Forever Dead (14 page)

“You mean Jake Diamond?”

“Oh, gruesome story there, isn't it? I mean …” she glanced hurriedly at me. “I mean, they say he died fast, like, I think, at least they say …”

“What a way to go.”

“Yeah, but sort of like him, you know? Ever the macho man. Oh, such a great guy though. I had him for the course on animal form and function. Funny man and sexy as hell.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Ha. Would have loved that. Nah. He was just a prof. I got to know him a bit because I'm a grad student of his colleague, Don Allenby. They worked together on a bunch of papers, you know.”

“You mean they collaborated?”

“Yeah, I guess. Diamond was a cat man and Don is small mammals. They teamed up sometimes on those predator-prey jobs — you know, linking the number of predators to the number of prey and that sort of stuff. Diamond's name always came first. I always wondered about that. Guess Diamond felt he had to be first author. Had an ego the size of an elephant. Lots of profs around like to take all the credit, you know, but at least he did a lot of the work. Some profs do zip all. Their graduate students do it all and then the profs take all the praise. Oops, sorry.”

“Sounds like he could have had a bunch of enemies.”

She looked up suddenly, surprised.

“Nah. Not Diamond. Everyone liked him. I'm pretty sure. Except Davies, of course, but Davies doesn't much like anyone at all.”

I gave her a quizzical look.

“Guess you haven't been around here before if you don't know Davies. He calls himself the dean of the zoology department such as it is here, only four profs,
you know. We're a small operation. The student rumour mill has it they hated each other's guts.”

“Why?”

The woman laughed. “Diamond was a free spirit, you know what I mean? He was classy, like, and didn't care what Davies thought of his lectures so long as the students liked them. Like the time he taught us the mechanics of flight. He brought in a whole slew of mechanical birds and he had them flapping all over the lecture hall. It was great. Then Davies walks in and everybody shuts up. He's kind of a dried-up little man. He kinda looks around and eyeballs Diamond with his fierce little flinty eyes and just as he's about to say something — God, we would have given a lot to know what he was going to say — a little whirly-bird bashed into his bald head and everyone started laughing. Davies was furious and he stalked out like a scorched rooster. After that there were lots of rumours that he was actively trying to get rid of Diamond. Hard to do when Diamond had tenure but, well, there you go. Guess Davies won't need to worry anymore, eh?”

“Davies doesn't sound like the kind of guy who would have liked his profs getting involved in stuff like logging protests and things like that,” I noted.

“You can say that again. He wants to be president of the university here, not just dean of science, and I think he feels Diamond was preventing that from happening. He was furious about Diamond's high profile in this logging spree, said it harmed the reputation of the university — meaning his reputation. Oooeee was that fun. Manning the barricades. It was like one great big …”

She stopped in mid-sentence as footsteps sounded in the hall. She glanced at me, suddenly anxious. “Don't tell anyone I said any of this, will you?” She turned and raced back to her typing as a gaggle of students entered the office on some mission or other.

I walked down to the end of a long tiled corridor, peering at the doors as I went. Each door had a glass pane in it, but most of the occupants had carefully blocked them with pictures of animals or pithy sayings.

Unlike the other offices, whose doors were closed, the door to room 202 was open. I knocked and walked in.

Allenby was sitting at a desk surrounded by papers and looked up quickly as I came in. He didn't look much better than when I had last seen him in the bush, except that his clothes fitted him and were immaculate and his crisp white shirt highlighted the extreme pallor of his face.

“Dr. Allenby. I'm Cordi O'Callaghan.” I held out my hand. “We met up in Dumoine. I stumbled across the body.”

“Oh yes,” he said uncertainly. “Yes, I remember now. Come in, come in.” He didn't get up to shake my hand because he hadn't seen the gesture. Not surprising since the man hadn't looked at me since his first quick preoccupied glance. He remained behind his desk as if it could defend him from my presence.

