Diana's Altar

by Barbara Cleverly

  His words sounded hollow even to his own ears, though he spoke nothing but the truth. He deserved a derisory, “Ooh, er!” from Hunnyton, but the man merely looked away in embarrassment and changed the subject. “There’s always Adelaide to consider, Joe, mixed up in this as she is up to her armpits,” he said. “It wouldn’t do her much good professionally to have her name dragged into a murder case. The phrase ‘accessory after the fact’ comes to mind.”

  “What are you suggesting, Hunnyton? That sounded a little ominous. Out with it, man! That’s an order.” Faced with Hunnyton and Pertinax side by side, Joe would not have known which to smack on the jaw first.

  “Well, two corpses all too literally in her hands in suspicious circumstances in one night . . . Were you quite happy with her account?”

  At least Hunnyton had the grace to look uncomfortable as he trailed his question. He usually did when speaking of Adelaide. He got to his feet and went over to the notice board where he straightened quite unnecessarily one or two notices, his face turned away from Joe. “Look here—I’d rather she spoke to you herself. Not knowing how things stand between the two of you, it’s difficult for me . . .”

  “Nonsense! This is a professional matter, not a personal one,” Joe said briskly. “So clear that away.”

  Again, Joe sensed a calculated retreat in the face of his brusqueness and a change of tack.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder how she came to be in Cambridge, employed in the practice of that arsehole Easterby?” Hunnyton asked, beginning to stride uneasily about the room.

  Joe was taken aback. “No. Her father paid a goodly sum, I understand, for Adelaide’s junior partnership and it’s conveniently close to her Suffolk home. Entirely reasonable and commendable.”

  “Easterby’s outfit is doing well. It has a splendid location in the middle of a flourishing city. His list of subscribers is wealthy and growing. He didn’t need the encumbrance—as he would see it—of a woman partner. Indeed, if you were to get to know him better, you’d realise that he actively dislikes women. One of life’s eternal bachelors. He can’t see the point of ’em.”

  “All the more reason for passing on his female patients to a female partner,” Joe said. “I suppose some of his male clients have wives, sisters, daughters who seek advice and I’d further suppose they would have been only too relieved to be diverted to the care of lovely Adelaide.” Joe shuddered. “A paunchy bloke with boiled-egg eyes, nose hair and bad breath—not what you want poking about in your underpinnings!”

  Hunnyton grinned. “You could hear the sighs of relief from here to Newmarket! I agree that employing Adelaide would be a good device for keeping a happy family practice. But it’s not Adelaide’s involvement with the happy families that concerns me. You’ll have noticed I’m not indifferent to the lady. I’ve got fond of her, Joe, and would go far to protect her person and her good name. Easterby is vile. He’s involved in a vile business.”

  “He’s known to be medically involved with some influential people,” Joe ventured a neutral answer to give himself time to absorb the import of Hunnyton’s comment. So matter of fact in its delivery, yet surely it amounted to a declaration of intent? Of overt rivalry? Joe wished his wits were not so befuddled. He was dealing with a man whose motives and morals were largely unknown to him, and he was struck again by the feeling that he’d climbed into the wrong ring and found himself squaring up to an opponent fighting above Joe’s own weight.

  “Yes. And one or two of them have recently, mysteriously, come to sticky ends.” Hunnyton steamed on calmly. Not, apparently, expecting a slap across the face with a glove. “None of them was clutching a pot of the good doctor’s pills—oh, no!—nothing so obvious! The master of a college, a candidate for the Nobel science prize, a dean of the Church—and that’s just the ones we’re sure of—have blown their brains out, jumped from rooftops and so on.”

  “The Cambridge Connection.” Joe nodded sagely. Why couldn’t those buggers at the Home Office have briefed him fully? Warned him? Provided him with some names? Feeding their addiction to secrecy as usual, he decided, or protecting friends and relations. Send in Sandilands and have him rootle about and confirm our suspicions. Deal with the outfall with discretion. It’s all got too much for us, like an attack of dry rot you know you should have dealt with years ago.

  Figaro, here, Figaro, there . . . Figaro every-bloody-where! Hunnyton was right as usual. Damn him!

  “You’ll have to find the proof, but I’m sure Easterby is in cahoots with that gang at Madingley. He probably met Pertinax as a patient. A patient suffering from a sexually transmitted disease.”

