by R. J. Amos
‘Eating is one of the basic rights, yes. Haven’t you been eating? I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, I’ve been eating, but I’ve eaten my lunch at my desk while I’ve been working. I’ve decided it’s not good for me. I’m going to take the time to eat and actually taste the food.’
‘Shows how long I’ve been away from the desk. I had forgotten those days eating ‘al desco’. I remember a staff meeting where the boss said, ‘I know you’re all feeling under time pressure, but I’ve seen you going to the toilet. I only go to the toilet at lunch time.’’
‘Seriously? You weren’t meant to use the toilet? We’re not quite that bad here. Not yet.’
‘You can use the loo, but you can’t eat, is that it?’
‘Pretty much. But I’m standing against the trend.’
‘You rebel!’
‘That’s me.’ Trudy picked up her toasted sandwich and bit with great relish.
I had told Trudy then the good news about getting a registration for the conference, and she had informed me about the excitement in the Biochemistry Department because Professor Conneally was coming to speak.
‘Oh yes, the poster child for Tasmanian Biochemistry,’ I said, ‘is he well remembered up in Biochem?’
‘He’s definitely remembered. Some of us hate him more than others.’
‘What? What’s the story? Sounds totally juicy.’
Trudy looked at her sandwich in a contemplative manner.
‘It was a little bit before my time, so all of my knowledge is second or third hand, but it sounds like Conneally’s motto in life was ‘You don’t climb to the top of the ladder without stepping on a few heads’ and there are people here who still feel the pain.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as Ken Jones.’
‘I think I remember him – he taught genetics, right? Short, stocky, greying hair like a wire brush sticking up?’
‘Yes, that’s him. Totally grey hair now. And he’s still teaching genetics even now, lowly lecturer Dr Ken Jones, while Professor Conneally is up in Cambridge with the big boys.’
‘But surely it’s your quality of work that decides how far up the ladder you are?’
‘Now you’re being naive Alicia. There are so many ways that colleagues can boost a career or keep it low. Conneally would block Ken’s in-house funding applications, deny him the money to pay for his work to be published in high ranking journals and so on. Conneally was held in high esteem by the university – he’d brought in a bit of money and the uni thought he was the bees knees, anything he said went and what he said boosted his own career at the expense of everyone else’s.
‘In fact, there’s talk of one year where the Jones group had started to grow but he hadn’t managed to get his hands on government funding yet. The story is that he was running out of money to do any research at all – he couldn’t pay for animals to do experiments on, or reagents, or cell lines, or antibodies, or anything. He was in a bad way and he approached all the staff at a staff meeting to ask for support for a special funding application to keep his work going. But Conneally wouldn’t hear of it. He said it would make the school look bad to be begging for cash. He didn’t want that reputation. He thought it would adversely impact his own reputation. So he cut Ken off completely.
Ken’s career would have been pretty much over if some of the other staff didn’t take pity on him and lend him stuff. As it was he had to drop students and pretty much start his group from scratch when he managed to get funding again.’
‘But Jones is still here,’ I said.
‘Yes, he’s here but he’s bitter. He’s sure (and maybe he’s right) that a little help from Conneally when he was starting out would have meant a good deal to his career. He’s taken to wandering the corridors muttering, ‘Who does he think he is, coming to lord it over us’ and so on.’
‘And there’s me thinking the Biochemistry Department would be proud of their big export.’
‘Human nature. And the tall poppy syndrome. Much more likely to tear someone down than build them up. It’s sad but true.’
‘And look at us, doing the same thing, passing on the terrible gossip.’
‘You look really shaken by it Alicia.’
‘Maybe I’ve been looking back at things through rose-coloured glasses. I’ve forgotten the pressure and the politics.’
I had forgotten somehow just what it was like at the uni, but Trudy had brought me back to earth with a bump. Was the pressure enough to bring someone to murder? I mean, we joke about it all the time – I could just kill him – but no one ever means it.
But someone had meant it this time. And it’s the little things that give the game away.
I could start building my list again.
I had one suspect. Ken Jones.
He’d been at the conference and he held a grudge.
Actually, come to think of it, he was the one telling the heart attack story just before the dinner.
And when you thought about that, well, it got even more suspicious. Why did he bring up his heart attack? Was it just to get people thinking in the right way when Conneally died? No one else was sharing health stories, but he just happened to bring it up. I guess it backfired on him though – it was that very story and Conneally’s response that made me think that this death was a murder in the first place.
Had he even been in Singapore? I guess that was a fact we could verify. I would have to look into Ken Jones a bit more. Maybe I’d have morning tea in the biochemistry building instead of the chemistry building. It was a bit of a trek up the hill but the results would be worth it.
I had a look through a few more pages of my journal and found the page where I wrote about all the people watching I had done in Brasindon’s oh so incredibly boring lecture. And that brought up yet another suspect. It was amazing what you could find when you looked with the right attitude.
