Death and Other Lovers Read online

  Mid-way through the evening Donnelly came round. He had the photograph Spalding had given him, but Shimoni got the impression that he had called not to discuss the picture but to check that they were all right.

  The policeman was clearly depressed by his day’s investigating. He sat heavily in a chair with his grey raincoat settling round him like a shroud. “At nine this morning I’d have given reasonable odds that we were close to cracking this thing. I reckoned we knew who was behind it, and a bit about why, and that we’d have the rest including signed confessions probably by close of play today.

  “Then I talked to Hehn, and getting the signed confessions started to look a bit of a problem. And then Spalding gave me this thing, and the whole idea that the bomb was to destroy the picture suddenly seemed about as feasible as the nuclear aeroplane.” He passed the photograph to Flynn in a way that suggested it was rather heavy. “I mean, if this is what it’s all about, (a) why give me a copy of it, and (b) and more fundamentally, why worry who sees it?”

  Flynn took the print and examined it. He looked at the marks on the back. He held it close to his eye to examine the grain in the darkest and lightest regions. He flexed it between his fingers, feeling it bend and reform. He said, “This isn’t actually the photo I sent Deerings.”

  Superintendent Donnelly could not have looked more startled if the improbable nuclear aeroplane had not only taken off but had flown through Leah Shimoni’s livingroom window. He was out of his chair as if shot from a gun and peering over Flynn’s shoulder, helped by the fact that Flynn remained seated. “What do you mean, it’s not the one you sent Deerings?” He ferreted his copy of Context from his raincoat pocket and compared the cover with the print minutely. “It is the same. What are you talking about?”

  “Well yes, it’s the same print,” said Flynn. “But when I sent it to them it was about half as big again. Look. The full negative included a lot more background than that. I sent it to Greg Miller like that so he could crop it to the shape he wanted, OK? It’s pretty standard practice if you’re not sure what format the editor’s looking for. So Greg, or his picture editor, cut it down to what was basically a vertical-format portrait to fill his cover up to the title.

  “So when Spalding came looking for copies, naturally I printed the full negative again. Including the background. For some reason he’s cut this one down to the same format that Greg printed in Context. I wonder why, that’s all.”

  Donnelly squinted at the print—the cheerily grinning Hehn so different from the block-house of a man he had met—then at Flynn. “So what has he cut off?”

  Flynn shrugged. It made no more sense to him than it did to Donnelly. “Nothing. I mean, maybe an inch and a half all round, but nothing in it. Background.”

  Donnelly was a man with considerable reserves of restraint. He plumbed them deeply now. He said evenly, “You’re telling me that the key to this whole business is contained in an inch-and-a-half-wide strip of disposable background trimmed from a photograph? That that’s the only difference between a negative worth murdering two hundred and twenty people for and a print the putative murderers are happy to give to the investigating police?”

  “Hey, I’m not telling you anything.” But Flynn sounded thoughtful. “Still, it would explain why nothing happened after the magazine came out, only after I started sending copies to Deerings. They thought the cropped version was all there was, until they got the first full-negative print. That’s when they saw they had a problem.”

  “Then that’s it,” said Donnelly, his lips tight. “It’s a dead-end. They’ve got away with it. The negative is gone, and all the original prints from it have either disappeared or been trimmed of whatever evidence they contain. I’ll try and trace the other prints you sent Spalding, but I imagine every one of them will have been cropped in the exact same manner. And when I ask him why he’ll say, well, that was how it appeared on the magazine cover, that was how he wanted to show it round.”

  Apropos of nothing Leah Shimoni said, “Rubbish.”

  The two men looked at her. Somewhat stiffly Donnelly said, “I assure you, Miss Shimoni, Spalding will not have overlooked—”

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “Rubbish. Garbage. Waste paper. Photography generates vast quantities of the stuff. Mickey, what did you do with yours?”

  Flynn had caught up with her train of thought but he knew it was not taking them anywhere. “I put it in the bin. In the darkroom. You’re right, I made a couple of prints that the tone wasn’t great on, that I dumped and started again. But even the last ones I made, in the week before the fire, aren’t going to be there any more. The darkroom’s where the fire started.”

  “All right, so your rubbish is gone,” said Shimoni. “What about the picture editor at Context?”

  Donnelly had had to sprint for it but he too had caught the train by now. “The magazine with Hehn on the cover was printed the guts of two months ago. Don’t you think they might have emptied the waste-paper bin before now?”

  “So they might,” agreed Shimoni. “And they might incinerate their waste, or have it pulped or something. Or they just might do what other newspapers do, which is bale it and store it and have it picked up when the pile hits the ceiling.”

  Chapter Three

  Pretext Publications had invested in a waste-paper baler some twelve months previously. Greg Miller had thought it would be the end of his refuse problem. He had not allowed for repeated difficulties in getting the bales collected. Huge and heavy, they lined every wall in the building—much reducing the noise levels on printing days—until the factory inspectors got stroppy, after which they accumulated out of sight in a yard covered by a tarpaulin. Miller suspected that the tarpaulin was a mistake, that the darkness encouraged them to breed.

