One Man and His Bomb (Harriet Martens Series Book 6)

by HRF Keating

  So, battle lines again.

  ‘I have been fully briefed, sir,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was given the name of a man on file as possibly suspect. That of a former professor at Birchester University, one Ernst Wichmann. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Wichmann? A German? What else do you know about him?’

  Aggressive bugger.

  ‘I asked if you knew him, or of him.’

  At that, for an instant, Dr Lennox looked disconcerted. Then, in level tones, he replied.

  ‘No, Superintendent, I do not think I have ever heard of the gentleman.’

  ‘Very well.’

  She paused.

  ‘Now, in the ordinary way,’ she said, ‘I would be asking you to vacate this office, and —’

  ‘What do you mean vacate? It’s out of the question that I should not be able to conduct the work of the Institute from this room. Out of the question.’

  ‘I was about to say, sir, that in the particular circumstances of the case, the need to have hundred per cent security concerning the theft, coupled with the fact, as I have ascertained, that the people who broke in here appeared to be professionals, gloved and masked, I think it better to omit the customary forensic checks. People like that are not likely to leave any useful indications.’

  She came to a halt. But could not resist adding one small jibe.

  ‘So you can continue with your work, on your CA 534 and whatever else you were expecting to do, undisturbed.’

  Slowly the Institute’s director simmered down.

  ‘That will be very helpful,’ he said.

  ‘So perhaps you could help me with some facts about how the CA 534 was stored here? Was there no other secure place to put it, if it had to be kept?’

  Dr Lennox stiffened a little.

  ‘I gave the matter considerable thought,’ he said. ‘Naturally. But I came to the conclusion that the fewer people who knew about it and its whereabouts the better. Staff do talk, you know, however firm their instructions to the contrary. Perhaps you read in the Evening Star recently what purported to be an account of the discovery we made of CA 491, the predecessor to 534. That was not from any official statement issued to the media.’

  ‘Yes, I read that story.’

  She decided not to go on to say she had read, or been told of, the other, more speculative, and more damning, story in the Star. And it was plain the Director was by no means prepared to draw her attention to it.

  ‘Very well,’ he continued smoothly. ‘In the circumstances, I thought that the fewest possible number of people who knew where the CA 534 was, or who knew indeed of its existence, the better. Of course, the people who worked on it knew it had been produced, but even they did not know for certain that I had decided it was premature to have it destroyed.’

  ‘This is more than I was told in my briefing this morning,’ Harriet said. ‘It narrows down the field by a considerable extent. But let me get the situation absolutely straight. Were you the sole individual who knew that the specimen was in that drawer there?’

  Dr Lennox considered.

  ‘No, Superintendent,’ he said at last. ‘There was of course my PA who happened to be present when I put it in that drawer. But, that aside, I still cannot give you such an assurance, not absolutely. For instance, there must be three, four or five people who were working on the substance and who perhaps knew I had taken the specimen away with me. They could have worked out, or simply guessed, it was likely I would have put it in my locked filing cabinet. And, I suppose, one of them might have spoken out of turn.’

  ‘Could you tell me their names, please?’ Harriet asked.

  For a moment or two Dr Lennox hesitated.

  ‘Very well,’ he said then.

  He snatched the top sheet from a memo pad on the desk and scribbled the names on it.

  ‘I hope you understand, Superintendent,’ he said then, ‘that as long as CA 534 is not subjected to a degree of heat it is absolutely inert, and so perfectly safe. I could have happily put it in its protective cardboard box — an empty one from our test tube suppliers — just into a drawer of this desk.’

  He gave the wide surface in front of him a proprietorial look.

  ‘I notice the desk is extremely well polished,’ Harriet put in. ‘That must mean this room is visited by a cleaner. Is that an everyday occurrence? Does someone come in here before you arrive?’

