Free Tampered by Ross Pennie

looked at the samples. Nothing.”
    â€œNo amoeba, no giardia, no cyclospora cayetanensis?” Hamish said.
    Natasha dipped her eyes. “I’m afraid not.”
    â€œWhat about C diff?” Hamish asked. “You
must
have looked for
that
.”
    â€œAll negative,” Natasha told him.
    â€œYou sure? What test method did they use?” Hamish asked. “Re-current diarrhea among the elderly is C diff until proven otherwise.”
    Hamish was talking about clostridium difficile, C diff for short, a bacterium that lurked silently in the intestines. It caused explosive diarrhea when awakened from its slumber by antibiotics taken for unrelated infections. C diff epidemics raced through hospital wards and nursing homes, where it was particularly hard on the elderly.
    Natasha looked at Zol as if to say,
Why am I taking the heat?
    â€œIt’s your university hospital’s diagnostic lab, Hamish,” Zol said. “We have to trust them to use the best test available.”
    Hamish shrugged then raised his professorial finger. “Mind you, the smell of C diff is very distinctive. You couldn’t have missed it, Zol, when you were collecting your samples.”
    Zol hoped Hamish was right, but he got a sinking feeling at the memory of the nauseating odours on the Mountain Wing. Had he been so overwhelmed by the stench that he’d missed the telltale horse-manure smell of C diff?
    â€œMoving on,” Zol said, “any ideas about the vector of transmission? I know we have damn little to work with.” They’d never bring this outbreak to a halt unless they could find where the responsible microbe was entering the Lodge’s food chain.
    â€œI keep thinking about those hard, stale doughnuts at Camelot,” Hamish said. “Restaurants waste a lot of food. And I mean a lot. I bussed tables for a couple of summers at university. It’s amazing what gets thrown out. Not just scraps. Entire meals untouched.”
    â€œYeah,” Zol said, thinking back to his days as a junior chef when he’d thrown out bins full of perfectly good food. “No one goes to a restaurant to eat leftovers.”
    â€œYou started out by asking about the soup,” Hamish said. “Is there a problem with it?”
    â€œHard to say.” Zol looked to Natasha for confirmation. “We did wonder about the freshness of its ingredients and the fact that it never seems to get heated to a roaring boil.”
    â€œHomemade soup can contain almost any old scraps,” Hamish said. He sipped his latte and held Zol’s gaze, his eyebrows raised. “Did you look up freegans on the Internet, like I told you?”
    â€œSorry. Never thought of it again, till this second.”
    â€œWell, just think about,” Hamish said. “Food is going to waste at the back of restaurants all over the city, we know that. Dumpsters are full of perfectly good but slightly wilted produce, day-old baked goods, and untouched full-course meals. On the other hand, you’ve got savvy entrepreneurs, like Gus and Gloria, feeding fixed-income seniors with poor eyesight and fading taste buds.”
    â€œDr. Wakefield,” said Natasha. She was hiding her smirk with her coffee cup, but her eyes revealed her unrestrained amusement at Hamish’s theory. “You think Gus and Gloria are Dumpster diving? And bringing the stuff back to Camelot?”
    â€œThat’s what freegans do. It’s part of their manifesto. They refuse to shop in grocery stores because they’re owned by hard-hearted, wasteful capitalists. Instead, they pull freshly discarded food out of Dumpsters and take it home. Claim they’re saving money and the planet at the same time.”
    Zol looked at Colleen, who was covering her mouth with her serviette. He bit his lip. The last time Hamish approached him with a wildly eccentric theory, Zol had laughed it off, and Hamish stormed off in a major pout — stayed