“It cannot, Miss Stone! It cannot!”
“Rosa,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your first name.”
“Jay,” he replied.
“Well, Jay, are we agreed that the glass is a red herring designed to distract from the real business of manufacturing uranium?”
“Yes, indeed. This must be the case.”
At long last, here was somebody I could talk to! I edged closer.
“So Mr Dexter died because he discovered what the British Government were really up to; he discovered the second secret. And, while they wanted to sell him uranium, they had no intention of revealing how they’d come by it.”
“Mr Dexter? I’m afraid I am not familiar with that name.”
“An American businessman with links to the Soviet Union. Namely exporting uranium from Alaska to Eastern Russia via the Bering Strait.”
“How do you know this, Rosa?”
I showed him the atlas and explained about Mr Dexter’s business in Cape Prince of Wales.
“But what I don’t quite understand . .” I continued, “ . . is why the English Channel and why the Bering Strait? Doesn’t that strike you as beyond the realms of coincidence? I mean to say, two such incredibly similar waterways when seawater, after all, can be found all over the world.”
He sat back in my bedroom chair and gazed at the wall above my head, pondering deep, technical thoughts. I was beginning to wonder whether he was ever going to speak again when he suddenly uttered:
“Because it’s not seawater.”
“Not seawater?” I leapt off the bed. “I thought we’d established it was seawater! You just told us it was! ‘I’m afraid it is undeniable, Miss Stone.’ Those were your very words!”
“Forgive me. I jumped to conclusions when I didn’t have the full facts at my disposal; an unpardonable mistake for any scientist to make.”
I laughed at his solemn face:
“That’s alright, Jay. We all make mistakes, you know.”
“No,” he shook his head, vehemently. “Not Jayagaon Tamang.”
“Well, I don’t know what makes you so special. I make mistakes all the time; my whole life is one long mistake, if you ask me!”
But he was still shaking his head.
“No, no, no. I glimpsed a thing and assumed it to be something else. It was so familiar, you see, that I assumed the process to be the same. But it was not. I see that now.”
“I’m glad you do. I’m totally in the dark. What on earth are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t a fractional distillation tower at all. The process was, in fact, destructive!”
I instantly grasped what he was getting at.
“You mean they’re using dry distillation?”
I was pleased to see him look at me with new eyes.
“Yes, that’s exactly it, Rosa. They weren’t separating one substance from another using evaporation and condensation; I had experimented with this fractional process, myself, and produced minimal results from marine water. No, they were heating a solid substance in order to break it down. Destructive, or dry distillation, in other words.”
This was so tremendously exciting that I began to dance around the room. (Just finding somebody who wanted to talk to me properly, who used the same language and thought the same way, well, that alone went completely to my head!)
“Solids!” I exclaimed. “Solids from narrow bodies of water!” It all started to come back to me. “Dark patches in the sea! The Pacific Ocean! Gulf of Santa Carolina! Farallon! Oh my goodness, Jay – it’s seaweed!!!”
He was on his feet, jumping up and down with me.
“Kelp!” He shouted. “Kelp! Kelp! Kelp!”
And then:
“Laminaria!” We cried, as one, and we jumped into one another’s arms and toppled backwards onto the bed.
——
Rosa Stone was alive and somewhere in Kent. Maybe lying in bed at that very moment, memorising Shakespeare’s lesser sonnets and crunching her way through a bag of crisps. I took heart from the idea. Magnus Arkonnen, meanwhile, was lying in bed in a drafty caravan listening to his crazed aunt and uncle argue outside. They were going at it like hammer and tongs.
“I just fail to see why we can’t go back to ‘Seaspray’, Reg. I’ve had it done up so nicely and the roses will be out before we know it. I don’t want to spend my holidays in a cramped, little caravan, Reg,” Aunt Dilys whined.
“For Pete’s sake, woman, would you give it a rest? I’ve said we can’t and that’s my last word,” Uncle Reg stormed.
“You can’t expect me to live in a field full of gypsies, Reg. It’s not what I’m used to.”
