The Cambridge Theorem

by Tony Cape

  “Who’s that?”

  “There is a tutor who sleeps in his rooms every night at the college during term. He’s the duty tutor after the administration offices close. He makes all those kinds of decisions. The tutors rotate the duty every week.”

  “Who was it two nights ago?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t checked. I had already locked up the lodge and just kept going after I left Simon’s room.”

  “So, obviously, regardless of whether technically you have committed a crime, you did not perform your duties as they were expected of you.”

  “No.” Fenwick was staring at the floor.

  Smailes said nothing for a minute, and re-read his notes. “It’s not my decision whether to charge you with anything, Alan. That’s up to the Chief Superintendent. But you will have to come to the station and make a full statement. And you may be required to testify at the inquest. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Fenwick, without raising his eyes.

  “And I will have to let Mr. Beecroft know that we have had this discussion. It’ll be up to him to decide what to do with the information, you understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “So. Do you know why Simon Bowles killed himself?”

  “Honest, officer, I’ve no idea. No idea.” He looked up at Smailes with angry, red-rimmed eyes. “If he was upset about something, I don’t know why he didn’t wait to talk to me about it.”

  “Did he feel guilty about your friendship?”

  “I don’t think so. He felt frustrated that we couldn’t be more open about it, that’s all.”

  “Did he tell you about any other relationships he had, about other men he would like to be, er, friendly with?” Smailes thought of the Giles Allerton theory.

  “Definitely not. There was nobody else, for either of us.”

  “How about problems with money, or drugs, anything?”

  “Not at all. Simon was from a very good family.”

  “Did Simon Bowles confide in you?”

  “I thought so."

  “Had he told you of anything that was bothering him lately?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you why he went down to London the day of his death?” asked Smailes mildly.

  “It wasn’t Tuesday. It was Monday, the day before. No, he just told me he was going down for the day.”

  “How did he tell you?”

  “The usual way. We left notes for each other in Simon’s pigeon-hole. He left me a note when I came in Monday lunchtime. Said he would be back by Tuesday, ‘as usual.’ That was our signal.”

  “That you would meet as usual.”

  “Yes.”

  “How about his reason for missing the gathering at his sister’s house on Sunday?”

  “In Rickmansworth?” Fenwick seemed genuinely surprised. “I had no idea he was supposed to go there.”

  “How about his latest research project, on communism at Cambridge?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, officer,” he said primly. Smailes had heard enough to know that Bowles did not confide in him in any significant way.

  “Mr. Fenwick, I’d like you to come with me. To the station.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No. I’d like you to make a voluntary statement.”

  Fenwick stood up and heaved a sigh. “All right. Let’s get it over with. Shall I drive?”

  “That your Mini outside?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Make the payments on your salary, Alan?”

  “I used to, just,” said Fenwick gloomily.

  “No, I’ll bring you back,” he said gently.

  Fenwick walked to a wardrobe and extracted a yellow zippered leather jacket. Smailes doubted that he wore it to work.

  Chapter Nine

  GEORGE DEARNLEY removed his glasses and rubbed his face vigorously with his hand, then gave his jowls a strong tug. Then he put the glasses back on and pursed his lips. He looked at Smailes quizzically.

  “You believe him, Derek?”

  “Yes, I do, unfortunately.”

  Dearnley looked down again at the printout of Fenwick’s record, and the handwritten statement. Three arrests for vandalism, two while still a juvenile. One shop-lifting arrest nine months ago, from a clothing store. Hardly an exemplary citizen.

  “So the Bowles kid hung himself between ten-thirty and one and we don’t really know why. Except he was an unstable type, right? Fairy too?” asked Dearnley. Smailes nodded.

  “So it’s a question of whether we charge,” Dearnley looked down again at the statement, “Fenwick with failure to report, or maybe obstruction, something like that.”

  “Yes”.

  “Teach him a bloody lesson, wouldn’t it?” Dearnley mused. Smailes said nothing.

  “So what’s the downside?” asked Dearnley, anticipating opposition.

