'Yes, sir. The content was not specific and was not of any interest or relevance to the death.'
'Thank you,' said Wilkes. 'Has anyone any questions to ask the witness? No? That completes all the evidence. Is there any further statement that anyone wishes to make? It is my responsibility, therefore, to summarise these proceedings and finally to give a verdict.'
* * *
'I'm sorry, Helen. I didn't mean to loose off at you.'
'Forget it.' Helen waved her hand. 'I'm an insensitive clod-hopper. I should have kept my nose out and my mouth shut.'
'Don't say that. I appreciate you like mad.'
'Mummy, Mummy, come and look at the insects in the window,' called Sarah.
'Wait, darling. Mummy's finishing her coffee.'
'Perhaps it would help if you had some space away from the kids,' observed Helen.
'Please, Mummy.'
Laura nodded. 'It might, but it's not a very practicable idea.'
'Too much going on.'
'Like life, for instance.'
Matthew now joined the chorus, with the one-liner he had found to be most effective in shops and at market stalls alike, whenever he was taken shopping:
'I really need it. Please, Mummy.'
Laura shook her head: 'I can't even think about it any more at the moment, Helen.' She couldn't cope with making serious decisions when she was out like this with the kids.
'I'm coming, Matthew. But I haven't the money for any more presents.'
At the centre of the display in the corner of the charity shop window was an old plastic container accompanied by a faded poster proclaiming "Ant Farm. Kids: Keep your own colony of ants and watch them lay eggs, feed their young and milk their ant cows."
'Listen, you two, I've no money to buy any toys today.'
The chorus from the children died away. Laura stood up, went over to the shop window and peered in. It was full of second-hand junk.
'I don't believe it. I bring my kids to town and the only things they show any interest in buying are the most common items of equipment in Tom's labs at the Uni. They also have an instinct for the most awkward items in every shop.'
Laura sat down again.
'At least yours have other interests. All my nephews want to do is surf the net and play on computer games …' said Helen. Her voice tailed off and she stared at the cup.
'Are you thinking about the inquest?' asked Laura. It was an inspired guess.
Helen nodded, lips pursed and eyes filling up.
'It was a bad accident,' said Laura. 'But he wouldn't have suffered. He'd have died instantaneously.'
Helen shook her head: 'Don't even try to soften it. I've seen the photographs. I happened to be there when Tom shared them with Robin.'
She sat staring at the table. Laura fidgeted, not knowing how best to help.
'He didn't do it. He would never have killed himself.' The words burst from Helen. She pressed her hands flat against her face, as though to shut herself off from the reality. She took a deep breath before removing her hands, composing herself.
'I'm so sorry, love,' said Laura, putting her hand on Helen's shoulder. They leaned together and hugged.
* * *
Coroner Wilkes was speaking again.
'Finally, I come to the verdict. In considering the possibility that the deceased took his own life, I have to bear in mind that whilst most verdicts are given on the basis of the balance of probabilities, this doesn't apply to the taking of one's own life. For this verdict to be given, the level of evidence used to prove it has to be far higher than for other verdicts. That is, it has to be clear beyond all reasonable doubt that all other possible explanations have been ruled out.
'In this case, no overwhelming and unambiguous motive for suicide is evident. There is evidence that the judgement of the deceased may have been clouded by the consumption of alcohol. There is further evidence of factors which could have led to the deceased being depressed. There is also evidence he was recovering from the particular trauma of the death of his father, four years earlier. There is no evidence he was suicidal over this. My conclusion, therefore, is that the evidence is not sufficient to support the verdict of taking his own life. I am giving an open verdict. This is a final verdict, but it leaves open the question of what caused the death. I should like, finally, to offer my condolences to you for this sad event and to thank you all for attending today.'
Tom was in a daze. Was that it? He'd given up a day's work for this ritualistic nod in the direction of truth. He hadn't realised the proceedings would come to a climax and end as suddenly as this. The clerk froze with bowed head and both hands pressing on her temples. The usher stood up and stepped forward:
'The Court will rise.' They stood while the coroner left the courtroom, followed by the clerk and the usher.
* * *
Laura looked across the wide pavement, with its scattering of tourists, shoppers and others, to where the two children had stood till a moment ago, noses more or less glued to the shop window. But now, the equilibrium, always delicate between these two strong, outgoing personalities, was disturbed. Sarah said something to Matthew and he pouted and pushed her.
While this was going on, unnoticed by the two adults, across the pavement, standing lopsidedly and gazing intently at both children and shop window, was a stockily built man. He was dressed oddly out of harmony with the brilliant sunshine, in orange anorak, bright blue hiking trousers and boots. He carried a large frame rucksack on his back. His face, too, was at odds with the outdoor gear. Instead of weather-beaten features, the puffy flesh of his cheeks and jowls was waxy and pallid, as though he'd been fed on some unsavoury fatty substances and had spent a long period away from daylight.
There was a moment when Matthew, sensing a sinister presence, stopped arguing and looked across the pavement. Afterwards, the eyes of the stranger, the silence which surrounded him and the chill of being near him, were what the little boy remembered.
