Beard had heard rather too much recently of this whole-world talk. He had never been well disposed to biology enlisting quantum mechanics to its cause. And he had an irrational prejudice against physicists who defected to biology, Schroedinger, Crick and the like, who believed that their brilliant reductionism would carry all before them. In fact, greenery in general – gardening, country rambles, protest movements, photosynthesis, salads – was not to his taste.
‘How long have you been fucking my wife?’
Aldous sighed, and seemed about to object. Then his shoulders sagged and he resigned himself. ‘About a month after I first met her.’
‘After I introduced you.’
‘That’s it, Professor. You were away for the night, Birmingham or Manchester. I called in on my way home to see if there was anything Patrice needed . . .’
‘And there was.’
Again, the wheedling of the rural tenant. ‘Honest, Professor Beard. I had no designs on your wife. She’s way out of my league. I don’t even have a league. She invited me in, then she asked me to stay to dinner – and that was how it began. Later on she told me how it was all over between you, and I sort of persuaded myself that you um . . .’
‘Wouldn’t mind?’
He knew it already, but it angered Beard, or worse, it pained him, to hear for the second time from Patrice by way of Aldous that she thought the marriage was over. Since the late summer of last year, she had been seeing Aldous, not Tarpin. Or possibly both. The goofy post-doc turned up on her doorstep one August evening and she grabbed another chance to punish her husband.
‘Has anyone ever told you how naïve you are, Aldous?’
The young man seized on the word with joy. ‘I am naïve, Professor Beard! I do science and nothing else. I’m naïve because I don’t meet people, I don’t go out. I go home and work in the studio in my uncle’s garden, often through till dawn. That’s how I’ve always been. But my work is at your disposal. I’ve been making a file for you. For you and no one else. Please say you’ll read it. This is so important.’
Until then the two men had faced each other over a distance of several feet, Aldous standing close to the sofa, with arms clasped in front of him, as if to defend himself against a possible fate or to prevent Beard’s dressing gown from swinging open. Beard began to back away. He was tired of listening to Aldous, he wanted to be alone.
He said, ‘Now you can leave. I’ll be at the Centre tomorrow and I’ll see you in Jock Braby’s office at eleven.’
As Beard crossed the room, Aldous was pleading, almost shouting. ‘No one will ever hire me again. You know that, don’t you? This is too important for private revenge.’
As he reached the sitting-room door, Beard turned and said, ‘Before you go, clear up the mess in the hall.’
‘Professor Beard!’
Aldous was starting to run at him, arms outstretched, his head shaking in denial, his lips stretched across his huge teeth, and it was probably his intention to throw himself at Beard’s knees and beg for mercy. He certainly would have had it, for Beard had no wish to set his domestic humiliation before Braby, and therefore the whole Centre. The Chief betrayed, made an ass of by one of the ponytails. But Aldous never reached Beard, he barely made it two metres into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. As his right foot landed on the bear’s back, it leaped forward, with its open mouth and yellow teeth bucking into the air. Aldous’s legs flew up before him and there was a moment when his considerable length was parallel to the ground, and then his legs rose even further and, though his arms flailed instinctively downwards to break his fall, it was the back of his head that made first contact, not with the floor, not with the edge of the glass table, but with its rounded corner, bluntly penetrating the nape of his neck.
A deep, smothering silence settled on the room, and several seconds passed.
‘No, no, please no,’ Beard muttered as he crossed the room.
Aldous lay at full stretch on the floorboards, as though laid out by an undertaker, with only minimal space between arms and torso, eyes wide open, lips parted, the dressing gown covering him decently. Beard kneeled down by the young man’s shoulder. No breathing, no pulse. There was a halo of blood under his head about nine inches across, and for some reason it did not grow larger. Then Beard saw that blood was seeping away, no, cascading down the gaps between the boards. Blood loss alone would have finished Aldous.
