Seeing Red

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Self-discipline, that’s what it needs,’ I said grandly. ‘Did you have that, Angie?’

  ‘Me?’ She turned in surprise, taking a wisp of hair from her eyes with one finger. ‘I didn’t need it. Daddy wanted me to get a first, and I always felt he was at my elbow. It didn’t take any self-discipline.’

  But she hadn’t got her degree after all. It had been necessary to look after daddy in his misfortune.

  ‘So Paul was given the proverbial shilling and banished from the family home?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. There was another try, this time at Loughborough, but it still didn’t work out. Then there was an almighty row, and Paul marched out. The next we heard, he’d found his way to the States, and was working hard at UCLA.’ She laughed. ‘It was clever, when you think about it. Paul knew his own faults. He knew he couldn’t keep up the pressure on himself if there was one single distraction. So he went to a University where there wasn’t any cricket or his sort of football.’

  ‘It worked?’

  ‘Yes. Daddy was right...Paul’s got a fine brain. He got his PhD over there in social philosophy, and he’s been lecturing at his old University.’

  ‘Then why has he come home?’ I wondered. ‘Why has he brought his rich American wife to this country?’

  I wasn’t even aware that I’d said it out loud. It had been a thought, and Angie treated it as such, so that we were silent there, me puffing smoke with apparent content when I was not contented at all. Even disturbed.

  Angie had confirmed what I’d suspected. If she’d thought of murder, her mind must have embraced all possibilities, including the one that her brother must be a suspect. But that was not the limit of her fear. She wasn’t necessarily trying to prove her father had been murdered, there was also the possibility that he’d committed suicide. Otherwise, why had she reacted strongly to no more than a hint that she’d neglected him? But — consider suicide, and there has to be a reason for it.

  Already, with his death, she would have had to face her conscience. Her father had been deserted, first by Paul and then by herself, and of the two her own desertion was the more deserving of blame. At least, Paul’s flight had followed an almighty row. Hers had been the purely personal satisfaction of an urge. It might even be said to have arisen from a growing, perhaps subconscious, desire to get away from what had become a responsibility. After all, she’d been the only one left with him. She would perhaps have felt trapped into a situation that could become permanent, she an old maid, with her first love, Evan Rees, gone from her completely into his academic flights.

  I could imagine her, at that time, suddenly becoming aware of her predicament, with her father self-absorbed in his eccentricities and research, and in himself, and she caught in something he would not even realise existed. Had Phil Rollason been no more than a lifeline to be grabbed for, the Phil Rollason Lynne had said became everything to Angie? The death of her father — so suddenly and tragically — would appear to Angie to offer her a re-birth. Or would it more likely be a trap? The tragedy of it would be the trap. If there was now nothing left of what she had felt for Rollason, then her childhood home, without the entrapment of her father’s presence, could well seem a release. Once it became too attractive, what chance had Rollason then?

  But the prospect was soured by the tragedy. She could have no peace at Viewlands until I’d absolved her of any blame, however distant, for his death. By solving the problem, I might be denying Rollason what he’d asked me to do for him.

  And was I going to worry about Phil Rollason? No sir, I was not.

  Glancing sideways, trying to detect something of her dreams, I saw only an abrupt awareness, an excitement, a sudden tenseness in her.

  I looked to see the cause. Climbing over the far rail of the paddock was a stocky, dark young man in working jeans and a roll-neck sweater, who advanced with the easy, space-consuming lope of the hill farmer, but with something else — a confident lift to his chunky face and a confident eagerness.

  Timmis had described him as big. Evan Rees couldn’t have been more than five feet eight, but he was broad and strong, resilient. That was what made him seem big.

  When Angie flung open the gate and ran towards him there was no change in his pace, and not even a smile on his face that I could see, but his pleasure was apparent in every movement. His head came up. They reached out and clasped hands, looking at each other.

  ‘Evan!’ I heard her say.

  ‘You’re looking well, Angie.’

