The Cambridge Theorem (24 page)

Smailes decided to tell Kramer what he knew of the days and hours preceding Bowles' death, and then about the suicide note, and the interpretation that people who had known Bowles had put upon it. Kramer listened intently, hunching his shoulders in concentration. He regarded the detective with a genuine expression of puzzlement.

“My word. It does sound as if something may have happened like you suggest. But his behavior sounds quite normal, from what you say. I know that one of the symptoms that Simon found most distressing before was his inability to concentrate.”

“This doesn't seem to have been happening in this case, does it?”

“Well, I'm not sure. He was not under any form of care before this, was he? No medications? All I can think is that he was really quite severely depressed at this time, but had been able to mask his feelings most successfully from everyone. But frankly, I doubt very much that his delusional thinking had returned. I doubt that very much.”

“What kind of a person was he, Simon Bowles? Do you recall your impressions?” the detective asked, still looking down as he wrote rapidly in his book.

“Not too much. It's really a long time ago. We don't concern ourselves too much with personality analysis, you know. Don't have the time. We concentrate more on making an accurate diagnosis and prescribing the right therapeutic intervention. I may have some notes here. I remember he was quite an engaging personality.”

Kramer flicked through to the back of his file. “Well, ‘unipolar syndrome, possible narcissistic tendency' is basically all I wrote. I don't know if that helps.”

“Not much.”

“Well, as I recall, Simon displayed some of the classical personality attributes that our profession has identified as depressogenic. Roughly, these could be described as inability to constructively channel feelings of hostility, a highly developed superego, and an unusual sensitivity to loss. I also detected some tendencies towards a grandiose sense of self-importance, which was counterbalanced by feelings of special unworthiness. This is what I'm referring to as a unipolar syndrome with a narcissistic tendency.”

Smailes stopped writing to consider whether this sounded like a description of himself. He convinced himself that it didn't.

Smailes asked a couple more routine questions, then concluded the interview by reviewing the discharge procedures for Bowles. They confirmed that the young man had been recommended to stay on his medication for six months to a year, and was released to the care of Selby, the doctor who had prescribed the drug that had gotten Bowles into trouble in the first place. Smailes wondered whether the young man had complied with these terms, and Kramer confirmed that there was little follow-up from the Myrtlefields end—they had no outpatient facility. All that was required was that Selby confirm that Bowles had visited him within ten days of his release, which he had done. From that date nothing further was known, and Smailes had a strong hunch that Bowles had dropped the good doctor Selby like a brick at his first opportunity. He had probably had no contact with a medical professional since.

As he was leaving, Smailes asked the question that had been formulating in his mind since he had been told the genesis of Bowles' earlier psychotic lapse.

“Doctor, as far as we can tell, Simon Bowles had been receiving no medical attention in the period before his death. But if he had been, if he had been prescribed the same drug as before, he might have had the same psychotic reaction again, mightn't he?”

“Well, yes of course,” said Kramer, dubiously. “But Simon was a smart fellow. I doubt very much whether he would have consented to take Parnate again, and if he had, he would certainly not have made the same dietary mistakes. Certainly not.”

“Okay. That's what I would have thought. But if he had been taking the drug
without his knowledge
, then the same delusion might have returned, when he inevitably ate the wrong thing.”

“My word, officer, what on earth are you suggesting?” asked Kramer, a little flustered. Smailes waited for the psychiatrist's answer, saying nothing.

“Very unlikely indeed. You see, all anti-depressants take at least two weeks to have any effect, which includes any major side-effect. So this young man would have had to take the drug in considerable dosage for an extended period of time, before any such thing could have happened. It hardly seems likely he could have done this without his knowledge, does it?”

Smailes agreed. It hardly seemed likely. Neither did it seem likely that the delusion of the snakes had returned, according to Kramer. So why had Simon Bowles taken his own life? He felt frustrated that no one seemed to be able to answer that question.

