The God Particle

by Daniel Danser

  It took the inspector a few seconds before he realised what Tom was referring to and apologised, moving himself and his papers to the other side of the desk.

  ‘Your man on the door said you wanted to see me,’ said Tom, sitting in the warm seat recently vacated by the inspector.

  ‘Yes, I have the initial report from our forensic team.’ The inspector looked through his glasses at a sheet of paper on the desk. ‘It appears they have found traces of an explosive device.’

  ‘A bomb?’ Tom said incredulously. ‘I don’t believe it. Who would want to sabotage the project?’

  ‘The motives for planting such a device could range from a disgruntled employee to an extremist group and anything in between,’ Inspector Gervaux informed him, leaning back in his chair and taking his glasses off. ‘We are now treating this…’ he paused for dramatic effect, ‘…as a murder investigation.’

  Tom surmised the inspector had been reading too many Agatha Christie novels. ‘Do you have any suspects?’ he asked, knowing that was the customary response.

  ‘Do you know a man called…’ said the inspector, referring back to his paper, ‘…Anjit Gopal Bose?’

  ‘Ajay, yes. Why?’

  ‘We received an anonymous tip-off suggesting he could be involved.’

  ‘Ajay? No way. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Do you know this man well?’

  ‘I know him, but I wouldn’t say I know him well.’

  ‘Then how do you know what he’s capable of?’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ replied Tom, baffled. ‘But he’s just a messenger boy.’

  ‘Professor, some of the most notorious murderers in history had menial jobs. The Yorkshire Ripper in the UK was just a delivery driver, Harold Fritzl in Belgium was just an electrician, Jeffrey Dahmer in your own country killed at least seventeen people and he just worked in a chocolate factory. I could go on.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I get the point. But Ajay’s not a serial killer.’

  ‘We will follow up any leads we have,’ replied the inspector. ‘Most of the time they turn out to be nothing more than an over-zealous do-gooder playing detective, or a vindictive colleague trying to exact revenge on a workmate. But we have to take them all seriously.’

  ‘But Ajay was liked by everybody,’ Tom protested.

  ‘Obviously not, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the tip-off. Do you know where we can find Anjit? Only he hasn’t shown up for work yet, and the officer I sent to his room reported there was no answer.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Frederick had returned his call and they arranged to meet just after lunch. He didn’t know if he was getting paranoid or not, but he thought he could detect a note of tension in Frederick’s voice. Perhaps the police have already spoken to him about Ajay’s disappearance? he wondered.

  Tom spent the rest of the morning trying to avoid the inspector. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help the police with their enquiries; he just wanted a chance to speak with Ajay first. He wasn’t prepared to accept that he was such a bad judge of character.

  Just before lunch, he decided to check on Ajay’s apartment for himself, in case he was hiding there and too frightened to answer the door to the police. He may be holed up, ready to make his last stand, as Inspector Gervaux would have it. He thought it prudent to grab his jacket on the way past his own apartment, just in case he had any more problems getting back into the office.

  As Tom made his way down the corridor, he noticed that the door to his apartment was slightly ajar. He could have sworn he’d pulled it to and heard the lock click before he’d left in the morning. He wasn’t a citizen’s arrest type of person, so figured his best course of action would be to make as much noise as possible to give any intruder a chance of running away, then leave it to the police to track him down later.

  He stood a few feet away from the door to allow safe passage for any fleeing criminals and started up an imaginary conversation on his phone. ‘No, I’m not in my office. I’m just going back to my apartment to pick my jacket up. Yes, I’m there now. No, I won’t be too long. I’ll see you shortly.’

  He held his breath and inched closer, trying to hear any movement coming from inside his apartment. Nothing. He knocked on the door.

  ‘Hello, is there anybody in there?’ He didn’t know what he’d do if somebody answered him. ‘Yes, I’m just robbing your apartment. I won’t be too much longer.’ As it happened, there was no reply. Tom breathed a sigh of relief and pushed the door open with his foot. Still nothing. He peered cautiously into the room.

