by P. D. James
Through the window of the guard house they saw a woman, obviously Miss Amphlett, walking unhurriedly down the concrete path. She was a cool, self-possessed blonde who, on arrival, ignored Oliphant’s bold stare as if he weren’t present and gravely greeted Rickards. But she didn’t respond to his smile, either because she thought a smile inappropriate to the occasion or, more likely, because in her view few visitors to Larksoken merited such a personal welcome and a police officer wasn’t among them.
She said: “Dr. Mair is ready for you, Chief Inspector,” and turned to lead the way. It made him feel like a patient being shown into the presence of a consultant. You could tell a lot about a man from his PA, and what she told him about Dr. Alex Mair reinforced his private imaginings. He thought of his own secretary, tousle-haired, nineteen-year-old Kim, who dressed in the more bizarre extreme of contemporary youth fashion, whose shorthand was as unreliable as her timekeeping, but who never greeted even the lowliest visitor without a wide smile and the offer, which they were ill advised to accept, of office coffee and biscuits.
They followed Miss Amphlett between the wide lawns to the administration building. She was a woman who induced unease, and Oliphant, obviously feeling the need to assert himself, began to prattle.
“That’s the turbine house to our right, sir, and the reactor building and the cooling plant behind it. The workshop is to the left. It’s a Magnox thermal reactor, sir, a type first commissioned in 1956. We had it all explained to us when we went round. The fuel is uranium metal. To conserve the neutrons and to allow natural uranium to be used, the fuel is clad in a magnesium alloy called Magnox with a low neutron absorption. That’s where the reactor gets its name. They extract the heat by passing carbon-dioxide gas over the fuel in the reactor core. That transfers its heat to water in a steam generator, and the steam drives a turbine coupled to an electric generator.”
Rickards wished that Oliphant didn’t feel the need to demonstrate his superficial knowledge of nuclear power in the presence of Miss Amphlett, and only hoped that it was accurate. Oliphant went on: “Of course this type of reactor is out of date now. It’s being replaced by a PWR—pressurized water reactor—like the one being built at Sizewell. I’ve been shown over Sizewell as well as Larksoken, sir. I thought I might as well learn what’s going on in these places.”
Rickards thought, And if you’ve learned that, Elephant Boy, you’re even cleverer than you think you are.
The room on the second floor of the administration block into which they were shown struck Rickards as immense. It was almost empty, an arrangement of space and light deliberately deployed to make a statement about the man who now rose to his feet behind the huge black modern desk and stood gravely waiting while they walked across what seemed endless yards of carpet. Even as their hands touched, and Alex Mair’s grasp was firm and disconcertingly cold, Rickards’s eyes and mind took in the salient features of the office. Two of the walls were painted a smooth light grey, but to the east and south sheets of plate glass reached from ceiling to floor, giving a panorama of sky, sea and headland. It was a sunless morning but the air was suffused with a pale ambiguous light, the horizon blurred so that sea and sky were one shimmering grey. Rickards had for a moment the sensation of being weightlessly suspended in outer space in some bizarre and futuristic capsule. And then another image supervened. He could almost hear the throb of the engines and feel the ship shudder as the great surge of ocean divided under the prow.
There was very little furniture. Alex Mair’s uncluttered desk, with a high but comfortable armchair for visitors, faced the southern window, before which stood a conference table set with eight chairs. In front of the east window was a display table holding a model of what Rickards presumed was the new pressurized water reactor shortly to be constructed on the site. Even at a glance he could see that it was beautifully made, a marvel in glass and steel and perspex, as intricately crafted as if it were a decorative object in its own right. On the north wall hung the only picture: a large oil showing a man with a rifle on a skinny horse, posed in a bleak landscape of sand and scrubland with, in the background, a range of distant mountains. But the man had no head. Instead he was wearing a huge square helmet of black metal with a slit for the eyes. Rickards found the picture disturbingly intimidating. He had a faint memory that he had seen a copy of it, or of something very like it, before, and that the artist was Australian. He was irritated to find himself thinking that Adam Dalgliesh would have known what it was and who had painted it.
Mair went over to the conference table and lifting one of the chairs, swung it lightly and placed it by the desk. They were to sit facing him. After a moment’s hesitation, Gary Price took a chair for himself, placed it behind Mair and unobtrusively took out his notebook. Looking into the grey sardonic eyes, Rickards wondered how Alex Mair saw him, and a snatch of conversation, overheard some years ago in the mess at New Scotland Yard, came unbidden into his mind.
“Oh, Ricky’s nobody’s fool. He’s a bloody sight more intelligent than he looks.”
“He’d better be. He reminds me of one of those characters you get in every war film. The poor, honest son-of-a-bitch who always ends up with his face in the mud and a bullet in his chest.”
Well, he wasn’t going to end with his face in the mud in this enquiry. The room might look as if it were specifically designed to intimidate him, but it was only a working office. Alex Mair, for all his assurance, his rumoured brilliance, was only a man, and if he had killed Hilary Robarts he would end up, as better men than he had done, looking at the sky through iron bars and watching the changing face of the sea only in his dreams.
