Chapter 5

Monday passed uneventfully.

On Tuesday morning Mike had diarrhea, and felt a little under the weather. He didn’t feel like having an energetic day, so he bought a Guardian and a Times on his way over to Jill’s.

Jill met him at the door. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to your own devices for a few hours, Mike. After you left last night, Mum popped round and said that Adrian and David had been brought home from camp with a stomach upset, and asked me to come and look after them while she goes shopping, and goes round to see Gran.’

‘I’m not so clever myself this morning. Bit of diarrhea.’

‘The boys must be a lot worse than that for my mum to want me to see to them while she’s out for a bit!’

Jill didn’t reappear until the middle of the afternoon. She found Mike fast asleep, with his head on his arms on the paper on the kitchen table. She didn’t wake him; she started to make a pot of tea.

Mike woke with a start. ‘Hello love, when did you get back? How are the boys?’

‘Just this minute. The lads aren’t too good, I’m afraid. They’ve had to go into hospital. Diarrhea and vomiting, and this morning Adrian was shitting blood. They say half the lads in the camp have got it. And we had to wait ages for an ambulance. The ambulance man said they’re rushed off their feet at the moment. Proper little epidemic by the sound of it.’

‘Is June round at Auntie Alice’s?’

‘I imagine so. She went round there last night, and didn’t come home.’

‘I hope Auntie Alice isn’t ill.’

‘I don’t suppose she is. Apparently it’s mainly youngsters that’ve got it, though David said the staff at the camp were as badly hit as the boys.’

‘Do they know what it is?’

‘The ambulance man said he didn’t think that they did. But he didn’t hang around. His ambulance was half full, and he had a list to collect before he went back to the hospital.

‘There’s a pot of tea just ready. Do you feel up to a mug?’

‘Now don’t you go treating me like an invalid. I’m all right. Of course I want one.’

They exhausted the subject of the epidemic quite quickly. Although Jill was worried about her two brothers, there was nothing they could do, and they agreed that they should try to take their minds off it. They settled down and did all three crosswords in Mike’s papers one after another.

‘I hope the boys are all right.’

‘I expect so.’

‘Give us a kiss, love.’

When June came in at half past nine, they were fast asleep in each other’s arms, on the sofa in front of the gas fire. She put a fiver in the meter and relit the fire, and put the kettle on. The whistle of the kettle didn’t wake them, so she made tea in the cup just for herself. They didn’t wake in the hour or so she sat in the rocking chair reading, so she fetched a blanket down from Jill’s bed and put it over them before she turned off the fire and went to bed.

Jill and June were talking in the kitchen when Mike woke. He felt much better than he had the previous day, but when he stood up after putting his shoes on, his head reeled for a moment. Then he felt okay again. They heard him going upstairs to the bathroom.

‘Morning sleepy-head! How do you feel this morning?’

‘Better, thanks.’

‘Cup of tea when you come down!’

‘Thanks.’

‘By the sound of it, you and June have had the same bug. She had a bit of diarrhea at Auntie Alice’s, so she stopped there the other night rather than walk home. Then she was asleep on and off all yesterday afternoon.’

‘How do you feel now, June?’

‘Fine. A bit dizzy when I first got up, but okay now.’

‘Let’s hope that what the boys have got is just a slightly worse version of the same thing. Shall we go down and see them at visiting time this afternoon?’

‘They’re only allowed two visitors at a time.’

‘Two each. Us three and your mum.’

But at the hospital there was a cordon, and a sign:

IN THE PRESENT EMERGENCY, ALL VISITING IS CANCELLED. PLEASE CO-OPERATE. SERIOUS CASES AND EXPERIENCED VOLUNTEERS ONLY PAST THIS POINT.

There was quite a crowd outside. A few people were arguing with the policeman or the porter at the gate, but most were rather subdued, and conscientiously keeping out of the way of the ambulances, and the taxis that were apparently operating as ambulances.

They found Jill’s mother. She had already been to the counter by the other gate, where there was another sign:

PLEASE QUEUE HERE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT RELATIVES OR FRIENDS

The boys were not on the “critical” list.

‘There’s a danger list?’

‘They say that the disease isn’t thought to be dangerous, with treatment; but all visiting is cancelled because of the number of cases, and there are always critical cases in a hospital.’

‘Don’t they know what it is?’

‘No, they don’t. Come on, let’s get out of the way.’

They walked together down into town, Jill’s mother on her way to cook lunch for herself and her mother, Mike to buy stuff for dinner for four, the others for company. As they were passing the Britannia, Jill’s mother said,

‘Let’s pop in here for a cuppa. I’ve plenty of time. I’ll treat you all.’

