Bloodstains Read online

  Or perhaps Adrian could actually issue the blood to an accomplice in a hospital, who could then send it back. Possibly: but I preferred the first idea, although both illustrated the futility of relying on the computer for information, when it received no feedback from the hospitals served.

  Was I prejudiced against Adrian? Yes, but he was still the most likely suspect, no one else had the same opportunity.

  What about all the other problems and tensions — were they relevant?

  I wrote them down. Why had Trefor promoted the obviously incompetent David? Why did Holly detest him and not Adrian? Why had Chalgrove not moved, if his position was so untenable? And why had Falkemham wanted to remain working long after most people retired? Perhaps none of them was relevant. Perhaps time would show that they were.

  Chapter Six

  Trefor’s door was open, so I walked in, casually tapping the glass panel. He looked up. ‘Tom, I was wondering where you were.’ Not smiling for once. ‘Could you close the door, please?’

  Oho, whence the ominous tone? I thought as he waved me to a chair.

  ‘Where shall I begin?’ He stared at the ceiling for a moment, fingertips together. ‘You were aware when you came here of the — er — difficult circumstances and the need to — er — handle people gently.’ Adrian, it had to be.

  ‘Well, I’ve received a complaint from Adrian that you harassed him in his work this morning, deliberately antagonized him.’

  I started to speak but he held up an imperious hand.

  ‘Now I know that he can be a little difficult at times, but I think you should remember that he works here, and you don’t. I think you could have been more tactful.’

  He stopped and waited for me and I realized that it was he who needed the tactful handling now.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Trefor, but as you said, he can be difficult. He was this morning. I have a job to do here as well, and a key part of it concerns his work. I intended neither to harass him nor antagonize him, only to find out about his job.’

  Not tactful enough. ‘Well, I must tell you that what he repeated to me sounded rather like antagonism. Perhaps you have a different definition of the word in London.’

  Calm down. ‘Well, I’m sorry it happened.’

  ‘Perhaps you should tell him that.’

  Too much. ‘I’ll try and keep out of his way in future.’

  ‘Well, that’s up to you,’ he said shortly. ‘I was going to show you the Plasma Lab, wasn’t I? Let’s do that now.’

  He stood up abruptly and made for the door. ‘The sooner we get it done, the sooner you’ll be finished here.’ This last was muttered into a non-existent beard, as though he couldn’t quite find the courage to say it aloud.

  I would never have believed it was so easy. The two girls worked like automata, each picking up a bag, placing it into a spring-loaded squeezer and allowing the straw-yellow liquid at the top to flow over into the satellite pack. When most of it had been transferred, the thin tubing heat-sealed and cut. And that was the extraction of plasma! No wonder the villains in West London had been able to steal it so easily.

  ‘The red cells are heavy, see, and gravity pulls them to the bottom of the pack,’ explained Trefor, ‘either by being left overnight, or being spun for a few minutes in a centrifuge.’ His voice had lost its tightness now that he was talking about something he understood. ‘So, it’s easy just to push the plasma over, see?’

  ‘What happens to it now?’

  ‘The bags are packed into these aluminium boxes and quick-frozen in liquid nitrogen. Here, let me show you.’

  He picked up a full container and clamped it into a boxlike device by the window. Then he pulled a lever, there was a roaring hiss and a white cloud of gas floated down to the floor. He pulled on a heavy pair of gloves and took the aluminium container out.

  There,’ he said proudly. ‘Frozen solid.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I mean, why freeze it?’

  ‘To preserve the Factor VIII, of course. Goes off very quickly, does Factor VIII. You know what that is?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said quickly. ‘But won’t it melt?’

  He answered with great patience. ‘We keep it in a freezer so that it won’t.’

  ‘Must be a big freezer.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  He hesitated, then said, ‘I suppose so.’

  He picked up the aluminium box and I followed him to a door in the side of the room which led into the corridor of the Blood Bank, but was separated from it by another door. A pair of very thick green suits hung on the wall and I asked what they were.