‘Oh fuck . . . oh fuck . . .’ Beard whispered to himself over and over. Something impossible had happened and he was willing it away, undoing it, reversing it, simply because it could not be. It was too improbable. But with each second the new reality advanced on him, pushed his efforts aside and settled into place. It was true. He also thought of what he should have been doing, of heart massage, of mouth-to-mouth. Like all laboratory workers, he was required to learn these techniques. But something quite still, possessing authority, not so much a voice as a presence lying safely beyond his distress, suggested that he should not touch the body.
He got up and went to the telephone. He was shivering. The stillness of Belsize Park intensified as his hand hesitated above the receiver. The same reasonable presence proposed that he think carefully before dialling. He was not a naturally indecisive man. What was wrong with him? His hand felt dead. It took him some moments to catch up with his own good sense and read the situation as others might. Here was how it looked: a man returns from abroad to find his wife’s lover in the house. A confrontation follows. Twenty minutes later the lover is dead from a blow to the back of the head. He slipped, I tell you, he slipped on the rug as he ran across the room towards me. Oh yes? And why was he running, Mr Beard? To throw his arms around my knees and plead with me not to have him sacked, to beg me to join with him to save the world from climate change. There would be sceptics. For the last time, Mr Beard, did you not smear blood on the corner of the table? And what have you done with the murder weapon, Mr Beard? Innocence would come at a high cost. It would have to be earned, fought for. Media interest would be lacerating. Sex, betrayal, violence, a beautiful woman, an eminent scientist, a dead lover – perfect. Patrice, sincerely or maliciously, would be his chief accuser. Two years thinking of nothing else. Nobel laureate, balding boffin, government appointee, in the dock, fighting to stay out of jail.
At the thought he felt weak in his legs, in the tendons behind his knees, but he did not sit down. It was clear. Only those who loved him would believe him. And no one loved him. He should have had children, grown-up daughters, indignant on his behalf, busy in his defence. He walked across the room towards the hall and then came back. He did not know what to do. Then he did. He went out of the sitting room into the hall, stepped carefully over the trail of puddles and walked into the kitchen, to the drawer where tinfoil and clingfilm and greaseproof rolls were kept. Also in that drawer was a carton of transparent disposable gloves.
He drew on a pair. Nothing criminal in that, but once his hands were encased, he felt invisibility, invincibility steal over him, over his entire body. A mental state, to be sure, but what other states did he have? He did not have a plan, he simply enacted one. His body had a plan. And he walked it through, as though experimentally, believing at every stage he could undo it, go back to the beginning, with nothing lost or compromised. Everything he was doing now merely served a precautionary principle. He might return to the phone, he might summon the emergency services. But just in case he did not, he needed to be prepared. In his light-headed way, he was thinking clearly. He went through the kitchen towards the back door, and walked into the windowless vault where the light bulbs and household junk were kept. It was in exactly the same place, against the wall, the dirty canvas tool bag. He turned over the contents and found a hammer, one of several, with a narrow head that seemed about right. While rummaging, he saw other items he thought he might use. The comb, the used tissue, the withered apple core. He arranged the bag to make it look undisturbed, took the four item
s into the kitchen and put them in a plastic carrier bag. He took a few sheets of kitchen towel and soaked some of them in water, and was about to return to the sitting room when he changed his mind. He went back into the vault and fetched the tool bag and carried it into the hall and set it down by the front door.