  They stood together in the grimy yard, greasy from the effects of rain on the visiting cards of a hundred generations of pigeons, and eyed the grim towers with doubt and disfavour. The tallest must have been ten feet high. Donnelly, who had a slight mathematical bent, reckoned there had to be a thousand cubic feet of waste paper there, and under pressure at that, constrained by plastic girths. When those were cut it would be like Vesuvius erupting.

  He said judiciously, “So that’s four months’worth of waste paper, is it?”

  Miller, who was standing beside him, looked rueful. “Summer’s our quiet time, too.”

  “And you don’t stack them in any particular order. I mean, there’s no particular advantage in starting bottom left.”

  Miller shook his head. He was a slightly plump man of forty in a sweater that Laurie Ash’s mother could have knitted, tweed trousers and trainers. Any man over the age of thirty wearing trainers to work is making a statement. Sometimes it is “My God I’m fit, you’ll have to be out early in the morning to keep up with me.” In this case it was more “No, running a magazine does not mean I’m rich. Sue me for libel and I’ll go bankrupt, so see where that gets you.”

  Miller himself said, “They’ve been shifted about three times before they end up here. All I can suggest is, look for the dates on the magazines. They’re mostly duff ones dumped straight from the presses, so they’d be baled within a week of publication. The photograph could have been handled anywhere in the week before publication.”

  Donnelly did his sums again. “So the edges trimmed from this photograph should be baled along with copies of the issue prior to the one it appeared in.”

  “Probably,” said Miller, in a voice which conveyed the opinion that there’s many a slip twixt the expected and the discovered.

  So they began. The search party included two particularly beefy young constables armed with a fork-lift, some police cadets to do the actual picking-through-the-garbage part, and Flynn and Shimoni to go through the remnants of photographs looking for the right one.

  It would have been easier if the picture editor had worked with the sharp prints, but he had not. The original print of the Hehn photograph, in its original
state and dimensions, had been filed until it was stolen in the break-in. What the picture editor worked with was a photo-mechanical transfer, a rather less sharp image but one which the offset presses could print. The trouble with PMTs is that, like cats at night, they all look grey, and that goes double for bits trimmed from them.

  Nor was there any way of knowing whether the margins removed from the Hehn PMT had come away cleanly in one piece, consisted of four strips taken one from each side, or even of a series of narrow ribbons pared as the editor tried out different shapes. After two months he had no recollection. All they could hope to do was find the outside edge of the picture, and then as many strips as were necessary to meet the edges of the portrait on the cover. The searchers each had a photocopy of the cover for reference.

  “Well,” said Donnelly, “let’s do it.” He cut the bindings on the first bale a little like the Queen Mother opening a railway station, and multi-coloured paper exploded round him.

  Five hours later one of the cadets, whose task was to extract photographic remains from the general waste and pass these on to the experts, paused with his hand halfway to the Hopeful pile, looked again and said, “I think this is it.” Three hours before he might have managed a little excitement, but now he was too tired. Five hours is a long time to spend on your hands and knees.

  Flynn took it from him. Even before he had worked out just what he was looking at, he recognised his own work. He held it to the photocopy, dog-eared after half a day in and out of his pocket, and was sure. What he had was an L-shaped strip of the Hehn PMT trimmed from the left-hand side and lower edge. Hehn’s white coat was a pale area at the bottom, the blackboard a dark area with white scribbles to the left.

  “This is it,” he said. “It’s the right bale. This is about half of what’s missing: now we need the top and the right margin. They might be in one piece, like this, or several, but they’re in here somewhere.”

  Other piles were abandoned as everyone turned their attention to the pay-dirt. Within ten minutes the right-hand edge had been found. A minute later Shimoni held up the top strip. Together the three pieces framed exactly the picture which had appeared on the cover of Context. Whatever information two hundred and twenty people had died to protect was now before them.

  Donnelly took custody of the fragments as if he had been entrusted with the Crown Jewels. He wiped grime off them with his handkerchief then put them carefully into an envelope. Then he tapped Flynn on the shoulder. “You’re not finished yet.”

  A police photographer combined the three pieces of the Context PMT with the print supplied by Spalding and made several copies. They lacked the sharpness of the original but were adequate to most purposes. Then he sandwiched the composite in clear film to protect it, and Donnelly took the composite, the copies and Flynn and Shimoni back to his office.

  “So what is it?” Donnelly gazed down at the pictures laid out on his desk. “What is it in there that we absolutely did not have to see, that had to be kept from us at whatever cost?”

  They looked in silence, searching the margins for something to explain the monstrous event which had brought them together. They saw nothing.

  Flynn said, “It didn’t have to be kept from me.”

  “What?”

  “They weren’t worried about me seeing it, or they wouldn’t have kept asking me to get it out again and print it.”

  Donnelly nodded slowly. “Right. Well …” He was thinking on his feet. “Of course, you took the photograph. If this—whatever it is—had meant anything to you, you’d have said something or done something at the time. When no-one came asking about it, they assumed it meant nothing to you so it didn’t matter how often you looked at it.”

