Chapter 1

‘The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’

(Hamlet Act 2)

Act 1: A Surprising Connection

Scene 1: Party Pooper

“Welcome to Ultima Thule,” were Paul’s first words when I stepped through the door of the laboratory twelve weeks before. Not that the building was anywhere near the end of the known world; in fact, it was part of a Science Park, close to Cambridge, surrounded by trees and set in landscaped gardens. It was the nature of our work that placed us beyond normal limits.

We were part of a global pharmaceuticals company that operated major research laboratories. From time to time, the exterior of one of these labs will appear on the evening news when they have made a breakthrough to improve the lot of suffering humanity. They are well, even generously funded, spending their days on research right at the frontiers of science. Our little lab is not so well funded but that is hardly surprising since we step beyond the boundaries.

There is not a test tube or Bunsen burner in the building, and we wear ordinary clothing. Our specialty is looking at published work and trying to form connections. It is rather like a dot-to-dot puzzle but with no numbers adjacent to the dots. We use AI, of course, to assess the possibilities, but it requires the human ability to cross boundaries to find a wholly new answer to a problem. Secrecy is important so I can explain no further.

The work we do is exciting but can be frustrating. Most of our projects go nowhere, either being closed down or simply petering out when insurmountable obstacles are encountered. Even when an idea shows promise, it is taken from us and developed by one of the main labs. The money men do at least recognize that the genius of the original team should be harnessed. This afternoon we were saying farewell to a couple of our colleagues from ‘K’ team, who are moving across town to build a much larger team in one of the cutting-edge facilities. They have succeeded in pushing the frontier just a little further forward; perhaps five or ten years from now they will be giving television interviews as another deadly disease is tamed by human ingenuity.

Friday afternoon farewell parties were not uncommon: people who had left earlier to work in the mainstream would remember a colleague when they were expanding a team and would visit us to entice them with comparative riches. This was only the second such party since I had joined the lab and the first that I had attended. I would not have come to this one if I had not been in Paul’s office when his PA reminded him of the affair. I was back on crutches, and, at the end of a long week, I really wanted to go home and relax.

That would be impossible this weekend, in any event since I was scheduled for forty-eight hours of intensive physiotherapy. The car had been coming to my cottage, but I called to ask the driver to collect my bag and then pick me up at work. In the meantime, I hung on my crutches like a vulture, trying to look pleased to be there. It was difficult; not only would Staff Sergeant Grant push me beyond my limit, but my mother would also be there nagging me to recover more quickly so I would be fit for the next round of surgery.

Hector Grant’s declared ambition was to get me fit for the Paralympic Games, while mother was equally determined that I should not qualify. Not that mother had any official standing; she is a fine surgeon in her own right, but it is my stepfather who has been putting me back together since I was torn apart by several bullets in Afghanistan.

“I’ll divorce the old bugger if he doesn’t put you right,” she promised at my bedside when I was brought back to hospital in England. I do not know what strings she pulled to get stepdad put in charge, but I do know that she rates him the best orthopedic surgeon in Britain if not the world. He and I have different surnames which probably makes it all right for him to stick his scalpel in me.

At the farewell party, Paul stayed beside me at first, but he was soon called away to chat to the departing scientists. He had been the external examiner on my doctoral thesis, and we had remained friends. He tried very hard, as did others, to dissuade me from joining the army and he pressed me to take my present job. I argued that I was not properly fit and would be more of a liability than an asset, but he had a role for me, he insisted.

He has only been the director of the unit for eight months. Although small compared to the proper research labs, our budget must be justified. Given the nature of our work it is difficult to conceive of accounting procedures that could be applied by an administrator. The previous director had been suspected of covering up research that was obviously of no value, letting it continue long after it was seen to be worthless. Paul was appointed to get to grips with waste. He argued that unless you were closely involved in the research you could not judge the likely outcome.

Enter Mark Ferguson, crippled warrior, employed out of pity while he was recovering from his wounds. To spread the burden of having him around, he would move from research team to research team, doing what little he could to help. The other employees knew that I had a doctorate in biochemistry, but they believed that I was, at best, out of date and, probably, rendered imbecilic by the bullets that had wrecked my left shoulder and right thigh. Or, more likely, they considered that I was utterly stupid to join the army in the first place.

In fact, I had kept abreast of my subject during off duty hours in Camp Bastion and my brain was functioning as well as it ever had. Not to mince words: Paul was using me as a spy to help him judge the most promising lines the lab was pursuing. I would have felt worse about the situation if the other scientists had not been so damned patronizing. I needed crutches but I did not have a white stick, nor were my ears clogged; you would be amazed how rude people can be in their audible remarks in the presence of the disabled. Do they think I chose to be in this state?

Musing on what I had seen and heard in my twelve weeks in the lab, I was finding it difficult to maintain my happy demeanor. I was wishing the car would arrive soon, when there was a stir in the little clump of men surrounding Molly Paterson, the laboratory’s acknowledged queen. She dropped out of a doctoral degree to lead a team in the lab, the youngest person ever to do so. Most of our scientists remain relatively unknown until they make their big breakthrough, but Molly was already being touted for stardom in head office, if all we heard was true.