Jenny and Cathie were sitting at a table by the counter. Although it was Wednesday lunchtime, there wasn’t a customer in the place.

‘Four teas love, please. You’re busy today!’

‘I think it’s the epidemic. Everyone’s staying at home, for fear of catching it. Or they don’t trust anything they’ve not cooked themselves. Are you sure you do?’

‘If I’m going to get it, I’ve probably got it already. My two sons went into hospital yesterday.’

‘Were they at the camp? My little brother was supposed to go, but he had a bit of a cold and couldn’t go, lucky devil.’

‘Yes, they were. How did you know?’

‘We’ve been listening to the local radio. There’ve been a lot of odd cases, here and there, but there’ve only been two big groups of cases: most of the boys and staff on that camp, and a whole lot of foreign labourers off the sewage project. Apart from them, it’s mainly children, but nothing much to connect one case with another. Hello, Mike.’

‘Hello, Cathie. Seems as though Pete’s escaped at just the right time, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. He’s in a foreign country where no-one will understand him if he needs help. And they say there’s several other places scattered around the country and Europe that’ve been hit just like Burnfield.’

‘They still don’t know what it is?’

‘They say not. Hello, here comes Tom Green.’

Jill’s mother excused herself, saying that Gran would be wondering where she was.

While Jenny served Tom, Mike introduced Cathie to Jill and June. He told the Js about how Cathie had asked him what was on Tony’s mind, and how they’d discussed the copper-watching idea. The epidemic totally overshadowed the whole issue. Jill had two brothers sick with it, and Cathie had been listening to the news every hour: they had a common obsession and were old friends in no time.

Tom couldn’t help overhearing.

‘I’ll drop you a paper in as soon as I get them.’

‘Thanks Tom.’

Mike left to do his shopping, and June slipped out a little while later and found him in the market.

‘That’s the Cathie who’s taken up with Pete, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You know, I didn’t think I really loved Pete any more, but now I’m as jealous as hell. But she seems a very nice person. I don’t know what to want.’

‘Your’re asking the wrong person. I’m glad you like Cathie; I think she’s great. And Pete’s my best friend, and you’re one of my best friends. What chance have I got to be impartial? For what it’s worth, I think the sooner you find yourself a really nice boyfriend, preferably one who fits in well with the rest of us, the better.’

‘Jill seems to think Tony has his eye on me. I like him, too, but somehow he just doesn’t seem to be right. I think he’d send me round the twist after a bit.’

‘Funny, that’s just how I feel about him, though I can’t put my finger on why. But I don’t get the impression you fancy him anyway.’

‘That’s the difficult bit for me. You see, I don’t think I ever fancied Pete, either. But I’m sure I loved him. I think I still do.’

‘I wish I was certain we all meant the same things when we use words like those. I’m pretty sure I know what you’re talking about, but I’m not sure I would if I didn’t know you and Pete so well.’

Shortly after June and Mike got to Mike’s flat, Tony arrived to help Mike prepare the meal. When the three of them had almost finished, and were beginning to wonder where Jill had got to, she came in dripping.

‘I hope no-one minds – I’ve invited Cathie along too. She’ll be here in a few minutes. She’s coming via her house to let her mum know where she is. Get the fire on, Mike, there’s a dear, while I get out of these wet things. Cathie’ll be soaked, too. It just suddenly started bucketing down.’

June helped her out of her wet things. She was soaked to the skin. They found some of Mike’s things and she came downstairs looking like a rag doll. Tony laughed; Jill made a face.

Mike said, ‘If you come round here much, you’ll see Jill looking like that quite often. She’s got quite a collection of my stuff round their place, so I’ve no problems.’

‘Cathie’s smaller still. She’ll look really funny!’

She was, and she did. Mike wrung out the two lots of wet clothes and hung them up over the bath.

‘They won’t be properly dry, but they’ll be a bit lighter to carry home, anyway.’

Cathie had brought the evening paper with her. She and Jill had waited for Tom to bring it, and it had been a bit late. She hadn’t been able to keep it dry, and Mike took it apart carefully and laid it out on the floorboards in front of the fire. Cathie and Jill perched as near the fire as they could. Everyone could see the headline, but Jill read the lead article out for them.

IF YOU’VE GOT IT, GET HELP

But if you have a minor complaint, PLEASE don’t bother the health services. Your local doctor’s surgery is CLOSED: he is helping at one of the emergency hospitals.