  “You’re right. It’s the dreaded syphilis, I’m afraid. Adelaide’s seen his notes. Seems to be in the clear for the moment but you know how these things go, Hunnyton.”

  “How they go and how they come back again. Yes. It’s a terrifying diagnosis. Inexorable decay of private parts, possibly extending to other soft tissues including the brain. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a syphilitic brain, Sandilands?”

  “I have. Several. I don’t shirk the autopsies. More to the point, I’ve dealt with the murderous consequences of such a brain while the body it inhabited was still alive and able to wield a knife and a hammer. ‘Dashed bad luck! Caught a dose of the clap,’ I’ve heard men say. Passing it off like a bad cold in the head. ‘Join the club!’ his friends give him the ritual reassurance. It really doesn’t convey the enormity of the situation . . . the mental and moral putrefaction that goes on inexorably, often for years. It’s a long, painful descent into madness and death.”

  “For which there is no cure, what’s more. If Easterby is telling his patients there is, he’s lying. I’ve made it my business to find out.” Hunnyton resumed his seat opposite Joe and fixed him with his “Honest, guv, nothin’ but the truth” expression. “Joe, Pertinax is not the only one on his books with problems in that quarter. And Easterby sees the foul condition as something of a gold mine. He’s travelled to Germany, Austria and Scandinavia and come back with the best theories and medical science the world has to offer in that field. Indeed, his dedication and initiative deserve our respect and admiration, not our sneers. His reputation as a discreet solver of gentlemen’s problems has spread.”

  “I can see that it gives the practitioner a certain power too. When your skills and your very particular knowledge are all that can preserve a patient from a very nasty death . . . well, that conveys an incalculable value. But I can’t see why this medical bonanza should require him to take on a female doctor,” Joe said in puzzlement, risking another pitying glance.

  “He can afford to offload his day-to-day doctoring to concentrate on his rich male patients with very special needs. The other two medics are his front, his disguise.”

  “Sounds like a sensible and economic allocation of time and skills,” Joe suggested.

  “Yes, but there’s a decidedly uneconomic aspect to these arrangements,” Hunnyton murmured. “The Saturday clinics.”

  “You’ll have to explain. But I’m guessing this involves Adelaide in some way, seeing as she’s forever engaged at weekends,” Joe said in a voice heavy with suspicion. “Too busy to see me anyway!”

  “It’s a free service for the poor and needy of the town who turn up in droves and receive diagnosis and treatment from Adelaide, courtesy of a charity that sponsors her work. It’s not at all what Easterby would want, as the exclusive Harley Street image is the one he strives for. She told me once that she’d made it a condition of her employment. No free service—no Adelaide.”

  “And there I was picturing Adelaide punting up and down the Cam to the Orchard Tea Rooms in Grantchester with some frisky young don in her time off,” Joe said.

  “Time off! The girl gets no time off! Easterby cuts her no slack. No hours off in lieu. Can’t you see how strained she’s becoming?”

  Joe ignored the intended critici
sm. “Tell me, Hunnyton—what charity is involved with these surgeries?”

  “I wondered if you’d think to ask. It’s the Red Heart Foundation.” He looked at Joe, waiting for his reaction.

  “Never heard of it. Something on the lines of the Red Cross?”

  “Nothing on the lines of the Red Cross we all know and love! But that’s the image the name is meant to conjure up: starched nurses, cups of tea and tins of Queen Mary’s chocolate! This group is quite recently formed. Everything above board, legally registered and professionally run. Some big names on the Board of Directors. Admirable service supplied. It really fills a disgraceful gap in our unequal society. Money is genuinely given for the relief of the poor and suffering of Britain. The students here in the city made a wonderful contribution last year—proceeds of their Rag Week stunts. And that’s all right. I’m a contributor myself!”

  “But?”

  “Red means ‘Red,’ Joe. I investigated. For Adelaide’s sake. I didn’t want her involved with some dubious outfit, and, as we were dealing with Easterby . . . Well, you never know. Anyhow, making innocent routine enquiries of a ‘public safety order . . . police need to know . . .’ nature, I discovered that the cash, which flows freely into the coffers, comes mainly—about eighty percent—from Russia.”

