by HRF Keating
‘Oh, but wait.’
Harriet looked up.
‘Yes?’
‘I think I can provide a yet better guarantee of the authenticity of that list, if you care to take it up. I have just this moment recalled there is one name missing from the roll of attendees, a simple error in the notes made at the time. There present, as well as the names you have, was a lady who is, I understand, connected by marriage to your husband. She frequently pleads with us to make use of the services of the Majestic Insurance Company, though I fear I would not trust such an organisation with even tuppence ha’penny of my money. She is one Miss Beryl Farr. You can get any confirmation you need from her. I know myself how the police never accept anything they are simply told.’
Harriet had expected at that, had even looked forward to it, another tap-tap on the sternum, saying ‘Me, Me, I, I’. But the gesture did not come.
*
Outside — it was a mercifully dry day — Harriet thought over what she had learnt. She rapidly came to the conclusion that it was nothing worth knowing. Women Against Genetic Interference had every sign about it of being no more than ferocious Gwendoline Tritton’s private hobby. All right, let her spend her inherited wealth in buzzing off newsletters and appeals and print-outs of significant newspaper articles to whoever came into her head. But nonetheless she was daft. No doubt about it. Daft, and only a little dangerous. If at all.
So where to go now? Back to Professor Wichmann? Or have another look at wretched Christopher Alexander? But in neither case have I any more ammunition to use. Talk to John about his Aunty Beryl, turning up once again? No point surely. He’s thoroughly accounted for her as a helpless old creature.
No, nothing for it but to report to the ACC, and hope he produces some other line of inquiry. Or, perhaps even better, that he’ll say there doesn’t seem to be any benefit in going on with inquiries in Birchester. Or not until whoever has the CA 534 issues a threat to use it unless … Unless what? No telling.
*
Mr Brown saw her at once. But, in place of the sharp questions she expected about what progress she had made, he got up from behind his desk to greet her.
‘Harriet, tell me about your Malcolm. Good news? Or not so good?’
She made an effort to adjust her thinking in response to that warmth, as well as to his lack of sentimentality in offering her those alternatives, ‘Good?’ or ‘Not so good?’
‘Well, good news really, sir. Malcolm’s out of intensive care now, and he’s able to talk, though he does get quickly exhausted. And then he’s apt, poor boy, to think he’s on the point of death, or something. But that doesn’t last. He even had the courage, when we saw him last night, to ask about the group who planted that booby-trap bomb.’
‘Yes. A demented lot from India, as I understand it. You know, people like that show us how these days we’re all in danger. In danger of violent death coming out of nowhere, no getting past that. And for very little reason, too, that we can understand. It’s something we’ve all got to take into account. That the weak have realised they possess the weapon of violence, senseless violence. You see it in the suicide bombers all over the world.’
One man and his bomb, the thought, even sung to that old tune, came winging back into Harriet’s head.
‘Yes, my husband says much the same,’ she soberly answered, however. ‘I suppose it’s all too true.’
But, at once, what he had just said made her sharply revise her decision about Women Against Genetic Interference. Wasn’t that tinpot organisation one of the weak who’ve realised they possess the weapon of violence? If a handful of Indian hotheads could launch a murderous campaign to back their preposterous cause, so might Gwendoline Tritton and her fellow protesters.
‘In fact, this brings me, sir,’ she said, ‘to something I wanted to put before you.’
Then she made a face.
‘Or, to be honest, to something I had decided there was no need to draw to your attention. But perhaps, I see now, that there is some need. It’s a Birchester organisation called Women Against Genetic Interference.’
‘Ah, I know something about them, not a great deal but something. Run by a lady by the name of — let me see — yes, Tritton, Gwen Tritton.’
‘Gwendoline, in fact, sir. And spelt with a final i-n-e. I’ve just been interviewing her, and I don’t think she’d thank you for the abbreviation.’