The disease has two forms, or two diseases have both struck widely at the same time. The mild form has diarrhea, sleepiness, and dizziness for about twenty-four hours. DO NOT TROUBLE THE HEALTH SERVICES. The serious form has severe diarrhea, possibly with blood, uncontrollable vomiting and possibly a blotchy red skin rash. Without treatment, several people have DIED from this: SEEK HELP AT ONCE. There is an emergency hospital in every school in the Burnfield area.

If you have any medical experience, please volunteer to assist at your local school.

Tony and June brought in the food, and they ate slowly in silence, digesting the news privately. None of them had ‘any medical experience’. Two of them had had the ‘mild form’ of the disease – or the other disease. How many cases were there, if every school had been converted into a hospital? Pity Cathie hadn’t brought the radio; but Jenny would want it at the café.

Maybe they’ve converted every school, rather than just a few, to make it easy to find an emergency hospital.

Tony finished his meal first, and picked up the front page, dry enough now. ‘Shall I read it out loud?’

Chorus of ‘mmm’s.

There was a list of towns affected. Figures were changing constantly, but at the time of going to press, about four percent of the population of Burnfield was sick with the serious form of the disease, and about half a percent nationwide, ‘but this figure is probably less up-to-date than the Burnfield figure.’ The differences of age of different reports from abroad made ‘comparison impossible’, but it was ‘evidently a major problem worldwide.’

Then Jill picked up a page with a leader article, which speculated about biological warfare, and questioned the veracity of reports from China of similar problems there. ‘Their reports did not begin until some time after ours: perhaps they were waiting to see the precise effects before pretending to suffer in the same way.’

‘I think that’s pretty unlikely. They couldn’t keep that kind of pretence up for very long, and unless they’re expecting pretty well a hundred percent fatalities, they’d have some pretty difficult explaining to do later. They’d have foreseen that, if it was a premeditated act of war. For that matter, why should one expect reports to begin simultaneously? It’s a funny epidemic that appears everywhere at the same time, and the press is always harping on about the Chinese tendency to secretiveness about internal problems.’

‘It is a funny epidemic that appears simultaneously all over the place. That’s one of the things that points to biological warfare. It’s hard to see how a disease can spread as quickly as this has.’

‘There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason about where it’s struck.’

‘That’s a thought. Pass us the atlas, Jill, and read us that list of towns again, Tony.’

‘You’re not going to deface the atlas, are you?’

‘I don’t mind having a bit of history recorded in it!’

Mike marked each town as he found it.

‘It’s got a pattern. I can’t understand why, but it forms three broad stripes. Two of them go through London.

‘And the other one?’

‘Hull to Liverpool approximately, with a bit of a curve. We’re just to one side of that.’

‘Let’s have a look.

‘No, you’re right, it looks too much like a pattern to be just your eye connecting up random dots. Perhaps it follows the major transport routes.’

‘I suppose that’s a pretty obvious way for an epidemic to spread.’

‘But it doesn’t seem to have spread at all. It seems to have appeared simultaneously along the whole path. That might be hard to tell within a small area like Britain, but over the whole world?’

‘But we don’t know accurately when it struck anywhere else... hello, there’s someone at the door.’

‘Sorry to bother you...’

‘Come in out of the rain and let’s get the door shut... What do you want?’

‘I’m a policeman. Not here on official business though. It’s just that I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with the waitress in the Britannia the other night. I should have reported it, and we’d probably be watching you all now, but I didn’t. I’m probably putting my job on the line, but it’s reached the point where I don’t care all that much.’

Mike’s mind reeled. He didn’t know what to do for a moment. Probably it’s true. It could be a very subtle ‘in’ to our group, but he knows about us anyway, and there’s nothing else to discover about us really.

‘We’re all here at the moment. Let me hang that wet mac up for you, and come and get warm by the fire – there’ll be a cuppa in a minute. What’s your name, anyway?’

‘Brian. Brian Westover. You’re Mike, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right. I won’t ask you how you know, or how you know my address!’

‘Not the most difficult piece of detective work!’

‘I think I’d rather let you tell everyone what you’re doing here... Everyone, this is Brian. Brian, this is Tony, Cathie, June, Jill, and I’m Mike.’

Jill put a chair next to the fire for Brian, and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Sugar, Brian? Milk? It’s only tea, I’m afraid.’

‘Milk but no sugar, ta, love. Tea’s very welcome, thanks. Perhaps I’d better wait till – she’s Jill, isn’t she? – Jill comes back, before I start my story.’