Tom Aldous did not look different, but the rug’s frozen laugh appeared sinister to Beard as he kneeled down beside the body. The bear’s hard, glassy eyes each captured a warped parallelogram of the sitting-room windows and looked murderous. It was the dead polar bears you had to watch. He set out the four items from the carrier bag in a neat row, staring at the fragment of dried-out apple core, wondering how it might help him. But he could think of no possible use for it and returned it to the bag. As he took the hammer in his hands he understood that his calculations about the precautionary principle, about returning to the beginning, to the phone, were all wrong. What he was about to do could not be undone. He would be putting his innocence behind him. He dipped the head of the hammer in the puddle of blood, smeared the handle, and set it aside to dry. Next, he took the used paper tissue and bloodied that too, and pushed it under the sofa, well out of sight. The comb was trickier, just as he had anticipated. He pulled away some hair from between the teeth and managed to place some between Aldous’s fingers. Hairs attached themselves to the gloves, but Beard was not concerned. The hammer head was now half-dry and easily took a hair, as did the handle. He put another single hair on the arm of a chair. Then he used the kitchen towel to wipe down and dry thoroughly the edge and corner of the glass coffee table, though there was no blood there visible to the naked eye.
He stood at last and paused, wondering if there were a simple mistake he was making. Not so far. He put the hammer and the comb and kitchen towel in the bag and went to the front door. Still wearing the gloves, he walked unhurriedly down the garden path and stopped by the gate to look around. There was no one about. He took out the hammer and tossed it into the shrubbery by the front wall, and then went back into the house, removed the gloves and put them in with the apple core, comb and kitchen roll, then folded the bag carefully, so its bloodstained handles were not exposed, and shoved it into an outer zip compartment of his suitcase.
As far as he could tell, there was no blood on his person, his clothes or his shoes. He took his luggage and the tool bag and stepped outside, pulling the front door closed with his foot. The unending gentrification of Belsize Park ensured that he found a skip within a few hundred yards. He dumped the tool bag. Within several minutes he was on Haverstock Hill getting into a cab bound for Portland Place.
He assumed that his state of affectless calm was due to shock and would wear off soon. Before it did he hoped to bump into someone who would recognise him. The taxi dropped him outside the Institute of Physics – he had once been a vice-president – and before going in he found a litter bin and disposed of the plastic bag. Inside the Institute, it was more or less as he had hoped. He had some minor business there and got into conversation with one of the administrators, who knew who he was. Beard mentioned that he had been in Spitsbergen, and then, casually, that he had come straight from Heathrow by cab and had been caught up in a traffic jam. The administrator commiserated. He agreed to keep an eye on the suitcase while Beard went to the British Library.
In the cab to the Euston Road his legs, independently of the rest of his body, began to shake. But he crossed the Library’s forecourt like any other scholar, penetrated the building and found a carrel. He called up some papers – historical material relating to a lecture he was due to give – and sweated it out for several hours, waiting for the time, around four fifteen, when he would feel his phone vibrate in his pocket.
Hunched over his documents, he read nothing, but he forced himself to write out some notes. It amazed him, what had happened. Each time he thought about it, it was as if for the first time. He marvelled at what he had done and how he had acted so calmly, without reflection, behaved like a murderer covering his tracks, while obliterating the truth that could have saved him. He was now in deep, the sole witness of his own innocence. In effect, he had panicked, even while he had felt clear-headed. What did he know of forensics? It was at least possible that today’s fresh fingerprints, the ones that were his, were notably different from the ones he had left around the house the weeks and months before. In which case, they would be able to tell that he had been in the house that morning and he would become a suspect.
What other mistakes had he made, what unseen neighbours had observed from a window his arrival or departure? Or seen him throw something into the skip? Was he right to have brought the tool bag away with him? When he was kneeling over Aldous a torrent of his own skin flakes and hair and other microscopic compounds might have poured over the boy, over the dressing gown. But it was his own dressing gown, already filled with the organic traces of his own existence. Not so bad then. If the house was filled with his marks, they were his cover. But only if a fingerprint could not be dated. Somewhere in this building, in the stacks, were a thousand books that could tell him, and he dared not call one up. It would make no difference now if he did.
