George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (22 page)

The sound of Jerry’s breathing shifted, lost some of its harshness and then finally was replaced by the hiss of the oxygen cylinder which was at once attached to the laryngeal tube to take over the breathing task. His face began to become a more normal colour, losing the pinched blueness that had been so terrifying, and after a few moments he opened his eyes and stared up at Adam’s upside-down face above him. His gaze was clearly an appealing one and Adam grunted, ‘It’s all right, you’ll be fine now. Just hang on in there.’

Once the breathing was right the team relaxed and George with them. The nurse mopped at Jerry’s eyes, putting drops
into them, for they were reddened and watering copiously. Adam looked at George and said, ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Or at least — Look, I came in early this morning to do some work of my own and realized after a while there was someone else here. I went looking — I thought it might be another break-in — and found Jerry like this. I broke the window to help him get better air.’

She indicated it and one of the others in the team murmured, ‘Quick thinking,’ and she glanced at him.

‘Oh,’ she said and nodded as she recognized the young anaesthetist, James Corton. ‘Thanks, but believe me it was a reflex action. I don’t even know if it did any good. And then I called you. You’ve managed to deal with him in good time, I think, haven’t you? I was terrified his tissues would swell so much he’d lose his airway altogether.’

‘He bloody nearly did,’ Adam said. ‘Look, is this tube OK, Corton? Even though you couldn’t do it yourself, I’d be glad if you’d check before we move him to the recovery unit on A & E to sort out any remaining problems.’

James, in response to George’s brows lifted in query, raised his right hand apologetically. ‘I twisted my wrist in a difficult intubation last night, so I asked Adam to deal with this one. It looks fine to me.’

George had checked for herself, not waiting for James. It might be his responsibility as the anaesthetist in the crash team to intubate but every doctor worth the label could manage that, after all. Adam had done the job perfectly; Jerry’s easier breathing and greatly improved colour were an index of how effective he had been.

Jerry rolled his head and George said quickly, ‘No, Jerry. Keep still. And don’t try to talk, you ass, you’ve got a laryngeal tube in. Be patient.’

He stared at her and then rolled his eyes again, upwards this time. She looked at him, frowning, then understood.

‘I think I’ve worked it out,’ she said quietly. ‘It happened when you refilled your reagent bottle?’

He closed his eyes in an agony of frustration as the nurse tried again to mop at them, but he moved his head once more to push her away. A little affrontedly, she stood back as George came and leaned above him.

‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. ‘I think I know what it is you’re trying to say. I can smell it too. I’ll be careful. I’ll check what happened and, Jerry’ — he was still staring up at her beseechingly — ‘don’t worry. I’ll keep a close eye not only on you but on Sheila too. I know this is her work-station, as well as you do. And her reagent bottle.’

He closed his eyes, clearly in relief, as the porters arrived. There was another bustle as he was shifted to a trolley and his breathing apparatus carefully stowed, and then he was taken off by the troop of them. But Adam turned back at the door and looked at her just as they reached it. ‘Have you any idea what caused this?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Give me a little time and I might have more than an idea. Proof perhaps,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to do some investigating. But I think I can guess. Chlorine gas.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. A hell of a thing to happen in a professional lab, isn’t it? I thought everyone would know of the risk.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ George snapped. ‘This wasn’t carelessness or ignorance, believe me. My staff know which chemicals they can and can’t mix. Someone did something to make this happen — but, like I say, let me investigate. I’ll let you know if I identify anything that’ll affect Jerry’s treatment. Meanwhile, regard it as chlorine-gas poisoning.’

‘Will do,’ Adam turned to go, leaving only James Corton lingering.

‘Chlorine gas?’ he said anxiously, staring at her with that wide shy gaze of his. ‘That’s very bad.’

‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘Very.’

‘An accident, though, surely? I thought it was something that happened often, accidents with chemicals?’

‘Not in my lab, it doesn’t,’ George said. ‘Anyway, as I say, I’ll be checking it out. So, thanks for getting here so fast.’

