Ken McClure: Deception

‘Jesus! What the... ’

Alex and Wattie turned to see Fergie thrashing about in the water frantically.

‘It’s biting me!’ he yelled.

‘One nil to the Loch Ness monster,’ grinned Alex sceptically.

‘He’s going down,’ observed Wattie, equally coolly.

‘No shit... something’s got me... Jesus! It hurts.’

Alex and Wattie suddenly realised that Fergie wasn’t fooling around. Any remaining doubts were dispelled when Fergie’s foot broke the surface with the wriggling body of a rat firmly attached to it. Blood sprayed everywhere as Fergie waved his leg.

‘Get the fucking thing off me!’ he screamed.

Alex and Wattie went to his aid, Alex grabbing hold of the furry ball after two abortive attempts and causing even more pain with his efforts to pull it off Fergie’s foot. But after several tugs it did come away and Alex smashed the rat down on the stone flags at the edge of the towpath until it was dead beyond all doubt. Meanwhile, Wattie helped Fergie out on to the bank where they examined his foot.

Fergie was shivering from the effects of shock and the sight of his injured foot. The animal’s incisor teeth had gone clean through his foot at the base of the little toe on his left foot. It had then locked its jaws and refused to release its grip. Alex’s efforts had succeeded in dislocating the animal’s jaws — the reason its grip had been broken — but he had widened the wound on Fergie’s foot in the process and it was now bleeding profusely.

Alex took control and insisted that Fergie lie on his back with his foot raised while he snatched his tee shirt up from the bank and tried to tear it into strips to use as bandaging. This proved more difficult than he had imagined but thanks to a weak point at a small tear in the shirt he got started and eventually finished up with four pieces of cotton. He squatted down and cradled Fergie’s foot between his thighs as he wrapped the pieces of bandage round it.

‘I saw them do this in the movies,’ he announced. ‘Guy got his arm blown off and his buddy tore up his shirt to stop the bleeding.’

‘Did it work?’ asked Fergie who had now calmed down a bit.

‘Nope, he pegged out after the next scene, just after making his buddy promise to look after his kid.’

‘Will you look after my mouse, Eck?’

‘Daft bampot!’

‘I’ll go back and tell my old man,’ said Wattie. ‘I’ll tell him we need an ambulance here.’

‘Jammy git! You’re going to get a ride in a blood cart with the lights and everything’ said Alex to Fergie.

‘Maybe I can go too and avoid Kate’s sprog,’ yelled Wattie as he started to run back towards the farm.

Fergie was admitted to St John’s Hospital, Livingston within the hour and operated on that same evening to repair damaged tendons in his foot. Alex and Wattie were to join him as patients in the same hospital by the end of the week. All three boys had contracted Weil’s disease from their swim in the stagnant water of the canal. Fergie’s condition deteriorated rapidly when he also succumbed to rat-bite fever. These two infections conspired to obscure a third problem — a post-operative wound infection in his foot, which had progressed to full-blown septicaemia by the time it was recognised. There were now fears for his life.

Glenvane

Dumfriesshire

Scotland

Summer 1999

‘What do sheep do, Daddy?’

Steven Dunbar thought for a moment before looking down at the little upturned face and saying, ‘Not a lot really, Jenny. They just sort of... stand around and eat, I suppose.’

Father and daughter returned to looking at the pastoral scene before them; sheep munching contentedly in the field at the end of the village in the afternoon sunshine. Steven was leaning on a five-bar gate and Jenny watched through the bars below, one hand firmly latched on to his trousers as if afraid he might escape.

‘Yes, but what do they do?’ Jenny persisted. ‘What’s their job?’

‘I don’t think they actually have a job, Jenny. In fact, they don’t have much in the way of purpose in their lives at all.’

Steven Dunbar could not help but see a parallel in what he’d just said. The comment might just as well have applied to him during the last nine months since Lisa, his wife and Jenny’s mother, had died. Nine months that had seemed like nine lifetimes.

They’d only been married for three years when Lisa’s tumour had been diagnosed and the word ‘forever’ disappeared from their vocabulary to be replaced by, ‘a year at most’. In the event, Lisa, the Glasgow nurse he had met during the course of one of the most nightmarish investigations of his career, had left him and their daughter after just seven months and two days. With her she seemed to take every hope and dream he’d aspired to and left behind an emotional desert, bleaker than an arctic landscape.

Steven’s employer, the Sci-Med Inspectorate had been understanding about the whole thing. Apart from anything else they knew that their investigators had to have their mind on the job at all times. Anything less and they could end up by screwing up an assignment, embarrassing the government and possibly even putting lives, including their own, in danger. A man consumed by grief and hopelessness — as Steven Dunbar had been — was best left to his own devices for a while, was the official line they’d taken. He would come back when he felt ready or not at all.

The Sci-Med Inspectorate was a small body, funded by the government and run as an independent unit within the Home Office. Its function was to carry out preliminary investigations in establishing the possibility of malpractice or criminal activity in areas where the police lacked expertise. In practice, this was mainly in the Hi-tech areas of science and medicine, where it was difficult for any kind of outsider to see if anything were amiss let alone know if a crime had been committed.

In practice, this often meant dealing with professional people in powerful positions and called for tact and diplomacy as well as intelligence and investigative skills. Such people often resented what they were quick to see as unwarranted outside interference in their own personal fiefdoms.

Steven had come to Sci-Med in a roundabout sort of way, as indeed had most of their investigators. He personally had studied medicine and qualified as a doctor before opting for a career in the army and seeing service with the Parachute Regiment and the SAS on assignments that had taken him all over the globe. He had, in the process, become an expert in field medicine — not something there was much call for when he finally returned to Civvy Street but his experience had fostered in him an ability to cope and improvise in all sorts of tight and demanding situations.

Being a tall, naturally athletic man, he had relished the physical challenge of his time with the military as well as the excitement and danger of being on active service. But when he passed the age of thirty he knew that the time was fast coming when he would have to make a change. There could be no allowances made for the passing years in that line of work. You either swung with the best or you didn’t swing at all, as one NCO had put it during ‘Basic Wales’ training with the SAS in the Welsh Mountains.

He had been unsure of what to do with his life when the time actually did come to leave the service. The army had assumed that, being a doctor, he would simply carry on with that but Steven hadn’t been so sure. It had been too late for him to pursue a career in hospital medicine — with the possible exception of A&E thanks to his expertise in field medicine — and he saw life as a GP as an unattractive option after the excitement of what had gone before. That left various fringe jobs in medicine like medical officer in the prison service or possibly a job in the private sector through an attachment to a large company as their in-house physician. The thought of feigning interest in dealing with chronic fatigue and stress management however, had not appealed.