As they seated themselves, Mair said: “I expect you’ll need somewhere to interview people. I’ve made arrangements for a small room in the Medical Physics Department to be made available when you’re finished here. Miss Amphlett will show you the way. I don’t know how long you’ll need it, but we’ve moved in a small refrigerator, and there are facilities for making tea or coffee, or, if you prefer, tea and coffee can be brought to you from the canteen. And the canteen staff can, of course, provide you with simple meals. Miss Amphlett will let you have today’s menu.”
Rickards said: “Thank you. We’ll make our own coffee.”
He felt at a disadvantage and wondered if this was intended. They would need an interview room and he could hardly complain if this need had been anticipated. But it would have been a better start if he could have taken the initiative, and he felt, perhaps illogically, that there was something demeaning to his job in this careful reassurance that he would get his food and drink. The look bent on him across the desktop was unworried, speculative, almost, he could imagine, slightly judgemental. He knew that he was in the company of power, and the kind of power with which he was unfamiliar: confident, intellectual authority. A clutch of chief constables would have been less formidable.
Alex Mair said: “Your Chief Constable has already liaised with the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary. Inspector Johnston would like a word with you this morning, probably before you begin your general interview. He realizes that the Norfolk Constabulary have the principal responsibility here, but naturally he has an interest.”
Rickards said: “We recognize that, and we shall be glad of his co-operation.”
And it would be co-operation, not interference. He had already made himself familiar with the duties of the AEAC, and he was aware that there was a potential risk of dissension and overlapping of powers. But this was essentially a matter for the Norfolk CID and was seen as an extension of the Whistler enquiries. If Inspector Johnston was prepared to be reasonable, then so was he, but it was not a problem which he proposed to discuss with Dr. Mair.
Mair opened the right-hand drawer of his desk and took out a manila folder. He said: “This is Hilary Robarts’s personnel file. There’s no objection to your seeing it, but it merely gives the background information: age, places of education, degrees, career before she came to us in 1984 as deputy to the Admin
istrative Officer. A curriculum vitae from which the vitae is unusually conspicuously absent. The dry bones of a life.”
Mair slid it across the desk. The action had a curious finality. A life closed, finished with. Taking it, Rickards said: “Thank you, sir. It will be helpful to have it. Perhaps you could flesh out some of the dry bones for us. You knew her well?”
“Very well. Indeed, for a time we were lovers. That doesn’t, I admit, necessarily imply more than physical intimacy, but I probably did know her as well as anyone here on the station.”
He spoke calmly and totally without embarrassment, as if it were as unimportant as stating that he and Robarts had shared the same university. Rickards wondered if Mair expected him to seize on the admission. Instead he asked: “Was she popular?”
“She was highly efficient. The two, I find, do not invariably go together. But she was respected and, I think, generally liked by those staff who had dealings with her. She will be greatly missed, probably more deeply than would be more egregiously popular colleagues.”
“And missed by you?”
“By all of us.”
“When did your affair end, Dr. Mair?”
“About three or four months ago.”
“Without rancour?”
“With neither a bang nor a whimper. We had been seeing less of each other for some time before then. My personal future is at present rather unsettled, but I am unlikely to continue as Director for very much longer. One comes to the end of a love affair as to the end of a job, with a natural feeling that a stage of life has run its course.”
“And she felt the same?”
“I imagine so. We both had some regrets at the break, but I don’t think either of us ever imagined that we were indulging in a grand passion, or indeed expected our relationship to be lasting.”
“There was no other man?”
“None that I know of, but, then, there’s no reason why I should know.”
Rickards said: “So you would be surprised to learn that she wrote to her solicitor in Norwich on Sunday morning to make an appointment to discuss her will and that she told him she was expecting shortly to be married? We found the unposted letter among her papers.”
Mair blinked rapidly but otherwise showed no sign of discomposure. He said evenly: “Yes, it would surprise me, but I’m not sure why. I suppose because she seemed to live rather a solitary life here, and it’s difficult to see how she could have found time or opportunity to enter into a new relationship. Of course it’s perfectly possible that some man from her past has re-emerged and they have come to an arrangement. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
Rickards changed the tack of his questioning. He said: “There seems to be a feeling locally that she wasn’t much help to you during the public enquiry into the second reactor here. She didn’t give evidence to the official enquiry, did she? I can’t quite see how she was involved.”
“Officially she wasn’t. But at one or two public meetings, unwisely, she got embroiled with hecklers, and on one of our open days the scientist who normally escorts the public was off sick and she took his place. She was, perhaps, less tactful than she should have been with some of the questioners. After that I arranged that she wasn’t directly involved with the public.”
Rickards said: “So she was a woman who provoked antagonism?”
“Not enough, I should have thought, to provoke murder. She was dedicated to the work here and found it difficult to tolerate what she saw as wilful obscurantism. She hadn’t a scientific training but she did acquire considerable knowledge of the science done here, and perhaps undue respect for what she saw as expert scientific opinion. I pointed out that it was unreasonable to expect this to be shared by the general public. After all, they’ve probably been told by experts in recent years that high-rise flats don’t collapse, that the London Underground is safe from fire and that cross-Channel ferries can’t keel over.”
