A Matter of Loyalty

by Anselm Audley

  ‘He was. There’s no room for manoeuvre there. Somewhere else in the files, it turns out Domentzov didn’t even mention Moisevich’s name when he aired the plan with his MGB minders.’

  ‘Oh, he was doing the decent thing all right,’ said Hugo, mind racing. ‘But he was telling us something else, too.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this too much,’ said Harriet. ‘Out with it.’

  ‘As far as Domentzov’s source was concerned, the accident wasn’t Rothesay’s fault.’

  Scene 9

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘This is rather an inventive interpretation, isn’t it?’

  He’d called the people working on Foxley material in for a brief and, as far as Hugo was concerned, quite unnecessary meeting. It seemed he had hopes of getting Jarrett out of his hair by the end of the week.

  Hugo, for his part, could have done with more time to prepare. There was an art to finessing Sir Bernard, and it involved dropping careful hints in the right ears before you took your case to him. Unless it was likely to upset London, he would always go with whatever seemed to be the consensus.

  There were four of them and Sir Bernard, chairs arranged in a semicircle around his big desk.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Peter Woolhope, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs out. ‘I was the one you sent up to read the report, if you remember, and it’s a rum thing.’

  ‘Dr Oldcastle is an extremely capable administrator,’ said Sir Bernard, who’d clearly been won over.

  Woolhope had his own views on capable administrators. ‘Absolutely. It takes a first-class mind to come up with such contortions of logic. Some chap Oldcastle valued made a balls-up, so he found a way to blame it on Rothesay, who just happened to be too important to fire. Mind you, if that were me, I’d be narked as all hell.’

  Roger Bailey frowned. ‘If Rothesay was aggrieved, and believed himself innocent, doesn’t that suggest he was the mole? The details fit, and so does the motivation.’

  Sir Bernard brightened. This was exactly what he wanted to hear.

  ‘The true story might be common knowledge among Oldcastle’s people,’ Harriet pointed out. ‘We don’t know because no one asked them.’

  ‘So what are you after, Hawksworth?’ said Sir Bernard.

  ‘I’d like to go back to Foxley and do a few more interviews. It’s a logical extension of the background work I’ve been doing.’

  ‘You were looking for someone with military training. I’d say you did a splendid job pointing us to Saul Ingham.’

  ‘Which may well solve the murder. But London won’t be happy until someone pins down the source of the leak. If it was Rothesay, that’s two birds with one stone. If it isn’t, we need to find them.’

  Sir Bernard looked around the table for guidance. Harriet and Peter were in agreement. Roger looked dubious.

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Sir Bernard. He waved a finger in Hugo’s direction. ‘Be quick about it. Remember what I told you on Saturday.’

  Which translated to, Don’t give Jarrett a reason to stay any longer than absolutely necessary.

  Scene 10

  The receptionist at Foxley was surprised to see Hugo. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here again, Mr Hawksworth. We thought it was all the Special Branch lot.’

  ‘Just come to do some spadework,’ Hugo said. ‘Who’s in with Inspector Jarrett at the moment?’

  ‘He’s taking a break with His Nibs. The Brigadier won’t have interviews going on too long, says it wears his people out.’

  So Caundle was still sitting on his scientists like a hen on her eggs. ‘I shan’t interrupt them. Who’s up next, then? I shall take someone else first, so as not to get in their way.’

  ‘They’re talking to the two technicians this afternoon. They were in with Dr Wood this morning.’

  ‘He’s back?’

  ‘Yesterday. Dr Oldcastle got him another military flight, he’s been to all sorts of places on the way. Very tanned he looks, too. I’d have liked a few weeks in the sun myself, although it’s hard for him to have lost his pa.’

  ‘I’ll start with him, if he doesn’t mind. Where will I find him?’

  ‘Same room as the others you were talking to, through that corridor and third on the right. I suppose you’ll want somewhere private. Try the meeting room, that’s two further on. Just pull the blinds down, you’ll have all the quiet you need.’

