by R. J. Amos
‘A talk as a second year, that’s pretty good. I only presented posters in my first and second years. Did you have a talk too Dan?’
‘Yep, the two of us gave talks, the rest of the group had posters. And now I need to catch up on all the work I’ve missed. Speaking of which ...’
Dan finished off his coffee with one swig, and together the two of them said their goodbyes and left the table.
‘Well, that was an interesting conversation.’ This comment came from the man sitting opposite me. I hadn’t really looked at him before but now he caught my attention. He had long black hair tied back from his face with a rubber band, strands hanging out everywhere. He wore a grubby t-shirt and his pants had holes in them and I would put good money on his shoes being the cheapest you could buy from K-Mart. I was sure I recognised him from somewhere.
‘I’ll tell you something for nothing. They need to put a rocket up Dan, he’s been here way too long. If you ask me, he shouldn’t even be here. If he doesn’t pull his finger out he’s going to be chucked out of the uni. The Dean and that, they only let you have so long. I dunno what he thinks will get him through. If he tried to get a job anywhere they wouldn’t take him on.
‘I had to work 60 hour weeks during undergrad. Forty contact hours at uni and another twenty at the shop to get money to live off and I didn’t complain. He’s just had it too easy. No idea what work is.’
The guy had decided that I needed to know his opinion about everything in the research group. He obviously didn’t want me to have too high an opinion of the students I had been talking to. I wasn’t sure what to say in response but it turned out I didn’t need to say anything, the grumbling continued in a steady stream without any encouragement needed.
‘And Liv, Liv doesn’t think for herself, ever. She’s not even really doing her own research, she only does what Susannah tells her to do. And Susannah lets her do it. She should be made to think for herself for a while. Otherwise, what’s the PhD worth? She honestly doesn’t know a thing about what she’s doing. You should hear her in group meeting.
‘And don’t even get me started about the state of the lab. No-one cares if the glassware is clean. No-one ever puts anything away. And you’d think they’d take some responsibility for the dry solvents or the ordering but no, they just leave it up to me. I tell you, I’m jack of it. I’m not their servant. I’m the lab technician. I should take a break and leave them to it. It would all fall over in pretty quick order I reckon.’
So this was Joshua the lab technician that Susannah was talking about earlier. I could see what Susannah was saying now. He looked as unreliable as they came in spite of what he was saying about being the linchpin of the research group. I wondered why Susannah was putting up with him and whether the university management structure just didn’t allow anything to be done about it.
As soon as I could find a break in his unrelenting litany of complaint I made my excuses and got back down to the lab. Anything was better than listening to that. Sometimes I think that it’s a shame that all jobs come with people attached.
As I walked back down the long hallway to the instrument room it clicked. I had seen him at the conference with that girl. He was the one that had been pointing something out at Brasindon’s lecture. I almost turned around to ask him what was going on there but I decided I had better not. I didn’t want to get him started again.
‘So then she took me down this long dark hallway, right down in the basement of the building. And through a door with a keypad lock on it, and past a couple of offices and into the instrument room. It was like heading down into Dr Jekyll’s laboratory or something. I truly wondered what would be at the other end.’
‘But you’re here to tell the tale. What a relief.’
I had finished up at the uni and headed back to The Lemon Tree to debrief. Jan had been true to her word – she really wanted to hear about my day. And I was happy to tell her. Telling a real human being was so different to just writing in your journal. Humans laugh (or groan) at your jokes. And this human gave you slices of carrot and ginger cake to nibble on while you were chatting. No such delicacies were available at my cottage.
‘I know. I know. I’m such a dag.’ Ok, so I was playing it up a bit. But truly, the hallway down to the instrument lab could be really spooky – especially if no-one had turned the lights on. You could almost hear the music playing.
The café was closed, we were sitting in the cosy apartment that Jan and Nate had carved out of the back rooms.
‘So what were the things Susannah was showing you?’
‘They are pretty big machines, but we don’t call them machines – we call them instruments. I think because they do such delicate work. These were Mass Spectrometers. MS for short. They take unknown compounds, ionise them with electro-spray ionisation and measure the fragments to identify the compound. It’s fascinating really. You take something completely new, something that someone has made in the lab. You inject the teeniest bit into this big instrument, bombard it with a chemical – a proton donor – until it blows apart. Then you capture the particles in the quadrupole ion trap and you measure the mass to charge ratio and by working backwards and maybe matching it to a library of compounds you can find out exactly what the new compound is.’ I took a bite of the cake, so delicious.
‘Right. Can I just pretend that made sense? It all sounds pretty complicated.’
‘Ok, let’s see. How do I make this simpler? We take chemicals that people have made in the lab and blow them to pieces in a controlled way in a big machine and then measure the pieces. Then we put the jigsaw back together and we know what we had to start off with.’
‘Before you blew it up.’ Jan didn’t look so convinced.
‘Right.’
‘But if it’s blown up, it’s no use anymore, right?’
