Read Online Crisis by Ken McClure - Free Book Online

countryside. If the train was on time they must be soon approaching Berwick and the Scottish border.
    As he got out on to the platform at Waverley Station in Edinburgh, Bannerman considered his options. The medical school were expecting him any time after nine so he still had some time to kill. He was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat in the station buffet. He walked up the hill, out of the station and up to Princes Street, where he admired the sight of Edinburgh Castle looming out of the morning mist before opting for breakfast at a large hotel. His third cup of coffee took him up to a time when he could hail a taxi and ask to be taken to the university.
    ‘Nice to meet you,’ said the white-haired man who stood up and introduced himself as George Stoddart, when Bannerman was shown into his office.
    Stoddart was a small man in his sixties with silver hair and a neatly clipped moustache. He was wearing a dark suit with a Bengal striped shirt and a university tie. The shirt seemed a bit too tight around his middle, thought Bannerman, as he took the out stretched hand and said, ‘How do you do Professor.’ He wondered if the slight coldness he detected in the man’s manner was real or imagined. If it was real it was not entirely unexpected, after all, he was an outsider being foisted on the department by the MRC. There had been no opposition from Munro because his people were scientists not medics, but Stoddart’s department was different. It was medical and it was not inconceivable that he might be seen as an interfering interloper from the south.
    ‘We’ve arranged an apartment for you in the old town,’ said Stoddart. ‘Would you like to be taken there right away or would you rather settle in here first?’
    ‘Here I think,’ said Bannerman.
    ‘Very well,’ said Stoddart. ‘I’ll have someone show you to your lab and then we can talk.’ He picked up the phone and requested that ‘Dr Napier’ come up.
    Bannerman was introduced to a woman in her mid-thirties. She was pleasant looking but her appearance was tempered by what he regarded as middle-class notions of respectability. Her clothes, hairstyle, shoes, all deserved the adjective, ‘sen sible’, and when she spoke she did so with just the genteel accent he expected her to have. The soul of discretion and reliability, he thought; there’s a woman like her in every university department. He noticed that she was wearing an engagement ring. That didn’t quite fit with his appraisal of her as a ‘bride of the university’.
    ‘Morag Napier,’ said the woman, holding out her hand with a smile.
    ‘Ian Bannerman.’
    Bannerman followed Morag Napier along a corri dor and down some stairs to where she opened a half-glazed door and ushered him inside. ‘I think you’ll find everything you need here,’ she said. ‘If not, I’m only next door. You only have to ask.’
    Thanks,’ said Bannerman, looking about him with a heavy heart. The building was old. It was part of the original medical school at the university and consequently high ceilings and tiling were much in evidence. The cold, grey light coming in from a north facing window did nothing to lighten the atmosphere.
    A modern microscope stood on a turn-of-the- century lab bench, and a calendar from a laboratory supply company decorated the wall above it. There was a blackboard on one of the other walls with a duster and a cardboard box containing an assortment of coloured, mainly broken, chalk sticks.
    There were some dusty pathological specimen jars arranged along a wooden shelf with labels that were peeling and practically indecipherable with age. Bannerman looked closely and saw that one patient’s liver had achieved immortality, courtesy of formaldehyde fixative. Diamonds ain’t the only things that are forever my son, he thought.
    ‘I hope everything’s all right,’ said Morag.
    ‘Everything’s fine,’ replied Bannerman, with his back to her.
    ‘ I’ll leave you for a bit, then,