Fenton's Winter (2 page)

Fenton had been inconsolable.
He had fallen into an endless night of despair which had taken him
to the limits of his reason and had threatened to push him beyond.
Time, tears and a great deal of Scotch whisky had returned him to
society but as a changed man. Gone was the happy, carefree Tom
Fenton. His place had been taken by a morose, withdrawn individual,
devoid of all drive and ambition.

After a year of being haunted
by the ghost of Louise Fenton had taken his first major decision.
He had applied for a job abroad and, four months later, he had been
on his way to a hospital in Zambia.

Africa had been good for him.
Within a year he had recovered his self confidence and could think
of Louise without despairing; he could even speak about her on the
odd occasion. He had enjoyed the life and the climate and had
renewed his contract on two occasions bringing his stay to three
years in all before he suddenly decided it was time to return to
Scotland and pick up the threads of his old life. The prevailing
economic climate and the perilous state of the National Health
Service had made it difficult for him to find a job quickly and he
had spent a year at Edinburgh University in a grant aided research
assistant's post before applying for, and getting, his current
position at the Princess Mary Hospital.

The sudden return to the
demands of a busy hospital laboratory after a year of academic calm
had been a bit of a shock but he had weathered the storm and
established himself as a reliable and conscientious member of the
lab team. The fact that the Princess Mary was a children's hospital
and the lab specialised in paediatric techniques pleased him.
Working for the welfare of child patients seemed to compensate in
some way for the child he had lost.

After a year he had scraped
together the deposit for a flat of his own in the Comely Bank area
of the city and, on a bright May morning, assisted by Neil Munro
and two of the technicians from the lab, he had moved in. The flat
was on the top floor of a respectable tenement building that had
been built around the turn of the century and featured high
ceilings with cornice work that had particularly attracted him to
it in the first place. It had south facing windows which, on the
odd occasion that the skies were clear in Edinburgh, allowed the
sun to stream in from noon onwards. The undoubted reward he reaped
from having to climb four flights of stairs up to the flat was the
magnificent view. As Autumn had come around he had watched the
smoke from the burning leaves hang heavy in the deep yellow
sunshine and had come to understand fully what Keats, who had once
lived in the same area of the city, had meant by 'mists and mellow
fruitfulness.' In the last year Fenton had met Jenny, a nurse at
the hospital. She was very different from Louise but he had been
attracted to her from the moment they met. Their relationship was
easy, undemanding and good. Marriage had not been mentioned but
Jenny had moved in to the flat and they were letting things take
their course.

Jenny Buchan was twenty-four.
She had been born in the small fishing village of Findochty on the
Moray Firth, the youngest of three children to her father, George
Buchan, a fisherman all his life. He had died in a storm at sea
when she was fourteen leaving her mother, Ellen, to fend for the
family but luckily it had not been too long before her two older
brothers, Ian and Grant, had reached working age and had followed
their late father into the fleet fishing out of Buckie. They now
had their own boat, the Margaret Ross, and, between them, they had
provided Jenny with three nephews and two nieces. Jenny herself had
travelled south to Aberdeen after leaving school and had trained as
a nurse at the Royal Infirmary before moving further south to
Edinburgh and the Princess Mary Hospital where she had settled in
happily. She had spent her first year in the Nurses' Home before
moving into a rented flat with two other nurses and living in
traditional, but pleasant chaos.

She had met Tom Fenton at a
hospital party and had been drawn to him in the first instance
because he had seemed genuinely content to just sit and talk to
her. His dark, sad eyes had intrigued her and she had resolved to
find out what lay behind them until, after their third date, he had
told her about Louise and alarm bells had rung in her head. If Tom
Fenton had decided to dedicate his life to the memory of a dead
woman then she, Jenny Buchan, had not wanted to know any more. She
need not have worried for, after an idyllic picnic in the Border
country, Fenton had taken her home and made love to her with such
gentleness and consideration that she had fallen head over heels in
love with him. Despite this she had still decided to make her
position clear. One night as they lay together in the darkness she
had turned to him and said, "I am Jenny, not Louise. Are you quite
sure you understand that?" Fenton had assured her.

