Antman (7 page)

There was a pause.

'Helen's seeing me off, not going with me.'

'Right.' Tom sounded surprised.

Robin found himself waffling an explanation. 'It's a host of things. The house, Helen's father's health, leaving the house empty.'

'There's nothing else? I thought Helen would be dead set on going.'

Tom knew Robin's restless temperament. Robin could not abide staying in college term after term. He had to be on the move. His relationships were like that too. Over the years, he had acquired a legendary reputation for slipping rapidly from one woman to another. Tom had been taken aback when Robin moved in with Helen, and he was surprised now at the realisation they had been living together for nearly seven years:

'Nothing to do with me. She decided. To be honest, she was doubtful as soon as I mentioned it. We have to think about so many factors.'

'It's none of my business so tell me to take a running jump. There's nothing wrong between you and Helen?'

Robin glanced at Tom, but obliquely as though avoiding looking him in the eye:

'Between me and Helen?' He laughed. 'You must be joking. Helen and I are secure as a rock, safe as houses. How do you want your coffee?'

'Black with no sugar.'

'You sounded pretty uptight on the phone.'

'It's the laboratory. No it's not. Why should I shelter him? It's one of the technicians. If we could hire and fire laboratory technicians purely on the quality of their day to day work that man would be out of here today. Also, more generally, we'd have far fewer hiccups with the experimental work.'

'Flog-em and sack-em? Not you, I think.'

'No dammit, it isn't.'

Tom couldn't hide the weariness in his voice.

'What's the man done?'

'It makes me so mad. I won't bore you with the why's and wherefore's. To cut a long story short, I asked him on Friday to prepare the equipment for me to replicate with the postgrad students the communications experiments we did with the slave-making sanguineas. I turned up Monday morning five minutes before my session to find he'd installed a colony of Myrmica Rubra in a maze, to test very basic patterns of communication in locating food sources. Then, to cap it all, we've lost, he's lost, or at least he can't track down, the equipment we used to carry out those first communication experiments with ants. I don't know if you remember that work we did with the Nuffield grant three or four years ago.'

'It rings a bell. I probably do. At the moment, my head's a shed with all this packing.'

'Sorry, Robin. I shouldn't load all this onto you.'

'No, it's me that feels guilty leaving you with all this.'

'Think nothing of it. It isn't your problem. It started as one of those days and in my experience it'll go on that way. Get out of this place and do your fieldwork. That's where the real world is. Hopefully, in the process you'll make new contacts and generate the extra income we need to survive.'

'That's a big responsibility.'

'I'm not laying it on you like that. Just pack up and go.'

'There must be more to it,' said Robin. 'I haven't seen you this uptight for years.'

Tom shook his head, as though to dislodge a persistent thought.

'I suppose this inquest has got to me. I'd never been to one before. I can't believe the coroner didn't pursue the investigation further. I also felt powerless. I'm not used to not being able to resolve queries and to explore possibilities till questions are answered. I can't see why the coroner was so uninterested in reaching a full explanation beyond a verdict on the immediate physical cause of death. How could such a puzzling incident be simply left as “open verdict”?'

*  *  *

Tom felt guilty after leaving Robin. He'd dumped onto him many of the questions humming round in his head. Robin had enough to contend with. They hadn't got round to looking at the notes he'd made. He always did this. “The jottings of an obsessive mind,” Laura had once called them, pages of reminders about building contacts with other universities and developing research opportunities.

Tom transferred his irritation for the time being to the task in hand – hunting through the untidy mess in the storeroom at the rear of Lab One in the laboratory block. Why is it, he thought, that you find all kinds of lost items except the one you're actually seeking? It was partly his own untidiness which was responsible for this situation. He also realised the error of leaving the lab technicians to sort it. Discarded apparatus and surplus office furniture tended to find their way here, in a haphazard fashion. No one person had ultimate responsibility, so the various stacks of boxes had grown more impenetrable over the past four or five years. Now the prototype apparatus used for the communication experiments with ants was not to hand. He did not even know whether it had been thrown out. That really would be a criminal waste of resources. On the other hand, he could recall over the years seeing some near-mint items of furniture in skips around the campus.

Where had he put the inventory? Perhaps that would have shed some light on the mystery. There was no great urgency and the inventory itself didn't matter. Tom felt more than a touch of that obsessiveness about detail which sustained him through his experimental work. By next week when he gave his “state of the Research Centre” address to the staff and post-graduate students, he wanted to be able to satisfy himself about particular points of departmental housekeeping, setting out future priorities and targets.

'Nothing much in the post,' said Jean. 'There's only one message on the voice-mail – from Hugh Mackintosh. He must speak to you.'

'What does he want?' Tom muttered.

Several stacked boxes of envelopes fell into the last clear space on the floor.

'Can I help, Professor Fortius?'

'No, please ignore me. I'm trying to find something.'

She did not pursue this. Tom was exercised over the possible reasons for Hugh's call. It was unusual. Hugh didn't normally leave messages like that. He rang at home over the weekend, or if it was a trivial matter, left it till Monday morning. It could be his concern over Tom's state of mind after the inquest. It isn't every day a key member of staff dies unexpectedly under mysterious circumstances. That was a possibility. He had to admit it was a very un-Hugh possibility.

