Siding Star

by Christopher Bryan

  “Oh, really, sir. Now that is an interesting opinion.”

  “It’s not an opinion, officer, it’s a statement of fact. Law is a meta-narrative by which successful groups disguise their moves to power.”

  “Which leaves you feeling free to break it, sir?”

  “Good heavens, no, officer. For so long as the society of which I am part is successful, I follow its customs.”

  “Very wise, sir. Well, I’ll see you get the book back. Goodnight, sir.”

  “Snooty little blighter, that one,” Wilkins said as they walked through light rain to the car.

  Cecilia nodded.

  “Still, at least he gave you the notebook, ma’am.”

  “Yes, he gave us the notebook. In fact—and make sure you note this when you write it up—he all but thrust it at us. He was also, as you point out, snooty. The trouble is, I’m not sure what the snootiness meant. What do you think?”

  “He didn’t like it when you asked him if it was the right book, ma’am.”

  Siding Star 77

  “You noticed that? Good for you! But what was his problem? Guilt? Or injured innocence?”

  “Hard to say, ma’am. He’s very smooth.”

  “Yes. Smooth and yet somehow… not smooth. Erratic. I think

  he’s lying, but I certainly don’t know how to prove it… yet.” Wheatley watched their departure from an upstairs window. He’d prepared the notebook he gave them against just such an eventuality as this. For a moment he almost smiled at the thought of their bringing in someone who might actually read it. Then he frowned. The academy might be asked to confirm his story about the June conference. It would depend on how thorough the police were, but it was better not to take risks. The one who’d done the talking—the one with the Italian name— was obviously not nearly as stupid as she pretended to be. The loose end must be tied up.

  Wheatley turned to the telephone.

  nineteen

  Wednesday, October 22.

  T

  he first thing Cecilia did when she arrived at her desk the following morning was to face the truth about herself and this case: she was frustrated. And no wonder.

  Every instinct she possessed told her that Wheatley was dangerous, that he had lied to the police and given her a substitute book, that he had committed acts criminal and terrible, that he was up to something criminal and terrible that involved other (criminal and terrible) people. She was sure of it.

  Which meant nothing.

  Which got her nowhere.

  What we can’t show, we don’t know.

  “You know what your trouble is, Cavaliere?” her form mistress had said when she was thirteen, after dragging her out of a fight with a girl two years older and twice her weight who’d said all Italians were cowards, and by whom she’d been getting rather badly knocked about. “You don’t seem to know when you’re beaten.”

  She shrugged.

  A couple of things she could still do.

  80

  ChristoPher BryAn She put in a routine inquiry regarding Wheatley and Kakoyannis’s attendance at a Conference on Science and Philosophy at the Academy for Philosophical Studies in London during the previous June. Just in case.

  She sent the book to Scientific and Technical Services for examination. She felt that she owed that to Wheatley. They’d have Kakoyannis’s fingerprints, and his print on the notebook would indicate that Wheatley was telling the truth. Of course, if there were no such print, that wouldn’t prove him a liar— enough people had handled the book in the station that his prints could have been eliminated.

  Scientific and Technical Services were, of course, backed up. Unless she was prepared to categorize Wheatley’s book as urgent, she’d have to wait a week give-or-take for her report. How could she do that, when she didn’t have any hard evidence even that a crime had been committed?

  The results of her enquiry about the conference were faxed to her within a half-hour of her request. The Academy of Philosophical Studies confirmed that there had been a Cosmos conference in June of the previous year. Dr. Henry Wheatley and Dr. Nikos Kakoyannis had both taken part in it.

  For now that seemed to be all she could do. There remained Joseph Stirrup’s work, but even he didn’t know when he’d have those results.

  So she had nothing.

  So far. It was well into the afternoon before the question occurred to her.

  What isn’t a murder trial but precedes one?

  What sometimes sounds like a murder trial?

  She picked up the telephone.

