Dust to dust sd-8 Read online

  A man wearing a Guards regimental tie nodded. ‘I’ll certainly do my bit.’

  ‘Malcolm?’

  The nervous man nodded. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Doctor?’

  The man wearing the caduceus tie said, ‘Sir Laurence and I have identified the best practitioners in the country and given their details to James’ people for screening after the initial approach.’

  ‘And the initial approach?’

  ‘The usual legal firm has agreed to manage things with its customary absolute discretion.’

  ‘All candidates are currently under surveillance,’ said Monk.

  ‘Good,’ said the Cambridge man. ‘We don’t want any of them swanning off to conferences on the other side of the world just when we need them most.’

  THREE

  ‘You were very restless last night,’ Cassie Motram said when her husband appeared in the kitchen for breakfast. John Motram wrapped his dressing gown around him and manoeuvred himself up on to one of the new stools that Cassie had bought to accompany a recently installed breakfast bar. He was a little too short for this to be an entirely comfortable procedure and his irritation showed.

  ‘I feel like I’m in an American film,’ he complained. ‘What in God’s name was wrong with a table and chairs?’

  ‘We’re moving with the times,’ Cassie insisted, dismissing his complaint. ‘Now, as I was saying…’

  ‘Bad dreams.’

  ‘Mmm. You’ve been having a lot of these lately. What’s on your mind?’

  Her husband gave her a sideways glance, as if deciding whether or not to come clean, before saying, ‘I don’t think they’re going to renew my research grant for the historical stuff.’

  ‘They always have in the past. Why should this time be any different? Or are they using the credit crunch as an excuse like everyone else in this country?’

  ‘It’s not just that; the university’s changing,’ said John. ‘Scholarship’s becoming a thing of the past. The pursuit of knowledge is no longer good enough for the suits in the corridors of power: there has to be an “end product”, something the bean counters can patent, something they can sell. There has to be “economic justification” for what you do.’

  ‘And researching fourteenth-century plagues doesn’t fit the bill?’

  ‘They couldn’t have put it better themselves,’ John agreed. ‘Although, of course, they didn’t, preferring instead to go all round the houses using that funny language they speak these days about “moving forward” and being “proactive in the need for networking” as we “embrace the twenty-first century”. Where did they come up with all that junk?’

  ‘These people are everywhere,’ Cassie said sympathetically. ‘A woman turned up at the WI the other day, giving a talk about detoxifying the system, as she put it. I asked her what toxins she would be removing and she got quite snippy, demanded to know if I was a qualified nutritionist. I said no, I was a bloody doctor and would she please answer the question, and of course she couldn’t. Just what the hell is a qualified nutritionist when it’s at home?’

  ‘There’s been some kind of fusion between science and fashion which means that pseudo-scientists are popping up everywhere, spouting their baloney.’

  ‘Maybe we should go for a change of career.’ Cassie accepted the milk jug.

  ‘I may have to if any more grant money dries up. You know…’ John paused for a moment while he struggled with the marmalade jar. ‘I think I’m going to retrain as a celebrity nail technician.’

  Cassie almost choked on her cornflakes. ‘Where on earth did you come up with that one?’ she gasped.

  ‘I heard some woman on breakfast TV being introduced as that and I thought that’s for me… John Motram, celebrity nail technician. To hell with higher education, let’s do something really important and start polishing the fingernails of the rich and famous. How about you?’

  ‘International hair colourist, I think,’ said Cassie, after a moment’s thought. ‘Same source.’

  ‘That’s us sorted then,’ said John. ‘A new life awaits.’

  ‘It’s just a pity we’re in our fifties,’ said Cassie. ‘And I have a full surgery waiting for me.’

  ‘And I have a second-year class in medical microbiology to fill with awe if not shock,’ said John. ‘Such a pity. I was looking forward to jetting off to LA or wherever these people go at the weekend.’

  The letter box clattered and the sound of mail hitting the floor caused Cassie to swing her legs round on her stool and pad off to the porch in her stockinged feet. She reappeared, head to one side as she shuffled her way through a bunch of envelopes, giving impromptu predictions of their contents. ‘Bill… bill… junk… junk… postcard from Bill and Janet in Barcelona — we must go there: we’ve been talking about it for ages — and one for you from… the University of Oxford, Balliol College no less.’

  ‘Really?’ John accepted the letter and opened it untidily with his thumb, taking thirty seconds or so to read it before saying, ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Well? Don’t be so mysterious.’

  ‘It’s from the Master of Balliol. He wants to see me next week.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Doesn’t say.’ John handed the letter over.

  ‘How odd. Will you go?’

  ‘What’s to lose?’

  ‘Maybe he’s heard you’re thinking of a career change and offering you a chair in celebrity nail technology?’

  ‘Could well be.’ John nodded sagely. ‘But I’ll only accept if you’re given a research fellowship in international hair colouring.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Cassie, slipping on her shoes. ‘Meanwhile I have coughs to cure and bums to jab… Have a nice day, as we international hair colourists say.’

