He wondered how this had happened. How was it, that he was driving along the coastal road with a woman he hardly knew in search of a man with learning difficulties who was quite seriously implicated in the murder of a physicist. That DI, Berenice Killick, made it very plain. A man was thrown from Hank’s Tower to his death, and the only witness, backed up by CCTV, was Tobias, now on the run.
As they’d left the police station, Berenice had taken his arm. A smart woman, he’d thought, tall, bright, nicely dressed. ‘You’re the vicar?’ she’d said, and he’d nodded. ‘Keep an eye on her. I don’t think it’s sunk in just how serious this is. Two killings,’ she’d said. ‘Two men dead.’ She’d patted his arm, slipped him her card. ‘Look after her,’ she’d said. ‘And call me if you hear anything.’
And now here he was, looking after her. Or rather, driving along the coast, watching storm clouds gather, with Virginia at his side, wraith-like and motionless.
‘We’ll find him,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find him.’
He’d gone, now. He’d held her tight, there’d been another kiss, several… And now he’d gone, and she was sitting at her kitchen table wondering whether it had happened at all.
Extraordinary, she thought.
In front of her two cups and saucers, coffee-stained.
It was all true.
She remembered fragments. The feeling of his soft sandy hair. His murmured words, something about not ever doing anything like this before… She remembered her hand flat against his shirt, her mumbled explanations of marriage and morality as she took a step away from him. He’d gathered himself, apologized, ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘no need for that, no one’s fault…’
He’d kissed her again and then he’d gone.
And now the house was still, and she was left with only the washing up. That, and the thrill throughout her body, an ache of need for him, a deep awakening desire. So new and so familiar. It made her want to dance. It made her want to weep for what she’d had with Chad that seemed to have so thoroughly deserted her.
She stood up, wandered through the house, into the lounge. She tidied cushions, straightened curtains, checked that everything was neat again. Then, in the middle of the room, she danced.
Tobias heard the car before he saw it, pondered what it meant, this approaching drone of engine noise. Someone after me, he thought. The Prof, come back for revenge. The Cops, the Law, but they won’t find me here.
He ducked down behind a rock. Above him, on the beach road, the car drew nearer, stopped. Doors opening, slamming, his name being called, a man’s voice.
Tobias shrank further down.
But – that was her voice. Auntie’s voice. He leaned to the edge of the rock, peered out.
‘Tom…’ he heard her call.
A wave of relief, as he got to his feet, stumbled out from the rock, along the beach, ‘I’m here,’ he cried, shouting, ‘I’m here…’
Virginia met him at the steps, wrapped her arms around his waist, felt his hug around her neck. ‘Thank God,’ she was saying. ‘Thank God.’
‘Entelechia,’ Tobias said, into her hair.
‘It’s all right, love,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said.
‘Of course it wasn’t.’ She took his arm, began to lead him back to the car. ‘You’re safe now.’
Tobias stopped still. ‘But – him?’ He pointed at Chad, who was standing next to the car, leaning on its open door. ‘Not with him. He’ll take me back to them.’
‘It’s all right, love,’ Virginia was saying. ‘Isn’t it?’ she said to Chad.
‘Don’t take me back to them,’ Tobias said.
Virginia turned to him, placed her hand on his arm. ‘Nothing’s going to happen, love,’ she said.
‘It’s the two Lions,’ he said. ‘The Green Lion and the Red. If the Red Lion wins then it’s the end, the noble particle turns to lead instead of gold, and the waters will rise up…’
His voice was loud in his distress. Virginia hushed him. ‘It’s all right, love. We’re going home.’ She faced Chad, her eyes steel-bright.
He could think of no answer. He held the door for Tobias as he curled himself into the back seat.
‘Philalethes faced the Dragon and won,’ Tobias said.
Chad started the engine, turned the car round on the narrow lane.