The rain assisted by a bitter
February wind woke them before the alarm did. "What's the time?"
asked Fenton.

"Ten past seven."

"What duty do you have?"

"Start at two."

"You mean I've got to get up
alone?"

"Correct."

"Good God, listen to that
rain."

"Jenny snuggled down under the
covers.

Fenton swung himself slowly
over the edge of the bed and sat for a moment holding his head in
his hands. "I feel awful."

Jenny leaned over and kissed
his bare back. "The whisky," she said.

"Coffee?"

"Please,"

Fenton returned to sit on the
edge of the bed while they drank their coffee.

"Are you on call this
week-end?"

"Tomorrow."

Jenny put down her cup on the
bedside table and put her hand on Fenton's forearm. "You will be
careful won't you?"

Fenton looked puzzled. "What do
you mean?"

"You said yourself it must have
been a lunatic who did what he did to Neil. Just take care that's
all."

Fenton was taken aback. "You
know," he said, "I didn't even think of that."

The rain drove into Fenton's
visor as he wound the Honda up through the streets of Edinburgh's
Georgian 'New Town', streets crammed with the offices of the city's
professional classes. The road surface was wet and the bike
threatened to part company with the cobbles at every flirtation
with the brakes. The infatuation with two- wheeled machinery that
most men experience in their late teens and early twenties had
proved, in Fenton's case, to be the real thing. Apart from a brief
period when he had succumbed to the promise of warmth and dryness
from an ageing Volkswagen beetle his love for motor cycles had
remained undiminished. There was just no car remotely within his
price range that could provide the feeling he got when the Honda's
rev counter edged into the red sector. Tales of being caught doing
forty-five in the family Ford paled into insignificance when
compared with Fenton's one conviction of entering the outskirts of
Edinburgh from the Forth Road Bridge at one hundred and ten miles
an hour. The traffic police had shown more than a trace of
admiration when issuing the ticket but the magistrate had, however,
failed to share their enthusiasmand had almost choked on hearing
the charge of 'exceeding the speed limit by seventy miles per
hour.' His admonition that a man of Fenton's age should have 'known
better' had hurt almost as much as the fine.

Fenton reached the hospital at
two minutes to nine and edged the bike up the narrow lane at the
side of the lab to park it in a small courtyard under a canopy of
corrugated iron. The Princess Mary Hospital, being near the centre
of the city, had had no room to expand over the years through
building extensions and had resorted, like the university, to
buying up neighbouring property as a solution to the problem. The
Biochemistry Department was actually one of a row of Victorian
terraced villas that the hospital had acquired some twenty years
previously. The inside, of course, had been extensively altered but
the external facade remained the same, its stone blackened with the
years of passing traffic.

Fenton pushed open the dark
blue door and took off his leathers in the outer hall in front of a
row of steel lockers. Susan Daniels, one of the technicians, saw
him through the inner glass door and opened it. "Dr Tyson would
like to see you," she said. Fenton buttoned his lab coat as he
climbed the stairs to the upper flat then knocked on the door
bearing the legend, 'Consultant Biochemist.'

"Come."

Fenton entered to see Charles
Tyson look up from his desk and peer at him over his glasses. "What
a day," he said.

Fenton agreed.

"We are going to have the
police with us for most, if not all, of the day," said Tyson.
"We'll just have to try and work round them."

"Of course," said Fenton.

"I've requested a locum as a
matter of priority but until such times..."

"Of course," said Fenton
again.

"I'd like you to speak to
Neil's technician, find out what needs attending to and deal with
it if you would. I'll have Ian Ferguson cover for you in the blood
lab in the meantime."

Fenton nodded and turned to
leave. As he got to the door Tyson said, "Oh, there is one more
thing."