He went pink. ‘Oh, it was just routine. I mean, we were the A & E crash team. And anyway, I couldn’t do much, what with my wrist like this and …’

He went, leaving behind him the ghost of his uneasiness. Poor bastard, George found herself thinking. He’s got to go a long way to get the self-confidence he’ll need to be any good in this game. Then she forgot him as she turned to contemplate Sheila’s work-bench.

Properly speaking, if she suspected some sort of meddling she should call the police. She knew that. If someone had tampered maliciously with the contents of the Beetle cupboard — she even thought she knew when it had happened — then a criminal offence had been committed, and she had no right to go nosing about before a SOCO had been to check over the scene and to mark the evidence. But that would take so long and by the time someone had come from the nick and mobilized the SOCO, the last vestiges of the chlorine gas she could still smell would be gone. She looked up at the broken window and the scudding clouds that showed there was a brisk breeze out there and made up her mind. She’d be careful and she would make her own checks, and
then
call the police.

She wore gloves, collecting them quickly from the mortuary, and set to work. She handled each of the bottles very carefully, turning them so that she could see their labels and then replacing them precisely as they had been. And then with great delicacy she made a couple of tests of her own on the contents, first of the bottle which had clearly been removed from the Beetle cupboard and then of the smaller work-bench bottle. To make extra sure, she then checked the content of every other bottle at every work-station labelled
Hydrochloric Acid
, writing down her findings at each stage of the process in her own notebook.

She was barely halfway through when the big doors
outside clattered open. She lifted her head and swore softly. It was Alan who appeared at the door of the lab and came round to stare at her in amazement as she crunched from place to place over the broken glass. She looked at him and shook her head quickly.

‘No, Alan,’ she said as he opened his mouth to release the inevitable flow of questions. ‘I can’t explain now. You’ll have to be patient. Meanwhile, keep everyone out of here till I’ve finished, will you? Then I promise I’ll explain as much as I can.’

He closed his mouth, nodded, and went. She was deeply grateful to him. A good chap in every way, she thought; I’m lucky to have him on the team. I must tell him so. And went on with her work.

By the time she had finished, closed her notebook and bagged the phials of liquids she had collected from the various bottles, all of them carefully labelled in her neatest handwriting, it was well past nine. She came out into the corridor to find it filled with a group of subdued but intensely curious staff. She did the only thing she could and told them as succinctly as possible just what had happened.

‘It seems there’s been a third attempt on Sheila,’ she said. ‘Only this time it was Jerry who got into the line of fire. Someone got in here — I think it happened before the break-in, by the way; there was one night, I discovered, when a stranger tried to get in — went into the Beetle cupboard and meddled with the bottle labelled
Hydrochloric Acid.
It had been emptied and refilled with common-or-garden bleach in a strong concentration.’

There was a sharp hiss of sound as several people drew breath and she nodded grimly.

‘You’re ahead of me. Whoever it was then emptied the reagent bottle on Sheila’s bench of almost all of its hydrochloric acid, leaving just enough to make a reaction with bleach, but not enough to work with. He worked out she’d have to refill her bottle —’

‘And when she put bleach on top of hydrochloric acid …’

‘Exactly. It released chlorine gas and damned nearly choked Jerry to death.’

There was a stunned silence and then they all began to talk at once, but it was Alan who said it, most clearly.

‘It could have been Sheila.’ He was wide-eyed with horror. ‘What on earth is going on here? Who can possibly hate Sheila that much?’

‘That is what we have to find out,’ George said grimly. ‘I’m calling the police now — I’ll tell ’em myself that I’ve been doing my own checks. No need to — well, dwell on it, though.’

Alan managed a faint grin. ‘Not a word,’ he said. ‘Right…’ He looked at the others, at Peter and Danny and Jane and Sam and there was a faint murmur of assent. ‘Let’s get on with it, then. We’ll only use the other benches, OK? No one go near the end one.’

It wasn’t until they were nearly all inside the big lab that it happened. They all stopped at the sudden loud wail. It was Louise Dee, the junior, standing very still in the middle of the corridor, clutching her cyclist’s helmet to her chest with both hands, still draped in her leather jacket and trousers from her motorbike ride into work, and with her mouth gaping to let the sound out.