  “About Henry Wheatley,” she said. “Would you ask DS Jones please to try ‘inquests’ for me, instead of ‘murder trials’?”

  twenty

  Friday, October 24.

  Cecilia had to attend a two-day conference at Middlemoor, so it was not until Friday that she entered her office again. She had scarcely sat down at her desk when there was a knock. Through the glass-paneled door she could see DS Verity Jones. “Come in!”

  Hmm… Perfectly cut navy blue suit, quiet high-necked blouse, black shoes. Cecilia raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve a meeting with Superintendent Hanlon,” Verity said.

  Ah. Cecilia nodded, for a moment not DI to DS but woman to woman.

  “If you have a problem, I want to know.”

  Verity Jones gave the faintest of smiles.

  “You’ll know,” she said.

  Cecilia smiled. Little Miss Perfect was tougher than she looked.

  But the detective sergeant was on a mission. She walked up, took a sheet of paper from a folder, and laid it on Cecilia’s desk. She confined herself to one word.

  “Bingo.”

  Cecilia picked it up, and the heading leapt at her. Sir Joseph Loveland. The Loveland inquest. Third of February 1993. The death of the great biologist.

  She’d been not much more than a girl at the time, but it had made a splash on the news, and she’d heard all about it. And Wheatley—their Wheatley—was called as a witness.

  She looked at DS Jones, who was wearing the triumphant grin she surely deserved.

  “Good work.”

  “I‘ve a full transcript of the inquest: it’s being scanned and you’ll have it on your email this afternoon, ma’am.” She hesitated, then went on. “The fact is, I’ve done a bit of work on my own on this, and I think there’s more, ma’am. If you’ve got a minute.”

  Cecilia was due at the site of a robbery on the other side of Exeter in half an hour, but this was definitely worth a minute. She waved Verity Jones into a chair.

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Well, ma’am, first, I’m beginning to wonder if there maybe is something strange about Wheatley’s early career. He went up to Oxford with an open scholarship, but then he didn’t really do all that brilliantly. Ended up with a Second.”

  Cecilia smiled. Verity Jones, she happened to know, had achieved a double First in Mods and Greats.

  “Then he got a research position with Loveland, at that point reckoned perhaps the most brilliant biologist of his day. And that’s the first odd thing—that Loveland took on Wheatley when he could have had his pick of brilliant minds.”

  “Maybe he just saw something in Wheatley the others missed. It’s possible.”

  “Well, ma’am, maybe he did. Just regard me as your oldfashioned positivist.” She dropped into a passable imitation of a Scottish brogue. “It is for poets and theologians to offer interpretations. I merely exhibit the facts.”

  She had managed to inject just the right note of contempt into “poets” and “theologians.” Cecilia laughed.

  “All right. Facts noted.”

  “Well, ma’am, in any case Wheatley joined him, and they

  siding stAr 83 worked together for two years. Then as we know, Loveland died in strange circumstances. Committed suicide. Hence the inquest.”

  “As you may remember, and as you’ll certainly see when you read the report, the suicide was a mystery. Loveland seemed in every way a ha
ppy, contented man. No evidence of depression, debts, family troubles, anything. He’d gone up to London for his daughter’s fourteenth birthday. They’d had a little party, he’d made a charming toast. Seemed in the best of spirits. Then that night he wrote a note saying life was too much and took an overdose. Just like that. His daughter found him next morning. In one way the inquest was straightforward enough. All the actual facts pointed to suicide, and there didn’t seem to be anything that suggested otherwise. Except, as I said, that no one could find a motive.”

  “And that’s where Wheatley came in?”

  “Right, ma’am. Wheatley had been in Oxford on the night of the death. He was called to give evidence about Loveland’s state of mind. But then both the coroner and a lawyer for Loveland’s family started asking a lot of very pointed questions about Wheatley’s own relationship with Loveland. Wasn’t it true they’d quarreled? And so on. That got into the news, and that, presumably, is what you remembered.”

