Chapter 8: See Chapter 1 disclaimer
Mark Mylow had hoped the days between Christmas and New Years would be quiet from a plumbing point of view, but it was not to be so. There were no calls for electrical work, so Mike Pruddy was able to enjoy some much-needed time off. M and M Home Services had been quite busy covering Portwenn and the surrounding towns since Bob Jackson had retired, and there had never really been a regular electrician. The electricals in the older homes were a bit dodgy to begin with, and people often tried to fend for themselves, attempting fixes or to install new outlets, with potential disaster at every turn. Mike had been busy constantly.
One of the first calls Mark got shortly after Boxing Day was to the Portwenn Police Station. Janice had complained to Joe that the smell of the water in the toilet seemed off, although she really couldn't describe what she meant.
Mark knocked on the door and Joe let him in. "Sergeant Mylow, I mean, Mark, oh my! Thanks for coming out so quickly. Janice has been sick and spending a lot of time in the toilet and is complaining about some smell. I haven't really been able to pick it up, but I'm not sure how good the old smeller is since I got kicked in the head."
Great, Mark thought. Something to look forward to, catching whatever it is that Janice had. And he didn't appreciate the slip of Joe referring to him in police terms. However, Mark wanted to be cheerful. "Cheers, Joe. Hey, nice job playing Santa the other night. Although, you know, maybe with my size, well, it's something I could have done this year, but then, I'm hoping to slim down a bit, so, yeah, um, you just plan to keep playing Santa."
Joe didn't quite follow all that, but thanked Mark for the compliment, nonetheless. "Do you think so? Thanks. Although I imagine Leonard Maitland will just pick up next year where he left off," Joe finished, somewhat crestfallen. Still, Mark had echoed what Bert had told him on Christmas Eve, so Joe figured he must not have been half bad at playing Santa.
Mark asked, "So, Joe, about Janice being sick. Ah, anything, you know, catching?"
Joe replied, "Well, like the doc, I'm not at liberty to discuss patients. But seeing as you're here to work in our toilet, I imagine I can say confidently that, uh, we don't know. But I haven't felt sick at all and I've been in there too." Mark took a bit of comfort in this.
Being intimately familiar with the station, Mark proceeded to the toilet on his own. Unlike when he lived here, there were two sets of toiletries. Mark deduced that Janice stayed overnight sometimes but didn't live with Joe. A quick sniff told him nothing. As far as he could tell, everything was all right and proper. He ran the tap and sniffed more closely. He flushed the toilet. Nothing seemed amiss.
"Joe, does Janice feel well enough to come here and help me figure out this smell? It all seems fine to me."
Joe walked off to check with Janice, who was napping in the bedroom. Janice came back with him, looking the worse for wear. "'lo, Mark. Did you find it? It stinks!"
Mark didn't really know Janice, so he wasn't familiar with her tendency to exaggerate everything. He knew what he smelled, though, and it was normal water. "Actually, I can't smell anything that doesn't seem like a normal loo. Can you describe it, like muddy or something? Is it all the time?"
"It's hard to say. I don't smell it now. That figures! It seems like I smell it more when I'm getting ready in the morning or going to bed. Maybe someone is poisoning the water at night and it Lasts Until THE MORNING!" Janice's tone rose in a bit of a panic.
Willing to humour her to a point, Joe chimed in, "Hmm, that's one idea, but wouldn't I be sick too?" Mark thought that was actually pretty astute of Joe. Mark of course had considered and eliminated the idea before Joe put voice to it as being both unsupported by evidence as well as, well, silly. Still, he asked Janice another question that could help isolate the issue. "Do you smell it only at Joe's or also at yours?"
"Now that you ask, I think I smelled it once at mine, the 23rd. That's the last night I spent at home before staying here for a few days. Did you hear, we got ENGAGED?" This elicited the most excitement Mark had seen in Janice since he'd arrived. Lucky bugger, thought Mark.
"Oh, no, I hadn't. Um, congratulations to you both. I hope you'll be very happy. At least you've had some time to make sure that neither of you guys are identity thieves, right? So, you've got that going for you."
Joe and Janice looked at each other in confusion, so Mark replied, "Oh, right, you came here when I left. Just forget I said that. So, you smelled it once at yours and then regularly here at Joe's, but only at night and in the morning?"
