Frank Giles got to his feet. ‘I take it we’re talking about a particular smell if the officers have called in?’
‘Yes sir, PC Robson’s a twenty year man: he knows the smell of death well enough and in view of your alert about reports of illness…’
‘Do we know who the flat’s registered to?’
‘The lease holder is one, Abu Zahid. The neighbours say three young Asian men live there.’
‘Better organise a biohazard team and I’ll call Dunbar. This could be what he was looking for.’
Forty minutes later Steven, Giles and the biohazard team met up in Sefton Street which had already been sealed off by uniformed officers.
‘Do we know what we’re dealing with here?’ asked the leader of the biohazard team when he’d been introduced by Giles to Steven.
‘Not for sure, but possibly a highly infectious virus,’ said Steven. ‘We’ll need full containment protocol set up before entering the flat and full wash-down facilities for those coming out. The smell from inside says we’ll also need hermetic-seal body bags but we don’t know how many yet.’ Steven turned to Giles and asked, ‘I take it you have a forensic team standing by?’
‘They’re here, just waiting for the nod.’
‘They’ll need respirators.’
‘I’ll tell them. I take it you’re going in with the team?’
‘If they can give me a suit,’ said Steven.
The team leader detailed one of his men to fetch one. The man took a few seconds to appraise Steven’s size before heading off.
‘We’re going to look a right bunch of clowns if it turns out to be a dead rat in the drains,’ said Giles.
‘I could live with that,’ said Steven, considering the alternative. He took the suit that was handed to him and started getting into it. The other waited for him and then they all checked the seals on each other’s suits and hoods before setting off towards the entrance to the flat where two of the team had already set up a secondary entrance out of plastic sheeting. This amounted to a porch which would prevent any organism escaping from within the flat when the door was opened. Once they were all inside the plastic bubble, the sheeting was sealed behind them before the door was forced open and they moved inside.
There were three dead bodies in the flat, all of Middle Eastern appearance and all three found in the one bedroom where they lay on separate single beds. There was no obvious sign of violence and the abundance of tissue boxes and bottles of cough remedies and aspirin suggested illness rather than violence. There were bowls of congealed, blood-flecked sputum lying next to the beds and blood-stained tissues scattered across the floor. After making sure that all three were dead, Steven signalled to the team leader that they should leave things as they were and gestured towards the door. They trooped out in single file and were washed down with disinfectant sprays before removing their hoods.
‘Good call from your men,’ said Steven to Giles. ‘Three dead and they all look like virus victims. We should let forensics do their business before we touch anything. When they’re finished, the biohazard boys can wrap the bodies for removal and clear and disinfect the site. You’ll have to warn the police pathologist about the danger at post-mortem.’
‘I’ll tell Marge,’ said Giles.
When he heard the name, Steven remembered that he’d met her before and that she’d been right — they were all a long way from Walton’s Mountain.
By three in the afternoon, the dead men had all been identified from ID found in the flat. They were Abu Zahid (24), Nasser Qatada (23) and Ahmed Mohammed (23). A preliminary investigation established that they appeared to have no connection with anyone else in the city but all three had relations living in Leicester.
‘How did you get on?’ Giles asked Morley when he came back from leading the team interviewing the neighbours. ‘Let me guess. Quiet, respectable chaps who kept themselves very much to themselves?’
‘Incredible. You could give Paul Daniels a run for his money, sir,’ said Morley.
‘The point is,’ said Giles, ‘Was one of them “Ali”?’
‘Maybe we could try out Shanks with a photograph of the bodies?’ suggested Morley.
‘A good thought; do that, will you?’
‘I didn’t draw a complete blank with the neighbours,’ said Morley. ‘One of them told me that the dead men had a vehicle, an old Land Rover, he said. The kind farmers use. He thinks they kept it in a lock-up round the back in Granary Lane. Uniform are on it right now.’
‘Well done. Warn forensics and tell them to give it a right going over. They’re looking for anything that will connect the vehicle to the Robert Smith murder.’
Steven returned to his hotel and called Macmillan to tell him of the day’s events.
‘God, it’s like a nightmare unfolding before our eyes,’ said Macmillan. ‘Did you find any indication of what they were up to in the flat?’
‘No,’ said Steven. ‘But it wasn’t being used as a lab if that’s what you were getting at.’
‘It was,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘So on the face of it we have three dead men of possibly Middle Eastern origin with Cambodia 5 being the likely cause of death but with no indication as to how they got it?’
‘That’s about it at the moment but stay tuned, as they say,’ said Steven.
‘Wild horses, etc,’ said Macmillan.
Three hours later, as Steven was preparing to drive over to the city mortuary to check on progress of the post-mortem examinations of the men, he got a call from Colonel Rose at the Defence Intelligence Service.
‘They’re on our list,’ said Rose. ‘All three of them.’
‘You have the better of me, Colonel,’ said Steven. ‘What list?’
‘Suspected al-Qaeda associates. The three dead men are all English, born in Leicester, but they got sucked into the Muslim fundamentalist movement by persuasive clerics working the Midlands. All three have recently been ‘on holiday’ to Pakistan but it’s odds on they spent time at what we like to call, “Butlin’s, Kabul” — Mujahadeen training camps in Afghanistan.’
‘So now we have a definite al-Qaeda connection.’
‘’Fraid so,’ said Rose. ‘Albeit a low level one as far as these three were concerned. They’re puppets. It’s who’s pulling the strings we have to worry about.’
‘And what kind of show they’re planning to put on,’ murmured Steven. ‘Thanks Colonel.’
‘Well, John Boy, weren’t we lucky it was only flu that you and Sci-Med were worried about?’ said Marjorie Ryman sarcastically as Steven, gowned and masked, entered the post-mortem room. Frank Giles was already there.
‘Just doing my job, Elizabeth,’ said Steven although he was stung by the comment. Ryman was another of the people he had had to be circumspect with at the outset.
Ryman continued to work without saying anything for fully a minute although the sound of instruments she tossed into the metal tray beside her acted as punctuation marks in a silence that spoke eloquently of her displeasure. Eventually, she looked up at Steven and said, ‘This man’s airways were so full of bloody mucous that he actually drowned in it. That’s how he died…’
The stare continued and Steven was prompted to say, ‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘Thank you, Doctor?’ exclaimed Ryman. ‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘What would you like me to say?’ said Steven evenly.
‘I would like you to tell me why his airways are so full of bloody mucous, Doctor,’ said Ryman.