David pushed the door further, listened to the grinding protest of a dry hinge, until the door was pushed back against the wall. The hallway stretched out ahead of them, a depth of shadows.
"Hello?" David called out. His voice boomed hollowly in the darkness. There was no reply. Somewhere in the dark, a small thing moved or rustled. There had been a noise. He'd been almost sure. For an instant he thought he heard a kitten whimper. There was a scrape, like a chair being moved, but just then a car turned at the far end of Latta Street, its diesel engine rumbling loud through a hole in its manifold and momentarily drowned out all sound. The car moved on and when it had gone, there was a silence in the hallway. David called out again, louder this time. Now there was no sound at all. The words echoed back from the narrow walls and he was not sure that he had heard anything.
He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and swung the beam ahead of him. "Looks like there's no-one home."
"That's no surprise. Nobody's reported her missing. Even though it's only been a day, if she had family here I reckon somebody would have called us."
He motioned ahead of him, put a foot over the doorstep and slowly walked inside, following the cone of light. There was no window in the hallway, just the walls, papered in an old fashioned print. There was a small telephone table bearing a bunch of dried flowers that looked as if they'd been there since the sixties. There was no telephone.
"Why don't I just put on the light?" Helen asked. He turned to face her, seeing only her silhouette against the faint glow of a street lamp somewhere out there in the frosted night. "After all, it's not an armed robber we're looking for."
"Go on then," he conceded. She fumbled for the switch, found the brass plate at shoulder level close to the door, flicked it down. Nothing happened.
"Maybe she never paid her bill," David said. He moved forward. The hallway was dry and dusty and even in the dark it gave the impression of being festooned with cobwebs layered with dust. Off in the shadows, the darkness seemed to twist with motion. David pulled back.
"What is it?"
"I thought something moved," he whispered. The dark had seemed to roll forward, billowing towards him. He knew it was just imagination, but it was a strange thing to have imagined. He blinked and as he did so, sparks of colour flashed in front of his eyes, like the kind of after images he got when the sunlight reflected off the water on the estuary while he was taking pictures of the wading birds. But here, he had not been looking into the light.
He moved further down. Something rustled. Helen gave a start.
"Police," David called out. "Don't be alarmed."
Nothing moved. He swung the beam up. There was a narrow door slightly ajar, just a crack. The noise hadn't come from there.
"Maybe not," David answered his silent question. "There's nobody here." For some reason he was tense and strained, suddenly, wound up. It was an odd sensation of hyper-alertness. His heart gave a thud and raised its beat to a higher speed. "Daft bugger," he told himself. "Settle down."
Yet strangely, in the narrow confines of the hallway, right at that moment, he sensed danger. It was a completely inexplicable sensation, and a peculiar one, because it was not a physical danger. For that brief instant, it was a shudder at the unknown, at the oddly moving dark in the tiny, dilapidated house.
He got halfway down the hallway, taking each step slow, trying to avoid making the floorboards creak. Then he walked into the smell. It came thick in the air, musty and musky, powerful enough to taste.
"Bloody hell," he coughed.
"God, that's awful," Helen said, gulping as if about to retch, "What on earth is it? Smells like something's died in here."
For a moment, David considered calling in, to get a team round to turn over the shabby little apartment. The smell of rot and decay really was like the reek of a shallow grave, and both of them had experienced that stench before. This, though, was somehow different. David pulled a roll of tissues from his pocket, handed half to Helen. She clamped it over her face and they moved on, reached the door. He fully expected to find a mouldering corpse lying in a greasy heap. David pushed the door open, his nerves twisting with that strange anticipation, and they moved in.
This time the smell took them hard. David took a breath and his vision blurred as if chemical had been squirted into his eyes. Helen gave a little cough and then a soft groan that told him she really was holding back on vomit.
He turned. "Keep quiet, for God's sake."
As soon as the words were out, he wondered why he had spoken them. They had just blurted out, an angry slash at Helen. He turned to face her, swinging the beam of the torch low. The shunt of anger flared and the muscles of his belly clenched. His shoulders and forearms tensed to trembling tautness as a surge of adrenaline hit into his veins. In that instant he could have lashed out at anything.