But afterwards, having dropped them back at the cottage, he couldn’t help but wonder. That police inspector would want to see Tobias. Two men killed. One of them, his sort-of-father. But the other…. At least the poor boy should clear his name.
Chad turned off the coastal road, drove towards the town centre.
We know he’s innocent.
His words circled in his mind. He tried to dismiss the doubt that shadowed them.
Chapter Fourteen
15th August, 1922
‘Entelechia?’ Gabriel faced his wife. ‘This is all nonsense, Amelia.’ He handed the book back to her.
‘My father writes about it. Completeness,’ she said. ‘What Aristotle called the perfection of matter – ’
Gabriel was shaking his head.
‘My brother believed – ’she began.
‘Your brother?’ He reached for the bottle of claret.
‘Gabriel – it’s only luncheon…’
‘Your brother was a scientist.’ His voice was harsh. ‘As I am.’
‘And my father too.’
‘Your father was wrong.’ He splashed wine into his glass. ‘Your father never lived to see the work that men are doing now. Our work, our machine, is about seeing the universe as it really is. Your father was content with faith, not proof. Our detector will help us see the truth, the quintessence, the tiniest particles that show us the whole. We don’t need Aristotle.’
She was watching him, waiting for the signs of rage, of madness, but he seemed calm. He turned to her. ‘It’s like this. If I’m walking on the beach, and it’s raining, and I look at the pattern made by raindrops in the sand – I think I see something. The particles that Guy and I are seeking, they’re as elusive as that.’ He smiled at her. ‘Your father was content with the gaps. Where he saw an emptiness, a space between the particles, he called it God. Fairy tales, you see. Mere fairy stories.’ He patted her hand. ‘In the end, Guy and I knew better.’
She smiled up at him, breathing with relief.
He reached for the fruit bowl. ‘The last of the peaches,’ he said.
‘The end of the summer,’ she agreed.
He cut the peach into quarters.
She watched him eat it. She wanted to clasp this to her, this moment of peace between the two of them, a married couple finishing their lunch with the late summer sunshine falling across the windows, their daughter sleeping in the nursery…
She reached for her father’s book.
‘That can be thrown into the fire,’ he said.
She hesitated. ‘I would rather keep it,’ she said.
‘A museum piece,’ he said. ‘What place is there for all that now?’
‘But you must agree,’ she began, ‘that the new physics still follows Newton - ’
‘When I speak of gravity, I am describing a force within the universe. That’s all. I have no interest in divining the workings of some God or other. Do you really think we are put on this earth because of some benign force?’
‘But Guy always said – ’
‘What do you know of what Guy believed?’
The flash of rage in his voice. I should not have spoken, she thought. ‘You forget, Gabriel, dear, that Guy and I were educated by our father – ’
‘Your brother came to know better. If he ever once believed that there was an order in the universe, a controlling force – such beliefs were trampled to death in the mud of France.’ The table shook as he got to his feet. ‘Only I know how it was.’ His voice was loud.
‘Hush – dear - ’
‘If I don’t tell the truth, there is no one left to tell it.’ H
e brushed past her, seized hold of the door handle.
‘Grace will be waking from her rest,’ she said.
‘And I shall take my walk.’
She heard his hurried steps upon the flagstones. When he’d gone, she tiptoed up the staircase to the nursery, blinking back tears.
The tide was up. Waves the colour of earth crashed against the stones. Gabriel stared at the shingle beach. He could almost see it, the rough geometry between the gaps, the smaller and ever smaller parts that vibrate in their invisibility.
All this is here, he thought. It might just as well not be here, but it is here. It sustains itself in being here.
His hand went to his jacket pocket, fingered the silver chain.
There is the before, and there is now.
There is a gap between them. A gap that cannot be repaired.
He drew the chain out of his pocket, watched the silver crucifix swinging in the sharp sea air.
This was once his.