“Did we arrange to meet? I didn't ask you to come, did I?” he said, looking at a point somewhere way off to the left of my ear.

“May I sit?” I asked.

Finally he looked at me and smiled. “Oh, yes, sorry, do.”

I studied him for a moment trying to evaluate how much to tell him.

I decided to keep it simple and told him that my lab had been fumigated and my disks stolen and suggested there was a possible link between that and Diamond's death.

“What possible link could there be?” he asked.

I told him briefly about the significance of the cedar twigs and my certainty that the body had been moved. I was sure the disappearance of my larvae and my data were related to that one fact.

“I don't know if there's a link. I may simply be on a wild goose chase, but you're a researcher. You can understand what it means to have your data stolen and why I'm grasping at the only straw I can find.”

Allenby began shuffling the papers on his desk. His eyes flitted across my face avoiding eye contact. I could see a fine mist of sweat forming on his upper lip. What was he so worried about? Could he have moved the body, and if so, why?

“What do you hope to get from me?” he asked the wall in front of him. I followed his eyes and saw a picture of a young woman and a small girl swinging on a hammock, laughing at the photographer. The little girl was the spitting image of Don.

“I don't know. I'm hoping something will twig. What can you tell me about Diamond?”

“Diamond?” The word rang out like the tolling of a bell and lingered in the air, as if it were the first time Allenby had ever uttered the name. Finally he shifted in his seat, but the silence dragged on. Suddenly Allenby looked directly at me.

“He was a bit of a legend. He knew the bush backwards, could survive on nothing. You know the sort of thing. Give him a knife, a tinder and flint, and some snare wire and fishing line and he could live forever. Sweet irony that he got done in by a bear.”

I said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.

“We were working on a paper together, a cycle paper on lynx and hare. Hares are my baby, lynx his. Now, I don't mean to be rude but I don't see why any of this should interest you. He's dead, isn't he? Mauled by
a bear, so why are you poking about? It won't bring your insects back to life and it's not going to help you get your disks back. It isn't related at all. Just some macabre coincidence.”

I didn't say anything, waited. The silence lengthened until Don couldn't stand it any longer.

“He was a good man. Ruthlessly honest in all his dealings, almost to a fault, and when he got behind a cause he gave everything he had to it.”

“Like the logging?”

“Yeah,” sighed Allenby. “Like the logging. It became a personal vendetta to him.” He glanced out the window, as though he were seeing a magnificent pine slowly topple, and then dragged his eyes back to me.

“Jake organized everyone to oppose logging up here in the Dumoine area. It's prime logging country, has been for generations, but the logging companies haven't done much replanting and the clear-cutting of the past has caused a lot of erosion.”

“How many of the faculty have study sites up in the area?”

Allenby looked at me and nodded.

“Yes. That's right. We have a biology station up in the area and most of us have some ongoing and longstanding projects up there, either our own or those of our graduate students. If the area is logged, lots of research could go up in smoke. So yes, Diamond did have a very personal reason for fighting the logging companies. He'd been studying lynx and bobcat in the area for fifteen years. So, it was not all altruistic, although he probably would have argued otherwise.”

“I understand he organized a barricade to keep the loggers out.”

“Yeah. And it worked. Jake was the sort of guy that could inspire you. He was the catalyst. Now he's dead,
and no one has taken over his leadership. Without him the cause is winding down. Because of the barricade and the publicity surrounding it we got a temporary injunction, but it didn't last long. Now the loggers are poised to move in and we're without a leader. You see, Jake was one of a kind. He really believed we had to win or the world would collapse. That's what drove him. No one else has quite the same drive.”

“Was he well liked?”

“What's that got to do with it?” Allenby raised his thin voice to the stretching point, was about to say something and then thought better of it. Instead his voice dropped and he said, “Yeah. He was well liked by most. He had people who didn't much like him, loggers and people like that, but I don't think he had any real enemies.”

“Were you in the area on or around the day he died? Did you see anything that might help me?” He hesitated only a fraction.

