Antman

by Robert V. Adams

  He picked up the phone and dialled Chris's direct number.

  'The bugger! He's got my lab equipment.'

  'What?'

  'The social insect communication experiments. We lost some of the back-up equipment some while ago.'

  'So our suspect works with you?'

  'Or did do till recently.'

  'Yes!' Chris clenched her fists in triumph. This was the break-through she'd desperately needed in this case.

  She picked up her mobile and pressed a button.

  'Hullo, Chris Winchester here. I'd like to speak to Superintendent Bradshaw.'

  * * *

  Tom suspected a link between the deaths and insect research at the University, but beyond that couldn't specify what it might be. He took his suspicions that Detlev was murdered to Chris and tried to convince her Detlev's body should be exhumed. She put it to him it would be difficult without fresh evidence to challenge the verdict of the coroner at the inquest.

  'Absurd! You can't have a body exhumed immediately after the inquest,' said Bradshaw.

  'What about where there is doubt?' asked Chris.

  'It'll cause a furore.'

  This was how Chris imagined Bradshaw would react. He appeared preoccupied not with pursuing a possible murder but with avoiding rocking the boat.

  'On what grounds will we make the request for an exhumation?'

  'On the grounds of new evidence.'

  Bradshaw stood up and walked round his desk, standing close to Chris. His voice was low; he hated being put on the spot. 'This is the last time I indulge any of your eccentricities. If I give you your way, you must come up with results, and quickly.'

  Once the order was granted, the procedure was straightforward. The pathologist proposed exhuming the body early in the morning.

  Quite apart from minimising the effects on decomposition of warming by ambient temperatures, there were fewer people about. There was less likelihood of attracting attention.

  The exhumation was carried out at six o'clock, as the sky was lightening from the east. Dark clouds hung forlorn and grey over the coffin and its attendants.

  Chris was shaking her head over a piece of paper, as Tom walked into her office. 'Problems?' she asked him.

  'The post-mortem report on Dr Brandt.'

  'That was quick.'

  'They say there's no fresh evidence proving unlawful killing.'

  Tom's expression showed his disappointment.

  'And there's no evidence that he killed himself.'

  'So the original open verdict is confirmed?'

  She held up her hand. 'Hold on, they haven't closed the investigation yet. There is one unresolved matter. They found a fragment in the oesophagus. Only a fragment, you understand. Not much thicker or longer than a hair.'

  'What's so special about that? Hardly enough to affect the hypothesis as to the cause of death.'

  'We've just received the results from Forensics. It was a fragment of an insect. It's been identified as part of the mandible of an ant.'

  Part Two

  Generation

  Chapter 20

  Graver was back home. Safe in his home territory, the superficiality, the outer persona, fell away. Everything Graver felt and thought came down to the single word hate. He hated all those he saw as contributing to the injustices, the indignities, of his life: his parents, school, the town and at this moment the entire world. His general loathing extended in every direction and reflected back on himself. It drove him then; more and more it drove him now. He hated himself.

  He couldn't cope with the complexity of himself as a composite animal. He jumped back in horror when he thought about or touched the mirror of his own reflections, his image fractured into the twenty million fragments of the photo cells at the back of his retina. This person was no more. In his place was the composite inhabited by the million fibres of the optic nerve, along which the pulses of the image travelled to different parts of his brain.

  * * *

  Tom parked in the public area on the street to the rear of Wawne Road Police Station. As he walked ruminatively towards the entrance to the offices, his reverie was rudely interrupted. Superintendent Bradshaw, walking just ahead of him, stopped and turned so Tom would catch up with him. 'Strange, Professor,' said Bradshaw, 'how every road keeps turning back in your direction.'

  'Good morning, Superintendent,' said Tom with what little enthusiasm he could muster.

  'A fortnight ago nobody ever talked about ants. Now I can't get away from them. I gather one of your little friends found their way into the windpipe of your ex-colleague Dr Brandt.'

  'One of your ex-special constables.'

  Bradshaw nodded. Apparently, he didn't like being reminded of this.

  'I can't understand how it was missed.'

  'It was only a small part of an ant's jaw,' said Tom. 'People, even specialists, see what they look for and they look for what they expect to find. Scientists have done it throughout the history of science. It happens to us all, all the time.'

  Bradshaw changed the subject. He couldn't work up any enthusiasm for the history of science.

  'I thought you'd be using our car park.'

  'I wouldn't presume, not being a police officer.'

  'True.'

  Bradshaw didn't ask Tom's destination. Tom assumed he anticipated the reply. They walked side by side towards the building in tense silence. Tom was preoccupied with many other matters at this moment; police inquiries were rather low on his list of priorities.

  'You're a difficult man to miss, Professor. You seem to be everywhere,' said Bradshaw. 'First the body, or rather bodies, the links between possible suspects and your previous employees and now the questions about who has the know-how to advise us.'

  Tom started as he belatedly registered what Bradshaw was saying. 'It doesn't surprise me,' he said. 'In this field the University has almost the monopoly of research expertise in this part of the country.'