  ‘No, no. You mustn’t think that, with the importance of the experiments we carry out here, we are not extremely conscious of security. No, the system is that in this office, and in one or two other parts of the house where particularly confidential work is undertaken, every member of the cleaning staff is always under supervision. In the case of my office, my personal assistant arrives here well before I do and opens the door for the cleaner. Subsequently she is watched until she has finished. So, in fact, no one other than myself and my PA can have known for certain that the CA 534 was in that drawer. I was satisfied its security was assured. So should you be, Superintendent.’

  Oh, should I?

  ‘If you say so, sir. But I would like all the same to have a word with your PA.’

  For the second time she had disconcerted Dr Lennox.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last.

  He reached forward and dipped down a switch on the matt black intercom box at the corner of the big desk.

  ‘Come in, would you?’

  They waited in silence for a minute or more.

  A little to Harriet’s surprise the Director’s PA proved not to be the pretty young woman she imagined Giles Lennox as gratifying his ego by employing, but a neatly-suited young man, who could equally be described as pretty, with well-brushed fair hair over his forehead, big brown eyes, and a come-and-go rosiness of cheek. But someone who was perhaps less likely to be an admiringly submissive office ornament.

  ‘Chris,’ Dr Lennox said, ‘this is Detective Superintendent Martens. She is here to look into the circumstances of the break-in last night.’

  Harriet, who had observed the wince that had crossed the young man’s face at that casual ‘Chris’, gave him a friendly ‘Good afternoon’.

  ‘You had better take Miss Martens to your own office, and then see her out,’ the Director said. ‘I have a good deal of work I should be doing.’

  Last strike to you, Harriet said to herself, as the Director stood up and firmly pushed the forced drawer back into its proper place, its dented front obediently straightening itself out with a deep ping.

  Chapter Four

  Harriet followed the Director’s PA — does he prefer to be called full-out Christopher, she wondered — along to a much smaller office at the far end of the corridor. Cubbyhole, she thought as she entered, that’s the word.

  ‘Take — take this chair,’ Chris, or Christopher, said, hauling from its corner a scuffed leather-seated captain’s chair, letting a pile of document wallets slip from it to the floor.

  ‘I — I suppose I ought to introduce myself properly,’ he went on, squeezing his way round to his typist-style desk and slipping into the seat behind it. ‘I — I’m Christopher Alexander, and, of course, Dr Lennox’s PA.’

  ‘Glad to know you, Christopher.’

  She saw a small gratified smile appear on the rosy-tinted cheeks.

  She took out her notebook.

  ‘But first, may I take your details?’

  Christopher’s smile disappeared.

  ‘It’s just a formality,’ she said to him, momentarily wondering why he had been so disconcerted, but deciding this was no more than simple shyness. ‘We ask anyone who we’re seeking information from.’

  A look of relaxation on the cherub face on the other side of the tiny desk, and name and address were trotted out.

  ‘Dr Lennox has been most helpful,’ Harriet said. ‘But there are one or two points he was unable to assist me with.’

  ‘Well, if I can …’

  ‘Yes. First of all there’s the question of who exactly k
new where that box of CA 534 had been put for safekeeping. Did you know where it was yourself?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I was with the Direc — with Dr Lennox when he put it into the filing cabinet. In fact, he asked me to wrap some sticky tape round the box in case the lid somehow came off.’

  ‘I see. And did you watch him after you’d done that? See him lock the drawer?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I did. I saw him take his keys — he has them on a chain, a thin gold chain — from his trouser pocket. It’s long enough for him to be able to use the key at the top of the cabinet.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all very clear. One has to ask these detailed questions, you know. So, Dr Lennox put the ring of keys back in his trouser pocket? How many others are there on it?’

  ‘Oh, only three or four. I don’t think he needs more.’

  ‘I see. And you, do you have a key to the cabinet?’

  ‘I do. Sometimes I have to get out some document Dr Lennox has instructed me to have ready for him.’