  Cecilia nodded.

  “Well, as you’ll see from the transcript, the fact is Wheatley stood up perfectly well. The questions didn’t get anywhere, and on balance, the inquest’s conclusion had to be for a straightforward suicide… balance of the mind disturbed, and so on. But it’s evident there was more than a hint of suspicion in the air. And it attached to Wheatley. Just, I think, as you remembered.”

  “So have you talked to the coroner and the lawyer?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t. Because they’re both dead. What’s more, they both died within three weeks of the inquest.”

  Cecilia contented herself—for the moment—with a question.

  “Didn’t anyone think that rather strange?”

  “No ma’am, and unless you happen to look at the thing from the point of view we’re taking, I suppose there’s be no reason to. The coroner died of a heart attack at his home in Surrey. The lawyer was killed in a car accident in Cornwall, by all accounts his own fault.”

  “Very interesting.” Cecilia picked up a pen and started to doodle, determined to control her mounting excitement. “There’s more, isn’t there.”

  “Ma’am, you just wait. Henry Wheatley produced that brilliant thesis on techniques of biological warfare eighteen months after Loveland’s death. Since then, he’s never looked back. Being of a nasty and suspicious turn of mind, I immediately wondered if there might be any connection between Wheatley’s thesis and whatever Loveland was working on. In other words, did he pinch the boss’s work?”

  “And did he?”

  “How to find out—that’s the problem. Now, apparently there was a second member of Wheatley’s research team, a man called Travers. He’d left about six months before Loveland’s death. But he’d have had a good idea where Loveland was heading and to what extent Wheatley’s thesis connected with it.”

  She’d done great work, but she did love to draw the story out!

  “Verity, by your tenses am I to take it that Travers is dead too?”

  “That’s right, ma’am. What’s more…” She paused again. Clearly, she had saved the good wine until last and could hardly be blamed for savoring it. “Ma’am, he died on a climbing holiday in Scotland three weeks after the Loveland inquest.”

  “Good God! Bodies all over the place. Yet nothing obvious to connect them with each other.”

  “Exactly, ma’am. No reason to connect them unless you look at them from this angle, and no one did. Why should they?”

  Why would anyone have connected these deaths? Why would they if not for Cecilia’s wild and still largely unsubstantiated hunch, now expanded if not buttressed by Verity’s intelligent follow-up?

  “Really good work, DS Jones. Now, do we know where Wheatley was while all this was going on?”

  “He left England two weeks after the inquest and was in the United States until just before publishing his thesis. While he was away, the three men died. Within three weeks. I would imagine he can account for every hour of those three weeks.”

  “Yes, I rather imagine he can. Never mind. This is good. Very good. So we’ve got three men, all dying within days of each other, all having something to do with Loveland or Loveland’s death, and all having something to do with Henry Wheatley. Not that there mightn’t be some other party linking them, someone we haven’t thought of or don’t know about. Have you considered any possible alternatives?”

  “With respect, ma’am, I don’t see that anyone else could have been involved in the research end. Wheatley and Travers were the only members of the team. And Travers hadn’t been replaced. On the family end, it was Wheatley they questioned so hard. Not anyone else. He is the only link, so far as I can see.”

  “I see what you mean.” Cecilia got up from her chair, walked across to the window, and gazed out. These facts were all but incapable of innocent explanation. On the other hand…

  She came back to her desk.

  “Ma’am, I’ve scanned the rest of the files, newspaper reports, and so on, and I’ll attach them to the inquest transcript. Maybe you can get something else from all of it. I don’t think I can, for the moment.”

  “You’ve done very well indeed. And of course I want to see the rest of your material. I’ve a feeling about this man.”

  “I know, ma’am. Me too.”

  *** During the afternoon, Cecilia read all of Verity Jones’s research, then went back and reread the material she’d come up with earlier on Henry Wheatley. It was then that she noticed, in a list of organizations, The Academy for Philosophical Studies. Member: Board of Governors.