Cathie shot Mike a meaningful glance. ‘You were in the Britannia the other night, weren’t you, Brian? I’m a waitress there.’

‘Yes, I was. That’s really how I come to be here. Can I have a look at your paper? I’ve not had a chance to see what the Press is saying yet. None of you are ill, are you?’

‘Jill’s two brothers are in hospital. Mike and I have both had the mild form, we think.’

‘Haven’t you got a radio or a telly here?’

‘No. Mike’s an ascetic and the rest of us are just poor.’

General mirth.

‘I’d be poor too if I wasn’t an ascetic.’

‘Why do you ask about the telly?’

‘I want to know what’s happening on the epidemic front. In this kind of thing the paper is hopelessly slow and infrequent. This tells you damn all.’

He threw the paper down.

‘It tells you how to tell if you’ve got it, and where to go. Those are the really important things, surely?’

‘But not how it spreads, and how you can avoid getting it.’

‘Or even that no-one knows the answer to either of those questions, which happens to be the case.’

‘How do you know that, Brian?’

‘Superintendant Davies gave us a briefing this afternoon. They haven’t isolated the cause, but a lot of labs are working on it. They think it’s a virus, but they don’t know how it’s spread so far, so fast.’

Tony gave Mike a puzzled look, but Mike just smiled enigmatically.

‘If they don’t know anything about it, how can they treat it?’

‘There you have me. Thanks very much Jill.’

‘Help me fetch the others through, Mike love.’ Then, in the kitchen, under her breath, ‘Who the hell is he?’

‘He’ll tell you, in a minute.’

‘Well, I know that the epidemic has a horrible fascination for all of us, and that Jill has an especially charged interest in it; but it’s not what I came here for, and now that you’re all here I’ll introduce myself properly. I’m a detective constable in the Burnfield police force. Mike has obviously decided that I’m straight up, or that I’ll learn nothing by coming in here that I couldn’t learn easily enough anyway. I overheard a conversation between Mike and – Cathie? –

‘That’s right. I thought you were listening.’

‘ – the other night. It ought to have aroused my professional ear, but instead it aroused a sympathetic one, so I didn’t report it. I just hope I’m talking to the right people, that, at best, you’ll do some good with the information, and at worst, that it won’t rebound on me. I don’t know who else I could talk to. How Tony managed to stumble on the fact that the garage was out of use beats me; it was assumed that Joe Public would never notice. Without some pretty daring escapades, opening yourselves to some pretty drastic consequences without any very sound reason for doing so, I doubt you’d ever have found out just what is going on. I’m surprised you were astute enough to realize that it was anything significant, Tony.’

‘I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t think of any reasonable explanation, that’s all. All the unreasonable ones I could think of sounded so far-fetched, I didn’t really believe in them. I was mystified.’

‘Well, the real reason is pretty far-fetched. I’m very interested to know whether you’d thought of it. It’s an exercise, the first of a series. I don’t like the social and political implications of it a bit, and it wants exposing, but I don’t know how. I’d be risking my job and my future going to the media. At best I don’t think they’d touch it, and sooner or later someone would shop me.’

‘I’m touched that you trust us.’

‘You seem the best possible people to trust: I know the nature of your interest. If you lot are a set-up to trap me, then the thought police have reached a level of sophistication even I hadn’t imagined! You’ve already stumbled on things, so if you find out more for yourselves and spill the beans, with a bit of luck it doesn’t have to involve me.

‘The garage and half the cells have been converted into a shelter. It can be sealed completely, biologically, chemically and radiologically. Between exercises the garage and cells can still be used, albeit with a reduced capacity. About a fifth of the Burnfield force are incarcerated in there at the moment.

‘They don’t know if it’s an exercise or the Real Thing. They’re in communication with us via intercom, and we are feeding them a prepared story about what’s happening outside. We’ve been thoroughly briefed about the story, and we’ve got advisers on the spot to help us with awkward questions. A lot of the time there’s no-one at our end because “we’re too busy”. With this epidemic, we really are.

‘I was rather surprised that they didn’t call the whole exercise off when the scale of the epidemic became apparent, but Davies said that he’d been in touch with the MoD, who are organizing the exercises, and they said, “no, keep them in there, the labs say they want to know if they get any cases inside, it’ll give valuable information.”

‘Of course, we can’t ask them, because they don’t know about the epidemic – they think things are much worse! – and they haven’t volunteered anything; but they might just not want to add to our troubles. But I doubt if they’ve got real problems, or they’d surely ask point-blank, “if it’s an exercise, let us out.” Mind you, they’ve got first-class medics in there anyway.’