  ‘You too. Maybe I’ll have a think outside the box about all this …’

  ‘Absolutely… Push the boundaries…’

  Cassie left for the surgery and John cleared away the breakfast things, still feeling curious about the letter from Oxford. As a senior lecturer in cell biology at Newcastle University, he hadn’t had much to with Oxbridge although he had visited both Oxford and Cambridge for various conferences and meetings over the years and liked them both. It had been almost inevitable that he would: he was a born academic and scholarship was so obviously cherished at both universities. It had been one of the regrets of his earlier life that he had been unable to take up a place at Cambridge after leaving school, but reading science at a university nearer home had made more sense at the time and enabled him to contribute to the family income through part-time work — a not insignificant consideration for the son of a mother who provided for her family by cleaning the homes of the well-off and a father who had been invalided out of mining thanks to the damage that thirty years underground had done to his lungs.

  Although both his parents had been dead now for a long time, someone wheezing in the street could still trigger memories of the sound of his father’s laboured breathing. His parents had lived to see him graduate with first class honours from Durham, although his father had died before he completed his PhD and never shared the pride his mother took in calling her son ‘doctor’.

  Not going up to Cambridge proved to be no drawback for Motram. His sheer ability had taken him through a couple of successful post-doctoral fellowships at prestigious American universities where he had established himself as a researcher of international repute in the mechanics of viral infection. His particular interest lay in the epidemiology of plagues of past times, although this generally had to take a back seat to the study of more modern problems for which it was easier to attract funding.

  John had met Cassie shortly after getting a lectureship at the University of Newcastle, where she had been in her final year of a medical degree, and had decided very quickly that she was the girl for him — a choice not entirely applauded by Cassie’s parents, who’d held higher social aspirations for their clever daughter. However, their love had survived the slings a
nd arrows of outraged parents and they had married six months later.

  The marriage had been successful from the outset, surviving the strain of the first few years of the demanding work that goes with being very new in their chosen professions, particularly for Cassie who, as a junior doctor in a busy hospital, seemed to be on call every hour of the day and night. Life had got easier with Cassie’s move into general practice and John’s growing academic reputation, which had made it easier for him to obtain research funding.

  Two children had come along and the Motrams had been in a position to give them the best possible start in life. Their daughter, Chloe, was currently a translator with the European Commission in Brussels, and their son had followed his mother into medicine and was establishing a career in surgery. There were no grandchildren as yet but the possibility was a warming thought for both of them, and Cassie, who had an eye for decor, kept an eye out for possible changes to one of the upstairs rooms in their cottage which she felt might be ‘nice for little people’.

  FOUR

  John Motram took his time on the walk through the streets of Oxford, savouring the undoubted charm of the place and letting its history seep into his bones. He smiled as he realised that his affection for its dreaming spires was not entirely born of academic regard; being an avid fan of Inspector Morse was certainly playing its part. He found himself keeping an eye out for a Mark Two Jaguar.

  Nothing disappointed him about the interior of Balliol College either. Everything just got better.

  ‘The Master will see you now,’ said a suitably deferential woman who looked as if she might have been a pillar of her church guild, sensibly dressed from her high collar with the cameo brooch to her polished brogues.

  Motram was shown into a large office that couldn’t fail to impress. Minimalist it was not; metal and plastic pointedly failed to make an appearance. Wood — old polished wood — reigned supreme, comfortable in the light that came in through a series of tall, leaded windows that also admitted the sound of chimes and bells, confirming Motram’s arrival at the appointed hour of eleven a.m.

  A tall, patrician man rose from behind his desk and smiled. ‘Dr Motram, good of you to come. I’m Andrew Harvey, Master of Balliol. Please come and sit down. You must be wondering what all this is about.’

  It wasn’t a question, but Motram, who’d been thinking about little else for the past week, said, ‘I think I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Harvey. ‘I’m afraid microbiology isn’t exactly my field, but I understand that you are an expert on both the viruses of today and the epidemics of the past, shall we say?’

  ‘That’s a fair enough description.’

  ‘What is it that intrigues you about past plagues, doctor?’

  ‘Their cause. What many people don’t realise is that microbiology is a very young science. Bacteria weren’t discovered until the late 1800s and viruses even later, so the identification of the causes of the great epidemics of the past has been based largely on guesswork… or presumption.’

  Harvey smiled at the acid emphasis Motram had put on the last word. ‘I understand there is… something of a disagreement between you and your academic colleagues over the origin of the Black Death. Am I right?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  Motram frowned slightly. He didn’t quite see where all this was leading, but he continued, ‘There’s a general assumption among the public and indeed some of my colleagues that the fourteenth-century pandemic generally called the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the population of Europe, was caused by an outbreak of bubonic plague.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to admit to being one of the public who subscribe to that view,’ said Harvey. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’m convinced it was caused by a virus.’

  Harvey looked slightly bemused and Motram smiled, recognising the problem. ‘There is a very big difference between bacteria and viruses,’ he said. ‘They are completely different entities but, for some reason that escapes me, people appear reluctant to take this on board.’

