Free Crisis by Ken McClure

looked out of the window while the kettle boiled and mulled over what he had learned so far. The medical records for the region had failed to provide him with what he was looking for. Although it was true that there had been an increase in leukaemia and cancer in the area round Achnagelloch and Stobmor, it was not a striking one - even when he examined the raw data instead of the statistics, which he didn’t trust.
    He had been hoping to find something in the figures to indicate that the radiation leak from the power station had been severe enough to affect the health of the local community. This, in turn, would have indicated that the levels of radiation around the immediate area of the power station would have been high enough to account for a mutation occurring in the Scrapie virus. A twelve per cent increase in childhood leukaemia sounded a lot, but it was based on a relatively small number of cases. It might have been due to a radiation leak but, on the other hand, it might not. This conclusion merited an expletive from Bannerman.
    He sat down with his coffee and turned his attention to the details of the three deaths. It made alarming reading. The dead men had been employed as farm labourers on Iverladdie Farm, to the north of Achnagelloch. Only one of them, Gordon Buchan, had been married; he had lived with his wife in a tied cottage on the farm. The other two had stayed in lodgings in Achnagelloch. An outbreak of Scrapie had been reported in the sheep of Inverladdie and all three had been involved in the disposal of the carcasses.
    The men had died within a three week period of working on the slaughter, after suffering head aches, vomiting, and finally, dementia. One of the two bachelors had run amok in the streets of Achnagelloch, smashing windows and screaming obscenities before being constrained and taken to the cottage hospital where he died the following day. Witnesses had described him as being ‘out of his skull’.
    The married man had been nursed by his wife until he had gone into a coma. His eyes had remained open but he had not been able to communicate or respond to anything she said. Just before she called the doctor for the last time, who in turn called the ambulance, the man had appeared to develop some unbearable itch and had scratched himself all over until he bled.
    There were no details of how the third man’s illness had progressed. He had been found dead in his room by his landlady. She had, however, noticed that his arms had been scratched and bloody and there had been a wax candle in his mouth, as if he had been trying to eat it.
    Bannerman knew that there was not much to be gained by studying the behaviour of deranged patients. Once control of the brain had been lost, the patient would be liable to do anything without neces sary rhyme or reason. His or her entire behavioural pattern would be indicated by circumstances and events in his or her immediate surroundings. The reports of scratching, however, were alarming and Bannerman saw the significance in them. The sheep disease had been given the name Scrapie because of the infected animals’ habit of scraping themselves against fences, as if fighting a constant itch. It sounded like the men had displayed the same symptoms.
    The pathology reports from Lawrence Gill and Morag Napier reported extensive spongioform en cephalopathy in the brains of all three men, just as Bannerman had seen for himself in the microscope slides the MRC had sent him. He could find no loophole in the report as it stood. Many of the lab tests had yet to be completed but all the circumstantial evidence pointed to the dead men having been infected with Scrapie while handling contaminated carcasses on Inverladdie farm.
    Gill had included some notes on Scrapie research. It had been established that the disease could be transmitted from one animal to another through scarified tissue. Bannerman supposed that this must be how the dead men had been infected. The agent had got