  There was no sign of a burglar, but there was evidence that somebody had been there. The apartment had been ransacked. He stood in the entrance, surveying the carnage. The large orange sofa was tipped over; its fabric had been slashed and stuffing spilled out onto the floor, like entrails. The unit housing the TV and CD player lay on top of it, its contents smashed beyond recognition, their constituent parts scattered across the floor. The small table, upon which the laptop computer was placed, had been tossed across the other side of the room, but Tom couldn’t see the laptop anywhere.

  He made his way into the kitchen, picking his way around the debris. He could feel a cold breeze on his cheek – the patio doors leading to the quadrangle were wide open. He thought perhaps he had disturbed them, after all. The kitchen was in a similar state as the lounge. All the cupboards had been unceremoniously emptied onto the floor, which was now covered by a carpet of glass and china. Drawers had been pulled out, their contents tipped onto the kitchen work surface before being discarded. He didn’t need to go into the bedroom to know that it would have received the same treatment.

  He dialled the main CERN number from the mobile he was still clenching in his hand and asked to be put through to Inspector Gervaux. He had to wait several minutes before he heard the heavy French accent on the other end.

  ‘Hello, Inspector Gervaux. How may I help you?’

  ‘Inspector? Hi, it’s Tom Halligan. I think I’ve been burgled.’

  ***

  ‘And you say the only thing missing is your laptop?’

  Inspector Gervaux was jotting down everything that Tom was telling him in his notebook. It had taken him less than ten minutes to get to the apartment. He had with him a short, broad-shouldered gentleman with a squat neck and a heavy mono-brow arranged in a constant frown over close-set eyes. He had a round face with black, short-cropped hair. A badly-stitched scar ran from one side of his mouth to just below his cheek. If Tom hadn’t known better, he would have sworn he was looking at somebody who came from the wrong side of the law. He was introduced as Sergeant Lavelle.

  ‘As far as I can tell,’ replied Tom. ‘But, as you can see, it’s difficult to work out what’s here, let alone what’s gone.’

  The three men were standing in what was left of Tom’s bedroom. His mattress and duvet had been shredded, covering everything in a layer of snowy-white downy feathers. His clothes were strewn across the floor, the pockets of his jackets and trousers ripped open.

  ‘Do you have any idea who could be responsible for this?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘No, I don’t. Perhaps it was an opportunist thief,’ Tom suggested.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a regular burglary. It appears more like they were looking for something.’ It was the first time Sergeant Lavelle had spoken. Even when he was first introduced to Tom, he had simply nodded a greeting. His voice was gravelly, with a mix of French and German accents.

  ‘But what?’ Tom tried to rack his brains. ‘I don’t have anything of value.’

  ‘What was on the laptop?’ Inspector Gervaux enquired.

  ‘Nothing of mine. I haven’t even had time to log on since I arrived.’

  ‘Was it a new laptop?’ Sergeant Lavelle interjected.

  ‘As I said, I hadn’t really had a chance to use it,’ replied Tom. ‘But, going by everything else, it was probably a hand-me-down.’

  ‘Pardon?’ the two men said in unison.

 
; ‘It probably belonged to my predecessor,’ Tom explained.

  ‘Ah yes, Professor Morantz.’ Inspector Gervaux closed his notebook and pocketed it. ‘I will send our forensics team in to see if they can find any fingerprints or DNA. But, I must advise you, if they were professionals it’s very unlikely that we will find anything. If you remember something that could help us, please give me a call.’ He handed his card to Tom.

  He watched the two men leave, then turned his focus back to his bedroom. It was clearly uninhabitable. He gathered a pile of underwear, socks, T-shirts and a pair of trainers from the floor, grabbed the American Airlines complimentary wash bag from his bathroom and stuffed them into his flight bag, which he located in the living room; there really wasn’t anything else worth salvaging. He put on a sweater, gave one last perfunctory glance around and left the apartment without locking it, then made his way to the canteen.