  Hmmmm. Wheatley’s being on their board surely made their backing up his story about Nikos Kakoyannis a shade less impressive?.

  Apropos the academy, Verity Jones had added a note of her own:

  Educational charity. Established 1989. Chief business— running evening classes—very MENSA and pseudointellectual. Also goes in for fund-raising for other people’s educational schemes. Last year made huge contribution to the new Cranston College of Science (govt. sponsored—Hackney). One thing against them—brush with Charity Commissioners in 2001— use of funds—question of political involvement—put right—no action taken.

  It hardly amounted to a criminal indictment.

  And yet …

  Slowly, she reached for the telephone. It was answered by

  one of the others, but she asked for DS Jones.

  “Do we know any more than is written here about the

  Academy for Philosophical Studies?”

  “No, ma’am. Not at the moment we don’t.”

  “Well, there may be nothing in it, but I’m starting to get a

  feeling about them, too. See what you can turn up, will you?

  Oh—and the notebook. Since Scientific and Technical appar-

  ently need forever to do their thing with it, could someone in

  the meantime at least let me have a photocopy of it?” “Yes ma’am. On it, ma’am.”

  Cecilia shook her head. Apparently DS Jones had time to

  watch American films.

  She looked at the clock. She should have been off duty

  twenty minutes ago. She was to buy fish from the fish shop in

  Magdalen Road for pesce alla griglia.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But no hurry for anything today! I’m

  out of here.”

  Verity Jones needn’t think she was the only one who could

  talk American.

  twenty-one

  London, Bayswater. Friday, October 24.

  The chairman presided over the next board meeting in his usual manner, reacting to nothing and behaving in general as if he heard nothing. He listened expressionless as Coleman reported on a major project: the academy’s link with the new Cranston College of Science and Technology. Most of the plans she unfolded with such conviction he knew to be irrelevant to his own expectations, but there was no harm in letting her play with them for a while, and there was always the possibility of some frustration to his plans that would make
what she was doing useful.

  Occupying a wide area on the north bank of the Thames below Tower Hamlets and above Limehouse, Cranston would, when fully operational, offer over four hundred places for studies in engineering, applied sciences, sociology, behavioral psychology, management, and related subjects. The facilities would be the most up-to-date and extensive in the country—in some respects, in the world. The project was financed mainly by government, a condition of which had been the provision of considerable additional funds from voluntary sources. The academy had been able to offer an astonishingly large sum

  90

  ChristoPher BryAn

  from its own funds, in return for which it would have a share in formulating the policies and design of the project. “I am happy to tell you,” Coleman said, “that building is on schedule, and there is every prospect that the plant will be complete in time for the intake of students in October next year. Our own influence on the thinking of the institution grows daily and will amply repay, I believe, our participation in the financial investment. Should the position of this academy be in any way jeopardized in the future, I believe it would be possible, in time, for our entire operation to be transferred there. In any event, both before and after the establishment of the New Order, it seems clear to me that Cranston College can provide, as we hoped, the best young scientific brains available. Whilst none of us would wish to underrate the value of this academy as a recruiting center, we cannot deny that our clientele in general tend toward certain obvious limitations of character and intellect. The enrollment of Cranston College will be altogether wider and more satisfactory in scope.

  “There is also another matter to be considered.” She paused and looked at the chairman, who reacted in no way whatever. Thus encouraged she sailed on. “It is becoming evident that as we suspected, the area to be occupied by Cranston contains an ancient and valuable center of power—the site known, at least since the sixteenth century, as Hadrian’s Grave. Of course, it has nothing to do with the Roman Emperor Hadrian. We can now state positively that it was used as a base for the mysteries of the Mithras superstition as early as the third century. According to several authorities, it vastly exceeds the potentiality of anything we have yet controlled, being entirely free of Christian influence and already affected by a powerful act of reversal at some time in the more recent past—possibly the eighteenth century.