Siding Star

by Christopher Bryan

  According to Papa, that was just the problem. As he’d said to her one evening when he found her weeping, “Bella, you’re more woman than George knows how to handle, and he’s fool enough to think he ought to be able to ‘handle’ his woman. So he finds a Swedish beanpole less challenging. Simple as that! It isn’t you that flunked. It’s George.”

  Papa was, of course, hardly an unprejudiced observer.

  She looked at her watch. She’d better go and do something about the Magdalen Road break-in.

  Still, she reflected as she left her office and walked towards the stairs, it was nice to know someone still thought she was bella, even if he was prejudiced.

  six

  University College, London. 11:00 a.m. The same day.

  “A

  ll right then, let’s call it a day. Thank you.”

  The class filed out, keeping their chatter low. They were nice kids. The fact was, Charlie’s lecture had been boring, and he knew it. What was worse, they knew it. Not that there was anything wrong with the content. He knew his stuff. But he hadn’t cared. And if he didn’t care, then why on earth should he expect them to?

  And now here was Ms. Zaziwe L’Ouverture, graduate of the University of the West Indies, doctoral student and presently also his research assistant, standing by his desk waiting to see if he needed her. He liked Zaziwe very much and generally enjoyed working with her, but just at the moment he didn’t want to deal with anybody.

  “Okay, Zaziwe, I’m done here. Let’s call it a day.” He gathered his notes from the lectern.

  “You’re repeating yourself, Dr. Brown. What’s the matter?” Charlie looked up at her.

  “I’m fine, Zaziwe. Thank you for asking.”

  She folded her arms and stared at him.

  “No you’re not,” she said.

  30

  ChristoPher BryAn Zaziwe had challenged him before, but never so bluntly and only on matters of physics. He shuffled his notes together, stuffed them into his computer case and zipped it. Eventually he had no excuse not to look up again.

  She was still waiting.

  How African she looked! An African princess! That Africa is the mother of all humanity was suddenly something more than an interesting hypothesis, or even, perhaps, an interesting fact. His own whiteness seemed frail and pathetic, his humanity a pale, insipid imitation of hers.

  “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you. But it’s idiotic, really. Yesterday, well, I had to put my cat to sleep. I know—it’s just a cat. But I’ve never been without him since I was a kid. And I feel terrible.”

  She cocked her head. “And you think that’s idiotic?”

  “Well, relatively speaking. I think of poor Ferguson, who’s just lost his son—“

  “Sorry, sir, I didn’t know we were talking about Professor Ferguson’s son. I thought we were talking about your cat.”

  “Well, yes, but it’s ridiculous to be barely functioning just because a cat died—“

  “Excuse me, sir, but…” She spoke slowly and distinctly. “To love something may hurt, but it’s never ridiculous. That includes cats, by the way. And you can’t measure out love by kilos. Or grief. So many kilos for a son, so many for a cat. It doesn’t work like that.”

  He blinked at her.

  “What’s your cat called?”

  “Mickey.”

  “So isn’t it appropriate to be sad about losing Mickey, just like it’s okay to be sad about losing any friend? Or a son?” She looked at her watch. “I’d better go, if you don’t need me, sir. I said I’d meet Thaddeus for lunch.”

  “Of course.”

  Halfway to the door, she turned back.

  siding stAr 31 “By the way, you’re a Christian, aren’t you, sir?” “I am, actually.”

  “Well, sir, it says in the good book God will save man and

  beast, doesn’t it?”

  “I believe it does.”

  “So God won’t have finished with Mickey yet, will he? Death

  doesn’t have the last word. The best is still to come.” “Perhaps it is. I’ll try to remember that. Thank you, Zaziwe.” “That’s all right, sir. See you later.”

  He gazed at the door for several minutes after she left. He’d known for some time that Ms. Zaziwe L’Ouverture

  from Barbados was brilliant.

  But this was the first time he’d realized she was also wise.