  ‘And you have, of course, your own key to his office?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I have. And naturally I guard it with particular care.’

  A touch of his boss’s defensiveness rubbing off?

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she said placatingly. ‘So — am I right? — it was you who actually discovered that the break-in had occurred? When you went — with the cleaning lady, was it? — into Dr Lennox’s room at an early hour this morning?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that was it. And as soon as I saw that drawer wide open and the dent in its front I guessed what must have happened. So I’m afraid I bundled the cleaning lady out of the room straight away, and then I rang Dr Lennox at home. He got here in a few minutes. He doesn’t live far away, although he sometimes makes use of the bedroom next to his office, if he’s been working very late for instance.’

  ‘That was smart work on your part,’ Harriet said, mentally recording that no doubt his bundling out of the cleaning lady accounted for the untidiness in the Director’s bedroom.

  ‘Well, I’d realised at once what sort of a disaster it would be if anybody got to hear the CA 534 had been stolen. It could wipe out in hours acres and acres of the countryside, you know. And, even worse than that, huge tracts of land could be devastated if the thieves were able to manufacture more from that small specimen. Something that’s not too difficult to do, in fact.’

  ‘Could you clarify that for me,’ Harriet jumped in. ‘Dr Lennox told me CA 534 needed a degree of heat to become active. Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it is. He remarked on it when he was putting the box into the secure cabinet.’

  ‘Or the not-so secure,’ Harriet commented with a smile.

  No harm in ranging herself on the young man’s side against the dictatorial Director.

  For a moment it looked as if this little snide comment had had the wrong effect. Christopher seemed distinctly disconcerted. But a moment later the tiny act of resistance was explained.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Christopher said. ‘The cabinet turned out not to be totally secure. But then who would expect it to be attacked with a crowbar? If that was what was used. It was only secure enough just to keep any prying eyes from seeing documents they weren’t meant to.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Harriet said. ‘But I was asking you about heating the CA 534. How much heat would be necessary?’

  ‘Oh, not much, as I’ve gathered. Perhaps just exposure to an electric fire, something of that sort. And it would remain active as long as it retained that heat.’

  ‘I see. And would someone, say, with a smattering of scientific knowledge be able to tell, or to guess, that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think they would. Almost anybody with an A-level in chemistry would.’

  Yes, Harriet thought, this young man, scared stiff of the Director though he plainly is, is no simpleton.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘tell me more about the box it was in. How big is it? Come to that, how safe is it from being accidentally damaged?’

  ‘Oh, it’s perfectly safe. If you’re able to retrieve it before the thieves use it, or try to sell it, if that’s what they have in mind, then no harm will be done. And, as to its size, it’s not very large. The CA 534 itself was in a standard test tube, though one made of specially treated strong glass. It’s just a few millilitres of a dark yellow oily liquid, and the box is one that usually holds ten new test tubes. It’s about two-hundred millimetres by a hundred, and, say, fifty millimetres deep.’

  ‘Tell me in inches,’ Harriet said, with an inward smile at young Christopher showing-off his scientific credentials, such as they were.

  He had to calculate for a moment.

  ‘Oh, say about — er — eight inches by four and a couple of inches deep, bit less perhaps.’

  ‘As small as that? And the single tube in it is capable of doing as much damage as you’ve indicated?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it is. I’ve seen it at work. The Director conducted a very small experiment, on a specially isolated patch of lawn in the grounds here.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I actually saw. The Director put just two drops of the liquid, preheated, down on that small square of grass, and, as soon as they came in contact with the single blade he’d put them on they started to multiply at an extraordinary rate. It’s because they feed on chlorophyll. That’s the principle behind all the herbicides we’ve been experimenting with, actually. But, and this is the thing, in almost a minute all the grass in that patch simply disappeared. It was literally eaten up, to the last possible trace.’

  For the first time the true extent of the hovering threat made itself clear to Harriet. She felt a rising tide of deep coldness move inside her.