  Then their hands fell apart and they walked back towards me, side by side, with, apparently, no more to say.

  They had both come home, and I knew Phil Rollason had faded a little further into the background.

  We were introduced. He had a small smile for me, though he was not one for expressing his feelings too openly. Perhaps Angie had trained him in that. Getting the blame loaded on him, and always responding with a shy smile, was no doubt good grounding for one whose emotions ran deep and stubborn. So a tentative smile for me, a firm handshake and a hard, steady stare from deep-set dark eyes. He was wondering whether he could trust me with Angie’s tender constitution. I was the one who’d be needing his protection, I had no doubt, before all this was over.

  Tactfully, I wandered into the lab. So many years for them to retrieve. But maybe he wasn’t fully prepared; he followed me inside, Angie standing in the open doorway and watching from a distance. She quietly and unnervingly stared, as I’d done with the Rover when I’d picked it up at the showroom, deferring the pleasure of touching, using, savouring its solidity and power.

  I moved quietly at his shoulder, observant of his silence. He was a man of strong silences. I wouldn’t have wished to arouse his anger. So I walked round with him, allowing him to make observations in his own time.

  ‘Still using the Munsell system,’ he commented, opening a cupboard on what looked like a bundle of multi-coloured little trees. ‘A bit out of date, now.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It relates everything to hue or colour, and what Munsell called value, which is luminosity and chrome, which you’d call saturation.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘We all use the CIE System now. It’s more mathematical. With the Munsell, it was a colour atlas, like the charts the paint people issue. In the CIE System it’s all numbers. Poor Gledwyn could never have handled metallic colours, or the fluorescents.’

  ‘He was behind the times?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, certainly.’ He moved along the back bench. ‘Colorimeters, too. I see he’s got a Burnham-Wright. Useful that. It’s quite portable.’

  ‘I suppose it would be.’

  ‘And here’s a Lovibond.’ He touched it. Not at all portable, this one, a box with a single eyepiece protruding from the top. ‘That’s a bit better, but all the same, a colorimeter.’ He turned, scanning the rest of the equipment. ‘But no spectrophotometer anywhere. Dear me.’

  ‘It’s bad?’

  ‘Really, you know, he was years behind the times.’ But he was cheerful about this eccentricity. It had been an observation and not a criticism. He caught my eye and his mouth assumed a shape close to a smile.

  ‘But he did some fine work here,’ he told me. ‘You know that? But you haven’t been here for years. So I understand.’

  ‘I met him at Blackpool. That’s really the basic idea behind these Conventions. Meeting old friends, chatting, searching each other’s minds for ideas. We spent hours together that week. I’ve got a lot to thank Gledwyn Griffiths for.’

  We were standing in front of a large steel globe. This seemed to interest him more than the instruments had.

  ‘It’s his vacuum chamber,’ he explained. ‘He’d need it for the spraying technique he was using.’

  I felt he was trying to slide me away from personalities. ‘A lot to thank him for, you said...so you had time to express it all?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And how did you find him, at that time?’

 
; ‘Older. More tired. But still trying.’

  I persisted. ‘My information is that he was very upset, on the journey to Blackpool.’

  ‘Gledwyn wasn’t a person to load you with his troubles.’

  Yet Lynne had felt Gledwyn’s distress. He’d loaded it on her, all right, so much so that he’d had no time to notice hers.

  ‘He didn’t mention anything that was upsetting him?’

  ‘Not to me.’ His attention was still on the vacuum chamber. ‘It was this idea he had — that by vacuum spraying spectacles, with some special formula he’d developed, he could make some sort of change in greens and reds. That’d be a great advance.’

  ‘Would be?’

  ‘If it’d worked.’

  ‘But I thought it did.’

  He shook his head and moved on, not speaking.

  ‘He tried it on a windscreen,’ I said. ‘Or so I’m told.’

  ‘He’d have to spray small pieces of plain glass and stick ’em on the windscreen.’