  “Good Lord! The buggers are everywhere! Does Adelaide know this?”

  “I told her. She told me to sod off and not bother her with such nonsense. She didn’t give a toss where the cash came from so long as it was curing her patients. Boils, rickets, broken limbs and miscarriages healed whether the money was red, blue or green.”

  Joe groaned and stayed silent. He had no idea what Adelaide’s political stance was. Did she even have one? They’d never discussed it. Why on earth hadn’t she asked his opinion, his advice?

  Hunnyton began to sum up, “So, someone in an office in Whitehall, troubled by the suicides of old friends, family members, perhaps, up here in Academia, put two and two together . . .”

  “Or were tipped off by a victim . . .”

  “. . . and the powers that be decided to get to the bottom of it. By sending in their pet factotum. And here we are. Waiting for Figaro to make his move.”

  He looked at Joe—slightly drunk, somewhat disorderly and in retreat—with satisfaction.

  There was one more piece of local knowledge Joe wanted to winkle out of Hunnyton before he left. With no reference to the Whitehall briefing he’d received, he asked, following on the Red Heart revelation, what were the superintendent’s views on the so-called Red Menace. Was it a problem on his patch? Could Pertinax possibly be involved in any way? And the laboratories where the Russian scientist was working—the Cavendish—had Hunnyton ever had cause for concern in that quarter?

  Hunnyton laughed. “I’ll tell you the extent of police involvement with the labs! I mean apart from helping the young gentlemen on their way after closing time at the Eagle. One day last year. April it was, I think . . . Our beat bobby on King’s Parade spotted something odd. A young man on a bike was wobbling down the Parade, shouting at passersby. Drunk as a skunk, the bobby decided and went to investigate. When he got close enough to hear what the chap was shouting, he heard: ‘We’ve split it! We’ve split the atom! We’ve split it!’

  “The constable passed a fatherly arm around the bloke’s shoulders and helped him off his bike. ‘Never you mind, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you bright fellows will be able to stick it back together again tomorrow morning. On your way now.’”

  “I intend to approach the laboratory and make enquiries and fully expect to get the polite brush-off. But can you, here and now, Hunnyton, tell me what projects the Russian scientist Kapitza and his team are working on?”

  The question provoked a sly smile and a raised eyebrow. “About time someone asked! Why has his name suddenly come to your attention?”

  “Four good reasons. Kapitza is in contact with the ARCOS offices in Moorgate. That’s the All Russian Co-operative Society and it’s not somewhere you’d go to buy a bag of sugar. Not this Co-op! It’s the front for communism in Britain. Heavily financed by Moscow. He is also close to Maurice Dobb—the doyen of the communist fraternity at Trinity. Thirdly, his name has been handed to us by a Cavendish scientist who insists his colleague is passing information to the Russians. A spy. Fourthly, he is known to be planning a trip back to St. Petersburg in the summer vacation. Leaving his family behind for once. He has two young children, I’m told. Changes in pattern of behaviour are always interesting. With the mischief-making propensities of Pertinax popped into possibly the same crucible, someone at the labs rang the fire alarm.”

  “About bloody time!” Hunnyton rasped again. He rose from his chair and stamped around his desk in his agitation. “It’s been bothering me for some time. Nothing the CID can do about it! All those science boys are perfectly law-abiding. I’d love to get one or two of them to face me in the cells, but they don’t even spit in the street! Not one of them is on my watch list. But I try to keep abreast of politics. I love the country that I damn nearly died for and if someone blows the bugle again (heaven forbid!) I’ll be there in the front ranks. Shoulder to shoulder with you most probably, Joe. When I sniff the wind and scent danger, I take notice and I take action. Those labs worry me. Remember how in the last lot we came close to being finished off by the infernal invention of a scientist? Bloody poison gas! If it all happens again—and I’m one of those who think it will because Europe hasn’t done with the blood letting—the outcome will be engineered in some smart, modern, innocent-looking laboratory. If we’re lucky it will be the one round the corner here in Cambridge . . . but if we’re not, it will be the new one that’s planned for Leningrad or the one in Göttingen.”

  “Not so much stinks as bangs to expect next time around,” Joe said. “Atoms. Smashing them to smithereens in magnetic chambers to see what they’re made of. Neutrons . . . nuclei . . . electrons . . . or some such. Dangerous business. Huge potential, I understand, for fuelling what MI5 calls ‘war work.’”