She is clearly very clever and there is no question that she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She expects to be admired and has developed a repertoire of cutting remarks to keep men at arm’s length. Having witnessed her stripping the hide of some luckless male who asked her to go with him to dinner, I quickly decided to leave her alone. I was hanging on my crutches all on my own when she approached me with a seductive smile. The next few moments were going to be tricky.

The reason I was in Paul’s office at the start of the party was that he was proposing to place me next in Molly’s team. He required team leaders to provide formal reports of progress but, in a lab with only forty scientists, word got around when problems were slowing progress. There were whispers that Molly’s project had stalled.

“Hi, you must be Mark, our good deed for the day.” Her voice was low and sultry, as attractive as the rest of her.

“You must be glad to have me, since it is better to give than to receive.”

I smiled at her with genuine pleasure. Not only is she easy to look at, but her venom-laden style of conversation reminded me of parade ground exchanges with non-commissioned officers. Her laugh, on the other hand, sounded just a little forced.

“I hear you were hurt by some little men in long, colorful gowns so I just had to meet you. I’ve always wanted to see a real hero.”

“You’ll have to wait a little longer, I’m afraid. I’m a sort of de-natured hero. They inject the essence of my story into young soldiers to build up antibodies to the kind of stupidity I showed.”

“I’m not surprised that you’re bitter, Mark.”

“I think you must be detecting the reflection of your own bitterness, Ms ... I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.”

“What?” Her voice had risen an octave and was loud enough to reach beyond the circle of her admirers who had been standing glaring at me since she left them. “Why would I be bitter?” The voice was still shrill but quiet enough so only I could hear her. “And my name’s Paterson, Molly to my friends; you can call me Ms. Paterson.”

“I have no idea why you are bitter, Ms. Paterson. I’m told that you have a first-rate brain and you’re not unpleasant to look at, but there must be something that drives you to humiliate every man who comes within your orbit.”

She stood for some moments while the ripples from our altercation spread throughout the room. I had taken no pains to lower my voice, and the hush after her cry meant that the whole assembly heard me. I glimpsed Paul detaching himself and making his way towards us; I was watching Molly, still smiling pleasantly, while she gazed unfocused over my shoulder, her face flushed. Just before she turned away, I was astonished to see tears forming in her eyes. I felt like a heel: just because she uses sarcasm like a sergeant-major does not mean that she has the same thick skin.

“Right gang!” she exclaimed, her voice back to its harmonic norm. “I’ll powder my nose and then we’ll leave the mausoleum and head for the pub.”

As she headed for the door, she passed the receptionist who had spotted me, still hanging on my crutches like a vulture over the corpse of the party.

“Your car’s here, Dr Ferguson,” she smiled.

The canteen opens off reception across the foyer from the toilets, so I followed Molly out of the room. Pat, the receptionist, has her own party at her desk with her special friends. That way she can continue to guard the door and answer the phones while she joins the fun. I noted that Molly looks almost as good from the back as she does face to face. Paul intercepted me as I reached the foyer.

“Is it going to be bad, Mark?”

“Pretty bad,” I sighed. “They can’t put me under the knife again until the left leg is fully recovered. I may not make it back until Tuesday, Paul.”

Jenny came in then, saying ‘Hi Mark’ and giving me a kiss on the cheek. She looked very fetching in her lieutenant’s uniform.

“Aren’t you supposed to salute him, corporal, and call him major?” Paul laughed.

“He’s not that kind of officer, are you sweetheart?”

I was surprised that Jen had come to fetch me, and that she was in dress uniform. She had done it before, but this was the first time since I left the wheelchair behind.

She held the street door open for me so I could climb into the back seat of the staff car with its distinctive army number plates. As I exited the lab, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye in the direction of the toilets. It was only later that I learned that Molly had heard the interchange before I mounted into the tumbril. After we got better acquainted, she told me that she spent the rest of the evening thinking about me: I did not give her a thought after the car pulled away.

Jen became my nurse when I was wounded, returning with me on the flight back to England. There were other nurses as well, of course, but over the first few months I developed a close bond with Jen. As a nurse she was more than competent but as a friend she saved my sanity. I meant it when I told Molly that I was not bitter, but I had been, and I might still be if it had not been for Jen.

“I’m only going to be sorry for you if you stop being so bloody sorry for yourself,” she told me, early in our friendship, when I had been whining even more than usual. That became my mantra, and it has kept me together during the series of operations over the last four years. Now there were only a couple left to restore me to something very close to what I had been before I met the little men in the colorful robes, as Molly had described them.

I did not pay much attention to their mode of dress nor, as it transpired, did I take sufficient notice of the machine pistols in their hands. Three bullets raked my body when I exposed myself briefly. The first shattered my left shoulder, spinning me to catch the second on my Kevlar body armor about where my appendix was situated; the third shattered my right femur. It was the last bullet the Taliban soldier ever fired. I shared the helicopter to the dressing station with the man I had tried to rescue without taking the elementary precaution of first eliminating the enemy. As I told Molly, they are now giving lectures to young soldiers on where I went wrong.