That crazy girl – headphones girl. Watching movies in the sessions, giving an unprepared and unsuccessful talk, and then, at the conference dinner, mooning over Professor Conneally like she was really impressed by him and everything chemistry. And I was sure she dropped something into his bag while she was with all the giggling girls at the dinner. Would it be possible for me to find out what that was that she had ‘given’ him? It was all very suspicious activity. (There I go, muttering into my beard. Not that I have a beard, but muttering, anyway. It was suspicious though.)
I thought about how I could find out more about her. She would be a lot harder to investigate than Jones. I didn’t even know which university group she was in. Her accent was Australian but there were plenty of Australian universities represented at the conference and she could easily have been working in the US or the UK.
Then I remembered the abstracts book. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it. I spent long enough packing the conference show bags.
Susannah had given me a ring the day before the conference started and asked if I could possibly help with the organisation. How could I say no? It was one way to pay her back for paying for the conference. I had intended to spend that Monday reading and researching and getting my head into the right work-space, but instead I spent it putting lanyards and name tags together, packing conference bags with flyers, notepads, pens, and a few mints, collecting boxes of wine for the welcome wine-taster and trying to make room in the staff fridge for the white and bubbly, all kinds of little fiddly jobs.
Just as we had it all together, Susannah had burst into the room looking more stressed than I had ever seen her.
‘Where are all the abstracts?’
‘They are in the bags, we’ve put one in each bag. Why?’
‘I just got off the phone with those dimwits in New England, apparently two of their students have intellectual property issues with their talks and have to be pulled. Two talks! We’re going to have to go through every book and rip out the abstracts.’
‘Good thing they are spiral bound then. Will that change the program mu
ch?’
‘No, they are going to present something, I managed to talk them into that. But just not what’s been put into the book.’
‘That’s a bit of a relief. But why didn’t they pick it up sooner?’
‘That’s what I’m asking. It’s crazy. You don’t prepare for a conference with stuff that has to be kept confidential. It’s ridiculous. I can’t tell you how frustrated I am.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort it.’
And we did. We opened every single bag, pulled out the abstracts book, ripped out (neatly) two pages from the middle for shredding, and put the book back into the bag like nothing had happened. It took a reasonable amount of time to doctor 400 bags or so. And I had developed a close and personal relationship with the abstracts book. Well, it was time to get to know it just that little bit better.
I pulled my copy from the conference out of the bag that I had flung on the floor next to the front door and had a look at the first couple of pages – they contained a headshot of all the participants and their contact details. The photos were pretty atrocious and I found it hard to recognise anyone for a while. People looked so different once they had been printed in black and white and shrunk to a thumbnail size. But I kept searching. Eventually I found the photo of headphones girl and I turned to the page indicated for the abstract of the talk. And there it wasn’t. It was one of the talks we had pulled.
No wonder her talk was so bad, so unprepared and badly presented. She’d had about two days to write it, and she was only an honours student, only in her fourth year of an undergraduate degree. No wonder she was disinclined to pay attention after all the stress she must have had the few days leading up to the conference. What a disappointment. But motive for murder? Who knows?
If she was that upset from having her work pulled, why was she giggling and chatting at the conference dinner? Was she up there, trying to look natural, just so that she could put something in Conneally’s food?
Well, there it was. I had my suspicions but I couldn’t do anything about them. There was no way to casually investigate this girl like I could with the whole affair situation. There was not much chance of something serendipitous happening like with Mrs Conneally or Mrs Brasindon – I was pretty sure that everyone from outside of Tasmania would have gone home by now. No one had told them to hang around – no one thought it was murder until too late. What was I going to do?
I decided to let the police know my suspicions, officially, using Crime Stoppers. I could make the anonymous phone call, let them know what I was thinking, and let them deal with it. I was pretty sure that they would be interested in any information anyone could give at this time. And then tomorrow I could do the analysis I was being paid to do. I was part of the team now – even if no one was telling me anything. I had a job to do and a good reason to do it.
I sent a text to Trudy telling her that I’d be coming up for morning tea. I didn’t mention why, of course, and I felt a little guilty misleading such a good friend. But I liked spending time with Trudy and that much was true. And also, if she asked, I’d tell her that I never wanted to give Joshua the opportunity to whinge to me again. That morning tea yesterday was so uncomfortable and awkward. Never again.
I would head up to the Biochemistry Department at around 11am and have a coffee there. In the meantime, I had work to do. I put on my lab coat and got started.
Boy did that feel good. Knowing what the day was going to hold and just getting in and ticking jobs off the list. I was focussed and slipped completely and easily into the work zone. I had missed this. Not the politics, not the funding applications, not the interesting people, but the work itself, I had missed this.
Once I had the instrument up and running again and had put on a new sample, I saved the output from the NMR that had run overnight onto a memory stick and went back to the desk to check it out. I had been told to use Eoin’s desk – a big heavy wooden desk covered with piles of paper, scrap paper with scribbled notes, pens and pencils and erasers and rulers, and heavy reference books. I was pretty grateful that I could use the computer monitor to look at all the information – I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess up the piles. They looked disorganised but maybe Eoin was the kind of guy that had an elaborate piling system. Not a filing system, he wasn’t using files. Just a piling system – elaborate piles. And he hadn’t been expecting anyone to use his desk while he was away on holidays. I had the feeling I could get in a lot of trouble if an important scrap of paper got lost.
