by Sam Bourne
And yet it would be better than standing still. More to the point, there was little else he could do until morning and that, surely, was equally true of Preston McAndrew. As long as he reached Washington, DC, early tomorrow, and was able to get started right away, he would not be too late. That, at least, was what he told himself.
But as he paced the platform, his shirt sticky with sweat and clinging to his back, he could not escape the fear that the reverse might be true. Dorothy’s words had been clear. He said he was off to have ‘the most important meeting of my entire life’. He said that he had to go right away…
What if that meeting were tonight, even at midnight? What if McAndrew were travelling to the capital by motor car; would that mean he would get there later or earlier than by train? James cursed himself. If only he had understood earlier, he would have got to the Dean while he was still in New Haven. If only he had had the wit to put Lund at his ease. Florence would have known what to do: she’d have had Lund spilling his guts, the Assistant Dean explaining that the naked photos had merely acted as the signpost, pointing him to McAndrew’s larger, grander scheme, the one Lund had only truly grasped when he read the Dean’s lecture, Cleansing Fire. Somehow Lund had made the mistake of letting on to McAndrew what he knew, or at least what he suspected. That, surely, is why the Dean had decided his assistant had to die, so that no one else should have the same inkling.
James now understood the Dean’s aim well enough: the lecture had made that clear. He was determined to keep the United States out of the war, so that a great eugenic experiment might unfold. Let Britain suffer a catastrophic defeat and then watch the consequences, observing as the weak and the inferior were wiped out in their tens of millions while only the strongest would survive. Britain was to be a giant laboratory, its population mere lab rats, while McAndrew’s hypothesis was put to the ultimate test. And once it was done, once this cleansing fire had burnt through every corner of England, devouring the ‘runts’ from the British litter that were too feeble to save themselves, those still standing, stronger and better than the rest, would be reinforced by the return of one hundred and twenty-five of the fittest, cleverest children, safely incubated in New Haven.
It was a monstrous scheme. However much he loathed Bernard Grey and the rest of the Oxford circle that had connived in Florence and Harry’s departure — and he did loathe them — James refused to believe they could have collaborated in the entirety of such a diabolical plan. What they had colluded in was a plan to spare a special, privileged class of children, so that, in the event of catastrophic defeat, this elite might be sprinkled like top-quality seed into the soil of a devastated Britain. They doubtless believed they were saving the lives of a hundred and twenty-five innocent children who were, yes, more deserving than others because of their value to the English national ‘stock’. That was morally reprehensible enough. But there was a world of difference between planning for the contingency of a British defeat by the Nazis and positively willing that outcome. Whatever nonsense Grey and the other socialists, Fabians and do-gooding social reformers believed, they were still British patriots, firm in their support of the war effort and in their opposition to Hitler. They did not long to see German bombs flatten British cities and a jackbooted Gestapo gauleiter in every English parish hall. McAndrew must, surely, have hidden from them his ultimate purpose — that what they saw as a doomsday to be planned for, he saw as a dream to be desired. For the Dean actively yearned for calamity and slaughter, for the sake of his warped, repulsive notion of ‘science’.
But if that was the end the Dean was pursuing, James still had no inkling of his chosen means. Which meant he had no idea what he would do once he got to Washington, how on earth he would find McAndrew who would, after all, be one man in a capital city, a man who could be anywhere. If only he had understood all this yesterday or even earlier today, when there was still time. If only he could ask Lund, who might have known the answers, who might have uncovered the details of the Dean’s plan, thereby signing his own death warrant. If only, if only, if only. James kicked the gravel, the toe of his shoe sending up little clouds of dust.
Through the gloom he now saw a light, some distance away. It was getting larger and now came the first rumble of noise. He looked at his watch for the fifth time in twenty minutes. The overnight train was not due to pull in here for another quarter of an hour. Only as it got nearer did he realize that this was a train coming into the other platform from the opposite direction.
There was a sudden commotion and a flurry of colour on his own side of the tracks. James wheeled around to see a woman gesticulating at a station guard. All he could see clearly, picked out by the sodium lamps of the station waiting room — no blackout here — was a bright bulb of honey-blonde hair. And then he heard the voice and knew instantly that it was Dorothy Lake.
She saw him at the same moment and broke into an athlete’s sprint, running towards him with no restraint. She began shouting long before she had reached him. ‘You must get on that train! Quick! Get on that train!’ She pointed across the tracks at the small locomotive, drawing no more than three carriages, now slowing to a halt, hissing with steam.
James could hardly hear her. ‘What? That’s going the wrong way.’
‘No,’ she panted, catching up with him at last. ‘No, that’s the right way. That’s where you need to go. Take that train to Greenwich. Get off there and ask for Hope Farm. Harry and Florence are there.’
James felt his heart stop. For a second, he and everything around him froze. He stared at Dorothy Lake and knew in an instant — from the earnest, pleading urgency of her face — that she was telling the truth.
‘I don’t und-’ he started, but she cut him off.