  “Well, you spoonfeed the bloody Evening News a tailor-made scandal, don’t you?” said Smailes forcefully. “‘Dead student in midnight tryst with porter,’ all over page one. When Fenwick’s previous convictions come out, and that he was a regular visitor of the deceased, it’ll be hard to maintain he was delivering a phone message, won’t it? I’m not saying Fenwick doesn’t deserve it, but it seems hard on the family.”

  Smailes knew George would have to chew on this one. It had caused a minor scandal around Cambridge when George had left his second wife and set up home with Jill Wilde, who was the crime reporter for the Evening News and a well-known figure around the town. When they had both divorced and married each other, she had been forced to resign from the paper out of potential conflict of interest, and had eventually found a job on the crime desk of a Fleet Street daily. Smailes doubted she was entirely happy about it, though, commuting nearly three hours a day, and altering her career so George wouldn’t have to alter his. So George probably had mixed feelings about the Evening News. Like all policemen, Dearnley had an intense distrust of the press in general, and had no wish to dish up a juicy and damaging story if it was avoidable. He probably also resented the management of the News for the way they had forced Jill out, inevitable though it had been. Smailes felt he was probably on firm ground.

  “So you suggest?” asked Dearnley, disinterestedly.

  “Tell the family how Fenwick found the body and panicked. Suppress the statement from the report to the coroner, and tell the family that we are doing so to avoid a scandal. Let the record show that the bedder was the first person to find the body. Let Fenwick take it in the neck from the people at St Margaret’s. He’ll be fired, which is probably enough punishment.”

  “Yeah, except we can tell Baddeley what we want him to do. He’ll toe the line.” Oscar Baddeley was the Cambridge coroner who would conduct the inquest. Like magistrates, coroners were simply private citizens of good character with no special medical or legal training. They usually deferred to the police in the strategy for conducting inquests, particularly a Chief Superintendent. Smailes realized while it would be hard to sell Baddeley on suppression of evidence simply to deny the press, he would probably accept the desirability of protecting the family, and no doubt the college, from unnecessary scandal. He would also appreciate the appeal to his discretion and compassion.

  “Fenwick will have to know he’s not going to be called, and agree to keep quiet. Will he do it?” As Smailes had hoped, Dearnley had picked up the ball and run with it.

  “Sure,” said Smailes. “He’ll be getting off light.”

  “You mean yes, do you?” George, in particular, loathed his Americanisms.

  “I mean yes, George,” said Smailes, smiling

  “So what else? Can we give Baddeley any idea why he did it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve got to talk to this scientist guy tomorrow, who supervised him. Then the Myrtlefields people, I suppose, but I don’t think we’ll turn up anything specific. One thing worries me, though.”

  Dearnley leant forward on his elbows and adopted his most pater
nal tone. “Say ‘concerned’ Derek. ‘One thing concerns me.’”

  “One thing concerns me,” he repeated, obediently.

  “Yes?”

  “Bowles was a bit of an amateur detective. He’d worked out a theory about the Kennedy murder. Quite clever. Recently he’d begun work on Russian spies from Cambridge. You know, the Blunt business. Were there any left, that sort of thing.”

  Dearnley said nothing, listening skeptically

  “Well, the day before he hanged himself, he’d been down to London, to Somerset House. We don’t know why. Cancelled out of a family celebration to do it. Maybe he learned something there which made him do it.”

  “You mean found out that one of his ancestors was a spy, and the shame was too much for him?”

  “I don’t know, but…”

  “Derek, really.” Dearnley made a scoffing gesture with his hand.

  “Could be just coincidence, but…”

  Dearnley’s voice was firmer. “Damn right it could be coincidence. It’s nothing, Derek. Nothing. Don’t let me see any expenses for trips to London, understand?”

  “Okay, George.” Smailes felt slightly embarrassed.

  “Let’s wrap this up.” He swung around in his chair and glared at his Slazenger wall calendar. “Report by Tuesday. I’m gonna need you on the Royston lorry job.”