‘You’re right. She wouldn’t. I met her once, and on reflection I certainly see what you mean. I can guess, too, why you changed your mind about mentioning that organisation, WAGI, as they’re inclined to call themselves. They are indeed very much the sort of people I was just referring to just now. Ridiculously feeble, but therefore not unlikely to have learnt the lesson your Indian bombers have grasped, that it’s all too easy to use weapons that can cause damage altogether out of proportion. All you need to make a devastating bomb, after all, is a bag of fertiliser and a little something extra. As Hasselburg has taught us all.’
‘It has, sir. So, do you think I should pursue my inquiries there? I had only the merest hint that they could be behind the Heronsgate House theft, and I had thought, half an hour ago, that I could really cross them off my list.’
Mr Brown gave her a wintry Scottish smile.
‘That would depend, Mrs Martens, on who else is on that list of yours, and how long it is.’
‘No point in flannelling,’ Harriet answered. ‘My list is very short, and not very rewarding. There are just two other lines I’ve found to work on. There’s Professor Wichmann, whom you mentioned to me, and there’s a young man, Christopher Alexander, who is — or he was until a few hours ago — PA to the Director at Heronsgate House.’
‘And …?’
‘Right. Professor Wichmann, so I understand from DI Skelton, has been on his Special Branch files since as long ago as 1939, but that’s the sole reference to him. And certainly, when I talked to Wichmann at some length, I found nothing to make me feel in the least suspicious of him. I’d put him down, in fact, as a man of simple goodwill, a thoroughly worthy citizen even.’
‘So, what about the Heronsgate PA?’
‘Well, there’s a little more that’s perhaps suspicious there. He was sacked from the place yesterday morning, without any warning, and, as I understand, with very little explanation. Of course, Dr Lennox may have had his reasons for believing Christopher Alexander told someone where the specimen of CA 534 was hidden, possibly reasons he couldn’t quite put a finger on. But, if he suspected that was what had happened, why didn’t he get in touch with you?’
‘I imagine you’ll know the answer, if you think for a moment about that man Lennox.’
Harriet blinked, and thought.
‘Oh, yes, sir. Yes, Dr Lennox is someone who thinks he always knows best. Keeping that condemned specimen is proof enough of that.’
‘Exactly, Superintendent.’
A picture of Gwendoline Tritton came into her mind then.
Another one who thinks she knows best, or believes whatever she happens to think must be so. All right, it’s not at all likely that on Tuesday night an eighty-year-old lady had lurked somewhere outside Heronsgate House clutching a large sum in untraceable notes. But there could perhaps have been some trusted younger member of WAGI who could have carried out that task.
‘So you think WAGI really worth digging into, sir?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Mr Brown answered. ‘It’s likely enough, isn’t it, that there was some individual at Heronsgate House who passed on the information that the Director had kept that sample of CA 543. If it wasn’t his PA, it could have been someone else. How much was it common knowledge there?’
‘It wasn’t at all, sir. The Director — I think he knew he was acting wrongfully in keeping that specimen — was pretty careful about putting it where it was safe from any prying eyes. He eventually chose the secure filing cabinet in his own office, a somewhat unorthodox place, but one that there was some reason to use.’
‘And his PA knew he’d done that?’
‘More than knew, sir. He saw him do it.’
‘Very good. And were there others who knew?’
‘Not directly, as I understand. But Dr Lennox did admit to me that several of his scientists could have worked out where the specimen might be.’
‘He told you who those scientists were?’
‘He wrote out a list of their names, sir. But, after some thought, I decided not to question any of them immediately. Dr Lennox was very concerned that nothing at all about the disappearance should get out.’
A yet more wintry Scottish smile.
‘That I can well believe.’
‘So you think I should interview the people on that list now, sir?’
Mr Brown sat in silence for a moment or two.