'He asks you to ring as soon as you arrive at the office.'

'Odder and odder,' said Tom, shaking his head.

Hugh's secretary, Margaret, answered the phone.

'Hullo, Margaret,' said Tom. 'Is Hugh in?'

'No, he's popped out to see someone. He'll only be five minutes.'

'I'll ring back.'

'Wait a moment. He asked me to book an appointment for you when you rang.'

'Oh.' This was definitely not Hugh the minimalist manager. The awful feeling grew ever stronger that this wasn't sparked by the aftermath of Detlev's inquest.

'Have you some time this morning? He was particularly anxious to meet you before lunch.'

'Is eleven any good?'

'Yes, he should be back by then. I'll put you in the diary for eleven.'

Tom hoped once the funeral was well in the past and the police and other people had stopped asking questions, Hugh would settle back into his normal pattern of non-intervention. This amounted to virtual non-participation in the affairs of the Research Centre.

Before meeting Hugh, Tom had a further task. He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty, probably about right to make this particular telephone call. A mission only now had surfaced from his submerged memory of the inquest.

Seated to one side of his desk in the easy chair he called his thinking chair, he dialled Directory Enquiries for the number of the coroner's court. Afterwards, he looked at his watch – still sufficiently early – and dialled.

'Hello, is that the coroner's office? Could I speak to the clerk please – yes, it is urgent – I can't pass on a message, no – hello, are you the clerk who was present at yesterday's inquest? Good, my name is Professor Tom Fortius, Hull Wilberforce University – yes that's right, from my Department, yes – that's right, I was there, sitting near the door on the right – yes, with the black suit and, er, hair. This is a little difficult, but I need the opportunity to ask you something. At the point the verdict was announced, I noticed, were you feeling, that is – oh, please, don't ring off. I didn't mean – no, all I wanted to know was whether you'd meet me for lunch tomorrow – I don't know, I only just – yes – no, I promise, it's purely a professional matter – say, a quarter to one in the front lounge at the Beverley Arms – no, it won't compromise your professional role in any way. I can guarantee that. I considered being a magistrate you know, before this job became so time-consuming.'

On his way back through the office, Tom stopped by his secretary's desk.

'Excuse me, Jean. You haven't any idea where the prototype equipment we used for the social insect communication experiments is stored?'

'I'm sorry, Professor Fortius. You've already asked me.'

'I'm losing track. With you having been with us so many years, I've never had anything to do with the laboratories. I wouldn't know one end of a Bunsen burner from the other.' She smiled.

'No, of course not.'

'The technicians should be able to put their finger on it for you.'

'Yes,' he responded, unconvinced. 'The problem is our current staff haven't been with us long enough to know what I'm referring to.'

'Oh dear, that's difficult.'

Ever the diplomat. One of the reasons people found Jean so reassuring and calming in the stressed atmosphere of academic research, was her refusal to engage in any sort of banter or sniping. She rarely made any comment, or even hinted at a judgement on other people's work. Tom found it an occasionally irritating, but ultimately reassuring characteristic. He set off across the quadrangle towards Hugh's office, in a thoughtful frame of mind.

'Come in, Tom.’ With his distinctive Sandhurst accent, Hugh always came across as the aristocratic English gentleman, which meant he cut an eccentric figure in the University. Five-foot nine in height and rather portly, he invariably wore a Harris tweed, or a brightly checked sports jacket. Typically, his trousers were immaculately pressed cavalry twill of the off-duty army officer, hanging perfect length over brown leather shoes so carefully polished you could imagine using them as mirrors. His moustache and upright posture, whether seated or standing, completed the picture.

Tom was sure Hugh's cultivation of the image of the retired brigadier or colonel who had taken up country pursuits on his small farm between Hull and Malton, was one reason why, despite many critics of his laid-back approach to working with people, he'd survived for so long in his job as Dean. With his confident manner, he tended to cast opponents, especially younger ones, in the role of junior officers, or in the case of some new staff and students, in the role of apprentices, from which it was difficult for them to challenge him.

Hugh's days were numbered, though. It wasn't so much that colleagues saw his old-fashioned manners as inherently bad. He was such an obvious anachronism in the increasingly robust, even brutal, contemporary world of higher education.

On the rare occasions when Hugh came straight to the point – as now – it was a very bad sign:

'I've just had the VC's latest pronouncements on targets for the coming round of income generation.'

'We used to call them research grants,' said Tom drily.

'Yes,' said Hugh absently. He wasn't renowned for his political subtlety.

'Depressing reading. Look at these figures for the professional courses – nurses, teachers, social work – far below our expected income.'

'You mean their student numbers, especially postgrad figures, are sky high,' said Tom. 'So the pressure's off them.'

'You can say that again,' Hugh agreed. 'Anyway, they're not our problem. The good news is that as far as sciences as a whole are concerned, we have an across-the-board agreement that in the next financial year, there will be no compulsory redundancies among academic staff on permanent contracts.'

Tom nodded without enthusiasm.

'Incidentally, Tom, I should have said at the outset how much I enjoyed your lecture the other day. That was a good write-up in the University Blah. If I may say, you did yourself no harm with senior management and from the point of view of your own career prospects that's no bad thing. There were people listening very carefully to your comments about forensic entomology, by the way. I have that on the best authority.'