When first I met him, me, the son of the blacksmith, hearing the clatter of hooves in the yard, coming out into the sunshine, wiping blackened hands on my leather apron… And he stood there, smiling, his hands holding the reins of a snorting, stamping gray mare, ‘D’you think you can do anything for this poor old lady? Dropped a shoe out with the hounds this morning, limping now, though she’s always one to be dramatic…’
Was it then that I first saw this silver chain? Did this catch the sunlight, as we agreed a price for the shoe? I fancy now that it did. Certainly, it became familiar to me. So that, when, as he lay in the mud, his trembling arm reached to his neck, his shivering fingers dropped it into my hand - ‘Take this, Gabe. And my watch. Keep them – ’ I knew, then, that it was the end.
‘For your sister?’ I said, but he shook his head. ‘For you, silly.’
He had closed his eyes, then.
Gabriel saw it still. Guy’s face, shadowed like a skull against the khaki green, rivulets of brown slashed dark with blood.
He had clutched the silver cross so hard it had made marks in the palm of his hand.
There was moaning, screaming, the pounding of artillery. But at his side the halting breath was louder still.
And then it stopped.
Gabriel found he’d walked as far as the Scallop Tower. He stepped along the jetty, climbed the ruined stairs, wondering, not for the first time, who it was who’d thought to build a lighthouse on this flat shore. A folly then, and a folly now.
He reached the top. He crossed the circular platform, leaned on the low wall, looked out to sea.
They had come home by ship. Herds of soldiers, wounded, sick, blank-eyed, crazed.
They called us Heroes. But all I could think was, he is still there. His headstone, there, across the sea, one among the hundreds in their serried ranks.
It was that, as much as anything, that broke his father’s heart.
The gulls circled above him, their song rising and falling with their swooping path.
And Amelia, he thought. If only I could make her see. In those last hours we talked, two men of science, half-drowning in the swamp of war. We both came to see, then, that the search for meaning is as foolish as this tower. There is no meaning, no redemption. But there is science. There is investigation, evidence, knowledge. There is matter, atoms, particles, subject to the force of gravity. But there is no divine will. Were I to fall, now, from this tower, it would be because of Gravity, not because of God.
He straightened up, smoothed a lock of hair from his face.
I promised him then, to continue the work we started. And I know that he is with me.
He looked at the crucifix between his fingers. He saw that he’d been clutching it so tight it had left marks in the palm of his hand.
He crossed the stone platform and descended the lighthouse stairs. He picked his way along the brickwork jetty, the waves splashing at his feet.
“It is not that we are the fallen. It is nearer to the truth, to say that we are still falling.” Amelia turned the page of her father’s book. “For if gravity can be said to be the force that acts upon all matter, we must assert that it is put in motion by the Lord…”
She paused, the book in her hands. She thought about her husband, even now pacing the marshlands. His walk always took him back along the ocean’s edge, past the Scallop Tower. Soon he will return, she thought, to lock himself away in his laboratory, to emerge, as usual, at dinner, taciturn, despairing, even hostile.
We were happy once, us three. Guy, Gabriel and me. Our father used to tease us about finding our friends amongst farmhands and blacksmiths, but he knew as well as we did how quickly Gabriel became one of us. He was brilliant, charming, always questioning, always seeking after truth.
We all loved him.
When he returned from the Front, so thin, yellow-skinned and haunted, my father began to live again, a little. He lived long enough to see Gabriel make me his wife, to witness our wedding in the village church, a simple white dress, a posy of pink roses…
I was happy.
And now…
From the hall came the sound of a door slamming shut. Amelia got up from her seat. Grace had only just gone with Cook to pick raspberries, how odd they should be back so soon…
She went out to the hall.
‘Gracie?’
The house was silent.
A draught of air blew through the hall. She followed it, down the dark corridor that led to the kitchen.
‘Oh – ’ She wasn’t sure if she’d spoken, or even screamed, the silence was so thick – but there he was, his sunken face and torn white shirt, staring, staring at her through the choking cold of the corridor.