  ‘You’re not optimistic?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Optimistic? But he would be, wouldn’t he?’ I asked. ‘I mean, he’d been testing the spectacles he’d coated, and I’ve been getting the impression he’d had some success.’

  ‘Have you? Perhaps you weren’t listening.’

  ‘I was. You’re saying it failed?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘But he was upset. Would it be because of the failure of his process? Or maybe something more personal?’

  He did not shrug, but there was something in his voice that warned me he was impatient with the subject. ‘He mentioned no personal problems to me. All his old enthusiasm came back.’

  ‘Came back? It wasn’t there on the first day?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to say. The first two days I thought he seemed exhausted. Working on your own can be a strain. He was pale and absent-minded. But we went for long walks together. The sea air seemed to do him good.’

  ‘You both missed the lectures and the papers being read — and the rest?’

  ‘As I told you, it’s for meeting old friends. He was more than a friend.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. So had Angie been.

  ‘I had a paper I read on the Tuesday. He read his own on Thursday.’

  ‘Successfully?’

  ‘Everybody knows my work on genetics and vision. I’m trying to isolate the pigments that affect the cones. It was nothing spectacular.’

  ‘But Gledwyn’s was?’

  He moved away. I hurried after him, aware that I was close to something. There were discs of semi-smoked glass on a bench in the centre. He picked one up and looked through it in all directions. I noticed that Angie was no longer standing in the doorway to the yard, but Lynne, whom I’d assumed to have left, was standing in the doorway to her office. Evan Rees seemed not to notice her through his bit of glass.

  ‘But Gledwyn’s paper was spectacular?’ I insisted.

  ‘You can’t leave it alone, can you!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you must know, it was a spectacular failure.’

  Then he noticed Lynne. He put down the glass disc. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  She found him a small smile. ‘We haven’t met.’ A hint to me.

  I introduced them. He nodded, but did not shake hands with her.

  ‘He mentioned you,’ he said.

  She blushed.

  ‘With pride,’ he told her, smiling now. ‘You helped him a lot.’

  She looked away. ‘I was just leaving.’

  ‘Don’t go. Not for me,’ he appealed.

  ‘No. Really, I must.’

  I noticed she kept a bench between us as she moved away. The blush was still in her neck.

  ‘It was a failure,’ I prompted him when she’d gone. ‘In what way?’

  ‘It’s complicated. I’d need to explain.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ I said patiently.

  ‘Briefly, then.’ Now there was more than a hint of impatience in his voice. He was anxious to get to Angie. I stared at him encouragingly. ‘All light can be broken down into a mixture of three primary colours — call ’em red, green and blue...near enough. Using those three, you can create any colour there is by overlapping, sometimes using only two of them, sometimes using all three, in various proportions.’

  ‘Angie said something...’

  ‘You’re with me?’

  ‘With you,’ I agreed, my brain reaching for it.

  He was wandering into Lynne’s office. On his own subject, now, he was becoming enthusiastic. ‘I wish I’d got time to rig something for you.’

  ‘I’d like to see that.’

  He sat at her desk. ‘And where all three rays of equal intensity overlap, you’d get white light.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, you’ve got to understand that colour blindness, or at least some colour deficiency, is most common in men. In effect, these sort of people can match every colour they see with only two of the rays, or they use just a touch of the third. I’m simplifying, you understand. And because they use only two we call them dichromate. The most common difficulty is with reds and greens. Trouble with blues and reds is pretty rare.’

  ‘It seems I might have that.’ I told him. ‘In poor light, anyway. The other evening I mistook a red car for a blue car.’

  He smiled. I’d nearly squeezed a laugh from him. ‘I could test you, if you like. We’d call you a tritanomalous dichromat. But if it’s only in poor light, I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘It sounds like some fearsome disease. Go on, though. I interrupted.’

