Diana's Altar

by Barbara Cleverly

  “Decaying empires? Italy, Spain, Russia, Germany . . .”

  Neither man dared voice his next thought.

  Disturbed by his own vehemence, Hunnyton checked himself and finished more lightly, “It’s enough to make you head for the hills to build a bomb shelter! Personally I’ve always thought the men who argue that science should be encouraged to travel the globe without impediment are indulging in a bit of arrogant self-foolery. Scientists are infected with the annihilation virus and they’re spreading it round the world, in my book.”

  “And, as with syphilis, there’s no chance of an antidote. One wonders why the government has been so complacent. Have they any qualms?”

  “They haven’t! These lads make utter fools of them. Twist them round their little fingers. They open up new magnetic labs and suchlike at vast expense and who do they invite to a champagne opening and launch? Not Royalty, whom they despise, but prime ministers (where the power and the purse strings lie) and ex-prime ministers (where the prestige and the honours come from). I was invited to one of these do’s as the token civil law and order presence, put to stand next to the mayor in his regalia. The occasion was the opening of that new laboratory of theirs—the Mond—last February. I was covering for old Baxter who couldn’t be bothered. One of these jokers—the Russian you’ve just mentioned, I think—was smarming away with Stanley Baldwin, ex–prime minister and chancellor of the university, who was present to cut the ribbons and declare the place open. I overheard our Russian charmer answer a question from the old grandee and add with a grin Mephistopheles would have been proud of, ‘Oh, you can believe me, sir. I’m not a politician.’”

  “Bloody cheek!”

  “Baldwin laughed. That’s the kind of attitude you’ll be dealing with if you try to get aboard. This new intellectual élite is more exclusive and arrogant than the old aristocratic sort. Frighteningly—a good number of them qualify on both counts. Many have private means and ancient families. They seem to owe allegiance, not to their own country, but to each other and their science. Science is their god.”

  “And they’re quite prepared to offer up humanity on his altar?”

  “I don’t doubt it. We’ve seen it happen, Joe. The thing that disturbs me is what’s in the minds of these men of science. Or rather what’s not. Geniuses, we’re told they are worthy of not only our breathless respect but bucket-loads of the country’s cash, when some of them—to ordinary blokes like us—appear to have the moral sense and reasoning of a three-year-old infant. There’s a great gap where you would expect, well . . . wisdom . . . a certain social awareness . . . allegiance and respect for their alma mater. They show a naiveté that would have had my mother say they had a tile loose. I’ll tell you a story . . .” He sat forward, claiming Joe’s slightly out-of-focus gaze and gave a wry smile that promised humour or surprise.

  “There’s a well-known Cambridge story that did the rounds a year or two ago. It originates from my old college—Trinity. One of these scientists making a name for himself, a St. John’s fellow, was invited to dine on High Table. Problem: this chap was notorious for his lack of small talk and his awkwardness in company. A genial Trinity gent was selected to sit next to him and warned, ‘You might find him a bit sticky. Do your best to draw him out.’ Turning to his silent fellow guest to open a conversation, our cheerful chap essayed, ‘I say, have you seen any good films lately?’ To which the response was a puzzled silence, then: ‘Why do you want to know that?’”

  “A good story. I don’t dismiss these folk tales—they have a way of hitting the nail of truth on the head,” Joe said with a smile.

  “I was that genial gent, Joe. My silent scientist was Paul Dirac. You may have noticed he won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics? Believe me, it was an uncomfortable two hours. But enlightening. This man who discourses and swaps ideas with Einstein, one of the select band who may—how would we know?—have the expertise to blow up the world, has the social skills of a hermit with a bad stomachache.”

  “Was there nothing you could say to get him going?”

  “One thing. One of the subjects you’re not supposed to raise at the dinner table. Nothing else was working so I thought I might just as well plunge in, defy tradition and ask him what I really wanted to know: Did he believe in God?”