‘No,’ he said with a sigh. ‘No, it’s still worth keeping the theft a secret, though hardly for the reasons Dr Lennox may have. We don’t want panic to spread through Birchester, not when we’ve avoided it as people here shrugged away al-Qaeda’s more distant threat. No, when there are sharp newspaper types about there’s every chance that bit of knowledge will be put into print if even as much as a glimmer of it gets outwith these four walls.’
‘So, sir,’ Harriet asked, thinking as she did that there was scarcely anyone else but the ACC to whom she would have admitted that she was floundering, ‘where should I go next?’
‘You’ve found nothing else suspicious?’
‘No, sir.’
The ACC sat in silence for what seemed to Harriet several long minutes, though it could not have been anything as long.
‘Harriet,’ he said at last.
It gave her a small shock to hear herself addressed as such, when he had used her forename earlier only to emphasise his sincerity in asking about Malcolm.
‘Harriet, when I tasked you with this inquiry I had, I ought to tell you, some doubts about whether you should be given it at this time. However, you appeared to be ready to undertake it, and I let it go forward.’
‘I was ready, sir. And I still am.’
Another interval of silence.
‘No, Harriet, I have to tell you that I don’t think your judgment is yet on enough of an even keel.’
‘But —’
‘No. Let me point to one thing you said to me just now. It was when you were giving me your account of your interview with Professor Wichmann. You used words something of this order, “a man of simple goodwill”. But, you know, that judgment was no more than your personal feeling about the man. You had no evidence for it, none at all.’
And Harriet realised then that Mr Brown was perfectly right.
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘I well understand how you came to feel as you did about Wichmann. Hardly more than forty-eight hours earlier you had suffered a terrible blow. Your faith in humanity, it’s not too much to suppose, had been shattered. So, when you had the smallest chance of finding that faith again, you took it. I’ve no doubt Wichmann appears on the surface to be, as you said, a man of goodwill. But what may lie below that surface?’ Harriet took a deep breath.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘may I go and question Professor Wichmann once more?’
‘You may, Superintendent.’
Chapter Ten
Once again, Harriet, having today remembered to get herself a bite of canteen lunch, made her way up the narrow iron steps to Professor Wichmann’s flat. Before pressing the familiar buzzer, she stood for a moment or two going over in her mind exactly what, on Mr Brown’s instructions, she was to try to discover. Could the man seemingly filled with goodwill be hiding, deep inside himself, a reason for wanting to gain possession of that potentially devastating herbicide? And, if he was, what might that be? On her way to Bulstrode Road, going over and over in her mind her previous interview, she had in the end recalled a few tiny things which had not struck her then.
Hadn’t there been a trace of sharpness once or twice amid the stream of jolly Germanic teasing with which he had responded to most of her questions? Had his recollections of his earliest days in Britain when his refugee father had been imprisoned as a possible spy, left him, even after all those years, with a secret anger? Or, again, hadn’t there been an edge of bitterness in his confessing his hope that through Christopher Alexander he would somehow perpetuate his name in academic circles? And might that loss of a flicker of semi-immortality have turned his thoughts to revenge against an uncaring world?
Tenuous, tenuous, she thought, standing there outside the blue door, the aroma of stored potatoes from the lean-to below rising up to her.
Was Mr Brown right in saying I was careering down the wrong track in my longing for something to reassure me that goodness still existed in a world where Graham had been brutally killed, Malcolm horribly injured?
Right, let’s find out, even if I have to show Professor Wichmann a very different side of myself. Let him experience what once the Hard Detective inflicted on even the pettiest wrongdoers when I was campaigning to Stop the Rot.
She pressed firmly on the little white button crookedly set beside the flimsy door. From within came the crackly buzz she had heard twice before. After a minute she took her finger off the buzzer and strained forward to make out, if she could, the shuffle of approaching slippered feet.
She could not.
But perhaps he’s out doing his shopping, as he was the first time I tried to see him. Or possibly now he’s really fast asleep in his tall winged armchair, German book flopped on his lap.
She tried another buzz. A much prolonged one.