‘How come none of them realized it was just a false alarm when they were being gathered up in the first place?’

‘It was about three o’clock, last Friday morning. I was sitting in my car, watching a house – but I can’t tell you anything about that. Suddenly the radio comes to life:

“All personnel! Alpha Alert! Proceed at once to your Alpha location.”

‘We’d all been briefed about it; Alpha Alert meant war drill, or actual war. All our Alpha locations were the same: Burnfield Central Police Station. Those of us who arrived after the door was sealed were to take over running the station until the relief arrived. I was too late: I’m jolly glad it wasn’t the real thing.’

‘If it had been, would you still have had to go on running the station?’

‘Officially, yes. Unless you’ve got a private shelter, there’s nothing much else to do. The station’s as well protected as anywhere; it’s filtered air and distilled water that’s the real problem. Depending where you are and what weapons are used, you’ve got some chance of surviving, anyway.’

‘Why should the police get a shelter, when nobody else does?

‘Some other people do. But it would be impossibly expensive to provide adequate shelter for everyone. They just figure that it’ll be chaos afterwards, and they’ll need all the police they can save.’

‘And I suppose inadequate shelters for everybody would just make the police to population ratio even worse, while people were taking longer over dying.

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘But surely any shelter is inadequate, in the sense that the day comes eventually when you have to come out and face the world. None of the big weapons are going to leave the world fit to live in for the foreseeable future, are they?’

‘I don’t know much about it – probably no more than you lot do. Zaps aren’t supposed to have much effect outside the zones, though – apart from pollution from smoke and dust, depending what gets zapped. Obviously if someone zaps a nuclear power station or two things’ll be pretty messy.’

‘It’s another of those things that people like us should be finding out more about – but I suppose that’s not an immediate problem. Do the police in the shelter have any instruments to tell them about conditions outside? Are they in communication with anyone outside the station?’

‘I don’t know the answer to either question – we’ve not been told. They’re obviously not on the public telephone network, any more than they’re on the public electricity or water supply. But whether they’re in contact with other shelters, or Ministry workers simulating other shelters, I don’t know.’

‘That’s surely a giveaway for them that it’s just an exercise: if it were real, there’d be no reason to keep them incommunicado.’

‘I think there is: it’s a matter of morale. But I shouldn’t like to be the briefing officer who told them.’

‘That’s a neat virtue in their not knowing if it might be an exercise, when it’s actually real. The psychology of knowing that the reason you’re being held incommunicado may be so that your family can’t tell you they’re okay is much better than knowing that it’s so that you can’t share their agony. But there’s another thing exercising my mind: I can see how they expected the members of the force to keep it secret. But they’d have to tell their families, and I can’t see how they expected them to keep it secret.’

‘That’s not so difficult. You’re obviously not as au fait with police organization as Tony is. I bet he could tell you.’

‘Possibly, but go on, I’d only be guessing.’

‘For several years now, it’s been fairly normal for policemen and women to be called away on compulsory training exercises at no notice. The first the family knows is when a welfare office calls round to tell them they’ve gone, and ask if the family needs assistance while they’re away. There was a rumpus the first time it happened, but it seems that it’s been possible under the conditions of service for ages, and they give a big bonus afterwards. We’re under strict orders not to tell anyone about Exercise Alpha, not even family. The pre-briefing was quite brief. A lot of questions got cut off with, ‘you don’t need to know that.’ There’ll be a bit more information floating about when they come out. They’ll have had the full briefing, and a few weeks experience in the shelter. There’ll be no stopping them talking to their colleagues. That’s when I think it’ll be hard to keep it under wraps: civilian staff are bound to overhear something.’

‘What did they do about civilian staff during the ‘alert’?’

‘Didn’t tell them a thing. Don’t forget, this was at three in the morning. The mechanics were all transferred to the vehicle depot over a year ago; they’ll just assume that the building work is still going on. I don’t know what they’ll do when they have a daytime alert, though. They’ve got to have them, or if the real thing happens in the daytime, they’ll know it’s real.’

‘But that’s not as important as not knowing either way in an exercise.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘The Ministry of Defence is organizing this, you said?’

‘Yes. They’ve been interfering more and more directly in police affairs over the last few years.’

‘No, what I was thinking is that they must be taking the possibility of war pretty seriously.’

‘Either that, or they want the police to think that they do.’

‘I find it hard to imagine what they’d gain by that.’