  'The world has changed since I was a lad,' said Bradshaw. 'In those days we were expected to leave secondary modern school as soon as possible and earn a living. I was working in a factory before I was sixteen and it never did me any harm.'

  Tom steeled himself. He wasn't in the mood to listen to nostalgic reflections from the man who from Chris's vantage point was adding to the difficulties of the investigation.

  'I suppose you went to one of those grammar schools, Professor?'

  'I did.'

  'How does one become a professor? It must feel strange, sitting in that ivory tower on Cottingham Road looking out at all the people scurrying about far below'

  'I don't work in an ivory tower. Most of our research is very practical, to do with helping farmers control insect pests, for instance.'

  'People crowded together, they're a bit like ants.'

  Tom was taken aback at this. 'I suppose crowds of people are rather similar in appearance to crowds of ants, but there are very big differences.'

  Bradshaw returned to his former tack. 'My nephew wants to go to university to study music and my niece is studying for her PhD. Can you credit it, Professor? Me a complete ignoramus and the next generation are complete brainboxes. They'll be taking jobs in places where they're waiting for old codgers like me to retire. That's the way of the world. And now we have Professor Fortius coming into the Police Force to tell us how to do our detective work.'

  'Correction,' said Tom, irritated. 'You're the detective and I'm just the biologist.'

  Bradshaw left Tom waiting at the reception desk while he stomped off down the corridor to his own office.

  A couple of minutes later, Chris walked briskly down that same corridor. She saw Tom, indicated with a nod and he followed her from the foyer out into the rear car park.

  She looked extremely fed up. Tom turned away from his own problems. 'How is police work?'

  She pulled a long face. 'Police work isn't brilliant at present. In fact it's crap.'

  She walked fast across the car park and he had
to increase his speed to keep up.

  'We aren't making visible headway with this investigation and Bradshaw's being a royal pain in the backside.'

  'Are you sure you want me to help out?'

  'You aren't having second thoughts?'

  'It isn't that. I don't want to tread where it wouldn't help.'

  'We need allies, more voices like yours, from the outside, to counteract this attitude that Bradshaw exemplifies, this kind of “we used to manage without all these experts” view. We need more, not less voices like yours, from the real world out there.'

  'Bradshaw's just been telling me that he lives in the real world and I don't.'

  'That's typical. The cheek of the man. Where would he and all his narrow-minded colleagues be without people like you, willing to come and share your expertise with us on particular investigations?'

  'I'm flattered, but don't build me up. We aren't magicians at the University.'

  'Bradshaw carries a lot of baggage. It gets in the way of our work.'

  They reached Chris's car and climbed in. 'We have a problem persuading Bradshaw to widen the scope of this investigation beyond his own preconceptions.' She drove towards the exit of the car park. 'He likes to keep control of his staff. Take a look at the fourth window from the right, on the first floor. Tell me who you see.'

  Tom looked up and saw Bradshaw's unmistakable figure, framed by the window, staring down at them.

  'You don't even need to tell me,' she said. 'That's my problem – a boss who won't let us get on and do our job. If he could he'd do all our policing for us.'

  * * *

  Tom had to call home to collect some papers.

  'I may be late tonight,' he said apologetically as he walked through the kitchen on his way out. Laura was mixing a cake for the children's tea.

  'What do you expect me to say?' She laughed ironically, showing her slightly crooked eye teeth in that way Tom had once found so endearing when they were first together. Her open laughter had signified a welcome escape from the intensity of his laboratory work. He found himself trying vainly to recall when it had stopped being that way.

  'I'm past the stage of becoming uptight over a member of your faculty staff flipping his lid. You do your thing and I'll continue to do mine. Are you bothered?'

  'Bothered? Never. The only thing that I worry about is you and the kids.'

  He saw Laura grimace. They're only words, he thought. What do they mean? They're what I'm expected to say, so I say it. Like a drama on television. Someone else's life being acted out in front of me by other people. Or rather, I'm there, but as one of the actors, not as me. Where did he belong in this family, this relationship? Tom fervently wished he could answer the question.

  * * *

  Graver was agitated.

  This is wrong.

  Wrong, wrong, WRONG

  Bad

  Wrong.

  Let me start again.

  I am so frightened.

  I don't know what is out there.

  Who am I?

  There is a hole in the middle of me.

  It is called terror.

  An infinity of terror at the heart of me.

  Nobody can reach it.

  Nobody can reach it.

  I saw Charles Darwin today. I always know him by the stabbing eyes under the hood of that long black coat. He wanted to speak but I looked straight ahead and crossed the road. It was an effort. I had to be at work. I couldn't afford the time to argue the evolution of insect species and in particular to puzzle over the confinement of army ants to the Southern continents.

  J

  * * *

  Graver had anger about teachers. He was confused. Where was his anger directed? He didn't know the endpoint but wanted to right something which was very wrong. He'd started with the aim of lancing those abscesses from the past. Not all of them were apparent any more. He would continue with the present.