  Several hours later Following a late afternoon seminar, Charlie went to his office to check his email and his answering machine. The Lilley Foundation grant he’d been waiting for had finally come through! The news was good—better than he had dared hope. Everything he’d asked for, including the most important thing: complete funding for him and for his two doctoral students.

  He looked at his watch. It was late, already starting to get dark outside, but he had a feeling Zaziwe and Thaddaeus would still be around. The Culberton lab, perhaps?

  He’d guessed right. There they were, beavering away. He smiled. The truth was, they were the best pair of doctoral students he’d ever had. He knew for a fact that Oxford and a couple of the American ivy leagues had done their best to get the two young West Indians, so he was pleased—and not a little flat- tered—that they’d chosen to work with him. He put his head around the door.

  “May I interrupt?”

  32

  Christopher Bryan He told them the news, and they applauded.

  “That’s fantastic! Everything we asked for!”

  “Good old Lilley Foundation! They must have had a

  brainstorm.”

  “Who cares?” Charlie said. “The thing is, ANU want us out

  there as soon as possible—by early next week, if we can. Are

  you still on?”

  “Definitely!”

  “Of course!”

  The invitation from the Australian National University to

  use what was in some ways the best equipment on the planet

  had actually arrived three months ago.

  “In particular, they’ve asked us to work with FLAIR,” he’d

  told Zaziwe and Thaddeus. “Do you know what that is?” “A bench-mounted fiber-fed spectrograph,” Zaziwe said.

  “You can position it off the United Kingdom Schmidt telescope

  to access the entire 6.6-degree Schmidt field.”

  “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “Oh, I only know about it because there was an article in the

  American Journal of Physics, sir. I just happened to pick it up in

  the library for a bit of light reading.”

  Thaddaeus gazed at her fondly and then looked away, hiding

  a smile.

  Zaziwe pressed on. “The thing is, you can get up to a hundred low dispersion spectra of stars and galaxies simultaneously,

  working down to about magnitude eighteen. It’s brilliant.” Charlie swallowed his own smile and nodded.

  So the invitation was accepted with excitement and alacrity. But thanks to paperwork delays at Senate House, only now,

  with days to go, was financing finally confirmed. Still, it was

  confirmed, and that was the main thing.

  “When do we leave?”

  “Wednesday a.m. on QANTAS, I hope. Arrive Sydney

  Siding Star 33 Thursday afternoon, Yanda Airlines to Coonabarabran, and then a quick fifty-mile walk through the outback to SSO.” “Fifty mile what?”

  “That’s a joke, Zaziwe. There’ll be a bus. Anyway, Shawn’s checked the agency and will book the tickets as soon as I call her. Which, given she’s gone home, will now have to be tomorrow a.m. Let’s meet here then.”

  “What on earth are Yanda Airlines?”

  “Local.”

  “I take it with all this money of Lilley’s we’ll be traveling first class?”

  “Dream on,” Zaziwe said.

  Charlie turned to leave.

  Thaddeus went back to the computers, but Zaziwe caught Charlie at the door.

/>   “It’s good to see you smiling, sir. And you made a joke!”

  “I’m feeling better, Zaziwe. And thanks—you helped.”

  Charlie walked slowly back to his office, gathered his papers, and started the short walk to the underground, and so home to an empty house. No one with welcoming meows and poker tail would be coming to greet him. No one would be fussing at him for their supper. There was a catch in his throat and he could feel tears starting in his eyes. But it was okay to mourn for Mickey the cat, and he wasn’t going to apologize for it to anyone, not even to himself.

  And now, of course, there was another side to the Oz trip. He’d been looking forward to it for the research opportunities it offered, but the fact was he was glad to be leaving the house in Sussex Gardens for a while. It would be good simply to be with colleagues in another place, to eat his meals in company, to be part of a little family.

  So, like many a better man before him, he was glad to be going Down Under.

  seven

  Exeter Crown Court. Friday, October 10.