  “Oh Lord, no!”

  “Oh Lord, yes! I’d pressed the right button. I’d calculated that all scientists must be prepared for this. Suddenly eloquent, he explained that God is a product of the human imagination. God is a useful notion for keeping the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are easier to govern. I challenged him on this, ‘You’re hinting at an alliance between God and the State?’ ‘Oh, yes. Both rely on the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven, if not on earth—those who have done their duty without fuss or complaint.’”

  “Sounds familiar. I’ve heard similar views being shouted from soapboxes in Hyde Park. Karl Marx? Crikey! Religion and politics in the same response! It would take me a week to unpick his assertion. Not that anyone would be listening. Opinions like that tend to flow from people with cloth ears. One-way traffic! What on earth did you say?”

  “How does a humble historian argue with a quantum mathematician’s view of the universe?” Hunnyton finished hopelessly.

  “How do you account for this . . . detachment from reality . . . always assuming a definition of ‘reality’ can be agreed on? How do you test for it? Has anyone invented the science that will test the scientists? Should we? Have we the right? Who are ‘we’ ?” Joe wondered aloud.

  “If anyone thought it fit to measure scientists on a scale for morality or sociability, they’d have to reject three quarters of the world’s geniuses as unviable. I have that insight from a physicist. One of the sane ones,” Hunnyton said grumpily. “Some of them are aware of the problem.”

  Intrigued and encouraged by his colleague’s ventures into the scientific world, Joe pushed him further. “They seem not to acknowledge national borders and patriotic conventions either. What do they care about, Hunnyton?”

  A question Hunnyton had evidently already addressed as his reply came with swift decisiveness. “The pursuit of knowledge, the ready cash to support that pursuit and the winning of prestigious prizes. That’s it.”

  “Emotional ties?” Joe asked. “Family, friends, native land?”

  Hunnyton snorted. “Nothing you can count on. That arsehole who gave us poison gas—Haber—was begged by his wife to stop his ghastly work. Just after the second battle of Ypres where sixty-seven thousand of us had died as a result of his infernal concoction. He refused to listen to her pleas. In despair, she shot herself in the heart with his service pistol to make her point. The next day he went off, leaving behind his thirteen-year-old son, who’d discovered his mother’s body, to the Eastern Front to gas the Russkies. As though nothing had happened.”

  “What’s one death when you’re planning millions? I can’t begin to understand them.”

  “Yet this Kapitza has a family here in Cambridge: Russian wife and two children. As far as I know, he’s devoted to them. He takes them everywhere with him.”

  “Except to St. Petersburg next vacation. Hmm . . . Doesn’t want to expose them to Stalin’s hospitality? Offer up political hostages? Trigger a ‘Do as we require and then your children may avoid being offered accommodation in some Arctic gulag’ situation?”

  Hunnyton grunted. “Too complicated for the CID! Give me a Stourbridge Common Strangler any day. Anyhow—to get you back on track again—I’ve been sent the police lab results of your friend’s death scene. Mountfitchet in All Hallows Church. Everything in Adelaide’s and Risby’s accounts is confirmed. Puts your mind at rest, I should think. Personal not professional motive. ‘Suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed’ will be the coroner’s decision. Pity he had to top himself with his job incomplete, but there you go. Perhaps he’ll have left some indication of
the state of his mind in his college rooms. St. Benedict’s. I ordered the master to have his rooms sealed off and left untouched until you gave the say so.”

  He handed Joe an envelope that had already been opened. Joe took a few minutes to glance through the material. “No prints other than the victim’s own on the knife. There’s the clincher.”

  “Had you expected anything else?”

  “No, I hadn’t. But I always check. The knife itself . . . good lads! They’ve traced it! Not one of Aidan’s own. But he could have helped himself to it in preparation for his own death because it comes from the college itself.” Joe looked up at Hunnyton. “Silver handled and stamped with the college arms, sharpened, six-inch-long blade . . .”