"Yes?"

"Neil's funeral, it will
probably be at the end of next week, when the fiscal releases the
body. We can't all go; the work of the lab has to go on. I thought
maybe you, Alex Ross and myself could go?"

"Fine,’ said Fenton without
emotion.

He walked along the first floor
landing to a room that had once been a small bedroom but had, in
more recent times, been the lab that Neil Munro had worked in. He
sat down at the desk and started to empty out the drawers, pausing
as he came to a photograph of himself holding up a newly caught
fish. He remembered the occasion. He and Munro had gone fishing on
Loch Lomond in November. They had left Edinburgh at six in the
morning to pick up their hired boat in Balmaha at eight. The fish,
a small pike, had been caught off the Endrick bank on almost the
first cast of the day and Munro had captured the moment on
film.

There had been no more fish on
that occasion and the weather had turned bad in early afternoon
ensuring that they were soaked to the skin by the time they had
returned to MacFarlane's boatyard. Munro had ribbed him about the
smallness of the fish but, having caught nothing himself, had come
off worst in the verbal exchange. Fenton put the photograph in his
top pocket and continued sifting through the contents of the desk.
He was working through the last drawer when Susan Daniels came in.
"I understand you will be taking over Neil's work," she said. "Can
we talk?"

"Give me five minutes will
you," said Fenton.

A system involving three piles
of paper had evolved. One for Munro's personal belongings, one for
lab documents and one for 'anything else.' The personal pile was
the by far the smallest, a Sharp's scientific calculator, a
University of Edinburgh diary, a well thumbed copy of 'Biochemical
Values in Clinical Medicine,' by R.D. Eastham, a few postcards and
a handful of assorted pens and pencils. Fenton put them all in a
large manila envelope and marked it 'Neil's' in black marker pen.
The 'anything else' pile was consigned mainly to the waste-paper
basket, consisting of typed circulars advising of seminars and
meetings and up-dates to trade catalogues. Fenton started to work
his way through the lab document pile while he waited for Susan
Daniels to return. Much of it was concerned with a new automated
blood analyser that the department had been appraising for the past
three months. Neil had been acting as liaison officer with the
company, Saxon Medical and the relevant licensing authorities and
from what Fenton could see in copies of the reports there had been
no problems. The preliminary and intermediate reports that Munro
had submitted were unstinting in their praise.

Fenton turned his attention to
Munro's personal lab book and tried to pick up the thread of the
entries but found it difficult for there was no indication of where
the listed data had come from or what they referred to. Munro, like
the other senior members of staff, had been working on a research
project of his own, something they were all encouraged to do
although, in a busy hospital laboratory, this usually had to be
something small and relatively unambitious. Fenton stopped trying
to decipher the figures and went over to look out of the window. It
was still raining although the sky was beginning to lighten. He
turned round as Susan Daniels came in.

"Sorry I'm late. The police
wanted to talk to me again."

Fenton nodded.

"It all seems a bit pointless
really. Who would want to kill Neil?" said the girl.

Fenton looked out of the window
again and said, "The point is, somebody did kill him."

"I'd better brief you on what
Neil was doing," said Susan Daniels.

"Do you know what his own
research project was on?" asked Fenton.

"No I don't. Is it
important?"

"Maybe not, I just thought you
might have known."

"He didn't speak about it
although he seemed to be spending more and more time on it over the
past few weeks."

"Really?"

"Actually he seemed so
preoccupied over the last week or so that I asked him if anything
was the matter."

"And?"

"He just shook his head and
said it probably wasn't important."

Fenton nodded. That would have
been typical of Munro. Although he had been a friend, Neil Munro
had been a loner by nature, never keen to confide in anyone unless
pressed hard. He himself had not seen much of him over the past few
weeks, in fact, since Jenny had moved into the flat, they had seen
very little of each other socially although that would have changed
when the fishing season had opened in April.