And then he’d gone.
‘Guy?’ She took a step towards him, towards where he’d been. ‘Guy?’ Another step. ‘Why?’ she said, out loud. ‘Why here? What do you mean by it? Why can’t you rest in peace?’
She had reached the kitchen door. Through the glass she could see her daughter, skipping in the sunlight, holding her skirts with one hand, a basket of raspberries in the other, laughing as she came towards the house.
“It is not that we are the fallen. It is nearer to the truth, to say that we are still falling. For if gravity can be said to be the force that acts upon all matter, we must assert that it is put in motion by the Lord…”
Helen turned the page, just as her mobile rang, loudly. She jumped, almost dropped the book, Liam, she wondered -
‘It’s me.’ Her husband’s voice.
‘Chad.’
‘I’m on my way back. We found Tobias,’ he said.
‘Oh. Good.’ She felt a wave of relief.
‘I’ll pop into the office,’ he said. ‘See you after that. Tea time ish.’
‘Sure. I’ll be here.’
‘I… ’ he began.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘Yes.’ His voice was distant now. ‘All a bit upsetting, that’s all. I’ll see you later.’
He’d gone. She placed her phone on the table.
I love you. Was that what he was about to say?
We used to, she thought. Both of us. Just part of the ebbs and flows of normal married life, endearments, jokes…
Normal married life. It seemed so far away.
She went into her ballet studio, switched on lights against the gathering clouds, began to flick through books of piano music for Barbara to play for the Grade Threes tomorrow.
The girders of blue steel rose high above his head. The wide windows flashed with the low sunlight. Liam walked towards his office.
It’s as if there’s a gap, he thought. If we’ve fixed the luminosity, and if the charge is at its limits, it still doesn’t explain why that’s a negative charge and not a positive. Yes, a gap, he thought. A B-meson, if that’s what it is, having a negative charge but behaving as if it has positive charge. It makes no sense.
The quiet swish of a glass door. He was on the staircase, climbing back towards his office. Through the windo
ws, the low roofs of the lab complex. Beyond that, the lush green of the fields.
It’ll rain later, he thought. He thought, she is out there somewhere. He wondered whether she too was thinking it might rain.
‘Liam – ’
He looked up. Iain was on the landing above him.
‘They’ve found Tobias,’ Iain said.
‘Thank God for that. Was he OK?’
‘Seems to be. Though there’s a finger of suspicion…’ Iain held the door open.
‘What, just because he got upset with Moffatt?’
‘It makes no sense. No sense at all.’ They reached Iain’s office. Liam noticed his pallor, the shadows round his eyes.
‘I mean, why Moffatt?’ Iain flung himself into a chair.
‘Why what?’
‘Dead, I mean.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk, absently, gazing unseeing at his computer.
Liam sat down on the other chair.
‘I miss him.’ Iain looked up. His eyes were bleary. ‘Murdo. Don’t know how I’ll manage…’
‘Can you take a break?’ Liam watched the twitch of his fingers.
‘A break?’ He spoke loudly. ‘We’re right at the crunch point, aren’t we? These charges are all wrong, Murdo would have known….’ His voice cracked.
‘Family? Someone you can visit?’
Iain met his eyes. ‘My mother is in a home in Morningside and doesn’t know who I am.’
‘But back in Edinburgh…’ Liam remembered there was someone, some story, he couldn’t quite recall, a girl, certainly, a grand amour, maybe, a microbiologist, was it, Penelope –
Iain shifted in his seat. ‘I’m better off here,’ he said.
‘Wasn’t there someone – ?’
Iain gave a brief bark of laughter. ‘Penny’s the last person I want to see at the moment,’ Iain said.
‘Of course,’ Liam murmured, feeling foolish.
A flock of geese crossed the sky, black triangles against the now thunderous clouds. ‘Do you think we’re worse than most?’ Liam said.
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 12