The altercation between the children quickly became more public as the volume increased. The last sentence reached Laura's ears with the clarity of children's voices floating over a hundred adult conversations which also must have been within earshot.
'Shut up, Sarah, or I'll call Mummy.'
Laura made a sudden decision.
'I'll tell you about our last trip to Africa,' she said, 'but not when I'm shopping with these two.'
She pushed back her chair and made for the children, just arriving in time to prevent a full-scale eruption.
'Now, you two.'
'Mummy, who was that man?' asked Matthew.
'Which man, darling? I can't see any man.'
'Over there. He was staring at us.'
'What's the matter?' Laura asked Helen.
'He had a horrid face.'
'What does that mean?' Laura was getting no answers, which wasn't unusual, given the leapfrog imaginations of her two little ones.
'He walked funny.'
'The kids are on about a man watching them.'
Helen's mind wasn't on what was happening. 'When?'
'Just now.'
'I didn't see any man.'
'They see too much on their cousins' computer games. All those surreal situations with horribly realistic videos embedded in them.'
'He was dizzy.'
'Drunk, silly. Like Auntie Vera.'
'He smelt,' said Matthew.
'It's rude to say that,' said Sarah.
'He smelt of dog-meat.'
Laura was embarrassed by the children's loud voices. This is why I never get the chance to have a proper conversation with my friends, she thought. She was suddenly angry. It was doubly frustrating though, because Tom had sworn her to secrecy about the uncertainty hanging over the future of the Centre. She absolutely hated being a party to secrets at work and objected strenuously: 'How do you expect me to act naturally with the partners of your colleagues when you're constantly passing me these little time-bombs of confidential information?
"Don't tell so-and-so, but … Don't say anything to anybody, but …" She felt inhibited from talking about her relationship with Tom, particularly on this day when Helen was likely to be vulnerable.
Suddenly Laura was feeling physically sickened by the whole situation. She couldn't escape from it quickly enough. She went back to the table, pulled out her purse from her handbag, extracted a five pound note and shoved it into Helen's hand.
'Pay for the drinks with this, there's a love. Come on, kids, time to go.'
Sometimes Laura hated Hull; the appalling deprivation, the down-trodden people wandering through the streets. She was trying to shelve this and reassure herself about the man.
'Probably a squaddy. Gulf war syndrome, makes them go dizzy.'
'That was years ago. Anyway, I thought they'd found no evidence that GWS exists.'
'Whatever you call it, as my doctor says, there's a lot of them about. Plenty of them still can't find jobs. Anyway –' Laura gathered up the children, who'd sensed the end of the game. She was showing signs of agitation. She leaned forward and kissed Helen on the cheek. 'See you later. Sorry about the –' She was already moving away and mouthed the word 'kids' and threw her hands up in a gesture of hopelessness.
'Don't worry,' Helen mimed. Then she waved to the kids and out loud called 'Byee.'
* * *
Tom was shaking his head as he walked out of the courtroom into the warm summer's day:
'It's all wrong,' he muttered, 'all so terribly wrong.'
Despite his general feeling of dissatisfaction, he struggled to put his finger on any specific failing in the verdict on the gruesome account of Detlev Brandt's last day on earth. It was incomprehensible that Detlev should have killed himself.
'Watch out!'
The warning came from an old man pushing a bicycle across his path. Before Tom could stop himself, he'd cannoned into the machine. The man lost his grip and it fell over. Vegetables piled loosely in the basket on the handle bars spilled all over the pavement. Tom bent and scrabbled frantically to recover onions, potatoes and carrots before they rolled onto the road, or other pedestrians came along. He pulled the cycle upright and piled the rescued items back in the basket. The man went on his way to the mantra of Tom's profuse apologies.
Get a grip, Tom chided himself as he took a deep breath before walking off. You're becoming neurotic over a tragedy beyond anyone's control.
Chapter 3
'Damn, damn, damn,' said Tom to himself. His conversation with Roger Hedley, professor of legal studies, grew out of Roger's concern for him. He sat in the senior common room with a coffee, well before nine on the morning after the inquest.
'What are you doing in so early?' asked Roger. He reminded Tom of a used-car salesman, short, rotund, dapper, a few straggling silver hairs slicked across his scalp.
'I could ask you the same thing.'
'Touché. A hundred examination scripts to moderate in my role as external examiner. What about you? A bit tetchy for the time of day. Come on, Tommy, what's bugging you?'
Tom could take even this hated corruption of his name from Roger, his long-standing colleague. They were contemporaries, having been in the University so long, side by side in dissimilar, yet parallel situations. He gave Roger the gist of the previous day's events.
'Why didn't you set to at the time, old chap, and tell the police what you thought?' asked Roger.
'I didn't think it was significant at the time.'
'That's what our students say.'
Tom was so preoccupied that he missed the force of this remark.
'I'm kicking myself. It was only today I realised the limited scope of the coroner's court proceedings.'
'Most people never realise it, because they never have reason to come into contact with an inquest.'
'Even then, I had no inkling he would return an open verdict.'
'Things have changed since the old days.'
'How do you mean?'
