Free Wildcard by Ken McClure

knows you’re here.’
    ‘I’ll grab some coffee next door.’
    Steven was sipping his second cup of coffee and reading the clues of the Times crossword before committing pen to paper – he had to get at least four before starting to fill it in – when he heard the sound of people leaving next door. A few moments later Miss Roberts popped her head round the door to say that Macmillan was asking for him.
    John Macmillan was standing looking out the window when Steven entered and closed the door softly behind him. From past experience he knew that Macmillan took up this pose when he had bad news to impart.
    ‘Any idea why I called you back?’ asked Macmillan.
    ‘You’re going to tell me there’s been another case of haemorrhagic fever,’ suggested Steven.
    ‘Guess or inside information?’ asked Macmillan, sounding surprised.
    ‘Just a guess.’
    Macmillan turned round. ‘There are seven new cases in Manchester. One woman has already died.’
    ‘Sweet Jesus!’ exclaimed Steven. ‘Seven?’
    Macmillan walked over to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper. ‘The dead woman is Ann Danby, aged thirty-three, a graduate computer expert who lived alone in the city. Ostensibly she took her own life, but she was found to have been suffering from the disease.’
    Steven looked puzzled.
    ‘The police were called to her apartment by neighbours concerned about noise. They found that she’d taken an overdose of sleeping tablets and washed them down with booze, although it’s not clear why. Maybe it had something to do with her illness, but when a routine post mortem was performed, she was found to be suffering from the disease. Two policemen, a pathologist, a hospital houseman, an ambulanceman and a medical lab technician have all gone down with the disease and all are dangerously ill. They were all contacts of this woman in one way or another. Public Health are waiting for the next wave, when contacts of these people start falling ill. They are resigned to it spreading further.’
    ‘Classic kinetics of a disease spread by body contact,’ said Steven. ‘If one gets you six, six will get you thirty-six and so on, like ripples on a pond. I take it this woman was a passenger on the Ndanga flight?’
    Macmillan shook his head. ‘No, damn it, I’m afraid she wasn’t.’
    ‘Then how?’
    ‘That’s really why I called you back. The Danby woman was not on that flight, nor has she been out of the country anywhere during the past two years, not since a holiday in Majorca in spring of 1998.’
    ‘But she must have had contact with someone from the Ndanga flight?’
    Macmillan shook his head again. He said, ‘Public Health have gone through the passenger manifest with a fine-tooth comb. They can’t find a connection with the dead woman at all.’
    ‘But there must be one.’
    ‘You’d think so. Apparently the police pathologist started to have doubts during the PM. He thought he was examining a routine drink-and-drugs suicide, but when he opened her up he found that she’d been haemorrhaging badly. Haemorrhagic fever crossed his mind, but when he couldn’t come up with an African connection after talking to the woman’s parents he didn’t sound the alarm for fear of looking foolish.’
    ‘We’ve all been there,’ said Steven.
    ‘The Public Health people have been working round the clock to isolate contacts, but unless we find out – and soon – where the disease originates from, we could be looking at a very unpleasant situation indeed. What do you think?’
    ‘Well, assuming that we’re talking about the same disease here – are we?’
    ‘Porton haven’t finished analysing the samples from the Manchester cases yet, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t.’
    ‘Then obviously the passenger, Barclay, and this woman, Danby, are the prime movers in the affair. We know how everyone else got the disease. We have to find out how these two got it.’
    ‘That’s where you come in,’ said