine o’clock he went all pale and started sweating, said he was feeling like shit. He went to bed but when I went through later he was shivering like he was cold but he wasn’t; he was burning up and he couldn’t speak and he had this rash on his face like he’d grazed it or somethin’.’

‘Had he taken drugs between tea time and then?’

Denise nodded.

‘He’d injected?’

Another nod.

‘You’d taken something too?’

‘Sure.’

‘But you didn’t share the needle?’

‘I’m on Methadone. You take it by mouth.’

‘Where did Mike get the stuff you think was bad?’

Denise’s eyes hardened. ‘You’re some kind of cop!’ she spat.

Dewar tried reassuring her that he wasn’t but to no avail. Her demeanour had changed in an instant.

‘Oh yes, you bloody are. Yer all the fucking same, think you can con us with a few soft words then bang, in comes the question about what you’re really after. Well you’re getting fuck all out o’ me so fuck off you English prick!’

‘Denise, I might be an English prick but I’m not a cop. Promise.’

‘Fuck off.’

Dewar gave it one last try. ‘Denise, I’m a doctor, not a policeman. I work at the university … in the Institute of Molecular Sciences,’ he lied, hoping to salvage at least something from the interview and see if there was a response to the name.

Denise looked at him blankly. ’Are you deaf?’ she said. ‘Fuck off!’

Dewar left the room and went off in search of Finlay.

‘How’d you get on?’

‘Not brilliantly,’ confessed Dewar. ‘She seemed to think I was a policeman out to trap her.’

‘Paranoia’s all part of the game when you’re dealing with addicts,’ said Finlay. ‘If Jesus Christ himself were to give them a kind word they’d think he had an angle. Don’t take it personally.’

‘That’s not what’s worrying me. I didn’t even get to the first question I wanted to ask her. I thought I was passing the time of day with her, trying to gain her confidence when she flew off the handle. I knew she thought Kelly’s illness had something to do with drugs so I thought she’d be keen to let off steam about the supplier. How wrong can you be?.’

‘Maybe you’ll have better luck with some of the contacts Mary Martin’s team have been coming up with.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Want me to call you a taxi?’

Dewar shook his head. ‘I’ll walk for a bit first.’

The light was already fading fast as Dewar left the grounds of the hospital and crossed the road. Sea fog was rolling in from the Forth about a mile to the north and traffic was already building in the run up to rush hour.

He felt depressed about his failure to establish any kind of meaningful contact with Denise Banyon and tried to analyse it, feeling that it was important to understand what had gone wrong. He was unused to dealing with drug addicts yet it looked as if he was going to be dependent on them for information. His start with Denise did not bode well.

Despite Finlay’s dismissal of her behaviour as par-for-the-course paranoia, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe he had accidentally touched a raw nerve when he asked who had supplied Kelly with the drugs she imagined were to blame for Kelly’s condition. Come to think of it, why did she believe that anyway? he wondered. She was an addict herself. She must have seen a lot of bad trips in her time, seen a lot of her friends go down with AIDS and hepatitis and septicaemia and infected needle sites. What made her think in this instance that Kelly’s illness was drugs related? No answer was forthcoming as he reached a busy intersection.

To his left, the concrete blocks of the Muirhouse housing estate sprawled out to the west where the last light of the day was now a narrow band in the sky. A bus shelter across the road had graffiti on its one remaining glass panel. It said ‘Fuck Everybody’. For a moment Dewar thought about the virus at large in the estate. ‘It just might,’ he murmured before turning away to the right.

He was now in Ferry Road, the main thoroughfare that ran along Edinburgh’s northern edge. He flagged down the first taxi with its sign lit up and returned to the Scottish Office.