up as car mechanics or estate agents. I could see all that ahead of me, and I couldn’t face it. I wanted to do something that meant something. And then…’
‘Go on,’ she said softly.
‘And then my dad died. Just upped and died. We found him in the bedroom one morning, slumped against the wall. He was wearing his shirt and his boxers and he had one sock off and one still in his hand. He looked… he looked like someone had said something to him that he couldn’t quite hear, and he was trying to work out what it was. One of the arteries in his chest had just given way. Aortic aneurysm, it’s called. I’ve done all the lectures, and I’ve seen photos in textbooks, and I’ve conducted autopsies of people who’ve died that way, but for me an aortic aneurysm will always be my dad, sitting there, one bare foot, and frowning.’
His face was wet. Tears were slipping from his eyes and spreading out across his cheeks leaving coldness behind. He hadn’t even realised he was crying. The grief was something separate from him that his body could get on with while he was talking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said.
‘And that’s why I became a doctor.’
‘So you could save people like your father?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So I could stop the same thing happening to me.’
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then: ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Tapanuli fever.’
‘About what?’
‘Tapanuli fever. This thing I’ve got.’
For a moment the flagstones seemed to tilt under Owen’s backside. He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Then he remembered. Tapanuli fever. He’d told her she’d been infected with a tropical disease and she was in an isolation ward.
‘Oh, yeah, Tapanuli fever. Used to be known as the Black Formosa Corruption, back in Victorian days. Endemic to a few small regions of… er… South America. Argentina. I’m guessing that someone in Cardiff’s just got back from doin’ missionary work out there or something.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
Not surprising, considering he’d made it up. ‘It’s very rare. Like Ebola. Nobody’d heard of that until there was a sudden spate of deaths.’
‘And is that what’s going to happen to me?’ She was trying to be offhand, but he could hear the catch in her voice. ‘What’s the mortality rate? Isn’t that what you call it – “mortality rate”?’
Almost involuntarily, his right hand reached out as if to take hers and squeeze it reassuringly, but all it encountered was smooth, cold glass. After a moment there was a small thud as something hit the glass on the other side. Her hand, seeking his.
‘I won’t let you die,’ he said.
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘We just don’t know. In the jungle—’
Did they have jungle in South America? Or was it pampas? What the hell was pampas, anyway?
‘—In the jungle, half the people who catch it die. But we’ve got you under observation, and we can treat it with antibiotics and stuff. I won’t let you die.’
‘You’ve got me isolated. It must be very contagious.’
‘We have to take precautions.’
‘You haven’t even given me any antibiotics. You’ve just left me here, waiting.’
‘The tests. We’re looking at the results of the tests. Then we can treat the disease.’
Perhaps, he wondered, he could give her an injection. Just distilled water, but he could tell her it was an antibiotic. It might help her cope.
‘I wish I could see my family,’ Marianne said wistfully. ‘They could just stand the other side of the glass, couldn’t they?’
Owen knew that he shouldn’t be talking to her this way, but he couldn’t help himself. Jack would have told him to just leave her alone – do whatever tests were necessary and not engage in conversation – but he couldn’t do that. Unlike most of the people and the things that had ended up in the cells, she didn’t know what was happening to her. She needed reassurance.
She needed a friend.
‘They’ve been notified,’ Owen told her, ‘but they’ve got to stay away. We’re paid to take risks, here. They’re not.’
‘Could I write them a letter?’
He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath the thin layer of chirpiness she put on, there was a deep chasm of vulnerability and fear. And he wasn’t sure whether he was making things worse or better. ‘Too risky. We’d have to spray the letter with antibiotics and stuff, to kill any bacteria, and the words’d just smudge and run off. It wouldn’t look pretty.’
‘Neither will I, if