‘Oh we only need a little bit, just a tiny fraction of a gram. The rest is fine to use. And sometimes (like what I’m doing right now) we just want to find out what the chemical is. We don’t need to use it for anything.’
‘And you can tell exactly what it is from that?’ Jan waved towards the cake, offering me more. Why not? I had worked hard all day and this was a great reward.
‘It helps if the researcher knows what they think they’ve made. So you know what you’re looking for. The library of compounds helps with the identification too – comparing your results with previous results and putting all the puzzle pieces together. And there’s a couple of other methods: NMR and IR that give you other pieces of information and if you put it all together you can solve the puzzle.’
‘That makes a little more sense. So NMR?’
‘That’s, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, oh boy, I guess you could say you look at the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the molecule and what sort of atoms and bonds are around them.’ I tried to draw a molecule in the air with my hands .
‘Right ...’ Jan drew the word out, she didn’t sound convinced, ‘and, what was the other one? R something?’
‘IR. Infrared Spectroscopy – you shine a light at the molecule and it makes it wiggle, you measure the wiggles and you can see what types of bonds or groups you have in the molecule.’ This time my hands were the molecule showing the bending vibration and the twisting vibration, but it was no good.
‘Oh my goodness. I have no idea what you’re saying.’ Jan laughed at me and at my waving hands, which had nearly waved the cake off the plate.
‘Ha. Just believe me, I can take a compound, and with a bit of background information I can work out what it is. It’s like those logic problems, you know? ‘Mrs White lives in the house next door to the poodle and three along from the garden with the pink flowers’? I never do those, I usually get enough of it at work.’
‘Sounds like it. So what have you found?’
‘It’s a bit tricky. The MS didn’t match to anything in the library – not that I could see, but I’ll have another look tomorrow. There were a few near misses but nothing concrete
.’
‘And the N, the other one, the carbon and hydrogen one?’
‘The NMR. Well, the hydrogen by itself doesn’t tell you too much, unless you know what you’re looking for. And the carbon is still running. There was so little sample that it’s going to take a long time. Maybe I’ll get an answer, or part of an answer in another couple of days.’
‘I hope it’s not too frustrating for you. I’m glad you’ve got work. Are you enjoying it?’
‘I am, it’s so good to be back in the lab again. I thought I was ready to be back, but I didn’t realise how ready I was.’
It was almost like the old days again. Jan and I, best friends again. Almost. You can see that I made no mention of what exactly I was doing. No mention of Conneally or that this was an investigation into the means of his murder. I mean, it was good to chat with Jan, but I knew if I had brought up the professor again that a barrier would have gone up between us. She probably thought I’d forgotten all about it in the excitement of work. I was happy for her to think that.
When the last crumbs of cake were eaten off my plate I grabbed my bag and said my goodbyes. It had been great to chat but I was also looking forward to some alone time. And I didn’t really need to be there when Nate came home.
I wasn’t sure, obviously, what Nate was thinking, but if the police had found a glass vial that they thought was connected to Conneally’s death then he must know that the death was suspicious. He must have known for the whole weekend.
Even if he hadn’t been put on the case himself, Hobart is a small place and he would have been keeping an eye out after our conversation. He must have known.
And yet he didn’t tell me. He didn’t come and talk to me about it. He didn’t tell me that I had been on the right track.
Maybe he didn’t even tell Jan.
If he had told Jan then I felt even worse. They both knew that I was interested, worried even, about this. And yet, it didn’t occur to them to put me out of my misery and tell me that an investigation was ongoing? I could have been helpful to the investigation, I was being helpful to the investigation, but not through Nate. Not the way I thought I would.
I had matched the substance in the vial that was found in the bathroom to the saliva sample. They both had the same substance in them. But what that substance was, I didn’t know yet. But I would. I would work it out.
However, if they were not telling me anything about their investigation, then I would not tell them anything about my own investigation and we’d see who worked it out first. It sounded fair to me.
I walked through the front door of my little cottage on the river and dropped my keys on the hall table. This place was unchanged since my childhood. I almost expected Mum to wander out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel and telling me she had put the kettle on and that I was just in time for a cuppa.
But instead, I had to go in to the kitchen and put the kettle on myself. Which I did. Even though I’d just had a drink with Jan and didn’t need any more liquid. Just the sound of the kettle, the feel of the warm cup in my hand, was comforting.
I have lived in quite a few different apartments over the last years. Different little homes in different cities. But none of them felt like home, not like this place did. This cottage was my anchor.
If I got work in another city I would probably have to sell the cottage, or at least rent it out. Could I bring myself to sell it? I looked around again. Would this place even sell? The kitchen was straight out of the seventies – orange bench top, brown floor tiles, wooden cupboard doors, a tiny little fridge. It worked as a food preparation area, but it wasn’t beautiful. Not even slightly.