  “War work!” Hunnyton chuntered with disgust. “What a phrase! Infernal inventions feeding the arms manufacturing industry. An expensive business, too. Have you noticed, Sandilands, that the smaller the subject of study, the larger and more elaborate the apparatus required and the space to do it in?”

  Hunnyton took a file from a drawer and glanced briefly inside it. “I’m no physicist and I hardly understood a word of what I was being told when I cornered one of the Cavendish scientists in the pub one evening. Not a big fish. Lower echelon, research assistant I think. A college tie and a jar or two of ale loosens their tongues. Gawd! It was like inviting a sewing circle to indulge in gossip. I risked being swept away by the outpouring! The tittle-tattle! The wrist-slapping and hair-tugging! What Blackett thought of Kapitza. What everyone else thought of Blackett. How Rutherford gave the damned Russian everything he asked for. Spoiled bastard. Things had improved since that nut-case Oppenheimer had buggered off to Göttingen in Germany to study theoretical physics. And good riddance, eh? Did I know he’d tried to kill Blackett with a poisoned apple? And do away with himself? Pity was, he’d failed on both counts.”

  The superintendent sighed. “Spiteful little sod! But—the stuff they’re doing in there!” He began to read from his notebook: “Radio-activity physics . . . nuclear physics . . . cloud chambers . . . electromagnetism . . . low-temperature physics . . . superfluidity . . . and here’s one that’ll stand your hair on end—cosmic ray physics! Can that be as alarming as it sounds? Sorry, Joe! I could hardly get my pencil out in the pub so I had to do my best to remember the terms and write them down later. And the lad was three sheets to the wind at the time. So I may be offering you gobbledegook, I’m afraid. Or his version of the latest episode of Buck Rogers in Amazing Stories comic. But I tell you, these blokes travel about, flitting from country to country like honeybees, fertilising and spreading ideas. And it’s use
less checking their luggage for blueprints; give them a blackboard and a stick of chalk and they can reproduce anything, anywhere. This Kapitza is, in addition, a dab hand at engineering. Designs his own labs and equipment as well. He has undoubtedly the skill to design weaponry. To convert the equations on the blackboard into actual explosive devices or death rays that some bugger can manufacture. With his knowledge he could set up anywhere in the world to work on a new-fangled armoury. Not every country encourages science purely for the sake of scientific advancement. Not every country is as benign, open-handed and trusting as our own. I tell you, Joe, it’s all very disturbing.”

  “I’ll tell you what else is disturbing—living within a hundred yards of these laboratories!” Joe said, stricken. “Oppenheimer? Good Lord! ‘Unstable’ is the last estimate I had of him, on top of ‘clumsy in his conduct of experiments in the laboratory.’ Even MI5 had got wind of the psychiatric help he was being given here in Cambridge a year or two ago. Brilliant in his field, however, and now you’re telling me this chap has gone off with all the experience he’s acquired here to lay it at the feet of Herr Hitler’s alarming government?”

  “You can add to that the Japanese bloke whose name escapes me. He’s gone sailing back home with his mental blueprints. Do the Japanese love us? Who would know?”

  Joe was suddenly starkly sober. “These men are swanning about the globe, carrying with them the means of destroying the world. We just smile, stamp their passports and wish them bon voyage.”

  Hunnyton nodded. “They’ll tell you in justification that you can’t stop the march of progress, and that the larger the number of political powers in possession of the nasty secrets, the less likely it is that the world will be threatened by the domination of a single power. If every industrialised country possesses the means to blow the others to bits, then not one of them will give the order for fear of reprisals. The globe in flames and all the rest of it. Have you ever heard such twaddle? Might just work—barring accidents—as long as you could guarantee that each power is run by a sane and civilised ruler. But you can’t. Scum rises to the top and in most of Europe it’s scum that has its slimy finger on the detonator. You look at Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and what do you see? Power-hungry upstarts, sprung from nowhere salubrious. Crass, ruthless, supported by gangs of like-minded thugs. They appear overnight like full-blown fungus in the forest and they grow most easily on the trunks of rotten trees. A healthy stout oak tree has defences that shrug them off. They thrive amid aged, decaying roots and timber.”