  “Maybe it’s something that would only make sense to another chemist,” offered Flynn. “What happened was this. I’m on their roof doing something else when the post comes. Hehn gets his letter, goes round telling everyone, Spalding grabs me and I grab the pic. It’s as spontaneous as that. No preparations, no tidying up, just stand the guy in the middle of his lab and hit the shutter.

  “Well, there’s something on view that shouldn’t be, but they don’t realise it right away. It isn’t there in the Context picture. It’s only when I send that first full-negative print to Spalding for his house magazine that the four-minute warning goes off. I have a negative with a state secret in the background, and if I sell another copy of it and this one gets published full-size, the secret is out. Any picture of a chemist is likely to be seen by other chemists.”

  “So Spalding tries to buy the negative,” said Donnelly, taking up the narrative. “But you won’t sell, so he has to find a way of destroying it. He hires Laura Wade.” If he saw Flynn wince he took no notice. “She picks you up and moves in with you so she can look for it; when she can’t find it she decides to burn the flat out. It should have worked, it was sheer luck that particular negative survived. But it did, and she knew it had.

  “She’d have had another go in a day or two, except that you insisted on splitting up. Once that happened she’d lose track of the negative. You even told her you might sell prints from it to raise some cash. She had to make sure this time. She bought you the bag and some clothes, and took them somewhere to rig a bomb. You were never going to go over the case with a magnifying glass: you’d open it long enough to put the negatives inside and then you’d go. Wherever you were when the clock ran out, the contents of the case would be destroyed, and probably you with them.”

  “Afterwards,” said Flynn; his mouth felt dusty and the words were a moment coming, “Spalding traced me to Gil’s flat. He called asking for another god-damned print. I told him what he wanted to know: that there wouldn’t be any more prints, that the negative had been destroyed. I gave him the name of a commercial photographer but he never called him. Why would he?—he didn’t want more pictures of Hehn, he just wanted that picture of Hehn. To make sure it would never appear any place it could be seen by someone clever enough to understand what he was looking at.”

  “Another scientist,” said Donnelly. “We need a chemist up here.” He picked up his phone and called Dr. Ash.

  Ash went straight to it. He looked round the three of them as if he thought they were mentally deficient. “It’s what he’s got written on the blackboard, isn’t it?”

  And of course it was. The right-hand edge of the blackboard was just visible at the left-hand edge of the picture Context printed. But the full print had shown perhaps a third of the board and everything chalked on it. That was what Spalding had seen in the print Flynn had made him: the results of months or years of work, the blueprint for Deerings’next breakthrough, that Hehn had been working on when the post came and that he had forgotten in the heat of the moment.

  Flynn breathed softly in the face of revelation. “What is it? What does it say?”

  Ash said gently, “I left my microscope at home.” And indeed, whatever was written there was very small, a faint white scrawl across a blackboard in the background of a photograph which itself measured only five-and-a-half inches by eight.

  “Your darkroom will have a magnifying glass,” said Shimoni.

  So they all trooped back to the darkroom, four of them now including Ash. The police photographer put the original composite under a big square glass and played with it, jockeying magnification against focus. Then he leaned back. “Try that.”

  Ash took his place. He moved his head a little back and forth, trying to get his eye in. By degrees the tiny chalk-marks began to resolve as symbols he recognised. He looked away for a moment, perplexed. He took a pen and an envelope from a pocket and jotted down what he could read. He said, with total certainty, “That’s not antibiotics.”

  Startled, Donnelly looked from him to the glass and back. “Are you sure? That’s what he got the Sondheim Prize for.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have got it for this.”

  Donnelly caught an inflection in his voice that said more than the words. “Why—what is it?” />
  “Look,” Ash said uneasily, “I’m only seeing part of the formula here—not even one section, just the second half of a lot of lines. I’d be guessing if I tried to say what he was working on when he wrote this. But it wasn’t antibiotics; and I don’t think it was anything he’d have put before the Sondheim committee.”

  “So guess,” said Donnelly firmly.

  Ash looked at his notes, at the magnified photograph, at the ceiling, finally at the Superintendent. “It could be a formulation for a synthetic narcotic.”

  Donnelly was not a scientist. “A drug? We’re still talking pharmaceuticals here?”

  “Well, yes,” agreed Ash. He tapped the end of his pen on a row of symbols sketched on the back of his envelope: C17H “But if someone gave me a sample of this, I’d be more21O4N. inclined to sniff it than inject it into my cow.”

  “What we have here,” Donnelly said slowly—they were back in his office and the other three were trying to work out why he looked so grim when as far as they could see he had just solved the most important case of his career—”is a policeman’s nightmare. We have two hundred and twenty bodies. We know who killed them, and how, and now we know why. And I don’t know if I can make the case stick.

  “We have a limited amount of circumstantial evidence. Part of a formula on a blackboard. If we had the whole formula it still wouldn’t incriminate the man who wrote it. He’ll say it was just a philosophical exercise, a bit of scientific doodling. A court would want evidence that he took it off the blackboard and tried to put it into production, and in an uncertain world the only thing I am absolutely confident of is that this long after, Deerings will have been swept to remove any such evidence. Without it, everything we think is mere speculation.”