“Christ Almighty . . if you knew what I’ve to deal with! Will you just shut up for a moment!”
“It’s not just you, Reg,” she said, huffily, “I’ve done my bit, haven’t I? All that time in the office and that?”
“Yes, and now look what you’ve gone and done; only brought two rogue spies right to our bloody door. It’s the last straw! Can’t you see I’ve enough to do with my glass? It’s near on bankrupting me. The factory in Finland is working at full stretch to meet this insane order and I’m shipping it down here to the scientists as fast as humanly possible. Just one more order and I swear it could ruin me. Tip me over the edge. I can’t be doing with these distractions, Dil.”
There was a blessed bit of quiet and then I heard her ask:
“What do they want with all this glass, Reg?”
I strained to hear more.
“I told you before, Dil, it’s big and it’s going to set us up for life. That’s all you need to know; I don’t want you bothering your pretty head about it any further, alright? Now let’s get inside and have our tea, woman.”
“But Re . . eg,” she began to whine again, “why can’t we go back to ‘Seaspray’? You know I love it there and . . . Ow!”
It sounded horribly like he’d clouted her one and she began to cry nagging, hopelessly dreary, tears. He must have taken himself off, because I heard her open the door and climb into the caravan and go and sit up front, by the driver’s seat, and she was all on her own, still weeping. I waited until her crying jag showed signs of subsiding and then I called out:
“Are you alright, Aunt Dilys?”
She climbed round the seat and came over to see me, where I lay on a mattress in the back. She looked that blotchy and down-trodden it was pitiful to see. She had a rolled paper tissue in her hand and damp scraps of it had got stuck round her eyes and nose. A pencil and pad stuck out of the pocket of her cardigan, as if she’d been writing.
“I couldn’t help overhearing . . you shouldn’t let him get away with hitting you. It’s not right for a man to do that to a woman.”
She sat down on the end of my mattress with her head bowed over her restless hands, which turned her tissue this way and that, that way and this, in that odd, compulsive way of hers.
“Has he done it before?” I asked.
She gave a little mewing noise, and then a shudder; both of which I took to mean the bastard had.
“Well, it’s got to stop. You let him get away with that and who knows what he’ll do to you next time. Have you got any friends or family you could go and stay with?”
“Oh, he’s not that bad, Magnus. I appreciate your concern, but . . it’s just that he’s got a lot on his plate at present.”
“That makes no difference; there’s never an acceptable time to hit a woman.”
“And the poor man has such trouble with his eyes, you know. I couldn’t possibly leave him to go blind all by himself.”
“Blind? As bad as that, is it?”
“Oh, yes, dear. I’m very much afraid it is.”
“Well, I’m dead sorry to hear that. I had no idea . . . What set it off in the first place, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“The glass did him in, it’s as simple as that, Magnus. He learned his trade young, when the Yorkshire glass industry was at its peak . . it’
s dying now, of course, like so much else in this country of ours. The New Elizabethan Age, my foot!”
She’d begun to pluck at her skirt, while her voice rose an octave and I wondered what we were in for. Thankfully, she recollected herself.
“Your uncle is a master-craftsman - one of the best there is, they say - he loves his glass and he can turn his hand to anything. But his great love gave him cataracts; not that it’s unusual for a glass maker to suffer from cataracts, but his are so bad nothing can be done. They de-mobbed him early from the war because of them, but not before he’d worked for some of the best people at the very highest levels, if you get my meaning.”
A light flared in her eyes as she mouthed the word, “Intelligence” and tapped the side of her nose. A bit of tissue paper was dislodged and fluttered into the air.
“It was round about that period that Reginald and I met, actually.” She sighed. “He’s built himself this wonderful new career as a businessman, but who knows how much longer he can carry on . . when his sight’s completely gone. When he’s got nothing left but his jazz music.”
“And you and Terry,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she smiled brightly, “and Terry and I, of course.”
Then she got up and put on her pinny to make the tea, humming snatches of a top-twenty tune; the picture of a contented housewife.
