Wildcard by Ken McClure Read Free Book Online

called Medic Outreach. Both stated that, as far as they could ascertain, Ndanga was free of haemorrhagic fever and had been for some time. He faxed back his thanks.
    Steven switched out the lights and rested his head on the chair back for a moment to look up at the sky. It was a clear night and he could see the stars – that was why he liked sitting in this chair. He reflected that finding out what he wanted to know had all been surprisingly easy. No one had reported that they didn’t know or that they weren’t sure. Everyone had said that there was no haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga. Barclay’s misfortune in contracting the disease had just been one of these things – whatever that meant, he mused; it tended to be a generally accepted explanation anywhere outside academia. Just one of these things … just one of those ‘crazy’ things, as the song said, or one of those ‘unexplained’ things that spawned late-night television programmes that invariably never came to any conclusions. To the list he added one of those ‘foolish’ things, when he realised with a wry smile that this was the title of the current Getz track. But whatever the reason for Barclay’s bad luck, he felt confident that he could tell Macmillan in the morning that there was no good reason for the foreign secretary’s visit not to go ahead. With a bit of luck, he himself should be able to catch an afternoon flight up to Scotland and be in Dumfriesshire with his daughter by early evening.
    Steven’s five-year-old daughter, Jenny, lived with his sister-in-law, Sue, and her solicitor husband, Richard, in the Dumfriesshire village of Glenvane where she was being brought up with their own children, Mary, aged eight, and Robin, six. This had been the case since Steven’s wife, Lisa – Sue’s sister – had died of a brain tumour some two years ago. It had become his practice to visit Scotland every second or third week and stay the weekend, so that Jenny would not forget who her real father was and he could enjoy watching her grow. Despite her tender years, there was a lot about Jenny that reminded him of Lisa and he took pleasure from that – especially the look in her eyes when she thought that he might be keeping something from her. That was Lisa to a tee and he just melted inside when she did it.
    To say that Steven had taken Lisa’s death badly would be a gross understatement. Although there had been seven months to prepare for the inevitable after the initial diagnosis, her death had hit him hard, and after the funeral he had given up on just about everything. He hadn’t worked at all for over nine months afterwards, preferring instead to seek solace in booze and trying desperately to live in the past by shutting out the present and ignoring the very possibility of a future. But, like most people going through the hell of bereavement, he survived and came out the other side – perhaps not better for the experience, but knowing a great deal more about himself than he had before. He could now look back on his painfully short time with Lisa – a little over four years in all – with great fondness. He still missed her but it was no longer that awful knife-in-the-guts feeling.
    The situation with Jenny was not ideal but his job was such that it ruled out arrangements involving day help or nanny care. He had toyed with the idea of finding a more ordinary job so that he would be home every night and could therefore have Jenny living with him, but, if he was absolutely honest with himself, it hadn’t gone much further than that and it wouldn’t. It might be selfish – in fact, it almost certainly was, he admitted – but he liked working for Sci-Med too much to give it up. Any feelings of guilt he might harbour were comfortably offset by the fact that Jenny seemed very happy living with Sue and Richard and their kids, and they saw and treated her as one of their own.
    The Getz track changed to something soulful and almost subconsciously he