‘Don’t say anything!’ she said, the glow of her cheeks visible even in the half-light. ‘Just get on that train. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know. Your wife is waiting for you. Your son is waiting for you. Go!’
‘I… I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. The train’s right here.’
‘I have to get to Washington. There’s something I have to do before it’s-’
On the opposite platform the guard was marching through clouds of steam, inspecting both ends for any passengers still getting on or off. He had a flag in his hand.
Dorothy turned back to him, her eyes afire. ‘You must go now. I don’t know how much longer they’ll be there. Now’s your chance!’
‘Dorothy-’
‘You said that all you wanted was to see them again.’ Her eyes were both pleading and baffled. On the other platform, the guard was raising his whistle to his lips. ‘Or were you just lying?’
‘I want to see them more than anything in the world. But there’s more at stake here than me and my family.’
The guard bellowed, ‘Last call! All aboard!’
Dorothy’s eyes were now two wells of tears. ‘I wanted to help you.’
He gripped her by her shoulders. ‘I know you did. And I will never forget what you’ve done.’ A piercing sound cut through the air: the guard’s whistle. ‘I love my wife and I love my child. Very much. But I also love my country.’
They were suddenly engulfed in a fresh cloud of white steam, their voices swallowed up in a loud hiss as the pistons of the locomotive cranked back into motion.
‘There’s still time,’ Dorothy cried as the train inched slowly forwards. ‘You could jump on. Florence and Harry are less than an hour away.’
James did not answer. Instead he watched the train gather speed and move away, its tail-lamps becoming smaller and smaller until they were a mere pinprick of light, no bigger than a distant star. He did not know what to say to this young woman but at last, when the train had disappeared from view, he turned to her.
‘Dorothy, I know what this looks like. And I know what you’re thinking: that men like me, maybe all men, are snakes and that we can’t be trusted. But it’s not true. There are some bad ones, I can’t deny it. But the rest of us try to
do our best, we really do. Even when it doesn’t look like it, we try to do what’s decent and what’s right.’ He wasn’t making any sense.
Now she looked at him. ‘What is it my uncle is doing in Washington that would make you sacrifice your own family?’
‘I don’t know yet and I don’t want to say until I’m certain.’ He gazed at her damp, flushed face, her distraught expression. ‘And it’s nothing you’re responsible for.’
‘I could telephone him and tell him you’re coming after him.’
‘You could, Dorothy. But I’m taking the chance that you won’t. Because you’re a good person and you have your whole life ahead of you. And look what you were prepared to do to save just one family.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘No, nor do I. Not completely. But we will. And you will have done the right thing.’ They stood in silence for a moment until he spoke again. ‘Besides. You don’t know where in Washington he is.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because if you did you would have told me.’
The stationmaster was back, checking his pocket watch. He called over to them, the only passengers on the platform. ‘The Federal to Washington, DC, this track. Federal to Washington, arriving this track.’
James looked at Dorothy Lake, and as he did so her face crumpled, the sophisticated veneer completely gone now. Impulsively, he hugged her for just a moment. ‘Thank you, for what you’ve done.’ He pulled away from her to give her an exhausted smile. ‘Wish me luck.’
Chapter Forty
James spent the first minutes of the train journey staring into the dark, thinking of Harry and Florence. He could see nothing outside as the train headed into what he imagined to be vast acres of American farmland, empty and endless. Instead he saw Harry’s face, his wide eyes looking into his father’s, asking him where he had been, and why he had not come for him when he had the chance.
Alone in that rattling carriage, James tried to formulate an answer. He imagined himself perching his son on his knee, explaining how there were moments in life when you had to do things you did not want to do. How sometimes your own needs, your own desperate hunger to see the two people you love most in the world, had to come second because of an even greater need. He heard himself saying these words to his son; and then he heard his son’s husky voice answer him back with a single word, repeated over and over again: why?
James closed his eyes and pictured Hope Farm. As the train clattered over the tracks at a pedestrian nocturnal speed, he saw it in bright summer sunlight, a place of white fences and orchards teeming with shiny apples, of yellows and ambers and the golden colours of American plenty. And the next moment in sharp contrast he imagined Harry and Florence huddled together on two bare wooden chairs in a tiny freezing kitchen, the whole scene bathed in blue-grey light. He knew it made no sense; that if they were just an hour away, as Dorothy had said, then their weather was no different from his. But he pictured it that way all the same.
What was Hope Farm? Why were they there? Dorothy had insisted she would not tell him how she knew — but he had not even asked, pressing her for no details. He had not wanted to hear anything specific, anything too real, because he knew that would make it harder to resist. His choice was hard enough already.
At intervals, as the night-time minutes turned to hours, he would be gripped by panic, becoming convinced he had made a grotesque mistake. What, after all, did he have to go on? The text of a lecture and a few casual remarks by McAndrew to his impressionable young niece. It was quite possible that the Dean had been thinking aloud in that Darwin anniversary lecture; that he was heading to Washington merely to boost his career. The most important meeting of my entire life. Perhaps the President had summoned him to serve in his cabinet, the way British politicians were always wooing Bernard Grey.
