The Cambridge Theorem (45 page)

“Oh yeah, who?”

“Philby,” said Smailes.

He made no effort to stop her as she reached into the bottom of the suitcase and pulled out a small automatic pistol and pointed it at his chest. It looked like a Beretta.

“Shut up, shithead,” she said coldly. “Put your hands on your head.”

He complied, and as he did so, felt the tape that held the microphone against his chest stretch against his skin. “Put the gun down, Lauren. You're under arrest for the murder of Simon Bowles and Giles Allerton.” He tried not to say the cue line too loudly. They had discussed the fact that she might have a gun, but Standiforth had said he thought it unlikely. If she did, all he had to do was let her know about the backup in the street, and she would probably fold. If she didn't she would lose her concentration when they forced the door and he could jump her then. Smailes had gone along with the plan.

“Now Lauren, you'll never get that through airport security, will you?” said Smailes. He was listening for the door, the sound of feet on the stairs.

“I said shut up, shithead,” she repeated. “Did you drive?”

He nodded.

“Show me the keys. Slowly.”

Smailes went in his right hand coat pocket and held up his car keys.

“Let's go,” she said. “You're driving.”

Where the hell were they? Something had gone wrong, he thought with a flicker of panic. Christ, she had better not frisk me, he said to himself.

“Move,” she said. Lauren slipped the automatic into the pocket of the baseball jacket as they left the room and walked down the stairs. He heard nothing except the vacuum cleaner. The street was dark and he did not look back for the Jaguar. He climbed into the car and Lauren got in the passenger side. She pulled out the gun again and kept it on him. “Drive,” she said. “North. Huntingdon Road.” He looked in the rear view and thought he saw a black car pull out before they turned the corner at the end of the street, but could not be sure.

He tried to keep his voice easy as he pulled out into Huntingdon Road and headed out of town past Fitzwilliam College. “You see it seemed pretty obvious that Gorham-Leach, or should I call him Gottlieb, was protecting someone with his little farewell speech. But he was angry and it made him trip. You see, he never forgot a title or a rank, and he almost called me Mr. Plod, which must have been your little joke about me, right? He did the honorable thing, you know. Fell on his sword. His story about Bowles killing himself after a fight with Fenwick just didn't jibe. It must have been the most incredible night of Simon Bowles' life. He would hardly have been so upset about the supposed behavior of a boyfriend he'd only just met. And if the Fenwick story was a cover, how did he know about him? Then the cover story about the theft of the Bletchley file. Gorham-Leach didn't have a pass key, so how could he have pulled it off after we'd sealed the room? You see, I'd told him about the missing file earlier in the week, and he must have worked out you were responsible. And I figure the only way you could have pulled it off was to con Allerton into taking it for you while he was over there alone with that deadbeat bookseller friend of his. What was the pretext, Lauren, that you were going to keep the investigation alive yourself? Is that the same line you gave him about the spectacles in the case, Lauren, why you had to go to me yourself? So you see, it all began to point to you, Lauren.”

Smailes was desperate to get some kind of reaction out of her, to distract her from her terrible intent, but her face remained fixed and impassive, staring out onto the road and night.

“Bowles certainly wasn't interested in seeing you, was he? But you had to go across there, preferably with Allerton as cover, because you knew he'd been to Oxford and then down to London, and Gorham-Leach had warned you that that was the danger sign, hadn't he? So you showed up and managed to get a look at what was in the typewriter and it confirmed your worst fears, right? Gorham-Leach was blown and you could bet that Simon wasn't just going to sit on the information. You must have had quite some influence on him to get him to go out to the bar with you, given what he was in the middle of. Because the original plan had misfired, hadn't it? The idea was for you to show up as an innocent, displaced fellow scientist and get friendly with Bowles so you could keep tabs on him. Only when it turned out he was gay, you turned to Allerton as the closest alternative. Then me. It was safest to get me in your bed to monitor whether I could retrace what Simon had done. That's why you jumped the gun when Giles got suspicious about the glasses in the pocket, right? Since Giles intended to speak to me anyway, you had to beat him to it. That was a really dumb mistake. Couldn't you just have put them back on the body?