  Quite how or why the wolf had got into the cathedral was impossible to say. In one sense the “how” was clear enough, for the north door was still open when the police arrived. But the precise sequence of events that brought her there remained a mystery. Of course it was easy to theorize: to suggest, for example, that Katie, trying to return to the fair and getting as far as the High Street, might have bolted into the close; how then voices or a car starting might have driven her further toward the silence of the cathedral where, finding the north door open, she plunged through it.

  Whatever drew her there, by the time Katie jumped onto the high altar she was surely confused and frightened. Faced by a nasty little flame and a sweaty, bawling man, she appeared to have shied from the flame and in doing so backed into one of the altar candlesticks, sending it to the floor and triggering the alarms at Heavitree Road Police Station.

  In the light of what evidence there was, that, or something like it, could reasonably be conjectured.

  What did not appear, however, was any evidence that the wolf had attacked Nikos Kakoyannis. Quite the contrary.

  36

  ChristoPher BryAn “You are certain, then, that the deceased met his end by what you would describe as natural causes?”

  In view of the strange circumstances surrounding Kakoyannis’s death, the coroner had ordered a post mortem. Dr. James Boswell, who conducted it, was perfectly clear. The deceased had died of a heart attack, the result of immense strain followed by sudden shock.

  “And you saw no signs of assault by a wild animal?”

  “None whatsoever. Of course the mere sight of the wolf in those extraordinary circumstances could have been enough to bring on the victim’s heart attack, and that, I surmise, is what happened. Upon his person, however, it is clear that the wolf itself laid not so much as a claw. The creature should, so to speak, leave this court without a stain upon its character.” Dr. Boswell fancied himself something of a wit. He glanced, as he spoke, at the couple of local reporters in attendance.

  “So that’s all right,” DS Sims said in the pub afterwards, supping the pint that DI Cavaliere had just placed in front of him. “Death by natural causes it is.” He seemed to have got over his snit in the Cathedral.

  Cecilia smiled. She was feeling indulgent.

  “There’s still the matter of the crucifix, though. Obviously it didn’t affect the manner of death. But I’m puzzled, all the same.”

  When the police arrived at the cathedral, they’d found lying on the ground not only one of the candlesticks but also the crucifix that normally dominated from a stand behind the high altar. But Katie could only have moved the crucifix by knocking down the stand on which it rested, and the stand was unmoved. Not only that, but the crucifix was undented.

  “You see what that means?” she said.

  “He must have moved it himself, ma’am. A Satanist wouldn’t want Jesus on the cross staring at him, would he?”

  siding stAr 37 “But if he did that why didn’t he set the alarms off, the way Katie did when she knocked over the candle? They were all on the same system.”

  “There must be a fault in the system.”

  “The manufacturers say not. According to them they’ve checked thoroughly and it’s working perfectly. And they say there’s no way to beat it.”

  DS Sims supped his pint and looked thoughtful. Finally he said, “Well ma’am, it seems to me both those things can’t be true. Either there is something wrong with the system, or else there is a way to beat it, and the old boy knew what it was.”

  Cecilia smiled. “I agree. And unfortunately we can’t ask him.”

  The economy, national and international, and the American presidential election campaign were between them dominating the news that week, and so Kakoyannis’s death and the inquest made scarcely a paragraph in the nationals and only the inside pages even of the west country press. The Express and Echo’s reporter did draw his editor’s attention to Boswell’s bon mot in court.

  “Who gives a damn if wolves have stains on their characters?” The editor settled on DEVIL WORSHIP LEADS TO CATHEDRAL DEATH—with its vague implication that somehow or other the Church of England was to blame for the whole thing—as altogether more appealing.

  eight

  Heathrow Airport. Monday, October 13.