At three fifty he stood stiff-kneed from his carrel and went to wait in the Library’s café for the call he knew must come. He spent the time preparing himself by trying to remember what it was he was not supposed to know: that Aldous was in the house, that he was Patrice’s lover, that he was dead. There might have been a fourth detail he needed to appear ignorant of, and he was too fretful to recall it. There may even have been a fifth. It was not so easy to concentrate, for the venerable Library and its environs were not quite as hushed and serious as they once were. There were scores of kids, undergraduates, in the café. Their coats and backpacks were piled up in the spaces between the tables, and they wandered the public spaces, the wide staircases, laughing and talking at a relaxed, normal pitch. Perhaps this was some form of open day for schools. The atmosphere was of a student-union building in a modern university – a bar, a pinball machine, table football would not have been out of place. It suited Beard well to feel obscure among the crowds, but he almost missed the call when it came, an hour late by his calculation, and he still had not remembered the fourth and fifth things he should pretend not to know. He had to trust himself and assume they did not exist.
Patrice said, ‘Where are you?’ Her voice was flat, and despite everything, he could not restrain a certain foolish hope: at last, she cared about his whereabouts.
He told her, and then he said, ‘What’s up?’
‘The police are here. You’ve got to come home.’
He said, ‘Patrice, what’s going on?’
She had put her hand over the receiver. He heard the murmur of a man’s voice, and then she said, ‘Just come back now.’
‘Have we had a break-in?’
There were more voices around her. Dozens of people were in the house. She was starting to repeat herself in the same toneless voice when she gave out a sudden cry as if stabbed in the arm, and half shouted, half wailed, ‘It’s Rodney, he’s killed someone …’ and a man’s voice cut in over her saying, ‘Mrs Beard . . .’ and then the line went dead.
Beard went back to his carrel to gather up the notes he had taken the trouble to write out, then he hurried across the Library court, past Paolozzi’s Newton, and it was only when he was on the street, raising his arm for a taxi, that he remembered what he had decided hours before: it would look better to arrive home with his suitcase. He had the taxi wait in Portland Place while he went into the Institute to thank the administrator. On the way to Belsize Park, Beard wondered whether this – not dashing straight home, but making the detour to collect his luggage – was one of those items, that fourth or fifth thing he was supposed to remember. He could not think it through.
* * *
He was interviewed at length on four occasions, and his last account did not waver from the first. Under the sustained pressure of police interrogation, honesty is a fine, unassailable thing, and
as a man of science, Beard had an automatic respect for internal consistency. The truth was impregnable. No need to remember what he had said last time when he could return to the source. So yes, his early flight from Oslo brought him into Heathrow at eight. He went straight to the taxi line, and then – this was his only fiction, the rest was mere omission – he was caught up in a long delay on the M4 and did not get to Portland Place until the mid morning. But he had taken many taxis from Heathrow before, and had been in many traffic jams, and memory was wax-soft, and soon his construction formed itself in his mind like any genuine recollection, both vague and certain. He really felt he had lost an hour in the traffic. What did he do during that long taxi journey? He read a paper for peer review. Total concentration. He did not look up to see the pile-up in the middle or fast lanes, or wherever it was. The rest was hard truth – his business at the Institute, his day’s work at the Library, interrupted at last by Patrice’s call when he happened to be taking a break. With painful honesty he acknowledged that he knew about and had been upset by his wife’s affair with Mr Tarpin. But he, Beard, had had many affairs himself, and that, regrettably, was the kind of marriage they had, and probably it was coming to an end. He did not stray from the truth as he described Patrice’s black eye, his Sunday-morning visit to Cricklewood, the confrontation and the slap in the face, and how he, unused to violence, had hurried away for his own safety. Though it embarrassed him, he gave the detective inspector a thorough description of the afternoon he introduced Tom Aldous to his wife, and no, he did not notice anything pass between them, and no, he never suspected that while he, Beard, was in the Arctic, and, who knew, perhaps months before, Patrice was making love to Aldous. And yes, of course he knew the boy, a brilliant young scientist who often picked him up from Reading station. No, not obviously likeable. Too self-obsessed, too narrow, too awkward in company. But many people were like that in his field.