“You see, you left Giles at his staircase and pretended to go get your bike at the front gate to go home. But you hung around until the bar closed and things got quiet then you went back to Simon's place. He was certainly not interested in seeing you a second time, was he? Because he was almost finished typing up the theorem, and he didn't want anyone looking at it until he'd decided where to go with it, right? But, of course, he was unsuspecting. He maybe even appreciated it when you started to rub his shoulders. After all, he must have been feeling pretty tense and he was pretty easy with you, physically, right? I saw it in a photograph Giles took of both of you, you had your arm draped around him and he looked quite relaxed. Is it difficult to break someone's neck with your bare hands, Lauren? I guess with your strength, it's not that difficult, is it? You rupture the spinal column at the first and second vertebrae, which is the same injury that kills someone who is hanged, right?”

He looked across at her. Oncoming headlights streaked her face with light. She turned and looked at him expressionlessly, the dark orifice of the gun levelled at his heart. They were a mile or so out of town. “Right to Girton,” she ordered.

Smailes swung the car off the main road towards Girton village. He could see no black Jaguars behind him, no flashing blue lights. Christ, had he been hung out to dry? Where were George and Standiforth? Why had they not come through the door on the cue line, or when they had heard her pull the gun? He was fighting a dreadful awareness, that Standiforth wanted him dead. Secrecy becomes an obsession with us. He had known Gorham-Leach was going to kill himself, and made no move to prevent it. And although the thought sickened him, he thought George might fall even for it, the King and country stuff, expendability in the national interest. His tongue felt dry. Keep talking, he told himself.

“But then you started making mistakes, right? The glasses had flown off when you broke his neck, and you didn't think about them until later. You wanted to make it look like suicide, so you typed up that stupid note. Then you wiped the machine, and took Simon's hands and pressed the fingers on the keys. Except you pressed the thumbs flat on the space bar, Lauren. That's not how a typist hits that key, is it? Think about it. They tap it with the sides of the thumb, don't they? You left the wrong print.

“That's when you went over to get Gorham-Leach. Must have been quite late by now. No one saw you. Was he expecting you? Had you already decided that tonight had to be the night? Probably, because he was only duty tutor for a week, right, and if you needed help to stage a suicide, you had to act fast. So you went back together and managed between you to get Bowles strung up by his belt on that hook. You were careful, wiping off the plant pot. Then you remembered the glasses, right? Lying there on the floor. You found the case, wiped them off, and stuck them in his pocket, never thinking that Allerton would find out and talk about coming to me with the story. He might even have blurted out his own role in removing the file. So you got to me first, and getting me in the sack was playing safe, wasn't it? Actually, maybe your acting was good so far, but I always thought your fucking was weak, Lauren. I was just too much of a gentleman to say so.”

They had come to the T-junction in Girton village and Lauren pointed to the right, the road to Oakington. Smailes' monologue was becoming more forced. He thought feverishly of the information Standiforth had given him that morning.

“I'm just surprised you fell for the whole thing from the start, Lauren. Didn't you realize you're a discard? No one has learned about Gorham-Leach's identity over the years and lived to talk about it. You thought you were superior to those jokers from Leningrad? They didn't know who he was, right? Somewhere on the road to the airport tonight they would have turned off and blown your brains out, sweetheart. And you thought you were such a hotshot, such a major mission for your first outing, stepdaddy pulling strings in Moscow and all that. You've been dead for months, Lauren.”

“Left,” she said angrily.

Smailes drove down a side road, council houses on the right, bungalows on the left, giving way to hedges and open fields. The road dead-ended in a car park, and the headlights caught a sign.
Girton Golf Club
. “Left,” she said again, and Smailes pulled into a small overspill car park. It was surrounded on all sides by a thick hawthorn hedge.

“Kill the lights. Out,” she said.

Smailes stepped out onto the wet gravel and into the pitch dark night. His legs felt shaky. Where the fuck were Dearnley and Standiforth? Why hadn't they taken them out on Huntingdon Road? Or had they just driven off as soon as Smailes disappeared into the house? Were he and Lauren both discards, in fact?