"What the fu..." he started. He didn't even know what he intended to say, whether it was a question directed at Helen Lamont or at himself. The muscles spasmed hard, as if a hand had clenched his intestines and twisted. The flashlight beam swung and caught Helen in its periphery. Her eyes were wide, not to compensate for the dark, but with the same bewilderment that mirrored his own.
"Oh Jesus," she muttered, and sagged back out of the light. "Oh my...." she started again and faltered once more.
Her own belly was suddenly roiling, but not in anger. She was reeling within the scent that filled the dark of the room. Her eyes blurred and swam with blurting tears. A wave of bleak longing rippled through and within her. Right on its heels came an appalling sense of empty loss and an utter, un-nameable need. A flush of heat like a fever's bloom crawled under her skin, infusing her temples, burning her ears. Her stomach spasmed and her breasts instantly throbbed, nipples suddenly taut and tender against the cup of her brassiere. Deep in the basin between her hips the muscles cramped again and she felt the unmistakable draining sensation down there.
The thick, sickly sweet smell, underscored by a rotting, rancid scent, was clogging and cloy in the musty airlessness of the room.
"Gas," David coughed. His throat was trying to clench in involuntary twitches. The hairs on the back of his neck felt as if they were marching in unison. The strange, unbidden rage flared to a bubbling heat and he felt as if his head was beginning to inflate. In the dark of the room, pictures flashed and flickered in the front of his consciousness, and his body was pumped up ready for fight or flight, every nerve sizzling in readiness. Powerful anger, the need to hit out, lurched through him and he knew this was not his own emotion, not a genuine feeling. He had to be reacting to some chemical agent. His heart thumped a quick drumroll and he could hear the pulse in his veins.
"Gas." He spat the word out again and without hesitation, he reached for Helen. In that split second, he could easily have grabbed her and slammed her against the dark wall. The violence swelled huge within him. But as soon as his fingers snagged the corduroy of her jerkin he dragged her towards him. He forced the fury away from him, mentally punching it out of his head while his thoughts were still reeling in the dark. It had to be contamination, some sort of pollution. Rational thought was almost impossible but he made it to the window, swept the thick curtain back and got a hand to the catch. Helen came dragging along with him gagging all the while. Pictures flickered in front of his eyes, wavering images in splashes of flat and somehow poisonous colours. Helen's knees were giving way and threatened to spill her to the floor but he gripped her collar tight, lifting her almost off the ground. She was blinded by the tears and the bleak sense of abandonment that emptied her heart.
"I can't," she started to say in a voice that was hardly more than a whimper.
He opened the window, flinging it wide with one push of his arm and he pushed her in front of him, right into the cold air. The breeze from the open door at the other end of the room swept through in a cold draught that made the ragged curtain billow outwards. Immediately the smell began to dissipate rapidly. He scooped in a lungful of air. Little sparks orbited and wheeled in his vision and the breath was cold and frosted, sharp in his throat. Helen gagged and sagged again. He could feel her reflex vomit choking, felt her sides heaving. A back tide of rage surged up inside him, faded just as quickly and was then swamped by a secondary wave of dreadful guilt coupled with the explosive decompression of relief. He could have hit her. He could have slammed her up against a wall. He could have done something much worse than that. For a moment, for a dreadful dizzying few seconds, he had been pure and savage animal. He could have ripped her coat off, ripped her clothes off and thrown her down on the ground and spread her wide to slam himself into her again and again.
"What the fuck's going on?" he rasped.
"Oh David," Helen blurted. "I'm really sick." She heaved in a huge breath. The wind whistling round the chimneys and rustling in the dead ivy that crept over the little brick porch came blasting in the door and blew the stench away. A cat swaggering tail-high by the scrubby hedge caught the scent and suddenly screeched. Its fur stood on end, like a caricature of a startled tomcat. Its back arched and then it snapped into motion. One instant it was a shuddering ball of fur and the next it was a streak of black. It crossed the concrete patch in a second and hit the crumbling wall with such force that it bounced back in a complete somersault. Without a pause, and with no cessation of its caterwauling, it ran at the barrier again, went straight up like a rocket, its momentum taking it two feet higher than the top of the wall, then down the other side. It went screaming away out of sight.
