Free Resurrection by Ken McClure Page B

Salmonella in Kensington. He played back the Sci-Med message. The voice said, ‘Fax for you on code 9.’
    Dewar frowned and sat down to bring up the Fax Centre on the machine and then prompt the unscrambling code with his password. The printer whirred into a life and spawned a single page message. It was an update on the institutions complying with the audit request. All had now reported and all had declared having only what they were supposed to have. There was however one addendum - the reason for the message coding. The Sci-Med computer had come up with a piece of information that it had correlated as being relevant to his current assignment. A PhD student, working at the Institute of Molecular Sciences in Edinburgh, had recently committed suicide. He was Iraqi.
    Dewar stared at the name, Ali Hammadi. ‘Now, what were you working on, Ali, I wonder,’ he muttered out loud.
    He looked at his watch and called Karen at the lab before it got any later. ‘How’s it going?’
    ‘Like a fairground. We’ve had seventeen confirmed cases over the last twenty-four hours and we’ve got another nine suspected ones to check out.’
    ‘No idea where it’s coming from?’
    ‘Eight cases ate at the same Greek restaurant, the others didn’t so it must be something coming from a common supplier. It’s just a question of which one and what product. How was Manchester?’
    ‘Shit.’
    ‘I’d rather you didn’t mention that word at the moment.’
    ‘Sorry. Are you going to come round later?’
    ‘I think I may just go back to the flat. It’s going to be late when I get away and I’m whacked.’
    ‘Call you tomorrow?’
    ‘You know where I’ll be.’ sighed Karen.
    Dewar put down the phone and smiled affectionately. He and Karen, a down to earth Scottish girl from the East Lothian fishing village of North Berwick, had been together for nearly two years now. They had actually attended the same medical school but hadn’t really got to know each other until they met up again some four years after graduating when Karen had already been with the Public Health Service for three years and Dewar had just joined Sci-Med after deciding a career in research was not for him. He’d had an unhappy attempt at post graduate research and finally decided he’d had enough of pretending to be a team player when he clearly wasn’t. He was a loner by nature and wouldn’t pretend any more. The fact the earth went round the sun had not been discovered by ‘a team’ led by Copernicus. At Sci-Med he’d found a job where he could do things his way.
    He and Karen still had their own flats, an expensive arrangement but both were reluctant to risk damaging their relationship through fall-out from their jobs. Both had stressful, demanding occupations, even life-threatening on occasion in Dewar’s case.
    Dewar sat down by an open window where he could see the river. His flat wasn’t actually on the waterside - he couldn’t afford that - but was one street back on the first floor of a converted warehouse. It was very small but if he sat to the left of the main window he could see the river through a gap in the buildings across the street. He read through the FAX from Sci-Med again. If Hammadi was Iraqi he’d better find out as much as possible about him, starting with the police file on the incident and then of course, there was his research project. What exactly had he been studying? Although he’d been a student at the same institute where they had access to smallpox DNA fragments, it was, by all accounts, a very large institute. He could have been working on something completely different.
    As a foreign student, Hammadi would have been on several official registers. The funding for his degree would presumably have come from abroad but the actual university registration would be British unless of course, he had been on some short-term exchange deal. Dewar opened up his dial-in connection to the Sci-Med computer facility and used it to