  ‘Ah, educating the public,’ sighed Harvey, relaxing into his chair with a slightly amused expression on his face. ‘Never an easy business. But in what way are they different, doctor?’ He managed to endow the question with the unspoken rider, And does it matter?

  ‘Bacteria can exist independently,’ Motram explained. ‘They are living entities in their own right. They have all they need to grow and divide provided they can find suitable nutriment. Viruses can only exist inside living cells. In fact, there is a longstanding argument over whether they should actually be regarded as living things at all.’

  Harvey nodded. ‘I see.’

  ‘Another major and more practical difference is that you can treat bacterial infections with antibiotics: antibiotics are useless against viruses.’

  ‘So what makes you think Black Death was caused by a virus and not plague — which presumably, in the light of what you’ve just said, is a bacterium?’

  Motram nodded. ‘A rod-shaped bacterium called Yersinia pestis, named after a Russian microbiologist called Yersin who worked with Louis Pasteur. It was originally called Pasteurella pestis after his boss, but in the end justice prevailed.’

  Harvey gave a slightly pained smile that suggested too much information and Motram cut short the lecture. ‘I suppose I began to wonder about ten years ago when I was studying the rate of spread of Black Death in Europe. It was all wrong for a bacterial infection like plague and it didn’t show the seasonal differences you would expect.’

  ‘Was the spread faster or slower than you expected?’

  ‘Much faster. Plague is primarily a disease of rats. Human beings get it from fleas, but Black Death spread like wildfire, as if it were an airborne infection like flu.’

  ‘Are you alone in your suspicions?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Motram. ‘Scientists have been working on a genetic mutation in human beings which confers resistance to certain virus infections. It’s called Delta 32: basically it leads to the absence of a receptor on the surface of certain cells in the body, which denies viruses access to the cells they would normally infect.’

  Harvey nodded, then said, ‘I’m sorry, I must seem terribly dense but… where does the connection with Black Death come in?’

  ‘Before Black Death swept over Europe, we estimate that the Delta 32 mutation was present in the general population at a frequency of about one in forty thousand.

  ‘And after?’ asked Harvey.

  ‘About one in seven.’

  Harvey let out his breath in a low, silent whistle. ‘Now I see,’ he said. ‘So people without the mutation were much more susceptible to Black Death than those few at the time who had it.’

  ‘Precisely. It was clearly an enormous advantage to have the Delta 32 mutation,’ said Motram. ‘What, of course, is absolutely crucial from my point of view is that the mutation stops viruses from entering cells, not bacteria. Bacteria don’t need to enter cells. It makes absolutely no difference to them whether you have the Delta 32 mutation or not.’

  ‘So there we have it,’ said Harvey. ‘Game, set and match to you, it would appear. Black Death was caused by a virus, not a bacterium.’

  ‘I believe so.’

  Harvey picked up on Motram’s guarded response. ‘So shouldn’t that be an end to the argument?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not. The old guard still insist Black Death was caused by plague and see the new findings as academic stuff and nonsense — Disraeli’s third kind of lie, if you like.’

  ‘Statistics.’ Harvey smiled.

  ‘Even those who’ve moved to the virus camp are now falling out over which virus it might have been. Smallpox is one of the favourites and it’s been shown that that could have exerted the selective pressure necessary for such a dramatic genetic shift in the population while
plague certainly couldn’t. There are others who propose it could have been due to a combination of infections, and there is of course one other intriguing possibility, that it could have been caused by a completely different virus altogether — something that existed then but is unknown to us today.’

  ‘A killer from the past,’ said Harvey, raising his eyebrows. ‘Do pardon my ignorance, but isn’t it possible to find out what caused it simply by… digging up the past, so to speak?’

  ‘It’s been tried on a number of occasions,’ said Motram. ‘But we’re talking about seven hundred years ago. Mortal remains tend not to last that long.’

  Harvey rested his elbows on his desk and formed a steeple with his fingertips as he appeared to gaze off into the middle distance. ‘You know, I seem to remember reading something about a group of workers claiming to have recovered plague from Black Death victims… somewhere in Europe, I think.’

  Motram nodded. ‘France. They found plague bacilli in the dental pulp of an exhumed corpse. Trouble is, no one else has been able to reproduce their findings. Everyone else has drawn a blank.’

  ‘So the French findings are… doubtful?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Motram. ‘There seems little doubt that the body they examined was a plague victim, but without wholesale corroboration you can’t really say that plague caused Black Death, only that plague caused the death of the body they were examining.’

  Harvey nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, it would help enormously if you were to come across a number of victims of Black Death preserved in good condition?’

  ‘Indeed it would,’ said Motram, ‘but after seven hundred years the chances of that are-’

  ‘That’s really why I asked you here, Dr Motram.’

  FIVE

  The door opened and tea was brought in on a silver tray, leaving Motram to wonder if Harvey had a button behind his desk to press at an appropriate moment.

  ‘Milk or lemon?’

  ‘Neither,’ replied Motram. ‘Just as it comes please.’