The pinwheeling lights faded out and the adrenaline surge emptied out of his blood, leaving him trembling and weak. Helen started to raise herself up, breathing hard, but not sick now. He swung the beam round. A small table light with a dark shade was close by on an old fashioned chest of drawers. He reached and tried it, surprised when it came on, letting a feeble light swell in the small room.
"God, I thought I was going to be sick," Helen said. The bleak and empty sense of loss had vanished, drained away. It was as if it had never been. With the window open, the smell had faded to barely a background scent. "What the hell was it?"
"I thought it was gas, but it's not. Maybe come chemical. Cleaning fluid or something?"
"Did it make you sick?"
"I nearly puked all over you," he lied. He couldn't tell her how, in that split second he could have clubbed her to the ground. He could hardly believe it himself. The image of her lying naked, legs splayed, hovered on the edge of conscious thought and he tried to close his mind to that, for once planted, the thought had triggered an excitement he did not want to feel at all. The anger, however, had burst like a balloon, leaving him deflated and even the recollection of it was difficult to conjure up again. He flicked the flashlight off and they stood there, embarrassed by his reaction and shaken by the strange, surreal experience.
The room was small and narrow. There was an old bed at one end and a door halfway along the wall that led into a small kitchen. There were two seats, both unmatched, overstuffed armchairs. In the corner a mound of children's soft toys were piled in a pyramid, teddy bears and furry animals. There were teething rings and rattles. Beside the bed a white plastic baby bath sat in a frame and a selection of oils and lotions were lined up surprisingly neatly.
A Moses basket that might have been made before the war, stood over in the corner, but it was piled with folded sheets in laundry bags. The bed, low and narrow was covered by a pile of blankets that were tumbled and twisted into a circular shape, as if whoever had slept there had eased out so as not to disturb them. To David, it reminded him of a vole's nest down by the riverbank.
"She said she had a baby," David said.
"Who would let a somebody bring a baby back here?" Helen sniffed, got an aftertaste of the strange rancid scent on the still air and the strange sense of longing throbbed subliminally, just a tickle at the back of her consciousness. She squashed it flat for she recognised the sudden and completely unbidden sensation of need within herself. It had taken her by surprise, a sensation she had never experienced before. She did not welcome it now. Nor did she welcome the other need she'd felt when he'd grabbed her and hauled her, flopping and helpless towards the window. As soon as she'd breathed the fresh air and the nausea had subsided, she had been suddenly aware of the grip of his hand on her neck. His touch had tingled through her skin in a sudden sizzle of sensation that had flared in a burst of heat and another kind of longing that had flowed over and through the other.
"A baby," David repeated, and she shook her head emphatically, telling herself not to be such a bloody idiot. His hand was reaching towards the mantelpiece. For a sizzling instant, she wanted to feel it on her again. She drew her eyes away, looked up at him."
"That was what the paramedics said," David continued, "and the assistant from Rolling Stock. She told me the dead woman had a baby with her and nobody believed it." He was trying to recall exactly what he'd been told. "Phil Coulter said she had tried to get away from them because she had to get to her baby. He thought she was delirious."
"I thought she was alone," Helen said. "And nobody came to report her missing, did they?"
He shook his head, eyes narrowed, thinking. "She told them to find it. But it wasn't on the video."
He scratched his head, taking in the rest of the room. "But we didn't look at them all." He tried to think back to what he had seen, Jenny McGill pounding the chest. The expert lift onto the paramedic's trolley. The woman reaching to snatch the Mothercare bag. Then he recalled Carrie McFall bending quickly to pick up the handbag beside the line of trolleys. Something was itching in his memory, but not yet hard enough.
"There's been a baby here," he said, letting his eyes wander around the cramped little room. It was not damp, but musty and unclean. The odd smell that he'd taken for contamination had blown away now, leaving only the flat and stale odour of dirt and sweat and lack of hygiene.