But James’s gut said otherwise. He knew what he had read; McAndrew could not have made his intentions much clearer. And surely only Lund’s discovery of a plan this ambitious could explain the poor man’s agitation — and indeed his murder by the Dean.
He thought back to those final moments at the station with Dorothy. The train had taken time to leave, as they shunted on new rolling stock. The delay had been awkward; neither knowing what to say to the other. To fill the silence, James had asked a question that had popped unannounced into his head. It came in the voice of William Curtis, the lecturer at the American Eugenics Society. The subjects in such a study will, of course, have to be photographed without clothing
…
‘This will sound strange and rude, but tell me something. Have you ever heard anything about students at Yale being photographed without-’ He hesitated. How to put this delicately?
‘Without what, James?’
‘Without their clothes.’
‘Oh, you mean the posture photos?’ She said it matter-of-factly, as if it were something perfectly normal.
‘The what?’
‘The posture photos. We had them done in our first week.’
‘“Posture photos”? Why “posture”?’
‘Because they were taken to help us with posture. You stripped off, they put steel pins on your back and then snap. Took your picture.’
‘Pins?’
‘Yes, about four inches long.’
Suddenly James was seeing those pictures stashed in Lund’s bag. ‘They put pins in your back?’
‘No! Not into our backs. They taped them on. Afterwards they looked at the shape of the curve made by the pins. Any of the girls, or boys I suppose, whose “postural curve” was not good enough were sent to posture improvement classes.’
As the train now rattled through the darkness, James heard the voice of Curtis echoing in his head. Discretion may demand that this work be done in combination, as it were, with another more conventional activity. Now it was confirmed: this was what Lund had first discovered. That Yale was taking nude photographs of its new students under the spurious cover of a posture-improvement drive.
James’s memory instantly threw up a sight he had not registered at the time but which he had stored all the same. He was in the Dean’s outer office, rifling through the filing cabinets. He had gone past the M’s — Memorial, Monroe, Montana — and landed in the P’s — Political Science, Posture Study, Professional Training. His eye had glided past, as if it were just another, regular field of university activity: posture study.
Now he knew better. This was a secret research programme aimed at proving the link between physical strength, intellectual prowess and ‘moral worth’. The men behind it were trying to answer the question Leonard Darwin had asked in that damned book of his: If our object is to try to improve the breed of man, should we not first decide on the kind of man most to be desired? Those photographs, which doubtless included not only Dorothy, the boy behind the counter at the Owl Shop and every other young person entrusted to Yale’s care, were the attempt to provide an answer. It must have been Lund’s discovery of the bogus posture study that first alerted him to the Dean’s unflinching brand of eugenics, that led him ultimately to realize the ‘bigger and more dangerous’ scheme his superior was embarked upon. Had he kept those photos in his briefcase as his only hard evidence?
James was disturbed by a sound so muffled, he first wondered if it was inside his own head. He looked up and over his shoulder; the carriage was still empty. It must have been a loose bit of gravel, thrown against the window. He went back to looking into the void outside, searching for the glimmer of even a solitary farmhouse. But he could see nothing.
A minute passed and there was another sound, louder and more metallic. James looked up again. All was quiet behind him and, apparently, at the far end of the carriage. There was a click.
He looked closer now, rising from his seat. Unlikely to be an inspector on this ghost train, doubtless loaded with sacks of mail and churns of milk rather than paying passengers, but not impossible. There was definitely movement on the other side of that door.
‘Who’s there?’ James called out, without thinking.
Now he saw the handle of the far connecting door, linking this carriage and the next, begin to twist.
The train hit some kind of rut and jumped, sending James stumbling towards the windows on the other side, his left shoulder slamming into the wooden seat post. He let out a cry of pain. At the same instant, the carriage door flung open.
All he could see was height, a tall man made taller by a hat that appeared to rise to a sharp peak, covering his face in shadow. He was walking this way, in brisk, deliberate steps. Only when he was about two yards away did he speak.
‘Hands in the air, Dr Zennor.’
Reflex sent James’s hands towards the ceiling, even before he had noticed the small, dull metal ring hovering in the air, parallel with the man’s waist. It took another second for him to understand what he was looking at: a revolver, its barrel covered by a silencer.
Time seemed to slow down; he felt detached from the scene, as if he were an observer rather than a participant. Something similar had happened during gun battles in Spain. It meant that, at this very moment, instead of fear or alarm, he felt irritation at his own foolishness. He had shouted ‘Who’s there?’ in his telltale English accent. He had betrayed himself.
‘Walk backwards. And keep your hands in the air.’ The voice was rougher than any he had heard in New Haven. Instantly James decided that this man knew nothing about him, that killing him was a job.
James did as he was told, reversing down the aisle between the benches, counting two, three, four paces. He stopped when he felt the blast of wind coming through the gap between the carriages. He was now in the standing area at the end of the car, a door on each side. The cold air seemed to slap him back to reality. Now his heart surged, a flood of adrenalin as he desperately tried to think of what he might do to save his life.