D
EREK SMAILES FIRST
began reading Bowles' Cambridge files during the weekend after his encounter with Hawken and Davies at the crematorium. In the days following the trip to Myrtlefields he renewed his efforts. It was his way of keeping the case alive, of trying to understand the young man better, of trying to determine whether there were clues in his research that would help explain his death.

As with the Kennedy material, Smailes had removed only the typed summaries from the hanging files, leaving the handwritten notes, newspaper clippings and magazine articles in Bowles' file cabinet for Alice Wentworth to take back to Rickmansworth in her Volvo station wagon. He felt an obligation to her—she could have easily refused his request to see her brother's work—and wanted to get the material back to her as soon as possible.

From the start, he was hampered by his lack of knowledge of the period Bowles was writing about and a basic lack of interest in the subject matter itself. The periodic contortions of the British Establishment over traitors in its midst had never really captured his imagination and had ceased to even surprise him—the phenomenon seemed emblematic of Britain's decline in the world, a fact Smailes had long taken for granted. He could remember his father's wrath over the successive scandals during his boyhood, the defections of Burgess and Maclean, the Profumo affair, and then the furor when Philby finally turned up in Moscow. His father would recite the litany of their names along with those of Gormley, Scargill and Benn, contemporary figures he was convinced also wanted to create a communist Britain. The disclosures about Anthony Blunt, coming more recently, had won his attention briefly, and he had been sickened to learn about the immunity Blunt had been granted. There followed disclosures about all kinds of smaller fry, and there always seemed to be the common denominator of the Oxford or Cambridge education and the impassioned conversion to communism in the thirties. It was extraordinary how many of these men had then entered the mainstream of political and diplomatic life without their allegiances being known, or judged to be of significance.

Smailes had begun systematically with Bowles'
Apostles
file, which described the activities of the elite secret society at the University in the thirties. The Apostles club was founded by the poet Tennyson and his brother in the nineteenth century, and restricted its initiates to those of special intellectual or artistic distinction. Membership was small and by invitation only, and new members had to swear all kinds of terrible oaths of loyalty and secrecy. In the thirties, the club's guiding light was John Maynard Keynes, the world famous economist at Kings, and although homosexuality was not a requirement of membership, it seemed that many members, like Keynes, had distinct and open preference for their own sex. Whereas Blunt and Burgess were both homosexual and prominent members of the Apostles, Maclean and Philby, although students at the same time, were not. Bowles had been able to identify all the members of the club between 1930 and 1939, and then had written extensive profiles of their careers since leaving the University. Smailes had to admit that a surprising number of them had been Soviet sympathizers, and quite a few had been active agents. Bowles seemed satisfied that he had accounted for the activities of all of them.

The file on the
Communist Party of Great Britain
represented Bowles' research into the way the Communist International, or Comintern (merely a front for the KGB, Smailes was to learn) used leading communist academics to identify promising student recruits for Soviet espionage work. The strategy had been stunningly successful, for it seemed that volunteers had been recruited in scores, who then proceeded to take up their rightful positions in the corridors of power in government, industry and academia. What puzzled Smailes was why so many young men, heirs to the traditionally conservative ruling class, should have embraced revolutionary socialism with the intensity of commitment that allowed them to spy for a foreign power. Wasn't the nature of Stalin's regime already clear in the thirties? But again, Bowles seemed confident that the activities of the Soviet recruiters had been sufficiently traced and documented.