The nest of blankets looked as if they'd be crawling with lice. A strip of wallpaper had peeled away from the wall at the ceiling and in other places there were signs of dusty mould. "She's been looking after a baby here," David said. "So she's got relatives, or she's a child minder."
"If he was a child minder, then whoever gave her a licence should be shot," Helen said. "It would be a crime to let a child in here."
"We were concerned at first," Simpson Hardingwell said. "But then, when you get a case as unusual as this, it's always best to take a step back and be systematic."
Hardingwell was the consultant microbiologist at St Enoch's. He was tall and gaunt and had an enormous axehead of a nose which made him look pompous and aristocratic, but he was pretty straightforward as far as David could make out, and not at all patronising.
"There are still one or two things that puzzle us greatly. Professor Hartley, he's the pathologist as you'll know, called me in almost immediately and we both made a further examination of the woman."
"This was after the post mortem?"
"No, this was the post mortem. Young Quayle at casualty got Gordon Hartley in right away. The paramedics had told him she'd revived en route and then, on arrival, she had shown some signs of life in the crash unit though there was no heartbeat and no sign of brain activity whatsoever. Occasionally you observe reflexes for some time after death, but Quayle said she had spasmed quite violently and had been foaming at the mouth, gushing saliva. His first thought was rabies, because these symptoms are quite characteristic of the virus, though we haven't had a case here in years."
He leaned back and run his fingers through thick white hair. "When Hartley looked at her down in the mortuary, there were still slight tremors in the muscles, though the spasming had stopped. He was concerned about her physical condition. In many respects she was emaciated. An elderly woman who seemed to be half-starved. Her body fat was almost non-existent and her skin colour indicated she was anaemic. She appeared to be in her sixties, early sixties I would have said. Now that gave Hartley a problem and he'd already asked me in for an assessment of bacteriological or viral risk. To tell you the truth, I've never actually seen a case of rabies, in the flesh, so to speak and I was quite interested, though I was sure this would be something else.
"Anyway, to get back to the initial picture, she was in her sixties, but there were anomalies."
"That's what my boss said."
"Quite. The first difference was in the condition of her breasts. Quite a contrast with the rest of her appearance really. They were neither flaccid or lumped with cellulite or fatty deposits as you might expect in someone of her age. They were swollen, very full indeed. That could have indicated a number of pathological causes. Beriberi for instance, but that's hardly common here. Hartley thought there was an inflammation, perhaps caused by a blood disorder. There were marks around the nipples, and the aureole area, abrasions and bruising, some of them quite severe. Much of the tissue was swollen and it was clear that blood had seeped from the abrasions. My first reaction was Kaposi's sarcoma, which is one symptom of the final stages of HIV."
"You mean she had aids?"
"No. The haematoma were different in shape and colour for a start, and later tests showed she was not HIV positive."
He leaned forward again and put both hands on a pristine blotter pad. "That was just the initial observation you understand. Once Gordon went in, we found things were very odd indeed. I took swabs of all the mucous tissue, blood samples and both muscle and integument. I waited until Hartley was further in before I got the fluids from stomach and bowel and nothing at all from the brain until close to the end.
"What we have is a puzzle. From the pathology point of view, Gordon's as baffled as I am. Contrary to expectation, the breasts were fully functional and still lactating. In fact there was still a slight leakage of milk and that's extremely rare in a woman that age, almost unheard of. There have been two cases recorded and third in a woman in her sixties on hormone replacement therapy. Not full lactation, you understand, but merely a slight resurgence of glandular activity.
"Our woman, what's her name? Quigley? Her mammary glands were fully functional. Comparable to a woman in her twenties within two weeks of birth. The bruises, it transpired, were not the haematoma common to bruising from a blow, but suck-punctures. The Americans would call them hickeys. You would say love bites. They had been worked with some force, enough to rupture minor capillaries and draw blood through the pores. There were odd abrasions too, shallow scrape marks with lined striations which were deep enough to break into deeper capillary vessels."
"And what would that mean?" David asked. So far he was just curious, and he was aware that Hardingwell was indulging him. The consultant seemed to be enjoying it too.