  ‘Insulation,’ he replied. ‘This room is held at -40°; if you have to stay more than a minute or two, you wear one of those.’

  He reached out and twisted a knob on the wall and a red bulb beside it glowed. ‘Lights,’ said Trefor. He pulled the lever-like handle on the heavy door. There was a snap as a catch was released and a dull kiss as the door parted from its frame and swung slowly open.

  The brilliantly lit interior seemed to sparkle, but before I could make out any detail, a mist formed in the doorway like a sheet of frosted glass and the hairs of my ankles prickled in the rush of intensely cold air.

  Trefor stepped inside. ‘We won’t stay more than a moment, it’s probably colder in here than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps Siberia or the Arctic.’

  I followed him through the curtain of mist where cold and warm air met. It was crystal clear inside.

  We were in a room about eight feet by sixteen, the sides and middle of which were taken up by slatted wooden shelving, leaving space to walk around the perimeter. The brilliance I had glimpsed from outside was from the frost that thickly coated parts of the walls and ceiling, and in one or two places hung like snow on the eaves of a house.

  For a moment as I breathed in, a familiar smell tantalized, then quickly faded as the moisture in my nostrils froze hard and stiffened round the hairs. As I moved, the freezing air pulled at my face like a strong after-shave, nipped at the lobes of my ears and nibbled at arms and shoulders through my thin summer jacket.

  The shelves were stacked with metal boxes like the one Trefor had, the rack with tubes and crates of glass bottles, half-filled with what looked like Cornish ice-cream. Ice-cream, that was the smell! The smell as you bent over the freezer in the shop to pick one out.

  ‘What’s in the bottles?’ I asked as he placed his box with the others.

  ‘Eh? Oh, serum. Probably here because it contains a rare antibody.’

  ‘What happens to the boxes?’

  We send them off fortnightly to CPPL, Central Plasma Processing Laboratory, in London.’ His breath solidified like the steam from an old railway locomotive.

  ‘I’ll take you round once, and then out,’ he said. I followed obediently.

  He pointed up at a heavy radiator-like object hanging from the shorter wall. ‘Refrigerator unit. There’s another one on the opposite wall. They have to run almost constantly to keep the temperature this low.’

  I could see the static fan-blades behind the metal grill. Why aren’t they running now?’

  ‘They stop automatically when the door’s open.’

  He walked on. A row of spindly icicles hung from the bottom of the unit and I shivered. The cold bit through my shoes, my fingers ached, and my jaw started to tremble.

  ‘Has anyone ever been trapped in here?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that I can remember. Anyway, there are two safety devices in case that should happen.’

  We arrived back at the door. ‘If this should shut,’ he said, ‘this handle opens the catch from outside.’

  He pulled the door shut, and there was an angry buzz as the refrigerator units came to life. The movement of the air made it much colder.

  Trefor pushed the knob on the end of the handle and the door swung open.

  ‘And if that doesn’t work, you pull this.’ He indicated a cord hanging from the ceiling.
‘It sets off a siren in the main corridor that would wake the dead. I won’t show you, because it also has a pretty dramatic effect on the living.’

  He chuckled at his own joke, the first I could remember him making. ‘Anyway, I think we’ve had long enough in here.’

  I nodded vigorously, my whole body was trembling now with a deep aching shiver as the heat was sucked from my flesh.

  We stepped out and he slammed the door. ‘You’ll feel like you’re in a sauna for a few minutes, but don’t worry, it soon wears off.’

  He was right. As I followed him back to the plasma room, my cheeks burned as though I had just entered a centrally heated building in midwinter.

  I asked, ‘How long would someone last in there, if they were just dressed normally?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He chuckled, then thought for a moment. ‘It would depend on the person. Twenty-minutes? Certainly, no more than half an hour.’