George took her firmly by the shoulders. ‘Now calm down, Louise,’ she commanded. ‘There’s no harm done. Jerry is fine and now we know this attempt has been made we’re in a good position to protect him and Sheila in the future, believe me. There’s nothing for you to be upset about.’

‘But there is,’ Louise wept. She dropped her helmet on the floor with a crash and put both hands to her cheeks, staring at George over them with wide-eyed terror. ‘It could have been me! Don’t you see? If it wasn’t that I keep on forgetting to fill those bottles, it could have been me what was nearly choked to death. Oh, Dr B., what shall I do? I’m scared! Is it me they’re really after?’

‘It’s all so bloody
clumsy
,’ Gus said fretfully after a long silence, ‘it’s like a bunch of kids are being mischievous, and not thinking through the result of their actions. And cases like that — casual malice, you know? — they’re right buggers to deal with. Give me the professional every time.’

‘Yes,’ George said abstractedly. She too had been thinking hard, and now she lifted her shoulders and looked at him consideringly. He had arrived promptly with a full team when she had phoned Ratcliffe Street Police Station and told them what had happened. Well before noon the SOCO had crawled all over the section of the lab involved as well as checking for prints everywhere else (a little forlornly, however. As he said, ‘The world and his bleedin’ wife have been in and out of here’): all the photographs and fingerprint tests necessary had been done: everyone possible had been interviewed: and they’d left, all except Gus. Now he sat in her office, crouching over a cup of coffee and staring gloomily at his notes.

‘I’m not surprised that poor kid got the collywobbles and thought he was after her,’ he said. ‘When someone lets off a scatter of grapeshot like that everyone feels like a target’

‘I managed to persuade her there was nothing personal in it. That Jerry had just been unlucky while she’d been the one to benefit from his misfortune.’ She made a face. ‘I’ll tell you
this much — from now on I’ll never get her to refill bottles, not for a pension.’

‘Who’d be a boss?’ he said, but it was an almost automatic rejoinder. He was clearly deeply in thought. ‘Look, let’s just run through it, shall we?’ He spoke as much to himself as to her. ‘First, the car is doctored in such a fashion that it could kill — but only chokes. Then the chocolates are poisoned, using a very toxic substance but in so low a concentration that all it did was make the person who ate one sick without killing her. And now this business of rearranged chemicals in bottles — you say that the amount of hydro-whatsit left in the bench bottle was too little to make a killing dose of chlorine gas when mixed with bleach, even though it’s highly toxic, but just enough to cause a lot of discomfort.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s a fair résumé.’

‘It’s like Chummy just wants to play games, frightening people. Like he doesn’t want to kill, just to scare.’

‘I’m not entirely sure of that,’ she said after a moment. ‘I think maybe there’s been some real killing going on as well as this other stuff.’

He looked up sharply. ‘What gives you that idea?’

‘I think I might have had a helluva lot of wool pulled over my eyes,’ she said after another, longer pause. ‘Shit, this is hell to have to admit. It’s those three deaths that were put down to — dammit, I can’t use the passive sense,
I
put them down to accident or suicide. Now I’m not so sure.’

He said nothing, just staring at her with his eyes wide and bird-bright.

She went on, never more painfully aware of how much of a fool she felt. ‘The first one was a chap who was a recovered alcoholic, remember? Well, he hadn’t had a drink for a long time, which is as much as any alcoholic will ever admit to. They know they’re never really cured. I thought when I did his PM that his death had been accidental — that he’d slipped from the AA ideal and had a drink — only he’d taken a big one matching his previous consumption, not realizing that
that would now be an excessive dose. And died. And now I’m wondering just how he came to take too much.’

‘But —’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve started, so let me finish. Though I have to say the last thing I feel like is a Mastermind. Now, the second one, Lally Lamark — though in fact she might have died first. But let that be. It’s not important — at least, I don’t think so. She was a diabetic and I assumed that she had inadvertently taken the wrong dose of insulin, or something of that sort — maybe failed to eat after taking her insulin. But I’ve read her notes again, seeing I’m lucky enough to have them in spite of the break-in, and I’ve tried to read between the lines, this time, to see what sort of person she was.’