“Keep your hands out from your sides. Walk. Through the gap in the hedge.”

He walked slowly towards a clearing in the hawthorn at the end of the car park, his feet splashing through pools of rainwater, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. His breathing was shallow and his chest felt tight. He was fighting panic, his thoughts careening. This must be where she had brought Allerton to kill him, he thought. He was on his own. Unless he did something soon, he was dead too. He walked through the clearing in the hedge and stumbled on a root. In the darkness he could see a drainage ditch to his left, a small thicket of young birch trees to his right. Half a mile away across a field the headlights of cars streamed silently north on Huntingdon Road. Far away to his left were the lights of Girton village. There was a strong smell of wet earth and rotting vegetation.

The sound of his blood was pounding in his ears. In his desperation he thought of a goalkeeper's feint, inviting the shooter to fire away from the body, the natural shot. With his right hand he reached inside his jacket to the holster and slipped the safety catch off the revolver. “Hey, keep the hands…” she began. Smailes buckled his right knee and fell forwards to his right, and in the same motion drew the gun and flung himself to his left onto his back, firing before he hit the ground. Two shots roared in the night and he felt a bullet smash into the earth at his left ear. Lauren pitched backwards. He was winded but got to his feet and moved towards her, the gun drawn. In the darkness he could see that her throat had been torn away by his bullet. A dark lake of blood was widening under her hair. Her mouth moved noiselessly, like the mouth of a fish, and the blood in her throat bubbled quietly, with a frothing sound. Her body began convulsing, first the torso, then the legs. Her eyes were frozen behind the round lenses, terrified and dying. He moved aside to vomit.

Strong hands gripped his shoulders. “Derek, are you hit?” said Dearnley.

Smailes was still retching. “Where the fuck were you?” he said eventually.

“We couldn't hear nothing for the bleedin' vacuum cleaner, Derek. Just static. Then we see you come out and we know she's got a gun on you. We couldn't jump you on Huntingdon Road, she could've started shooting. Jesus, I'm sorry. This was close.”

“Too fucking close, George.” He looked over at Lauren's body, which was still. Standiforth was looking down at it with a pen-sized flashlight.

“She dead?” said Smailes.

“Yes, she certainly is,” said Standiforth. He walked up to them, and shone the beam at Smailes. “Sorry about that,” he said evenly. “But well done. You were right, of course. You were right about everything. Glad you still had the gun on you. Seems you needed it. That was quite a shot, falling backwards like that.”

Smailes wanted to go for his face. Dearnley was supporting him, and he was breathing in great heaves.

“Let me see your hands,” ordered Standiforth. Smailes holstered the gun and held his hands out in front of him. Standiforth held the beam on them. They were steady.

“Okay, leave. Take a week. Get out into the country, the hills somewhere. Just let it work itself out of you. Don't fight it. Tonight, stop driving as soon as the shaking starts, you understand? Just stop, spend the night somewhere. Remember, stop driving when the shaking starts. We'll take care of everything here. Everything.”

Dearnley and Smailes walked slowly back towards his car, the older man supporting him round his shoulders.

“Jesus, Derek, I'd no idea this was going to be so dangerous. I'd never have agreed to it…”

“George, you telling me the truth? You didn't know what was going on…? The mike, you couldn't hear…”

“Derek, I swear. Just static. Then you came out, I realized we had trouble. Not even any uniform backup. Standiforth had a pistol. I had nothing. God, you were nearly killed. Are you all right to drive?”

They had arrived back at the cars. Standiforth's Jaguar had been hurriedly parked, the doors flung open, the headlights ploughing into the hawthorn trees. Smailes could still smell cordite, and underneath, sweet wet earth.

“Yeah, I think so.” He stood away from Dearnley and felt his own weight, searching for his face in the darkness. “George, I've got to believe you.”

“Derek,” said Dearnley, pleading, holding up his hand and squeezing his shoulder firmly. “You can't believe this was deliberate. I'd never let one of my men… Look, do as he says. Take a week. Take two. Just call in, tell me you're all right. You want me to tell your mother you're gone? Your sister?”