The driver, a corporal from the carpool, was holding the door open for me. He had a rather strange expression, and his black face was shiny.

“Afternoon Corporal Curtis,” I mumbled, reading the nametag on his uniform blouse. He gave me an exuberant salute while he continued to hold the door with his other hand.

His attitude was a little strange. The average Tommy treats all officers with thinly disguised contempt when they are out of uniform – in mufti, as the jargon calls it. Even the crutches would be dismissed as the result of a drunken fall into a ditch leaving the Officers’ Mess. It was not until I got into the car and saw my dress uniform hanging from the hand grip above the opposite door, that I understood. The overhead light picked out the major’s tabs on my shoulders and high-lighted the row of medals attached to the Barathea.

“Most of them are bullshit, Corporal,” I softly told him as I handed over my crutches.

“But not in this case,” Jen added, leaning in when the young soldier went to the boot.

When we were underway, I jerked my thumb at the clothing swinging beside me.

“This is it, I assume.”

“We both knew it would happen, Mark. It’s the best possible news in some ways since it means that you’re well enough to do without me. We talked about this day - we’re going to get drunk on expensive champagne, remember.”

I was not the first damaged goods Jen had brought back from a battlefield. Tonight, at a formal dinner in the Mess, she will be Dined Out, and tomorrow or the next day, she will fly to a dressing station close to the greatest danger. She will do the same things as the other nurses until a shattered being more dead than alive is brought in. From the moment I was carried unconscious into her orbit, Jen took over the management of my future. There were, of course, a whole army of specialists who entered the picture briefly to perform some miracle that was their everyday job, but when they left to heal other damaged bodies, Jen was still there, the one constant factor in a shifting world.

When I was stabilized and sent home, Jen was beside my stretcher throughout the flight; she it was who settled me in my new hospital. She was the last face I saw before I was put under and the first when I woke from the operation. Her care went far beyond the physical: I had more than a few moments in utter despair; Jen was there to listen, to explain or to bully. Whether I needed a sticking plaster on a shaving cut or the determination to face what was in front of me, Jen was right there doing what was necessary.

There was no time limit on her services but we both knew that a moment would come when her continuing presence at my bedside was a waste of her talents. She had helped four others before I was brought into her care, and I recognized that it was the right moment for her to bring another basket case back from the Twilight Zone. We should have been swapping insults or telling bad jokes but neither of us was in the mood. That behavior belonged in the past when it was often needed to cover the bleak despair.

When we meet sometime years from now, we will reminisce, but it was all too raw at present. We sat thigh to thigh, my right hand entwined with the fingers of her left. There did not seem to be a lot to say; the Mess President might ask me to say a few words after dinner. Jen would understand that it was necessary for me to heap praise on her in that eventuality, but she would be appalled if I got gushy and sentimental in private.

“Say something, Mark. What are you thinking?”

“I think I might have put my foot in it at work.”

There was a certain amount of truth in that statement, but my main purpose was to reassure my companion that I really was capable of getting on with my life without her. She had played an important part in getting me the job and would be pleased that I had become sufficiently involved to bring problems out of the office.

“I gave Paul my verbal report today on ‘O’ team and he told me my next assignment. I’ll write up my notes this coming week and then I join a new team a week on Monday. The problem is that I think I’ve offended my new boss.”

“That’s not like you. You usually take such care to put people at ease.”

So, I admitted that I had formed an opinion of my new boss before I had spoken to her and that I had based my conversation with her on an assumption that I now thought was wrong.

“Scientists come in all shapes and sizes, as I’ve told you before, and this particular young woman is shaped like a goddess.”

“I think I saw her,” Jenn interrupted. “Red hair in a French pleat, well-cut but rather severe trouser suit?”

“That certainly sounds like Molly. How do you know her?”

“She came out of the party just ahead of you and crossed to the toilets. With my interest in women, that could have been enough, but I might not have paid attention if she hadn’t stopped at the toilet door when you came out with Paul. She listened to everything we said.”

“I wonder what she made of Paul’s daft joke about you being a corporal.”

He has a love for old movies almost amounting to mania. In some black and white B-movie there is a scene where a corporal driver, neat in her uniform, greets a newly arrived major with a smart salute. As soon as they are out of the public gaze they embrace, calling each other darling. Paul struggled to understand the relationship I have with Jen, and he used this reference to try to force us to explain. He simply could not believe that a man and woman could be so close without developing romantic feelings.

I discovered that your senses operate after a fashion even when you appear to be deeply unconscious. Through the mists of pain and the clouds of morphine pumped into my carcass, I knew that the people standing beside my bed did not expect me to live. The one exception was Jenny; she never uttered a negative opinion in my hearing. I recall that I had no particular feelings about that; I was neither glad nor sorry, but simply resigned. I did hope that I could have a word with dad before I went.