  Showing me the freezing room seemed to have put him in a better humour, so I asked him how the computer was involved with plasma separation.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m the wrong person to ask, I’ve only been filling in here since poor Mike… Well, I’ll do my best.’

  We went back to where the two girls were working.

  ‘This blood has come back from a morning session, has to be fresh, see. Most of it comes back in the evening and is separated by the night shift.

  ‘Well, when they’ve taken the plasma off, they put one of these stickers on.’ He showed me a tiny label with a bar code and the words ‘Plasma reduced’. ‘Then, when the bag is labelled properly, this tells the computer that the plasma has been taken.’

  ‘Why does the computer need to know?’

  ‘Because they’re two different products; anyway, we have to keep the records of what’s been separated.’ He held up a sheet of donation numbers. ‘This is what the girls write out to tell CPPL what we’re sending them, and the computer counts them up as well.’

  ‘Oh, I see, so you can total by two different systems. D’you compare them to check that they tally?’

  ‘Adrian does that.’

  ‘D’you check them yourself?’

  ‘No,’ he said crossly. ‘Why should I?’

  I changed the subject. ‘What about the whole blood that goes out, then comes back unused?’

  Oh, Time-expired blood. Er — that’s light penned into the computer, which then tells you to take off the plasma, as if you didn’t know already. Very useful material, Time-expired plasma, you can make a lot of things from it."D’you see much of it?’

  ‘A fair amount. Not that we’ll be seeing it much longer, mind.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, all blood will have the plasma taken off soon, won’t it?’ Statement, not question. ‘Plasma’s coming to be the most important part of it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? We’ve got nearly six thousand haemophiliacs in this country, most of them needing Factor VIII at some time. CPPL makes over six million pounds’ worth every year, but that’s still less than half our needs, so we spend millions buying the rest from the States. People don’t realize just how much haemophiliacs cost this country,’ he continued artlessly. ‘Anyway, our Government have decided in their wisdom that we must become self-sufficient in the near future, thus the need for more plasma. Apart from the cost, our haemophiliacs keep catching diseases like hepatitis from the American stuff, so…’

  I didn’t know whether to feel sick or angry, but he didn’t notice as he showed me how the plasma was packed, given batch numbers and stored ready for delivery to CPPL. Then, fatigued by his labours, he suggested the inevitable ‘cuppa’.

  I said I needed the gents’. Not true. I wanted to make notes of what he had been telling me before I forgot. He didn’t know it, but he’d given me an idea.

  The usual mutter of voices faded for a moment as I entered the tea-room. Holly wasn’t there.

  Then Pete said, ‘So you’ve been doing some real work this afternoon, then, Trefor?’ This had to be for my benefit.

  ‘I’ve been showing Tom the Plasma Lab, yes.’

  ‘Nice change from bum-polishing,’ observed Steve.

  Trefor turned to me as I sat down with a mug of tea.

  ‘They have to pretend they despise my postion—’

  ‘No pretence,’ said Steve.

  Trefor ignored him. ‘The truth is, if I were to win the pools and retire, I’d never live to enjoy it. I’d be killed in the undignified scramble for my seat.’

  ‘It’s not the position we want,’ said Pete. ‘It’s the money.’

  ‘An extra crust or two for the wife and kiddies,’ sighed Steve.

  Pete looked at him in amazement. ‘You can afford crusts?’

  ‘It’s all right for you two,’ put in Adrian. ‘At least you could afford to get married.’

  ‘I shouldn’t let it worry you,’ said Steve. ‘There’s nobody who’d have you.’

  ‘Well, I had to manage with a wife and two kids,’ piped David’s plaintive voice, and before I was promoted.’

  ‘I don’t know how you survived,’ said Pete, shaking his head. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to have been in his shoes, would you, Steve?’

  ‘I’d never have lived to tell the tale—’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘Oh, but we do!’ Pete again. ‘You keep telling us.’

  ‘Lay off, Pete,’ said Adrian. He then caught my eye. ‘And what are you grinning at?’ he snarled, ‘What’s so funny, eh?’