  “The cigarette lorry?”

  “Yeah. It’s Sikhs, seems. You know what that means.”

  “No, what?”

  “Think about it. Probably gun-running. You read the papers, don’t you? Howell and Swedenbank are beginning to mess their britches about it. Finish this up so we can get you on it, okay?”

  “Okay, George,” said Smailes, turning on his heel. As often with his meetings with George Dearnley, he came away feeling both chastened and flattered. He did not see that as he left, Dearnley pulled the Fenwick paperwork again and stared at it pensively, before reaching for his telephone.

  There was no one in the detectives’ room. The ranks of gray metal desks and green filing cabinets stood silent and empty, like abandoned weaponry. The table just inside the glass panelled door had become a graveyard for dead typewriters and had collected another newly-expired model which was tipped over on its end, its key bars lolling like a parched tongue. Smailes ran his hand over it. There must be only a couple of working models left in the whole department.

  Two reports were waiting for him in his in-tray. He examined the first, the post mortem report from the pathologist at Addenbrookes. He saw the familiar signature of Dr. Maurice Jones, who had performed all the post mortems in Cambridge for as long as Smailes could remember. He skipped the preamble where Dr. Jones always spoke about the physical condition of the cadaver and the presence or absence of the major diseases, and jumped to the probable cause and time of death. Jones had time of death between midnight and four a.m. No doubt, thought Smailes. For cause, he had rupture of the spinal column between the first and second vertebrae resulting in massive neurological trauma. A broken neck, in other words. He referred to the contusions on the neck and found them consistent with constriction caused by a thick strap or rope. Or belt, thought Smailes. There were no other marks of injury to the body. He read carefully the blood and stomach contents analysis. A blood alcohol count of 0.06—or about a pint and a half of beer, Smailes calculated. No other unusual chemicals or substances. Dr. Jones’ summary was eminently reasonable—that whereas the neck bruising and abrasions suggested the possibility of strangulation, there was no evidence of asphyxiation. Thus the cause of death was the sharp, traumatic injury to the spinal column, which was consonant with hanging. Dr. Jones found it likely that the young man’s injury was self-inflicted.

  The second report was from Klammer. He was a little surprised the lab had worked so quickly. It probably meant the coroner’s people had taken the lifts from Bowles’ hands without being asked, and Klammer had been able to run comparisons right away. Smailes was disappointed. As Klammer had predicted, there were nothing but smudges and fragments from the plant pot—Klammer had written Wiped? in the Comments column. The leather belt had a number of poorly-defined prints from different sources—some definitely belonged to Bowles, and Klammer had written Need Eliminators under Comments. From the desk lamp there were again only smudges and fragments—Klammer had no comments. From the file cabinet Klammer had pulled many distinct prints, all identified as belonging to Simon Bowles. And finally, the typewriter keys had yielded good prints of all of Bowles’ eight fingers, with fat, full thumb prints from the space bar. So much for someone else typing Bowles’ suicide note. It made sense that Bowles would type properly, using all his fingers and thumbs. George was right, it was time to wrap up this case and move on. He looked over the report again and decided no further action was needed. He knew for sure that the belt had been handled by the coroner’s officers, and he himself had taken it down and placed it on the desk, without using precautions. It also made sense that the plant pot would seem wiped, as he had manipulated it with his handkerchief. There was no point bothering with eliminators, because there would be no unidentifiable prints, he was convinced. He jotted down these comments and removed his Bowles file from his portfolio, and inserted the report. Time to think Sikhs, he said to himself.

  His portfolio felt fat and heavy on his knee, containing all the notes that Alice Wentworth had let him remove that morning. He examined the slim document he had missed yesterday, Bowles’ Kennedy Theorem. He yawned mightily, and remembered again how little sleep he had had the night before due to Simon Bowles.