  Then another thought came.

  Yes, thanks to the vaguer threat hanging over the whole country, post-Hasselburg, it’s now been left entirely to me to see how that cardboard box with the single test tube of oily yellow destructor in it can be recovered. It’s been left to me.

  And then, despite herself, she thought, too, of the personal threat hanging over her and John. Malcolm. Is he, even at this instant, surrendering to the wounds he suffered from that booby-trap explosion?

  But, no, I must thrust that aside. All my effort must be directed to countering, if I can, if I possibly can, the more immediate threat.

  One small line to follow came back into her mind.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said to Christopher. ‘Does the name Wichmann, Professor Wichmann, mean anything to you?’

  She saw a look of mild astonishment, appear on the pretty face in front of her.

  ‘Professor Wichmann? Do you mean the former Professor of German Studies at Birchester University?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, his name does mean something to me, quite a lot even.’

  A prick of hope lit up in her. Have I hit straight away on something that’s going to lead somewhere? Has the man that MI5, or whoever the Faceless Ones were, suggested to the Assistant Chief Constable as possibly behind the theft here, had some contact with the Institute Director’s personal assistant? If so …

  ‘What does Professor Wichmann mean to you then? What exactly?’

  To her complete surprise Christopher smiled, warmly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I read German under him. He — he was a great influence on me really. I mean, I had only opted for a degree in German because at school I happened to have done better at that than French. But when he began to teach me I really discovered what a wealth of stuff there was in German literature. Marvellous stuff. I was —’

  He came to a full halt.

  ‘Yes? You were …?’

  A deep blush, and a rather strangulated cough.

  ‘Well, you see, when I was in my final year at the university there was some talk, if my degree turned out to be a first as people thought it would, of going on to do a DLitt on a writer called Richter, a very interesting man, though not as well known outside Germany as he ought
to be.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘And, well, in the end I decided not to go for it. I … er … Well, I decided I’d prefer to have a straight job. That’s when I got this one. The Director, Dr Lennox, was sort of impressed with my degree. It was a first, actually.’

  ‘But you opted for a regular job rather than the academic life?’

  Christopher seemed to jump at this.

  ‘Yes. Yes, that was it. A job. I wanted a proper job. And actually it’s a pretty good one. Responsible — well, quite responsible. And it’s very interesting. I’ve been here two years now, and I suppose eventually, when I feel the time’s … er … ripe, I could go on to better things. Science administration, you know.’

  Not a very self-confident young man, Harriet registered.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ she said. ‘And is that the full extent of your connection with Professor Wichmann? Or are you in contact with him still?’

  There might still be something here. If this young man has perhaps been talking about the work here more than he should … And Wichmann, on some list of people to be kept an eye on which the Faceless Ones have, just might have learnt from Christopher about the possibilities of CA 534 …

  ‘In contact?’ Chris answered. ‘Well, no, not really. I do meet him occasionally. If, as I sometimes like to do, I go to a public lecture at the university, on something that particularly interests me, I may chance to see him there, and we chat. I still really admire him, you know.’

  Admire him? And do what he asks of you? Even something you know you should not? It could be. Look how he’s under the thumb of Dr bloody Lennox, for example. Someone easily controlled. And, possibly, lying to me as he sits squeezed up there behind that wretched desk.

  ‘So Professor Wichmann is still teaching at the university?’

  ‘Well, no. No, he retired the year after I left. But they made him a professor emeritus. He’s a really distinguished figure in the academic world.’

  ‘And he still lives in Birchester?’

  ‘Yes, he does. He has, or he did have — I don’t know if he’s moved now that he’s retired — a flat in a little street just off University Boulevard. I used to go there for — well, for extra tuition. He — well, actually, he had great hopes for me. The DLitt, you know. So, yes, it’s in Bulstrode Road. Rather a poky place, actually. I can’t remember the number, but it’s above a greengrocer’s shop.’