  ‘Let’s keep it to Gledwyn Griffiths. He was a dichromat, because he could match any colour he could see by using only two of the primaries, and because he was red-blind we’d class him as a pronatope. Red and green are the trick colours for these people. We test it by checking what mixture of red and green light they use to match a pure yellow light. Gledwyn would use a very high proportion of red light. You — for instance — would need equal quantities of red and green.’

  ‘How does this relate...’

  ‘Very importantly, I can assure you. He saw red and green differently, but as grades of grey, I suppose. Who can ever say what somebody else sees? It’s all in the mind, after all. But what he’d done was fatal to scientific procedure. He’d found some method of spraying glass — his spectacles at first, then the windscreen bits — that changed the emphasis. But he’d related it to himself. With the glasses, he saw red as smaller but very much brighter, green as spread out larger, but darker. You can see his mistake.’

  I couldn’t. The scientific mind baffles me. I shook my head.

  ‘It was completely unscientific,’ he said, with the nearest approach to emotion I’d seen so far. ‘I can’t understand — he’d have known! As a researcher, he must have grown up with the basics, and one of them is that you don’t claim anything on the results you’ve got from experimenting on yourself. I know...there’ve been hundreds of examples...mostly doctors. They’ve tried serums and vaccines after injecting themselves with diseases. But they didn’t stop there. Dozens — hundreds — of other experiments had to be made, before they were sure. But Gledwyn rushed it. Damn it, he was only fifty. Lots more years...’ He stopped. ‘Oh, hell!’

  ‘It doesn’t affect your argument,’ I assured him. ‘He should have taken it further — I can see that. But where would he get all his colour blind subjects?’

  ‘It’s no excuse. No reason. But it was worse than that. All his experiments were aimed at one aspect of it, which was the help he could give to drivers. At night. It’s too small, too tight, it embraces so little.’ He made a small impact with his fist on Lynne’s desk. ‘If only he’d have come to me. I could have broadened the sphere of investigation.’

  ‘But if he helped only a few, in just that way...’

  ‘Lord, but it was even worse than that. He based it all on himself. He was a dichromat/pronatope. I sai
d that. The glasses suited him because he’d made them for his own colour deficiency. But what if a green-blind person used them? God knows what that would’ve done to his night vision. Gledwyn was red-blind. Hell, it would’ve made a green-blind person a killer on the road at night. Or take yourself: a trinatope. A pair of Gledwyn’s magic spectacles could completely confuse you, when now you’re probably quite okay, because the balance is only slightly out. You see what I mean? He hadn’t done his research, and he’d concentrated it on himself. It was interesting, as a theory, but...’

  ‘But his paper was not well received?’

  ‘They barely let him finish it.’

  ‘The spectacles worked for him, though. You said that.’

  ‘He said they did.’

  ‘Reds smaller but brighter, you said. Greens spread out but dimmer.’

  He raised his eyebrows, cocking his head with interest. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘The night he died, he seems to have been wearing them. If they did that for him, he’d be less likely to make a mistake over a traffic signal. He’d tested them, and he knew the effect they had. So he wouldn’t drive through a red — at that roadworks, I mean. Have you seen it?’

  He nodded, his eyes deep and serious.

  ‘So he’d hardly drive through a red and meet somebody coming the other way.’

  ‘It’s unlikely.’

  ‘And yet that’s what he seems to have done.’

  He was silent, his fingers playing with one of Lynne’s ballpoints. At last, without raising his eyes, he said: ‘I’m not sure of your interest in this. I’ve been talking about my own subject, so I got carried away. But I’d like to know what you’re trying to do.’

  ‘Angie hasn’t told you?’

  ‘Only that she had a guest.’

  ‘She believes her father was deliberately killed, and didn’t simply die from an accident. I’m trying to find out the truth.’

  He took a long time thinking about that, but there are time-wasting things you can do with a pipe. I took it into the yard and reamered it out, strolled back, and found him examining the smoked glass discs again.

  ‘Look through,’ he said, handing me one. ‘Go outside and look at the maples.’