——
“The Channel Islands of the Pacific are noted for their kelp forests,” said Jay, as we walked along the beach towards Ness Point, holding hands. “Giant Kelp and Bull Kelp, predominantly.”
I nodded:
“Macrocystis pyrifera and Nereocystis luetkeana,” I declared.
He laughed, delightedly, and squeezed my hand. I was a bit taller than him and felt rather a pang when I remembered my new, high-heeled, green shoes.
“I’ve had occasion to study these species,” he said, “although not in association with the production of uranium, I admit. They are quite remarkable. They grow as profusely as the rainforests in Brazil. Two feet per day – can you imagine that, Rosa? Great ropes of kelp winding through the ocean. What an incredible resource this would be!”
“Mmm. But, that’s not what we’ve got here in Kent, is it?” I thought of my miniature Collins GEM, ‘Plants of the British Isles: Sea & Shore’. “Laminaria digitalis, or hyperborea, I rather think.”
“Exactly! And Laminaria digitalis is what I saw on the floor of the chamber in the cliff; a far greater volume of it than I would expect to see in Southern England.”
We sat down by the low fence that skirted the Coastguard pub and a herring gull the size of a cat hopped around us, pretending not to be eyeing us up for sandwich crusts or crisp crumbs.
“Do you think that it might have something to do with the nutrients in the water?” I suggested. “I’ve heard that seaweed is on the increase around Dover because all the activity around the harbour is heating the water up. Just a millionth of a degree will do it, apparently. The same goes for the power-stations on the Thames and all the river-weed they have to dredge out by the gallon because it hinders the boats. Here, too, the fishermen get jolly cross about it.”
“Yes!” He jumped up. “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Rosa! What a wonderfully intelligent girl you are!”
I tried to smile demurely, but it may have come out as more of a smirk.
“Let’s say that Dover is the first stage of a gigantic experiment,” Jay pronounced. “The technique is being perfected, so now the British Government begins to do deals around the world, wherever there are healthy supplies of kelp: the Pacific coast of America, sub-Arctic Alaska, from the Bering Strait down the coast of Eastern Russia to the Bering Sea. They are mining the oceans of the world to produce uranium for a nuclear future!”
I looked out to sea and thought about it. The gunmetal-grey shape of a tanker sat on the horizon and I wondered how many more of those there would be in the coming years, scouring the seas. Should we be rejoicing that Britain was on the up; that Britannia was going to be ruling the waves once again? Think how many jobs would be created for her people. How much wealth would pour into her cities. Truly, it would be the New Elizabethan Age . . . How could they be expected to care about poor, handsome, Mr Dexter or my brave Uncle Tristram when their secret was still vulnerable? What were two lives, when such wonders were so very nearly ready to be performed? Why, they’d let entire armies burn before they gave the game away. Two lives were nothing.
“Do you think the police will manage to set him free?” I asked Jay the question that had loomed in the back of my mind all morning long.
He sat down beside me once more, hung his head and said nothing.
——
She started on our tea, switching the wireless on to keep me company on my bed of pain. I’d managed to persuade her to tune into the BBC Home Service so I could catch up with the news, but it only got me down. Every now and then they’d stick in some classical music, but they never strayed off the beaten track far enough to broadcast any jazz. I’d have turned the damn set off if I could, only I couldn’t, of course, being so completely and utterly useless. Pablo, who was sitting on the end of the mattress, making a serious job of washing himself, stopped, with one leg cocked in the air, to assess me. Yes, I could tell he thought I was useless, too.
For the thousandth time, I wondered what they’d done with the spies. Or had they managed to escape? Aunt Dilys refused to discuss it and Uncle Reg steered as well clear of me as he possibly could in a caravan. To tell the truth, it was a mystery to me what was going through his nasty mind. He knew that I could blow the whistle on him, no problem. He knew that I knew what he’d attempted to do to Rosa. So what was the old devil up to? Was Aunt Dilys keeping me safe from him, or was he waiting until I’d recovered to make his move? Surely he wasn’t banking on my silence because we were ‘so-called’ family? That would have been preposterous! If I’d had the use of my arms and legs, I’d have called the police the minute I hit dry land, you bet I would.