  James Wood was a cheerful, open man about Hugo’s age with a deep tan and a ready smile. Hugo liked him at once. He might still be the mole – he’d come from Ulfsgill too – but there was no question of involvement in Rothesay’s death. He’d been stuck in Singapore while his RAF transport underwent some minor repairs, everything vouched for.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Hugo said, by way of courtesy, as they settled themselves on deeply uncomfortable chairs in the meeting room. He flicked the blinds closed. Better not to have anyone looking through those.

  ‘He had a good innings,’ said Wood. ‘Said so himself. Liked his cricket. Glad I got there to say goodbye.’

  Hugo hadn’t been granted that grace. He’d heard about his father’s death in the Western Desert, the CO calling him into his tent one night to break the news that the ageing destroyer HMS Alcyone had been sunk by a U-boat in the North Atlantic. All hands lost, including her skipper, Commander Charles Hawksworth RNR, veteran of Jutland and the convoy battles of 1917.

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Hugo.

  Wood gave him a sympathetic look. ‘The war?’

  ‘He was in the Navy.’

  ‘Only right and proper. You too?’

  Hugo had never felt the call of the sea, to his father’s great bafflement. ‘No. A life on the ocean wave wasn’t for me. Army, Intelligence Corps.’ True, after a fashion, except he’d only ever been on secondment from the Service.

  ‘And now you’re Special Branch?’

  ‘Thorn Hall.’

  ‘Ah, the hush-hush place. I was only ever for the Navy myself. Grew up right on the coast. Mountains for climbing on one side, sea for sailing on the other. Best place on earth.’ Years in England hadn’t taken the edge off his New Zealand twang.

  ‘You’re a long way from home.’

  ‘There’s no physics to be done at home. Not enough of us. I grew up reading about Rutherford splitting the atom, finding things no one ever dreamed of. Knew that was the life for me, even if it meant coming to grey old England.’

  ‘And the greyest corner of it, so I see.’

  ‘That was quite a shock. It gets wet and cold down in the South Island, but nothing like Manchester.’

  ‘Why did you pick Manchester?’

  ‘Rutherford had been there and it was still a strong department. It was that or Cambridge, and there’s nothing to climb around Cambridge. Flat as a pancake, Pa told me. So it was Manchester for me. Peak District one way and the Lakes the other. Couldn’t have been happier. I didn’t even mind Ulfsgill the way some of the others did. Fells right on the doorstep, you see.’

  ‘It’s Ulfsgill I wanted to talk about, actually.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  If this man were a Soviet spy, he was the unlikeliest spy Hugo had ever met.

  ‘Tell me about the accident.’

  Wood shook his head. ‘If you mean the one that killed Sørensen, it was a bad business all round. He was a good guy. Didn’t say much, I guess they’re not great talkers up in Scandinavia, but we went out walking together a few times. Get a couple of beers in him and he’d thaw out a bit.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘How up are you on the science?’

  ‘Strictly a layman. I’ve read enough to have an idea what you were up to, dealing with contaminated plutonium.’

  Wood folded his arms. ‘It’s a real bore for the weapons guys. Me, I’m more interested in nuclear energy. Strictly the reactor side. Don’t care much for the Bombs, to tell you the truth, terrible things they are. But my supervisor said if I wanted to work on nuclear e
nergy, there was nowhere better. So I went. Before you can build a Bomb, you need the fuel. For the fuel, you need a reactor, so you need reactor specialists. If we’re going to get the world running on nuclear power instead of coal one day – and let me tell you, after living in Manchester, that’ll make a big difference to a great many people – the training ground will be these weapons programmes.’

  Hugo said, ‘Which the Government pretends are all about nuclear energy.’

  ‘Fair enough, I suppose. You see, reactors are easier than Bombs. You can get away with using much dirtier plutonium in the reactor fuel – that’s the contaminated sort, by the way.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Contaminated plutonium is less likely to go bang when you want it to. Not good in weapons, not good at all. Does that make sense of it?’

  ‘So you were trying to refine the plutonium.’