'There's a lot at stake for families. Stigma and that sort of thing, to say nothing of the insurance. There's every incentive for the relatives to challenge what they view as an unjustified verdict of suicide. The coroner can't bung in a verdict of suicide without cast-iron evidence.'
'People aren't meant to benefit financially as a result of an inquest verdict.'
'They aren't. But you can't stop insurance companies including certain conditions in their rules. Many life policies exclude payment in the event of a person taking their own life.'
'I wasn't thinking so much of suicide as the other extreme of –'
'You think he was murdered?'
'I believe he was.'
'Good God. Why didn't this come out in the inquest? You made a statement.'
'That was months ago.'
'You've changed your mind?'
'Not exactly. I've reconsidered and am prepared now to examine the possibility that Detlev was killed.'
'You're prepared to examine the possibility. Sounds a bit wishy washy and typically academic to me, if you don't mind me saying so. A minute ago you said he definitely was killed.'
'Correction. I think he may have been murdered.'
'Have you any evidence for this remarkable assertion?'
'I could have, eventually.'
'In my world, Tommy, could have is never. It's nearly a year on. In my line, we say every year later is evidence lost. My advice is, if you don't know, keep your trap shut and stay out of it. Nothing you do will bring him back. It's over. Forget it.'
Roger was right about the difficulties of evidence, but wrong to say it was over. It had hardly begun.
* * *
It was mid-morning. After an early start, Tom already had been at work for almost five hours, when the phone rang.
'Tom Fortius.'
'Hi Tom, Robin here. Are you busy?'
'No more than usual.'
'Does that mean you haven't a few minutes to spare?'
'Quite the reverse. I could do with a break from this bloody job. I was about to brew up.'
'Beaten you to it. Come to my office. It'll give me the chance to run some ideas past you.'
* * *
Tom found Robin blithely unaffected by the chaos of boxes and files around him in his office, spilling into the departmental office. In all their years as neighbours, he had never known it to be much different. If their research interests had coincided, they would have gone to war, for they were almost incompatible. When Robin had particular concerns, they merged into the blur of items they discussed. Then came the perennial issue whenever a member of departmental staff went away on fieldwork leaving colleagues behind working in related fields.
'It would help to know what we might look out for, on your behalf,' said Robin.
Tom's long, tried and tested relationship with Robin enabled him to set aside the traditional hesitance of the academic about sharing his newest research preoccupations with another person.
'Let's think,' he said. 'As you might expect, it has to be the impact of various insect migrations on human settlement and agriculture in particular, and also I guess we'll find time for patterns of predation and communication. Probably most of all among the driver ants of course. We're building up quite a body of experience with them, and an ever longer list of questions. I'll make some notes on these. When are you and Helen off?'
There was a pause.
'Helen's seeing me off, not going with me.'
'Right.' Tom sounded surprised.
Robin found himself waffling an explanation. 'It's a host of things. The house, Helen's father's health, leaving the house empty.'
'There's nothing else? I thought Helen would be dead set on going.'
Tom knew Robin's restless temperament. Robin could not abide staying in college term after term. He had to be on the move. His relationships were like that too. Over the years, he had acquired a legendary reputation for slipping rapidly from one woman to another. Tom had been taken aback when Robin moved in with Helen, and he was surprised
now at the realisation they had been living together for nearly seven years:
'Nothing to do with me. She decided. To be honest, she was doubtful as soon as I mentioned it. We have to think about so many factors.'
'It's none of my business so tell me to take a running jump. There's nothing wrong between you and Helen?'
Robin glanced at Tom, but obliquely as though avoiding looking him in the eye:
'Between me and Helen?' He laughed. 'You must be joking. Helen and I are secure as a rock, safe as houses. How do you want your coffee?'
'Black with no sugar.'
'You sounded pretty uptight on the phone.'
'It's the laboratory. No it's not. Why should I shelter him? It's one of the technicians. If we could hire and fire laboratory technicians purely on the quality of their day to day work that man would be out of here today. Also, more generally, we'd have far fewer hiccups with the experimental work.'
'Flog-em and sack-em? Not you, I think.'
'No dammit, it isn't.'
Tom couldn't hide the weariness in his voice.
'What's the man done?'
'It makes me so mad. I won't bore you with the why's and wherefore's. To cut a long story short, I asked him on Friday to prepare the equipment for me to replicate with the postgrad students the communications experiments we did with the slave-making sanguineas. I turned up Monday morning five minutes before my session to find he'd installed a colony of Myrmica Rubra in a maze, to test very basic patterns of communication in locating food sources. Then, to cap it all, we've lost, he's lost, or at least he can't track down, the equipment we used to carry out those first communication experiments with ants. I don't know if you remember that work we did with the Nuffield grant three or four years ago.'
'It rings a bell. I probably do. At the moment, my head's a shed with all this packing.'
'Sorry, Robin. I shouldn't load all this onto you.'
'No, it's me that feels guilty leaving you with all this.'
'Think nothing of it. It isn't your problem. It started as one of those days and in my experience it'll go on that way. Get out of this place and do your fieldwork. That's where the real world is. Hopefully, in the process you'll make new contacts and generate the extra income we need to survive.'
Antman Page 4
