Fenton's Winter (5 page)

Ferguson and Alex Ross, the
chief technician, followed Fenton into the 'front room', closing
the door and leaving the others out in the hall. Fenton crossed the
floor and put his hands on the radiator by the window. "God, it's
cold."

"Did they say what it was?"
Ross asked.

"No, I don't think they know.
They are going to do a post-mortem on her." Fenton sensed that his
answer had failed to satisfy Ross; he turned round to face him.

Ross said, "It was natural,
wasn't it? I mean, she wasn't murdered like Neil?"

Fenton was shocked. "Christ, I
hadn't even considered that. I assumed it was some gynaecological
thing."

"Me too," said Ferguson.

"You're probably right," said
Ross. "It was just a thought."

"What a thought," said Fenton
turning back to look out at the rain that had just started
again.

On Saturday the lab staff
finished at one pm leaving Fenton as duty biochemist till Sunday
morning. He picked up the internal phone and gave the hospital
switchboard his name and 'bleep' number, adding that he was about
to go to lunch. He hurried up to the main hospital leaning forward
against a fiercely gusting wind and climbed the stairs to the staff
restaurant; it was half empty. He looked around for a familiar face
but failed to find one save for Moira Kincaid from the Sterile
Supply Department who was just leaving. He nodded to her as she
passed.

Fenton paid for a cellophane
wrapped salad and took it to a table by a window where he could
watch the trees bend in the wind. It seemed to be blowing more
strongly than ever.

'Want some company?" asked a
voice behind him.

Fenton turned to find Jenny and
smiled.

Jenny laid down her tray and
Fenton held the edge of it steady while she extracted her fingers.
"What a morning," she complained, "The ward's going like a
fair."

Fenton smiled, paying scant
attention to what she was saying but thinking that Jenny Buchan was
the best thing that had happened to him in a very long time. "I
didn't hear you leave this morning," he said.

"You were asleep. It seemed a
shame to wake you."

Jenny joined Fenton in looking
out of the window at the rain as it lashed against the blackened
stone in wind-swept frenzy. "Do you think you will manage home
tonight?" she asked.

Fenton shrugged his shoulders
without taking his eyes off the rain and was about to reply when
the bleeper in his jacket pocket went off. He shrugged again and
Jenny nodded as he got up to leave. Outside in the corridor he
picked up the phone and called the switchboard. "Fenton here."

Although the biochemistry lab
was primarily concerned with the patients of the Princess Mary
Hospital, it also carried out paediatric work for other hospitals
in the city. Fenton had been informed that a blood sample was on
its way from the maternity unit at the Royal Infirmary, a sample
from a jaundiced baby for bilirubin estimation. He sat in the front
room until the clatter of a diesel engine outside told him that it
had arrived. Taking the plastic bag from the driver he signed the
man's book and took the sample upstairs for analysis.

With the blood sample in the
first stages of assay Fenton turned on the radio and tuned it to
Radio 3. The sombre music seemed appropriate to a grey Saturday
afternoon in February. He changed the settings on the analyser for
the next stage and, with a fifteen minute wait in prospect, went
along the corridor to Neil Munro's lab to collect Munro's research
notes. He settled down to read them as, yet again, the rain began
to hammer on the windows. The sound made him appreciate of the
warmth of the lab. He wondered for a moment if the house had ever
been this comfortable when it had been home to a well-to-do
Victorian family. No trace of a fireplace could now be seen along
any wall, in fact, the only trace of the original fittings lay in
the ceiling where a plaster repair had failed to conceal the rose
from which a chandelier had once hung. Fluorescent fittings were
now bolted to the ceiling, incongruous against the cornice.

The bilirubin result chattered
out of the printer. Fenton looked at it and compared it with the
standard graphs on the wall. "Well, young..." He checked the name
on the request form, "John Taylor, aged three days, you won't be
going home for a little while yet." He called the maternity unit
with the result and asked the nurse who took the call to read it
back to him. "Check."