“I was out there well east of his site, working on a hare census in a new area. Left for the field before he did, and came out about a week before Leslie and I bumped into you.”

“What were you doing up there when I ran into you?”

Allenby stared past me, his round wet eyes unblinking.

“We were manning the barricade with about thirty other people. Didn't you see it?”

I shook my head.

“It's just up the road from the biology station. If you came by the portage, though, you'd bypass it, so I guess that's why you never saw it. We've been using the biology station as a storage spot for food and other supplies.”

“Was anyone else with you who was out in the field who might have bumped into Diamond on his last day or seen something that could help me?”

“I don't really know what you're looking for so I can't say. I didn't see him. I generally prefer to do my fieldwork alone. You should check the bio station schedule, though. We have an in/out roster. Everyone signs out and signs in again when they return. We have to record where we're going, who with, and for how long. It's an honour system, but everybody observes it for their own safety. Besides, Davies doesn't take kindly to wasting the budget on emergency rescue operations. They're expensive and if they are unnecessary, well … you understand.”

“Where can I find this roster?”

“Dr. Davies keeps all the old ones in the registrar's office. Roberta, my grad student, is helping out there this week. Someone's sick, I think, and she needed the cash. It costs a lot to get a grad degree these days. Go ask her.”

“Who else should I talk to?”

“Diamond's grad student, Patrick Whyte, might be able to tell you something. He sometimes went out in the field with Diamond, but I don't think he went on this last trip. Anyway, Diamond and I weren't that close, just work colleagues. I was far too conservative for his liking and not athletic enough. You should also speak to Leslie. They were friends once.”

His voice suddenly sounded hollow and empty.

“Look. I'm sorry. I have a load of work. Leslie's new office is just down the hall. Diamond's grad student is in the lab, room 205. But he won't be there right now. He's demonstrating a lab. But you'd better speak to Davies. He gets furious when things happen around here that he doesn't know about.”

I stepped thankfully out of his office and went back up to see Roberta. Allenby had unnerved me and I wasn't sure why. The
tap tapping
was still going on, and I popped my head around the barrier. She jumped.

“Sorry, didn't mean to scare you, but Don said there was a roster for the biology station that I could take a look at.”

“Oh sure. You mean the ‘come look for me if I don't show' book? It's over here.”

She led me across the cluttered space to a large desk heaped with magazines; above it was a huge topographical map with red pins scattered about. I waved my hand toward it while she got out the roster and put it on the table in front of me.

“Are these all the study sites for the faculty?”

“Yep. You got it. The little red pins mean people in the field right now. All those other little pins of various colours mean study sites.

There were strings linking together all the blue pins, all the yellow, and so forth, so at a glance you could see all the study sites.

“Who's yellow?”

“That's Don. He works in the area east and south of the bio station.”

“You're Don's student, right?”

“That's right. Just finishing up my master's. Roberta Smith. I'm doing a population study on hares, but most of my fieldwork is done. I'm glad of that. I don't really like the bush. But he's up there almost as much as Diamond.”

I remembered the picture of the woman and the little girl.

“What about his family? How does he juggle his time with them?”

She frowned.

“Oh no. Don't you know?”

“Know what?”

“He doesn't really have a family anymore.”

“But the picture in his office?”

“Yeah, his wife and kid. Really sad.”

I felt sick, anticipated what was coming. Waited.

“That picture was taken just before his wife died, five years ago now, I think. It was a godawful accident. They were driving home one night. Don fell asleep at the wheel, or so they say. They barrelled through a stop sign and were flattened by a truck. His wife died instantly, and the kid, who was only four years old at the time, is now a vegetable. But Don won't give up hope that she'll get well. The poor man was wracked with guilt and has spent every blessed penny and gone into debt giving her the best care in a private nursing home. He still talks about the day she'll come home, but we all know she never will. He won't face up to that, poor man. He'd do anything for the poor kid.”