The morning slipped away and the alarm came up on the computer telling me that it was time to head to morning tea. At the same time an email came in from Susannah, but I didn’t make time to read it. I could do that after morning tea. Checking that everything was ticking along just fine with the instruments, I locked the office door and started the walk up the hill to the Biochemistry Department. The weather had broken, a lazy breeze from the south was blowing right through me and bringing spits of rain. A lovely Tasmanian summer’s day. I hunched my shoulders and hoped that this front would pass soon, and was grateful that the Tassie weather had done its thing after the conference. While today felt like winter, it was perfectly normal summer weather on this island. It just didn’t look good when tourists were treated to this. Of course, there were obviously some tourists fighting their way through the rain to see the various guidebook destinations, but at least they weren’t tourists that I felt any sense of responsibility for.
By the time I had climbed the hill, I was sweating and puffing despite the cool rain. I truly needed to do more exercise. I was making plans to climb the hill twice a day while I was working at the uni. I could make these plans comfortably, knowing that I’d never carry them through.
Trudy got us a cup of tea and we sat at the table with the other staff. It was an interesting collection of people. They looked much more outdoorsy than the chemistry bunch. There was a lady, slim, tanned, dressed in a sleeveless tunic dress; a young guy with dreadlocks; an older man with a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and another who managed to wear a short-sleeved shirt and tie and still give the impression that he was ready to bush walk at a moment’s notice. And there was Ken Jones with the wiry hair. The conversation around the table started with the weather, but fortunately (and probably quite understandably) Professor Conneally’s death was still the talk of the town.
‘I heard he started his career here,’ I said, and the many and varied stories began – each person trying to out do the other.
There was the lecture where someone dressed as a gorilla swooped in and kidnapped a girl from the lecture theatre.
There was the lecture where Conneally burst into song to drive a point home ‘Quite a good voice too’ was the general opinion. There was some idea he was part of a choral group.
‘He really was an excellent lecturer – his lectures were fun, full of stories and unexpected happenings, he kept the students engaged and managed to get his point across at the same time. Brilliant speaker. Such a loss.’
I agreed that his conference lecture was similarly brilliant and then asked, ‘How did he treat his research students?’
‘He only had a few students while he was here – nothing like the huge group he has now. Or had. It’s so hard to think in past tense. Anyway, I think he was the chummy type of supervisor.’
‘Yeah, group BBQs and curry nights, heading to the pub on a Friday night, first to show up, last to leave.’
‘He did have that one student though, things went a bit badly then ...’
‘That wasn’t Conneally though, that was the student’s fault.’
‘Really? What happened there?’ I had to push a bit then – people who are so eager to dish the dirt when someone is alive, are much less eager when they are gone. But finally someone reluctantly let it out.
‘The story is that there was some cheating in a thesis. Or some such thing.’
I blurted out, ‘a PhD thesis? How do you cheat in that?’ I had never heard of anything like that
before. And the group around the table weren’t really sure of the full story.
‘Plagiarism?’
‘Nope, I think it was on the results from some of the tests – he was doing something with mice wasn’t he?’
This was biochemistry, all the experiments were on either mice, or rats, or cell cultures derived from mice or rats. That was one reason I avoided biochemistry. I much preferred to experiment with inanimate chemicals.
‘It would have to be in the area of Motor Neurone Disease, right? That’s where Prof Conneally works isn’t it? Or worked ...’
‘I can’t quite remember, I think that some mice died that shouldn’t have, something like that. Or they didn’t report things from mice that lived and shouldn’t have, or something.’
I took note of that. The older guy in the tweed jacket seemed to know what he was talking about. I was finding all this gossip incredibly interesting – it was making my brain move in new directions. But I wasn’t getting the vibe I was expecting. There was no bitterness or anger about how people were used by the professor. The story that Trudy had told me before the conference wasn’t coming up now. I wondered why.
I looked at Ken Jones to check his response but he looked completely at peace when discussing his old rival. There was no animosity there at all. I was a little confused. I kept digging.
‘So did Prof Conneally leave because of the cheating?’
‘There was a big fuss at the time, but I don’t reckon that’s why he left, but he did leave pretty soon after. He won an award or something that sent him over to the UK and the rest is history,’ said dreadlocks.
‘A meteoric rise to fame in just, what is it? Ten years?’ tweed jacket asked.
‘He really did make a name for himself. It’s pretty devastating what has happened here – so much research that will now never happen,’ said the lady in the tunic.
‘Tragic really. You never know what a day will bring – one day you’re doing fine, getting along like there’s no problem at all, then the next, BAM! Heart attack and you’re gone.’ That was Ken Jones. I decided to introduce myself.