Oliphant, who had until now remained silent, suddenly said: “I was one of the visitors on that open day. Someone asked her about Chernobyl. She made a remark, didn’t she, about ‘only thirty dead, so what were people worrying about?’ Isn’t that what she said? It rather begged the question: How many dead would Miss Robarts agree was an unacceptable figure?”
Alex Mair looked at him as if surprised that he could actually speak and, after a moment’s contemplation, said: “In comparing the Chernobyl death toll with fatalities in industry and in mining fossil fuels, she was making a perfectly reasonable point, although she could have done it with more tact. Chernobyl is a sensitive subject. We get rather tired of explaining to the public that the Russian RBMK type of reactor had a number of design weaknesses, notably that it had a fast-acting positive power coefficient when the reactor was at low power. The Magnox, AGR and PWR designs don’t have this characteristic at any power level, so that a similar accident here is physically impossible. I’m sorry if that sounds overtechnical. What I’m saying is: it won’t happen here, it can’t happen here and, in fact, it didn’t happen here.”
Oliphant said stolidly: “It hardly matters whether it happens here or not, sir, if we get the results of it. Wasn’t Hilary Robarts suing someone in the community for alleged libel arising out of the meeting I attended?”
Alex Mair ignored him and spoke to Rickards. “I think that’s generally known. It was a mistake, I think. She had a legitimate case but she wasn’t likely to get satisfaction by going to law.”
Rickards asked: “You tried to persuade her not to in the interests of the station?”
“And in her own. Yes, I tried.”
The telephone on the desk rang. Mair pressed the button. He said: “This shouldn’t take much longer. Tell him I’ll ring back in twenty minutes.” Rickards wondered whether he had arranged for the call to be put through. As if in confirmation of the suspicion, Mair said: “In view of my past relationship with Miss Robarts, you’ll need to know my movements on Sunday. Perhaps I could give them to you now. Both of us have a busy day ahead, I imagine.” It was a less-than-subtle reminder that it was time they got down to business.
Rickards kept his voice steady. “That would be helpful, sir.” Gary Price bent his head over his notebook as assiduously as if he had just been reprimanded for inattention.
“They’re hardly relevant until Sunday evening, but I may as well cover the whole of the weekend. I left here just after ten-forty-five on Friday and drove to London, lunched with an old university friend at the Reform Club and went on at two-thirty to a meeting with the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Energy. I then went to my flat in the Barbican and in the evening attended a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Barbican Theatre with a party of three friends. If you later need their corroboration, which seems unlikely, I can, of course, give you their names. I drove back to Larksoken on Sunday morning, lunched at a pub en route and arrived home at about four. I had a cup of tea and then went for a walk on the headland and got back to Martyr’s Cottage about an hour later. I had a quick supper with my sister at about seven and left for the station at seven-thirty, or soon afterwards. I was working here in the computer room alone until ten-thirty, when I left for home. I was driving along the coast road when I was stopped by Commander Dalgliesh with the news that Hilary Robarts had been murdered. The rest you know.”
Rickards said: “Not altogether, Dr. Mair. There was some delay before we arrived. You didn’t touch the body?”
“I stood and looked down at her but I didn’t touch her. Dalgliesh was rather conscientiously doing his job, or should I say yours. He very rightly reminded me that nothing should be touched and that the scene should be left undisturbed. I went down and walked by the sea until you arrived.”
Rickards asked: “Do you usually come into work on Sunday evenings?”
“Invariably if I have had to spend the Friday in London. There is a very heavy pressure of work at present which it is impossible to fit into a five-day week. Actually I only stayed for less than three hours, but t
hey were valuable hours.”
“And you were alone in the computer room. Doing what, sir?”
If Mair found the enquiry irrelevant he didn’t say so. “I was engaged on my research, which is concerned with the study of reactor behaviour in hypothesized loss-of-coolant accidents. I’m not, of course, the only person working in what is one of the most important areas of research in nuclear-reactor design. There’s a great deal of international co-operation in these studies. Essentially what I’m doing is evaluating the possible effects of loss of coolant by mathematical models which are then evaluated by numerical analysis and advanced computer programs.”
Rickards said: “And you’re working here at Larksoken alone?”
“At this station I am. Similar studies are being carried out at Winfrith and in a number of other countries, including the U.S.A. As I have said, there’s a considerable amount of international co-operation.”
Oliphant asked suddenly: “Is that the worst thing that can happen, a loss of the coolant?”
Alex Mair looked at him for a moment as if deciding whether the question coming from such a source warranted an answer; then he said: “The loss of coolant is potentially extremely dangerous. There are, of course, emergency procedures if the normal cooling arrangements fail. The incident at Three Mile Island in the United States has emphasized the need to know more about the extent and nature of the threat posed by that kind of incident. The phenomenon to be analysed is in three main groups: severe fuel damage and core melting, migration of released fission products and aerosols through the primary coolant circuit and the behaviour of fission products in released fuel and steam in the reactor-container building. If you have a genuine interest in the research and enough knowledge to understand it, I can provide you with some references, but this hardly seems the time and place for scientific education.”