  The affinity between Graver and one of his teachers, Mr Regel, was inexplicable. It bridged some uncomfortable differences of role, age and race. In the stratified and narrow-minded atmosphere of the grammar school, Graver, the pupil, was victimised and so was Mr Regel, each in his way. Their common experience was more binding than the massive gulf between them.

  As for making the science plain to Graver, that was something else. Regel had a rapport with him. It was quite unusual for Graver to have a rapport with anybody; few people established any kind of personal relationship with Graver. He was reckoned in the staff room to be a pretty impenetrable pupil. Insofar as Graver took anything from school apart from the scars of bullying by other pupils, it was Mr Regel who taught him pretty well everything he knew. It was an odd relationship, more leading by example than verbal. It felt like forced feeding, with plenty of the forced: a most unusually mixed diet of zoology, biology, history of science, music and even a little philosophy, until Graver's mind could absorb no more. Taking it all in became a panic and an obsession. Could he take it all in and how could he gather even more knowledge? He cried at night with the frustration of not being able to stay at his desk any longer and keep on reading. Regel's obsession with German Romantic composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gradually seeped into Graver's consciousness. He imagined resemblances between the lives of Bruckner and Mahler and his own life. Regel lent him records of their symphonies. He borrowed biographical studies of both composers and spent hours transported into their world, creating scenarios in which he faced and surmounted the difficulties of Bruckner's childhood. He empathised with Bruckner's loneliness and disappointments. Mahler in adulthood exemplified to him the heroic tyrant whom he admired and pretended he could emulate. He furnished first a bedroom, then a complete downstairs room in the farmhouse with icons associated with these two composers. The bedroom became the theatre for his intimate fantasies. The drawing room took on the character of a concert hall, with a podium and conductor's lectern as its dominant feature.

  The laboratory, in contrast, was a Spartan place, compared with many. Most of the tables were bare, a few contained drawers or shelves, some looking as though they had never been opened. There were no chairs, just a couple of tall stools at the bench to the rear of the lab, under the bookshelves. These, too, were an apology for proper furnishing. They looked like someone's cast-offs rather than a well-used resource. A pile of dusty journals, some loose-leaf reports, untidily stacked, a desultory row of old works of scientific reference, a few copies of New Scientist. Across the lab, under the window was the single exception to its atmosphere of disuse – some piled cardboard boxes, apparently containing equipment of an unspecified nature. To the side of one of these, on the bench top lay a large, opened box, with a pile of packaging, some plastic and glass tubes and tubing.

  * * *

  The Senate sub-committee was urbane, scrupulously polite. Tom wouldn't have expected anything else of an upper middle-class Inquisition. The outcome was inevitable.

  In the loo after the meeting, Tom let rip out loud with the bitterness of years of struggling to keep his Research Centre going. ‘Bloody rationalisation, down-sizing, out-sourcing and all the rest.' The young lecturer from physics who emerged from an adjacent cubicle a few seconds later gave him a wary look as he washed his hands. Tom looked the other way. He had thought the toilet was empty.

  Tom called at Hugh's office for the inevitable debrief. 'I'm sorry,' said Hugh, who was browsing through a copy of Nature. 'I'll do what I can to help. You can draft a letter for me to send to the Senate.' This was typical Hugh. It was what Tom called passive management, or management by default. Hugh wasn't one to act assertively on his own behalf. He relied on others to take the initiative. 'We can appeal to the research committee.'

  Hugh became aware of Tom's irritated expression. 'I say, Tom, are you feeling off colour?'

  'No, absolutely brilliant,' said Tom tonelessly. 'I love this game called work harder while we try to destroy what you're doing. The recommendation to put my unit on the lin
e must have come from the research committee in the first place. If you haven't any more suggestions, I'll be going. I've some urgent tasks, postponed because of your sub-committee meeting.'

  'I see.' Hugh's embarrassment and guilt was a wall between the two men. 'I want you to know, Tom, that this isn't my doing, or even my wish.'

  Hugh's phone rang. He turned his head and picked up the receiver. At moments of stress, it didn't take much to distract him: 'Mackintosh, hullo, yes, ring you back in a couple of minutes.' He continued, as though they were still discussing the subcommittee.

  'Good, good. So speculation apart we haven't anything further to add at this point.'

  Tom looked puzzled, but Hugh continued. 'There's no mad rush. I suggest we take a break and you pop in after lunch with any further ideas.'

  Tom, inwardly fuming, stood up and walked to the door: He knew further discussion was useless. Hugh's mind had moved on to whoever had phoned.

  'I'll see you later,' said Hugh. Even before Tom reached the door, Hugh was picking up the phone.

  Tom's anger blotted out rational thought as he walked through the gloomy lobby, past the Epstein bust of a previous professor of biology, out into the bright sunshine.

  Chapter 21

  Bradshaw was prepared to resource a blanket approach – screening every potential suspect in a thirty-mile radius of where the last two bodies were found. He pointedly ignored Chris's efforts to restrict the search initially to people connected with insects in some way, based on Tom's advice and the forensic evidence of insect predation.