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scribbler. “Seventeen percent.”
    “Hell’s bells,” Hamish said. “That’s worse than pneumonia or meningitis. Must be a high-grade pathogen.”
    Zol turned to Natasha. “What about the culture of Nick’s rash? Any staph aureus there?”
    Natasha shook her head, her mouth sagging in disappointment. “Just the normal bacteria you’d find on anybody’s skin.”
    Hamish squinted in obvious puzzlement. “What’s that about?”
    Natasha explained their theory, now debunked, about staphylococcus aureus exotoxin making its way into Camelot’s meals from the infected-looking rash on the chef’s arm.
    “What else have you got, Natasha?” Zol asked.
    “We took twelve samples from the kitchen on Tuesday,” she said. “Drains, surfaces, food. And at the same time, we collected seven stool specimens from the patients with active diarrhea.”
    “And?” Hamish said.
    “No bacterial or viral pathogens in anything. Not even under the electron microscope.”
    “What about parasites?” Hamish asked.
    Natasha shook her head. “Routine staining for cryptosporidium was negative in the hospital’s lab. A parasite specialist next door at the university looked at the samples. Nothing.”
    “No amoeba, no giardia, no cyclospora cayetanensis?” Hamish said.
    Natasha dipped her eyes. “I’m afraid not.”
    “What about C diff?” Hamish asked. “You
must
have looked for
that
.”
    “All negative,” Natasha told him.
    “You sure? What test method did they use?” Hamish asked. “Re-current diarrhea among the elderly is C diff until proven otherwise.”
    Hamish was talking about clostridium difficile, C diff for short, a bacterium that lurked silently in the intestines. It caused explosive diarrhea when awakened from its slumber by antibiotics taken for unrelated infections. C diff epidemics raced through hospital wards and nursing homes, where it was particularly hard on the elderly.
    Natasha looked at Zol as if to say,
Why am I taking the heat?
    “It’s your university hospital’s diagnostic lab, Hamish,” Zol said. “We have to trust them to use the best test available.”
    Hamish shrugged then raised his professorial finger. “Mind you, the smell of C diff is very distinctive. You couldn’t have missed it, Zol, when you were collecting your samples.”
    Zol hoped Hamish was right, but he got a sinking feeling at the memory of the nauseating odours on the Mountain Wing. Had he been so overwhelmed by the stench that he’d missed the telltale horse-manure smell of C diff?
    “Moving on,” Zol said, “any ideas about the vector of transmission? I know we have damn little to work with.” They’d never bring this outbreak to a halt unless they could find where the responsible microbe was entering the Lodge’s food chain.
    “I keep thinking about those hard, stale doughnuts at Camelot,” Hamish said. “Restaurants waste a lot of food. And I mean a lot. I bussed tables for a couple of summers at university. It’s amazing what gets thrown out. Not just scraps. Entire meals untouched.”
    “Yeah,” Zol said, thinking back to his days as a junior chef when he’d thrown out bins full of perfectly good food. “No one goes to a restaurant to eat leftovers.”
    “You started out by asking about the soup,” Hamish said. “Is there a problem with it?”
    “Hard to say.” Zol looked to Natasha for confirmation. “We did wonder about the freshness of its ingredients and the fact that it never seems to get heated to a roaring boil.”
    “Homemade soup can contain almost any old scraps,” Hamish said. He sipped his latte and held Zol’s gaze, his eyebrows raised. “Did you look up freegans on the Internet, like I told you?”
    “Sorry. Never thought of it again, till this second.”
    “Well, just think about,” Hamish said. “Food is going to waste at the back of restaurants all over the city, we know that. Dumpsters are full of perfectly good but slightly wilted produce, day-old baked goods, and