  “A game blade. Used on special occasions at High Table. At banquets when one of the courses is a joint of challenging meat. The things they get their teeth into! Swan, boar, haunch of venison, sometimes all rolled up together in a bloody great medieval sausage! You need an electric saw to get through some of the concoctions!”

  “Aidan appeared on High Table last week at the invitation of the master. He was an old boy, of course, so that courtesy would be expected. He could have hacked his way through his paupiette de Gargantua or his roast neck of swan, wiped his blade off on his napkin and dropped it down the sleeve of his gown and made off with it. Premeditation. But why? The doctor gives him a clear bill of health. In perfect physical condition, apparently. No diseases, no growths, all organs in good shape . . . Definitely not one of Easterby’s specials, I’m relieved to note! The life he led—there was always that fear. Yet . . . He had intended to kill himself before he set off for All Hallows. He wasn’t tipped over the edge of reason by the Reverend Sweeting and his doom and gloom merchants at least. I don’t need to think that badly of my friend. But why pick that place to die?”

  “There’s little in the way of private space in this city. Mountfitchet was a gentleman. He wouldn’t want to put anybody out. The clowns who jump in front of trains and leap from buildings cause an awful lot of mess and trouble for others. He sounds like the kind of bloke who would have sought out a quiet, spiritual atmosphere close to his Maker where he wouldn’t be disturbed and he’d be no bother to anyone else. It’s what I’d have done. The only human he risked startling was the Reverend Sweeting and perhaps he didn’t mind that.”

  “Makes sense.” Joe sighed. “He’ll have left his affairs in order too, I suppose I’ll find when I contact his lawyer in London. He named me his executor. But he has failed me in one matter: we haven’t had his report back to HQ , Hunnyton, and that’s a concern. I know he was told to report weekly, but MI5 have had nothing yet. I’ll go and search his room. He may have left an account of some sort.” Joe got to his feet. “Don’t ring ahead. I’ll just slip back to my hotel and change my tie. I don’t think I’d get past the porter dressed like this.”

  “A gargle with Doctor Smyth’s patent mint mouthwash wouldn’t come amiss either, Sandilands. Let me know how you get on.”

  Chapter 14

  It was a soberly dressed gentleman with firm tread and impeccable breath who offered his warrant card at the porter’s lodge an hour later.

  “Been expecting you, sir. Do you know the college, may I ask? . . . No? . . . I’ll ask George to conduct you to Sir Aidan’s room. It’s not straightforward. George!”

  Wondering how he was going to find his way out of this stone warren when he’d finished, Joe dismissed the footman on arrival at Aidan’s door. Hunnyton had told him the room in the visitors’ staircase had been sealed off, but there was no sign of police tape or Keep Out notices. Merely a hand-written sign drawing-pinned to the massive door, saying oak up. Probably much more effective, Joe judged. People could never resist the challenge of trying to get through police barriers. This door was barred by eight hundred years of college tradition.

  He left the notice in place when he entered and shut the door behind him. He stood, as he required his detective squads to do on entering a strange room with crime-solving in mind, back to the door, looking around carefully. Then, notebook of squared paper sheets in hand, he began his professional scene-of-crime inspection. A disproportionate reaction, he knew, but it gave a formal framework to his search, validating a distasteful rummage through a friend’s life.

  At least it was speedily done. The guest room was almost devoid of Aidan’s presence. Conscious of the clandestine nature of his spell in the college, he had clearly brought very little in the way of personal belongings with him. Such as were on display: alarm clock, coffee flask, electric torch, books and newspapers, Joe noted down. He looked for the photographs every man carries with him into strange territory. Or battle. Wife, sweetheart, children, spaniel? There were none. No familiar face welcomed him back to his lonely room. Joe remembered that Aidan had had no family left to speak of. A second cousin in the navy he rarely saw, an old uncle with whom he’d long since lost touch. A succession of girls but never a steady one. Joe saw loneliness. The fate of every black sheep born into a respectable English family. But Aidan had shown no signs of feeling any disadvantage. His quickstepping path through life had seemed charmed and was the envy of many of his more steady-going friends.