"Right," Joe and Janice answered simultaneously, glancing at each other like year eights with a crush.
"Alright, well, I can't immediately detect anything wrong, so I'll take a sample of the water and see if the smell changes over time, but I really don't expect to find anything. The water supply in Portwenn is tested regularly and we sure don't want anyone to think there's anything wrong with it!" Mark was VERY well aware of times when the water supply got blamed for making people sick when the ole H2O had nothing to do with it.
"Okay, whatever you say. You're the expert," Joe commented. He probably didn't realize that this was a morale boost to Mark, who still felt a little self-conscious about not being the local expert in the law anymore.
Mark thought back on the prior times the water was blamed for the outbreak of illnesses. The most recent one had always seemed suspicious to him. He had the police sense to think that Bert might have had something to do with it, but Doc Martin only let on that the problem was sorted. The Doc also seemed to tacitly accept some of the blame, something about a dishwasher. But, Mark thought, there's no way the number of sick people all were patients of the Doc's in the right timeframe. Still, it made him think that asking the Doc about the water sample might make sense.
After packing up the few tools he'd taken out of his chest and taking his sample, Mark decided to drive his van straight to see the Doc. He parked down by the Platt and walked up the hill to the surgery. Mark figured that leaving the van at the Platt might help advertise the business. For a December day, the weather was quite nice and it was great to be out of the van. As he walked up, he breathed a deep breath of the Cornish sea air and admired the views across the harbor and sea wall. How could he have stayed away from Portwenn for so long?
He entered the surgery and noticed Morwenna was not at her desk. "Doc? Morwenna? It's Mark, Mark Mylow, M and M Home Services? Your friendly neighborhood plumbing expert? Hello, is anyone around?"
Martin had been in his consulting room, working on a clock, something he didn't get much time to do these days between practicing and parenting. He did NOT appreciate what sounded like a social call or, worse, a solicitation.
"What?" Martin said loudly, not quite a yell, but certainly not an encouraging sound to Mark.
"Afternoon, Doc. I wondered if I could have a little chat with you about the local water supply?" replied Mark, loudly enough to carry.
Martin reluctantly set down his tools and took off his magnifier, then went into the waiting room to see what ridiculousness he needed to deal with. "Why would you think I would be the water supply expert?"
"Well, Doc, I was up at the police station and Janice, Joe's fiancé, you know her, she's sick? She said the water smelled bad, but it smelled fine to me. I remembered years ago that you knew how to get the water tested and I thought maybe you'd, well, test a sample for me or tell me how to go about it?"
"Ah, well, it's not straightforward. The, um, water supply itself and public pools and whatnot are tested regularly according to Council procedures, but I don't know of private testing. "
"Well, I have a sample of the water with me, maybe you can, um, do something with it, just as, you know, a help? Or a second set of nostrils." Mark realized that he didn't really know what question to ask. He quickly blurted, "You know, I'm trying to figure out why a sick person would complain about the smell of water and if maybe something about the water was making her sick? Of course, Joe's not sick, but maybe Janice doesn't have a good immune system, you know, she was run down from the hols or something?" Mark finally grew quiet, realizing he was rambling.
Martin was about to bark out a reply, when he realized Mark may have a germ of truth in what he was asking. Janice had a UTI which seemed to be responding to treatment, and that could have worn her down in a way that Joe did not experience. Instead, he asked, "Did you use a sterile container to collect the sample?"
"Um, no Doc. I just rinsed out the water bottle I had from the Co Op and filled it from the tap."
Martin sighed and thought his initial instinct to call the idea idiotic was right. "That would not make for a valid test sample, but I suppose I could smell it to see if I can detect anything that doesn't smell like our own water." He opened the bottle and, as expected, didn't smell anything different.
"I don't smell anything either. If there were bacteria or other pathogenic contents, it's not clear we'd be able to detect them in such a simplistic way. That's really all I can do, Mark." Martin made a mental note of the idea that something in the water could affect a compromised person more than an uncompromised one, but there was no way he was planning to say anything about the water with one possibly meaningless data point.
"Well, thanks for smelling it anyway, Doc. At least I know I didn't miss that." Mark left to go back to his van, chalking up the problem to one of a sick person with an "off" sense of smell.