Warm cup in hand I wandered through the rest of the cottage, seeing it with new eyes. The dining room – pokey and dark. The long lounge room with the net curtains and the gold carpet and oh, yuk, the brown square patterns on the wallpaper. The brown carpet tiles in the hallway with yet another brown patterned wallpaper. The broken venetian blinds on the bedroom windows. It felt like home to me, but it looked dreadful from a buyer’s perspective. Awful.
But the bare bones were good. Most of the problems were cosmetic. If I removed the wallpaper and painted, and put in new carpet, and maybe if I knocked a wall out between the lounge and dining room that would help it out. The afternoon sun coming in the lounge window would make it all the way through to the dining room wall in winter. It could be gorgeous.
The kitchen would need a complete work-over but I could do the painting and some of the knocking out myself and keep costs down that way. It could be a really fun project too. I could see myself now, renovator by day, writer of job applications by night. It was a thought.
I threw a frozen dinner in the microwave and sat down to eat it, putting the house renovations on the back burner and thinking again through the interesting development of the day. The murder investigation was back on. Conneally had been poisoned somehow with something. And I was able to use my chemistry skill to answer some questions. I was now officially on the case.
I wondered if Nate had brought Brasindon in for questioning following the one lead I had given in our conversation. I could imagine the scene – Nate and Brasindon facing off over a metal table in an interview room, recording device blinking its red light to show that every word is being kept for posterity (do they use tapes now, I wonder, or is it all through MP3 or something?) and Nate saying to Brasindon,
‘I am sure, sir, that you can see that we have to look into every possibility.’
And Brasindon replying ‘I don’t see that at all. I don’t know why you would even think that I have anything to do with this death.’
‘It is common knowledge that your relationship with the deceased has been strained at times.’ (Do you like that touch? ‘The deceased’? I am so professional.)
‘Again, I do not see that your question is of any significance. We are two professionals, working as professionals. I did not treat Professor Conneally any differently to the way I would treat anyone else.’
(Which is true, he treats everyone badly.)
And then Nate could have asked, ‘Were you in competition for the same funding?’
And Brasindon would have told him about his research funding and how he now needs a new partner.
‘Do you have any evidence of this situation?’
‘It is in the public domain. You could have found that yourself if you had done even a little research.’
And then I guess Nate would be cursing me for throwing him off, but if he’d just talked to me I could have told him the same information with much less embarrassment.
I wondered if, just maybe, Brasindon had been in that very situation, in an interview with Nate or another police officer, on Saturday while I had been having morning tea with his wife. No wonder he was in such a foul mood when he came to pick her up. Had Nate dropped my name? Surely not.
Anyway, it looked like I would never know. Nate obviously wasn’t going to tell me anything, and Professor Brasindon will never speak to me again if he can help it.
But I would continue my own investigation. I would take it more seriously now that I knew for sure that Professor Conneally had been murdered.
Surely there was something in my memories that would help me point the finger at someone. I just needed to go back through the conference day by day and think about the behaviour of people. Something would give someone away, I was sure of it.
I decided to read through my journal and see whether I had inadvertently written myself some clues. Something that didn’t seem important at the time but would be important now. It all felt incredibly Agatha Christie but hey, I knew that the murderer wasn’t me, and I was the one that had been at the conference and met all the suspects. It was worth a try.
I flipped back through the pages – where to start reading?
I was going to start with the conference but something made me turn a few more pages back, and find a conversation I had forgotten about. The conversation with Trudy about a
lecturer called Ken Jones.
I’d met up with Trudy for lunch on the day I’d gone to look for work. We had been friends since our undergraduate degree and I was always ready for a catch up with her – whenever time permitted, which was not often with Trudy.
‘What do you think my chances are of getting work here in paradise?’ I had asked raising my voice to be heard above the hubbub of voices and the background music in the university refectory.
‘Well, you might be as lucky as me and get a three month contract but there’s not much going.’
‘A three month contract?’
‘Yep. That’s how it’s been lately. Three month contract after three month contract but I’ve managed to stay on. You have to take what you’re given when you’re trying to stay in one place for your family.’
‘I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified.’
‘To be honest, neither do I. You never know, things might be better in Chemistry but in Biochem that’s just how it is.’
‘How are your family? The kids doing ok?’
‘Thanks for asking,’ she said cheekily, ‘you know I try to pretend they don’t exist when I come here. No, they are going well, it’s easier now they are all in primary school, I just have all the running around to after school activities to do now. It’s easier in the summer when the soccer season is over – four boys to four different soccer games each Saturday morning. It’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘I can imagine. No, I can’t. I won’t tell you about my Saturdays, you’ll probably hit me.’
Trudy took a playful swipe at me anyway and made rude noises about the lazy life of the unemployed.
‘I guess I should be apologising for taking you away from your work, then.’
‘No, lately I’ve been making the effort to treat myself with a bit more care. I’m trying to give myself time to eat. I mean everyone deserves to taste the food they’re eating, right?’