  An hour and a half later he finished the document with a racing heart. He was almost sure Bowles was right, that Hector Martinez had killed Kennedy, or at least masterminded the murder. Bowles pronounced it the crime of the century, and Smailes was inclined to agree. He also had to agree that it was likely this improbable young man in his Cambridge study had solved a crime that had defeated all other public and private investigations. He felt an involuntary surge of admiration.

  As Alice Wentworth had said, her brother’s breakthrough appeared to come after the arrival of a number of documents from the States during the time he was in the hospital. Bowles had corresponded with an independent researcher in California, who had sent him a stack of FBI and CIA documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. Many of these apparently dealt with the activities of the Cuban exile community in the months preceding and following the Kennedy assassination. There were even photographs of Oswald taken with some Cubans at one of the paramilitary camps in Louisiana. Then there was a long report by a UN-affiliated Latin America Research Group, examining upheavals in Cuba in the mid-sixties, in particular a damaging rift between the Castro brothers which some analysts had thought might lead to an open power struggle, and even civil war. He had no idea how Bowles had located this document, which was nearly twenty years old. Together the documents seemed to represent to Bowles the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that he had known must be lying around somewhere, and he had latched onto their significance with awesome intellectual speed.

  The loops and turns of Bowles’ exposition were hard to follow, but his breakthrough had obviously come with the identification of the mysterious Cuban with whom Oswald was seen in the months preceding the shooting. From the photographs he’d received, Bowles tagged him as Hector Martinez, an agent run personally by the Cuban Intelligence chief Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother. It appeared Oswald had known Martinez years before in Minsk during his stay there, when Martinez was enrolled in a KGB language school.

  The plot to murder Kennedy was apparently an elaborate triple bluff hatched by Martinez as a freelancer, without approval of either of the Castros. Mafia money bankrolled the job, which entailed the murder of Kennedy by three professional assassins including Martinez and the set-up of Oswald for the fall, while pinning the conception on the anti-Castro exiles. Martinez’ game was to neutralize both Kennedy and the exiles, the two biggest threats to the survival of the revolution, and to become a
hero himself on his return to Cuba. Oswald had been sold a story that he and Martinez would escape together, the blame falling on the lunatic Cuban right-wing that they had infiltrated. Meanwhile, Martinez had conspired with the exiles to arrange for Oswald, a known Marxist, to be taken out trying to escape. Apart from Oswald’s unexpected survival of his arrest, the plan worked perfectly. Martinez had counted on the Mafia’s code of silence as a failsafe, which kicked in when Ruby, the mob’s bagman in Dallas, gunned down Oswald in the police basement. This was the story, Bowles speculated, that Martinez told Raul Castro after his documented flight from Dallas to Havana on the afternoon of the murder.

  Simon Bowles claimed that Hector Martinez was still in a Havana jail, his execution stayed only by personal intercession of Raul Castro. The other assassins were not so fortunate; Fidel Castro insisted they each be located and eliminated. Indeed, the Cuban leader had been enraged when he learned of the crazy plot, and hourly expected invasion after Oswald’s Marxist background became known. That Raul had not authorized the murder did not excuse him in Fidel’s eyes, and a dangerous rift opened up between the two brothers. Only when it became clear that the U.S. Establishment would close ranks behind the “lone nut” theory, and that the Texan who had inherited the White House would not invade, did the division heal. The official investigation suppressed any evidence that might have tied Oswald to the exiles, and likewise the Warren panel dismissed notions that Oswald was an agent of Havana, despite LBJ’s private doubts. Luckily for Cuba, the U.S. military leadership soon persuaded Johnson that his main communist threat lay elsewhere, in Southeast Asia, and the danger of reprisals passed. After Raul Castro, retreating to his power base within the Cuban military, was rehabilitated, the threat to Cuba’s stability receded. Fidel Castro even met later with Congressional investigators to explain Cuba’s innocence in the affair. It would have been folly, he argued, for Cuba to provoke its superpower enemy through such a lunatic act. The Congressmen accepted the sorrowful analysis, and conceded that a traitor’s murderous actions had indeed prevented better relations with this troublesome neighbor. It was one minor note in the greater tragedy of that brutal crime.