‘That’s not so hard. It could be nothing more sinister than consolidating their own status. If war is a strong possibility, then the MoD is important. They could just be making sure of their jobs.’

‘And making a profit for their friends in the shelter trade.’

‘Well, you know as much as I do, just about. What are you – or we – going to do? I’m going to have to be going soon.’

‘I think we’ll need a little time to think about it...’

General nodding of heads.

‘... can we contact you if we need you? You can always find us here, or via Cathie at the Britannia.’

‘You could leave a message for me to contact you, at my parents’ in Raikeley. I share my flat with another cop, and he’d want to know who you are. Only friendly interest, but awkward, so my parents’ place is better. Get a bit of paper, I’ll give you the address.’

‘Before you go; you were saying you’d had a briefing about the epidemic. What did they say?’

‘It was mainly organizational: a general lowering of all other priorities, and how to help in organizing volunteer labour, and getting the sick to the hospitals. But he told us a few things that aren’t in the paper: at that stage, no-one had died under treatment in Burnfield, and not many anywhere. But no-one had really been cured, either. He thinks that the government will declare a state of emergency soon if things don’t improve. But I’d better be going, or Mark’ll wonder what’s happened to me.’

‘Well, thank you very much Brian. We’ll be seeing you again, I hope.

‘Don’t get up, Mike, I think I can find my way out! So long, everyone.’

‘See you.’

‘There’s a turn-up for the book! He’s a strange policeman, that’s for sure!’

‘I’m pretty sure he’s straight up though. It occurred to me that he could be an agent provocateur; but now we know what we’re looking for, I think we can check his story without any daring escapades. And anyway, if it isn’t true, there’s still the original observations to explain. They’ve scarcely shut the garage for our benefit.’

‘But what are we going to do?’

‘I suggest, for the moment, nothing. It’s got no immediate consequences of any significance, and it doesn’t radically change our world-picture. We ought to try to find some innocent way of checking it, just in case it’s a subtle red herring to keep us off a more significant trail, but I doubt that. The epidemic is the real issue at the moment.’

‘But there’s nothing we can do about that. It’s very frustrating not being able to do anything at all for the boys, but I’ve thought and thought about it, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do. Except worry.’

‘We’re all thinking about them, Jill.’

‘All we can do is keep checking that they’re not on the critical list. And what do we do if they are? Worry a bit more?’

‘But there might come a time when there is something we can do; so what we should be doing now is keeping as up to date as possible with what’s going on. Where can we get hold of a radio, or a telly?’

‘We could all go to Auntie Alice’s. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. In fact, she’d be glad to see us. I don’t think she’ll be much bothered that we’ve come to see her telly, not her. If we all went round without an ulterior motive, she’d be worried what it was! And it’s stopped raining.’

‘Come on then. And everybody try to think of Tony’s innocent way to check Brian’s story.’

‘It does feel bad, to be so suspicious of Brian.’

‘It doesn’t hurt him – I think he’d expect it. And it doesn’t feel nearly so bad, to be so suspicious of a policeman!’

Laughter.

Auntie Alice was very pleased to see them, and to be introduced to Cathie and Tony. She laughed at Jill and Cathie in Mike’s things. She showed off the new decorations, and gave them all tea and cakes.

She’s always got fresh cake, even when she’s not particularly expecting anyone. Half her diet must be cake when no-one comes round for a couple of days.

Every channel on the telly seemed to be totally obsessed with the epidemic: they didn’t have to change channel very often to keep to the subject. But extracting any solid information was like looking for needles in a haystack. In three hours more or less all they learnt was:

The number of sufferers was increasing all the time. Every town in the country was now affected to some extent. Several hundred people had now died despite care, mainly in the London area. The Government had declared a state of emergency, and all unnecessary traffic was prohibited: essential foodstuffs and medical supplies and very little else was to be permitted to travel. Most businesses were obliged to close. Following the observation that many dogs were also becoming sick, all stray animals were to be shot on sight and incinerated.

‘That’ll keep Brian busy!’

All pets were to be kept indoors, and handed over for destruction at the first signs of illness. No real progress had yet been made towards finding the cause, the means of propagation, prophylaxis, or a cure.

Little wiser, and much more worried, they made their various ways home.

‘I’ll pick my clothes up sometime tomorrow, if that’s okay, Mike. We’ll not be opening, I don’t suppose, so I’ve the whole day to kill.’

‘Of course, Cathie. See you tomorrow.’

No-one had had another thought about Brian’s story.

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On to Chapter 6