  Serena was already there, sitting on a small table by the window picking at a tuna Niçoise salad. She saw him as soon as he came in and waved him over.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ Serena asked, motioning to the bag over Tom’s shoulder.

  ‘Long story,’ Tom replied taking the seat opposite her. ‘My apartment was broken into and this,’ he indicated to the flight bag, ‘is the sum total of all my worldly possessions.’

  ‘Oh my God! Did they take much?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but they trashed the place and my clothes with it. Apart from what I’m wearing and the few essential items I managed to recover, everything else was either ripped to shreds or smashed.’

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but the police seem to think they were looking for something.’

  Serena automatically reached for the tan-coloured briefcase in front of her. ‘You don’t think they were after this, do you?’

  Tom looked bemused. ‘What, your briefcase?’

  ‘No, dummy. Morantz’s file.’ She tried to say the words without moving her lips, but would have failed spectacularly to get a job as a ventriloquist.

  Tom was a little taken aback by the insult, but warmed to the way familiarity had crept into their relationship.

  Up to that point, it hadn’t crossed his mind that the file could have been what they were looking for.

  ‘But nobody knew I had it…’ Then he remembered the voice message he had left earlier that morning. ‘Except, of course, Frederick.’

  ‘What would Frederick want with the file?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m seeing him this afternoon. Why don’t I just ask him?’

  ‘Do you think that’s wise? After all, somebody did break into your apartment and he was the only person who knew you had it.’

  ‘Frederick’s not the breaking and entering type.’

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  Tom thought for a moment. That was the second time in one day that his character judgement had been brought into question. ‘Alright, perhaps I won’t ask him directly,’ he replied. ‘But I should be able to determine how desperate or not he is to get his hands on the file, by his reaction when I show it to him. Did you manage to confirm the figures, by the way?’

  ‘Yes and they stack up. The earthquakes all happened when the Collider was producing its maximum electromagnetic output.’

  ‘And the one in Istanbul?’

  ‘The timings match, but I haven’t been able to extrapolate all the figures yet.’

  Tom studied the half-eaten meal in front of Serena.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get anything to eat?’ she said, noticing him eyeing her plate.

  ‘No, I seem to have lost my appetite.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Serena offered.

  Tom knew the chivalrous thing to do would be to exclude Serena in case he had totally misinterpreted Frederick’s intentions. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I think it would help if you were there to verify the figures.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Tom had arranged to meet Frederick in his office, which was in a different part of the complex to the main building. At the time, he decided it would be a more discreet location than his own office, which was swarming with police. As he sat next to Serena in the golf buggy, he was wishing he could have reversed that decision.

  ‘Did you manage to make a copy of the data?’ he asked, pulling into a parking spot in front of a two-storey, anonymous grey building.

  ‘Yes, why? Do you think he’s going to steal it from us at gunpoint?’ Serena joked.

  Tom didn’t know what to think or say, so he remained silent. He was feeling a little apprehensive as he made his way into the building.

  ‘We have an appointment with Frederick Volker,’ he told the receptionist. Serena was by his side; she reached out and gave his hand a quick squeeze, out of sight of the woman behind the counter. She had heard the nervousness in his voice.

  ‘I’ll just let him know you’re here. Can I have your names, please?’

  ‘It’s Professor Halligan and Serena Mayer.’

  The receptionist punched Frederick’s extension number into the computerised switchboard. When he answered, she informed him that his visitors had arrived.

  ‘He said he’ll be right down. If you’d like to take a seat,’ she said pointing to the row of black plastic chairs behind them.

  They sat in the two furthest away from the reception counter.

  ‘I feel like I’m waiting to see the dentist,’ whispered Tom, leaning conspiratorially towards Serena.