A slim file elliptically entitled
The Gang of Four…
represented Bowles' examination of the Cambridge careers of the four traitors who had attained such notoriety in their later years. Burgess and Maclean had come up in 1930, a year later than Philby and four years later than Blunt, whom Bowles portrayed as the
eminence grise
of the student communist movement. Surprisingly, Bowles had chosen not to dwell at length on their recruitment and subsequent development, although it was clear they had all known each other well, itself a departure from recognized Soviet recruitment practice. He was more interested to track down previously undocumented activities, and particularly to identify friends and associates who might have escaped official scrutiny. “If you want to discover a person's true nature, find his friends,” Bowles had asserted somewhat haughtily at one juncture in the notes. But apart from a few contemporary accounts and anecdotes, Bowles seemed disappointed in this quest, and seemed to get sidetracked by the somewhat distasteful question of whether Burgess had in fact slept with each of the other three. It seemed Blunt and Burgess had become lovers early in their acquaintance, and remained firm friends for the rest of their lives, and it also appeared likely that the bi-sexual Maclean had been compromised by Burgess and was later blackmailed by him. But Bowles apparently believed that the shy, pipe-smoking Philby had also succumbed after a reputed meeting in Philby's economics supervisor's rooms, although Bowles' physical description of the garlic-chewing Burgess gave him pause in his account. Whether this little-known fact was significant in Philby's later rise to general's rank in the KGB was left unclear.

Bowles' next step had been to turn to the University archives themselves. It seemed that the University Library, the ugly fortress off Grange Road that looked like a power station, contained copies of all literature produced by University societies stretching back into the nineteenth century. Bowles had obviously spent weeks poring over publications of left-wing groups in the thirties, checking on authorship of articles, the members of editorial boards and internal references to individuals. In a file called
Bolsheviks and Gentlemen
he had traced the activities of the members of the executive committees of the Socialist Society, the Labour Club and the Union Society for all the relevant years. He checked the participants in debates, who took the pro- and anti-socialist sides. He even checked college magazines for political gossip about college members and had pored through reports of the University administration, the Council of the Senate, for accounts of political demonstrations and upheavals during those years. The sheer volume of detail was overwhelming for Smailes, and made for much less compelling reading than Bowles' Kennedy research, which had read like a detective novel. Most of the names Bowles had researched meant nothing to him, but he did recognize the names of a surprising number of people who had become prominent in later life in politics, business and the arts. It seemed that almost anyone with talent or brains during those years before the war had been on the left. Bowles had selected out a few names for further research, but there was no indication that the research had been completed.

In the
Trinity Homintern
file Bowles had been able to document the particular activities of the communist cell at Trinity during the thirties, and had examined in detail a number of events that he thought might be of special significance. It appeared there had been a series of labor disputes at the University in 1933 and 1934 that had been orchestrated by the cell, in which students and college workers joined together to protest wages and conditions at the University. It was clear that organizers from the Communist Party in London were also involved, and several of the strikes and demonstrations had ended in violence with numerous arrests. Bowles had attempted to identify both the student and worker organizers from contemporary accounts, and to trace their later careers.

It was clear that he was also interested in the various pilgrimages made by parties of communist students from Cambridge to the Soviet Union in the mid-thirties. Compatriots from Oxford often participated in these trips. For some, the ghastly conditions they found in the Russian countryside and cities were enough to wean them from their socialist faith permanently; others merely saw what they wanted to see, interpreting the obvious suffering of the Russian people as the heroic and necessary struggle of the proletariat. One of these trips was led by Max Gottlieb, the fiery student organizer from Oxford, who was a member of a famous communist dynasty. Born in Russia to a communist German engineer, Gottlieb retained his Soviet citizenship even though he was educated privately at an English boarding school in Switzerland and at Oxford. His father Karl Gottlieb became a government official in the Department of Industry, and was one of the few non-natives to survive Stalin's purges. Karl Gottlieb's eldest son Peter became a daring and highly successful spy for Russia in Japan during the war, before his capture and execution in 1944. The younger Gottlieb never returned from Moscow after the Oxford trip he led there in 1935, and since had conducted an illustrious career in the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a leading metallurgist and crystallographer. He was awarded the Order of Merit, the highest Soviet scientific award, in 1975. Bowles was particularly interested in following the careers of those who returned from Russia with newly declared antipathy to the Soviet system. Clearly he was skeptical whether these renunciations were in fact real.