So did I.
I asked Glenda, ‘Did George know at Doncaster that I’d said I would look up those weather discrepancies?’
‘He sure did. I told him. He wasn’t going to do me any harm as long as he knew someone else could give him away.’
Glenda, the new lesser-varnished edition, was still far too naive. I was less and less inclined to be in George’s house when he returned, but Bell at last arrived, saying she’d packed a suitcase, argued with her father and talked to Kris on the telephone to persuade him to give her bedroom.
Without urgency she loaded Glenda into her car while protesting that none of this haste was necessary.
‘It will avoid a scene,’ I pointed out and, with the equivalent of ‘wagons rol’, we at last set off in two cars towards London.
Jett glanced over at me and said, ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I didn’t understand everything that Glenda said.’
‘You came in halfway through the movie.’
‘Was that powder uranium?’
‘Judging from its wrapping in tissue paper and lead — that heavy container sounds like lead — I’d guess it might be perhaps ordinary basic uranium ore, but also it might have been some other radioactive stuff giving off alpha particles.’
Jett said, ‘And is George buying and selling uranium? Is Glenda right?’
‘She’s half right. He’s putting in touch with each other people who know where to buy enriched uranium and enriched plutonium with people who want to buy it. The grey powder wasn’t bomb-making stuff, though, since the filly recovered.’
I told Jett about the Unified Traders frightening away the residents of Trox Island, and she said it explained why my grandmother spent her days biting her manicured nails.
‘Then don’t make it worse for her... but about that dipstick...’ I stopped, in hesitation.
‘Do you know who took it?’ Jett asked.
‘Do you remember what George Loricroft said at breakfast?’
She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Something about Kris must have left the dipstick on the ground at Doncaster when he clipped shut the folded-back engine cowling.’
‘Absolutely right, but Kris didn’t unclip or fold back the engine cowling at all at Doncaster, so George couldn’t have seen that. Add to that a few more facts, such as George’s car was in the car park near Kris’s private aeroplane. Glenda had just told him that I would have him investigated. He knew I’d been to Trox Island, but didn’t know what I’d learned there. And he could have known oil on the windscreen could kill, as he could have read about a case of it that was in the news last year.’
‘That’s damning,’ Jett said.
‘And all circumstantial. He could have folded back half of the engine cowling and taken out the dipstick. Also he might not.’
It was a bit later that I asked why we weren’t on the right road in London. Wait and see, Miss van Els uttered calmly, and soon after that she found a parking place in a side street near wide busy Marylebone Road.
‘Follow me... in sickness and in health,’ Jett said with humour, and I found myself in a medical specialist’s waiting-room in an annexe to a small private hospital that I certainly couldn’t afford. The specialist’s name, a placard informed me, was Dr Ravi Chand, citizen of Uttar Pradesh.
‘I can’t stay long,’ I warned. ‘At two-thirty I’m due in Wood Lane.’
Jett didn’t answer but was some sort of miracle worker, as in a very short time I was prodded, inspected and generally turned inside out by a briskly competent Indian practitioner with a wide grin of splendid teeth. To Jett, summoned as my nursing companion, the odd news was delivered in the neat accent of New Delhi.
‘My dear Jett, your impatient Dr Stuart isn’t suffering from radiation sickness of any sort, nor are his troubles to do with fractured ribs. He is developing a rash which is still under his skin but may erupt into sores in a day or two, or perhaps later today. He has been infected with a disease I can’t readily identify. I need to grow cultures and take blood tests. Meanwhile, he shouldn’t go to work, but I can give him prescriptions to allay the severe nausea. This may be unwelcome news to you, my dear Jett — and how nice it is to see you again — but I would advise you not to sleep with this young man until we know how infectious he may be.’
Demurely she said, ‘He hasn’t asked me yet.’
‘That’s unfair,’ I protested. ‘Who said don’t hurry? Consider yourself asked.’
Ravi Chand smiled, ruminated, inspected his nails, which were lighter against the brown of his fingers, and told me to rest in bed (alone) in the hospital next door for at least a day or until he knew what was wrong with me.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I said, and got overruled by Dr Chand’s quick reply that money came tailed off compared with health. He himself phoned the BBC and alarmed them far too much. So I spent a worse pincushion and pill-popping afternoon with X-rays, CT scan and embarrassing interior searches, and wrote as requested a long list of where I’d been in the past two months. Halfway through the list I realised what might be wrong with me, relaying the revelation to the gleeful satisfaction of my Indian inquisitor.
‘Cows!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought so. Unpasteurised milk! Paratuberculosis!’ He frowned. ‘You do not, though, have any ordinary form of tuberculosis. I had you tested for that routinely, to begin with.’
He bustled away, thin, good humoured, dedicated to mystery solving.
In a bedroom that would have honoured a hotel for comfort I watched someone else on television foretell cold showery periods for the following day with a chance of sunshine in Wales later, and I recognised with gratitude that the feeling of abject illness had abated to a much more bearable level. Jett, returning to visit briefly in the evening, wore an anti-infection surgical mask and, having incautiously asked what she could do for me, made a face at the length of my list.
‘In sickness and in health,’ I reminded her teasingly.
‘For richer, for poorer,’ she replied, nodding. ‘I promised Ravi I would pay your bill here, so you can cross off number one on your list, “bring credit cards over”. You don’t need them.’
‘Bugger that,’ I said. ‘Please do get the cards.’
‘I’ll pay your bill out of the money I earned looking after your grandmother. That,’ Jett explained, ‘came from your BBC salary, didn’t it? I know it did.’
I said, shaking my head, ‘After all those dreadful tests today, you must leave me at least a little pride.’
‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘I’m not used to your sort of man. I’m not used to self-sufficient survivors. I’m used to adult little boys being brave but needing succour. Needing comfort. Needing their hands held. Why don’t you?’
I would give it a try, I thought, one day.
‘Please bring my cards,’ I meanwhile said.
The looking-glass in the morning (Thursday) confirmed the Indian doctor’s prognosis. There were three sores round my mouth and several small outposts of the same bad news from forehead to chin, from chin to waist, and other places besides. The knowledgeable product of New Delhi seemed quite pleased, however, and sent in well-protected and gloved nurses with relays of pills, needles and swabs.
He hustled in again himself at what would have been lunch time if I’d felt like it, and with obvious pleasure rattled off his diagnosis.
‘The already good news is, of course, that you don’t have straightforward tuberculosis, as we’d established already,’ he said. ‘The rest of the news, my dear Dr Stuart, is that you have a variation of an already rare complication of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.’
He waited quizzically for some sort of reaction from me, but all I was numbly thinking was that it seemed to be my week for long incomprehensible medical terminology and other words to that effect.