  ‘I quite liked my dentist, actually. He once asked me out on a date,’ she replied chattily.

  ‘Is that allowed? Doctor-patient relationships, I mean?’

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, he wasn’t a doctor,’ Serena replied. ‘So I suppose so. But I turned him down, anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t want to have to find a new dentist if it didn’t work out. Where I grew up, good dentists were hard to find. Boyfriends, on the other hand, were plentiful.’ She chuckled at her own witticism.

  ‘I bet they were,’ he retorted, with a hint of jealousy.

  Just then, Frederick burst through the door with all the ardour of a teenager.

  ‘Tom! Welcome to my lair. And I see you’ve brought the delectable Miss Mayer with you. What a pleasure!’ His enthusiastic welcome dispelled any doubts that Tom had about Frederick’s disposition. ‘Come! Come! Let me show you to my office.’ He put his arm around Tom’s shoulder and shepherded him through the door, holding it open for Serena to follow. ‘Up the stairs, first on the left,’ he shouted after them.

  They reached the landing and stood back to let Frederick lead them in.

  His office was much bigger than Tom’s but, despite its size, it felt more homely, more lived in. Photos of family and friends adorned the walls. Tom recognised Ajay in a few of them and wondered, again, if Frederick had been told of his disappearance. The ubiquitous florescent strip lights were turned off and, instead, a softer illumination was provided by a tall standard lamp in one corner.

  Thick, dark green curtains dressed a large window that overlooked the car park Tom had used earlier. A mahogany bookcase stretched the full length of one wall and was stocked with rows and rows of ancient books bound in vellum, the aroma of which filled the office with a sweet, camphorous scent.

  His work station was an antique leather-topped pedestal desk and a matching green, high-backed chesterfield chair. Two plain green leather chairs occupied the other side of the desk. Pot plants filled corners and niches. It reminded Tom more of a gentleman’s study than a place of work.

  ‘As you can see, I do like my home comforts,’ Frederick commented, closing the door behind him and taking up position behind his desk.

  Tom left Serena to join Frederick and wandered over to the bookcase. He scanned the books’ bindings for titles or authors he would recognise, the musty smell of the parchment almost overpowering him. He was familiar with the names of a few of the authors – Galilei, Kepler,
Copernicus, Pflaum – but he was embarrassed to admit that, apart from Einstein and Newton, he hadn’t read any of their works.

  ‘Are all these originals?’ he asked, tilting his head to read the vertical writing of one book spine.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ replied Frederick. ‘It’s more of a compulsion of mine rather than a hobby. If my wife were to discover how much I’d spent on my cosmic collection, I can guarantee you I’d be a single man the very next day.’

  ‘Are they all about astronomy?’ Serena asked, studying the titles.

  ‘Astronomy, science, physics, they’re all linked together, really.’

  ‘Do you have a favourite?’ She could tell by the light shining in his eyes that he was bursting with pride.

  ‘Far too many, my dear,’ said Frederick. ‘But, if I had to choose one, it would be Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, printed in 1610, in which he first announced his use of a telescope and his subsequent discoveries that there were craters on the Moon, that the Milky Way was made up of stars, and that Jupiter had moons. Quite remarkable for his day.’

  Tom was only half listening to the conversation going on behind him; astronomy had never been his forte. But then his excitement grew as he spotted a book he knew well. He stretched to his full height and managed to pull it out with his fingertips – QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman. He opened the cover and noticed that there was an inscription: ‘To my dear friend Freddy, without your inspirational guidance, I would still be in the dark.’ It was signed Dick.

  ‘Did you know Richard Feynman well?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Ah, I see you’ve found his book. We worked together on a number of projects and became quite close. But don’t take too much notice of that dedication, he always was a bit over-generous with his praises,’ Frederick replied modestly. ‘I could bore you all day with my library, but I’m sure that’s not the reason you wanted to see me.’