It was mystifying; everything that’d happened since Rosa Stone knocked on my door with no skirt on had been mystifying. Take that story Rosa’s uncle had told me about glass and uranium: that could’ve done with a journalist’s analytical eye, and no mistake! It sounded like the biggest load of crap I’d heard in a long while. Or . . a conspiracy theory. If I didn’t already have a G (for Gunpowder Plot) in my series on how governments manipulate conspiracy theories to their own advantage, I could have slotted Glass in there like a dream.
26. Watching & Listening
Mr Piotrowski fetched a magnifying glass and peered through the clear jacket at the little squares of flat film.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a microfiche, Kathleen,” he replied. “Ninety-eight documents on one fiche. I don’t have the optimum magnification system, but this may do for the moment.”
“Yes, but what is it?”
“All in good time, my dear. All in good time.”
It was after midnight and his flat had grown cold. Twenty minutes had passed since we’d opened the envelope and, if I was going to stay much longer, I’d have to wrap up a sight warmer. A car drove down the road and the lights streaked across a wall and then up and over the ceiling. My throat hurt from all the cigarettes I’d smoked and I suddenly wanted to lie in my own bed so much more than I wanted to know about the microfiche. I got up to fetch my coat. Only then did I realise how much of me ached. I ached all down one side and it wasn’t just the effect of hours spent on the old spy’s uncomfortable sofa; there would be bruises where I’d fallen against that parquet floor. Bath and bed and, perhaps, a cry, if I could remember how.
“Must you go? This is really rather interesting, you know.”
Mr Piotrowski had got his second wind.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the stamina for ninety-eight documents. Not tonight.”
“No?” He seemed rather surprised.
“I’m dying on my feet. I must go home to bed.”
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He nodded, scarcely hearing because he was so engrossed in what he had under his magnifying glass.
“I’ll ring you tomorrow,” I promised, “if you’ll give me your number.”
“Ah,” I’d got his attention, “my telephone is - temporarily - out of order, Kathleen.”
In other words, they’d cut him off.
“Let’s rendezvous at the Queen’s Elm,” he suggested. “Opening time do you? Shall we say Thursday because there is so much de-coding to do?”
Thursday was three days away, but I took his point. After all, it had taken me long enough to open the envelope, what were a few more days?
“Opening time in the morning, or evening?” I asked.
“Oh, I never drink in the day, my dear. Not all of us have your head for strong drink!”
I laughed and he stood up and performed an elegant, little bow over my hand.
“Are you sure you will be alright, Kathleen?” He asked.
“Thank you, yes,” I picked up my handbag. “Thank you so much for . . everything.”
“Nonsense. It is you I should thank. This business shows promise . .” he was returning to the microfiche before I’d got as far as the door. “Yes . .” I heard him mutter, “considerable promise.”
Nothing much happened on the Tuesday . . well, nothing much that anybody would want to know about. I think I slept in a bit and then I had a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge with a puddle of golden syrup in the middle, while I stood at the sink looking up through the bars on the window to the feet going past on the pavement above – the kitchen being in the basement of our house in Tite Street. I think I wondered, vaguely, what had become of my husband. I had left him - had cleared out and gone to stay with Peter and Gabe in Norfolk - so why did I feel as though he had left me? It was, frankly, annoying to be trounced at the leaving game like that; to be wondering about Tristram’s whereabouts, when he should have been wondering about mine.
I’d played it all wrong, I thought, going upstairs to use the sitting-room telephone and harass my agent. Tristram’s things were everywhere I looked - not surprisingly, it being his house - but I’d tipped most of my stuff into those bags you get from the laundry when they return the sheets, stuffed the lot into the car and carted it off to Norfolk, so now I appeared to be living in somebody else’s house. Any other woman would have sat tight and shown him the door, possession being nine-tenths of the law, etc. I was prepared to bet the Duchess of Argyll sat tight. Zsa Zsa, too.
The Yellow Glass Page 27