The Cambridge Theorem (10 page)

“Where did you go, you and Miss Greenberg, after the bar? Did you go to bed together?”

Allerton's sudden emotion spilled into anger. “Look, I don't like your tone, and I don't like what you're saying, and if it's just the same with you, I've had enough of this.” He began to rise from his seat.

“Well, did you?”

“No, we bloody well did not, you dirty-minded…” He hesitated, as if unsure of the repercussions of swearing at a policeman. Smailes remained impassive.

“We haven't been sleeping together recently. We're friends. I have rooms in Axton Court. Lauren lives in digs, a ways out. I left her at my staircase. I assume she had her bike at the front gate. That's where she was headed. Look, are we finished, officer?”

“For the time being. Please tell your friend Miss Greenberg that I will see her now.”

“Greenwald. Not Greenberg. Yes. Look, I'm sorry, officer. I just don't see this is any of your business. And I'm upset. You understand.”

Such breeding. Smailes managed a thin smile as Allerton rose and walked unsteadily out of the room.

D
EREK SMAILES
could never remember hearing his father laugh. He patrolled the house as if he were policing a public meeting, and his children and their friends were unruly demonstrators. Not that Derek had many friends apart from Iain Mack, but they went to his house most of the time.

The only intimacy he could ever remember between them was when his father would read Dickens to him at bedtime. It had been a tradition in his own home, which Harry Smailes chose to continue. He seemed to shed the burden of his severity amid the colorful gallery of characters, adopting accents and mannerisms with abandon. Derek saw his father could have been a music hall performer, he came alive with a script in his hands. Derek would lie mesmerized in the grip of Dickens' imagination long after Denise had fallen asleep, pleading with his father not to stop. His father would close the book with a look of guilty pleasure, and return to the glowering part he had chosen in real life. When Derek Smailes became a teenager, he started to read Dickens himself. It was the start of his interest in serious reading, which was probably the only reason he had ever done well in anything at school.

The only other passion Harry Smailes seemed to feel was for his dogs. Those bloody dogs. It was the first thing he and his mother had done after the funeral. They had sold them both.

Harry Smailes kept and raced whippets. Derek had always thought they were absurd animals, prancing around on their toes with their bug eyes like giant insects. His father kept them in a special wire compound at the bottom of the garden, and the two dogs, Lucky and Lady, won from him a devotion which no human seemed able to. The whole family resented the amount of time he spent talking to them and grooming them, and taking them to weekend races in his specially converted Morris van. As they got older, Denise used to complain to their mother about the amount of time and money he spent on them, and how their yelping kept her awake at night. Their mother would tell her to mind her tongue. Derek accompanied his father to a race only once, and he was appalled by the cruel spectacle of the frantic dogs and the harsh-voiced men in mufflers with whisky on their breath.

Then suddenly at the beginning of May when Derek was eighteen, his father had died, and any real chance of getting into University had been wrecked. The events were blurred in his memory, but he remembered that one morning his father, who had an almost flawless record of attendance in over thirty years of service, had not gone to work. He had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, when Derek had left for school. His father was still at home in the middle of the afternoon when he came back, standing at the bottom of the garden, talking to the dogs.

He had asked his mother, who seemed crippled with anxiety, what was wrong, but she would only say that his father wasn't well, that she didn't know what was happening.

Denise, who was engaged at this time and soon to leave home, was more contemptuous.

“What's he doing, moping around all day? Why isn't he going to work? Have you called the doctor?” she would persist.

Smailes could not remember if the doctor had visited, but he remembered his Uncle George, who was an inspector at the station, visiting the house to talk to his Dad and holding a worried conference with his mother at the kitchen table.

The next two days he remembered approaching his house with dread after killing time over at his friend Iain's. His sense of foreboding was overwhelming, and he could not concentrate on his revision, although his exams were only weeks away. His father no longer bothered to dress, emerging in his dressing gown to eat in brooding silence, then walking back up the stairs. He looked very old.

Then, on the third day, Derek Smailes had come home from school to see an ambulance with flashing lights parked at the front door. He had rushed in and found his mother at the foot of the stairs, weeping.

“It's your Dad. He's had a heart attack. They're taking him to the hospital,” she had told him.

He had held on to her in fright. His father had died the same night.

He was shocked by the intensity of his grief, and his feelings of guilt. The examinations arrived, and he did miserably. He felt that by continuously letting himself down, he had let his father down, and that the disappointment had killed him.

Smailes looked back at his notes and was reflecting wryly on Allerton's concoction of petulance and manners when Lauren Greenwald came angrily into the room. He doubted he would receive any such deference from her. She slouched across the room and slumped into the chair opposite the desk, not looking at him.

“Good afternoon, miss,” Smailes began. “Let me just check the spelling of your name, if I can. Is that G-R-E…”

“Let's get this over with. What do you want to know?” she interrupted.

“Now, miss, we could start by being a little more polite. Don't like policemen much, is that it, miss?”

“Cops are cops. I'm pretty sure I don't like you. Giles told me about your wise ass remarks. I think that stinks. He's pretty upset. Everyone's pretty upset. Maybe you don't appreciate that.”

Smailes studied her. The similarity with Allerton was purely superficial. In background, outlook and attitudes this woman was from a different planet. In his most careful tone he rehearsed the spelling of her name, then looked at her mildly.

“I'm just trying to get the facts, miss. Perhaps you'll tell me what happened last night, as you recall it.”

