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‘And you’re her parent. She reckons that’s a conflict of interest for you. You said it yourself the other day.’ Thea decided not to mention that Ava had said that Lucas would probably go ballistic if she told him.
‘Right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Actually, that’s a pretty mature choice for her to have made.’
‘I thought so.’ Thea decided to change the subject while Lucas still seemed relatively happy with the situation. ‘So how does that affect our thinking on the spread of the infection?’
He strode over to the white-board on the wall and started drawing circles. ‘All right, so what do we know? There’s Safiyah, and she’s in contact with her boyfriend.’ He frowned. ‘Not too much contact, one hopes. Her mother’s not going to like that one bit.’
He turned suddenly, weighing the marker pen in his hand. ‘I don’t suppose Ava happened to mention…’
‘Whether she’s got a boyfriend too? No, she didn’t.’
‘Couldn’t you have asked? Woman to woman?’
‘If she’d told me, woman to woman, that would imply I’m not supposed to tell anyone else.’
‘Does it?’ He gave her his most charming smile and Thea resisted it. ‘You’d tell me if you’d discussed it, though?’
‘What, so you could try to get me to tell you what we’d said?’
‘Well, we both know that wouldn’t work.’
No one even talked about Bangladesh, let alone joked about it. Thea drew in a startled breath and then found herself laughing. If Lucas had treated this like a dirty little secret, it would have compounded all her fears. Talking about it, laughing about it even, made it all shrink back into perspective.
‘Yeah. Keep that in mind, eh?’
Lucas shrugged and returned to the white-board, drawing a few more circles. ‘Okay, so we know that Derek Thompson’s not our index case. What if Safiyah is? What if the infection passed to the boyfriend and then on to Derek?’ He stood back and shook his head. ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Derek’s been ill for a while now. Safiyah would have been ill sooner.’
‘Maybe he
r body fought the infection off for a while. Each case of TB develops at a different rate.’
‘Yeah, sure. But she’d have had to be infectious for months. I don’t see that much of her, Ava usually takes her over to my parents’ for tea, but I think I’d have noticed if she had active pulmonary TB for the last six months.’
Thea nodded. ‘True. Although if you’re keeping a strict barrier between home and work, you probably shouldn’t mention that…’ A marker pen whizzed past her ear. ‘Missed.’
‘I meant to. Moving on…’
‘Okay, moving on, it’s the other way around. Derek passed the infection to the boyfriend who passed it on to Safiyah.’
‘Maybe.’ Lucas started to pace restlessly. ‘Now there’s something else I don’t understand. In order to pass the infection on to Safiyah, he’d have to have active pulmonary TB. And yet if he’s not been tested then he’s not in any of the contact groups. And despite us briefing all the teachers on the symptoms to look out for, none of them have noticed. Does that sound very likely to you?’
‘No.’ Thea rested her chin on her hand. The problem seemed insoluble.
‘We need to know more, and we need to know quickly. There are a lot of kids at risk in those two schools.’ He threw himself into his chair, rubbing his hand across his face. ‘You do know this is killing me, don’t you?’
* * *
It was a tough admission to make. Ava used to tell him everything, and now it seemed that he was the last to know. Even her friends thought that Thea was a more likely confidante than he was. He couldn’t argue with the logic of that, but the reality of it was eating at him.
From the look on her face, Thea knew she was treading on eggshells. ‘You’re being very reasonable about it.’
He gave a snort of wry laughter. ‘Yeah, well, looks can be deceptive.’
‘It’s a lot easier to discuss these things with someone you don’t know so well. I wouldn’t have talked about my friend’s boyfriends to my dad.’