Finding that he was making
little or no progress with Munro's book Fenton decided to make some
coffee and came downstairs to switch on the electric kettle in the
common room. The front door rattled in the wind as he came down the
spiral stairs and crossed the hallway. He paused in front of one of
the lockers to look at a photograph stuck up on one of the doors.
Summer '86, said the caption in Dymo tape. It had been taken on the
lab staff picnic in July, one of the few occasions Fenton could
remember when a planned outing in Scotland had coincided with a dry
sunny day. The good weather had made all the difference to the
occasion and the smiles on the faces in the photograph said it.

Fenton looked at Neil Munro,
relaxed, smiling and now dead; Susan Daniels in Tee shirt and
shorts, young, carefree and now dead. He thought about Susan's
death and on what Alex Ross had said. Surely it couldn't have been
murder. But the thought had been voiced; it would not go away. Two
people in the lab murdered? Considering the notion, albeit briefly,
spawned another thought that was even colder than the icy wind that
sought entrance to the hall through the cracks round the door. If
two people in the lab had been murdered did that not suggest that
the killer was one of the lab staff? One of the people in the
photograph? Impossible, he decided and went to the common room.

The phone rang as he drank his
coffee; he swivelled in his chair to pick up the receiver. Four
blood samples were on their way. The phone was to ring twice more
that afternoon for the same reason keeping him busy till a little
after seven when things seemed to quieten down. He began toying
with the idea of going home, deciding finally to give it till seven
thirty before committing himself. At twenty to eight he phoned
Jenny to say that he was on his way and then called the switchboard
to say where he would be should his bleep fail.

The smell of cooking greeted
him as he opened the door of the flat making him think how nice it
was to come home to a warm bright apartment instead of the cold,
dark silence that he had been used to before Jenny.

"How was it?" Jenny asked.

"Busy," Fenton replied,
grunting as he pulled off his motor-cycle boots. "You?"

"It quietened down a lot this
afternoon but we had one admission for the by-pass op."

Fenton washed his hands and
joined Jenny at the table.

"I've got some bad news Tom,"
said Jenny.

"What?" asked Fenton.

"I'm going on night duty
soon."

Fenton made a face. "What does
that involve?" he asked.

"Four nights on, three
off."

"Well, at least the bed will
never get cold," said Fenton, "There will always be one of us in
it."

Jenny came towards him and put
her arms round his neck. "And we'll still make sure that there are
plenty of occasions when there are two."

They finished their meal and
shared the washing up before sitting down in front of the fire to
drink their coffee. "Did you manage to make anything of Neil's
research notes?" Jenny asked.

Fenton replied that he had not
but, on the other hand, he had not had that much time to look at
them.

"Do you think that Neil was on
to something important?"

Fenton shrugged and said,
"There's no way of knowing until we decipher the notes but I wish I
knew what he wanted the blood for."

"Blood?"

Fenton told her about the
request Munro had submitted to the Blood Transfusion Service and
how the requisition had not gone through normal channels.

"Why would he have done that?"
asked Jenny.

"Another question without an
answer," said Fenton.

"I suppose when you think about
it that was quite like Neil. He kept things very much to himself
didn't he?"

Fenton agreed and gave a big
yawn. Jenny smiled and said, "Was that some kind of hint?"

Fenton kissed her lightly on
the forehead. "Early night?"

"Nice idea."

Fenton was taking off his
second sock when his bleeper sounded from the chair his jacket was
stretched over. He put his head in his hands before looking at
Jenny who was already in bed. "God, you'd think they knew."

Fenton fastened the strap of
his crash helmet and looked out of the window, shielding his eyes
from the glare of the room lights. The look on his face when he
turned round told Jenny that it was still raining.

"Take care."

It was six in the morning when
Fenton returned. Jenny was already out of bed and putting on her
uniform; she stopped buttoning her dress when Fenton came in and
walked over to him. "Bad night?" she asked putting her arms round
his neck.

"One thing after another," said
Fenton.