"Something had sucked on her. Adult or child, it's hard to say. I'm not in forensics."
"And there was more?"
"Oh yes. Her ovaries were still fully functioning, though greatly enlarged, which might explain the superfluity of progesterone in her blood. She had unusual abrasions on the vaginal wall and, another surprise, she was still menstruating, which might account for the anaemia. Hartley ascertained that she'd suffered a massive rupture of the left ventricle."
David had watched enough hospital scenes on television to get the picture. "A heart attack?"
"Catastrophic. The wall had ruptured almost completely. It was paper thin and must have been giving her pain for some time. It was a wonder she was able to walk. Further examination showed embolisms in a number of blood vessels in the brain, bubbles in the walls which could have burst at any time. It was a race between a cardiac arrest or a stroke. It was clear that she had high blood pressure, despite the anaemia, but the damage to the heart wall was quite significant. It was as if the muscle had been leeched away, causing severe reduction in tissue mass and strength. It was a third of its normal weight.
"My tissue samples were equally perplexing. That's why I called Mr Bulloch. Blood showed severe depletion of red cells and a corresponding increase in white. Pre-leukaemic I would normally say, but that's academic of course. She had raised levels of progesterone, well above normal levels one would expect even in a woman of pre-menopausal age. And then there were the antibodies."
"She had an infectious disease?"
"Not quite. Antibodies are the body's defence against disease. They are triggered by contact with viruses or bacteria, any invasion at all. Current theory is that we have dormant antibodies for every disease that has ever existed, a sort of biological overkill. The scanning electron microscope also showed a rather large compound of proteins and amino acids, long polypeptide chains, like new genetic material. It is unlike anything I've ever seen, and my colleagues are equally baffled. All I can surmise that the antibodies are a reaction to some infection, possibly to those complex molecules though it will take some time to isolate what the vector is. If it's viral, it could take months. I don't believe it's serious, but I would prefer to take no chances. I have to consider the possibility of a mutation, which happens from time to time, in the formation of an antibody, or even a new strain of virus, neither of which might be serious. But we would prefer to be sure. That's our job."
"So you do think she's had some sort of disease?"
"Oh she had disease all right. Heart disease, embolisms, distension of the ovaries, over-production of hormones. She was a sick woman. I'm trying to find out if she had a disease she could pass on to anyone else and I also want to find out whether the bug she may be carrying is what caused the other conditions. As I say, it could be a new strain. I'd like to find out if our Thelma Quigley had been abroad recently, or if she's been in close contact with someone who has come from the tropics."
Hardingwell looked across at David and gave a twist of a smile. "At least we know it's not rabies, and that's a blessing. But we want to find the source of this new cellular material if we can. It could be a mutation, which is unlikely, but it could be something as simple as a parasitic infection, one that is new to us. Apart from the other questions, it's fairly miraculous that the woman was walking and talking instead of being hospitalised weeks ago."
"What about the paramedics? They said she was dead, but she came back to life. Could that be something to do with it?"
"More to do with the heat of the moment. Despite what they tell you, medicine isn't an exact science. It's most likely that her pulse had dropped to an extremely low level because of the rupture, but there was still some brain activity. The heart might still have been operating on the other side, which wouldn't have made a great deal of difference, but there is a remote possibility she could still have been alive then and in crash. The signs would be very easy to miss."
David drew out his notebook and flipped over the pages. He found the notes he had made and read them quickly. "The witnesses said that she spoke about a baby. In her home, we also found evidence that there might have been a baby at some time. Is it possible she did have one?"
"She could have looked after one," Hardingwell conceded.
"But the milk thing, and the ovaries. Is it possible that she had actually given birth?"
Hardingwell laughed, not unkindly, but in real mirth. "If she had, somebody would be rushing to get a paper out on it even as we speak. I'd even be tempted to write to the Lancet myself. But no. She could not have given birth."
"She was too old?"
"Oh, there was that, although those damned Italians are pushing back the age frontiers faster than you would imagine. It won't be too long before a woman of that age will actually give birth. She'd have to be healthier though."