  Charlie Brown looked at his watch and nodded. So far, so good! The minibus he’d ordered had arrived on time. The driver had known the way to the airport, and even how to find the right terminal. There had been no traffic jams, the minibus had not broken down, and here they were waiting at the checkin, actually fifteen minutes earlier than necessary. It was not, of course, that nothing could now go wrong. But he did have the luxury of reflecting that whatever went wrong at this point, it would almost certainly be the airline’s problem, not his.

  The line moved slowly forward.

  Zaziwe was checking in.

  Thaddeus.

  “See you in the duty-frees!” Hand in hand, they disappeared. They went well together. When he first realized they were

  an item, he’d wondered how Thaddeus might deal with the fact that good though he was, Zaziwe was proving to be better. The perceived problem had turned out to be no problem at all. Thaddeus seemed proud of his girlfriend’s superior abilities and sometimes introduced her as “the one with the brains.” Charlie found it endearing.

  40

  ChristoPher BryAn And now he was at the counter. Electronic boarding pass, passport, all were in order. He started off after them into the overseas departure terminal.

  He didn’t hurry. Thaddeus and Zaziwe would find him when they needed him, and he reckoned the duty-frees were a rip-off anyway.

  Oh, there they were. Laughing together at something they’d seen on the shelves.

  Of course, rip-off or not, the Duty Frees would no doubt be more fun with a girlfriend.

  A lot more fun.

  nine

  Ministry of Defence Research Establishment, Harton Down, near Exeter. Tuesday, October 14.

  James Drew was something of a raconteur, especially among the lab techs. At the precise moment when he felt the tap on his shoulder he was in mid-flow—indeed, in mid-sentence—of a particularly good story.

  “Yes?” He turned to find himself faced by Wheatley—Dr. Henry Wheatley, world-ranking scientist, leading researcher into the art of biological warfare, and vastly his senior. “Yes, sir?”

  “Excuse me,” Wheatley said. “May I see that?”

  “Oh, this!” Wheatley was pointing to a copy of the latest Express and Echo, which was, as it happened, jutting from Drew’s lab-coat pocket. Drew pulled out the paper, which was folded to the editorial page, and being of a tidy mind he started to refold it.

  “No, no. Leave it. That’s exactly what I wanted to see.”

  “Oh, sorry. Here you are, sir.” Drew gave him the paper, and waited. Dr. Wheatley was not noted for his interest in popular journalism or, indeed
, anything else that did not bear directly on his work. He handled the paper now like a tech handling an unpleasant specimen, scanning the editorial quickly, his lips pursed.

  “Thank you.” He handed the paper back, nodded, and left.

  Drew looked after him for a moment, turned back to his friends, and shrugged. He’d quite lost the thread of his story.

  That evening, driving toward his home on the outskirts of Exeter, Henry Wheatley stopped at a newsagent. When he returned to the car he held a copy of the paper he had borrowed along with copies of all the other papers. He shut the car door but did not immediately drive on. Instead, in failing light, he sat and read all that the press could tell him of the life and death of Nikos Kakoyannis. It was not much, but it was enough to interest him.

  The wolf by no means came out of the affair scot-free. In addition to the cut on her ear, Katie seemed to have picked up a virus. Within days of returning to her cage she began to mope: her nose was dry, her eyes dull, and her appetite nonexistent. Just as her keeper was about to call the vet, she seemed to recover. But then, the fair having meantime moved to Hampstead Heath, she became ill again. This time a vet was called. She prescribed antibiotics for Katie and was against her travelling. So it came about that when the fair moved again, Katie found herself convalescing in an isolated enclosure in the London Zoo.

  ten

  The Academy for Philosophical Studies, Bayswater, London. Thursday, October 16.

  “W

  e know then,” Reginald Hargrove MP said, “that the method exists. We have, ah, good reason to suppose that this fellow, ah, Kakoyannis found it. The question that remains is, can we gain access to his knowledge?”

  “Precisely,” Henry Wheatley said, with a glance at the others gathered around the boardroom table.