No response.
Tap hard, as I did before, with the tinny knocker of the letter box? No, no good then, no good now.
Kneel and shout through the pushed-open flap?
No, give up. A word with Mr Chaudhuri down below, there among his neatly piled apples and oranges, his cunningly arranged bunches of grapes.
*
‘Oh, no. Not at home, not at home.’
‘Not here?’
Harriet could not fight down instant depression. Professor Wichmann not at home? Does this mean he has actually taken it into his head to make a run for it? Did my questions to him, as a few moments ago I wondered if they had, take him back to the days when his father had been interned? Has he, somewhere in his mind, got an image of two alien British police officers coming to make an arrest?
But then, like a gust of fresh air, came a wild, hilarious thought. Had neat, chubby little Mr Chaudhuri been somehow transformed into a tall, powdered-wig footman stately refusing entry to a banned visitor? Not at home.
The notion served, if nothing else, to bring her back to reality. If Professor Wichmann was absent from his flat, it didn’t at all mean that he had, for some reason or none, disappeared. If he was not out shopping, he might well have told Mr Chaudhuri that he was spending the whole day in the university library.
‘So where has he gone now?’ she asked, all but producing an absent-minded professor joke.
‘I am not at all knowing.’
And then she took in the anxious expression on the little greengrocer’s face.
‘But — but —’ she stammered out.
‘Yes, you are hundred per cent correct. Professor is always and always telling where he is going. So that he can be found if emergency occurs. If he is going only to university library, for shopping even, to some meeting in evening, he is telling. When he is going away also. He is leaving address, asking to have letters sent on.’
‘But this time he’s said nothing? Can he have forgotten? Has he done that ever?’
‘No, never is he not telling.’
A sudden dreadful thought came to her.
‘Mr Chaudhuri,’ she said, ‘do you think Professor Wichmann … That he may be there in his flat, unable to answer. Ill, or …?’
‘That he has taken own life?’ Mr Chauduri said firmly. ‘But I am not thinking Professor was a person who would do that. All the time I am knowing, and it is now for many years, I am finding him
always with a little joke when he is talking.’
But, Harriet thought, you can have had no idea that this joking old man may have been all the time mulling over the blackest of thoughts. Or that he may now be in possession of a supply of destructive CA 534.
‘Mr Chaudhuri,’ she said, ‘you mentioned Professor Wichmann going away. Where did he go at such times? Do you know?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I am knowing. He was going for walking. It was what he was very, very much liking. On his shoulders he would put what he was calling my good old knapsack. Yes, altogether very, very old, in good German leather, he was saying. And for one week, two, he would walk in beautiful English countryside.’
‘Yes. He mentioned to me that he was a devoted hiker. So, perhaps … But what I was going to ask you was: do you have a key to his flat, one you use when you are collecting his letters?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I am having. In case of flood etcetera. But when he was going for walking I was not always sending on any letters.’
‘No, I suppose not. However, I think it might be sensible to go up and look in at the flat.’
‘One first-class idea. For some minutes I would shut up shop, and I will come also.’
*
But when little Mr Chaudhuri had carried his baskets of oranges, apples and neatly paired grapes inside, closed the shop and gone with Harriet round to the back, into his storage yard, up the iron steps and had then opened the blue door, they found the place unoccupied.
‘All right, I must admit this puts my mind more at ease,’ Harriet said, untruthfully. ‘But have you any idea where he might have gone now? I mean, has he ever forgotten to let you know where he would be?’
‘Never. Never.’
‘Well, do you think we could take a look to see if that knapsack of his is still here? That would give us some hint about where he may be?’
‘Yes, yes. I would look. He is keeping same in cupboard just here, where electricity meter is. I have seen many times.’
And the cupboard was bare. An old-style meter wheel was whirring behind its little window, and that was all. Only when Mr Chaudhuri clicked off the light switch and left the narrow hallway in darkness did it cease.