  ‘We were looking at ways to sort the gold from the dross, as it were. The Americans solved all of this already, but they won’t share, so we’re working it out for ourselves. Rothesay came up with an idea. I won’t go into the details, but it would have speeded up the whole refining cycle. We’d have better plutonium, and faster. Bear in mind this has all been done on a shoestring, and in quite a hurry.’

  Hugo was quite familiar with that way of operating. ‘Was it a good idea?’ he asked. ‘Scientifically, I mean. Were there flaws in it?’

  ‘Well . . . no. There weren’t. It was sound.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Plutonium-240, that’s the contaminant, it’s tricksy stuff. Sprays out neutrons all the time, not just when you want them. Plutonium-239 is much more disciplined, you can make it do what you want. Too much 240 in a Bomb, and it could go off just fine, or it could be a squib. Makes the whole thing less dependable.’

  ‘Not ideal.’

  ‘Absolutely. Anyway, Rothesay came up with a very simple set of procedures to separate the types of plutonium. Relied on the different density of the allotropes – no, don’t ask, we’d be here for an hour. He came up with a way to use the fizzling to our advantage, and we could do it with a very primitive experimental setup. Trouble was, there were too many things to go wrong. If something happened, you needed a safety mechanism to separate the plutonium ingots. In this case, the scram – that’s the safety shutdown mechanism – was just a few wires and a pulley, to lift one ingot off the other. The day Sørensen tried to use it, it failed. He had to pull two ingots apart with his bare hands before they went critical, but that was the end of him. Nasty way to go, a radiation overdose. Takes a couple of weeks.’

  ‘The safety mechanism, that was Rothesay’s idea?’

  For the first time, Wood looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘If you want the short answer,’ he said, ‘no, it wasn’t. It was all done too quickly. Rothesay thought it could speed the whole process up. It would have been a real coup for all of us reactor types. But Rothesay was a theoretician. You wouldn’t put him in charge of supply if he were the last man on Earth. We didn’t even let him near the plutonium without supervision, although in fact he was in the room the day the accident happened.’

  ‘Who was in charge of supply?’

  ‘Look, I don’t like to get a friend into trouble . . .’

  ‘This isn’t about reopening the inquiry into the accident. You have my word on that. I’m looking into Dr Rothesay’s history. In the official record, he’s to blame for Dr Sørensen’s death. If there’s a discrepancy there, it may be critical to finding out why he was killed. I also think he deserves better than to be saddled with responsibility for a death he didn’t cause.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Wood reluctantly. ‘Back then, supply was Dr Vane’s province. He was Head of Section, the boss’s right-hand man.’

  Hugo might have known. He’d have to come at Vane from an unexpected direction. ‘Before I talk to him, take me through the incident in a little more detail. Were you there at the time?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ said Wood.

  Scene 11

  Gus had driven Vivian up to the Castle to take a look at the ballroom. Dust-shrouded, chill from years of neglect, it was like a place frozen in time. A relic of the age before the war, when such places were full of grace and elegance.

  ‘There’s enough room, I hope,’ he said. ‘I should like to see it used again, though I can’t imagine I shall be holding many balls.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Vivian at once, pacing out the width. It was, aside from her ugly memories of the main part of the Castle.

  ‘I’ve asked Ben to test the heating, he’s working on that today. Freya says she’ll organise the girls into a work party, take the dust sheets off and clear away some of the cobwebs.’

  Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen paces wide. It wasn’t too far off the space they’d have in the Cathedral.

  ‘I’ll get some chairs brought up,’ said Vivian. ‘You don’t want all and sundry sitting on these. Louis Quinze, lovely. I didn’t know there was any of the Castle like this.’

  ‘Only the ballroom,’ said Gus. ‘There was an orangery, too, but one of my Victorian ancestors knocked it down to build the Paxton hothouse.’

  She walked over to the harpsichord, pulled the cover back. ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen one like this. London music schools would give their eye teeth to get their hands on it. Does anyone play?’