Her story tied with Allerton's pretty well, at most points. In her version, it had been Allerton who had suggested the visit to Bowles' room. He had been working at his typewriter, and put his work away in the desk after they entered. It had been her doing to persuade Bowles to go with them to the college bar. Her description of his behavior was the same; aloof, preoccupied, but nothing to suggest he might do anything drastic. She had left the bar with Allerton around eleven, left him at his staircase, and cycled home. She had found out about Simon's death that morning when she picked up her mail after her Wednesday morning supervision at Magdalene College.

“What kind of person was Simon Bowles?”

Lauren Greenwald's manner had loosened during her narrative, and she seemed less sullen.

“Simon? He was, well, a gentleman. You live in the States, you know, and you have this expectation that the whole country's like, some giant version of
Upstairs, Downstairs
. Of course, it's not, but it sure is a lot more civilized than what I'm used to. And that was Simon. He had this real civilized, courteous intelligence. You could see he had a mind like a steel trap, but with—er, padded jaws.”

“How did you meet him?”

“When I first arrived, there was some hospitality thing for the American students. Simon came to it. I think he liked Americans. He had this whole Kennedy trip.”

“What was that about?”

“He was an assassination freak. There's a ton of them in the States. He corresponded with them. I think he was quite an authority on the whole thing. He had his own theory, about the Cubans. I didn't take too much interest.”

“Do you know why he was interested in this subject? Did he talk to you about it?”

“Not after he realized I wasn't interested. I think he found unsolved mysteries intriguing, that's all. They offended his sense of propriety.”

“Did he tell you what he was working on currently? Did you see the papers he was working on when you came in the room?”

“No, I didn't look. I think he was interested in something about Cambridge and politics, but he didn't discuss it. Said he didn't like to make assertions until he'd worked out his ideas properly. He was a private sort of person.”

“What was the nature of your friendship. Were you intimate?”

To his surprise, she didn't take offense, or become defensive like Allerton, but gave a long, low-throated laugh.

“Simon? Of course not. Simon was gay. Pretty firmly in the closet, but definitely gay. He'd even talk to me about it, in the right mood.”

Smailes had taken few notes while Lauren Greenwald was speaking, but he wrote down this short, abused word and underlined it. This was a new aspect of Bowles' personality, but he chose not to pursue it.

“And with Giles Allerton?”

“Giles and I were lovers, for a while, until I put my foot down. Giles is what you guys call a cad. A blue-blooded Englishman—horses, liquor and women. Endlessly promiscuous. I sort of got sick of it, his untrustworthiness. But we managed to stay friends.”

Smailes found himself intrigued by this woman's assurance, the lack of contrivance with which she presented herself. She seemed quite a bit more adult than the boyish Allerton. She had a delicate face beneath the swath of black tangled curls, dark brown eyes in a foreign complexion, small even mouth, strong nose. In Smailes' youth, her National Health-style glasses would have been a shameful emblem of poverty, but now they gave her an air of radical chic. Her masculine choice of clothes did not diminish a strong female aura. He realized he quite liked her.

“What are you doing here? I mean, are you studying for a degree?”

“No, I'm a grad student at Columbia. Doctoral candidate—chemical engineering. I won a one year scholarship, and in recognition of our high academic standards in the U.S., the University lets me take a year of undergraduate course work.”

“Chemical engineering? Not very lady-like.”

The disdain in her reply was not harsh. “Aw, come on, detective. Times change.”

“Columbia. That's in Harlem, isn't it?”

“Not quite. Upper West Side. You know New York?”

“Not really. I've read about it. Cambridge must be a bit different.”

“You bet. I have a studio on 118th Street above a Chinese Cuban restaurant with two families of Puerto Ricans on either side. Kinda noisy. Here I live with Mrs. Bilton in a semi-detached house, with scones every day for tea.”

“Lauren, why do you think Simon Bowles killed himself?”

Her face clouded. “I've been trying to think it through, waiting across there in the lodge. It's hard to believe it's really true. You know, not having seen him. Of course, I know about that episode a couple of years ago, what Giles told me. Last night he was kind of quiet, but that's not unusual. I think he had this tortured thing inside himself, about being weird, about being gay. He told me once—we were in his room, alone, he'd had a few drinks—that he had this terrible crush on Giles. Then he made me swear never to tell anyone, specially Giles. I never have, until now.”

“Did Giles realize this, perhaps?”

“Giles is a horny English heterosexual. Believe me, he had no idea. But when Simon told me, it let me know it was a big deal for him, that it was real significant he was confiding in me. I would bet that it had something to do with this, some love affair no one knew about, some big guilt and remorse thing.”

“Or jealousy?”

“Jealousy? Of Giles and me? Oh, I can't believe that. That would be no reason to…I can't really believe that. But then he left the bar so suddenly. Why did he do that?”

“No one had said anything to him?”

“No. He wasn't even paying attention. Some other guys we know showed up, and he just suddenly announced he was leaving. But you know, I think the note was a blind, that he was covering something.”

“What note?”

“The suicide note. The typed note. Giles told me about it. He thinks the snake fantasy came back, and that Simon freaked out. It doesn't sound right, does it? You don't sit in a bar, having a quiet drink, and then go back and imagine your room full of snakes, do you? I bet it's a blind.”

“Yes, I see.” Suddenly Smailes wished he'd kept these two apart after his questioning began. Had they managed to tailor their stories? What was missing here? He agreed that a sudden return of the terrifying hallucination seemed far-fetched. The desk drawer had been empty of typed papers that morning. Perhaps Bowles had returned to find his papers stolen when he returned. Perhaps their contents had been so intensely personal that their loss was too much for him. Although another, more plausible explanation was that before taking his life, Bowles had simply transferred the manila file and its contents to the cabinet, which after all had been locked this morning. What had been its contents?