"Maybe looking after a grandchild?"
"Not that either, I'm afraid. She could never have given birth at all."
"Why?"
"Because she was a virgin. Hartley found her still intact." The consultant smiled. "She really was an old maid."
The search of the flat had not taken long. The drawers of the dresser had been filled with baby clothes, all of them laid out and folded neatly and most of them showing no signs of wear at all. There were tiny cardigans, larger pullovers, as if someone had been buying for a baby's growth. In the kitchen, there were sterilisers and plastic bottles, unopened tins of baby food and rusk teething biscuits on which the cellophane wrapping was still shiny and tight.
"None of this has been used," Helen said. "Not the bottles and the clothes. They're all brand new, but some of them are old."
"Don't baffle me with logic," David told her. "I didn't understand a word of that."
"They're new in the sense that they have never been used, but they are old in the sense that some of them came out of the ark. Look at that romper suit. That went out with button boots. I used to wear something like that."
"Not yesterday then?"
"Very funny. No, not yesterday. It looks as if she's just been collecting baby gear and storing it away."
"A weirdo?"
Helen looked over at him. She was crouched down, careful not to kneel on the threadbare carpet. In her hands she held a jumper in knitted pink, with two tiny ribbons as ties.
"Depends on your point of view. Maybe she just wanted a baby. Like an obsessive. Some women can't have them and it drives them over the edge, according to the psychology course. They can even fantasise that they actually have a child. Sometimes it gets worse than that and they steal one."
She got up from the floor and held up the small garment. "I think she was a very disturbed old lady. None of this stuff matches, either in fashion or sex." She half smiled, thinking of how disturbed she herself had been only half an hour before. David was rubbing his jaw with his free hand, making the hairs on his chin rasp. The sound, completely masculine, tingled on her nerves. She ignored it.
"I wouldn't know," David told her, and she laughed out loud, hoping it wouldn't sound forced.
"Of course you wouldn't. No offence, but you're a man and I've never yet met a man who knew that only baby girls wear pink. Some of these are blue and the rest are pink. It's as if she didn't have a clue what she was buying. Some is for a child more than a year old and others are for new-borns."
"You know a lot about it," David observed.
"I'm the youngest of a big family. You know my sisters breed like rabbits."
"And you?"
The image came back to him, the mental picture of her lying spread. Breeding like rabbits.
"Give me a break. I buy the kids sweets and Christmas presents and that's where my maternal instincts end. I think there's something wrong with my hormones." She gave him a lop-sided grin and tried to shuck away the strange reverberation of the twin aches that had rippled deep within her. The first powerful compulsion had drained away almost as quickly as it had swamped her but the memory still hovered scarily close. The second remained with her, strangely strong.
David returned the smile, but he too was trying to focus his mind on the maternal drive. June had been pushing him and he knew wanted to get engaged. She needed to settle down, start a family. He wasn't ready for that, he knew. He'd resisted moving in with her and he was coming to realise that his reluctance was nothing to do with settling down and having kids. It was to do with him and it was to do with her. He'd have to do something about that. He looked at Helen Lamont and wished he'd never brought her here. He could do without any complications.
The wardrobe at the far end of the small room had more bags of baby clothes and an old fashioned hatbox that was filled with newspaper clippings and some tattered exercise books. At the bottom, there were two old diaries filled with neatly looped handwriting that at first sight looked similar to the woman's name on the rent book. He took them with him when they left the house and went back to the station. David dropped Helen off on South Street, only half a mile from his own place and then drove home.
Of the three messages on his answering machine, two were from June, the second more irate than the first, demanding to know where he was and telling him he had spoiled her evening. She asked him to call immediately . The second was from John Barclay at the Waterside Mall.
"I've had a look at some of the early tapes," John said. "There's something you maybe want to have a look at."
David called back, but there was no reply and he made a mental note to call the ex-policeman the following day. He made himself a cup of strong, sweet coffee which went a long way to taking the winter chill from his bones. While he sipped he opened up the box and began to sift through the old cuttings and pieces of paper. He hefted one of the diaries, opened it and began to read.
He never returned June's call that night.