  ‘I’m told Hugo did when he was younger, but he won’t touch it now. Doesn’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘Too many secrets, that man has. I suppose it’s a good quality if you’re going to be in the Service.’ She walked over to the end of the room, where there was a small door set into the panelling. ‘Where does this go?’

  ‘Servants’ passages.’ Gus opened it, a dark musty smell came out. ‘They’re shut off, too much for Mrs Partridge to look after.’

  ‘I should say so. Lots of dust, not good for anyone’s lungs. I shan’t try to press it into service as the Compton Chapel, then. One of the chantries in the Cathedral, we’ll be using it for entrances and exits.’

  Gus shut the door.

  ‘However do you look after all this?’ Vivian asked.

  ‘I’ve been gently encouraged to hire more people. Ben does his best, but he’s been looking after it single-handed for seven years. There’s quite a backlog, and I haven’t even been taken round some of the attics. It’s a warren up there.’

  ‘Sooner you than me. But then,’ she said shrewdly, ‘you’re in even further over your head than I would be.’

  Scene 12

  Dr Edward Vane was, if possible, even more disagreeably suspicious than the last time Hugo had spoken to him. ‘I’ve been interviewed twice,’ he said. ‘I don’t have anything further to add about Dr Rothesay’s disappearance or his conduct in the last few days.’

  ‘I’m here in connection with a loose thread,’ Hugo said. ‘The security breach we were investigating.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been apprised of your various responsibilities here, but at Ulfsgill your group was working directly on reactor construction. I need to know who was responsible for what.’

  Vane began turning a pen round in his fingers. ‘If you’re flogging that dead horse of who knew what and when, you can forget it. We work as a team here, as you and the Inspector have been told more than once.’

  ‘You may indeed work as a team,’ said Hugo, ‘but you each have your areas of responsibility, and material to which you had the most regular access. For example, Dr Rothesay was a theoretician. You presumably didn’t look at his research notes on a daily basis.’

  ‘We would occasionally ask him to take us through his reasoning.’

  ‘But that would be his material.’

  ‘If someone had wanted to riffle through Rothesay’s notes when he wasn’t looking, they would have found an opportunity, but there would have been no point. When he had something ready to show us, he would show us. Until then, anyone looking at his work would have found no more
than scrawled notes on the paper. He was not a systematic thinker.’

  ‘What else was he responsible for?’

  ‘Very little. I considered him too unreliable to entrust with further responsibility, and Dr Oldcastle agreed. We gave him some minor administrative tasks, of the sort entrusted to every member of the team. They were done, although not with notable efficiency or alacrity.’

  Hugo ran him through the other members of the team, touching on the accident once or twice, but never delving too deeply. Sørensen’s speciality had been almost as theoretical as Rothesay’s, but it seemed that on that particular project he’d been employed as a jack-of-all-trades, filling in wherever needed.

  ‘Was he a good experimentalist?’

  ‘I should say he was competent. Considerably more so than Rothesay.’

  ‘If he was merely competent, why was he in direct charge of radioactive materials?’

  Vane frowned. ‘As a consequence of pursuing Rothesay’s hare-brained scheme, we were attempting to do more work than we had people for. Some technicians were borrowed from another department, but they were spread thin. Other personnel were pressed into any service for which they had the necessary basic training.’

  Again, that touch of Soviet planning-speak. It didn’t make Vane a traitor, of course, merely a bore to work with.

  ‘Did you make those assignments?’

  ‘I did. I was given day-to-day oversight of the project, despite my opposition. My responsibility was to match our resources to the demands being made on them.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if you wanted the project to go ahead.’

  Vane pursed his lips. ‘I didn’t speak in favour of it. I considered it quite beyond our capacity, and planned on an excessively optimistic timescale.’

  ‘What should have happened to Rothesay’s idea?’

  ‘It should have been rigorously critiqued by other theoreticians, and then entrusted to a properly equipped engineering division supplied with adequate materials and a more generous timetable.’

  ‘It was flawed from the start, then.’

  ‘Indeed, as I believe the report made clear.’