  I caught Trefor’s narrowed eyes on me as Pete said, ‘Why don’t you lay off, Adrian?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, getting up. ‘Trefor, d’you mind if I use the terminal in your office?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  The VDU hummed as I switched it on, the screen flickered and glowed, resolved into a message inviting me to ‘log-on’. The keys rattled musically as I fed in my password and settled gratefully into the union between man and machine.

  Pressed M for Menu and a long list of options slid up from the bottom of the screen.

  Selected ‘Display Donation Record’.

  Donation number?’ demanded the screen. I made one up and keyed it in.

  ‘This donation number does not exist,’ the screen patiently informed me. ‘Donation number?’

  I glanced around the room. The list would be in the Issue Office, and I wasn’t going there.

  My eye fell on a written list atop the pile of paper on Trefor’s desk. I slid off my seat and picked it up. Donation numbers, consecutive, like the Plasma Lab list.

  I keyed in the first and the information slid up the screen.

  Donor’s name… date bled… date labelled… Group… Hepatitis… other hieroglyphics… and yes! As Trefor had said, ‘Plasma Reduced.’

  I sat back and thought.

  How does the computer know that? Because of the little bar code label Trefor had shown me. Because it had been told by somebody.

  I pressed ‘Return’ for the next screen, more information. Issue Record: Date of issue… issued by… place of issue… date of return.

  But there was no point in returning this blood, the cells were of no use, and there was no plasma to harvest. Or so the computer said.

  I tried another number. The same.

  There was a step in the doorway and I looked round. Holly!

  Our eyes met and then hers slid away. ‘Do you know where Trefor is?’

  ‘Probably still in the tea-room.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She turned away.

  ‘Holly.’

  She turned back, her face impassive.

  ‘I’m sorry about this morning.’

  She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t all your fault.’

  ‘Some of it was, and I apologize.’

  She gave the ghost of a smile. ‘OK. Apology accepted.’

  ‘I still want to take you out tonight.’

  ‘T
he smile vanished. ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘Please, Holly.’

  ‘It would be better not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Her eyes glided past me to the window. ‘Oh, all right.’

  ‘Are you still going to pick me up?’

  She smiled again. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Eight-thirty, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Mm,’ I nodded.

  ‘See you then.’ She turned rather abruptly and left.

  I grinned vacantly at the screen for a moment — Tom, the big bad wolf.

  Sighed and absently tapped in another number. The same.

  I felt blind, having to accept information that the computer had been ‘told’ by someone else.

  There was another stir in the doorway. Trefor.

  He grunted and sat at his desk, shuffled the papers as I turned back to the VDU. The shuffling grew frenzied and he swore under his breath.

  My heart sank. ‘Trefor, is this what you’re looking for?’

  ‘What the hell are you doing with that?’ He jumped up and snatched the list from my hand. ‘Have you been going through my desk?’ He shouted.

  ‘I have not. I needed a donation number and that was just lying—’

  ‘I’ll thank you to leave my desk alone in future,’ he stormed.

  I stared at him in amazement. ‘Trefor. I’m sorry. I had no idea that those numbers were so important.’

  ‘They’re not. Not particularly.’ His tongue darted out and touched his lips. ‘I just don’t want my desk interfered with, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry—’

  ‘No. No! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted like that—’

  ‘I’d better leave you in peace.’ I started for the door.

  ‘No! I had no right to fly off the handle like that, it — it was uncalled for, please carry on with what you were doing.’

  ‘All right. I’d nearly finished anyway.’

  Since I was morally obliged to stay for a few minutes, I took down the last number I had been working with from the screen, together with the information and dates.

  Then I made my excuses and left, intending to go back to the hotel early and have a talk with Marcus.

  ‘Mr Jones!’ The hoarse gravelly voice reached from the other end of the corridor. Falkenham. He beckoned with his finger, then turned and walked back to his office.