  It was a spartan room space. Joe compared it with the fine rooms stuffed with elegant belongings Aidan kept in Albany in Picadilly, the brief shaft of sympathy extinguished by the further thought that Aidan was used to hard living. He’d been a student here until 1914, a boy at boarding school before that—he was used to deprivation of a scholarly nature. He’d just graduated from this place when, as most boys had, he’d left the academic life at the age of twenty-one and taken up a commission in the army. No nonsense in those days of refusing to fight for King and Country. Downy-faced boys had made hard choices: Army? Navy? The new Royal Flying Corps, perhaps? Which regiment to join? Surely grandfather had served? Family history and tradition were suddenly invoked and men looked to their roots to direct and inspire them.

  Had it been the making of Aidan or had it wrecked his life forever? He certainly voiced no complaints. Active, lucky, harum-scarum and downright scurrilous on occasion, he’d been a man Joe had always expected to burn himself out at an early age like a shooting star. He’d never have imagined death would overtake him alone in a dim church at midnight. Death by his own hand. The Curse of Pertinax? Joe wondered fancifully. Had it struck his friend so soon after contact? Had, indeed, contact been made?

  How would they know? Damn it! They’d run Aidan on too long a lead. He was clever and confident about the whole thing, but, still, an amateur. A puppet who’d been left dangling between the two strings of MI5 and the Branch, each assuming the other was the secure and guiding hand. Joe could have taken steps, managed things differently, preserved his agent’s life or sanity. His death was Joe’s fault and, standing here in the man’s room, the sharp steel of guilt cut him to the core. He could do nothing now but, belatedly, his job. More thoroughly.

  Joe checked the desk and the bookshelf first of all. No documents. The blotting pad was unused. Apart from the college handout of essential reading matter: a history of the college, a Bible and the works of Shakespeare, there were four books of Aidan’s own. Joe smiled to see the latest Wodehouse, snatched up at the railway bookstall and still in its wrapper, a slim volume of French Romantic poetry, with improvements in pencil in the margins, the works of Aeschylus (Greek on one page, English on the opposite) and a cheap edition of a Dickens novel. Ah. A Tale of Two Cities. The first spy novel? Finally, a joke—or at least a grin—shared with Aidan.

  Joe checked methodically through the wardrobe and the bedside cupboards. The pockets and linings of the spare tweed suit, the evening suit, the officer’s trench coat, the pockets of the shirts, brought to light nothing but ticket stubs and handkerchiefs. No more than the search through the overcoat and dark suit he’d been wearing on the night he died had produced, according to the police report.

  Aidan’s lig
htness of touch belied the seriousness with which he’d undertaken the preparation for his task. He had been taking the spy’s role very seriously apparently. To a professional level. He had insisted on being given a course in fieldcraft by the bloke at MI5 who was interested in that sort of thing. Joe had thought to provide a few extra—and more practical—life-preserving hints by fixing him up for an afternoon in a gym with his Special Branchman, Bacchus. Hints involving use of concealed weapons, locating the jugular in the dark, a neat back-breaking trick, silencing guard dogs and manoeuvres for shaking off a tail in a city environment had featured. Bacchus couldn’t be doing with dark glasses, holes in newspapers and invisible ink, and any agent-in-training who made the mistake of bending to tie up a shoelace would get the Bacchus boot up his backside as a corrective. Joe’s lieutenant had never been a Boy Scout in practice or in philosophy. Get the job done, make sure you’re the man left standing and get out, just about summed up his attitude to his clandestine work. Bacchus, Joe recalled, had been favourably impressed by Aidan’s ability. The professional soldier was evolving smoothly into the professional agent.