Despite his tiredness Fenton
still felt aroused by Jenny's nearness. He kissed her hard on the
lips and felt her respond after initial surprise.

When they parted Jenny said,
"At six in the morning on a cold, damp winter's day?"

"Any time and any day," said
Fenton drawing her close again.

Jenny giggled and Fenton
slipped his hand inside the top of her uniform to feel the warm
swell of her breast. Pushing her back on to the bed he felt the
muscles of her face relax as he pressed his mouth down on hers. Her
lips parted to let his tongue probe the soft warm inside. "I want
you," he murmured.

"I believe you, I believe you,"
Jenny giggled, struggling with his trouser zip to free him. She
raise her bottom slightly to let him pull her panties down half way
then raised her knees as he knelt over her to pull them down the
rest of the way. He let his erection rest between her calves as he
looked down at her. "I love you Jenny Buchan...God knows how I love
you." He ran his hands gently up the inside of her thighs.

Jenny looked at her watch.
"Duty calls," she said. There was no reply from Fenton. She raised
herself on her elbows and looked at him; he was fast asleep. She
got up quietly from the bed and smoothed her uniform then, looking
at Fenton again, she smiled and bent down to kiss him lightly on
the forehead before leaving.

Tyson called a meeting of the
lab staff on Wednesday afternoon in the common room. The wind and
rain that had lashed Edinburgh for the past week had still not
abated and the windows rattled as he looked around to see if
everyone was present. Fenton was missing, delayed by an urgent
blood test, but he arrived before anyone had been sent to fetch
him. He entered to find Tyson and Inspector Jamieson looking
grim.

"We are now in possession of
the post-mortem report on Susan Daniels," said Tyson. "Inspector
Jamieson obtained it from the fiscal's office this morning. Susan
did not suffer a miscarriage as some of us had imagined. She wasn't
pregnant. She died because the normal clotting mechanisms of her
blood were no longer functional. She had received a massive dose of
an anticoagulant drug so that when she started bleeding there was
no way of stopping it. It seems unthinkable that she administered
the drug to herself which leaves us with the unpleasant, but
inevitable alternative, that she was murdered." Tyson paused to let
the hubbub die down. Fenton looked at Ian Ferguson who returned his
glance. The nightmare was coming true.

Jamieson rose to put everyone's
fears into words. There had been two murders in the hospital and
both victims had been members of the Biochemistry Department. As
both killings were apparently without personal motive the
possibility that there was a psychopathic killer at large in the
hospital, and with a particular grudge against the lab, had to be
faced. Jamieson concluded by saying, "I'm sure I don't have to tell
you but, if you have the slightest suspicion, the vaguest notion,
of anything not being quite right, tell the police. We will be here
in the hospital. Nothing is too trivial.

The possibility that the killer
might actually be one of the lab staff was not mentioned but it ran
through everyone's mind. The staff of the lab was small, sixteen in
all including the two women who washed the glassware. There were no
convenient strangers to suspect. Everyone knew everyone else, or so
they thought.

Another day passed and the work
of the lab went on as usual, it had to, but the atmosphere had
changed dramatically. The light, good humour which had made it such
a pleasant place to work in disappeared overnight. Neil Munro and
Susan Daniels had gone and in their place had come fear and
suspicion. The constant comings and goings of the police only
served to heighten the tension as they returned to ask the same
questions time and time again.

Fenton's spirits hit a new low
on Friday at Neil Munro's funeral. The unrelenting wind and rain
swept through an unkempt cemetery as they lowered Munro's coffin
into the ground with prayers that were carried away on the wind and
a handful of earth that spattered irreverently on the lid and
turned to mud almost immediately. Tyson, Ross and Fenton, the three
representatives from the lab, went to a nearby pub afterwards and
drank whisky without speaking as water still trickled down the back
of their necks and wet grass from the graveside clung to their
shoes.

Fenton got home at six to find
Jenny already there. "It was that bad?" she asked, reading his
face.

"That bad," Fenton agreed
quietly

"Do you want to stay home and
brood about it or shall we go out?"