Free Tampered by Ross Pennie Page B

and winced slightly. “I don’t type as fast as I used to. It makes my arthritis play up. Thank heavens for those Xanucox pills.”
    “They help, do they?”
    “On a good day, they work wonders. Raimunda used to share hers with me. I gather they’re rather expensive. Vik provided them to her for free. You know, because she was Gloria’s mother.” She dipped her gaze, as if embarrassed at speaking out of turn about the recently deceased. “All in the family, if I can put it that way.”
    Camelot’s residents, and so many others like them, would be on dozens of medications in a variety of eye-catching shapes and colours. Hamish could see how trading them could become an intramural sport.
    Betty’s face crumpled as tears welled in her eyes. “Poor Raimunda died on Tuesday. Such a shock. She was the strongest person here. She kept getting gurgly tummy, before and after she spent that week in the hospital. But I must say, neither her arthritis nor her tummy ever stopped her from helping Gloria with the cleaning.”
    Hamish handed Betty the box of tissues from the bedside table and watched as she dabbed her cheeks. “Don’t worry, now, Betty. It’s not Xanucox that upset your tummy or gave you the fever. The drug company is making a fortune out of the fact that Xanucox is easy on the stomach.” Finally, an arthritis medicine that didn’t induce ulcers or intestinal bleeding. And didn’t cause strokes and coronary syndromes like its competitors. “But I need to remind you, it’s not a good idea to share your tablets. You never know what that could lead to. If you think you need Xanucox, you should ask Dr. Jamieson about it.”
    He pulled off his gloves and asked her to drink plenty of fluids and stop the antibiotic that Dr. Jamieson had prescribed. It obviously wasn’t working. He promised to check on her again soon and told himself that if she got any worse he’d send her for X-rays of her abdomen. He scanned the room for a bottle of alcohol hand sanitizer but couldn’t find one. He hated washing his hands in a patient’s bathroom. The inevitable clutter of pills and tubes and bottles around the sink gave the maneuvre an unsavoury ick factor. He had no other choice, so he carefully soaped and rinsed his hands, turned off Betty’s taps with his elbows, and shook the water from his fingers. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her frilly towels.
    At the doorway, still shaking the water off his hands, something stopped him. A faint, unpleasant smell, rising above the scent of Betty’s lavender soap. He closed his eyes and sniffed. Yes, there it was. Unmistakable. The textbooks said it smelled like a horse barn, but he’d have to trust them on that. It wasn’t the normal odour of urine or feces you’d expect in a healthy person’s bathroom, it was the odour of para-cresol. And it gave him Betty’s diagnosis on the spot.
    He returned to her bedside and kept his hands in his pockets.
    “You found good news in my bathroom, Dr. Wakefield?” She hadn’t missed the smile of success on his face.
    “Absolutely. Tell me, have you noticed anything unusual about the odour of your stools?”
    “Really, doctor,” she replied with a teasing grin, “what a thing to ask a lady. Even the Queen doesn’t pass lavender-scented motions.”
    “But I mean, do your stools smell any different with this illness than they did the other times you had gastro?”
    “Well,” she said, glancing at the floral-scented deodorizer on her night table. “It’s not the sort of thing one brings up in polite company, but I did notice an unusual odour for the first time this morning. Brought me back to my childhood, my uncle’s farm. In Manitoba.”
    “Horses?”
    “That’s right. How
ever
did you know?”
    “And you’re sure you haven’t smelled that odour here at Camelot before?”
    “Certainly not. Goodness, Dr. Wakefield, what are you getting at?”
    “I have good news for you. Well, good news in the sense I know what’s